The event introduces a new permanent contract called Trouble in the Ancient Forest, which you’ll be able to start if you’re Hunter Rank 16 or higher. Just hop into the game and look for a group of Felynes on the deck of the Astera in the trade yard.
Once you talk with them, you’ll be invited to the Research Base, which is where you’ll get your introduction to Geralt, who will agree to look into some strange events going on in the Ancient Forest. At this point, you can start playing as good old Geralt right away, heading straight into the quest. He's equipped with a special version of Monster Hunter: World's sword and shield that looks just like the pair of steel and silver swords he uses in The Witcher 3.
Geralt’s English lines are performed by Doug Cockle, who voiced him in The Witcher series. It’s a good thing too, because he has a lot of lines from what I’ve seen so far. Geralt sets to work investigating right away, constantly muttering to himself as he examines the carcass of an aptonoth.
This contract is available permanently, so there’s no rush on getting this one done. However, you’ll only have from May 17-30 to take on Ciri’s half of the crossover, which is a multiplayer hunt for a much tougher beast.
The content update includes a patch, and you can find the details about that over on Steam.
The masked killer from the Scream movie series is set to join the ranks of murderous psychopaths in Dead by Daylight, according to leaks based on a developer build of the game inadvertently pushed out during this week’s Mid-Chapter Update.
Dubbed “The Ghost” (or possibly Ghostface) in the game, the Scream killer wears a black hood and belted robe, along with the iconic wailing ghost mask made famous by the film. He carries a stabby kitchen knife, and apparently a mobile phone as well.
While Dead By Daylight has its own rogues gallery of murderers, the game has added several iconic horror villains over time, including Halloween’s Michael Myers, Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Dataminers have unearthed the Ghost’s animation set, which includes some menacing knife-waving, and a “memento mori” that allows the Ghost to kill a survivor while taking a selfie. Funny murderers are just the worst.
Leaks and datamining can be sketchy, but this one is legit: Behaviour tweeted an acknowledgement once word started getting around that Ghostface was coming to the game.
“Some lucky players got a glimpse of our upcoming chapter release content in today’s mid-chapter update,” they tweeted from the official Dead by Daylight account. That update has been corrected, but “in the meantime, enjoy the early hype on the next chapter.”
The next Dead by Daylight chapter update is due out in June.
Rainbow Six Siege has been trying to figure out what to do about friendly fire and teamkilling for a long time now. This week, Ubisoft rolled out a solution it's been mulling over for a while: reverse friendly fire.
Simply put, reverse friendly fire (RFF) reflects damage done to teammates back onto the attacker. It’s activated when a player kills a teammate, and the downed player either confirms that the kill was done intentionally or "forgives" the attacker. A confirmed teamkill triggers the RFF effects, and further damage done to teammates by that attacker is absorbed by the source of the damage. So, after killing a teammate, if you shoot a friendly player, you’ll take whatever damage they would have taken, and if you use a damage-dealing gadget like Twitch’s Shock Drone or Maestro’s Evil Eye camera, the damage will reflect back onto the gadget.
This solves the problem of created by the system that automatically kicks players on their second team kill. In a 5v5 game, griefers were routinely able to effectively throw matches by killing two friendlies and then getting booted, giving the opposing team a 5v2 advantage. But accidents do happen, and not everyone is careful around other players’ fields of fire, and this new system allows for that.
It should be noted that the current RFF system automatically tallies total damage done to teammates, so it’s not strictly necessary for a downed teammate to validate a teamkill to activate the RFF effects. If a player passes a certain threshold of friendly damage, the RFF effects will kick in on their own.
Ubisoft says this isn’t the final version of the RFF system, and that they’ll continue to consider community feedback as they fiddle with it. The sheer number of different operators in Siege make this system fairly complicated in practice, and Ubisoft has a breakdown of how RFF works over at the official Siege blog.
One of Valve’s riskier decisions with Artifact was to tie its cards to the Steam Marketplace. When the game launched, it was possible to buy every card you needed to complete your collection that way, but getting your hands on the most sought-after rare cards was an expensive proposition, with certain heroes costing nearly $20. But markets rise and fall, and now you can get a complete set of Artifact cards for around $40.
In fact, the cost of a full collection of Artifact cards has recently dipped below $40 for the first time, according to a site called How Much Does Artifact Cost that tracks current card prices and adds them up. For one of each hero card and three of everything else, the price at the time of this writing is $40.64. For May 9, the average price for a full collection was $39.15.
Again, these figures are aggregated from current prices on the Steam Marketplace, which of course means individual cards are getting cheaper. When we rounded up Artifact’s most expensive cards in December, the highest-priced cards were Axe ($17.91) and Drow Ranger ($13.57). Those cards are now $1.53 and 61 cents respectively.
Prices for Artifact cards have been in steady decline. Part of this is explained by the lack of demand—after an initial concurrent player count of more than 60,000, Artifact now usually has less than 200 players at a time. But the bear market for cards is also likely tied to the fact that Valve has said it’s planning to rework Artifact’s economy, and even rethink its core design. Players are likely waiting to hear what the company’s plans for Artifact are before sinking any more money into the game.
Two Point Hospital developer Two Point Studios is now a part of Sega, which announced today that it has acquired the studio after working with it as a publisher for more than two years. Sega said the acquisition is the first to come about as a direct result of Sega Europe's Searchlight program, which seeks out and supports "exciting new development talent" and games.
"We’re delighted to welcome Two Point Studios officially in to the Sega family. As a relatively new, British-based developer with a global hit already under their belts, we knew we had to move quickly on this deal because they are an extremely attractive investment proposition with a great deal of talent," Sega Europe president and chief operating officer Gary Dale said.
That's technically true—Two Point Studios was founded in 2016—but co-founders Mark Webley and Gary Carr have been working together for more than 20 years on games including Theme Hospital, Black and White, and the Fable series. Two Point Hospital, released in 2018, is a spiritual successor to the first game they worked on together, and it's exceptionally good: "A brilliant management game," we said in our 87/100 review, even without the benefit of nostalgia.
"It’s a landmark step for Two Point Studios and we’re thrilled to be joining the Sega family. We’re looking forward to executing the next phase of our plans as we continue to evolve Two Point County," Webley said.
"It’s a hugely exciting time to be a part of Two Point and we are here today thanks to the hard work, passion and dedication of our small, but amazingly talented team here in Farnham and the incredible fans that have supported us throughout and guided our continued development of Two Point Hospital."
Two Point Studios added a new co-op challenge mode to Two Point Hospital in the free Superbug Initiative update, released last month. It's also working on "several exciting unannounced projects" that will be revealed over the coming months.
It looks like my wildly speculative theory that the upcoming reveal of a new Ghost Recon game will actually lead us to a new Splinter Cell is in trouble. The unveiling is set to take place tomorrow, but a leak captured by redditor jrmywl30 has revealed—unofficially—that it will in fact be called spoilers.
No, it won't be called spoilers, but potential spoilers follow, so consider yourself warned.
The leaked image shows the "Wolves Collector's Edition" of Ghost Recon Breakpoint, a direct sequel to Ghost Recon Wildlands. The CE will apparently include a large figurine of someone who wouldn't be out of place in a near-future Assassin's Creed game. But that, according to further leaks, is not where Breakpoint is headed. Instead, the game will reportedly be set on the fictional island of Aurora—too many hassles dealing with real-world locales, maybe—and the chief villain will be none other than Cole D. Walker, the Ghost team leader and Jon Bernthal lookalike who came to Wildlands in the new Operation Oracle expansion.
That's an interesting twist, and not outside the realm of possibility. The teaser for the expansion suggests that Walker is something of a loose cannon, describing him as having "his own agenda" and warning that players "will uncover information [in the expansion] that will redefine loyalty … What you will discover here might very well set the scene for the future." In hindsight, the bit with Walker removing his dog tags and dropping them into an ammo box seems a lot more meaningful, too.
The leak, if accurate, doesn't complete ruin my Splinter Cell theory. It's possible that Walker isn't really bad, he's just more of a "lone wolf" type (and the wolf motif is certainly present in the collector's edition image), and all of this is actually just the in-between step from Ghost to Fourth Echelon—kind of like those superhero crossovers where everyone's a good guy but they have to fight before they figure out that they're all on the same side. But all of this is entirely unconfirmed, obviously, and will remain that way until 11:30 am PT/2:30 pm ET tomorrow.
Earlier this week, Bethesda Netherlands shared a small Elder Scrolls tabletop adventure set in Elsweyr, to promote the upcoming Elder Scrolls Online expansion of the same name. Players could download the digital pages, print them out, and then rock their own tabletop RPG while waiting for the new MMO content to arrive.
It sounds like a really sharp idea, but there was one big problem: People quickly noticed that the adventure bore a very strong resemblance to The Black Road, a tabletop adventure for Dungeons & Dragons that was released in 2016. And we're not talking occasional superficial similarities: Paige Leitman, who co-authored The Black Road with Ben Heisler, put together an "annotated Powerpoint presentation" comparing their original work with the Elsweyr adventure, and the two are almost identical:
The Elsweyr adventure was taken down quickly once the plagiarism came to light, and Bethesda said on both Twitter and Facebook that it is trying to determine who is actually responsible for the plagiarized content. Tweets announcing the adventure are also gone, and so is Leitman's Powerpoint presentation, although you can still catch it on Ars Technica. Leitman said in a followup tweet that she's "going to let the Powers That Be handle this."
I've reached out to Bethesda and Wizards of the Coast for more information on the situation and will update if I receive a reply.
Crysis is one of the most demanding games ever released, and it can still chug at times even on modern extreme hardware. But that hasn't stopped one modder, Pascal Gilcher, from pushing things to the next level, attempting to inject path tracing calculations into the mix. It's currently not quite as polished as the Minecraft path tracing mod, but the results are nevertheless impressive.
Pascal's ReShade filter (in alpha form—you have to be a Patreon backer to get access) attempts to apply path traced global illumination to games. Yes, any compatible game can in theory add global illumination, not just Crysis. But an older game like Crysis seems like the perfect playground for such shenanigans, and EuroGamer / DigitalFoundry put it to the test—in co-op mode, just to take things to the next level.
It's still a bit unclear as to how this particular filter accomplishes its magic. ReShade typically applies post-process filters to improve the way a game looks—adding SMAA to remove jaggies, SSAO for more realistic shadows, depth of field effects, and more. ReShade injects a DLL into the DirectX or OpenGL libraries to provide access to frame color and depth data, but ray tracing normally needs a lot more than that. Specifically, ray tracing (or path tracing) relies on having access to the geometry in a scene, and runs ray/triangle intersection calculations to help determine shadows, reflections, global illumination, and more.
This 'path tracing ReShade filter' focuses on global illumination for now, but this is not actually path tracing (or ray tracing) in the traditional sense. It doesn't have access to all the geometry and other data that would be necessary to do that sort of ray tracing. I also gather that it doesn't require or even make use of features that accelerate ray tracing, like the RT cores in Nvidia's RTX graphics cards. Doing so would require the use of DirectX Raytracing (DXR) or Vulkan-RT, which would cause problems with an old DirectX 9/10/11 game like Crysis. Instead, computations are done using traditional shaders to simulate path tracing.
Again, this is all a bit fuzzy and there's no detailed explanation right now. I've reached out to Pascal to try to get some additional explanation about what's going on and will update if I receive a response. The information available suggests the filter is using screen space data to approximate some of what ray tracing does, with less of a performance hit and in a way that can be applied to existing games. If that's correct, it's perhaps better to characterize this 'path tracing' as a form of screen space ray tracing—it sounds similar to Unigen 2's SSRTGI at least, which is used in the Superposition benchmark.
Whatever the case, this ReShade filter makes the 11-years-old Crysis look even better. That's in part because Crysis was released before things like global illumination were even attempted. It was the first game to do ambient occlusion, trying to make things look less 'flat,' and GI kicks the shadows and lighting quality up another level. Just don't expect performance to improve, because 'path tracing' of any sort only makes Crysis even more demanding.
CD Projekt Red has opened an online merchandise store that features T-shirts, hoodies, and various swag from across the studio’s titles—although naturally, you’re mostly going to find Witcher-related gear.
There’s a limited collection of Cyberpunk 2077 T-shirt designs, but the really neat stuff is found in The Witcher category. CD Projekt has a Wolf School emblem bracelet, a leather-bound notebook featuring the five magical Signs, and a rather stunning 12” polystone statue of Geralt reimagined as a ronin samurai. There’s also a huggable talking plush version of Shupe the Rock Troll, who tosses around card kegs in Gwent.
For the time being, the store is only shipping to territories within the European Union, but CD Projekt Red says it plans to open up orders to addresses in the United States, Canada, and other locations in the near future.
One strange omission, though? We can't find this thinganywhere.
After more than a year of waiting for approval from Chinese regulators to monetize the mobile version of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, publisher Tencent has shut down the test version of the game, updating it to a more patriotic version called 'Game for Peace.'
Tencent says Game for Peace “pays tribute to the blue sky warriors that guard our country’s airspace” and has a counter-terrorism theme. However, Reuters reports that Weibo users have described the game as being similar to PUBG in almost every way, except for the blood and gore. Now, instead of dying, characters fall down briefly, then get back up and wave goodbye.
However, Weibo users have noted that when they update their version of PUBG to Game for Peace, the progression they've made in PUBG transfers over.
Tencent has made enough changes with Game for Peace to pass muster with China’s regulators, allowing the company to charge for in-game items.
Players in China will still be able to access the PC version of PUBG through Steam, which operates in a somewhat grey regulatory area there.
