Gaming - Page 238

Unlike competitors like Xbox, who are embracing artificial intelligence to help write in-game quests and dialog in future games, Nintendo has no plans to use generative AI tech in its first-party titles.

As the games industry cuts thousands upon thousands of jobs, publishers are looking for new ways to save on costs. AI is one potential solution: in theory, the technology may be able to speed up game development and potentially even replace positions through automated processes. AI has become a controversial topic because of this, yet despite this sensitivity, publishers like EA and Microsoft are big proponents of the new tech.

Nintendo, however, is dubious about using generative artificial intelligence in its games. The rationale is pretty simple: Nintendo knows that generative AI can have implications for IP rights, and as one of the most litigious companies in the entire industry, Nintendo is one to protect and respect all forms of copyright and intellectual property law.

In 2023, Microsoft announced a partnership with NVIDIA to see its first-party PC games become available via the GeForce NOW cloud gaming service. A direct competitor of Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming service for Game Pass Ultimate subscribers, but the move was seen by many as a means to get Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard over the line.

Many see GeForce NOW as the best cloud gaming service for visual fidelity, latency, and features, which lets you play games you own on a cloud-based GeForce RTX-powered rig. GeForce NOW offers up to GeForce RTX 4080 levels of performance with DLSS, Frame Generation, Reflex, and even G-Sync support. And now, based on a few images that have surfaced on Resetera - GeForce NOW is being integrated with Xbox in some way.

The images come from the Xbox PC app, showing titles like Street Fighter 6, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Resident Evil Village with the text 'Included with NVIDIA GeForce NOW.' So, what's going on?

Team Fortress 2 is suffering from a community of unhappy gamers who are now taking to the title's Steam listing to voice their distaste toward Valve for a recent collaboration.

The problems began mounting when Team Fortress 2 started becoming a cesspit for bots, with reports saying for many months now the classic title was being overrun by bots that resulted in players taking to the Steam listing to leave negative reviews. However, that distaste was exacerbated when Valve and 10:10 Games announced it a new collaboration that would bring Team Fortress 2 to Funko Fusion in a new DLC.

The announcement of the DLC pack sparked a wave of negative reviews by players, many of whom wish Valve would fix Team Fortress 2 before releasing "marketable plushies". Some players responded to the Funko Fusion DLC with comments such as, "I feel like I'm being pranked" and "I know it's just a license but this does not feel like the time for a fucking TF2 FUNKO pop DLC LMAO, especially when the community is planning to boycott, unless we see permanent change."

Nintendo is currently preparing to unveil its long-anticipated next-generation console, which has presumably been placeholder-named the Nintendo Switch 2, especially considering the incredible popularity of the original Switch (about to beat PS2 unit sales in the US).

The Nintendo Switch was released back in 2017 and was met with quite a lot of demand despite the console releasing with a bunch of Wii U games ported over and only a few first-party titles. However, the sluggishness of Switch sales could at least in part be attributed to the chip shortage that was caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This debacle resulted in many Nintendo Switch consoles appearing in reseller markets at exorbitant prices.

That apparently isn't going to happen with Nintendo's next console, or at least Nintendo will have a plan in place to mitigate the likelihood of it occurring. During a Q&A with investors, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa was asked if Nintendo has a plan to avoid resellers with the coming launch of the new console. Furukawa responded by simply saying Nintendo will already have enough units of its next-generation console at launch and that we shouldn't see a reseller market like we did with the launch of the Nintendo Switch.

Elden Ring gamers have been enjoying the main game with co-op for quite some time, and now the recently released Shadow of the Erdtree DLC has received support.

Modder LukeYui, the creator behind the Elden Ring Seamless Co-op mod, has updated the popular mod, implementing compatibility for the latest version of Elden Ring, version 1.12, which was released alongside the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion on July 20. The modder explained that while the co-op isn't "perfect," it has reached a state where the co-op in Shadow of the Erdtree is playable. LukeYui wrote that they are aware of some bugs and that, over the next few days, they will be ironed out.

The updated mod has added enemy scaling options, player death count is now a player banner option, the ability to view the current session password, compatibility with ModEngine 2, matchmaking verification (players must have the same mods to be able to connect to each other), invasions, and more. The Seamless Co-op mod has grown in such popularity that even Elden Ring's creator and FromSoftware director Hidetaka Miyazaki recognized it and said it could be natively built into future FromSoftware games.

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has discussed the future of the Assassin's Creed franchise. He said, "The goal is to have Assassin's Creed games come out more regularly, but not for it to be the same experience every year." One way the publisher will do that is by making different styles of Creed games and remaking classic games in the franchise.

It also sounds like Ubisoft plans to remake several Assassin's Creed games, with Yves Guillemot adding, "There are worlds in some of our older Assassin's Creed games that are still extremely rich," and that the remakes will "modernize them." As for what that could mean - more RPG-like elements, as seen in the modern Creed releases.

Rumors point to the popular Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (2013) getting the remake treatment first, where Ubisoft will use the latest Assassin's Creed engine technology to recreate the game. The word remake is important because we're not talking about a simple remaster; think more about what Capcom has done with classic games in the Resident Evil franchise: new visuals, new gameplay, and a new take on a classic game.

FromSoftware macabre maven Hidetaka Miyazaki reveals that he still takes great influence from Natoshi Zin, the director of the original King's Field games released in the 1990s.

FromSoftware's penchant for grueling dark fantasy is well known today, but that wasn't always the case. Back in the mid-1990s, the studio released King's Field, a first-person hack-and-slash action adventure game with strong RPG influences. The game is a nostalgic favorite among FromSoft faithful, but didn't manage to shake-up the market the way Dark Souls did--sales-wise, King's Field wasn't a huge hit, at least by today's standards. That being said, the original King's Field sold twice as much as FromSoft predicted, and laid the groundwork for what would eventually become the studio's immortal legacy.

It's interesting then to see that Hidetaka Miyazaki, the current president of FromSoftware and director of its most famous and well-celebrated games, takes great inspiration from those olden days of yore. In particular, Miyazaki says that he looks up to Natoshi Zin, the director behind the OG King's Field launched in 1994 on the PlayStation 1.

It's not just you. Hidetaka Miyazaki also has a tough time mastering video games...which says a lot because he's helped create some of the toughest games on the planet.

FromSoftware is known for one thing first and foremost: Making the type of video game that redefines the word difficult. After three Dark Souls games, the beloved PS4 classic Bloodborne, the challenging action-based Sekiro, and more recently Elden Ring and Armored Core 6, the studio has consistently one-upped their sadism with every successive release.

Elden Ring's latest expansion Shadow of the Erdtree is no exception. The DLC is terrorizing fans across all skill levels and giving everyone a collective reason to be afraid again. But it's not just you that finds FromSoft's games rigorous and tough as nails, or games in general--Hidetaka Miyazaki is the first to admit that he "absolutely sucks" at games.

There's a new online fad in town - however fleeting it may be - but this one marks itself out as one of the more left-field efforts we've ever seen: It's an online game (well, of sorts) called One Million Checkboxes.

It does very much what it says on the tin. You go to the game's web page, and you're faced with a vast grid, a seemingly never-ending swathe, of tick boxes, except it is, of course, finite, and there are a million of them.

They can't all be displayed on the screen at once (obviously), so the grid can be scrolled down, or there's a search box that you can use to jump to any area swiftly (just enter the number of a checkbox).

Although it has its own cloud gaming service in the form of Amazon Luna, today, the company has announced a new partnership with Xbox to bring Xbox Cloud Gaming (available as part of the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription) to select Fire TV devices in July.

The service will be compatible with Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2023) and Fire TV Stick 4K (2023) devices paired with a Bluetooth-enabled controller. As mentioned above, Xbox Cloud Gaming is part of Xbox Game Pass. It offers immediate access to games like Fallout 4, Forza Horizon, Starfield, and Senua's Saga: Hellblade II without a console or dedicated gaming hardware.

Like Samsung's Smart TV lineup, the Xbox app will be added to the Amazon storefront for Fire TV devices. After downloading, users will need to sign in with their Microsoft account. Those without a membership can test the service with access to Fortnite, Epic's popular free-to-play competitive shooter sandbox.

AMD launched its revamped latency reduction technology, Radeon Anti-Lag 2, in May. However, its debut with Valve's Counter-Strike 2 was part of an opt-in Technical Preview driver release, effectively a Beta release. With today's AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 24.6.1 update, Anti-Lag 2 is now official, with all Radeon GPU owners getting access to the technology - supported by Counter-Strike 2.

AMD notes that Anti-Lag 2 reduces latency by up to 40% when playing in 4K with the Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics card and by up to 27% when playing at 1080p using the Ryzen 7 8700G processor with integrated Radeon 780M graphics. At this stage, Anti-Lag 2 is still only supported by a single game, Counter-Strike 2, and there is no word on what other games might add support in the coming weeks and months.

The latest AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 24.6.1 driver release also adds day-one support and optimizations for two games: The First Descendant and Once Human. The former is a fast-paced, free-to-play action RPG shooter, while the latter is a multiplayer open-world survival game.

AMD's FSR 3.1 update is here, and it's debuting in five first-party PlayStation games on PC - Horizon Forbidden West, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Ghost of Tsushima, Spider-Man Remastered, and Spider-Man Miles Morales. AMD confirms that FSR 3.1 support will also arrive with God of War Ragnarok's highly anticipated PC port.

Announced earlier this year, AMD's FSR 3.1 update 'brings significant improvement' to the quality of FSR upscaling while also decoupling AMD's frame generation technology so it can be enabled with other upscaling technologies like DLSS and XeSS. AMD's FSR 3.1 upscaling and frame generation are platform-agnostic and work on GPUs from all major vendors.

The exciting thing for Radeon owners is the image quality improvements for FSR upscaling, with AMD noting that FSR 3.1 improves temporal stability, reduces flickering and shimmering, and features less ghosting. AMD provides the following example of the improvements with a video of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart with FSR 2.2 compared to FSR 3.1.

GeForce Game Ready Driver 556.12 is here, with the big update being day one support for The First Decendant - a new free-to-play four-player co-op action RPG shooter powered by Unreal Engine 5. The game is set to be a visual showpiece, including several real-time ray-traced lighting effects (ray-traced reflections, ray-traced ambient occlusion, and ray-traced shadows), DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction, NVIDIA Reflex, and NVIDIA DLAA support.

The latest GeForce Game Ready Driver also "gets your system ready" for PAYDAY 3's upcoming DLSS 3 Frame Generation implementation as part of the new Boys in Blue update. Performance-wise, DLSS 3 will deliver 2X improvements when playing the game in 4K, with everything from the GeForce RTX 4070 and up hitting triple digits.

The latest driver also adds more Optimal Settings for games, automatically adjusting in-game visual settings to maximize performance and fidelity. It's a part of the legacy GeForce Experience app and the new NVIDIA App, which is still in beta.

Capcom is bringing back an iconic zombie game, and it's not an entry in the Resident Evil franchise. Xbox 360-era classic Dead Rising is getting the remake meets remaster treatment, with the publisher teasing Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and presumably PC.

This will be the second remaster of the game. However, as the teaser trailer depicts, there are massive improvements to the game's visuals. Details are a bit light at the moment. Capcom is set to lift the lid on the remaster next week, but the expectation is that it's being called a Remaster because outside of the visuals, the core game will remain relatively unchanged.

In the original Dead Rising, players take control of photojournalist Frank West, who is investigating a mystery at Willamette Mall. The mystery turns out that 'thousands of zombies have taken over a mall,' with players given 72 hours to uncover the truth while slaying zombies with various weapons and vehicles.

Amazon Games VP Christoph Hartmann believes that artificial intelligence will help fuel major innovations in games and software.

With its disruptive effects on jobs, AI is a hot-button topic in gaming. But leaders in the interactive entertainment space are convinced that artificial intelligence can be a net benefit in key ways, such as speeding up production cycles through generative effects and other behind-the-scenes advancements.

Some, like Amazon Games lead Christoph Hartmann, have gone so far to say that AI will 'define your game in the future,' a thought predicated on using the nascent technology to help give players more control and agency in how they interact with game worlds.

Amazon's gaming division is currently working on eight different game projects, including publishing games like NCSoft's upcoming free-to-play MMORPG Throne and Liberty.

Amazon Games is pretty busy these days. The division has released multiple titles like the once-popular MMORPG New World, and published Smilegate's MMORPG Lost Ark. Despite the current disruptive macro-economic climate around games (rising costs, mass layoffs, long delays in production pipelines, to name a few), Amazon Games has no plans in slowing down.

The mega-retailer's game branch is active and bustling in a space that is being squeezed by less-than-ideal pressures, with eight different projects in the works. Among the higher-profile games is a fully-fledged new AAA Tomb Raider game from the franchise stewards at Crystal Dynamics alongside a new Lord of the Rings project.

Steam Game Recording is now available in Beta for you to try out. It is Valve's surprise new in-game recording and exporting tool, which sounds a lot like ShadowPlay or recording gameplay on PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X consoles.

The new feature is built into Steam and offers background recording, on-demand recording, a replay feature, and a groundbreaking tool for editing tools and creating clips. Plus, you can share videos conveniently, and Steam Game Recording is Steam Deck verified.

One of its groundbreaking and game-changing features worth exploring is the new Timeline with Event Markers. Each recording will include a Timeline overlay that shows when you were in a menu, capturing a screenshot, or unlocking an achievement with Event Marker icons. This makes it super easy to find moments and create highlights and clips.

The original Resident Evil was released in 1996, and over the decades has seen numerous sequels, remasters, remakes, and more. You may be wondering why the original PlayStation-era version of the game becoming available to purchase on PC is a big deal. Well, the version of the game on platforms like Steam is the HD version of the Nintendo GameCube remaster/remake.

The DRM-free Resident Evil, now available on GOG, is the original CD-ROM era version of the game. It features the same cheesy live-action cinematics, low-resolution computer-generated backgrounds, and blocky-as-hell PlayStation graphics from the early days of 3D gaming. For retro gaming fans, all of that is a plus, as is the native support for Windows 10 and Windows 11.

This release marks a new collaboration between Capcom and GOG that will see the original version of the first three Resident Evil games make their way to the platform - so fans can look forward to the original uncut versions of Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis releasing soon.

From June 27 until July 11, you can save big on a Steam Deck with Valve offering a 15% discount on the Steam Deck (LCD Edition) 64GB and 512GB variants as part of the latest Steam Summer Sale.

Valve's Steam Deck launched in 2022, and although it wasn't the first PC gaming handheld, it helped make it mainstream thanks to impressive hardware and an affordable price point. It doesn't hurt that it runs a custom Linux-based OS created by Valve (SteamOS) that plugs you straight into Steam - the world's most popular PC gaming platform.

The discount brings the entry-level Steam Deck 64GB model to its lowest price, $296.65 USD (down from $349), with the 512GB model on sale for $381.65 USD (down from $449). Unfortunately, the premium Steam Deck OLED model with a larger battery capacity and higher refresh-rate OLED display is unavailable.

FromSoftware games are notoriously difficult, and typically, when a new title from the developer is released, it's met with a wave of gamers complaining about the overall difficulty.

This sentiment has been abundantly true for the recent Elden Ring DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, with thousands of gamers taking to Steam to review the game poorly for its difficulty (and some performance issues).

However, the difficulty in FromSoftware games isn't about to change, at least that's according to FromSoftware director Hidetaka Miyazaki, who said in a recent interview with The Guardian that players need to experience extreme difficulty to be given a "sense of achievement," and that reducing the difficulty "would break the game itself."