Microsoft Flight Simulator was no slouch at launch, but since release its developers have been been applying extra polish to its world map country-by-country. World update 4, out now, brings that extra detail to France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg - including new photomagicry of two major cities and three new hand-crafted airports.
Subnautica: Below Zero has been in early access for over two years, and the underwater survival sim follow-up is approaching its final release date next month on May 14th. To mark that looming date, developers Unknown Worlds have released a cinematic trailer which gives a brief introduction to some of the creatures that will terrify you in the murky deep.
One of my favourite memories from the past 15 years of doing this daft job was at EVE Online's fan fest. A developer on stage in a packed auditorium announced a more efficient way to move items between cargo holds, and the crowd around me erupted with "We just won the World Cup"-level cheering.
This is what Satisfactory's update 4 trailer reminds me of. Today's update adds hoverpacks, drones and particle accelerators to the factory building game, but it feels like it's a set of street lights turning on at the end that would get the biggest cheer.
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.