Fallout 76's latest Infestations update will be 'one of the easiest w…

Fallout 76's next update launches today, alongside the new season, Appalachia Under Siege. With it comes a new hostile encounter that sees different factions or forces claim up to "40 unique locations" only to be driven out by you, the player.

Instead of introducing a massive map expansion, new events, and NPCs like we saw in Burning Springs, Infestations seeks to "enrich the existing experience" by making the current map more rewarding and interesting to explore. asg-reflektory.pl

"I love seeing all the dots moving around, to me it sounds like the map is 'sizziling' there's stuff going on on the map constantly," Jon Rush, Fallout 76's creative director says in a group Q&A. "And to me that tells me players are in the game, having fun. So Infestations is another one of those forays into adding another layer of experiences on our map."

Infestations will appear randomly around the map with players having to sniff out the specific area for themselves. "The max number will be about five spawning every five minutes," senior systems designer Fahad Khan adds. The infection won't spread if no one manages to or bothers to clear it; it'll just disappear after five hours.

Those who do find the Infestation and decide to take it on, however, will have their work cut out for them, because while this isn't specifically end-game content, it's as near as dammit. "If [players] left at a mid level, maybe wait until you start to see the Infestation get a lot more dots around it before you hop in," Rush says. "These are hard, these bosses are hard, it is end game content to an extent, you do get four star legendaries from these bosses so they're going to be challenging if you go at it alone or aren't with the right people." Welp, it sounds like I'll need some help then.

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But luckily, unlike Raids, Infestations won't need to be completed in a group, you can just wait for anyone on the map to show up and help. Carl McKevitt, lead designer on Fallout 76 explains how it's an example of Fallout 76's "emergent social gameplay" and that because of this it "floats somewhere between end-game and casual friendly."

So Infestations is a high risk event, but that's ok, because it's also high reward; "It is one of the easiest ways to get a four star," McKevitt says. "Which is helpful because that's a hurdle that has been hard for players that are in the late but not quite end-game to cross. So we're hoping to see an improvement in players' arsenals as a result of this." Some of the new four star legendary mods you can get from this include: Hauler's, Raging, Satiated, Tarnished, and Vector.

"We have something that we're calling a 'common pool' for our four stars which is about half of what went out with the raids," McKevitt adds. "We're moving towards a system where things that drop four stars will at least pull from the common pool and then pull from an additional 'exclusive pool' to that content. We want to make sure that any new sources of four stars we introduce don't necessarily invalidate the previous sources.

"In this case you'll get the commons plus the newly created ones that came out of this update. We want to try and preserve Raids as where you get some of the top tier most highly desired four stars but getting any four stars is still better than having none."

In terms of other rewards, while there won't be any new Xbox achievements or trophies Khan does confirm that there are "rewards which are specifically geared towards finding and completing infestations both in quantity and type as well. And obviously that's just the initial rollout of those as well, we'll be adding more team based challenges and additional gameplay challenges."

But you'll be able to experience all of this for yourself today, so good luck and godspeed in finding and defeating these Infestations and let us know in the comments if getting four star legendaries is as easy as the devs say it is.

Asus might be sticking 24 carat gold into its mice to celebrate its 20th anniversary and Gigabyte is slapping satellite-grade metals onto its motherboards for its own anniversary, but it's a diamond anniversary for MSI as it's jamming smooshed up diamonds into its next-gen GPU cooling solutions.

The next-gen graphics card cooler MSI had on-show at Computex today is a concept design for what the cards of tomorrow (or rather 2027 at the earliest) could look like. The new cooling feature set is estimated to cut maybe four degrees centigrade off the peak temperatures of a high-end GPU, but every little counts.

Those new features in short:

• Full metal fan blades
• Rifled heat pipes
• Diamond-composite thermal pads
• Diamond-copper composite contact plate

Switching from the plastic fan blades of its existing coolers means saying goodbye to potential warping of the blades at high speeds, allowing for a more rigid structure, which should reportedly increasing cooling efficiency.

And they feel really cool to the touch, too, though I wouldn't want to get a finger caught in one of them.

Maybe more interesting is the rifled barrels of the heatpipes MSI is using on this new design. Inside the pipes there is a spiral structure which increases the contact area inside them, allowing for greater thermal transfer as opposed to the regular design.

Then we come to the diamonds. Mixed inside both the heatpads sitting atop the expensive memory modules and the base plate of the cooling array itself, is a diamond powder designed to increase the thermal conductivity within both components. In the baseplate it's a diamond-copper composite and you can see in the images that it looks kinda dirty by comparison with the standard all-copper version. But it also sometimes sparkles in the light. And cools a bit better, apparently.

Now, as I said, these new features will only drop the temps by an approximate four degrees, but you've got to think that switching in more expensive materials and introducing more intricate manufacturing is only going to do one thing to the manufacturing price of associated cooling shrouds, and therefore to the price of the associate cards.

But this is a concept design in lieu of actual new GPUs to drool over, so while that RTX 5090 there does look pretty, you're not going to be able to buy one even if you did have the cash. Best just wait for the RTX 6090, eh?

Baldur's Gate 2, and likely the original Baldur's Gate, are getting remakes, we recently learned. Wizards of the Coast has even brought BG2's co-lead designer back. It's exciting news, but we still have no idea what shape these remakes will take, or how liberal the team is being when it comes to changing things.

Well, I'm hoping for at least one significant change.

The people have spoken

When I revealed the existence of the project yesterday, I said that changing BG's combat system was a "significant risk". While real-time-with-pause combat has fallen out of favour over the years, fans don't tend to take it well when things change too much, and if there's any group still holding a torch for this style of combat, it's BG fans.

But here's the thing: nobody is taking RTWP out of Baldur's Gate. Indeed, you have two versions, the originals and the enhanced editions, full of RTWP brawls. You have been catered to already. So maybe it's time for something different.

And while the most vocal BG fans might disagree, I know a lot of you would much rather dabble in some turn-based bouts. Last month, in my Dungeon Master column, I asked you all if you preferred RTWP or TB, and it wasn't even close.

A whopping 75% of you picked TB. My people.

An elegant weapon for a more civilised age

I've been a TB evangelist for a long time, but I can't deny that Baldur's Gate 3 is a big part of why I'd love to see the original games get a TB makeover. Larian turned its fights into elaborate puzzles that fully take advantage of their environments in a way that just doesn't really work in RTWP—at least not the way it was implemented in BG1 and 2.

Importantly, a TB system would also make Baldur's Gate more authentically D&D. Tabletop battles are complex affairs that encourage patience and planning. Every move you make is given space to breathe. Every charge, every slash with your sword, every explosion of magic missiles—they all become critical, instead of being lost in the scrum.

It's simply a more civilised way to slaughter a bunch of gnolls.

And what's the point of a remake anyway if you're not going to take some risks, some big swings? Playing it safe is pointless, otherwise you're just making a slightly prettier version of a game that people are still more than capable of enjoying despite its advanced years.

I don't want a prettier version of Baldur's Gate. I want a new take on a classic. A new experience that augments the old one. Something complementary, sure, but also something bold. That's a lot more exciting than just repeating some adventures I originally had when I was still in school.

But it's undeniably a tricky thing to balance, and I wouldn't be pleased if we saw a cavalcade of changes made just for the sake of change. I don't want the team to soften Jaheira's rough edges, make vampires less annoying to fight—they should be annoying!—or give Jon Irenicus a funny sidekick.

That's why TB is the way to go, though. It maintains everything that's great about Baldur's Gate while giving us a new way to experience it.