Gaming News

Leo Torres is a creator who uses the power of Unreal Engine 5 to present the various cities and locations in The Elder Scrolls with a "realistic and lore-accurate scale." Their laster creation, Riften, is widely remembered as the home of the Thieves Guild in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, where autumnal colors meet stone buildings, housing, and a waterway that gives the city character.

This isn't a mod or one of those videos that demonstrates what Skyrim might look like running on Unreal Engine 5; we have some incredible gameplay from versions of the game running with thousands of mods. Instead, this is a tech demo or interactive work of art meant to showcase what it might look like and feel like to walk around Riften at scale.

The results are undoubtedly impressive, capturing the tone and feel of exploring the location within Skyrim. Riften was always one of the most remarkable locations in the game due to how built-up and modern it felt compared to towns like Whiterun.

Epic has ambitious plans to also give out free smartphone games on the mobile version of the Epic Games Store.

The Epic Store's freebie program has done wonders to boost the storefront's user numbers, with MAUs jumping from 160 million in 2020 to a whopping 230 million in 2022. A good portion of that uptick is from users signing up to nab the free games that Epic routinely doles out on the service.

As it turns out, the freebies are also coming to Epic Games Store mobile, too. And with federal judge ruling that Google must now allow competing third-party storefronts right in the Google Play Store, Android gamers will be able to access these free mobile games once they are made available without having to do any extra steps.

Most game developers have switched to Unreal Engine 5, which is powering some of the biggest games available now or currently in development at studios worldwide. In a new interview with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney at The Verge, we learn that the studio is already working on Unreal Engine 6, which will be much more than a game engine.

Sweeney says that the current plan for the next version of Unreal Engine is to combine the developer tools and platform that game studios and teams are using today with Fortnite's easy-to-use Unreal Editor. The reason can be summed up using a single word, which you probably haven't heard in a while - the 'metaverse.'

"The real power will come when we bring these two worlds together so we have the entire power of our high-end game engine merged with the ease of use that we put together in [Unreal Editor for Fortnite]," Sweeney says. "That's going to take several years. And when that process is complete, that will be Unreal Engine 6."

Epic Games wins big in its antitrust case against Google, with Judge Donato ruling that Google must allow competing third-party app storefronts within the Google Play Store for the next 3 years.

Google has officially been ordered by United States District Judge James Donato to break open Android's ultra-lucrative Google Play Store and allow competing storefronts on the service.

Today, Judge Donato issued his final ruling in the Epic v Google antitrust case with a permanent injunction. Documents retrieved from PACER reveal that the terms of the injunction are to start on November 1, 2024.

This Pokeball-related patent possibly the reason why Nintendo is suing Palworld developer Pocketpair for patent infringement.

Nintendo is officially suing Japanese games developer Pocketpair, but it's not for copyright. Instead, the lawsuit alleges that the Palworld developer has infringed on one of Nintendo's game patents. While we can't be 100% certain, it looks like this is the patent in question.

The patent (publication number 20230191255 in the United States) was filed in September 2022 in the U.S., and published in June 2023 in the region. However, the Japanese version of the patent (identification number JP2023-92953 (P2023-92953A)) was published in July. The patent also appears to be closely related to patents filed in 2021 specifically for Pokemon Legends, and a YouTube clip of the patent in action was also attached to the Japanese patent filing.

Ubisoft has two main goals right now: open-world adventures like Assassin's Creed Shadows and Star Wars Outlaws, and live games like Rainbow Six Siege.

Reports say that Ubisoft could go private in a bid to better control its business, with the Guillemot family teaming up with Tencent to buy out all existing shares. No one knows exactly what will happen, but Ubisoft's core focus remains the same as it has been for a while: open-world games and live services.

We've heard as much from the publisher's executive management, who have frequently discussed this dual-pronged approach to investors and analysts. Now the company has reiterated this business plan in a formal response to the share buyout rumors. Ubisoft stock has rallied since the reports, increasing by up to 40% from €10.74 to a peak of €15.07 on Monday, October 7.

More than half of worldwide surveyed gamers like singleplayer games the best, but the story is different for younger audiences--hence why publishers are still chasing and perpetuating live service trends.

The battle between live services and singleplayer games has been waging for a while, and it's now almost as old as the ever-shrinking battle between frame rate vs fidelity. Thanks to forever games like Fortnite, which has made $20 billion in revenue in less than a decade, everyone is trying to break into the live service market--even traditional singleplayer-makers like Sony.

The market has shown that there's more than enough room for both live and singleplayer games to co-exist, but microtransactions still reign supreme, likely due to their constant always-on storefronts and comparatively lower costs. Even still, analyst firm Midia has conducted some interesting research that shows surveyed players typically prefer to play singleplayer games on average when compared to other forms of gaming like PVE, couch co-op, and online PVP.

Alien Isolation 2 is confirmed--get ready for more thrilling interstellar terror.

There's few games that are scarier than Alien Isolation. It's a horrifyingly tense experience full of sheer nail-biting suspense. Being hunted by the monstrous xenomorph throughout the haunted ship of the Nostromo makes you feel like prey with the odds hopelessly against you. 10 years ago, Creative Assembly captured one of the most unique movies in cinema history and let us actually experience it in an interactive way.

Now the team is going to do it again. Today, creative director Al Hope officially announced that Alien Isolation 2 is in development at Creative Assembly. "Today, I'm delighted to confirm, on behalf of the team, that a sequel to Alien: Isolation is in early development. We look forward to sharing more details with you when we're ready."

Just imagine... a totally next-gen Grand Theft Auto 7 on a future-gen PlayStation 7 console, powered with next-gen hardware and AI that looks almost photorealistic... but with a certain (really awesome-looking) vibe. Check it out:

We all know Rockstar is going to release the biggest game of all time with Grand Theft Auto 6, but with our eyes to the future with next-gen hardware (AMD's future-gen Zen 6 and RDNA 6 architectures) as well as Sony's continued advancements into adding ray tracing (RT) and AI-powered upscaling that truly begins with PlayStation 6, but this tiny glimmer of hope is inspiring... the hype for this would be unbelievable.

In a post on X, NikTik explained that the scene in the tweet (below) is a scene from GTA: San Andreas reimagined with Runway Gen-3 AI. He also mentions that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang talked about the future of DLSS, mentioning that it will generate in-game assets including textures and objects, with DLSS 10 hypothetically delivering full neural rendering.

Fortnite has just broken its concurrent player count record it set back in December 2023, as nearly six million gamers flocked to the popular battle royale shooter to help take down Marvel's Doctor Doom.

According to a new report from Insider Gaming, Fortnite attracted 5.6 million gamers to its end-of-season finale, which spawned a 150-foot-tall Doctor Doom onto the map that, in natural boss fashion, began destroying environments and attacking players. Reports indicate the 5.6 million concurrent users battled against Doctor Doom's global health pool, which took approximately an hour to deplete.

The spawning in of Doctor Doom as the season finale concludes Fortnite's Marvel-themed season and ties directly into Marvel's upcoming projects. For those that don't know, it was only earlier this year that Robert Downey Jr revealed will be playing Doctor Doom in an upcoming Marvel project. As for Fortnite, events such as this are a testament to the effort put in by the developers over at Epic Games. Global events such as this one are why Fortnite remains one of the most popular games on the market.