Month: September 2024

Life By You is a new game in development at Paradox Interactive that aims to out-Sims the Sims: It’s an open-world game that uses “real language conversations,” enables players to take direct control of in-game avatars, and will come with a suite of customization tools that will “allow for unparalleled levels of storytelling.” Development is also being headed up by Rod Humble, who prior to becoming general manager at developer Paradox Tectonic was the head of EA’s Sims label for several years.

It’s an ambitious project, and as associate editor Lauren Morton wrote earlier this month, it will provide some long-overdue competition for The Sims, which has effectively owned the “dollhouse-core simulation genre” for more than 20 years. Unfortunately, she (and the rest of us) are going t…

Speaking with Game File (users will encounter a paywall) at the Game Developers Choice Awards, Larian director of publishing Michael Douse gave his take on the current state of the industry, including some sharp criticism on the wave after wave of mass layoffs we’ve been seeing.

“They are an avoidable fuck-up,” Douse said. “That’s all they really are. That’s why you see one after the other. Because companies are going: ‘Well, finally. Now we can, too. We’ve wanted to do it for ages. Everyone else is. So why don’t we?’ That’s really kind of sick.”

Though Douse allowed that big publishers are complicated operations that can’t react quickly to new demands or market changes, he argued that better planning and leadership could have prevented the worst of what we’re seeing, and ex…

Disney Dreamlight Valley has shared its roadmap for the first half of 2023 including some new characters, several star path season passes—oh, and multiplayer too. Gameloft has not given any further explanation about what kind of co-op or online multiplayer DDV will have, but it sure is right there on the plan for the year so keep your ears peeled.

Whether or not DDV would have any multiplayer was a bit of a personal goose chase for me last year. Only one mention of it seemed to exist in the wild (thanks IGN) and when I asked Gameloft about it I basically got Jedi mind tricks for an answer—these are not the features you’re looking for. But apparently patience, if not perseverance, wins the day. We sure will be getting multiplayer, in some form, at…

Neopets is kicking off its new era by returning to an old one: The company’s newly-independent leadership has announced the creation of a trading card game called Neopets Battledome, harkening back to the original Neopets Trading Card Game from the early 2000s. I never played that one myself, but I bet there are a lot of 20- and 30-somethings out there who experience a kind of full-body time travel whenever someone reminds them of it.

Unlike the original Neopets TCG, which was made by Wizards of the Coast, the new card game is being made by Upper Deck. That’s the same company taking rival game-maker Ravensburger to court over upcoming CCG Disney Lorcana, if the name sounds familiar.

Neopets Battledome is set to hit in 2024, just in time for Neopets’ 25th anniversary. It’ll b…

A sprawling Darkest Dungeon mod will release this month, with Black Reliquary set to release on March 24, 2023. The mod is a total conversion mod with the thumbs-up of the original Darkest Dungeon developers at Red Hook, and the list of changes is… really big. It’s foremost a gameplay overhaul and entirely new campaign with a new setting, new characters, new narration, new music, new enemies and facts, trinkets, and new player heroes.

The story will follow a band of heroes as they delve into the Black Reliquary, a monolithic structure in a desolate desert known only as The Valley. Here’s how the developers describe it: “Abandon what you think you know. The Valley does not know mercy or sympathy, and the trials ahead of you will be unlike anything you have faced before! Find your…

NASA has demonstrated a successful transmission of a high-definition video from a probe over 30 million kilometres away in space. Instead of using the traditional method of radio waves, the system onboard asteroid-probe Psyche utilises a powerful near-infrared laser beam. Rather than showing us the unnerving splendour of the empty void, engineers chose a 15-second clip of Taters: An orange cat, chasing a red laser dot about a couch.

No, I haven’t made this up. Our office team spotted the news on CNN and having gone through all of NASA’s pages on the craft Psyche and its mission details, I can confirm that it’s all 100% true: Taters is now a space legend.

Deep space probes routinely send data back to Earth, providing information on the craft’s status and results from any spec…

In 2021, developer Felipe “HarvesteR” Falanghe, the creator of Kerbal Space Program, launched a new game on Steam called Balsa Model Flight Simulator. His follow-up to Kerbal reflected much of the same spirit as the space sim that eventually became a PC phenomenon: it was open-ended, focused around building and flying your own vehicles, and based on a childhood passion. As soon as he released the game, Falanghe realized two things.

One: Expectations for early access games have changed a whole lot in 10 years.

Two: There are a whole lot of people who don’t know what balsa wood is, because fragile, dirt cheap model planes aren’t exactly the hottest toy around these days.

“That made me feel appropriately old,” he says. “Now I wonder if I were releasing KSP again, now, if …

It would be fair to say that PCIe Gen 5.0 SSDs have had a difficult start in life. While Gen 4 drives have become something of a standard in many high-end systems, Gen 5 drives have failed to take off in similar fashion, primarily because for most users the previous generation SSDs bring great real world performance for a much more reasonable price. Beyond the high pricing and limited usefulness for this sort of speed as things currently stand, there’s still another rather large elephant in the room: Heat. 

However, Phison has announced several new products it’ll show off at its CES 2024 booth (via Tom’s Hardware), and one controller in particular seems designed to address those pesky thermals.

The snappily titled PS5031-E31T is an M.2 PCIe Gen 5 controller with a maxim…

Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, will lay off 10,000 more employees and eliminate 5,000 currently-unfilled positions as it struggles to cope with a “new economic reality” that includes higher interest rates, geopolitical instability, and increased regulation.

The cuts come as part of what Zuckerberg called Meta’s “Year of Efficiency,” which over the next couple of months will see “restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates.” Employees of Meta’s recruiting team will be told whether they still have jobs tomorrow, while cuts to tech groups will occur in April, followed by business group layoffs in May.

“This will be tough and there’s no way around that. It will mean…

Last night in Japan’s popular Akihabara shopping district, two stores opened especially late for the RTX 4060 Ti graphics card release. But rather than being inundated with customers all climbing over each other to grab Nvidia’s latest 40-series offering, the stores were met with just one humble customer. 

Not one customer per store, one altogether.

Across the whole of Taito City, just one person physically came into Dospara Akihabara Main Store to make their purchase in the evening. Japanese news outlet Hermitage Akihabara posted a photo on its Twitter account about the singular purchase made, and just look how nonchalantly the picture shows this person waiting for their RTX 4060 Ti to be packed up, hands in pockets (via Videocardz).

It’s a stark contrast to the …

Please say hello to my new favorite pal, who I’ve named Cake Boss Kitsun. This rare elemental fox has the dubious honor of being the most specialized pal, a total accident of great genetics and bad luck from my very first specially bred Palworld egg. Even though he’s tragically specialized, I did find a way easier breeding combo for this rare pal than the advice I’ve seen circulated so far.

After about a week playing, I finally tried my hand at Palworld breeding. The process is a bit time consuming, so I tried to stack the genetic deck as best as I could for my very first egg. After rifling through my Palbox for likely candidates, I decided to breed my lucky Gumoss with my alpha Sweepa, hoping to combine the work-boosting buff all Lucky Pals have with my Sweepa’s 50% work…

Larian CEO Swen Vincke is obsessed with Ultima 7. You can find its DNA—the many weird systems, the possibilities for emergent gameplay, and the beautifully stackable crates—across Larian’s entire catalogue, and especially in Baldur’s Gate 3. Vincke says he’s “been chasing [it] ever since” it came out back in the ’90s, and yet he hasn’t been back and played the game in just as long.

In a chat with PC Gamer at this year’s GDC, Vincke said he’s loath to return to classics like Ultima 7 “because I’ve played old games before that I thought I was still going to love… I don’t want to do it again, because I’m pretty sure it will have not aged very well.

“I don’t want to destroy that feeling, my memory of it is very fond,” added Vincke, before dispensing with the n…

I’d wager that nearly every enthusiast gamer has run 3DMark at some point. For years it’s been the go-to benchmark for comparing GPUs whether on PCs, laptops, tablets or smartphones. It can be run on Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, and Android.  

But no benchmark lasts forever, even if we do like to see bigger scores. Eventually, older 3DMark benchmarks become CPU-limited, making them irrelevant for their original purpose, which is to measure graphics performance.

UL Solutions, the company behind the ever-popular 3DMark benchmarking software, has released an update called Steel Nomad. It’s been designed to supersede the now aging Time Spy benchmark. It incorporates the latest graphical enhancements and it’s roughly three times heavier for your PC than Time Spy. Even though …

You might recall a couple of weeks ago that MultiVersus fans meticulously had picked apart a new gameplay video for its upcoming re-release, and came to two major conclusions: The game looked an awful lot slower, and the character models an awful lot bigger.

While the jury’s still out on the first deduction, the second one has recently been confirmed by the developer itself. Player First Games took to Twitter to share a comparison between the old and new character sizes, as well as a little explanation behind the change.

“You all noticed right away, characters seem to be bigger,” the tweet read. “Numerous players had difficulty tracking characters both in play and while watching. We wanted to improve overall clarity of battle while keeping the same fundamentals.”

Takin…

The mysterious boat league has been a deep cut bit of lore in Path of Exile’s community for something like ten years now. “Redacted” forum posts, bits of fishing lore on items removed from the game, and hinty posts from the legendary former community manager Bex (we miss you!) have resulted in a playerbase frothing at the mouth for it to finally happen. With PoE’s latest league, the Settlers of Kalguur, we’ve finally got it—and it’s a doozy.

The 3.25 patch for Path of Exile released last week, and it’s already being hailed as one of the best ever. A news post from the Grinding Gear Games team on the Sunday of launch weekend said they had a new record peak of 350,000 players, content creators have been glowing, and anecdotally I’ve never seen my friends so excited for a leagu…

Madden NFL 25 debuted on Steam on August 16, and it doesn’t seem to be going over very well. Common complaints include poor performance, inadequate controller support, and frequent crashes. There is one bright spot amidst all the upset, though: It doesn’t seem to be faring worse than any other Madden NFL game on Steam.

The Steam version of Madden NFL 25 currently holds a “mixed” user rating, with just 57% of the user reviews coming in positive. Even among the positive reviews, a certain lack of enthusiasm is detectable. 

“It’s football,” one Steam user wrote. “It scratches the itch, especially since we were robbed of CFB/NCAA [College Football 25, which isn’t available on PC]. Going from [Madden NFL] ’23 to ’25 myself I don’t have many complaints, the new features are p…

Nvidia has released its latest earnings info showing revenues down by 46% in the most recent quarter compared with the same period a year ago. However, with the computing industry on the cusp of an AI revolution, Nvidia is bullish about the future, something the market seems to agree with. The company’s share price is up by over a third since the beginning of the year.

Overall, Nvidia’s revenues for the quarter were down by a lesser 21% for a total of $6.95 billion. That’s because Nvidia’s data center revenue for the period is actually up 11% to $3.61 billion. Gaming graphics revenues for the quarter were $1.83 billion for reference.

So, in the space of a year Nvidia’s gaming graphics has gone from equal to roughly half that of its data center revenues. Yikes.

Notable …

Steam has removed a large clutch of games of various genres which all seem to have one thing in common: they were low effort shovelware. That might seem a slightly mean designation, but we’ve all seen the type of thing that this ban wave targeted. Extremely basic asset-flipped titles with popular words in the name, such as Zombie Defense TD or Play Football, out there just to try and make a few bucks from the unwary.

Ever since Valve opened up Steam this has and will continue to be a problem, the inevitable downside of what is inarguably an otherwise good policy. Steam’s biggest issue these days, for both developers and players, is discoverability, and the sheer mass of shovelware on there is a big part of that. While this ban wave appears to have removed 90 games total (pe…

The Borderlands 4 teaser at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live was many things: a confirmation for a rumored sequel, a reveal unfortunately forced to follow in the immediate wake of the franchise’s box-office fumble, and according to Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, a devious brain-tickler.

After the teaser aired, Pitchford tweeted that it harbored “several secrets,” some of which he said he hadn’t seen fans discover yet. That’s a noteworthy clarification for two reasons: one, because fans—as they are wont to do—immediately began tearing the teaser apart in frame-by-frame analysis. Two, because Pitchford started replying to those analyses almost as soon as they started. (Randy likes to tweet.)

So, what might those secrets be? To begin, let’s run through th…

Bethesda’s games are complicated beasts, filled with all sorts of cheese wheels and sweetrolls and duct tape for you to pick up and do physics crimes with. It’s not a surprise, then, that the games have their fair share of bugs that evade the notice of Bethesda’s official patches. That’s why we have community patches—Morrowind’s Patch for Purists, Oblivion’s UOP, Skyrim’s USSEP—and now Starfield’s got its own one, too.

The Starfield Community Patch hit Nexus Mods yesterday, despite the fact the game hasn’t put out full modding tools yet, and “aims to make the game better for everyone by offering up fixes in a free and collaborative manner”. It tries to fix things relating to “Misplaced objects, script errors, inconsistencies in item properties, faulty …

The upcoming Tekken 8 recently held a closed network test (CNT) that had a PC version, which of course meant that the game pretty quickly got cracked, datamined, and played beyond when developer Bandai Namco wanted it being played. The publisher has subsequently issued a statement acknowledging some players accessed the game beyond the CNT, warning that unauthorised downloading or distribution is illegal, and threatening bans for accounts found to have accessed the CNT after it ended.

The director and presiding spirit of the Tekken series is Katsuhiro Harada who, outside of the official statement, decided to take matters into his own hands. Like Clouseau with sunglasses the developer stalked Twitch looking for streams that were broadcasting gameplay from the CNT after the p…

Ahh, Bethesda physics, you never let me down. Starfield‘s no exception—and its physics engine is genuinely impressive, able to handle thousands of potatoes stuffed into a room (with some understandable framerate tanks and whining from your rig). PC Gamer’s Lauren Morton even had some fun herself, shoving all sorts into that same locker. 

We’ve seen Rube Goldberg machines and milk rain in New Atlantis, but most of these experiments are due to things just… falling down. Gravity’s beautiful, but it’s predictable. You put milk cartons in the sky and they’ll plummet, certain as cheese wheels and taxes. Earlier this week though, player Joshohoho saw an opportunity to create Starfield’s largest industrial-grade salad tosser.

Read more

We’ve been waiting for word on when Shattered Space, the first Starfield expansion, will arrive, and now we have it—or at least a somewhat narrower release window. During an interview with Kinda Funny Games today, Todd Howard revealed that the big add-on is expected to be out this fall.

Howard mentioned the detail in a conversation about a different Starfield update that’s coming sooner. He said that Bethesda wants to serve players who love ship building, and that there’s “some great stuff” coming in that department in an update that he expects will be announced sometime this week.

When asked whether that was connected to the Shattered Space expansion, Howard replied, “This is a separate update. Shattered Space is in the fall.”

Even though it’s far from precise, …