Elon Musk admitted he cheated at video games to get high scores, a transcript of a private online conversation he had shows, seemingly concluding a fiery scandal over the billionaire's outlandish claims to be a globally-ranked player. Musk has regularly bragged about his gaming rankings. He told the podcaster Joe Rogan last year that he was in the top 20 players in the world for the fiendishly difficult action role-playing game Diablo IV. His claims have raised questions about how the world's richest man could find time to compete internationally. He would need to have played hundreds of hours in between running businesses including Tesla Inc, X and SpaceX, as well as his growing political activity alongside Donald Trump.

This week, Blizzard released Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred, an expansion to the wildly popular fantasy action-role-playing game that tasks players with slaughtering masses of screeching demons and collecting the randomized gear that they leave behind. Since coming out last year, Diablo IV has been a big success for Blizzard, earning more than 666 million (yes, really) in its first week. But before that release came years of fits and starts, including a predecessor that was perceived within Blizzard as an embarrassment and an iteration that was so drastically different, people began wondering if it was really still Diablo anymore. Today, Diablo is one of Blizzard's most important franchises. But to at least one Blizzard executive who was around in its early days, it wasn't even a "real game."

One of the only announcements at this year's Gamescom, an event replete with games to play but usually light on news (as Keith wrote in last week's newsletter), was that the demon-killing, time-deleting action RPG Diablo IV's second "season" would start on 17 October. That means new stuff for its 12 million players to do – vampiric powers feature heavily. But given that this game only came out in June and its first season of new content started in late July, it also means that its developers will have been working nonstop since its launch to get yet more game content ready to go. I have often wondered how the makers of live service games – "forever games" that essentially wish to monopolise a player's attention over an extended period of time, a still relatively new genre and business model that's emerged in the last 10 years – manage these brutal schedules. Twenty years ago, studios would release a game and that would be it; 10 years ago, they'd be on the hook for a patch or maybe a downloadable expansion, but not such an endless stream of content. So I asked Diablo's GM, Rod Fergusson – who has been running games teams for more than two decades, most famously with Epic Games on Gears of War – how they manage it.

Blizzard Entertainment has released the trailer for the second season of Diablo IV along with the announcement that it's arriving on October 17th. According to IGN, Rod Fergusson, who oversees the development of the franchise, players will get vampire powers and will face against a vampire lord in the new questline during the opening night of Gamescom 2023. Season 2 of the online action role-playing game is called "Season of Blood," because yes, it does feature vampires. Gemma Chan, actor and producer who starred in Eternals and Crazy Rich Asians, voices the vampire hunter companion Erys, who leads the fight against the new threat in the game's universe. The new season will also feature five new and returning endgame bosses, as well as updates to renown rewards, gem and stash storage, making it so that gems no longer take up space, as well as to resistance and status effects.

Let's talk about mounts in video games, because Diablo IV's horses bum me out. From horses to dragons to oversized beds that move around as if on wheels, mounts can be just about anything in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. Not only are they something of a status symbol, as they're usually hard-earned during challenging boss battles and unforgiving grinds, but they're also necessary tools to get from place to place. I like a fashionable mount that lessens my travel time and helps me get to far-away lands. That said, if the mount seriously stinks, it can really impact my gameplay.

The game sold more copies during its pre-launch period than any other Blizzard Entertainment title before it. Players have already spent 93 million hours with the game, and counting. Even before its full release this week, critics were praising its design and story. It's a rare positive outcome for a company that's been mired in controversy. Since 2021, Activision Blizzard's place in headlines has been next to allegations of harassment and news of burgeoning union efforts.

When I listen to the voice recording I made at the Irvine, California, headquarters of the video-game company Blizzard Entertainment this past January, I hear a noise that many gamers find blissful: the sound of utter mayhem. Playing a prerelease version of Diablo IV, the latest installment in a 26-year-old adventure series about battling the forces of hell, I faced swarms of demons that yowled and belched. I jabbed buttons arrhythmically--click … click … clickclickclick--while trying to stifle curses and whimpers. But the strangest sounds came from the two Diablo IV designers who sat alongside me. As I dueled with an angry sea witch, Joseph Piepiora, an associate game director, gently noted that I was low on healing potions.

With the rise of AI language models and tools like ChatGPT and Bard, we've heard warnings from people involved, like Elon Musk, about the risks posed by AI. Now, a group of high-profile industry leaders has issued a one-sentence statement: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." It was posted to the Center for AI Safety, an organization with the mission "to reduce societal-scale risks from artificial intelligence," according to its website. Signatories include OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis. Turing Award-winning researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, the godfathers of modern AI, also put their names to it.

And if you happen to be upgrading your PC in anticipation of Activision-Blizzard's next great dungeon crawler, Nvidia has a deal for you. If you buy a GeForce RTX 4070, 4070 Ti, 4080, or 4090, you'll get a digital code for Diablo IV for free, along with some in-game goodies for the game and other Blizzard titles. The offer is good from now until June 13th, and though the Rise Against Evil bundle is limited to "select retailers," it shouldn't be too hard to find -- these code bundles generally show up at all the major retailers. In addition to the $70 game (ouch), the code includes the Light-Bearer Mount and Caparison of Faith Armor for Diablo IV, Inarius Wings and Inarius Murloc pet for Diablo III, an Amalgam Rage Mount for World of Warcraft, and the Umber Winged Darkness Cosmetics set for the Diablo Immortal game for PCs and mobile devices. If that's not enough, the latest version of Diablo IV supports Nvidia's impressive DLSS 3 technology, which you can try out in the Server Slam Beta taking place between May 12th and 14th.

NVIDIA's DLSS 3 upscaling (Deep Learning Super Sampling 3) will soon be available for some particularly high-profile games. To begin with, Diablo IV will use the AI-based technology when the game launches on June 6th. If you have a GeForce RTX 40 series GPU, you can push the click-heavy action RPG to a high resolution without worrying so much about a frame rate drop. Bethesda's open-world vampire shooter Redfall will also support DLSS 3 when it ships on May 2nd. And if you're a fan of arcade-style racing, you'l be happy to know that a Forza Horizon 5 update will introduce the feature on March 28th.