Gaming News - Page 143

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is a game that's been blighted by performance issues since its launch, with gremlins in the works that are still to be cured - but one enterprising PC gamer has taken matters into their own hands.

Wccftech spotted that 'Snight01' took to the Steam forums with a post linking to their DIY mod (that you stick in the PAKS directory) which fixes some of the most annoying problems with Jedi: Survivor.

Namely the game crashing with ray tracing turned on, plus the mod fixes occlusion culling pop-in (that causes horrible flashes of white to appear fleetingly).

Nintendo's new Mario game is weird...really weird.

Today Nintendo announced Super Mario Bros. Wonder, a new 2D side-scroller that hearkens back to the old-school days of SNES platforming. The game looks pretty familiar on its surface, but things get truly strange when Mario touches a "wonder flower." After that, all bets are off.

The game basically goes into a psychedelic trip that makes Alice in Wonderland look tame; Mario literally turns into an elephant, gets stretched out like a giraffe in a strange shadow world, power flowers start talking to you, and pipes even come alive and wriggle around like caterpillars.

The Sims 4 is getting a new expansion that's broadly cowboy-themed and introduces horses, according to heavy hints dropped by EA.

This follows recent rumors of a horsey expansion, fueled by listings at retailers for 'The Sims 4 Horse Ranch' (as PC Gamer pointed out).

With EA announcing on Twitter that a 'rootin' tootin' expansion' is coming that'll allow you to 'take the reins,' there's not much doubt that horses are inbound for The Sims 4. Especially as in a following tweet, EA tells us that there's a trailer due to arrive on June 22 (tomorrow) and to "giddy up for good news coming soon."

Here's a strange one, with all props going to the team at Wccftech for doing a little sleuthing when it comes to recent major PC game releases. It might be a case of 'tin-foil hat conspiracy' thinking, but the evidence does point to a very noticeable trend.

And that is, regarding PC game releases sponsored by AMD and Radeon, titles with FSR do not feature NVIDIA DLSS support - widely considered the superior rendering tech for boosting performance with a minimal hit to visual fidelity. The flip side to this, NVIDIA sponsored PC games with DLSS support; these games also feature support for AMD's FSR.

Some of the notable AMD-sponsored games without DLSS support include new AAA titles Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Dead Island 2, and Resident Evil 4 Remake, with older releases like Far Cry 6, Callisto Protocol, Saints Row, and many more making up the list.

Traditional console and PC gaming segments are expected to comprise less than half of 2023's total revenues in the United States,

New data from analyst firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) indicates that console and PC gaming are expected to shrink from 2023 onwards, driven by gains in the social and casual gaming segment. According to the figures that were published by VentureBeat, the firm expects console and PC gaming to generate $15.514 billion in the United States throughout 2023, comprising about 27% of total regional earnings.

Casual gaming, which includes mobile titles, is expected to make $34.459 billion in 2023, driven primarily by advertisements (over $20 billion) and in-app spending like microtransactions.

A new patch has arrived for Cyberpunk 2077 which makes an important fix for some PC gamers, plus a bunch of other tweaks and honing across console and PC platforms.

The significant development for those with a gaming PC that pairs a new AMD processor with an NVIDIA Lovelace GPU is that CD Projekt Red has improved the performance of DLSS 3 with Ryzen 7000 CPUs in patch 1.63.

You may have seen reports online that the game engine (REDengine) doesn't play nice with Ryzen 7000 chips, with players experiencing bad stuttering (highly off-putting, of course - and also affecting The Witcher 3, it should be noted).

Some very interesting developers are involved with Skydance New Media's upcoming Star Wars game.

Five years ago, EA shut down Visceral Games and cancelled an ambitious new Star Wars game. 10 years ago, LucasArts cancelled Star Wars 1313, an action game based on Boba Fett's exploits in the layered criminal city-world of Coruscant. Now two of the main creatives behind both of these projects--Amy Hennig and Dominic Robilliard--are under the same roof working on a new Star Wars game.

In a recent LinkedIn post, Dominic Robilliard announced that he will serve as game director on Skydance New Media's upcoming Star Wars game. It's a fitting placement, considering Robilliard was the creative director of the famously cancelled Star Wars 1313 project.

Xbox's management downplays the importance and significance of cloud gaming as regulators use the nascent tech as a lynchpin to their anti-merger arguments.

In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty shared an interesting perspective on cloud gaming. According to Booty, the tech isn't a big part of Xbox and is more of an experimental and additive part of Microsoft's gaming focus. Despite entering private testing in 2019 as Project xCloud, and moving to public beta in 2020 as Xbox Cloud Gaming included as part of an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, Microsoft apparently considers its streaming service to be highly experimental.

"For us, to be clear, it is a very, very small market. I'm not even sure you would call it a market yet, in fact. It's very small usage and very small audience," the Xbox Game Studios boss said.

Sony's new mobile gaming segment loses the head executive that oversaw business development.

Sony has big plans to tap the mobile gaming segment using its lucrative and popular PlayStation IPs. The company is investing heavily into new segments including PC expansion, live services, and mobile, with around 20% of its new games lineup aiming to launch on mobile by FY25. To help kickstart its fledgling efforts, Sony conscripted Nicola Sebastiani, an industry vet who helped establish Apple Arcade, to serve as VP and head of mobile for PlayStation Studios.

After 2 years of helping build the PlayStation mobile initiative, Sebastiani's LinkedIn confirms that he's leaving Sony.

The Ryzen Z1 Extreme-based ASUS ROG Ally has had a lot of eyes on it of late, with the impressive Windows PC gaming handheld giving Valve's extremely popular Steam Deck a run for its money in terms of performance and capabilities. Though, if you're one of the early adopters, you might want to hold off on updating the device to the latest 319 firmware - as reports out there point to it lowering in-game performance.

The update, available via the MyASUS app, fixes some bugs concerning the ASUS ROG Ally and its software, causing issues regarding everyday gaming on the handheld. In fact, the 319 update was intended to improve performance when using the 9W low-power preset.

Instead, you're getting overall performance degradation with the latest firmware, with the YouTube channel The Phawx showcasing that even across the various power modes, the benchmark results are noticeably worse, especially when it comes to things like 1% Lows, which are great for gauging the overall stability of a game.