Gaming - Page 257

Square Enix may have just teased the hotly anticipated FF9 Remake on stage at PAX East 2024.

Final Fantasy IX is expected to be the next game to get the full-on remake treatment from Square Enix, but official details have been slim. The existence of the FF9 Remake was accidentally leaked as part of NVIDIA's gigantic GeForce Now server hiccup from 2021. Things have certainly changed since then--the games industry has shrunken by over 16,000 workers--but it seems possible Square Enix kept FF9R's flame alive.

At PAX, Final Fantasy XIV director Yoshi-P outlined the MMORPG's new Dawntrail expansion, announcing two interesting in-game items that can be had with collector's edition pre-orders. Final Fantasy IX's main characters Zidane and Garnet will soon be included in the MMO as wind-up minions. Gamers quickly speculated that a FF9 Remake announcement could be imminent.

In a stunning show of self awareness and understanding of its core fans, Square Enix has decided to push Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail's expansion release date in order to make room for Elden Ring's thunderously anticipated Shadow of the Erdtree expansion.

Elden Ring took the world by storm in 2022, and FromSoft's fantasy RPG is poised to make a big mark on 2024 as well with the new Shadow of the Erdtree expansion. This is a big one, with FromSoft saying that it's their largest-ever expansion, complete with a premium $40 price tag. Everyone is looking forward to it, even Final Fantasy XIV game director Yoshi-P, and publishers have taken note from the game's success. Rather than compete, it might be best to just...get out of the way of Elden Ring, at least for a little bit.

That's exactly what Square Enix decided to do. At PAX East 2024, Yoshi-P broke the fourth wall and once again showed why he's such a beloved figure in gaming.

Final Fantasy XIV's new expansion Dawntrail is on the horizon, and Square Enix is prepping a huge $215 collector's edition...but there's some details you need to know before you buy.

At PAX 2024, Yoshi-P revealed tons of new details about the upcoming FFXIV Dawntrail expansion. Dawntrail is a big deal for Square Enix and previous expansions have also had CEs in the past, but this one comes with some restrictions.

Dawntrail's big box collector's edition comes packed with a bunch of extras including a handsome figurine of the new Viper class, a cloth map that would look incredible on your wall, a neat little pen case and journal set, and a gleaming box with breathtaking artwork from Yoshitaka Amano. There's just one potential problem: The CE doesn't come with a console version of the game--only PC or Mac.

Square Enix's Creative Business Unit III lays out what the next 10 years of Final Fantasy XIV will look like, and more intense and thrilling battles are a big part of the plans.

A bit ago, Square Enix confirmed that FFXIV would last at least another decade. The MMORPG has grown to 30 million registered users and is big consistent contributor to the publisher's earnings. It's definitely a cash crop, but the team has to keep innovating, iterating, and evolving the game over time to keep players interested.

At PAX East 2024, game director Yoshi-P outlined what gamers can expect from Final Fantasy XIV moving forward into the new Dawntrail expansion and beyond. A big goal is to keep combat fresh, exciting, and generally fun. Right now, depending on class and the role, combat is typically a rotation of spells and abilities that need to be carried out in specific sequences. According to Yoshi-P, this is a bit rote and he wants to spice things up.

Reports indicate that Microsoft is currently experimenting with new handheld gaming prototypes, presumably in an effort to help the hybrid market mature while raking in profits along the way.

Microsoft may be exploring a new handheld device capable of natively playing Xbox games. The news comes from a recent episode of the Xbox Two podcast where Windows Central's Jez Corden says that Microsoft has new gaming handheld tech in early prototype stages of development.

There's admittedly not a lot to go on. This topic is generally speculative in nature, and Valve's success with the Steam Deck is typically seen as evidence of a potential Xbox handheld. Corden cautions listeners by saying he's still investigating the matter and hasn't issued a report because info is still being gathered.

New compensation policies at Blizzard have cut bonuses for Overwatch 2 developers, sources tell Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.

New reports have pulled the curtain back on the complex inner-workings of game development at the industry's former-largest independent publisher, Activision Blizzard. On top of layoffs, a new compensation plan at Blizzard has further stressed developers. The plan has changed the way developers receive their bonuses (if at all).

The new policy was instituted in 2023. Before the change, Blizzard would dole out bonuses to all employees based on the overall success of the publisher. If Blizzard's earnings were up, then everyone would get a bonus. The new policy only gives bonuses to the teams that are successful. For instance, in 2023, Diablo IV generated $666 million in just 5 days via game sales alone. The Diablo team's success doesn't affect other teams within the confines of the newer bonus scheme.

Capcom is facing backlash and controversy from gamers for the new Dragon's Dogma 2 microtransactions that seemingly popped up out of nowhere.

Dragon's Dogma 2 just launched, and right at release, Capcom has injected microtransactions into the game. This has predictably kicked the hornet's nest and gamers aren't happy about in-game purchases being included in a singleplayer RPG, especially one that costs $69.99. After all, Capcom offered a ton of in-game purchase options for the original Dragon's Dogma.

While gamers didn't know exactly what to expect from Dragon's Dogma 2, the inclusion of microtransactions wasn't exactly intended to be a surprise. Capcom didn't really detail the in-game purchases to consumers, but DD2's mTX options were detailed in review documentation that was sent to journalists. Both the PlayStation Store and Xbox versions of the game mentioned in-game purchases months before release. Capcom's latest games, including singleplayer titles like Resident Evil 4, typically include time-saving convenience microtransactions.

Sony gaming CEO Jim Ryan has interesting things to say about Microsoft's proposed 10-year Call of Duty deal with Microsoft.

PlayStation head Jim Ryan will leave Sony at the end of March, but before he departs, Ryan appeared on CNBC to discuss the history of the gaming brand. In the interview, the games leader briefly talked about the $70 billion Microsoft-Activision merger and more specifically, the decade-long deal that Sony ended up signing with Microsoft in order to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation.

According to Ryan, Sony was "thrilled" to sign the deal. The deal Ryan is referring to is actually the third and final contract offered to Sony. At the beginning of the Microsoft-Activision merger proceedings, Microsoft offered an unsatisfactory deal that only offered Call of Duty up until 2027. Sony rejected that deal, and Microsoft offered a second deal, one that upped the terms to 10 years of Call of Duty access. The second deal was also turned down, but we still don't know why.

We'd pretty much accepted that Baldur's Gate 3 wouldn't get an expansion, but this has now been confirmed.

This comes direct from the founder and CEO of Larian, Swen Vincke, who at GDC confirmed that there definitely won't be an expansion for the hit RPG, according to IGN.

Indeed, Vincke went further than this, clarifying that not only are there no plans at all for an expansion or DLC drop of any kind, but there will not be a Baldur's Gate 4 - or another Dungeons & Dragons RPG from Larian for that matter.

Blizzard held a lengthy Diablo 4 'Campfire Chat' this week, where the team discussed major changes coming to the game in Season 4. A complete overhaul of itemization, crafting, and enchanting has many excited for what feels like the game's Diablo 3 "Loot 2.0" update. In addition, a new endgame mode called The Pit sees players racing against the clock in increasingly more challenging dungeons - ala Diablo 3 'Greater Rifts.'

Players can expect massive, fundamental changes that make loot drops feel important and special on the item and loot side. Items are being simplified with fewer and more meaningful aspects while ensuring that only 'Sacred' items appear in World Tier 3 and only 'Ancestral' items appear in World Tier 4. With less clutter and expanded trading to allow players to trade Legendary and Unique items, this feeds into the new Tempering and Materworking crafting systems.

It works fairly straightforwardly. Tempering is all about adding affixes from special books or crafting manuals - so if you're a Necromancer who loves minions, you can temper pet-related bonuses. Each class, skill, and playstyle is being overhauled, and item affixes are being updated to celebrate Diablo 4's kinetic action.

Xbox users will have to buy a new type of premium currency in order to play the full version of Final Fantasy XIV, and it's priced so that gamers may have to overspend when trying to purchase Entry monthly subscriptions.

A bit ago, Square Enix announced that Final Fantasy XIV on Xbox would have two strict requirements. The first is that Xbox Game Pass subscriptions are required to play the MMORPG on Xbox consoles. This a stark contrast to FFXIV on PlayStation, which does not require PS Plus in order to play.

The second mandate was more controversial. The publisher says that Xbox gamers can only pay for Final Fantasy XIV game time and in-game purchases with a new premium currency called FFXIV Coins. It's a subscription-based game, so all users must pay a set fee to play FFXIV on all platforms. It's just that Xbox gamers can't buy game time directly from Square Enix and must first exchange their cash for in-game currency.

During the recent State of Unreal livestream, Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra was showcased in a new trailer, revealing a seemingly head-to-head battle between Captain America and Black Panther.

The new game is developed by Skydance New Media, and according to the overview of the title found on the Marvel website, the game will put players into the chaos of the 1940s where Captain America and Azzuri, T'Challa's grandfather and the Black Panther of the 1940s, will need to overcome their differences and form an alliance to confront their common enemy.

Additionally, the overview reveals that both heroes will be fighting alongside Gabriel Jones of the Howling Commandos and Nanali, a Wakandan spy embedded in Occupied Paris, to stop "a sinister plot that threatens to turn the havoc of WWII into the ultimate rise of Hydra." Captain America will be voiced by Drew Moerlein, and Black Panther will be voiced by The Walking Dead's Khary Payton.

AMD just announced FSR 3.1, which brings a couple of significant updates to the company's upscaling and frame generation tech for PC - image quality improvements when upscaling and decoupling frame generation so it can run with other upscaling technologies like DLSS or as-is.

AMD has also included support for the Vulkan API and Xbox in the update - specifically, "Xbox Game Development Kit (GDK) support." Although FSR 3 upscaling and frame generation have been available on PC for a while, they have yet to make their console debut.

The new FSR 3.1 update only hints at the update arriving "later this year," but mentioning Vulkan and Xbox in the same sentence does suggest that we might see its support in Xbox's big first-party holiday release - Indiana Jones and the Great Circle from Machine Games and Bethesda. Hear me out.

AMD's FSR 3 with Frame Generation, the company's answer to NVIDIA DLSS 3, launched in September 2023. It is supported by just two games-Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum. A slow start, FSR 3 was also not quite as impressive as it should have been. Visual fidelity was a step down from DLSS 3, and features like support for VRR displays and tech like AMD's own FreeSync were missing.

All that changed in December 2023 with AMD releasing the full source code and an updated, more impressive version of FSR 3 launching with Ubisoft's Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. With AMD improving frame issues and adding VRR support, 2024 saw an influx of games supporting FSR 3 (most recently with Starfield and The Last of Us Part I), bringing the total number of games with FSR 3 support to 40.

It's still far from where DLSS 3 is, but it's picking up pace - and FSR 3.1 was announced at GDC 2024. FSR 3.1 brings two significant updates: an improvement to upscaling image quality and the ability for FSR's frame generation technology to work with "other upscaling solutions" like NVIDIA's DLSS or Intel's XeSS.

Remedy Entertainment posted its latest quarterly report for Q4 2023 after the mega-successful launch of Alan Wake 2, which became Remedy's fastest-selling game ever.

Inside that report, Remedy provides some updates on its upcoming Max Payne 1+2 Remake, which the developer said is fully funded by the IP owner and publishing partner, Rockstar Games, who is currently working on the next-generation Grand Theft Auto 6.

Remedy CEO Tero Vertala said: "Max Payne 1&2 Remake also continued in the production readiness stage. The team made considerable progress throughout the year. Max Payne 1&2 remake is going to be a major new game with great potential, enabled by a similar development budget as Alan Wake 2".

Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro might actually be an affordable console that doesn't cost $700.

On paper, the new PS5 Pro sounds like an expensive machine. Recent leaks have basically unearthed all of the PlayStation 5 Pro's secrets and exposed some interesting new advancements to the world, including a beefy new RDNA 3 GPU capable of 33.5 TFLOPs of power clocked at 2.1GHz. The PS5 Pro is also said to have a special new machine learning (ML) block on its GPU that will power Sony's new PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling tech. All of this is said to enable more detail-heavy gaming experiences at boosted effective resolutions without biting so much into FPS, potentially leading to more sustainable 4K gameplay.

This has led to lots of talk about the PS5 Pro's price tag. Will it be a $600 machine that doesn't move the needle very much in terms of mass adoption? Or is it a carefully planned and budget-balanced device that is specifically made to sell as a profitable, cost-effective piece of hardware aimed at helping stabilize Sony's falling operating margins? The latter seems more likely, especially given Sony's current position.

We all know Sony is working on a beefed-up PlayStation 5 Pro console for later this year, but now we're hearing news about a new Xbox console that has just hit South Korean regulatory offices.

The South Korean Radio Research Agency (RRA) regulatory office received a new Microsoft Xbox Development Kit (XDK) for testing, which is usually part of the procedure before new hardware launches in a few months' time. We saw the Xbox 360 console back in 2005 being sent through regulatory offices before the console hit retailers a month later.

We could expect a refreshed Xbox Series X console in an all-white design without a disc, similar to the PlayStation 5 Slim released last year by Sony. Microsoft could release an all-digital Xbox Series X or even a new Xbox Series Pro. This isn't the next-generation Xbox, as that is still a few years away... leaving Grand Theft Auto 6 players in 2025 flocking to Sony's upgraded PlayStation 5 Pro console if they want to experience the best of what Rockstar has to offer (before GTA 6 comes to the PC, that is).

We heard about Sony's new PlayStation Spatial Super Resolution (PSSR) technology from new leaks last week, but now the folks at Digital Foundry have torn through the rumors and provided some more information on the PlayStation 5 Pro console and its beefed-up hardware capabilities.

PSSR will reportedly be capable of being backported to any existing PlayStation game, which will make for some even better-looking PS5 games on the faster PS5 Pro console. Digital Foundry explains that Sony says PSSR has a 250MB memory footprint, but developer disclosures show that PSSR can be backported to ANY game... now we're talking.

Digital Foundry explained: "This is at odds with 'back compat plus' features bolted on to PS4 games running on PS5, which required games to run on modern development environments (SDKs). This could be of crucial importance in upgrading existing PS5 games that suffer from image quality problems - and we're seeing a lot of those thanks to low internal resolutions and FSR2 upscaling. The Pro could deliver vastly improved results via its extra GPU power and PSSR upscaling".

Dragon's Dogma 2 is out in a couple of days, but the review embargo is lifted, and to say there's some high praise is an understatement - although it's tempered by concerns on the performance front for PC gamers.

Cleary, this much-awaited open world action RPG sequel has been extremely well received, offering immersion and depth aplenty, and an innovative pawn system, and... well, the positivity gushes on, frankly.

James Galizio, who reviewed the game for RPG Site, enthused: "At the best of times, Dragon's Dogma 2 feels far less like a game and more like a world you're exploring - learning about those that live in it, and in turn yourself by how you choose to engage with those same people. It's unlike any other RPG."

An insider who provided the release time frame of Ghost of Tsushima days before it was officially announced has taken to X to tease a PC release date for God of War Ragnarok.

If you were hoping that God of War Ragnarok was arriving on PC sometime this year (as I was), you will likely be disappointed to learn that it won't be, that's if seemingly industry insider Siknigth is right about their prediction. Siknigth, an X account that appears to have connections within the industry that inform them of release dates that are under non-disclosure agreements (NDA), has taken to X to tease that God of War Ragnarok should be coming to PC in the first quarter of 2025, with the leaker writing, "if it arrives earlier, it's a gift, but I doubt it".

Judging by the leaker's comments, it seems that God of War Ragnarok would be an unexpected release if it made it to PC sometime this year, which would certainly be disappointing news for many if that information is correct. However, it wouldn't be totally unexpected to see God of War Ragnorok make its way over to PC eventually, as Sony is planning on bringing a lot of first-party PlayStation titles over to PC, with Ghost of Tsushima being the latest title announced for a PC debut on May 16.