Gaming News - Page 14

Diablo IV's long-awaited ray-tracing update is here, with ray-traced reflections and shadows adding more detail to the game on PC and console. On the PC side, DLSS 3 with Frame Generation and Reflex can improve performance by up to 3X - with the GeForce RTX 4090 can hit an average of 144.4 FPS at 4K with max settings, according to NVIDIA.

The recently released GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER and RTX 4080 SUPER can also push performance past 100 FPS at 4K. Jumping down to 1440p, the GeForce RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 SUPER hit triple-digit performance, followed by the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, which averages 92.5 FPS.

If you turn off DLSS 3 and Frame Generation, performance does take a notable hit, as the game's RT reflections reflect all pyrotechnics in the environment. RT shadows replace existing shadows to create a more realistic Sanctuary with "contact hardening and softening."

Rockstar's new Game Pass-like subscription service GTA+ gets a huge value boost.

In a recent Q3 earnings call, Take-Two management said it expects to make more money from Rockstar's premium GTA+ subscription. Now we're seeing how exactly that will happen: With must-play games.

Rockstar today announced that fan favorite Western sim Red Dead Redemption and its Undead Nightmare expansion are now available on its $5.99/month GTA+ subscription. RDR joins other hits like the recent GTA trilogy collection on consoles. This service is kind of like Xbox Game Pass for Rockstar titles; pay a fee to access a handful of Rockstar games and get GTA Online benefits along the way.

Why is Xbox making radical changes? It's all part of a big strategy that hopes to capture a new generation of gamers.

The games industry is changing, and Xbox is changing with it. Higher production costs have led to $70 games and microtransactions being included in practically every new release. The industry grew under COVID, but contracted due to economic pressures from inflation and reduced disposable income.

According to Xbox CEO Phil Spencer, the console market isn't growing, and global gaming revenues have been down for the past 2 years in a row. So that leaves Spencer and his team with an important question to answer: How does Xbox create growth if its core market isn't growing? Diversification is one option, and that's the current route Microsoft is trying to take.

More first-party Xbox games could break exclusivity and release on PlayStation and Nintendo Switch platforms, a new interview with Xbox CEO Phil Spencer indicates.

A bit ago, Microsoft made the controversial decision to officially break first-party exclusivity and sell Xbox games on PlayStation and Nintendo platforms. Four first-party Xbox Game Studios titles crossed over to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, including Sea of Thieves, Grounded, Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment. Now it sounds like more games are coming.

In a recent interview with Polygon, Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer asserted that Microsoft's new business plan has a few goals. Xbox wants to reduce friction and break the barriers in between the walled garden ecosystems that separate the Big 3's platforms. There's some ambiguity to Spencer's words because of the author's paraphrasing, but overall the interview shows how Spencer is thinking about the current gaming landscape and the future of Xbox.

Fortnite-maker Epic Games plans to bring its digital storefront to mobile, and this move should help improve the odds of the store becoming profitable.

Europe's new Digital Markets Act is helping shake up the video games industry. Apple made $14.8 billion from mobile games in 2022, despite not having released its own games. That money was generated from the 30% fee that Apple takes from mobile developers, which would put App Store mobile game revenues at nearly $50 billion. The EU's new DMA law requires Apple to let developers sell their games and goods directly to iOS users via separate stores, thereby avoiding the 30% revenue sharing "tax."

With the runway cleared, Epic Games is making big moves and intends to launch the Epic Games Store on both Android and iOS sometime in 2024. Epic has secured the support of key third-party partners that could include some of the biggest players in the business. In any case, mobile offers another endpoint for Epic to sell their digital wares--not just another endpoint, but the largest games platform on the market--and should help boost overall revenues and sales on EGS.

Dragon's Dogma 2 players struggling with frame rates - seemingly pretty much everyone - can pep up their FPS courtesy of a freshly launched unofficial mod that implements DLSS frame generation for those with NVIDIA's Lovelace graphics cards.

This is from well-known modder PureDark, who has previously brought DLSS 3 to the likes of Starfield, Elden Ring, and another high-profile PC games.

While Dragon's Dogma 2 has witnessed some considerable critical acclaim as a game, the performance issues have led to a seriously mixed bag of reviews on Steam. Frame rates can plummet to unplayable levels in towns, even bringing the mightiest GPUs to their knees and that includes NVIDIA's RTX 4090.

Epic Games has announced its plans to bring the Epic Games Store to mobile devices this year with the help of unnamed publishers and partners.

The European Union's new Digital Market Act has cracked open Apple's billion-dollar walled garden, forcing Apple to allow companies like Epic Games to bring their own stores into the iOS environment. Thanks to EU's DMA, Epic can sell its own games and Fortnite V-Bucks on iOS and Google through its own storefront and keep 100% of earnings. To gain traction on mobile, Epic has sought and acquired the help of some partners.

"We're excited to be leading the charge and bringing Fortnite back to mobile, along with a selection of third-party partners that have expressed interest in joining us when we launch," said Epic's Steve Allison said at GDC 2024.

Bethesda has taken to its social media channels to celebrate the 30th anniversary of The Elder Scrolls: Arena, the very first Elder Scrolls game.

The Elder Scrolls: Arena was released in 1994, and now 30 years later the franchise is one of the biggest open-world RPG series' of all time, with The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim being one of the most sold games of all time at 60+ million copies.

In celebration of how far the series has come, Bethesda took to its X account with a message outlining the impact of each game, with Bethesda writing that Arena "started it all, with the entirety of Tamriel generated for you to explore freely", Daggerfall introduced "political intrigue" and "a detailed character system," Morrowind introduced the franchise to consoles and modding, Oblivion brought players to the "heart of the empire," and Skyrim enabled epic battles with dragons.

Microsoft's new DirectSR (Direct Super Resolution) tech for DirectX was created to make it easier for developers to integrate and add support for popular upscaling technologies like NVIDIA's DLSS, AMD's FSR, and Intel's XeSS. Supporting both Windows and Xbox, it doesn't replace existing methods and plugins for adding something like DLSS into a game - instead; it's all about making the game data that all upscaling tech uses available in a single catch-all location.

Once DirectSR is added to a game, it becomes simple to add DLSS or FSR support, with Microsft describing the process as "pick which one you want." Integrating it into DirectX means it becomes part of the pipeline, with the added ability for developers to update games with newer versions of upscale tech via a simple file swap.

Interestingly, as AMD's FSR works with all graphics cards and was created as a general-purpose program for upscaling, Microsoft has integrated the FSR 2.2 code path as the base algorithm for DirectSR. So, the new DirectX update will make it trivial for developers to add FSR support to a game, including the recently announced FSR 3.1 update.

Although Unreal Engine 5 powers several high-profile games currently in development, several studios and publishers still use their own proprietary technology. This includes EA's Frostbite engine, which powers everything from Battlefield to the upcoming Dragon Age Dreadwolf, and Capcom's RE engine, developed for Resident Evil but most recently seen in the popular open-world action RPG Dragon's Dogma.

According to industry insider Dusk Golem on X, Capcom's engineers had to add open-world functionality to the engine to support the game's scope. This is a significant upgrade compared to the version found in the recent Resident Evil remakes.

Interestingly, Capcom will use this new and improved RE engine in two upcoming releases: Monster Hunter Wild and Resident Evil 9. Resident Evil going open-world for its next mainline entry would be a significant departure for the series. Dusk Golem quickly adds that the team aims to ensure Resident Evil 9 "retains the series DNA."