January 2023

A group of Grand Theft Auto players have come together to create a heartfelt tribute to rally and stunt driver Ken Block.

Block, who appeared in 2015's Need for Speed reboot and the Dirt series of games, sadly passed away earlier this week following a snowmobile accident on his ranch in Utah.

Following the news of his passing, fans gathered together to pay tribute to Block in one of the most fitting ways - by recreating some of the famous stunts from his hugely successful series of Gymkhana videos (thanks, PCGamesN).

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UK games sales were down across the board in 2022, despite an increased interest in new releases.

As per GSD market data (thanks GamesIndustry.biz), video game sales fell by six percent, while console sales dropped by 29 percent.

FIFA and Call of Duty were the top games of the year, while Nintendo Switch was the best selling console (despite a drop in sales).

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Fire Emblem is one of Nintendo's longest running series, but one that only began appearing outside of Japan during the Game Boy Advance era. Since then, impressively, the series has managed to gain popularity around the world with the first mainline Switch entry, Three Houses, quickly becoming the best-selling game in the entire series. The latest series entry - Fire Emblem Engage - delivers promising first impressions, with a range of improvements over its predecessor.

For those unfamiliar with the series, the gist is this - Fire Emblem is a tactical role-playing game. Battles are fought across a series of map broken up into a grid around which players can move their units. You'll build up your characters between battles while working your way through the main campaign. It's wickedly addictive and the series has long been respected as a result.

With Fire Emblem Engage, Intelligent Systems returns to some of the series more traditional concepts with a fantasy-driven story spread across multiple continents serving as the game's framework as opposed to the almost Persona-esque school system of Three Houses. That's not to say some of these ideas haven't been carried over - the light exploration and side content remains - but it carries a different tone.

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Humble Bundle has announced the games available this January in its Humble Choice subscription, including Doom Eternal and OlliOlli World.

Eight games have been added to the service in total: Tribes of Midgard, Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG, Grow: Song of the Evertree, Conan Chop Chop, Hokko Life, and The Serpent Rogue, as well as the two mentioned above.

In addition, Choice members also have access to the Humble Games Collection, with indie games like Signalis, Unsighted, and A Hat in Time, which all come recommended.

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Bloober Team's remake of Silent Hill 2 will be "faithful to the original title" while also modernising areas that haven't aged as well.

That's according to Bloober Team's marketing chief Anna Jasińska in an interview with DreadXP.

Asked about the extent the studio was given free reign by Konami to transform the game with its own vision, Jasińska said: "We are focusing on bringing the distinct, visceral atmosphere back in the modernised Silent Hill 2. Longtime fans shouldn’t worry about us 'missing the point' while we’re livening up the title. We faithfully stick to the traditional story canon while remaking the gameplay and updating the graphics from the ground up."

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After a brief stint away, having only left the service back in November, Mortal Shell is back on Game Pass once again.

I heard rumours it had returned so went to double check for myself, and, sure enough, when I typed the game's name into Game Pass I was soon greeted with a tired looking knight (or Shell) looking back at me.

Mortal Shell is a Dark-Souls inspired action RPG from Cold Symmetry, with the developer stating it will "test your sanity and resilience".

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We haven't seen or heard much about Fntastic's upcoming zombie MMO The Day Before for a while now. However, with its release date tiptoeing ever closer (1st March on PC), the developer has debuted some new gameplay.

Shared as part of CES 2023, this trailer shows off the game with Nvidia's latest ray tracing tech in play. It's a bite-sized little teaser that begins with a few sweeping shots showing the destruction and destitution left in The Day Before's version of a post-pandemic America.

It then cuts to scenes of the player character shooting down their enemies, engaging in stealthy trips into darkened rooms and along questionable corridors, and, of course, a swarming zombie horde. You can see it for yourself below.

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Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti graphics card goes on sale today, offering largely RTX 3090 to 3090 Ti level performance at $799 in the US and £799 in the UK. That's the narrative, anyway - but how many cards will actually be available at the MSRP/RRP?

It's an important question, because as the old saying goes, there are no bad products, just bad prices. The RTX 4070 Ti is quite a strong option at $799, given its level of performance - particularly for those upgrading from Pascal (GTX 10-series) and Turing (20-series) GPUs or AMD's equivalents. At $899 or $999 though, this graphics card starts to make much less sense.

And with no Founders Edition cards available, we're relying on third-party GPU makers to create SKUs that meet that price point - when it would be much more profitable for them to offer overclocked designs with oversized coolers and RGB bling for $50, $100 or $200 more. In fact, it's these sorts of cards that seem to have been sent out for review, including our unit which offered a paltry 30MHz overclock over stock - but came with a higher price tag to match.

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Fire Emblem Engage feels like the tactical RPG game I've been waiting for, yet after a handful of hours in its presence I'm still unsure if I prefer it to Three Houses. It's a natural evolution for the series with a classic touch, building upon Fire Emblem's modern gameplay while taking cues from older entries. That might sound obvious when former protagonists like Marth are back, but this goes beyond the 12 familiar faces. Engage reminds me more of Fire Emblem Awakening, the 3DS entry that pushed the series’ popularity to new heights – and even if it might not yet trump Three Houses, after eight chapters I’m struggling to put it down.

Set on Elyos, you play as Alear, a divine dragon who's spent the last millennium sleeping after defeating the Fell Dragon, Sombron. With both sides awake once more, it's a race to recover the twelve Emblem rings, each housing the spirit of a former hero. Engage falls into some tired tropes like the amnesiac protagonist, though I'm currently enjoying its character writing. Alear's a charming leader, and there's a likable supporting cast, even if I do miss the moral greyness that made Three Houses (and Fates, somewhat) so intriguing. However, that's a likely consequence of ditching multiple routes for a singular campaign.

A lawsuit filed by Bungie against the perpetrator behind a series of fake Destiny 2 DMCA strikes is scheduled for a jury trial in 2024.

The $7.7m lawsuit was filed last year due to a number of false copyright takedowns sent to Destiny 2 players in March. In June the perpetrator was identified as Nicholas Minor a.k.a Lord Nazo.

At the time, Bungie alleged that Minor launched a "malicious campaign to serve fraudulent takedown notices to some of the most prominent and passionate members of that fanbase, purportedly on Bungie's behalf, in apparent retaliation for Bungie enforcing its copyrights against material Minor uploaded to his own YouTube channel".

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Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, best known in the football world for purchasing small Welsh club Wrexham AFC, have been discovered in a FIFA 23 Easter egg.

Smaller clubs like Wrexham aren't normally featured in FIFA, but the club entered the game in FIFA 22 in the "Rest of the World" category, likely due to the novelty of Reynolds and McElhenney being the new owners.

Wrexham then returned for FIFA 23, only this time, players have found some trash talk from Reynolds and McElhenney from the benches.

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The brains behind the upcoming Fallout 4 mod Fallout: London have shared another update on its progress.

This update (spotted by PC Gamer) includes catchy renditions of Rule Britannia, working trains, and - checks notes - murderous mail worker bots known as Post Boxers that will "stamp you out" if you do them wrong. Huh.

This latest update video is truly a sight to behold. Along with the Post Boxers, it also introduces us to another bot out for our blood - the Naval Walker. This is a sentient (in so much as it walks around at its own free will) mine that will chase you down. There are different types of these walkers throughout the mod, with the paint on each denoting which kind you are dealing with.

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AMD has announced a raft of new Ryzen processors at its CES 2023 showcase, including the long-awaited Ryzen 7000X3D processors that should provide a stern rejoinder to Intel's 13th-gen desktop CPUs and could let Team Red reclaim the gaming performance crown.

The idea here is pretty simple: take the '3D V-Cache' technology that made AMD's last-gen Ryzen 7 5800X3D so fast that it challenged even next-gen flagship CPUs, and pair it with some of AMD's fastest Ryzen 7000 processors. The result is three new chips, the Ryzen 7800X3D, Ryzen 7900X3D and the Ryzen 7950X3D. All three come with dramatically increased cache sizes - 104MB of L2 and L3 cache on the Ryzen 7 and up to 144MB on the Ryzen 9 - which minimise the time CPUs spend waiting for data to be copied into the cache, increasing performance considerably in some games.

In AMD-provided benchmarks, the 7800X3D was between 10 and 25 percent faster than the 5800X3D at 1080p in games like Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Borderlands 3 and F1 22 - slightly less than I would have expected, given that the 7800X3D is also using DDR5 RAM versus the DDR4 on the 5800X3D. Perhaps a more interesting comparison is that of the 7950X3D against the 13900K, where AMD showed between a nine and 24 percent performance lead in Watchdogs Legion, Dota 2, Rainbow Six Siege and Horizon Zero Dawn.

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Everyone's favourite rhythm laser sword game Beat Saber is heading to PSVR2.

The news was announced at Sony's CES presentation, alongside Gran Turismo 7 receiving a free upgrade to add PSVR2 compatibility at the launch of the device next month.

It's currently unknown when Beat Saber will be released for Sony's forthcoming VR headset, but it's great news for the platform - it's something of a VR killer app.

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Asus has announced an officially licensed Xbox controller with a built-in OLED display and tri-mode connectivity.

The ROG Raikiri Pro is the first licenced Xbox controller with such connectivity, allowing players to connect to devices via Bluetooth, low-latency 2.4GHz radio, or good old USB-C. This will be especially useful to players who game not just on Xbox or PC (with the relevant adaptor) at low latency, but also on other devices like smartphones or TVs.

The controller's tiny 1.3-inch display can display custom animations, battery life, or microphone status.

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Sony has revealed Project Leonardo, a new accessibility controller for the PlayStation 5.

Announced at CES, the controller has been designed with contributions from accessibility experts and organisations like AbleGamers, SpecialEffect and Stack Up.

The controller is highly customisable, comprising a circle of various large buttons and a control stick. You can hear more about its development in the video below.

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For those of you who, like me, are quite partial to a live action video game adaptation, I am pleased to tell you we have been given a new look at Sony's upcoming Gran Turismo film.

This trailer covers a few behind the scenes shots that give us a closer look at how the film was made - things like cars rigged up with cameras left, right and centre. It also has some quotes from the film's actors, including Pirates of the Caribbean and Lord of the Rings' Orlando Bloom who has promised us all "body vibrating sound" that will mean viewers will feel "every jolt [and] every thrill" of the race on the film's release (which will be exclusively in theatres).

Not that this film is going to solely focus on the cars, however. The cast has said there will be "heart-pounding action, drama [and] a love story" also woven into the script, that follows the true story of Jann Mardenborough.

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In the torrent of CES news, Sony announced that it has now sold more than 30 million PlayStation 5 consoles worldwide, an increase of five million sales since the release of the last sales figures in October.

This is despite the fact Sony raised the price of the console in a number of territories in August. Sony also declared that the global console shortage is over.

"Everyone who wants a PS5 should have a much easier time finding one at retailers globally, starting from this point forward," said PlayStation chief Jim Ryan.

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Gran Turismo 7 will support Sony's new PlayStation VR2 headset when it launches late next month, and the PSVR2 upgrade will be free to all owners of the driving sim.

It's a big boon for the new hardware, joining Horizon Call of the Mountain when it comes to first-party titles available for PSVR2 at launch. Racing games are a natural fit for virtual reality - it's been my preferred way to play ever since it became a viable option - and Gran Turismo 7 follows in the footsteps of Gran Turismo Sport which was supported by the original PSVR headset.

PlayStation VR2 is coming out on February 22nd, with units costing a cool £530. Here's everything you need to know about PSVR2, including its launch titles and full specs - and it's a device that Eurogamer's VR expert Ian Higton has been very enthusiastic about since trying it for himself.

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This is it - 2023 is the time to try something new! So instead of peering mysteriously into a crystal ball and pretending to divine some trends for the year ahead, we thought we'd make things more personal. We thought we'd share our personal gaming ambitions for the year ahead.

What does that mean? Well, gaming ambitions are a lot like New Year's Resolutions, but they're about games rather than going to the gym. So it's you deciding, for instance, that 2023 is the year you're going to get into virtual reality, like Ian - and with PlayStation VR 2 out soon, now is a good time.

Or, maybe you want to get into speedrunning because you've always thought it looks cool, which it does. Or, maybe you're ready to get serious about competitive Pokémon. Or maybe you want to make that game you've always been talking about. Who knows? These ambitions can be anything; dream big.

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Bella Ramsey, aka Game of Thrones' Lyanna Mormont, plays Ellie in the soon-to-be released The Last of Us TV adaptation from HBO. Along with Pedro Pascal's Joel, we will see all the highs and lows these two characters go through on their perilous journey across America when the show makes its debut later this month.

However, it turns out that before Ramsey landed the part of Ellie, fellow Game of Thrones alum Maisie Williams (who played Arya Stark) was in talks for the role back when the game was being pegged for a film adaptation.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Naughty Dog president Neil Druckmann said the team needed to ensure that whoever was cast as Ellie in any adaptation would be able to appear "tough and vulnerable and wise beyond [their] years and also have a potential for violence" all at once.

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Amazon has announced the free games available for Prime members this January.

Six games are now available until the end of the month, led by horror game The Evil Within 2.

From Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami, this sequel sees protagonist Detective Sebastian Castellanos on a mission to save his daughter. Despite some flaws, "there are chills and spills enough here to sate most patrons of the bloody arts," said Edwin in our The Evil Within 2 review.

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To kick off the series' 10th anniversary year, developer Naughty Dog has shared a new piece of concept art for its upcoming The Last of Us multiplayer.

This new image shows an abandoned cruise liner that, along with the rest of the world, has succumbed to the weather and decay of time. Its windows have been smashed, its hull has rusted - a far cry from its presumably once luxurious state.

Along with this artwork, which you can see in full below, Naughty Dog president Neil Druckmann stated the studio's upcoming multiplayer project is "shaping up to be a fresh, new experience". But while it may be fresh and new, Druckmann has said it will still be an experience "rooted in Naughty Dog's passion for delivering incredible stories, characters, and gameplay".

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Many of the lines written for NPCs in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask relate to crunch, including its infamous "you've met with a terrible fate" line.

It's widely known that the game was developed in under two years - an extremely short amount of time that led to huge pressure and Nintendo employees working overtime.

As unearthed from Japanese magazines by YouTube channel DidYouKnowGaming, the game's writers inserted their experience of crunch into the mouths of the game's NPCs.

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Atomic Heart first caught widespread attention all the way back in 2018 with a trailer showing us a Bioshock-like shooter that was set to release "soon".

However, we are now just shy of five years since that initial trailer first splashed its surreal way onto our screens, and with the release now a little over a month away (21st February), the developer has addressed the game's lengthy development.

According to Atomic Heart director Robert Bagratuni, the game's delay and our subsequent long wait for this release can be attributed to four things - "youth, ambition, innovation and new technology".

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The next generation GPUs from Nvidia - and, as it turns out, AMD - have had a problem: pricing, or rather relative pricing. The issue is that with the Radeon RX 6800 XT and more so the GeForce RTX 3080, we've had GPUs that struck an excellent balance between price vs performance. Both were cut down compared to flagship models, but each retained the bulk of their gaming prowess. For whatever reason, their recently released equivalents - RTX 4080 and RX 7900 XT - have not been able to match the same sweetspot in 'frames for the dollar'. The new RTX 4070 Ti goes some way to addressing this, but still hammers home the point that extra performance and big price reductions are things of the past.

That said, the renamed RTX 4080 12GB does finally address the value challenge of the RTX 3080 to a certain extent. With a confirmed MSRP of $799/£799 - $100/£150 up on the RTX 3080 - you are getting value from the extra cash. Performance of the card is typically in RTX 3090 to RTX 3090 Ti territory. You're getting an extra two gigabytes of framebuffer memory. On top of that, there's DLSS 3, which hasn't yet established itself as the game-changer that DLSS 2 is, but is swiftly becoming very useful - game-changingly so in the case of The Witcher 3: Complete Edition.

Arkane's upcoming vampire-riddled FPS Redfall will reportedly make its bloody debut this May.

That's according to sources at Windows Central, who claim the game is targeting a release some time during the first week of the month.

There is also the suggestion of an early access period for the game as well. This will reportedly be something akin to that of Forza Horizon 5's "premium edition" that offered owners a few bonus days of play ahead of the game's official release.

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Amazon Games has confirmed Lost Ark's new addition The Artist will have less revealing costumes for Western audiences.

Amazon and developer Smilegate released details of its 2023 roadmap at the end of last year, and introduced The Artist as the next playable class.

Skins for The Artist will be adjusted in the West, with shorts added beneath short skirts and clothing lengths amended.

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Elden Ring has won yet more awards, with Steam users voting it the Best Game You Suck At.

It's just one of many accolades for the notoriously tricky title, but an amusingly tongue in cheek one for "the toughest game we've ever loved".

The game was also awarded Game of the Year, beating out Dying Light 2 Stay Human, Stray, God of War, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

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While the United States government's Federal Trade Commission (hereon referred to as the FTC) has agreed for staff to engage in settlement negotiations with Microsoft regarding its ongoing efforts to purchase Activision Blizzard, "there are no substantive discussions" between the two parties being conducted "at this time."

That's coming from FTC lawyer James Weingarten, who took part in a pretrial hearing on Tuesday to discuss Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard for a record-breaking $69bn.

Back in December, the FTC revealed its intention to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, claiming should the deal be allowed to proceed, it would enable the company to suppress its fellow games industry competition.

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Nvidia has partnered with Hyundai, BYD and Polestar to bring its GeForce Now cloud gaming service to cars.

Announced at CES yesterday, it will allow PC games to be streamed to vehicles using cloud technology and mobile internet.

That means the likes of Fortnite, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Cyberpunk 2077 will be playable on the go - at least for passengers.

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Microsoft has voluntarily recognised a union formed of about 300 ZeniMax Studios testers.

A "supermajority" of workers voted to unionise, the Communication Workers of America said.

The testers work across ZeniMax Studios, which includes Dishonored developer Arkane, Skyrim maker Bethesda and Doom dev id Software. The testers are currently working on a raft of games, including 2023 Xbox exclusives Redfall and Starfield.

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Dungeons & Dragons owner Wizards of the Coast has cancelled at least five unannounced video games, Bloomberg has reported.

The move is an apparent scaling back of the company's ambitions in the video game space.

Wizards of the Coast is best known for the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop games, but in recent years has made a significant investment in video games.

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Over the space of two years, three of the most beloved Japanese role-playing games in history were released in North America. The first, in 1994, was Final Fantasy 6 (known in America as Final Fantasy 3), a story of people coming together amidst chaos. Many still think of it as the greatest work of an iconic series. A teenage Scott Lynch was so fond of the game that, years later, the protagonist of his novel ('The Lies of Locke Lamora') was named as a homage to one of the main characters in the game.

The second game (which was at first only a cult favourite) was named Earthbound, a surreal and striking work that ended up as a crucial influence on Toby Fox, the creator of Undertale. And the third game was Chrono Trigger, perhaps the most consistent and winsome of all three. It influenced multiple games, including the upcoming Sea of Stars, which even has the same acclaimed composer, Yasunori Mitsuda, in a guest role.

None of these three all time classic games were released in Europe until years after their North American dates; in the case of Chrono Trigger and Earthbound, it was over a decade.

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Stranded Deep has surprise-dropped on Game Pass.

Australian studio Beam Team's open-world survival game is available on both Xbox and PC Game Pass now, and is the first addition to the subscription service in 2023.

Microsoft is yet to announce the slate of games coming to Game Pass this month in its usual round-up, but we do know a handful of titles previously confirmed.

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Nvidia just wrapped up its CES press conference, unveiling a new desktop graphics card - the RTX 4070 Ti - plus a lineup of RTX 40-series GPUs for laptops and a new RTX 4080 tier for its GeForce Now streaming service. Here's what you need to know.

First, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. This is the renamed, repriced and now relaunched version of the RTX 4080 12GB that was so roundly derided upon its announcement that Nvidia 'unlaunched' the card soon thereafter. The key to that move was a feeling of confusion from gamers and press alike that the card was too distant in price and performance from the 4080 16GB, as it wasn't even based on the same AD103 chip.

Now, the GPU seems more sensibly positioned - as a small improvement over the popular last-gen RTX 3080, with a price to match of $799. With DLSS 3 frame generation, it can be up to three times faster than the RTX 3090 Ti while consuming nearly half the power, although we look forward to putting those claims to the test. The latest Ada Lovelace card is scheduled to launch on January 5th, so we don't have too long to wait!

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Witchfire, the upcoming rogue-lite shooter from the developer of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, supports Nvidia's DLSS 3 technology, a new gameplay trailer has revealed.

Polish studio The Astronauts said the trailer, below, shows off Witchfire's "rapid gunplay and new open-level design (not to be confused with fully open-world gameplay)".

DLSS 3 is Nvidia's fancy graphics tech that uses AI to generate additional frames while keeping image quality and responsiveness up.

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Agent 47, this is Diana, I have a new assignment for you - as of 26th January, we will be renaming Hitman 3 as 'World of Assassination'.

In addition to this, it now will also include all levels from Hitman 1 and Hitman 2. We will make this a free update for those who already own the game. Do you understand?

OK, Diana didn't actually say that, but Hitman developer IO Interactive sure did.

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With the imminent closedown of the 3DS eShop - which is coming at the end of March this year, with its Wii U sibling being taken down with it - it seems some thoroughbreds are bolting the stables and heading for pastures new, with Game Freak's Pocket Card Jockey coming to iOS later this month.

Pocket Card Jockey first launched on 3DS back in 2013, and is one of Game Freak's more successful non-Pokémon games. An intriguing mash-up of horse racing and solitaire, it's gone on to earn cult status (though I recall Eurogamer's former in-house solitaire expert Oli Welsh being charmed but not wowed by this take on the form).

Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! - spotted by our friends at VGC - is a buffed-up re-release for Apple Arcade, with new 3D visuals for racing sections, and it's due out 20th January. It's got me wondering what other 3DS gems are ripe for being rescued by new ports - is it too much to hope for a re-release of Attack of the Friday Monsters?

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Die Hard writer Jeb Stuart is no longer involved in Netflix's upcoming Assassin's Creed adaptation.

Stuart's involment with the project was first announced back in 2021. However, speaking to Collider earlier this month, the screenwriter revealed he is no longer a showrunner on the adaptation due to differing visions between himself and the show's executives.

"I think it was a little bit of a move of executives from LA to London, and it allowed the London group who, unfortunately, had to inherit my vision of what it was instead of getting to develop their own vision," Stuart explained to the publication.

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