Lionel Rainaud, Executive Vice President of Creative for Ubisoft's Canadian studios, shared via a blog post an interesting, albeit not novel idea, for games. The aim is to end the disparaging of resources that is the finite game experience: as in, the game that you experience once or twice, but that once you've seen the campaign's completion and finished all the end content, goes back on the shelf never to see the light of your interest again: all the development time (measured in years) and effort (and dollars) for what amounts to an 8-hour experience (or less). The goal, then, seems to be to take online experiences to a whole new level, where a game's content can be constantly updated so as to keep the credits from rolling.

"(...) the will to not give finite experiences. The idea was that you have this conflict, and the resolution, and then it's finished - you've killed the bad guy, for instance. We build a strong nemesis, and the goal of the game is to kill him or free the country, we've done that a few times in our games. But when you succeed, you have to leave the game, because there is nothing else to do. So the goal was to break this, and say that you will be the hero of a region or population many times, not just once. And if you get rid of a dictator or an oppressor, something else is going to happen in the world, and you will have a new goal.

AMD today released Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.6.1 beta. The drivers come with performance optimization for "Warhammer: Vermitide 2," with up to 9 percent performance improvements over 18.5.2, seen on Radeon RX Vega 56, at 1440p resolution; and up to 10 percent improvements seen using the RX 580 8 GB. In addition, the update fixes a number of bugs.

Blank screen issues with "Subnautica" have been fixed. System hangs or crashes experienced in "Sea of Thieves" in the "Cannon Cove" area have been fixed. Ground texture corruption in "World of Tanks" on certain multi-GPU systems, has been fixed. Flickering noticed in certain menus of "Middle Earth: Shadow of War" has been fixed. Desktop being out of the visible area at the 8K resolution on Radeon Pro Duo has been fixed. Grab the drivers from the link below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.6.1

The change-log follows.

In another case of new, obnoxious revenue streams being removed from games they were shipped in, Monolith Studios has come forth to announce that their hit sequel, Middle-Earth: Shadow of War will see its microtransactions cut. Implemented via War Chests, Shadow of War's microtransactions traded real money (after in-game Gold was acquired) for what were basically lootboxes, which could earn players powerful companions and other gameplay-boosting items. These features, including the in-game market, will be rolled-out eventually via a slew of free updates to the game, which aim to improve quality of life for gamers on the title, paired with some campaign improvements that will set its Nemesis system back, front and center, on the pedestal it should always have been.

Denuvo has been one of the foremost DRM technologies in recent times. There have been a number of issues around this particular RM technology: unclear terms of service that didn't explain the use of this third party DRM, or reports of inconsistent and even degraded performance on Denuvo-protected games. While some of those points have since been corrected - there's no clear evidence of degraded performance with Denuvo anti-tamper on or off - and games' terms of service have been updated to include references to Denuvo anti-tamper being used, this is one of those technologies that has been more ill-received - kind of like SecuROM, back in the days.

Denuvo, however, has enjoyed some measure of success in the past, in that it has allowed games developers to see their products remain uncracked for longer periods of time that they would with other DRM technologies that are currently employed (like Steam, for instance). Developers and publishers say this allows them to see more fruits from their labor in that at least during that DRM-protected window, would-be pirates will likely make the jump towards a legitimate version of the game, instead of waiting for the DRM protection to be bypassed. Lately, though, its protections are being bypassed almost as fast as Steam's, which has been the case with Middle-Earth: Shadow of War - cracked two days after release. This is a prickly subject that usually neatly divides proponents of either DRM-free games, or those that really don't care, so long as it doesn't tamper with end-user experience. There are success cases for both fields - GOG on the DRM-free side of the fence and Steam on the other, for example - but this is clearly a debate that won't be settled any time soon.