There are plenty of people that ignored our advice and pre-ordered The Outer Worlds 2.  It seems that Obsidian is having a bit of a laugh with those people, as the Consumerism…

The AI bubble, for that is what it is, hasn't really made anyone a profit unless they are selling the hardware needed to run an LLM like NVIDIA has been.  It…

Building on the success of its Arx 500, Endorfy has officially launched a new variant of its popular mid-tower: the Arx 500 White ARGB. As the name suggests, this new model brings the same airflow-focused design to builders seeking a clean, all-white aesthetic.

Endorfy states that significant effort went into achieving a precisely matched white hue across all the case components, ensuring a consistent look right out of the box. The white variant remains unchanged from the original Arx 500, featuring perforated front and top panels designed for maximum ventilation while also acting as dust filters. A tempered glass side panel provides a clear view of the interior components.

The case comes pre-installed with four Stratus 140 White PWM ARGB fans, developed in partnership with Synergy Cooling. These fans are rated for speeds between 200 and 1400 RPM, aiming for a balance between strong airflow and low noise. The interior can accommodate ATX motherboards and radiators up to 360 mm in size.

Endorfy's new Arx 500 White ARGB is now available in stores, priced around €120-€130.

KitGuru says: Are you a fan of white PC cases?

Although Valve's Steam Deck is relatively old compared to mainstream handhelds, it remains a capable device that supports several AAA titles. However, to 'supercharge' your experience, Dockcase has introduced their newest Chizha Mount Ling Dock for Steam Deck, and they were kind enough to send us an 'exclusive' review sample. After testing the dock for several days, I must say, it is indeed an accessory that every Valve fan out there should own, since it really brings in 'valuable' benefits and add-ons. Steam Deck Chizha Mount Ling Dock - LAN Support, Extra M.2 SSD Slot & Futuristic Design Since the […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/review/steam-deck-chizha-mount-ling-dock-review/

To celebrate a decade of Geralt's legendary adventure in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Corsair has teamed up with CD Projekt Red for a limited edition collection of officially licensed gaming peripherals. The new gear brings iconic elements from the beloved RPG to some of Corsair's most popular hardware.

Leading the collection is a unique version of the Corsair K65 Plus Wireless keyboard. This 75% mechanical board (available in NA layout only) comes adorned with special Witcher signs printed on the keycaps, a custom Esc key featuring the game's logo, and a large graphic of Geralt's Wolf medallion on the chassis. It features Corsair's smooth MLX linear switches and promises the same reliable wireless performance as the standard model.

Joining the keyboard is a themed M75 Wireless Lightweight RGB gaming mouse. This version features artwork inspired by the fearsome King of the Wild Hunt, Eredin, adding a touch of villainous flair to your desktop. To complete the set, Corsair is also releasing an MM300 2XL Anti-Fray Cloth gaming mouse pad. This desk-spanning mat is decorated with artwork depicting the Spiral's astral map and the iconic Witcher signs.

The Corsair x The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt 10th Anniversary Collection is now available in limited quantities worldwide directly from Corsair.com and CD Projekt Red's official store. The K65 Plus Wireless costs £159.99/$169.99/€169.99, the M75 Wireless costs £119.99/$129.99/€129.99, and the MM300 2XL mouse pad costs £39.99/$49.99/€49.99.

KitGuru says: Are you a fan of Witcher 3? Are you planning to get any of Corsair's limited-edition Witcher 3 gear?

Earlier this week, we learned through leaks that Stray would be one of the big games offered up for free to all PlayStation Plus subscribers in November. Now, Sony has confirmed the official list of freebies, adding two more games to the list.

Stray is a third-person adventure game where you play as a stray cat navigating a neon-lit cybercity inhabited by robots, machines, and lurking dangers. With the help of a small drone companion named B-12, the cat solves puzzles, evades threats, and searches for a way back to the surface.

If you are subscribed to any tier of PlayStation Plus, you'll be able to claim the game for free on PS4 and PS5.

WRC 24 (PS5) is the next free game available to claim in November. This racer, developed by CODEMASTERS and published by EA, offers close to 100 cars to check out in a series of challenging rally races.

Finally, we have Totally Accurate Battle Simulator (TABS), which has previously made appearances on Game Pass. This title is a physics based game with two main modes – campaign and sandbox. In Sandbox, you can freely experiment with over 130 units and let massive battles play out. In the campaign, you'll overcome a series of challenges versus AI controlled enemies.

KitGuru Says: Will you be installing any of November's free PlayStation Plus titles?

While Monster Hunter Wilds had a successful launch, the game's sales have been dwindling ever since, in part due to Capcom's unwillingness to address the title's underlying technical performance issues. Sales have continued on a downward trend all year, with Capcom's latest quarterly earnings showing it losing out to much older titles in the catalogue.  

As part of Capcom's most recent quarterly earnings report (via VGC), the company released its top-ten performing titles for the quarter, broken down by sales for the quarter and total lifetime sales. Monster Hunter Wilds now sits at the bottom of this list, selling fewer units than even Monster Hunter Rise, a game that has been out for a few years at this stage.

In total, Monster Hunter Wilds sold around 637,000 copies for the quarter ending on September 25th. Meanwhile, Monster Hunter Rise sold 643,000 copies. Meanwhile, other back catalogue titles like Devil May Cry 5, Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil Village, all sold more than 1 million copies each during this same time period.

Capcom acknowledged that it was concerned by the Monster Hunter Wilds sales trend during its Q2 earnings call earlier this year. Around that same time, the Monster Hunter development team also announced that it would finally be focusing on optimising game performance, but that fixes could take months.

At this time, Monster Hunter Wilds has a negative overall user score on Steam, with many reviews pointing to the game's technical performance as the core reason for the low score.

KitGuru Says: Monster Hunter World wasn't the most optimal game either, but fans clearly expected more from Monster Hunter Wilds and judging by the continued negative reactions to the game, Capcom failed to deliver. 

Corsair has unleashed its new flagship PCIe 5.0 SSD for the storage market, the MP700 Pro XT. This new flagship Gen 5 M.2 drive is aimed squarely at enthusiasts and power users who want to push the limits of PCIe Gen 5 performance.

Powered by a next-generation controller, the MP700 Pro XT is pushing the boundaries of the M.2 interface. Corsair claims sequential read speeds of up to 14,900 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 14,500 MB/s. These are some of the fastest speeds we've seen to date, promising near-instantaneous boot-ups and load times. In addition, Corsair claims the maximum random read speed can reach 2.7M IOPS, and the maximum random write speed can reach 3.3M IOPS. Despite this incredible performance, Corsair also highlights that the drive has a power-efficient design to help keep heat in check.

The drive, of course, supports Microsoft DirectStorage for faster game loading by allowing the GPU to communicate directly with the SSD. To manage the driver, the user can use the Corsair SSD Toolbox software. Moreover, the driver has an endurance of 700 TBW per TB and is backed by a five-year warranty.

For those looking to make the jump, the Corsair MP700 Pro XT is available to purchase starting today in 1 TB, 2 TB, and 4 TB capacities, with even more options planned for early 2026. The 1 TB model costs £159.99/$159.99/€179.99, the 2 TB model costs £259.99/$249.99/€294.99, and the 4 TB model costs $459.99.

KitGuru says: Given its price, which MP700 Pro XT variant would you get, if any?

As part of Amazon's big round of job cuts, the company has also announced plans to cease development on its most successful game to date, New World. Season 10 will be New World's last and the servers will go offline next year.

In a statement released this week, the developers behind New World confirm the news, saying:

“After four years of steady content updates and a major new console release, we've reached a point where it is no longer sustainable to continue supporting the game with new content updates.”

“The recently launched Season 10 and Nighthaven update will serve as the final content release for New World on PC and consoles. It is only after much consideration that we've reached this decision. To thank you, the New World community, for your support over the years, we have made the Nighthaven release available to you for free. To ensure all New World players can experience this content, we also made Rise of the Angry Earth free for all PC players.”

Over the next few months, the New World team will finalise its shutdown plans. Currently, the game is expected to remain online through 2026 but after that, any players looking to keep New World alive may need to resort to private servers.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: While New World had its faults, it was a pretty decent MMO. It is sad to see it shutting down so quickly, but clearly, no other projects within Amazon Games were bearing any fruit. The money was bound to dry up eventually.

Despite being the series that defined Japanese role-playing games, Dragon Quest took some time to get the widespread recognition it deserved in North America and Europe. Nowadays, the franchise created by Yuji Horii is a household name as much as Final Fantasy is, and the popularity of the franchise led to the successful release of the Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, a very solid remake that was met with a warm reception from fans, thanks to its great visuals and how small choice tweaks made the classic gameplay more compelling. Remaking the remainder of the Erdrick trilogy, however, needed something […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/review/dragon-quest-i-ii-hd-2d-remake-classic-rpgs-at-their-best/

Amazon has been spending millions on its gaming division over the past decade, with very few shipped games to show for it. Now, as cost-cutting measures come into effect, thousands of Amazon game developers, and those working on the publishing side, are set to be let go. 

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier has heard that for its gaming division, Amazon will be making significant cuts at its studios in Irvine and San Diego, and will be reducing the amount of work it does on AAA games. Specifically, Amazon no longer believes in the MMO concept and will no longer focus on “massively multiplayer online games”.

This round of job cuts is also likely to have a big impact on Twitch, the biggest livestreaming site for videogame content. Twitch is well known for operating on razor thin margins and often losing money. Despite being owned by Amazon, Twitch is also one of the largest customers for Amazon Web Services, which continues to be the site's biggest expenditure.

In the last round of job cuts, Amazon let go of more than 27,000 employees. This time around, the number is expected to be closer to 14,000.

KitGuru Says: On top of this, Amazon is also shutting down New World, its only successful game. It is unclear what this means for announced projects, like the next Tomb Raider game, which is due to be published by Amazon. 

After a lengthy period of early access for Premium Edition buyers, The Outer Worlds 2 officially launches for all today. I've completed my first playthrough of the game and while I do want to play another character and make a few different choices, I'm not sure Obsidian has done enough to address the first game's problems.

Before we dive into gameplay and story elements, lets touch on PC performance. I've put around 35 hours into The Outer Worlds 2 so far. Like in the first game, you are likely to encounter frame drops in towns, but overall, I found the game to run smooth and I didn't encounter any major technical problems. The game looks and feels polished, runs at over 120FPS at QHD with an RTX 4080 and DLSS, and this time around, we also get the benefit of Ray-Traced lighting, bringing the game graphically on par with other UE5 titles, without losing the original game's colourful art style. On an RTX 5080, you can achieve even higher frame rates thanks to DLSS Frame Generation, enabling up to 4x higher frame rates at the cost of some additional latency.

I will say that Ray Tracing in this title is particularly heavy. While I can normally expect extremely high frame rates with Ray Tracing and DLSS enabled, in The Outer Worlds 2, I found that ray tracing often brought my frame rates down to the 60FPS mark on an RTX 4080, while playing with it switched off allowed me to achieve high frame rates (100+ FPS) at all times.

Now with that out of the way, let's get onto the main review section, where we go over the game's changes and improvements, or lack thereof.

Immediately upon finishing the prologue, The Outer Worlds 2 gives a much bigger sense of scale compared to the first game. Tiny planet maps have been replaced with much larger explorable zones, with caves and hidden laboratories to discover, alongside many side quests, faction quests and more. It is clear that some inspiration was taken from Avowed in this aspect, which also offered much larger explorable zones compared to previous Obsidian RPGs. There is a lot of stuff to find but equally, there are important things that you can miss on a playthrough. For instance, the main quest doesn't take you to Free Market Station for a very, very long time, but there is a companion character hiding away there, who you can completely miss by just visiting the main objectives. There are also some double-jump enabling boots on Eden that can be missed pretty easily.

Throughout the game, dialogue options are plentiful, and you will encounter instances where you can solve a problem through stealth, brute force or via diplomacy. With that said, I did create a character with maxed out Speech and I was ultimately disappointed in how few opportunities I had to use this to influence quests. The Observation skill is another funny one, as it is supposed to highlight ‘hidden' things in the environment. Despite investing into this skill, it was still quite rare for me to use Observation in exploration. I only found a few hidden rooms across my playthrough, and most of the time, these were small, closet-sized rooms with a lootable chest or safe inside. I didn't encounter any situations where Observation opened up an entirely new pathway through a mission objective.

When diplomacy and stealth options fail, you'll be forced to tough it out in combat. This is an area where Obsidian has massively improved compared to the first game. Combat in the original Outer Worlds was the weakest part of the package. It is perhaps best described as ‘functional but floaty', with many bullets flying past enemies and almost forcing players to use Adreno Time, the in-universe drug that allows the player to slow down time to better line-up shots. I had to use this ability in almost every combat encounter in the first game. However, in The Outer Worlds 2, weapons now feel more distinct, they handle better, they have more punch and most importantly, they are easier to aim. You can largely get through this game's combat encounters using your own mechanical shooting skill, with less reliance on character stats and the slow-time mechanic.

While I initially built my character around the tenets of stealth and diplomacy, more often than not, I found myself having to shoot my way out of situations. Overall, this gave me the impression that there is a ‘right' way to play The Outer Worlds 2, and so over time, I focused less on my speech and observation perks and more on guns and improving the effectiveness of my companions. This is absolutely not something you want the player to feel in a game that supposedly offers so much choice. Most of the time, it felt like combat was the only answer, with a few key exceptions during the main questline.

This might not be so much of an issue if Obsidian embraced the idea of letting you respec your character. However, aside from one early check after the prologue, your character decisions are locked in for the entire playthrough. You won't be able to refund any skill or perk points if you change your mind later. As a result, I mostly let the game inform my level-up decisions. Have I encountered any doors I couldn't unlock? Then add some points into lockpicking. Have I encountered a speech check I couldn't overcome? Add more into speech and so on.

The one constant thorn in my side up until around halfway through the game was combat. There were far less ways to avoid shooting than I had anticipated going in so ultimately, as the game went on, I ended up putting more points into guns and leadership to improve the combat efficiency of my squad, rather than upping my other character traits.

This has left me with mixed feelings about The Outer Worlds 2. I had hoped for true freedom to play the game ‘my way', which typically involves exhausting every dialogue option and route possible until being forced into a fight. However, I often found myself being forced into fights regardless of whether I went through a sneaky vent or unlocked a particular door beforehand. There were a few key moments in the main questline where I could convince an NPC to ‘stand down', but these moments were so few and far between that building my entire character around those traits felt like a waste.

Again, without the benefit of a respec, this becomes incredibly frustrating, because there would be no way for you to know how useful or useless a skill really is until you've played the game. By the time you have figured that out, many of your skill points will already be committed, making it difficult to pivot.

The companions in The Outer Worlds 2 also feel more like mercenaries. Some of them have very little reason to be on your crew and some of them have no reason to care about your main mission at all.

One of my favourite companions, Aza, was a higher-up in a cult that worshipped the Space Rifts. During her companion questline, you learn that the cult was created by members of The Order, a strict religious group, as a way to spur leaders of the religion into action. This has absolutely no significant impact on Aza. Yes, she's annoyed that her cult betrayed her, but ultimately, she is still a believer and despite the whole thing being built on lies, she still wants to lead the cult once she's done helping you out. This leaves the character in the exact same place we found them in, with no significant changes to personality or goals. You found her as a high-ranking member of a cult and when the game ends, she will still be a high-ranking member of the cult.

Despite her questline being rather bland, I still enjoyed having Aza around for her enthusiasm. She will often chime in on conversations with threats of disembowelment, which I found quite amusing. Out of all the companions, she is probably the most ‘fun' to bring along with you, even if her reasoning for joining your quest is the weakest of the bunch.

The only companion who I really felt had a full ‘arc' is Marisol, a former assassin for The Order who is looking to destroy some dangerous scientific research before it falls into the wrong hands. By the end of her questline, Marisol is a changed person, less prone to bloodshed and more open to diplomatic methods. You don't get this level of character depth from most of the other companion questlines.

This brings me to my final point. The writing in The Outer Worlds 2 is very similar to the original game. The game doesn't take itself too seriously and bad news is often delivered with a cheery voice and a fake smile. You'll hear a lot of jokes about the pitfalls of extreme capitalism, but equally, communist life is shown to have quite the dark side too. It is all a lot of fun, and I had a good few laughs playing through it, but the lack of emotional response from various characters leaves me with the feeling that I, as the player, have very little influence in Arcadia and the larger forces at play will almost always come out on top.

If you did enjoy The Outer Worlds, I think you'll enjoy the sequel just as much, if not more. However, I don't think this sequel does enough to draw in those who didn't enjoy the original. A lot of marketing for The Outer Worlds 2 has centred around character build variety and ‘freedom' within the game but in practise, The Outer Worlds 2 is not a stealth game, or a social simulation – it is a shooter with dialogue options. I still had a lot of fun with it, and I am looking forward to giving it another run with a fresh character so I can see some of the other outcomes, but overall, this was a 7/10 experience at its worst and an 8/10 experience at its best. If the game had truly offered as much choice and variety as it claimed to, the game could have easily pushed into 9/10 territory, while also offering up more compelling reasons to go for another playthrough.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: The Outer Worlds 2 is a competent sequel, but it doesn't deliver on its promises as much as I had hoped.

Vampire Survivors pretty much invented a new genre of video games when the bullet-heaven (a.k.a. Reverse bullet hell) released back in 2022. Since then, studio Poncle has kept the title alive with plenty of both paid and free DLC. In terms of the latter, a major Balatro-themed update has been announced and released for all to enjoy.

Available for free right now, the ‘Ante Chamber’ update crosses Vampire Survivors over with fellow popular indie roguelike Balatro, with the team writing:

“Join Jimbo and a cast of wild cards with combo potential that'll probably break the game. Get in on the action for a Full House of silly synergies, clownish combos, and bewildering Boss Blinds.”

As part of the free DLC, players can look forward to trying out 4 new characters alongside 4 additional weapons (and evolutions):

Characters

• Jimbo (Multiply stat-boosting Survarot cards by x4)
• Canio (Trigger additional Survarot drafts)
• Chicot (Cuts boss health in half and switches off hazards)
• Perkeo (More passive slots)

Weapons

• Infernolatro (Summon a burning score counter)
• Gros Michel (Release a barrage of banana projectiles)
• Fibonacci Seltzer (Fires mathematically beautiful spiralling streams)
• Celestial Booster (Planets and a rocket orbit you constantly)

Since its launch in 2022, Vampire Survivors has continued to be the best and most content-rich game in the genre which it helped create/popularise. This latest free DLC seemingly only helps maintain their lead in the space.

KitGuru says: Will you be checking out this DLC? What’s been your favourite crossover so far? Let us know down below.