Gaming - Page 133

Capcom explains why fan-favorite Leon Kennedy isn't the main character in Resident Evil 9, essentially saying that he doesn't fit the game's tone of "addictive fear."

New Resident Evil 9: Requiem details have emerged that reveal Capcom's thought process on the game's new protagonist, FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft. According to the devs, Requiem is focused more on the raw, terrifying side of horror where players feel diminished and hunted. None of Resident Evil's previous characters fit the bill, so Capcom created a new one.

Capcom's formula is something like this: Leon is good for survival, but bad for RE9's specific 'addictive fear' type of horror because of the machismo power fantasy that he invokes to players. Leon is tall, rugged, and faces the zombie apocalypse with grim determination.

GPD is working on a new gaming handheld prototype that is powered by AMD's flagship Ryzen AI Max+ 395 series "Strix Halo" APU, packing 16C/32T of Zen 5 processing power and the powerful RDNA 3.5-based Radeon 8060S GPU.

AMD launched its Ryzen AI Max 300 series "Strix Halo" APU earlier this year, finding its way into laptops and Mini-PCs, but now GPD is reportedly using the new Strix Halo APU inside a new gaming handheld. The Chinese manufacturer has reportedly used the new Strix Halo APU inside of a gaming handheld prototype, and with the powerful integrated Radeon 8060S GPU, it would offer some truly awesome gaming performance on the go.

In a new post on X by leaker @9550pro, we're seeing that GPD's new gaming handheld prototype and the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" APU has been benchmarked in 3DMark TimeSpy, spitting out 10,393 points overall and 10,366 points in graphics.

Diablo 2 celebrates a huge milestone while Blizzard potentially teases more content could be on the way for the classic ARPG.

Diablo 2 was released 25 years ago today on June 28, 2000, and was both then and now one of the most beloved PC games on the planet. The isometric demon-slaying loot simulator helped evolve and refine the ARPG genre, inspiring hits like Path of Exile. But it sounds like Blizzard may not be done with Diablo 2 just yet.

While Blizzard didn't really do anything special for Diablo 2's 25th birthday, they did release a tweet with a cryptic line of text: "If you think you've seen and done it all, just wait for the chaos we've yet to unleash."

There aren't many things gamers like more than getting a crazy good deal on a game, particularly when the deal is hitting the 95% off mark. Borderlands 3 is currently at that mark on Steam, but according to the CEO of Borderlands development studio Gearbox Software, fans shouldn't wait around for Borderlands 4 to be discounted, as it will be quite a while, years.

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has taken to his personal X account to comment on the recently debuted Steam Summer Sale 2025, sharing an image of Borderlands 3 receiving a 95% discount. Pitchford states that it took five years for the game to be discounted by this much, and for it to become available on subscription services such as Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus. Pitchford added that he wants to set expectations for Borderlands 4 now and say that it will be even longer for the same thing to happen to Borderlands 4.

Pitchford added in a reply to a comment criticizing the CEO for being "terrible at marketing" that he doesn't set the pricing for Gearbox's games, and that he didn't even know about the Borderlands 3 sale before it was announced. However, Pitchford said that he does know "a lot about the macro games industry and business and I have seen our games through many cycles over many years."

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was unveiled at the Xbox Showcase earlier this month, and now, publisher Activision has seemingly accidentally leaked two game modes coming to the unreleased title. One of which is a 20v20 game mode featuring wingsuits.

The Black Ops 7 official teaser trailer was released to a mixed reception, with the trailer gaining nearly 40 million views in just two weeks and featuring a not-so-good Like to Dislike ratio (134,000 thumbs up versus 82,000 thumbs down).

Now it seems Activision or Treyarch, or both is trying to get some goodwill back from unhappy gamers as CharlieIntel has reported that a message about an internal, developer-only Black Ops 7 play test set to begin this weekend was "accidentally" pushed "to everyone on Xbox on the Call of Duty app, instead." This message was intended for developers only, but it was inadvertently made public.

Sports betting has now been officially embraced by one of the biggest companies powering the Esports scene, Riot Games, as the company has put out a new article detailing how it intends to adopt betting sponsorships in its titles "responsibly".

Esports and sports betting have been kept separate for quite some time, but Riot Games has just changed that with a new announcement stating that the company is now embracing gaming sponsorships. This means that Tier 1 League of Legends and Valorant teams are now allowed to pursue sports betting sponsorships. The change has come after professional teams have asked Riot to reconsider its stance on engaging with betting companies, which was previously prohibited.

Riot President of Publishing and Esports John Needham explained that, after years of analysis, Riot has decided to start engaging with betting companies, as betting activity has already existed around Riot's Esports, whether Riot is involved in it or not.

The Xbox 360 is, by any measure, a legendary gaming console, providing gamers with some of the most iconic video game characters we have today. Despite its infamy for the 'red ring of death,' the console went on to be one of the most popular video game consoles ever released.

By the end of its lifespan, the Xbox 360 moved as many as 85 million units, making it the 7th most-sold video game console out of every video game console ever released, putting it just behind Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Game Boy / Color. It has been 20 years since the Xbox 360 was released in 2005, and despite its age, Microsoft has pushed out a new update for the console, meaning it might be time to blow the dust off the old thing and update it.

The update was spotted by TrueAchievements and posted to the r/Xbox360 subreddit, where it shows the update adds improvements to the Xbox 360 Dashboard. The new update makes thumbnails for games much clearer and easier to read, as they appeared stretched and somewhat distorted prior to this update.

The average gamer shames other cheaters when they are discovered in their lobby, as the act by definition is quite a selfish one. Both teammates and enemies are deprived of the vanilla fun of the game, and now no one understands this principle more than the player who was just sentenced to pay a $175,000 fine for cheating in Fortnite.

Epic Games has announced via its official Fortnite Competitive X account that a judge has ruled in favor of the company suing the player over cheating in several Fortnite tournaments. The lawsuit was initiated back in December 2024, and according to the recent statement from the Fortnite Competitive X account, the cheater ignored the lawsuit and now is required to pay $175,000 to Epic Games, which the company states it will donate to charity.

According to Epic Games, this player was using both hardware and software cheats to evade detection and had multiple accounts at his disposal to make detection even harder. Epic Games believes the lawsuit will hopefully set a precedent for how developers and publishers should deal with cheaters in their games. Currently, no other developers or publishers have spoken out about the Epic Games vs cheater case, or if publishers will use the $175,000 precedent to curb cheating in their games.

The Steam Summer Sale 2025 is here, offering the latest discount frenzy on countless PC games, which is set to run from now until July 10 at 10:00 a.m. PT. With every genre and style of play covered, including significant discounts on some of the most notable releases in recent years, as the old saying goes, there's something for everyone.

And with that, we thought we'd take you through some of the notable deals that stood out to us, from new releases to deep discounts on classic titles. This includes games that are 90% off, which means you can pick them up for only a couple of bucks. The discounts can be even higher as Borderlands 3 is currently 95% off, and available for just $2.99 (down from $59.99). With the highly anticipated release of Borderlands 4 right around the corner, this deal will let you dust off those rusty looter shooter skills ahead of the main event for the price of something that only costs three bucks.

Brand-new titles are also being discounted for the first time, with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered currently 20% off. Here are our picks of the best Steam Summer Sale 2025 deals, broken down into different categories.

Chris Avellone is working on a new game, but it's not Fallout-related--it's a new fantasy RPG.

Fallout New Vegas writer Chris Avellone has returned to the games industry, and is working on a new RPG. Avellone has officially joined Republic Games, a new studio built by former Quantic Dream writer Adam Williams, to help design the narrative of a dark fantasy RPG.

The main focus for this new game, Williams says, is to "combine that golden-age of RPG design with a next-level interactive storytelling."

Microsoft's next wave of layoffs may permanently alter the Xbox business with studio closures, and reports indicate potentially over 1,000 employees could be let go.

Reports say that Microsoft plans to hold a third round of layoffs in its Xbox games division, and these cuts have been described as substantial and significant. While Microsoft hasn't confirmed the layoffs, the tightly-knit games industry is anxiously buzzing behind the scenes as developers share rumors of impending demise.

3D Realms co-founder George Broussard heard that entire video game studios may be shut down by the new Xbox layoffs. Following the merger with Activision, Microsoft now has three major parent groups that oversee dozens of development studios and teams across the globe (Xbox Game Studios, ZeniMax/Bethesda, and Activision Blizzard King).

Peak, the new cooperative survival climbing game, has seen major success since it launched on June 17, with the developers only recently announcing it sold 1 million copies in just 6 days.

Peak has climbed its way up Steam's Most Played games ranks, capping out at a staggering 102,799 concurrent players on June 22, 2025. The title is developed by Landcrab and published by Aggro Crab and Landfall, who are now celebrating the success of Peak in a new Steam blog post where they reveal they have sold two million copies of Peak in just 9 days. The developers and publisher thanked the community for their support and revealed what is coming next for Peak in future updates.

According to the blog post, the developers are prioritizing optimization and stability first, and warned that content updates aren't around the corner just yet. But, the creators of Peak can confirm that "localization is coming soon!". The developers also state that they are currently unsure of the number of major updates planned for Peak, but will continue to update the community as the ideas are further developed.

The gaming handheld landscape is certainly heating up with Xbox jumping into the fray with the newly announced ROG Ally and a big push into Windows 11 being the predominant operating system on handheld devices. However, one thing stands in Microsoft's way: Valve, and, particularly, SteamOS.

Microsoft knows that SteamOS is its biggest competitor when it comes to PC gaming handheld devices, with the company recently canning work on its own first-party handheld device to pursue optimizations for Windows 11 on already established handheld devices such as the Xbox ROG Ally. But how far behind is Windows 11 compared to SteamOS? Well, Ars Technica has pitted the operating systems against each other in a new string of tests using the Lenovo Legion Go S.

The publication conducted performance benchmarks on five high-end 3D games: Returnal, Borderlands 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Homeworld 3, and DOOM: The Dark Ages. Each of these games was tested on SteamOS and then on Windows 11 using the Legion Go S as the testing platform. The results were very interesting, as Windows 11 lost to SteamOS in almost every single test they conducted, and in some instances, SteamOS was significantly better than the Microsoft alternative.

PlayStation Plus turns 15 this month, and Sony is celebrating with a heavy-hitting game freebie and a bunch of promos.

Blizzard's Diablo IV will be the free monthly PS Plus game for July, Sony has announced, as it prepares for the big PS Plus birthday party. The service will turn 15 years old on June 29, and while Diablo IV isn't technically timed to correspond with the anniversary, a freebie of such a marquee heavy-hitting game is suspiciously close to the milestone.

Diablo IV is one of Blizzard's best-earning video games with over $1 billion earned as of 2024, and more importantly, it made $150 million in microtransactions from launch until that time. Sony makes most of its PlayStation revenues from in-game purchases, so a well-timed Diablo IV freebie could help catalyze digital spending on mTX.

Dbrand has been caught up in a controversy over its Killswitch Joy-Con 2 grip, with the accessory maker now issuing an apology to owners and a promise to ship replacements free of charge.

Dbrand issued a lengthy apology to owners of the Killswitch Joy-Con 2 grip who reported that their controllers were disconnecting when using Dbrand's accessory. Initially, Dbrand blamed the Killswitch owners for the disconnecting issues, claiming they were holding the Joy-Con 2 controller incorrectly. They stated that they had tested the Killswitch internally and externally and found no issues. Dbrand said users experiencing the disconnecting issues were holding the console by only one Joy-Con, stressing 87% of the weight on the hinge.

However, the pushback from the community was immense, resulting in Dbrand backtracking on its past statements, issuing an apology, and promising to replace all Killswitch units completely free of charge. Dbrand wrote it's going to "try out a new communication strategy where we both say fewer words and devote less of them to blaming you."

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl's mod software was just released onto the Epic Games Store with a massive 700GB file size. Predictably, this drew attention and grabbed headlines, but the explanation is pretty ordinary.

Mods are a big part of PC gaming and can be powerful to elongate a game's lifespan--heavily-modded titles like Skyrim still thrive today nearly 14 years after release. Developers also like to release these tools to see what unique creations the community can cook up, but these programs can be pretty spec-intensive and demanding. The mod tools are, after all, creating a dev environment for gamers to experiment with.

That's the case with Stalker 2's new Zone Kit, which clocks in at an astronomical 700GB. GSC has a simple explanation for the size: the Zone Kit uses uncompressed assets. So gamers are getting raw access to full resolution textures and assets that were used to build Stalker 2. The devs also say that this is just phase 1 of the ZoneKit SDK, and updates will come in the future, including one that potentially shrinks the file size.

MindsEye has become the latest in broken video game releases, which has resulted in the studio behind the title, Build A Rocket Boy, beginning the layoff process of employees. Now, the lead actor of the recently released game has responded to the broken release.

Build A Rocket Boy, a studio with roughly 300 employees and helmed by former GTA producer Leslie Benzies, has started laying off employees two weeks after the disastrous launch of MindsEye. The layoffs are expected to impact more than 100 employees.

Now, Alex Hernandez, who voices Jacob Diaz in MindsEye, has sat down for an interview with Check It TV to discuss the release of the game, his relationship with Build A Rocket Boy, and the fallout of MindsEye's release in such a dismal state.

PlayStation's vice president of global services has said that PlayStation Plus subscribers won't get free first-party PlayStation games.

The news comes from a recent interview with Game File's Stephen Totilo. PlayStation vice president of global services Nick Maguire said Sony currently has a policy of waiting at least a year before adding first-party PlayStation games to PS Plus, and that strategy is performing adequately. So, what is the value of PS Plus? Sony prefers to add indie titles to PS Plus over its first-party games, as the company believes they "complement" its current strategy around when it adds first-party titles.

According to Maguire, that strategy is "working really well across the platform." Additionally, Maguire said that Sony was willing to consider adding more titles to PS Plus, depending on whether PlayStation feels that it's warranted. Notably, some indie titles have released day one on PS Plus, with an example being FBC: Firebreak developed by Remedy Entertainment, Lost Records: Bloom and Rage, Animwell, Sea of Stars, and others.

Diablo 4 Season 9: Sins of the Horadrim begins on July 1, and as part of the new seasonal questline, you'll be able to craft and customize powerful spells to enhance your existing powers. Spellcrafting in Diablo 4 is accessed via an in-depth menu that will let you create new spells that can be improved and leveled up throughout your Season Journey.

Called Horadric Spells, these are created by combining three elements - a Catalyst, an Infusion, and an Arcana. The Catalyst is the base power of the spell, providing its form and function. For example, the 'Celestial Surge' Catalyst pulls in all surrounding enemies, triggering a torrent of stars that randomly strike enemies in the area.

Once you've got your Catalyst, apply an Infusion that modifies the type of elemental damage your spell deals. Finally, Arcanas add additional effects to the base power of your spell. For example, the Legendary 'Frigid Heart' Arcana adds a frozen explosion to the beginning and end of 'Celestial Surge.'

Nightdive Studios is renowned for bringing back classic games, remastered and optimized for modern hardware. The list includes classics like Shadow Man, Quake, Turok, Star Wars: Dark Forces, and more. Nightdive's latest is System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster, now available on PC and coming to Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch consoles in July.

This one has been a long time coming, with development taking over six years to complete due to roadblocks like missing source code, bugs, and "completely non-functional" co-op multiplayer. System Shock 2 is regarded as an immersive sim classic and one of the genre's defining releases, alongside Deus Ex.

In a new post celebrating the announcement, the team at Nightdive Studios notes that bringing System Shock 2 back presented them with "some of our greatest challenges to date."