Gaming News - Page 1

New PlayStation exclusive Stellar Blade appears to get a sales lift from positive reviews.

Reviews for Shift Up's new femme fatale action game are in, and the dust has settled on a strong 82 out of 100 on Metacritic. It looks like these positive reviews may have boosted Stellar Blade's game sales in the United States.

Stellar Blade has enjoyed a boosted position on the PlayStation Store's top 25 best-selling games. The Korean hack-and-slash is now in the #12 spot, beating out Overwatch 2 and Fallout 76 while brushing up against the mighty Roblox. At #12, Stellar Blade is higher today than it has been since I started tracking sales data a week ago. Just yesterday, Stellar Blade was at #17 - on April 17, Steller Blade was #21.

NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR aren't the only upscaling techs in town, lest you forget that Intel has its XeSS rival too - and Team Blue is continuing to push support for it.

To that end, VideoCardz picked up on the fact that Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora just had XeSS upscaling added with a new patch. This is update 3.2 which weighs in at a 3GB download on PC - and a similar size on consoles, where it adds something else: support for a 40 FPS mode.

Horizon Forbidden West also just received a new patch v1.3 via Steam and the Epic Games Store, and this improves XeSS, delivering support for the newest version.

Digital Foundry has done another discussion on what to expect from Sony's PlayStation 5 Pro, which recently had its specifications leak online, revealing what is under the hood of the coming console.

According to the leaks Sony's PS5 Pro will come with a range of performance improvements, with one being a 45% increase in GPU performance compared to the standard PS5. Digital Foundry explains the PS5 Pro will come with PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), Sony's new upscaling technology, and Ultra Boost mode, which is designed to help games using Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) achieve a higher framerate.

The YouTube channel says that games using AMD FSR 2 will likely benefit quite a lot from the PS5 Pro hardware, which would be titles such as Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Final Fantasy XVI. Digital Foundry says all of the aforementioned titles, and any other title that specifically uses a VRR mode will benefit greatly with the PS5 Pro, likely clearing up issues of dynamic resolution scaling being overused resulting in image quality degrading at random times throughout the game.

Ubisoft's long-standing series is expected to get Cillian Murphy to play its next villain in Far Cry 7, according to a known Assassin's Creed leaker.

Oscar-winning actor Cillian Murphy was recently decorated for his portrayal of Robert J. Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan's film "Oppenheimer". Now, rumors are circulating that he's taking his actor prowess to the video game industry, specifically Ubisoft's Far Cry 7. If true, it's likely Murphy will take on the role of the game's main villain, similar to how Giancarlo Esposito played Antón Castillo in Fary Cry 6.

Leaker' xj0nathan' said that an announcement for Far Cry 7 is due to happen extremely soon. Far Cry 7 leaks date back to as early as last year, with those leaks suggesting Ubisoft's next instalment in the series will make some major mechanical changes, such as adding a 72-hour that's similar to Dead Rising.

If you're familiar with Peter Jackson's incredible The Lord of Rings trilogy of films, then you're probably aware that it helped create one of the best practical effects, design, and collectibles companies in the world called Weta Workshop.

Today, we've got a very cool announcement - the company is teaming up with publisher Private Division to create a brand-new game set in J.R.R Tolkein's iconic universe. The game is called Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game, and it's set to launch in the second half of 2024 on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (via Steam).

As for what style of game it is, well, it sounds a little bit like The Hobbit meets Nintendo's Animal Crossing in that there's no real action or orcs or armies of Sauron to contend with - instead, you'll live out the idyllic life of a Hobbit living in the Shire.

Capcom has let us know that there's a big patch coming for Dragon's Dogma 2, but it has disappointed a good number of players who were hoping that the well-publicized performance issues affecting the game might be addressed.

Sadly, smoothing over the wrinkles regarding performance hitches - and serious slowdowns in some areas of the game - is not part of the plan for the update coming later this month.

Instead, there are various gameplay tweaks and fixes, the headline one of which is an adjustment for the infection frequency of dragonsplague, reining that in somewhat - and making it more obvious when a pawn is infected (their glowing eyes, for example, will stand out more).

Baldur's Gate 3 is not only one of 2023's most celebrated games but is widely considered one of the best RPGs ever made, an iconic release that will influence RPGs for years. Developer Larian is still hard at work on the game, with the upcoming Patch 7 set to expand and improve the branching story's "evil endings" with new cutscenes.

However, as part of a recent communityupdate on Steam, Larian confirmed that the studio is already working on its next game, and won't be Baldur's Gate 4. The studio's next two games will be moving on from the world of Dungeons & Dragons.

"After six years in the Forgotten Realms and much discussion and rumination, we've decided to seize the opportunity to develop our own IPs," Larian wrote. "We're currently working on two new projects, and we couldn't be more excited about what the future has in store." So, what does it mean for Baldur's Gate 4? Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast are figuring that out.

Microsoft isn't in a rush to disrupt its new billion-dollar publishing triumvirate--the company appears to be taking the old phrase 'if it's not broken, don't fix it' to heart.

Business consolidations can often be messy things, leading to hundreds of layoffs, product cancellations, and big interruptions. But that isn't the case with Microsoft's $70 billion buyout of Activision Blizzard King. The three-armed unit is indeed owned by Microsoft, but ABK operates as a limited-integration company--similar to ZeniMax/Bethesda, ABK has its own budgets, creates its own projects, and balances its own books.

Blizzard is apparently enjoying the transition over to Microsoft's employ. In a recent interview with VideoGamesChronicle, World of Warcraft VP Holly Longdale says that the trillion-dollar tech giant hasn't come in and starting telling everyone what to do. WoW is doing great right now, and Microsoft doesn't want to get in the way. In short, Microsoft wants Blizzard to just keep doing what it's doing--making hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter from successful live service games.

Target has confirmed plans to significantly reduce the amount of physical media that it sells on store shelves, but video games will not be impacted.

Last night, a social media post went viral that lamented the death of disc-based media at Target. "Exclusive: Target sources are telling me they reportedly will stop selling physical media in-store and online by 2025," the so-called President of Physical Media said on Twitter. It turns out this is only half true.

Target delivered a statement to IGN that clarified a few things.

On the heels of the big new Amazon Prime adaptation, Fallout games are headlining Sony's PlayStation Plus subscription service.

Thanks to the new Fallout TV show, millions of people are talking about the series. People are also buying and playing the games en masse--much to Microsoft's delight. We've already seen Fallout games skyrocket on Steam and now the same thing is happening on PlayStation.

According to listings on the PlayStation 5 console, the Fallout games are among the most popular titles on PlayStation Plus in the United States. Fallout 4 headlines the top 10 list with the #1 spot, and Fallout 76 is close behind at #3.