I wonder if there's a Rorschach test specifically tailed for games. So one person can look at it and see a blocky Minecraft village, another sees Illidan's face, and a third sees the concept of Inland Empire. Someone should make this a thing.

Not us though, we're too busy playing games, or doing other things that are less interesting than playing games. Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!

Read more

Nvidia DLSS 4 has launched under not-terribly-happy circumstances. It’s a mostly AI-powered technology at a time when mistrust in artificial intelligence, fuelled by underbaked applications and anti-creative policies, is at all-time high – not to mention how the new GeForce GPUs it’s released alongside, the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090, have immediately entered 2020-style stock shortage purgatory.

However, having tried it out in a few different games, I suspect time will prove kinder to DLSS 4 than the RTX 50 series launch has been. It is, in fact, a rather nifty collection of upscaling improvements that can help out older graphics cards as readily as the very newest, while building on DLSS 3’s frame generation tool with Multi Frame Generation (MFG) to send visual smoothness skyrocketing. If you care even the slightest iota for how your PC performs in modern games, DLSS 4 demands your attention.

Here, then, I’ll break down DLSS 4’s various tricks and components, looking at how they really affect performance – and whether it’s worth upgrading your rig to maximise compatibility with it.

Read more

Bioware released a statement yesterday. It talked of "turning towards the future". It dreamed of "a more agile, focused studio". Nowhere in the post did the word "layoffs" appear. But this is what the post was actually about. The closest it got to addressing the facts of what happened to an unspecified number of workers is the phrase: "we don’t require support from the full studio."

It's one of the most disingenuous announcements of job cuts in a recent and plentiful history of job cuts. A weirdly impressive feat from BioWare, considering the last two or three years have seen some spectacular verbal gymnastics from games companies when it comes to shitcanning people. Let's take a look at some of our "favourite" mealy-mouthed press releases in which people have their jobs poetically "sunsetted" rather than, say, dropkicked out the window.

Read more

Sundays are for playing some video games, I think? Seems unlikely but let's find out.

Jonathan Nash died. That name might not mean anything to you, but Nash was a writer for the much-beloved British games mag Amiga Power in the '90s, and he was influential on the generation of games writers that followed - including several founders of this website. RPS co-founder Kieron Gillen wrote about what made J Nash unique in his newsletter:

Read more

It's been a busy week of prep here in the treehouse! At least, I assume so. Nothing's broken or in flames around me, so I can only assume we're waiting for the next big thing to break down or burst into flames. In the interim, here's what we'll be clicking on this weekend!

Read more

Doom is back, and this time it’s bringing its signature blend of demon-slaying chaos and heavy-metal energy to medieval times. Doom: The Dark Ages launches on May 15 for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5—unless you’re eyeing one of the pricier editions, which grant early access starting May 13. Naturally, our attention is on the PC edition and, of course, where to get it for the best price.

Read more

A performance and settings guide for a ropey PC port of a Final Fantasy game? Sweet, I haven’t done one of these in four whole months. In fairness to Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, which Nic says can be great as a game per se, it does make some> effort at settling into Windows. It has rebindable M+K controls. It has DLSS. It has generally more consistent framerates than FFXVI, which could bait you in with silky visuals before grabbing your head and shoving it into the cold ice bath of sub-30fps.

Yet it also steps back from that game on its supported tech, while raising its hardware requirements so far above Final Fantasy 7 Remake that it won’t even launch on a lot of older graphics cards. Even so, hitching and microstuttering issues from FF7 Remake return once more, along with plenty of other signs that this PC version didn’t get the love that a lot of other erstwhile PlayStation exclusives – like Horizon Forbidden West or God of War Ragnarök – did for their ports.

Read more

If you turn 33 years old in the next couple of months then, sorry, you are dead. I don't make the rules, that's just how Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 explains the lack of elders in its very French yet very JRPG world. The fantasy game will see you journey across a dangerous landscape to stop the mad "paintress" who's magically culling humanity at younger and younger ages every year. We've been keeping a weary middle-aged eye on its development, and yesterday it got a release date. It's too late for most of us in the RPS treehouse. But watch the trailer for yourself, maybe you'll make it.

Read more

Typical, really. I get all excited about sharing details from a preview event for upcoming FPS Doom: The Dark Ages, then it turns out the gameplay reveal video is going public before the embargo anyway. Then> the alleged release date allegedly leaks, allegedly. How am I supposed to present myself as a font of knowledge now, Id? Fortunately, we had a roundtable interview afterward with executive producer Marty Stratton and game director Hugo Martin. Sweet, job-justifying details!

Writing up the interview in full would involve typing out the words "awesome", "slaughter", "core pillars", and "iPod" more times than anyone realistically needs to read. Instead, here's a list of every detail I found interesting that isn't already covered in the showcase.

Read more

Assassin's Creed Shadows has a lot riding on it. Between its multiple release date delays in response to Star Wars Outlaws not selling as well as Ubisoft would've liked, and Ubi potentially being bought by Tencent as they clamour for help, there's a sense that Shadows needs to deliver not only a great game, but corporate redemption.

I've now played Shadows for four hours, having dipped into a bit of prologue action, some open world exploration, and a questline as both the hulking Yasuke and the lithe Naoe. Have Ubi delivered? I think there's a strong chance. What I played was a lot of comforting Creeding, carried along by a gorgeous interpretation of Edo Japan, and some subtle tweaks to up stealth stakes. Although I do think the two protagonists are a split personality that doesn't quite> work for me.

Read more