Latest News - Page 506

For Capcom, there may not be room for two big dino-based franchises on the market--at least that's what original series director Shinji Mikami seems to think.

Despite its status as a quadruple-platinum franchise, it could be a long time before Capcom revives the Dino Crisis series. In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Shinji Mikami, who directed both Dino Crisis 1 & 2, said that he believes that the survival franchise could stay on ice a little longer. The reason? The colossal dinosaur-ridden Monster Hunter is the apple of Capcom's eye with over 100 million sales.

"The awesomeness of dinosaurs and the stuff you can do with dinosaurs, that's been kind of really nailed down by Monster Hunter in recent years. So even if I were to decide to make a remake or a new version of Dino Crisis, I don't really feel like there's a whole lot of space for that kind of game right now, just since Monster Hunter has become such a big game," Mikami told Eurogamer at Gamescom 2024.

Comments from Warner Bros. Discovery executives indicate that we could see more F2P games roll out soon, and that WB Games could license out key properties like Batman and Superman to third-party publishers.

WB Discovery has had huge success with its games division. According to company CEO David Zaslav, WB Games has been profitable for the last 15 years. The division has produced multiple best-sellers, including the Batman Arkham titles, and more recently with Hogwarts Legacy, which generated over $1 billion in revenues since release.

Despite these milestones, WB Games has had some big misses. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League failed to meet expectations, and the game's underperformance actually led to some interesting comments from WBD executives.

One of Capcom's powerhouse creative forces is leaving the company.

Hideaki Itsuno, director of hit franchises like Devil May Cry and Dragon's Dogma, has announced that he is leaving Capcom after more than 30 years with the Japanese video games publisher. Itsuno will start development of a brand new game throughout September, and it has not yet been revealed exactly which company that he will be moving to, or what project he is currently working on.

On Twitter, Itsuno announced his departure from Capcom with the following message:

WB Interactive Entertainment is not developing a new game based on 2022's The Batman, DC has now confirmed.

A bit ago, rumors started circulating about a new Batman game. Following the lower-than-expected sales of the Suicide Squad live game, reports indicated that WB games could be shifting focus back on the Caped Crusader--more specifically the modern rendition of the Dark Knight universe as shown in the 2022 film starring Robert Pattinson. The reports came from news site Puck, which said that a new game based on Matt Reeves' The Batman film was happening, and that it would be based on the Penguin character in some capacity.

These rumors have been proven false, however. There is no game based on The Batman in development at Rocksteady Studios or WB Games. The confirmation comes from DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn, who has taken over a big portion of the company's superhero focus.

Intel has been suffering of late, we all know it, but the "Royal Core" project was meant to destroy Zen 5... and rumor has it, CEO Pat Gelsinger killed the project.

Intel hired Jim Keller years ago -- the father of the Zen CPU architecture from AMD -- who worked on the "Royal Core Project" which was an architecture that moved past Core, which would be the largest upgrade in CPU architecture for Intel in decades.

2024: Arrow Lake was (meant to be) the bridge architecture to "Royal Core". Hyper-Threading was removed with the knowledge that it was going away soon anyways, and so it was time to focus on any extra single-threading you can get by simplifying the core design.

AMD is expected to unveil its new RDNA 4 GPU architecture later this year, with a smaller, mid-range focused range of Radeon RX 8000 series GPUs. One of those will be the Navi 44 XL GPU-powered card that should materialize into the Radeon RX 8600.

In a new shipping manifest, the Navi 44 XL GPU has been spotted, the second most powerful RDNA 4 GPU other than the Navi 48 that should power the Radeon RX 8700 or Radeon RX 8800 series graphics cards. Data miner "Orlak29" spotted the new Navi 44 XL entries in a new shipping manifest that you can see above.

The purported Navi 44 XL GPU would power the mid-range Radeon RX 8600 if AMD doesn't go through any name changes in the meantime, while Navi 48 will take the slightly higher-end, but no RDNA 4 cards will be competing in the high-end against NVIDIA. Hell, AMD's new RDNA 4 cards won't even be competing against AMD's previous-gen RDNA 3-based high-end Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs.

At Gamescom, NVIDIA announced that RTX technology, including DLSS, was now available in over 600 games and apps. In 2024, it's unusual for a PC game release not to include support for DLSS upscaling - to the point where no DLSS is potentially a bigger news story than having DLSS. One of the biggest PC gaming stories surrounding Starfield's launch in 2023 was the existence of a mod that replaced FSR in the game with DLSS, as it took a few months for Bethesda to add DLSS to the game officially.

DLSS is NVIDIA's AI-powered upscaler that offers a free performance boost without sacrificing visual fidelity. In the case of newer versions and DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction, it can improve visual fidelity alongside boosting performance.

This is what makes the new open-source DLSS Updater tool so useful. It scans your games across various launchers to update outdated DLSS DLL files with the latest version. And yes, it works with Steam, EA, Ubisoft, Epic Games, GOG, and Battle.net launchers.

Okay, so this is more for marketing than something you'd consider practical - Cooler Master has used its Cryofuze 5 thermal paste to paint a landscape mural on a CPU. Available in a range of colors, the Cryofuze 5 Prism lineup promises high-performing thermal conductivity, and here, we see the various colors mixed up and used by an artist to turn a CPU into a work of art.

Naturally, once the cooler is on, the PC fires up, and the thermal paste binds to both the cooler's cold plate and the CPU; the art is basically ruined, but this is cool nonetheless. If the scene of a mountain surrounded by clouds in the sky and trees in the foreground is reminiscent of painter Bob Ross's iconic TV show, you're not alone. Cooler Master even includes the theme song from the show at the end of the clip.

We don't expect this to become a "thing," but it does show that mixing various thermal pastes of different colors could be a way to add some flair to a new build - just for fun.

With the launch of the Nintendo 64 in 1996, Super Mario 64 presented a seismic shift in how games are played - especially for those considered 'platformers.' It spawned a new genre, the 3D Platformer, which saw an influx of Super Mario 64 clones in much the same way that Software's Doom saw the arrival of countless new first-person shooters.

The list includes games like Banjo-Kazooie (also for the N64)m, Spyro the Dragon, Glover, Sonic Adventure, Gex: Enter the Gecko, and many more. One of the first to arrive on the scene was Croc: Legend of the Gobbos for the original PlayStation from Argonaut Games. The veteran studio had an impressive run throughout the 1990s, which included the developer creating the iconic Star Fox for the Super Nintendo - one of the very first 3D games for the console.

The studio closed in 2004, reportedly due to financial troubles. Fast-forward to 2024, and Argonaut Games is back with new CEOs Gary Sheinwald and Mike Arkin, resurrecting the developer as a "boutique publisher." Its first game is set to be a remaster of Croc: Legend of the Gobbos.

GeForce NOW, NVIDIA's cloud gaming service, allows you to stream games running on up to GeForce RTX 4080 hardware with DLSS and G-SYNC support. This week, it expanded its library with 26 new games, including Star Wars Outlaws and the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Open Beta.

Star Wars Outlaws is an excellent addition as the game supports several RTX technologies, including full ray-tracing, DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction, Frame Generation, and NVIDIA Reflex. With the graphics settings maxed out, it looks fantastic - presenting a richly detailed Star Wars game with multiple planets to explore.

Another significant addition is Square Enix's Visions of Mana, a new action RPG and the latest installment in a series that dates back to the Super Nintendo era with the iconic Secret of Mana. And for gamers jumping into the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Open Beta this weekend, GeForce NOW lets them jump straight into the action without downloading or installing the game.

AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 24.8.1 is available now for all Radeon owners and supports a range of new games. The highly anticipated Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Open Beta kicks off this weekend for gamers who have pre-ordered the latest Call of Duty or are subscribed to Xbox or PC Game Pass, and support is included here.

There's also support for the dead-on-arrival Concord, the new Sony and PlayStation multiplayer title struggling to find an audience. Plus, popular new single-player games Star Wars Outlaws from Ubisoft and the long-awaited PC debut of Final Fantasy XVI from Square Enix.

AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 24.8.1 also adds new HYPR-Tune profiles for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, and Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which will automatically configure settings and enable AMD FSR 3. Also, AMD Radeon Anti-Lag 2 support for Ghost of Tsushima DIRECTOR'S CUT has been added, and the company's low-latency tech is similar to NVIDIA Reflex.

Intel has shared a new update on the instability issues plaguing its 13th-gen and 14th-gen processors, soothing the doubts of those who are paranoid that Arrow Lake might suffer from the same problems - and Lunar Lake laptop CPUs get a clean bill of health, too.

The new statement from Intel spokesperson Thomas Hannaford relates to the "Vmin Shift Instability issue investigation," pinned down as a root cause of the mentioned stability woes (though not, we should note, necessarily the sole root cause).

At any rate, we're told in no uncertain terms that:

A new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters details a hole that was created in Earth's atmosphere following the Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD) of SpaceX's Starship rocket during it second orbital test flight.

The study was published in the scientific journal on August 26, and claims SpaceX created a hole in Earth's ionosphere, which is located between 50 and 400 miles above Earth's surface. This region of Earth's atmosphere is where gasses are stripped of electrons and turned into plasma, but following the explosion of SpaceX's Starship rocket researchers detected a first-of-its-kind disturbance.

According to the study multiple ground-based instruments and satellites detected the disturbance in the region of the atmosphere where the rocket exploded, with it lasting for anywhere between 30 to 40 minutes before fully recovering. The team explained the ionospheric holes aren't particularly new with chemical rockets exploding, as researchers know that carbon dioxide and water vapor can result in ionized oxygen atoms reforming into normal oxygen atom. The region this occurs in causes a "hole" to form in the plasma sea that is the ionosphere.

Final Fantasy XIV is coming to practically all gaming platforms at some point in time.

Square Enix has big plans for their top-earning MMORPG. Since expanding to Xbox platforms for the first time in more than 11 years, the publisher wants to bring the online hit to all platforms--some of which aren't typical places you'd expect to play Final Fantasy XIV.

A bit ago, we reported that Square Enix is working alongside Tencent to create a mobile version of FFXIV for Chinese markets. It's possible we'll also see a North American version of FFXIV mobile roll out as well. This could be a boon for Square Enix's slowing video games segment, which has been mostly buoyed by mobile and MMORPG earnings.

AMD's Ryzen 7600X3D has been rumored for a while, and now we've had it confirmed by AMD that this 3D V-Cache processor from the Zen 4 range actually exists - but with a chunky caveat.

Speculation around this last-gen X3D addition held that it might not be in the DIY market, and that the 6-core Ryzen 7600X3D would be sold mainly via OEMs, but it turns out that it will be on sale to consumers - but only via Micro Center.

Yes, it turns out that one of the things we feared about the 7600X3D has come true, because like the 5600X3D before it, this is being sold as a Micro Center exclusive, at a price point of $299.99.

If accurate, the PlayStation 5 Pro's leaked design highlights Sony's focus on tight hardware production efficiencies across its console lineup.

Sony's PlayStation 5 duo has changed a lot since 2020. Specifically, Sony has released a few hardware revisions with one simple goal in mind: To maximize the profit on every PS5 unit sold to consumers and retailers. There's a few ways that Sony has tackled this objective, and based on the rumored design of the new system, the PS5 Pro will continue this trend moving forward.

According to reports from reliable leaker billbil_kun, the PS5 Pro will retain the existing revisionist design of the newer PlayStation 5 slim models. The PS5 Pro's overall shape and design are similar with one exception--the Pro will have extra slits on the side, likely a stylized choice to easily differentiate the base PS5 lineup from the more powerful Pro.

Square Enix producer explains why so few of the publisher's games come to Xbox platforms, and why it took so long for the mega-hit MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV to finally cross-over to Microsoft's game system.

While Microsoft has made great strides in improving overseas relations, Japanese publishers like Square Enix don't always bring their full portfolio of games to Xbox. The reason is pretty simple: Japan's domestic playerbase prefers PlayStation and Nintendo, and Xbox is in a distant third place in the region.

In a recent interview with Eurogamer, FFXIV director Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida offers rare comments about Xbox's presence in Japan. According to Yoshida, Xbox has an "extremely low" amount of users in the region, and this has traditionally stood in the way of expansion onto the platform. Square Enix is changing up its model, though, and plans to bring more of its games to Xbox...and we have to wonder when FF7 Remake, Rebirth, and even Final Fantasy XVI will be offered on the platform (if ever).

It was only last week we heard about Neuralink's second human patient using the company's new brain-computer interface (BCI) called "Link" to play Counter-Strike 2, and now we have an update from Nolan Arbaugh, the Neuralink's first human patient.

Arbaugh's success with the first BCI implant has truly been remarkable as the 29-year-old paraplegic has demonstrate competent control over a computer cursor through simply thinking where he wants the cursor to move.

In a nutshell, the BCI implant within both of the Neuralink patients' heads measure electrical signals within the brain and coverts them into readable input data for a computer to process in real-time. The device gives patients such as Arbaugh the ability to play Mario Kart, and even describe his skill within first-person-shooter games as unfair as he has "an aimbot". But more importantly, it changes the life for someone like Arbaugh as he is now able to interact with the world in a way that without Neuralink wasn't possible.

It was back in May we last heard about NASA launching its Advanced Composite Solar Sail System, which if successful could revolutionize space travel in the solar system and perhaps even further out into the seemingly endlessness of the universe.

NASA launched a tiny CubeSat on the back of Rocket Lab's Electron rocket on April 23, and reported the next-generation technology was successfully placed 600 miles above the surface of Earth in a Sun-synchronous orbit. The CubeSat was then ready to move onto the next part of its mission, the lengthy unfurling process that will eventually result in the sail appearing as a square that's approximately 860 square feet, or about half the size of a tennis court.

NASA has now provided an update on the mission, writing the solar sail is "now fully deployed in space after a successful test of its sail-hosting boom system." The space agency goes on to explain aboard the solar sail are four cameras that captured panoramic views of the reflective saily and supporting composite booms. NASA states on September 4 images from these cameras will be published to showcase the achievement.

A new Batman game is reportedly in the works over at Warner Bros. and its based in the Batman universe created by Matt Reeves that debuted two years ago starring Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne (Batman).

The news comes from film industry insider Matthew Belloni from Puck News who reported that AT&T attempted to sell the Warner Bros. Interactive video games assets back in 2020 for $4 billion, but only months later the idea was side-swiped as the properties were deemed "too valuable to unload."

Warner Bros. has apparently now taken a step in the other direction and is looking at games as a strategic play, with Belloni pointing to "the upcoming Penguin HBO show and game" and how they're "both seeded in the 2022 The Batman movie" universe.