Though Left 4 Dead 2 still exists, and has a reasonably healthy if sodium-infused community, it’s still stuck in its 2009 ways. It's exciting, but it lacks proper personalisation. Back 4 Blood, the spiritual successor from the original-ish developers of L4D, is fully embracing 2021 by letting players and the AI game director throw down some game-changing cards before each battle.
Ah, autumn. Crunchy leaves, snuggly jumpers, and the sort of weather that makes you want to cosy up with a good tabletop RPG - or a digital adaptation of a tabletop RPG, I suppose. Owlcat Games are pandering to my ideal autumn evening by giving Pathfinder: Wrath Of The Righteous a September 2nd release date. There's also a second beta available right now for Kickstarter backers too, so they can try out some new quests and systems before the game's full launch.
Ray tracing might be the big, hot graphics tech of 2021, but of all the ray tracing games that have come to PC so far, only a handful of them have actually blown me away in the old graphics department. I can count the number of games worth buying a ray tracing-capable graphics card for on a single hand - Control, Metro Exodus, Cyberpunk 2077, Minecraft at a push - but the good news is that we can now add Resident Evil Village to that exclusive list, as Capcom's latest survival horror game really capitalises on its atmospheric lighting to make it one of the best ray tracing games yet.
Resident Evil Village is a blended smoothie of horror, one that covers a spectrum of flavours to suit various tastes. Those first couple of sips are delightfully complex. Dark and brooding. But as you drain the glass, it begins to taste a bit too fiery, a bit too wild, until you can't taste anything. In fact, it's spilled all over your shirt. Again?! Urgh, this happened last time.
If, like me, you were one of the many excited players eager to jump into Apex Legends last night to try out all the lovely new things added in the battle royale's ninth season, you likely had a rough time logging in. A menu screen telling me there were no servers, the queue for Arenas mode being infinitely long, and losing access to all but the base characters were but a few of the problems I ran into myself. While these things seem to have been fixed now, it's fair to say the Legacy update had a rough go of it.
The opening moments of the Epic vs. Apple antitrust suit were rendered amusingly farcical yesterday, after a public conference call failed to mute all of its listeners, leading to a chorus of Fortnite players dialling-in to sound off about the restrictions placed on their favorite battle royale title.
The conference call — implemented in many courtrooms — allows members of the public to log on and listen to proceedings live as they take place. But, as reported by The Verge, the court failed to mute all of yesterday's listeners, leading to over 200 participants simultaneously caterwauling that Fortnite remains unavailable on iPhone and iPad. Some listeners reportedly made the most of the opportunity, taking time out to advertise their YouTube and Twitch channels. You gotta hustle, I guess...
One of the most beloved players in the Overwatch League is facing backlash over political comments he made in a stream. On Chinese social media site Weibo, several members of the Chinese Overwatch League teams stated they would boycott any events that include Korean player Jong-ryeol “Saebyeolbe” Park due to his…
I remember vividly the first time I played one of my favorite games of all time, Resident Evil 4.
Ever since the joy-inducing Hot Wheels expansion pack for Forza Horizon 3 I’ve been craving a high-quality game about racing my favorite toy cars through real-world locations. I’m really hoping September’s Hot Wheels Unleashed is it.
As soon as I arrived in Resident Evil Village’s sinister rural setting, its Resident Evil 4 influence reared its snarling head. Almost immediately surrounded by rabid Lycan locals, I scrambled for shotgun shells and bookshelves to block doorways as the horde closed in, only to be saved a split-second away from death. It’s an intense welcome that serves as a fantastic flashback to the opening of Shinji Mikami’s magnum-toting magnum opus, and one made all the more frantic in first-person perspective. Resident Evil Village might not break much new ground in its own right, but it successfully grafts Resident Evil 4’s best action elements onto the series’ more modern form established in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, making for a genuinely engrossing and increasingly combat-heavy continuation of the Ethan Winters story.
Forgotten Waters from Plaid Hat Games takes home the first Golden Geek for remote play
Meet the characters at the heart of the Targaryen civil war
Finnish mobile studio Metacore has secured â¬150 million in funding from Clash of Clans maker Supercell. ...
Justin Keenan, one of the writers at ZA/UM who worked on the revered RPG Disco Elysium, will be on-hand at the all-virtual GDC 2021 to talk about shaping the game's outstanding narrative. GDC 2021 takes place July 19-23. ...
Updated:After Google Stadia shut down first-party game development operations, a number of developers have reemerged at former Stadia games boss Jade Raymond at her new Sony-backed Haven Studios. ...
Full fibre broadband is here. The availability of this much-faster fibre to the premises (FTTP) broadband technology has grown significantly across the UK. There's still a long way to go before it's more universally available, but there's growing competition between BT, EE, Sky, Vodafone and more to offer incredible download speeds. These providers are seeking to entice customers to switch to the new service with better offers. If you're lucky enough to be within the coverage area and want to try it for yourself, here are some of the best full fibre broadband deals out there this month.
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The arrival of hardware-accelerated ray tracing has seen developers mostly adopt a hybrid approach, combining standard rasterisation techniques with carefully deployed RT features. Fully ray traced games are few and far between, but revisiting decades-old classics and delivering them with a full RT upgrade is within the power envelope of today's graphics hardware. We've already seen Quake 2 RTX and today we can reveal early work on a fully ray traced version of the N64 classic, Super Mario 64.
The embedded video below shows over half an hour of gameplay taken from an early technical preview of Super Mario 64 RT, a PC-based revamp of the game that replaces all of the lighting and the reflections in the game with RT effects. We've got a somewhat special build of the game, built from source code provided by author Daríosamo with additional elements provided by Render96, a project that aims to improve models and textures in Super Mario 64 with a view to matching the kind of pre-rendered SGI aesthetic seen in pre-release Nintendo 64 renders. The SMT64RT project goes public today with a technical preview available to download.
The Humble Choice bundle for May is now live with Metro Exodus as the headline game - including the option for a free upgrade to the Enhanced Edition when it launches on 6th May.
Digital Foundry has already gone hands-on with this “simply brilliant” update which demands ray tracing capable graphics hardware to play. As the first triple-A game to make this demand it's a strong showcase for the tech so if you want to see the results and don't own a copy yet here's a cheap way to do so.
If you aren't aware, Humble Choice is a rolling subscription service that gives you a number of PC games to keep each month as part of your membership. If you're a new subscriber, you can get the latest bundle with all 12 games for a discounted introductory price of just £8.61 per month.
At least half a dozen more Google Stadia staff have found a new home at Haven Studios, the developer set up by former Stadia games exec Jade Raymond.
The list notably includes Corey May, who like Raymond once helped define the early Assassin's Creed series. May served as scriptwriter, lead writer and then narrative director on numerous Assassin's Creed games over the course of a 12-year span, and worked with Raymond on the series' first couple of entries.
At Stadia, May served as its head of creative services. He's joined at Haven by former Stadia general manager Sebastien Puel - another high profile hire.
Everywhere I look, the empty gaze of one - two, three, five; oh my god, dozens of - glassy eyes are staring back, watchful and hateful. They chitter merrily to each other as I tear through rooms, desperately seeking the outlier secreted somewhere in the mass of giggling, squirming china dolls. Twice I run out of time - I'm so panicked, I don't even see the thing when it's right in front of me - and then they swarm me, lifting horrifying, segmented appendages to attack, and I properly scream this time, loud enough that my next-door neighbour hears me via an open window and hesitantly knocks on the door to ensure I'm okay.
It's not entirely Capcom's doing that I'm a screamy, jumpy mess - I effed myself up watching the (terrible) 1987 horror Dolls when I was still in junior school and my fear of those frozen china faces has never quite left me - but it's as though the developer reached into my brain, jotted down my worst nightmare, stuck it in Resident Evil Village, and then forced me to relive it.
It is to the developer's credit, however, that this neat, traditional home is such a triumph of understated spooks and masterful level design. Later, when I'm lost within a labyrinthine factory that long outstays its welcome, I'll realise how unusual - and special - House Beneviento is; even if I wasn't quite able to appreciate it while I was trapped there, racing through shadowy corridors and frantically hunting for a place to hide. It's terrifyingly brilliant and brilliantly terrifying in equal measure.
The people behind Gamescom have ditched plans for a hybrid event and announced its 2021 show will be digital only.
Gamescom will now be online and free for all, the German Games Industry Association announced.
"This decision was made after extensive discussions with partners and exhibitors," Gamescom said. "Thus, the organisers take into account the current situation, in which too many companies are unable to participate in physical events this year due to the still difficult development. In this way, they also meet the partners' strong need for planning security."
Spirits from Splatoon, Pokemon, and Ouendan get to take center stage in the next May 2021 SSBU Spirit Board event.
The post SSBU Spirit Board Event Salutes Singers appeared first on Siliconera.
A The Bitmap Brothers Collection 1 cartridge with five games will debut in September 2021 and work with both of the Evercade systems.
The post The Bitmap Brothers Evercade Cartridge Will Appear in September appeared first on Siliconera.
Once again, gamescom 2021 will be an online only affair in August 2021. Here are some of the upcoming parts of the event.
The post gamescom 2021 Will Be Digital and Free appeared first on Siliconera.
Resident Evil Village starts off incredibly strong, but loses steam during its final hours.
The post Review: Resident Evil Village Starts Strong and Loses Its Luster appeared first on Siliconera.
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I haven’t had the time to shift my mental furniture around to accommodate Hitman 3, yet. It seems like an undertaking that requires some serious focus, and right now I’m too busy playing Overwatch and watching Prodigal Son. So I confess I didn’t know that the game’s seasons were themed according to the deadly sins, which really confused me when I saw what he was wearing for the 'Pride' update. I’ve never even seen a PVC peacock suit before.
I can’t even be accused of exaggerating. Look! That’s a peacock outfit, made entirely out of non-peacock materials. The lights really do bounce off that polished three-piece, which seems entirely antithetical to 47's skulking lifestyle.
Humans have had their day in the city builder sun, so Distant Kingdoms is making way for fantasy folks such as dwarves and elves and orcs and all. Except none of them can get along, so the gods have banished them all from their homes and forced them to rebuild. No lovely castles for you until you decide to behave. Distant Kingdoms has just launched into early access with two maps and four races to choose from while it works to add a full campaign and modding support.
Ah, I do so love a fresh new glitch with the latest season of my favourite battle royale. Apex Legends' ninth season, Legacy, launched last night, and it came with its fair share of server woes. Those are mostly dealt with, but now players have had a chance to try out the new character Valkyrie, and some of them are finding her abilities have some interesting (read: completely broken) combos with other Legends. Namely, her ultimate keeps throwing her terrified squadmates under the map.
In real out-of-the-blue news, retro-lovin' publisher Microids has announced that the 16-bit adventure classic Flashback is to receive a sequel. The new game, tentatively titled Flashback 2 is scheduled to launch on PC and consoles sometime in 2022.
Originally released on the Amiga in 1992, Flashback is an action-packed platformer telling the story of Conrad Hart, an amnesiac federal agent whose memories contain information pertaining to an alien invasion. Players guide Hart through a futuristic cyberpunk setting, completing missions, engaging in wild gun battles, and even becoming a contestant on a Running Man-style game show in efforts to return to Earth and overthrow the subterfuge.
Flashback won over critics and fans with its intelligent storytelling, beautiful animation, and immersive atmosphere. Flashback would be followed by pseudo-sequel Fade to Black in 1995, and has received multiple remasters and remakes since release. Microids' new project appears to be a straight sequel to the original title, although no details have been released regarding its gameplay or aesthetic approach.
Importantly, original Flashback designer Paul Cuisset is on board with the project.
"Developing a sequel to Flashback is an idea I've had for a very long time. I can’t wait for players to discover the new adventures of Conrad B. Hart, a character created almost 30 years ago," said Cuisset of the project. "With Microids, we are really aiming to please the fans of the original title while being appealing to any players with a weak spot for futuristic games."
Detective Pikachu is a really strange subseries for The Pokemon Company. Beginning life as a 3DS game, it spun off into a film that did fairly well, and it even got a giant amiibo! It's on their radar to an extent, but only just.
Is there room for a film sequel? Speaking to Inverse, star Justice Smith (who plays Tim Goodman) doesn't think it's going to happen, though he is game if it does.
How did we get here?
It feels like just yesterday that I rode to the store (RIP Power Video) to rent the original Resident Evil, which transported me to a magical haunted mansion for an entire weekend. From there Capcom slowly ramped up the action and ham to the utter point of excess in RE6. People couldn't take it anymore! I think some of you drew the line at Wesker's anime son punching zombies.
Sure enough, Capcom got back to their roots with the spooky Resident Evil 7, and it paid off, big time, as it's the most successful entry to date, and their overall second-best-selling game ever. Village brings back some of that lovely Christmas glazed ham and pairs it with the first-person horror of RE7. But mostly in a good way.
It had to happen at some point. But so soon?
Hot on the heels of yesterday's Barney the Dinosaur mod, the Resident Evil Village homebrew community has taken its creativity one step too far, birthing what one of the most disturbing and frightening images in the storied history of Capcom's survival horror franchise. Curse you, Crazy Potato, for unleashing the "Count Theodora" mod, which transforms the beautiful-yet-unsettling face of Lady Alcina Dimitescu into that of Resident Evil's trademark stalker: Thomas the Tank Engine.
Be afraid... Be very afraid.
To follow Outriders’ post-launch journey is to watch an Olympic game of whack-a-mole. Developer People Can Fly will stamp out one issue, only for another to pop right up. The latest: Some players are apparently getting instantly killed by attacks that otherwise would not cause instantaneous death.
GamesCom 2021 will be a fully digital event this year, GamesCom officials announced in a press release today. The move is a reversal of earlier plans for a semi-live event, inadvisable given the, y’know, roiling pandemic that’s still an ever-present aspect of everyday life.
