Baldur’s Gate 3’s final patch is full of bees

Welp, it’s finally happened. After many months of mainly murder related updates, Larian’s stonker of an RPG has at last received its final major content update. Patch 8 – which you can read in full here – brings Photo Mode, full cross play, and 12 new subclasses to Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s one for each playable class, and likely at least six more than I’ll ever reasonably experience. Still, a swarmkeeper ranger sounds very tempting. Yes the bees, is what I always say.

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I got my least favourite Battle Brother immediately mutilated and I feel great about it

It was always going to end badly for Thillmann The Braggart. 30 gold, he told the brigands. He’d pay them 30 gold each if they could knock up a stew so disgusting that even he – Kobmanhaven’s most famous glutton – couldn’t keep it down. Whether Thillmann actually had the coin on him, they never found out. Seconds after he raised the first reeking spoon of what he suspected was mostly reindeer shit to his lips, he projectile vomited straight in the face of their leader, and they jumped him.

Death comes quickly in the turn-based tactics and open-world merc work of Battle Brothers, and victory comes hard. Really, it’s the stories of the mercs you hire, and their emergent traits and peccadilloes, that make the game what it is. Still, Thillman was possessed of the sort of cocksure spirit that makes a man far less cognisant of sharp objects than he should be, although you couldn’t fault his reasoning: he was still alive, so as far as fate had proven to him up until now, nothing could kill him. I can only apologise for adding to the bastard’s delusions. The boys and I happened to be passing by at just the right time to save him from those brigands, and he’s been with us ever since.

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Nvidia’s RTX 5060 GPUs are launching soon, with price cuts on the RTX 5060 Ti

The GeForce RTX 50 series – Nvidia’s hated, adored, but never ignored family of gaming GPUs – could soon be complete, as the RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti have been specced out ahead of their imminent releases. These are mostly as-expected replacements for the RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti, with moderate performance bumps augmented by DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation, though the RTX 5060 Ti is getting a lowered MSRP on both its 8GB and 16GB variants.

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In Blight: Survival you roam a decaying medieval world putting the sword to fungal zombies

For years now I have watched Haenir’s putrid action-horror game Blight: Survival like a miasmatic knight errant squinting through the bushes at a peasant-shaped mushroom. I reached out to the devs for an interview a couple of years ago, and received no reply. I wasn’t hugely surprised by their silence: Blight began life as a two-person project, and is a long way from release. Still, there’s been some ominous movement of late: the developers have unveiled a new biome and enemies, and are now fielding applications for very limited closed playtesting.

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The mutants in Stalker 2 will finally drop loot, making them less of a bullet sink

The developers of post-apocalyptic shooter Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl have shared a roadmap for future updates, promising new guns, smarter foes, and a helpful development kit for modders. Among the changes is good news for anyone frustrated after pumping their entire backpack of bullets into 30 to 50 feral hogs. Murderised mutants will now drop loot of some kind, instead of offering no reward at all.

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Sipssassin is Hitman but you nick people’s drinks instead of killing them

I’m thankfully very remote from the capital these days, but Edwin will occasionally regale the morning meeting with dark fables about how much a pint now costs in London. He’ll stumble on to camera, his eyes bloodshot and breathing heavy, and we’ll all know he’s traded a new vital organ for a swift half. Occasionally he’ll dart his head around to the sound of banging at the door then immediately dive out of the window, and we’ll pray for his safe return after outrunning The Bad Teapot gang, who he borrowed £8000 from in 2006 for a warm plastic beaker of Carling with a dead wasp floating in it. Sounds bleak down there.

As such, I would not blame anyone south of the Severn-Wash for resorting to the stealth puzzle drink stealing antics we find in Sipssassin. You play a bald, sharply dressed sneak thief. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to never pay for another drink as long as you live. There are some nonsense lore reasons about why it’s actually good and cool that you’re half-inching everyone’s tipples but that just makes it less fun, honestly. Here’s a trailer.

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“We have no official information on an Oblivion remake,” say Bethesda, which isn’t a denial, is it

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion‘s remake is near upon us, going by the Loud Noises online. Somebody’s finally managed to get a response out of Bethesda regarding the much-tipped Oblivion comeback, and it is that special flavour of non-committal that attracts the true believers like wasps to a capsized icecream van. “We have no official information on an Oblivion remake,” observed the company’s Support staff in a response to some nosy parker last week. “Apologies for any confusion.”

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Crawl 8-bit catacombs with a glowstick in first-person horror Repose

If you’ve been playing Blue Prince and thinking, ah, this could really benefit from having approximately 16.7 million fewer colours and a couple more homicidal husks in diving suits, may I usher you wincingly towards Repose. It’s a moodalicious, monochrome dungeon-crawler in which you get 50 in-game steps to search hideously dishevelled techno-crypts for oxygen cylinders, before you die of exhaustion. More likely, you will die of getting shot by a zombie astronaut. Here’s a trailer.

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This ROG Ally X/Steam Deck charging dock is $35 off today at Best Buy

I want fewer cables in my life: Fewer plugs, fewer dongles, and definitely fewer moments spent wondering why something isn’t charging. That’s why I own the ASUS ROG 65W Charger Dock. And for thirty big ones, it can also save you from the cable spaghetti and gives your ROG Ally X or Steam Deck some actual desktop or TV stand respect. It’s down to $29.99 at Best Buy, or £39.99 at Amazon in the UK.

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