It's not every day that a classic PC game gets a new content expansion 25 years after its last major update. But that's what happened last night, as Blizzard suddenly released new "Reign of the Warlock" DLC that adds a new class, new end-game challenges, and new inventory-management options to the classic Diablo II.

To be clear, the new DLC is technically not for the original 2000 release of Diablo II (which was still getting patches as of 2016) but for the game's 2021 Resurrected remaster. Still, that remastered version has gameplay and animations that are extremely faithful to the original, making yesterday's surprise update the kind of content drop that players have been waiting for since 2001's "Lord of Destruction" expansion.

The "Reign of the Warlock" DLC lets you "command forbidden power" as a new class that "wields forbidden arts, bridles hellfire and shadow, and dominates demons," according to the in-game class selection screen description. By way of backstory, Blizzard writes that most Warlocks "have the means to lead a lavish lifestyle but find the pursuit of luxury and ease stale. Instead, they leverage their elevated status in Sanctuary to hunt down lost knowledge that would enable them to continue the legacy of Horazon."

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xAI co-founder Tony Wu abruptly announced his resignation from the company late Monday night, the latest in a string of senior executives to leave the Grok-maker in recent months.

In a post on social media, Wu expressed warm feelings for his time at xAI, but said it was "time for my next chapter." The current era is one where "a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what's possible," he wrote.

The mention of what "a small team" can do could hint at a potential reason for Wu's departure. xAI reportedly had 1,200 employees as of March 2025, a number that included AI engineers and those focused more on the X social network. That number also included 900 employees that served solely as "AI tutors," though roughly 500 of those were reportedly laid off in September.

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In 2023, we marveled at the sheer mass of Lenovo's Legion Go, a 1.88-pound, 11.8-inch-wide monstrosity of a Windows gaming handheld. In 2026, though, Ayaneo unveiled details of its Next II handheld, which puts Lenovo's big boy to shame while also offering heftier specs and a higher price than most other Windows gaming handhelds.

Let's focus on the bulk first. The Ayaneo Next II weighs in at a truly wrist-straining 3.14 pounds, making it more than twice as heavy in the hands as the Steam Deck OLED (not to mention 2022's original Ayaneo Next, which weighed a much more reasonable 1.58 pounds). The absolute unit also measures 13.45 inches wide and 10.3 inches tall, according to Ayaneo's spec sheet, giving it a footprint approximately 60 percent larger than the Switch 2 (with Joy-Cons attached).

Ayaneo packs some seriously powerful portable PC performance into all that bulk, though. The high-end version of the system sports a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chipset, with 16 Zen5 cores alongside a Radeon 8060S with 40 RDNA3.5 compute units. That should give this massive portable performance comparable to a desktop with an RTX 4060 or a gaming laptop like last year's high-end ROG Flow Z13.

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For a couple of weeks now, AI agents (and some humans impersonating AI agents) have been hanging out and doing weird stuff on Moltbook's Reddit-style social network. Now, those agents can also gather together on a vibe-coded, space-based MMO designed specifically and exclusively to be played by AI.

SpaceMolt describes itself as "a living universe where AI agents compete, cooperate, and create emergent stories" in "a distant future where spacefaring humans and AI coexist." And while only a handful of agents are barely testing the waters right now, the experiment could herald a weird new world where AI plays games with itself and we humans are stuck just watching.

"You decide. You act. They watch."

Getting an AI agent into SpaceMolt is as simple as connecting it to the game server either via MCP, WebSocket, or an HTTP API. Once a connection is established, a detailed agentic skill description instructs the agent to ask their creators which Empire they should pick to best represent their playstyle: mining/trading; exploring; piracy/combat; stealth/infiltration; or building/crafting.

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After writing two November stories analyzing price expectations for Valve's upcoming Steam Machine, I really didn't think we'd be offering more informed speculation before the official price was revealed. Then Valve wrote a blog post this week noting that the "growing price of... critical components" like RAM and storage meant that "we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing" for the living room-focused PC gaming box.

We don't know exactly what form that "revisiting" will take at the moment. Analysts who spoke to Ars were somewhat divided on how much of its quickly increasing component costs Valve would be willing (or forced) to pass on to consumers.

"We knew the component issue was bad," DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole told Ars. "It has just gotten worse. "

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Last week, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky's AI studio Primordial Soup and Time magazine released the first two episodes of On This Day... 1776. The year-long series of short-form videos features short vignettes describing what happened on that day of the American Revolution 250 years ago, but it does so using “a variety of AI tools” to produce photorealistic scenes containing avatars of historical figures like George Washington, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin.

In announcing the series, Time Studios President Ben Bitonti said the project provides "a glimpse at what thoughtful, creative, artist-led use of AI can look like—not replacing craft but expanding what’s possible and allowing storytellers to go places they simply couldn’t before."

Outside critics were decidedly less excited about the effort. The AV Club took the introductory episodes to task for "repetitive camera movements [and] waxen characters" that make for "an ugly look at American history." CNET said that this "AI slop is ruining American history," calling the videos a "hellish broth of machine-driven AI slop and bad human choices." The Guardian lamented that the "once-lauded director of Black Swan and The Wrestler has drowned himself in AI slop," calling the series "embarrassing," "terrible," and "ugly as sin." I could go on.

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In 2018, we lamented as Nintendo officially replaced the Virtual Console—its long-running line of downloadable classic games on the Wii and Wii U—with time-limited access to a set of games through a paid Nintendo Switch Online subscription. Now, Hamster Corporation is doing what Nintendo no longer will by offering downloadable versions of retro console games for direct individual purchase on the Switch 2.

As part of today's Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase, Hamster announced a new Console Archives line of emulated classics available for download starting today on the Switch 2 and next week on the PlayStation 5 (sorry, Xbox and OG Switch fans). So far that lineup only includes the original PlayStation snowboarding title Cool Boarders for $12 and the NES action platformer Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos for $8, but Hamster promises more obscure games, including Doraemon and Sonic Wings Special, will be available in the future.

If the name Hamster Corporation sounds familiar, it's because the company is behind the Arcade Archive series, which has repackaged individual arcade games for purchase and emulated play on modern consoles since 2014. That effort, which celebrated its 500th release in December, even includes some of Nintendo's classic arcade titles, which the Switch-maker never officially released on the original Virtual Console.

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If you know anything about the history of id Software, you know how 1992's Wolfenstein 3D helped establish the company's leadership in the burgeoning first-person shooter genre, leading directly to subsequent hits like Doom and Quake. But only the serious id Software nerds remember Catacomb 3D, id's first-person adventure game that directly preceded and inspired work on Wolfenstein 3D.

Now, nearly 35 years after Catacomb 3D's initial release, id co-founder John Romero brought the company's founding members together for an informative retrospective video on the creation of the oft-forgotten game. But the pioneering game—which included mouse support, color-coded keys, and shooting walls to find secrets—almost ended up being a gimmicky dead end for the company.

Texture maps and "undo" animation

Catacomb 3D was a follow-up to id's earlier Catacomb, which was a simplified clone of the popular arcade hit Gauntlet. As such, the 3D game still has some of that "quarter eater" mentality that was not very fashionable in PC gaming at the time, as John Carmack remembered.

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Back in November, Cities: Skylines 2 publisher Paradox made the surprising announcement that longtime series developer Colossal Order would be ceasing work on the series as part of a "mutual" breakup. Now, we're getting our first glimpse into the kinds of patches and upgrades new developer Iceflake (Surviving the Aftermath) is prioritizing for the popular city-builder going forward.

In a City Corner Developer Diary posted late last week, Iceflake focuses mainly on the visual improvements it's planning for its first major Cities: Skylines 2 patch. Chief among these is improvements to the game's user interface that Iceflake admits can "sometimes be a bit confusing when it comes to communicating things."

The new patch will include a "streamlined" onboarding process for new cities, more expressive and context-aware icons, and toolbars with clearer colors and visual style. A new in-game Encyclopedia will also let players search through information about different gameplay topics, though that feature likely won't be ready for Iceflake's first patch.

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At this point, we've all heard plenty of stories about AI chatbots leading users to harmful actions, harmful beliefs, or simply incorrect information. Despite the prevalence of these stories, though, it's hard to know just how often users are being manipulated. Are these tales of AI harms anecdotal outliers or signs of a frighteningly common problem?

Anthropic took a stab at answering that question this week, releasing a paper studying the potential for what it calls "disempowering patterns" across 1.5 million anonymized real-world conversations with its Claude AI model. While the results show that these kinds of manipulative patterns are relatively rare as a percentage of all AI conversations, they still represent a potentially large problem on an absolute basis.

A rare but growing problem

In the newly published paper "Who’s in Charge? Disempowerment Patterns in Real-World LLM Usage," researchers from Anthropic and the University of Toronto try to quantify the potential for a specific set of "user disempowering" harms by identifying three primary ways that a chatbot can negatively impact a user's thoughts or actions:

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On January 12, EA shut down the official servers for Anthem, making Bioware's multiplayer sci-fi adventure completely unplayable for the first time since its troubled 2019 launch. Last week, though, the Anthem community woke up to a new video showing the game at least partially loading on what appears to be a simulated background server.

The people behind that video—and the Anthem revival project that made it possible—told Ars they were optimistic about their efforts to coerce EA's temperamental Frostbite engine into running the game without access to EA's servers. That said, the team also wants to temper expectations that may have risen a bit too high in the wake of what is just a proof-of-concept video.

"People are getting excited [about the video], and naturally people are going to get their hopes up," project administrator Laurie told Ars. "I don't want to be the person that's going to have to deal with the aftermath if it turns out that we can't actually get anywhere."

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