With expansion Dawntrail around the corner, there are some big changes coming to Final Fantasy 14. Some of these were outlined in a 14-hour livestream that took place over the weekend, and one in particular stood out to me: an overhaul to how blacklisting players works.

The MMO’s blacklist feature is notorious for being pretty weak. Currently, all the blacklist does is prevent you from seeing any messages from the person you blocked, as well as hiding any party finders you’re hosting. It does little in the way of preventing any actual stalking or harassment that can unfortunately take place—blacklisted players are still cool to enter your player housing and, if you were friends prior to the blocking, it won’t actually remove you from their friend list. 

That’s loo…

Lucid dreams are defined as the experience of knowing you are dreaming while you are asleep, and can range from the sublime to the genuinely terrifying. According to the CEO of new startup Prophetic, its latest project aims to “detect when dreamers are in REM to induce and stabilize lucid dreams” via a wearable device they call “The Halo”. And if that doesn’t sound like a cyberpunk future developing in front of our very eyes, I’m not sure what does.

Vice’s Motherboard recently interviewed the CEO of Prophetic, Eric Wollberg and CTO Wesley Louis Berry III about this project and the ramifications of such a potentially world-changing technology. Prophetic has recently entered a partnership with the Donders Institute, a research centre for neuroscience and cognition based in a univers…

Look, the Sims community can be a bit odd. I’ve just been reading a thread about the joys of flirting with married men with single female sims to knock out a particular baby achievement (“they won’t move out of their house so them and their wife are just stuck there hating each other”) , before discovering that one of the current dramas is over an undoubted bug that Sims players would prefer is left untouched. Don’t fix that problem, EA!

The bug in question is one whereby taking a photo of two Sims together using a particular tripod causes dramatic gains in relationship / reputation between the two characters. Those two metrics usually take a long time to build up through conversations etcetera, and so this bug is a bit of a shortcut for players to gain a large friendship gr…

Tabletop RPG design studio Son of Oak has had enormous success with City of Mist, a game that combines superhero action with a setting steeped in noir atmosphere and mythological magic. In fact, it’s so full of cool ideas that I put it in our list of the best alternatives to D&D. 

It turns out, it’s been such a hit that the company’s decided to do a spin-off, called Legend in the Mist. It’s a fantasy game—out of the core book, it’s designed to be used with your choice of setting, but there’ll also be an original setting detailed in a separate expansion book called Hearts of Ravendale. 

It’s a little odd to see the creators of one of the most distinctive settings around making a generic fantasy RPG—but Son of Oak says it’s “not another tactical fanta…

The shambling corpses of The Walking Dead refuse to rest, and now the zombies will be gracing tabletops (though not for the first time) courtesy of Free League and The Walking Dead Universe RPG. A Kickstarter will be launching soon, on March 14, and while the finished game won’t be appearing until this autumn, the core rulebook will be available alongside the crowdfunding push.  

Swedish publisher and developer Free League is pretty damn prolific, and has lately become synonymous with quality adaptations of notable licences like Alien, Blade Runner and Tales from the Loop. I don’t have as much time for TTRPGs as I used to, but even when I’m too busy to play, sometimes I’ll just gawk at the books, which are all lavish, dense tomes. 

The pedigree of the design team s…

All the help you need to solve today’s Wordle is ready and waiting below, and that’s true whether you’re looking for general tips, a clue for the June 12 (723) game to help point you in the right direction, or you’d just like to rush straight to the part where you read today’s answer. Whatever you’re after, you’ll find it here.

Wow, that was tense. Today’s puzzle started off strong, but I had real trouble finding the right slot for a floating yellow—so much so it didn’t turn green until my very last nerve-wracking row. I could’ve done without that sort of worry so early on in the Wordle week.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Monday, June 12

Incorrect. Untrue. False. Inaccurate. Whatever word you use, the answer to today’s Wordle isn’t …

If you’ve ever thought to yourself that Geralt of Rivia would make a really great guardian in Destiny 2, I have good news: Bungie and CD Projekt have teamed up to create all-new Witcher-inspired Destiny 2 cosmetics, including armor ornaments, a Ghost shell, a new ship, Sparrow, emote, and finisher.

The Geralt-inspired gear is set to go live on November 28, with the start of Season of the Wish. You can see the Titan, Hunter, and Warlock outfits in all their glory in the image below—click the X in the upper-right corner for a full-resolution look.

So what do you think? The Witcher inspiration is particularly overt in the Titan armor, but I can’t say any of them really knock my socks off. I think it would’ve been fun to see a more direct lift from The Witcher 3: Cat armor…

Long gone are the days of speedrunning being confined to mere video games. You can gamify anything into speedrun territory these days: Wikipedia, Google Maps and even gamified language learning apps like Duolingo, as proven by one person who managed to blast through the entire Spanish course in 24 hours. Well, sort of.

Reddit user quilqon, also known as JoZapinski on YouTube, posted his attempt to complete all 205 units of Duolingo’s Spanish course as fast as he could. In his Reddit post, he said “I already speak Spanish so I just went with that since my goal was to try and speedrun the whole thing,” mentioning that he thought it would only take him around 12-14 hours to complete, though that wasn’t the case.

“It ended up being extremely difficult and I greatly underestimate…

 The blimp survival game Forever Skies is set to launch into early access on Steam later this week, and ahead of that developer Far From Home has revealed what you’ll need inside your PC case if you want to play.

We haven’t heard a whole lot about Forever Skies, but I think it looks potentially very cool. Amidst the ruins of an Earth devastated by an ecological disaster that left the planet encased in a thick cloud of toxic dust. Returning to the world hundreds of years after the disaster, you’ll build and maintain a high-tech airship that will enable you to explore ruins, extract and refine resources, and discover where it all went wrong.

Forever Skies reminds me of Subnautica in a superficial way: Flying through the open skies doesn’t have quite the same potential for…

2022’s roguelike of the year and eternal sovereign of my heart, Poncle’s Vampire Survivors, has announced its next major patch. The 1.8 Adventures update is due to release in a few weeks, and brings with it barely explained additions like remixed content, a new “sort of mini campaign” mode for members of the Vampire Survivors cast, and most important of all: “a whole bunch of deep lore lmao.”

Those mini campaigns are the titular adventures, and the dev describes them as “self-contained miniature story modes that reset and remix the game’s content, following the Survivors cast on a series of wacky sidequests.” Perhaps some of that deep lore will strike during one of those stories, giving us a chance to finally unfurl the rich tapestry of Vampire Survivor’s fiction.

Or perhaps…