Month: October 2024

I’m not really sure why it works this way, but the Catholic church has released a statement previewing the message that Pope Francis is due to deliver on World Peace Day on 21 September this year. And the Pontiff, clearly having seen the faked image of him in a puffer jacket, is having none of this AI nonsense.

Pope Francis’ address is where the guy who’s got religion will tell you if your sin’s original, and this year’s theme is “Artificial Intelligence and Peace”. The announcement gives a precis of the talk which acknowledges “the remarkable advances made in the field of artificial intelligence” but will go on to rain holy fire about its “rapidly increasing impact on human activity, personal and social life, politics and the economy.”

Get ready to genuflect because Pope Fr…

Call of Duty spawns are always a little wonky on launch day, but they’re rarely as entertaining as this Modern Warfare 3 bug. Some console folk hopping into multiplayer early (presumably employing the good ol’ New Zealand region switch trick) are getting swept up in a nonstop bullet barrage as the map Quarry will sometimes spawn every player in the lobby at the same spot.

The results are a sensory nightmare of constant gunfire, blood squibs, and killstreak chimes. Not even the deliberately claustrophobic layouts of Rust or Shipment can compare to the wrath of the Quarry corner. 

modernwarfareiii from r/ModernWarfareIII

The culprit for the Quarry bug seems to be a specific mode: Hardpoint. Players in the comments of Reddit user…

Like I pointed out at the end of last year, mid-January to early February was pretty damn big for gaming. Games like Palworld I did not see coming, while others like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Tekken 8 have been having their moments. One game I pointed out but didn’t particularly expect to bang was Granblue Fantasy: Relink, a JRPG from a relatively niche franchise that’s gone through its fair share of development hell.

Yet here we are, nearly two weeks after release, and the game has kinda banged. It managed to sell 1 million copies in just 11 days across PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Steam. Even on Steam alone it’s been doing pretty dang well for itself, regularly breaking 100,000 concurrent players over the past week-and-a-half and nabbing itself a spot on the…

I love Ramón Salazar, Resident Evil 4’s ridiculous little lord boy who manages to look like a child and an old man all at once, while somehow only being 20 years old, but his boss fight can be a bit of a chore in the recent remake. Luckily, there’s a way around it: Pelt that tiny aristo with eggs.

Spotted by Polygon, the trick actually involves RE4’s rare golden eggs, which you’d normally use to fully restore your health. But if you hang onto the ones you pick up long enough to use them in Salazar’s boss fight, you can take him down in just a couple of tosses. It works in any difficulty mode, too: You can see Larxa, a streamer, obliterate him using the method in hardcore mode in the tweet below.

The only trouble is that golden eggs can be hard to find, and you’ll prob…

Jon Peddie Research has just wheeled out its latest analysis of the graphic card market. And, boy, it ain’t pretty. Sales continue to fall. This time around, sales for the first quarter of 2023 are down 38% on the same period last year and 12% down on the last quarter of 2022.

Of course, these latest slumps come on top of the massive 50% year-on-year cratering of sales at the end of 2022 reported by JPR. Not good, is it?

Figures like these do come with a few caveats, however. By way of example, JPR erroneously included 60,000 Intel data centre GPUs into its figures last time around, only to have to rapidly adjust it figures. Errors can always be made, but the fact that its original figures suddenly put Intel on par with AMD with GPU sales should have rung alarm bells as bein…

CD Projekt Red’s two biggest RPG hits, The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, are both known for big main quests and engaging characters, but more than anything you’ll hear people consistently bring up the little adventures they have between other stories. In an interview with PC Gamer at GDC this past week, Cyberpunk 2077 lead quest designer Pawel Sasko said that’s mostly because they’re thinking of lots of ideas and only using the best ones.

“A good designer has an acceptance ratio of their ideas of between five to 10%,” said Sasko, “If someone has 10%, this is probably one of the best people we have in the team.” “

Sasko emphasized that for CD Projekt the key to weeding out the bad ideas was in the process of having quest designers pitch all of their ideas to the team so that …

Harold Halibut is one of the more intriguing videogame ideas I’ve seen in a while. It’s “a handmade narrative game about friendship and life on a city-sized spaceship submerged in an alien ocean,” which is interesting in its own right. But it also employs a stop-motion visual style reminiscent of games like The Neverhood or Armikrog, or (for those of a certain age) those classic 1960s holiday movies. We got a closer look at Harold Halibut at the PC Gaming Show in 2023, and now you can take a piece of it for a spin courtesy of the demo that’s now available on Steam.

The demo promises about 1.5 hours of gameplay from the very beginning of Harold Halibut, although developer Slow Bros. said some people have needed twice that time to get through it. It’s a chunky demo, clocking in at 5…

Cities: Skylines 2 has announced that eight new regional building themes will come to the city builder via the Paradox Mods distribution platform. Created by a variety of well-known modders from the Cities Skylines modeling scene, the new packs will be Japan, UK, East-coast USA, West-coast USA, China, France, East Europe, and Germany

Spread across these thematic regions will be over 2500 new assets. These will join the two already in-game, the more generic European and American themes.

“We’ve teamed up with some of your favourite creators, including Titan, bsquiklehousen, Darf, RichardShi, MacWelshman, Badi_Dea, Feindbold, Gurny, and many more, to bring you 8 Free Region Packs, coming soon to Paradox Mods!,” said the announcement. Accompanying the announcement was a teaser t…

A new Bloomberg report says Electronic Arts has cancelled development of a new game based on the Apex Legends and Titanfall series that was in development at Respawn Entertainment.

The report, which cites three sources, says the cancelled project was a singleplayer game codenamed Titanfall Legends and set in the shared Apex/Titanfall universe. It was reportedly being directed by Mohammad Alavi, until his departure from the studio in 2022.

That would presumably be the project Alavi teased on Twitter in July 2021. “We’re developing a brand new singleplayer adventure from Respawn Entertainment,” he said at the time. “We’re a small, but ambitious team with a history of dreaming big and making splashes.”

Alavi’s LinkedIn page indicates the same thing, saying he was “creativ…

Come, ye weary faithfuls who have held fast to the dying flame—Grand Theft Auto 6 is upon us after ten long years. First, a rumour, then an official confirmation, and now, an official confirmation with a number attached. The sky may fall next.

As posted to Rockstar Games’ official twitter account, the GTA 6 trailer (slated to release in December) will be setting the internet on fire next week.

Just to reiterate this groundbreaking announcement, we will be getting an official, non-leaked look at an honest-to-god new GTA game Tuesday December 5 at 9 am Eastern. That’s 2 pm GMT if you’re in the UK. Not having to rise up bright and early to watch this thing is one of the few advantages of being on rain island as winter sets in.

At the time of writing, it’s been not e…

Apple has emerged largely victorious in the latest round of a legal battle with Epic Games, which focuses on antitrust laws and the way the App Store is run. Epic’s suit, sparked by various shenanigans around the hugely popular Fortnite, says that Apple’s marketplace violates federal law by banning third parties from using their own payment platforms on the operating system: That is, it’s a monopoly.

The suit began in 2020 after Epic updated Fortnite on iOS with a payment workaround, which would bypass Apple’s usual 30% cut. In response, Apple promptly banned the app. Essentially this is all about the cut the platform-holder is taking from third party developers, and whether those developers should have the right to implement their own payment systems. The 2021 judgement in the ca…

Fortnite has temporarily had leaderboards before, with limited-time modes like Solo Showdown and Blitz Showdown adding more competitive options, and Arena mode has its Hype Score and Bus Fare, but now the long-running battle royale is adding a way to determine your worth by labeling yourself Silver or Gold or whatever. As the Fortnite Team at Epic has announced, Arena is being discontinued and ranked play will arrive in the v24.40 update.

Rank improvement will be based on the number of kills a team or solo player scores in a match (with kills later in the match and kills of high-rank players worth more), as well as their placement at the end. A progress bar tracking how far players are from either hitting the next rank or falling back down to the previous one will appear on the le…

There was a small segment for Fallout 76 during the Xbox livestream at the Tokyo Game Show, in which the creative director Jon Rush took a second to celebrate all the wonderful camps made in the game so far and ended by announcing a new feature for Fallout 76 that’ll arrive at the end of the year.

“We wanted to give a huge shoutout to our playerbase over here,” Rush says. “The Japanese Fallout 76 community has been one of our most talented and dedicated. From playtime, to levels, to camp building, you guys have been an absolute joy to watch and play with.” After this, we got a little montage of some of Bethesda’s favourite camps, which are all significantly better than mine. But Bethesda’s time in the showcase wasn’t just spent looking at pretty pictures—there was also an …

I really thought Activision and Microsoft would drag it out at least until June, but nope, one day after launching a not-really-cryptic teaser site at thetruthlies.com, it’s official: Call of Duty is going back to Black Ops.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, as it’s officially known, will—as expected—be revealed on June 9 at the Black Ops 6 Direct stream, which will follow immediately after the Xbox Game Showcase. Details on what we can expect at the show haven’t been shared, but Activision said it will be a “full reveal,” which will presumably include whether they stick with the numbering scheme in the official title.

The current expectation is that Black Ops 6 will carry the series forward from the 1980s setting of the previous game, Black Ops: Cold War, to the Gulf W…

There’s snow on the ground, magic in the air, and the doors on your advent calendar have begun popping open to reveal the treasures inside. That can only mean one thing: It is time to look at Geoff Keighley. The Game Awards—an awards show, but for games—returns tonight, December 7, and promises to bring with it a gamut of premieres and trailers that you’ll probably want to tune in for.

There’s a lot of questions around this year’s show. Will we get Elden Ring DLC news? Will Kojima show off something incomprehensible appended with a release window? Will Swen Vincke be able to hold all of Larian’s awards this time? Pertinent queries all, and there’s only one way to answer them: Watching the show. Or reading our articles about the show. Two ways then, I guess. 

Bandai Namco has a friendly FYI for all the Elden Ring players out there: The big Shadow of the Erdtree expansion arrives on June 20, which is less than two weeks away, and an awful lot of you have work to do before you’re ready to take it on.

Minor spoilers follow:

Back in February, Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki said players will access Shadow of the Erdtree through Miquella’s cocoon, which is found in the palace of Mohg, Lord of Blood. Naturally, Mohg is not cool with people like you messing with Miquella, so step one of the process is putting the thump on him.

And that’s where the problem lies. As streamer Cohh Carnage pointed out, less than 38% of Elden Ring players on Steam have earned the achievement for collecting Mohg’s head, which means that n…

Working out exactly what the backpack number means in Once Human might take you a little while. It’s kind of unnerving the first time your rucksack—or Cradle as the game calls it—starts beeping and displaying a steadily climbing number. Usually, a counter like this would represent your proximity to something important, perhaps even a hidden treasure.

In Once Human, however, it’s more like when the radiation sensor on your Pip-Boy in a Fallout game starts going off: big numbers and lots of sound means stop and turn around. If you’re just starting out for the first time, you might want some help changing worlds or some Once Human codes for free stuff, but otherwise, here’s that number on your backpack explained.

So what does…

Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida has rather cheekily brushed off discussions around a PC port for the game, telling fans to “buy a PS5” if they want to play it. He went on to ask, “Why is it like a PC version is releasing six months later?”

It’s possible that he’s forgetting Square Enix’s own PlayStation Showcase reveal trailer for Final Fantasy 16, because that’s why. The existence of a PC version of the upcoming RPG has been a strange one. The aforementioned reveal trailer very visibly added a footnote that, while the game was a PlayStation exclusive, it would also be on PC. Despite that, Square Enix seems to have done everything in its power to deny the port’s existence since then. All traces of a PC announcement have vanished. The closest we’ve gotten is a recent traile…

When you picture what a Final Fantasy game is, what does your mind jump first to? Shiny, pretty landscapes? Even prettier hair? Cute little creatures? Final Fantasy 16 really doesn’t fit that mould. With high-stakes action combat and a much darker tone, FF16 flips all of your expectations upside down.

The world of Valisthea feels as grubby as Game of Thrones. Both have medieval(-ish) worlds full of warring nobles vying for power with a cruel approach to their citizen’s welfare, and both face impending doom—in Final Fantasy 16’s case, a blight that is draining life and magic from the world, slowly consuming it and leaving it barren.

Those who can use magic without the aid of crystals are feared and marked as “Bearers”—forced to work as slaves and per…