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Difficulty

What we've been playing - mud slides, 9-0 wins, retro difficulty anguish, and space hoppers
Game Reviews

What we’ve been playing – mud slides, 9-0 wins, retro difficulty anguish, and space hoppers

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4th October

Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing. This week, Kelsey digs out the DS to play The Urbz, for some reason; Tom inadvisably asks Jim for some help in Baby Steps; Marie leaps over a wall on a space hopper; Ed is determined to learn Final Fantasy Tactics, which keeps kicking his ass; Connor buys Persona 5 Royal in a Steam Sale; Chris gives a potted review of EA Sports FC 26; and Bertie tries to work out if he likes Steam sensation Megabonk.

What have you been playing?

Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.

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The Urbz: Sims in the City, DS

I recently had the urge to revisit all of The Sims games on Nintendo DS and started with The Urbz, which is an absolute nightmare in terms of balancing your Sims’ needs and their relationships, but it’s all worthwhile to see the story of Daddy Bigbucks’ downfall unfold. Unapologetically goofy, they just don’t make Sims games like this anymore, though I’d sure as hell love to see more story-based console iterations of Sim adventures.

-Kelsey

Baby Steps, PS5 Pro

Watch on YouTube

20 minutes into Baby Steps and I’m texting Eurogamer video’s Jim Trinca with a screenshot asking if I’ve gone wrong. I felt the game was pointing me in one direction and I deliberately looked around to go off in another, and well, I regret it. I’m stood at the bottom of a large mudslide of a hill, seemingly only able to get about half way up. Jim replies, stubbornly: “The only right way is up.”

Thanks, Jim.

-Tom O

Wobbly Life, Xbox Series X

I did not expect to get sucked in by Wobbly Life, but after a week of wobbling around the various different islands, I dare to say I’m hooked. And I first realised this game had me in its clutches when I stole my neighbour’s space hopper and used it to hop over the raised bridge into the city.

Wobbly Life is fabulously unserious, which is why I’ve found it becoming my evening entertainment this week. There’s no real time investment needed for it either. You can spend a few moments to a few hours wobbling around doing various jobs, or simply causing chaos by parking your helicopter in the road – the choice is yours.

Is Wobbly Life silly? Yes. Was this something I didn’t realise I needed? Absolutely.

-Marie

Final Fantasy Tactics, Switch 2

Honestly, I’ve really struggled with Tactics. As a fan of the series who missed its previous releases, I am absolutely the target market for this and expectations are sky high. Yet the early hours have proven rough. It’s a notoriously tricky game, but even with the overall lower difficulty of this re-release and its tweaks, I’ve repeatedly lost battles. In large part that’s due to the game not really explaining itself very well: there are so many intricacies to its wonderful Job system, but it demands a huge amount of time spent tinkering away in menus, only to fail yet another battle partway through.

I’m determined to stick with it, though. I already adore the tone of the game (I see where Final Fantasy 16 stole from now), the hand-drawn intro is simply gorgeous, and now I’m a chapter in, its political storyline absolutely has its hooks in me. At the least, I’m happy to be finally ticking this classic off my list.

-Ed

Persona 5 Royal, PC

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The Steam sale has hit me like Gabriel Agbonlahor was hit by his thirties: hard. Typically a good saver, my bank account has been ravaged by a variety of games because I have no kids and therefore no one relying on my frugality. Persona 5 Royale will be my child for the foreseeable future.

It turns out that Metaphor Refantazio has acted as a bridge to the wider Atlus catalogue, and I will happily take my place as the 2,342,857th person to say online that I think the game is pretty good. People say it’s slow and I’m not feeling it yet, though I suppose one doesn’t grasp how tall Everest is when you’re lounging around Dingboche.

So far Morgana is okay. I initially thought Ryuji was a wasteman but he’s grown on me with his tale of physical injury, and I’ve just met a girl who’s a total narc and who wants to keep me and the gang off the school roof where we do crimes. Pharmacy punk girl best character.

-Connor

EA Sports FC 26, PS5

Been gallantly suffering through this one for our review this year (coming soon!) and, you know what, actually I’m being harsh there. This year it’s alright? Well, sort of. Ultimate Team is comically arcadey this year, with stamina removed entirely so you can run around holding R2 the entire time like a 12-year-old. Offline modes, by contrast, are stodgy as all hell, with an equally comical leap between difficulties (on Professional I win 9-0, on World Class, which is one tier up, it’s a load of agonising 0-0 draws where I hardly touch the ball). An upside though is how incredibly customisable FC is these days, which deserves genuine praise. Look forward to me saying exactly this but in about 2000 more words of waffle, some time in the coming week.

-Chris

Megabonk, PC

It’s taken me a while to work out whether I like Megabonk or not, and I think I’m probably on the side of “like”, but it took some convincing. Megabonk is like a 3D Vampire Survivors, and it looks a bit like it’s been made in Visual Basic (hey I did computer science for a few months before dropping out) so it’s quite scruffy, which is sort of its charm, sort of not. And herein lies my dilemma actually: is this a rip-off or is it something more? It takes a while to distinguish itself.

But actually there is something unique here. WASD platforming and running and jumping and sliding bring a lot, and as you get into the loop of unlocking things after each run, it starts to feel more like there’s a generous amount of content here, albeit metered in the way it gives it to you, rather than the game Scroogily withholding things from you, sort of like a mobile game would.

More to come!

-Bertie



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Cloud grabs his sword on his back.
Game Reviews

Final Fantasy 7 Remake Gets New Options To Reduce Difficulty

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Final Fantasy 7 Remake, with all of its fantastic action RPG combat, is making its way to the Switch 2 (and Xbox) soon. And based on how the Switch 2 is handling modern AAA games, it should be up to the challenge of delivering some quality visuals and stable performance, even on the go. But it sounds like this port is worried about something else that might not be up to the challenge: You. With new difficulty options that allow players to dramatically reduce just about any level of challenge in the game, series antagonist Sephiroth sure is in for a world of unfair hurt. Maybe he’ll review bomb the game over it.

As reported by GameSpot, the upcoming port has a new menu called “Streamlined Progression” which, as the name implies, gives you various options to reduce or eliminate challenge in the game and make defeating bosses and progressing through the story much, much easier. If you activate every option in the menu, you’ll basically be playing in “God Mode,” with perpetual max HP and MP, infinite money and recovery items, and attacks that always deal 9,999 damage to your opponents. I guess that works for those who just want to focus on the story, but at this point, I have to wonder, does it make more sense to just watch a Let’s Play instead?

FF7R, especially on its hard difficulty and during some of its late game bosses on normal mode, can be challenging. And I do like it when games grant modular levels of control over difficulty (I also used to love breaking games with my GameShark back in the day), but for me, such options are typically at their best when they aid you in learning the mechanics of a game by scaling down a challenge so you can take it on. The suite of options in the “Streamlined Progression” menu, however, which do things like keep you persistently at max health and damage output, do very little to “streamline” anything; instead, any and all challenge is just completely removed.

Read More: The Debate Over Silksong Points To A Growing Divide In The World Of Gaming

This new mode also arrives as we’re in the middle of some hot discourse™ about difficulty, mostly because one little hornet’s big adventure was a bit tougher than some were expecting.

In my opinion, activating these Streamlined Progression options in FF7R would put you just a step away from letting the game play itself, at least if all the options are enabled. Even individually, so many of these options are just “on/off” toggles for godly powers, so they’re not going to aid in mastering the game. Which, again, if a player has no interest in doing, I have to wonder if it just makes more sense to watch a cutscene compilation at that point.. Managing MP, for example, is a core facet of FF7R’s combat. Having it always at max can easily teach bad habits and take away from what the game’s combat is asking you to do. Same thing with dishing out 9,999 damage with every hit, which doesn’t “streamline” build-crafting, but rather makes it irrelevant. I would’ve preferred to see difficulty sliders, perhaps a guarantee of a damage minimum that encourages the player to learn how to build more power while still providing some assistance. Same with having an always-full Limit Break meter. Why not instead just have the bar filled up faster so new players get a better sense of what increases the meter and what the pay off for it is?

Not all of us are type-A overachievers who want to take on the toughest challenges, sure, but part of what makes the power fantasy in FF7R work is that Cloud and co. aren’t strong and capable because they’re all wearing plot armor, but because we as players invest our attention and energy into gaining competency or mastery over its complex systems. That’s why defeating Sephiroth is so satisfying; not because the narrative simply designates us as heroes, but because we lived up to the challenge of becoming heroes.



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The main character of Silksong holds a sword against a red/orange background.
Game Updates

Silksong Devs Talk Difficulty As Fans Debate If It’s Harder Than Elden Ring

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Hollow Knight: Silksong ratchets up everything from its predecessor. The world is bigger, more detailed, and more dangerous. Team Cherry co-founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen recently spoke about some of their thinking behind making the Metroidvania Soulslike sequel harder, and what players can do to navigate the higher difficulty.

“Hornet is inherently faster and more skillful than the Knight–so even the base level enemy had to be more complicated, more intelligent,” Gibson said during an interview at the ACMI Game Worlds exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, according to reporting by Dexerto. Even basic enemies in Silksong hit harder and can be much more aggressive. That’s because the hero Hornet is much more agile, and Team Cherry wanted to balance that out with more effective adversaries.

“The basic ant warrior is built from the same move-set as the original Hornet boss,” Pellen added. “The same core set of dashing, jumping, and dashing down at you, plus we added the ability to evade and check you. In contrast to the Knight’s enemies, Hornet’s enemies had to have more ways of catching her as she tries to move away.”

If you keep dying, go somewhere else

That was essentially what Gibson’s advice seemed to be from the interview. He argued that Silksong is much less controlling than its predecessor when it comes to where the player can go and explore at various points in the game. “The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path,” he said. “So one player may choose to follow it directly to its conclusion, and then another may choose to constantly divert from it and find all the other things that are waiting and all the other ways and routes.”

The logic is reminiscent of Elden Ring which, despite its punishing enemies and brutal boss fights, was arguably more inviting than previous FromSoftware Soulslikes because the open world allowed players to approach each challenge in unique ways. In addition to being able to grind additional levels, they could also explore off the beaten path until they found a weapon or spell that would tip the balance of power in their favor.

“Silksong has some moments of steep difficulty–but part of allowing a higher level of freedom within the world means that you have choices all the time about where you’re going and what you’re doing,” Gibson said, adding that players “have ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely, rather than getting stonewalled.”

A clash of design philosophies

There was recently a mini-debate about whether Silksong is actually harder than Elden Ring. The Washington Post‘s Gene Park came down on the side that it is. I would agree, though I think that’s in part because Elden Ring isn’t necessarily one of the harder games out there. Elden Ring is just a hard game that happened to sell over 30 million copies, meaning that its reputation is partly derived from tons of people who wouldn’t normally play a Soulslike actually giving it a try.

Ryan Thompson, an assistant media studies professor at Michigan State, teased out what I thought was an interesting observation about one of the core differences between Silksong and Elden Ring. It’s not just that one is a 2D side-scroller and the other is a 3D open-world RPG; it’s also the way the roots of those genres diverge. “3D games are designed for you to win eventually,” he argues. “2D platformers are originally designed to take your quarter and tell you to piss off.”

That’s an oversimplification, but a helpful one when it comes to a Metroidvania Soulslike like Silksong. As the genre name denotes, it has its feet in two related but distinct traditions. One is 8-bit action platformers of the NES era that seemed to be perfectly content if the kid they were sold to was never able to beat them. The other is a baroque RPG adventure in which the expectation is you’ll be able to level up or learn your way out of any challenge.

Silksong is as much a 2D bullet hell game as a Metroidvania, maybe even more so. The margin for error on screen is more circumscribed than in its 3D counterparts, and its arsenal is more streamlined. It’s borrowing from Castlevania III: Dracula‘s Curse more than Dark Souls, and the result can be more uncompromising. That might be easier to accept if Silksong didn’t also tell an evocative and whimsical story that’s constantly dropping devilish obstacles in your path. But I’ll take that challenge over the original Mega Man any day.



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Watch out, Hollow Knight: Silksong's hiding a sneaky Stardew Valley creatorman cameo
Game Updates

Yes, Hollow Knight: Silksong has “some moments of steep difficulty” Team Cherry admit, but have you considered going for a pre-boss walk

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Something Hollow Knight: Silksong-related has happened at an Australian museum again. This time, rather than the game being confirmed for an appearance back when it was still infinitely mysterious and sans release date, it’s Team Cherry devs addressing just how difficult their creation is, following plenty of post-release discourse on the subject.

This follows the metroidvania’s first patch making a couple of its early bosses a bit easier to tackle, amid debate as to whether it’s just good and hard, or pushes into unnecessarily annoying slog territory via the likes of bench placement and hazards being able to deal out two masks of damage. As with every FromSoft game since time itself began with the release of Demon’s Souls, where you stand on that bickering will likely depend on how prepared you are to spend hours battling one foe over and over again.

Naturally, the appropriate venue for Team Cherry co-directors Ari Gibson and William Pellen to weigh in on this conundrum of our time is Australia’s national museum of screen culture, ACMI, where the launch of a new exhibition was attended and reported on by Dexerto.

“The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path,” Gibson said when asked about the difficulty by exhibition co-curator Jini Maxwell. “So one player may choose to follow it directly to its conclusion, and then another may choose to constantly divert from it and find all the other things that are waiting and all the other ways and routes.”

While acknowledging that Skong packs “some moments of steep difficulty”, Gibson stuck to emphasising that going for a wander is the best medicine if you get stuck banging your head against a bug-shaped wall, as there are “ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely”. Learning? In a video game? Come on lads, I can’t be doing that. I use my brain for marginally more important things during the average day, but by the time I get to playing games for non-work purposes, it’s all just mush up there.

Anyway, I digress. Gibson and Pellen also explained the differences between developing Silksong and the original Hollow Knight from a hardness perspective. Hornet, with her superior zippiness and superior skills to the knight, demanded more complicated base enemies to make sure she still faced a good challenge.

“The basic ant warrior is built from the same move-set as the original Hornet boss,” Pellen said. “The same core set of dashing, jumping, and dashing down at you, plus we added the ability to evade and check you. In contrast to the Knight’s enemies, Hornet’s enemies had to have more ways of catching her as she tries to move away.”

I imagine this was followed up with a gesture to some screens of culture as the devs indicated that the time had come to check out the Aussie exhibitions. If you’re still struggling with Silksong, definitely check out our great Silksong walkthrough Ollie’s worked very hard on. There are also mods.



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Hollow Knight: Silksong devs admit it has "moments of steep difficulty" but also a "higher level of freedom" to avoid getting stonewalled
Game Updates

Hollow Knight: Silksong devs admit it has “moments of steep difficulty” but also a “higher level of freedom” to avoid getting stonewalled

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Team Cherry’s long-awaited Hollow Knight follow-up Silksong has spawned lengthy discourse around difficulty in games, and now the developers have addressed the topic too.

The game is part of the Game Worlds exhibition at Australia’s national museum of screen culture (ACMI), which was attended by Dexerto. The exhibition’s co-curator Jini Maxwell spoke with Ari Gibson and William Pellen from Team Cherry at the event.

“The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path,” Gibson explained. “So one player may choose to follow it directly to its conclusion, and then another may choose to constantly divert from it and find all the other things that are waiting and all the other ways and routes.”

Hollow Knight: Silksong Review – Beautiful, Thrilling And CruelWatch on YouTube

While Gibson admitted Silksong “has some moments of steep difficulty”, he added “part of allowing a higher level of freedom within the world means that you have choices all the time about where you’re going and what you’re doing.”

So instead of players repeatedly attempting a particular boss fight, they “have ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely, rather than getting stonewalled.”

Gibson further noted that as Hornet is “inherently faster and more skillful than the Knight” of the first game, even base level enemies had to be “more complicated, more intelligent”.

Added Pellen: “The basic ant warrior is built from the same move-set as the original Hornet boss. The same core set of dashing, jumping, and dashing down at you, plus we added the ability to evade and check you. In contrast to the Knight’s enemies, Hornet’s enemies had to have more ways of catching her as she tries to move away.”

Team Cherry’s approach was therefore to “bring everyone else up to match [Hornet’s] level”.

One other area of contention are the boss runbacks, which often task players with repeating difficult platform sections before re-attempting a boss. But have boss runbacks had their day?

“Pretty and charmingly mean-spirited, this is a game filled with revelations and genuine personality,” reads our Silksong review.



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NFT Gaming

Bitcoin Hash Rate, Difficulty Hit Record Highs as Miner Supply Spikes

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In brief

  • Bitcoin’s hash rate surged to 1.12 billion TH/s on September 12, marking a new record high.
  • The surge in hash rate has also adjusted Bitcoin difficulty to an all-time high of 136.04T.
  • Experts suggest this outlook has historically preceded an explosive price surge.

After Bitcoin’s recent price surge saw it breach a two-week high amid multi-week record inflows to U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, hash rate and difficulty have also hit new all-time highs.

Bitcoin’s hash rate, which is the measure of the network’s total computational power, hit 1.12 billion TH/s on September 12, per Bitinfocharts data. The network’s difficulty, a measure of how computationally hard it is for miners to find a new block on the blockchain, also touched a record high of 136.04T.



Hash rate is the total computational power of all miners that secures the Bitcoin blockchain. The difficulty in finding a block increases once every 2016 blocks are mined, or roughly every two weeks, and it increases if the hash rate increases.

The next difficulty adjustment, per CoinWarz, is scheduled on September 18, 2025, and the current estimate puts the value up 6.38% to 144.72T.

With such a huge spike, Varun Satyam, co-founder of DeFi platform Davos Protocol, told Decrypt that these windows often cause “smaller or inefficient miners to scale back, while larger, efficient operators hold or even accumulate, positioning for the rally to recover their capex.”

With the highly anticipated Federal Reserve rate decision due on September 17 and risk-on markets primed for a 25 basis point rate cut, investors are bullish, expecting Bitcoin’s price to push higher. This outlook coincides with the uptick in miners’ reserves bouncing to a 50-day high of 1.808 million BTC on September 9, per CryptoQuant data, indicating that miners are not looking to sell their stack.

Satyam explained that hash rate surges post-halving have historically preceded price rallies. “We may be entering a similar phase now,” he said, with easing selling pressure and the right macro backdrop, “Bitcoin is primed for a decisive upward move with altcoins riding shotgun.”



Users of prediction market Myriad, launched by Decrypt’s parent company DASTAN, are more sanguine. While over 80% expect it to hold above $105,000 through September, they’re more evenly split on its broader outlook, with just 56% expecting it to top $125,000 by year-end versus 44% who see it dipping under $105,000.

Bitcoin is currently trading at just under $115,000, up 0.8% on the day and 2.3% on the week, per CoinGecko data.

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Esports

First Silksong update patch notes will finally reduce early difficulty

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Team Cherry has revealed the patch notes for the first Hollow Knight: Silksong update, which looks to make the early game slightly easier, although it doesn’t completely remove the difficulty.

After finally launching on September 4, Silksong has already become one of 2025’s biggest games. Less than a week later, its player count has reached over five million, and it even crashed many platforms as players all try to download it at once.

It hasn’t all been good news, though, as some fans have complained about the punishing difficulty, with some even using mods to make it easier.

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Now, the 1.0.28470 update has been revealed, and while it’s set to address some of the issues, don’t expect the game to be a breeze once it goes live.

Do we know when the 1.0.28470 update goes live?

There is no concrete date just yet, but the devs have confirmed it will be mid-next week if everything goes as planned. This means it will likely be rolled around sometime around September 17, although it could be slightly earlier or later.

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If you’re playing on PC, the update is available right now through the public-beta branch on Steam.

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Team Cherry

First Silksong update nerfs early bosses

Although the patch is primarily focused on squashing bugs (no pun intended), it also addresses some of the more brutal early bosses.

Both Moorwing and Sister Splinter will receive a “slight difficulty reduction” going forward. It isn’t entirely clear how the devs will go about this, but it could mean that they will no longer deal two masks of damage per hit, or it could be as simple as making their attacks easier to dodge.

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Given that it’s only listed as a “slight” tweak, it’s more likely to be the latter or something similar.

Full Silksong 1.0.28470 update patch notes

Check out the full patch notes for the first Silksong update below, as shared by Team Cherry on Steam:

  • Fixed situation where players could remain cloakless after Slab escape sequence.
  • Fixed wish Infestation Operation often not being completable during the late game.
  • Fixed wish Beast in the Bells not being completable when Bell Beast is summoned at the Bilewater Bellway during the late game.
  • Fixed getting stuck floating after down-bouncing on certain projectiles.
  • Fixed courier deliveries sometimes being inaccessible in Act 3.
  • Fixed craft bind behaving incorrectly when in memories.
  • Fixed Lace tool deflect soft-lock at start of battle in Deep Docks.
  • Fixed Silk Snippers in Chapel of the Reaper sometimes getting stuck out of bounds.
  • Fixed Claw Mirrors leaving Hornet inverted if taking damage during a specific moment while binding.
  • Fixed Snitch Pick not giving rosaries and shell shards as intended.
  • Removed float override input (down + jump, after player has Faydown Cloak).
  • Slight difficulty reduction in early game bosses Moorwing and Sister Splinter.
  • Reduction in damage from Sandcarvers.
  • Slight increase in pea pod collider scale.
  • Slight reduction in mid-game Bellway and Bell Bench prices.
  • Slight increase in rosary rewards from relics and psalm cylinders.
  • Increase in rosary rewards for courier deliveries.
  • Various additional fixes and tweaks.

All fixes will apply retroactively, so players who’ve hit a significant bug that prevents progress may want to switch over to public-beta to receive the fix.

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Further fixes are already being worked on for a second patch. If you have an issue and you don’t see the solution in the list above, we may be working on it.

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For more on Silksong, be sure to check out the location of every Mossberry, as well as where to find all three Coghearts.



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Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Reaches New All-Time High
Crypto Trends

Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Reaches New All-Time High

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The Bitcoin (BTC) mining difficulty, the average difficulty level for mining a block on the network, climbed to a new all-time high of 134.7 trillion on Friday.

Network difficulty hit a previous all-time high in August and steadily rose throughout the month, despite projections that network difficulty would decrease.

Bitcoin’s hashrate, the average of the total number of hashes per second from all miners on the network, has fallen to 967 billion hashes per second, down from the all-time high of over 1 trillion hashes per second recorded on August 4, according to CryptoQuant. 

Bitcoin mining difficulty climbs to new all-time high. Source: CryptoQuant

Higher difficulty has created tighter operating conditions for large mining firms in an already competitive industry that runs on narrow profit margins.

The need to expend ever-greater computing resources to mine blocks on the BTC network has also raised concerns over the centralization of Bitcoin mining, as the cost of mining becomes progressively more expensive, leading to domination by large corporations and mining pools.

Related: Jack Dorsey’s Block targets 10-year lifecycle for Bitcoin mining rigs

Solo miners still have hope in a sea of large, institutional players

Despite large players increasingly dominating the Bitcoin mining space, small and solo miners are still successfully mining blocks on occasion, and claiming the 3.125 BTC block reward valued at over $344,000 at the time of this writing.

Three solo miners defied the odds by successfully adding blocks to the BTC ledger and claiming the block reward in July and August.

The first miner added block 903,883 on July 3, netting just under $350,000 in block subsidy rewards plus priority fees paid by network participants to miners to ensure their transactions are included in the block.

The second solo miner added block 907,283 on July 26, claiming over $373,000 in rewards, when calculated using Bitcoin prices at the time.

On August 17, another solo miner mined block 910,440, nabbing $373,000 in block subsidy rewards and network fees. All three miners were operating through the Solo CK pool, a solo mining pool service.

Magazine: Bitcoin miners steamrolled after electricity thefts, exchange ‘closure’ scam: Asia Express



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Indiana Jones and the Great Circle update adds new difficulty, improved hair and more
Game Updates

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle update adds new difficulty, improved hair and more

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While Silksong may be dominating the headlines, yesterday also saw the release of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s DLC, known as The Order of Giants. The developer has released an update for the base game across platforms which along with enabling compatibility for the DLC, also adds a new action experience difficulty, among other bits and pieces.

This action experience difficulty is called “very light”, and is designed for “players who prefer to be challenged by the exploration and puzzle solving” rather than combat.

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Another new feature is support for RTX Hair on 50-series Nvidia RTX GPUs, which enables ray-tracing on a characters’ barnet and makes it look more realistic.

Then we have a number of fixes and improvements across the board. For example, the Great Circle team has fixed an issue where Indy’s whip may not animate correctly later in the game if you had died during the Dart Trap in Peru.

You can find full details on the latest Indiana Jones and the Great Circle update below:

New Features

  • This update enables compatibility with The Order of Giants DLC, available for purchase separately now
  • We’ve added a new “Very Light” action experience difficulty for players who prefer to be challenged by the exploration and puzzle solving, and prefer not to find the combat too challenging
  • This update adds support for RTX Hair on 50-series Nvidia RTX GPUs. This is a high-end rendering feature to enable ray-tracing on character’s hair for a more realistic appearance. We recommend enabling this feature only on higher-end GPUs with 16GB of VRAM or more. You can find the option for “Ray Traced Hair” in the “Advanced Video Settings” menu.
  • New Radio MCs have been added to the Jazz and Opera radio stations found on radio sets in Marshall College and the Vatican. You can also now tune the Vatican radio sets to hear news broadcasts that cover the events from the around the game’s world.
  • We’ve added information to the Quick Inventory to let you know which of your outfits and disguises are safe or restricted in the current area you find yourself in

Bug Fixes and Game Updates (please note that these can provide minor spoilers for the game)

General

  • Fixed an issue where fast-travel signposts may become unusable if a player died while the combat timer was cooling down. Restarting a checkpoint will make the signposts usable again now.
  • Fixed issue where markers for the Open Season and Sleight of Hand adventure books may not appear if the player had already purchased the Vatican Books map before installing Update 4 of the game
  • Fixed an issue where, if you have the Punch Out 2 ability, the controls could get locked if you died in the middle of doing a stealth takedown on an enemy
  • Fixed an issue where mantling/vaulting at the same time as you’re placing an object down might cause the object to disappear or cause controls to get stuck
  • Fixed an issue where Indy’s whip may not animate correctly later in the game if you had died during the Dart Trap in Peru, or during the last stage of the final fight with Voss
  • Fixed a slight animation snap that occurred if tapping the button to raise your candle
  • Indy’s hand now animates when collecting coins from a coin purse

Missions & Quests

The Vatican

  • Fixed an issue where you could block yourself in the Necropolis by throwing the Antique Bust (needed to open a gate) into an unreachable location
  • Fixed an issue where the “Secret of Giants” inscription number counter may not be correct if revisiting the Vatican using a savegame made using Update 3

Gizeh

  • Fixed an issue where the player may be blocked from entering Nawal’s tent if they had died while in combat nearby to the tent
  • Fixed an issue where Gina may not follow you through to the last scorpion room in the Sanctuary of the Guardians mission if you run through the level quickly
  • Fixed an issue where revisiting Gizeh might result in the player appearing in the “buried in sand” scorpion fight once more, but not able to complete it
  • Indy will now give a voice clue about needing to burn objects if trying to pass through the first Stelae tomb before having purchased the Lighter
  • Fixed a crash that might occur in rare circumstances while escaping from the Nazi Compound with Gina
  • Fixed an issue where you may not be able to talk to Professor Savage at the Gizeh Village market in certain circumstances
  • Fixed an issue where the game might crash in rare circumstances if revisiting Gizeh with a savegame that was made while playing the Update 3 version of the game

Nepal

  • Improved Gina’s enter and exit into and from wall-presses, so she doesn’t appear to be making unnatural sidesteps

Sukhothai

  • Fixed an issue where Indy’s whip might detach itself from a branch in the spiral staircase leading down to the “leech room” in the Blessed Pearl mission
  • Fixed camera shaking issue if player tried to dive in shallow water during the first visit to the Sukhothai village at night

Iraq

  • Fixed an issue where the clouds during the end credits appeared in very low detail if you were not using the Higher Resolution Texture Pack (which is not installed on Xbox Series S unless the player chooses to)

UI

  • Fixed an issue where the “continue” button might appear visually corrupted if pausing during a level load
  • Fixed the description of the “Performance Metrics” menu option

Accessibility

  • The in-game Manual text now adjusts to match the player’s choice of enabling/disabling control toggles

Audio

  • Fixed an issue where the sound of plane propellers might be heard persistently in other levels after revisiting Shanghai
  • Gina’s voice lines when using the boat radio in Sukhothai are now radio-processed correctly

PC

  • Fixed an issue where switching between Native TAA and other upscalers (DLSS, XeSS or FSR) might cause a crash on some systems
  • Fixed an issue where Frame Generation might disable when skipping cutscenes or restarting checkpoints
  • Fixed an issue where the glass on Clerical Doors appeared incorrectly when using DLSS Ray Reconstruction
  • Fixed an issue where water caustic reflection effects may not appear on walls when DLSS Ray Reconstruction is used
  • Fixed an issue where applying some ray tracing options while in the Shanghai level may have caused a crash in certain situations
  • Fixed an issue where, if you linked your Steam version saves to your Xbox account, you could temporarily corrupt your saves on one of your devices if quitting a play session before any progress was made in that session

Xbox

  • Fixed an issue where subtitles might briefly flicker between camera cuts in cutscenes

Steam Deck

  • Fixed issue where there may be a black screen for a long while generating shader pipelines during the first launch

Localisation

  • Additional one-liners from Indy when finishing combat are now available in non-English languages too
  • Fixed an issue where controller input was reversed in the Arabic localisation on the “Apply Video Settings” confirmation menu
  • When playing in the Russian language, based on community feedback, the keyboard bindings now always use Latin alphabet characters rather than Cyrillic

Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to play some of the Order of Giants on my lunch break.

Image credit: Bethesda

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Bitcoin Mining
GameFi Guides

Bitcoin Miners Brace For 5% Difficulty Spike To Fresh Record

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Data shows the Bitcoin Difficulty is set to see a jump of around 5% in the coming network adjustment, making miners’ job tougher than ever before.

Bitcoin Difficulty Is Estimated To See A Notable Spike In Next Adjustment

According to data from CoinWarz, the Bitcoin Difficulty is heading toward its fifth consecutive increase. The Difficulty refers to a metric built into the BTC blockchain that controls how hard it is for miners to find the task of mining on the network.

The feature exists for one purpose: to limit how fast miners perform their duty. This may sound strange at first since miners being able to process transactions faster should be a positive from a BTC-as-a-mode-of-payment perspective, but the cryptocurrency’s creator Satoshi made the feature with another goal in consideration: inflation.

When miners add the next batch of transactions to the blockchain, they receive the block subsidy in return as compensation for their work. The block subsidy happens to be the only way to produce more of the asset. Thus, if miners are freely able to add blocks and receive this reward, they would flood the market with coins.

Supply-demand dynamics guide that this would tank the cryptocurrency’s value. Thus, to prevent inflation running out of hand, Satoshi programmed the Difficulty. Whenever miners become faster than the network intends (by raising their computing power), the Difficulty automatically goes up just enough to slow the validators down to the standard rate.

The target block time for the Bitcoin network is 10 minutes. As the data below shows, miners have been going through blocks at an average time faster than this recently.

The details related to the upcoming Difficulty adjustment | Source: CoinWarz

Bitcoin miners have been taking an average of 9.52 minutes per block recently, which is significantly faster than needed. As such, the blockchain is estimated to respond with a rather large Difficulty increase of about 5.1%.

The BTC network adjusts its Difficulty about every two weeks, with the next such event estimated to occur around 4:25 AM UTC, Friday. Once the increase goes through, the Difficulty will spike to a new all-time high (ATH) of around 136.29 terahashes.

Miners will face this pressure after already dealing with record-high Difficulty levels for the last few weeks.

How the BTC Difficulty has fluctuated over the last six months | Source: CoinWarz

As is visible in the above chart, the Bitcoin Difficulty has seen four-straight positive adjustments recently, with three of the raises resulting in fresh ATHs. Despite this, miners have only expanded their total computing power to a new record, as data from Blockchain.com shows.

Looks like the 7-day average value of the metric set a record just a few days ago | Source: Blockchain.com

It now remains to be seen whether miners will continue to expand even after the upcoming Difficulty spike or if they will roll back in the coming days.

BTC Price

Bitcoin recovered above $112,000 on Wednesday, but it appears the coin has seen a retrace since then as its price is now back at $110,700.

The trend in the BTC price over the last five days | Source: BTCUSDT on TradingView

Featured image from Dall-E, Blockchain.com, CoinWarz.com, chart from TradingView.com

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