We've all done it. One moment, you're playing The Elder Scrolls 3. Then, boom, you pass the thrust and everything implodes. Thankfully, the latest update to OpenMW - the open source engine reimplementation that's one of the the best ways to play Morrowind on modern hardware - includes measures to stop this thrusting from accidentally breaking the game.
Just 100 days ago, when new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma replaced long-serving executive Phil Spencer, she said she'd work to "understand what makes [Xbox] work and protect it." Now, Sharma and Xbox Studios chief Matt Booty have laid out the many things that are not working for the Xbox brand in a brutal self-assessment the they say necessitates a wholesale "Xbox reset."
The message sent to Xbox employees and shared publicly via Xbox Wire last night paints a grim picture for practically every facet of the Xbox division. That portion of Microsoft is currently only seeing a "3 percent accountability margin" (read: profit margin), down year over year and well below both the game industry average and the lofty 30 percent margins that Microsoft is reportedly seeking across the board.
It's an underperformance, they write, born out of being "overextended" by moves like the $69 billion acquisition of Activision. That mega-merger came on top of $20 billion in spending on other acquisitions, platform investments, and hardware subsidies over the last five years, the executives write. But despite the spending spree, Microsoft's overall gaming revenues are down nearly $500 million compared to five years ago.
Alkimia Interactive and THQ's Gothic remake launched over the weekend, and many are the complaints that the RPG's revised lockpicking system is far too hard. I know, right - tricky lockpicking in a game set in a giant prison! Please excuse me while I lift both hands from the keyboard and strenuously knead my face into a shocked expression.
Hey you! You're finally awake – oh, hang on, I'm thinking of the other fantasy yarn in which you start out as a shackled prisoner. Today is release day for Alkimia Interactive and THQ Nordic's remake of Gothic, the 2001 first-person RPG from Piranha Bytes. It'll be live on Steam in a matter of hours, with a demo still available as of writing.
While much plumped up with expanded questlines, more NPC routines, new traversal abilities and "modernized" combat, it's still broadly the same tale of a bunch of convicts trapped beneath a magic dome, quarrying ore to sell to a king who is waging an endless war against the orcs. That's the king in the intro cinematic, below, looking down at the orc's head in his fist like he can't quite remember how it got there. How long has he been carrying that head? Did he confuse it with his coffee mug at breakfast?
How about a little look ahead at what's apparently coming to Subnautica 2? Following the game's incredibly strong launch that is probably going to force Krafton to pay out that $250 million bonus after all, Unknown Worlds have released another dev log outlining a few details about future updates.
Last week, Subnautica 2 developers Unknown Worlds held their hands up and said that players seeking a means to kill dangerous fish was down to the survival game's tools for avoiding and outfoxing such creatures not feeling as effective as they should. Cue tweaks to creatures and their behaviour aimed at addressing the issue, which have started to arrive with Sub 2's latest hotfix.
When the Steam Deck OLED launched three years ago, we were glad to see that the new, more brilliant screen fixed the biggest flaw of Valve's original handheld hardware. So we're unsurprisingly excited about today's announcement that Asus is preparing a new, OLED-equipped ROG Xbox Ally X20 for the coming holiday season. Still, it's a bit worrying that Asus is positioning the new upgrade as a niche collector's item rather than its new handheld gaming standard.
The X20 expands the 7-inch screen found on last year's ROG Xbox Ally line to 7.4 inches, matching the display on the Steam Deck OLED and approaching the 7.9-inch screen on the Switch 2. The 1080p HDR panel also increases the maximum brightness from 500 nits on original Xbox Ally models to a full 1400 and adds some new anti-glare coating that should help when playing in direct sunlight. The X20's 120 Hz display now supports Dolby Vision HDR colors and FreeSync Premium Pro to help smooth frame rates while still providing a larger color gamut.
On the control front, the X20 introduces magnetic TMR thumbsticks, replacing the carbon-film potentiometers that made the original Xbox Ally more prone to stick drift and physical wear. A new D-pad on the X20 also introduces a neat little lift-and-twist design that can transform it from a four-direction cross to a more circular eight-direction pad, similar to the convertible D-pad found on some now-classic Xbox 360 controllers.
When I play Subnautica 2, I often feel as though I am swimming in two worlds simultaneously. On the one hand, there's the world that goes on without me, the world of wonky indigenous beings living out their lives, careless of my presence: shoals of unharvestable fish swizzing past like dropped fireworks, growth cycles half-deciphered in flooded laboratories, crested hammerheads idly circling their territories. On the other, there's the world that goes on for me, its rewards and hazards colour-coded and reasonably predictable, its flora and fauna gated-off and patterned according to their role within the crafting and progression systems.
Most of the Steam Deck imitators on the market right now use AMD silicon, specifically the Ryzen Z-series chips. These are the same chips AMD makes for regular laptops, but with different power settings better suited to a compact handheld system. There are handhelds based on Intel silicon (MSI’s Claw is the main one), but Intel hasn’t yet tried making silicon marketed specifically for that purpose.
Today, the company is throwing its hat in the ring with two Intel Arc G-series processors, which will allow gaming handhelds to leverage the company's genuinely quite good Arc B-series integrated GPUs. Intel says that several Arc G-series handhelds will arrive "starting in June 2026, with broader availability throughout the year." These systems will include a new MSI Claw model, a Predator Atlas 8 from Acer, and a device from OneXPlayer.
Intel normally uses its "Arc" branding for integrated and dedicated GPUs, but in this case, the "Arc" brand encompasses the entire chip, including the CPU, GPU, NPU, and other components.
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