A prominent Fortnite leaker has revealed that proximity chat could be coming to Epic Games' po[CENSORED]r battle royale in the near future, allowing players to hear their allies based on how close they are. Fortnite recently featured a live event that saw players face off against a large creature with a massive tentacle. While the players defeated that creature with the help of Superman, the tentacle remained on the island. Chapter 6 Season 4 of Fortnite is all about a massive bug invasion, which has seen the creatures run rampant on the island. As with every season, players can expect to see the loot pool significantly updated. Gamers will also be able to explore all new locations and even meet fresh characters. A new season also means players will be able to work through a fresh battle pass that features both free and paid rewards. Chapter 6 Season 4 launches on August 7 alongside Season 5 of the po[CENSORED]r game mode Fortnite OG, which is also receiving a new battle pass. Proximity Chat Could Be Coming to Fortnite In a recent post on Twitter, the po[CENSORED]r leaker Wensoing (with the help of Loolo_WRLD) revealed that proximity chat has been added to the game's files. Proximity chat is one of Fortnite's highly requested features, as some gamers enjoy the immersion it provides. Currently, it seems as if the files were added to Creative experiences, though the leaker stated proximity chat could also come to the game's main battle royale mode as well. According to Wensoing, this feature can be enabled and disabled, so players won't have to engage with it if they don't want to. It has also been rumored that Fortnite will be adding companions to the game. While leakers have been unable to share a firm timeline, it has been rumored that companions will be a new cosmetic type. According to various leaks, only the player and their teammates will be able to see the companions, as they will not be visible to everyone. A lot of players were happy to hear about the feature, as some people were worried that the presence of pets could create too much visual clutter on the battlefield. It seems as if Epic Games is preparing to release a wide variety of crossovers for fans to be excited about as well. At San Diego Comic Con, James Gunn announced that Peacemaker will be coming to Fortnite's Item Shop. A recent leak also revealed that players will soon be able to purchase cosmetics based on the po[CENSORED]r anime One Punch Man. With so much content to enjoy and even more just around the corner, many fans are feeling optimistic about the future of Fortnite.   https://gamerant.com/marvel-rivals-reveals-season-3-twitch-drops-mantis-skin-free/

Every now and then one of my American friends will admit to me, with a slight sheepishness, that they don't really get Warhammer. They didn't grow up with it and now there's so much of it—a far-future science-fantasy setting, two fantasy settings (one of which has been re-released as a prequel to itself), and a football-themed parody of one of those fantasy settings—and they don't really understand its whole deal. The older generation of my British friends, the ones who grew up before Dungeons & Dragons became mainstream with its fifth edition in the 2010s, find D&D equally bewildering. Most have belatedly tried it out, but there's a barrier there. They got into tabletop gaming via Warhammer and Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: The Masquerade and etcetera, and D&D has a flavor that's different enough to be off-putting. While obviously Warhammer's roots are British and D&D's are American, the degree to which that defines them is maybe not apparent to everyone. For instance: American game developer Zach Barth, of videogame studios Zachtronics and Coincidence, once outlined a pitch for a Warhammer 40,000 game to Games Workshop. The creator of automation puzzle games like SpaceChem, Infinifactory, and Opus Magnum thought it might be fun to make a game about playing a junior tech-priest in the 41st millennium, but wanted it to be a "workplace comedy, except that it's set in a Warhammer 40K factory, where you're pumping out power armour and stuff." Barth had concerns about how this would be received. He asked a Games Workshop representative how the company would react to a pitch for a "funny" Warhammer 40,000 game. The response he got back was, "They're all funny, it's a funny setting." Barth was shocked by this. "I'm just like, I don't know if Americans see it that way!" he said. To understand why that sense of humor doesn't always translate, first we need to look at an example of just how American the assumptions behind D&D can be. A lot of Dungeons & Dragons games start in an inn. Even the ones that don't soon arrive at one. It makes sense: one of the first things the hobbits do after setting out in The Lord of the Rings is stop at the Inn of the Prancing Pony. And like the Prancing Pony, the default inn from a game of D&D comes with a hooded stranger in the corner as a standard part of the package. He's practically furniture. But everything else about the Prancing Pony is part of Tolkien's idyllic imagining of rural England threatened by oncoming darkness. Bree and the Shire are the land of Tolkien's youth, of village pubs and greens being put at risk by dark modernity and industrialization. This is where Dungeons & Dragons diverges: the average D&D tavern is a place where you open the door and everyone stares at you and the piano player stops mid-tune. There will be a brawl, probably within minutes. It's not the Prancing Pony. It's a saloon from an American western transplanted into a different genre, like the cantina from Star Wars. In 1987, White Dwarf magazine published an adventure for Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play set entirely in a tavern. It was so po[CENSORED]r it was reprinted several times and eventually became the basis for a whole series of adventures in the same format. Called A Rough Night at the Three Feathers, it's about multiple plots taking place in one building over the course of, as the title suggests, a single rough night. There's a scandalous affair, a dead body, mistaken identity, cheating at cards, and the whole thing's triggered by a noblewoman and her gigantic entourage being crammed in with a bunch of commoners for a night. It's not a scene from a cowboy movie transplanted into a fantasy world, it's a hotel farce transplanted into a fantasy world—an episode of Fawlty Towers where nobody can mention the warhammer. It's a type of humor that relies on an understanding of social class deeper than being able to tell he's the Emperor because he's the only one not covered in shit, and it applies to every faction in Warhammer.Paul Barnett, as general manager of Mythic Entertainment when it was creating Warhammer Online, had the job of explaining this to Americans at E3 in 2006, and handled it enthusiastically. Warhammer's orcs, he said, were "soccer hooligans" while its dwarfs "are like the northern working class of England," who are "very proud of their holes in the ground." Meanwhile, "The high elves are British posh people. Never done a day's work in their lives, don't understand about doing the washing." As well as the broad class satire, there are incredibly specific digs like the villainous Een McWrecker being based on Ian McGregor, who was head of the National Coal Board during the miner's strike of 1984-85, while Empress Magritta is based on Margaret Thatcher. It's not just British, it's extremely 1980s British, with a particular visual and topical debt owed to that era's New Wave of British Heavy Metal, a debt it repaid by licensing out Warhammer art for releases by Bolt Thrower and Saxon. With all these hyper-specific references, it's no wonder Americans don't always get Warhammer. If you're not familiar with Zulu, Bernard Cromwell's Sharpe books, and season four of BlackAdder, then the way 40K's Astra Militarum parodies military incompetence yet celebrates the ordinary man in the trenches yet laughs at their disposability—an entire wargame faction with the ethos of Jona Lewie's 1980 anti-war song Stop the Cavalry—must fly right past you. No wonder even a smart guy like Zach Barth doesn't get it. Before Warhammer fans wear out their arms patting themselves on the back for appreciating its complexities, there's a lot more to unpack in D&D as well. The game that would become Dungeons & Dragons was first run by Dave Arneson in the Twin Cities: Minneapolis–Saint Paul. He took it down to Lake Geneva, where Gary Gygax lived, and ran a demonstration. Arneson's game was set in and around a village called Blackmoor, and when Gygax started running his own version, he based it in and under a city called Greyhawk. The two plonked these locations down on a shared map of "the Great Kingdom" based on North America, with Blackmoor where the Twin Cities would be located, and Greyhawk positioned roughly where Lake Geneva or Gygax's home town of Chicago would be. It's been said that Americans think 100 years is a long time while Europeans think 100 miles is a long distance. Even when they're not recycling a map of the continental United States, distance in D&D's settings is based on an American understanding of scale. Everything is a long way from everything else, and connected by wide roads. This doesn't just affect the way the maps look, but gives D&D adventures one of their foundational cliches. When adventurers aren't delving dungeons their baseline job is working as caravan guards, which can seem mundane if you don't imbue it with the romance of its inspiration: wagon-train westerns. The tavern-as-saloon isn't the only place cowboy movies bleed over into D&D's version of fantasy. Fantasy is often about long-distance quests, and the western is another genre that treats overland travel as romantic and dangerous. Think about how many westerns involve cattle drives, stagecoach robberies, horseback posses chasing down their target, and railroads being built. When a typical D&D campaign first leaves the dungeon it becomes a wilderness adventure, and the frontier fantasy of adventures from Gygax's Keep on the Borderlands module back in 1979 to Lost Mine of Phandelver, the adventure that kicked off D&D's fifth edition, is an explicitly American one. (Image credit: Wizards of the Coast) Look at the maps of classic D&D villages like Hommlet from The Temple of Elemental Evil. It's got four broad roads leading into it, and no ditch or wall to defend it. It doesn't look like a medieval settlement at all. It looks like Hadleyville from High Noon. It's a place ready for adventurers to ride onto its main street while the locals peer out at them from behind shuttered windows, only instead of Stetsons the riders will be wearing pointy wizard hats. Gygax and Arneson weren't the only D&D designers whose take on fantasy comes off more American than European. The Dragonlance campaign, and the bestselling novels based on it by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis, co-star Riverwind and Goldmoon of the Que Shu tribe, whose culture is explicitly Native American. The setting's fire-and-brimstone take on religion, with gods who eagerly leap to Cataclysm to punish sinners, was inspired by Hickman's Mormon faith, with Dragonlance's religious texts the Disks of Mishakal an explicit reference to Mormonism's golden plates. They make for jarring blasts of USA-ness in what is otherwise a textbook Lord of the Rings knock-off. If the British don't quite get D&D, or Americans are confused by Warhammer, it's not because they're missing something obvious. These games, despite the global reach they now enjoy, are deeply rooted in their respective national cultures. Understanding their origins, from the wide open spaces and Wild West saloons of D&D to the combination of class satire and the rainy industrial grubbiness of Thatcher's Britain underpinning Warhammer, can help bridge that cultural divide. While D&D has broadened its scope (the cover art no longer features women who look quite so Californian), and Warhammer continues to change (the new army of Grand Cathay doesn't reference a brand of fizzy drink from Manchester) these differences remain a fascinating lens to view them through.     https://www.pcgamer.com/games/d-and-d-is-quintessentially-american-and-warhammer-is-quintessentially-british/

Honor is working on a new smartphone that will be equipped with a 10,000mAh battery, as per a tipster. The handset is rumoured to be powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 8500 chipset, potentially becoming one of the first options in the market to get this upcoming SoC. The tipster also suggested that the device has entered the New Product Introduction (NPI) stage. Although its moniker remains unknown, reports suggest that the purported model could debut as the Honor Power 2. Honor Smartphone to Launch with a 10,000mAh Battery This information is from a post by Digital Chat Station (machine translated from Chinese) on the Chinese social microblogging platform Weibo. As per the tipster, Honor's Dimensity 8500 SoC-powered phone could have a battery capacity around the 10,000mAh mark. While much of the information remains confidential, the tipster also highlighted that the purported handset has entered the NPI stage. Notably, this is a crucial step in a product's manufacturing process where it transitions from conceptualisation to mass production and commercialisation. A product has to pass through several key stages, such as design, development, testing, and manufacturing, before it can be brought to the market for sale. This information aligns with a previous hint by the same tipster, which revealed that an unnamed China-based OEM was planning to test a handset with a 10,000mAh battery in the first half of 2026. At the time, it was suggested that the device could maintain a profile less than 8.5mm thick, despite packing such a large battery. Although the tipster stopped short of revealing which model could debut with the Dimensity 8500 SoC and 10,000mAh battery, it is speculated to have the Honor Power 2 moniker. If this turns out to be accurate, the said handset could be a successor to the Honor Power, which was launched in April this year, featuring an 8,000mAh silicon-carbon battery. Notably, Honor is not the only OEM working on phones with massive batteries. As per a previous report, Xiaomi's subsidiary Redmi is also developing a handset with a battery capacity that ranges between 8,500mAh and 9,000mAh. It is rumoured to be built using an upgraded version of the silicon-carbon technology, which is used today, in order to keep the thickness at a minimum without affecting the battery life.     https://www.gadgets360.com/mobiles/news/honor-power-2-10000mah-battery-dimensity-8500-chipset-npi-stage-weibo-9060374

After using Bazzite (a SteamOS clone) on my Asus ROG Ally, with a plethora of features that are ideal for a console-like user interface (UI), I'm edging closer to installing it on my main desktop gaming PC. If you're wondering why, the answer is simple. Microsoft's Windows 11 has been a frustrating operating system for gaming, in my experience, with numerous UI bugs and errors that have left me tempted to step away from my desktop setup entirely. I'm fully aware of Microsoft's new Xbox PC app and the upcoming 'full-screen experience', which is intended to improve game performance and portability for handheld users, with a streamlined console-like UI, similar to what Valve has going with SteamOS. As I've mentioned before, I'm excited to see how this works once the ROG Xbox Ally launches, but I'm not confident it will topple SteamOS – so I'll likely use it on my handheld via a dual boot setup. As for SteamOS, or more specifically, Bazzite in this case, this can easily be installed on most desktop gaming PCs, and will be highly beneficial for those with AMD hardware. However, it's not exactly the same story for Nvidia hardware, since the 'Steam Gaming Mode' requirements has Nvidia GPU support, but in beta with 'major caveats compared to AMD hardware'. It's not just about Nvidia hardware either; I've tested Discord on my Asus ROG Ally running Bazzite, and while it functions well for voice chat and screen sharing in Game Mode, the latter isn't exactly well polished. To put it simply, streams in servers can randomly end without reasoning or appear dark with nothing on screen. Streaming to friends on Discord has easily become a fundamental part of my gaming enjoyment, and if I'm going to move away from Windows 11 as my main operating system on my desktop rig, full official Nvidia GPU support (or at the very least stepping out of beta on Bazzite) and Discord are an absolute must for me.I'm sure that I'm not the only PC gamer who uses their home TV to dive into immersive titles, especially when you want to sit away from your desk after work. Sure, that's what handheld gaming PCs are for, but I'd be lying to you if I said holding up any handheld for an extended period doesn't get tiring. While I own a PS5, it's not my main source of gaming; to be transparent, I only still own one because of exclusive PlayStation titles, and because GTA 6 won't be coming to PC day one. Fortunately, I have hardware powerful enough to run games at 4K on high graphics settings, so combining this with an operating system that has UI akin to a Nintendo Switch, PS5, or Xbox Series X console seems like a no-brainer to me. It makes gaming so much easier, knowing you can hop in and out of games without worrying if it will crash or you randomly lose controller functionality, or worse, have your entire system lock up on you, essentially forcing you to restart. And that all goes without mentioning possibly the most impressive and important feature of Bazzite/SteamOS. Quick Resume is a literal Godsend, allowing you to put your system to sleep and pick right back up from where you left off when you return. Now, I've not installed any version of SteamOS on my desktop rig yet, but there's no reason why it shouldn't work in the exact same manner. Without going off track, what I'm saying is the addition of Discord's screen sharing capabilities (improved to work well on SteamOS) and greater official GPU support, with an already impressive console-like OS, is the stuff of dreams for easy and simple gaming. It's not like a desktop PC with an Nvidia GPU won't work at all on Bazzite, I'd just much rather avoid any issues that might not have occurred on Windows 11 (excluding the recent driver hiccups from Nvidia itself), specifically regarding the GPU. Once these matters are addressed through official integration as an app on Steam from Discord, and better Nvidia hardware functionality in SteamOS Game Mode, is the moment Windows 11 will become a secondary operating system, with Valve's SteamOS easily replacing it.     https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/only-two-things-are-stopping-me-from-moving-to-steamos-on-my-desktop-pc-permanently-the-moment-theyre-addressed-ill-be-saying-adios-windows-11