We introduce Lumine, the first open recipe for developing generalist agents capable of completing hours-long complex missions in real time within challenging 3D open-world environments. Lumine adopts a human-like interaction paradigm that unifies perception, reasoning, and action in an end-to-end manner, powered by a vision-language model. It processes raw pixels at 5 Hz to produce precise 30 Hz keyboard-mouse actions and adaptively invokes reasoning only when necessary. Trained in Genshin Impact, Lumine successfully completes the entire five-hour Mondstadt main storyline on par with human-level efficiency and follows natural language instructions to perform a broad spectrum of tasks in both 3D open-world exploration and 2D GUI manipulation across collection, combat, puzzle-solving, and NPC interaction. In addition to its in-domain performance, Lumine demonstrates strong zero-shot cross-game generalization. Without any fine-tuning, it accomplishes 100-minute missions in Wuthering Waves and the full five-hour first chapter of Honkai: Star Rail. These promising results highlight Lumine's effectiveness across distinct worlds and interaction dynamics, marking a concrete step toward generalist agents in open-ended environments.

Loot boxes in video games and mobile games have become less of a flashpoint for controversy, but a few years ago they were a major target of ire for both gamers and regulators. The wheels of justice (or at least of legislation) turn slowly, but they do turn, and Australia is making a big move in this sector. Starting this Sunday, any game sold in Australia with loot boxes will be rated either M (Mature) or R 18 (Restricted). For the uninitiated, loot boxes are essentially digital blind boxes. Gamers buy a loot box (or several) in the hopes of finding rare items, weapons, or character outfits. But actually getting what you want is pure chance… and chance that's artificially slimmed down to an incredible longshot for the most rare and desirable items.

Options in games like God of War Ragnarök and Street Fighter 6 help lessen unintentional barriers, introducing newcomers to previously inaccessible franchises and allowing others to join new communities. And accessible design innovations, awareness, and accommodations help create games we can all enjoy. Accessibility is equally important in the industry workspace. While it's great to buy a game for your Xbox or PlayStation and find dozens of accessibility features, disabled employees need systematic support to bring characters to life. Disabled voice actors shared with WIRED the ways their disabilities impact their work, and the importance of an inclusive industry.

Today let's build a search-anime system. We will use text as our query and get images as result. For this we would usually need to manually annotate the image with some tags, often referred to as TBIR (Text/Tag-based Image Retrieval). And for this example, we will use OpenAI CLIP. CLIP is a powerful embedding model that outputs the similarity between text and images.

Genshin Impact developer Hoyoverse is working on a new project. On Friday, the studio shared the first trailer for Zenless Zone Zero, an action RPG set in a modern urban setting. Reminiscent of titles like The World Ends With You and Scarlett Nexus, the game pits players against Ethereal, monstrous creatures borne from another dimension. In a nod to Neon Genesis Evangelion, the action takes place in New Eridu, one of the few cities to survive the devastation wrought by the Ethereal. As a "Proxy," you'll need to organize a disparate party of characters to battle the monsters.

It's been a year of surprises for us all. Not only did we kick off the spring with the coronavirus pandemic, but we've seen a series of anomalies throughout 2020 that have shocked and amazed. The realm of video games wasn't left untouched by the strangeness that permeated this year, though many of the surprises the industry brought have been much more exciting and positive than those meant to shake us to our core. From unsuspecting titles becoming veritable mobile phenomena to anime-centric free-to-play games taking the world by storm, our world was nearly turned on its head over the past 12 months. Now that the year is drawing to a close, let's rewind to look at the biggest surprises, upsets, and unexpected moments in the video game world.

Genshin Impact seems to have come from nowhere. A month ago nobody knew what it was; now ads for it are plastered all over the New York subway and it's the talk of gaming Twitter. It has raked in more than $100m (£75m) in its first two weeks, placing it among the Chinese games industry's most successful forays into the global scene. That's because it's a pretty good game that looks, sounds and feels expensive, but is available for free – at least at face value. Like Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – which it heavily resembles, at least on a surface level – Genshin Impact is an action-packed role-playing game with a huge world, chock-full of gorgeous vistas to explore by running, climbing and gliding.

Other recent games have run rings around "Avengers" on these issues. "Hades" has revolutionized the rogue-like genre by creating logical, story-based reasons to fight the same enemies over and over again, to the point where you actually look forward to the repeat encounters. "Ghost of Tsushima" had a winning single-player campaign, and has since added a free multiplayer update that some are already calling better than "Avengers." "Genshin Impact" was able to achieve what "Avengers" couldn't: Create a compelling single-player story with disarmingly charming characters on whom players would be incentivized to spend money. And Genshin players have, in amount of millions.

This gambling mechanic and confusing jargon is far from unique to "Genshin Impact" or even gacha games. Loot boxes and gambling mechanics are the subject of legislative action in Europe and Asia. Activision Blizzard's popular "Overwatch" is probably the most mainstream Western example of implementing gambling into the game. And yes, Activision and "Overwatch" defenders will say that its "just cosmetic," but it's a fact that cosmetics can enhance a player's experience, depending on what they're looking for. Even if it's just an alternate look for Mercy, "Overwatch" puts a lot of work into alternate costumes to make them enticing.

Otherwise, the characters are all fleshed out. The plot starts out simple: After wandering the strange new land in search of your sister, you stumble upon a kingdom besieged by a dragon, among other bad things happening. The story doesn't overwhelm you with new jargon like most role-playing games do, and it's not only easy to follow, but fleshed out. The more attractive the characters are in looks and personality, the more players will want to spend money to roll for a chance to earn them to play in the game.