Eurogamer

After three months in public beta, PlayStation 5's Tournaments feature is now officially live.

Tournaments for PlayStation 5 is an updated version of the feature first seen on PS4 back in 2016, giving players an on-console means of competing against other players to win prizes across the likes of PlayStation events, challenges, and leaderboard competitions.

Sony says the new PlayStation 5 version of Tournaments "streamlines" the competitive player experience, offering easily discoverable tournaments, seamless on-console sign-up, shorter tournament times, plus automatic and real-time match updates - all delivered though a new UI, featuring the likes of notifications.

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A three-year study into the impact of video game loot boxes on young people has concluded that such mechanics cause "financial and emotional harm" to teenagers and children.

The report, published by Newcastle and Loughborough Universities, tracked the gaming habits of 42 families with children aged between five and 17, and interviewed another 30 parents, carers and video game designers.

In short, the study found children struggled to track spending in video games where "highly alluring" digital items were advertised to them using techniques borrowed from regulated gambling.

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Evil West is a remarkably direct take on third-person action, a linear and propulsive combat game with no open-world diversions, no loot, no crafting, and no side quests. The combat system at its core is fast-paced, responsive, and fair, and the B-movie style plot is well-told through a series of high-quality cinematics.

Unfortunately though, the game has garnered controversy prior to release thanks to a pretty unexciting set of resolution options as reported by the game's publisher - a 4K30 quality mode is par for the course, but 1080p60 performance modes for PS5 and Series X have concerned many. Meanwhile, Xbox Series S gets a basic 1080p30 mode. The question is, if we look past the raw pixel counts, is there an attractive game underneath - and is performance really as straightforward as a simple 30fps/60fps split?

Before we tackle those issues, it's worth mentioning that Evil West does some things well in terms of assets, lighting, environmental design and rendering quality, with beautiful environments that stretch from sandy deserts to snowed-in summits and damp catacombs. This is very much an Unreal Engine 4 game - expect a heavy reliance on baked lighting within fairly static environments - but I love the way the visuals often come together.

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UPDATE 30/11/22: As expected, today brings PlayStation's official confirmation of yesterday's PlayStation Plus Essential line-up leak. Get downloading Mass Effect's Legendary Edition as soon as possible!

ORIGINAL STORY 29/11/22: December's PlayStation Plus Essential games will be Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Biomutant and Divine Knockout.

That's according to reliable source Dealabs, which routinely leaks the list of games in advance.

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Australian MP Andrew Wilkie has filed a bill with the Australian government which seeks to regulate classification for games with loot boxes.

Wilkie first stated his intention to introduce the Classication Amendment (Loot Boxes) Bill last year (via Kotaku Australia). Back then, he wanted any games with loot boxes to be given a R18+ rating, and a new "advisory" classification to highlight their presence.

The bill was filed yesterday by Wilkie, and the details of it can be viewed on the Australian government's website.

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Two Point Studios has announced its first expansion for spoof school strategy game Two Point Campus: Space Academy.

The expansion will add three new campus locations, six student archetypes, six new courses and classrooms, and more.

It's set for release on 6th December across all platforms except Switch, which will arrive on the 12th December. Check out the trailer below - it's clear the Two Point team are Trekkies.

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Nvidia's own souped-up version of Portal will launch next Thursday, 8th December.

This version of Valve's classic first-person puzzler comes crafted by Nvidia's own Lightspeed Studios, and will be released as a free DLC update for existing owners via Steam.

As you'd expect from its name, this version adds ray-tracing, Nvidia DLSS 3, "hand-crafted hi-res physically-based textures" and "enhanced high-poly models evocative of the originals". Here's how it looks in action, compared to the original:

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UPDATE 29/11/22: Grand Theft Auto's original programmer Mike Dailly has added some clarification to Colin Macdonald's story about GTA starting out as a "dinosaur game".

Dailly replied to this news on Twitter, saying "the game was called 'dino', because the early C code framework came from a dinosaur game - several Dave-demos earlier." Dailly went on to "[copy] code and [keep] the useful bits."

Macdonald replied to Dailly's update by saying "Ah bugger, I was sure of that - ah well, it's a nice story, but at least I know now!"

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Bohemia Interactive, developer of military simulation game Arma 3, has asked fans to watch out for edited in-game videos being shared around social media that are falsely labelled as real-world war footage.

Specifically, Bohemia has called for players and content creators to "use their game footage responsibly", "refrain from using clickbait video titles" and "always state clearly that the video originated from a video game" rather than footage from a real-life conflict.

Arma 3 gameplay videos have a history of being mistaken for real-world footage - even by professional news organisations - and this problem has only increased since the current conflict in Ukraine has begun, Bohemia said.

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Almost two weeks after it went offline, the original Call of Duty Warzone is back online under the new name Caldera.

During the game's offtime, players were "encouraged" to play Warzone 2.0 for free, whilst developer Raven Software shifted its focus over.

As promised, Warzone has been quietly relaunched as Caldera, albeit on life support, as Ishraq put it earlier.

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Sony has revealed a set of six motion-tracking gadgets that will allow a user's body to influence an avatar's moves.

Known as Mocopi, this set will enable mobile motion capture, thanks to sensors worn around a user's head, waist, wrists and ankles. When paired with the compatible smartphone app, these trackers can then be used to animate an avatar within said app.

In addition to adding your avatar to real-world locations, users will also be able to combine avatars and background images within the app. Meanwhile, it will also use VRChat as a motion input device. You can see just how Mocopi looks in action via the trailer below.

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The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red has described the upcoming remake of the series' first game as a "story-driven, single-player open-world RPG - a modern reimagining of 2007's The Witcher".

It's the first detailed description we've had of the remake, and suggests a more from-the-ground-up reworking of the original role-player than previously thought.

Thanks to the success of The Witcher 3, the series is now thought of as a fully open-world franchise. But that was not the case back in the original Witcher game, which featured a number of separate large maps and various smaller areas.

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Here's a question for you: if you fudge something up in a game, and it doesn't kill you so you can still continue on afterwards, albeit with the undesired outcome, do you? Or do you reload?

For a long time, I reloaded. I thought that was what I was supposed to do. The games I grew up on, that's what you did. You quick-saved, you reloaded, you got your desired outcome. That was how I always played. By the end of a game, I'd done everything exactly as I intended, or I hadn't done it at all. If only life were that simple.

But would you do the same in life if you could? Because how many times have you heard someone say they wouldn't change anything, even the mistakes, because those are what made them who they are? It's cringey but however I look at it, it feels true: mistakes have a huge impact on our lives.

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If it's bug squishing you want, you're in luck; developer Offworld Industries has unveiled Starship Troopers: Extermination, a new 12-player, squad-based co-op FPS coming to Steam early access next year.

Inspired by Paul Verhoeven's cult-classic 1997 movie, Starship Troopers: Extermination drops up to three squads of four players onto the front lines amid an Arachnid assault, challenging them to work together to complete objectives, acquire resources, build and defend their base of operations, and finally escape to the extraction zone.

There are three classes to choose from - Assault, Support, and Defense, each with their own weapons, equipment, and perks - alongside a base building system that sees players using resources acquired from planetside refineries to construct walls, towers, ammo stations, and various other amenities in an effort to gain the upper hand in battle.

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UPDATE 29/11/22: We're still a few hours away from today's Nintendo Direct broadcast with the second official trailer for the Super Mario Bros. movie (that's at 2pm Pacific, so 10pm UK time today).

Regardless, new artwork for the film has popped up online and is being shared around social media - including a first look at Mayor Pauline, last seen in Super Mario Odyssey, and a height chart for the film's main stars.

Join us back here a little later for that trailer!

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Ubisoft's much-delayed The Settlers reboot has resurfaced once more, bringing with it a new name - it'll now be known as The Settlers: New Allies - and a 17th February 2023 release date on PC, with console versions to follow.

This latest release date marks Ubisoft's fourth attempt at getting its Settlers reboot out the door; when the publisher first revealed it was revisiting the series' much-loved city-building and real-time strategy formula back in 2018, the reboot was expected to arrive in autumn the following year. That wasn't to be, though, and the game was first pushed into 2020 before being postponed indefinitely as summer 2020 rolled around.

It seemed like the end was finally in sight for patient The Settlers fans at the start of this year, however, when Ubisoft announced a new 17th March release date for its reboot - but, following less-than-stellar closed beta feedback, the publisher slammed on the breaks once more, only saying the game would instead launch at "a later date".

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Microsoft is reportedly readying to make a number of formal concessions to EU regulators investigating its proposed $69bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard, including the guarantee Call of Duty will be availalble on PlayStation for the next ten years.

Call of Duty has remained a focal point during government scrutiny of Microsoft's Activision Blizzard deal, with regulators - including those in the UK and Europe - raising fears Microsoft may leverage the juggernaut franchise to gain an unfair advantage over its competition.

Reports in September revealed Microsoft had initially pledged to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for "at least several more years" beyond Activision's existing deal - an arrangement PlayStation boss Jim Ryan would go on to call "inadequate on many levels" - but as regulatory scrutiny deepened, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said the company would continue releasing Call of Duty on Sony's consoles for "as long as there's a PlayStation out there to ship to".

The regulatory battles between Sony and Microsoft over the latter's Activision Blizzard acquisition are throwing up all manner of headline stories - such as Xbox effectively positioning themselves as third out of three in terms of the major console platform holders, Sony writing off its chances of ever creating an FPS as potent as Call of Duty - and perhaps most intriguing of all, acknowledgement that this console generation is likely to persist until 2027 or even 2028.

The various legal documents make for great reading but do need to be treated with more than a little caution. On the face of it, it appears like we're getting a fascinating insight into the inner workings of the platform holders, who are producing all manner of never-seen-before 'insider' information. However, we also need to remember that all of these disclosures are being driven by very specific agendas and nothing should be taken at face value, no matter how intriguing the information may be.

With that said, the idea of a prolonged console generation absolutely has merit. I'm not sure it's fully understood how hard Microsoft and Sony pushed to make PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X as powerful as they were, given the technologies available to them. Various factors - outlined in depth in this interview with Xbox's chief system architect - demonstrate that the routes forward in producing any kind of next-gen console are (right now, at least) limited to say the least. The basic assumptions we have about new technology being both more performant and cheaper are clearly being challenged.

Pokémon Go has revealed details of its ninth season, Mythical Wishes, which will carry the game through the next three months: from 1st December to 1st March.

Mythical Wishes is a reference to Hoenn's Mythical creature Jirachi, which has only appeared in Pokémon Go once previously. It looks set for a reappearance (and possible Shiny debut?) at 2023's Pokémon Go Tour event, which is set to be detailed fully tomorrow. More tangibly, today's new trailer also teases the release of Primal Groudon and Primal Kyogre at the end - some of the most powerful creatures in the series, and a big deal for fans.

Hoenn creatures dominate much of the next season, with the introduction of the region's three Starter creatures in their Mega evolved forms: Mega Sceptile, Mega Blaziken, and Mega Swampert. The trio will debut via a Raid Day event this Saturday, 3rd December which will offer a number of extra free raid passes.

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Three years after it released on PC, Red Dead Redemption 2 broke its all-time peak of concurrent players yesterday.

Single-player DLC for the game looks unlikely, and the bundled multiplayer offering Red Dead Online was pronounced "dead" by its community of players after developer Rockstar confirmed it would no longer push major updates to the game to shift development to Grand Theft Auto 6 instead.

That hasn't put people off enjoying Red Dead Redemption 2 and Red Dead Online, however (with some help from the Thanksgiving holidays across the pond and Steam's autumn sale).

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There are plans afoot (or should that be, apaw) to introduce a console, complete with its own video games, that is tailored exclusively to dogs. After all, who says man should have all the fun.

The brainchild of the UK-based startup Joipaw, the Joipaw Console will come with a "dog-tailored touchscreen, a height-adjustable stand and an automated treat dispenser." It will run interactive puzzle games, such as a whack-a-mole challenge, that are "constantly new and challenging" for man's best friend (thanks, Axios).

"Add speakers, a microphone and a Full HD camera, and you have the smartest dog tech product to ever hit the market," Joipaw proclaims on the console's reservation page.

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New details have surfaced of an F-Zero Switch game prototype.

YouTube channel DidYouKnowGaming interviewed ex-Nintendo programmer Giles Goddard, who now runs his own studio (Chuhai Labs - Cursed to Golf, Carve Snowboarding). Previously he worked on Super Mario 64, Star Fox, and 1080 Snowboarding.

In 2021, Goddard hosted a reddit AMA where he admitted F-Zero was his favourite game on the SNES and that his studio had created an F-Zero prototype with ultra-realistic physics that was never released. DidYouKnowGaming dug deeper.

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Activision was kept busy over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend fixing a popular Call of Duty glitch which granted infinite money and weapon XP.

The now-fixed exploit let you repeatedly sell weapons at the game's Buy Stations in exchange for XP. In a quick fix for the issue, XP from Buy Stations was nerfed to counter the number of people quickly levelling up their weapons.

But, as fans quickly found, this still left the game's white dumpster Dead Drops as an option. This lasted another half day or so, until it too was countered by another behind the scenes change.

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With the release of Need for Speed Unbound this week, Criterion Games is properly back. Not that the Guildford studio's been away, of course, but in recent years its role shifted towards a support studio, lending a hand with the Battlefront and Battlefield series among others - and its last standalone title was the X-Wing VR mission for Star Wars Battlefront back in 2016.

It's something of a moment, then, to have Criterion Games back - and back on Need for Speed for a second stint behind the wheel following 2010's Hot Pursuit and 2012's Most Wanted. Need for Speed Unbound marks the start of a new chapter, with Criterion now overseeing the series once more and to mark the occasion I spoke to studio veteran and Unbound's creative director Kieran Crimmins.

Thanks for chatting to me, I'm sure you're exceptionally busy with launch not many days away. Before we get into that, I just wondered if you could tell me a little bit about yourself and your history at Criterion because I believe you've been there quite some time.

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Fans of Supermassive Games' Dark Pictures Anthology are unhappy at the long wait for what they see as crucial fixes to earlier games in the series.

The horror franchise's first two titles - Man of Medan and Little Hope - were updated on 28th September with a spruce-up designed to introduce difficulty settings, QTE warnings and more accessibility options. Man of Medan even gained a "previously unseen" story chapter.

But these updates also had the unintended consequence of introducing a raft of bugs to the games, with a number of players complaining of being unable to save or make progress past certain points.

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Fran Lebowitz once said, "You're only as good as your last haircut," and perhaps she has a point. After all, Joel Miller from Naughty Dog's The Last of Us series is easily recognisable, with his full head of hair and slightly scruffy facial furniture.

However, it turns out that if you remove all of his hair (bar his eyebrows, thank goodness), he looks really quite different... and I am not sure that is a good thing.

As shared by prolific modder Speclizer, who recently unlocked God of War Ragnarök's unfinished photo mode, there is now a The Last of Us Part 2 mod that makes Joel's head and face almost as smooth as a baby's bottom.

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Pokémon Scarlet and Violet players have noticed that the RNG of the Battle Stadium is not working as intended.

As shared on reddit, user Lord-Trolldemort noticed that the accuracy of certain moves was rigged.

And as the Battle Stadium is the game's ranked online mode, this could have serious implications.

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Hello! Today we're taking a look at one of Fortnite's greatest features - the option to visualise sound effects.

Chris: After a decade of mishearing people in the office, I've been wearing a hearing aid for most of the last year or so. It's been absolutely incredible. I have mild hearing loss, mostly high frequency sounds, which is why I have had trouble with human speech - I can't hear the consonants anymore. When I first put my hearing aid on at the hospital and then walked outside, I don't think I'd ever heard so much birdsong in my life - all the birds in the world came back to me.

Anyway, one of the things I'd noticed slipping before I got my hearing aid was fast-paced games like Fortnite. It's a game you play with your ears a lot of the time - I wasn't hearing chests or the sounds of people healing or approaching - all sorts of things. My daughter introduced me to the Fortnite Sound Ring - the official term, I think, is the visual sound effects setting - and it's been transformative. For someone with hearing issues like me it's a game-changer, but I've been talking to a number of people who don't have hearing issues and who also use it and also find it to be a brilliant thing - is that a fair way of putting it?

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If you thought Pokémon Scarlet and Violet had been mined of all its weird, buggy content - well, here's another one for you. Players have discovered you can kiss your Meowscarada. Or at least make Meowscarada lean in and call it a kiss.

In what was presumably an oversight from the developers at Game Freak - and not intentional - fans have found you can align your character and Meowscarada just a little too well, allowing for a kiss-like interaction when out picnicking.

Why would you want to kiss Meowscarada? Well, when its design leaked shortly before launch, people quickly made hordes of fan art, some of which was not particularly wholesome or Safe For Work.

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Details of Fortnite's upcoming Chapter 3 ending have leaked online, days ahead of the game's Fracture live event - scheduled for this Saturday, 3rd December at 9pm UK time.

The leak contains audio files including dialogue, as well as assets and artwork, and appears to have come from someone able to bypass Epic Games' own in-game encryption for these files.

Eurogamer will not be spoiling any details of the event itself ahead of time.

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A Pokémon fan is creating a 60fps mod for Scarlet and Violet that significantly boosts performance.

The mod, created by theboy181, is not yet complete or publicly available, but videos have been posted on Twitter showing the smoother frame rate.

Of course, this is all happening on a PC emulator rather than the Switch directly.

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Following his appointment as co-chairman and co-CEO of DC Studios alongside Peter Safran, filmmaker James Gunn has confirmed that future DC video games will indeed be part of a larger connected universe for the Warner Bros. franchise.

In a back and forth on Twitter, Gunn stated the "DCU will be connected across film and TV (and animation)." When asked further if this statement also included games, Gunn replied with a simple and clear "yes".

This news is not surprising. Earlier reports revealed that Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav had spoken to the wider company about plans to "build a bible for a cohesive DC universe" that would include media such as "live-action films, TV, animation, gaming and more".

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One thing I've always loved about the work I do is hearing about people's lives. I like hearing their stories, I like hearing about the things that shaped them, because they not only relate to me as a fellow human being but inevitably, they are the things that end up shaping what they make. The games they make. The games we love.

It's a privilege to be able to focus on this in my podcast One-to-One which, hey, you should listen to (search "Eurogamer Podcasts" wherever you get them). And I've had some wonderful guests. But few struck me the way Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer did - the lead mind behind Pentiment - in the latest episode.

Sawyer was not what I expected - and I say this as someone who's met him a few times. But on those occasions I got only a glimpse of him. He demoed a game, or we traded pleasantries while thinking about what work we were doing next - it was that kind of thing. But this time I got a chance to sit with him for a chunk of time and hear about his life, hear about who he is. And there's much I didn't know.

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Sonic Frontiers' 1.10 update is about to be deployed, seemingly starting with PlayStation consoles.

The update primarily hopes to address bugs and issues with the game, as well as provide some additional - if unspecified - quality-of-life improvements for players.

Whilst the game's English-language social media channels have yet to publicise the patch, the blue blur's Japanese counterpart has, revealing that the update is now ready for PS4 and PS5 now and will be available for other platforms "in the near future".

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Firaxis' Marvel's Midnight Suns contains "something like 65,000 lines of voice dialogue".

In a "special message from Firaxis" posted to YouTube, the team outlined their favourite aspects of the upcoming tactical role playing game, and it included confirmation that there'll be a lot of cut-scenes and conversations as you foster relationships with your teammates.

"I think we ended up with something like 65,000 lines of voiced dialogue, over two hours of cinematics, and, gosh, more branching choices than you could imagine," lead engineer Will Miller said in the interview (thanks, PC Gamer).

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Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi has revealed that Sony is "considering" porting the racing series to PC.

In an interview with GTPlanet (thanks, VGC), Yamauchi was asked if he would "consider" following the recent trends set by Sony first-party titles like God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Death Stranding by taking the latest instalment, Gran Turismo 7, to PC.

"Yes, I do think so," Yamauchi responded when asked if Polyphony Digital could do the same.

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The Callisto Protocol has turned to many things for inspiration, including some of horror's most terrifying movies like Alien and Event Horizon, but here's one that may come as a bit of a surprise: SpongeBob SquarePants.

No, I'm not talking about the (also horrifying) Rock Bottom episode where SpongeBob gets stuck in Glove World; it turns out that the way animated characters move have inspired the character director of The Callisto Protocol, too.

“Some creatures came from the art perspective, though, like, 'Hey, let's just do something that is very crazy looking'. And then we put that in the game and find a way of making it work," character director Glauco Longhi told GLHF, via The Sun.

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As our friends across the water settled down after their Thanksgiving celebrations, gaming seems to have been at the forefront of their minds because - would you believe it - Steam's broken its own concurrent record. Yes. Again.

Whilst the number includes players who are idle - that is, signed in but not actively playing anything - Steam's own analytics show that a new peak of 31,349,780 concurrent players was set over the weekend.

As is often the case, third-party tracker SteamDB boasts a slightly different number - a higher figure of 31,379,760 concurrent players - 9.3 of whom were actively online and gaming at the time the record was set.

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Street Fighter 6 has been rated in South Korea.

As spotted by the eagle-eyed folks at Resetera, the fighting game - which, as yet, does not have a firm release date beyond a very vague "2023" window - has secured a 15 age rating due to its "expression of physical damage shown in illustrations in addition to basic fighting expression".

Whilst this doesn't necessarily mean that a release is just around the corner, it does intimate that it's probably set to drop in the next six months or so… and with The Game Awards just a few days away now, many fans are speculating that we may get that all-important release date then. Watch this space, eh?

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Game of the Week goes out to all of our supporters as part of the Eurogamer Essentials newsletter. There's going to be a slight shake-up of the supporters program in the near future (don't worry - it's all good news) so stay tuned for more details, and thanks as ever for your support - it's much appreciated.

The Gungrave pairing of third-person shooters that came to PS2 in its pomp seem like the epitome of all that; an anime aesthetic brimming with edgy swagger, with a growling no-nonsense attitude to back it all up. I remember playing them back-to-back in a friend's living room one sunny Saturday afternoon in Brighton oh-so-many years ago, the curtains drawn and endless pots of green tea powering us through the action.

This was one of those clued-up, cooler friends that pushed me towards so many awesome things back then; a cult movie and anime obsessive, they introduced me to Cowboy Bebop that same summer, while pointing out the pointed similarities between Gungrave's protagonist - the imaginatively monikered 'Grave' - and Spaghetti western hero Django, with both dragging their own coffins behind them into battle (I was then sent home with a handful of Django VHS tapes so I could continue my education in my own time).

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