Today, Ubisoft announced that Judgment of Atlantis, the final episode of the post-launch story arc of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey: The Fate of Atlantis, is now available on the PlayStation®4 computer entertainment system, the Xbox One family of devices including Xbox One X and Windows PC.

Watch the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey: Judgment of Atlantis Gameplay Preview Trailer HERE.

Judgment of Atlantis takes players to the legendary world of Atlantis, a gorgeous landscape of architectural wonders, and a playground for Isu knowledge and power. As the last trial to master the Staff of Hermes, players must make the hardest decisions yet in a world where humans and Isu coexist. In this often unstable world, Poseidon, ruler of Atlantis, tries to maintain balance and hopes that our hero, dubbed the Dikastes, will bring harmony to his kingdom.

Each of the episodes of The Fate of Atlantis introduced new ability enhancements related to different branches of the skill tree – Hunter, Warrior and Assassin. In this third episode, players will discover three new ability enhancements, including:

• Ares Wrath (Warrior branch of the skill tree) – an enhancement to the Ring of Chaos ability. Players smash the ground with the Broken Spear to create a large area where all enemies inside slow down and take damage after a few seconds.
• Blessing of Kronos (Assassin branch) – an enhancement to the Venomous Attacks ability. Player’s receive the Isu Power for a limited amount of time, giving immunity to Isu effects, such as Adrenalin Freeze and Adrenalin Drain.
• Kronos’ Punishment (Assassin branch) – an enhancement to the Call to Arms ability. Create a replica of our hero that performs a stealth attack on the target, so players can assassinate enemies without exposing themselves when there are many enemies close together.

In order to play Judgment of Atlantis, players must complete the previous episodes from The Fate of Atlantis in addition to the below:

• Following the main game, players will have to complete the questline Between Two Worlds, the mythological main game story arc and the Lost Tales of Greece questline Heir of Memories that is available after completing the former questline. Finally, they must have reached character level 28 or above.
• For players who have not completed the main game, a shortcut was developed allowing them to enter Greece at level 52 with all their preset abilities and resources, so they can access Heir of Memories to start their adventure into the afterlife. However, player progression using the shortcut will not carry over to the main game save, and they will not be able to obtain achievements.

The Assassin’s Creed Odyssey post-launch plan has been the biggest and most ambitious in the franchise, and season pass owners have access to two major episodic storylines, Legacy of the First Blade and The Fate of Atlantis. The season pass also includes Assassin’s Creed® III Remastered and Assassin’s Creed® Liberation Remastered, which released for the PlayStation®4 computer entertainment system, the Xbox One family of devices including Xbox One X and Windows PC. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey players will continue to access to free content including the story-focused episodic Lost tales of Greece as well as daily and weekly in-game events.

For more information on Assassin’s Creed, please visit assassinscreed.com.

By E. Fylladitakis @ AnandTech

Kinesis is a computer peripherals manufacturer solely focused on the design and manufacture of ergonomic input devices. They were one of the first companies in the field, with their earliest ergonomic products released nearly three decades ago. That makes Kinesis one of the oldest peripherals manufacturers, with the brand establishing a solid number of followers over the years.

Until recently, Kinesis designed and released products exclusively targeted towards professionals that work long hours in front of a computer. Despite their peculiar appearance and the narrow target group, virtually every one of their products has been a memorable success. Last year Kinesis took a huge leap of faith and started a crowdfunding campaign for an ergonomic mechanical gaming keyboard, giving birth to the Freestyle Edge, the world’s first ergonomic gaming mechanical keyboard. This summer Kinesis is giving the Freestyle Edge an upgrade via the release of the Freestyle Edge RGB, which we’ll be looking at today.

Read The Review Here

By Hilbert Hagedoorn @ Guru3D

MSI offers something incredibly extreme with this X570 motherboard, meet the MSI MEG X570 Godlike. We check out this piece of hardware loaded with features, in combination with a Ryzen 7 3700X processor, AMD prepped the 570 chipset, that offers a more fine-tuned experience for your Ryzen Generation 3 processor. The new MEG, however, is taking things to an entirely new level. Including PCIe Gen 4.0 and AX Wifi and 10 Gbps Ethernet.

Read The Review Here

Check out these latest hardware announcements for today from around the web. Also included are some hardware news bits, and on some days, a few rumors tossed in for good measure. Click on the links below to read the official press release, visit the products web page, or to an independent news source.

• EK-Velocity Strike CPU Block for Intel and AMD CPUs – The Right Angle of Aesthetics
• Cooler Master Launches the GS750 Multi-Use Desktop Hub
• New Analog Keyboard Switches Promise Lifespan of 1 Billion Presses
• EK Water Blocks Launches EK-Vector Special Edition RX 5700-series Water Block
• HyperX Announces First Wireless Headset Under $100
• BIOSTAR Launches the B365MHC Micro ATX Motherboard
• Kinesis Gaming Rolls Out the Freestyle Edge RGB Split Mechanical Keyboard
• NVIDIA Won’t Launch GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Super
• Thermaltake Announces New Floe DX RGB Series TT Premium Edition CPU Coolers
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super Features 10 Percent Faster Memory
• ID-Cooling Announces IS-50X: 130W, Low Profile CPU Cooler
• Thermaltake Cooling Solutions Back the Latest Powerful Processors
• AMD Offers Free ‘Boot Kit’ for Struggling Ryzen 3000 Owners
• Thermaltake Gaming Announce X-FIT & X-COMFORT Burgundy Red Real Leather Professional Gaming Chairs

The fierce anti-communism of Finland’s Larry Thorne put him on different sides in two wars

By David Kindy @ Vietnam Magazine

U.S. Army Capt. Larry Thorne had just arrived at the Chau Lang Special Forces camp in South Vietnam’s Mekong River Delta in early 1964. The Green Beret, a member of the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), reported for duty, stowed his gear and grabbed binoculars to study the terrain around the base. Thorne noticed something on a nearby hill: a Viet Cong flag blowing in the breeze above the dense tropical jungle. The captain set down his binoculars and called for volunteers to join him on a mission. The men silently crept around enemy positions to reach the VC site, where Thorne ripped down the flag and stuck it in his backpack. He would not allow the enemy to flagrantly display its colors in sight of his base.

That was pure Thorne (pronounced THOR-nee). A warrior in in the classic sense. He lived for battle and prepared endlessly for combat.

Read on…

Source: Blue’s News

Activision offers first details on multiplayer support for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare with the announcement of a two-versus-two mode called Gunfight that will be part of the next installment in the shooter series. This is just the start, as they say this “is only a fraction of the full, online multiplayer experience,” promising a full multiplayer game reveal for August 1st. On a related note, Activision also informs us of a preorder bonus for Modern Warfare that will unlock Captain Price as a playable character in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4′s Blackout mode. Naturally this is coming to PS4 first: “Pre-order any version of Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® and immediately unlock the classic version of Captain Price as a playable character in Blackout! The character will be playable on PlayStation 4 today, with other platforms to follow on July 18.” The Activision Blog has details on Gunfight mode as well as their plans to show off more next month. We also have the following announcement with more:

A new generation of Call of Duty® multiplayer is coming. Mark your calendars for Thursday, August 1, when Activision and Infinity Ward will reveal the multiplayer universe of Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare®. Recently named “Best Online Multiplayer” by Game Critics Awards Best of E3 2019, Modern Warfare multiplayer delivers a game-changing online experience.

As players enlist in the heart-racing Modern Warfare story, multiplayer continues the experience as players head online into the ultimate playground for the global balance of power. Featuring unified progression across modes, Modern Warfare seeks to unite the community with plans to support cross-play across platforms and the removal of the traditional season pass in order to deliver a greater mix of more free maps, content and community events post-launch.

Moments ago, fans got the first glimpse of the game’s new 2 vs. 2 Gunfight mode, which is only a fraction of the full, online multiplayer experience in Modern Warfare. Shown live on Twitch, Gunfight delivers a new level of quick-action, close-quarters duo-based combat that is a blast to play and to watch.

Tune-in August 1st to Twitch.tv/CallofDuty for the full reveal of the Modern Warfare Multiplayer Universe and deep look at gameplay coming to fans at launch. In the meantime, fans can follow latest information on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s multiplayer on @CallofDuty and @InfinityWard on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Free the streets of Paris from Nazi control in both Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot

Bethesda has announced that Wolfenstein: Youngblood & Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot have gone gold. Click here to see the full PC specs for both games, as well as preload details.

In Youngblood you’ll be able to buddy up with another person and play as BJ Blazkowicz’s twin daughters, Jess and Soph, as they fight to find their missing father and kick Nazi ass along the way. Cyberpilot is a standalone VR experience that sees you taking on the role of a Resistance hacker turning the Nazis’ own war machines against them. Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot both launch on July 26. Youngblood will be available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC and Nintendo Switch, and Cyberpilot will launch on PC and PlayStation 4. 

Source: Blue’s News

Valve offers a look at what they’re cooking up by opening up the doors to the Steam Labs. This unveils “experiments,” works in progress which will not necessarily succeed in the long run. The first three of these are: Micro Trailers, the Interactive Recommender, and Automatic Show. Micro Trailers “are six-second looping videos designed to quickly inform viewers about titles on Steam with a presentation that’s easy to skim.” The Automatic Show is a bot-generated entertainment program. Finally the Interactive Recommender is a new recommendation engine. This last one seems to hold the most promise, as they offer a separate news post with extensive details on its operation. Here’s an explanation on how they hope this might improve upon previous ways of generating game recommendations:

Recommendations on Steam
Rather than introducing a big change to the way customized recommendations are determined on Steam, we’re introducing this new recommender as an experiment customers can seek out and try. This will help us get better usage data while avoiding any sudden shifts that we know can be frustrating for customers and developers who are accustomed to Steam. Should the interactive recommender or related experiments prove useful, we’ll share an update before rolling out any big changes to the way Steam recommends titles to people. The data driving Popular, New, and Trending is different from that of the Discovery Queue, this new recommender, and so on. We view this new interactive recommender as one discovery element among many, and look forward to introducing more ways to connect customers with interesting content and developers.

Recommendations and new games
New games in a system such as this one have a chicken-and-egg effect known as the “cold start” problem. The model can’t recommend games that don’t have players yet, because it has no data about them. It can react quite quickly, and when re-trained it picks up on new releases with just a few days of data. That said, it can’t fill the role played by the Discovery Queue in surfacing brand new content, and so we view this tool to be additive to existing mechanisms rather than a replacement for them.

Why it works for short games
The recommender knows that there are great short-form games you can finish in an hour, and those you’ll play for thousands. Your playtime data is normalized to reflect the distribution of playtime in each game, ensuring that all games are on an equal footing.

No need for developer optimization
Sometimes, computer-driven discovery makes creators focus on optimizing for “The Algorithm” rather than customers. You might ask, how is this any different? We designed the recommender to be driven by what players do, not by extrinsic elements like tags or reviews. The best way for a developer to optimize for this model is to make a game that people enjoy playing. While it’s important to supply users with useful information about your game on its store page, you shouldn’t agonize about whether tags or other metadata will affect how a recommendations model sees your game.

The day has come! Today you’ll have the opportunity to get one of the most anticipated strategy games, set in the Ancient Era. Today is Field of Glory: Empires day!

Choose one from among 77 civilizations of that time and be prepared for the greatest challenge ever made: to preserve and to enrich the Culture of your Civilization, making your Legacy stand for centuries.

Field of Glory: Empires is a grand strategy game in which you will have to move in an intricate and living tapestry of nations and tribes, each one with their distinctive culture. Set in Europe and in the Mediterranean Area during the Classical Age, experience what truly means to manage an Empire.

Expand your dominion through wars of conquest and make your culture a beacon of light, but be careful though. The risk of Decadence is not trivial. Many civilizations have collapsed for not having seen in time the signs of impending crisis. The older your empire, the more challenges will lurk in the shadows. Just expanding your borders without carefully shaping your form of government and culture won’t be the wisest of strategies.

Have a look at the tutorial videos recently released!

For you willing to have direct control over specific battles, if you own Field of Glory 2, you can import tactical battles from Empires into FOG2 and vice versa. We have set up a Field of Glory Masters Edition. This edition is a bundle including FOG2 and FOG Empires 25% discounted. This means:

• If you already have FOG2 in your library, you can buy FOG Empires at 25% off, and vice versa
• If you want to buy both, the cumulated price for FOG2 and Fog Empires is 25% discounted

The Masters Edition is available only on Steam. The non-Masters Edition is also available on Steam and at the official Matrix Games Store.

By Bill Gray @ Wargamer

BLUF – Bottom Line Up Front: They nailed it. Slitherine-AGEOD’s new grand strategy game Field of Glory: Empires is here and I think it just set the standard on how challenging is was to be top dog in the days of Rome. I’m talking at least XII Ave’s for not only producing one of the best ancient grand strategy games on the market, but because the designers have also taken the genre one step beyond.

Read The Review Here