Month: October 2024

In the 1980s, British pop star Shakin’ Stevens had a string of hits with what was essentially an Elvis Presley impersonation, leading the Chart Music podcast to nickname any poor man’s incarnation of another pop star the Shakin’ version. Tori Amos, for instance, is Shakin’ Kate Bush.

I told you that so I can tell you this: The First Descendant is Shakin’ Destiny. 

And yet, according to the official Twitter account, The First Descendant has been played by more than 10 million people in its first week. “We’ve reached 10 million Descendants in just 7 days!” they wrote. “Thank you all for your tremendous support and love. It means everything to us. We will do our best to bring you great experiences. Can’t wait to continue this journey together!”

Meanwhile, on Steam, t…

Feedback for early access survival games typically comes from two sources: players who want things to be harder, and players who want things to be easier. Give people a big open world and some will always want a supremely challenging experience, while others will want to do some farming, build a base, and have a chill experience with their friends.

Enshrouded just took a crack at making both camps happy at once: the survival game’s new “Back to the Shroud” update is packed with difficulty options. In fact, it’s overflowing with them. There are now over 30 difficulty settings (31!) you can tweak to shape the game into the precise experience you’ve been looking for.

You can start with some expected sliders that let you change options like how much damage enemies and bosses do …

Corsair is ditching 80 Plus ratings for its power supplies. Instead, it’ll opt exclusively for an efficiency standard from Cybenetics. Don’t worry, it’s a pretty easy switch to get your head around.

80 Plus Gold becomes Cybenetics Gold. 80 Plus Platinum becomes Cybenetics Platinum. You’re seeing a pattern emerge here, right? The Cybenetics range uses mostly the same system of metals to signpost efficiency as 80 Plus.

However, these efficiency ratings from Cybenetics, in Corsair’s own words, are a “more comprehensive assessment of PSU performance than its predecessor.”

“Cybenetics testing, however, is far more thorough and detailed than 80 Plus, leading to more accurate results.”

Some new ratings from Cybenetics won’t be entirely familiar to some, though. These ar…

In a fantastic turn of events, Remedy has lowered the PC system requirements for Alan Wake 2. This means you can now enjoy the beauty of Bright Falls and all the horrors that lie within without needing a beefy PC. 

The performance optimisation patch for Alan Wake 2 lowers the minimum GPU requirement to a GeForce GTX 1070 or Radeon RX 5600 XT. Previously, you needed to have at least an RTX 2060 GPU to even think about playing the horrifying yet beautiful game. More modern GPUs also received some improvements. According to Digital Foundry, the recent patch saw the RTX 4070 enjoy a 14% frame rate jump.

However, an Intel i5-7600K or the AMD equivalent is still a minimum requirement, along with a minimum of 16GB RAM and 90GB SSD storage. So double-check …

Cult of the Lamb developer Massive Monster said last week that the upcoming Sins of the Flesh update, slated to go live in early 2024, will not be “the sex update.” But now it looks like maybe it will be.

Hopeful speculation about the insertion of sex into Cult of the Lamb was driven by the title of the update, naturally, and also a piece of official art that depicted a gathering of cute forest cultists clothed in nothing but a strategically placed leaf. That almost immediately sparked a conversation in the Steam forums, and by “conversation” I mean people mostly demanding that it actually happen.

Massive Monster eventually stepped in to bring reason to the proceedings. “Don’t worry, the ‘sex update’ is more of a meme in the community,” one developer said in response to one …

Was it a good idea for The Phantom Menace to include a lengthy subplot about our heroes gambling on a child to win a space Grand Prix? It was not. Did the visual spectacle of podracing blow our tiny ’90s brains regardless? Of course it did. 

What a concept: basically just tethering a little cockpit to two jet engines and sending it off careening at 600mph around a ludicrously dangerous course. And as proved by 1999’s Star Wars Episode I: Racer, it’s perfect fodder for a videogame. 

Enter: Deathgrip, an upcoming sci-fi racer shown off at the PC Gaming Show, that embraces that spirit of ridiculous speed and even more ridiculous mortality rates. 

As soon as I hop into my first race and see the vehicle designs and windy canyon race course, the Star Was inspi…

Epic has announced a foolproof plan to tempt devs and publishers to put their back catalogues onto the Epic Games Store: throw money at them. Announced yesterday, the Now On Epic program will offer game makers (and licence holders) 100% of the revenue generated by older games they put on Epic for the first six months of their time on the store, as opposed to the 88%/12% split that selling games via Epic usually entails.

It’s the corollary and the inverse of the Epic First Run program that launched yesterday. That program offers devs six months of 100% revenue from their games so long as they commit to an equal period of Epic Games Store (semi-)exclusivity. Once those six months are up, the revenue split reverts to Epic’s usual 88%/12% division.

The Now On Epic program, by co…

In the first of a new series of “campfire chats” about ongoing support for Diablo 4, a group of senior Blizzard developers outlined changes coming to the action RPG’s endgame—for the few who have reached it already, that is.

“First off, the significant majority of our players haven’t finished the game yet,” explained Diablo 4 game director Joe Shely. “But many of the people who are watching this stream, and our dedicated players, play through content much more quickly and have been experiencing this situation with the dungeons.”

The “situation with the dungeons” is that Diablo 4’s normal side dungeons currently make for more attractive endgame grinding spots than the Nightmare dungeons specifically intended to serve as, well, endgame grinding spots. Blizz want…

During IGN Fan Fest, Lies of P, the Bloodborne-esque soulslike reimagining of The Adventures of Pinocchio being made by Round8, got a new trailer and a release window: August, 2023.

That puts Lies of P up against two RPGs. Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3 is scheduled to leave early access in the same month, and Sea of Stars, a retro Nintendo-style prequel to The Messenger, is due in August as well.

This latest trailer shows the ruined, plague-ridden city of Krat, where ropy beasts stalk past fallen automatons and puppets. As one of the slimy monsters combines itself with a mechanical figure, reassembling to form something that will probably be a boss we have to fight, a scarred man (who is called Simon Manus according to the Lies of P account on Twitter) siphons blue energy …

A new trailer from the PC Gaming Show highlights some key bits of new gameplay from Windblown, the next game from Dead Cells developer Motion Twin. Notably, Motion Twin wants it to be not just a good single player roguelite, but a cooperative one for up to 3 people.

First highlighted is Windblown’s ultra-high-speed dashes courtesy of a convenient back-mounted thruster carried by all three playable protagonists. They’re dang fast, blasting through multiple screens of the isometric-view action in seconds and arcing players over enemy attacks. You’ll also be able to switch weapons mid-run, and swapping to a new weapon after the end of a full combat will let you pull off a stylish “ultra attack.” 

There’s also a bit of multiplayer footage, during which Motion Twin’s …

Counter-Strike 2’s latest patch makes a bunch of changes to the competitive shooter, and one in particular has been on player wishlists for a long time. As Valve puts it: “Lefties rejoice!” Players can now set a default preference for which side their character holds their weapon, and switch between sides on-the-fly during rounds (by pressing H), all the better to peep corners with.

The buy menu’s also got a few new tricks. The top right of the menu now displays the minimum amount of money you’ll have in the next round, and at the bottom features a new “dropped weapons” panel. This is a brilliant addition, because part of the economy game in Counter-Strike is passing weapons around the team and sometimes buying for your teammates: this panel doesn’t just show weapons that’v…

If you’ve been tempted to get into D&D—perhaps after enjoying Baldur’s Gate 3?—but been intimidated by the price, now might be the time to jump in. With big sales on both the official D&D store and D&D Beyond, core books and sets are looking a lot more affordable, and it runs until 17 September.

Dubbed the “Back to School” sale (sounds like a lot more dragon-slaying is going on in classrooms these days than there was in my day?), it offers its biggest savings on digital books. On D&D Beyond—a digital platform for playing D&D that you can read more about in our guide to online role-playing—you can pick up the big three core books (the Dungeon Master’s Guide, the Player’s Handbook, and the Monster Manual) for 40% off. There’s also some goo…

Valve boss Gabe Newell is headed to court. A court order filed on November 16 (via Gamesindustry.biz) says Newell is required to testify in person in the ongoing antitrust lawsuit between Wolfire Games and Valve so the plaintiffs in the case can “adequately assess” his credibility.

Wolfire filed the antitrust suit in April 2021, claiming that Valve suppresses competition in the PC gaming market through the dominance of Steam, while using it to extract “an extraordinarily high cut from nearly every sale that passes through its store.” Valve takes 30% of all sales made on Steam up to $10 million, after which the percentage drops to 25% on sales up to $50 million, and 20% for all sales beyond that.

The suit was dismissed without prejudice in November 2021, meaning Wolfire had 3…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m bullish on Dragon Age: The Veilguard and I’m not ashamed to defend its honor. Yes, BioWare’s had a streak of lean years. Yes, there have been numerous high-profile departures from the studio. Yes, Larian and CD Projekt have kind of eaten BioWare’s lunch in the meantime. And yes, there was just something slightly off about its first trailers. Despite all that, the game underneath always seemed solid to me. But god damn, EA and BioWare could have avoided a lot of doubt if they’d just led with something more like today’s release date trailer for The Veillguard’s official reveal in June.

The unanimous take from DA-likers on the PCG team is that this just felt more Dragon Age than anything we’ve seen of The Veilguard to date. The …

Things keep going from bad to worse for the Borderlands movie, and now it has been dealt perhaps the most cruel insult of all. Infamous film director and full-time troll Uwe Boll has come out all guns blazing at the film’s reception, positively jubilant at how badly it’s been received.

Boll posted an image on social media he’s nicked from IGN, which says the film only made $8.8 million on its opening weekend, against a budget of $115 million. “Haha,” writes Boll. “My movies were rated R and made more money than this. Now you wish I directed.”

Let’s put the last part aside for a moment: have Boll’s movies really made more than $8.8 million? They have if you add a bunch of them together. Twitter user StopSkeletons replied to Boll with some of the stats: Boll’s bi…

Yesterday on the Diablo 4 subreddit, a user by the name of MrFrodoBaggins posted the sum total of his findings from a three-day stint through Diablo 4’s cellar levels, which are small, bitesize dungeons you can find scattered throughout Sanctuary. 

“Hello everyone, I decided to diversify the levelling of the second barbarian a little and thought, why don’t I go through the basements 10 times each and see what happens.”

Let’s do some napkin maths really quick: assuming each basement took them two minutes to complete, that’s roughly 42 hours of solid basement delving. I think if I had to endure that, I’d emerge looking like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, but MrFrodoBaggins did come back from his journey with some interesting statistics.

Over the course of his advent…

Dragon’s Dogma 2, like its predecessor, handles parties in a cool and novel way—through its “pawns” system. Basically, there are soulless people-shaped adventurers you can summon from beyond the rift, often created by other players. You get a main pawn that you get to customise, while your remaining two party slots are filled out by rentals.

Getting your pawn rented gives you rift crystals (RC), which can be spent on in-game items or to hire pawns above your current level. As a bonus, players can send your moonlighting mate back with a gift or two. Or just a rotten hunk of meat, if they’re feeling vindictive.

As discovered by players on the game’s subreddit (thanks, GamesRadar), however, your Pawn might be getting pity-rented by Capcom itself.

“You can t…

Early sales figures for AMD’s new Radeon RX 7800 XT indicate that it’s a hit with gamers. Numbers from German retailer Mindfactory make the 7800 XT the second most successful day one seller this year with around 400 units.

Only Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti has edged it, with an estimate 400 to 450 units sold on day one. However, Mindfactory managed to shift just 40 examples of the 7700 XT on day one. That’s one tenth the volume. Yikes.

These figures tally with other obvious indications of demand for the new GPUs. On Newegg, all variants of the 7800 XT sold out on day one. Happily, restocking has been taking place and as we write these words two days after launch, there are three 7800 XT variants available on Newegg, one of which is offered at the 7800 XT’s $499 MSRP.

By contra…

Nothing stands still in F1, and Frontier’s impressive pace of change in licensed sports management sim F1 Manager 2023 is a testament to that. Building on last year’s fine debut release, the updated 2023 title introduces several key innovations, including an all-new scenario mode. 

Entirely separate from the main career, scenario mode is a chance to relive key moments from the unfolding season, take on specific strategy conundrums that crop up during the actual races, and find out whether the strategy you shouted at Sky Sports F1 repeatedly really would have done better than what Ferrari went with. 

A new trailer played at the PC Gaming Show reveals that scenario mode in action, giving the player a chance to right some wrongs that they watched unfold th…

After two attempts to mollify fan outrage over a new $250 version of Escape From Tarkov with an exclusive PvE mode, developer Battlestate has finally relented, promising PvE access to players who previously bought the $150 Edge of Darkness edition of the game that promised access to “all future DLC.”

In a statement on the Tarkov subreddit early this morning, Battlestate COO Nikita Buyanov said he was “very sorry that fans and the game community in general are experiencing these feelings,” and that this negative response would factor into his future decision making. In terms of the company’s response, Buyanov offered the following concessions and assurances:

• $150 Edge of Darkness purchasers would get access to the PvE mode with no further payment or time limit during ear…
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All hail the conquering hero. Iconic Elden Ring boss-fight artist and our gamer of the year for 2022 Let Me Solo Her has completed what must, surely, be his greatest challenge of all time. He’s finished the modded run of the game he began last month in which every single enemy—from the lowliest rat to the Elden Beast—was replaced with Malenia, the game’s toughest boss.

Fighting Malenia is nothing new to LMSH. The legendary player made his name in the Elden Ring community by helping other players overcome her, manifesting like some kind of jar-clad angel of death to lay waste to the boss thousands of times. But that was just one Malenia. The Malenia. You’d imagine even he would struggle with a roiling sea of angry Maleniae.

Apparently not! Over the course…

A recent court deposition in the case between 22-year-old Ben Brody and the owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, has been made publicly available after a transcript was obtained by the Huffington Post.

First, some important context. The lawsuit, filed by Brody, relates to a reply to a since-deleted tweet June 27 of last year. Musk accused a brawl that broke out (between the far-right groups the Proud Boys and a local neo-Nazi organisation) during Pride Night Fest in Oregon City, June 24, as being a “probable false flag situation”.

Musk theorised that two members in the footage looked like “a college student (who wants to join the government” and “maybe an Antifa member”. This led to Brody being falsely accused of being a federal agent plant in the Rose City Nationalists, the local n…

The dream of any sci-fi fan is a functioning holodeck. Just step into a humble room and be transported into another world, time period (probably in 1930’s Chicago, if you’re one particularly popular sci-fi TV show), get up to hijinks, and come crashing back into reality when it all goes dreadfully wrong. Well, sci-fi fans, you’re in luck because Disney just showed off a floor that looks incredible for limitless traversal in a small space.

In a video homage to Disney Research Fellow and Imagineer Lanny Smoot, who is set to join the prestigious ranks of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the inventor showed off the incredible floor. It’s called HoloTile, and it’s one of the sleekest VR flooring solutions I’ve seen.

“It will automatically do whatever it needs to have me stay …

Last Moon is a retro 1990s RPG reminiscent of the early Legend of Zelda games with maybe a little bit of Wonder Boy in Monster Land thrown in, developed by the independent French team at Sköll Studio. Its wacky setting is a world that exists on top of a giant called If, which has become covered in corrupted creatures after the moon was somehow destroyed by human greed. This situation calls for a plucky Lunar Knight to restore order, and guess what? That’s you, my guy.

After waking up inside a gem held by an overgrown vine—look, I told you it was wacky—you set out on a quest that’s definitely going to involve some block-pushing puzzles and returning to previously locked-off areas to gain access to them once you’ve gained the ability to, say, remove a wall of thorns…

If you type Waffle into Google you will no longer find a delicious square breakfast treat covered with syrup and powdered sugar as the number one result. Instead (at least in the US and UK) you will find Waffle, one of the many daily word puzzle games that were inspired by the sudden smash-hit success of Wordle.

That’s pretty impressive—waffles have been around since the 14th century and Waffle only popped up in February of 2022. 

Granted, if you want to eat a waffle you probably just go and eat a waffle, you don’t look it up on Google it first. But Waffle (the game) is still pretty darn popular. According to Waffle’s creator, James Robinson, the game now has roughly 450,000 daily players, and that success hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Speaking…

The big Elden Ring patch that dropped today ahead of the Shadow of the Erdtree launch does a lot of good things—you can finally change the map key!—but it’s causing some headaches for Steam Deck users.

“A Steam Deck related issue has been identified and a hotfix is being worked on,” FromSoft said. “Leaving your Steam Deck inactive for more than five minutes may stop the game from accepting inputs.”

Elden Ring is Steam Deck Verified, meaning it’s been tested and confirmed to be fully functional on Valve’s handheld device. It’s pretty great on it, too: There were some initial technical hiccups, but updates took care of that, leading us to include it in our list of the best Steam Deck games as “one of those games that really hits the ‘I can’t believe this runs on th…

Way back in the day, one rich dude in a Rolls-Royce pulled up to another rich dude in a Rolls-Royce and asked, “Pardon me, would you have any Grey Poupon?” It was an ironic expression of performative wealth that quickly evolved into a sort of pop culture touchstone, referenced and parodied many times since. There’s even a spot on Wikipedia dedicated to it.

Things are a little different these days. Wealthy white guys with dijon mustard and Phantoms are out, and wealthy hip-hop artists with Steam Decks and big SUVs—specifically Drake and Lil Yachty—are in.

“Want it? Yeah, you want it?” Drake asks, holding the “portable gaming console” out the window as the two vehicles slowly converge. When Lil Yachty replies in the affirmative, Drake says, “So then get it,” before…

Eidos Montreal, developer of the Adam Jensen-centric Deus Ex reboots as well as 2021’s Guardians of the Galaxy, announced today that it has laid off 97 employees “from development teams, administration, and support services.” According to a Bloomberg report, the layoffs coincide with the cancellation of an unannounced Deus Ex game the studio was working on. 

Eidos didn’t confirm the existence or cancellation of an unannounced Deus Ex project in its announcement, but Bloomberg describes the game as having been in development for two years, likely starting just before or immediately after the studio’s acquisition by the Embracer Group in 2022.

According to the anonymous sources who spoke to Bloomberg, the game was ready to transition out of pre-production into full develo…

The great X spiral continued today as Sony revealed on its support site that integration with the social media platform formerly known as Twitter will be disabled on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 consoles next week.

“As of November 13, 2023, integration with X (formerly known as Twitter) will no longer function on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 consoles,” Sony said (via The Verge). “This includes the ability to view any content published on X on PS5/PS4, and the ability to post and view content, trophies, and other gameplay-related activities on X directly from PS5/PS4 (or link an X account to do so).”

Sony’s decision to drop X integration comes several months after Microsoft opted to disable uploads to the platform from Xbox consoles and the Windows Game Bar. Blizzard re…

Elon Musk is a controversial figure in the online community, or really, any community. Whether you think he’s a super genius the likes of which the world has never seen, or simply a grifter that ruins perfectly functional social media websites, you’ll find strong opinions about the owner of X/Twitter on both sides.

Someone who has been voicing their opinion on the Musk-master, however, is ex-Twitter Vice President for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Bruce Daisely. Writing in The Guardian in regards to Musk’s references to civil war during the recent UK riots, Daisley offers a simple solution to prevent Musk’s pot-stirring antics: arrest him.

For those not internationally aware, Britain has recently been host to a number of far right protests—ostensibly claimed…

I’m always here for some hack’n’slash action—and that’s exactly what Necrofugitive promises to offer. Developed by Black Garden Studios, the game centres around a runaway monster hounded by mediaeval knights after a brutal witch hunt. It’s just dropped another gameplay trailer as part of Realms Deep.

The basic premise is this: you’re The Prisoner, you have gory shapeshifting powers, and the whole kingdom—plus a few bounty hunters—wants you super dead. The trailer shown above promises a hack ‘n’ slash time through the Kingdom of Avencia, though it’s not all combos and evisceration.

As per the game’s website, Necrofugitive features a reactive AI system with enemies keen on actually hunting you down, rather than just being cannon fodder for your big boney claw…

We finally got our first word on Final Fantasy 16’s promised PC port since its initial announcement in September. Speaking with Famitsu (spotted via Genki_JPN on Twitter), FF16 developers Hiroshi Takai, Takeo Kujiraoka, and Naoki Yoshida (affectionately called Yoshi-P by fans) briefly touched on the PC version in a long interview about the game.

“Details will be announced in due course,” Yoshida replied to a question about recommended PC specs for the game. “However, I would like you to prepare an SSD… In FF16, a game where loading speed is critical, an HDD would be difficult to use.

“Of course, we will do our best to optimize as much as possible, but we cannot overcome the hardware barrier alone, so please consider that an SSD is a must.”

That makes plenty of s…

Habbo, formerly known as Habbo Hotel, went all-in on the Web3 nonsense in 2021 with the announcement of the Habbo NFT project in 2021. Its first offerings were Habbo Avatars, which quickly sold out 10,000 randomly generated NFT avatars, before moving on to NFT furniture and other cosmetics.

You can see why publisher Sulake thought this idea might be a winner, and it certainly wasn’t alone. 2021 was a bit of a peak for companies getting on-board with various Web3 ideas, before 2022 saw the wider crypto ecosystem hit by crisis after crisis, exposing various schemes for the cash grabs they were.

Habbo’s model seemed relatively successful from the outside, probably because a game about collecting cosmetic items, decorating rooms and socialising is a natural fit for ‘uniqu…

Rockstar has released the first official trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 early, and in 12 hours it’s already smashed through 60 million views (and counting). Needless to say the 90-second video is jam-packed full of details and hints about what we’ll be getting up to in Vice City, and if you want the nuts-and-bolts breakdown we’ve got you covered. But one element of the trailer really jumped out at me: TikTok framing, and the real-world parallels.

It’s no surprise that GTA 6 will incorporate its own version of TikTok, because the series has always jumped on the tech trends of the moment: characters use their iFruit phones, you can surf Live Invader (Facebook) or Bleeter (Twitter), and pretty much any piece of pop culture you can imagine has its GTA equivalent. What Rockstar’s seize…

PC hardware and gaming are like a perpetual arms race for the enthusiast’s money. Games continue to excel at technical levels with realistic graphics, audio, and physics engines that demand more and more out of our little machines. Even without jumps in computation, storage alone can be a constant battle forcing you to decide which 100GB game you’ll need to delete for your newest adventure. Or you could just buy some more storage with Samsung’s current sale.

Samsung is having a sale across a range of its SSDs over on Amazon and the official Samsung store. For PC gamers there’s big savings on M.2 format drives, and there’s plenty on offer for console gaming fans too.

You can grab a 1TB stick of Samsung’s 990 Pro NVMe M.2 SSD with a 41% discount down from $170 to $100 on both …