Gaming - Page 262

The online world is a colorful place that often descends into stupidity, or beyond, and some of the fads witnessed on TikTok (and elsewhere) demonstrate this - the latest being huffing the fumes from the Steam Deck's cooling vents.

Yes, you read that right - the idea is to directly breathe in the exhaust fumes, with one Steam Deck owner messaging Valve to check if it's safe to do so, observing that they "kinda like" doing this.

As you might guess, this is a practice that's probably best avoided on balance.

Support for AMD's FSR 3 has been very thin on the ground so far, but we've just learned that another title is inbound, with support coming to Starfield.

As you may recall, Starfield launched with FSR 2 support, but no DLSS - although recently it was furnished with DLSS 3. Which led to the slightly odd situation of the AMD-sponsored game having cutting-edge frame generation with NVIDIA and not with Team Red's graphics cards.

At any rate, we've been told by Bethesda that FSR 3 support will be debuting in early 2024, a bit too late for some gamers, no doubt, but still very definitely better late than never.

Starfield is far from complete, and Bethesda knows it, as the company is planning on rolling out a bunch of updates that will add some highly-requested features.

Bethesda has confirmed that Starfield will be getting a series of new updates that include many features that players have been requesting. The confirmation from Bethesda can be traced back to a Reddit comment by the company that said the developer has been "hard at work" on many of the "features you asked for, from city maps, to mod support, to all-new ways of traveling (stay tuned!.)"

These updates will be rolled out "roughly" every six weeks, and according to Bethesda the official mod tools for Starfield are expected to release sometime in 2024, and are expected to involve some version of the Creation Kit tool that was present in previous Bethesda titles. As for bug fixes, Bethesda says its working on those as well and early next year to expect an update that will include FSR3 and XeSS.

Spider-Man developer Insomniac Games has reportedly been hit by a ransomware attack, and confidential data is believed to have been compromised.

Reports indicate that Insomniac Games has been hacked by Rhysida ransomware, and that sensitive company and employee information may have been attained by threat actors. Sony has acknowledged the reports, and has confirmed its investigating, but has not announced whether or not the attack took place.

Rhysida perpetrators have posted up images of leaked information to serve as proof of hacking, complete with multiple snapshots of confidential documents, employee tax records, emails, passports, and an unreleased snapshot of Insomniac's upcoming Wolverine game. The data is being auctioned off with the starting price at $2 million, or 50 bitcoin.

Usually, when I'm writing about a new mouse for PC on TweakTown, it's about that thing that plugs into your PC for pointing and clicking, so it's nice to take a little break from that to talk about a new PC game due to arrive in 2025 called Mouse. It is a new first-person shooter with retro-inspired gameplay from the Doom era; however, the visual style and art direction are all about classic 1930s cartoons. Most notably, Disney's iconic Steamboat Willie animation from 1928.

If you're a fan of Cuphead, which applied a similar sensibility to the classic 2D platformer and side-scrolling bullet-hell genre, Mouse is something to watch. Over on the game's Steam page, developer and publisher Fumi Games described Mouse as a "gritty, jazz-fueled shooter" that is "inspired by classic FPS and noir films."

What stands out in this trailer is how the animation faithfully recreates the over-the-top cartoon violence of animation from the first half of the 20th century. From headshots to tommy guns and what looks like an 'ultimate' ability that gives you fast-firing finger guns, a lighthearted and comedic tone nails the old-school cartoon vibe.

Will GTA 6 run at 60FPS on the PS5 Pro? Rockstar's latest may be locked to 30FPS even with the PS5 Pro's power boost.

Note: Sony has not officially confirmed they are working on a PS5 Pro, nor has the company announced official specifications for the upgraded PS5. All of the information here remains speculative and based on rumor, reports, and unverified sources.

If the leaked PS5 Pro specs are anything to go by, then Sony's new mid-gen refresh should be a hefty upgrade over the original PS5. Reports suggest that the PS5 Pro's custom 5nm Viola SoC could leverage an RDNA 3 GPU with 60CUs (that's 67% more than the base PS5) and 3840 stream processors--the same amount of stream processors found in AMD's desktop-grade RX 7800 XT video cards.

THE FINALS is a new competitive shooter from Embark Studios, a team of veteran developers who worked on iconic entries in the Battlefield series. It got a surprise release during The Game Awards 2023, and with its impressive visuals, destructible environments, and a compelling loop, it's proving to be a massive hit among PC gamers.

The free-to-play title amassed a 242,619 peak concurrent player count this past weekend. In THE FINALS, teams of three enter elimination tournaments that end with an epic one-on-one finale, with the goal being to collect as much cash as possible. The smash, shoot, and grab setup of THE FINALS is thrilling and a lot of fun. And for those rocking a GeForce RTX 40 Series card, the game supports DLSS 3, DLAA, Reflex, and real-time ray tracing.

THE FINALS use of NVIDIA RTX Global Illumination (RTXGI) is jaw-dropping, especially when you get to see entire buildings blow apart or come crashing down in seconds. At 4K, the GeForce RTX 4090 can push over 200 FPS with max settings, ray-tracing, and DLSS 3, with the GeForce RTX 4070 being able to push over 100 FPS.

Black Myth: Wukong, from Chinese studio Game Science, is a new cinematic action RPG based on Journey to the West and Monkey King mythology powered by Unreal Engine 5 technology. Thanks to some pretty spectacular trailers, it has garnered plenty of attention in recent years. At The Game Awards 2023, we got another brilliant-looking trailer with a release date of August 20, 2024.

Watching the trailer a few times, this is one of those "mark your calendar" games, and today we've got confirmation from NVIDIA that all of the footage in the trailer was captured on a "GeForce RTX 40 Series PC" with DLSS 3 Frame Generation enabled.

We assume that means GeForce RTX 4090 because the level of detail in the characters, world, and visual effects looks incredible. If you haven't seen the latest trailer, watch the one posted on the GeForce RTX YouTube channel in high-quality 4K.

NVIDIA has just released its new GeForce 546.33 WHQL Game Ready drivers, which provide Game Ready support and optimizations for THE FINALS and Squad.

The new GeForce 546.33 WHQL Game Ready drivers also include specific DLSS optimizations for Fortnite Chapter 5, which was just released, as well as adding GeForce Experience support for six new games. Not only do we have the game-specific optimizations, but the new drivers fix issues with Discord, where colors were appearing muted when streaming gameplay, and the general bug where a new NVIDIA icon is created in the system tray every time a user switch happens in Windows.

The new GeForce Experience support includes the following games: Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, The Day Before, THE FINALS, THRONE AND LIBERTY, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, and Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of the Ruins.

Known insider Kepler issues corrections to the recent PlayStation 5 Pro spec leaks.

On Saturday, an anonymous ResetERA user posted a thorough spec sheet for Sony's rumored PS5 Pro. On paper, the PS5 Pro aka Project Trinity looks like a significant upgrade over the existing PS5, offering a beefier RDNA 3-powered GPU with dedicated raytracing hardware and an implied 28TFLOPs of single-precision (FP32) power. The PS5 Pro's secret sauce is a new custom AMD chip called Viola, which leverages tech from both RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 architectures. There's just a few problems with these numbers.

Graphics insider and known leaker Kepler has found some discrepancies with the PS5 Pro's spec sheet. Kepler notes that the Pro will use 60 out of the 64 CUs available, not the 56 CUs that was included in the original report. This would put the PS5 Pro's GPU at 3840 Stream Processors, the same amount found in RX 7800 XT graphics cards, which is a stark contrast to the 3584 Stream Processors from the first report.

End of an era: Gaming's largest video games event, E3, is officially gone for good.

E3 has been permanently cancelled and the show has been retired. The Entertainment Software Association today announced the news to a beleaguered video games industry plagued by layoffs and an ever-dwindling press. Coming off the heels of two consecutive years of cancellations, a privacy controversy, and a digital event that mostly failed to gain traction, the news isn't exactly a surprise. But for people like me who had the privilege in attending E3 as press, the news comes as a blow to an already-shaky industry.

"After more than two decades of hosting an event that has served as a central showcase for the U.S. and global video game industry, the ESA has decided to bring E3 to a close," ESA CEO and president Stanley Pierre-Louis tells The Washington Post.

Bethesda has many more updates coming for Starfield, including some tweaks to how players travel within the game.

In a bid to keep players engaged with Starfield, the devs at Bethesda Game Studios plan to continually refresh, tweak, and update the game over time. The studio's strategy includes various fixes to glitches and gameplay bugs as well as various additions that fans have been asking about, including local city maps, fully-fledged mod support (coming in 2024), and...more vehicles?

Yesterday, Bethesda rolled out a new update for Starfield that nixed the frustrating "pet asteroid" glitch, and the studio actually responded on the official Starfield Reddit with a surprising bit of info. In the post, Bethesda teased that "all new ways of traveling" would be part of its update roadmap.

Only a few days after releasing the early access of The Day Before, developers Fntastic have announced the studio is closing, as they have simply run out of money.

The announcement came to the official Fntastic X account, where it explained that the developer has "failed financially" and that it "lacks the funds to continue". Notably, The Day Before quickly rose to the top of Steam's best-seller and most-played games list, before it was quickly smacked with a myriad of negative user reviews that were reporting widespread bugs that caused the game to crash and server issues.

Additionally, some users have claimed that Fntastic has misled gamers into thinking they were getting a survival MMO, but when the early access hit, the game was an extraction shooter. The last update for The Day Before occurred on December 8, and it seems it will be the last one it will ever get where critical bugs are addressed.

Heading into 2023, The Day Before from developer Fntastic was one of Steam's most wish-listed games - hype and goodwill garnered from the game's impressive reveal trailer from 2021. A trailer that showed several minutes of what was described as an "open-world MMO survival set in a deadly, post-pandemic America." And it looked good, a little bit of Ubisoft's The Division, Naughty Dog's The Last of Us, and a dash of DayZ.

At a glance, it was easy to buy into the hype. However, those who took a closer look saw a game that was more concept than anything else, from shots copied and duplicated from popular game trailers to the revelation that its "gameplay" was all smoke and mirrors. Even the game's logo and artwork, being "inspired" by The Last of Us, were questionable.

Since its reveal back in 2021, some of the development milestones for The Day Before include being pulled from Steam due to not filing the proper trademark paperwork, gameplay demos and presentations looking worse than what came before, and revelations that the studio was exploiting "volunteers" to develop the game. This brings us to The Day Before hitting Steam Early Access on December 7, 2023-last week.

Free Radical Design, the studio behind the anticipated Timesplitters 4, has been shut down as video games industry layoffs continue.

The gaming market has cut over 6,000 jobs as publishers try to stabilize profits through cost control measures. Big-name publishers from Electronic Arts to Ubisoft have eliminated hundreds of jobs, but Swedish decentralized games empire The Embracer Group may lead the charge with over 900 people being laid off as of September 30, with more layoffs happening since.

At the time Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors warned that more layoffs are possible. Now parent company Plaion, who operates the Deep Silver publishing label, has apparently closed Free Radical Design (FRD). This comes shortly after Plaion also closed Volition, the developers of the Saints Row franchise. The FRD studio had been resurrected in 2021 after Embracer purchased the IP back in 2018, and Free Radical Design had been working on a new Timesplitters game.

Sony's beefed-up PlayStation 5 Pro console has been teased for a while now, where last week I pondered that the just-announced Grand Theft Auto 6 would be a huge system seller for an upgraded PS5 Pro console... and now we have more information on the PS5 Pro out of nowhere.

The new information on the PlayStation 5 Pro is coming from leaker Kepler and the ResetEra forums, where we've heard that the PS5 Pro is codenamed "Trinity". In contrast, the upgraded SoC inside of the console is codenamed "Viola". The APU will see the CPU side boosting at up to 4.4GHz, which makes sense as we heard about the "low 4GHz range" in rumors a couple of months ago now.

Viola still uses the Zen 2 architecture that is inside of the regular PS5 for compatibility, but the CPU will boost up to a higher 4.4GHz. There's also reportedly 64KB of L1 cache per core, 512KB of L2 cache per core, and 8MB of L3 shared cache (4MB per CCX).

Classic old-school Zelda games may become just a link to the past as Nintendo focuses instead on freedom, choice, and player agency.

It sounds like the open-world formula in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom will now be the standard for future Zelda games. In a recent interview with IGN, the Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma indicates that linear and restrictive games with a set progression path are relics of the past.

"So I am in complete agreement with what Mr. Fujibayashi said in that games where you need to follow a specific set of steps or complete tasks in a very set order are kind of the games of the past," Aonuma told IGN's Kat Bailey.

Despite the commercial failure of Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy, Disney is still open to future collaborations with Eidos Montreal and Crystal Dynamics.

Years ago, Japanese games publisher Square Enix made a surprise announcement: It was working on two games set in the Marvel universe, and its Deus Ex and Tomb Raider teams were leading production. One was a live service game based on the Avengers, which ultimately flopped, and the other was an excellent singleplayer Guardians of the Galaxy game that also "failed to meet expectations."

Back-to-back sales misses led to significant losses, prompting Square Enix to sell its entire Western games division including the devs of the Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy games, Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal. The Embracer Group snapped up these studios in a landmark $300 million deal, and Eidos is currently making a new Tomb Raider game with Crystal Dynamics believed to be returning to Deus Ex.

GTA 6 won't release on PC at launch, and now a former Rockstar Games animator explains why it takes so long to make PC ports of games.

Grand Theft Auto VI is only coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles in 2025. It's assumed a PC version is coming, but may not happen until years after launch. This revelation prompted PC Gamer to publish an article entitled "There's no technical reason Rockstar can give for why a PC version of GTA 6 isn't arriving with the console release." Now a former GTA animator explains why PC ports aren't made in tandem with console versions.

According to Mike York, who worked with Rockstar Games on titles like GTA 5 and RDR2, there's two main reasons why a PC port of GTA 6 will take a while: Focusing on what sells, and the large amount of meticulous and hard work that goes into PC versions of games.

Sony Interactive Entertainment has reportedly shipped out devkits to more distant third-party studios, and it may only be a matter of time before specs start to leak.

According to new reports from Insider Gaming, executives at Sony's game division expect the specs for its upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro console to surface throughout this month. Sources have told Tom Henderson that Sony is starting to distribute PS5 Pro devkits to third-party studios. It's assumed that some group, team, or studio will pass around the highly-confidential spec sheet for Sony's upgraded PS5.

Given this timing, it's highly likely that Sony has already distributed PS5 Pro devkits to its internal teams--studios like Insomniac Games and Guerrilla Games probably had early PS5 Pro iterations before the tech was matured. It's also possible that Sony has already shipped out PS5 Pro devkits to its closer third-party partners, including companies like Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, and Take-Two Interactive to name a few. It's typically unlikely that these closer publishers would leak specific portions of the PS5 Pro's capabilities.