Gaming - Page 295

Sony has officially announced the new PlayStation 5 "slim" duo, complete with a modular redesign that allows consumers to fluidly change their consoles at any time.

As previous reports had indicated earlier this year, Sony will indeed release a new PS5 Slim lineup for Holiday 2023. Sony isn't calling the new designs "slim," though. These new versions are meant to be successors that eventually replace the existing PlayStation 5 disc and digital consoles that are currently on the market.

The new PS5s will still be sold separately as the PlayStation 5 ($499) and the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition ($449). As before, one model comes with a disc drive and the other doesn't. The major difference here is that either model can morph back and forth between each form factor. PS5 Digital Edition owners can buy a disc drive later down the line for $80 and install it at any time--the PS5 digital edition is no longer permanently digital. The converse is true--any disc-based PS5 can also transform into a disc-less unit.

Some players of Assassin's Creed Mirage have been experiencing a bug that has left them unable to play the game on the Xbox.

Wccftech spotted that Microsoft took to X (formerly Twitter) to let affected Xbox gamers know that the firm is aware of the problem, where an error code (0x87e10bc6) appears, and is investigating.

That error is popping up when Assassin's Creed Mirage is first launched, and the game crashes with it rather than reaching the menu.

Elden Ring's expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, now has a rumored release date, so you can tentatively pencil in February 5, 2024, in your diary (assuming you've bought one for next year already).

As Wccftech spotted, the news comes from YouTuber Ziostorm, who shared the rumor about Shadow of the Erdtree on X (formerly Twitter) as you can see above.

The first thing to note here is that the speculation comes from "unverified sources" which gives us cause for concern. Furthermore, we're told that those sources haven't come up with anything concrete.

Unity CEO John Riccitiello is retiring from the company, an official press release has announced.

Unity today announced a significant leadership shake up. John Riccitiello will retire as acting chief executive officer, president, chairman, and board member of Unity. Riccitiello's retirement is immediate and Unity's board has appointed James Whitehurst as interim CEO of the engine-maker.

"It's been a privilege to lead Unity for nearly a decade and serve our employees, customers, developers and partners, all of whom have been instrumental to the Company's growth. I look forward to supporting Unity through this transition and following the Company's future success," Riccitiello said in the press release.

Activision Blizzard games won't start showing up on Xbox Game Pass until 2024, the publisher today announced.

The $68.7 billion Microsoft-Activision merger is expected to close by Friday, October 13, but gamers shouldn't expect to see a full Activision library up on Xbox Game Pass for several more months. Activision has clarified that it has no strategy to add Diablo IV or Modern Warfare III directly into Xbox Game Pass in 2023.

Instead, Activision-Blizzard and Microsoft will work to bring a catalog of games to Xbox Game Pass in 2024.

Remedy Entertainment's head of PR has some choice words about Microsoft's lower-end Xbox Series S, saying that some of the system's lower-end specs are a "big problem" for developers.

Remedy is known for pushing hardware to pretty extensive heights. From the original Max Payne games and Quantum Break on the Xbox One, to Control's impressive utilization of early raytracing on PC (via RTX cards) and Xbox Series X/PlayStation 5, the studio is known for pushing the envelope with its proprietary Northlight engine. This level of experience adds significant weight to Remedy's overall analysis of video games console hardware.

So when a studio like Remedy says that the Xbox Series S' weaker specs are an issue, then it means two things: one, we should listen and heed what is being said, and two, this isn't an isolated incident and other devs are likely experiencing frustrations with the Series S. We've seen first-party studios like Bethesda also saying that Starfield's 30FPS hard cap is there to ensure "consistency," which infers the FPS cap could have been lowered to ensure the Series X and Series S are uniform experiences. After all, the Series S has 37% less RAM and has a GPU with 60% less compute units than the Series X.

The video games industry has laid off more than 6,000 employees across all disciplines, startlingly disappointing figures from Video Games Layoffs.com indicate.

Most of the popular video game-related aggregator websites will track things like review scores, how many players are actively playing a specific game, or the prices of the games themselves. One site chronicles the more depressing state of the world's leading entertainment space: How many people have been laid off and let go, often from companies that generate billions of dollars of revenue a year.

According to the Video Games Layoffs website, an estimated 6,100 workers in the video games industry have been laid off throughout 2023 so far. The data includes games-related layoffs across platform-holders and game developers big and small, ranging from the Xbox games division and SEGA to the engine-makers at Unity and Epic as well as smaller-scale devs like Telltale Games.

Bethesda's Todd Howard is surprised by how far people have taken the custom shipbuilding in Starfield, an area of the game that allows players to flex their creativity to create something new or something based on pop culture. When the game launched last month, we highlighted some of our favorite creations, including ships from Star Wars, Futurama, and some fun stuff like Thomas the Tank Engine.

Thanks to mods that remove the physical size limitation of ships on PC, we've seen the shipbuilding go one step further - and potentially reach the absolute end-game thanks to this new faithful recreation of a giant Star Destroyer from Star Wars in the game. Created by Reddit user DotElectronic7174, they note that due to the size and scope of the ship, the in-game shipbuilder struggles to rise above 15 FPS.

However, performance is fine when the massive Star Destroyer is rendered in-game orbiting above a planet.

Assassin's Creed: Mirage is now out in the wild, and the folks over at Digital Dreams have cranked up Ubisoft's latest title at the glorious 8K resolution, running at 60FPS.

Digital Dreams ran Assassin's Creed: Mirage at 8K (so 7680 x 4320) at 60FPS+ on NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card, with the ReShade preset enabled. The rest of the hardware is beefy, too: AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X processor is installed into an AORUS X670 AX motherboard with Kingston DDR5-6000 memory to boot.

Chromatic Abberation was disabled for the test, with "Beyond All Limits" ray tracing added... and still, it doesn't make Assassin's Creed: Mirage look out-of-this-world, but you can't knock that it doesn't look fantastic cranking along at 8K 60FPS+ on that level of hardware.

Sony is hard at work on its next-generation PlayStation 6 console, which should be released sometime in 2027 or so... but if you can believe it, rewinding back the clock to June 2018... I remember driving back home from Melbourne to Adelaide and had a call from an industry insider who exclusively revealed to me that Sony was working directly with AMD on the Navi GPU architecture for its next-gen PlayStation 5 console. We have been all over the console APU releases since, and now we're looking at the PlayStation 6.

The folks over at Yanko Design noticed a new job listing at Sony, that saw a position open for someone who would help the company "contributing to identifying and developing the technology portfolio of future PlayStation platforms". Once that happened, PlayStation 6 concept renders were created... and man, they look absolutely wild.

I don't think Sony would ever go for this radical design for the next-gen PlayStation 6 console, but I do love it... the way that the controller slots into the side of the PS6 would be such a fantastic idea. It is functional, and it looks awesome at the same time.

Right now, Baldur's Gate 3 is only available to buy as a digital version, on PC and PS5, but it would appear that a physical copy for the PS5 may not be out of the question.

At least based on a tweet that popped up on X recently from the Director of Publishing at Larian, Michael Douse, which you can see above.

Douse bumped a recent tweet from a site that covers the PS5 which asked: "Would you buy a physical version of Baldur's Gate?"

The ASUS ROG Ally is an absolute champion of a gaming handheld, but now ASUS is getting down to the nitty gritty when it comes to 720p and 1080p gaming benchmarks. The company has run a test between the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme version of the ROG Ally, and the Z1 non-Extreme in both 720p and 1080p with some rather interesting results.

First off, the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU is part of the Phoenix family of products, with the Z1 Extreme featuring 8 x Zen4-based CPU cores while the Z1 non-Extreme features 2 x Zen4 and 6 x Zen4c cores. It might not look like much, but there's a big difference when it comes to gaming performance, as you can see in the benchmarks above (1080p results) and below (720p results).

ASUS is using the Z1 Extreme in its higher-end ROG Ally gaming handheld, which features an RDNA 3-based GPU with 12 Compute Units, versus the 4 x Compute units in the Z1 non-Extreme... hence the big performance gap between them. Still, even with the big cull in Compute Units, the Z1 non-Extreme version of the ROG Ally still has some rather decent performance.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the best-looking games you can play on the PC, and it's an even more gorgeous game with some mods applied. But, this new video from Digital Dreams running Red Dead Redemption 2 with over 100 mods -- including the new Vestigia mod with the ReShade raytracing preset -- running at 8K looks absolutely beautiful. Check it out:

You can see Red Dead Redemption 2 running at 8K 60FPS looks truly mind-blowing, with the environment never looking better with the various mods applied. The new Vestigia mod for RDR2 overhauls a bunch of things in the game, including HDR compatibility, 5 new weather times, and oh-so-much more.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is running on NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card, the only one that's capable of driving the native 7680 x 4320 resolution at 60 frames per second. 8K 60FPS isn't easy, but hot damn does it look -- and run smoothly -- on Red Dead Redemption 2. There's nothing like it, with 8K gaming a huge step up from 4K gaming, something I'm sure that Sony's next-generation PlayStation 6 console will struggle to do. The current PlayStation 5 console can't do native 4K 60FPS+ without upscaling, so it would be awesome to see 8K 60FPS+ even if it's with some FSR-style upscaling on the PlayStation 6.

Last month, Sony raised the prices of its three-tier PlayStation Plus subscription. Now we know why. Well...sort of.

Sony has announced a new value-oriented offering to help justify its controversial PlayStation Plus price hike. In September, Sony Interactive Entertainment drastically increased the cost of PS Plus Essential, Extra, and Premium by 33% across the board. Consumers were confused because there wasn't any extra content or bonuses to complement the price jump.

Now Sony has announced some extras that help balance out the hike. All PlayStation Plus Premium (known as Deluxe in other countries) subscribers will now get access to up to 100 ad-free movies from the new Sony Pictures Core storefront. Sony Pictures Core will replace the existing Bravia Core service and deliver access to over 2,000 movies to rent or buy directly from PlayStation consoles.

Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a live action adaptation with some of TV's most seasoned producers attached to the project.

CD Projekt today announced a ton of info about its latest sci-fi franchise, confirming sales figures, budgets and costs, and new transmedia initiatives like a live action Cyberpunk 2077 adaptation is currently in the works.

The games-maker has teamed up with Anonymous Content, the producer of hits like True Detective, Mr. Robot, and Revenant starring Leonardo DiCaprio, for the new project. Management says the live action adaptation may not follow the games and instead "tell a brand-new story set in the world of Cyberpunk 2077."

Cyberpunk 2077's one and only expansion, Phantom Liberty, enjoys impressive success after just one week on the market.

CD Projekt has some exciting news to share with investors: Phantom Liberty has sold around 3 million copies in 1 week on the market. The news comes after the triumphant announcement that Cyberpunk 2077 also broke 25 million lifetime sales. The last leg of purchases in the 13-month period from September 2022 - October 2023 was actually driven by interest from the Phantom Liberty expansion.

In a live stream to investors, CD Projekt Chief Financial Officer Piotr Nielubowicz offers more color around the sales figures and what they mean for the game's long-term potential:

After decades of action games, Hideki Kamiya is leaving PlatinumGames.

Hideki Kamiya is a unique figure in the video games industry. Kamiya has gained a following and notoriety for his--for lack of a better term--"salty" nature, but now the developer shares a heartfelt message.

It turns out that the famed Bayonetta series director is leaving PlatinumGames after 23 years with the Japanese games studio. Kamiya says that he will continue making games, but has not revealed exactly where he will go after Platinum. It's possible that NetEase or another publisher has snagged Kamiya to help fulfill plans for worldwide expansion.

UPDATE: CD Projekt has clarified that the 450 million PLN budget was for all of Cyberpunk 2077's development, and not just the expansion and the next-gen versions of the game.

CD Projekt Group management gives eye-opening updates on Cyberpunk 2077's post-release development budgets, confirms high price tag for both Phantom Liberty and new-gen versions of the game.

Games are extremely expensive to develop. They're so expensive that most AAA publishers are clawing back as much savings as possible through drastic employee reductions and outright cancellations. Now CD Projekt gives us an idea of how much money they've spent on Cyberpunk 2077's continued development.

Cyberpunk 2077 has sold 25 million copies since launching in 2020, CD Projekt RED today confirmed.

It looks like CD Projekt's redemption arc with Cyberpunk is finally complete. The release of Phantom Liberty and punctuates years of controversy, tumult, and an impressive turnaround with the sci-fi RPG. The expansion comes alongside the latest major update for Cyberpunk 2077--the ambitious Update 2.01--and essentially sunsets the game as CD Projekt moves on to other games (a new Cyberpunk sequel and numerous Witcher games).

In today's investor day presentation, CD Projekt Group management highlighted their operational performance. This includes updates on game sales. The company says that Cyberpunk 2077 has now sold 25 million+ copies worldwide across all consoles and PC. Another huge update: CD Projekt's total game sales have now broken 100 million, meaning that the Witcher trilogy has sold at least 75 million copies (the Witcher update isn't new--CD Projekt divulged this info a bit ago).

NVIDIA has announced a raft of games that'll be brought into the GeForce Now streaming fold during October.

There'll be 60 new games debuting on the streaming platform throughout this month, with 29 coming this week.

Those 29 are spearheaded by Assassin's Creed Mirage, the big-name release that arrived today.