Gaming - Page 367

Red Dead Redemption 2 didn't launch with support for AMD's new FSR 2.0 (FidelityFX Super Resolution) upscaling technology when it hit the PC, but modders quickly added FSR 2.0 support... and now, the developer has added official FSR 2.0 support into the game.

The latest v1.31 update for Red Dead Redemption 2 on the PC adds support for AMD FSR 2.0, with developer Rockstar Games noting in the 1.31 patch notes: "AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.0 has been implemented". Ahhh, also... Rockstar, that would be "FidelityFX, not 'FidelityX' as you've noted here'.

You'll need to download the 433MB update, which will also add Reflex to reduce lag on the gamepad only (there's no help here for the mouse and keyboard input). Red Dead Redemption 2's new 1.31 update also sees Rockstar Games making improvements to Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA). So it's not just AMD FSR 2.0 in the new update, but that's the biggest deal here for sure. There's also plenty more in the patch notes, these three here are just the PC-only tweaks in the RDR2 patch.

Halo Infinite's latest September update sets the stage for the future of the live service game, but many fans aren't happy with the plan.

343i is at a crossroads with Halo Infinite. In a new Halo Infinite update video, studio has laid out a new strategy that will establish a foundation for Infinite with an emphasis on five main priorities including: seasonality, rewards, inviting social gameplay, balanced competitive PVP, and stability. The devs had to sacrifice in order to move forward on these goals, though, and executing on this plan lead to the cancellation of Halo Infinite's promised split-screen co-op.

Fans weren't happy about this. 343i's Sean Baron also raised controversy with comments that Halo is a competitive shooter first and foremost. Many fans objected to this, saying that Halo was a fun party game before anything else, and this comment sparked multiple YouTube responses adequately attributing Halo's early success to split-screen co-op and in-house, local PVP with friends.

Ubisoft will show off four new Assassin's Creed games during its special Ubisoft Forward event on September 10, sources have told Bloomberg's Jason Schreier and TryHard's Tom Henderson.

Ubisoft has ambitious plans for the Assassin's Creed series and is ready to start branching off into mobile while executing on Assassin's Creed Infinity, which will be the franchise's games-as-a-platform ecosystem. The first game will be Assassin's Creed Mirage, a smaller-scale game compared to Valhalla that is set during 8th century Baghdad and stars Basim, one of the titular characters of 2020's mainline game. Mirage is expected to launch in 2023.

The other three games are where Ubisoft starts differentiating its slate. There's two main games and then one mobile game. The first main game is codenamed Red, and will be set in Japan, possibly with samurai-style armors and playable male/female protagonists. Red is being developed by Ubisoft's Quebec team.

Tencent has made a strategic purchase that could pave the way to a buyout of Ubisoft in the future.

Ubisoft has fended off a potential hostile takeover from Tencent by selling shares of the Guillemot family's company instead of Ubisoft stock. Tencent has purchased a 49.9% stake in Guillemot Brothers Limited, a company run by Ubisoft's founding Guillemot family. The Guillemot brothers have the largest individual shares of Ubisoft stock out of all shareholders, so this technically gives the founders a way to sell their shares if they decide to.

"Post transaction, Guillemot Brothers Limited will hold 17,086,199 Ubisoft shares, including 9,086,199 shares held via derivative contracts," reads a press release.

CD Projekt RED today announced that it is officially dropping PS4 and Xbox One consoles in regards to new Cyberpunk 2077 content.

The new Patch 1.6 Edgerunners update will be the last major content drop for PS4 and Xbox One versions of Cyberpunk 2077. CD Projekt RED will no longer provide new content updates or features to these older consoles. That also means Cyberpunk 2077's newly announced expansion Phantom Liberty will not release on PS4 or Xbox One.

"There's going to be some smaller updates primarily focusing on tech support to keep it all running smoothly, but yes all new future features and content are only coming to current-gen consoles as well as PC," Phantom Liberty game director Gabriel Amatangelo said in the recent Night City Wire stream.

Cyberpunk 2077's first major expansion is arriving in 2023 on PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC, and it's called Phantom Liberty.

Cyberpunk 2077's new expansion Phantom Liberty is described as a sci-fi spy thriller where V enlists as an agent of the New United States of America. This kind of espionage action wasn't something I had expected from CP2077, but CD Projekt RED says they're having a lot of fun with the expansion, possibly drawing upon pop culture references to craft a story of intrigue, betrayal, and assassinations.

"We're having a lot of fun with it. It's a new kind of style of a plot that we're having fun with. A new cast of characters expanding on a district in Night City, where it primarily takes place," said game director Gabriel Amatangelo.

CD Projekt RED has confirmed it will reveal "what's next for Cyberpunk 2077" as part of a special Night City Wire stream tomorrow, September 6 at 11AM EST.

Cyberpunk 2077's long-awaited expansions could be formally unveiled--or at least teased in a meaningful capacity--during tomorrow's big Night City stream. The new Cyberpunk anime Edgerunners will be the star of the show, and rightly so since the show premieres on September 13 on Netflix, but CDPR also teases some tidbits on Cyberpunk 2077 as well.

Studio management has previously said the first Cyberpunk 2077 expansion will not release until 2023, which is years after the game's original controversial launch in 2020. No specific details were revealed about the expansion but we do know that CD Projekt spent roughly $19 million on the expansion's development so far.

Microsoft's first-party studios hold special game summits, which are internal mini-conferences were experts come together to share expertise and technology while opening the doors for collaboration on new projects.

Iteration is one of the most exciting things about game development, especially when it comes to first-party studios that are linked together under the same banner. We've seen this kind of collaboration between Sony's first-party studios with Insomniac's machine learning inference object deformation on the PlayStation 5, and the collaborations between Kojima Productions and Guerrilla Games with the Decima Engine, which powered both Horizon and Death Stranding.

The same kind of higher-level collaboration also exists at Microsoft's internal studios, and rightly so given the depth of the DirectX 12 in-house API toolsets and SDKs. Different devs have their own unique ways of doing things and will often share tips with other studios. Microsoft exec Matt Booty says that the company holds game summits where teams will gather and work together to solve problems and iterate on many different things.

Talented modders are recreating the cancelled 2001 Duke Nukem Forever build that could've revitalized the franchise.

Back in 2001, 3D Realms started work on their own version of Duke Nukem Forever. The result was a chaotic mix of old-school FPS sentiments with the crude humor and flashy bombastic thrills the series is known for. 3D Realms didn't have an actual game, though--they had created a prototype demo build using Unreal Engine. The finalized game, released in 2011 from Gearbox, was markedly different.

Naturally fans want the original 2001 game, and while the source code for the old build has leaked, after a while they might just get it. With the Duke Nukem Forever 2001 Restoration Project, a team of modders and tech wizards are meticulously piecing together a playable version of DNF2001 and trying to create something that 3D Realms may have released way back when.

Back when Halo 3 was on the misty horizon, Bungie put out one of the most incredible pre-release teasers ever made. It had a simple tagline: Believe. The UNSC was overrun. Everyone was dying, the Covenant was unstoppable. Even Chief, the indomitable Demon, was being held up like a trophy kill. But Chief wasn't dead--he woke up, ignited a plasma nade, and that was that. We believed. It was pure magic.

It's been a long time since I felt that kind of magic with Halo. Like a lot of things these days, Halo just isn't the same. It's not bad, it's just...different. It's harder to get excited about live services, you know? But there's one silver lining: Halo mods. 343i is just one team, but there's a veritable army of talented modders out there who are creating such impressive things that I believe in Halo games again. These wizards are sparking that old-school feeling that has been asleep for a long time--if you grew up with the original Xbox, you know what I'm talking about. It's the feeling you got when you booted up Halo CE and tried the campaign for the first time, or your first 16-player local LAN party with system link multiplayer.

For the past 2 years, VKMT has held a community showcase to highlight some of the best Halo mods that are either ready to play or currently in development. It's kind of like an E3 for Halo mods. The most recent showcase for 2022 is just amazing. There's some really impressive stuff in here that can add a new dimension of play to the Halo MCC games, including a fully playable recreation of Star Wars Battlefront II built into Halo MCC, Halo Doom Evolved, which merges Doom and Halo together in pixelated glory, and an incredible restored version of Halo 1 multiplayer with cut weapons as well as a bunch of extra surprises. There's even a standalone mech shooter called Wolves that's presumably a nod to the original Spartan I ORION suits.

Grand Theft Auto V, one of the best-selling games of all time, was made with the help of thousands upon thousands of people.

Rockstar Games recently put up a new post thanking the massive army of developers, specialists, and staffers who worked on one of the most popular and best-selling games of all time. With nearly 170 million shipments worldwide across three console generations, GTA V is less of a game and more of a kind of mini franchise in of itself; the game has generated at least $7.68 billion since 2013, and much more when the full scope of GTA Online's microtransactions are included.

That massive success came at a heavy investment of both manpower and funding. The Rockstar Games thank you post highlights just how many people it takes to make something like GTA V. By our count, more than 5,000 people worked on the game. We selected all the names and copied them into Excel to see how many columns there were, and Excel clocked in 6,820. Headers/job titles account for a sizable portion of these columns so keep that in mind.

Kadokawa Group, the Japanese multimedia giant who owns FromSoftware, confirms that Elden Ring will expand with transmedia content.

With 16.6 million copies sold, Elden Ring is an incredible success that took the gaming world by storm in early 2022. The RPG has made a long-lasting impression with its incredible and unique environments, meaningful exploration, hard-as-nails boss fights, and social engagement--it's so big that Bandai Namco has recognized it as an official franchise.

Now according to the Kadokawa Group, who wholly owns Elden Ring's developer FromSoftware, the landmark fantasy franchise will cross over into other media. In a recent Q1 earnings report, Kadokawa briefly mentions that it will "maximize the lifetime value of Elden Ring with a media mix," strongly indicating that the series will get its own cross-over media.

Sony and Tencent have made strategic investments in one of the most lauded Japanese video game developers on the planet.

FromSoftware is one of the most unique studios in gaming. The team, led by Hideaki Miyazaki, is renowned and infamous for the punishing Dark Souls and Bloodborne games--a series that's been so transformational that it has created its own "Soulsborne" genre. FromSoftware just released their most popular game ever with Elden Ring, which has amassed 16.6 million sales, and the team is now gearing up for big new projects like a new Armored Core title.

The studio has larger ambitions, though, and it needs more funding to reach them. That's why FromSoftware owner Kadokawa Group has allowed FromSoft to directly sell its shares in exchange for funding. Sony and Tencent have bought a combined stake of 30% (Sony bought 1,476 shares for $120.47 million equating to 14.09% of total shares, and Tencent bought 1,703 shares for $138.97 million equating to 16.25% of total shares).

The first images of Bloober Team's new Silent Hill 2 remake have leaked out, but they depict a very early pitch build of the game and are reportedly do not reflect the current version that's in development.

Bloober Team, the devs behind The Medium and Layers of Fear, are working on a new remake of Silent Hill 2. This happens to be one of the most closely-guarded and lauded horror games ever made, and fans are up in arms over newly leaked images of Bloober Team's remake. Now insiders like Dusk Golem, who have excellent track records with Capcom titles, have stepped in to assuage fans.

According to Dusk Golem, the leaked images aren't from a finalized version of the Silent Hill 2 remake. Far from it. They're actually small snippets from a proof-of-concept version that was built specifically to convince Konami (and from what it looks like, PlayStation) on the idea of Bloober Team handling a remake. These leaks are from 2018.

One talented modder has added Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello, and Raphael into Insomniac's new Spider-Man PC game, showing us what a new TMNT should look like.

Modder Chase aka Space_Dasher has done what hasn't been accomplished in 6 years: Effectively helped create a new TMNT game using custom skins. It's not a new game exactly...but the totally tubular turtles really do add a new layer of depth to the game.

The famous shell-shockers have been added into Insomniac's new Spider-Man game as a downloadable PC mod, effectively transforming Peter Parker's adventure into a highly acrobatic ninja romp befit of the old Eastman and Laird comics. It might sound weird to see Leonardo sling on webs and tie up enemies using spider-silk, but it's actually surprisingly fitting. It's kind of like the 90s crossover that we've always wanted--maybe in some alternate dimension the turtles got soaked in TGRI mutagen and bitten by a radioactive spider...

If Microsoft's Matt Booty can be believed, the new Perfect Dark game should mix spy thriller action with suave and sophisticated confidence.

We haven't seen much of the new Perfect Dark reboot from Microsoft's secretive games studio The Initiative. The game was formally announced in 2020 with a 2-minute trailer consisting mostly of flycam footage and not any actual gameplay sequences. But according to Microsoft, the game will take the best of the worlds of James Bond and The Bourne Identity, indicating a "super spy fantasy" that features a skilled Joanna Dark with an arsenal of slick and dangerous gadgets.

"We're rebooting the game very carefully. Some of those things don't age well, right? What's super cool about Perfect Dark and Joanna Dark is the super agent fantasy, the spy fantasy, the Borne Identity and James Bond kind of thing, that's always a cool meme that people want to lean into, but we have to make sure we bring it forward in the right way. So we're moving very carefully," Booty said at PAX West.

Ex-Arkane Studios head Raphael Colantonio never wanted to use the Prey series name for the 2017 shooter.

Prey 2017 was one of the best games I've played in recent memory. It was my favorite game of the year and with its mind-bending storyline, innovative mechanics, and incredible environments, it remains one of the most intriguing games of the PS4 console gen. But the game was never meant to be called Prey.

In a recent interview with the Game Maker's Notebook, Colantonio expressed frustration with Bethesda and gave a brief look at what it was like to work on the game behind the scenes. Bethesda gave Arkane a lot of freedoms to create something they wanted to make, but that freedom didn't extend to the game's name. Bethesda made Arkane call the game Prey despite having nothing to do with the fan-favorite shooter from 2006 with its weird alien sphincter doors and crazy portals.

Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass already has tremendous value with content. Now it's getting even more value through savings and discounts.

There's two ways to add value to a subscription service: Content and savings. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate has become exponentially more valuable over time with the sheer volume of content that it offers (over 440 games to date, with more on the way), but now Microsoft is adding more icing on the cake with its new shared family subscription options.

Microsoft is rolling out its new Xbox Game Pass Friends and Family subscription tier that offers up to five people access to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for just $22 a month. For reference, a normal Game Pass Ultimate subscription is $14.99 for one user, so upgrading seems like a no-brainer, especially if you have just one extra friend who's willing to chip in (let alone four). This new tier will tremendously benefit consumers and help onboard more subscribers, boost possible monetization and game sales, and overall inflate Microsoft's internally-tracked KPIs.

Call of Duty alum Glen Schofield confirms that his new studio, Striking Distance Studios, is currently working long hours and crunching in order to finish The Callisto Protocol.

In a few years' time, crunch has gone from normal standard operating procedure to a vilified, anti-worker practice. Companies like Rockstar Games and Naughty Dog have instituted major reforms that help reduce the overworking conditions for their employees. That isn't the same for indie developers, though, especially those who are on a tight schedule with a tight budget.

In a now-deleted Tweet, Glen Schofield recently confirmed that his dev team is crunching hard to get The Callisto Protocol ready for its December 2022 launch.

Paramount is bringing back its $8 billion dollar franchise, A new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game is currently in development

TMNT is back in the limelight. Paramount and Nickelodeon have released two big TMNT games in 2022--the excellent Shredder's Revenge, a beat-em-up throwback recreation of the immortalized 1990s arcade game, and the new Konami Cowabunga Collection, a mega-pack of old-school favorites featuring 13 TMNT games. Now a new big AAA game is in the works, too.

In a recent interview featured in the September issue of Toy World, Paramount's head of consumer products and experiences Lucy Dixon delivered the totally tubular announcement: