We're fast approaching the launch date for the new Apex Legends season, and judging by the teasers shared by Respawn so far, Season 7 is going to be a big one. Following the lore trailer from earlier this week, we now have another trailer to show how new legend Horizon fits into the group - and a proper look at the new map and vehicles.
As established in the previous video, Horizon is a genius astrophysicist with a Scottish accent (and tragic backstory that seems eerily similar to Christopher Nolan's Interstellar). It looks like she'll be putting these skills to good use in the battle royale arena, as at one point she throws a trap that launches a squad into the air, while another appears to suck a team into a black hole. Unsurprisingly, this seems to be quite effective at wiping them out.
Horizon's squad spends a fair bit of time driving around new map Olympus, a cloud city located on the planet Psamathe (which you may remember from the Season 4 trailer - and also happens to be Octane and Lifeline's home town). The new Trident vehicle is a hovercraft capable of swift turns, and possibly comes with a boost mechanic. So thankfully, it seems those little manoeuvres will not cost you 51 years. As for Olympus, it generally looks like an idyllic and lush environment with ramps and tall towers - along with a mysterious orb at one end of the map.
It's time for BIG NAVI, as AMD has unveiled their new Radeon graphics cards: the $579 RX 6800, $649 RX 6800 XT and $999 RX 6900 XT. AMD claims that the cards should meet or beat Nvidia's flagship RTX 30-series graphics cards, all the way up to the $1499 RTX 3090, often at lower price and while consuming less power. The 6000-series cards are also the first desktop AMD GPUs to support real-time ray tracing, variable rate shading and other DirectX 12 Ultimate features. All in all, it's an exciting package for AMD fans - and would-be Nvidia users that might have become frustrated with poor RTX 30-series availability.
The performance here is what most people are looking for, so let's start with that. In AMD's slides, they showed the 300W RX 6800 XT trading blows with the 320W RTX 3080 at 4K, with small leads for the AMD card in Battlefield 5, Call of Duty Modern Warfare and Forza Horizon 4 and narrow losses in The Division 2, Resident Evil 3 and Wolfenstein Young Blood. Elsewhere, like in Doom Eternal, Borderlands 3, Gears 5 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the two cards were more or less equal. It was a similar story at 1440p, where the AMD card remained competitive in each title displayed.
Meanwhile, the RX 6800 looks set to compete against the RTX 2080 Ti - and by extension, the RTX 3070. AMD's marketing materials showed the 6800 beating the 2080 Ti comprehensively at 4K and 1440p, often by a 10 per cent margin or higher, although the slide notes that this is with Smart Access Memory enabled, a feature that requires a Ryzen 5000 processor (more on that later).
Tetris Effect: Connected is one of the greatest single-player games ever made with multiplayer (and an unlikely Xbox Series X and S launch killer app). It's an easy sell to someone like me, who adores Tetris Effect to the point of never really shutting up about it. But its timing couldn't be better.
I was lucky enough to get the chance to play Tetris Effect: Connected for just over an hour recently, and yes, it has the versus multiplayer you'd expect, with the time-stopping Zone mechanic cleverly woven in, but what's most interesting about this game is the co-op.
The co-op, called Connected (a riff on Tetris Effect's life-affirming title song), sees three players team up to try to defeat computer-controlled bosses. That's right, boss fights in Tetris Effect - and it's wondrous.
No Man's Sky is getting in on the next-gen action too, and developer Hello Games will be bringing its irrepressible exploratory space sim to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S - complete with an "impactful graphical upgrade" - in a free launch day upgrade for all existing players.
Hello Games' matter-of-factly titled Next Generation Update promises a range of No Man's Sky enhancements, but top of the list is what the studio is calling "fuller worlds". Expect "lusher, richer and more densely populated universes", alongside increased planetary detail "with thousands more rocks, alien grasses, and exotic flora on screen at any time".
These visual improvements, which you can scrutinise at your leisure in the new Next Generation Update announcement trailer below, will be made available on PC too.
Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed once again yesterday, and although the game's release was only pushed back by 21 days, it seems that was enough to stir up some nasty corners of the internet. Senior game designer Andrzej Zawadzki took to Twitter to report that members of the dev team have received death threats in response to the news, and reminded angry fans this was not acceptable behaviour.
"I understand you're feeling angry, disappointed and want to voice your opinion about it," Zawadzki said last night. "However, sending death threats to the developers is absolutely unacceptable and just wrong. We are people, just like you."
The backlash is not only related to the delay itself, but from a perception CD Projekt Red "lied" about staying on schedule, with many pointing to a specific tweet from the Cyberpunk 2077 account on 26th October promising no further delays. CD Projekt Red staff member Fabian Mario Döhla addressed this in the replies to Zawadzki's tweet, explaining that the social media manager would not have known about the delay (seemingly confirming a report CD Projekt Red staff heard the news at the same time as everyone else).
There's a new version of Rebecca out, which is good news if you love Rebecca, and who doesn't? But it's also weird news, because you're going up against Hitchcock and a version of Rebecca that is pretty much ideal.
In truth, I love this. I think people should have a swing at things even if an earlier swing was a home run. Don't make it better - make it your own! But I also remember the standard line for remakes: never remake something that worked. Remake something that almost worked.
FlashForward almost worked. Also, for my sins, I kind of love it. It's been a science fiction novel - I finally read it during lockdown - and it's been a TV series that didn't quite come together. Now I would love it to be a game. FlashForward!
SadSquare Studio's genuinely terrifying PT-inspired first-person psychological horror Visage is finally leaving PC early access - and getting its remaining two chapters - this Friday, 30th October, and it's heading to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on the same day.
Visage has been a long time coming, having initially secured Kickstarter funding back in 2016. It made its way to Steam early access in 2018 where, in-between somewhat frustrating bouts of prolonged radio silence from SadSquare, it's grown from a single chapter to two.
Yet despite only accounting for around half the final game, those two early access chapters have been more than enough to establish Visage's substantial horror credentials, amply demonstrating the work of a developer with a real flair for brilliantly conceived chills.
Developer Ion Lands' glorious Blade Runner-esque delivery thriller Cloudpunk is already an absolute joy to meander around, thanks to its gorgeously designed open-world playground - a vast rain-slicked sci-fi metropolis shrouded in endless night - but, from today, PC players can admire its neon-streaked, voxel-based splendour while staring out the window of their flying HOVA cars, thanks to a new first-person cockpit update.
Cloudpunk, if you've not yet had the pleasure, casts players as protagonist Rania as she attempts to survive her first 24 hours in the perpetually sodden city of Nivalis, completing jobs - primarily by zipping back and forth through the night sky, ferrying packages and passengers around the place - at the behest of illicit delivery company Cloudpunk.
Before long Rania and Cloudpunk's immensely likeable cast of characters - including her loyal AI companion dog Camus - finds themselves embroiled in a suitably intriguing mystery, and while the ensuing adventure might be a little slight (there's sadly not much to do in the city outside of the main plot), careening nippily around that breathtaking cityscape is a constant delight.
Ghostrunner is a game about the joy of movement, and I love how it never loses sight of that. You're a cyborg ninja and your weapons are speed and agility; everything you do, and everything the game throws at you, revolves around it. There are many enemies and boss encounters and special abilities, but they all centre on the fundamental idea of momentum.
It's a relief. I worried Ghostrunner would do a Mirror's Edge and get bogged down in combat, but it doesn't. Polish developer One More Level understood why the Ghostrunner demo worked earlier this year, and stuck with it. Do one thing and do it well.
Ghostrunner is a game about acrobatic routines, about devising them and performing them. It's what everything boils down to. You're an incredibly agile character who can wall-run, slide around, swing around, dash around and even slow time. But you're also an incredibly fragile character who will die in one blow from anything. The challenge of Ghostrunner, therefore, is a kind of elegance: not getting hit while simultaneously getting close enough to hit and slice apart others.
The release of Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed yet again, and will now launch on 10th December.
In a statement posted to Twitter just moments ago, developer CD Projekt Red said it was struggling to ship the large number of different versions of the game it needs to have ready this year - including current and next-gen consoles, PC and Google Stadia.
It comes less than a month after CD Projekt Red admitted it had asked staff to work mandatory six-day weeks for the remainder of the project until launch - and after the studio said it had now "gone gold" on the project, effectively finishing the version which comes out on a disc.