Baldur’s Gate 3 just received its fourth major patch. Once more, the thing’s big enough to break the Steam notes. While there aren’t any new major features—like the third patch’s appearance-changing mirror or, equally as important, letting small characters kiss Karlach—it’s still packed with changes.

A huge quality of life improvement comes in the form of some much needed personal hygiene. You can now use sponges and soap to wash the grime off your party members—which is nice, since Baldur’s Gate 3 features Dragon Age: Origins levels of blood splatter which, while immersive, does undercut more sensitive moments by saddling you and your crew with axe murderer vibes.

Another gamechanger: when purchasing a statue from Boney in the Circus of the Last Days, you now have your choice of modesty—fully armoured, camp clothes, or butt naked. I’ll be disappointed if you don’t get any unique dialogues for just plonking down y…

It’s been many years since Microsoft implemented proper support for HDR monitors in Windows but trying to correctly capture the colours in a screenshot has been a constant problem. At long last, though, the Snipping Tool has been updated in the latest development versions of Windows to help solve this annoying issue.

As announced in a tweet by the DirectX 12 team, Microsoft’s latest Insider preview builds of Windows 11 contain an update to the erstwhile Snipping Tool that “should be able to better display colors” when taking a capture of a screen running in HDR mode.

If those three letters mean nothing to you, HDR stands for high dynamic range. Basically, it means more bits are used for the three colours (red, green, and blue) that make up every pixel in your monitor. So instead of the usual eight, HDR monitors will use 10 or 12 bits, to make colours more accurate.

HDR screens also tend to have a higher maximum brightness than standard monitors, to increase the amo…

I don’t watch TV. Not in a smart guy way, more of a “I have 200 hours of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous logged on Steam” kind of way. Still, despite such a cultural diet, even I know about Love is Blind, the Netflix show where emotionally unwell people agree to get married before they’ve even met. It turns out love may be blind because it’s afflicted with scarlet rot.

As reported by Huffpost, on a recent episode contestant Zack Goytowski decided to run some curious baby names by his shotgun bride, Irina Solomonova: “What about Godfrey,” he proffered, with Solomonova simply responding, “Ew.” While she was nonplussed at the name of the First Elden Lord, maybe Goytowski would have had better luck with “Hoarah,” as in, “Hoarah Loux, Warrior, Chieftain of the Badlands and Alter Ego to Godfrey.”

Undeterred, Goytowski then hits her with “Godrick,” referring to the first Great Rune holder most players are likely to encounter, a mythic coward who rides around in a me…

New co-op survival game Enshrouded has been picking up Steam in the past few days, as the survival-crafting action RPG has not just pretty compelling combat but a really nice, rather in-depth building system. Per our predictions last year, Enshrouded’s impressive system of terrain alteration and building is giving rise to some truly delightful community creations. I’ve rounded up some of the best I’ve seen in the handful of days since release.

Hobbit Hole (WIP) from r/Enshrouded

In a hole in the ground there lived a Flameborn. Not a nasty, dirty, we hole, but one that was pretty neat because on the exterior, creator Guntoucher gave it that nice tudor style look, but on the inside it’s hall of hardwood flooring with detailed stonework atop the walls. 

It’s important to have a cozy place to stay in Enshrouded, because as we recently discovered sleep is one of its coolest features.

Mah House…

Life By You looked set to be the game that finally gave The Sims a run for its money, until it was beset by delays and then, in June, a surprise cancellation followed almost immediately by an unsurprising closure of developer Paradox Tectonic. Now, as so often happens in cases like this, previously unreleased images from the game are starting to come to light, giving us a look at what might have been—and it looks like it might have been really good.

The images come from the online portfolios of former Life By You artists Richard Khoo, Eric Maki, and Chris Lewis, and were helpfully put together on Twitter by Sims enthusiast and content creator SimMattically. Many of the images are basic shots of the character creator, but others showcase more visually impressive indoor and outdoor locales.

The sad irony is that many of these shots look better than the official Life For You screens shared by Paradox prior to the game’s cancellation, and that hasn’t gone unnoticed in …

This graph seems so unbelievable it makes the thing a little hard to parse. But basically, cryptocurrency mining in the US sucked down more energy that every computer in the entire country. Every. Single. Computer. 

Yes, even Macs.

Hell, at 50 billion kWh, crypto mining in the US almost used more power than all the televisions. And there are quite a few TVs in the States, in case you’d forgotten.

I’ve seen all the stories about cryptocurrency mining using more power than [insert country here], and those stats are always pretty astounding. But they always relate to the entirety of the global crypto network, or just the bitcoin mining around the world. And it’s quite easy to insulate yourself against such broad terms.

But when it’s just about the output of a single country—albeit the single largest contributor to the bitcoin mining industry—to me it seems to hit home much harder.

This all comes from a White House report on the proposed Di…

Watch On

A first look at Splitgate 2‘s gameplay shows off how the idea of an arena shooter, but with portals, is still just as wild and interesting a concept as when we first saw it. The 4.5 minute gameplay reveal features a few skilled streamers as they pour over Splitgate 2’s combat, what sets it apart from the original Splitgate, and its three new classes—called factions. 

They especially note what’s new about Splitgate 2, particularly the introduction of factions. The original Splitgate had a traditional Halo setup with weapon pickups on the map and periodic power weapons, but Splitgate 2 pivots in a Call of Duty-shaped direction with classes and loadouts. Streamers also noted faster-paced movement, including a new sliding mechanic that punches up firefights. They also emphasize the new variety to matches, with abilities and utility powers like a deployable shield and self-boosting stim.

There are now three factions of Splitgate competitors to choos…

Embers of Neltharion, the first big update to World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, has brought a new zone, raid, and dungeons to Blizzard’s long-running MMO, and of course a whole bunch of new and interesting items—one of which requires a very old and uninteresting item to acquire.

As Starym on the Icy Veins forum (via GamesRadar) explains it, there’s a Blazing Shadowflame chest located at coordinates 28.8, 47.5 of the new Zaralek Cavern zone. The problem is that the Shadowflames surrounding the chest cannot be bypassed unless you have an Onyxia Scale Cloak. And the problem with that is that the Onyxia Scale Cloak is an item from Vanilla (read: old) WoW, and not many people have kept one lying around.

That, predictably, led to a surge in demand for relevant crafting materials, and a commensurate spike in prices for said materials. “Thanks to a recently discovered secret requiring an old cloak, farmed ingredients for the cloak which includes scale of Onyxia is now going…

We haven’t heard much about the upcoming Subnautica 2, apart from the devs reassuring fans that it won’t be a live service game, so fans are understandably excited at the discovery of secret new screenshots of the sequel. 

An eagle-eyed Subnautica player spotted what looked like a strange new creature in a time capsule. The picture includes a few new rainbow tadpole-like creatures, which we haven’t seen before. “Hey um, found this on my way to the rocket,” the image’s description says. “Is this thing new? Never seen it before! :O” 

This kicked up quite a fuss as even veteran players couldn’t identify the odd sea creature leading some to believe that this has to be from some kind of mod: “That looks quite similar to that screenshot they shared a few months ago,” one player says. “Could just be mods and a weird perspective tho.”

However, it turns out that this isn’t from any mod, it’s actually a new screenshot from the upcoming Subnautica 2. While a couple …

You can find many deals on SSDs today. That bit is relatively easy, especially as the Memorial Day PC gaming sales get into full swing. What’s tougher is knowing if any drive is actually worth your hard earned money. Some are, and I’ve dug them out for your easy browsing below.

First off, this Nextorage 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD for $136 over at Newegg. This is a drive that takes full advantage of the PCIe Gen 4 connection with write speeds of 7,400 MB/s and read speeds of 6,400 MB/s. It’s right up there with many of the best SSDs for gaming.

Nextorage actually started out as a company dedicated to building SSDs for the PlayStation 5, but relatively swiftly saw the opportunity in the wider PC market—as has Sony itself. We were impressed with the company’s PCIe 4.0 drive in our Nextorage NEM-PA 2TB review, and since then I’ve looked at the Gen 5 option—the Nextorage X Series NN5PRO—a much pricier drive but hella quick.

There’s also a Nextorage drive with a …