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The latest version of ChatGPT will talk to you. It sounds eerily similar to a human being, too. That’s swiftly become a problem for the company behind it, OpenAI, which has announced it will be removing one of ChatGPT’s voices for sounding too similar to Hollywood actor Scarlett Johansson.

“We are working to pause the use of Sky,” OpenAI said in a post on X. 

The company has also published a blog post on how it created the voices for the chatbot’s Voice Mode. It includes the key characteristics it was aiming for with each of the five voices used in the program, which include a sense of timelessness, being approachable, and being easy to listen to. And yet the voice assistant feature still makes for awkward watching. 

The post says that professional voice actors were used for each of the voices: Breeze, Cover, Ember, Juniper, and Sky.

Also mentioned is how OpenAI believes “AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity’s distinctive voice.”

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When Helldivers 2 came out in February, Sony decided to try something different. It let developer Arrowhead Game Studios launch the PlayStation-published co-op shooter on both PS5 and PC on day one, instead of the publisher’s usual tactic of making PC ports three to four years after the PlayStation version.

Helldivers 2 enjoying three straight months (and counting) as a Steam top seller suggests Sony’s first simultaneous launch was a huge success, but until now, we didn’t know how Helldivers 2’s PC version compared to the PS5.

Turns out, in terms of money coming in, Helldivers 2 is bigger on PC in the US. That’s according to industry analyst Mat Piscatella at Circana (formerly NPD group), who shared some insights on Twitter from official sales information provided by Sony.

“PC has been a huge part of the success of Helldivers 2 in the US,” Piscatella wrote. “With PC, Helldivers II is already the 7th highest grossing Sony published game in history. Without PC it wou…

Well, well, well. It looks like Cyberpunk 2077 is finally about to come full circle. 

When it launched in 2020 it was utterly baffling that you couldn’t alter your character’s appearance after creating them—you couldn’t even change your hair style or nail polish once you started playing. The reason, we discovered soon after launch, was that the game wasn’t finished, and it would take until the huge 1.5 update in 2022 for CD Projekt to add the feature to Cyberpunk 2077 that finally let you change your appearance.

And in September’s Cyberpunk 2077’s expansion, Phantom Liberty, you’ll be able to change your appearance on the fly, thanks to some interesting new cyberware. At the Xbox Games Showcase Extended today, Paweł Sasko, quest director, gave us a little look at the expansion’s new location, Dogtown, and mentioned some of the new cyberware you’ll be able to buy on the black market.

“Like the air-dash, or the ability to see enemies through the walls…

They’ve been an awfully long time coming. But AMD finally has some new GPUs to take on Nvidia in the meat of the mid-range gaming graphics card market. We give you the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT and the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT. Both GPUs will be available from September 6th for $449 and $499 respectively which is both better and worse than we were expecting.

Well, we say mid-range. These days “mid-range” means an awful lot of money. But hold that thought while we deal with the speeds and feeds of these important new GPUs.

Ultimately, the 7700 XT and 7800 XT are very much in line with the expectations generated by the incessant rumour mill. So, both are based on AMD’s new Navi 32 GPU. Like the Navi 31 monster in the Radeon RX 7900 models, Navi 32 is a chiplet design with a main GCD die containing all the shaders and clever stuff which is surrounded by smaller MCDs with the memory controllers and cache.

Navi 32’s GCD is inevitably smaller than that of Navi 31. And it likewi…

In a recent interview, Star Wars: Outlaws game director Mathias Karlson and narrative director Navid Khavari sat down with GameSpot to dish out some more details on the upcoming open world Star Wars game. They give the impression of new character Kay Vess as an up-and-coming, Han Solo-style character diving into the galaxy’s underworld at one of the darkest points in the movie timeline.

If Vess’ snappy space jacket, quirky nonhuman companion, and chunky junker of a starship didn’t clue you in, Outlaws is trying to be the Star Wars scoundrel game, much like how 1313 (RIP) was supposed to be the definitive bounty hunter send-up. “We got excited about this ‘scoundrel fantasy,'” Khavari told Gamespot. “And when you think of scoundrels and what era this could fit in between, well, in Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, there’s this civil war consuming the galaxy.

“To enter into the underworld within that window felt like a perfect starting point for someone l…

For one Starfield modder, every short animation of your ship landing and departing from planets that you’re forced to watch is time you could’ve spent actually playing the game. So, they cut out every transitional space travel scene to please all the players who are tired of seeing them every time you want to travel somewhere new.

Ship Skip is a mod that makes Starfield’s space travel a little more honest. It deletes the short animations where you see your ship dock, undock, land, or takeoff and skips right to the loading screen. It effectively transforms Starfield into the “series of loading screens” experience that people jokingly described it as when they found out you can’t actually land your ship manually.

It works as intended for both the Steam and Windows Store versions of Starfield. Installation is fairly simple, but you should know going in that it has some bugs the developer is currently working on squishing. When you board enemy ships, you can get stuck in an …

The Crew is being taken off the streets: Ubisoft announced today that sales of its online racing game have been halted on all storefronts, and it will no longer be playable on any platform after March 31, 2024.

“We understand this may be disappointing for players still enjoying the game, but it has become a necessity due to upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints,” Ubisoft said. “Decommissioning a game, and especially our first one, is not something we take lightly. 

“Our goal remains to provide the best action driving gameplay experience for players and to deliver on it, we are continuing to provide new content and support for The Crew 2 and the recently launched The Crew Motorfest.”

It is disappointing, and also an indictment of a system in which server-dependent games suddenly become memories once a studio decides to pull the plug. The Crew is a multiplayer-focused game but it offers a singleplayer campaign, which by definition is something…

Star Citizen has just updated its minimum system requirements and they appear rather easy-going: a quad-core CPU of unspecified age, a GPU with 4GB of VRAM, and 16GB of system memory. Many modern systems quite happily conform to that specification, especially with the developers noting a few examples of graphics cards that meet the requirement, including the GTX 1060, RX 460, and Arc A380. 

That’s the absolute bare minimum hardware required to run the game, as per the developers (via KitGuru). Though you probably won’t get far even if you do meet them. Take a look at the Star Citizen subreddit and recent threads would suggest anyone with a similar specification PC may run into some performance issues. In a thread noting the need for updated system requirements, you’ll find multiple mentions of how 32GB of speedy RAM is much more a requirement to enjoy the game with a modicum of performance than anything else.

The Star Citizen developers have addressed that with the …

Australian director George Miller has recently been on the circuit promoting Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which releases tomorrow, and someone called Hideo Kojima has done a good job inserting himself into the story. The videogame director has a long-held obsession for Miller’s works, and after attending an early screening of Furiosa delivered the extremely measured verdict that George Miller “is my God, and the saga that he tells is my Bible.”

Kojima also made the effort to travel to Cannes for the film’s premier, where Miller was collared by Gaming Bible and asked about his interest in making videogames based on the new film.

“Well we did have a videogame made when we did Fury Road,” said Miller. “We’ve been asked many many times to do one. It wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be, it wasn’t in our hands, we gave all our material to a company to do it… but I’m one of those people that i’d rather not do something unless you can do it at the highest level, or at …

Check out our helpful Wordle tips below, or scroll on down for a link to our guide, if you’d like to learn how to polish up your daily guesses. Need a little more help? You’ve got it. There’s a clue for today’s Wordle on this very page, and the answer for the November 1 (865) puzzle is only a click away.

I was certain my next guess was going to be a winner three times today, although the first two of those turned out to be wrong in different ways. That was a fun game, though it felt like I was following a trail of letter-shaped breadcrumbs to the answer, even if it did end up longer than I would have liked it to be.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, November 1

Technically, today’s answer can refer to any sort of sound, although this word is generally reserved for irritating, unpleasant, or overly loud ones. Imagine a dog that won’t stop barking, or an inconsiderate neighbour blasting out music at 2am. 

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SAG-AFTRA, the union representing actors, broadcast journalists, hosts, voice actors, and other media professionals in the US, has voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike against videogame companies including Activision, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, and Take-Two Interactive. The vote does not mean that a strike will be called, but the union hopes it will provide “added leverage” in its negotiations for a new Interactive Media Agreement.

The terms of the current Interactive Media Agreement were reached in 2017 following a nearly year-long strike by voice actors. That deal was set to expire in 2020, but was eventually extended until November 2022. 

Negotiations for an updated agreement have been underway since October 2022, but SAG-AFTRA said signatory game companies “have refused to offer acceptable terms on some of the issues most critical to our members, including wages that keep up with inflation, protections around exploitative uses of artificial intelligence,…

Knights of the Old Republic is one of Bioware’s most beloved RPGs—a game that capitalised on the promise of the Star Wars extended universe in so many inventive ways that it spawned an entire fandom dedicated to that slice of a galaxy far, far away. So when a remake was announced in—god—2021, we were all pretty excited. Then it was consigned to the inferno of development hell. 

In July of 2022 it surfaced that the remake was possibly delayed. No, wait, it was actually shifted to another studio. Then radio silence followed, so much in fact that the CEO of Embracer Group—the giant monolith that had also flubbed a $2 billion deal and would later lay off over a thousand people, kill a Deus Ex sequel, and sell off studios to keep the lights on—outright refused to talk about it. But don’t worry, it’s totally not dead—Saber Interactive is still working on it, wait, no, Embracer’s selling Saber Interactive off now. I want to get off Lars Wingef…

You’re now just one click away from winning the December 27 (921) Wordle—the answer’s ready and waiting if you need it. You’re also in the right place if you’re after a tailor-made clue for today’s game too, if you’d like a bit of help without being handed the solution on a plate. Whatever Wordle support you need, we’ve got it.

I soon found myself staring at (almost) all the right letters in all the wrong places after two guesses this morning, which usually means I’m either in for a very long game of “Where the heck does this go?” or I’m just one more attempt away from a win. Luckily for me, today’s Wordle was the latter. Hopefully tomorrow’s game will be just as simple—hopefully.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, December 27

The word you need to find today is a type of flower, the most common type having white petals and a bright yellow centre. If something is a fresh as one of these, it’s full of energy and…