Month: September 2024

Back in February, someone leaked more than 200 pages of an art book from the upcoming Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Nintendo wants to know who: A TorrentFreak report says the company has filed a DMCA subpoena with Discord, seeking the identity of a user who shared the images.

The images were only up briefly before Nintendo sent its initial DMCA takedown request, which Discord responded to very promptly—in just eight minutes, according to the report—with a promise to take down the art book content. Several hours later, Nintendo asked that the channel named “Tears of the Kingdom Official Discord Server” also be taken offline because some of its members were still sharing the leaked content.

Naturally, that was not the end of it. On April 7, lawyers for Nintendo filed a subpoena seeking the real identity of Discord user Julien#2743, “including the name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), and e-mail addresses(es),” for posting the content on the Discord channel. The filing says the information will be used “for the purposes of protecting the rights granted to NOA [Nintendo of America] under the Copyright Act.” Since the infringing content is al…

This is a tough call to make: Should RTS units cycle through the comforting traditional acknowledgments when you click on them—”ready,” “awaiting orders,” that kind of thing—or should unit barks finally evolve past the generic assertions of Command & Conquer and Warcraft? For the upcoming Homeworld 3, Blackbird Interactive is taking the latter position, saying that it’s innovating on unit barks and that “the scale of chatter design” in the RTS is greater than the series has ever seen.

Those comments come from a new Homeworld 3 developer update which also teases the work Blackbird has done on pre-rendered cutscenes and in-engine environment rendering. There’s some strong nebula work to admire near the bottom of the post, but the big section in the middle titled “No one can hear you scream” is what caught my attention, because I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered such a thorough breakdown of RTS unit bark theory.

“Of the four audio design pillars we have for Homeworld 3, the one that has driven ship pilot speech the most is: ‘Humanize the fleet,'” writes audio director Dave Renn. “If you’ve played a lot of real-time strategy games, then you’re all-too-fam…

On Friday, OpenAI, the industry leading machine learning firm and creator of ChatGPT, ousted its co-founder and CEO Sam Altman. It was an unexpected move and the board expressed the reasons for its decision in extraordinary terms, saying it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading” after he had not been “consistently candid” with them. The news drove a frenzy of speculation in the tech world over the weekend, with Microsoft in particular (which has a multi-billion investment in OpenAI) said to have been blindsided by the move, amid speculation that Altman would be re-hired by the firm.

Well, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella decided to just cut out the middleman, and has announced that Microsoft has hired Altman to lead “a new advanced AI research team” though remains “committed to our partnership with OpenAI”. Microsoft has also hired Greg Brockman, also an OpenAI co-founder and formerly the company’s president, who was laid off alongside Altman.

For its part OpenAI has appointed ex-Twitch CEO Emmett Shear as its new CEO, who said he had “spent today drinking from the firehose as much as possible”. Shear noted that “it’s clear that the pro…

I’m genuinely hoping Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League doesn’t sink itself. There is something to be said for live-service fatigue, but I am not immune to the appeal of numbers going up, and it looks like it could conceivably be a good time. Here to punch another hole in my hope-boat is the news that, yeah: the game has Denuvo DRM in it.

As spotted by PCGamesN, the game’s Steam Page now lists Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League as incorporating “Denuvo anti-tamper”. SteamDB notes that the change took place January 20. 

Denuvo is a notoriously unpopular form of DRM. It’s blamed for a swathe of problems from crashes to major performance issues. Conventional wisdom is that Denuvo always makes your games run worse—that’s not necessarily always true, as the Denuvo DRM in Final Fantasy 15 was found by DSFix creator Durante to simply add a bump to loading times. 

But the accusation isn’t always false, either. Resident Evil: Village suffered from a plague of stuttering woes caused by the software—by Capcom’s own admission, no less. Even if Denuvo was washed clean of all suspicion from a performance standpoint, its online components can cau…