Even though the Assassin’s Creed series has become something of a hooded, shifty-eyed poster child for AAA bloat and excess, its more recent editions have understood the need to keep the hardware side accessible, never over-gorging on fancy effects to the detriment of performance. That Assassin’s Creed Shadows adds mandatory ray tracing to its already hyper-detailed rendition of feudal Japan might, therefore, make it look like it’s going rogue.

Read more

Half Life 2 RTX, the Nvidia-backed graphical overhaul mod for Valve’s seminal FPS, has a Steam demo out today. It covers both the Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt chapters, for an extended look at how much ray-slash-path tracing, RTX Remix asset remastering, and DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation is being packed into the decades-old shooter.

Read more

Two years since the first gaming-focused PCIe 5.0 SSDs showed up, there are some encouraging signs that these drives might eventually develop something approaching a point. Consider the Crucial T700, one of the first 5.0 SSDs to escape the data centre and make a break for our PCs: more expensive than the best PCIe 4.0 models, and slower than them at loading games. Useless. Now, though, we have drives like the PNY CS2150 bringing down the entry fee, as well as the new Samsung 9100 Pro to finally – finally> – deliver a performance improvement.

Still, there’s a way to go before PCIe 5.0 storage becomes the new standard, and honestly, that could take another two years or more. For all the CS2150’s cost-cutting and the all the 9100 Pro’s speed, neither make for compelling all-rounders like their 4.0 cousins do.

Read more

So you're after an AMD Radeon RX 9070 / XT? While the price is great, trying to seemingly find one at retail price is about as easy as finding a PS5 in 2020. Instead of paying inflated prices, I'd instead recommend picking up a prebuilt gaming PC—and these Skytech options are some of the best I've seen.

Read more

In a post last week about Steam's unhelpfully vague generative AI disclosure policies, Nic touched on "that most insidious side-effect of GenAI", the culture of paranoia it has bred among players who find themselves peering at every remotely uncanny piece of video game art, hunting for signs of machine-learning metastasis. Given the lack of transparency about the latest genAI tools, these AI-watchers often do their communities a real service, but there's the risk of art that is merely generic or worse, simply unusual> being flagged as generated. The problem goes well beyond games, of course: I've been accused myself of faking whole articles because I've done counter-intuitive things with the framing that read a little like the output from a text scrambler.

Read more

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Three weeks! Three weeks is all it took before Booked For The Week patron saint Gene Wolfe got mentioned again. Welcome back Gene. It's like you never left.

Read more

Lo! What's that on the horizon? It's another gigantic whale of an RPG soon to release. Good grief, there's been a lot of those recently. Must be mating season.

Here's what we're clicking on this weekend!

Read more

What can we learn about games by comparing the thrill of a nailgun kill in Quake to the elation of triple word score in online Scrabble? For Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering and KeyForge, it's actually quite a bit.

Taking place over progressive rounds in which you'll pick and assign your force to capture victory points over an expanding tileset, Vanguard Exiles exists because Garfield is "smitten" with autobattlers, a love he traces back to an "epiphany" he had in the 90s thinking about the different roles a computer could play in both natively digital games and what he calls "paper games".

"Yet they were both games," Garfield tells me over call, "I was playing them both digitally. The computer is vital. It serves a really good purpose, and yet, when you play [an autobattler], it feels like you're playing a paper game. You can sit back, think about your moves and understand really everything about the game before you execute, which is not the standard in a lot of digital games."

Read more

Alienware Area-51 gaming desktop is the kind of PC that makes console players jellous. It's big, powerful, and costs as much as a used car. But if you're dropping this kind of cash, you want to make sure you're getting the best deal.

Read more

Maybe five or ten years ago, everybody was absolutely sick of climbing towers in Ubisoft games. Are we still? I’m not sure. If you’ve never scaled one of these landmarks, possibly because you have recently arrived from Mars, let me start you off on the ground floor. The open world tower mechanic dates back to the original Assassin’s Creed in 2007, and is a simple, perennially gratifying narrative loop. It goes like this: you spy the tower on the horizon, you scuffle and shoulder through the city towards it, you savour the ensuing clamber - all those sinuous parkour animations, the wind around your ears as the urban backdrop fades - and then you get a nice view of Creation that also renders the scenery more consumable, by unfogging your map and populating it with content.

Read more