Gaming - Page 172

Intel has taken to social media to announce a new milestone achievement for its XeSS AI upscaling technology: over 150 games now include the option to turn it on. Intel Xe Super Sampling is the company's answer to NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR, taking an AI approach on Arc graphics hardware similar to DLSS for GeForce RTX.

As we saw in our review of the new Intel Arc B580 GPU, the first second-gen Battlemage desktop card to launch, XeSS was available in most games in our benchmark suite. Some recent titles that have added support for XeSS 2 include STALKER 2, F1 24, and Marvel Rivals. Intel XeSS 2, the latest version, also includes Frame Generation and Xe Low Latency for Arc owners.

XeSS isn't limited to desktop GPUs, as mobile Intel chips with integrated Arc graphics can also enable the technology to boost performance.

Elden Ring: Nightreign will incorporate some roguelike elements, but the director of the game has reassured fans the studio simply isn't "chasing a trend" -- there are reasons for the adjustments of in-game mechanics and gameplay.

In a recent interview with PC Gamer, Elden Ring: Nightreign game director Junya Ishizaki touched on how the latest game from FromSoftware will be different from the other titles the studio has produced. For those that don't know, Nightreign is a multiplayer-focussed title that players will be able to enjoy solo or in a group of three. The title will be "session-based," meaning players will hop in and do a "run" through enemy bosses, collect loot, and rinse and repeat.

At face value this sounds a lot like a roguelike experience, which is extremely popular with titles such as Hades and Deadcells. However, this isn't the case with Nightreign. According to Ishizaki, Nightreign has implemented some roguelike elements but with the goal of condensing down the RPG elements, the exploration, character building and leveling -- "We wanted that to feel like it was all coming together and culminating in a boss fight but in a more concentrated form."

The official artbook for Assassin's Creed Shadows has leaked, revealing character backstories, in-game weapons, locations, and more.

Over the weekend, Assassin's Creed Shadows was hit with a leak that contains spoilers for the upcoming game scheduled to release on March 20. The leak consisted of more than 200 images of the title's official artbook called "The Art of Assassin's Creed". The artbook was leaked onto a hentai forum, and the images definitely contain spoilers for in-game content as they reveal pivotal character backstories, weapons, locations, settings, and more. It should be noted the below images aren't spoiler free -- view with caution!

As for specifics, the concept art of the major cities such as Kyoto and Osaka have been revealed, along with character designs for Hattori Hanzo, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Momochi Sandayu. Additionally, we have looks at Portuguese Templars that are named Nuno Caro and Duarte de Melo. Furthermore, other key historical in-game figures include Kamiizumi Nobutsuna, Ashikaga Yoshiaki, Lady Nene, and Lady Oichi.

NVIDIA's cloud gaming service GeForce NOW exited Beta in February 2020, and so this month, it's celebrating its fifth anniversary as a game changer for how PC gamers access their libraries. GeForce NOW has only grown from strength to strength in recent years, with subscribers able to access their PC game library - with over 2,000 titles supported.

GeForce NOW is widely considered the best cloud gaming platform currently available. It offers up to GeForce RTX 4080 levels of performance in 4K with DLSS, ray-tracing, and even NVIDIA G-SYNC. NVIDIA notes that 17 titles will hit the service in February, with "a major game release" set to debut each week.

These major games will be the highly anticipated Kingdom Come: Deliverance II from Warhorse Studios, Avowed from Obsidian, and Sid Meier's Civilization VII from 2K. Here's the complete list of games that will be added to the GeForce NOW this month.

Never mind Doom, can Grand Theft Auto run on a smartwatch? Most certainly, as an intrepid denizen of Reddit has just proved.

This feat was pulled off with a Galaxy Watch 5, albeit the device could only host an old GTA game (well, what did you expect?) namely Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (released way back in 2002).

How was this achieved? As TechRadar spotted, by installing a PSP emulator on the smartwatch, the Redditor (ZenonDesingk) was playing GTA: Vice City and the likes of God of War, or Need for Speed: Most Wanted on the device.

The Grand Theft Auto 6 community was set alight after an online store posted a release date for the highly anticipated game, followed by it being promptly removed, adding to the mystery of whether it was credible.

The online retailer is a Spanish store called XUruguay, which listed the release of Grand Theft Auto 6 on September 17, 2025. This date coincided with Rockstar Games' official release window for the title "Fall 2025," leading fans to speculate if the date could be true. Further validity was added to the conversation when fans realized the September 17 date was the same as the release of Grand Theft Auto 5. Then, illusive mystery flavored the conversation when the store randomly removed the date.

What gave more speculatory credibility to the date was a screenshot that stated the store obtained the date directly from PlayStation, but now the store has responded with its own statement about the recent fiasco it's created. According to XUruguay, the date was simply a placeholder as the store simply Googled "GTA release date and the results was (9/17) so we said ok lets start the preorder that day." The store goes on to apologize to the gaming community for the mistake and admits it didn't receive any official information about the release date of the game.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer recently stated during an interview that he can't rule out Starfield releasing on multiple platforms.

Spencer responded to a direct question about the title in a recent interview on Save State Plus with Destin Lagarie, who asked the Microsoft gaming head if he could confirm if Starfield will remain an exclusive Xbox/PC title. Spencer replied with, "No," and went on to reiterate a sentiment that has long been held by himself and Xbox as a whole.

With the GeForce RTX 50 Series, NVIDIA is introducing a suite of groundbreaking new RTX Neural Rendering technologies designed to enhance in-game ray-traced visuals and performance. RTX Mega Geometry is one of these new bits of technology, and it has arrived in Alan Wake 2 - boosting the game's Path Tracing and Ray Tracing performance for all GeForce RTX gamers.

RTX Mega Geometry accelerates rendering complex, highly detailed scenes with many ray tracing effects enabled. According to NVIDIA, "RTX Mega Geometry accelerates BVH building, making it possible to ray trace up to 100x more triangles than today's standard." What this means for gamers is that path tracing performance is improved with RTX Mega Geometry, and there's now no limit to how detailed and intricate environments, characters, and objects in a scene can become.

As part of Alan Wake 2's new Update 1.2.8, which adds full DLSS 4 support to the game, including the impressive new Transformer AI models for DLSS Super Resolution and DLSS Ray Reconstruction, it's also the first game to implement RTX Mega Geometry.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 hasn't even been available for 48 hours, and PC gamers are already taking to the Steam listing to post negative reviews.

The Steam listing for Sony's latest PC port of an exclusive PlayStation title is being bombarded with negative reviews citing performance issues with the title. These negative reviews have resulted in the title's Steam rating currently sitting at "Mixed," with nearly half of the approximately 2,100 user reviews reporting in-game bugs, stabilization problems, crashes, low FPS, audio desyncing, freezing, stuttering, and a myriad of other performance-related issues.

Unfortunately, it's not just negative users leaving negative reviews, as some players that left positive reviews even cautioned other players about the title's performance. With one player writing, the game crashes "every 20 minutes or so if you have turned ON the Frame Generation (which, guess what, is turned ON by default)." Additionally, this same player reported a critical bug that prevented them from being able to start a new game unless their old game save was deleted. The player managed to work around this problem by disabling Steam Cloud and then manually deleting their save.

Microsoft is using its competitors to sell games and re-invest in its burgeoning video games empire.

During the FTC v Microsoft case of 2023, Xbox's Phil Spencer said something very interesting about PlayStation's exclusivity practices, going so far as to call Sony a hostile competitor. "Every time we ship a game on PlayStation, going back to the 70-30 split, Sony captures 30% of revenue that we do on their platform. And then they use that money among other revenue to do things to try to reduce Xbox's survival on the market," Spencer had said at the time.

Microsoft, however, has a different tact: Rather than keep games off its platforms, it wants to open the floodgates and release as many of its popular games to as many platforms as possible. The rationale is simple. Xbox wants to sell more games, make more money, and further cement itself as a vital partner to its competitors. Every sale on a competitor's platform is more money that can then be reinvested into Xbox.

While gamers (and sometimes developers) lament the Xbox Series S parity clause, Microsoft sees it as a major advantage in its fight for future competition in the games industry.

The Xbox Series S is substantially weaker than the Series X, but it's also $200 cheaper. The Series S was meant to grow the Xbox userbase with a lower-cost option that's locked to the digital ecosystem, furthering Microsoft's high-value target goals. This power difference has caused headaches for some developers who are bound by a strict parity clause (all Gen 9 Xbox games have to run on both Series S and Series X in order to get released) that forces them to scale down their games to run on the much-weaker Series S.

Overall, though, this is a good move. At least that's what Microsoft thinks. The rationale is that developers could use the Series S spec profile of their games onto other lower-power devices. This is especially true with first-party games like Minecraft, which has been carefully scaled to run on both consoles and on the Nintendo Switch handheld (Minecraft is wildly popular on the Switch and makes far more money on Switch than it does on Xbox).

If everything is an Xbox, why buy an actual Xbox console? Microsoft hopes that the system's functionalities and capabilities will be the selling point.

The base Gen 9 consoles are very similar: Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X have the same chipsets and deliver similar performance. What sets them apart is their feature sets--the Xbox Series X/S, for example, has Quick Resume, whereas the PS5 has features like ultra-fast loading via its SSD technology.

This is really how Microsoft wants you to think about Xbox hardware, to judge Xbox consoles on the merit of their capabilities based on your play style. That means a more enthusiast box would be capable of targeting 4K 60FPS, a cheaper box 1440p 60FPS (and maybe even a handheld at 720p 30-60FPS), but more importantly, it means Xbox being able to set itself apart from the competition with its own features.

Multiversus is shutting down on May 30, 2025, WB Games has confirmed.

Season 5 will be the last big update for Multiversus, the failed online game that combined classic DC and Hanna-Barbera characters in a beat-em-up setting. WB had hoped to capitalize on Nintendo's popular Smash Bros. with their own free-to-play crossover game. Multiversus proved to be an expensive misfire for the games division.

With today's announcement, the studio has turned off all in-game purchases within Multiversus. That means no one can spend real money to buy in-game currency. Multiversus will still be playable offline, though, and you'll still have everything you've unlocked. Gamers also have until server shutdown on May 30 to spend any Gleamium they may have left.

Xbox has been steadfast in its approach to bringing Xbox games to as many platforms as possible, and now, building upon the rumors of Xbox-exclusive titles coming to PlayStation, we have a new rumor that claims the Nintendo Switch 2 will also be a target platform for Xbox games.

It was only yesterday that Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer alluded to many games coming to Nintendo's new platform, with Spencer saying in a recent interview that Xbox is "really looking forward to supporting them with the games that we have." Previous rumors suggested Xbox was working on a selection of new titles to bring over to PlayStation, with leaks pointing to Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Gears of War: Ultimate Edition coming to Sony's platform and the Nintendo Switch.

Now, Spanish publication Vandal has claimed it has obtained information from unknown sources that some of the "closest" Xbox titles coming to PS5 "are Killer Instinct and Starfield." The publication also claims that both of the aforementioned titles have been in development for the PS5 "since its launch on Xbox Series and PC - late 2023." These aren't the only titles purportedly currently in development to make the transition, as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, Age of Mythology: Retold, and Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, have all been mentioned for PlayStation ports.

Hollywood is looking to cash in on the massive popularity surrounding video game franchises by creating adaptations in the form of movies and TV shows, and now one more video game can be added to that list -- and it's not even released yet.

The newest video game to get an adaptation is Clair Obsur: Expedition 33, a new turn-based combat fantasy RPG from Sandfall Interactive and publisher Kepler Interactive. The title was part of Microsoft's summer showcase in August and was further highlighted during last week's Xbox Developer Direct.

It was only yesterday that Sandfall Interactive announced it's struggling to keep up with pre-orders for both the physical edition and collectors edition of the game, with Sanfall Interactive saying it's seen the "outpouring of support" for the title, and "Never could we have imagined we'd have sold out of our collectors editions so early, nor did we know the demand for our physical editions would be so high."

Microsoft needs the help of advertisers to fulfill its gaming ambitions.

Editor's Note: Microsoft has not revealed any concrete plans to bring advertisements to Xbox games on consoles and/or PC.

Earlier this month at CES 2025, Microsoft's advertising group presented some interesting details about what the future of Xbox could look like. Microsoft has been doubling down on making Xbox more accessible than ever before through various endpoints across mobile, console, and PC, and that infrastructure could also host cross-platform advertisements for extra revenue.

Microsoft has made one point very clear to fans: once-exclusive Xbox games are coming to all platforms, including competitors like PlayStation and Nintendo.

Today Xbox announced that Forza Horizon 5 is coming to PlayStation 5 this spring, complete with cross-play with PC and Xbox. Once a shining star in console game exclusivity, the Forza franchise's cross-over to PS5 is the latest development in Microsoft's current plan to maximize game sales. Right now the Xbox division is under pressure to deliver specific margins following the $75.4 billion buyout of Activision Blizzard King, and this has led Xbox to target what it calls high-margin businesses, which include digital game sales, subscriptions, and microtransactions.

The plan is working, too. Microsoft's latest Q2FY25 financials indicate that improved profit margins at Xbox helped boost total More Personal Computing segment earnings. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella further underlined the games division's current cross-platform, exclusive-shy business model that had been previously discussed by Xbox's Phil Spencer on numerous occasions.

No Man's Sky just got a huge patch which brings in all manner of goodies.

This is the 'Worlds Part II' update (which follows up, yes, you guessed it - 'Worlds Part I') and it expands the game's universe with new stars, planets, terrain and environments to dive into (literally, in the case of the deep oceans that have been introduced).

The developer tells us:

The official PC requirements for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 have been released, following the developer announcing on X they are struggling to keep up with the demand for both the Collectors Edition and physical edition of the game.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a turn-based combat RPG that is powered by the graphically impressive Unreal Engine 5, and while the title may have slipped under some gamers' radars, the hype for it is certainly building momentum, with the developer Sandfall Interactive taking to the official Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 X account to announce they are struggling to keep up with pre-orders. Sanfall Interactive states in its post it has seen the "outpouring of support" and has requested restocks of certain editions and availability.

BioWare has put out a strangely opaque statement about the current developer situation at the company that has been coupled with a positive announcement regarding Mass Effect 5.

The developer took to its blog to announce that Mass Effect 5 has officially begun development, with the studio writing the "core team at BioWare is developing the next Mass Effect game" and that the project is headed by leadership from the original trilogy of games. That veteran leadership includes Mike Gamble, Preston Watamaniuk, Derek Watts, Parrish Ley, and others.

Moreover, BioWare writes that it's taking this time between the release of Dragon Age: Veilguard, which publisher EA confirmed underwhelmingly performed sales-wise, and the development of Mass Effect 5 to reimagine "how we work at BioWare" and to "think deeply about delivering the best experience to our fans."