Gaming News - Page 12

A bunch of Final Fantasy games are leaving PlayStation Plus next month. Could these games find a new home under a direct subscription from Square Enix?

New reports indicate that the majority of Final Fantasy games will be removed from PS Plus Extra sometime next month. The news is from a PlayStation catalog tracker on Twitter who notes that 24 games are rotating out of PlayStation Plus by May 21. The departing lineup includes 7 Final Fantasy titles.

There are currently 11 Final Fantasy games available on PS Plus:

It was only earlier today that a bunch of PS5 Pro specifications were confirmed by The Verge, and now the publication has put out more details regarding Sony's internal plans for tackling the "Enhanced" games.

For those that don't know, Sony is planning on releasing the PS5 Pro alongside a new label that will be slapped onto PS5 games that meet certain graphical and performance improvements, with the idea that gamers will see the label and immediately know the game has met the graphical and performance standards set by Sony.

The Verge reports it has been told by sources familiar with Sony's plans that developers are being informed by the company to create a new PS5 Pro-exclusive graphics mode in games that combines Sony's new PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling to 4K resolution with a 60fps frame rate and ray-tracing effects.

Call of Duty Vanguard, the one that didn't live up to Activision's expectations, has apparently sold 30 million copies across a two-year span.

There's no other video game franchise quite like Call of Duty. No other game series are able to consistently sell tens of millions of full-priced premium games per year while also making billions of dollars in microtransactions along the way. Official numbers are sparse--we know that the shooter series has made over $31 billion as of Modern Warfare II's release in October 2022, for instance--even doubly so now that Microsoft owns Activision, but it looks like there's an inadvertent sales update from a surprising source.

We don't have official updates for total Call of Duty game sales and/or lifetime revenue. We did get an interesting snippet at Vanguard's overall performance, which is at over 30 million sales. That's according to Brian Hong, who worked as a social media strategist on Call of Duty Vanguard's marketing campaign.

It has been a day for PS5 Pro news as The Verge has posted yet another article revealing more details about the upcoming console.

As I have previously outlined, Sony's upcoming console slated to be launched in the 2024 holiday period, will come with significant performance hikes compared to the standard PS5, and with these performances jumps will be a bump in visual fidelity for games, as indicated by the PS5 Pro "Enhanced" label Sony will be putting on games that meet specific criteria. But what about old game that don't get the new label? Will they run better on the PS5 Pro?

Sony has thought of that and has provided developers with an "ultra-boost" mode that will help Variable Refresh Rate modes run at a higher framerate, and games with a variable resolution may render at higher resolutions. Furthermore, framerates are believed to be more stable on the PS5 Pro.

NVIDIA has pushed out a new GeForce Game Ready Driver and it comes toting support for a couple of imminent high-profile PC games.

Those are Manor Lords and No Rest for the Wicked, both of which are now supported with driver version 552.22.

Manor Lords recently had its release date announced, and the city builder that takes place in a medieval setting - featuring social and economic intrigue mixed with Total War-style tactical battles - is out on April 26.

A lost piece of videogame history has been discovered and preserved: a canceled game for the Nintendo 64 called Riqa, a 3D action adventure in the style of Tomb Raider. The first Lara Croft games were exclusive to the PlayStation console, so the N64 getting its own Tomb Raider clone was a big deal.

Nintendo first announced the game in its official magazine in 1999. Riqa was described as a "sci-fi adventure featuring action and puzzle elements" and has been developing for some time. The title, Riqa, gets its name from the female protagonist. However, the art style was more anime than the realistic look of Tomb Raider.

The now-defunct UK developer Bits Studios led the game's development, with Nintendo set to publish. Originally shown off at E3 1999, the game disappeared, only to surface 25 years later with one of the original developers sharing a few different prototype builds online.

The Fallout TV show has sparked a debate among viewers: Is it better to binge the entire season on day one or take your time with weekly episodes?

The new Fallout TV show on Amazon Prime is an example of incredible execution. The entire transmedia campaign was clearly planned out from the get-go by people who A) know their audience, B) care about the franchise, and C) have a bunch of products at the ready. The Fallout show is a huge success, but it only works because of the engagement firestorm that is binge culture.

I've seen a few articles criticizing the Fallout show's binge format. This thinking is a bit myopic and loses sight of why the Fallout show actually exists in the first place: To shine a lighthouse beacon on the Fallout games. The Amazon show brought Fallout front and center, exposing the post-apocalyptic franchise to Prime's 200 million subscribers.

The PC version of Horizon Forbidden West has been well received, not only as an expansive sequel to a great open-world action-adventure but also as one of those rare PC ports that does justice to the source material while leveraging all of the additional goodies that come with the platform, from improved visual fidelity to uncapped frame rates to ultrawide monitor support to upscaling and even Frame Generation.

Horizon Forbidden West's impressive PC port was developed by sony studio Nixxes, image credit: PlayStation Studios.

For its upscaler support, Horizon Forbidden West includes support for AMD's FSR, Intel's XeSS, and NVIDIA's DLSS. However, when it comes to frame generation, this is limited to NVIDIA's DLSS 3.5 version of Frame Generation, which works great. Still, it is limited to the GeForce RTX 40 Series because it requires specialized AI hardware - so there's room for AMD's frame gen.

The Fallout TV show is a hit, with fans and newcomers alike falling in love (or getting reacquainted) with one of the most recognized and beloved franchises in gaming. As expected, the show has brought people back into playing Fallout - but in a surprise twist, the online multiplayer Fallout 76 just broke its concurrent player count record on Steam with 39,455 peak players this past weekend. This is notably higher than the previous launch record of 32,982.

Every major game in the franchise, including older titles like Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4, has experienced a massive surge in players on Steam. The show faithfully captures the fun, bleak, and violent world of post-apocalyptic America, as seen in Fallout, so it's no wonder people have been flocking to the wasteland.

Fallout 76 is interesting because the game launched in an abysmal state, with a litany of bugs and a string of controversies. But, Bethesda has spent the ensuing years fixing the game's many issues, including the addition of actual NPCs, with the latest update to the game expanding the world to include a post-apocalyptic Atlantic City.

The specifications for the PlayStation 5 Pro have leaked and it now seems we have a very good idea of what Sony has been baking behind the scenes and when they plan on releasing it.

The specs for the PS5 Pro were originally leaked back in March, which reportedly sparked an investigation by Sony into which developer seemingly broke the silence on what is under the PS5 Pro's hood, leading to a further assumption the specifications were legitimate. Now, we have a double confirmation of the specifications as The Verge obtained what appears to be a more detailed developer blueprint for the PS5 Pro, which listed many of the same March specs and even more that weren't previously known. Check out that full specs list below.

One piece of information that surfaced was the release window for the PS5 Pro - the 2024 holiday period. This got me thinking. What game will Sony market with the PS5 Pro to sell it? Or is the company going to entirely rely on the performance hike from the standard PS5 to entice gamers? I proceeded to check what Sony has in the 2024 pipeline in terms of games, specifically system seller-caliber titles such as the God of War franchise from Santa Monica Studios or the Spider-Man games from Insomniac Games.