Gaming News - Page 17

If you're hankering for a new game to play on your PC but are a bit short of cash, you're in luck - there's a great new freebie on offer at the Epic Games Store.

Epic is famous for high-quality giveaways and The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition certainly falls under that category.

It's a slick and thoughtful sci-fi RPG that received considerable critical acclaim, coming from Obsidian Entertainment, the force behind the likes of Fallout New Vegas. The Outer Worlds was praised for its storyline, depth and the freedom of choice available to the player.

Deus Ex is a series of first-person games. The iconic and groundbreaking original, released by Ion Storm in 2000, mixes shooting, stealth, adventure, and role-playing elements. With its moody futuristic setting and story, it's widely considered one of the greatest PC games of all time, which makes it a perfect candidate for an RTX Remix makeover.

NVIDIA's impressive modding and remastering tool allows budding developers and modders to take just about any classic games, add full ray-tracing (path tracing), remaster textures, replace models with new updated versions, and generally remaster titles with a robust set of tools add access to tech like DLSS, Frame Generation, and Reflex.

Deus Ex Echelon Renderer, from modder onnoj, is "a fixed-function rendering pipeline intended for use with NVIDIA's RTX Remix." It's not technically a mod, but it allows RTX Remix users to play through Deus Ex with full path-traced lighting. The results are awesome.

The highly anticipated Knights of the Old Republic remake has been officially confirmed to be in development...but there's still no word on a potential release window or concrete updates about the project.

The KOTOR remake was announced in 2021 by Sony, but since the tne project has been shuffled around. Aspyr, the team behind many of the Star Wars re-releases, was originally developing the KOTOR remake. Aspyr was acquired by Saber Interactive in 2021 for $100 million. At the time, Saber was still part of Embracer, and Embracer re-assigned the KOTOR remake to Saber's principal dev teams.

Reports indicated that the remake was put on ice in 2022, but apparently the project is still happening.

Google engineers spent a month hacking the PlayStation Portal to run PSP games natively...but then they handed the secrets right to Sony.

It's official: The PS Portal's is once again a "remote player." Sony has released a new firmware patch for the PS Portal that fixed a big security vulnerability that ultimately led to PSP games running on the device. The $199 PS Portal is specifically designed as a profitable accessory that requires a PS5 in order to stream games to the controller-screen hybrid. Being able to play games without needing a PS5 goes against the entire point of the handheld.

Two Google security experts--Andy Nguyen and Calle Svensson--spent an entire month hacking the PS Portal to see if it could run games natively. It turns out that it can indeed do this, at least when it comes to 20-year-old PSP games. Yesterday, Nguyen confirmed that Sony had been notified of the vulnerability and that a fix has been employed with PS Portal's new v2.0.6 firmware update.

AMD recently announced a big FSR 3.1 update was 'coming soon,' which would improve upscaling and Frame Generation visual fidelity, decouple the two technologies and introduce console support.

With NVIDIA's DLSS 3 and AMD's FSR 3, frame generation has been among the most talked about and exciting PC technologies of the past couple of years. And now, it's finally headed to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.

As part of a developer update on Immortals of Aveum, Ascendant Studios announced that, in addition to a new HDR patch dropping for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S today, the team was working on bringing "AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3), including its frame generation capability" to the game on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

Sony amps up the competition as it signs multiple indie games as day one releases on PS Plus.

Sony doesn't want to bring its own games to PlayStation Plus on day one, but other projects are fair game. Unlike Microsoft, who took a radical subscription-first approach and promised to launch all first-party Xbox games day-and-date on Game Pass. This strategy has affected first-party game sales on Xbox as consumers opt for Game Pass subscriptions instead of buying some games--an effect referred to as cannibalization.

Game Pass has another part of its billion-dollar equation: Third-party games. For years now, Microsoft has been spending tens of millions of dollars to convince indie devs and publishers to launch their games on Game Pass day one. In other words, Microsoft trying to offset any game sales cannibalization with upfront payments. These deals can sometimes go far enough to fund an actual game.

Rockstar's GTA+ subscription has become the cheapest way to play the publisher's games.

Two years ago, Rockstar Games announced GTA+, a new $5.99 subscription service aimed at its billion-dollar GTA Online mode. The idea was to give GTA Online players a bunch of extras if they subscribed, kind of like Runescape's Members subscription.

The service has grown tremendously in scope and value since then. In September 2023, Rockstar turned GTA+ into its own mini Game Pass subscription by offering a rotating lineup of full games. The catch is you can only play the games as long as your subscription is active (Rockstar went old-school PS Plus here), and the games will rotate in and out like Xbox Game Pass.

Dragon's Dogma 2 has now sold more than 2.5 million copies on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC, Capcom today announced.

Capcom's latest fantasy game is an innovative, if not sometimes maddeningly complex RPG that's taken the world by storm. The latest figures show that Dragon's Dogma 2 has now broken 2.5 million sales on all platforms in just 18 days' time.

While this is historically below Capcom's previous fastest-selling game records (see below), it's an important milestone for the house of Mega Man that punctuates the company's new modern approach. Capcom has emphasized selling as many games as possible, and this plan has led to multiple years of cumulative record-breaking profits.

Helldivers 2's latest update makes the tense squad-based shooter even more replayable.

Arrowhead just released patch 01.000.200 for Helldivers 2, bringing some welcomed changes. The most radical update is the level cap tripling from 50 to 150. We don't often see these kinds of dramatic level cap increases in live games, but Helldivers 2 is all about exaggeration. Plus there's some extra environmental hazards to keep you on your toes, including blinding sandstorms and frozen blizzards.

Other changes include a full-auto mode for the Liberator Penetrator, a 100 point damage boost to the Dominator, boosted damage to the Breaker Incendiary, bonuses to the Anti-Materiel Rifle, and the Guard Dog now refills full ammo when you pick up an ammo box (very welcomed change).

Sony publicly says PlayStation 2 has shipped 155 million units, but the actual numbers are quite higher.

Sony's PlayStation 2 is the best-selling video games hardware of all time. The system defined the early 2000s era thanks to its ability to play games and DVDs--the latter of which sparked widespread consumer adoption. So we have to wonder...just how many PS2s did Sony ship?

Shortly before leaving Sony, ex-PlayStation boss Jim Ryan recently said the PlayStation 2 sold 160 million units in its lifespan. Sony, on the other hand, officially puts the PS2 at 155 million. So what gives? Who's right?