Posts

Journey To The Savage Planet landed on Google Stadia last month, but unfortunately it arrived with a game-breaking bug that makes it unplayable. It’s a pretty serious issue that you’d think the developers would be working on ASAP. However, Google are in the process of moving those developers to new roles within the company after shutting down their studios earlier this month, and now nobody seems to know who’s supposed to be working on a fix....

Not For Broadcast puts you behind the eyes of a janitor-turned-unwitting producer controlling the dials of a national British broadcaster in the 80s. You’ve got to keep your eyes on live broadcasts, played out in delightfully hammy full-motion video clips. In a totally unrelatable scenario, you’ll be altering the output of a national broadcaster, making sure the country only sees what the top brass considers appropriate. Shockingly unrealistic. Completely unimaginable....

That’s all less than five months since the launch of the original Intel Core i9-12900K, which as far as I can tell actually is the best CPU for gaming right now in pure performance terms. And the Core i9-12900KS is even set to beat the Ryzen 7 5800X3D to shelves, releasing on April 5th to the Ryzen’s April 20th street date. No brakes on the top-tier processor train, it seems....

Where to buy an RTX 3070: The RTX 3070 is launching worldwide on Thursday October 29th at 6am PT / 1pm GMT, just over a month after the release of its RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 siblings. Prices will start from £469 in the UK, and $499 in the US, which is more or less the same launch price as the RTX 2070 Super. Third party versions of the RTX 3070 will likely be more expensive, though, depending on how much they’ve been factory overclocked, but the Nvidia Founders Editions will stay at a fixed £469 / $499....

DLSS (or Deep-Learning Super Sampling, to give it its full and proper name) has quietly become one of the best things about recent graphics card tech. Ray tracing may be the big shiny obvious one that gets all of the attention whenever a new graphics card comes out, but DLSS is what makes a lot of those ray tracing games actually playable on today’s RTX cards, as the performance cost of switching on ray tracing (particularly at higher resolutions) is still prohibitively large in a lot of cases....

I think this is because Old Gods Rising feels like the starting principle was “how can I make a good game?” rather than “how can I gamify my favourite weirdo author?”. But if you want a Lovecraft game where you’re wading around in tentacles and uncomfortable metaphors, you will be disappointed. There aren’t none tentacles in Old Gods Rising, but despite the very Lovecraft-y name, the game is mostly about whether you believe the tentacles actually exist or not....

“A text-enabled mobile phone number is required to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II on PC,” the blog post said. “Existing Call of Duty: Warzone players that have previously verified their account will not be required to provide any additional information to access Modern Warfare II and Warzone 2.0.” Activision Blizzard say the phone requirement is no different from that of Warzone’s, which has been in place since May 2020....

However, to my eyes at least, some of the environments on old planet Enoch can sometimes look a little, well, plasticky. Outriders is a handsome-looking game, don’t get me wrong, but stare at its glossy visual feasts for too long and their clean lines and smooth textures betray a distinct lack of nitty gritty detail. Even in its torn-up battlefields, there’s very little roughage in the wilds of Outriders, as if every rock and mud track has been buffed and polished within an inch of its life, even on Ultra quality settings....

Outriders was in pretty rough shape for a few days after it came out, suffering from a raft of issues like players getting stuck in an endless sign in loop, inventories being wiped for no reason, and PC and console players getting disconnected from crossplay matches - that one got so bad the devs had to turn off PC and console matchmaking. To apologise for the problems and thank players for their patience, the developers are offering an “appreciation package” to anyone who played between March 31st and April 11th....

I always thought the Overwatch animated shorts paled in comparison to Team Fortress 2’s equivalents, particularly in their writing, but the above is pretty good. I enjoyed the righteous beatdown when it happened, and the rest is inoffensively sweet. Kiriko is one of Overwatch 2’s new heroes and as such you’ll have to unlock her via its new battle pass system. You might want to do that, too, since Kiriko is currently at the top of the game’s meta....

The meta has begun to settle after the first couple of weeks since Overwatch 2’s release, and so we’ve accordingly updated our Overwatch 2 tier list of heroes, which range from the very best, essential picks for any team, to the least effective characters on offer. Further below we’ve provided writeups on each of the best heroes in the game, to help give you a well-rounded impression of the current meta as you delve further into the new era of Overwatch 2....

The change was announced by Jeff “from the Overwatch Team” Kaplan in a very normal developer update, filmed on a phone taped to the back of a box in his home. Overwatch’s comm wheel is a reliable substitute for voice chat. But it’s been somewhat stagnant since launch, and as Kaplan notes, rather limited in its current form. While it’s often handy to let your team know when your ults are up or you’re low on HP, there were plenty of gaps in its coverage - gaps that this update hopes to fill by dramatically expanding the chat wheel’s vocabulary....

“We tried to stop it. We failed. Signals are breaking through into Oxenfree, and we can’t block them,” developers Night School Studio said in last week’s update post. “If we’re going to beat wha-ever is invading the r-dio waves, we’re going to need your hel-. Hard-n Tower. Epipha-y Fields. Fo-t Milner. Download this new patch, -o there, and tell us what you hear.” Valve did a similar thing to tease Portal 2 way back in 2010, updating the first Portal’s ending to lead into the sequel (as well as adding a bunch of other tease-y things)....

“In the wake of the recently leaked survey to the press, there have been rumors and discussions about my role in this environment, citing a specific incident in 2018,” begins Wester’s Twitter thread today. He says that at a company-wide conference in 2018, “a Paradox employee was subject to inappropriate behavior from me personally”. Wester says he apologised for his behaviour the following Monday “in a process reviewed by HR”....

This is an essential step in leveling up a new character, especially on league start. While you will have to complete each Labyrinth on every individual character, you only have to complete the Trials of Ascendancy once per league. Find every Trial and avoid unnecessary backtracking with our guide to Trials in Path of Exile. Path of Exile Trial of Ascendancy locations Here’s every Labyrinth Trial location in the order you encounter them: Normal Labyrinth Trial locations:...

You can see the full schedule for the event right here. Sessions are split across 11 different livestreams and some will run at the same time, so it’s probably a good idea to take a quick look now to plan out all the ones you want to catch. It’d be rude of me not to immediately plug the live edition of the Rock Paper Shotgun Electronic Wireless Show podcast. Alice B, Nate and Matthew will be discussing the theme “living a normal life”, because life hasn’t been very normal this year, really....

On January 5th, the Atlus Sound Team and Spotify delivered a jazzy New Year’s care package. They’ve gifted us the Persona 5 OST, Persona 4 & Golden OST, Persona 3 FES OST, Persona 2 Sound Collections, and seven other albums from Persona spin-offs, including the Persona 4 Dancing All Night OST. It’s a bit tricky to find them initially, as searching for something like the “Persona 4 Soundtrack” will only inundate you with covers....

Pick up an RX 6700 XT for £420 (RRP) So what makes the RX 6700 XT a good GPU to pick up? Well, as RPS called it last year, this is a powerful 1440p graphics card, sitting between Nvidia’s RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 - at least as far as UK RRPs are concerned. It boasts more VRAM than its Nvidia rivals too, 12GB to 8GB, and generally offers quite good performance in rasterised games....

Get the Crucial BX500 1TB for £56 (RRP £74) Despite being a budget drive, the QLC NAND in the BX500 offers high peak speeds - up to 540MB/s reads and up to 500MB/s writes, which allows it to run right up to the limits of the SATA interface originally designed for hard drives. Its DRAM-less design means that performance dips in sustained read/write scenarios, but if you’re using this for media or game storage, you’ll experience this tech’s limitations less frequently than if you were using the BX500 as your Windows/Linux/macOS install drive....

The game’s PC edition was revealed on slide 26 of a “Game & Network Services” presentation, with all the fanfare that a PDF presentation can muster. There’s no release date or anything just yet, but you can clearly see it sitting quietly under Days Gone in their “More PC releases planned section”. Uncharted 4 is an action adventure game about treasure hunter Nathan Drake and his worldwide quests for shiny things....