Of course, the Xbox solution has its advantages - it's dead easy to buy and install, with only a handful of varieties available with equivalent performance. The Sony solution does require some research - such as a visit to our list of PS5 drive recommendations - and a bit of confidence to take off one of the PS5's wings, unscrew the drive bay, screw in the SSD and replace everything again. It's totally achievable within a few minutes, but it's the sort of thing that you might understandably feel a bit anxious about if you chose a console because you want an easy, plug-and-play experience. On the Xbox side, you just buy the card and push it into the storage expansion port on the back of the console in a few seconds. The ability to move games from console to console in a matter of seconds is also pretty neat - and incredibly useful for our work, as it allows us to quickly compare games on both Series X and Series S.
CD Projekt Red is hosting a gameplay livestream for Cyberpunk 2077 later this week, where it will share more details about its next update.
During the stream, which will be hosted by CDPR's community managers over on Twitch, the Cyberpunk 2077 team will "discuss several features" that players can expect to see added to the game when this update goes live.
In addition, the developer will also share more about its Idris Elba-fronted Phantom Liberty expansion.
I've spoken to staff past and present at Altagram, the company which was publicly highlighted for failing to list its freelance localisation staff in Baldur's Gate 3 credits, as well as localisation freelancers and the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), to find out.
Below, Altagram's CEO also offers an explanation for what went wrong specifically with Baldur's Gate 3 - something they claim was simply an innocent mistake, after Larian previously asked for freelancer names to be provided.
The festival is being presented by Indie Cup and Ukrainian Games with support from Valve, and features 337 games, 77 demos, 95 in-development games.
There is a range of discounted titles, all of which have been created by Ukrainian game developers. This includes everything from blockbusters to indies, puzzlers to shoot 'em ups and more.
Texas Chain Saw Massacre is, at least, exactly what it says on the tin. An asymmetric horror cast from the same mould as genre leader Dead by Daylight, four victims fight to escape the clutches of Leatherface by lockpicking doors to get out of the basement, steathily navigating the exterior environs by avoiding its traps and antagonists, and escaping to the road. The twist here, however, is that our chainsaw-touting maniac is not alone; yes, it's still asymmetric, but Leatherface is accompanied by two Family members, which makes it 4v3. And it absolutely works.
Additionally, MyTimeToShineHello said Uncharted movie director Ruben Fleischer will be directing this adaptation.
IO clearly didn't want anything other than Agent 47 himself being responsible for the mysterious killings in Hitman, and therefore tried to fix the issue by adding some extra collision along the wall. However, this didn't stop characters from dying instantly when they came into contact with the wall. So, instead, the Hitman team has, quite literally, boxed the wall in.
So what do you do? You look at the numbers printed on empty tiles, which tell you how many road tiles they share a border with. It's Minesweeper! Except instead of looking for mines, you're looking for roads, which have a higher percentage chance of containing something dangerous.
"Starfield's start screen either shows hasty shipping deadlines by a passionate team overworked, or a team that didn't care.
First the basics. Ported by Double Eleven Studios with support from Rebellion North, this release has content parity with the PS4 version. The 11.4GB install crams in the main Red Dead Redemption adventure, plus the Undead Nightmare expansion - though sadly, the multiplayer mode of the original release is chopped out here. The 1080p docked presentation is the highlight though. In direct comparison with the Xbox 360 and PS3 originals, Red Dead's huge landscapes benefit from a huge boost in clarity on Switch. Distant detail is more defined, and the higher pixel count in general reduces the flickering artefacts - the noise - on fine details like fences.
Immediately then we're off to a good start with the Switch release. In fact, at 1080p we're in essence matching the base PS4 version's native resolution already. But native resolution isn't the only factor for image quality. After all, anti-aliasing type plays a big role in tidying up the shimmering, the noise, and other visual artefacts too. Sadly - but perhaps inevitably - the Switch game uses FXAA post-process anti-aliasing, whereas the PS4 version can tap into temporal super-sampling via AMD's FSR2. In truth, FXAA doesn't look quite as good as the 2x MSAA found in the Xbox 360 original, but the burden on the GPU will be much lower.
Good news, Tomb Raider fans – rumour has it, "breaking news" is on the way.
As is usually the case with these kinds of things, we need to take it all with a very generous bucket of salt, but a recent update to the official Tomb Raider website is inviting players to sign up to be the "first to hear" about "breaking news regarding the Tomb Raider franchise", including "rewards, exclusives, merch, releases, and more".
So far, so what, right? Fair enough. However, pair the timing of the site's sudden update with rumours that Crystal Dynamics was getting ready for a reveal later this year – which came from noted leaker Miller Ross, who accurately dropped information about Marvel's Avengers ahead of schedule – and it's enough to get Lara fans excited that the developer is gearing up to reveal a new game.
The beta test invites you to discover the red isle and the coast of Africa, wherein you'll find the pirate den of Sainte Anne, which is "ruled by John Scurlock, the local Kingpin". Here you'll be able to interact with other players and NPCs, level up your weapons, ships, and equipment, as well as access your loot in your warehouse.
The patch – which brings in an all-new levelling system at the cost of wiping out your progression, items, and virtual bank balance – rolled out on Thursday. Whilst it's been welcomed by most of the community, a handful of issues – including performance woes and a problem with the falloff volume of ghosts, making hunts considerably trickier – have marred the launch.
Kinetic moved quickly to address reports raised by its community. For instance, one change includes shifting the Tier 3 lighter from a consumable item to a non-consumable one following player feedback, and another ensures that the T3 crucifix now has the correct five-metre radius.
In a statement posted to the game's official website, Aaron Keller said that while being review bombed "isn't a fun experience", the plan was to "move forward" by "adding to and improving Overwatch 2".
In less than 48 hours after its Steam debut, Blizzard's free-to-play hero shooter became Steam's "worst game of all time".
Whilst it had initially been set to end at 4pm UK / 8am PDT, Mortal Kombat's co-creator and NetherRealm CCO, Ed Boon, confirmed on X/Twitter earlier today that the test has been extended by an additional seven hours.
"The Realms have spoken! We will be extending Pre-Order Beta for an additional 7 hours. The Beta will now conclude on Monday, 8/21 at 3:00pm PT," added the official Mortal Kombat Xitter account.
The one area where I can properly engage with the lore, however, is the Zelda series. I think that's because lore in Zelda feels different to lore in other games. Deep down, I don't believe Nintendo thinks about lore too seriously - or maybe it didn't until quite recently. It feels like Nintendo thinks about what's fun and what the team wants to do in the new game, and it certainly thinks about the detail of each specific game and its art and sense of cultures. But for a long time it felt like the wider, deeper, tying-it-all-together lore that spread outside of individual games themselves was left to the fans.
I may be deeply, deeply wrong about this - Lottie's just told me a brilliant story about how the skeletal warrior from Twilight Princess may actually be the Link from Ocarina of Time passing on his skills from the timeline he's trapped in. That sounds like pretty deep thinking tbh. But regardless, when I first saw the Zelda official timeline, say, it felt like a playful, jokey sort of thing - a lark. Crucially, I think I felt there was room for all of us in there still - room for the players. We could continue to make our own connections, right or wrong, and they would retain a kind of validity to them.
One of the quirks of this heavier performance in Act Three is that movement makes the game visibly heavier on the CPU. In one particular static scene, I noted a 90fps frame-rate on a Core i9 12900K, but just moving the character around in mini-circles hit performance by 20 percent, even though the view and amount of objects on-screen is essentially the same. The frame-rate is lower, but more pertinently, frame-times are spikier.
Currently, a ban will only stop disruptive or abusive users from being able to communicate via Twitch chat.
But that will change in September with an opt-in feature for all Twitch streamers to immediately cut their live feeds for anyone given a ban.
"Jordan Mechner," the studio explains, "was an 18-year-old college student when he started making the martial arts adventure that would become one of the most influential games of the Apple II era. The Making of Karateka presents the story behind Mechner's first published game through an exhaustive archive...that can be explored at your own pace."
First, though, it offered context for yesterday's bungled release, explaining, "Hotfix #4 went through a rigorous QA pipeline and was confirmed as a candidate for release yesterday. However, we triggered a rebuild of the version relatively last minute to change the version number. The version that was cooked was unfortunately plagued by compiler corruption, which was causing certain exceptions that normally wouldn't cause crashes to - you guessed it - cause crashes." Larian calls these kinds of compiler issues "extremely rare", adding, "We weren't prepared for it. We should've been. We messed up."
The game's protagonist Fortuna is a gifted oracle witch, exiled to a tiny asteroid for a thousand years without her tarot deck – an extraordinarily harsh punishment from the leader of her coven. After two hundred years of isolation, Fortuna understandably gets desperate – she summons Ábramar, a forbidden cosmic entity, and makes an even more forbidden pact with him to alleviate her sentence. With Ábramar's help, she starts creating a new not-tarot divination deck to rebuild her craft and identity, and a path back to her coven. Through various chapters, the player learns about Fortuna's past, her ascension to witchhood, and the circumstances surrounding her exile, culminating in a dramatic final act of judgment.
Mechanically, it's a story-driven deck builder with a creative twist: Fortuna makes her own cards rather than drawing from a preset deck. Between visual novel-style dialogue sequences, she sits at a crafting table to determine (to an extent) the meaning of each card, and how it looks by manipulating the size and placement of its graphics. Each card has three components – the sphere (background), the arcane (main icon) and symbols (minor embellishments). Each component requires energy from the four elements of air, water, earth, and fire, which in turn affect the themes and emotions each card represents. For instance, combining an earthy sphere with earthy symbols produces a rather unbalanced card full of immobility and stagnation; a fire-and-fire card brims with overwhelming transformative power. The readings themselves are straightforward. Visitors come with problems, and Fortuna draws a single card for each of their queries, which can involve a bit of internal angst when the card turns out to be anything less than a glowing promise of success and serenity.
In addition, the Microsoft Movies & TV app on the Xbox 360 will no longer function.
Earlier this week we reported on the Sentient Streets mods for GTA 5 created by Bloc, which uses AI to generate free conversations with NPCs.
Now, the mod's NexusMods listing and a YouTube video showcasing its gameplay have both been made unavailable due to copyright claims by publisher Take-Two. Sentient Streets is no longer available to download.
EA says it will not contest a €10.8k (£9.2k) fine laid down by an Austrian court that decided FIFA Ultimate Team packs constituted a breach of the country's gambling laws.
Naturally, EA says it still disagrees with the verdict.
This decision will likely have no wider impact, GamesIndustry.biz reports, as Austrian courts rule on individual cases without a need for their impact to be felt in subsequent cases.
"You never know," he said. "It can end up being three or five. But four seems like a good number. Some seasons, because of the story we're telling, will need fewer episodes and some will need more."
"We have dedicated the past year to reviewing our business model alongside months of extremely valuable player testing of the gameplay experience," a Sega spokesperson told me.
"We're very excited with this progress and the reaction to yesterday's gameplay reveal. We'll build on that foundation with our Closed Beta test beginning 31st August and use this insight to finalise our plans for launch."
Starfield's hype handle cranks ever-more furiously in the run-up to its September release, and Bethesda has now fired out a scattershot volley of fresh details, courtesy of a new Discord Q&A.
Subjects tackled are inevitably rather chaotically broad (and, alas, disappointingly sandwich-free), guided as they were by fans with radically differing concerns, but the end is still a fascinating peek into a game that remains a little enigmatic so close to launch.
We now, for instance, know (thanks Games8) that Starfield will feature various possible punishments for those caught doing naughty things like smuggling contraband. Illegal goods are frowned upon across the galaxy (which is said to operates within a fixed economy, although buy and sell prices can be influenced with certain skills), and must be smuggled past security ships orbiting major settlements by stuffing them inside special purchasable ship modules.
It's an ambitious idea, particularly in the CRPG space, where there's a general trend that very close adaptations of tabletop rulesets tend to feel hostile to their players - we rely on human moderation to fudge dice rolls, adapt encounters, and respond to their players, and a straight adaptation running on cold hard random numbers alone can feel like the person (computer) running the game is being cruel. But, at least for the first 30 hours, as it responds to the choices you've made through character creation, dialogue, and even tiny interactions with its world, developer Larian seems to pull off the unlikely, and make an RPG that feels truly collaborative.
This breadth of possibility in Baldur's Gate 3 is really an illusion - but one that's closer to excellent stagecraft than a distracting wizard spell, and it's meticulously done. The magician Larian pulls a rabbit out of its hat, and instead of looking up the developer's sleeve you think about casting Speak with Animals, or doing an animal handling check to try and pet it, or maybe seeing if it has unique responses to a wildshaped druid.
The maximum severity, after eight strikes, will be a year's suspension from Xbox social features like multiplayer, messaging, parties, and party chat.
Bethesda has laid down some of Starfield's backstory, detailing the events which take us from 2023 to 2330 - when the game's story is set.
Bethesda's timeline begins in 2050, when humans first arrive on Mars. Such a date is relatively consistent with NASA's own estimates of when humanity will touch down on the Red Planet, after returning to the Moon later this decade.
After that, Bethesda jumps forward 56 years to humanity's 2156 arrival in Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the Sun. And it's here we really start to enter science fiction.
Final Fantasy has a proud tradition of mini-games of all shapes and sizes, from the hidden number puzzle in the very first game through fishing in FF12 to pinball in FF15. I could have done with some of that while playing Final Fantasy 16. As you may have read in my Final Fantasy 16 review, I found the game to be full of good things with lots of less-good things between them. The story quests can be thrilling but many of the sidequests feel like office admin. The combat sings, but half the fights are with reluctant scorpions and rando bandits who seem to barely understand the mechanics of swinging a sword. A proper side activity of some kind would have been a pleasant relief. Sadly, the nearest FF16 offers to this are those feats of spectacular genre-splicing you encounter during larger Eikon bossfights.
While Embracer declined to confirm who its proposed partner was at the time of its announcement, a new report from Axios, citing "four sources familiar with the deal", claims it was the Saudi government-funded Savvy Games Group, the gaming-focused arm of the Saudi investment fund set up by the hugely controversial Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Axios says the proposed deal would have seen $2bn being invested in the development and publishing of games from Embracer, but adds its sources were "less certain about why Savvy walked away".
That's a week sooner than its previous launch date, which was set for 12th October.
The move means Mirage will now have more of a gap between its October launch and some of the many other games due in the same month: Lords of the Fallen, Alan Wake 2, Spider-Man 2 and Super Mario Wonder.
All 24 previous starter Pokémon are set to arrive in Scarlet and Violet in the second part of its Hidden Treasure of Area Zero expansion.
A new trailer confirming which starters will return in The Indigo Disk was shown yesterday during the Pokémon World Championships 2023.
"Past first partner Pokémon are appearing in spades," the trailer states, suggesting the starters can be encountered and caught in the wild.
I had been waiting for this for ages: my first night dive. Listen: doesn't the night transform things? A quick wander outside, a spot of sky-staring, even a casual glance out the window at the dark horizon becomes a thing of intrigue. Tall buildings picked out with those gorgeous red lights on the corners, trees rendered as cavernous congregations of clasping branches. And underwater? Underwater at night? What would that be like?
So, while I had legitimate in-game reasons to want to go diving at night - a customer back at the restaurant wanted moray eel for a dish that would deliver a spicy blast of nostalgia, and morays only appear once the sun has gone away - really, I just wanted to get into the sea to understand what it was like at night down here. How would the landscape, already ever-changing, already filled with bright mysteries, be transformed yet again?
In the end, my first night dive took place during a storm. I had been told I might get more than the moray eel during a storm - there might be an underwater vortex with a dangerous secret inside. Down, under the surface I went. The reefs I thought I would recognise were suddenly new again, their edges picked out in cyberpunk neon. Bioluminescence! Meanwhile, rain hitting the surface of the water above me formed a shifting repetitive ripple of disturbed water, corrugating, corduroying the surface: sea, but with a likeness of undulatus cloud. There was a feeling, suddenly very strong, that I was at the centre of everything.
This year's Pokémon World Championship tournament saw organisers disqualify multiple pros using hacked Pokémon teams, sparking debate across the community.
Using hacked Pokémon is technically against the rules, but players haven't always been caught. However, at this year's tournament in Yokohama, Japan, the rules were seemingly tightened and many players who travelled across the world were disqualified.
As a result, the community has been debating whether using hacked teams is an acceptable method of saving time, or if it's against the spirit of the monster training games.
As fan complaints over game quality grow, The Pokémon Company has said it is now having "more and more conversations" about ensuring game standards - while keeping to the series' relentless release schedule.
The Pokémon series' breakneck launch rate has recently seen at least one major game or pair of expansions released per calendar year, and it's something fans say is having a detrimental effect on the games themselves, particularly as the series has morphed to become fully open-world.
Last year, Nintendo was forced to apologise for the state Pokémon Scarlet and Violet arrived in at launch, and acknowledged the technical issues affecting each games' performance. Now, The Pokémon Company has also addressed the issue.
No, I'm not talking about the record-breaking movie starring Chris Pratt and Jack Black – I'm talking about the infamous 1993 live-action offering starring Bob Hoskins.
In honour of the movie's 30th anniversary – and no doubt buoyed by the animated movie's recent success – on 15th September 2023, Japanese audiences will be treated to a 4K re-release of the cult classic, which was called Super Mario: Goddess of the Demon Empire locally.
At the time of writing, Baldur's Gate 3 is sitting pretty with a combined score of 97, whilst Tears of the Kingdom is runner-up with 96.
"You’ll dispatch foes through rap battles, using each character's unique style to put together the perfect harmony for every battle," explains developer Super League. "Featuring music from the tony award winning musical, Hamilton on Roblox provides a fun adventure for new and old fans alike."
Neville_Lynwood points out that whilst "thematically [it] makes sense" to Long Rest in order to "reflect on stuff that has happened", we're all essentially "de-incentivised" from doing so because you lose your temporary buffs and elixirs… which is a problem, given some think that a lack of rest results in "breaking the narrative progression which leads to event flags and triggers getting jumbled", leading to "all kinds of bugs".
A brief Google while writing this has taught me that the wondrous cover was painted by Julie Bell, an American illustrator and fantasy artist. I love it. I love all the artwork to do with Eternal Champions. Ignore my words for a moment and look at those screenshots and the photos from the manual. Lovely character models, aren't they? They're mostly courtesy of Ernie Chan, a comic book artist, who worked on a lot of DC and Marvel comics during the 1970s.
None of this would matter if the game lacked personality and wonder, but it has both. It's also a rock solid fighting game that even now I struggle to succeed at. While I can't remember the timing, I know I bought it because my best mate had Street Fighter 2 on the SNES and I couldn't find the Mega Drive version. Mortal Kombat scared me (I was a wimpy kid) so that was out of the question other than brave gazes at a demo machine in a local computer store. Eternal Champions felt like it was somewhere in between those two.
The studio announced the news on the company's website and social media channels, stating that it was "proud" to welcome the team to Rockstar Games.
The news is particularly surprising given the modders were banned from the game back in 2015. Despite attempting to comply with Rockstar's rules - which stated that modding of the developer's official GTA Online mode will face the banhammer - and making their own multiplayer service away from GTA Online, Rockstar banned them anyway.
"It's been an exciting few months… I'm happy to share that I'm starting a new position as IP Director of Far Cry at Ubisoft!" Holmes announced on the professional social networking site (thanks, VGC).
Before discussing the game's graphical options, I wanted to underscore just how well Baldur's Gate 3 carries the analogue experience of Dungeons and Dragons, from the overt way the dungeon master's narration sneaks into moments as internal thoughts beyond the player's control, or the way you can navigate the environments in encounters, utilising the terrain and your attributes to come out a victor. It is all free form and flows wonderfully, and the amount of choice you have to affect the game in your own way is staggering.
My favourite aspect is how Larian has blended analogue elements from the tabletop experience into play where it matters most. In combat, the rules of chance are automatically dealt with to keep combat as fast and satisfying as possible in a turn-based system, but when it comes to big moments of player action, chance is made overt with a throw of a D20 die that you can see spinning in front of you and determining your fate. If you've ever played tabletop games you know how exhilarating this is - how empowering a natural 20 is and how hilarious it is to see a critical failure 1 pop up. As I see it, Baldur's Gate 3 is the best translation of that D&D table experience into the digital realm that I have ever played.
As noted by Andrew Marmo (thanks, wccftech), who spotted the listing, it seems unlikely that this is a placeholder, as the website is listing other games with no firm release window with the placeholder date of 31st December, 2023.
That's according to an advert taken from Sony's Arabic's YouTube channel, which reportedly said that players can "play the demo first on PlayStation" "at least five days before any other platform".
As spotted and translated by Call of Duty specialist CharlieIntel - and as is usually the case these days - you'll only be able to participate in the first beta if you've pre-ordered the game first.