Gaming - Page 268

There's some disappointing news for Xbox gamers looking to try FF14: The game will not only require a paid subscription fee in order to play, but you'll also have to have an active Game Pass subscription too.

After more than a decade, Final Fantasy XIV is finally coming to Xbox. Square Enix will hold an open beta test starting Wednesday, February 21, 2024 at around 12:00 a.m. (PST) on Xbox Series X/S, where anyone can dive into the world of Eorzea. Well...almost anyone.

The developer has confirmed that an active Xbox Game Pass Ultimate or Xbox Game Pass Core subscription is required to play Final Fantasy XIV's open beta. This is the equivalent of the old Xbox LIVE Gold requirement that online games had years ago, before Microsoft phased-out and re-named Xbox LIVE Gold. PlayStation gamers, on the other hand, do not have to have an active PlayStation Plus subscription to play FFXIV.

The Nintendo Switch family has now shipped nearly 140 million units worldwide, further cemented it as the third best-selling video games hardware ever made.

Despite being on the market for 7 and a quarter fiscal years, the Switch is still selling pretty strongly for such an older system. Nintendo's latest financial report delivers updated figures for the platform and confirms some staggering lifetime sales.

According to the figures, total Switch shipments have reached 139.36 million as of December 2023. Nintendo shipped 6.9 million consoles during Q3 FY24 (Oct - Dec 2023), down 58% year-over-year from holiday 2022. In fact, these are the lowest holiday shipment numbers that the Switch platform has ever seen.

Apex Legends launched in native next-gen form for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles back in 2022, offering 120Hz, but developer Respawn promised 120FPS was on the way... and now that day has finally come.

The new update for current-gen consoles in the Sony PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X/S consoles unlocks 120FPS gaming on Apex Legends with its new Breakout season. This is huge news for Apex Legends players on current-gen consoles, as PC gamers have been enjoying 120FPS (and much, much more) since the game launched 5 years ago.

Apex Legends developer Respawn Entertainment explained the 120FPS update on its website: "Enable Performance Mode on current-gen consoles for 120Hz output to displays that support it! This new Video Settings option adjusts graphical settings, leveraging recent improvements in the Apex rendering engine to target up to 120 FPS gameplay".

What's going to be the big step forward taken by Sony's next-gen console? It could well be seriously upping the quality of games using AI, if one leaker is right.

This comes from Moore's Law is Dead (MLID) on YouTube, who in the latest episode of Broken Silicon discussed a wide swathe of topics, including the PlayStation 6 and what features it might have in terms of how the console will really advance the world of gaming.

That could well be some of the usual stuff - even faster loading (although with the PS5 we already have blazing speeds), better graphics, faster frame rates and so forth. Which is all great - particularly the latter in terms of 4K gaming on your big-screen TV - but the real difference will be made somewhere else.

Fallout 4: Project Arroyo is an ambitious fan remake of the classic 1998 isometric hit Fallout 2 from Black Isle Studios - the last major entry in the franchise before Bethesda Game Studios took over in the mid-2000s.

Like other ambitious mods like Skywind and Skyblivion, which are Morrowind and Oblivion remakes in a more modern Bethesda engine, this goes one step further by translating a 2D game into full 3D.

Fallout 4: Project Arroyo has been in development for a few years, but over the weekend, we got our best look at the project with a two-minute location trailer that captures the look and feel of Fallout 2's New California setting. Fans of the classic will undoubtedly notice the Sacred Head of the Vault Dweller looking very cool (and imposing) recreated in Fallout 4.

Patch 2.11 for Cyberpunk 2077 and the Phantom Liberty expansion went live recently, bringing several fixes to the game, including a few visual updates. Although not mentioned in the full release notes, the update also adds a new NVIDIA DLSS settings called DRS or Dynamic Resolution Scaling to sit alongside the Quality, Balanced, and Performance modes.

The various DLSS modes refer to the rendering resolution as a percentage, where Quality at 4K means AI upscaling from 1440p and Performance at 4K means AI upscaling from 1080p. The new DRS mode is about maintaining a target frame rate, where the resolution that DLSS is upscaling from dynamically changing to ensure a minimal performance loss.

It's an exciting new addition as it means DLSS will be able to dynamically switch from DLAA's native rendering to lower resolutions in much smaller increments, with Redditor 'skyj420' posting that they witnessed native 1440p drop to just 1420p to maintain the target frame rate set of 45 FPS.

Reports say Microsoft is thinking about bringing select Xbox console exclusive games to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. Fans are predictably not happy and want answers. Next week, they will have them.

Multiple reports say that big-name games like Starfield, the new Indiana Jones project, and even Gears of War could break exclusivity and release on PlayStation. The goal here would be to maximize sales outside of the Xbox and Windows Store ecosystem--both of which have not captured substantial shares of their respective console and PC markets.

Everyone is confused by these announcements, but Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer confirms that the new business plans will be revealed next week during a special stream. This event could determine the fate of the Xbox hardware business as we know it.

It's official: The godfather of tactical stealth games is returning to the genre. Hideo Kojima has announced he is making a new experimental espionage game with Sony.

Hideo Kojima has now announced three projects: Death Stranding 2, the horror game OD for Xbox, and a new stealth espionage game that's totally not Metal Gear Solid. The last game was announced at Sony's recent State of Play event, and while details are light, we do have a name.

The project is codenamed PHYSINT, which could be short for "Physical Intelligence," a term used to describe operatives collecting intel on the field. It'll be set in a totally new, all-original IP, and it's being made for PlayStation. It's also to be a film-game hybrid...which is interesting. "Two years from now, I will celebrate the 40th anniversary of my game production career. I am confident that this title will be the culmination of my work," Kojima said at the event.

Gears of War could be the next big Xbox exclusive to release on PlayStation.

Reports indicate that Microsoft is thinking about breaking Xbox exclusivity for select franchises. The idea is to launch new and catalog titles onto rival platforms like PlayStation and Nintendo to boost sales. Sources have told The Verge that Xbox-exclusive games like Starfield, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Hi-Fi Rush could break exclusivity. Other rumors suggest Sea of Thieves could also cross over.

Today we have fresh reports that even more games could be going to PlayStation. Giant Bomb's Jeff Grubb says that Microsoft is currently discussing bringing its billion-dollar Gears of War series to PlayStation. Xbox leadership has not officially confirmed or denied the rumors, and nothing has been decided yet.

Last month, news surfaced regarding the release of an unofficial PC port of Marvel's Spider-Man 2, and just last week, the modding team behind the port released a new version of it.

While the port is imperfect, we have 25 minutes of PC gameplay footage to share. Watching the gameplay footage, you can notice missing textures, shaders, and some effects. However, it is already looking much better than its original launch version.

In regards to gameplay mechanics, most appear to be in place, the settings UI works rather smoothly, the HUD looks great, and the cutscenes are working nicely. Even the game's opening boss fight with The Sandman seems to work well despite some visual lag and stuttering.

If you ask some people, Skyrim is one of the best games of all time, and a testament to that claim is the dedicated community behind it that has been providing mods and adding extra content to enjoy for many years after its release.

If you are still enjoying the world of Skyrim, a new mod called Lordbound is something you should keep your eye on. Lordbound is a new DLC-size mod for Skyrim that will largely change the game, adding a brand-new region with more than 40 quests, 50 new dungeons, and more than 60 hours of additional content.

The Lordbound Dev Team is working hard to bring their DLC-sized mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to life. This fan-made expansion promises to have the biggest main quest ever played in Skyrim, with choices that matter and consequences that change the state of the valley around you. The mod will also include fully fleshed and voiced NPCs, as well as a totally original soundtrack. This is truly an ambitious project.

Path tracing requires powerful hardware to run, even with tools like DLSS and Frame Generation. Rendering fully path-traced environments shouldn't be possible yet, but here we are - with the path-tracing transforming games like Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake II, and Portal with RTX. The latter is a mod created by NVIDIA using its new and powerful RTX Remix platform - and when it debuted, you needed a GeForce RTX 4080 or RTX 4090 for it to be playable.

At a higher resolution with 'ultra' settings, that is, because someone managed to get a playable version of Portal RTX running on a Steam Deck - Valve's portable gaming PC handheld powered by a custom AMD mobile SoC.

The video demonstration by NightSightProductions is a great reminder that when you can tweak settings, you can get a demanding game to run on a wide range of hardware. However, in the case of Portal with RTX, there's some serious tweaking going on alongside the resolution being dropped to 864 x 486 to hit a playable 30 FPS.

The biggest Starfield-related news today has to be the current rumorpointing to Microsoft bringing Xbox-exclusive titles like Starfield and the upcoming Indiana Jones game to the PlayStation 5 - a bombshell revelation if true. There's no official word from the Xbox team to back this up, so we'll shift our attention to the world of Starfield PC updates - namely, patches.

The game recently received its largest post-launch update, with hundreds of fixes, including several changes to how lighting works and looks across various locations and scenarios. As part of Bethesda's plan to roll out substantial updates, fixes, and new content every six weeks for Starfield in 2024 - the good news is that PC gamers are getting a smaller update very soon.

And that is one that finally adds in-game AMD FSR 3 support, which will bring dedicated frame generation support to the game on Steam (via the Steam Beta branch this week) for all non-GeForce RTX 40 Series owners.

Xbox is reportedly mulling over a shift in its business model that will help maximize game sales.

Microsoft has discussed bringing big-name Xbox exclusives to PlayStation 5, sources have told The Verge's Tom Warren. Bethesda games like Starfield and the new Indiana Jones and the Great Circle game are both potentially heading to PS5. It's believed Microsoft is aiming at magnifying game sales by offering its titles on PlayStation, further cementing third-party ties between the two harmonic rivals.

The decision has faced heated opposition among Xbox teams, and Microsoft has yet to make any official comment on the reports. There is no guarantee that the games will break exclusivity and release on PlayStation.

Intel is reportedly gunning hard to win the contract to both build Microsoft a semi-custom APU for its next-gen Xbox console and fabricate the chip at its own foundry. This is compared to both console SoCs being made by AMD and fabbed at TSMC in Taiwan.

Intel had a custom Pentium III "Coppermine-based" CPU at 733MHz inside of the original Xbox back in 1999, but AMD has been securing contract after contract from both Microsoft and its Xbox consoles and Sony with its PlayStation consoles. Intel powering the next-gen Xbox would be an exciting thing to see, as AMD has reportedly already signed a contract with Sony to build a next-gen PlayStation 6 console.

Intel has been hard at work with its Tile-based APU approach, with its latest Meteor Lake CPUs featuring CPU, GPU, AI tiles, and more on a single chip. Intel's own Arc GPU division is reportedly not going to continue on with discrete GPUs past Battlemage, where rumor has it the company will shift to using GPU Tiles only on future-gen APUs.

Video game developers would like to rely less on monetization and more on creativity for their games.

Gaming is a business, and that means profits come first. Since the introduction of new transformative disruptions like live service games and microtransactions, game devs have tried to balance their project vision with some sort of guaranteed money-maker. Project budgets are skyrocketing, and sales aren't guaranteed, so devs will often try to improve the odds of success by putting in microtransactions into their projects (often at the behest of publishers).

Apparently, game devs want this to change. According to a new 2023 State of Game Development & Design report from Perforce, video game creators would like to see the industry move towards quality games and away from aggressive monetization for the sake of profits.

AMD and Sony are working together once again, this time on a next-gen SoC for a next-gen PlayStation 6 console.

The news on Sony's next-gen PlayStation 6 is coming from leaker Moore's Law is Dead, who reports that he can 100% confirm that AMD has received the contract for the next-gen PlayStation 6. AMD has already baked a beefed-up codenamed "Viola" SoC for Sony's upgraded PlayStation 5 Pro console, which should be revealed later this year and released towards the end of 2024, or into 2025 depending on multiple factors.

We have no hardware specs for the next-gen PlayStation 6 console, but I'd like to see maybe the same 8 cores and 16 threads of CPU power, but based on the current-gen Zen 4 architecture. AMD will have its next-gen Zen 5 architecture out later this year, but they're probably building a next-gen SoC for the PS6 with Zen 4 and 8C/16T, but at maybe up to 5GHz+ clock speeds (4.4GHz for the PS5 Pro and its Zen 2-based 8C/16T processor).

Sony is reportedly working on a next-gen PlayStation gaming handheld, which might or might not be called the Vita 2, and is part of the "PlayStation 6 family" as a handheld that's meant to launch with the next-gen PlayStation 6 console, but as a weaker handheld that can play some PS5 games, and should play ALL previous-gen PS4 games.

In a new rumor, leaker Moore's Law is Dead said that he's heard from sources that state a custom AMD APU is currently in the "High-Level Design Phase," which means we're at least two years away from seeing it. Inside, Sony's next-gen PlayStation handheld would have 18 CUs on the GPU side of things, meaning that it would be natively backward-compatible with all PS4 digital titles, and it should run some PS5 games as well.

Sony uses variable clock speeds inside of the PlayStation 5, so a portable PlayStation console with its GPU running at up to (variable) 1.8GHz means you'll have a decent amount of power in your hands on the go. Not all PS5 games would work on the next-gen PlayStation portable handheld, but would require per-game testing and patches, and would run at much lower resolutions than the minimum resolution rendered on a full PlayStation 5 console.

Sony's beefed-up PlayStation 5 Pro is getting some confirmation on rumors from leaker Moore's Law is Dead, who says that we will indeed have an 8-core, 16-thread CPU based on AMD's last-gen Zen 2 architecture... the same as what's used in the regular PS5 non-Pro console.

In previous rumors from late last year, we heard that the upgraded "Viola" SoC inside of the PlayStation 5 Pro would boost its CPU up to 4.4GHz, with Moore's Law is Dead not confirming that, but said he wouldn't be surprised if we see that. Previously, we heard that the CPU inside of the PS5 Pro has 64KB of L1 cache per core, 512KB of L2 cache per core, and 8MB of L3 shared cache (4MB per CCX) while MLID says it'll be made on TSMC's 4nm process node.

Sony's more powerful PlayStation 5 Pro console is reportedly enjoying a full die of 60 CUs (compute units), with MLID saying that with "current plans" to disable down to 56 CUs in the final PS5 Pro product. The company will be using 16GB of GDDR6 18Gbps on a 256-bit memory bus providing 576GB/sec of memory bandwidth, but could be bumped up to 20Gbps adds MLID, up from the 14Gbps memory used inside of the regular PS5 non-Pro console.

DOOM can run on virtually anything... we've seen it on fridges, MacBook Touch Bars, and even pregnancy tests... and now DOOM is running on human E. Coli gut bacteria, and we're not kidding. Check it out:

MIT biotechnology PhD student researcher Lauren "Ren" Ramlan concepted a very interesting 32 x 48 resolution, 1-bit display made up using E. coli cells, with each cell effectively acting as an individual pixel by lighting them up using a fluorescent protein.

DOOM isn't really "running" here because you're not getting 30FPS, let alone 60FPS or anything higher, as the cells are extremely limited in their ability. Still, it did successfully run on the walls of cells as a display for DOOM, rendering gameplay using the illuminated E. coli.