There are no plans to release DLC for Baldur's Gate 3, and Larian Studios is already working on its next title, which will not take place in the Dungeons & Dragons universe. Despite that, Jennifer English, the actress for Shadowheart, said that the entire cast would love to return for a sequel, provided that it's worth their time.

Image: Epic Games Lego is building something new in Fortnite. A year after Lego Fortnite launched a new era inside of the game — one based on the idea that Fortnite is a collection of many game experiences, rather than just a battle royale — Lego is expanding its presence with a new title that sounds reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto V roleplaying as well as a rebrand of its core survival game. First up is a game called Brick Life, which is billed as “an all-new social roleplay experience.” Players explore a Lego-ified city location with 31 other people and can take on specific jobs like courier, security guard, or sushi chef. Players can design their own homes and explore locations like a magical school and rooftop club, and there are missions to take on as well. From the sounds of it, Brick Life is a more family-friendly take on the enduring popularity of roleplaying servers in GTA V, and Epic isn’t being all that subtle about the connection: Ah bricks here we go again... pic.twitter.com/1HiNMIbUKX— LEGO Fortnite (@LEGOFortnite) December 8, 2024 Brick Life is launching inside of Fortnite on December 12th, though it won’t be available for players in South Korea. As part of the announcement, Lego Fortnite — the Minecraft-style survival experience that launched last December — is being renamed Lego Fortnite Odyssey. From now on, “Lego Fortnite” will be the name of the hub inside of Fortnite that houses all of the Lego experiences. Epic and Lego have been steadily expanding their partnership over the last year, launching new games and also letting Fortnite players build their own Lego games. The ongoing collaboration between Lego and Fortnite could provide a hint at what to expect from the upcoming “persistent universe” that Epic and Disney are making together, following a $1.5 billion investment from Disney in February. Since then, we’ve heard very little specifics about what the virtual world might look like. Meanwhile, Epic has also announced that Fortnite is getting support for a revamped version of text chat, which will be available as an option across all of its experiences starting on December 10th. There will be three kinds of text chat available: party channel for talking with your squad; game channel for a public conversation with people on the same island; and DMs with people on your friends list. Epic says there will be two kinds of chat filters — one that removes personal information, and another that filters out “various kinds of mature language and toxicity” — which will be always on for players under the age of 13 in all forms of text chat. They will also be always on for all players in the channel chats. The feature will also include a reporting system similar to the voice reporting tool Epic launched last year. Here’s an example of what text chats look like in the game: Image: Epic Games All of these announcements come at a particularly busy time for Fortnite. The battle royale game is currently in the midst of a brand-new chapter that kicked off following an ambitious music-themed season, and Epic also recently brought back the nostalgia-filled Fortnite OG as a permanent mode. Meanwhile, Epic just announced “Ballistic,” a multiplayer first-person shooter mode that launches inside of Fortnite on December 11th.

Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo: Microsoft The company’s new AI chief on working for Microsoft, the OpenAI relationship, and when superintelligence might actually arrive.  Read the full story at The Verge.

Are we here to celebrate the color of the year or the luxury goods produced in its hue? Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman at the UK AI Safety Summit in November 2023. | Photo by Leon Neal / Getty Images Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman disagrees with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s recent claim in a Reddit AMA that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is possible on today’s hardware. While AGI is “plausible,” he tells The Verge’s Nilay Patel in the latest Decoder episode that it could take as long as 10 years to achieve. With current hardware defined by Nilay as “within one or two generations of what we have now, I would say,” Suleyman replied, explaining why he thinks that’s unlikely: I don’t think it can be done on [Nvidia] GB200s. I do think it is going to be plausible at some point in the next two to five generations. I don’t want to say I think it’s a high probability that it’s two years away, but I think within the next five to seven years since each generation takes 18 to 24 months now. So, five generations could be up to 10 years away depending on how things go. “The uncertainty around this is so high,” Suleyman said, “that any categorical declarations just feel sort of ungrounded to me and over the top.” He’s also drawing a line between AGI and the “singularity”: It depends on your definition of AGI, right? AGI isn’t the singularity. The singularity is an exponentially recursive self-improving system that very rapidly accelerates far beyond anything that might look like human intelligence. To me, AGI is a general-purpose learning system that can perform well across all human-level training environments. So, knowledge work, by the way, that includes physical labor. A lot of my skepticism has to do with the progress and the complexity of getting things done in robotics. But yes, I can well imagine that we have a system that can learn — without a great deal of handcrafted prior prompting — to perform well in a very wide range of environments. I think that is not necessarily going to be AGI, nor does that lead to the singularity, but it means that most human knowledge work in the next five to 10 years could likely be performed by one of the AI systems that we develop. And I think the reason why I shy away from the language around singularity or artificial superintelligence is because I think they’re very different things. The challenge with AGI is that it’s become so dramatized that we sort of end up not focusing on the specific capabilities of what the system can do. And that’s what I care about with respect to building AI companions, getting them to be useful to you as a human, work for you as a human, be on your side, in your corner, and on your team. That’s my motivation and that’s what I have control and influence over to try and create systems that are accountable and useful to humans rather than pursuing the theoretical super intelligence quest. Last week, during The New York Times DealBook Summit, Altman set out a lower set of goalposts for AGI than the superintelligence-style phenomenon he’s described in the past. Now, Altman says AGI will arrive “sooner than most people in the world think and it will matter much less.” And when it comes to superintelligence, “a lot of the safety concerns that we and others expressed actually don’t come at the AGI moment. AGI can get built, the world mostly goes on in mostly the same way, things grow faster, but then there is a long continuation from what we call AGI to what we call superintelligence.” This is a relationship that appears strained only one year after Microsoft helped reseat Altman as OpenAI’s CEO. After confirming that Microsoft is working on its own frontier AI model capable of competing at the “GPT-4, GPT-4o scale,” Suleyman also commented on the tension between Microsoft and OpenAI: Every partnership has tension. It’s healthy and natural. I mean, they’re a completely different business to us. They operate independently and partnerships evolve over time... partnerships evolve and they have to adapt to what works at the time, so we’ll see how that changes over the next few years.

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images A court rejected arguments against forcing a sale of the massive Chinese-owned social network. Read the full story at The Verge.

In a recent newsletter, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman detailed Apple's purported plans to give the Vision Pro a major gaming boost. The strategy reportedly involves coopting Sony to turn its PlayStation VR2 (PSVR) controllers into Vision Pro controllers. The main purpose of the PSVR controllers is to support more precise gaming controls on a device that you normally control with your eyes and fingers. But the two companies are also working on making PlayStation VR controllers work with all of Apple's Vision Pro interface. That is, the PSVR controllers might let you interact with apps and UI elements. Considering the scope of the partnership, I think it'll be only a matter of time before we see PlayStation VR games run on the Vision Pro, assuming Sony considers that endeavor worthwhile. But would that be enough to get you to buy a Vision Pro? Continue reading... The post Would this big change be enough to get you to buy an Apple Vision Pro? appeared first on BGR. Today's Top Deals Cyber Week deals: $139 AirPods 4 with ANC, $4 smart plugs, $40 Ninja blender, last-chance PS5 deals, more Amazon is giving out free money for Black Friday 2024 Early Black Friday deals: $719 Black Apple Watch Ultra 2, 15% off PS5 consoles, $38 Sony headphones, more Best Cyber Monday deals 2024: All the top sales

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday that he's open to the potential deployment of Western troops in Ukraine to guarantee the country's security as part of a broad effort to end the almost threeyear war with Russia.

The remaining chemical weapons in Syria could very well fall into the wrong hands, former Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie told Newsmax on Monday. Appearing on "Wake Up America," he warned that it's vital to stop that from happening.

The Supreme Court once again declined to the lift Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan's gag order on President-elect Donald Trump in the "legal expenses" trial that led to a conviction in May of 34 felony counts.