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The hack 'n slash action fighter Project Eve, first unveiled back in 2019, has a new name and a release year. It's now called Stellar Blade and will be a PS5 console exclusive (read: it'll probably come to PC, too). Sony aired a new trailer during today's State of Play that showed a nice chunk of combat.
We got our first good look at Stellar Blade last year during another PlayStation showcase. That trailer mostly showed off the melee side of its combat system that reminds me a lot of a Platinum game, but today's showcase focused on the guns: arm-mounted machineguns and railguns, to be exact. It looks like between sword combos, players can take aim at any time to pelt enemies with bullets, too. It's good to cover all your bases when fighting 15-foot ogres with two lava balls for hands.
The trailer also touches on story, which is still a bit vague but seems to start with a team of sci-fi warriors trying to save a forgotten city buried beneath a post-apocalyptic wasteland. There may also be some generational destiny stuff going on with the protagonist—to be honest, I was more enthralled by the guy with a giant spinning chainsaw wheel for a head.
The gameplay snippets already look cool, but what Stellar Blade really has going for it is being very, very pretty. Makes sense—this is one of the first PS5 console exclusives that'll really get to stretch its legs by leaving the PS4 behind. Stellar Blade is being made by Shift Up Corporation, a Korean outfit that's actively recruiting developers for the game. It's due out sometime in 2023.
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Tekken 8 was properly revealed during Sony's State of Play stream on Tuesday. The first trailer, embedded above, comes over seven years after the arcade release of Tekken 7 in 2015.
The existence of Tekken 8 was teased at fighting game tournament EVO last month, and it's also one of the titles that appeared on a list of games that leaked out of an Nvidia database last year. Nvidia said at the time that the list was "only for internal tracking and testing," but many games from the list have turned out to be real projects. Here's yet another one.
(I won't go so far as to say that "Half-Life 2 Remastered," another title on the Nvidia list, is definitely real at this point, but it would be a funny way for Valve to continue rejecting the number three.)
The Tekken 8 trailer is ripe with muscles but not with details about the fighting game. We know it'll release on PlayStation 5, and a PC release feels very likely, given that Tekken 7 is on PC. The fine print in the trailer at least confirms that we're seeing real-time footage running on a PS5, not a pre-rendered scene.
Given the relatively small scenes they involve, modern Street Fighter and Tekken games like to go as all-out as they can on particle effects and glistening abs, and Tekken 8 is keen to deliver in that respect.
Speaking of Tekken's primary competitor, Street Fighter 6 was also announced recently, and is coming out next year—Wes played it in June, and was impressed. We're not sure yet when Tekken 8 is out, but perhaps it'll go head to head with SF6? All Bandai Namco says right now is: "Stay tuned."
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Big day for Yakuza news: First the modern murder mystery thriller series Judgment gets rated for PC, and now the feudal Japan spin-off Yakuza Ishin, first released on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 in 2014, is getting a remake. More importantly: it's being localized for the first time.
Like a Dragon: Ishin! is set in 1860s Edo Japan and puts you in the shoes of famous samurai Ryōma Sakamoto—though he happens to be a dead ringer for Yakuza series protagonist Kiryu, and he's also changed his name to… well, you get the idea. Ishin plays a lot like the other Yakuza games, with a heavy dose of cutscenes interspersed with beat-em-up (or in this case, slice-em-up) action. There's also farming and cooking and other side activities, like chicken racing and mahjong.
The trailer for Like a Dragon: Ishin! that debuted during Sony's State of Play stream on Tuesday was running on a PS5, and makes no mention of a PC release. But it seems like almost a foregone conclusion at this point, with Judgment on the way as well. The trailer teases a livestream tomorrow, September 14 at 10 am UTC (that's 3 am PST / 11 am BST), which may give us the PC confirmation we're hoping for.
The remake releases on PlayStation in February 2023.
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The trailer for Pacific Drive starts with an average-looking station wagon slowly driving through a gloomy evening in the Pacific Northwest. Pretty quickly it becomes apparent this is no normal car, however. There's a futuristic display on the dashboard. There are various accessories, some glowing, bolted to the hood and side panels. And when it peels out, it's clear this car is secretly a beast, which is important because the world around it appears to be pretty monstrous as well.
"Pacific Drive is a run-based, first-person driving survival game," says developer Ironwood Studios. "Your car is your only companion as you navigate a surreal and anomaly-filled reimagining of the Pacific Northwest." The trailer shows just how terrifying that world is, with driving rain, howling winds, toxic spore clouds, electrified tumbleweeds, rocky projections bursting through the ground, and a few glimpses of what could maybe, possibly, be zombies.
And you've gotta drive right through it all.
"Structured as a 'road-like', each excursion into the wilderness brings unique and strange challenges, as you restore and upgrade your car from an abandoned garage that acts as your home base," says Ironwood Studios.
I like just about everything I'm hearing. A driving survival game? Check. It takes place in the "Olympic Exclusion Zone" full of bizarre and dangerous anomalies? Check. A car you can cobble upgrades and gadgets onto? Check.
Here's a feature list from the official website, and all of those bullet points sound pretty darn compelling:
- First person run based driving survival gameplay
- Form a unique bond with a fully customizable car that develops its own quirks and personality
- Tense driving from behind the wheel, with moments of vulnerability when you step out to gather resources and make repairs
- From your upgradeable garage, each repeatable trip into the Zone is unique and randomized
- Systems driven gameplay that allows for player freedom, creativity, and experimentation
- Unravel a long-forgotten mystery of the Olympic Exclusion Zone as you explore a surreal and anomaly filled version of the Pacific Northwest
- Original score by Wilbert Roget, II and featuring 15+ licensed songs
Pacific Drive is coming to PC in 2023.
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This fiery hat all but rendered players invincible... until today. (Image credit: Bungie)
Titan mains, it might be time to hang up your favourite hat. Following a hotfix that rolled out to Destiny 2 earlier today, players began noticing that the Loreley Splendor Helm was no longer functioning as it had pre-patch. In fact, it appeared to have eaten a substantial nerf. The text for the item's main perk still reads: "When you are critically wounded with full class ability energy or when you cast a Barricade, create a Sunspot at your location that has improved restoration effects."
Sunspots are like friendly bonfires that heal you and speed up ability regen. Previously, the Sunspots that Loreley cast when you took a substantial amount of damage granted Restoration x2. However, after the Hotfix they only grant Restoration x1. As there was originally no mention of a balance change in the patch notes, many assumed this was either a stealth nerf by Bungie or a bug. As it turns out, it was an intended change that was simply left out by accident.
UPDATE: Hotfix 6.2.0.3 includes a recent change to the Loreley Splendor Helm Titan Exotic, reducing sunspot health restoration to X1.This change will be reflected in the latest patch notes article shortly. https://t.co/ND8tYzcMi3September 13, 2022
See moreSure enough, the post now reads: "Loreley Splendor Helm Titan Exotic has been adjusted to grant x1 Restoration from x2."
Despite the frustration that it wasn't flagged correctly, I don't think much of the Destiny 2 community will be surprised that the helm has been changed. The Restoration x2 effect was so powerful that it enabled Solar Titans to heal through frankly ridiculous amounts of incoming damage in even the hardest PvE content. Loreley had become the go-to item for Titans thanks to its ability to render them all but unkillable, and Bungie often intercedes when a piece of gear seems like it has become so mandatory that all other options are being squeezed out.
In Datto's video below you can see how strong the pre-nerf Restoration x2 effect was.
Loreley was also a menace in PvP because it substantially extended players' effective health pool while dueling, so a lot of people will be glad to see the back of it there.
As for whether it'll be any good at all now, frankly I suspect not. Loreley had operated as a universal 'get out of jail' card. The reduced effect, though still useful because it triggers automatically, will be more akin to a 'call my state-appointed lawyer' card.
The fact that regular Sunspots already grant Restoration x1 means that Solar Titans are likely to begin experimenting with other options, such as Path of Burning Steps and Phoenix Cradle. I also wouldn't be surprised to see the Heart of Inmost Light chestpiece, which is seeing a ton of use across all subclasses, become even more popular—so much so that it could be on the rebalancing block next.
For me, though it's an entirely understandable nerf, it's also sad for two reasons: 1) I still hadn't got around to soloing the Grasp of Avarice dungeon without dying, which I need to do for the sweet pirate emblem. 2) Loreley's fashion game is on point, and I'll miss seeing those fiery plume horns bouncing around the Tower.
Please enjoy my favourite Loreley look below, as we pour one out for a hall of fame piece of over-powered Destiny 2 armor.
Look how beautifully it paired with my burning butt towel! (Image credit: Bungie) -
There's nothing quite like the feeling you get when you’re playing a racing game and you hit the seam just right coming out of a turn, scorch over some ridiculous boost mechanic, and just… fly. Upcoming indie Turbo Force, from newcomers Blitzkrieg Games, looks like a good opportunity to do just that… in a year or so.
The Steam page for Turbo Force bills it as an "ultra fast anti-gravity racing game with online competitions, deep gameplay mechanics, and a track editor." Giving off serious F-Zero vibes, the gameplay video features some low-poly raceships flying around turns on a track hanging in midair over some pretty picturesque backgrounds.
While there’s not a lot to go on just yet, the stuff that’s there is pretty hype. The physics on the ships look smooth as butter, the tracks look interesting, and the theme playing over it is a banger. With some more development and an actual track editor, I could see this game being like a modern day mashup of Wipeout and Excitebike (I know I’m not the only one who spent infinite hours as a kid making up his own tracks).
With no new entries to the F-Zero or Wipeout franchises coming any time soon, it may be time for a new challenger in the antigrav race… space. After all, Captain Falcon has been doing more punching of faces than punching of gas lately—the last racing game he was in was F-Zero Climax on the Gameboy Advance in 2004.
In the meantime, you could check out a couple other entries in the genre. Redout 2 came out this June and features insane speeds, lots of racing physics challenges, and some cool dragons hanging out with you on steely neon tracks. BallisticNG is described by its creators as a "love letter to the original Wipeout trilogy," and features super slick low poly ship design and an active mod community that periodically adds new tracks and ships.
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Saturnalia, the ancient Roman festival to Saturn held during the winter solstice, represents the birth of a new sun. The death of the past. It eventually formed the spiritual center of what we call Christmas. My time with the game of the same name did not feature merry elves, bright candles, and cheerfully wrapped gifts, however. Instead I crawled around a dreamlike maze of an imaginary Italian town called Gravoi, evading a horrible monster and trying to solve a mystery.
The upcoming horror adventure game is a bit homegrown in that sense: it comes from Italian indie developer Santa Ragione. Saturnalia puts you in the shoes of a quartet of survivors—people brought together by happenstance, each with their own story to tell. You spend much of your time exploring the narrow, confusing streets of Gravoi attempting to find tools, explore clues, and meet other people who can shed some light on what’s happening. All the while a shadowy creature hunts you, and if it catches all of your characters, the town resets procedurally, destroying your hard-earned knowledge of where things are.
This destruction of what you think you know pervades the game in every way—control flashes back and forth to the past, things you thought you knew are different when you go back. I found myself on multiple occasions running shrieking from a monster only to find myself in a familiar place, but to have it change on me.
As disjointed as it made me feel at first, the place grows on you. Lovingly crafted with influences ranging from Sardinian architecture to Impressionist art to classic Italian horror films, Saturnalia pulls you in and makes you want to keep exploring. Keep digging. And keep trying to find a damn wrench.
It’s not without fault—my first big scare in the game fell flat when I literally didn’t see the monster due to a funny camera angle, it can be hard to parse what’s going on with your inventory, and the multiple character system could use some tuning. It wasn’t clear to me what bringing multiple characters at a time meant, what the phones did, or how to use Paul’s camera.
Hopefully by the time it releases (exclusively on the Epic Store) later this year, that stuff will have been polished. In the meantime I’m gonna go looking for a way to get this monorail working. In this creepy mine. Nothing could go wrong, right? Right?
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Hello StrOnz0,
Welcome to UnityHQ Nolfseries Community. Please feel free to browse around and get to know the others. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.
StrOnz0 joined on the 09/13/2022.
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Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's detective agency spin-off from its Yakuza series has so far been console-exclusive, but hot damn, it's finally on the way to PC. As spotted by Nibellion on Twitter, the ESRB has listed official age ratings (Mature) for both Judgment and Lost Judgment on PC, which makes this almost certainly a sure thing. Nothing's final till it's final, but the RGG Summit livestream scheduled for this Thursday seems very likely to be when we see an official reveal for these long-awaited PC ports.
This is a big deal for us Yakuza series freaks. As of last year, the entire main series is now playable on PC, and all eight games are in the PC Game Pass too. But Judgment, and its sequel Lost Judgment from 2021, have remained console-only. Hell, I'm downright annoying about the Yakuza games and even I've drawn the line at dragging my dusty original PS4 out of the closet for Judgment.
There's been a good amount of "will they or won't they" over the past couple years as rumors about a possible Judgment PC version contend with official comments that it isn't happening and rumors about talent agency disagreements surrounding the series protagonist's actor Takuya Kimura.
It seems that Sega has sorted all that out now, because the PC ratings, which you can find on the ESRB website, are indeed legit. They're relatively new, too. As of October 2021, Lost Judgment's rating was only listed as for Playstation 4 and 5 and Xbox consoles (via the Wayback Machine). Equivalent ratings haven't shown up on PEGI's website yet.
Aside from being an allegedly damn good pair of games, this will also mean that RGG's classic action brawler combat will get to live on for PC players. Historically, the Yakuza series has always been action beat-em-up fare until the series reboot Yakuza: Like A Dragon in 2020 opted for a turn-based battle system derived from classic party-based RPGs. The studio has since made it clear that the Yakuza series will carry on with the turn-based format while the action combat will live on in the Judgment series. So unless the Judgment games ever came to PC, we'd be out of luck.
I'll replay Yakuza 0 however many times I need to satisfy my love for combo-bashing, but getting cut off from its future iterations was a tad tragic. It'll be grand if PC players get to keep both turn-based and action thanks to some fresh Judgment releases.
This is pretty suspiciously good timing, too. The studio's RGG Summit is scheduled for tomorrow, September 14 at 6 am EDT / 9 am BST / 7 pm JST. I was hoping for a proper reveal for the next Yakuza game, but I'll surely take a side order of Judgment on PC confirmation.
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Disney Dreamlight Valley bridges let you access new areas of locations you've unlocked. You may have seen them in locations like Dazzle Beach and the Forest of Valor. The only problem is that these bridges are often blocked by big coral rocks or large tree stumps that you can't remove with your pickaxe or shovel until you upgrade them by completing quests.
But there's a little trick you can use to cross those bridges and gain access to those areas even if you haven't upgraded your royal tools and removed those obstructions yet.
Disney Dreamlight Valley: How to cross blocked bridges
First you'll need to unlock the wishing well in the area the bridge is in, which can be done by interacting with the Scrooge McDuck sign next to the well and spending coins. With the well unlocked, enter your inventory and choose the Furniture menu or just press F on your keyboard.
The same way you can move furniture and buildings around on the map, you can also move the wishing wells you've unlocked. Simply click on the well to select it and then drag it to the far side of the bridge you want to cross. Even though you can't walk across it yourself, Dreamlight Valley doesn't prevent you from moving a wishing well to anywhere in its area.
Place it somewhere on the other side of the bridge, exit the furniture menu, then open your map. Click the icon of the well in its new location and you'll woosh up into the air and land next to the well on the far side of the bridge.
That's it! Now you can explore the area on the other side of the blocked bridge before you have the tools to remove the stumps or rocks blocking your path. Keep in mind, to get back you'll need to move the well back to the other side of the bridge, or use a different well on your map to fast-travel.
This may just be an oversight by the developers, so it wouldn't completely surprise us if this little trick gets patched out of the game at some point. And note that you can't move the well to locations outside of the area they're in, so there's no using wishing wells to access areas you haven't unlocked first.
If you're just getting started with Disney Dreamlight Valley, be sure to check out our guides on how to unlock Royal Tools, import your avatar and how the Star Path works. If you're working on character quests, here are our guides on how to make crudites and ratatouille, and how to solve the cave puzzles.
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Whether it’s the rise of cloud gaming, TVs with built-in games, "smart" monitors, or the popularity of retro game decks, constant change is a fixture on the gaming landscape.
Those changes are not confined to gaming platforms and PCs. TVs are being built with gaming-specific features, such as support for Variable Refresh Rate, Auto Low Latency Mode, and 4K@144Hz, making them a viable alternative to more expensive computer monitors.
Jeff Park, chief technology officer of HDMI Licensing Administrator, a first-person shooter aficionado, tracks these and other changes in the context of the HDMI specification.
In this interview, Park discusses how the latest HDMI spec is affecting gamers.
Q: Gamers have many more options today than they did a few years ago with streaming, mobile, and cloud-based games. How is HDMI supporting gamers as their platforms evolve and the types of platforms grow?
Jeff Park: One of the priorities for HDMI technology and specification development is to make features available across the board and not to make it super proprietary so you would have to buy a specific brand to get certain features. That was a reality for a lot of PC gaming.
So, a lot of the features that may accompany Variable Refresh Rate—even the other high-end features—if you want a combination of Variable Refresh Rate and, let's say, a game at 120Hz, or 144Hz, you had to get a particular monitor, a particular brand and a GPU, for example. That’s been the reality, and most of that was not available on consoles.
HDMI 2.1a and its additions made it more affordable and accessible to a lot more gamers.
If you go to any retailer to look for a TV, there are many that are affordable that have Variable Refresh Rate, 4K@120Hz, or even some of the newer, higher-end TVs are getting 4K@144Hz.
That’s one of the things we try to do—make the technology affordable and accessible to many users.
Q: The last time we spoke, you had mentioned many of the latest TVs are now being built with the latest HDMI specification-supported gaming features. We’re several months down the road since then. How have gamers responded?
JP: Great, actually. That’s one of the things you’re seeing on the TV side of things. 4K@144Hz with VRR and HDR isn’t the kind of feature a TV manufacturer would add unless there is demand for it. Why is there demand for it? Because PC gamers are seeing the console players are getting a great experience on these giant, very affordable screens. PC gamers want all of that, but a little bit more because a PC can do 144Hz with VRR and HDR.
What’s interesting is the TV makers are seeing the demand for those features in smaller sets. They’re actually going in the opposite direction than in the past. For instance, LG recently announced a 24-inch OLED TV in response to demand from PC gamers. I think many PC gamers are finally recognizing the performance available from these sorts of gaming TVs.
Q: That raises an interesting point. Do you see platform selections changing if you compare casual to competitive gamers?
JP: Competitive gamers are a little more sensitive to feature sets, especially for first-person shooter games. I was a first-person shooter guy back in my day. Even then, the choice of a mouse, keyboard, and the hardware I used was guided by reducing latency as much as possible.
Running at the lowest quality possible, at a resolution that a GPU could maintain with high frame rates—whatever my monitoring could do at that time—or jumping on G-Sync when that first came out was very expensive. But there were buyers for these niche features because hardcore gamers were seeing the benefit from those new features.
Casual gamers just want accessibility. That’s where HDMI technology becomes beneficial as they will get access to a lot of these features without even knowing it and having the benefit and enjoyment of it, because to them it is almost invisible.
If the technology is not accessible to everyone across the spectrum of users, then it’s not a successful technology.
Our goal has always been to enable everyone to have the best experience possible.
Q: What about retro decks? Are there spins of them that take advantage of HDMI connectivity, or does that even make sense?
JP: All the ones I’ve seen are fairly popular. I see a lot of them being used as a travel console. It makes perfect sense. They are so tiny and just plug into any USB port, and it just works.
I don’t know that any of the HDMI gaming features would be necessary for these because of the 8-bit graphics. Even if you go 16-bit, there won’t be a drastic improvement.
But one of the things I have seen is the TV guys are using Auto Low Latency Mode in a smart way. The way they do it is, even if a source device doesn’t support that particular feature, they’ve figured out a way to identify what’s plugged in—like a Nintendo, Saga or Atari, whatever it might be. If they can figure out what’s plugged in, they will turn on gaming mode.
The devices themselves are meant to be low-cost and accessible. Can you upscale 8-bit to 4K or 8K? Sure, but are you really going to see the benefit? Probably not.
Q: What can we expect for the rest of the year as it relates to HDMI tech and gaming?
JP: One of the things will be more TVs that have a PC gaming feature like 4K@144Hz. It’s going to be more and more commonplace. That includes HDR and VRR.
I haven’t seen any plans for the consoles to support 4K@144Hz today, so that’s most likely going to be in the PC realm, at least for the short term.
We’re also seeing more of the 4K@120Hz TVs available coming down in price. One other thing, the availability of consoles and GPUs is getting a little bit better. So, I think the industry as a whole is hoping that the world is getting through the pandemic and logistical issues, getting all of that sorted out so that we can have a more consistent supply as well as availability so consumers can have the best experiences that are available today.
For more information go to www.hdmi.org.
The terms HDMI, HDMI High-Definition Multimedia Interface, HDMI Trade Dress and the HDMI Logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of HDMI Licensing Administrator, Inc.
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Triangle Strategy, Square Enix's first brand new stab at the strategy RPG in years, is about to land on PC where it belongs. Square announced on Tuesday that the turn-based tactics game hits Steam on October 13, sandwiching it right in the middle of two other fairly similar games from Square. At the end of this month it's launching real time tactics game The DioField Chronicle, and then in November we're getting the remastered Tactics Ogre: Reborn. If you're a glutton for number-crunching, grid-based Japanese RPGs, you are eating good this fall.
As we just wrote about recently, we're living in a resurgent golden age of tactics RPGs right now. Triangle Strategy is one of the big ones: it uses Square's popular "HD-2D" pixel art aesthetic and harkens back to that sweeping political flavor of fantasy that Final Fantasy Tactics did so well.
Triangle Strategy was a hit on the Nintendo Switch earlier this year, though not everyone loved that it leans a bit heavier on the talky RPG side of things than it does the tactics side. In its review, our sister site GamesRadar wrote, "While Triangle Strategy soars in its actual strategic battles, it stumbles a little elsewhere. Leading characters are easy to root for in the opening hours, but it’s a shame Square Enix takes so damn long to develop actual personalities outside of politicking for the majority of them."
I'm actually more excited for Tactics Ogre's comeback, personally, but Triangle Strategy is destined to be an excellent Steam Deck companion. It already ran well enough on the Switch, but we can hopefully look forward to a better-than-30-fps framerate without any dynamic resolution dips.
Thankfully Square turned this one around pretty quickly, with just a seven month gap between the Switch and PC releases. Once it arrives, we expect quite a few patient PC players will continue using their Steam Decks like a better Nintendo Switch.
(Image credit: Square Enix) -
The tech industry tends not to show off its first drafts, not so with Valve's Steam Deck. Companies such as Microsoft would rather you imagine that their sleek, oblong gaming machines fell from the sky fully-formed than give you a look into the innumerable failures and rejected versions that had to be made first. Thankfully, Valve has never really shared that philosophy. In the Steam Deck booklet, interviews, and even (slightly hurtful) nicknames, the company has never hid that the process of creating the Steam Deck was one of trial, error, and constant iteration.
The best part is that they (mostly) all still boot, serving as an exciting reminder of how far things have come since.This one has a Picasso APU, at about half of the GPU power of the final Deck. The flatter ergo was an interesting experiment and taught us a ton about comfort. pic.twitter.com/yLwTtDDYloSeptember 12, 2022
See moreThat hasn't changed with the Steam Deck's launch in Asia. At press events, Valve has laid out tables with the Decks that didn't make it and, most interestingly of all, given us a look at how one of them ran. Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of Valve's coders who works on the Steam Deck, has given us a quick glimpse at the boot-up process of a Deck that never saw the light of day.
It's noticeably less sleek than the boot process of the final Deck, of course. Most obvious is the fact that before the machine realises it's a Steam Deck and loads up the right UI, it boots into Steam's default Big Picture mode: a nemesis I still have to contend with every day when I play games on my TV.
Big Picture mode will, one day, be replaced by the Deck UI across all of Steam, but it's interesting to see that it's still lurking in there somewhere under the surface.
We get a brief look at the Deck from another dimension running Half Life 2, as well. Surprise surprise, the Deck was able to play Valve's classic without breaking a sweat, though I admit that some part of my brain—the part that refuses to accept 2004 was 18 years ago—was actually taken aback that the weaker Picasso APU in the prototype didn't have any trouble with the game.
That's a slice of AMD silicon with half the raw graphical processing power of the Aerith APU that ended up in the final handheld gaming PC we have today.
It's an interesting and brief look into a world that wasn't. A world of circular track pads, multicoloured face buttons, and the lingering spectre of Big Picture mode. I kind of like the flatter design on this prototype more than I do the curves of the current model, if I'm honest, although Loup does say that flat design taught Valve "a ton about comfort," probably because it wasn't all that comfortable. Who knows, though, maybe it'll make a return on the next Steam Deck?
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I can't wait for next week to roll around and for us to finally get some concrete numbers about Nvidia's new RTX 40-series graphics cards, because I cannot cope with all the 'holy heck, if this is true…' rumours popping up every single day.
The latest is that the AD102 expected to be powering the RTX 4090 is going to have 165% more transistors than the freakishly beefy GA102 monster that ran the RTX 3090 Ti. Yes, yet another tweaker has come out with some GPU number porn: here's @kopite7kimi claiming that Nvidia's full-fat Lovelace chip is going to be sporting more than 75 billion transistors.
For a full frame of reference, the RTX 3090 Ti's GPU houses 28.3 billion transistors inside its massive 628mm² die, and the Navi 21 chip inside AMD's RX 6950 XT comes in at 26.8 billion in a 520mm² die.
I get that the Lovelace GPU of the RTX 40-series is going to operate with a smaller TSMC N5 (nominally 5nm) production process, as opposed to the Samsung 8nm and TSMC N7 (7nm) lithography of our reference chips above, but still, that's going to be an absolutely enormous graphics processors.
Surely right at the reticle limits; as big a GPU as it is physically possible to manufacture with today's technology.
Given that the RTX 4090 is expected to offer something in the region of twice the performance of the RTX 3090, you'd expect it to be bigger. But this suggests Nvidia has needed to throw a whole lot more logic at the problem to be able to top its previous biggest GPU to this level.
(Image credit: Future)The transistor number has come from an update to an old tweet of the serial Twitter leaker. Back in April they set up a Twitter poll asking users to guess how many transistors ("xtors") the AD102 GPU would have. The options were 40–50 billion, 50–60 billion, 60–70 billion, and 70–80 billion.
Just over 39% of respondents went for the latter option, which @kopite7kimi has now stated is "the right choice."
Remember this.
Most people made the right choice. More than 75B.September 13, 2022See moreYour next machine(Image credit: Future)Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines from the pros
Best gaming laptop: Perfect notebooks for mobile gamingHonestly, that's pretty startling. Not that 39% have supposedly got it right, but that Nvidia is really going to create a consumer-facing GPU with such a huge amount of cutting edge silicon inside it. I mean, this is some real brute force, sledgehammer graphics card creation stuff right here.
And sure to be priced to match.
Once again I have to go back to the novelty-size graphics card looks of the RTX 3090 Founders Edition in the system in front of me right now. That card always makes me laugh when I actually take the time to look at it. It's frankly a ridiculous-size graphics card.
Fingers crossed the RTX 4090 looks a whole lot more elegant a device when it finally hits the limelight at Nvidia's GeForce Beyond Special Broadcast on Tuesday September 20.
Rumored RTX 40 series specs RTX 4090 RTX 4080 RTX 4070 GPU AD102-300 AD103-300 AD104-400 CUDA Cores 16384 9728 7680 Base Clock 2235 N/A N/A Boost Clock 2520 N/A N/A Memory Bus 384-bit 256-bit 192-bit Memory Type 24GB GDDR6X 16GB GDDR6X 12GB GDDR6X Memory Speed 21Gbps 23Gbps 21Gbps TDP 450W 340W 285W -
The first wave of mods for Marvel's Spider-Man: Remastered have been largely character-focused, with fans swapping our hero out for alternatives as diverse as Kermit the Frog and Saul Goodman. Getting back to Spider-Man canon itself though (and no I'm not talking about Uncle Ben's gravestone), the biggest meme from the Sam Raimi movies has finally found its way to Insomniac's New York.
The Bully Maguire meme spawned from Spider-Man 3, the last of Raimi's trilogy, wherein Peter Parker for a time wears the symbiote suit. This messes with his head and our normally mild-mannered and loveable nerd becomes, for various amusing sequences in the movie, an emo dickhead.
Many years after the movie's release, sequences from the film were isolated and placed in other contexts, sometimes called 'emo Peter Parker', but the meme's popularity exploded after a video featuring Maguire throwing Tom Holland's Spider-Man away before a zoom to his angry face with 'Bully Maguire' suddenly plastered on-screen.
Now you can play Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered as the man, the meme, the full-on Bully Maguire. In a perfect coincidence, one of Spider-Man's taunts in the game is also a match for the finger-pointing that the character does in the movie.
"Daddy Maguire is here to put dirt in everyone's eyes," writes the model and mod creator Rezauddin Nur. "I used the game's Funeral Suit as a reference base model to create Bully Maguire's suit."
Bully Maguire joins everything from Ozzy Osbourne to GTA: San Andreas's CJ, as well as a particularly cursed Thomas the Tank Engine. The mod's a simple install. What's that chump, you can't get it to work? I missed the part where that's my problem.
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Conquer Viking purgatory with these Valheim guides(Image credit: Iron Gate Studios)
Valheim boss: Summon and defeat them all
Valheim workbench: How to build and upgrade it
Valheim dedicated server: How to get one working
Valheim commands: Handy cheat codes
Valheim mods: The best player-made additionsLooking for details on Valheim Mistlands? While the wait isn't over quite yet, Iron Gate has started releasing a few more details on the long-awaited update. It's hard to believe it's been more than a year since Iron Gate's Viking survival game launched on Steam early access. It enjoyed over five million sales in the first month, which came as a bit of a shock to the (then) five-person development team.
Since then we've had the Hearth and Home update and the addition of Frost Caves in the Mountains. And there's a lot of excitement around the upcoming Mistlands update which will introduce a whole new biome to explore. I say "introduce", but you can find Mistlands in the game right now, though these areas are very much placeholders, with no structures or creatures—hostile or otherwise—to bring it to life.
So if you're ready to find out what to expect from the next big patch, here's what we know about the Valheim Mistlands update.
Release date
When can we expect to play Valheim Mistlands?
No official release date has been announced for the new Mistlands update, though it is expected to arrive in 2022. The new biome was initially planned for late in 2021, but was pushed back in favour of fixing bugs and other minor issues after the game exploded in popularity.
It's also worth noting that Patrik Jarlestam, the composer of the Valheim soundtrack recently tweeted that he'd been working on "new music for Valheim, coming out soon".
I'll update this guide when we get a definite release date.
Biome
(Image credit: Iron Gate AB)You'll get to explore the new Valheim Mistlands biome
The Mistlands look, well, misty—at least, from the little we've seen so far. It looks like a damp and rainy region, scattered with sharp rocks, ruins, and cobwebs. Each biome in Valheim has its own boss, so what this one will be, and what it will drop, is anyone's guess.
You can currently find the original concepts of the Mistlands biome in the live game, though you'll generally need to explore towards the outer edges of the map to find them. These regions seem to favour tall, ancient trees, and it's unknown how much of the original biome will be retained in the finished version.
Assuming Mistlands works the same as the Hearth and Home update from last year, you'll need to start a new world to see the changes in the new biome reflected. This is still unconfirmed, however.
Creatures
Valheim Mistlands creatures: Two have been teased
Iron Gate is keeping pretty quiet about the kinds of creatures we'll encounter in the Mistlands biome, but it has teased a couple of them over recent months. First there's the concept art for some sort of bug. There's no telling whether this will be hostile or not, but if Deathsquitos are anything to go by, you won't want to run into one of these accidentally.
(Image credit: Iron Gate AB)Iron Gate revealed the Mistlands Hare more recently, which hopefully has a temperament to match its cuteness. The video above shows how it was created and how it looks in-game.
No other creatures have been revealed yet, though those spiderwebs found all over the Mistlands are more than a little concerning for arachnophobes.
Weapons and gear
We don't know much about the weapons yet
Iron Gate has said that Mistlands will add many new weapons, but we only know about two of them so far. Both of these are ranged weapons, so you're in good hands if you prefer keeping your distance and playing it safe.
The first is the Mistlands Bow—check it out in the video above. It looks like it's been made from some kind of spine, which is more than a little disturbing. How it will compare to the flashy Draugr Fang remains to be seen, but as Mistlands will presumably be more challenging than the Plains biome, some extra firepower might be welcome.
(Image credit: Iron Gate Studios)The second weapon is a crossbow, teased initially on Twitter before a recent update revealed a better image.
It's unclear whether all of the weapons planned will need Mistlands materials to craft. The Mistlands Bow would make sense, as the name is quite literal, but it's possible that not all new weapons will relate directly to the new biome.
(Image credit: Iron Gate Studios)You'll be able to craft a luxurious cape
A recent blog update teased a new feathered cape, fit for only the best Viking adventurers. You'll be able to craft it using feathers, and presumably some other so-far-unannounced material.
It's unclear what armor rating this new cape will offer, but as it looks so majestic, do you even care?
Food and resources
(Image credit: Iron Gate Studios)New resources: Black Marble and Black Core
Black Marble is one of the new resources that you'll be able to find in the Mistlands biome. It's unclear how this will be used but images have been teased that show you can build structures from it, so presumably it will work in a similar way to stone.
Black Cores, on the other hand appear to be a type of special resource, maybe similar to Surtling Cores. It seems that these new cores will primarily be found in Mistlands dungeons, though what they'll be used for is anyone's guess.
Food for thought
New food is also arriving with the Mistlands, along with new recipes to make different meals. Again, the details aren't known, though an image was recently posted showing the possible dishes you might prepare in the upcoming update.
(Image credit: Iron Gate Studios)Will the Mistlands be dangerous?
Most likely, yes. Though perhaps still not as dangerous as the trees.
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For those of us with console pals, today is a good day. Discord integration for Xbox is finally leaving the Insiders program and is available for everyone.
The integration means that PC players can chat with Xbox console users on Discord, as well as see their Xbox game activity. The feature has been in place for Insiders program members since July, but is now being opened up to the masses.
I tested it out and, unfortunately, the whole process of how to join is still a bit finicky and requires you to have your phone with you to get it set up. After linking your Xbox account to Discord, you'll be able to transfer the call over from Discord to your Xbox. You also need the Xbox mobile app to make all this happen, so it's not exactly the simplest of processes. It's a little annoying having to have two apps, your phone, and your actual console to make it all work, but it's nice that it even works at all.
Xbox Update: 100% of you should now be able to voice chat from your @Xbox console! If you are unable to do so, you probably do not own an Xbox. https://t.co/aqKbJLfcZ2September 13, 2022
See moreTo get Discord calls working on Xbox, you need to do the following:
- Connect your Xbox account to Discord via 'Connections' in User Settings
- Jump in a voice channel on Discord and select 'transfer audio'
- Confirm in the Xbox mobile app that yes, you would please like to transfer the audio
You can transfer any voice call on Discord: from servers, direct messages and group DMs. It's also a nice touch that people can see what you're up to on Xbox and how long you've been playing it, the same as you can on PC.
Even though it's a bit of a ballache to get going, I'm never gonna be mad about people having more ways to communicate across platforms. Not all of my friends own a PC and it can be annoying having Discord and game audio coming out of two separate channels, so this is a pretty neat addition. With PlayStation being my non-PC platform of choice, I'll be patiently waiting for voice chat to arrive over there, too.
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It's nice to be reminded that videogames aren't all about the latest shiny AAA snoozefest, but can slot into our lives in fleeting and funny ways. Such is Checkbox Olympics, a browser game that was probably built for a laugh but turns out as a weirdly perfect fit for passing around your colleagues.
Take me, a bitter old man with a lifetime's experience at clicking things. My wizened fingers managed 11.224 seconds in the 100 metre sprint, and I challenged my colleagues to beat it. Joshua Wolens, with his limber digits and all the advantages of youth, managed a risible 15.637 seconds. "But I am handicapped by a trackpad, that's my excuse," writes Josh. There are no excuses in the Checkbox Olympics my friend. "This is why my elite Starcraft career never took off," he laments, before going off to console himself with lunch.
Mollie Taylor manages just over 12 seconds. Nice try, but no cigar. "Mwahahaha" I declare in slack, prompting a few more colleagues to tilt at my insufferable windmill. It's a 15.74 for Lauren Morton. "Steelseries mouse," writes Lauren, "and for what." It's a 13.85 for Sarah James. A 12.758 for Alan Dexter.
No-one will ever beat me at the Checkbox Olympics!
"9.98 seconds" writes Robin Valentine. "First try too, bet I could get it faster."
"bullpucky" I declare, feeling the blood drain from my ego, "screenshot or it didn't happen."
Reader: he had the screenshot.
You see? Checkbox Olympics is perfect for lightly annoying colleagues, gaining office popularity, and eventually tempting out the one nerd who's going to beat your 'donkey'. The best bit is how you graduate from the 100m sprint into the 110m hurdles, which is even more of a challenge but also somehow feels amusingly like executing hurdle jumps with your mouse.
Phil Savage arrived late to the party, then said "I refuse to participate on this office PC with its messed up DPI settings," which is probably the most PC Gamer thing he could've said.
You can play Checkbox Olympics here. It was built by a nice chap called Tim, who has a Youtube channel here.
"8.973" writes Robin Valentine. On second thoughts, screw the Checkbox Olympics.
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This isn't scientific but, in my experience of Warcraft, the most beloved era and character is what WoW Classic is about to go into: Wrath of the Lich King. The Lich King being of course Arthas, once crown prince of Lordearon and knight of the silver hand, who would in an effort to save his people take up the mournblade Frostmourne, and in so doing damn himself.
Frostmourne is, as weapons go, as metal as it gets. It has the power to shatter and imprison the souls of its victims, turning the living into undead servants of the Lich King. Arthas slew kings and destroyed nations with Frostmourne, and to me at least it is WoW's most legendary blade and a key part of the world's history.
Febo is a professional jeweller with over ten years' experience, and a couple of years ago opened his own company and now has his own workshop. I'm guessing in his previous job the boss wasn't down with using the company workshop to crack out Warcraft weapons. Febo started playing Warcraft games when he was 12 and, basically, his two passions are jewellery and fantasy games: you can see where this is going.
He chose Frostmourne as his first high-end project because "I played the game for a very long time", which I think many of us will relate to. "Because Frostmourne has been in the lore since 2004 in different games and expansions I had to choose which design I would use as a reference," says Febo. "I used the design from Warcraft Reforged, and I know everyone hates Reforged, but to me that's still the most pleasing version of Frostmourne and it's definitely got the most details: and I like details!"
As you can see in the video below, being a professional jeweller means you are an absolute badass who warps and weaves precious metals with incredible heat. This is one of those 'process' videos that's kind of mesmerising to watch, mainly because of the combination of Febo's skillset and seeing all the kit jewellers use: plus the way all these hundreds of individual components are planned out, executed perfectly, and ultimately combined into something gorgeous.
There's also a funny appeal here, which is that my first reaction was "oh it's not a full-sized sword, it's small." Then the video became fascinating because the recreation is so small, and the level of detail that Febo is going into on these elements is wild.
As fan projects go, the only thing you can say is a well-deserved 'wow'. This is obviously also a professional project made with enormous skill, and thus sadly not something you'll be seeing for sale anytime soon. Needless to say, of course, Febo has been asked. "The piece was not made for sale, but it would be very very expensive!"
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Originally released in 2003, XIII was a great shooter that, largely thanks to a cel-shaded aesthetic based on a French comic, became a cult classic. In 2019 Microids announced a welcome remake of the game, but then it arrived and… oh. Oh dear.
Among the remake's crimes was an update to the visual style that frankly missed the point. It moved a game that was beloved for its cartoony, colourful style towards something more like Zuckerberg's terrible metaverse. I mean look at this: just look at it.
(Image credit: Microids)The remake was so bad, and reception was so negative, that Microids and developer PlayMagic made an official apology.
The remake was so bad, in fact, that in June this year Microids announced a remake of the remake, with a new studio (Tower Five) behind it. And now this re-remake has arrived, replacing the original remake on Steam and appearing as a free download for all existing owners of the game.
For some reason Microids' YouTube channel only hosts the Switch trailer, which is what I've stuck above, but from the first seconds this looks like it always should have looked. Which is to say, just like the original game but in HD. The trailer gives you a glimpse of many of the game's locations, and the brighter palette is a world away from the washed-out look of the first remake.
It's not just about the visuals, either. The original remake had plenty of bugs and poor performance issues, as well as an audio mix that didn't live up to the original, and I feel kinda bad having dunked on it so much by this point. Credit where credit is due. Something clearly went wrong with this project, and Microids didn't abandon it but decided to try and do it right.
The XIII remake currently has overwhelmingly negative reviews on Steam. We'll have to see if this substantial re-working can change its fortunes but, just on sight alone, it looks so much closer to what fans of the original always wanted from this project.
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194 days. That's how long Platinum Games' fast-forgotten live service game Babylon's Fall has been online. Now, a mere six months after release, the developer has announced the multiplayer action RPG will be closing its doors in early 2023.
Though it's still available for purchase on Steam at the time of writing, Babylon's Fall is in the process of being pulled from all storefronts and will no longer be available for purchase after September 13. Sales of premium currency Garaz are also being nixed. The game will continue with its second season until November 29 before kicking off "The Final Season" which will run until servers terminate on February 27, 2023.
Unsurprisingly Platinum says it's cancelling any large-scale updates, but says it's planning to "implement as many events and other initiatives" in the runup to the game's closure as possible. November will introduce the first of two new Very Hard duels—quests that pit players against an incredibly powerful boss—with Zenon, and then Ereshkigal in January.
Babylon's Fall will terminate its service on February 27, 2023https://t.co/Htx8ILAFjG pic.twitter.com/Osyd8lpMwlSeptember 13, 2022
See moreIn the closure's announcement, Platinum thanked its players for their continued feedback throughout Babylon's short lifespan. "In particular, through our surveys we received a great deal of enthusiastic messages of support alongside keen observations of issues and suggestions for improvement," the statement read. "This really made us feel that we were able to create the world of Babylon's Fall together with our players. Despite all of your support, we are truly sad and sorry to say that we will be unable to continue with the game's service. We hope you continue to enjoy playing Babylon's Fall until the service ends."
It's a real shame to see the path Babylon's Fall has taken, especially from a developer that once consistently put out bangers. From its release, the game was surrounded by negative feedback and a rapidly dropping player count. In her Babylon's Fall review, Anne-Marie Coyle said it would "bore you to death," calling it "remarkable only for its blandness." Despite being a full-priced $60 game, it was plagued by monetisation tactics and pointless battle passes that squandered any fun or natural player progression. Even just two months after release it appeared that only one person was playing the game—which turned out to be journalist Dashiell Wood who is probably very upset right now.
It's never nice to see a game go out this way—by the time it closes down it will have been live for 361 days. That's almost 200 days less than how much time we went between the game's E3 2018 reveal and its next appearance at the 2019 State of Play. It's hard not to think of the kind of game Babylon's Fall could have been if it had stuck to its original Nier: Automata-like vision, and feels like a mighty unfortunate end for something that could've been a hell of a lot more fun.
Babylon's Fall's servers will close on February 27, 2023 at 11 PM PT.
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Ubisoft must be in a reflective mood. Yesterday the company was (kinda) walking back its once-strident commitment to blockchain integration in games, and now it's decided that maybe not every Assassin's Creed needs to be a sprawling 150-hour epic. I couldn't agree more.
In an interview with IGN, Ubisoft's VP of editorial, Fawzi Mesmar, shed some light on the company's philosophy regarding its upcoming games. Ubi doesn't want "one game to do everything," says Mesmar, who says the company wants to be able to make more focused games that appeal to certain fans, "but maybe not everybody". Ubisoft's policy going forward will be to focus on "depth of experience" over breadth of content, says Mesmar, which sounds to me like less map-spam and maybe even a bit less map in general.
It feels like quite a shift for a company that's become synonymous with enormous, sprawling open worlds stuffed to the gills with collectibles and buyable gewgaws over the last decade. Sure, it's not like the company only produces Assassin's Creed and Far Cry games: Ubisoft is huge enough that it can have teams work on stuff like a Trivial Pursuit game and a less-than-amazing rollerblading game as well as the big time sinks. But it's the very familiar and sizable open-world format of recent Assassin's Creed and Far Cry games that define Ubisoft for many.
We'll have to wait for Assassin's Creed: Mirage to see what the philosophy looks like in practice. Mesmar confirmed to IGN that the upcoming game—and its sister-games AC: Red and AC: Hexe—is an example of this strategy. Mirage is "for the people who want to go back to [the] roots'' of the series, while other projects will cater to other fans, including those looking for a "big RPG" experience, so I suppose the template set by AC: Origins lives on somewhere. It'll just live alongside more focused games like Mirage.
Mirage will release sometime next year, while Red and Hexe probably won't see the light of day before 2024. You shouldn't be too starved for Ubi-content this year, though. The company promises a final free update to Valhalla "in a few months' time". Maybe Ubi's next addition to its design philosophy can be firmer release dates?
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The average price of a graphics card has effectively halved since the start of the year. That's the findings from a 3DCenter piece digging into historical data cribbed from Jon Peddie Research (paywall), and it highlights the massive change in GPU sales over the cryptomining/pandemic years, but also why Nvidia has found itself in such a serious predicament today.
It's a very thorough analysis of the raw numbers and, despite being native German, the Google translation still makes it very much worth reading. Though I just wanted to pull out a couple of interesting points that it raises.
We do though have to caveat this with a little clarification around what these numbers actually represent; they're not the final sales of cards to end users at retail, they're the sales of graphics cards from manufacturers into the retail channel itself. They're also not going to be 100% accurate, but still close enough for us to be able to draw some conclusions.
The real kicker from this is the average selling price (ASP) of cards going into those retailers. These numbers aren't the vastly over-inflated dollar figures we were used to seeing price-gouging resellers indulge in on ebay, they're not even taken into account here.
That's more than a 300% increase on the average price in just two years.
And yet, from a low of just around $267 in the innocent times of around the middle of 2019, the ASP of a GPU rose to a high of around $1,077 in the middle of 2021.
That's more than a 300% increase on the average price in just two years.
(Image credit: Future)The reasons for the rise in graphics card prices, and the increase in the overall volume too, have been covered in depth over the last couple of years. But, in short, it was the perfect storm of increased demand for tech due to the pandemic lockdowns, related disruption in the supply chain, and an exponential increase in the profitability of crypto GPU mining via ethereum.
That meant miners would happily hoover up any spare graphics cards they could, and do it in bulk. But, more importantly, the profitability of ethereum mining at the time meant they would also pay any price.
That drove prices to the average gamer through the roof too, and made it either very difficult to buy a card because of limited volumes or because of an unreasonable cost.
You can see from the numbers alone that the tipping point has happened, where supply is starting to outstrip demand, and that the bubble has burst as ethereum edges ever closer to the imminent merge. This is the point where it will end the use of graphics card processing to power the blockchain ledger, and that will likely occur in the next few days, at least that's what Google thinks.
(Image credit: NiseriN, Getty Images)It is worth noting again the dip in sales numbers relates to sales of GPUs into the channels; that's going down because the retailers are starting to realise they don't need to keep buying graphics cards from manufacturers, because they've got a bunch still sat in the warehouse and, with imminent next-gen releases, not all are going to sell.
And they're definitely not going to sell for the prices retailers were previously able to charge just a little while earlier.
At the end of 2021 we were looking at around $1,000 as an average selling price, while the numbers at the end of the second quarter—essentially the end of June 2022—were practically half that at $529.
Sadly, I don't like our chances of ever going back to an age where the average selling price of a graphics card is less than $300. If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that gamers will put up with ridiculous prices for the new shiny GPU thing. And you can bet manufacturers have noted that.
(Image credit: Future)The other numbers worth noting is the difference between AMD and Nvidia when it comes to the volume of graphics cards the two big GPU makers sold into retailers over the past few years. On the AMD side you can see either the difficulty the company had in producing a higher number of cards, or that it chose to keep the numbers down deliberately. It's numbers are remarkably consistent.
The red team only really seemed to kick its manufacturing into gear around the end of 2021 where volumes start to creep towards 3 million cards sold. Anecdotally that's how it seemed to us, too. Where it was all but impossible to pick up a Radeon GPU until late in 2021, when it almost started to dominate retail.
You can't blame Nvidia for cashing in on selling spades to the gold miners.
That wasn't really down to GPU mining either, as AMD cards were generally not seen as effective, either from a raw performance or efficiency point of view.
Nvidia, however, went full bore into over-production, with sales topping 9 million at the end of 2020 as it kicked off its RTX 30-series range. From there it continued to grow because, with GPU mining still holding sway for much of the past few years, it could count on those cards being sold. Now the bottom has dropped out of ethereum mining the lag in production and supply means there are a lot of cards floating around in the channel, and retailers are no longer buying in the same volume.
It was inevitable that the cryptocurrency crash, and the expected shift from the GPU-based operation of ethereum to a far more efficient one, would result in a large number of cards both in retail and in the second-hand market. But you really can't blame Nvidia for cashing in on selling spades to the gold miners, so to speak.
Though now it's having to do a bit of damage limitation, and the suggested delays in launching its new cards—or just giving us a single high-performance GPU to drool over in the RTX 4090—are the price we're maybe paying ourselves.
Still, there are still new cards on the horizon. Nvidia's much-leaked RTX 4090 is expected to be shown off by Jen-Hsun on stage at GTC next week, and AMD will have its own Navi 31 cards on show potentially in November this year.
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Intel's new technology will turn on your PC as you go to sit down at your desktop, or turn it off as you walk away, using nothing but standard Wi-Fi hardware included alongside its 13th Gen Raptor Lake processors.
The technology is called Wi-Fi Proximity Sensing (or just Wi-Fi Sensing), and since I'm over at Intel's lab in Haifa, Israel, I've been able to give it a go for myself. It really is as simple as it sounds. You just walk up to the PC and it will wake from sleep to your desktop or lock screen. Then, if you walk away, it'll go back to sleep again 30 seconds after you abandon it.
I'm told the tech uses the standard Intel Wi-Fi network interface silicon included in its upcoming 13th Gen CPUs—nothing extraordinary—so should work for most machines built using that hardware. Though, from what Intel has told us in its labs, we're unlikely to see it enabled on older CPUs.
There is some extra OS-side communication required for the system to work, though Intel's driver package will take care of that. Otherwise it's solely relying on detecting changes in the Wi-Fi frequency to detect movement and wake the machine.
Perhaps if you're the owner of a cat or dog you'll not want to use this feature. Or if you're prone to extremely long breaks from your PC mid-gaming session (we all know someone like that), but it's still a neat way to use extant technology and shouldn't cost a penny. Intel reckons it'll actually help reduce power consumption, as you won't accidentally leave your PC to linger for hours on end.
Now if you're wondering when you'll be able to pick up an actual Raptor Lake CPU, Intel is playing that one closer to the chest. It's undoubtedly going to be soon, however, as the company has already begun teasing single-threaded and multi-threaded performance improvements.
Team Ninja reveals its own Assassin's Creed Japan
in Gaming News
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Rise of the Ronin is Team Ninja's second action game currently in development—Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is coming soon too—and takes place in 19th century Japan near the end of the Tokugawa period.
In the third-person, (maybe) open world game, you play as a samurai and "fight to forge a new era for Japan," according to the description for the game's trailer, which debuted at the PlayStation State of Play stream today.
The trailer follows a hawk flying through populated streets and as it soars up to reveal the titular ronin character standing atop a cliff. It cuts between some characters in snowy, bright, and cavernous locations and then has a shot of the ronin riding a horse up a hill with a stunning scene of trees and a bridge in the background. Then it cuts to the ronin pulling out a wingsuit to glide over the water and to the city streets below—immediately evoking the sort of open-world exploration that Ubisoft is going for in its recently announced Assassin's Creed Japan game, codename Red.
It's a Team Ninja game, creators of the Souls-inspired Nioh games, so eventually the trailer slips into the game's combat. Rise of the Ronin's one-on-one duels resemble Sekiro more than Dark Souls, but the zoomed-in camera frames it almost like a fighting game. An apparent parry mechanic interrupts an enemy's swing and opens them up for a finishing blow. Another scene sees the ronin whip out a grappling hook to pull himself toward an opponent and slice him with fiery blades. The trailer ends with the ronin shooting a solider with a musket and drawing a revolver to finish someone off—this guy clearly isn't afraid to use the best hardware on offer.
Rise of the Ronin is a "PlayStation 5 console exclusive" which means it'll probably come to PC too. It's due out in 2024, the same year that Ubisoft is planning to release codename Red.
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