Developer Grinding Gear Games has revealed its plans for the first major update that will be coming to Path of Exile 2. As part of the update, Path of Exile 2 will be getting a host of quality-of-life features, including changes to some of the more challenging aspects of endgame content, as well as more variety of maps that players can clear out.According to PCGamer, in an interview with Twitch streamers Darth Microtransaction and GhazzyTV after the announcement, director Jonathan Rogers spoke about its decisions with the planned update, including how it will make potentially lethal on-screen effects more visible to players in the chaos of endgame maps. Rogers did, however, reiterate that the studio still wants deaths in the game to be a notable setback.One of the topics of this discussion is the fact that players only get one chance to clear a map for every Waystone they use. Breaking from the original Path of Exile, which allowed players 6 attempts, a single death in a Path of Exile 2 maps means that players will have to start that map from scratch.We did discuss quite a lot about whether we wanted to go back on one portal or not, said Rogers, referring to the number of portals that open up whenever a player activates a map. I think it comes down to the fact that it would just not feel the same. The whole death actually mattering thing is actually important.It is worth noting that one of the big changes in the upcoming update is that one of the Pinnacle bosses in the game, The Arbiter of Ash, will allow players 6 attempts before failing from death. This is due to the fact that accessing Pinnacle boss fights tends to require quite a bit of work in preparation, taking tens of hours to get the keys necessary to unlock the fight to begin with. A single death essentially undoes all of that progress.We were talking about the pinnacle boss and the discussion came up should we allow portals everywhere, should we be allowing checkpoints everywhere and we ultimately decided we really dont want to go that way if possible, explained Rogers. So first of all we try out this pinnacle stuff, make sure its something where you have true economic value you have to preserve: It takes time to get there and that matters.Rogers also mentioned that some level of failure are integral to how Path of Exile 2 was designed, since players wont fail in the same way Im not really a fan, I much prefer the whole one death thing.He went on to talk about the XP penalty that players face for dying in endame content, stating that the studio sees the penalty as a way to teach players that they might not be ready to take on the challenges theyre dying to as of yet. But maybe thats the wrong way of looking at it, he said.Further in the interview, developer Mark Roberts also spoke about how the harsh penalties for death would be better appreciated if the games ratio of risk and reward were more appropriate. Rogers admitted that, in the current state of Path of Exile 2, that balance might be off.Right now there are too many penalty axes, so if youre dying all the time, youre not gonna get materials, and thus youre not going to go anywhere and also an ad insult to injury thing [XP penalty] where youre just not levelling, said Roberts.I think theyre just a bit too severe when all combined together, and I also think that the very start of maps is just too difficult, I think we should ease into that a little bit, bring that down a bit then ramp the difficulty up, he explained.Rogers also spoke about how the ability to retry maps with fewer penalties would also lead to issues to the in-game player-driven economy, since players would start intentionally dying in order to farm gear and materials that they could then sell to other players.It would be nice if you could just spin another map and still be able to do that content, he said. But unfortunately we cant do that because it would open up too many economic abuse things, where like you fail the map intentionally because you want to farm the items in the rest of the area. So its very difficult for us to come up with a solution because I really would prefer that, honestly, if you could re-do a map without having all the problems that being able to re-run a map would actually cause.Roberts caps off the interview by stating that, while the studio was aware that players would complain about a single-death ending their map run, the studio was prepare, and there havent yet been better solutions to the problem discovered.But yeah, its a bit tricky, it certainly is the case weve discussed it so many times before [PoE2] came out we knew people are definitely gonna complain about this and we know and we havent found a solution, said Roberts.Path of Exile 2 is currently available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The game, currently available through Early Access that requires players to buy in, will eventually be free-to-play when it officially launches. In the mean time, Grinding Gear Games is all set to release this major update to the game later this week. Stay tuned for more details and complete patch notes.

Photo credit: SSACThe Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada (SSAC) has issued a call for papers for its 50th annual conference.The conference, which will be held from May 27 to 30, 2025, will return to the place it began in 1974: Ottawa, and hosted by Carleton University and Library and Archives Canada.The national capital is particularly well suited to celebrate this milestone in the Societys history. Situated on the traditional, unceded territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin people, Ottawa lies at the crossroads of the two original colonies that formed the United Province of Canada (established 1841), and was designated as the capital in 1857, reads the SSACs website.Ottawa, the Outaouais and the surrounding region remain a vibrant, diverse and dynamic blend of peoples and places.The SSAC supports inclusive dialogue as well as encourages perspectives that illuminate the influence and experience of gender- and sexually diverse, BIPOC, and disabled communities. SSAC also welcomes and encourages co-submissions by established and emerging scholars.The deadline for paper abstracts is January 31, 2025. Presenters must be members of the SSAC on the day of the conference.To propose a paper, clickhere.The post SSAC calls for papers for 50th Annual Conference appeared first on Canadian Architect.

LangChains founder Harrison Chase is looking to advance agentic AI with the concept of ambient agents, which might well be the next step on the path to generalized intelligence.Read More

Microsoft to lay off unknown number of staffEmployees across gaming, security, and sales divisions affected News by Sophie McEvoy Staff Writer Published on Jan. 15, 2025 Microsoft has announced another round of layoffs, affecting staff in its gaming, security, and sales divisions.As reported by Business Insider, a spokesperson for the firm said these cuts would affect a small number of employees but did not specify how many would be made redundant.They also specified that these layoffs were unrelated to the cuts announced last week that focused on underperforming workers."At Microsoft we focus on high-performance talent," the spokesperson said (via CNBC). "We are always working on helping people learn and grow. When people are not performing, we take appropriate action."Last year, Microsoft cut 1,900 employees from its game division, followed by another round in September 2024 affecting 650 workers.

Chris Kerr, News EditorJanuary 15, 20252 Min ReadHeadshot via MetaAt a GlanceMeta is laying off even more workers after previously cutting 21,000 roles across 2022 and 2023.Reality Labs and Facebook owner Meta intends to cut around 5 percent of its global workforce to "move out low performers faster."As first reported by Bloomberg, an internal memo penned by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg informed staff the company will be pursuing "more extensive performance-based cuts this cycle."Zuckerberg said he wants to "raise the bar on performance management" ahead of an "intense year."The full memo was later obtained by CNBC and claims Meta is currently working on "some of the most important technologies of the world.""Meta is working on building some of the most important technologies of the world. AI, glasses as the next computing platform and the future of social media. This is going to be an intense year, and I want to make sure we have the best people on our teams," wrote Zuckerberg."I've decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low performers faster. We typically manage out people who arent meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now were going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle, with the intention of back filling these roles in 2025."We wont manage out everyone who didnt meet expectations for the last period if were optimistic about their future performance, and for those we do let go, well provide generous severance in line with what we provided with previous cuts."Meta said people impacted by the cuts will be notified on February 10, 2025, if they reside in the United States. Employees based elsewhere will find out later.This is the third round of major layoffs at Meta in recent years. The company slashed 11,000 jobs in 2022 before cutting another 10,000 roles in 2023.The company formerly known as Facebook is attempting to reposition itself as a metaverse pioneer, but has lately become something of a low performer itself under the stewardship of Zuckerberg.Meta's stumbling Reality Labs division, which houses many of its metaverse initiatives including the Quest headset business, lost $4.4 billion during the last quarter.It's an eye-watering loss that has become normalized within Meta. The division reported full-year losses of $16.1 billion and $13.7 billion across 2023 and 2022, respectively. Meta execs expect that trend to continue for the foreseeable future.Read more about:[Company] MetaLayoffsAbout the AuthorChris KerrNews Editor, GameDeveloper.comGame Developer news editor Chris Kerr is an award-winning journalist and reporter with over a decade of experience in the game industry. His byline has appeared in notable print and digital publications including Edge, Stuff, Wireframe, International Business Times, andPocketGamer.biz. Throughout his career, Chris has covered major industry events including GDC, PAX Australia, Gamescom, Paris Games Week, and Develop Brighton. He has featured on the judging panel at The Develop Star Awards on multiple occasions and appeared on BBC Radio 5 Live to discuss breaking news.See more from Chris KerrDaily news, dev blogs, and stories from Game Developer straight to your inboxStay UpdatedYou May Also Like

What a thrill... Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater Funko Pops are officially up for preorder. There are two figures currently available, one of Naked Snake and the other of The Boss, with price tags of $12.99 a piece. You won't have to wait too long to add them into your collectible collection either as they're set to release on March 25 this year. Head to the links below to get your preorders in today.Preorder Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater Funko Pops, Out March 25Out March 25, 2025 Funko Pop! Games: Metal Gear - Naked Snake$12.99 at AmazonOut March 25, 2025 Funko Pop! Games: Metal Gear - The Boss$12.99 at AmazonAs for when the game itself is coming out, it's still unannounced. You can check out our Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater preorder guide for all the info about what comes in each edition, though. Generally, Funko Pops come out around the release of the main game/movie/show/etc.Alongside preorders for new gaming items, the year has started off strong with an excellent variety of video game deals as well. Best Buy, in particular, has a major sale going on at the moment on a variety of games for PS5, Xbox Series X, and Nintendo Switch. This includes Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Sonic X Shadow Generations, and quite a few more that are worth having a look at if you've been hoping to expand your physical game collection.To see even more of the best deals available at the moment, check out our individual roundups of the best PlayStation deals, the best Nintendo Switch deals, and the best Xbox deals. For an overall look of the best gaming deals available right now across each platform, our roundup of the best video game deals will point you in the direction of some of our favorites.Another great place to look for gaming deals is our Daily Deals roundup. There, we gather up some of the best offers across games and tech that have caught our eye recently. At the moment, some of our favorites include a discount on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora for Xbox Series X and a deal on an M2 MacBook Air.Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.

Yesterday, Apple TV+ had a fun marketing pop-up at Grand Central Terminal to celebrate Severances return. It turns out, Silo had its own unique marketing appearance too as a way to mark the coming season 2 finale.Apple shakes up TV+ marketing for Silos finaleSeason 2 of Silo is concluding this Friday, the same day that Severance season 2 kicks off.The coming Silo finale made a perfect occasion for Apples marketing team to have some fun.A suited Silo character was sent to an NBA game, where they sat inside a crowded stadium to watch the Dallas Mavericks.The Mavericks X account shared a video of the Silo appearance, which was reposted by the official Apple TV account.While not quite on the same scale as what Apple did with Severance at Grand Central, sending a suited Silo character to something random like an NBA game still shows Apples marketing team thinking outside the box and having fun.New marketing tactics could be what Apple TV+ needsDespite significant financial investment and over five years on the market, Apple TV+ continues struggling to make much of a cultural impact. Ted Lasso was a big hit, but most TV+ seriesincluding some of the very bestarent so lucky. Often, critically praised series come and go without making much of a blip on the radar of pop culture.Apple has never released TV+ subscriber numbers, but the service is largely seen as underperforming in customer adoption, despite having a strong reputation for its content.Maybe more unique marketing moves like weve seen this week can start to shift that trend.What do you think of Apples latest marketing attempts? Want to see more efforts like this? Let us know in the comments.Best Apple TV and Home accessoriesAdd 9to5Mac to your Google News feed. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.Youre reading 9to5Mac experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Dont know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Nothing to seed here. Laser FocusYears after blaming California wildfires on "Jewish space lasers," big-brained congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is complaining about the government not being able to control the most recent blazes using weather control technology that she seems to conjure up from her imagination."Why dont they use geoengineering like cloud seeding to bring rain down on the wildfires in California?" the Georgia Republican wrote in a post on X-formerly-Twitter. "They know how to do it."While it's unclear exactly which "they" the QAnon-supporting congresswoman is referring to, you could easily wager a guess based on the absolutely deranged things she's said in the past about immigrants, Jews, and Muslims.Beyond claiming that a secret cabal of powerful Jewish families orchestrated California's 2018 blazes in tandem with Pacific Gas & Electric, Greene was also censured by the House Ethics Committee in 2021 for "repeatedly [fanning] the flames of racism, antisemitism, LGBTQ hate speech, Islamophobia, anti-Asian hate, xenophobia, and other forms of hatred."Strangely enough, the bigoted Georgian also suggested last year that the United States use "space lasers" to keep out undocumented immigrants. The woman can't decide, apparently, whether such lasers are good or bad or maybe it's a "lasers for me but not for thee"-type situation.Clear SkiesWhatever the case may be, Greene is now promoting a different side of the government weather control conspiracy theory: that dubious technologies like cloud-seeding are able to radically change the weather, making it do whatever the people in charge want it to do.The reality, of course, is nowhere near that simple."Cloud seeding adds small particles to the atmosphere to attempt to promote rainfall, but to form clouds and rain you need enough water in the atmosphere," John Marsham, an atmospheric scientist at England's University of Leeds, toldNewsweek. "The fires in California are due to the ongoing drought; there simply isn't enough water in the air. Cloud seeding would be useless."These nascent technologies, which have drawn both optimism and scrutiny, have achieved patchy results at best over decades of experimentation. Moreover, as University of Reading atmospheric scientist Maarten Ambaum told the magazine, there's no indication that they'd even be helpful in Los Angeles."Cloud seeding is unlikely to be applicable to help wildfires, even if suitable clouds were present at the right location," Ambaum toldNewsweek. "Cloud seeding in clouds over wildfires is likely ineffective and possibly dangerous to the pilots of the seeding aircraft."The community note on the X post where she made her idiotic dogwhistle of a suggestion put it even better."If there are no clouds," the note reads, "there is nothing to seed."More on weather conspiracy theories: Congressman Asks FEMA Head If Shes Controlling Weather, Sending Hurricanes to Trump Voters HomesShare This Article

Jan 15, 2025Ravie LakshmananVulnerability / Software UpdateAs many as six security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the popular Rsync file-synchronizing tool for Unix systems, some of which could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on a client."Attackers can take control of a malicious server and read/write arbitrary files of any connected client," the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) said in an advisory. "Sensitive data, such as SSH keys, can be extracted, and malicious code can be executed by overwriting files such as ~/.bashrc or ~/.popt."The shortcomings, which comprise heap-buffer overflow, information disclosure, file leak, external directory file-write, and symbolic-link race condition, are listed below -CVE-2024-12084 (CVSS score: 9.8) - Heap-buffer overflow in Rsync due to improper checksum length handlingCVE-2024-12085 (CVSS score: 7.5) - Information leak via uninitialized stack contentsCVE-2024-12086 (CVSS score: 6.1) - Rsync server leaks arbitrary client filesCVE-2024-12087 (CVSS score: 6.5) - Path traversal vulnerability in RsyncCVE-2024-12088 (CVSS score: 6.5) - --safe-links option bypass leads to path traversalCVE-2024-12747 (CVSS score: 5.6) - Race condition in Rsync when handling symbolic linksSimon Scannell, Pedro Gallegos, and Jasiel Spelman from Google Cloud Vulnerability Research have been credited with discovering and reporting the first five flaws. Security researcher Aleksei Gorban has been acknowledged for the symbolic-link race condition flaw."In the most severe CVE, an attacker only requires anonymous read access to a Rsync server, such as a public mirror, to execute arbitrary code on the machine the server is running on," Red Hat Product Security's Nick Tait said.CERT/CC also noted that an attacker could combine CVE-2024-12084 and CVE-2024-12085 to achieve arbitrary code execution on a client that has a Rsync server running.Patches for the vulnerabilities have been released in Rsync version 3.4.0, which was made available earlier today. For users who are unable to apply the update, the following mitigations are recommended -CVE-2024-12084 - Disable SHA* support by compiling with CFLAGS=-DDISABLE_SHA512_DIGEST and CFLAGS=-DDISABLE_SHA256_DIGESTCVE-2024-12085 - Compile with -ftrivial-auto-var-init=zero to zero the stack contentsFound this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.SHARE

Anthony Russo initially turned down the idea of directing Avengers: Secret Wars.The filmmaker is returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universewith his directing brother Joe Russo and screenwriter Steven McFeely for Avengers: Doomsday and its sequel Avengers: Secret Wars, though Joe has revealed Anthony initially wasnt a fan of the idea of helming the follow-up blockbuster.Joe told Empire Magazine: There were ideas that we were trying to wrap our heads around that preceded this one, and we just never found the story.I remember calling Steve and said, Hey, crazy idea. What do you think if we all go back and do Secret Wars?[Anthony] was like, F no. Absolutely not. And then you hung up. And the next morning at 7:30 you called and were like, Alright, I have an idea.Anthony added he and Joe stumbled upon an idea that got the wheels turning on Secret Wars.He explained: Really what happened was, we ended up stumbling upon an idea that activated all of us ... You couldnt see it coming until it came, and once it came it was like, Well, thats a story we need to tell.Anthony and Joe Russo - July 2022 - Famous - The Gray Man ScreeningAnthony and Joe Russo - July 2022 - Famous - The Gray Man Screeningloading...READ MORE: Every Marvel Cinematic Universe Movie, Ranked From Worst to BestThe directing siblings started their MCU journey in 2014 with Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and went on to helm its sequel Captain America: Civil War, as well as Avengers: Infinity War before exiting the franchise following 2019s Avengers: Endgame and they werent planning to return to the series for the upcoming projects.Anthony Russo noted: Endgame was the end, and it took a little time for us to begin to think about it as something other than an end.The moviemaking pair had remained in contact with Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and franchise executive producer Louis DEsposito, and had discussed a lot of ideas for potential films.Anthony Russo continued: Were very close with Kevin and Lou and the entire Marvel team and weve had conversations through the years. Weve talked about a lot of ideas.Avengers: Doomsday will reintroduce Robert Downey Jr., who had fronted the MCU as Iron Man until the characters heroic sacrifice in Endgame, as the dreaded Doctor Doom, while the new Avengers are forced to do all they can from allowing the villain from enacting his sinister plans.Meanwhile, it was previously confirmed Anthony Mackies Captain America, Tom Hollands Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four team, consisting of Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) and The Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), would all be returning for Doomsday.As for other stars, it has also been rumored that former Captain America actor Chris Evans and Ana de Armas were both lined up for roles in the 2026 blockbuster, though their supposed parts in the film are currently unknown.The Best Marvel Movies Not Made By Marvel Studios