Eurogamer

The village of Gravoi, somewhere on the island of Sardinia, is a cluttering of cobbled alleyways, concentric stairways, and shaded nooks where a wheezing tourist might take refuge from the heat. In the boiling sun, overlooking the tinselled Mediterranean Sea, it's the ideal backdrop for an Instagram shoot: billowing dresses, floppy straw hats, leggy prawns splayed across a white porcelain plate. At night, however, Gravoi provides the blueprint and backdrop for a nightmare. Its architectural swirl of dead ends, religious shrines, and silhouetted iron gratings describe a hellish, claustrophobic warren. It's this latter reality in which Saturnalia, a survival horror game set in a shifting village, is principally set. Described by its makers as a "procedural death labyrinth", it is a place of horrors both physical and psychological into which the game's four protagonists are inexorably drawn.

Earlier this year, it was revealed that PlayStation's London Studio, which is best known for its work on Singstar and Blood and Truth, was working on a new online game for the PlayStation 5.

Now, we have more details on what this elusive game actually is - and what it is, is an online co-op combat game that is set in a fantasy version of London.

Speaking via the SIE Blog, co-studio heads Stuart Whyte and Tara Saunders shared more details about this currently unnamed game, which they call the team's "most ambitious project to date".

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 players have been advised against changing their console's region in order to gain early access to the game.

The "New Zealand" trick, which lets players trick their consoles into letting them access a game that doesn't release until midnight in their own region, has been a staple of game releases for many years.

But Infinity Ward has issued a statement warning players may experience "connectivity issues" and "may be locked out of the game" until the game is officially released in their region.

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Warner Bros. Montréal has released a PC patch for Gotham Knights addressing some of the game's current issues, with the next console update coming towards the end of the week.

Since its launch, Gotham Knights has faced a series of issues, with frame-rate drops, stutters, and frame-rate time fluctuations being reported across the board.

"We are aware that players on both PC and console have been experiencing performance challenges," the developer admitted earlier today, with an accompanying thread offering an overview of the game's upcoming fixes.

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Infinity Ward has shared a list of changes to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer ahead of tomorrow's release. The changes were made in response to feedback from the beta.

The biggest change is the addition of diamond icons above enemy heads to increase visibility.

In the beta, there was no indicator to differentiate between friendly and enemy players. This was traditionally achieved through name tags in previous games, but Infinity Ward took the design decision to remove them, seemingly to add to realism. Players didn't take kindly to the change and called for the return of name tags. Diamond icons are therefore a compromise between good enemy visibility and realism.

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Developer Unknown Worlds has removed the loot box system from Moobreaker, its new turn-based, digital tabletop strategy game.

In a post detailing the game's new content update, which is known as "Zax's Story", the team explained: "We've been reading and evaluating everything you've suggested on our Discord and Nolt board... and have been diligently reviewing every area of the game.

"Based on your ongoing feedback, we are realigning to make Moonbreaker better reflect our Early Access goals."

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It doesn't seem like Faith: The Unholy Trinity should be able to do this, to scare us, because it looks like something I played decades ago on a BBC Micro. It's got squiggly MS Paint lines for graphics, there are maybe two frames of animation, the sound garbles anything it plays, and you can even hear system beeps. And yet, somehow, Faith manages it - manages to be unsettling, manages to make me jump, manages to scare me. Had I played this as a kid, I would never have slept again.

The theme is exorcism, and Faith begins with you, a priest, driving along a road and parking by a forest, then getting out and walking into the trees. You're going to finish what you started, with or without the Vatican's permission, you're told, and that's really all you know. Faith is a game that doesn't tell you much because working out what you're doing is part of it.

Mechanically, though, you can't do much: you can walk around and hold up a cross. And holding up the cross near certain objects seems to exorcise souls from them, and doing so produces a note. And notes are important. They are what fill in the story around you, detailing who you are, what you're doing, what you're looking for and why. And they'll give you clues about what you'll find when you get there, too, the answer to that one nearly always being "demons".

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Author George R. R. Martin has admitted he hasn't played Elden Ring, despite providing backstory to FromSoftware's game.

That's not only because he's too busy writing his next book, but because he gets easily addicted to games.

"I have not played it, because people seem to want this Winds of Winter book," said Martin on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (spotted by GamesRadar).

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Pioneering Sega developer Rieko Kodama has passed away at the age of 58.

A memorial message for her was spotted in the credits of the Mega Drive Mini 2 and later confirmed by Sega producer Yosuke Oskunari.

Sega subsequently confirmed Kodama passed back in May, but was unable to share details in respect to her family, as reported by IGN.

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Striking Distance and publisher Krafton have announced the Japanese version of upcoming space-horror The Callisto Protocol has been cancelled.

This is due to the game's violent content, which means it was unable to secure an age rating with the CERO (Japan's equivalent of PEGI in Europe and the ESRB in North America).

The developer has stated those who pre-ordered this version of the game will receive a full refund for their purchase.

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Physical copies of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 contain a disc with just 72.23MB of data inside.

Players who received a copy slightly earlier than tomorrow's official multiplayer release are reporting that the disc contains almost no data and is accompanied by a hefty data download.

The latest pre-release update balloons the game to a massive 150GB, which does not yet include Warzone 2.0.

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Sales of Team Ninja's Nioh series have now surpassed 7m worldwide.

That's between both the first Nioh, released in 2017, and Nioh 2 released in March 2020.

Team Ninja shared the news in a celebratory Twitter post.

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In something of an inspired move, this year's Call of Duty is enjoying a staggered release, with the campaign being made available to all those who've pre-ordered Modern Warfare 2 a week ahead of the full release on 28th October. And as campaigns go it's possibly as big and bold as Call of Duty - a series that's not exactly renowned for being reserved - gets. Is it any good, though? We've played through it all and here are our thoughts...

Martin: So first of all, before we get to the campaign itself - I'm a fan of the split release. I love a good Call of Duty campaign but in recent years I've found myself skipping them in favour of the real meat that's the multiplayer modes. In fact, I can't remember the last time I finished a Call of Duty campaign - maybe Infinite Warfare? They can sometimes feel like afterthoughts and it's easy to pick them up for a couple of hours then put them down and forget about them. At least this way the campaign's getting its moment in the sun, and fittingly it feels like the biggest, boldest Call of Duty campaign there's been in an age. Now whether it's a good campaign or not is another question...

Wes: I think it's good! But I don't think it's brilliant. It's a weird mishmash of different gameplay types, some clearly inspired by other games but not quite as good as them. Take for example the car chase level. You're jumping from car to car, leaning out and shooting and blowing stuff up as you do in Call of Duty, but it's not as good as Uncharted's famous car chase stuff.

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Toem is a photography adventure. You wander around taking pictures and solving simple problems. It's fitting, I guess, that after playing through the recent Basto update yesterday, the first thing I did before writing today was look back through all my pictures.

Cor. Here's me at a camp fire listening to a spooky story. Here I am helping a mermaid sing a song. Here I am judging a royal sandcastle competition. Here I am stuck in some kind of pipe. Understand this: Toem is already one of my favourite games in years. Basto just makes it all even better.

The free update provides an entirely new region with a bunch of new objectives to tick off, but also a new bit of Toem's newsprint world to explore, new characters to meet, new whimsy to engage in. Basto's a tropical region, with lovely palm trees laden with fruit waiting to be collected and turned into ice cream. There's a new day and night mechanic that sees the tides changing and bringing different paths into play. There's a new attachment that allows you to fire water balloons from your camera. There are mountainy bits, camps, oddballs, and even a spooky cave. Get in.

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BioWare has revealed Dragon Age: Dreadwolf - the latest instalment in its fantasy role-playing series - has now reached the alpha stage of development and is playable "to the very end".

That news was shared in a new developer blog post celebrating the alpha milestone. "Up to this point, we've been working hard on the various parts of the game, but it's not until the alpha milestone that a game all comes together," the developer explained.

"Now, for the first time, we can experience the entire game, from the opening scenes of the first mission to the very end," it continued. "We can see, hear, feel, and play everything as a cohesive experience."

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Microsoft's head of gaming Phil Spencer has discussed possible price increases across the Xbox line, acknowledging that while the company has so far maintained prices for its consoles, Game Pass, and games, it will "at some point...have to raise the price on certain things".

Speaking at the Wall Street Journal's Tech Live (thanks The Verge), Spencer admitted, "We've held price on our console, we've held price on games and our subscription. I don't think we'll be able to do that forever... I do think at some point we'll have to raise some prices on certain things, but going into this holiday we thought it was important to maintain the prices."

Earlier this year, of course, Sony announced it would be increasing the cost of PlayStation 5 in response to "high global inflation rates, as well as adverse currency trends". At the time, Spencer said Xbox would not be following suit, explaining, "When our customers are more economically challenged and uncertain than ever, we don't think it's the right move." Given Spencer's latest comments, though, it's unclear how long that might last.

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We've spoken at length to Glen Schofield about it and seen impressive gameplay demos of it, but now we've finally been able to play The Callisto Protocol - one of the biggest games of what's left of 2022, and certainly its goriest.

A recent hands-on demo treated us to 90 minutes of action, and subjected us to so many ways for protagonist Jacob Lee to succumb to the biophage enemy you're up against. There's a lot to unpack, so Ian and Zoe - with the assistance of lovely producer Richard Smith - have pieced together this video with six things you need to know about The Callisto Protocol.

It's not really too long until you'll get to sample The Callisto Protocol for yourself, as it's coming to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Series S/X and PC on December 2. Which is terrifyingly soon.

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Co-founders Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker are leaving Rocksteady, the studio behind the Batman Arkham games and the upcoming Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

In a statement announcing their departure on the Rocksteady website, Warner Bros. Games' David Haddad praised the duo's work, complimenting their commitment to "the highest quality and excellence across all facets of game development".

He continued: "With Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League nearly finished, they have both decided to leave Rocksteady at the end of 2022 and will begin a new adventure in gaming. We have the utmost respect and gratitude for Jamie and Sefton and wish them all the best in their new endeavour, and like many fans, we look forward to what they do next."

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Genshin Impact developer HoYoverse has suffered a massive data breach.

Over the weekend, huge batches of information were shared online that revealed details of new characters, quests, and events from version 3.3 until 3.8.

HoYoverse has DMCA striked posts containing information from the data breach, although any future updates are of course subject to change.

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The hype is very real for Like a Dragon (formerly Yakuza) fans right now.

A long-awaited remake of Like a Dragon: Ishin! will release on 21st February 2023, which will be followed by Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name later in the year. In 2024, the maineline series will continue with Like a Dragon 8, and sees the return of protagonists Kazuma Kiryu and Kasuga Ichiban.

Ahead of the busy schedule for Like a Dragon, director and executive producer at developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio Masayoshi Yokoyama has spoken more about the increased recognition of Like a Dragon overseas, the upcoming games, and the possibility of the series on Nintendo Switch.

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God of War Ragnarök is less than a month away from its highly-anticipated release. However, its photo mode will not be present at launch.

Rather, it will be coming after the fact, much like it did with 2018's God of War.

Sony Santa Monica confirmed this news in a tweet, stating it will share more details on Ragnarök's photo mode further down the line.

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CD Projekt Red has announced a full remake of the first Witcher game is in production.

Earlier this month, the developer unveiled its forthcoming plans, including a Witcher project called Canis Majoris by a third-party.

Turns out that's a remake of the first Witcher game, developed by Fool's Theory with supervision by CD Projekt Red.

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Last week saw the release of two new games that do not support 60 frames per second gaming on PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series consoles, Gotham Knights and A Plague Tale: Requiem. Many would argue that one of the greatest wins from the new wave of consoles has been that the majority of titles support 60fps - or even 120fps - representing a game-changing improvement over the last-gen standard 30fps. The question is why this brace of titles do not support this option and whether it signifies the beginning of the end of 60fps as a standard for console gaming.

It's a tricky question to answer, but ultimately, I feel it is inevitable that the proliferation of 60fps support will slack off significantly - not least because so many titles are looking to tap into the full array of features offered by Epic's Unreal Engine 5, which sets the stage for a new 3D rendering paradigm. We've already had our first taste of the kind of fidelity UE5 offers thanks to last year's phenomenal demo - The Matrix Awakens - based on an early rendition of the engine's features. Lumen, tapping into hardware-accelerated ray tracing features, delivers an astonishingly realistic lighting solution, while Nanite offers a level of geometric detail in excess of traditional rendering.

It's quite unlike anything we've seen before, but the point is that the demo runs at an inconsistent 30fps during gameplay, while cutscenes are actually operating at a literally cinematic 24fps. Both CPU and GPU are put through the wringer here, so simply scaling down resolution to improve frame-rate will not help much.

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Sega has released an official comic as a prologue to the forthcoming Sonic Frontiers.

Called Sonic Frontiers Prologue: Convergence, it gives a little insight into the events leading up to the start of the game as Sonic and friends travel to the Starfall Islands in search of the chaos emeralds.

Part one of the comic was released on Twitter last week; now the second part has been published.

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Apple has confirmed the iPhone will be getting that USB-C cable port, in accordance with the European Commission's upcoming mandate.

By autumn 2024, all portable electronic devices sold in the EU will need to use USB Type-C for charging. The aim is to reduce electronic waste and be more consumer friendly by having just one "common charger".

Now the powers that be at Apple have confirmed the company will release an iPhone with this charging port - even though it is not very happy about it all.

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Capcom has released its quarterly earnings, and shared some impressive figures for its Monster Hunter series.

As of 30th September, Monster Hunter Rise has topped 11m sales. That is an increase of 1m since July.

Meanwhile, its expansion title Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak has topped 4.4m sales cumulatively.

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As part of the celebrations for Fallout's 25th anniversary, Bethesda has been uploading retrospectives on the history of the series.

The latest video discusses Fallout: New Vegas, and Todd Howard, executive producer at Bethesda and one of its most public figures, revealed the game was initially conceived as an expansion for Fallout 3.

Howard said following the success of Fallout 3, there was a "push" internally to ride the momentum the game had created. The decision was made to add a "big" expansion pack to the game.

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Valve has launched a new regional pricing recommendation system for Steam, but it could lead to higher prices in certain countries.

The new pricing tool suggests prices across the 39 currencies supported by Steam to simplify the process for developers, though these are just recommendations.

"We think it's a helpful guide, but with purchasing power and foreign exchange rates constantly evolving, we needed to make significant changes to those conversion recommendations to stay current," said Valve in its announcement.

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Developer Media Molecule's impressively flexible PlayStation creation tool Dreams is celebrating Halloween this year with the return of its annual All Hallows' event, this time beckoning players to take a spooky trip to the Land of Lost Dreams.

This latest journey to the realms of spookidom is the third Halloween event for Dreams, following previous outings that saw Media Molecule collaborating with its community to create explorable haunted houses and then, last year, a creepy old fairground.

Things are getting a little more fantastical this time around, however, with a quest to the far-flung Land of Lost Dreams, where players can embark on a quest full of odd characters and puzzles as they attempt to uncover a "rich and unnerving history".

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Nintendo has taken its Switch Sports servers offline - and suspended save data backups - while it investigates an issue causing crashes in the game's latest update.

Switch Sports' version 1.2.1 update launched earlier this week, aiming to further strengthen measures against what Nintendo called "disruptive behaviours" online, as well as pledging to suspend any online players violating its Community Guidelines. Punishable actions included "fraudulent behaviour such as save data manipulation."

Unfortunately, patch 1.2.1 also introduced a significant bug causing crashes - whether playing online or offline - during the pre-match loading screen.

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OlliOlli World is poised to receive its second and final expansion on 2nd November - and developer Roll7 has offered a closer look at its skybound skating hijinks ahead of its arrival.

Finding The Flowzone, as the new expansion is known, takes OlliOlli World's acclaimed skating action high above Radlandia, with players roaming the clouds in a fantastical floating boat alongside the infamous Radmospheric Three - "grizzled sea-dog Captain Squid, the prim and proper Professor Planks, and the mystically inclined Christopher Licht".

Ultimately, the goal is to reach the fabled city of Radlantis, meet the legendary Gail Force, and compete before the Skate Godz to earn the Radlantis Rivals Cup. First, though, players must complete courses set among the clouds, with some familiar Radlandia sights providing the backdrop.

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"The RTX 4080 12GB is a fantastic graphics card, but it's not named right. Having two GPUs with the 4080 designation is confusing. So, we're pressing the 'unlaunch' button on the 4080 12GB. The RTX 4080 16GB is amazing and on track to delight gamers everywhere on November 16th," says Nvidia, in a remarkable new blog post that effectively calls a halt to the upcoming launch of its most contentious of RTX 4000 releases, hinting that it'll be renamed when it does eventually re-emerge. RTX 4070 Ti anyone?

Unveiled by Nvidia boss Jensen Huang on September 20th, the RTX 4000 line of graphics hardware is based on the new Ada Lovelace architecture, fabricated on TSMC's 4nm process. The flagship GPU - the GeForce RTX 4090 - released a couple of days ago and was lauded for its massive generational leap over the existing RTX 3000 flagships, RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti. However, it's fair to say that the same level of acclaim and anticipation was not bestowed upon the RTX 4080, announced in two very different flavours.

The table below reveals that the spec differential wasn't just about the amount of onboard VRAM: each RTX 4080 model was based on an entirely different core processor, with wild variations in the amount of CUDA codes (compute power) and memory bandwidth. In effect, two very different graphics cards were being sold under the same name at very different price-points.

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EA Motive has been uncommonly talkative throughout the development of its Dead Space remake, with the studio hosting various livestreams to show off the likes of its improved art, audio, and gameplay changes - but now, with the game's 27th January launch inching ever nearer, we've had our clearest look yet at how all those elements will come together, courtesy of a new eight-minute gameplay walkthrough.

Hot on the heels of last week's 2-minute gameplay trailer, EA celebrated Dead Space's 14th anniversary today with an extended sequence from the remake's third chapter, in which protagonist Isaac must explore the infested USG Ishimura in order to reach the ship's engineering deck take and repair its engines.

The sequence began in Ishimura's hanger - an area that's now much bigger than it was in the original (a side-by-side comparison made the differences abundantly clear) - with players now able to zero-g their way around the area. Some of remake's environmental changes have been made to enhance the atmosphere, while other were required to accommodate the fact the Ishimura is now one seamless, interconnected ship, with players no longer needed to rely on the tram to get around.

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Pokémon Go's annual Halloween event is often one of its best activities and, as expected, this year features a number of new bits and pieces in-game. The event's first half, running from October 20th to 27th, features the arrival of Mega Banette in Mega Raids for the first time, plus the Shiny versions of Noibat and Galarian Yamask. But it also offers some more surprising additions.

These include the decision by developer Niantic to sell not one but two cheap event tickets featuring time-limited quests and rewards, with both a $1 and $5 option available. From the sounds of things, these will each offer different rewards, with the former offering encounters with Yamask, while the pricier option gets you an admittedly very cool animated Halloween lantern avatar item/pose.

Niantic is obviously trying something new here with a pair of different ticket options for the same overall event, as well as the fact these rewards will be time-limited - even if you paid. Typically, event questlines from Special Research remain in-game permanently, allowing you to complete them at your leisure.

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Overwatch 2 is a sequel if you take it on the face value of its title but it's more accurate to say it's a major update, replacing the original 2016 game on every platform. This isn't a sequel in the traditional sense clearly. Rather, it represents a change to how a familiar, well-loved game looks and plays. From a Digital Foundry perspective the headline is that with a new Overwatch 2 app rolling out, developer Blizzard actually uses this as an opportunity to release it as a proper, native PlayStation 5 app. For the first time, PS5 now benefits from several next-gen upgrades which til now Xbox Series X and S owners have been enjoying in Overwatch. So how does PS5 hold up with new features like 120Hz, and a native 4K resolution? And also, how much of an actual visual upgrade is Overwatch 2 compared to the original? And how does the game play across the board, bearing in mind that all consoles - even Switch - get the upgrade.

Outside of the tech, Overwatch 2 is now a free to play game. That's big change number one; it's free for anyone to download and play and much like Fortnite or Warzone, the model now revolves around season battle passes. It makes sense really: it wouldn't have been fair exactly to charge the fanbase all over again for what - again - amounts to more of a big patch update. The second change is more impactful to long-time players: Overwatch 2 moves to 5v5 matchups - rebalanced from the bigger 6v6 games of the original.

After eight years, the Destiny franchise is moving on from its various destination materials - the Spinmetal, Helium Filaments and Relic Iron you could zoom around on your Sparrow vehicle and harvest while patrolling the series' many planets and moons.

Some of my earliest memories from Destiny 1 are of looping the Cosmodrome for Spinmetal Leaves, hopping off my Sparrow to gather them, then heading off to the next node. Levelling your gear - which in turn levels your character - required plugging bits of these resources in, and I don't want to think about the number of hours I spent grinding these out.

Now, or rather as of Destiny 2's upcoming Season 19, the materials themselves will no longer be available to acquire - although you can still go zooming around on your Sparrow if you want to.

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Pokémon Sword and Shield are set to receive their final update ahead of the launch of Scarlet and Violet.

As Serebii.net reports, the Wild Area News will receive a final update on 1st November to add Pokémon not usually available, such as Gigantamax Snorlax.

Also, from this date the Battle Stadium will no longer update with a ranked season and results will not appear in Pokémon Home.

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Today brings another new Pokémon set to debut in the upcoming Scarlet and Violet games for Nintendo Switch: Bellibolt, an electric-type frog.

A couple of days ago, a teaser was released where Iono, a new gym leader character described as an influencer and livestreamer within the Pokémon universe, asked viewers to guess what her partner Pokémon was.

We were given the following clues: appearance-wise it's squishy, sluggish with an easygoing vibe, and has "two big ol' bumps on its noggin that people always mistake for eyes". And it's "so cute", according to Iono.

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A major new Dungeons & Dragons game is in the works from Invoke Studios, the rebranded developer of Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance formerly known as Tuque Games.

The project is being lead by Dominic Guay, a 20-year veteran of Ubisoft who worked on Splinter Cell before rising to become senior producer of Watch Dogs and its sequel.

Invoke owner and D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast announced the new project this week with only a few details: that it will have a triple-A scope, and be developed on the Unreal 5 engine.

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Blizzard has stated it won't be changing the balance of its heroes in Overwatch 2 until the game's second season.

In its latest developer blog post, Blizzard detailed its "current thinking on hero balance and gameplay", including map rotation and player ranking.

"While some heroes are performing better than others, and there are differences across player skill levels, we have been happy to see that no hero's overall power level is far out of line with our goals," Blizzard said.

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