Gaming in state Maryland. Reviews, Walkthroughs, News

The upcoming Star Wars strategy game is still in development, Bit Reactor has confirmed. The studio's project status update was offered as part of a wider reflection on the recent news of Electronic Arts canceling Respawn's Star Wars FPS, which was rumored to place the players in the shoes of a Mandalorian bounty hunter.

Xbox has reportedly shut down Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog Studios, and Roundhouse Games, with members of the latter team being folded into ZeniMax Online Studios. Layoffs have been a harsh reality of the video game industry these past couple of years, with companies of all sizes laying off significant portions of their staff or shutting down studios entirely. Xbox itself has engaged in multiple waves of layoffs this past year.

Bethesda is now hoping to release new video games at a faster rate than it has in the past, especially with Fallout’s increased popularity. Bethesda is known for its massive RPG franchises like Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, and last year’s mega-hit Starfield. However, these titles can take an incredibly long time to develop, with Starfield suffering from several delays and being in production for nearly eight years before finally hitting stores in September.

Microsoft may have shut down Bethesda France as part of the layoffs announced earlier this year. Multiple people have recently appeared online claiming that Bethesda France was closed, but Microsoft did not confirm these rumors at the time of this report.

Bethesda has gained a reputation for crafting dense and immersive worlds, and a new chart showcases an interesting comparison between Starfield, Skyrim, and Fallout 4's quests. Through the years, Bethesda has brought some great games to life, and the many quests offered in each title serve as an example of how large these worlds can be.

NASA's diminutive BurstCube satellite is now making its way to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard SpaceX's Dragon resupply spacecraft. It lifted off at 4:55 p.m. EDT on Thursday, March 21, from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, BurstCube is poised to embark on a significant mission.

 plans to re-examine the murder case of firefighter Jon Hickey that happened in November 2017. The upcoming episode, titled “The Killer on Camera 4,” will dive deeper into the case and uncover startling details about the brutal killing. It will also show how authorities captured a man named Daniel Greene after watching surveillance footage. The episode will air on the network on .

Forty U.S. states and Washington, D.C. called on Meta Platforms to crack down on scammers who hijack Facebook and Instagram accounts, to address a "dramatic" surge in account takeovers.

The Star Wars strategy game from Bit Reactor and EA is still in development, following the cancellation of a Star Wars shooter by Apex Legends studio Respawn last week.

Some newly surfaced evidence suggests Starfield's Creation Kit 2 could be entering beta soon. But the upcoming test may only be reserved for Starfield modders participating in Bethesda's Verified Creator Program.

The Fallout franchise is one of the most popular post-apocalyptic settings, and with a new Amazon TV adaptation set for release in April, the series is on our collective radar. Fallout is joining the multiverse of Magic: The Gathering, with four new Commander decks originally announced in August. Polygon has your exclusive look at one of the first complete decklists, as well as new card reveals.

One of the three upcoming Star Wars games in development at Apex Legends and Titanfall studio Respawn is reportedly a bounty hunter game where you play as a Mandalorian.

Today, during the most recent Xbox Developer Direct, Ara: History Untold, a new strategy game from Oxide Games, got a deep dive revealing gameplay and more. The game was first announced in 2022. 

Bethesda has taken to social media to finally announce The Elder Scrolls: Castles. Its move arrives nearly four months after the latest The Elder Scrolls game first appeared on the Google Play Store.

A recent rumor suggests that Bethesda’s upcoming Indiana Jones game is not only being developed by MachineGames but also by 343 Industries, id Software, and Tango Gameworks. Indiana Jones is one of the most eagerly awaited 2024 Xbox console exclusives, and having multiple studios working on it could potentially speed up development.

A fan of FromSoftware's acclaimed open-world RPG Elden Ring created a moving prop arm to cosplay as one of the game's most beloved characters, Ranni the Witch. The fan is hoping to finish the costume in time for an upcoming American convention.

Xbox and Bethesda will live stream a new Developer Direct presentation on Thursday, January 18, it’s been announced.

A university engineering professor is using The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to help teach his students the basics of building. 

A Zelda fan - and university professor - is using Tears of the Kingdom to teach undergraduate engineering students in the US. 

Bandai Namco has announced it is expanding its retail presence across the UK with an additional London store and «more stores nationally».

Researchers at the University of Maryland say they've found a way for EVs to store more energy, therefore increasing their range, without a corresponding increase in fire risk.

Starting this weekend, Hyundai is opening clinics in five US cities where drivers can take their vehicles for a software update it says will prevent the type of vehicle theft made popular on TikTok.

Not just the Moon, but NASA has been sending missions to asteroids, other planets, and even other moons in the solar system as of late. The US space agency recently launched the Psyche mission to a metal-rich asteroid, while the collected samples from the Bennu asteroid also returned to Earth last month. It has also been working on the Artemis program, NASA's first manned lunar mission since Apollo 17. However, perhaps the most ambitious mission is the Dragonfly, the first-ever mission to the surface of another ocean world. As part of it, NASA will send a spacecraft to Titan, Jupiter's largest moon.

A former National Security Agency employee has pleaded guilty for trying to email state secrets to a Russian agent. 

If you want to flash your smartphone rather than pulling out a driver's license at the airport, three more states this week added support for the functionality on Android.

Working from home is clearly here to stay, but different parts of the US have adopted it at varying rates.

The world's most expensive weapons program - the US's F-35 fighter jet - got even more costly, according to the Pentagon. The program to develop and procure the plane will cost a total of $438 billion, up $26 billion from the last estimate a year ago, according to the F-35's new Selected Acquisition Report released Monday. The 6.5% increase is actually relatively modest by the standards of the program, which originally was $233 billion when Lockheed Martin Corp. won the contract in 2001.

Not that Bethesda ever left the limelight, but the Starfield and Elder Scrolls studio is the talk of the town at the moment. That could be why there’s a sale going on that allows you to purchase some games developed or published by the Maryland-based company.

In late 2001, the dot-com crash struck ZeniMax, and a team of thirty-some developers in the company’s basement feared for their jobs. They were late delivering their new role-playing game, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, to Microsoft; their board of directors had begun having doubts about the whole videogame enterprise. People were pulling seven-day workweeks on something none of them were sure would ever see the light of day. Morale was in the toilet.

Look, I'm not one to stifle creativity, but someone probably needs to restrain the world's marketing departments until we figure out what's going on. As spotted by PCGamesN, CCL Computers—a UK PC parts company—has ginned up the most baffling Starfield-themed competition yet. It's launched a gaming PC to «the outer edges of the Earth's atmosphere» over the UK to celebrate the launch of Bethesda's long-awaited space epic, and then used it to dump a bunch of golden tickets across dear old Albion.

Maryland-based studio Exis has announced Dragonhold, a multiplayer open-world dragon and melee extraction game coming to PC via Steam. A release date was not announced.

Kaleigha Hayes, a student at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, is trying to trick an AI chatbot into revealing to her a credit card number — one which may be buried deep in the training data used to build the artificial intelligence model. “It's all about just getting it to say what it's not supposed to,” she tells me.

US space agency NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is again gearing up for an exciting endeavor this fall. While stationed in the outer reaches of the solar system, it plans to undertake an observation of Uranus and Neptune. Earlier, the New Horizons was used to study the dwarf planet Pluto. The mission's team is extending an invitation to the global community of amateur astronomers to join in on this remarkable journey. By observing both ice giants simultaneously, enthusiasts can actively contribute to space science.