Steam Next Fest is here and we're thrilled to have you join us to play the first-ever public demo of Stormgate! The Steam Next Fest demo includes full access to the current closed beta phase, codenamed "Elephant." (Each Stormgate playtest build is named after a classic RTS unit, in alphabetical order.) Here are some key insights into the current game state and what you can look forward to during the playtest.

How to Play With Friends
While our party system is still under construction, you can easily play with friends by creating custom games, either public or private, and sharing the Lobby ID. Crush that smack-talkin' Major Galt together in our 3P co-op map, WRECK HAVOC!

AMD has released the latest Adrenalin 23.8.1 WHQL driver, bringing support for Immortals of Aveum game, as well as several fixes, including issues with high idle power when using multi-display setups with mixed high-resolutions and high refresh rate on Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs when variable refresh rate is enabled, issues with performance drop on DirectX 11 games on Radeon RX 5600 XT when AMD SmartAccess Memory is enabled, issues in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart game with ray tracing and Dynamic Resolution Scaling enabled on some AMD graphics cards, issues in Starcraft II on Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs, corruption issues in Rocket League with Bloom set to off on certain AMD graphics cards, and performance drop on Radeon 700M series GPUs in various games.

Unfortunately, AMD still has not fixed issues with Baldur's Gate 3 with DirectX 11 API on Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards. AMD also included an important notes section stating that the factory reset is still temporarily disabled as a precautionary measure due to isolated installation issues during PC upgrades, and AMD Cleanup Utility can be used as a temporary option.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 23.8.1 WHQL

We visited Blizzard's floor space at Gamescom 2018, and what a space it was. Easily one of the more expansive areas, Blizzard outdid themselves with their multiple staging areas for the multitude of their developed - or in permanent development - games. Naturally, the crown jewel of Blizzard's space was World of Warcraft, but Overwatch stood just beside it, as if a wayward child trying to look over its ancestors' shoulder.

Blizzard, best known for their Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo series (who are also responsible for that phenomenon World of Warcraft), has recently announced they are going to cut back support for older Windows-based operating systems. Resource allocation is a real problem; the opportunity cost of having engineers working on ensuring that their most recent updates and recent remasters aren't breaking support for older operating systems always comes at the cost of work on newer OSes.

As such, in a blog post on their forums, Blizzard has announced that starting in October of this year, "we will begin the process of ending support for Windows XP and Windows Vista in World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm." They went on to explain this decision, in that "Microsoft ceased mainstream support for these versions of Windows in 2009 and 2012, respectively, but since a decent portion of our audience was still using them at the time, we continued supporting them. However, there have been three major Windows releases since Vista, and at this point, the vast majority of our audience has upgraded to one of the newer versions." And if you're thinking that this isn't true end of life for these systems when it comes to Blizzard game support, think again: "The games will not run on these older operating systems once they are no longer supported, so we encourage any players who are still using one of the older OSes to upgrade to a newer version. We'll be rolling out this change on a staggered schedule, and will post further notices as we get closer to making the change for each game."

Blizzard announced that support for several of its popular titles in Windows XP and Vista will be ending later this year. These titles include World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm.

Dropping support for these platforms makes sense from an economic standpoint. As a platform ages, it becomes increasingly hard to make software work with it without making it difficult to support modern technology and features. Windows XP in particular doesn't support above DirectX 9, severely limiting the abilities of a developer wishing to take advantage of modern graphics and effects. Vista, on the other hand, supports up to DirectX 11, but has such limited market share as to make it statistically irrelevant (XP market share hovers at slightly less than 10%, while Vista market share doesn't even register, according to netmarketshare.com).Source: HardOCP

RTS giant Blizzard let loose a few new teaser screens of its much anticipated title, Starcraft II, sourced by SK Gaming. The screens include stills of ongoing campaigns demonstrating the visuals and graphic design of the game. One of those hype building measures from a company that has so far stood and delivered to all its hype. Starcraft II is on course for launch later this year. Enjoy the screens. A larger archive of Starcraft II images sourced from Blizzard so far can be found here.