According to an industry analyst, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Scarlett will each have a $399 price tag when they hit store shelves next holiday season. Though the public has yet to get so much as a peek at what Project Scarlett actually looks like, and since the PS5 has yet to even receive a formal announcement, prospective players of each console finally have an idea of what size of a hole the next-generation of home consoles will blow through their wallets when it arrives. Since Microsoft officially unveiled its code-named Project Scarlett at E3 2019, all focus has shifted to the ninth console generation; what little is known has been run through with a fine-toothed comb to help piece together better images of what consumers will be bringing into their living rooms at launch. Both Scarlett and the PS5 are expected to be technological powerhouses capable of competing with high-end gaming PCs, each sporting an incomplete, but incredibly exciting list of specs. So far, Sony has remained more tight-lipped about its next console than its competitor due to being absent from E3, so very little beyond some general hardware expectations are known about the PS5. Meanwhile, some concrete Scarlett specs and features were shared at this year's conference, and the console's price and design are expected to be revealed soon. Speaking to GamingBolt, well-established analyst Michael Pachter estimates that both Microsoft and Sony will shoot for a $399 price point for the launch of Xbox Scarlett and the PS5. Pachter says he recognizes that "the specs suggest $500 or so," as it was with the 2013 launch of the Xbox One, but he maintains his hunch that "Microsoft will announce $399 and Sony will follow suit." While that seems like great news for any gamer looking to jump ship to the latest and greatest in console gaming, a Twitter account dedicated to PS5 news and rumors alleges that Pachter separately informed them that the PS5 will cost consumers a whopping $800 - an absolutely unheard of bar to entry for modern consoles. If the latter speculation is an actual prediction of Pachter's, it understandably casts some doubt upon the validity of his information this time around. Luckily, Pachter isn't the only pundit weighing in on the price of the PS5 and Scarlett. As translated and evaluated by T3, a report by Sony analyst Hideki Yasuda places the price of the PS5 back into Pachter's admittedly more pragmatic realm of $500. Players can, should, and likely will continue to keep their fingers crossed that Pachter's $400 guess is correct, but keeping expectations (and savings accounts) a bit more metered like Yasuda might save everyone from a lot of undue heartache. With persistently rising costs and stagnant wages, the result of the next console arms race between Sony and Microsoft may be largely decided by the ability of one to price the other out of the competition without selling too many consoles at a loss. It'll be a wonder how either the PS5 or Scarlett can remain affordable when packed with such beefy hardware for home systems, but the manufacturer that manages to pull that balancing act off best will be at a significant advantage in 2020.

Once upon a time (2018), Intel and Apple were the best of friends contractually obligated to say nice things about each other from public stages as part of a deal in which Apple would use Intel’s 5G modem in its future products and Intel would have a major customer with which to justify aggressively investing in 5G modems. The deal fell through when Intel failed to meet certain deadlines or achieve Apple’s target metrics. The details are uncertain. What we do know is that Apple paid Qualcomm $4.5B to settle the case and obtain a license for Qualcomm’s 5G modem technology, and Intel announced it was shutting its modem business and R&D down as a result. Now, there’s a rumor that Apple might actually want to buy Intel’s modem division in the first place, relieving Chipzilla of the German design unit it acquired when it bought Infineon. Intel, meanwhile, is potentially looking for a buyer. The company has been quoted as saying: “We have hired outside advisors to help us assess strategic options for our wireless 5G phone business. We have created value both in our portfolio of wireless modem products and in our intellectual property.” Some Infineon engineers and executives are now Apple employees, which may make the entire deal more likely. Did Qualcomm Kill Intel’s Mobile Efforts? A few years ago, I wrote a pair of articles on Intel’s lack of success in the mobile market. I stand by both — I think they hold up well today as discussions of some of the missteps Intel made. But if I were writing the series again today, I might well include a Part III — the impact of Qualcomm’s business practices on Intel’s ability to find a market for its products. Ars Technica published an excellent deep dive into the Qualcomm anti-trust finding last month that’s well worth a read. The more than 200 page decision spells out a number of actions Qualcomm took that Judge Lucy Koh felt were clear violations of antitrust law. Qualcomm structured contracts in ways that made it impossible for other chipmakers to compete against it and customers who refused to go along with these agreements could be subject to a crippling loss of access to product. There are some distinct similarities between what Intel allegedly did to AMD in the early 2000s and what Qualcomm did to its own customers over the last two decades, including rebate practices that required customers to sell either 85 percent or 100 percent Qualcomm hardware to receive them. This does not make such practices right, and it’s a matter of historical fact that Qualcomm dominated the LTE market, particularly in the early years of the standard. Apple was reportedly working on its own 5G modem even before it split from Intel, so the idea that the company might buy Intel’s modem division and make it the core of its own networking efforts would scarcely be a surprise. Doing so would mean Apple finally had all the building blocks necessary to build a complete, in-house processor (less whatever I/O blocks it might still license from various firms). With iPhone sales falling, Apple owning its own CPU, GPU, and modem would be a way for the company to capture a bit more profit on every phone, helping to keep margins and profits higher when sales are stagnant or declining.

Tracker Name: DXDHD Genre: General Review: Sign Up Link: https://www.dxdhd.com/register/null Closing Time: Soon Additional Information: DXDHD is a Private Torrent Tracker for HD/UHD Movies / TV / General Releases.

Hello all Our very own Th**** is running a competition to help those in need. Check it out https://beyond-hd.me/forums/topic/bps-for-forum-activity.214

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This is a guide that will help Seedboxes.cc users to create torrents from their seedboxes. You should have already your seedbox setup, your torrent client etc. Seedboxes.cc have an separate application called Seedbucket that is their file manager, this guide will demonstrate on how to use this file manager to create your torrent files. Step 1: When you are at your seedbox, you need to navigate to "Installable Apps" Step 2: Select "Add Application" Step 3: Click on "SeedBucket" to start the install Step 4: Click on "Install" Step 5: Once the application is installed, click on "Go To Application" Step 6: Login with your seedbox username and password. Step 7: Browse to the folder where you want to create your torrent from, any downloaded content would be "--> Files" Step 8: Right click the folder that you want to make a torrent from, in my case, I want to create a torrent from "Tutorial Example" and then click on "Create Torrent" Step 9a: By now, you need to know the announce URL from the tracker that you want to do the upload to, below is an example of how this should look like. Step 9b: Now at 1, you need to populate the trackers announce link, you can select a different Piece Size if you want, please note that some sites does not allow 1MB+. Now at 2, you need to mark all your torrents "Make Private" if you are uploading to a private tracker. Then you can "Create" your torrent. Step 10: When the torrent is created, you can download your created torrent, **Up till here your torrent is created** **Additional Information** Many, if not all trackers, when you have uploaded your newly created torrent to their tracker site, you need to download the new .torrent file that the tracker created and add it to your seedbox, if you do not do this, you will not be able to seed your created torrent.

Tracker Name: Mmtorrent Genre: General Review (If Any Sign Up Link: http://mmtorrent.us/signup.php Closing Time: N/A Additional Information: Mmtorrent is a new small Hungarian Private Torrent Tracker for Movies / TV / General Releases.

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The June '19 Update Whipper accepted for ripping After much ado, we have finally officially added support for logs generated from whipper 0.7.3 and later. We feel comfortable allowing Whipper now as its most outstanding issues have been fixed and is reasonably stable for general use. By allowing uploaders to use Whipper to rip CDs, we aim to help bring more rips to the world and do our part in helping in adoption of this wonderful open-source ripper. Please note, we do reserve the right to change what versions of whipper we accept going forward as we watch the project progress towards its 1.0 general release. For this, we have split out the Logchecker that was built into Gazelle into a standalone library (released on GitHub and installable through composer for other PHP projects on Packagist). Given the "pre-release" status of whipper as a project still, we will be keeping a close eye on torrents uploaded using it and may be adjusting the logchecker as we see more people use it and test it out. Rules 2.2.10.2, 2.2.10.3, and 2.2.10.5 have been adjusted to account for this change. A tale and a gift What happened during the downtime and why did it take so long? Our previous backend was showing signs of trouble, leading to the infamous "11 past the hour" downtime. This was caused by the hourly search update killing disk performance and preventing the database from being able to respond to queries in a timely manner (for what, it should be said, is a relatively benign operation). We decided to replace the backend, and having had a few months of experience to get a feel of what a tracker requires in terms of resources, we ordered a new server, with twice the amount of diskspace and twice the amount of RAM. At the same time, once the site was offline, there was a series of tasks we decided to undertake at the same time. We wanted to move to using Percona instead of Mariadb (as it offers a number of nice features over Mariadb), upgrade the distro our servers ran on, and upgrade a host of dependencies we use, such as memcache and PHP to help squeeze out more performance out of the site. Unfortunately, using Percona and the distro upgrade proved incompatible, so we have switched back to Mariadb for now, though we keep our eye on moving to Percona or potentially Postgresql in the future. At the same time we also moved away from stunnel and OpenVPN to use Wireguard everywhere. This has been a great success. Performance is much better, with less CPU load. At some point we will document the architecture in more detail in the Gazelle repo, so that people who want to launch a Gazelle installation have a fighting chance of success. This knowledge should not be kept secret. Don't be too worried about people saying that Wireguard is not ready for production. Remember that a certain email application by a search engine advertizing agency was kept in beta for years. Further reading: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=openvpn+versus+wireguard The other thing to remember is that we are all volunteers, and the time amount of time we can dedicate to the site on a daily basis can sometimes be measured in minutes. So sometimes a little delay can't be helped. (Hi Waffles we feel your pain). Now that you have reached this far then a reward is in order. It has been a while since there have been any presents, and what's the point in running a tracker if you can't hand out presents every once in a while? To celebrate the return of the site on a brand new backend, Bonus Points are being handed out. 8000 points has been handed out to all enabled accounts. Changes to Scene trumping rules Ah, the scene.. remember them? Perhaps that's just me. The scene was pivotal during what you may consider to be the infancy of modern file sharing. To this day, the scene is responsible for 0-day uploads of our favorite TV shows and games. Times change, and nowadays scene uploads are not considered to be aligned with our music naming standards. While scene uploads are certainly welcome, ALL scene uploads of music, FLAC or otherwise, are trumpable with a non-scene replacement that conforms to Orpheus file and folder naming standards. Scene applications and otherwise are not trumpable solely for originating from the scene. Rules 1.3.4, 2.2.5, and 3.10 have been updated to reflect this change. Inactive torrents removal begins After a long time hoping against hope that former users would join the site and reseed the catalog, it is time to draw a line and acknowledge that what is unseeded today will be unseeded tomorrow. We have wrestled with Gazelle to delete the torrents, but leave the metadata intact. If you see a torrent whose details are marked deleted, you may simply Add format to bring it back to life. The path to repopulating our music collection just got that little bit easier. Some people have reported receiving notifications for deleted torrents that they never snatched. You may receive some spurious notifications in your inbox; you may safely ignore them. Site cap reduced The previous site had a cap of 40,000 members. For a time, it looked like it would make it, until it didn't. Without open signups or greater mindshare, our user growth has pretty much flattened out. But that's OK! We don't want or care to be the biggest, we just want to build a reliable service for music lovers. To that end, the cap has been reduced to 20,000. We shall see about raising it if and when we have to. Interviewers needed Our interviewers need a coffee break every now and then. Help them with the growing influx of interviews by applying today! If you have an hour or so per week that you can spare, helping to interview a candidate for membership will help the site grow. Developers needed Our devs are more into yerba mate, but the same applies. Are you familiar with PHP? Javascript? SQL? C++? Python? (Some of these talents are more useful than others). There is always more work to be done on the site, both to optimize the user experience and to create new and exciting features! You can't put it on your Linkedin profile, you can't even mention it to colleagues. But if you believe this is something worth doing, we need to talk. If either of these things sound like something you could do, check out the applications page for more details as well as you can get a look at the code we run at our GitHub to see if its something you think you could contribute to. Community upload contest The long-promised Inaugural Upload Contest has arrived. Upload Perfect FLACS (WEB, CD and Vinyl) for greater glory. The more you upload, the more Bonus Points you will win. But pay attention, Singles don't count! Prizes are as follows: the person who uploads the most gets a Freeleech pick (to be published later on at Staff's discretion), for any torrent up to 1GB in size. For everyone else, the prize depends on the generosity of the network of Orpheus. Alongside the upload contest is a Bonus Point Pool. Donate as many points as you can, and everyone benefits. There is a tax. Not everything you donate makes it to the pool. At the end of the contest, a 5% cut will be taken, and distributed evenly to every enabled member, whether they uploaded anything or not. A second 10% cut will be taken, and distributed evenly to everyone who uploaded at least one release. The remaining 85% of the pool will be divided up pro rata according to how many releases were uploaded by each person. An example may help. Consider that there are ten enabled members, of whom five participate in the contest. The five uploaders finish by uploading 40, 34, 20, 4 and 2 releases, respectively. The Bonus Pool at the end of contest stands as two million BP. 5% of 2,000,000 is 100,000. The ten enabled members is therefore awarded 10,000 BP each. 10% is 200,000. The five members who uploaded something are awarded a further 40,000 BP each. The number of non-Single perfect FLAC releases at the end of the contest stands at a total of 100. The remaining 1,700,000 BP is then distributed evenly for each torrent uploaded. In this example, one upload comes out to 17,000 BP. The top uploader with 40 uploads therefore nets 680,000 BP. The fifth uploader who uploaded two releases is awarded 34,000 BP. Example payout: Uploads BP 40 730,000 (10K + 40K + 680K) 34 628,000 (10K + 40K + 578K) 20 390,000 (10K + 40K + 340K) 4 118,000 (10K + 40K + 68K) 2 84,000 (10K + 40K + 34K) 0 10,000 0 10,000 0 10,000 0 10,000 0 10,000 0 10,000 The contest began on 2019-06-15 00:00:01 and finishes on 2019-07-15, 23:59:59 UTC. (That's site time.) Yes, the start date was pushed back into the past, recognizing that most activity on the site occurs over the weekend. No point in penalizing everyone who was busy yesterday. – OPS Staff, with Talkin' about it

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Tracker Name: Broad City Genre: General Review (If Any Sign Up Link: http://broadcity.in/signup.php? Closing Time: Soon Additional Information: Broad City is a Turkish Private Torrent Tracker for Movie/TV/Documentary Sd-Hd-Uhd-Dvd9-Dvd5-Dvd Remux

Freeleech is ON until 19 Jun 2019 DoubleUpload is ON until 19 Jun 2019

Our 10 favorite games from this year's show. E3 2019 is behind us, and over 70 PC games were shown in some form or another. Now that we're all home recovering, we've taken some time to discuss our favorite trailers and gameplay demonstrations from the week, choosing the 10 games we came away from E3 most excited to play. We set no specific criteria for these awards, though we focused on games we got the best looks at—we're excited for Elden Ring, for example, but all we saw was a pretty cinematic. Even where we did get a good look, though, these awards are based on ideas and potential. We hope all of these games are as good as they looked at E3. John Wick Hex Samuel: Bithell Games' take on John Hex is a strategy game, as the name suggests, but it's not turn-based. Instead, the action is continuous, to replicate the moment-to-moment feel of a John Wick set piece, where goons arrive out of nowhere for close combat scraps. Each level doesn't last very long, and the tactical choices you have to make mid-battle are cool: is it worth rolling and grabbing that gun, at the risk of being hit by two incoming enemy bullets? Is it worth throwing your pistol since it's faster than aiming and shooting, even though the chance of hitting is only 70%? You have to think like Wick, basically. I played three levels of it at E3, and it really hit the spot as a fast-moving, fresh-feeling strategy experience. Wolfenstein: Youngblood Chris: It feels bold to make a Wolfenstein game where the star of the series has gone missing. It's also daring to make it a two-player co-op game (though you can play solo with the AI as your partner). But MachineGames may have managed to pull off both those risks nicely. BJ Blazkowicz's daughters, Jess and Soph, are fun: loud, cocky, and enjoyably energetic. There's lots of graphic, satisfying, Nazi-killing action, and just as importantly, lots of fun ways to work as a team that don't involve pumping lead into the scum of humanity. Working as a team to open doors, solve puzzles, activate elevators, and unlock secrets feels novel and takes the co-op to places beyond simply picking up your partner when they've been knocked down. MachineGames is partnered with Arkane, developers of Dishonored, which is evident in the level design which gives players lots of different options for combat and stealth. I'm excited to see more when it releases this summer. Cyberpunk 2077 Wes: I almost wish Cyberpunk 2077 could remain an idea forever, because as it becomes a real game it will inevitably disappoint in some ways. But it's also shaping up to be by far the highest fidelity single-city RPG ever, unprecedented in scale and detail. Combining Deus Ex's approach to open-ended design with The Witcher 3's RPG chops brings this down to Earth, but in a way that still makes Cyberpunk 2077 thrilling to watch take shape. James: Cyberpunk 2077 ‘s 50-minute E3 demo showed off the bewildering scope and detail of just one of Night City’s districts, which I’m thinking will be the true draw once it releases in April. What we saw of the combat stuck to the guns-blazing vs stealthy dichotomy we’ve seen in plenty of games already, but the people and history and atmosphere of the Pacifica district depict a setting that’s been carefully considered from every angle. Cyberpunk is an angry genre and Cyberpunk 2077’s portrayal of late-late-late capitalism and systemic racism are propped up to give players plenty of incentive to exercise their anger to, as digital Keanu said in this year’s cinematic trailer, “wake the fuck up” and get to burning that city. Let’s just hope the story and role-playing versatility within don’t simply treat these issues and people as set dressing. If we’re going to wallow in grim futuristic reflections of contemporary problems, let’s learn a thing or two along the way. Cyberpunk 2077 has the potential to be one of the few big-budget games that doesn’t shy away from ugly truths. Coupled with those stunning looks, complex stat systems, a diversity of playstyles, and, of course, Keanu, and we could have a modern classic on our hands. All that’s left to do is play it and find out. Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 Chris: I'm excited about the idea that you're not the only one who has been illegally turned into a vampire in the Mass Embrace at the start of the game. There are others, too, still out there somewhere in the city, and you'll be able to track them down and see how they're doing in a series of optional side-quests. Cara Ellision (who formerly wrote for PC Gamer) wrote these quests and they seem like an interesting way to tell the stories of regular people with jobs, with families, with lives, struggling to cope with their new situation in ways that your character might not be.—Chris Livingston Tyler: The gameplay we were shown was a bit wonky—especially the combat—but as Phil said after his look at Bloodlines 2 at E3, it wouldn't be a true sequel if it weren't. I hope it's been refined by the time it releases next year, but the goofy ragdolls don't turn me off of the roleplaying opportunities. Phil, who wasn't controlling the game but was directing the choices, decided to play as a cocksure vampire who thinks he can talk his way out of everything, but always fails to do so. That'll probably be my approach. Empire of Sin Phil: Brenda Romero's new strategy game looks like the spiritual successor to Gangster: Organised Crime. Set in 1920's prohibition-era Chicago, you pick one of 14 crime lords, based on real gangsters from the time, and work to take over the city's underworld. You can assault, build and upgrade businesses, recruit underlings who will gain dynamic personality traits based on your actions, and even sit down with your rivals for tense negotiations. Combat takes place in XCOM-style turn-based strategy encounters that are still affected by the underlying simulation. Cause too much carnage with grenades, for instance, and nearby police will be drawn to your location mid-fight. And Romero Games has already committed to comprehensive mod tools. This was one of the most surprising things I saw at the show, and I can't wait to see how deep the simulation runs. Telling Lies Phil: Her Story's Sam Barlow doesn't shy away from a challenge. His new narrative mystery, Telling Lies, draws inspiration from Breath of the Wild. Specifically, Barlow wants to create an 'open world' version of Her Story's scene search mechanic, where every thread you pursue leads to a satisfying story beat—even if it isn't directly related to the game's central mystery. Once again you're searching for words contained in video clips—although this time you're scraping the data from video calls its characters have made. It's a much bigger game, with four central characters and many more clips to uncover. To make that less daunting, new tools let you scrub through video clips, highlight terms from within videos themselves, and even bookmark to a specific point in time. It's a satisfying tactile upgrade to Her Story's systems, and—with Barlow being incredibly careful about not showing anything of the story—I'm excited to see what mysteries hide in its many, many scenes. Doom Eternal Phil: The combat is just as satisfying as in 2016's Doom, but Doom Eternal is doubling down on the resource juggling that so expertly set the pace of its predecessor. Need health? Punch it out of your foes with a melee takedown. Need ammo? Chainsaw an enemy and it will burst from their corpse. Need armour? Your shoulder mounted flamethrower will make that happen. Of course, everything is limited, meaning there's a delicate balancing act happening within each pacey display of gore-soaked combat skill. Enemies now gruesomely deform, combat mods feel more situational, and your Super Shotgun has a goddamned meat hook. Doom is arguably the best singleplayer shooter of this decade. Doom Eternal could well surpass it. Wes: I'm in love with Doom Eternal's new way of implementing 1UPs—like all of Doom 2016, it's a clever rethinking of an age-old gaming staple, rooted in the idea of balancing challenge with the goal of never letting up on momentum. Chris: It was sort of hard to imagine how Doom Eternal could top the acrobatic gunplay of 2016's Doom, but maybe it was obvious: more acrobatics and more guns. And dashing, climbing, and swinging around with the grappling hook all feel great thanks to a level design that makes it intuitive. At times during the demo my boots hardly seemed to touch the ground, and when they did it was just to stomp some grunt's head into mush before taking off again. Hollow Knight: Silksong James: Expect more lavish art, a triumphant orchestral score, and secrets to uncover for years, but Silksong isn’t just another Hollow Knight with a new face. This is Hollow Knight by way of Bloodborne, with a strong focus on agility and aggression in combat encounters and a much more complex moveset to work through them with. Nearly all of Hornet’s moves push her forward. The down attack is still allows you to bounce off of enemies, but Hornet moves down and forward at an angle, flinging you back and forth across arenas in a frantic bid to maintain momentum while slashing about to rid a room of armored bugs. Hold dash to move into a sprint. A well-timed slash while sprinting vaults you over the enemy, setting you up for another slash from behind or a downward dash into another aerial maneuver. Healing is different now too. Powered up from hitting enemies, the silk bar instantly and completely heals Hornet, a strong contrast to Hollow Knight much slower health recharge ability. It sounds like it simplifies things, but because you can only use it once the silk bar is completely full and because it completely heals Hornet, you’re encouraged to dance on the edge of death to get the full benefit of her healing power. It’s better to heal Hornet when she’s one hit away from death rather than four hits, for instance. Every hit you can ‘buy’ for her is more time spent alive, desperately chipping away at a boss’s health. These changes might not mean much to anyone that hasn’t played Hollow Knight, but think of it this way: the sequel to the best Metroid game ever now has much, much better combat. The Outer Worlds Samuel: The only disappointing thing about The Outer Worlds' presence at E3 this year was that it wasn't hands-on. It might've been a contender for game of the show if it was, and if it plays as well as it looks. It really has been crafted to be the dream RPG for a certain generation of player, with quests that can permeate in a whole bunch of ways, colourful little planetary hubs, and a bizarre, dark sense of humour that fans of earlier Fallout games will no doubt appreciate (bacon-flavoured pig tumours are a popular food item on the world shown in the E3 demo). The presentation shown off by Obsidian was a little too slight at about 20 minutes in length, under half of what CD Projekt Red had in store for Cyberpunk, but I still emerged excited. Just let me play an hour of this damn thing. It looks so good. Wes: The Outer Worlds seems like the exact RPG many of us crave right now—dense and reactive to our choices, but at a scale that won't take a hundred hours to see through. That hits the spot. Best of the show: Watch Dogs Legion Samuel: Ubisoft's open world hacking series gets a serious upgrade with Legion's novel central conceit: you can play as anyone you meet in a post-Brexit London dystopia, recruiting them to the Dedsec cause and unlocking them as your new protagonist. As the Ubisoft reveal showed, yes, this includes grandma assassins. The major twist, though, is that permadeath plays an important part of this game. If your new hero is gunned down and you don't surrender or end up in the hospital, they're gone. That should make each run through the game feel like a different story. But there's a load of other neat ideas in Watch Dogs Legion. You can hack and control delivery drones, and drop explosive barrels and boxes on people from above. The three new, defined classes let you play as a stealth character with a brief invisibility window, or put you in charge of mini spider robots to let you infiltrate enemy territory. You're not forced to fight lethally, which is most welcome in a game where you're playing as ordinary civilians. Chris: As someone with more than a passing interest in NPCs, Samuel's writeup of Legion sent it rocketing to the top of my most-wanted games list instantly. The trailer brought me back down to earth a bit—there was an awful lot of gunplay and this is London, not Chicago—but I'm still 100% into the premise of playing as a bunch of random nobodies instead of a single protagonist. Plus, there are plenty of non-lethal weapons and a genuinely great reason to use them—you can actually recruit your enemies, provided you leave them alive. Mainly, I love games that let players tell their own stories, and Legion feels it could accomplish that because we'll all be playing it as a different group of people. I'm looking forward to hearing about everyone else's experiences as I am in having my own.

Here are the big software changes Apple launched with iOS 13 beta The iOS 13 beta launched last week, and we got our first look at the features coming to your iPhone at Apple's WWDC 2019 keynote. It's changing things for the better. iOS 13 beta is not for everyone – yet. Apple advises that this developer beta should be used by its paid developer community. The iOS 13 public beta arrives in July. In the meantime, we'll explain (and show) what it's all about, including Dark Mode, a long-awaited UI tweak allowing you invert those bright white-screen backgrounds. We also have details surrounding the new QuickPath swipe keyboard and iPadOS, essentially a special iPad version of iOS 13, and explain how you can get iOS 13 beta today if you're an adventurous developer. There are so many iOS 13 features we've pored over in the last week, but we'll start with the iOS 13 release date schedule and all-important compatibility list first. iOS 13 release date schedule June 3: iOS 13 beta 1 and first look at WWDC 2019 July: iOS 13 public beta release date for adventurous testers Early September 2019: iOS 13 Golden Master (final dev beta) Mid-September 2019: iOS 13 likely to launch with new 2019 iPhones We've mapped out an iOS 13 beta timeline, from beta 1 to the final version of the software, and it all begins with a first look at the update in the form of the developer beta, which is out there now. We had June 3 date pinned down as the release date months ago, long before we got our WWDC invite. 1. iOS 13 developer beta: The iOS 13 beta 1 is available right now, but it's restricted to paid Apple developers. You should probably wait for the public beta, which is always more stable, or upgrade to the beta on a non-primary device. Plus, installing this iOS 13 beta requires Xcode or macOS 10.15 to be installed first. It's a bit more complicated this year than the over-the-air installation process we had before. 2. iOS 13 public beta: This is Apple's way of testing features on a larger scale, and it will roll out in July – last year the iOS public beta release date was June 25, so it's a bit later in 2019. It'll be worth the wait, though – it's typically a more refined version of the iOS developer beta, although it can still be rough, and never includes all of the features implemented in the final version of the software. 3. iOS 13 golden master: This will be the final version of the iOS 13 software, released one week before the final release, meant for developers and public beta testers. At this point it's very stable, and gives app makers seven days to adapt to the final software. 4. The official iOS 13 release date: We'll get the new iOS 13 software in its final, stable form about one week after the next iPhone launch event, at which we expect to see what we're calling (for now) the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Max and iPhone 11 XR. The date? Probably mid-September (last year it was September 17). iOS 13 compatibility list iOS 13 requires iPhone 6S or later, iPad Air 2 or later, the new iPad mini 4 and iPhone SE It won't come to older devices that support up to iOS 12: iPhone 5S, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPad Air, iPad mini 2 and mini 3 iOS 13 compatibility requires an iPhone or iPad from the last four years (depending on the device category). That means phones like the iPhone 6 won't be getting iOS 13 – if you've got one of those devices you'll be stuck with iOS 12 forever. You'll need an iPhone 6S or later, the iPad Air 2 or later, and the new iPad mini 4 or later, or the iPod touch 7th generation. No surprise, the new iPod Touch 7th gen is the only devices of its class that gets iOS 13 support. The iPhone SE fits into an odd category, as it has iPhone 6 era specs, but came out after the iPhone 6S. Don't worry, everyone's favorite little iPhone will get iOS 13. iOS 13 Dark Mode Overdue Dark Mode is coming to iOS 13 and iPadOS We saw macOS get a system-wide Dark Mode in 2018 Shortcut to black-and-dark-gray UI lives in Control Center Dark Mode in iOS 13 is going to be system-wide, meaning it'll change the hues from bright white and light grey to black and dark gray on all supported apps. That's going to be a nice feature when you're using your iPhone at night and want to avoid bright white hues. It may also save battery life on the OLED-equipped iPhones, from the iPhone X onward. Apple didn't talk about this at all, but we know that OLED displays essentially 'turn off' pixels when rendering blacks. Turning on iOS 13 Dark Mode can be done in Control Center, according to Apple, or you can set it automatically to turn on at night. Night Shift finally gets a companion, and a lot of people couldn't be happier. iOS 13 hints at Apple Tag product The theory that Apple is taking on the Tile tracker is backed up in the iOS 13 beta, according to a new leak regarding what's been dubbed the 'Apple Tag'. While the redesigned Find My app is supposed to locate your Apple devices and also your iPhone-carry friends, the Apple Tag is allegedly designed for everything else. Think: keys, bag, water bottle, or anything else a Bluetooth tracker could attach to. The Apple Tag wasn't a part of the iOS 13 reveal during WWDC 2019, but it could be an announced alongside the iPhone 11 in September. After all, it is mobile hardware. iOS 13 on iPad is iPadOS, and it's a big change Some of the biggest changes we expected for iOS 13 on the iPad are actually coming in an update called iPadOS. Apple is signaling that the iPad needs its own platform. That means big improvements to your iPad workflow, starting with the home screen redesign. Pinned Widgets, as we predicted in our iOS 13 rumors roundup, lets you add widgets from the Today View screen (that left-mode screen on your iPhone and iPad). So far, it's iPad-exclusive, and not coming to iOS13 for the iPhone. Slide Over lets you have multiple apps open and cycle through them like rolodex. You can also fan to preview them all at once with a swipe gesture, kind of like the recents menu on many phones and tablets. It's multi-tasking made easier. Split View has been enhanced to let you open one app on both sides of the screen (it wasn't possible before), and Apple demoed this by showing Notes side-by-side with Notes. You can also pair an app with more than one app – so now Safari can be paired with Pages in one space and Safari can be paired with Mail in another. App Expose is new to the iPad software, letting you see all of the space you have open. There's an App Expose icon on the Dock, requiring only a single press to get into the convenient overview mode. New copy, paste and undo gestures are coming to iPadOS. Three fingers scrunched down was shown to copy text, three fingers expanding (in the opposite direction) dropped the text on the page, and sliding three fingers across the screen undid the last action. We'll have to see how this performs when the software lands. Apple's keyboard can float around the screen in a smaller form, and it's debuting a swiping gesture keyboard, which it calls QuickPath Typing. There are also more keyboard shortcuts (a lack of shortcuts was a complaint we had about previous iOS versions). There are actually too many iPadOS changes to detail here in the iOS 13 explainer, so we've spun the full rundown off into a separate iPadOS release date, news and features article. iOS 13 features a QuickPath keyboard With iOS 13, Apple's default QuickType keyboard will be incorporating swipe-to-type, a popular way of sliding across the keyboard to form words. We've used this in prior iOS keyboard extensions like Google's Gboard and SwiftKey. You can use the QuickType and QuickPath methods of typing interchangeably, and so far supported languages include English, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Portuguese is now included. iOS 13 debuts new 'Find My' app Apple is combining Find My Friends and Find My iPhone in iOS 13, and the union lets you locate your friends and missing gadgets with a faster, easier-to-use interface. What's really neat is that it'll use a crowd-sourced encrypted Bluetooth signal to help you track down devices that aren't connected to Wi-Fi or cellular. That's mostly a big help for Macs, but it could also help with an iPhone in rare cases, too. iOS 13 makes your old iPhone faster, last longer More people are holding onto their iPhones for longer, and that's something Apple seems to recognize – and the company is speeding up iOS 13 to accommodate them. The most important iOS 13 stats: app launch speed is up to twice as fast according to Apple, and Face ID unlocking will be 30% faster than before. Apple also found a way to make app downloads smaller, up to 60% on average; iOS 12 gave us a faster update, and iOS 13 looks to build upon that. Battery life is also something Apple is tackling this year. Its aim is to slow the rate of battery aging by reducing the time your iPhone spends fully charged. iOS 13 is supposed to learn from your daily charging routine so it can wait to finish charging past 80% until you need to use it. Reminders gets a big overhaul Of all the built-in apps, Reminders is getting the biggest revamp in iOS 13. It appears to be better organized, and includes shortcuts that make it easier to add reminders. Big, color-coded buttons for Today, Scheduled, All and Flagged categories offer you a better oversight of your pressing tasks, while the keyboard when you're in this app has a top-line Quick Toolbar that acts as a shortcut to easily add times, dates, locations, flags, photos and scanned documents. Making plans in Messages? Siri will step in to suggest reminders that can be created, like a personal assistant who chimes in at all the right times. Camera and Portrait Mode changes The iOS 13 is going to offer important changes to camera features, starting with enabling you to change the intensity of light in Portrait Mode, which is something we've wanted for a while. Portrait mode is also getting a new monochromatic effect called High‑Key Mono. The Photos gallery is becoming what Apple called "a diary of your life", with a new tab designed to document your best photos by day, month and year. You'll also have more pinch controls to zoom in and out of the Photos gallery. Photo editing is refined with iOS 13, adding adjustment controls and filters, while the video editing portion mirrors this almost entirely: nearly every photo tool and effect – including filters, rotating and cropping – will make it over to video. If you're not good at tinkering with video, there'll even be an 'Auto' adjustment button. New Siri voice sounds more natural There's a new Siri voice debuting with iOS 13, and it sounds more natural than before – we've heard a sample and the tone is the same, but it sounds less robotic. It uses advanced neural text‑to‑speech technology, according to Apple, and you'll particularly notice this when Siri says longer phrases, like reading the Apple News aloud or answering knowledge questions. The timing is good, because Siri can also do a lot more talking if you wear AirPods – Siri can read incoming messages and pipe them through the buds, which is convenient. One more new Siri perk: your voice assistant on HomePod will understand the voices of the various family members in your home. This should mean, for example, that asking "What's on my Calendar?" won't bring up someone else's irrelevant information. Memoji gets makeup, Messages gets info sharing Apple is putting more of 'Me' in Memoji, allowing one trillion configurations: new hairstyles, headwear, makeup, and piercings to name a few categories. Examples on the WWDC stage showed that these personalized Animoji masks allow for such granular accessory detail as eyeshadow, braces and even AirPods. Memoji Stickers are something entirely new – iOS 13 will bring more iPhone and iPad users into the Memoji fold, TrueDepth camera or not. You can customize a Memoji and iOS 13 will automatically create a fun-looking sticker pack that lives in a sub-menu on the keyboard, which you can use in Messages, Mail, and third‑party apps. You'll be able to share your personalized Memoji with contacts through iMessages, but only when you grant them access. The same applies to sharing your name and photo with contacts, so you can chose how people see your name, for example. According to Apple, you can decide whether you want your profile shared with everyone, with only your contacts, or just once. New HomePod features You might not know this, but the HomePod is part of the iOS family, and it's getting updates too. First, you'll be able to transfer songs from your iPhone by simply holding your phone closer to the HomePod speaker. Previously, you had to tell Siri to do this, but now this hand-off feature is a bit easier, and you don't have to talk to do it. The HomePod will also introduce Live Radio – you can ask Siri to play 100,000 stations from all around the world. And HomePod will allow you to recognize who in your family is talking, and personalize the response – great with Apple Music, where selections will be based on your taste and history. It goes beyond Music, Messages, Notes, Reminders, and more. Sign-in with Apple Apple is taking on Facebook Connect, Google and other platforms that allow you to conveniently sign in to third-party accounts. Sign-in with Apple is poised to protect your privacy more than Facebook and Google do. What's neat is that if you don't want to fork over your email to an app developer or website, Apple will create a unique random email for you, and the email will be unique to that site or app. Maps get revamped iOS 13 Maps looks a lot better, even if everyone likes to hate on it. Will it ever be better than Google Maps? No, probably not. But for people who want Apple's pre-loaded maps app on iOS 13, it'll be much better. There's way more detail here by way of Apple rebuilding maps from the ground up. There's more realistic detail for roads, beaches, parks, and buildings, and you can now explore cities with a 3D 360-degree experience. Favorites were a part of Maps before, but iOS 13 makes these saved locations easier to navigate to with one tap – they appear at the very top of a search menu. Sometimes Google Maps on iOS doesn't get this right (but does better on Android). That's one reason to keep Apple Maps installed, even if you're a Google Maps person. Text formatting in Mail Mail is getting some changes when it comes to writing out properly formatted email. You'll have more control over font style, size, color, alignment, indenting and outdenting text, and numbered and bulleted lists. What we're really hoping to see in iOS 13 is the ability to insert a hyperlink into some text in an email. On both iOS and Android devices, that's just not possible in their default mail clients (that we've seen) – you have to paste long URLs, and that's not a computer, no matter what you call your operating system. Connect to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth from Control Center This is huge – and we've been asking for it for several years. You'll soon be able to select Wi‑Fi networks and Bluetooth accessories right from Control Center. Android has had this for years, and it was always convenient to connect to new Wi-Fi networks or Bluetooth earbuds without having to navigate away from your current app and dive into five Settings submenus. Apple is finally coming around in iOS 13. Xbox One and PS4 game controller support If you're going to play games on your phone, you might as well do it with one of the two best controllers available (and maybe something you already own). Enter PS4 and Xbox One game controller support for iOS 13. Apple didn't say if all games will support this or if it'll be limited to Apple Arcade, but whatever the case may be, we're happy to be able to put our PS4 controller to use everywhere we roam. Silence Unknown Calls Nuisance SPAM calls drive us crazy every day, and iOS 13 wants to fix the issue with the help of Siri, which scans your Contacts, Mail and Messages to see if you've previously been in contact with the caller. Silence Unknown Calls sounds fairly smart, if you're not expecting business numbers cold-calling you for work. Those that do call you and aren't on your personal 'VIP list' will go straight to voicemail. More iOS 13 features to come with the public beta We're waiting until the iOS 13 public in July to test out the software, but there's so much more to this update that we haven't yet explained – there's just that much to it. We'll continue to update the iOS 13 news here, with our guide to what you need to know about its features and how it'll change your iPhone. There might be a separate iPadOS now, but iOS 13 is still mighty important to millions of people.

hi @Hyldeqvist welcome to invitehawk

Cheat creator Global++ has shut down its operations after being sued in the United States. Pokémon Go creator Niantic accused the group of infringing its intellectual property rights and spoiling the gaming experience for legitimate players. Global++ websites and social media accounts are now offline. Video gaming is huge business, generating billions for companies around the world. However, the way some people choose to play games doesn’t always sit well with entertainment companies. In order to gain advantages over regular players, some resort to using cheats created by third parties. These provide access to skills and abilities unavailable in the regular versions of games. Development group Global++ provided such cheats for Pokémon Go and other titles but that drew the ire of San Francisco-based Niantic, the game’s original developer. As first reported by Business Insider, on Friday Niantic filed a lawsuit in a California federal court against Global++, two individuals named as Ryan Hunt (aka ELLIOTROBOT) and Alen Hunter (aka IOS NOOB), plus 20 ‘John Does’. Niantic’s complaint states that the only permissible way to play its augmented reality games (Pokémon Go, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, and Ingress) is via its original apps installable on mobile devices. These apps, which contain protected proprietary code, have permission to access Niantic’s servers. However, Niantic says that Global++ illegally copied its work. Global++ website “Defendants hack Niantic’s apps to access and copy Niantic’s Client Code, then modify and adulterate the Client Code to create what they call ‘tweaks’—i.e., unauthorized, hacked versions of Niantic’s apps. Defendants then market their hacked apps under the titles Potter++ (or, in some cases, Unite++), PokeGo++, and Ingress++,” the complaint reads. These cheats not only undermine the gaming experience for legitimate players, Niantic adds, they are also used by Global++ to “steal valuable and proprietary game-related information” which is then utilized for commercial purposes. These cheating programs have been reportedly distributed to hundreds of thousands of users but when Niantic asked Global++ to stop its activities, the unincorporated entity allegedly ignored the US-based developer and continued as before. Seeking an injunction from the court, Niantic’s complaint begins with alleged breaches of the Copyright Act, given that Global++ copied Niantic’s code in order to develop its cheats, and then distributed that infringing code to its users. According to the company’s analysis, up to 99% of Niantic’s original code is used in Global++ cheat software. Niantic further alleges breaches of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act due to Global++ and its users accessing Niantic’s servers “through unauthorized, hacked versions of Niantic’s apps.” According to the company, this illegal activity persisted even after Global++ was informed in writing that their access was unauthorized. Finally, Niantic notes that since Global++ are Niantic account holders bound by the company’s Terms of Service, breaches of that agreement – including copying Niantic’s code and misappropriating its code for commercial purposes – are also evident. With Niantic’s new Harry Potter game set for launch, the company is urgently seeking a preliminary injunction from the court to prevent Global++ from launching a new version of its Potter++ cheat within days “or possibly even hours” of that event. However, Global++ now appears to be more receptive to Niantic’s demands. Following claims in the complaint that Niantic has spent more than $1 million over the past year attempting to deal with Global++ cheats, Global++ took to its official Discord channel to indicate that the show is now over. “It is with great sadness that we will be shutting down indefinitely incompliance [sic] with our legal obligations,” the statement reads. “It has been a fun ride with the entire community and we have made some unbelievable memories. We will hold close to our heart all of the people that we were able to introduce Pokemon to that for various reasons could not play the game. Take care all.” At the time of writing, the Global++ website is down, its Discord channel is closed, its Twitter account and Facebook accounts are no more, and its Github.io address is returning errors. Niantic’s motion for a preliminary injunction can be found here (pdf) source: torrentfreak.com

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The latest 50-minute hands-off demo of Cyberpunk 2077 is the first time it's looked like a real videogame. At E3 2019, we're past the spectacle of seeing a new CD Projekt game for the first time and are finally figuring out what it actually is. We’ve seen the menus, the upgrade systems, shop inventories, dialogue systems, varying approaches to solving problems—the usual ‘go in stealthy versus guns-blazing’ approaches were mentioned. We’ve seen the box art and ridiculous collector's edition. Cyberpunk 2077 feels like Deus Ex with an obscene budget and Keanu Reeves. Like a thing that we will conceivably play and finish in April of 2020. It exists. The demo wasn't a revelation in game design, even if the technology and art direction is staggering in scope and detail. This is CD Projekt pulling back the curtain and tamping down the cumulative years of excitement to remind everyone that it's made a very large role-playing game and that it looks very nice and that it's coming out soon. Here's what I saw and what I thought about it. Sorry state The demo opens on a character creator, with the generic box art V staring at himself in a mirror. Keanu Reeves' character Johnny Silverhand leans on a nearby wall. The character creator isn't final, but it has the expected hair, skin, and facial feature options, if not the monstrous depth the Dark Souls or Mass Effect systems have. There's also an option to choose your background: street kid, nomad, or corporate. It's not just for your head canon either. Your background opens up certain dialogue choices throughout the entire game. As a street kid, if someone's trying to scam you, you might be able to see through their bullshit having swindled plenty yourself. A character with a corporate background will have a better time navigating big business hierarchies. Once finished making our man, Silverhand comments, not so kindly, "C'mon, you really think they give a rat's dick about how you look?" Reeves has a surprisingly important role in Cyberpunks greater story. He's a hallucination, sort of, the byproduct of a faulty chip in V's head central to a mystery we're still fairly hazy on. What matters is that he can appear at any point, and often does with some crude, funny commentary in tow. He's a great foil to V's so far monotone delivery. Last year we wrote about how Cyberpunk's dialogue was lacking color and that it was a bit too cliche, but Silverhand is a promising sign our first impressions might not hold true. I wonder if he watches you on the toilet. We're in the Pacifica district of Night City, a district designed and built as a luxurious resort town replete with lavish hotels, malls, and amusements. But a shaky economy scared investors, so they pulled funding and left the district unfinished and unsupported. The impoverished moved in, with gangs in tow. The secretive hacking gang the Voodoo Boys control most of the district, largely comprised of Creole-speaking Haitians. V, the player character, needs their help, so they head to a church to meet a contact who will put them in touch with the right people. The church is more like a nightclub, a darkened room only lit by the neon glow on the wall behind the altar. The room is so crowded people are touching shoulders. Whoever's driving the demo slowly pushes V through the crowd for a minute before the contact grabs him and tells him to check out a butcher shop nearby. A short walk through the district puts the poverty on full display. These aren't the rain-slicked neon streets of cyberpunk I'm used to. These streets are littered with dirt and trash. Neon is rare. Buildings are a drab grey-brown. The occasional car chassis is aflame. It's clear that systemic racism is still in play in 2077 and that Pacifica has become a ghetto for Haitians, and I'm really hoping Cyberpunk doesn't just use present-day strife as a backdrop. Cyberpunk is an angry genre, a stylish sci-fi exaggeration (less so, lately) of the byproducts of capitalism and technology working in tandem. Let's see Cyberpunk dig in, yeah? It's an impressive scene. NPCs shuffle around, some sit around a fire. Everyone looks like they have their own agenda. V enters the butcher shop and speaks to the man behind the counter while an old woman rocks in a chair, singing in her native language as V's retinal input translates the song in real time just above her head, a nice touch. A scanner moves its digital light across V, just in case, and he heads to the back room to meet Placide, a high-ranking member of the Voodoo boys. The details of the plot are a bit lost on me without proper context. This mission takes place around the middle of the game we're told, but the basic idea is that V needs Placide's help, so Placide asks a favor of him: figure out what the Animals, a rival gang of juiced up muscle freaks, are doing in the Grand Imperial Mall, one of the last projects to be abandoned in the massive investor pullout that led to Pacifica's collapse. After a quick walk and talk to Voodoo Boy HQ with Placide, he tests V's trustworthiness by trying to 'jack in' to him. As Placide reaches across the desk to plug a device into V's arm, a dialogue option pops up that lets you pull away and WTF the guy. Our V does just that, though it's possible to let him in without a fuss. A man emerges from the door behind Placide, and tells him something that sounds important. Just by looking at the door after the man leaves, V can shift the conversation and ask about what's going on back there, or just leave. It's a nice context-sensitive touch, and I hope to see it used in less overt ways. So V heads outside, hops on a motorcycle, and tunes to a radio station playing some industrial hip-hop. We're GTA now. The mall is a decent distance away, and our short cycle tour of Pacifica leads us through yet more poverty, trashfires, and wandering locals. Let's go shopping V meets two of Placide's men in the destitute parking lot outside. Here's where we get to see more of Cyberpunk's combat options. The mall is a massive open area. It's possible to just waltz in the front door—that's right—guns blazing. But our V takes the back route and sneaks in, crouching behind objects to avoid enemy patrols. It's very typical immersive sim stuff, Dishonored or Deus Ex without the vents or whale barges, except in a setting more well realized than I've ever seen before (and it's not like Dishonored or Deus Ex are lacking in the world-building department). In this way, it's unsurprising and astonishing all at once. During V's stealth run, he remotely hacks cameras to turn them off, hacks a soda machine to spit out cans and distract guards. Two particular hacks stand out: an Animal gang member is boxing with a training robot. A quick remote hack lets V increase the training difficulty, so the bot clocks the poor bastard and knocks him out, sending a stream of blood into the air. Another Animal is training on a bench press, and because nearly everything is connected to a network, we hack the damn bench press and remotely press the bar into his chest, hundreds of pounds of pressure pushing the bar against his sternum. Dead. They're clever contextual devices, but there's not a major difference between hacking a soda machine and throwing a bottle to distract patrolling enemies. It's great flavor, but functionally identical to plenty of stealth systems. Not disappointing, but not surprising or particularly challenging. Then again, I'm not the guy with his hands on the controller. The demo takes a turn as the developers switch to a female V heavily specced into strength and decked out with super strong cyborg arms. We're going to infiltrate the mall again, but not so quietly this time. It's also about when we get a look at the perk tree, separate from the skill point system. As you play and level up, you'll be able to put that experience towards perks in that open up new abilities or buff exisiting stats/skills in 12 branches: handguns, rifles, blades, hacking, shotguns, two-handed combat, assassination, cold blood, sniper rifles, engineering, melee, and athletics. Some are self explanatory, but I'm curious what others like cold blood entail. Jacked V gets spotted early on by an unarmed Animal. The big guns (arms) come out and a fist fight ensues. Punches are loud and crunchy, and V makes quick work of the guy, but it wakes two nearby Animals, one of which is armed with a knife. V picks up a bottle, seemingly broken during the first fight, and stabs the poor jerks to death. Again, it's nothing particularly novel in how it plays, but the realistic audio, detailed character models, fluid animations, and blood spatter make the violence sting more than other games with functionally identical melee combat. For the squeamish, know you can finish the entire game without killing anyone. With the room cleared, because of her strength, V can pry open a few doors that weak hacker guy V couldn't. It creates a shortcut to the atrium hacker V had to spend 10 minutes sneaking around and hacking to reach. Strong V's method for clearing the atrium is some Terminator shit. Over a dozen Animals are strewn about the room, accompanied by an automated turret. She's strong and hearty enough to sprint towards the turret and rip the LMG out of the computer-controlled carapace. She turns it on the room and lets loose a constant stream of nonstop gunfire for, I kid you not, about 30 seconds. It rips through everything, including a dolphin statue at the center of the atrium which sends it toppling over in an impressive demonstration of the destruction systems. Glass shatters, Animals fall by the handful. Cyber muscles can't stop bullets. An eerie silence settles in. Hell yeah, I think I'm going to spec into a strong character too. It's another example of Cyberpunk doing something familiar, but with striking flair. From there, we whip between hacker V and strong V a few more times, culminating in a disappointingly conventional boss fight. The local Animal gang leader is decked out with strength-enhancing tech too, enough to let her wield a massive hammer. But her metal muscles are easily disabled by shooting the massive purple spot on her back. One twist I dig: after weakening her she drops her axe, unable to wield it anymore, but immediately rushes and jams something into V's head, uploading some malware. A progress bar appears at the top of the screen, and if V doesn't finish off the boss (her name is Sasquatch) in time, V dies. It's a reminder that we're not a god among people, not the usual chosen one, just another person in a cyberpunk setting with access to the same abilities and tech as anyone else. After the fight, V finds his/her target. He's a NetWatch agent, basically an internet cop, and he's in cahoots with the Animals in their attempt to take down the Voodoo Boys. Since this guy has access to the internet cop network, Placide wants access to his brain, but not before V hears what the internet cop has to say. It's an example of the kind of big choices we'll supposedly run into on the reg in Cyberpunk. See, the cop thinks Placide will kill both him and V once he gets the intel he needs. The guy says it's a normal move for the Voodoo Boys. Our dialogue options can lead us to betray Placide and collab with the cop or incapacitate and hack him immediately. Our V chooses to stick with Placide, which isn't necessarily the wrong choice, but the NetWatch agent was right. Once we jack into the cop's network via his brain and share access with Placide, he uses the opportunity to overload the network and scramble the brain of anyone connected to it at that moment, including V. Oops. V survives for a story reason, and we're told that reason is connected to the same reason Keanu Reeves lives in our brain as a wisecracking computer ghost. He's a pissed computer ghost now, because once V awakes, he demands V confront Placide immediately. When V leaves the mall, the Voodoo Boys in the parking lot are very surprised to see her still walking, and offer a ride to see the Placide right away. I'm curious to know if you can opt out, and it seems so since you don't have to get in the car as part of the dialogue tree. I mean, how small choices radiate outward into the rest of the narrative are all I'm curious about at this point. The character-building stuff is, from what we've seen, very much in the tradition of the tabletop RPG with modern game skill progression systems layered over the top. I just want to know how far Choice and Consequence™ go in Cyberpunk. Without getting bogged down in story details we don't have proper context for, we meet Placide's boss, Brigette, someone who can hopefully help V out. And as part of that help, Brigette puts V in a bathtub full of ice. Keanu's character comes out and says hello again before V's sent to cyberspace. It's a truly trippy moment, like the final level in Rez overlaid on the psychedelic transcendence scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. V walks around in an abstract digital space, accompanied by Brigette, wireframes and digital artifacts zooming by and swirling all around. It's not a place you'll be able to freely explore, but clearly Cyberpunk's story won't strictly take place in meat space. And with that, the demo's over. Stripped of the mythic quality of its seemingly eternal development, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t present like a revolution in game design, and I don’t think that’s CD Projekt’s goal. It presents like an RPG with ambitious scope, playstyle variability, and a strict dedication to realizing a cyberpunk setting. I left the demo feeling like I had played many games like this before, just never with such a striking attention to detail. The combat looks great, Night City is a grim and gorgeous open world, the RPG systems are deep and varied, and Keanu Reeves isn't just some goofy sidequest NPC—he'll harass you for a good part of the journey.The only thing we need to know now is whether all the time and money and effort to develop such a detailed, fully-featured RPG will actually prop up an interesting story with meaningful character choices. And we'll need to play the whole damn thing to find out.

Watch Dogs Legion has no default protagonist. Those rumours about being able to play as any 'NPC' in the game were true—while it takes a little work to recruit each individual to Dedsec, you build up a pool of swappable playable characters. As the Ubisoft E3 conference demo showed, the story will play out with whichever character you chose, voice acted cutscenes and all. There is a major, brave twist to this, however: if that character dies in combat, they are gone forever. Permadeath is now a major part of the Watch Dogs experience. You'll have a chance to surrender to your enemies so that doesn't always happen, but it did happen in my 45-minute demo. I recruited a person, watched her liberate Camden Market from goons (and put Abe Welch in the hospital), then saw her get double crossed and shot dead in front of a massive security force. I was a little bit attached. The game's big idea is working. It sounds novel, but this system has enormous story-creating potential, and in my first hands-on demo, it's made a dazzling impression. Legion is set in near future London, after Brexit, and in a reality where blue and white collar jobs have been swept away by automation. The city is in a difficult state following riots and bombings. It's a surprisingly bold choice of setting by Ubisoft—and as a Brit familiar with both London and living through the predictable chaos of Brexit, it's weird that something so close to my reality is now the basis of a dystopian setting in a computer game. Your antagonist is a private security company called Albion, though, rather than politicians. London here is a kind of broken neon wonderland, full of brightly-lit futuristic streets, but rife with food banks and protestors. There are eight boroughs of London in the game, and I see Camden and Westminster in this demo. My first playable character is Ashley, a woman old enough to be your gran who struggles to climb over objects. My goal is to have someone new join the cause. The recruitment phase for Dedsec begins in a pub. In addition to the usual Watch Dogs information on each NPC in the world, you can also see what trait every potential target has. Their generated background ties in to what these traits are: I chose someone with a melee attack boost, but you'll see all kinds of buffs based around the different things you do in Watch Dogs. Recruiting someone is a multi-step process, sped up for this demo, but winning them over essentially involves completing side content to help win them over to the Dedsec cause, with a bar representing their opinion of the group. You'll finally complete an origin mission, which makes them playable. Once recruited, you can assign them to one of three classes, which offer more detailed flexibility of approach than previous games. Enforcer is a gun-focused class, with a combat roll, sticky mines and explosive rounds. Infiltrator has an AR cloak that briefly makes you invisible, as well as dedicated melee abilities, like a shockwave area of effect attack, and the option to hide bodies with an AR shroud. Hackers, meanwhile, have spider robots and spider turrets, and the robot kind will jump onto the faces of enemies like the Facehugger in Alien to take them out. Each class has its own upgrade tree, and each character individually progresses through them. You can hack drones in Watch Dogs Legion, too, and with the larger delivery drones flying across London, you can drop things on top of enemies from the sky, and use them to fly your character around. If you're a stealth or non-lethal player, Legion feels well optimised for those playing styles. With five storylines and over 60 missions, there should be plenty of opportunity to experiment until you find the class and character traits you like. And even if you don't care about getting that granular, recruiting an army of pensioners is probably quite fun too. It's not magic, this NPC recruitment system, but it does offer a very detailed simulation, and it makes Watch Dogs Legion feel like it's genuinely innovating. I ask creative director Clint Hocking how many variations and voice actors there are. "That's a complicated question just by itself. We've recorded 20 different what we call 'narrative personas', and those narrative personas all have their own lines written, so it's not just different voices saying the same stuff. They all have different personalities, perspectives and viewpoints, and those are combined with all the other things, the physical animation archetypes and all of that stuff. But roughly, there's 20 major characterisations across the game." That means your recruits will react differently in cutscenes, and that it's much more than just an appearance swap. The people you meet have their own schedules, family members, jobs, and homes. "There's a huge simulation. It's not just that we create random characters, they all have their own lives and they all have their needs and wants and opinions about Dedsec, the factions and all of that stuff. So when you interact with that simulation, it's not player-centric. The simulation keeps moving. If you kill someone—you see a man and a wife and you kill the guy's wife—he's not going to go to his appointment with his wife any more, he's going to go to the graveyard instead for a little while. And then after a little time, when he's done his mourning, he'll have a new thing to do in that part of his schedule. He'll have a new friend, or a new problem or whatever. All of it keeps moving forward all the time." I had a really granular question for Hocking, off the back of the demo. Let's say one of your playable characters gets put in hospital, and you use another character to prioritise their healthcare. Would that improve the opinion of Dedsec to the family of your hospitalised character, and make them potentially easier to recruit? Does it go that far? "It does go that deep, yep. The best way to answer your question is to say once you recruit people into your team, they're not removed from the simulation. They're going to keep walking around the world, living their lives and having their friends and family. And yeah, if one of our operatives gets captured by an enemy who's decided to take revenge, and you go and free them, their family will be positively impacted by you having freed them, just as if it was a character in the world." Whereas Watch Dogs and its sequel offered a slightly superficial glance at the people in the city surrounding you, here they're the stars, and you're supposed to get invested in them. By adding permadeath, the developers are truly testing your affection for the characters you've recruited. Imagine someone you spent 20 exciting hours with is shot to death then gone forever—it's potentially a lot more devastating than, say, picking one of three characters to die at the end of GTA 5. It could be Ashley, the winning frail old lady who guides spider bots into secured buildings, or it could be Abe Welch, your former goon turned hero. Whoever it is, if Ubisoft successfully pulls this off, it'll feel like the end of a story you've started, with all the payoff that brings. Ubisoft isn't saying anything about what happens when you play online in Legion, just that singleplayer is the 'springboard' into that experience. Just 45 minutes in this city full of potential heroes has captured my imagination, though, and made me want to test how far the simulation can go. This feels like something I've never seen before in an open world game, and I'll be surprised if I play anything else that surprises and delights me this much at E3 this week.

While coverage surrounding the US government's Huawei ban has focused primarily on how the Chinese tech giant will be affected, it's worth remembering that the company's US suppliers also stand to lose a great deal of money in the fallout of President Trump's executive order. Now, it appears that US chipmakers, including Intel, Qualcomm and Xilinx Inc, have been quietly lobbying the US government in an effort to ease the Huawei ban, as reported by Reuters. Citing sources close to the situation, executives from Intel and Xilinx Inc reportedly met with the US Commerce Department in late May to discuss a response to the Trump Administration's decision to place Huawei on the 'entity list', effectively barring US companies from trading with the Chinese brand. According to four other sources, Qualcomm has also reportedly met with the Commerce Department to discuss the issue. The Semiconductor Industry Association trade group has confirmed that it arranged meetings with US government on behalf of the chipmakers. While the American chip suppliers don't deny the potential threat to national security that Huawei's 5G networking technology could present, the US companies also argue that the Chinese firm's servers and smartphones use commonly available components and are far less likely to pose a risk, sources also suggest. Of course, the discussions are just that – a representative for the Commerce Department told Reuters that the governmental body “routinely responds to inquiries from companies regarding the scope of regulatory requirements,” but that the discussions do not “influence law enforcement actions.” Looking out for number one One thing that shouldn't be confused is the real reason for the US chipmakers' interest in the matter, which is to prevent the potential loss of billions in revenue. "This isn’t about helping Huawei. It’s about preventing harm to American companies," said one of Reuters' sources. The report also states that of the "$70 billion that Huawei spent buying components in 2018, some $11 billion went to U.S. firms including Qualcomm, Intel and Micron Technology Inc." Singaporean-owned (but US-based) chipmaker Broadcom has already reported a decline in Q2 revenues and has lowered its expectations for the rest of the year, citing the US Huawei ban as the chief cause.

It looks like GTA Online's infamous Vinewood Casino, a high-roller joint that's been in the game since it launch but has never actually been accessible, is finally opening its doors. The opening of the casino was actually rumored earlier this month: As reported by GamesRadar, GTA Online dataminer TezFunz2 dug up information revealing changes to an area near the casino, including changes to props that would make it appear as though the casino was under construction. Those changes, which included construction barriers and other equipment, became visible on June 6, according to the GTA Wiki. Details on how the casino will work haven't been announced yet—as far as I've been able to tell, the tweet is the extent of the announcement so far—but I expect that more information will be forthcoming shortly.

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