Gaming News - Page 17

Like others, we had high hopes for the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake project until it seemingly ran into one development issue after another. Announced back in 2021, with Sony's full backing, the PC and PlayStation 5 exclusive would remake and rebuild one of the greatest BioWare RPGs in a modern engine with modern cinematic visuals.

Our original concerns stemmed from the fact that the ambitious project fell under the umbrella of the Embracer Group, with one of its smaller studios - Aspyr - leading development. Aspyr, best known for porting older Star Wars games to platforms like the Nintendo Switch, hadn't tackled a project of this size and scope before.

In 2022, Embracer announced that development had shifted to Sabre Interactive, a studio with a fairly consistent track record. Since then, the industry has been tumultuous, with layoffs and cancellations. Embracer Group recently sold Saber Interactive, "one of its best-earning games divisions," for $247 million.

Helldivers 2 is an incredible success for developer Arrowhead, and now a TD Cowen analyst estimates that 8 million copies of the game have been sold so far, and things aren't slowing down.

Helldivers 2 launched without huge fanfare, but the game has been a runaway success with some in the industry comparing the game to the likes of Guitar Hero with its virality. In a new report from Bloomberg, the outlet reports that TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz estimates that over 8 million copies of Helldivers 2 have sold so far, and those numbers are growing weekly. Creutz said: "We believe the game has performed well ahead of expectations" in a note on Thursday.

The game is only out on Sony's current-gen PlayStation 5 console and on the PC... leaving Xbox gamers unable to spread Democracy. I can only imagine those numbers going up by a couple of million if Helldivers 2 was unleashed onto the Xbox Series X/S consoles.

Star Citizen used to be one giant leap from release, but now, according to Roberts Space Industries boss Chris Roberts, we're seemingly one small step from the game hitting version 1.0.

In a new "Letter from the Chairman" on the official Star Citizen website, Roberts said that the commercial launch of Star Citizen "twinkles on the horizon". This is the point the developer wants to reach when the game is polished enough and ready to leave the alpha or early access stages.

Cloud Imperium Games has been spending a lot of time on getting Star Citizen to v1.0, which Rich Tyrer is leading in his new position as Senior Game Director of both Star Citizen and the single-player Squadron 42 release alongside Roberts himself. Tryer was one of the team's key members in getting Squadron 42 to feature-complete status, something CIG announced in late October 2023.

Sony's beefed-up PlayStation 5 Pro consoles continue to ramp up with rumors, solidifying what we've heard over the last few months... but there's one very interesting tidbit here: RDNA 4 is being used.

AMD's current-gen RDNA 3 GPU architecture is found both inside the Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards as well as inside the PlayStation 5 console. But, the new PlayStation 5 Pro console will reportedly feature an integrated graphics processor that uses BVH8 traversal shaders, and while that might not sound like much, it's huge news.

This confirms that the PlayStation 5 Pro is using AMD's next-gen RDNA 4 RT (ray tracing) engine, also confirming that RDNA 4 doubles the throughput per cycle, something that hasn't been mentioned in any open-source patch yet, says leaker Kepler. The BVH8 traversal shaders are an 8-level bounding volume hierarchy for ray tracing, compared to the 4-level hierarchy on the RDNA 2-based GPU inside of the APU in the PS5.

Last week, the internet was blessed with some specifications for Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro, revealing a significant performance uplift compared to the standard PlayStation 5.

The original specifications leak began from Moore's Law is Dead, which was later backed up by Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson, a notable insider within the industry. Henderson wrote that the leaks were real and that Insider Gaming had seen leaked PS5 Pro documents sourced from a verifiable PlayStation developer portal. Now, Henderson has posted a new report revealing even more PS5 Pro specifications, such as System Memory, CPU, and Audio specs.

Insider Gaming has claimed to have learned more specifications of the upcoming console, and for comparison sake, the publication has included the specs of the standard PlayStation 5. The PS5 Pro system memory is rumored to have 576 GB/s (18GT/s), which is a 28% increase over the standard console. As for CPU, the PS5 Pro is rumored to have an identical CPU to the PS5 but includes a "High CPU Frequency Mode" that bumps the CPU to 3.85GHz, which is a 10% increase over the standard console.

In December, Ninja Theory, the developers behind the award-winning Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, released a trailer for the next installment in the series.

The trailer for Senua's Saga: Hellblade II was released at The Game Awards 2023 and showcased what I'm now considering to be the gold standard for video game trailers. The teaser showcased next-gen graphics, intense gameplay, phenomenal cinematic sequences, epic sound design, and incredible motion capture technology. Hellblade 2 will be set in "Viking Iceland," where Senua will journey to save those who have fallen victim to tyranny while attempting to overcome the darkness both within her and around her.

Notably, the in-game shots seen in the trailer were captured using the Xbox Series X, which is a testament to both the capabilities of Microsoft's flagship console and the work Ninja Theory has put into the title. Just like the in-game shots of the trailer, Ninja Theory's recently released screenshots were captured using "photo mode", which Ninja Theory says will be returning in Senua's Saga: Hellblade II.

The leaked PlayStation 5 Pro specs appear to be accurate, according to a new report from Insider Gaming.

Sony's new PS5 Pro sounds like a heavy upgrade over the original console. Recent reports from Moore's Law is Dead sparked debate among gamers, as the YouTuber outlined substantial power jumps with the Pro model. Now Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson says the leaks were real. Henderson, who has close ties with the going-ons in the industry, has since been proven trustworthy with his reporting.

Insider Gaming claims to have seen the leaked PS5 Pro documents and that the information came from a verifiable PlayStation developer portal. According to Henderson, the PS5 Pro codenamed "Trinity" will have 33.5TFLOPs of power, representing a 225% increase in raw performance over the base PlayStation 5 model. Apart from the sizable performance increase, the Pro is said to utilize two new advanced proprietary technologies: a built-in AI accelerator, and something called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling (PSSR), which is Sony's in-house answer to NVIDIA's DLSS and AMD's FSR upscalers.

The Embracer Group has divested another company, this time one of its biggest revenue-generating divisions.

Just years after the Great Expansion from COVID-19 spending, the games industry is now facing a Great Contraction. Companies are laying off workers en masse, cutting production budgets, and essentially stocking firewood for a harsh winter. This financial pressure has led Embracer Group, a once-mighty gaming empire with dozens of games in development at any one given time, to sell pieces of itself off in order to stabilize its accounts.

The reports were right. Embracer has chosen to sell Saber Interactive, one of its best-earning games divisions. The rationale is simple: Embracer wants to reduce its spending, and divesting a group will eliminate that group's production costs while also delivering a premium in the process. Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch bought Saber's independence, as well as the rights of 12 other studios for a total purchase price of $247 million. Karch opened a new company, Beacon Interactive, a Florida-based LLC for the rights buyout, and Beacon now owns the rights to these studios.

Created by NVIDIA using its powerful RTX Remix tools, Portal with RTX showcases what full path tracing can bring to an experience and how RTX Remix can transform a classic PC game like Portal into a cutting-edge modern masterpiece.

Path tracing is, of course, hardware intensive, and to play Portal with RTX at a decent frame rate, you'll need the help of DLSS 3 Frame Generation and a GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics card. Today, NVIDIA announced that it has updated and leveled up Portal with RTX to make it compatible with DLSS 3.5, allowing the new Ray Reconstruction tech to improve ray-traced image quality.

DLSS 3.5 is a game changer for RT image quality, as seen in Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake II, so it's great to see it added here. The update also supports RTX IO (aka DirectStorage) for faster loading times and a smaller storage device footprint (Portal with RTX now takes up 37% less disk space).

Star Wars Outlaws, from Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment (The Division, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora), is described as the first open-world Star Wars game and will launch later this year.

The story is set between Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. In it, you play Han Solo-like scoundrel Kay Vess as you "fight, steal, and outwit your way through the galaxy's crime syndicates."

As part of its latest DLSS update and round-up, NVIDIA has confirmed that Star Wars Outlaws will launch later this year and feature ray tracing, DLSS 3 Frame Generation, and Reflex support. The announcement arrives alongside a new RTX-powered ultrawide trailer showcasing snippets of some of the game's planetary (and out-of-space) environments.