Gaming - Page 280

Sony's beefed-up PlayStation 5 Pro console will reportedly be an "incredibly developer-friendly system" for game developers to create -- or upgrade -- their games on.

In a new video released by Moore's Law is Dead, we're hearing that game developers that have been targeting 30FPS for their PlayStation 5 games will be able to drive their titles up to 40FPS. Meanwhile, games with 40FPS and VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) that are becoming standard options in PlayStation 5 games will be able to run at a stable 60FPS.

Not only that, but games that are currently running at 60FPS on the PS5 will be capable of running up to 120FPS with "zero effort put in" by developers, that is, if the frame rate in those games is uncapped. If it's capped, well, we could expect higher resolutions being outputted (think 1080p to 1440p, or 1440p to 4K, or just less blur all over the place).

You probably forgot, but Bethesda announced it was working on an official 4K update for Fallout 4 in 2022 as part of the franchise's 25th anniversary. Described as a "next-gen" update for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5, in addition to higher quality assets, Bethesda noted that it would support higher frame rates, bug fixes, and even additional content via the Creation Club.

For Bethesda Game Studios, 2023 was the year of Starfield, so we can only assume this Fallout 4 remaster was put on the back burner while the team focused on launching its brand-new space RPG. This brings us to today, where, after a year or so of radio silence and Starfield out in the wild, the official Fallout account on X has confirmed that the Fallout 4 "next-gen update" is on track for a 2024 release.

Even though there's no official word on when we might get a Fallout 5, 2024 is set to be a big year for the franchise as the highly anticipated TV adaptation is set to debut on Prime Video in April. Based on the show's reveal trailer, it captures the look and feel of the post-apocalyptic landscape and world depicted in Fallout 4.

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was first released in 1993 for the Nintendo Game Boy, the first major Zelda game developed for a handheld console and one of the very few entries in the series not to take place in Hyrule. In terms of style, the top-down action-adventure is an extension of the Super Nintendo classic The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and the DX edition of the game presents the adventure in full Game Boy Color mode.

This brings us to the brand-new Link's Awakening DX HD fan remake for PC, which does some pretty amazing things that we'd love to see applied to more retro 2D sprite-driven games. The big thing is that not only does it draw more of the classic pixel art to fill a modern 16:9 widescreen without loading from one screen to another, but you can zoom in and out of the entire Zelda map and still play.

Yeah, it's the sort of feature that fundamentally changes the experience while remaining true to the original. Instead of a sequence of screens, you're presented with a seamless world with an accurate 1:1 pixel recreation. It doesn't stop there, as the Link's Awakening DX HD also supports a smooth 120FPS presentation.

In a bid to sell more units, both Sony and Microsoft have slashed prices of their PlayStation and Xbox consoles for Black Friday. This trend is apparently set to continue as the companies face hardware sales dips.

New reports from Circana analyst Mat Piscatella give valuable insight on the current US video games market. According to Piscatella's data, consumer spending on video games hardware dropped 24% year-over-year for the period from October 29 - November 25.

It's very important to note that this is one day after 2023's Black Friday sales started to kick off. This year's discounts saw significant savings on PlayStation 5 consoles as well as Xbox Series X and Series S systems. Circana's report likely includes Black Friday sales data, albeit not Cyber Monday.

Twitch has updated and condensed its sexual content policies to allow for "artistic nudity," but this doesn't mean streamers can be naked during broadcasts.

While scouting Twitter, I noticed an interesting report: Twitch apparently now allows nudity on its platform. Looking into this further, I whittled away at the truth: Yes, Twitch will allow some kinds of nudity. But you can't just get nude on a stream to thousands of people.

Twitch's updated adult content policy explains the limitations. According to the mandate, streamers can show "artistic depictions of nudity" in fictionalized content like drawings, animations, and sculptures.

Xbox Game Pass can now officially be accessed in virtual reality.

Game Pass is coming to VR, starting with the Meta Quest HMDs. The subscription can now be enjoyed on Quest 2, Quest 3, or Quest Pro headsets, but users won't be able to download full games just yet. Technically, only half of Xbox Game Pass is available for Quest owners.

Today Microsoft and Meta announced that VR users can now stream Xbox games via Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Microsoft has released a dedicated Xbox Cloud Gaming app on the Meta Quest Store that allows Ultimate subscribers to stream a selection of games directly to their VR headsets. Bringing Game Pass to VR was originally mentioned in the FTC v Microsoft trial.

Good things come in threes: Hideo Kojima's games production company has filed for three interesting trademarks since 2019, and the more recent ones give clues on what to expect from his new horror game OD.

Hideo Koijma's games are enigmatic and stylish, but the auteur will often provide surprisingly obvious clues on what he's working on (hindsight is 20-20, after all). Take his new game, OD, for instance; since 2019, we've been writing about Kojima's desire to create a new kind of interactive gaming experience using horror. That project has manifested with OD, an Xbox-funded title that will apparently use the cloud to deliver a uniquely social horror game. Kojima is even enlisting horror mavens like Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us, NOPE) to help out. We've also seen Kojima do livestreams with Peele in the past.

So what's up with OD? Not much has been revealed, but new trademarks give us some hints. It turns out Kojima Productions has filed for 3 separate trademarks that all have 3 words that begin with the letter S in them. The Social Strand System trademark was filed in 2019 for Death Stranding, and refers to the more loose and indirect online co-op featured in the game.

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.