gaming – Page 9

Doom: The Dark Ages review: Shields up!

Doom, Doom: The Dark Ages, Features, game review, gaming / Kris Guyer / May 11, 2025

Prepare to add a more defensive stance to the usual dodge-and-shoot gameplay loop.

There’s a reason that shield is so prominent in this image. Credit: Bethesda Game Studios

For decades now, you could count on there being a certain rhythm to a Doom game. From the ’90s originals to the series’ resurrection in recent years, the Doom games have always been about using constant, zippy motion to dodge through a sea of relatively slow-moving bullets, maintaining your distance while firing back at encroaching hordes of varied monsters. The specific guns and movement options you could call on might change from game to game, but the basic rhythm of that dodge-and-shoot gameplay never has.

Just a few minutes in, Doom: The Dark Ages throws out that traditional Doom rhythm almost completely. The introduction of a crucial shield adds a whole suite of new verbs to the Doom vocabulary; in addition to running, dodging, and shooting, you’ll now be blocking, parrying, and stunning enemies for counterattacks. In previous Doom games, standing still for any length of time often led to instant death. In The Dark Ages, standing your ground to absorb and/or deflect incoming enemy attacks is practically required at many points.

During a preview event earlier this year, the game’s developers likened this change to the difference between flying a fighter jet and piloting a tank. That’s a pretty apt metaphor, and it’s not exactly an unwelcome change for a series that might be in need of a shake-up. But it only works if you go in ready to play like a tank and not like the fighter jet that has been synonymous with Doom for decades.

Stand your ground

Don’t get me wrong, The Dark Ages still features its fair share of the Doom series’ standard position-based Boomer Shooter action. The game includes the usual stockpile of varied weapons—from short-range shotguns to long-range semi-automatics to high-damage explosives with dangerous blowback—and doles them out slowly enough that major new options are still being introduced well into the back half of the game.

But the shooting side has simplified a bit since Doom Eternal. Gone are the secondary weapon modes, grenades, chainsaws, and flamethrowers that made enemy encounters a complicated weapon and ammo juggling act. Gone too are the enemies that practically forced you to use a specific weapon to exploit their One True Weakness; I got by for most of The Dark Ages by leaning on my favored plasma rifle, with occasional switches to a charged steel ball-and-chain launcher for heavily armored enemies.

See green, get ready to parry… Credit: Bethesda Game Studios

In their place is the shield, which gives you ample (but not unlimited) ability to simply deflect enemy attacks damage-free. You can also throw the shield for a ranged attack that’s useful for blowing up frequent phalanxes of shielded enemies or freezing larger unarmored enemies in place for a safe, punishing barrage.

But the shield’s most important role comes when you stand face to face with a particularly punishing demon, waiting for a flash of green to appear on the screen. When that color appears, it’s your signal that the associated projectile and/or incoming melee attack can be parried by raising your shield just before it lands. A successful parry knocks that attack back entirely, returning projectiles to their source and/or temporarily deflecting the encroaching enemy themselves.

A well-timed, powerful parry is often the only reasonable option for attacks that are otherwise too quick or overwhelming to dodge effectively. The overall effect ends up feeling a bit like Doom by way of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! Instead of dancing around a sea of hazards and looking for an opening, you’ll often find yourself just standing still for a few seconds, waiting to knock back a flash of green so you can have the opportunity to unleash your own counterattack. Various shield sigils introduced late in the game encourage this kind of conservative turtling strategy even more by adding powerful bonus effects to each successful parry.

The window for executing a successful parry is pretty generous, and the dramatic temporal slowdown and sound effects make each one feel like an impactful moment. But they start to feel less impactful as the game goes on, and battles often devolve into vast seas of incoming green flashes. There were countless moments in my Dark Ages playthrough where I found myself more or less pinned down by a deluge of green attacks, frantically clicking the right mouse button four or five times in quick succession to parry off threats from a variety of angles.

In between all the parrying, you do get to shoot stuff. Credit: Bethesda Game Studios

In between these parries, the game seems to go out of its way to encourage a more fast-paced, aggressive style of play. A targeted shield slam move lets you leap quickly across great distances to get up close and personal with enemy demons, at which point you can use one of a variety of melee weapons for some extremely satisfying, crunchy close quarters beatdowns (though these melee attacks are limited by their own slowly recharging ammo system).

You might absorb some damage in the process of going in for these aggressive close-up attacks, but don’t worry—defeated enemies tend to drop heaps of health, armor, and ammo, depending on the specific way they were killed. I’d often find myself dancing on the edge of critically low health after an especially aggressive move, only to recover just in time by finishing off a major demon. Doubling back for a shield slam on a far-off “fodder” enemy can also be an effective strategy for quickly escaping a sticky situation and grabbing some health in the process.

The back-and-forth tug between these aggressive encroachments and the more conservative parry-based turtling makes for some exciting moment-to-moment gameplay, with enough variety in the enemy mix to never feel too stale. Effectively managing your movement and attack options in any given firefight feels complex enough to be engaging without ever tipping into overwhelming, as well.

Even so, working through Doom: The Dark Ages, there was a part of me that missed the more free-form, three-dimensional acrobatics of Doom Eternal’s double jumps and air dashes. Compared to the almost balletic, improvisational movement in that game, playing The Dark Ages too often felt like it devolved into something akin to a simple rhythm game; simply wait for each green “note” to reach the bottom of the screen, then hit the button to activate your counterattack.

Stories and secrets

In between chapters, Doom: The Dark Ages breaks things up with some extremely ponderous cutscenes featuring a number of religious and political factions, both demon and human, jockeying for position and control in an interdimensional war. This mostly involves a lot of tedious standing around discussing the Heart of Argent (a McGuffin that’s supposed to grant the bearer the power of a god) and debating how, where, and when to deploy the Slayer (that’s you) as a weapon.

I watched these cutscenes out of a sense of professional obligation, but I tuned out at points and thus had trouble following the internecine intrigue that seemed to develop between factions whose motivations and backgrounds never seemed to be sufficiently explained or delineated. Most players who aren’t reviewing the game should feel comfortable skipping these scenes and getting back to the action as quickly as possible.

I hope you like red and black, because there’s a lot of it here… Credit: Bethesda Game Studios

The levels themselves are all dripping with the usual mix of Hellish symbology and red-and-black gore, with mood lighting so dark that it can be hard to see a wall right in front of your face. Design-wise, the chapters seem to alternate between Doom’s usual system of twisty enemy-filled corridors and more wide-open outdoor levels. The latter are punctuated by a number of large, open areas where huge groups of demons simply teleport in as soon as you set foot in the pre-set engagement zone. These battle arenas might have a few inclines or spires to mix things up, but for the most part, they all feel depressingly similar and bland after a while. If you’ve stood your ground in one canyon, you’ve stood your ground in them all.

Each level is also absolutely crawling with secret collectibles hidden in various nooks and crannies, which often tease you with a glimpse through a hole in some impassable wall or rock formation. Studying the map screen for a minute more often than not reveals the general double-back path you’ll need to follow to find the hidden entrance behind these walls, even as finding the precise path can involve solving some simple puzzles or examining your surroundings for one particularly well-hidden bit that will allow you to advance.

After all the enemies were cleared in one particularly vast open level, I spent a good half hour picking through every corner of the map until I tracked down the hidden pathways leading to every stray piece of gold and collectible trinket. It was fine as a change of pace—and lucrative in terms of upgrading my weapons and shield for later fights—but it felt kind of lonely and quiet compared to the more action-packed battles.

Don’t unleash the dragon

Speaking of changes of pace, by far the worst parts of Doom: The Dark Ages come when the game insists on interrupting the usual parry-and-shoot gameplay to put you in some sort of vehicle. This includes multiple sections where your quick-moving hero is replaced with a lumbering 30-foot-tall mech, which slouches pitifully down straight corridors toward encounters with equally large demons.

These mech battles play out as the world’s dullest fistfights, where you simply wail on the attack buttons while occasionally tapping the dodge button to step away from some incredibly slow and telegraphed counterattacks. I found myself counting the minutes until these extremely boring interludes were over.

Believe me, this is less exciting than it looks. Credit: Bethesda Game Studios

The sections where your Slayer rides a dragon for some reason are ever-so-slightly more interesting, if only because the intuitive, fast-paced flight controls can be a tad more exciting. Unfortunately, these sections don’t give you any thrilling dogfights or complex obstacle courses to take advantage of these controls, topping out instead in a few simplistic chase sequences where you take literally no incoming fire.

Between those semi-engaging chase sequences is a seemingly endless parade of showdowns with stationary turrets. These require your dragon to hover frustratingly still in mid-air, waiting patiently for an incoming energy attack to dodge, which in turn somehow powers up your gun enough to take out the turret in a counterattack. How anyone thought that this was the most engaging use of a seemingly competent third-person flight-combat system is utterly baffling.

Those too-frequent interludes aside, Doom: The Dark Ages is a more-than-suitable attempt to shake up the Doom formula with a completely new style of gameplay. While the more conservative, parry-based shield system takes some getting used to—and may require adjusting some of your long-standing Doom muscle memory in the process—it’s ultimately a welcome and engaging way to add new types of interaction to the long-running franchise.

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

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Don’t look now, but a confirmed gamer is leading the Catholic Church

gaming, Pope, wordle / Mike M. / May 10, 2025

Yesterday’s naming of Chicago native Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV—the first American-born leader of the Catholic church—has already led to plenty of jokes and memes about his potential interactions with various bits of American pop culture. And that cultural exposure apparently extends to some casual video games, making Leo XIV our first confirmed gamer pope.

Speaking to NBC5 Chicago Thursday, papal sibling John Prevost confirmed that the soon-to-be-pope played a couple of games just before flying to the papal conclave earlier this week. “First we do Wordle, because this is a regular thing,” Prevost said. “Then we do Words with Friends. It’s something to keep his mind off life in the real world…”

OK, so the pope’s love of casual word games doesn’t exactly put him in the same category of people who are speedrunning Doom slaughter maps. But it’s still striking to realize that the 69-year-old pontiff is among the reported 44 percent of American Baby Boomer men who play video games regularly and the 15 percent of Americans aged 55 and over who have played Wordle specifically.

A new generation

In the recent past, papal interest in video games has usually taken the form of official statements decrying their potential for harm. Pope Francis, for instance, warned in a 2016 speech that young people should avoid spending excessive time on “a sofa that promises us hours of comfort so we can escape to the world of video games and spend all kinds of time in front of a computer screen.” And in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI specifically called out video games “which in the name of entertainment exalt violence and portray anti-social behavior or the trivialization of human sexuality.”

Don’t look now, but a confirmed gamer is leading the Catholic Church Read More »

Nvidia GeForce xx60 series is PC gaming’s default GPU, and a new one is out May 19

AMD, gaming, GeForce, geforce rtx, geforce rtx 5060, intel, NVIDIA, Tech / Paul Patrick / May 7, 2025

Nvidia will release the GeForce RTX 5060 on May 19 starting at $299, the company announced via press release today. The new card, a successor to popular past GPUs like the GTX 1060 and RTX 3060, will bring Nvidia’s DLSS 4 and Multi Frame-Generation technology to budget-to-mainstream gaming builds—at least, it would if every single GPU launched by any company at any price wasn’t instantly selling out these days.

Nvidia announced a May release for the 5060 last month when it released the RTX 5060 Ti for $379 (8GB) and $429 (16GB). Prices for that card so far haven’t been as inflated as they have been for the RTX 5070 on up, but the cheapest ones you can currently get are still between $50 and $100 over that MSRP. Unless Nvidia and its partners have made dramatically more RTX 5060 cards than they’ve made of any other model so far, expect this card to carry a similar pricing premium for a while.

	RTX 5060 Ti	RTX 4060 Ti	RTX 5060	RTX 4060	RTX 5050 (leaked)	RTX 3050
CUDA Cores	4,608	4,352	3,840	3,072	2,560	2,560
Boost Clock	2,572 MHz	2,535 MHz	2,497 MHz	2,460 MHz	Unknown	1,777 MHz
Memory Bus Width	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit
Memory bandwidth	448GB/s	288GB/s	448GB/s	272GB/s	Unknown	224GB/s
Memory size	8GB or 16GB GDDR7	8GB or 16GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR7	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
TGP	180 W	160 W	145 W	115 W	130 W	130 W

Compared to the RTX 4060, the RTX 5060 adds a few hundred extra CUDA cores and gets a big memory bandwidth increase thanks to the move from GDDR6 to GDDR7. But its utility at higher resolutions will continue to be limited by its 8GB of RAM, which is already becoming a problem for a handful of high-end games at 1440p and 4K.

Regardless of its performance, the RTX 5060 will likely become a popular mainstream graphics card, just like its predecessors. Of the Steam Hardware Survey’s top 10 GPUs, three are RTX xx60-series desktop GPUs (the 3060, 4060, and 2060); the laptop versions of the 4060 and 3060 are two of the others. If supply of the RTX 5060 is adequate and pricing isn’t out of control, we’d expect it to shoot up these charts pretty quickly over the next few months.

Nvidia GeForce xx60 series is PC gaming’s default GPU, and a new one is out May 19 Read More »

How long will Switch 2’s Game Key Cards keep working?

game key card, gaming, nintendo switch 2 / Rejus Almole / May 7, 2025

You could even argue that Nintendo is more likely to offer longer-term support for Game Key Card downloads since backward compatibility seems to be a priority for the Switch hardware line. If we presume that future Switch systems will remain backward compatible, we can probably also presume that Nintendo will want players on new hardware to still have access to their old Game Key Card purchases (or to be able to use Game Key Cards purchased on the secondhand market).

A pile of physical games that will never require a download server to work. Credit: Aurich Lawson

There are no guarantees in life, of course, and nothing lasts forever. Nintendo will one day go out of business, at which point it seems unlikely that a Game Key Card will be able to download much of anything. Short of that, Nintendo could suffer a financial malady that makes download servers for legacy systems seem like an indulgence, or it could come under new management that doesn’t see value in supporting decades-old purchases made for ancient consoles.

As of this writing, though, Nintendo has kept its Wii game download servers active for 6,743 days and counting. If the Switch 2 Game Key Card servers last as long, that means those cards will still be fully functional through at least October 2043.

I don’t know what I will be doing with my life in 2043, but it’s comforting and extremely plausible to imagine that the “eighty dollar rental” I made of a Switch 2 Game Key Card back in 2025 will still work as intended.

Or, to put it another way, I think it’s highly likely that I will become “e-waste” long before any Switch 2 Game Key Cards.

How long will Switch 2’s Game Key Cards keep working? Read More »

why-google-gemini’s-pokemon-success-isn’t-all-it’s-cracked-up-to-be

Why Google Gemini’s Pokémon success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be

AI, gaming, Pokémon / Paul Patrick / May 6, 2025

While Gemini is using its own model and reasoning process for these tasks, it’s telling that JoelZ had to specifically graft these specialized agents onto the base model to help it get through some of the game’s toughest challenges. As JoelZ writes, “My interventions improve Gemini’s overall decision-making and reasoning abilities.”

What are we testing here?

Don’t get me wrong, massaging an LLM into a form that can beat a Pokémon game is definitely an achievement. However, the level of “intervention” needed to help Gemini with those things that “LLMs can’t do independently yet” is crucial to keep in mind as we evaluate that success.

The moment Gemini beat Pokémon (with a little help).

We already know that specially designed reinforcement learning tools can beat Pokémon quite efficiently (and that even a random number generator can beat the game quite inefficiently). The particular resonance of an “LLM plays Pokémon” test is in seeing if a generalized language model can reason out its own solution to a complicated game on its own. The more hand-holding we give the model—through external information, tools, or “harnesses”—the less useful the game is as that kind of test.

Anthropic said in February that Claude Plays Pokémon showed “glimmers of AI systems that tackle challenges with increasing competence, not just through training but with generalized reasoning.” But as Bradshaw writes on LessWrong, “without a refined agent harness, [all models] have a hard time simply making it through the very first screen of the game, Red’s bedroom!” Bradshaw’s subsequent gameplay tests with harness-free LLMs further highlight how these models frequently wander aimlessly, backtrack pointlessly, or even hallucinate impossible game situations.

In other words, we’re still a long way from the kind of envisioned future where an Artificial General Intelligence can figure out a way to beat Pokémon just because you asked it to.

Why Google Gemini’s Pokémon success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be Read More »

The Last of Us takes Dina and Ellie on a tense, pictuesque Seattle getaway

culture, gaming / Paul Patrick / May 5, 2025

New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars’ Kyle Orland (who’s played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn’t) will be talking about them here after they air. While these recaps don’t delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.

Kyle: We start this episode from the perspective of a band of highly armed FEDRA agents in 2018 Seattle, shooting the shit in a transport that somehow still has usable gasoline. Maybe it’s just the political moment we’re in, but I was not quite emotionally prepared for these militarized characters in my post-apocalyptic escape show to start casually using “voters” as an ironic signifier for regular people.

“LOL, like we’d ever let them vote, amirite?”

Andrew: We’ve spent so little time with FEDRA—the post-collapse remnant of what had once been the US government—since the very opening episodes of the show that you can forget exactly why nearly every other individual and organization in the show’s world hates it and wants nothing to do with it. But here’s a reminder for us: casual cruelty, performed by ignorant fascists.

Of course as soon as you see and hear Jeffrey Wright, you know he’s going to be A Guy (he’s an HBO alum from Boardwalk Empire and Westworld, among many, many other film, TV, vocal, and stage performances). He just as casually betrays and blows up the transport full of jumped-up FEDRA jarheads, which is a clear prestige TV storytelling signifier. Here is a Man With A Code, but also a Man To Be Feared.

Kyle: Yeah, Isaac’s backstory was only broadly hinted at in the games, so getting to see this big “Who This Character Is” moment in the show was pretty effective.

What I found less effective was Ellie playing a very able A-Ha cover when she discovers the abandoned guitar room. In the game it serves as a welcome change of pace from a lot of frenetic action, and a good excuse for an endearing guitar-playing mini-game. Here it felt like it just kind of dragged on, with a lot of awkward dwelling on close-ups of Dina’s creepily enamored face.

I’ll…. be….. gone….. in a day or… twooooooooo. Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery

Andrew: You know what, though, I do appreciate that the show at least made an effort to explain why this 30-year-old guitar was still in pristine condition. I don’t instantly buy that the silica gel packets (which Ellie, wisely, does not eat) in the guitar case would have lasted for that long, but at least she didn’t pull a mossy guitar straight off the wall and start tuning it up. Those strings are gonna corrode! That neck is gonna warp!

I do also think the show (and the game, I guess, picking up your context clues) got away with picking one of the goofiest songs they possibly could that would still read as “soulful and emotionally resonant” when played solo on acoustic guitar. But I suppose that’s always been the power of that particular instrument.

Kyle: Both the game and the show have leaned heavily on the ’80s nostalgia that Joel passed on to Ellie, and as a child of the ’80s, I’ll be damned if I said it doesn’t work on me on that level.

Andrew: It’s also, for what it’s worth, exactly what a beginner-to-intermediate guitar player is going to know how to do. If I find a guitar during an apocalypse, all people are going to be able to get out of me are mid-2000s radio singles with easy chord progressions. It’s too bad that society didn’t last long enough in this reality to produce “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”

Kyle: Not to cut short “Guitar Talk,” but the show cuts it off with a creepy scene of Isaac talking about high-end cookware to an initially unseen companion on the floor. The resulting scene of torture is, for my money, way worse than most anything we’re exposed to in the games—and these are games that are not exactly squeamish about showing scenes of torture and extreme violence!

Felt to me like they’re taking advantage of HBO’s reputation for graphic content just because they could, here…

Andrew: Definitely gratuitous! But not totally without storytelling utility. I do think, if you’re setting Isaac up to be a mid-season miniboss on the road to the Dramatic Confrontation with Abby, that you’ve got to make it especially clear that he is capable of really nasty things. Sure, killing a truckful of guys is ALSO bad, but they were guys that we as viewers are all supposed to hate. Torturing a defenseless man reinforces the perception of him as someone that Ellie and Dina do not want to meet, especially now that they’ve popped a couple of his guys.

Because Ellie and Dina have unwittingly wandered into the middle of a Seattle civil war of sorts, between Isaac and his militarized WLF members and the face-cutting cultists we briefly met in the middle of last episode. And while the WLF types do seem to have the cult outgunned, we are told here that WLF members are slowly defecting to the cult (rather than the other way around).

Welcome back to “Jeffrey Wright discusses cookware.” I’m Jeffrey Wright. Today on program, we have a very special guest… Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery

Kyle: I will say I appreciated the surprisingly cogent history of the “chicken and egg games” beef between the two factions, as discussed between torturer and torture victim. Definitely a memorable bit of world-building.

But then we’re quickly back to the kind of infected attack scene that now seems practically contractually obligated to happen at least once an episode. At this point, I think these kinds of massive setpiece zombie battles would work better as a light seasoning than a thick sauce that just gets dumped on us almost every week.

Andrew: People in and from Seattle seem to have a unique gift for kicking up otherwise dormant swarms of infected! I know we’ll get back to it eventually, but I was more intrigued by the first episode’s reveal of more strategic infected that seemed to be retaining more of their human traits than I am by these screaming mindless hordes. Here, I think the tension is also ratcheted up artificially by Ellie’s weird escape strategy, which is to lead the two of them through a series of dead ends and cul-de-sacs before finally, barely, getting away.

But like you said, gotta have zombies on the zombie show! And it does finally make the “Dina finds out that Ellie is immune” shoe drop, though Dina doesn’t seem ready to think through any of the other implications of that reveal just yet. She has her own stuff going on!

Kyle: Yes, I’ve had to resist my inclination to do the remote equivalent of nudging you in the ribs to see if you had picked up on the potential “morning sickness” explanation of Dina’s frequent vomiting (which was hidden decently amid the “vomiting because of seeing horrifying gore” explanation).

Andrew: It does explain a couple of things! It does seem like a bit of a narrative shortcut to make Ellie extremely invested in Dina and whether she lives or dies, and given this show I am worried that this zygote is only going to be used to create more trauma for Ellie, rather than giving us a nuanced look at parenting during an apocalypse. But it is sweet to see how enthusiastically and immediately Ellie gets invested.

A question for you, while spoiling as little as you can: Are we still mostly just adapting the game at this point? You’d mentioned getting more Isaac backstory (sometimes the show expands on backstories well and sometimes it doesn’t), and some things have happened a bit out of order. But my impression is that we haven’t gotten a full departure a la the Nick Offerman episode from last season yet.

How do we keep getting into these messes? Credit: Warner Bros. Discovery

Kyle: At this point it’s kind of like a jazz riff on what happens in the game, with some bits copied note for note, some remixed and thrown into entirely different temporal locations, and some fresh new improv thrown in for good measure.

I’m definitely not a “the game is canon and you must interpret it literally” type of person, but the loose treatment is giving me a bit of whiplash. The reveal of Dina’s pregnancy, for instance, is not greeted with nearly as much immediate joy in the games. That said, the moment of joy Ellie and Dina do share here feels transplanted (in tone if nothing else) from an earlier game scene that the show had mostly skipped thus far. It’s like free association, man. Dig it!

The show also spends an inordinate amount of time discussing how pregnancy tests work in the post-apocalypse, which for me pushed past world-building and into overexplaining. It’s OK to just let stuff be sometimes, y’know?

Andrew: It’s jazz, man. It’s about the zombies you don’t kill.

However it’s been rearranged, I can still tell I’m watching a video game adaptation, because there are stealth kills and because important information is conveyed via messages and logos scrawled in blood on the walls. But I am still enjoying myself, and doing slightly less minute-to-minute missing of Joel than I did last episode. Slightly.

The episode ends with Ellie and Dina hearing the name of someone who has the same name as someone who knew Abby over a WLF walkie-talkie they nabbed, which gives them their next objective marker for Abby Quest. But they’ve got to cross an active war zone to get where they’re going (though I couldn’t tell from that distance whether we’re meant to be able to tell exactly who is fighting who at the moment). Guess I’ll have to wait and see!

Kyle: Personally, I’m hoping we see the moment where the newly out-and-proud bisexual Dina finally realizes “what’s the deal with all the rainbows.” Show your post-apocalyptic pride, girl!

The Last of Us takes Dina and Ellie on a tense, pictuesque Seattle getaway Read More »

Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts

console gaming, Game prices, gaming, Moore's Law, Tech, trump tariffs / Mike M. / May 4, 2025

Consider the PlayStation 2. Not all of the PS2 Slim’s streamlining came from chip improvements—it also shed a full-sized 3.5-inch hard drive bay and a little-used IEEE 1394 port, and initially required an external power brick. But shrinking and consolidating the console’s CPU, GPU, memory, and other components took the console from its original design in 2000, to the Slim in 2004, to an even lighter and lower-power version of the Slim that returned to using an internal power supply without increasing the size of the console at all.

Over that same span, the console’s price dropped frequently and significantly, from $299 at launch to just $129 by 2006 (the price was lowered again to $99 in 2009, deep into the PS3 era).

Or look at Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Its external design didn’t change as much over the years—the mid-generation “slim” refresh was actually only a little smaller than the original. But between late 2005 and early 2010, the CPU, GPU, and the GPU’s high-speed eDRAM memory chip went from being built on a 90 nm process, to 80 nm, to 65 nm, and finally to a single 45 nm chip that combined the CPU and GPU into one.

Over that time, the system’s power supply fell from 203 W to 133 W, and the base price fell from $300 to $200. The mid-generation 65nm refresh also substantially fixed the early consoles’ endemic “red ring of death” issue, which was caused in part by the heat that the older, larger chips generated.

As you can see when comparing these various consoles’ external and internal design revisions, shrinking the chips had a cascade of other beneficial and cost-lowering effects: smaller power supplies, smaller enclosures that use less metal and plastic, smaller heatsinks and cooling assemblies, and smaller and less complicated motherboard designs.

Sony’s original PS2 on the left, and the PS2 Slim revision on the right. Sony jettisoned a few things to make the console smaller, but chip improvements were also instrumental. Credit: Evan Amos

A slowdown of that progression was already evident when we hit the PlayStation 4/Xbox One/Nintendo Switch generation, but technological improvements and pricing reductions still followed familiar patterns. Both the mid-generation PS4 Slim and Xbox One S used a 16 nm processor instead of the original consoles’ 28 nm version, and each also had its price cut by $100 over its lifetime (comparing the Kinect-less Xbox One variant, and excluding the digital-only $249 Xbox One). The Switch’s single die shrink, from 20nm to 16nm, didn’t come with a price cut, but it did improve battery life and help to enable the cheaper Switch Lite variant.

Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts Read More »

“Older than Google,” this Elder Scrolls wiki has been helping gamers for 30 years

community, Features, gaming, interview, Tech, The Elder Scrolls, The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages, UESP, wiki / Mike M. / May 2, 2025

Interviewing the people behind the 30-year-old Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages.

The team is still keeping up with new updates, including for Oblivion Remastered. Credit: Kyle Orland

If at some point over the last 20 years you’ve found yourself in an Internet argument or had a question in your head you just couldn’t seem to get rid of, chances are good that you’ve relied on an online wiki.

And you probably used the online wiki: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. But for video games, Wikipedia provides a more general, top-down view, painting in broad strokes what a game is about, how it was made, when it was released, and how it was received by players.

In addition, many games and franchises have their own dedicated wikis that go a step further; these wikis are often part game guide, part lore book, and part historical record.

But what does it take to build a game wiki? Why do people do it? I looked to one of my all-time favorite games for answers.

The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages

It had been at least 10 years since I last played The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion before this past fall, when I decided somewhat arbitrarily to put another 80-or-so hours into a new save. Rushing through the first few parts of the main questline, it felt like I was visiting home, right up until I was named “Hero of Kvatch.”

Then, though, it quickly began to feel like I was playing the game for the first time, and, to put it mildly, I was getting beaten to a pulp across Cyrodiil.

While it was great to re-explore the game that consumed so many hours of my life and discover again what made the 2006 release an instant classic, I was frustrated that I had forgotten how the game worked.

Without the official manual that came with my now surely sold-to-GameStop Xbox 360 edition of the game or the Official Prima Strategy Guide, I quickly found myself (as countless others do) on The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages.

Broadly, UESPWiki is an impressive information repository of The Elder Scrolls franchise. It also documents the dense, often convoluted lore of the franchise, as well as books and merchandise sold alongside the games, and the multiple tabletop games.

The homepage for UESP, with a classic wiki design — The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages as they appear today. Credit: Samuel Axon

For all its uniqueness—the sort of early “Web 2.0” design style, limited advertisement space, and its namespace-centered way of organization—the UESP is an independent wiki at its core. It has all the bone structure that makes a wiki accessible and easy to use and is driven by a dedicated community of editors.

The wiki currently maintains over 110,000 articles. The phrase “We have been building a collaborative source for all knowledge on the Elder Scrolls series since 1995” is written at the top of the home page. This year, UESP is celebrating its 30th anniversary.

“The phrase I always say is ‘we’re older than Google,’” said 51-year-old Dave Humphrey, founder of the UESP. “Obviously, we’re not as big or as popular as Google, but we’re older than Google, and we’re older than a lot of websites. In fact, I don’t think there’s any other Elder Scrolls-related website that’s older than us.”

The earliest version of the UESP wasn’t a wiki at all and is just a little older than 30 years. It was a message distributed through USENET called Daggerfall FAQ, originally published in the fall of 1994, and it featured prerelease content about The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall.

A year later, the Daggerfall FAQ would become a webpage, and a few months after that, it would become the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages, which was just a webpage at the time, to include information about The Elder Scrolls games.

When The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind released, it was the franchise’s biggest game at that point, and Humphrey quickly became remarkably busy. He wrote hundreds of entries for the game and its two DLCs while maintaining his regular job. But the more he did, the more reader emails suggesting new entries and edits to the site came in. In 2005, UESP officially became a wiki.

“It was too much for me to do as a full-time or second full-time job sort of thing,” Humphrey said. “That’s when I decided instead of having a regular webpage, we’d move to a wiki-based format where instead of people, you know, emailing me, they can edit their own tips.”

In 2012, Humphrey officially made the UESP his full-time job, but he is largely no longer involved in the content side of the wiki. He instead maintains more of an overseer role, doing most of the back-end server maintenance, programming, and cluster design for the site.

What sets UESP apart, at least from Humphrey’s perspective, is the creativity and decision-making capacity derived from its independence. This allows the team to run the ads they choose and implement new utilities like the ESO Build Editor.

“We’ve been asked to join larger wiki farms before, and while it might make sense from a technical standpoint, we would lose a lot of what makes UESP unique and long-lasting,” said Humphrey.

In fact, UESP has been slowly expanding over the years and is starting to host wiki sites beyond The Elder Scrolls. In August 2023, the site launched the Starfield Wiki, which already maintains over 10,000 articles and has unofficially taken over all the construction set wikis for the Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises. Currently, Humphrey said, UESP is looking at hosting a few more existing game wikis later this year.

As for the Elder Scrolls series itself, The Elder Scrolls VI is still well into the future. But at the time of my interview, the Oblivion remaster was just social media speculation. Still, Humphrey predicted how the game might change the wiki.

“It comes down to the organization of the site. We sort of have to deal with that a bit with DLCs. There’s the base game, and then there’s the DLCs; for the most part, DLCs are their own contained area, but they do modify the base game as well,” said Humphrey.

“We’d probably take a similar approach with it, creating their own namespace underneath Oblivion and putting all the remake information there,” he added.

It’s always a challenge to determine how to organize things like DLCs and remakes into the wiki, Humphrey said. He noted that he would ultimately leave it up to the editors themselves.

Since the release of Oblivion Remastered, the game has, in fact, received its own namespace, and editors are already documenting some of the changes.

A changelog on the wiki — There’s a detailed page listing every known change in the *Oblivion* remaster. Credit: Samuel Axon

When it was still the Daggerfall FAQ, Humphrey wasn’t thinking about what it would look like in 2025 or how a community could be built around a website; he was simply someone with a passion for the game who liked building things.

But as time went on and Humphrey began attending conventions and Elder Scrolls-related meetups, he started to realize the kind of community that had naturally formed around the site.

“It’s not something I planned on doing, but it’s really neat, and it’s something I’m more aware of now in terms of doing community-related stuff,” Humphrey said.

That community, which has over 23,000 users with at least one edit in its history, measures the success of the wiki not by the quantity of content but the quality of the pages themselves. Humphrey leaves most of the content decisions up to those editors.

Scraping and editing

Robert “RobinHood70” Morley—a 54-year-old native of Ottawa, Canada—has been editing the pages since May 2006, just a short time after UESP turned into a wiki, while playing through Oblivion.

He explained that he found the wiki at a critical time, shortly after he fell ill with a sickness that doctors struggled to diagnose.

“Getting involved in the wiki provided a bit of a refuge from that,” Morely wrote through Discord. “I could forget how I felt (to some degree) and focus instead on what was going on the wiki. Because I couldn’t really leave the house much anymore, I made friends on the wiki instead and let that replace the real-life social life that I couldn’t have anymore… That continues to be the case even now.”

He didn’t necessarily set out to find that kind of community, which was much smaller at the time, but he recognized that it was helping him cope with things. Not only did editing give him a sense of accomplishment, but he enjoyed seeing what others were able to do.

Over the years, Morely’s involvement in the wiki has grown. He’s gone from a regular user to an admin to a bureaucrat. He’s the only editor with access to the servers other than Humphrey. He now does the critical job of running bots through the game pages that add bulk information to the wiki.

“In some sense, a bot is like any other editor. It adds/changes/removes information on the wiki. The difference is that it does so several thousand times faster,” Morley said. “Bots are often used to bulk-upload information from the game files to the wiki. For example, they might provide the initial documentation of every NPC in a game… They would provide the hard stats, but afterward, people would expand the page to provide a narrative for each character.”

When an Elder Scrolls Online update goes live, for example, Morley quickly deploys the bot, which detects any changes in the new versions of the game, such as skill and stat adjustments. All that added information is dumped into the wiki to provide human editors with a base to start from.

That’s similar to the process of creating pages for a brand-new Elder Scrolls game. The game would be scraped shortly after it was released, and editors would get busy trying to figure out how those pieces fit together.

Once created, the pages would be edited and continuously retouched over time by other editors.

Those editors include people like 26-year-old Dillon “Dillonn241” D., who has been a part of the wiki for over half of his life. He first discovered and began editing pages of the UESP at 11 or 12 years old.

While his activity on the wiki has ebbed and flowed over the years based on interest and the demands of daily life, he says the community is a big part of what keeps him coming back—the near-endless nature of collaboratively working on a project. He enjoys the casual conversations on the wiki’s Discord server, as well as the more focused and pragmatic discussions about editing through internal channels.

He has since become a prolific editor and was awarded a “gold star” on his talk page last year for editing more pages than anyone in 2024, with a total of 18,864 edits.

“I don’t want to call it an addiction because that makes it sound bad, but it’s kind of like—you know, I guess I have an hour here. I’ll just hop on UESP and edit a few pages or see how things I’ve edited have been doing.”

Most of those edits, he explained, were likely minor, things like fixing grammar, sentence structure, and formatting to better conform to the wiki’s internal style guide. In this way, he considers himself a “WikiGnome”—someone who makes small, incremental edits to pages and makes changes behind the scenes.

When he’s in the mood to do some editing, he’ll jump around the wiki using the random button for a couple of hours and make changes.

All those hours have given him not only refined copy editing skills but also a serious familiarity with the pages. Dillion says he can jump on just about any page and find at least one of his edits on it.

He has done a lot of work on the namespaces for the Tamriel Rebuilt mod and essentially rewrote the entire namespace for The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, a game he doesn’t particularly enjoy playing but started on a whim.

“At some point, I stumbled across the wiki section for it and was like, well this is nothing, this is awful,” he explained.

He recalled getting stuck on a section of the game, and the wiki wasn’t able to help him. He was able to stumble through the game but decided he would completely fix its entries so they would be more helpful to future players.

Now, the Redguard namespace includes detailed descriptions of the quests, characters, and items, along with photos, most of which Dillion took himself. He says that if the game and all its files were somehow wiped from the earth, developers would be able to remaster the entire game in Unity based just on what’s in the wiki.

A screenshot of the Redguard wiki page — Yep, he took those screenshots. Credit: Samuel Axon

“I guess that’s kind of the end goal,” he said, “and some of the namespaces are kind of close, like Oblivion I would say is kind of close to where the things that you can still add to the page are getting minimal.”

Efforts all over

While Dillion is a more prolific editor than most and Morley plays a more specific role in the wiki than others—and Humphrey represents the original jumping off point for the former two—it’s the combined effort of thousands of editors like them that make the UESP what it is.

And across the Internet, there are equally involved editors working on an endless number of wikis toward similar goals. In a way, they are remaking the games they love in a text-based format.

At their core, these community efforts help players get through games in a time when physical guides often no longer exist. But in the aggregate, deeper, centralized insights into these games can ultimately contribute to something new. A record over time of how a game changes and how it works can lead to discovery and debate. In turn, that could spark inspiration for a mod—or a new game entirely.

“Older than Google,” this Elder Scrolls wiki has been helping gamers for 30 years Read More »

Fortnite will return to iOS as court slams Apple’s “interference“ and ”cover-up“

Apple, Apple v Epic, fortnite, gaming, Policy / Paul Patrick / May 1, 2025

In a statement provided to Ars Technica, an Apple spokesperson said, “We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court’s order and we will appeal.”

An Epic return

With the new court order in place, Epic says it will once again submit a version of Fortnite to the iOS App Store in the US in the next week or so. That new version will offer players the option to use standard Apple App Store payments or its own, cheaper “Epic Direct Payment” system to purchase in-game currency and items.

That would mirror the system that was briefly in place for iOS players in August 2020, when Epic added alternate payment options to iOS Fortnite in intentional violation of what were then Apple’s store policies. Apple removed Fortnite from the iOS App Store hours later, setting off a legal battle that seems to finally be reaching its conclusion.

For those few hours when Epic Direct Payments were available on iOS Fortnite in 2020, Sweeney said that about 50 percent of customers “decided to give Epic a shot,” going through an additional step to register and pay through an Epic account on a web page outside the app itself (and saving 20 percent on their purchase in the process). The other roughly 50 percent of customers decided to pay a higher price in exchange for the convenience of paying directly in the app through the iOS account they already had set up, Sweeney said. “Consumers were making the choice… and it was a wonderful thing to see,” he said.

Speaking to the press Wednesday night, Sweeney said the new court order was a “huge victory for developers” looking to offer their own payment service alongside Apple’s on iOS devices. “This is what we’ve wanted all along,” he said. “We think that this achieves the goal that we’ve been aiming for in the US, while there are still some challenges elsewhere in the world.”

While Sweeney said the specific iOS developer account Epic used to publish Fortnite in 2020 is still banned, he added that the company has several other developer accounts that could be used for the new submission, including one it has used to support Unreal Engine on Apple devices. And while Sweeney allowed that Apple could still “arbitrarily reject Epic from the App Store despite Epic following all the rules,” he added that, in light of this latest court ruling, Apple would now “have to deal with various consequences of that if they did.”

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Is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion still fun for a first-time player in 2025?

Elder Scrolls, gaming, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered / Paul Patrick / April 26, 2025

How does a fresh coat of paint help this 19-year-old RPG against modern competition?

Don’t look down, don’t look down, don’t look down… Credit: Bethesda Game Studios

For many gamers, this week’s release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered has provided a good excuse to revisit a well-remembered RPG classic from years past. For others, it’s provided a good excuse to catch up on a well-regarded game that they haven’t gotten around to playing in the nearly two decades since its release.

I’m in that second group. While I’ve played a fair amount of Skyrim (on platforms ranging from the Xbox 360 to VR headsets) and Starfield, I’ve never taken the time to go back to the earlier Bethesda Game Studios RPGs. As such, my impressions of Oblivion before this Remaster have been guided by old critical reactions and the many memes calling attention to the game’s somewhat janky engine.

Playing through the first few hours of Oblivion Remastered this week, without the benefit of nostalgia, I can definitely see why Oblivion made such an impact on RPG fans in 2006. But I also see all the ways that the game can feel a bit dated after nearly two decades of advancements in genre design.

One chance at a first impression

From the jump, I found myself struggling to suspend my disbelief enough to buy into the narrative conventions Oblivion throws at the beginner player. The fact that the doomed king and his armed guards need to escape through a secret passage that just so happens to cut through my jail cell seems a little too convenient for my brain to accept without warning sirens going off. I know it’s just a contrivance to get my personal hero’s journey story going, but it’s a clunky way to dive into the world.

A face only a mother could love. Credit: Bethesda Game Studios

The same goes for the way the king dies just a few minutes into the tutorial, and his willingness to trust me with the coveted Amulet of Kings because the “Dragonblood” let him “see something” in me. Even allowing for some amount of necessary Chosen One trope-iness in this kind of fantasy story, the sheer speed with which my character went from “condemned prisoner” to “the last hope of the dying king” made my head spin a bit. Following that pivotal scene with a dull “go kill some goblins and rats in the sewer” escape sequence also felt a little anticlimactic given the epic responsibility with which I was just entrusted.

To be sure, Patrick Stewart’s regal delivery in the early game helps paper over a lot of potential weaknesses with the initial narrative. And even beyond Stewart’s excellent performance, I appreciated how the writing is concise and to the point, without the kind of drawn-out, pause-laden delivery that characterizes many games of the time.

The wide world of Oblivion

Once I escaped out into the broader world of Oblivion for the first time, I was a bit shocked to open my map and see that I could fast travel to a wide range of critical locations immediately, without any need to discover them for myself first. I felt a bit like a guilty cheater warping myself to the location of my next quest waypoint rather than hoofing through the massive forest that I’m sure hundreds of artists spent countless months meticulously constructing (and, more recently, remastering).

This horse is mine now. What are you gonna do about it? Credit: Bethesda Game Studios

I felt less guilty after accidentally stealing a horse, though. After a key quest giver urged me to go take a horse from a nearby stable, I was a bit shocked when I mounted the first horse I saw and heard two heavily armed guards nearby calling me a thief and leaping into pursuit (I guess I should have noticed the red icon before making my mount). No matter, I thought; they’re on foot and I’m now on a horse, so I can get away with my inadvertent theft quite easily.

Determined not to just fast-travel through the entire game, I found that galloping across a rain-drenched forest through the in-game night was almost too atmospheric. I ended up turning up the recommended brightness settings a few notches just so I could see the meticulously rendered trees and rocks around me.

After dismounting to rid a cave of some pesky vampires, I returned to the forest to find my stolen horse was nowhere to be found. At this point, I had trouble deciding if this was simply a realistic take on an unsecured, unmonitored horse wandering off or if I was the victim of a janky engine that couldn’t keep track of my mount.

The camera gets stuck inside my character model, which is itself stuck in the scenery. Credit: Bethesda Game Studios

The jank was a bit clearer when I randomly stumbled across my first Oblivion gate while wandering through the woods. As I activated the gate to find a world engulfed in brilliant fire, I was surprised to find an armed guard had also appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and apparently still mad about my long-lost stolen horse!

When I deactivated the gate in another attempt to escape justice, I found myself immediately stuck chest deep in the game’s scenery, utterly unable to move as that hapless guard tried his best to subdue me. I ended up having to restore an earlier save, losing a few minutes of progress to a game engine that still has its fair share of problems.

What’s beneath the surface?

So far, I’m of two minds about Oblivion‘s overall world-building. When it comes to the civilized parts of the world, I’m relatively impressed. The towns seem relatively full during the daytime—both in terms of people and in terms of interesting buildings to explore or patronize. I especially enjoy the way every passerby seems to have a unique voice and greeting ready for me, even before I engage them directly. I even think it’s kind of cute when these NPCs end a pleasant conversation with a terse “leave me alone!” or “stop talking to me!”

Conversations are engaging even if random passers-by seem intent on standing in the way. Credit: Bethesda Game Studios

Even the NPCs that seem least relevant to the story seem to have their own deep backstory and motivations; I was especially tickled by an alchemist visiting from afar who asked if I knew the local fine for necrophilia. (It can’t hurt to ask, right?) And discussing random rumors with everyone I meet has gone a long way toward establishing the social and political backstory of the world while also providing me with some engaging and far-flung side quests. There’s a lot of depth apparent in these interactions, even if I haven’t had the chance to come close to fully exploring it yet.

I bet there’s a story behind that statue. Credit: Bethesda Game Studios

On the other hand, the vast spaces in between the cities and towns seem like so much wasted space, at this point. I’ve quickly learned not to waste much time exploring caves or abandoned mines, which so far seem to house a few middling enemies guarding some relatively useless trinkets in treasure chests. The same goes for going out of my way to activate the various wayshrines and Ayelid Wells that dot the landscape, which have hardly seemed worth the trip (thus far, at least).

Part of the problem is that I’ve found Oblivion‘s early combat almost wholly unengaging so far. Even at a low level, my warrior-mage has been able to make easy work of every random enemy I’ve faced with a combination of long-range flare spells and close-range sword swings. It definitely doesn’t help that I have yet to fight more than two enemies at once, or find a foe that seems to have two strategic brain cells to rub together. Compared to the engaging, tactical group combat of modern action RPGs like Elden Ring or Avowed, the battles here feel downright archaic.

I was hoping for some more difficult battles in a setting that is this foreboding. Credit: Bethesda Game Studios

I found this was true even as I worked my way through closing my first Oblivion gate, which had recently left the citizens of Kvask as sympathetic refugees huddling on the outskirts of town. Here, I thought, would be some battles that required crafty tactics, powerful items, or at least some level grinding to become more powerful. Instead, amid blood-soaked corridors that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Doom game, I found the most challenging speedbumps were mages that sponged up a moderate amount of damage while blindly charging right at me.

While I’m still decidedly in the early part of a game that can easily consume over 100 hours for a completionist, so far I’m having trouble getting past the most dated bits of Oblivion‘s design. Character design and vocal production that probably felt revolutionary two decades ago now feel practically standard for the genre, while technical problems and dull combat seem best left in the past. Despite a new coat of paint, this was one Remaster I found difficult to fully connect with so long after its initial release.

Is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion still fun for a first-time player in 2025? Read More »

Backward compatible: Many old Oblivion mods still work on Oblivion Remastered

gaming / Tim Belzer / April 24, 2025

The modding community is already hard at work despite lack of “official” support.

Thanks to a circa 2008 mod, I have a ton of armor and weapons from the jump in Oblivion Remastered Credit: Kyle Orland / Bethesda

Bethesda isn’t officially supporting mods for the newly released Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. But that hasn’t stopped some players from discovering that many mods created for the 2006 original seem to work just fine in the new game with a bare minimum of installation headaches.

As noted on Reddit and the Bethesda Game Studios Discord, some .esp mod files designed years ago for the original Oblivion have the same effect when plugged into the new Remastered game. Ars confirmed this during some quick testing, using a mod uploaded in 2008 to easily add high-end weapons and armor to the opening jail cell scene in the Remastered version.

While players of the original game could use the Oblivion Mod Manager to easily install these mods, doing so in the Remastered version requires a bit more manual work. First, users have to download the applicable .esp mod files and put them in the “Content/Dev/ObvData/Data” folder (the same one that already houses DLC data files like “DLCHorseArmor.esp”). Then it’s just a matter of opening “Plugins.txt” in the same folder and adding that full .esp file name to the plaintext list.

Early testers report that some more complex mods designed for the original Oblivion will lead to crashes or mixed results when loaded in the Remastered game. Others theorize that “the game seems to read OG Oblivion as its base, so manually adding a mod that doesn’t have new assets … would work.”

As the community continues to analyze this modding backward compatibility, other modders have already rushed to release dozens of new mods designed specifically for the Remastered version, even without official support from Bethesda. At this point, most of these seem focused on some basic UI tweaks or quality-of-life hacks to make the game more enjoyable (we’re particularly fond of this one that makes slow-walking NPCs a bit faster).

More complex mods may require diving into the Unreal Engine’s pak file format to replace in-game assets with new, modded versions. That means it’s probably just a matter of time before we get the equivalent of the custom Mystic Elf race modded back into the newer version of the game.

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12-year-old Doom 2 challenge map finally beaten after six-hour, 23K-demon grind

doom 2, gaming / Kris Guyer / April 23, 2025

In the descriptions for those videos, though, Coincident acknowledged some of the reasons that Okuplok’s level has been “deemed impossible to beat in one segment” on Ultra Violence difficulty. Even if you have a perfect strategy mapped out for each segment, “some of the later fights are a pure RNG grind,” he wrote. “Losing multiple 5-hour-long [Ultra Violence] runs over and over again that late into the map would drive me insane.”

Coincident’s strategy videos for the slaughter map highlight just how tough even the “easy” sections are to complete.

The slaughter level’s “wildly varying levels of difficulty between each fight” are “extremely frustrating as a challenge, especially when you die to a difficult fight, after having cleared several easy (and borderline boring) fights for 3 hours,” Coincident continued in another video description. “Some consider that the only reason why no one has single-segmented Okuplok on UV yet is because no one even wants to try. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“It’s over!”

Nonetheless, over the weekend, Coincident proved he was willing to try what he once considered an “impossible” task. His grueling, six-hour-long marathon isn’t actually that fun to watch at many points. The occasional moments of intense, close-quarters combat are punctuated by long segments where Coincident circle-strafes endlessly around large hordes, waiting for enemies to hurt each other with incidental damage so he can conserve ammunition. He also kills many kited enemies one by one in corridors or through small gaps to keep things as safe as possible.

Even if you’re not willing to sit through six hours of that kind of meticulous gameplay, it can be thrilling to jump around the stream and revel in the portions where Coincident shows off some extremely precise, near-perfect dodging through arenas filled with projectiles and floors littered with pixelated corpses. The drama gets especially intense near the end, when Coincident’s breathing becomes noticeably heavy before finishing the run with a flashy rocket to the face just as he hits the exit panel.

“Yes! Fuck yes!” Coincident exclaims after the run is finally over. “Okuplok is done! Done, done, done, done, done! … Oh my god, what a ride, this was quite the ride… It’s done, I don’t have to run this again! It’s over!”

12-year-old Doom 2 challenge map finally beaten after six-hour, 23K-demon grind Read More »