Eurogamer

After more than two years of tinkering with the RE Engine, master modder Praydog is close to releasing a VR mod for the Resident Evil 2 remake that boasts motion controller support and the ability to play through the game in either third or first-person.

While this mod is yet to be released to the general public, myself and a handful of other VR fans have been given access to an incredibly impressive early build, which you can see in action in this week's episode of VR Corner.

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Rockstar has released a number of screenshots showing how Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy will look on Nintendo's handheld system, Switch.

Though there are only a few screenshots on the official website, they do offer a glimpse of what the world looks like, as well as its characters and vehicles, too.

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Pokémon TCG Live's Canadian mobile soft launch and global open beta for desktop have been "shifted" to 2022.

Addressing the delay on its social media channels, The Pokémon Company said the extra development time would ensure players would have "a more polished experience" at launch, and said it would provide more information on the "timing" of the test period - and release date - "soon".

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Nintendo is warning Animal Crossing: Happy Home Paradise players about a new, unspecified bug that spawns if they attempt to remodel an island resident's home while the gates of the airport are open.

Though the developer chose not to detail how, exactly, the bug manifests, it has given guidance on how to avoid the issue before a fix is issued later this month.

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Star Wars The Old Republic turns 10 years old next month, and to celebrate developer BioWare is re-releasing all of the game's classic cinematic trailers in 4K.

First up is a 4K re-release of the Deceived trailer - in my opinion one of the best video game trailers of all time.

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The pandemic has ravaged the theatre industry across the world - but one group of intrepid Fallout 76 players came up with a cool idea to help the show go on.

The Theatre Company, a theatre troupe that operates within the world of Fallout 76, staged a production of Macbeth live in-game, and streamed it on Twitch with the help of machinima experts Fallout Five-0.

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Call of Duty: Vanguard is out in the wild and fans are having their say about the game's multiplayer.

It seems to be going down relatively well - I haven't come across an outright dud of a map yet, and the action is fast, lethal and, when played with the Blitz combat pacing, all out chaos. Check out Eurogamer's Call of Duty: Vanguard review to find out what we thought.

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EA may have to remove Diego Maradona from FIFA 22 after a ruling by an Argentine court.

Maradona is currently available in various games in the FIFA series, including the recently-released FIFA 22.

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Guardians of the Galaxy left a great impression after our tests on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. The game itself is simply terrific and genuine highlight of 2021 - but equally obvious is that the Dawn Engine is demanding on console hardware. All of which raises the question: just how do the last-gen machines cope with the game? In a world where PS5 and Series X struggle to maintain 1080p60 in performance mode, can any PS4 or Xbox One machine deliver a good experience?

Obviously, there are going to changes from the current-gen console experience - so the option to choose between a 30fps quality mode and a 60fps performance alternative is off the table. It's 30fps and that's your lot, similar to Xbox Series S. Reducing resolution as well as frame-rate is another obvious way that Guardians of the Galaxy can scale: so, the base PS4 renders with a dynamic resolution range of around 900p to 972p, while Xbox One drops down to 720p (DRS is a possibility here but all counts came in at 720p, curiously). Owing to the temporal anti-aliasing in play, the lower the resolution goes, the less distinct the picture is but it's still a good-looking game: only hair and fur elements genuinely suffer.

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Elden Ring has a 4k graphic mode and 60fps performance mode on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S.

Confirmation comes from a GameStop listing for Elden Ring's Collector's Edition, which includes a paragraph titles "Enhanced Experience".

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Halo Infinite has discussed its approach to the game's battle pass, telling players not to expect silly dances in the game.

Infinite's multiplayer is free-to-play supported by a seasonal $10 battle pass. It launches alongside the campaign on 8th December.

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Square Enix has delayed Final Fantasy 14's Endwalker expansion by two weeks.

In a note to players, producer and director Naoki Yoshida apologised for the delay, which sees the hotly-anticipated expansion pushed back from its original 23rd November release date to 7th December.

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For a short while I had a very specific obsession with early 90s F1 console games - partly because it's often acknowledged as a golden age of the sport and partly because there were so damn many of the things at the time. Super Monaco GP! Satoru Nakajima F1 Hero! Super F1 Circus! Nigel Mansell's World Championship! Of the vast glut of them that crowded shelves back then it was always Exhaust Heat that was something of a favourite, its Mode 7-powered take on the 1992 season surprisingly authentic (plus I'll never forget the car journey home from a Slough shopping centre clutching the box in the back seat, the passing street lights occasionally illuminating the glorious airbrushed cover art).

It's one of the first comparison points that comes to mind when playing Horizon Chase Turbo's outstanding Ayrton Senna expansion. To call it an expansion is a bit of a disservice, really - this takes on the 1991 season with some authenticity, featuring recognisable tracks as well as recognisable takes on iconic liveries like Minardi's black and yellow or the aquamarine blue of March, but it takes on Senna's debut season at Toleman, his short but glorious tenure at Team Lotus as well as his breakout championship year in 1988. There is a lot of video game here, and the detail within is - to an old F1 head old enough to have been to Silverstone to see Senna in his 90s prime - absolute manna.

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A Better Ubisoft, a group of Ubisoft employees campaigning for improved working conditions at the publisher, has launched a petition seeking public support for reform following what it sees as an inadequate response to its demands from senior management.

Last summer saw a wave of Ubisoft employees calling out toxic work conditions within the company - including allegations of serious sexual misconduct aimed at members of senior management - after which Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot pledged to "do everything in [his] power to ensure that everyone... feels welcomed, respected, and safe".

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We called it an Xbox Series X masterpiece and that isn't hyperbole - Playground Games has delivered a phenomenal game and a sensational audio-visual experience for its flagship console. However, this is a cross-gen release: somehow, Forza Horizon 5 has to run on last-gen machines and still live up to the expectations of quality expected from a first-party studio production. Admittedly, we were sceptical about its chances but Playground Games was always optimistic - and having put every version through its paces, the studio has delivered.

Quite how Playground would deliver this was always the crucial question and it was very satisfying to visit the studio a few weeks back to see exactly how it was done, my tour kicking off with a look at a remarkable cross-platform comparison system the studio developed. Using one controller and a network of Xbox consoles, I was able to see the demanding jungle stage of the intro drive playing out in real-time across five of the six iterations of the game, with the debug camera used to zero in on the various rendering techniques Playground had developed for the game. From there, moving from left to right, I could see how each console delivered the scene: Xbox Series X quality and performance, Series S equivalents, then finally, the base Xbox One. Xbox One X? I didn't see that but I needn't have worried, it's a fitting send-off for the Microsoft's first 4K console.

Skyrim morphs into its latest form next week - the Skyrim: Anniversary Edition - to mark ten years since the original's launch, and ahead of its arrival on 11th November, Bethesda has shared pricing details, alongside word on a free next-gen update for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

As revealed at QuakeCon back in August, Skyrim's Anniversary Edition bundles together 2016's Skyrim: Special Edition and all Creation Club content released at the time of the Anniversary Edition's launch - amounting to over 500 elements, including quests, dungeons, bosses, weapons, and spells. Creation Club, for those unfamiliar, is the name given to Bethesda's curated pool of officially sanctioned mods, with each item available for purchase using premium currency Credits in the Special Edition.

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Nintendo has said its hugely-successful Switch is still in the "middle" of its lifespan, as it laid out its plan to expand the reach of Nintendo's franchises to investors.

A slide in the latest Nintendo financial results presentation shows how the Switch has seen the start of the company's Nintendo Account initiative, something it said would strengthen "long-term mutually positive relationships" between itself and consumers.

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Activists at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow dressed as Pikachu to protest Japan's support of the coal industry.

Japan ranks sixth in the world for coal consumption, accounting for 18.5 percent of the world's total consumption (Worldometer).

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Konami released eFootball's first patch today following its disastrous launch - and it shows why the game should never have been released in the first place.

v0.9.1 is now available for eFootball on PC, PlayStation and Xbox, and Konami has published the patch notes. They make for remarkable, sometimes hilarious, sometimes horrifying reading.

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E4 has released a first look at the new GamesMaster show.

The trailer, below, reveals a familiar audience-fuelled competitive gaming setting, as well as hosts Robert "Rab" Florence, Frankie Ward and Ty Logan hyping up the action.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: war, space adventures and a bit of robbery.

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.

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Custom matches have been added to popular online shooter Splitgate.

The Portal-inspired game is still in open beta, with an official launch in 2022. However, players have until 30th November to finish the battle pass for Season 0 as a new season begins in December.

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The first Community Day for Pikmin Bloom will be held on Saturday, 13th November, from 9am to 6pm local time.

Niantic announced the date today, with plans for in-game bonuses similar to the Community Day held every month for Pokémon Go.

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Amazon has said it will take "remediation steps" against New World players who "egregiously exploited" the recent coin duplication bug.

Players of the MMO found a coin/item dupe bug when player trading and, as you'd expect, exploited it.

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Bungie is selling a Pride Pin in its US store, with all profits in November donated to charity Trans Lifeline.

The news was announced via an in-game message in Destiny 2. Community manager dmg04 shared the message on Twitter.

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Sensible Soccer spiritual successor Sociable Soccer launches on PC and console at some point during the second quarter of 2022.

The football game launched first on Steam in early access form back in October 2017.

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Nintendo has revealed its latest user figure for Nintendo Switch Online, and a rise of six million paid subscribers over the last 12 months.

32 million people are now Switch Online subscribers (as of 30th September 2021), up from 26 million people last year.

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It's always a bit strange playing an old game for the first time, not that I like calling Project Eden old because it only just came out on PlayStation 2, and how can that be old? What - that was 20 years ago? Well that's Friday in the bin. But what I mean is, experiencing Project Eden for the first time now is a bit like watching a classic film. There's an air of historical importance to it, even if it is a bit clunky.

The premise is an intriguing one. Project Eden is a game by Tomb Raider creator Core Design, and it puts you in control of a squad of four law enforcement agents investigating the disappearance of various people in a futuristic city. It has that typical early 2000s feel to it: an undefined future that's clean yet also far from pleasant. There are some wild predictions in it, like synthetic meat companies. Imagine!

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Final Fantasy 7 The First Soldier comes out 17th November.

Developed by Japanese studio Ateam Entertainment Inc. and published by Square Enix, Final Fantasy 7 The First Soldier is a mobile battle royale spin-off.

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Konami has delayed eFootball's proper launch to next year following the game's disastrous release.

v1.0.0., which was due out 11th November, has been postponed to spring 2022, Konami said in a note to press today.

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It feels like a stop-gap year for Call of Duty. Developer Sledgehammer Games finds itself sandwiched in-between the mega sub-brands that are Modern Warfare and Black Ops, and has produced fun filler for fans to be getting on with. There's nothing wrong or bad or off-putting in this return to World War 2, but Vanguard does nothing exceptionally.

That return to World War 2 feels like a boring choice of setting. Sledgehammer's excellent Call of Duty: WW2 opened the door to the long-running shooter series for me, and after walking through I've spent thousands of hours in this new Call of Duty metaverse (sorry). But I struggle to get excited for another Call of Duty set in World War 2 - despite Sledgehammer's best effort to put a spin on storytelling.

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Animal Crossing: New Horizons has finally been given a long-awaited - and desperately needed - shot in the arm, courtesy of Nintendo's 2.0 update which, somewhat unexpectedly, arrived earlier today. We already knew it was going to be a big one, of course, but we now have a much clearer idea of just how big it actually is, with data miners having successfully unearthed and catalogued a whopping 9,000+ new items as part of the update.

Granted, a fair few of those items - as datamined by NWPlayer123, Trundler, and VillagerDB, and shared by AnimalCrossingWorld - are colour variations, but even taking those into account, it's still a mammoth set of additions, covering clothing items, furniture, a multitude of different light fixtures, cooking apparatus, and more.

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Riot, developer of the ridiculously popular free-to-play game League of Legends, has teamed up with Epic - developer of the ridiculously popular free-to-play game Fortnite - for a partnership that will see several Riot titles being made available via the Epic Games Store and an appearance from League of Legends character Jinx in Fortnite.

The Jinx crossover gets underway today, and - as is now very much the norm in the ever-revolving advertising billboard that is Fortnite's Metaversal world - will take the form of a purchasable skin in the shooter's Item Shop.

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Amplitude Studios' historical strategy game Humankind is getting in on the limited-time event action with a month-long celebration of Día de los Muertos, complete with related rewards.

As explained in Amplitude's announcement, events in Humankind - Día de los Muertos is hoped to be the first of "many" - will task players with completing various challenges across multiple chapters, with new chapters unlocking over the course of the event. Completing challenges will award players with unique customisation options, including symbols, frames, and avatars.

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Almost exactly 15 months after it was revealed Spider-Man would be heading to Marvel's Avengers as a PlayStation-exclusive playable character, developer Crystal Dynamics has announced a release date for the much-delayed hero; he'll be swinging into action on 30th November as part of a relatively beefy update for the beleaguered live service game.

Spider-Man was originally due to arrive "early" 2021, but players began to wonder if something was seriously amiss when the character, having failed to materialise in that initial launch window, was conspicuously absent from a development roadmap stretching all the way into "summer and beyond". Crystal Dynamics eventually moved to reassure fans that Spidey was still coming but his exact arrival date remained unclear - until now.

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Rune Factory 4 Special will launch for PS4, Xbox One and Steam on 7th December 2021.

The critically acclaimed remaster, which arrived on Switch last year, will receive an upgraded resolution and improved performance.

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Total War: Warhammer 3 will launch on 17th February via Steam, Epic Games Store and more - or you'll be able to play it day one via Xbox Game Pass for PC.

Sega announced the news today, alongside details of the Ogre Kingdoms Race Pack, which comes free for those who pre-order the game ahead of time or pick up a copy during its launch week. Notably, you'll need to buy this separately if playing via Game Pass.

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Let's get the shameful business out of the way first. Every year on Football Manager, I choose to manage Manchester United. United - or, ahem, Man UFC - are the team I support here in the real world, and that's about as far as my thought process goes when starting up a new FM save. There are two philosophies, basically: the fashionable, hipster choice of managing somewhere a little trendy, a little half-step out of the limelight, an AS Saint-Étienne, maybe, or for a greater challenge someone like AFC Wimbledon or your local ultra-underdogs of choice; or, you manage the team you support. There is technically a third way which we don't speak about (PSG), but broadly speaking, those are your options.

The reason I like Manchester United is because they straddle a bit of both. I know the club inside out, I'm desperate for us to win and loathe to see City win the race for another five attacking midfielders ahead of us, and frankly I just like having all my dreams fulfilled. At the same time Manchester United is a god awful mess of a club, and it brings me immeasurable joy to step into the breach every year and be the hero who comes and fixes it. So, like I said, best of both: favourite-team fantasy plus the pleasure of mending that which is fundamentally broken.

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From Software's hugely-anticipated Elden Ring was shown off again today in nearly 20 minutes of new gameplay footage, which revealed the open world Souls-like in new detail.

We saw glimpses of the game's Breath of the Wild-like open world, including a ubiquitous shot stood on a cliff. There was also combat against a giant dragon, and a friendlier encounter with a creature that looked like a giant cooking pot.

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For nearly as long as video games have existed, the racing game has stood as a monument to state-of-the-art technology - an opportunity to dazzle audiences with vividly realized automobiles gliding across virtual highways. As this technology evolved so too did the representation of driving - more advanced physics enabled more realistic simulations while more powerful graphics architecture enabled increasingly vivid recreations of the world around you. As new consoles launched, new racing games would inevitably appear to demonstrate why you needed that new machine. From Project Gotham Racing to Forza Motorsport to Forza Horizon, Microsoft has understood this - and with Forza Horizon 5, Playground Games has delivered an exceptional system showcase.

The defining structure of Forza Horizon is the marriage of driving and open world exploration. Players are plunged into an expansive map packed full of races and events - participation in or simply reaching these events allows players to drive a wide range of powerful cars along the way. To make this work effectively, the game needs to render large open areas that are both visually striking yet completely legible while also retaining near-field detail capable of showcasing both the cars and the environment. Oh, and it needs to do all of this at 200 miles per hour.

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