Mass Effect: Legendary Edition has the tough job of upgrading the visual appearance of games originally built to run at 720 or 1080p on an Xbox 360. That's a mammoth task even if it was just one game and not the entire Mass Effect trilogy.
A new trailer and blog post on the remaster's official site breaks down how BioWare went about upscaling 30,000 textures, and shows exactly how the results look.
Temtem's Cipanku island update is live now, adding a new region to the monster taming MMO - plus new Temtem to catch, a teleport sytem, and a lot else. There's a new trailer below that outlines all the new features.
As much as I adore Nier: Automata (degree: a lot), I cannot deny the PC version is a bit bum and has been since it launched four years ago. It's daft that we've had to use a fan-made fix to run it in the correct resolution or stop cutscenes stuttering. Square Enix did us dirty. But oh my giddy aunt, the stars have aligned and today they finally announced an "upgrade patch" for the post-apocalyptic RPG's Steam version. Presumably with the fixes from the recent Microsoft Store edition?
Ever since the demo failed to wow people back in February, it was pretty clear that Outriders had a ceiling. Not an outrageously low ceiling, but a ceiling nonetheless. Still, even with launch issues a lack of anything extraordinary, it's actually a pretty decent video game.
There's a Vulture circling overhead. Not a scavenger bird, but the somewhat larger Core Dynamics Vulture. Its engine reverbs across the moon's surface as it boosts off into orbit, ignoring me. I'm not worth the hassle. My Sidewinder, the trash-tier space banger of Elite Dangerous, is parked quiet and unoccupied on the edge of a huge meteor crater. I'm out for a walk, you see, with the long-awaited space legs of the upcoming Odyssey expansion. Not everything is smooth and picturesque in this ongoing public alpha. Despite that, it's gratifying to boot up your favourite space-trucking game and find not just a walking simulator inside, but a moon-walking simulator.
Over the last year or so, Respawn have been trying out loads of new game modes during Apex Legends' various events. It's been fun to see how even minor tweaks can really change the way you play the battle royale, and starting today there'll be five more modes to try out. The new War Games event kicks off this evening, promising a new mode every three to four days between now and April 27th. It all begins tonight with the Second Chance mode, in which each player will get to instantly respawn once per match.
AMD have announced six new additions to their family of Ryzen 5000 CPUs today, including their first pair of budget-focused Ryzen 3 chips. Based on the same Zen 3 architecture and 7nm manufacturing process as their existing Ryzen 5000 CPUs, the Ryzen 5000 G-Series will also come with integrated Radeon graphics chips capable of delivering "smooth 1080p gaming" without the need for a dedicated graphics card. However, if you were hoping to bag yourself one to tide you over until GPU prices start getting back to normal, you may be disappointed, as they're only going to be available in pre-built OEM systems at launch.
As they do every so often, Ubisoft have announced they're ending online support for another round of games this year. The latest games condemned to lose online services include Rainbow Six Vegas 2 and Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. This is on top of the server shutdowns Ubi announced earlier this year, which included Far Cry 2 and Anno 1404. It especially stinks because Vegas 2 multiplayer has been broken for months, so players can't even give it a proper send-off.
If there's one thing I've actually enjoyed during the last year of lockdowns, it's been how much more frequently I hop into online party games with my pals to mess around. That's probably why I'm drawn to What The Dub. It's a multiplayer game where players watch clips of strange old B-movies, then replace a bit of the script with some even more bizarre lines to try and make your mates laugh. Undoubtedly, this will turn into everyone trying to make the characters say incredibly vulgar things, but truly, what else are these sorts of games for?
I think we can generally agree that one of the main functions of video games is wish fulfillment. They let you believe you might not only be a powerful and competent person, but also the most powerful and competent person in the universe (and if that is not the case, why do Bethesda games even exist?). And, that being the case, survival games occupy a strange twilight world for me. I really wish I was good at them, because I really like the idea of most survival games.
I can barely survive my actual life when that includes sitting in a nice warm flat eating roasted, salted cashews from a bag that was sealed by a huge and complex robot the size of a warehouse, that was created specifically for the bagging and sealing of roasted, salted cashews. So pretending that I would, if I got stranded on an island or survived an apocalypse, be at all capable of doing anything other than lie down and wait for death to come to me is pure power fantasy. Except, I am very bad at most survival games.