Neverwinter Nights was made by the studio that produced seminal RPGs Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. It sold well and was critically acclaimed at launch. Yet, somehow, it has not been canonized in most gamers' minds over the decades the same way the games that came before and after it were.
Nonetheless, more than two decades later, it still has a tight-knit and surprisingly active community that none of those other games can rival. I think that's partly because it was a completely different beast.
A new bill proposed by Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) aims to establish new regulations that would ensure that "buying a video game would give the consumer ownership of the game rather than a license to play it," including assurances that they can continue to access the games for years after they are released.
The announcement names NBA 2K25 as an example of the problem the bill aims to solve; that game launched on September 6, 2025, but is scheduled to become unplayable on December 31 due to server shutdowns. The bill, which is called the Power to Players Act, directs the FTC to take action to prevent outcomes like that in the future.
Epic Games is shifting to an "AI first" development strategy for its collaboration with the Walt Disney Company, letting AI models write all the code and guide all the artwork for an upcoming shooter. That's according to a Bloomberg report, which cites unnamed people familiar with the project who commented on the significant pivot in internal development at the Unreal Engine maker.
Human developers will be tasked with managing and guiding code and art assets generated by models such as Anthropic's Claude, according to internal Epic employee messages viewed by Bloomberg. That means "no more hand-written code" and art assets "generated with full AI workflows," according to the report.
The $1.5 billion collaboration between Epic and Disney, announced in early 2024, was slated to release a Marvel- and Star Wars-themed shooter in March 2027. That project has now been delayed indefinitely amid the AI-related shakeup and understaffed, slower-than-expected development thus far, according to the report.
Just over 10 years after its initial release, space exploration and survival crafting game No Man's Sky is making its way to the iPhone and iPad, Apple and developer Hello Games announced today.
It will run on devices as far back as the iPhone 11 and the third-generation iPad Air. No Man's Sky might not have the most cutting-edge AAA graphics (though they're still strong, and they've come a long way since launch via updates), but the game's uncommon method of generating galaxies of incomprehensible scale on-device, and consistently for all players from a single-seed, happening on a phone is remarkable for those of us who remember phones performing far behind consoles or desktop PCs.
Deep Blue took down Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go in 2016, and poker bots have been beating professionals for years. But one classic game called Stratego held out. Even DeepMind, with its exceptional budget, couldn't build a machine that reliably beat the best human players.
Now, a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, New York University, and Stanford University has done it. Their AI, called Ataraxos, beat Pim Niemeijer, arguably the best Stratego player of all time, 15 games to one, with four draws. And it took just 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars to train it.
Hidden armies
In Stratego, each player gets 40 pieces representing military ranks, from a marshal down to a spy, plus bombs and a flag. You win by capturing the opponent's flag. Your opponent knows where your pieces are, but not what they are. Identities are revealed only when two pieces collide in battle—the weaker one is removed, and the identity of the winner is revealed. That makes Stratego an imperfect-information game, just like poker, which computers cracked years ago. “There's something super distinctive about Stratego, which is that it is a massive amount of hidden information that unfolds over a very long time scale,” said Eugene Vinitsky, a researcher at NYU and co-author of the study.
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