Technology

PCs with 32 GB and 64 GB of RAM are becoming less common, at least in the latest CPU-Z Validator statistics. According to Doc TB, one of the developers behind CPU-Z, this is the first time RAM capacity on PCs has declined year over year. 32 GB is still the most popular configuration at 37.2% of validations, though its share is down 2.5% compared to a year ago. 64 GB took a much bigger hit, falling 18% to 7.3%. Lower capacities are moving the other way, with 16 GB up 12.9% to 33.0% and 8 GB up 5.5% to 11.0%, while 96 GB and 128 GB setups dropped by more than 26% each. Memory type tells a similar story, with DDR4 now making up 54.5% of validations, up 6.0%, while DDR5 slipped 2.9% to 32.9%.

Of course, these figures only cover systems that users actually submit to the validator over the last three months, so they aren't a full picture of the PC market. Steam's September survey, for example, showed 32 GB overtaking 16 GB as the most common configuration among gamers, but that promptly flipped with the October survey. Still, the timing makes sense. Memory prices have climbed sharply this year, and Team Group expects the worst of the shortage to land between Q4 2026 and Q2 2027. DDR4 platforms may also get a second wind, with DDR4 motherboards getting released for unannounced LGA1700 processors expected in early 2027. It looks like plenty of people are sticking with older DDR4 systems or settling for 16 GB instead of paying current prices.

Video game commercials used to be pretty wild. Nintendo had mascots doing royal rumbles to The Turtles. Guys exploding into puke for Yoshi’s Island. And don’t get me started on the brand activation stunt era where Capcom served people-flavored food. Nowadays you’re lucky to get a promo reel set to The Hives. A new ad spot for the Switch 2 edition of Stellar Blade is a real throwback, featuring live action performers integrating lead character Eve into their day to day life. In isolation, it’s a pretty charming video. In isolation.

“It should have been me!” hollers dozens of comments on the YouTube page, which has already accumulated two million views.

The commercial wants to emphasize that on the Nintendo Switch, you can take Stellar Blade along with you. In its 100 seconds, we see Eve catching frisbees in the park, sharing sodas and showing off her future sword with commuters. Front and center is an indoors setting. A fully-grown fella who is being tucked in by Eve, having a beddy time story read to him, and even gets a little creature chased out from under his bed.

Released in 2024, the at-first unassuming sci-fi hack and slash Stellar Blade became a fixation of the roving culture wars. Higher profile than most available gaming erotica, those determined to manifest a return to the machismo ‘90s of games and marketing turned the game into a totem. This blade twisted around on developers Shift Up when any attempt to alter or add clothes to its characters erupted in a grievance campaign. It was pretty dumb. It’s always pretty dumb, out here.

Marketing teams are rarely as dumb. One must assume the oedipal undertones of the new ad and ensuing mesmerization of fans is intentional. And as someone who likes the unhinged Grand Theft Auto Coca-Cola ad, obliged to be consistent in my time on Earth, I’m giving this spot my blessings.

Of course, the other thing the Stellar Blade games have become associated with is an extra leery embrace of AI. The trailer to the sequel, Stellar Blade: Blood Rain, cranked each knob up, but with the kind of uncanny generative machine assistance seen throughout shovelware mobile ads. To their credit, this new commercial doesn’t set off any of those red flags, and Eve’s performer, Jade J, posted behind the scenes images to further suggest those in the commercial are flesh and blood. So that’s one less thing you’ll have to tell your therapist about.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Mariah Smith. It has been edited for length and clarity.

After my youngest child was born, we were all in survival mode, and it felt like the TV was always on to keep my older two kids entertained.

I knew I needed to do something about the amount of screen time they were having, but I was too exhausted to do much about it.

And then I didn't have a choice.

My 8-year-old found a horror film

We've got a smart TV, and when you turn on the menu, completely unwarranted advertisements for movies and shows pop up in the toolbar.

My 8-year-old managed to find a trailer for a horror film, something really scary about an exorcism. It was awful and led to her being frightened at night.

One night, I lay with her in bed as she cried and thought, "We're done with the TV."

I hid our remote the next day and told my two older kids it was broken until I could figure out what to do about screens. The first few days without TV weren't great. They were constantly asking to watch something.

But surprisingly, they adjusted much more quickly than I had imagined, and within a week, they rarely asked to watch a show.

We started watching VHS

I started looking for fun technology they could use instead. We got a boombox and CDs and started listening to the radio. I found my old Game Boys, and we played with those too.

The kids loved all of it. It felt like new technology to them, even though it was from two decades ago.

I remembered my parents had kept all of the VHS tapes we watched as kids, all the classics. After buying an old TV, I brought the tapes to our house, and we started watching TV the old-fashioned way.

They were fascinated.

It's been a year since we started using the little TV and VHS tapes, and I'm so pleased with the results.

I can leave them to watch stuff alone

As a mom trying to juggle three young kids and everything else life throws at me, I can't always sit down with my children to watch TV.

Now, I can leave them to watch something and trust that they'll be safe. Everything they watch has been vetted by me because I've seen all the films before. There won't be any age-inappropriate adverts popping up unexpectedly.

I feel like I have much more control over what they're watching, and that I'm able to keep them safer this way.

The kids argue with each other less and are nowhere near as agitated as they used to be.

Because the TV isn't always on anymore, my older two children have become more creative. My daughter has taken up embroidery and knitting.

I've noticed that, for some reason, the children disengage much more easily from this little TV with the VHS player than they did from our big smart TV. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the smaller screen or the slower-paced storylines. Either way, it's easier to turn off without a total tantrum.

They also can't choose to watch YouTubers like they can on streaming services. I don't want my children watching YouTubers, but I found it nearly impossible to remove that option from Netflix or Disney+.

Using VHS tapes creates a barrier of sorts to watching TV, so we watch a lot less of it now. It's not as simple as pressing a button and having thousands of options available. You have to make sure the tape has been rewound, sit through the trailers, watch the film, and then rewind it again afterward. Once the film is over, the TV goes off. It feels like a natural ending.

What has surprised me most is how my own body has reacted to less TV and less background noise. My nervous system doesn't feel as overwhelmed as it once did. I feel much calmer.

We've recently added DVDs to our collection because there's more variety available. My kids love Bluey, so we've bought DVDs with all the episodes.

Although it started as a quick decision to switch to VHS tapes, I'm incredibly grateful we did it. It's not that we've gone backward in time, but that we've found a slower, calmer way of living that works far better for our family.

When the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition remasters launched in 2021, they had just about everything you could have wanted from a modern-day port of BioWare’s sci-fi RPGs. There were, however, two major exemptions: the original game’s Pinnacle Station DLC, and Mass Effect 3’s cooperative multiplayer mode. In 2021, the ME3Tweaks modding group brought back Pinnacle Station. Now, five years later, it’s back to finish the job, and is releasing a remastered mod of the multiplayer mode for those who have the Legendary Edition on PC.

The project began in earnest three years ago, with modder Mgamerz coming up with the idea shortly after wrapping up a randomizer mod for the Mass Effect 2 remaster. Luckily, the ME3Tweaks group had a lot of the foundations set in place to bring the missing mode into the Legendary Edition after years of working in the Mass Effect modding space.

“There was somebody who had shown that they could port a level when they found an unused level in [Mass Effect 1’s remaster],” he tells Kotaku. “There was like an extra Citadel area, and I was like, ‘Oh man, what if I could port that to another game?’ Sometimes I just get these crazy ideas, like, ‘What if I just did something crazy?’ And so I tried porting it, and I was able to actually get it to port because we did Pinnacle Station, so we had a lot of the infrastructure to do it, and I was able to port it. I’m like, ‘man, what if we could do like a multiplayer level?’ And I was able to port, I think it was [Firebase] Condor. It’s one of the first DLC maps. It  looked terrible, but you didn’t immediately crash the game loading into it. And I had already ported multiplayer levels before in my Redemption map pack that I had made from single player to multiplayer, so I kind of knew everything that was needed. And then it was like, ‘Okay, well, I made this map, but there’s no game mode; you can’t do anything on it. Really, it looks terrible.’ And so I kind of shelved it for a couple of months.”

After some time, Mgamerz decided he wanted to make a multiplayer mod, and thus went back to the original Mass Effect 3, and says he was struck by how much “further advanced” the group’s modding tools had become while working on the remaster. 

“Literally probably about three hours into it, I’m like, ‘These tools suck,’ and I say that as someone who helped write most of them. Our tooling for the original trilogy is so bad compared to what we got in Legendary Edition.”

Part of that is because, prior to the remaster’s launch, the ME3Tweaks group had meetings with folks at BioWare about making the Legendary Edition more modder-friendly, and although the company wasn’t able to implement everything, it did give the group a better starting point.

“It was probably just like a month before the game release,” he recalls. “We gave them a list of some of the most awful things we have to deal with, and we kind of didn’t expect them to do most of the changes. And they didn’t. I mean, it’s one month before launch, so you can’t really make big changes. But they snuck a few in right at the end of development for us, which has helped a lot of single-player development. They gave us some information that we couldn’t really leverage until we started working on stuff like this, like how does DLC mount work? When the game loads, DLC mounts into the game, but in ME3, it loads single-player versus multiplayer, and we didn’t really have any idea how any of that worked. So they gave us information about that, and then we, you know, over the years we built on top of it.”

Over two years later, on November 7, 2023, Mgamerz created a Discord server for Project Milan, what would become the Mass Effect 3 Legendary Edition multiplayer remaster mod, telling the rest of the ME3Tweaks modders, “Let’s do something stupid. Let’s port multiplayer.”

He says that development was on and off over the course of three years, citing some personal matters that got in the way including breaking his arm at some point during the whole effort, but the group had a working prototype of the mode as early as December of 2023. 

“You could pick at least one kit, and the game didn’t crash until you got to wave three,” he recalls. “Enemies would spawn. Audio was totally broken. Like there was virtually no audio. The shaders were all broken, so you just got checkerboards all over the place. But you could actually play it, and enemies spawn. You could kill them. You get points. You know, the absolute bare bones were there.”

From there, the team built the rest of the multiplayer mode back up, but it isn’t just what BioWare created in 2012, as the mod includes new ways of play, as well as some alterations to the multiplayer’s progression system. What started as a scheme to bring the old multiplayer mode back to the masses became much more as Mgamerz says the team got “too ambitious” and decided to add more on top of the old bones. This includes new modes Coalition, which pivots between different enemy factions across a match with each wave hosting a different group, and Unified, which mixes enemies from all groups together.

“it picks a quasi-random list of enemies,” Mgamerz says. “Originally we had it fully random, and that was terrible. It was so bad, but now it draws from all of the different wavelist options and picks from those, so you get like a mix of the original compositions that we made, and that one actually is pretty fun.”

One notable fact about the multiplayer mode is that it was one of the earliest examples of a game using modern-day loot boxes to let players unlock characters and acquire consumables. The progression system remains intact in the mod, but the ME3Tweaks modders wanted to give players options for whether they wanted to engage with the system or not.

“There’s going to be options for you to choose how much you want unlocked at the start,” Mgamerz says. “Do you want the full grind? If you want to do the full grind, nothing changes. Do you want to start with tons of credits? We can just edit the same file to give you 10 million credits so you can get a nice start. Maybe you want us to just give you one of everything. ‘Give me the level one of every item, so that I have everything I want, but I still have to level it.’ I want to respect people’s time because when I started playing this game, I had a lot of free time to play this game, and now that I’m much older, I would never dedicate the time to grinding everything out.”

The team is hoping to add a straightforward store for players to just buy things with credits directly, but Mgamerz says that won’t be available at launch.

“It’s definitely something we want to do, but it takes a new interface and hooking all of it up and testing it,” he says. “That takes several days, even with people that know how to edit interfaces better than me.”

The mod is also adding new items to the store, including new banners that feature images from the now-cancelled Mass Effect: Universe, so there’s more to unlock and see than there was in the base game, on top of playing and unlocking old stuff.

One advantage of the mod is that it’s not reliant on BioWare’s servers and allows players to make their own private servers to play with friends. In theory, that means it could outlast Mass Effect 3’s official multiplayer. When BioWare was shut down on October 21, the N7HQ website where players were able to track their multiplayer stats was seemingly also lost, which has fans concerned that ME3’s actual servers could follow sometime in the near future. For the ME3Tweaks mod group, this didn’t start out as a preservation project, but now that EA has closed BioWare, it has, perhaps involuntarily, become one, and Mgamerz says he has complicated feelings on that.

“When I had an interview for Pinnacle Station, people said the same thing,” he says. “They asked me, ‘Is this like game preservation to you?’ And I’m like, ‘Not in the sense that I think most people say, ‘Oh, well, you’re making it so that this stuff exists in the future,’ and it’s like no, I don’t know. It’s hard to explain how I feel on that front, but it’s going to continue. But I don’t feel like this replaces the original. I’m like, this is my rendition of it. BioWare’s will always be Bioware’s. Mine will build on BioWare’s, but I don’t ever want to feel like it replaces it because, you know, BioWare didn’t make it. I don’t feel like it’s fair to say that I built on top of your work and now my version replaces your work. That never feels right to me. But, I mean, once it goes away, this is the only way you’ll even be able to experience it.”

For the ME3Tweaks team, the notion of “replacing” BioWare’s work is daunting given the group had a long-standing relationship with the company. 

“I went to work, and during the day, it was like it really started dawning on me,” Mgamerz says about the closure in October. “I’ve worked with this company on this company’s stuff for 14 years now. I’ve had an NDA with them for LE. I’ve toured their office in 2019. And so when it was gone, it was just kind of like this empty feeling. As a modder, and this is something I actually remember bringing up to EA in our call we had for Legendary. It was like, ‘you guys always recognize the artists. You guys always recognize the cosplayers and stuff, but it’s like you guys would literally never even acknowledge the modding scene, even though we did all this stuff.’ And they told us some stuff like, ‘Legendary Edition kind of came about because of the work you guys did. We saw what the modders were doing.’ I was on the team of the texture mod that they were pretty much citing. They’re like, “You’re the reason we kind of made this.’ right?” And so it was like, ’Oh, well, that’s quite a bit of acknowledgement.’ Yeah, that’s not public. And so you know, you build this hoping they would notice, even though you kind of know they never can really say anything.”

Mgamerz said that his contacts at BioWare were especially excited when the team brought Pinnacle Station to the Legendary Edition, which wasn’t included in the collection due to the source code being lost. 

“They’d reach out and be like, ‘Oh my god, that’s crazy, dude. We never thought that’d be possible,’” he says.

As AI and vibe coding have become more prominent in the modding space, with some modders using AI to create assets and entire projects, Mgamerz says that the ME3Tweaks team didn’t use any AI to create or generate assets. However, he does say they used it in researching the actual game files. We’ve included his full explanation on the extent of AI use in the project below:

I don’t use it to make any assets, no visual, audio. I don’t use it for any of that kind of stuff. I have a tool I made that can research into the game files, but I literally made it so it never can save anything. It can only tell me like findings. So, it’s like, one of our kits for some reason just won’t appear, even though we are like 99 percent sure we’ve configured it properly. And it’ll go through, and I’ll be like, ‘Okay, well I looked at how the game code works, and I looked at how you define this kit, and there’s a flag that makes it only appear if it’s been unlocked with this entitlement, which is just like a number that we weren’t sure where it actually came from.’ And then, that reminded me, ‘Oh yeah, BioWare drip-fed old kits back in 2012 on one of their DLCs to pad it out a bit, and that was the flag that was causing this.’ And so, we would use AI to do stuff like that. You know, it can help us prototype some interface design outside of the game and get a feel of what actually works, what doesn’t. But I’ve been on the scene for so long. I know when I make a certain change, what kind of wider impact it has versus, now this isn’t me trying to talk down on [developers who vibe code] or anything. Vibe coding is one thing when you make something for yourself and you don’t release it because you’re the only person it affects, but when you release it and it becomes a wider product and it starts causing problems for other people, you’re not going to be the only one that has to deal with those problems. So, I don’t like when stuff like—We’re seeing a lot of vibe coded apps or mods now. The first sentence of the description is, ‘I didn’t write a single line of this; it was all done by Claude.’ And so, whenever it’s like reviewing scripts and helping me design stuff, I review every single line that gets output, and it’s so tedious, and I hate doing it. So I totally understand why vibe coding is a thing, but I understand that if I’m releasing this, I’m responsible for this, so I should be the one that reviews it. So if AI goes away, for whatever reason, there’s still some chance someone can understand what the heck this thing is doing.  And so I spend an awful lot of time going through all of the changes that we’re making.  We didn’t really use AI until the last probably four months. Almost everything before that was all done by hand.

With BioWare’s closure, Mgamerz and the ME3Tweaks team are now expecting “a lot more attention” than they were previously, as the mod is launching on N7 Day, a day when fans have celebrated the series’ legacy. Now, fans are more tuned in to the release than they might’ve been, as online and IRL demonstrations are underway and fans rally under the #SaveMassEffect banner. Some fans are even calling for people to play the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition on Steam for N7 Day in order to raise the collection’s concurrent player count.

“We’ve been doing this in secret, so it’s not going to be super…I mean, we’ve tested it, but I don’t know if it’s going to handle whatever influx of users it may get on the first day,” he says. “I’ve never run like a live-service kind of deal, even though it’s just like a server. So I’m like, yeah, going to be a stressful first day, probably for sure. But I’m sure it’ll even out. It always has. But yeah, I hope someone at BioWare—or former BioWare— notices.”