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After a teaser at last year’s BlizzCon, Blizzard today revealed more details about the new character class that will be coming to Diablo IV this fall. The Spiritborn looks like a fun, powerful mix of several characters from past Diablo entries. Imagine the martial arts combat of the Diablo 3 Monk paired with the animal abilities of the same game’s Witch Doctor plus the aesthetics of the Amazon in Diablo 2. This sounds like a pretty darn tasty recipe to me.

The Spiritborn is a dexterity-driven class with four Spirit Guardians whose powers you can draw on in combat. The jaguar grants fire damage and the eagle offers lightning damage abilities. With the gorilla, players get defensive power and survivability. And the centipede provides poison and fear skills for damage over time and crowd control. During the livestream, Class Designer Bjorn Mikkelson said the Spiritborn is “probably our fastest, most aggressive class.” Think leaping into groups of enemies to deliver big burst damage with glaives, quarterstaffs, and polearms.

A typical rotation will see players using those short cooldown skills infused with an element of a spirit’s power. But the real payoff with Spiritborn is the ultimate ability, which brings one of the Spirit Guardians to fight by the player’s side. “Summoning the god into battle is the power fantasy for this class,” said Diablo IV’s Game Designer Brent Gibson.

Part of what has always made Diablo games compelling is the ability to personalize and specialize your playstyle within the broad character concept. And some of the other Diablo 4 class designs encourage players to specialize in a single ability tree, such as picking one elemental power to use for a Sorcerer. With the Spiritborn, players will have the flexibility to specialize in a single Spirit Guardian’s skill tree if they want, or to mix and match at will without any loss of stats. Things will get even more personalized with the Spirit Hall class mechanic and a whole new set of legendary and ancient gear for the Spiritborn to further fine-tune your preferred playstyle for demon-smashing.

Today’s livestream also had some good nuggets for the lore nerds, and hardcore fans will likely find it worth rewatching the video to see all the details about the worldbuilding that the Blizzard teams put into developing this character. Diablo IV‘s Vessel of Hatred expansion, aka ‘Neyrelle and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,’ will launch on October 8 and the standard edition will cost $40.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/blizzard-reveals-gameplay-for-the-new-diablo-iv-class-spiritborn-205945475.html?src=rss 

Google has officially confirmed the existence of the Pixel 9 Pro smartphone ahead of August’s Made By Google livestream event. This follows a leak earlier this week in which images and videos of the handset started popping up everywhere.

The company confirmed the smartphone via an announcement video, one that could have been waiting for August 13. The video isn’t big on details, but there is some footage of the phone in action that confirms one major suspicion about the Pixel 9 Pro. The absolutely gigantic camera bump is real and is ready to make obvious indentations in pockets everywhere.

Just look at that glorious thing. The bump looks like a 3D approximation of Bender from Futurama’s head. One thing is for sure. If you buy the Pixel 9 Pro later this year, be sure to also buy a newly-designed case. There’s no way previous cases will fit around that monstrosity.

Beyond the camera bump, Google’s video teases heavy integration with the company’s Gemini family of AI models. Affiliated marketing copy simply states “oh hi, AI” and the video shows a chatbot answering a query. This emphasis on AI should surprise absolutely nobody. It’s 2024.

You can sign up for information about the phone directly from Google. While we don’t have any actual specs, it’s likely that ginormous bump exists for a reason (a really good camera system.)

There have been other leaks ahead of next month’s event, though this is the only one proven to be real. These leaks do indicate, however, that the Pixel Pro 9 will be joined by the garden variety Pixel 9, the Pixel 9 Pro XL and a foldable called the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. As always, we’ll be on the scene August 13 to report on whatever Google announces.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-just-confirmed-the-pixel-9-pros-outrageous-camera-bump-185301609.html?src=rss 

The last couple of Alien movies have been good for the most part but it feels like they’ve been missing the raw, skin-shredding tension of the first few films. The latest trailer for Alien: Romulus looks like the series is headed back to its dark, claustrophobic roots.

Alien: Romulus features a whole new crew of doomed space-trekking souls who encounter the deadly Xenomorph on a derelict spacecraft. This time, it’s a crew of space colonizers who are scavenging for resources from abandoned ships and stations.

This Alien film was co-written and directed by Fede Alvarez, the filmmaker behind cult horror flicks such as the two Don’t Breathe movies and the Evil Dead remake. So, yes, Alien: Romulus is gonna be very tense and very, very bloody. Where the original Alien merely strapped a parasitoid xenomorph to a crew member’s face, the trailer for Romulus is willing to show a facehugger penetrating some poor guy’s head. Yikes.

Alien: Romulus hits theaters on Friday, Aug. 16.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-final-trailer-for-alien-romulus-looks-tense-bloody-and-awesome-191908758.html?src=rss 

OpenAI on Thursday released a smaller and more affordable version of its flagship large language model that powers ChatGPT. The new model, called GPT-4o mini, will cost developers 60 percent less to build AI-powered apps and services with as compared to GPT-3.5 Turbo, Open’s smallest model until today. But the big news here is for consumers. GPT-4o mini will replace GPT-3.5 Turbo for free users of ChatGPT starting today — which means that your baseline ChatGPT experience will improve significantly.

OpenAI claimed that GPT-4o mini achieved an 82 percent score on an industry benchmark called the MMLU, which stands for Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding, and includes 16,000 multiple-choice questions across 57 academic subjects. That’s slightly lower than GPT-4o, which scored 88.7 percent, but higher than GPT-3.5 Turbo, which scored just 70 percent. AI experts have warned against relying on these kinds of benchmarks to measure how smart AI systems are, but so far, they’re the only way to measure the performance of large language models.

Smaller versions of flagship models give developers more flexibility when it comes to building AI-powered apps. After all, not everyone needs or can afford access to the largest, most powerful models for every use case. In May, Google announced Gemini 1.5 Flash, its own lightweight model that the company said was optimized for speed and efficiency. Other AI companies like Anthropic, too, have smaller versions of their full-scale models.

GPT-4o mini can currently take in and generate text and images, but the model will eventually be able to process other types of content like audio and video. And even though GPT-3.5 Turbo is going away from ChatGPT, developers can still access it via OpenAI’s API to build apps and services with it for now — until it eventually goes away too.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/new-lightweight-gpt-4o-mini-model-promises-an-improved-chatgpt-experience-170143382.html?src=rss