Gaming - Page 4

As part of its weekly DLSS update, which sees DLSS, Frame Generation, and ray-tracing technologies arrive in new releases like FragPunk, the Silent Hill 2 remake, and Starship Troopers: Extermination, NVIDIA also took time to highlight a very cool build from modder czuga.

Inspired by Fortnite's LEGO modes, the build includes over 1,000 LEGO bricks to support all components, including the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Founders Edition graphics card and customer watercooling. With an entire LEGO Fortnite scene that includes characters, biomes, and the iconic Fortnite bus, it's a stunning one-of-a-kind build.

It didn't come together quickly either; it took countless hours to design the complete setup and around 14 days to build, test, and decorate. The fact that it uses LEGO for the case and all physical hardware support is awe-inspiring.

Blizzard's original vision for Diablo 4 would have changed the franchise in significant ways, bringing the dungeon crawler to the realm of third-person gaming.

Jason Schreier's new book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment chronicles some of the most interesting and pivotal moments of the game-maker's history. The book also discusses many of the cancelled projects and games, including Blizzard's own unique take on Minecraft.

One such story touches upon what kind of major departure that Diablo 4 could have been for the series. Blizzard sources tell Schreier that at the tail-end of Diablo 3's popular Reaper of Souls expansion, then-Blizzard president Mike Morhaime had put top leads in charge of pre-planning the next big Diablo game.

Previous reports indicated that Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) could increase its stake in Nintendo's shares, but the wealth fund has actually decreased its amount of shares.

Two days ago, Japanese publication Kyodo News reported that Saudi Arabia could buy up more gaming stock in Nintendo, as per a small snippet of conversation with crown prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Sultan Al-Saud during Tokyo Game Show 2024. As it turns out, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund has now reduced its stake in the Mario maker.

As per new regulatory documents filed in Japan, Saudi Arabia's PIF has shed an entire percentage point of its shares in Nintendo. The PIF now has 7.54% of shares as opposed to the 8.58% it previously had as of June 2024. This equates to roughly 97.6 million shares (worth about $5.3 billion) currently held by the PIF as versus the 111.45 million shares (about $6 billion) that it formerly held. This represents a decrease of approximately 1.69 million shares, or some $700 million in worth.

Halo moving to a multi-platform games engine could mean the franchise jumps over to PlayStation for the first time ever.

Halo is changing in a big way. 343 Industries has renamed the group to Halo Studios, and the franchise is now being developed in Unreal Engine 5. Now that the studio is no longer saddled with the development and upkeep of a proprietary games engine for its new games, Halo Studios can accelerate its production pipeline--and indeed that's what they plan to do.

There are now multiple new Halo games in development, and the leap to Unreal Engine 5 frees Halo Studios from the shackles of the archaic Slipspace engine. According to studio head Pierre Hintze, it's a shift-change for the team: "What we're doing right now is changing our recipe."

Like Goku collecting energy for an epic genki dama, Dragon ball fans have come together to make the latest Budokai Tenkaichi game the best-selling title across multiple storefronts.

Dragon ball: Sparking! Zero is now the top game across the industry's biggest digital stores. Bandai Namco's new Budokai game has become the #1 chart-topper on both the PlayStation Store and on Steam, and the new ki-blasting fighter is sure to supercharge the publisher's earnings to super saiyan levels and beyond.

Bandai also announced that the new Budokai Tenkaichi game has been released onto early access for users who pre-ordered any version of the game. Otherwise, Dragon ball Sparking Zero is due out on October 11.

After months of speculation, Rockstar finally announces Red Dead Redemption is coming to PC on October 29.

Rockstar's iconic outlaw western is coming to PC in time for Halloween, complete with its Undead Nightmare expansion. The PC version will come with all the bells and whistles befit of the platform, including NVIDIA DLSS 3.7 support and Frame Generation, tons of new settings to tweak, and performance up to 4K 144FPS.

Pre-orders will open up later this week, and Red Dead Redemption will be sold on the Rockstar Store launcher, the Epic Games Store, and Steam.

Nintendo's next-generation Switch 2 handheld will reportedly support all of the features baked into Unreal Engine 5, and possibly even Epic Games' just-teased MegaLights technology.

We're finding out some new information from the folks at Digital Foundry, where during their usual weekly podcast the staffers replied to a fan question asking if the Nintendo Switch 2 would support the latest UE5 features, including tech like Lumen, Nanite, and Virtual Shadow Maps. We could even see Nintendo Switch 2-specific versions of these UE5 technologies, allowing them to run with decent performance on the handheld, with some major power tweaks of course.

There is a huge amount of third-party support behind Nintendo and the Switch, so the new Switch 2 would be a huge focus for Epic Games and getting Unreal Engine -- cough, Fortnite -- ready to rock and roll on Switch 2. There's also the handheld side of thigns, with the Digital Foundry folks talking about handheld mode with the Switch 2 and the performance differences between Nintendo's new console and the Valve Steam Deck.

Nintendo is known for throwing the legal book at any entity that is mispresentating any of its IP, and it's shown through recent actions its more than happy to crack down on any company providing the tools to pirate its games.

Nintendo filed a lawsuit in US courts in June 2024 against Ryan Daly, the alleged operator of Modded Hardware, a company that Nintendo claims provides firmware and hardware to create and play pirated Nintendo games. Additionally, Nintendo claims Modded Hardware also provided customers with "copies of pirated Nintendo games." The lawsuit states Daly was offered a chance to walk away from Modded Hardware in March 2024, and both parties agreed that Modded Hardware's business would stop completely.

However, that didn't happen, and in May 2024, Nintendo issued a final warning. The US court filing occurred in the following month. Now, Daly has appeared in court without a lawyer to represent himself against Nintendo's allegations, and according to reports, Daly has denied any wrongdoing. Daly responded to the lawsuit claims by citing a lack of sufficient information to either admit or deny the allegations, fair use, an arbitration clause, failure to state a claim, invalid copyrights, a lack of standing, and more.

Bethesda has just released its big expansion to Starfield called "Shattered Space," and judging by the review scores from both critics and players, the reception hasn't been promising and is certainly an indicator of underwhelming sales figures.

While there aren't any official unit sales out for Shattered Space, we can devise an idea of how the title is performing by looking at a few public metrics. Firstly, when Shattered Space was released on October 1, the concurrent Steam players peaked at 21,792, which is only an increase of approximately 6,000 players from the title's previous concurrent player high back in August. What paints a bleaker picture is Starfield's concurrent players peaked at 330,723 when it launched in September 2023.

Another indicator of Shattered Space's sales performance is Starfield's position on the Most Played Xbox Games list, where it is ranked number twenty-six. Moreover, Starfield is currently the seventh most-played game on Console Game Pass and fifth on PC Game Pass, which puts it just behind the Microsoft Solitaire Collection. Moving back to Steam, Starfield is directly competing with Fallout 4 on Steam, a Bethesda title from nearly nine years ago.

Leo Torres is a creator who uses the power of Unreal Engine 5 to present the various cities and locations in The Elder Scrolls with a "realistic and lore-accurate scale." Their laster creation, Riften, is widely remembered as the home of the Thieves Guild in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, where autumnal colors meet stone buildings, housing, and a waterway that gives the city character.

This isn't a mod or one of those videos that demonstrates what Skyrim might look like running on Unreal Engine 5; we have some incredible gameplay from versions of the game running with thousands of mods. Instead, this is a tech demo or interactive work of art meant to showcase what it might look like and feel like to walk around Riften at scale.

The results are undoubtedly impressive, capturing the tone and feel of exploring the location within Skyrim. Riften was always one of the most remarkable locations in the game due to how built-up and modern it felt compared to towns like Whiterun.