It's a sad possibility, IGN has been doing their own technical analyses for games for a couple of years now. If they do decide to do layoffs instead of combining those two departments, I hope they give the IGN guys the axe since DF technical reviews are more popular than the IGN ones. 

Next Xbox using ARM.

BOOKMARK ME.

So finally after 9 years CDP has released proper modding tools for Witcher 3. This should allow the level of modding that Bethesda games get. Honestly it's pretty remarkable how many mods Witcher 3 already has without modding tools, 6.6k mods on Nexus over the last 9 years, enough to put it in 14th place for most mods, but that still pales in comparison to Bethesda games like Fallout 4 with 48k mods and Skyrim Special Edition with 60k mods. 

Quakecon tickets went live 5 minutes ago and I'm already 2000 in line

At the very least I think they will use it on the Xbox handheld they've been teasing, using Arm for that handheld will be more battery efficient than going with an x86 handheld like Steam Deck, while this new ability to emulate x86 Windows games will allow the Xbox handheld to play PC Gamepass games without the need for optimized ports built for Arm (though some games will get optimized ports I suspect, especially from 1st/2nd party). 

Now will the console use Arm? I'm doubtful there. Xbox was considering it back when they made the slide about gen 10 that came out during the ABK trials, but that was an old slide from like 2020 and much has changed since then, they were planning on a 2028 release at the time before Xbox Series underperformed and they seemingly decided to move up the release by 2 years, and we've had multiple leakers claim that the 2026 next gen Xbox will use x86 again, specifically an AMD Zen 5 CPU, 3 generations ahead of the Zen 2 CPU in Xbox Series S|X (they were considering Zen 6 vs Arm for the 2028 next-gen Xbox).

I'll finish Hellblade II tomorrow but it's fucking stunning, JFC.

And sure, the combat is basic and I've not struggled in a fight yet but it still feels tense, the one on one encounters feel dangerous, the atmosphere pops in battle scenarios, it feels like a genuine fight for survival, even though I'm playing as Senua, I'm sitting here rooting her on like "fuck em up Senua!" the animations, the brutality of it, you can see genuine struggle from Senua but pure instinctual survival, it's so well acted, and the music pops too.

Playing through chapter 1 so far, and lowkey getting some ASMR vibes while playing through it with headphones on, lmao. 

Started playing Hellblade 2 and this is the first time a first party Xbox game has Greek subtitles. Nice to see and hopefully not the last.

Not far in, but Hellblade 2 is badass. From a technical and cinematic perspective, I'm blown away. Even though combat is not exactly mechanically deep, it's still engaging with how intense encounters get with numerous enemies being thrown at you in varies ways and situations. The fact you can pause the game at any time and go into photo mode is crazy. Everything is in-game, right?

Probably gonna be awhile till I get to HB2. Started other games before it released that are much faster paced and putting them to one side for a few hrs for HB2 is just not scratching an itch right now.