Tag Archives: Windows games

Genshin Impact Devs Awarded PS5s, Graphics Cards Via RNG

Raffles and gift give-aways aren’t uncommon at company parties, but the company behind Genshin Impact went a step further, randomly awarding hard-to-get graphics cards and PS5s to employees as thanks for helping make one of last year’s hottest new free-to-play gacha games.

“MiHoYo, the developers of Genshin Impact, held their annual employee meeting where they gave away a bunch of electronics to employees in a lottery,” Niko Partners senior data analyst, Daniel Ahmad, wrote on Twitter yesterday. Accompanying photos showed giant stacks of iPhones, Nintendo Switches, GeForce RTX graphics cards, and PlayStation 5s, the latter of which has been especially hard for people to get their hands on following ongoing inventory shortages.

The irony, of course, as PC Gamer pointed out, is that Genshin Impact is itself largely based around lotteries—based on random number generators (RNG)in which players pay currency earned in-game or real money for a chance to unlock rare new characters. Some are much harder to get than others, leading players to grind and burn through resources waiting for top-tier characters like Venti to drop. Some players have spent loads of money on the game this way, one of the reasons Genshin Impact went on to make nearly $400 million in its first couple of months, according to mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower.

To celebrate the game’s lucrative launch, MiHoYo reportedly used a similar drop-rate system to allocate the limited supply of gaming hardware it planned to give away to employees on top of other bonuses. According to a screenshot shared by Ahmad, staff had a 30% shot at a Nintendo Switch, a 21% shot at an RTX 3070 graphics card, a 16% shot at a PS5, and a 1% chance of getting a combined Apple Watch Series 6 and iPhone 12 Pro Max bundle.

For the time being, it looks like you’ve got at least as good a chance of scoring a PS5 from getting a job working on Genshin Impact as you do from refreshing your Amazon cart.



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Enormous Dark Souls Mod Adds Halo’s Blood Gulch, Completely Changes Multiplayer

Screenshot: Dark Souls: Remastest

Modder InfernoPlus, the same guy who turned Mario into a battle royale game, has done wonders with Dark Souls, releasing an ambitious mod that transforms the game’s multiplayer and turns the map into something decidedly less horrific.

Dark Souls: Remastest is “a multiplayer focused mod for Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition that adds a variety of new PvP related content to the game, and removes most of the coop restrictions from the game.”

Though really that’s selling it very short. It adds a new matchmaking system, hugely increases the player count, introduces tons of balance changes and even brings a capture the flag mode to Dark Souls.

Oh, and it also includes a version of Halo’s famous Blood Gulch map.

That is just…so much stuff. So much, in fact, that InfernoPlus’ video explaining everything goes for 35 minutes.

If you want to download the mod, you can get it here.

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What Are You Playing This Weekend?

Attractive anime people kicking ass and brewing bombs.
Screenshot: Koei Tecmo

This weekend is for calling up your broker on their day off and asking them to explain all this Gamestop nonsense. It’s also about going to the big city and practicing your alchemy skills in really short shorts.

Along with a game I can’t mention but am sure will appeal to at least nine of yous, my weekend shall be packed with material gathering, order filling, and monster killing, in that order. The latest game in Koei Tecmo’s long-running Atelier series has arrived, Atelier Ryza 2: Lost Legends & the Secret Fairy. It’s the first numbered sequel in the series since 2007’s Atelier Iris 3, and it is something else. The character models are gorgeous, they’ve added swimming to the game so the random swimsuit DLC finally makes sense. And the dynamic new combat system is really nice to look at.

Between this and that other game, I find myself with a glut of Japanese role-playing games. It’s a nice glut to have.

How about you folks? What are you playing this weekend?

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Fallout Mod Pulled After Artist Allegedly Posts “Animated Pedophillic Content”

Illustration: The Frontier

We only wrote about the big new Fallout: New Vegas mod The Frontier last week when it was released! And now we’re writing about it again, because the mod has been “hidden” (basically temporarily removed) from Nexus Mods and pulled from its own website after allegations that one of its artists posted “animated pedophillic content on their personal artist accounts”.

The full statement, posted on the mod’s page by the development team, reads:

Some deeply concerning news has emerged in the past few hours. We have been recently notified that one of our developers, ZuTheSkunk, had posted animated pedophillic content on their personal artist accounts. The items in question are deeply disturbing to the entire team, and we condemn them in the strongest sense. ZuTheSkunk has since been removed from the Development Team and banned off of our Community Discord. We will be conducting dialogue with members of the development team to hear their thoughts regarding the current situation and help make our decision more informed. We have stopped production and work on the mod to address the current events properly. More measures will be undertaken and a more detailed address will be posted soon.

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed both in the mod, and outside of it, belong solely to the authors who write them, and not to the mod’s organization, community, or other group or individual.

ZuTheSkunk has a Deviantart account that’s still active, which is mostly made up of My Little Pony fan art, and which occasionally veers into sexual territory, though nothing of the magnitude alleged in the statement. There is, however, a now-deleted account at the more NSFW-leaning art website Fur Affinity called “ZuTheSkunk” that has been “deactivated by the owner”.

The mod is also unavailable on Steam, listed as simply being “Coming Soon”.

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Players Unlock A New Secret Weapon In Assassin’s Creed Valhalla After Hitting A Pile Of Rocks

Screenshot: Ubisoft / Kotaku

Players have discovered a new hidden and powerful bow in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. All you have to do is find a specific pile of rocks and hit it a few times and reload your save. Though, this isn’t the intended way to get the weapon.

Players have discovered that a small, unremarkable pile of rocks in the northern area of the main Valhalla map holds a strange and powerful secret. If you hit these rocks… nothing happens. Unlike similar rock piles in the game, this pile won’t break. However, if you hit this pile of rocks a few times, save your game, and reload, well nothing happens. But repeat this a few times, for most players, it takes about three reloads, and eventually, you’ll unlock Norden’s Arc.

JorRaptor did a great video showing off the rock method, how players even figured it out and how powerful the bow is. (Spoilers: It’s very deadly.)

This hunter bow is an Isu weapon. The Isu were an ancient civilization of super-powerful beings who enslaved humans and… look, you probably don’t care and I don’t have the time to fully explain it. They were powerful and aren’t around anymore, but their relics and weapons still exist, like this bow. That’s the short version.

My new bow
Screenshot: Ubisoft / Kotaku

I gave this method a try and got lucky. On my very first reload it worked. Though I deleted the save. Because, while this method works reliably, it doesn’t seem like the way Ubisoft would have intended players to unlock this special weapon. It seems like a glitch.

This was confirmed earlier today by Darby McDevitt, the narrative director on Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. McDevitt explained on Twitter, in a reply to a JorRaptor tweet, that this method was a “clever brute force hack” that might be useful for speedrunners.

However, he clarified that there is an actual in-game way to unlock this bow, but didn’t say how. Though when someone pointed out that some player must have solved the secret by now, McDevitt vaguely responded “Someone almost has.

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