Month: December 2024

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a great game. Even that feels like an understatement, though. It’s one of our highest-scoring games in a decade and a half, a landmark RPG so significant it sparked actual debates in the developer community about its own quality. It’s also done. 

While the game’s going to keep getting patches and updates, there won’t be much in the way of significant DLCs—but Swen Vincke (developer Larian Studios’ CEO and founder) says that choice was mostly down to studio enthusiasm. That’s as per a talk Vincke had with IGN at GDC earlier this week.

“The obvious thing would have been to do a DLC, so we started on one. We started even thinking about BG4. But we hadn’t really had closure on BG3 yet, and just to jump forward on something new felt wrong.”

Vincke explains that Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition (5e)—the game that Baldur’s Gate 3 is built on—is a bit of a tough thing to roll with when you’re designing a videogame, noting that his team “had all these ideas of new combat we wanted to try out, and they were not compatible.” 

Which makes sense. Baldur’s Gate 3 is already a game that breaks a lot of 5e rules over its k…

We live in some strange times. Let’s say you’ve splashed the cash and bought yourself a brand new Ryzen 9 9950X processor. It’s got 16 cores, 32 threads and it’s a seriously capable CPU, though not the absolute best for gaming. Well, Asus reckons it has a fix for the latter in the form of a new Turbo Game Mode, that halves the number of cores and quarters the number of threads.

Specifically, what Turbo Game Mode (TGM) does is disable one of the CCDs (Core Complex Dies) and SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading). In short, it turns the likes of the 9950X into an 8-core, 8-thread processor. The idea is that some games just don’t like to have threads scattered across separate dies or sharing any cores.

To see if this is the case for any of the games in our CPU benchmarking suite, I ran them afresh with the beta 2505 BIOS for the Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Hero motherboard. The test setup used a Ryzen 9 9950X, 32 GB of DDR5-6000 CL28, a GeForce RTX 4070, and Windows 23H2.

You can see the results for yourself below but as a quick summary, Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3 ran worse with TGM enabled, Metro Exodus and Total War: Warhammer 3 ran exactly the same as without…

Sony’s assimilation of Destiny 2 studio Bungie took another step forward today with the announcement that its Creative Studios arm, responsible for directing and developing the “artistic vision” and branding of Bungie games, is now fully a part of PlayStation Studios.

Word of the change came from Bridget O’Neill, formerly the senior director of Creative Studios at Bungie, now the senior director of Creative at PlayStation Studios, who said on LinkedIn (via Game Developer) that her team “is joining PlayStation Studios to build the foundation for a creative team that can support all PlayStation live service games.”

“This opportunity to share our experience working on Bungie titles with other studios that are building live service games is so exciting,” O’Neill wrote.

“Live service is hard and comes with a unique set of challenges, so with PlayStation and Bungie working together we will be able to give a huge jumpstart on development for new games as they enter this super competitive market.”

Despite the move, O’Neill said the team will also continue working on Destiny 2 and Marathon.

In some ways, the change has been a long time coming…