Gaming - Page 240

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond got its first gameplay reveal during the latest Nintendo Direct broadcast, which offered fans 40 minutes of announcements, trailers, updates, and release dates for upcoming Nintendo Switch games. The final reveal of the showcase focused on Metroid Prime 4 from Retro Studios, and it didn't disappoint; the two-minute trailer was full of impressive gameplay.

The fourth installment in the critically acclaimed and popular Metroid Prime series was first announced in 2017 with a simple logo and word that Bandai Namco would be handling development. In 2019, Nintendo provided an update on the game, confirming that Bandai Namco was out and series creators Retro Studios were back in.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is a visual step up from the impressive Metroid Prime Remastered from 2023. The game sports the same first-person perspective and mix of action and exploration. We even get a glimpse of the new mysterious villain Sylux. The trailer also confirms a 2025 release window, but the gameplay we see is running on current Nintendo Switch hardware.

Bethesda recently unveiled "The Shattered Space" DLC for Starfield, along with the long-awaited Creation Kit, which will undoubtedly be a welcomed addition to the game as players will be able to add new content to the game.

In what would seem to be a really positive moment for Starfield, players were quick to call out the content within the DLC. Players will gain access to a new mission that allows them to play a bounty hunter for the Trackers Alliance faction. Additionally, Bethesda plans on adding more Tracker Alliance missions with future updates. The Trackers Alliance mission "The Vulture" is what players are up in arms about, as Bethesda slapped a $7 price tag on a single mission.

Moreover, the mission costs 700 Starfield Creation Credits, which translates to $7. However, the smallest number of credits that can be purchased is $10 worth, meaning the DLC will be $10 for players who are solely purchasing credits to access the DLC. Now, Bethesda CEO Todd Howard has responded to the backlash, saying Bethesda "hears that feedback" and the company will "evaluate both pricing, what we put out for free, how we communicate what's in something, and really hear from the community there."

It's only a matter of days before FromSoftware releases the highly anticipated DLC to Elden Ring, and ahead of its launch, we now have the official PC hardware requirements.

The minimum and recommended specifications to play Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree have barely changed, with the only real difference being the amount of storage space needed for it to be installed. Elden Ring comes in at 60GB, while installing Elden Ring with the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC will require 80GB of free space.

FromSoftware has taken to its official Elden Ring X account to share an updated list of the minimum and recommended specifications for the upcoming DLC, and players should really be aiming for "recommended" rather than "minimum". The Shadow of the Erdtree will require Windows 10, a CPU that's at least a Core i5-8400 / AMD Ryzen 3 3300X, a GPU that's at least a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (3GB VRAM) / AMD Radeon RX 580 (4GB VRAM) / Intel Arc A380 (6GB VRAM), 12GB of RAM, and 60GB of storage.

Starfield is on track to receive annual story expansions, with the first of two currently in development on track for a 2024 release. The Shattered Space expansion focuses on the mysterious House Va'ruun, the Great Serpent, and a story that will take players to a new location in the "dark reaches of space."

As a new RPG from Bethesda Game Studios, the team behind Skyrim, Fallout 4, and other classic titles, the response to Starfield has been divisive among Bethesda fans - with any criticizing how different the game feels compared to Elder Scrolls or Fallout.

One of the biggest criticisms of Starfield surrounds how the game handles exploration. Instead of Skyrim's meticulously hand-crafted open worlds, you've got countless procedurally generated planets with a handful of randomly generated points of interest repeating. With a loading screen every few minutes.

Blizzard has just announced that Overwatch 2 Season 11: Super Mega Ultrawatch will launch on June 20, featuring a new Mythic cosmetic type, a new Push map, and the huge return of Pink Mercy. Check out the trailer below:

Pink Mercy launched in May 2018, and Blizzard helped raise $12.7 million for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF). I was one of those buyers (on a personal note: in support of my mother-in-law, who passed away from cancer in 2018, just months after the Pink Mercy skin was launched).

You can now secure the elusive Pink Mercy skin for $14.99, with 100% of the purchase price being donated to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Not just that, but Blizzard is giving everyone the chance to support this cause with a new charity cosmetic bundle, the Rose Gold Mercy bundle, which is available for a limited time starting on June 25, for $19.99, and just like Pink Mercy, 100% of the purchase price goes towards the BCRF.

In a recent interview with PCGamer, FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki said the developer isn't against the Seamless Co-op mod for Elden Ring, and it's something it's actively taking notes on and considering for future FromSoftware games.

For those that don't know what the FromSoftware president is referring to, the Seamless Co-op mod enables PC players have a true co-op experience within Elden Ring that enables players to take on bosses together and experience the narrative. Prior to this mod players were only able to summon in friends through the use of an item and in certain situations.

The Seamless Co-op mod revamped the way Elden Ring co-op could be played and was quickly popularized by players that wanted to experience their second or third play-through with a friend. Miyazaki was asked what he thinks about the mod, to which he said FromSoftware definitely doesn't "actively oppose or want to downplay" and it is something FromSoftware will consider "with our future games".

Blizzard Entertainment is looking to introduce a single-player "story mode" with the soon-to-be-released expansion for World of Warcraft.

According to a recent interview with PCGamer, associate game director Morgan Day sat down with Tyler Colp to tease a coming story mode, which players could use to level up characters through playing past expansion narratives. Notably, this single-player mode would enable players to experience classic raid moments in past expansions, and the experience gained would be included in their journey to reach the maximum level.

Day further explained that "story-mode" is currently being worked on for The War Within's content, and not previous expansions. Moreover, Blizzard is still internally considering whether legacy raids will take place in the future, and that player reactions to the feature in The War Within expansion will play a strong role in it being rolled out further.

With the recent success of Amazon Prime's Fallout TV adaptation, more people have played games in the long-running Fallout franchise than ever before. The most recent mainline entry, Fallout 4, saw its Steam concurrent player count reach heights it hadn't seen since 2015. The co-op and multiplayer-focused Fallout 76 is also breaking player-count records as Bethesda releases its first map expansion since its 2018 debut.

In a new interview with YouTube creator MrMattyPlays, Bethesda Game Studios head Todd Howard addressed several questions surrounding the future of the Fallout franchise while offering tempering expectations for those of us who thought the success of the Fallout TV show would expedite development on Fallout 5.

From Todd's comments, it sounds like Fallout 76 will be updated for many years to come. And right now, the Fallout TV show is the place for those wanting a cinematic or in-depth story set in the Fallout universe.

Earlier this year, when Microsoft announced it would start releasing more first-party Xbox titles on Sony's PlayStation consoles, it shocked many longtime Xbox gamers. Although we're now in a place where even Sony is releasing major first-party PlayStation games on PC and even the Nintendo Switch (with its upcoming LEGO Horizon spin-off), seeing first-party Xbox games on PS5 hits a little differently because they're competing platforms.

With the dust now settled on Microsoft's decision to bring select Xbox titles to the PS5, the controversial move is proving successful. First-party Xbox Game Studios game Sea of Thieves was the most downloaded PlayStation 5 game chart in the US/Canada and the European region in May 2024.

More PlayStation 5 gamers downloaded and installed Sea of Thieves in May 2024 than they did Madden, Call of Duty, Helldivers 2, Grand Theft Auto 5, Fallout 4, and Stellar Blade. Fellow Xbox game Minecraft topped the PS4 charts for the same regions.

Gamers are always looking for the latest game everyone has jumped on, and usually, these titles offer something unique in terms of gameplay or overall immersion. An example of this would be the rise in popularity of Helldivers 2.

A good place to find these emerging titles and get in on the action early is the Steam charts, which tracks the most-played games across the client. The top five most played concurrent titles hardly change, and when it does, it's a representation of the game making a noticeable splash in the gaming community. As I previously stated, when a game makes it into the top five, it usually has something unique about it that has attracted players or has legacy power behind it.

But that isn't 100% of all cases. Sometimes, a game can enter the top five for no apparent reason at all besides players simply choosing to get behind it. An example of that is Banana, developed by Pony, Sky, and AestheticSpark and published by Sky. Banana is a clicker game that involves players just clicking on the banana in the middle of the screen, and a tally starts. It's a free-to-play game that has earned itself more than 775,000 concurrent players at the time of writing, and peaked today for concurrent players at 830,000.

Gears of War studio The Coalition is widely considered one of the most adept at working with Unreal Engine 5. It has collaborated with Epic Games to create UE tech demos like the impressive The Matrix Awakens from 2021. The studio's first proper Unreal Engine 5-powered game, Gears of War: E-Day, was revealed last week, and it's set to be a technical showstopper.

The reveal trailer for Gears of War prequel taps into the horror of the first game while bringing back iconic characters like Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago. Although a pre-rendered cinematic, developers at The Coalition note that it was created using in-game assets and lighting effects to give gamers and Gears fans a taste of what to expect.

"Our ambition is to, once again, set a new standard in technical excellence," explains Kate Rayner, Studio Technical Director at The Coalition. "We have fully modernized Gears from the ground up, infusing the DNA of Gears with the full capabilities of modern gaming technology. Every character, environment, and animation in Gears of War: E-Day has been completely rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5, allowing us to portray the Gears universe with unprecedented detail and fidelity."

Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed his government to organize and create a domestic gaming console that would compete with the likes of the PlayStation and Xbox consoles... with the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade seeking a company to help it create a console.

However, the ministry is also talking with businesses and other departments to work out if the necessary resources and support are there for the project, with experts doubting a Russian-made console is something that will happen without the Russian government providing subsidies, with massive amounts of time (many years) and investment required.

After Putin's presidential directive in making a Russian-made gaming console, skeptical experts are still concerned, saying that no Russian company is capable of creating a console that competes with Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox console, as these consoles pack some of the most bleeding-edge chips on the market, that cost hundreds of millions, but more like billions of dollars to develop.

It's a bit of a standing joke at this point, questions and rumors about Bloodborne being ported to the PC - but we've just had a juicy little hint that has fired up a sliver of hope that one day, this could still happen. Maybe.

But we wouldn't get carried away with that notion, because, of course, speculation about Bloodborne being brought over for PC gamers to enjoy goes back a long old way.

At any rate, PC Gamer has the latest nugget of a rumor on the subject, prised from the president of FromSoftware, Hidetaka Miyazaki, at the close of an interview on the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion for Elden Ring.

Basemark has just announced its new Breaking Limit benchmark, which will test ray traced gaming performance on your iOS, Android, Linux, and Windows device.

The new Breaking Limit benchmark is aimed at current-gen iOS and Android mobile devices -- think smartphones and tablets -- while Basemark's new benchmark will also work on Linux, and of course, Windows. The new Breaking Limit benchmark includes global illumination, ray traced shadows and reflections, and support for NVIDIA DLSS 2 and AMD FSR 2 upscaling in the "Ultra" version, of course.

Basemark explains Breaking Limit: "Breaking Limit is our most demanding ray tracing benchmark for mobile and PC. Leveraging cutting-edge ray tracing technologies, including ray traced shadows, reflections, and global illumination, it also offers comprehensive performance evaluations for both FSR and DLSS. Breaking Limit is a true cross-platform solution, enabling effortless comparison of performance across various devices utilizing the same workload. Additionally, it has a desktop-dedicated mode tailored for high-end devices, catering to extreme workload demands".

Earlier in the week at the Xbox Game Showcase, Bethesda revealed what it has planned for its June update scheduled for Starfield.

Bethesda unveiled "The Shattered Space" DLC, along with the Starfield Creation Kit, which will enable players to add new content to the game. The Creation Kit will undoubtedly revitalize the Starfield community with an injection of numerous sought-after mods and customizations, which is one of the main reasons Skyrim has retained its consistent popularity over the years. However, that isn't what Starfield players are upset about; it's the DLC, particularly its pricing.

In a June update posted to Bethesda's YouTube channel the publisher explained that players will be able to download new missions for a group called the Track Alliance, but one mission has been locked behind a $7 paywall. GameSpot reports the paywall isn't just $7, but it's actually $10, as players must purchase 1,000 Starfield creation credits to obtain it.

Unreal Engine 5, developed by Epic Games, is renowned as one of the most impressive game engines currently available, providing nearly unmatched visuals in an ever-growing number of titles.

However, the engine isn't capable of running games at native 4K, according to Infuse Studio co-founder Jacob Sutton, who sat down for an interview with Moore's Law is Dead and explained Unreal Engine 5 has a baked-in feature that restricts developers from running games at native 4K. Sutton said that upscaling technologies that are becoming ever more present in games, such as NVIDIA's DLSS, AMD's FSR, and Intel's XeSS, are being relied upon by developers to fix optimization issues with titles.

Throughout this explanation, Sutton used Unreal Engine 5 as an example, saying that Epic Games' impressive engine in-built default upscaling software called Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), and that developers are almost required to use the upscaling feature to achieve a desired framerate.

NVIDIA has announced the latest round of PC games launching with DLSS, Reflex, and other RTX technologies - kicking off with the release of the Alan Wake 2: Night Springs expansion from Remedy. Like the base game, it supports Full Ray Tracing (or Path Tracing) with the benefit of DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction to improve image fidelity.

The visuals in Alan Wake 2 and the new Night Springs expansion are so impressive and cutting edge that you need DLSS Super Resolution, Frame Generation, and Reflex to make it playable. Check out the trailer above, which includes some tasty 4K DLSS 3 footage with Full RT.

Black Myth: Wukong is one of the most anticipated PC games of 2024. The stunning Unreal Engine 5-powered game launches on August 20. There's no new footage of the game with Full Ray Tracing with DLSS 3.5 Reconstruction and Frame Generation this week, but we did get a cool-looking CG Trailer for the game's upcoming launch.

You've probably heard of third-party Steam tools like SteamDB, which can access data from the platform to present stats on games. Well, with similar third-party access provided by Epic Games for the Epic Games Store, a third-party tool called EpicDB (naturally) was able to access and scrape a database to reveal several unannounced games from publishers and developers like Sony, Square Enix, Sega, and Bethesda.

Epic has since updated its third-party tools so they can no longer scrape info from unpublished or unreleased titles from the Epic Games Store catalog, but not in time for PC gamers to go through all of the data and post some of the juiciest findings over on ResetEra.

Many of the unannounced projects and potential games are listed with codenames, but fans and internet sleuths were able to decipher a few. One of the more notable listings comes from Square Enix for a game called Momo, which is presumed to be a Final Fantasy 9 Remake thanks to pre-order bonuses like the Tetra Master Starter Pack giving it away.

Valve is being sued in the UK and accused of using its market dominance with Steam to overcharge 14 million gamers. The claim, filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London, says Valve is shutting out competition in the digital PC gaming market through its business practices.

"Valve is rigging the market and taking advantage of UK gamers," says children's digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt, the person behind the claim with the support of law firm Milberg London LLP. There's even a website up for the suit, steamyouoweus.co.uk, which says that if the claim is successful, UK PC gamers could be eligible to take their share of the £656 million ($840 million USD) suit - around £44 each in compensation (or $56 USD).

Okay, so you're probably aware there's no shortage of digital platforms to buy and play PC games. There's the Epic Games Store, Battle.net, Ubisoft Connect, Xbox and the Microsoft Store, GOG.com, and more. And with that, you might be wondering what the lawsuit is carrying on about. Let's break it down.

Project G-Assist was a surprise announcement from NVIDIA at Computex 2024. It is a new AI-powered digital assistant designed for PC gaming with a GeForce RTX graphics card - or what the company now calls an RTX AI PC. Like DLSS, it's a general LLM or AI model trained on a broad range of titles, and Project G-Assist is ready to be plugged into any existing or upcoming release.

Project G-Assist's capabilities and features blew us away when we got to participate in a live demo of the technology integrated into the popular survival game Ark: Survival Ascended with help from its developer, Studio Wildcard. One of Project G-Assist's key features is that it can analyze and see what's happening on the screen. Plus, it has real-time access to game-specific data.

Ark is a game full of dinosaurs, so a few of the first questions we asked were simple things like, "What's that dinosaur on the left there?" "What's the best weapon to take out that enemy, and where do I find it?" As a general model, Project G-Assist, as seen in this example, has access to up-to-date lore and various Ark knowledgebases and Wikis.