Vampire survival game’s new expansion adds awesome multi-level castles with all the Dracula vibes-

Vampire survival game V Rising remains in early access, and is celebrating its first anniversary with the Gloomrot expansion: In which developer Stunlock Studios has basically said sod it, let’s add Frankenstein’s monster. The studio has now released a trailer for the expansion, which arrives on May 17, but the big takeaway for me is just how awesome the new castles look.

The Gloomrot expansion adds a ton of new stuff to the game, but what has fans most excited is the multi-level building. A big part of V Rising’s vampire fantasy is building your own gothic crib from which to terrorise the world, replete with ornate furnishings and all the Dracula trappings one could wish for. There was a bit of an issue though: The castles could only have one floor, which led players to th…

Vile treachery- When you ‘ran’ on the Citadel in Mass Effect, it just changed the FOV to make it look like you were going faster-

Just to say it up front: I’m very smart. My mom says so. That means it’s totally fine that, according to recent Tweets from former BioWare cinematic designer John Ebenger, I’ve been bamboozled into thinking my characters are moving faster when they aren’t, thanks to techniques like “speed lines” and “whooshing sounds.” Yes, I’ve basically fallen for the video game equivalent of when you trick a dog by pretending to throw something. I’m not at all upset and I’m handling it very well.

We owe this latest reveal of game developer villainy to Twitter user @dyingnome, who tweeted on Saturday that a Dragon Age: Inquisition dev once admitted that they “just added some wind lines” to obscure the fact that DA:I horses weren’t actually going any faster while sprinting. Ebenger quoted …

Valve won’t let devs frontload Steam screenshot galleries with a dozen trailers anymore, says many don’t know ‘how best to manage’ the space-

Valve loves tweaking and futzing with Steam to ensure that everything is running just so. Some of it is front-facing, like the recent beta client update that added “game notes” and a slew of other new features, and some happens more in the background—for instance, the discount policy changes for developers it rolled out in early 2022. But even by those measures, the changes that went live today are really granular.

Steam store pages are now limited to just two videos on the left-hand side of the thumbnail row. Developers can add as many as they like, but any excess videos will be display on the right-hand of the thumbnail row, after the screenshots. Page owners can set which two videos they want before the screenshots, and which will come after, through the…

Western Digital is planning to split its SSD memory and hard drive operations into two new businesses-

Hot off the news that the long-running plan to merge with Kioxia has ground to a halt yet again, Western Digital’s board of directors has approved a plan to split the company up. Its NAND flash and hard drive divisions will become entirely independent public companies, pending final board approval and other regulations.

Western Digital, or just WD as a brand name, has been around in the world of technology for 53 years and these days it’s best known for its self-titled SSDs and HDDs, as well as SanDisk mobile storage. In the NAND flash world, it’s the fourth largest supplier of such chips, behind Samsung, Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory Corporation), and SK Hynix.

To make SSDs and tiny flash cards, Western Digital uses manufacturing plants owned by Kioxia, and the two have w…

WoW- The War Within will tell its main story via delves and dungeons ‘when it makes sense’, giving me hope for an escape from 2 decades of raid-centric storytelling-

I’ve always wanted to love the setting of World of Warcraft—but its storytelling, gnarled up in confusing timelines, optional quests, raid cutscenes, and books,has always kept me at arm’s length. Despite that, I’ve always been rooting for it to get better. That’s mostly out of nostalgia, sure, but I also have a love for the mechanics of stories, and I like to cheer for an underdog.

Dragonflight, when I’ve dipped my toes in, hasn’t fired on all cylinders in the way I was quietly hoping, although it was definitely an improvement over what came before. But a sore spot remains: Because of how WoW is structured, almost every climactic moment in its story has had to exist in a goddamn raid.

Sure, there are questlines with their real-time cutscenes—but developers have l…

AMD will launch a new ‘mainstream’ GPU by the end of June and it’s almost certainly the 7600 XT-

AMD’s head honcho Lisa Su has confirmed what we really already knew. There’s a new mainstream Radeon RX 7000 GPU coming and it will be here by the end of June.

“We’re on track to expand our RDNA 3 GPU portfolio with the launch of new mainstream Radeon 7000 series GPUs this quarter,” Su said.

Sadly, Su didn’t go into any further details in her comments, which came in AMD’s quarterly earnings call with the usual roll call of bankers and financial analysts. However, “mainstream” in this context typically implies fairly low-end hardware. Put another way, we wouldn’t expect Su to refer to something like a Radeon RX 7800 XT or 7700 XT as “mainstream”.

At the same time, there have been numerous rumours of a May 25 launch date for the RX 7600 XT, which certainly aligns with bo…