Some Monday mornings, as I plonk myself down at my desk at 6.50am and load the RSS feed for the Steam Charts, I think to myself: you know what? There are so many other things I’d like to write about today. Anyway, here are the top ten games on Steam from the last week.
Nvidia has made available its 391.01 WHQL driver release for GeForce GPUs, and with it comes 'Game Ready' optimizations for Final Fantasy XV, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, and World of Tanks 1.0.
With regards to PUBG, Nvidia performed some internal benchmarking and found that GeForce GTX 1050 owners stand to see a 7 percent performance increase at 1920x1080. Likewise, Nvidia's benchmarks highlight the same performance gain for GeForce GTX 1080 owners at 2560x1440 and 3824x2160, and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti owners at 3840x2160.
Here's a look at the full set of data:
Bear in mind that these are Nvidia's benchmarks, not our own. That said, the testbed Nvidia used consisted of an Intel Core i7-7820X processor paired with 32GB of DDR4-2666 memory, running in Windows 10. A beefy system, in other words.
As for Final Fantasy XV, a version for PC is launching a week from tomorrow. It will arrive to Windows with 4K support "and a ton of other enhancements and additions" that Nvidia was eager to point out, such as Turf Effects and HairWorks.
Nvidia spent some time stomping out bugs with this latest driver release. Here is a rundown of the fixed issues:
Follow this link to grab the new driver package.
A lot of people have tried to argue over the years that it’s simply impossible to collate the top ten selling games on Steam from the last week, and then write a small comment accompanying each, beneath a screenshot. But today, for the first time, we hope to prove those people wrong. (more…)
When we first looked at Playerunknown's Battlegrounds on Xbox One, it's fair to say that we weren't hugely impressed, owing to its cut-back visuals and remarkably low frame-rates. And with that in mind, the basic concept of the game being adapted for iOS and Android seems almost outlandish. But here's the thing: as compromised as it is, the mobile port works and in fact, the sometimes brutal cuts are essential in actually making the game playable in handheld form on a relatively tiny smartphone screen. And in turn, this may offer up some idea of how - in time - the PUBG Corporation could bring the game to Nintendo Switch.
Ian's already taken a look at the game running under iOS - on a vintage 2014 iPhone 6, no less - but we wanted to push harder, so we deployed the game on two high-end Android devices: the Samsung Galaxy S8 (specifically, the version using the Samsung Exynos 8895) and the Razer Phone, based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 processor. PUBG actually ships with three quality presets designed to match the game's visuals to the capabilities of your hardware, and curiously, it also has three selectable frame-rate targets. It's difficult to figure this out because the title is currently available in China only and has no English text, but we've included a settings breakdown in our video embedded below.
The good news is that actually getting the game installed (freely and legally) is a piece of cake, and Eurogamer has a full install guide right here. Just be aware that the servers are geared towards an audience located elsewhere on the globe, so your ping may be high and PUBG's notorious rubber-banding and micro-teleporting may be more pronounced than you would expect.
Two new crates of clothing items have arrived in Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, one of them paid and one free. I am told they are inspired by 70s and 80s fashion. The odds are still that the crates will give you hideous clothing, just terrible, real awful looks, but at least there’s no chance of the game casually handing you one which requires buying a key to open it. The new paid crate is not thrown into the regular reward pool, see, so you’ll only get one if you want it. Today’s update also includes a few changes meant to improve performance, though it’s not clear how effective they are. (more…)
The thing about battle royale modes, right, is that the broad principle can be bent to many different games across different genres. They needn’t be ‘Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds but with…’ (Plunkbuts, as I’m sure you already know ’em). Robocraft doing battle royale with weird warbots is pretty decent and certainly different, and now battle royale is meeting class-based fantasy action in Paladins‘ Battlegrounds mode. Yes, that name is gobsmackingly cheeky. But while the name is a rip-off, the game might offer something different. We can see for ourselves now, as Hi-Rez Studios today launched Paladins Battlegrounds into public alpha testing and it’s free to play. (more…)
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is getting a new map next month, despite the fact dealing with cheaters has preoccupied PUBG Corp of late. To mark the beginning of its newest season, the last-person-standing 'em up is also in-line for two new cosmetic crates: The Fever crate, and the Militia crate.
From back to front, the Militia crate treats battle royalers to an 'Erangel resistance force' outfit and/or 'Miramar frontiersman' rig out—dropped randomly among the game's four existing crates free-of-charge.
The Fever crate, on the other hand, grants players an ensemble of neat '70s and '80s-inspired threads. They look like this:
Despite demand—seriously, who is willing to pay upwards of $450 for a cosmetic trench coat?—PUBG's outfits are otherwise pretty bland, so I'm all for adding a splash of disco-era clobber into the mix. Those outfits there can be purchased with BP and/or unlocked with Early Bird keys, so says the developer.
Both Fever and Militia crates go live on test servers today, and will be officially released tomorrow, February 22. Find out more this way.
The never-ending battle against cheaters has occupied the attention of the Playerunknown's Battlegrounds team in recent months, to the point that plans to implement some sort of ping limit had to be delayed. The upside, as the latest Steam update explains, is that the developers are now testing a different method of addressing ping issues that they hope will be even better than the system they first envisioned.
"Unlike the method considered earlier, we are going to divide the matching pool depending on ping. This means that the users with lower pings will be prioritized during matchmaking," the update explains. "The team is expecting to improve the overall play experience by splitting the matching pool rather than restricting connection depending on ping. Preparations are underway to test this method in some regions, with first trials planned to start this week."
The struggle to contain cheaters has also pushed back the announcement of new content and changes to the game that the developers say will result in a "deeper and more realistic" gameplay experience. Information about what's coming in the first half of this year, including the announcement of a new map, will begin to flow in March.
The current test server patch is focused primarily on optimization and bug fixes. Test build patch notes are below, and a timeline for a full rollout will be released soon.
World
Gameplay
Replays
Bug Fixes
Misc.