The Elder Scrolls VI: Castles
Bethesda just stealth-dropped a new Elder Scrolls game and no, it isn’t The Elder Scrolls VI. It isn’t a re-release of Skyrim, either, if you can believe that. Bethesda’s cooked up something new, something fresh: The Elder Scrolls: Castles, a mobile game that asks a big question: what if Fallout Shelter and Skyrim had a baby?
That’s the idea anyway. The game hit the Google Play Store in the late hours of last night, listed as early access. That won’t stop anyone with an Android and a set of fingers from downloading the game, however. If you need any more convincing, Castles is a “new mobile game that puts you in control of your very own castle and dynasty. Oversee your subjects as the years come and go, families grow, and new rulers take the throne,” according to the game’s listing.
If you’ve played Fallout Shelter before, you’ll quickly get to grips with Castles. The gameplay is like any building sim, not least its Shelter counterpart – allowing players to customize their castle, realize their ambitions for interior design, and assign their subjects to different tasks. Oh, and you’ll be able to create characters that’ll embark on “epic quests” and do battle with “classic Elder Scrolls foes.”
Any aspiring Castles players will need to download the game through this link, since searching for the game traditionally in the Store won’t yield any results. It doesn’t appear on the iOS store, either, leading us to believe that Bethesda’s ‘stealth-drop’ may not have been on purpose, with the company possibly intending to release it as a closed beta first.
Reddit’s making some changes
Reddit’s been busy. It recently made some changes to the platform earlier this week all in the hopes of finding that next bit of revenue, helped along by those API changes that got the internet all hot and bothered for about a week. Some of the new changes — like its new policy that stops users from opting out of personalisation – have been met with the usual outrage.
The platform’s other changes, which didn’t result in the average Redditor frothing at the mouth, involve a new program that’ll reward users for their shitposts. Yes, with actual money. It’s called the Contributor Program, and it’s only available in the US for now. Users with under 5,000 karma (those are no longer invaluable internet points) will earn $0.9 for every gold they receive. Users with more will earn $1 for every gold sent in.
Neither of the changes have yet wound their way to South Africa’s Redditors. And it might stay that way, at least for now. When it comes to personalised ads, Reddit said it was implementing the change to “improve ad performance” and would only take effect “in select countries.” It didn’t specify which countries, though a quick trip to Reddit showed us that the ability to opt out of personalised is still active on our accounts.
There’s a new cable-repairing vessel in town
Say hello to Sophie Germain, Orange’s new €50 million (R1 billion) ship designed to fix undersea internet cables connecting Africa, Europe and Asia. It’ll give Léon Thévenin a break at any rate.
The ship, spanning 100m long, will travel across the Mediterranean and the Red and Black Seas, performing cable work for Meta Platforms, Telecom Italia, and China Telecom. Its primary goal is maintaining the 70,000km cable that keeps the internet flowing between Asia, Africa, and Europe.
Despite Orange Marine — Orange’s subsidiary that controls its fleet of 50 cable-repairing vessels – only bringing in around €150 million a year in revenue, a fraction of its parent company’s €43.5 billion in annual sales, its importance to the industry’s well-being cannot be understated.
It’s time to dust off that Threads account (and delete it)
Remember Threads? Mark Zuckerberg’s big swing at knocking Elon Musk off his pedestal? How could you forget, with the Instagram app reminding you of its existence every five minutes or so? If you, like most, have left your Threads account to gather dust rather than delete it (because of the app’s ties to Instagram), the time has (nearly) come to log in again and delete it.
According to Meta’s chief privacy officer, Michael Protti (via TechCrunch), Meta’s would-be Twitter killer is working on a tool that’ll separate the two apps and allow users to delete Threads without any negative effect to the accompanying Instagram profile. About time.
“Technically, it was extremely challenging to allow deletion of a separate Threads account without also deleting your overall Instagram account out of the gate. So we paid particular attention to ensuring the user could still exercise their deletion rights, by deactivating the account to sort of hide all content, setting it to private or deleting individual threads,” Protti said.
The ‘feature’ is still being worked on, so you won’t be able to delete your Threads account (and only your Threads account) until sometime in December at least. We’ll let you know when that happens.