Mortal Kombat 11 will scale back the custom variation system for online ranked play.

As part of the Game Informer Mortal Kombat 11 cover reveal, developer NetherRealm confirmed each character will have at least two pre-built variations for use at tournaments and in online ranked play.

Mortal Kombat 11's custom variation system lets you select various special moves to create a loadout of sorts, a bit like picking weapons in Call of Duty. Each variation has three slots for you to assign moves to, and lead designer John Edwards told Game Informer the pre-built variations are "well thought-out".

Read more

Soon you'll be able to willingly experience some nightmares in bed, as Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is releasing on Switch next week.

Originally announced for the platform back in February, Ninja Theory has now unveiled the port will be available on 11th April. It's due to cost 24.99 and will be a digital-only release, and Ninja Theory currently has no plans for a physical release.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice first launched on PlayStation 4 and PC in 2017, before receiving an Xbox One port a year later. Clearly Microsoft loved it so much it decided to buy the whole damn studio.

Read more

It's not often video game box art catches my eye these days. If it's not generic action man looking like he's on a mission, it's a few generic action men looking like they're on a mission.

But the box art for Borderlands 3 did catch my eye, because it's weird and awesome and, crucially, different.

Video game Twitter person Wario64 leaked the Borderlands 3 box art, and it shows the game's familiar Psycho not blowing his brains out - as he has done in various poses on previous games in the looter shooter series - but with three fingers held up in an open palm pose.

Read more

When we first took a look at the PC version of Anthem, one thing was abundantly clear - this game is highly demanding on hardware. Average frame-rates are fine overall, but once the title's signature pyrotechnics kick off in full force, performance can drop alarmingly. Running at 4K resolution on max settings, not even Nvidia's top-tier RTX 2080 Ti graphics hardware can consistently run this game at 60 frames per second. However, the arrival of a new Anthem patch supporting Nvidia's deep learning super-sampling could potentially help.

DLSS is a fascinating technology that's still in its early days but has some remarkable properties. The idea looks simple on paper, and sounds almost too good to be true. The game renders natively at a lower resolution (4K DLSS tends to have a native 1440p base pixel-count) and then Nvidia's deep learning algorithm steps in to extrapolate the detail level up to 4K. In essence, new pixel detail is algorithmically generated to enrich the image.

DLSS is designed to replace temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) within a game's post-process pipeline, and it is fair to say that results thus far have been mixed. Early demos based around Final Fantasy 15 and Epic's Infiltrator showed the promise of the technology, while implementations like Battlefield 5's have not been so well received. Metro Exodus is a fascinating case: DLSS support at launch was extremely blurry, but a later patch radically improved the quality tremendously. And that's good, as DLSS opens the door for allowing higher resolutions to work at much higher frame-rates when paired with Nvidia's DXR-powered ray tracing.

Read more

Huge Sekiro spoilers ahead.

In Buddhism, the three marks of existence are impermanence, non-self and suffering. It's our failure to accept these things that leads to Samsara: an endless, painful cycle of reincarnation and an aimless wandering through a ceaseless existence.

Like weeping over wilted cherry blossoms when autumn arrives, we struggle against transience, and so we suffer. We cling onto fixed identities in ourselves and others, expecting to step into Heraclitus' river over and over, and so we suffer. Perhaps most painfully, we reject suffering itself, treating its presence in our lives as a failure, rather than a natural occurrence. And so we suffer.

Read more

BioWare has said it's looking at ways to improve the studio's culture after a new report revealed worrying crunch issues during the troubled development of Anthem.

According to Kotaku, many BioWare staff members suffered brutal crunch during the development of Anthem, which was critically panned upon launch earlier this year.

BioWare is described as a studio "in crisis", with reports of working having to take "stress leave" to tackle mental health issues brought about by crunch. "Depression and anxiety are an epidemic within Bioware," said one source.

Read more

Romero Games - the studio belonging to John and Brenda Romero - has signed a deal with Paradox to make a strategy game based on a new intellectual property.

That, really, is all we know. Maybe this is the publisher-tied project Brenda and John mentioned when I interviewed them in spring 2017.

"When you're working with a publisher, the publisher has a marketing department and a PR department and they're the ones who are responsible for talking about what's happening and they don't want the developer to talk about the game before they've laid all the plans," Brenda Romero said back then. "So we can't be the ones to first spill the beans."

Read more

It's another puzzling situation for Devil May Cry 5, this time for European PlayStation 4 users.

MILD SPOILERS FOR DEVIL MAY CRY 5 AHEAD.

Capcom issued an update for the game that adds the Bloody Palace mode, and with it pulled the lens flare butt cover-up that was included with the 18-rated action game on PS4 at launch.

Read more

Obsidian Entertainment demoed sci-fi role-playing game The Outer Worlds live at PAX East over the weekend.

A 20-minute demo, narrated by an Obsidian panel (co-game directors Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky; narrative designer Megan Starks; and lead designer Charles Staples), showed us the kind of city-based escapades we'll find ourselves in.

In this case, the player and two companions - Nyoka and Felix - auditioned for a part in an Odeon propaganda film. But these auditions used live ammo, and these auditions went a bit skewiff. From there: out onto the streets to bash locals and show abilities off.

Read more

If you played NBA Jam back in the early 90s, as I did, you'll instantly recognise the voice of Tim Kitzrow.

Kitzrow's bellowed basketball commentary became synonymous with NBA Jam, his "he's on fire!" and "BOOMSHAKALAKA!" lines iconic for a generation of video game players. Here's how it looked:

Now, 25 years after NBA Jam came out, Kitzrow has reprised his role - except he's doing it in a very different game: Rage 2.

Read more