Gaming - Page 282

Ninja Theory has released what I'm now considering the gold standard of video game trailers for the developer's upcoming Senua's Saga: Hellblade II.

The developers behind the award-winning Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice have released a new trailer for the sequel at The Game Awards 2023. The new trailer showcases intense gameplay and cinematic sequences that display an incredible level of motion capture technology, sound design, combat, the game's setting, and much more.

Ninja Theory explains in the YouTube video description that Hellblade 2 will be set in "Viking Iceland," and Senua will journey throughout, saving those who have fallen victim to tyranny while attempting to overcome the darkness within and without. Furthermore, the trailer showcases the impressive capabilities of the Xbox Series X, as it is detailed at the beginning of the trailer - the in-game shots were captured on Microsoft's flagship console.

Final Fantasy XVI is coming to the PC next year, and we just got some more details on the port, bringing some good news regarding bundling the DLC, and some not so great news as to the potential minimum hardware requirements.

The info was spilled in an interview conducted by Famitsu (a Japanese magazine) with producer of the game Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida.

In the interview, Yoshi-P suggested that the PC release would come complete with both expansions, and as that second DLC for Final Fantasy XVI is due in the spring of 2024, we can perhaps hope that the port will arrive on PC then, or shortly thereafter (fingers crossed - though from previous hints, it may well take longer).

Hello Games announced its next project, and it's not No Man's Sky 2.

Light No Fire is the next project from Hello Games. It's set in a vast online-driven multiplayer world that's scaled to be as big as planet Earth, complete with survival and crafting elements.

This time around, the studio is trading sci-fi spaceships and vehicles for flying dragons and mounts. Lasers have been replaced with bows and arrows, and the game has this feeling of grand myth and magic fantasy with Valheim-esque mechanics.

Dishonored and Deathloop developer Arkane Lyon is making a new game based on Marvel's undead vampire hunter, Blade.

It's official: A new Blade game is in development, and Arkane is working on the project. The game is a singleplayer, action-adventure game with a third-person view that touches on violent, mature themes. It seems Marvel is distancing itself as far as it can away from the failure of Square Enix's Avengers live game.

According Blade game director Dinga Bakaba, the Blade game is based on the "wildest take on a superhero we love," but he didn't expand very much on that point.

SEGA makes a surprise announcement at The Game Awards 2023, and it could tie into the publisher's ambitious new Super Game business model.

SEGA is cooking up something special. The company announced not one, not two, but five games at TGA'23. The news is especially exciting for old-school fans who grew up with SEGA's outrageous games--the publisher is reaching far back into its legacy catalog.

The publisher confirmed that new games in five classic franchises are currently in development, including Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Shinobi, Golden Axe, and Streets of Rage. This aligns with previous reports of a Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio game becoming part of SEGA's Super Game initiative, a new concept that emphasizes online multiplayer, digital engagement, and long-term earnings (think live service games).

Rockstar released the highly anticipated first trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 earlier this week, where it is currently sitting with a record-breaking 124 million views. The hype for this game is insane, and even though we have to wait until 2025 to play it (it won't be launching on PC), the in-game visuals seen in the trailer look next-level.

With the setting being modern-day Vice City, the GTA world's version of Florida, Derek has already posted a cool piece showcasing how several moments in the GTA 6 trailer are based on real-life Florida news stories. Be sure to check that out.

And now we can add Florida Joker or Miami Joker to the list, a real-world mugshot that went viral in 2017 showcasing a purple-haired man with several face tattoos. However, this time, the person behind the parody has responded. The Florida Joker is a real person, Lawrence Sullivan, and like everyone else, he's seen the Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer.

As part of the latest GeForce NOW Thursday update, which covers new games arriving on NVIDIA's cloud gaming service that offers up to GeForce RTX 4080 power with DLSS 3 and Frame Generation, we've got word of an impressive milestone. With the addition of the beautiful Ori and the Will of the Wisps, 100 PC Gamed Pass titles are now playable on the service.

And when you factor in that GeForce NOW subscriptions now come bundled with PC Game Pass access (details here), the cloud gaming service continues to grow from strength to strength. Alongside Ori, there are 17 new games joining GeForce NOW this week - including The Day Before from Fntastic and Ubisoft's Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

If you're unaware of The Day Before, the project began as an impressive open-world action game in the style of The Division that blew people away with its debut trailer a few years ago. Since then, the game has been continuously delayed, and with it now playable in Early Acces, early impressions via Steam are that it's terrible.

Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive are likely to delay the launch of Grand Theft Auto IV to much later in the year of its expected release, according to analysts at Bank of America.

The Bank of America dropped its ratings of Grand Theft Auto IV to Neutral from Buy, sparking a market downturn for Take-Two Interactive, the publisher of the highly anticipated game, as it fell 1.5% on Thursday. Notably, current earnings estimates placed the release of GTA 6 in March 2025, per analysts Omar Dessouky and Arthur Chu, but following the release of the insanely popular trailer, Bank of America now believes it "is more likely" the release won't take place until "the end of 2025".

But why is it likely GTA 6 will get delayed? The analysts believe that while the trailer was extremely popular, it didn't contain enough elements that "convinced us the game was well into alpha testing." Another concern was the lack of a PC version launch date, as there was no indication that the PC version would be launching in 2025 alongside the console version.

Payday creator Ulf Andersson reveals Den of Wolves, a new co-op mind-heist shooter with strong sci-fi elements.

10 Chambers, the dev team behind the spine-tingling GTFO co-op thriller, today announced its new heist game at The Game Awards 2023. The new project is called Den Of Wolves, and it goes from Payday's Heat to the more corpo-ruled Blade Runner without missing a beat.

The new shooter places strong emphasis on teamwork and best usage of advanced tech while tapping into a distinct dystopian futurism where AI and multi-billion dollar companies run amok. The result is a kind of no man's land city where crime runs rampant and players take on the role of mercenaries who pledge allegiance to the highest bidder.

10 Chambers, the studio run by Payday creator Ulf Andersson, just announced a new sci-fi heist game at The Game Awards 2023. We attended a special event in the Unity building in San Francisco to learn more about the FPS thriller.

The devs at 10 Chambers are mostly known for chaotic shooters. The studio made their debut splash in the FPS genre with the horrifying GTFO, which pits players in teams of four up against fearsome monstrosities in a brutal battle for survival, but before that, studio head Ulf Andersson was pioneering the heist genre with the Payday series.

The next game is a bit different and takes the studio back to its roots. It's a high-tech FPS called Den of Wolves, and it's centered around futuristic corpo-espionage and high-stakes combat.

10 Chambers has announced Duality, the final update to its cult hit GTFO.

It's official: After four years of support and 12 free content updates, GTFO's co-op survival story is coming to an end. The brutal FPS unleashed hellish carnage on the market back in 2019, and now 10 Chambers has revealed the very last chapter to GTFO's nail-biting roadmap.

Rundown 8.0: Duality is now live as a free update, and it will punctuate GTFO's narrative storyline as 10 Chambers gears up for its new sci-fi heist game, Den of Wolves. The horrifying live game won't be shuttered any time soon, and the studio plans to support GTFO with bug fixes and tweaks moving forward. That being said, Duality will be the last content update for the game.

Ubisoft has partnered with AMD to release Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and with that, the game takes full advantage of Ryzen and Radeon technologies, including FSR 3 and Frame Generation - alongside DLSS for GeForce RTX owners.

The game is currently bundled with AMD Ryzen processors and Radeon graphics cards, with AMD and Ubisoft creating a custom Radeon RX 7900 XTX that looks fantastic in Avatar blue.

It doesn't stop there as AMD has partnered with Maingear to create a custom Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora-themed gaming PC rocking an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor with the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX AVATAR: Frontiers of Pandora Limited Edition Graphics Card. And it's giving it away as part of a global Sweepstakes, so be sure to enter here for your chance to win this one-of-a-kind gaming PC.

Hideo Kojima has formally announced his new Xbox game at The Game Awards 2023.

Hideo Kojima made quite an appearance Keighley's TGA23 showcase. The auteur showed up with Nine Inch Nails' "Came Back Haunted" blaring, walking through a creepy otherworldly doorway that's right out of his new Xbox game.

Kojima's upcoming title is called OD, and he's working alongside horror maven Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us, NOPE) to add a new level of immersivity to the game. OD will star Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer and a very terrified Udo Kier, and is described as a movie-game hybrid.

Ubisoft's Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is one of the last major game releases for PC, and it comes from the team behind The Division franchise - Massive Entertainment. With gameplay set in the world of Pandora, as featured in the visually stunning films from acclaimed director James Cameron, it uses the studio's Snowdrop engine to deliver some incredible visuals.

With detailed environments, characters, impressive animation, and real-time ray tracing, you've got some stunning visuals to look forward to when firing it up on a high-end Radeon RX 7000 Series or GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU.

Like all Ubisoft games, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora features an in-game PC Benchmark tool - but it is the most detailed, in-depth, and future-proof Ubisoft benchmark tool to date. A new PC Features Deep Dive article from Ubisoft even includes a hidden 'Unobtanium' graphics setting that exceeds the 'Ultra' preset. It is "extremely difficult to run on currently available hardware."

Ark: Survival Ascended players will know that the servers have been having issues galore, but recognition from Studio Wildcard boss Jeremy Stieglitz saying they're complete "ass" would make Ark players feel a little bit better.

During a recent Extra Life charity stream, Studio Wildcard co-founder Jeremy Stieglitz said: "The servers are ass. They run like ass. And their stability is ass. We need to improve it. It's going to be improved". He said the developer would fix the Ark: Survival Ascended servers, but it would take time.

The original Ark: Survival Evolved was a huge hit when it launched years ago, with Ark: Survival Ascended being a remake of the original game using Epic Games' delicious Unreal Engine 5 technology. It launched in October on the PC through Early Access and then in November for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles. The game sold over 600,000+ copies in its first two weeks on the market, which is a damn good feat.

Analyst's general consensus is that Grand Theft Auto 6 could sell tens of millions of copies in its first year of availability and generate nearly $3 billion in revenue.

GTA 6 is gearing up to be the most anticipated game in the last 10 years. Rockstar officially announced the game with an explosive trailer that has broken 122 million views in just 2 days. Gamers want to play now, but they'll have to wait: GTA 6 won't be here until 2025.

Analysts in the interactive entertainment field are busily updating their models for with GTA 6's projected performance and trying to fit their predictions into Take-Two's telegraphed earnings forecast. According to video games industry expert Joost van Dreunen, who cites various reports, analysts expect GTA 6 to sell about 38 million copies in its first 12 months on the market.

As per the $3.7 billion acquisition contract, Sony can take over Bungie and dissolve its internal board of directors if certain earnings targets aren't met.

New investigative reports from IGN's Rebekah Valentine shed more light on the current situation at Bungie. Sources tell IGN that the studio's independence hangs in the balance of ROI targets mandated by Sony. The $3.6 billion acquisition has squeezed Sony Interactive Entertainment's margins--the company has delivered low operating profit margins for the last three consecutive quarters as the games division pays for Bungie's buyout cost.

Bungie remained an independent subsidiary after the acquisition, complete with its game publishing branch. Two Sony executives--Head of Worldwide Studios Hermen Hulst and Sony SVP Eric Lempel--would get seats at Bungie's board of directors, sitting alongside three other Bungie execs. Part of the acquisition contract also included terms that allowed Sony to dissolve Bungie's board and take full control over Bungie's operations should the developer not hit specific earnings requirements.

Overwatch 2 players are struggling on the PlayStation 5 as numerous gamers are reporting framerate drops down to single digits.

The eighth Overwatch 2 season went live on Tuesday, and since then, gamers have been taking to Blizzard's own forums, along with Reddit, to voice their concerns with the performance of the game, specifically on the PlayStation 5. Checking the Blizzard forums, you can see dozens, potentially hundreds of players reporting framerate drops following the update. Some players reported their framerate dropped below 20 fps, rendering the game "unplayable".

Engadget reports they encountered the same issue as it took a few seconds for their character to turn around, which is undoubtedly a critical component in a competitive shooter such as Overwatch 2. Engadget described the framerate drop as "almost like playing GoldenEye 007 at 12 fps all over again." Blizzard seems to be aware of the issue as they released an update on Tuesday that states, "We are investigating reports of performance issues for some platforms."

The first-look trailer for Rockstar Games' sequel to Grand Theft Auto V has been released, and it's already shattered world records, according to Guinness World Records.

Guinness World Records has taken to its website to post an update about the newly released trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV, explaining that the extremely popular trailer, which at the time of writing has gained more than 105 million views, has already become the most liked videogame trailer on YouTube with 8.9 million likes over a 24 hour period.

Additionally, as I reported earlier, the new GTA 6 trailer also took the crown from MrBeast for the most viewed YouTube video in 24 hours (non-music). The new trailer breezed past Mr. Beast's "Every Country On Earth Fights For $250,000," which reached 59.4 million views in 24 hours as Rockstar's sequel landed on a whopping 90,421,491 views in just 24 hours.

Just when we thought CD Project Red was ready to close the book on Cyberpunk 2077, going out on a high note thanks to years of updates and fixes culminating in the release of the excellent Phantom Liberty expansion - comes Update 2.1, and another dose of RTX improvements.

Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition is out this week, and it packs in the base game and the Phantom Expansion. One of the coolest new features to arrive with Update 2.1 is that you can finally take a ride on the Night City metro system, including new, unique subway scenes and interactions. Players can now take the in-game radio system with them on the go, thanks to a new Ripperdoc implant.

Throw in new vehicles and revamped boss fights, and it's a meaty update. And for those playing the game on a high-end GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU, you'll be pleased to know that the game's Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode has exited preview with the full release, improving visual fidelity and performance for its incredible full path tracing mode.