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The announcement at BlizzCon 2016 that met with the most muted response was arguably the most revolutionary.

While new content for the likes of Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, and Diablo III drew appreciative roars from the Blizzard faithful, the news that Google’s DeepMind branch—which is dedicated to developing sophisticated Intelligence—would be teaming up with the makers of Starcraft 2 to further its research on AI elicited more of a murmur.

Perhaps the lack of enthusiasm was down to taste. After all, why would the plans of AI scientists be of interest to Starcraft 2 players? As it turns out, if the collaboration between DeepMind and Blizzard is what its developers hope it could be, players will see very tangible benefits—and so will many others outside the video game space.

Update, November 27: A promised update to No Man's Sky has arrived—and perhaps earlier than expected. The vague promise of the patch's arrival "this week" turned into "this weekend" thanks to the patch's launch on PlayStation 4 on Sunday. (The NMS 1.1 patch will be coming to PC players at a later date.)

Two new modes!

A six-minute video from Hello Games, posted above, explains what players can expect. Though the update had been teased primarily as a "base-building" update, it also includes two new default modes: survival and creative. The former jacks up difficulty and forces players to scrounge even more for survival-related items, while the latter turns the difficulty way down to let players explore at an even more leisurely pace.

And, yes, players can now use resources to build bases on a planet's surface, which can be filled with resource growth pods, alien helpers, and inventory storage units. Even better, players can now create and maintain a giant flying frigate, which works pretty much exactly like a surface base but can also travel from space system to space system.

Submitted by: (via The Awkward Yeti)

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

While New Horizons has gotten much of the planetary science glory this year after returning data from its spectacular Pluto flyby in 2015, NASA's Dawn spacecraft has continued to plug along in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt.

On Friday NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory released two new images of Ceres: a view of the intriguing Occator Crater that provides a new perspective on the distinctive feature and a global image of Ceres that represents how the world would appear to the naked eye were a human in orbit. (If only.)

Napster and Metallica, together again—and they look so happy about it, too! (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Metallica's first full album in eight years launched on Friday, and as with most modern albums, it went on sale on a variety of digital storefronts. One of those sellers was more noteworthy than the others, of course, as the album launch coincided with Metallica's first-ever warm, hugging embrace of Napster.

Earlier this week, the band and company announced that Metallica's entire catalog would finally launch on the Napster service on Friday. The $10/£10 a month music service currently resembles all-you-can-stream subscription services like Spotify and Google Play Music, and Napster's fee now includes every published song by Hetfield and Co., from 1983's Kill 'Em All to this week's Hardwired... To Self-Destruct.

Of course, the Napster of today is different than the Napster that drummer Lars Ulrich lashed out against in 1999. What was once a totally free, peer-to-peer service for the trading of MP3s has since been shuffled from corporate handler to corporate handler. After its transformation to an iTunes-styled MP3 store, Napster was taken over by Best Buy in 2008 before being dealt to Rhapsody three years later.

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The developer behind Star Citizen, the crowdfunded massively multiplayer space sim headed up by Wing Commander maker Chris Roberts, is making its production schedule public. The show of transparency comes nearly four years to the day that the initial crowdfunding campaign for Star Citizen launched, with no sign of a completion date in sight.

At last count back in 2015, developer Cloud Imperium Games had attracted over one million backers, and nearly $100 million in funding thanks to a combination of early access sales and sales of in-game ships. At least some parts of Star Citizen, including the separate single-player campaign Squadron 42, were originally scheduled to launch in 2015.

The weekly development schedule for Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 will now be shared on Roberts' website, which the developer says is an "internal schedule" with "no filter, no hedging. You see what we see." The schedule breaks out production times for the Star Marine and Arena Commander modules, technology and systems, content and UI teams, and the Mega Map stretch goal.

Enlarge / Host Dave Chappelle during SNL's monologue on November 12, 2016. (credit: Getty Images / Will Heath / NBC)

Video-streaming services continue to push and shove each other in a battle for the most original programming. While each has its fair share of original TV series and feature-length films, Netflix has run away with the crown for at least one sub-genre of content: stand-up comedy. As if the service doesn't already have enough stand-up specials, now Netflix is going all-in by inking a deal with Dave Chappelle.

The deal, announced very simply via a Tweet on Monday, appears to include three stand-up comedy specials, as opposed to any sketch-based programming like Chappelle's popular Comedy Central series. According to a Variety report, two of those specials have already been taped and are sitting in Chappelle's vault: one from an April 2015 performance at Austin City Limits Live and the other from March 2016 at the Hollywood Palladium.

Variety reports that those two will be released simultaneously at some point next year, while the third special will be a newly recorded performance with no scheduled Netflix release date.

Enlarge / Axanar Productions is arguing that its Prelude to Axanar doesn't infringe copyright because it's filmed in “mockumentary” style. (credit: Prelude to Axanar)

In a motion filed last week, CBS and Paramount asked a judge to rule that (PDF) fan-funded Axanar Productions infringed Star Trek copyright. A day later, the small production company filed its own motion (PDF) claiming that its only existing 20-minute film, called Prelude to Axanar, was shot in a “mockumentary” style, unlike a true Star Trek TV show or movie, and that Axanar Production’s output was always intended to be non-commercial.

The company also contended that CBS and Paramount don’t own “the idea of Star Trek or the Star Trek universe as a whole."

CBS and Paramount allege that Axanar's work copies from the “plots, themes, settings, mood, dialogue, characters, and pace,” of Star Trek works and that, by raising nearly $1.5 million on Kickstarter, the production studio didn’t operate non-commercially.

(credit: Claire Macnamara)

In response to a lawsuit accusing the US Navy of pirating more than 558,000 copies of virtual reality software, the Navy conceded Monday that it had installed the software on "hundreds of thousands of computers within its network" without paying the German software maker for it. But the Navy says it did so with the consent of the software producer.

Bitmanagement Software, in a federal lawsuit, claims the government pilfered its 3D virtual reality software on a "massive scale" beginning in 2013. The company says it agreed to license BS Contact Geo on just 38 machines "for the purposes of testing, trial runs, and integration into Navy systems." The suit, in which Bitmanagement conceded that it removed the "control mechanism that tracked and limited the use of the software," seeks hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

Those damages could grow into billions. The US Copyright Act allows up to $150,000 in damages per infringement.

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While there's plenty to like about the PlayStation 4 Pro for l33t gamers lucky enough to own a 4K HDR TV, the console offers less of a visual upgrade for those stuck with mere 1080p TVs.

Now, a new report looking at PS4 Pro performance has revealed that in some cases games perform worse on the PS4 Pro than a standard PS4 when plugged into a 1080p television.

The report, which comes from graphics analysis guru Digital Foundry, found that because the PS4 Pro opts to run games at a higher resolution or implement additional graphical effects—some games even run at higher than 1080p resolution and scale down, a process known as super-sampling—they run slower than on a standard PS4. This is contrary to Sony's technical requirements, which require games to match or exceed base PS4 frame rates.

Enlarge / I have something to show you, and you're not going to like it. At all. (credit: HBO)

Everything I believed was a lie on Westworld—at least, that's what I got out of this week's episode "Trompe L'Oeil." I guess that's just par for the course in this mind-breaking story about storytelling. This week on Decrypted, my guest is one of Westworld's writers, Charles Yu, who is also the award-winning author of the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. He can't give us spoilers, but he does tell us a lot about writing for this incredible show.

Topics discussed: Metafiction (i.e. fiction about fiction), what the hell with the Bernard reveal (really, what the hell), the challenge of telling a story that feels familiar yet surprising (and how Westworld does it), whether the robots are just like humans or radically different (yes and no), Ford's real motivations (it's complicated), how intellectual property might be the enemy of storytelling (or maybe not), whether stories can be dangerous (sometimes), what characters and ideas got Yu excited about writing for Westworld (hint: Bernard and metafiction), and why Felix is so important (he shows us a side of Westworld that no one else can).

I'll be analyzing, debating, and dissecting Westworld every week with a different guest, and we'll post the podcast on Tuesdays. The episodes air on Sunday, so you have plenty of time to watch before we get into major spoilers. Yes, there are spoilers. Listen when you're ready!