Humble, that purveyor of assorted gaming grab bags, has just launched its latest Choice bundle and it's headlined by a pair of excellent PC games: supernatural shooter Control and sci-fi strategy spin-off XCOM: Chimera Squad.
It's worth pointing out that Remedy's Control is already available through Xbox Game Pass on PC, but picking it up through Humble Choice means you'll own it forever and not be at the mercy of Microsoft pulling it from the service on a whim. It looks stunning on PC, too.
Next to these two leading stars, the March Humble Choice bundle is rounded out with ten other games. This includes the likes of side-scrolling strategy gem Kingdom Two Crowns, pyrokinetic stealth platformer Wildfire and tech-infused fantasy RPG Elex. I've popped the full list below:
Harry Potter prequel game Hogwarts Legacy is planned to include a "trans-inclusive" character creator, as well as a transgender character, Bloomberg has reported.
The character designer will let you pick from unlinked body type and voice options for your Hogwarts school protagonist. Body types are labelled as either "witch" or "wizard", and this will also determine which of the school's dormitories your character is placed in.
Numerous video games now offer unlinked body type, voice, and gender pronoun options, or simply avoid specific gender labels, but the fact Hogwarts Legacy will as well has drawn attention due to the game's connection to Harry Potter universe creator JK Rowling.
There's a new Aliens game on the way.
Aliens: Fireteam is a co-op third-person shooter due out summer 2021 on PC via Steam, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and Xbox One.
The gameplay trailer is below (it looks a bit like Gears of War meets Aliens to me):
Nvidia's DLSS has gradually evolved into one of the most exciting technological innovations in the PC space. The idea is remarkably straightforward: the GPU renders at a lower native resolution, then an AI algorithm takes that frame and intelligently upscales it to a much higher pixel count. There's an instant performance win, but remarkably, also a quality advantage too up against native resolution rendering. In the past, we've wondered whether this quality win comes down to mitigating the artefacts of temporal anti-aliasing - TAA - but the recent arrival of a DLSS upgrade to Nioh 2 provides us with an interesting test case. Nioh 2's basic rendering lacks much in the way of any form of anti-aliasing at all. It's pretty much as raw as raw can be. So the question is: can DLSS retain its performance advantage and still provide an actual increase to image quality up against native resolution rendering? Remarkably, the answer is yes.
DLSS was - and essentially still is - a replacement for TAA. Temporal anti-aliasing effectively uses information from prior frames and integrates them into the current one, typically using motion vectors to map where pixels in prior frames would sit in the frame being rendered. In best case scenarios, it's effectively improving image quality, and it is certainly the AA method of choice in modern gaming. But it can have its negative points: ghosting and added blur foremost amongst them. DLSS does have commonalities with TAA, which is why it is generally considered to be a replacement - it too requires the motion vector data in reconstructing its image. DLSS performance mode reconstructs from just 25 per cent of native resolution - so a 4K DLSS image is built from a 1080p native frame. Meanwhile at the other end of the scale is DLSS quality, which in this example would be generated from a 1440p frame. Balanced is the other major mode, sitting somewhere between the two.
As for performance advantages, in the case of Nioh 2, the effect is extraordinary. Nvidia's RTX 2060 is the least capable desktop GPU with DLSS functionality and at DLSS 4K, performance mode offers over 50 per cent of extra frame-rate, up against around 32 per cent for the DLSS quality mode. Perhaps the best utilisation for this GPU is 1440p rendering, where DLSS quality mode ensures you're essentially always running above 60fps. Meanwhile at the absolute top-end, RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 are delivering 4K gaming at 100fps and higher - it's an extraordinary experience on a suitable screen. But since Nioh 2 does not use TAA, does image quality hold up?
14 years after it came out, Halo 3 is getting back bling.
Taking a page out of the Fortnite playbook, Halo 3 is getting a raft of new customisation options, including what are called back accessories.
These new customisation options, which do not affect gameplay, are live now in the Halo: The Master Chief Collection flight (the version of the game where upcoming features are tested).
PlayStation 4 exclusive The Last of Us Part 2 has received 13 BAFTA Games Award nominations - the most for any single game in the history of the awards.
Sony games dominate BAFTA's nominations list, with 10 nods for Ghost of Tsushima, seven for Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, six for Dreams and four for Sackboy: A Big Adventure.
Supergiant's brilliant Hades - Eurogamer's Game of the Year for 2020 - has eight nominations, while Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Media Molecule's Fall Guys share five.
UPDATE 3/3/21:
The former developer of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has confirmed this week's layoffs, but said it would continue to operate and was developing multiple unannounced projects.
In a statement issued to RPS, a spokesperson for Hardsuit Labs stated that redundancies had affected "a small number of individuals", though a specific number of people was not disclosed.
"While we worked hard to source some great work opportunities for the studio to move forward with, we were unable to provide work for a small number of individuals and thus made the difficult decision to part ways. This decision was not made lightly and was done so only after we felt we had exhausted the opportunities to avoid such a layoff," Hardsuit said. "We sincerely wish the very best to our former colleagues and thank them for their contributions to the studio and our projects during their time here."
If you've been playing the Outriders demo since it came out last week, you may have picked up on an annoyance: loading cutscenes.
The third-person looter shooter game from People Can Fly (Bulletstorm, Gears of War: Judgment) plays a short cutscene whenever you want to move to a new area.
These cutscenes show everything from a character opening a door to climbing a ledge. They include a full fade to black opening before playing the cutscene, then another fade to black before you get back into the action.
So along with 4m other people, you're really enjoying Valheim at the moment - but perhaps there are a few quality of life improvements you'd like to see, or maybe you just want to turn the game into a building sandbox. Despite the lack of official support, the modding community has been hard at work on Valheim, and has already produced a number of mods to serve almost every community request. Here's a round-up of some of the most useful mods so far - along with a quick explainer on how to get started.
Before you get stuck into Valheim modding, you'll need to download a couple of prerequisite mods that make the rest of Valheim modding possible. One of these is Valheim Unstripped DLLs, which Vortex (Nexus Mods' mod manager) will recommend installing. Another mod called BepInExPack for Valheim carries out a similar function, providing a general purpose framework for Unity modding, which basically gives mod creators the tools they need to alter Valheim ( and you'll need to download it for these mods to work). You can find it over on Thunderstore. Oh, and remember to back up your save files before diving in - you can find them through Steam by opening the properties menu for Valheim, then 'local files' and 'browse'.
If you're looking for an all-in-one quality of life mod, the obvious choice is Valheim Plus - a gameplay mod that allows players to tweak most of Valheim's core systems. You can alter anything from stamina usage and health regeneration to certain items' rate of production, such as how fast a furnace can pump out iron. You can also sort out niggles like being unable to take metal through portals, and speed up that annoying thing at the end of each day called "night-time". Who needs game balance, anyway?
There are shooting games, and there are shooting games. Irem's 1987 R-Type can't exactly claim to be the first of its kind, and you could well argue there are more widely acclaimed shooting games, but you'd be hard pushed to find any as iconic as this stately sci-fi venture. Cold, composed and challenging, it's the archetypal 80s shooter, and a prime example of the genre in its pomp.
The popularity of shooting games would wane throughout the 90s, however, and by the turn of the century those in charge of the series wondered whether it had a future at all. Which explains the brilliantly fatalistic air that hangs over R-Type Final, the 2004 entry that was imagined as a full-stop for the series.
R-Type Final lead designer Kazuma Kujo has since discovered there's life yet in the series, though. The veteran of Nazca, Irem and now Granzella - the studio where many Irem alumni ended when the company moved away from video games - now finds himself heading up development of a sequel, somewhat bafflingly called R-Type Final 2, after a Kickstarter campaign more than doubled its targets. A month ahead of R-Type Final 2's release on April 29th, we spoke to Kujo about R-Type's return, and what it will entail.