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Last week, Inflexion Games published a YouTube video in which CEO Aaron Flynn and art and audio director Neil Thomson assessed the current state of Nightingale and where the studio hopes to take its gaslamp fantasy survival game next. Inflexion’s assessment was unconventionally frank: “We are not satisfied with where the game is at, we’re not satisfied with the overall sentiment, we’re not satisfied with our player numbers,” Flynn said.

Despite the video’s vaguely uncomfortable air—watching it felt like the two developers were expecting me to scold them—it’s admirable for its candor. In updates released since Nightingale’s early access debut in February, Flynn says the studio has worked to address the “shortcomings of the experience,” adding a mu…

OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman is to return as CEO of the company, mere days after his chaotic firing by a board that seems to have lost all support. A deal has been reached “in principle” for his return that will see new board members appointed, and the agreement comes shortly after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had essentially checkmated OpenAI by offering Altman a job and guaranteeing the role and salary of any OpenAI staff that wished to join him.

This is tech politics at the highest level where, as Bob Dylan would put it, money doesn’t talk: it swears. Microsoft has a $13 billion investment in OpenAI and is integrating the company’s machine learning tools into its own crown jewels of office and productivity software. Ever since the announcement of Altman’s firing on Friday last w…

A team of researchers at the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences says it has created a record-breaking 711 Wh/kg (watt-hour per kilogram) rechargeable lithium battery.

The previous record belongs to the research team at Dalhousie University in Canada, which made a 575 Wh/kg anode-free pouch cell just last year. The Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers tested their battery at 711.3 Wh/kg, with a volumetric “energy density” of 1,653.65 Wh/liter, making it the highest energy density lithium battery on record.

For context, the energy density of Tesla’s new 4680 cells is 272-296 Wh/kg. This team (via New Atlas) made a battery cell with nearly double the energy density, meaning you’ll get more juice with much less weight—but there are some challenges t…

Wizards of the Coast’s upcoming D&D book Quests from the Infinite Staircase will remix six old school adventures from the days of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition, including Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. The latter is also being made available in an abbreviated form called Descent into the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and you can currently claim it for free on DND Beyond.

First published in 1982, The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth began life as a tournament module run by D&D co-creator Gary Gygax six years prior. A competitive one-shot explicitly designed to kill the characters players brought with them to convention games, it remained unforgiving even in its modified, published form. A lovely document of this is Jason Thompson’s co…

Microsoft’s research division has been hard at work trying to make ray tracing a more accessible feature for games of the future. A new patent from one of the team’s senior architects describes how the memory and cache load for bounding volume hierarchies (BVH)— structures used to speed up ray tracing—can be reduced by using a similar approach to texture Level of Detail (LOD) application. 

While Microsoft’s Xbox consoles would be the main beneficiary of this technique, AMD’s traditionally ray tracing weak GPUs, and graphics cards that aren’t blessed with a ton of VRAM are also a potential winners.

As with all such patents, the details within it are complex but also broad in terms of where they could be used. Its author, Mark Grossman, is a senior architect i…

Terra Nil is kind of like a reverse city builder—instead of planning and managing a bustling town, you expand its base into the wilderness that surrounds it, bringing nature back to a desolate wasteland, trying to restore dead biomes as you go. There’s already a lot to love with this strategy game, but now developers Free Lives are getting ready to add even more. 

An upcoming major update will be the first of its kind for Terra Nil and will expand “on its deeply satisfying nature restoration gameplay… and a dramatic overhaul of the wildlife system,” according to a press release. 

“New levels include Polluted Bay, a dead landscape carved in half by a badly polluted river, and Scorched Caldera, a vast volcanic crater that you must terraform into a life-f…

It’s the calm before the storm in Helldivers 2. Operation Swift Disassembly was a success and the Automatons have literally been wiped off the map. For as much as we’re enjoying our victory and Arrowhead is faithfully sticking to the bit that robots are now extinct, we know by now that something is coming. We might’ve gotten a first glance at that something today in the form of a “rogue” ship upgrade that briefly appeared for players.

Called the “Catalog Expansion” in the Ship Modules menu, this is the first time a new ship upgrade has been discovered in Helldivers 2. Before it disappeared, players captured its description and the upgrade’s effect:

“New stratagem permits added to the ship management terminal for purchase,” the description reads. The effect field add…

Keep your Wordle win streak on the right path with a helpful combination of today’s clue and a range of tips that’ll make sure you squeeze the most out of every guess. Still not enough? Then keep scrolling, because the answer to the March 14 (999) Wordle is waiting below.

This was one of those Wordles that went from a useless scramble of yellows to today’s answer in a flash. All of the guesses that didn’t go the way I hoped they would did at least nudge my stubborn letters a little closer to the right word every time, even if I couldn’t see it happening until I was halfway down the board. Hurray for wrong guesses, I suppose.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Thursday, March 14

You’d use today’s answer to compare two different points in…

Sony says it is investigating a claim by a ransomware group that says it has hacked the company’s systems and is now trying to sell the data it accessed.

The hack was reported by Cyber Security Connect, which said that a group calling itself Ransomed.vc claimed to have breached Sony’s systems and accessed an unknown quantity of data. “We have successfully compromissed [sic] all of Sony systems,” Ransomed.vc wrote on its leak sites. “We won’t ransom them! we will sell the data. due to sony not wanting to pay. DATA IS FOR SALE … WE ARE SELLING IT.”

The site said the hackers posted some “proof-of-hack data” but described it as “not particularly compelling,” and also said that the file tree for the alleged hack looks small, given the group’s claim that it had compromised “all …