Tuesday news, the second part:

Dragon Age 4 just lost its veteran production director
https://www.pcgamer.com/dragon-age-4-just-lost-its-veteran-production-director/
Mac Walters, lead writer on Mass Effect 2 and 3 as well as creative director on Mass Effect: Andromeda, has departed BioWare after 19 years at the studio. Walters had been working as the production director for the upcoming Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, but it looks like that project will have to soldier on without him. Walters announced that he was leaving for new pastures in a post on LinkedIn last weekend (via Eurogamer).

Modern Warfare 2's hardcore mode finally returns next month, but fans are upset it took this long
https://www.pcgamer.com/modern-warfare-2s-hardcore-mode-finally-returns-next-month-but-fans-are-upset-it-took-this-long/
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's hyper-intense hardcore mode is set to stage a return in the game's upcoming season 2 update, scheduled for February 15. In a tweet posted yesterday, Infinity Ward confirmed the return of the much-missed mode in a sparse tweet, announcing "No HUD? No problem. Hardcore is back!" before encouraging players to keep an eye on the studio's blog for more season 2 details in the future.

The next SteamWorld game is a city builder, and there's a free demo out now
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-next-steamworld-game-is-a-city-builder-and-theres-a-free-demo-out-now/
We heard a while back that the SteamWorld series had a couple new games in development, and today finally we learned what the next one will be. For a series that's explored all sorts of different genres since SteamWorld Tower Defense released back in 2010, today's news makes the best sort of sense: Thunderful Development has announced SteamWorld Build. It's a city builder coming in 2023.

Three years after its original release, the latest Trackmania is finally coming to Steam
https://www.pcgamer.com/three-years-after-its-original-release-the-latest-trackmania-is-finally-coming-to-steam/
Ubisoft's struggles to cook up a live service game that anyone cares about are very well documented, so it's easy to overlook the fact that it's actually had one on the go for years now: The high-flying arcade racing game Trackmania. And now, three years after it launched as an exclusive for the Ubisoft and Epic stores, it's finally on its way to Steam.

Blizzard games go dark in China, with no return in sight: 'This is so tragic,' says former Hearthstone director
https://www.pcgamer.com/blizzard-games-go-dark-in-china-with-no-return-in-sight-this-is-so-tragic-says-former-hearthstone-director/
January 23 has now come and gone in China, and that means Blizzard games including World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Diablo 3, and Overwatch have been shut down in the country, with no return currently in sight.

GTA Online has its own Dark Souls-style critical security vulnerability on PC
https://www.pcgamer.com/grand-theft-auto-online-has-its-own-dark-souls-style-critical-security-vulnerability-on-pc/
The Rockstar Games-focused account Tez2 recently shared evidence of security vulnerabilities in Grand Theft Auto Online. (...)
Update: Rockstar has acknowledged "potential new exploits in GTA Online for PC" in a tweet from its support account, and says it will address them in a security-focused update.

Blizzard fires WoW Classic lead after he protests employee evaluation policy
https://www.pcgamer.com/blizzard-fires-wow-classic-lead-after-he-protests-employee-evaluation-policy/
One of World of Warcraft Classic's lead developers was fired by Blizzard after protesting an employee evaluation policy, according to a report by Bloomberg.
Brian Birmingham, who is the lead engineer on WoW Classic, refused to give an employee a low evaluation in order to meet a quota introduced by Blizzard in 2021. The process, called "stack ranking," requires managers to give about 5% of their employees a low performance evaluation to fit on a bell curve of relative performance. According to Activision Blizzard sources who spoke to Bloomberg, a low rating reduces an employee's profit-sharing bonus and "could hamper them from receiving raises or promotions in the near future."

Blizzard once again bans Overwatch 2 'sexual harassment simulator,' but not before it reappeared in the popular list
https://www.pcgamer.com/blizzard-once-again-bans-overwatch-2-sexual-harassment-simulator-but-not-before-it-reappeared-in-the-popular-list/
A user-created Overwatch 2 mode that simulates sexual assault reappeared in the game's custom game browser, and for some, showed up as one of the most popular modes.
I verified that the unique code to play the mode was working yesterday and contacted Blizzard. The code no longer works as of today, but I haven't heard back from Blizzard about what, if anything, it plans to do to prevent the mode from returning to Overwatch.

Here are the Forspoken release times for each region
https://www.pcgamer.com/forspoken-release-times/
The Forspoken release time is almost here, so your wait is nearly over if you're keen to jump in and start exploring Athia. Forspoken was delayed twice last year—the second time, in July, was apparently for strategic reasons rather than because the game wasn't ready. Whatever the reason, though, the wait is finally over.

All Hogwarts Legacy discussion banned on one of the world's largest gaming forums
https://www.pcgamer.com/hogwarts-legacy-discussion-banned-on-one-of-the-worlds-largest-gaming-forums/
Hogwarts Legacy was announced in 2020, and ever since has been dogged online by its association with J.K Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books and creator of the Wizarding World setting, whose views on trans issues have been so controversial and widely reported-upon that Warner Bros. is desperate to make clear she has nothing to do with the game's creation. Now, a few weeks before its February 10 release, the de facto gaming forum Restera has completely banned discussion of the game.
>> Imho, this is getting so out of hand that it's becoming just plain dumb.

'A spit in the face of every translator who worked tirelessly on the project'—Persona 3 and 4 localisers aren't in the credits
https://www.pcgamer.com/a-spit-in-the-face-of-every-translator-who-worked-tirelessly-on-the-projectpersona-3-and-4-localisers-arent-in-the-credits/
Persona 3 Portable was released from its PSP shackles last Thursday, and Persona 4 Golden got a sizable update too. Both games—wherever you play them—now have full support for French, Italian, German, and Spanish (FIGS) subtitles, thanks to the work of localisers brave enough to take on the long and wordy games. But now it's come to light (via Kotaku) that the people responsible for actually doing that localisation work have been left out of the final credits, with only senior staff members from Keywords—the localisation company that handled the work—mentioned by name.
>> To be clear, the fault lies on Keywords, not Sega.

AMD Ryzen 7000X3D series now listed as ‘unlocked for overclocking’

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-ryzen-7000x3d-series-now-listed-as-unlocked-for-overclocking

"Update: As expected, AMD has removed the mention of overclocking support."

Jebaited

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Was Searched 7 Times More Than AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX In 2022

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-searched-7-times-more-than-amd-radeon-rx-7900-xtx-in-2022/

Why yes, it is a slow news day

Community Driven MorePowerTool For AMD GPUs Will Not Support RDNA 3 GPUs Due To Hard-Lock, Users To Pay For Power Limits & Features

https://wccftech.com/community-driven-morepowertool-for-amd-gpus-will-not-support-rdna-3-due-to-hard-lock-users-to-pay-for-power-limits-features/

Nvidia loves locking things out so naturally, Radeon follows

I agree that the criteria used to select the games featured on the sale is quite questionable. I know there's a base building component in the game, but putting Fallout 4 in the same box as those games is going a bit too far.

Ha! I didn't know you were optimistic enough to belive we would be alive by 2030 given what's going on in Ukraine plus if there's another war for Taiwan.

Tested my 4090 with the Forspoken demo just for shits.

About 66-70fps at 4k Native but more like mid 50s during combat... On a 4090...

When I posted the article about the release times for the game in the diffeent regions and read that the game was delayed from Julya to now for "strategic reasons", I almost left a comment saying what a shame it was that they hadn't used this extra time to optimize the game on all platforms. But I'm sure they did, which begs the questioon of what a sh*tshow it would have been if S-E had launched it in July when they wanted to.

The absolute worst state any game can ever be in, when an extremely expensive GPU can barely handle just over 60fps...

SE royally shit the bed and the whole room on this one.

Yee this is a game where very platform loses. PS5 720p, 4090 barely does 60fps native. If I overclock it with 220+ Mhz Core + 1000 Mhz on Vram, it can stay above 60 during intense combat scenes but it's like... This game shouldn't even warrant it lol. It has worse lighting than a 6 year old FFXV...

Huh. I thought they simply didn't care about PC and thus skipped the PC demo, but it turns out they were either lazy or didn't want to reveal the game's poor performance, and now I'm strongly leaning towards the latter. Might try it at some point because I've personally liked what I've seen (somewhat), although just barely meeting the minimum requirements doesn't sound too great with this game...

It's just incompetence.

They absolutely knew what state their game was in prior to release.

Let's hope AMD and Intel can force them to not abandon cheaper GPUs.

GPUs will never get as cheap as they were some 10-15 years ago anymore (GeForce GTX 680 for $499 or Radeon HD 6970XT for just $369 MSRP, anyone?) due to the price increases at the chip fabrication, and especially the steep price increases below 10nm, but having the mid-range start at $600 or even higher is simply too much.

The 1060 cost only $199 at launch. While I don't expect such prices to return anytime soon, $300 max for a xx6x from either AMD or NVidia should be possible, $350 max for a Ti/Super/XTX (I have a feeling that AMD is turning the XT into the base version to not confound the GPUs with AMD CPUs without any suffix) variant. That would still be a big increase to the 1060, but it wouldn't price the cards out of the budgets of the players anymore.

In the same vein, xx7x cards should be below $500, $600 for Ti/Super/XTX. That's actually in line with the MSRP of the 3070/3070Ti and 6700/6700XT/6750XT