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Avowed delayed to February to ‘give players’ backlogs some breathing room’-

August 2: It’s official, Avowed has been delayed to Feb 18, 2025. It was previously expected to release sometime this year. Microsoft says it’s making the move to “give players’ backlogs some breathing room.”

Original story (August 1): According to The Verge’s Notepad newsletter (users may encounter a paywall) on Microsoft happenings, Obsidian’s first person action RPG Avowed is about to get delayed into early 2025. The game itself is supposedly in “good shape” to meet its original November release window, but Microsoft is sheepish about overcrowding its holiday release schedule.

The Verge cites STALKER 2’s delay into November as a potential motivating factor for the Avowed delay. Despite GSC Game World not being owned by Microsoft, STALKER 2 will be an Xbox (and PC) exclusive coming to Game Pass day one⁠—at least for premium subscribers. Also coming this fall from Microsoft: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and Diablo 4’s first expansion, Vessel of Hatred.

The move makes more sense when you consider how much Microsoft has bet the farm on Game Pass⁠, with the publisher removing pressure from an already crowded fall and instead giving subscribers something to look forward to in the doldrums of January and February. Also worth considering is the planned November release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which got its big reveal as part of Microsoft’s summer showcase. While the dynamics at play are very different from last year’s Starfield vs. Baldur’s Gate 3 matchup, avoiding another such stark RPG head-to-head may have also been on decision-makers’ minds.

Avowed has been cooking for a long time, with an initial pre-rendered announcement trailer in 2020. The first-person spinoff to Pillars of Eternity looks like it could be something special, with its vibrant fantasy environments expertly evoking the Pillars games’ pre-rendered worlds. It was, however, recently revealed that Obsidian went back to the drawing board on Avowed’s combat, making it “more juicy” in response to criticisms of its initial reveal. 

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These Fall Fashion Must-Haves from Nordstrom’s Anniversary Sale 2024 Belong in Your Closet ASAP

Courtesy of Nordstrom

We independently selected these deals and products because we love them, and we think you might like them at these prices. E! has affiliate relationships, so we may get a commission if you purchase something through our links. Items are sold by the retailer, not E!. Prices are accurate as of publish time.

The cozy jackets, the layers, the boots—honestly ask any editor and we’ll all tell you the best time to put together the chicest fits is Autumn. And even though we’re technically still in the middle of summer, it’s never too late to be prepared. Because before you know it (based on our experience), all those coveted fall fashion pieces you’ve been eying for months immediately sell out once the fall season comes around. So, trust that this summer, we’re getting in the fall mindset early to make sure we score all the latest and trendiest fall fashion pieces currently on the market.

Lucky for us, the Nordstrom Anniversary Sale …

Finally, Overwatch 2 gets a dating sim and more in season 3-

Overwatch 2’s third season aims to address the biggest issues players have had since the game’s launch in October.

Apart from debuting the new Antarctica Control map, season 3 will finally make skins easier to earn for free, tweak how Competitive works, and feature three events with skins and other cosmetics to earn and buy on the shop.

Anyone that logs into the game next week will instantly unlock the first five free tiers of the battle pass, a head start toward earning credits (a returning currency from Overwatch 1) to buy epic and legendary skins from the first game.

Loverwatch, a text-based Overwatch dating sim, will launch on February 13. In it, you can choose to date either Mercy or Genji and interact with them via dialogue options. It has a secret ending to unlock, which will grant you a play of the game highlight intro. On February 14 Overwatch 2 will have its Ultimate Valentine’s Event with a “Hanzo 4v4 Limited Time Mode,” and support-themed challenges to …

It’s official- consoles cost as much as gaming PCs now

Though I am a PC Gamer, I’ve always had a lot of love for PlayStation, and even manage to play my PS5 just enough to stop it getting dusty. I preordered that thing in 2020 (which I’d never advise doing) and I don’t regret it. Today, Sony announced the price for its new PS5 Pro, and I find myself wondering who exactly it is for.

Coming in at a whopping $700, you do get a lot of graphical power, with that refresh coming in the form of three major factors: a larger GPU, advanced ray tracing, and AI-driven upscaling. This reportedly offers up to 45% faster rendering, with a larger GPU and faster RAM. This is all to say that it will run your games much better and faster, though you are paying a substantial fee to get it.

The PS5 launch price was $500, but it has dropped up to $50 below that on Amazon, with some bundles even giving you games alongside it. See, the jump from $500 to $700 is about the price where you can invest money into a fully built PC, and here at…

God of War Ragnarök PC announced, coming in September-

Watch On

Big Papa Kratos is coming back to Steam.

During Sony’s State of Play stream on Thursday, the company dropped the news that God of War Ragnarök, the acclaimed sequel to the 2018 reboot of God of War, will be arriving on PC September 19. 

Dad Kratos’s second outing was a big hit in 2022—”Everybody but us is having a great time in God of War: Ragnarök,” we wrote not-at-all-passive-aggressively shortly after its release. While Elden Ring more or less swept the 2022 awards season as the top dog for Game of the Year, Ragnarök was still an impressive runner up. It took home the trophy at a number of publications that year, including at our sister sites Tom’s Guide and Laptop Mag. It also earned high praise in reviews; GamesRadar+ awarded it 4.5/5 stars, writing “There’s a light start that feels padded—still good but missing depth—which leads into a weighty finish that’s every bit the equal of its predecessor.”

Hopefully God o…

Nvidia driver update should improve Starfield performance for many-

Released today, Nvidia driver 537.34 adds optimizations for Lies of P and Mortal Kombat 1, but more urgently includes some Starfield-related performance notes. The biggest is the addition of a resizable BAR profile that Nvidia says will improve Starfield performance on RTX 30-series and 40-series GPUs.

Before this update dropped, we explained how to enable Resizable BAR manually for Starfield. You can find more details in that article, but the short of it is that BAR stands for “Base Address Register,” and the feature has to do with improving the game’s access your graphics card’s memory. According to Nvidia, this update improves Starfield performance by an average of 5% on RTX 40-series desktop GPUs.

The Resizable BAR profile will be “automatically applied for gamers running the latest Game Ready Driver (537.34) or the previous release (537.17),” Nvidia said. The new 537.34 driver also adds Starfield to the “optimal settings” GeForce Experience feature, which tweak…

Holy moly SSDs need serious cooling now-

I’ve probably looked at more motherboards just today than I have in the past three combined. That’s because every manufacturer has brand new Z790 motherboards ready to show off ahead of a yet unannounced Intel processor generation (that’s the Raptor Lake refresh, by the way). But one thing I’ve noticed across nearly every board I’ve seen today, be it from ASRock, Gigabyte, or MSI, is that they all are fitted with seriously beefy coolers on their PCIe 5.0 NVMe slots.

Some of these coolers are included on the motherboard, and even these integrated designs are looking beefed up with the coming generation of SSDs. But take a look at some of the coolers included or available as extras for PCIe 5.0 drives and things get out of hand pretty quickly.

Just look at the size of the cooler and fan loaded onto the MSI Spatium Pro PCIe 5.0 2TB Frozr+ drive. That drive is capable of a very impressive 14,520MB/s sequential read according to the benchmark results on display, and thanks to…