Gaming - Page 301

The fact that Bethesda Game Studios has fully embraced the modding community over the years is wonderful, and it's a tradition that will continue with Starfield - a game that, like the studio's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4, will end up being one of the most modded titles out there. Ahead of the game's full launch later this week, you can already download a number of mods over at Nexus Mods.

But the news that development on 'Starfield Script Extender' has already been completed means that we're on the cusp of getting a number of game-changing and potentially amazing mods to the game in the coming months. Like the 'Skyrim Script Extender,' this too "expands scripting capabilities and adds additional functionality," so odds are it will be as essential as that.

The Skyrim Script Extender or SKSE led to the amazing PC-centric SkyUI overhaul that became a must-have mod for the game, and with people already complaining about Starfield's similarly minimal but functional UI - this will allow modders to get to work on overhauling it similarly. However, there's a catch.

A movie insider has confirmed that the developers behind the immensely popular Hogwarts Legacy are already working on a sequel.

The confirmation comes from reputable movie leaker MyTimeToShineHello, who took to the platform formerly called Twitter, now X, to post that sources have informed the account that a Hogwarts Legacy sequel is "in the works". It can be assumed that the source of the leaker is an employee within Warner Bros., especially considering MyTimeToShineHello has leaked things from the studio in the past.

Unfortunately, the movie insider didn't reveal any specific details about the upcoming title, but considering how popular Hogwarts Legacy is/was, it's not surprising to hear about a sequel being worked on. For those that don't know, Hogwarts Legacy is the best-selling game for this year, with $1.3 billion in sales, and since it was so popular, it would make sense that developers behind the project are already working on the next installment in the series.

Bethesda Game Studios RPGs and mods go hand-in-hand, especially when looking at the developer's history in the PC gaming space - Morrowing, Oblivion, Skyrim, and most recently, Fallout 4. Some of the most moddable and modded games of all time, from simple texture updates to visual overhauls, redesigned UI, and even brand-new games.

Starfield will follow suit, thanks to the epic space RPG being built with the next iteration of the Creation Engine. Ahead of the launch of official mod kits and tools, as we saw with Fallout 4, based on the modding community's familiarity with the Creation Engine, we're already starting to see several Starfield mods over on Nexus Mods.

As of writing, the top mods are all about performance, with the number one mod for Starfield at launch being the 'Starfield Upscaler,' which replaces AMD FSR 2 with DLSS or XeSS. It's a straightforward installation that requires FSR 2 to be enabled and then brings up a menu in-game to override AMD's tech with either NVIDIA's or Intel's.

After several leaks showcasing and detailing the entire product, Lenovo has officially announced its PC gaming handheld that will compete against Valve's Steam Deck and the ROG Ally from ASUS. Like the ROG Ally, the Legion Go is a Windows-based handheld powered by AMD Ryzen Z1 Series processors.

Per the official announcement, Lenovo will offer various configurations for the Legion Go, with up to an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme processor, up to 16GB LPDDR5X (7500MHz) RAM, and up to 1TB of internal PCIe Gen4 SSD storage - starting from USD 799. And with that, we assume that the baseline model will sport the lower-end Ryzen Z1 processor with a 256Gb or 512GB internal storage configuration.

The baseline price is undoubtedly higher than the Steam Deck and ROG Ally, and this comes down to Lenovo opting for a robust and premium design that features detachable controllers (ala the Nintendo Switch) with a large 8.8-inch QHD+ (2560 x 1600) IPS display with a refresh rate of 144Hz and peak-brightness of 500-nits. Not to mention the cutting-edge APU, memory, and high-capacity 2-cell 49.2WHr battery.

Yoshi-P officially confirms that Final Fantasy XVI is coming to PC.

It's been a long time since we've heard Square Enix talk about FFXVI's PC port, but now the publisher has broken the silence. Yes, Final Fantasy XVI is indeed coming to PC at some point.

The news was dropped at a recent PAX West 2023 panel where game producer Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida had a quick update: "Finally, while Final Fantasy XVI was released as a PlayStation 5 exclusive, we are aware that many of you have been asking for a PC version," Yoshi-P said on the stream.

Starfield features huge towering mechs lifted straight out of an early version of Armored Core, but you can't actually use them (yet?)

One of the first things you'll notice about Starfield is that it doesn't have vehicles. Players have to run or jetpack everywhere they go--well, boost pack--and there's no options to create land vehicles or flying vehicles that can zoom you through the skies. Starfield doesn't even have alien mounts. It's disappointing and maybe it'll change in the future...but for now that's a reality.

So when you come across gigantic metal mech warriors throughout your space adventures, it can be pretty exciting at first. When I found my first mech, I thought maybe, just maybe, I would be able to enter one like a giant suit of power armor from Fallout. Sadly, that isn't the case. You can't actually get inside of the mechs nor can you pilot them...but they're still really interesting to look at.

Volition, the studio behind the Saints Row franchise, has officially been shut down.

After years of major million-dollar acquisitions, The Embracer Group is finally starting to pare back its reach on the games industry. Games are getting more expensive to make and all major publishers--Take-Two, EA, Activision-Blizzard, Xbox, PlayStation, etc--are looking for ways to save money. This has led to mass layoffs in the thousands of tech workers.

Embracer is not exempt from this trend and the cracks are starting to show in the company's decentralized, entrepreneur-based structure. The parent company has made a multi-million cost-savings plan that requires cancellation of games and studio closures. One of these casualties just happens to be Volition, the studio that has been making Saints Row, Red Faction, and Descent games for the last 30 years.

How to use Starfield's Console Commands

I think this is one of the most important things that I can teach you. Console commands are technically cheating, but they allow gamers to play Bethesda games the way they want on their own terms. Of course, provided you know all the commands and values.

I could provide a huge list of console commands for you to choose from, but I found it more important to teach you how to find those commands and values on your own.

The Play Anywhere version of Starfield offers a unique advantage to players: console commands carry over to the console build of the game.

ADVISORY: Specific console commands like godmode or infinite credits will disable achievements. Others will not. We're not sure which ones, so don't use commands if you want to earn achievements. There's also unknown effects with these commands and it's possible your save could be affected in certain ways by using them. User discretion is advised.

Starfield is an interesting game, not only because of its content but because of how it's distributed. The game comes in two main flavors: the dedicated Steam version, and the native Microsoft Store version. The latter allows gamers to freely swap between consoles and PC. Starfield is a Play Anywhere game so you can buy the title once and play it on both PC and Xbox Series X/S consoles. The Game Pass version is also included here.

Ahead of the launch of Bethesda's most anticipated title in a long time, leaks suggested that Starfield would arrive with zero or almost zero bugs. However, that doesn't seem to be the case, and now it's been confirmed by the company's head of publishing.

A Starfield reviewer who broke embargo by discussing his gameplay experience in a Discord chat made headlines when he said there wasn't a single bug within the first 15 hours of the game, leading many fans of the title to expect a completely flawless, bug-free experience.

This sentiment was further backed up when Matt Booty, the Head of Xbox Game Studios, said that Starfield would be the least buggy title from Bethesda, a studio well-known for releasing grandiose, large-concept, open-world games that are plagued with numerous bugs.

Starfield is now out - well, not the full release, but the early access for those who bought a premium copy - and already Bethesda's space RPG has support for NVIDIA DLSS (and Intel XeSS).

As you're doubtless aware, there's been some controversy about Starfield being FSR only at launch (with AMD partnering with Bethesda here), although in theory there's no reason DLSS shouldn't come to the game eventually with an official release (as AMD itself has clarified).

However, for those who don't want to wait for a helping hand in terms of a non-FSR frame rate boost for the demanding Bethesda game, a modder has introduced DLSS (and XeSS) support right now - just as they promised.

AMD has wheeled out a new graphics driver ahead of the release of Starfield, bringing in performance improvements for Bethesda's imminent space RPG (check out our first impressions here).

AMD's Adrenalin Edition 23.8.2 driver comes with support for Starfield, and Team Red tells us it delivers an up to 16% frame rate boost (at 4K resolution) for those who own an RX 7900 XTX or 7900 XT GPU (yes, both offer that same potential 16% uplift apparently).

That's compared to the previous driver, of course (version 23.8.1), and it's great news for anyone with a 4K monitor and one of these AMD graphics cards.

With the review embargo dropping and countless hours of Starfield takes, impressions, critiques, and overall ratings to scour through - I thought I'd take a different "first post-launch Starfield" approach based on how beautiful and immersive some of the planetary locations in the game can be.

And that is to take you on a tour through the Sol system - the place we're all currently in - home of Earth, Mars, Venus, and Uranus. With all footage captured on GeForce RTX 4090 at the 4K ultrawide resolution of 3840 x 1600, this is a mere glimpse at Starfield - a look at the somewhat barren worlds of our solar system.

Consider this documentary-style eye-candy, spoiler-free outside of giving a glimpse at Earth in the year 2330. The video showcases a brief look at Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Lune (aka the Moon). Check it out after the jump.

The latest Call of Duty operator isn't Skeletor, Spawn, or Evil Dead's Ash Williams (characters rumored to be joining Warzone as new operators) but a new AI-powered voice moderation technology system called ToxMod built by Modulate.

Okay, so it's not an in-game character, but a funky new AI that will offer Activision "global real-time voice chat moderation, at scale," to combat toxic and disruptive behavior beginning with the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III on November 10. As an AI tool, ToxMod will be able to identify and, in real-time, enforce Activision's toxic speech policies covering hate speech, discriminatory language, and harassment.

ToxMod will sit alongside Call of Duty's text-based filtering systems that cover 14 languages and the in-game reporting system that players can use. Ahead of its integration into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, Activision plans to roll out a beta for the new chat moderation technology in North America.

AMD has created 500 limited edition Ryzen 7800X3D CPU and Radeon RX 7900 XTX combos to giveaway, and one of them is up for auction on eBay, with the proceeds going to the Mental Drive Inc. nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting mental health awareness and support.

So, yeah, this is not someone you managed to win one of these super rare packs and decided to flip it for profit. However, as it is a private seller, there's no confirmation or info on what percentage of the purchase price will go to the charity.

The star of the show here is the custom Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which looks stunning in white and other colors with vinyl and a new backplate modeled after the game's main Constellation faction. The Constellation colors are being used as the color scheme for all special Starfield-themed products - and this is up there as one of the best looking.

Bethesda is known for bugs and glitches in its games to the point where the studio's name is a kind of adjective of sorts, but Starfield could break this age-old tradition.

Starfield is the result of 8 years of development, planning, and iteration. Bethesda went so far to significantly overhaul its Creation Engine tech to ensure the game is updated for modern platforms. Gamers will soon known just how well Starfield runs when reviews drop tomorrow and early access goes live on September 1st, but for now all we have is assurances from Bethesda themselves.

In a memo to employees published by Windows Central, Bethesda's Todd Howard shares how proud he is of the staff and that Starfield is the studio's best-performing game when it comes to overall technical results. This was achieved through lots of hard work from Bethesda and Microsoft's own internal Advanced Technology Group (ATG) division at Xbox, who had been helping with Starfield's development since 2022.

Microsoft has no intention of leaving the Xbox Series S behind, especially since the system has sold more than the Series X.

The Xbox Series S has been somewhat controversial since it was first revealed. Priced at $200 less than the premium Xbox Series X, the digital-only console comes with reduced specs to match--the Series S has 40% less RAM than the Series X and its RDNA 2.0 GPU is far weaker in terms of compute units. This effectively makes the Xbox Series S a comparatively inferior system that requires developers to re-tool their games in order to run well on the platform and adhere to Microsoft's parity policy.

Some developers have spoken out on the Series S, one of which was Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian, who had originally announced that BG3 would be delayed on Xbox because of split-screen co-op. The feature was eventually cancelled on Series S, and the game is confirmed to launch in 2023 on Xbox. Larian, however, accepts the limitations and boundaries that the Series S presents. This has led to fresh discussions on whether or not the Series S is holding back gaming and whether or not Microsoft should just drop the Series S and only support the Series X.

Bandai Namco is the latest video games publisher to start pricing its standard PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S games at $69.99.

Thanks to inflation and other economic effects, practically everything on the planet is now more expensive to produce, ship, and buy. The same is true for gaming. Although the video games industry is set to make about $187 billion in 2023, the cost of making games has gone up exponentially. Publishers like Sony Interactive Entertainment, Take-Two Interactive, and Activision-Blizzard were quick to use the new PS5 and Series X/S console generation as a way to introduce a new $69.99 baseline price for games.

Nearly all of gaming's platform-holders and publishers have now priced their games at the newer $69.99 MSRP, breaking the $59.99 model that had been in place for multiple console gens. These days, it's actually an anomaly to find a new PS5 or Xbox Series game that is less than $70, but Japanese publishers like SEGA, Capcom, and Bandai Namco in particular have been hesitant on embracing the new pricing scheme. Until now, that is.

Sony today announced that it will be raising the prices of its 3-tiered PlayStation Plus subscription starting September 6, which is exactly when Starfield releases on Xbox.

In a move that is sure to frustrate PlayStation owners, Sony has revealed its plans to increase the cost of its annual PlayStation Plus subscriptions. Starting next week, each individual PS Plus tier will increase by over 30%.

PlayStation Plus Essential will now cost $79.99 annually, as opposed to its previous $59.99 cost, representing a 33% increase over the previous price. PS Plus Extra will likewise rise by 33% to $134.99 annually, up $35 from its original $99/year price tag. PlayStation Plus Premium is seeing the largest price hike to $159.99 per year, up $40 from the previous $119 per year, representing a 34% price increase.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 Limited Edition PS5 consoles have made their way out to the public despite the launch of the game being a few months away.

Officially, these limited edition PS5s were meant to be released on September 1, but one lucky buyer has seemingly gotten theirs early, as showcased in the above image. While the image could have certainly been more HD, we can still make out some details about the highly anticipated Insomniac Games title, such as the minimum requirement of 98GB of storage space. For comparison, Marvel's Spider-Man on the PS4 required just 45GB of free space, which quickly jumped up to 71GB when the title was remastered for the PS5.

Spider-Man: Miles Morales came in at 54GB, but it seems Spider-Man 2 will blow that figure out of the water with a required 98GB of free space. It should be noted that this 98GB is a minimum, meaning Insomniac Games could easily blow past the 100GB figure between now and the title's release. While 100GB is a large game, it's nothing compared to the likes of other titles, such as Call of Duty: Warzone 2, which is approximately 200GB.