Hello everyone! Today I'm happy to announce that we're putting the next update for Age of Wonders 4 into Open Beta! This previews some of the improvements that are part of the Watcher update, due later this summer. This coming update focuses on what we feel are the issues which are most important to you, and we'd love to get your feedback on what we've managed to do so far.

It's important to remember that this is a work in progress patch. This means that it may be unstable or imbalanced, and that the features we've added may not work entirely as we want them to. It also means that we may revert certain changes later if we feel that they aren't achieving what we want them to or if we're inspired to replace them with something better! Instructions, Patch Notes and F.A.Q. are provided below...

Gather your forces because the Realms of Ruin Open Beta is now LIVE! The time has come to venture forth to tame the Realm of Beasts in the Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin Open Beta, right here on Steam. By participating in the Open Beta, you will have the chance to become an integral part of the development process, providing valuable thoughts and feedback to ensure a smooth and stable experience for players at the game's full launch.

It's not too late to join!
The Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin Open Beta is now available to download and play today, running from July 7-10. A Frontier account is required to access the Open Beta. You can create one on our Frontier website if you don't currently have an account here. Simply navigate to the Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin store page, here on Steam and follow the link there to download.

The Division Heartland will run a Closed Beta starting on June 27, giving players a chance to play a work-in-progress version of the game, explore the mysteries of Silver Creek, battle against NPC enemies and other players, and get a taste of what's in store for them when the free-to-play game launches. Visit the Heartland Closed Beta registration site to sign up for a chance to get in; note that this test is only available on PC to players in the United States, Canada, or Mexico.

Players who get into the beta will have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and refrain from sharing their thoughts or gameplay publicly, but they will be encouraged to share any and all feedback with the Heartland development team. The goal of the test is to get input from the community; if you want in, register on the official Heartland site and keep an eye on your inbox as invitations will go out progressively over the coming weeks.

XDefiant will launch later this summer, but players won't have to wait that long to play a few more rounds of the free-to-play PVP shooter. Announced at Ubisoft Forward, XDefiant will be running an Open Session for all players on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S from June 21-23; sign up by going to PlayXDefiant.com. Anyone who participated in the Closed Beta in April can log in a day early to participate in a special Early Access phase of the Open Session starting on June 20. Over one million players played in the Closed Beta, which was integral in helping the team test myriad aspects of the game and gather feedback.

"We received a lot of great feedback from our players after the end of our Closed Beta," says creative director Safy Saada, "and for the Open Session, we'll likely see some new faction balancing (particularly for Libertad) based on player feedback, as well as weapon balancing based on data we've collected from the Closed Beta."

A previous attempt to enable NVIDIA GPU video hardware acceleration by default within Steam running on Linux platforms was thwarted by numerous bugs and faults - adopters of the mid-May Steam Client Beta update reported their experiences of various crashes encountered in Valve's user interface. The embattled software engineering team has since investigated this matter and released a new update (yesterday).

The June 6th Steam Client Beta patch notes list a number of general improvements along with Linux-specific adjustments: "a crash when Steam windows were closed with hardware (HW) acceleration enabled on NVIDIA GPUs" and the re-enabling of "HW acceleration by default for NVIDIA GPUs." Early reports indicate that Linux gamers are having a smoother time after installing yesterday's update.

macOS Sonoma brings all‑new capabilities for elevating productivity and creativity with more ways to personalize via widgets and stunning new screen savers, significant updates to Safari and video conferencing, along with an optimized gaming experience - the Mac experience is better than ever. Apple yesterday previewed macOS Sonoma, the latest version of the world's most advanced desktop operating system, bringing a rich set of features that elevate the Mac experience. Stunning screen savers and powerful widgets unlock an entirely new way to personalize. Users can now place widgets right on the desktop, interact with them with just a click, and through the magic of Continuity, access the extensive ecosystem of iPhone widgets on their Mac.

In macOS Sonoma, video conferencing also gets more engaging with great new features to help users present remotely, like Presenter Overlay, which places a presenter on top of the content being shared, and Reactions, which enables fun gesture-triggered video effects in cinematic quality. Significant updates come to Safari, taking the web experience to the next level. Profiles keeps browsing separate between multiple topics or projects, and web apps provide faster access to favorite sites. And gaming gets even better, with the introduction of Game Mode, exciting new titles, and a new game porting toolkit that makes it even easier for developers to bring more games to Mac.

Today, Adobe unveiled Generative Fill in Photoshop, bringing Adobe Firefly generative AI capabilities directly into design workflows. The new Firefly-powered Generative Fill is the world's first co-pilot in creative and design workflows, giving users a magical new way to work by easily adding, extending or removing content from images non-destructively in seconds using simple text prompts. This beta release of Photoshop is Adobe's first Creative Cloud application to deeply integrate Firefly with an exciting roadmap ahead that will transform workflows across Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Experience Cloud and Adobe Express.

Adobe has over a decade-long history of AI innovation, delivering hundreds of intelligent capabilities through Adobe Sensei into applications that hundreds of millions of people rely upon. Features like Neural Filters in Photoshop, Content Aware Fill in After Effects, Customer AI in Adobe Experience Platform and Liquid Mode in Acrobat empower Adobe customers to create, edit, measure, optimize and review billions of pieces of content. Firefly, Adobe's family of creative generative AI models, now brings even more precision, power, speed and ease directly into workflows where content is created or modified.

Steam Client Beta updates do not normally attract much attention - Valve's iterative patch notes for the digital service application read in a mostly mundane way - but this week's trial system upgrade has turned heads. Valve has managed to introduce some interesting new features with this latest update - the in-game overlay system has been overhauled so users are offered the option to pin related windows over/on top of an active game session. Players are granted multiple options in the adjustment of overlay window opacity levels - so web browsers, document apps and image browsers can be customized to best suit the in-game experience. Users will also be happy to discover that they can now watch their favorite movies, TV shows or streaming platform within the same screen space as their chosen game - no need to minimize and arrange multiple app windows or shift everything across multiple monitor setups. The screenshot manager has been enhanced to a greater degree - Valve states that: "it's responsive, you can choose from large or small thumbnails, view recent screenshots rather than by game, and you can manage online screenshots as well as local screenshots".

A new Notes App has been introduced via the latest Steam Client Beta update - users can now jot down their thoughts and observations during game sessions. Valve boasts that the application offers: "rich text formatting, the ability to have multiple notes per game, and can even be used in offline mode." The blog also provides explanations of other handy features and improvements: "The new toolbar gives you access to anything you may need in the middle of a game - friends chat, achievements progress, guides, discussions, a browser, and more. We've picked a couple windows by default, and you can pick and personalize the pieces of content you'd like to see in your overlay - settings are saved between games. This toolbar can be switched between an icon view and a list view in Settings. The Game Overview is your one-stop shop to see what's going on with the game since you last played it. For example, it shows what achievements you have in progress, which friends are playing the same game, top guides, news, and more."

Earlier on in April keen-eyed users of macOS uncovered the presence of a strange document hidden deep within Apple's operating system directories. It turns out that this Easter egg was a digital copy of the original Bitcoin whitepaper, it is speculated that Apple engineers have been running a long term prank by stashing the manifesto inside of every released version of macOS since 2018 - which indicates that Mojave was the starting point. According to yesterday's 9to5Mac-published article the cryptocurrency whitepaper (said to be authored by mysterious figure Satoshi Nakamoto) has been removed from the latest macOS Ventura build - 13.4 beta 3 (made available to developers).

The initial discovery of the manifesto received significant press coverage, and it seems that Apple has chosen to send in the cleanup crew at some point in the weeks since then. The file was sat alongside miscellaneous assets in a folder relating to an Image Capture application. The internal tool "VirtualScanner.app" has also been removed from the latest macOS beta build. The 9to5Mac piece posits that Apple's engineers never intended to include the prototype image and document scanner app in any finalized operating system releases - hence the burying of the program's assets deep inside system files.

HELP US GEAR UP FOR LAUNCH DURING THE DIABLO IV SERVER SLAM - Calling all wanderers! In preparation for the launch of Diablo IV on June 6, we must enlist your demon-cleansing services for one final task: Server Slam. From May 12, 12 p.m.-May 14, 12 p.m. PDT, everyone can come to Sanctuary's defense on Windows PC, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 4—along with couch co-op for consoles and cross-play and cross-progression for all platforms—against the armies of the Burning Hells to help us test the durability of our servers.

WHAT TO EXPECT DURING SERVER SLAM
Server Slam will give players one final weekend in Hell to experience a fraction of what Diablo IV has to offer, while simultaneously testing the capabilities of our servers prior to launch. The Prologue and entirety of Act I will be your canvas to paint with the remains of slain demons. Fractured Peaks, the first Zone, is yours to navigate as you please. Traverse its rugged landscape as Barbarian, Druid, Necromancer, Rogue, or Sorcerer, unleashing devastating power upon foes, and honing your unique skillset in the process.

Hello everyone, Antoine here, those who recognize me know that I used to work on Humankind during the last few years. I'm now working as a Producer on Endless Dungeon, which means I'm helping to coordinate the Endless Dungeon team to make sure we can deliver a high-quality experience for you. We have some news to share regarding the release date of ENDLESS Dungeon.

We have decided to delay the release of the game to the 19th of October of this year, this includes all the versions: PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One, and Xbox X/S. The Nintendo Switch version will have a release date announced later. After all the feedback we've received we believe that it's important to spend extra time working on the game. We hope that you understand that decisions like this are never easy to make.

In the Windows operating system, the Print Screen keyboard command has been resulting in taking a screenshot for more than two decades. However, Microsoft will change the interaction by creating a screenshot in Windows 11 OS. Currently, when you press the Print Screen key, the entire window is captured, and your image gets saved, pasted to the clipboard and, if you have it enabled, the OneDrive folder too. In the latest Windows Insiders Beta Channel, the Windows 11 KB5025310 version is rolling out and changing the screenshot game. Instead of regular shots, pressing the Print Screen key now toggles the Snapping Tool, previously only used when Windows Key, Shift Key, and S key were pressed.

Microsoft is making it seem that the Snapping Tool now becomes the default screenshot tool, which is much more feature-rich compared to the traditional way of taking a screenshot. Of course, making a quick screenshot will still be favored by many. So, Microsoft has left an option to revert the future default setting by going into Settings > Accessibility > Keyboard, where you toggle off the button that says: "Use the Print Screen key to open Snipping Tool."

A combination of the Diablo IV Closed Beta and NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti graphics card is proving lethal for the latter - community feedback has alerted Blizzard to take action, and they will be investigating the issue in the coming days, with assistance from NVIDIA. It is speculated that the game is exposing underlying hardware faults within an affected card, but it is odd that a specific model is generating the largest number of issues. Unlucky 3080 Ti owners participating in the closed beta are said to be experiencing unpleasant or inconsistent in-game performance at best, and BSODs followed by non-functional GPUs at worst.

A Blizzard forumite, ForANge, chimed in with their experience: "My graphics card also burned out. While playing, the fans of my Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 Ti suddenly started running at maximum speed. At the same time, the signal from the monitor disappeared. After turning off the power and trying to turn it back on, I couldn't get it to work anymore. The card is just under a year old. It happened during a cutscene with flowers when they showed a snowy landscape."

AMD late Wednesday released the Adrenalin 22.9.1 beta drivers. These come with optimization for "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II" open beta, There's only one issue fixed with this release, and that's Enhanced Sync causing an intermittent black-screen to occur when playing games or videos using extended displays, and switching the Enhanced Sync feature on or off. Support appears to have been added for various new Radeon 600M-series iGPU models, which feature with the recently announced Ryzen 7020 and Athlon 7020 "Mendocino" entry-level processors. The upcoming Ryzen 7000 "Raphael" desktop processors are expected to feature a similar class of iGPU.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 22.9.1 beta

The Worldstone is shattered, and it now falls to the heroes of Sanctuary to fend off the terrors rising in its wake. Blizzard Entertainment today announced that beginning June 2, players in most regions across the world will take up the call to defend against the Burning Hells in Diablo Immortal, the first Blizzard game designed from the ground up for mobile, with the remaining regions in Asia-Pacific gaining access a few weeks later. n addition to offering an uncompromised AAA experience on mobile, the most ambitious game released in the Diablo franchise's 25-year history will enter into Open Beta on Windows PC at launch. Diablo Immortal supports both cross-play and cross-progression, allowing Sanctuary's heroes to join the fight with each other regardless of platform while being able to seamlessly transition between mobile and PC gameplay. The Open Beta on PC will contain all game features, including cross-play and cross-progression, and upon conclusion all progress will be maintained.

"The demons of the Burning Hells are ready to be slain in the most expansive Diablo game that Blizzard has ever released," said Mike Ybarra, president of Blizzard Entertainment. "As Blizzard's first game designed from the ground up for mobile, it was important to us to deliver an experience worthy of the franchise, so we did a lot of testing, incorporated a lot of feedback, and created a game that we're very excited to share with players. We're looking forward to unleashing this epic new entry in the Diablo franchise, and we can't wait to join everyone in Sanctuary." With the fate of Sanctuary in their hands, players will choose between six iconic Diablo classes-Barbarian, Crusader, Demon Hunter, Monk, Necromancer, or Wizard-and embark on a journey through eight unique zones and the great city of Westmarch. They will join up with new and familiar Diablo characters, including the franchise's patriarch Deckard Cain, on an expansive quest to hunt down the shattered pieces of the corrupted Worldstone before the forces of the Burning Hells can gather them for their own sinister plans in an epic all-new story taking place between the events of Diablo II and Diablo III.

AMD today released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin. Version 21.8.1 Beta comes with support for the Radeon RX 6600 XT graphics card (which we reviewed here). It also fixes an issue with "The Medium" that caused the game to crash while running FrameView. The company also identified a handful issues, some even specific to the RX 6600 XT, such as inaccurate point-lights in "Control," and driver timeouts observed in "Horizon Zero Dawn" with RX 6700 XT, and less specifically on RX 500 series products with simultaneous gaming+streaming. Grab the driver from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.8.1 Beta

If you're on the fence about whether or not Halo Infinite will be worth your time, you might just get your chance to find it out for yourself as early as this weekend. 343 Industries has announced the first of a series of technical flightings for the next chapter in the Halo universe, with users being called in an invite-basis to participate in and provide feedback on the multiplayer element of Halo infinite (which will be free to play when the game launches later this year). The gameplay focus is on team fights against bots (a first in the Halo universe) in big arena maps, plus a tutorial system called The Academy, which will feature missions for players to get into the groove of Halo's combat rhythms.

Tempered expectations are best when coming into any games' beta, and 343 Industries has informed players that the current build of the game being deployed for this flighting is some two to three months old compared to the games' current development stage - so there is some leeway to pardon their dust. If you want to get a taste of Halo's famed arena combat, you'll have to sign-up to the Halo Insider initiative, where you can choose the platform of choice for participation in the flighting program. If you choose PC as your platform, there are some other hoops to jump through; you'll have to send Microsoft a diagnostic of your system's DxDiag report, as well as connect your Steam account via the Halo Insider program. Meet you there, Spartan.

MSI, a world-leading motherboard manufacturer, announces the release of AGESA COMBO PI V2 1.2.0.1 beta BIOS for its AMD 500 series motherboards to add SMART ACCESS MEMORY support to AMD RYZEN 3000 desktop processors. Now both RYZEN 5000 and RYZEN 3000* desktop processors support SMART ACCESS MEMORY. AGESA COMBO PI V2 1.2.0.1 BIOS also improves L3 Cache bandwidth in AIDA64 for RYZEN 5000 desktop processors.

SMART ACCESS MEMORY is an innovative feature that allows the system to access the full capacity of the VRAM on the graphics card. Compare to the current solution which has a 256 MB access limitation, this feature will provide the users a better gaming experience.

AMD late-Tuesday released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin drivers. Version 20.7.2 beta adds optimization for "Death Stranding" (up to 8% performance uplift on offer as tested with an RX 5700 XT); "F1 2020" (up to 5% better performance in the ultra high preset, as tested with RX 5700 XT); and "Hyper Scape" Open Beta. The company also fixed a handful issues. To begin with, a display corruption or hang when launching VR applications with Occulus Rift headset has been fixed. A bug with AMD Bug Report Tool that caused list of application to fail to load, has been fixed. Netflix previews on Edge appearing black-screens has been fixed. Wallpaper Engine being detected as a game by Radeon Software has been fixed. Valorant failing to launch from Radeon Software or Gaming tab has been fixed. Hyper Scape experiencing a crash on Windows 7 systems has been fixed.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.7.2 betaThe change log follows.

There are two types of people in the world: tab minimalists who have just a few tabs open at a time and tab collectors who have...significantly more. For minimalists and collectors alike, we're bringing a new way to organize your tabs to Chrome: tab groups. This feature is available now in Chrome Beta. Now, with a simple right click, you can group your tabs together and label them with a custom name and color. Once the tabs are grouped together, you can move and reorder them on the tab strip.

AMD released the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition drivers just in time for Asia and ANZ regions to begin "razing hell" with DOOM Eternal. Version 20.3.1 adds day-one optimization for DOOM Eternal, including an up to 5 percent performance improvement with "Ultra Nightmare" graphics settings. Optimization is also added for "Half Life: Alyx" and the Vulkan API mode of "Ghost Recon: Breakpoint." The drivers also add a few Vulkan extensions: VK_EXT_post_depth_coverage (only supported on RDNA or later graphics architectures); VK_KHR_shader_non_semantic_info, VK_EXT_texel_buffer_alignment, and VK_EXT_pipeline_creation_cache_control. Grab the drivers from the link below and raze hell!

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.3.1 BetaThe change log follows.

AMD has just re-released Radeon Software 20.1.3 as WHQL. These drivers are identical to the Adrenalin 20.1.3 Beta drivers posted earlier this month, with the only difference being WHQL certification. It looks like AMD's driver team is hard at work fixing the various issues reported. 20.1.3 WHQL is an important release as it now gives RX 5600 XT owners a WHQL driver — previously they had to resort to beta drivers to power their new purchase.

Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.1.4 Beta was released just days ago and does include additional changes that aren't integrated in 20.1.3 WHQL yet, because Microsoft's WHQL certification process takes some time. A few days ago we reported that AMD silently patched a driver security issue with 20.1.1 Beta, maybe that's a reason, too, why we're seeing a WHQL version today.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.1.3 WHQL

AMD has released the Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.10.2 beta drivers. These drivers bring improved support for "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare," which sees up to 18% better performance on the Ultra preset when using a Radeon RX 5700 XT. "The Outer Worlds" also sees improved support and sees 8% better performance at the Very High preset again on the Radeon RX 5700 XT. Improved support and better performance are always welcome; however, this release also offers some much-needed fixes, including application hang in Borderlands 3, which will likely make quite a few gamers happy. For a full list of fixes and known issues, check the full change-log below. Otherwise, you can grab the new driver from the link below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.10.2 Beta
The change-log for 19.10.2 follows.

AMD today released the latest version of their Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition Drivers. The 19.6.2 Beta release offers no performance improvements however it does add support for various Vulkan extensions while simultaneously solving a few problems. These fixed issues include, Crackdown 3 experiencing application hangs on Radeon R7 370 series products, Wireless VR experiencing performance drops across various titles on some Radeon RX 400 and 500 series graphics products, and Performance Metrics Overlay failing to enable or being disabled when toggling Radeon Overlay in game just to name a few. You can grab this latest driver release from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.6.2 betaThe change-log follows.

AMD over the weekend released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition. Version 19.6.1 Beta adds support for Microsoft Xbox Game Pass for PC. The groundbreaking new service from Microsoft benefits gamers who play on both PC and Xbox, by providing Windows PCs with a Library and common access to games across platforms. The drivers also address AMD Link not working correctly on some of the installations of Radeon Software. Grab the driver from the link below.DOWNLOAD: Radeon Software Adrenalin 19.6.1 Beta

The change-log follows.