Ubisoft ผู้พัฒนาเกม Assassin’s Creed Shadows ออกมาขอโทษแฟนเกมชาวญี่ปุ่น หลังเจอเสียงวิจารณ์เกี่ยวกับเนื้อหาบางส่วนในเกม ที่มีการนำเสนอเรื่องราวของ Yasuke ซามูไรผิวดำ ซึ่งทางผู้พัฒนาเกมได้โพสต์ข้อความขอโทษผ่านโซเชียลมีเดีย โดยยอมรับว่าเกม Assassin’s Creed ไม่ได้ถูกสร้างมาเพื่อเป็นการจำลองประวัติศาสตร์ที่ถูกต้อง แต่เป็นการนำเหตุการณ์จริงมาสร้างสรรค์เป็นเรื่องราวใหม่ ซึ่ง… แน่นอนว่าเกมภาคนี้ (ที่ถูกเคลมว่าสร้างตามประวัติศาสตร์จริง) ก็เช่นกันค�…
ก่อนหน้านี้มีข่าวลือมาว่าทาง Hironobu Sakaguchi ผู้สร้างซีรีส์ Final Fantasy ได้ปฏิเสธข่าวลือว่าเขากำลังร่วมพัฒนาเนื้อหาสำหรับ Final Fantasy XIV ซึ่งก็ทำให้แฟนเกมหลาย ๆ คนตื่นเต้นเป็นอย่างมาก อย่างไรก็ตาม ล่าสุดในการให้สัมภาษณ์ที่งาน Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival 2023 คุณ Sakaguchi กล่าวว่าเขาไม่ได้มีส่วนร่วมพัฒนา Final Fantasy XIV และเขาจะไม่มีวันทำเช่นนั้นเด็ดขาด
“ผมต้องการสัมผัสประสบการณ์เกมในฐานะแฟนคลับ ไม่ใช่ในฐานะผู้พัฒนา” คุณ Sakaguchi อธิบาย “การที่ผมเข้าไปมีส่วนร่วมจะทำให้ผมโ�…
เป็นเรื่องที่ไม่น่าเกิดขึ้นแต่ก็เกิดขึ้นแล้วครับ เมื่อความดังของเกม Hogwarts Legacy ทำให้การเล่นเกมเถื่อนกลายเป็นทางออกของผู้เล่นที่อยากแล่นแต่ไม่ยอมเสียเงินซื้อ ซึ่งแน่นอนว่าการเล่นเกมเถื่อนพวกนี้จะต้องใช้ตัวไฟล์พิเศษเพื่อให้เข้าถึงเกมได้แบบผิดกฎหมาย
แน่นอนว่าการเล่นเกมผิดกฎหมาย ผู้เล่นจะต้องแบกรับความเสี่ยงในการติดตั้งโปรแกรมที่ผ่านการดัดแปลงมาแล้ว จึงไม่น่าแปลกใจนักที่คนพวกนี้จะติดตั้งโปรแกรม Malware เข้าคอมพิว�…
[อัปเดต : 29 พ.ค. 2567] Trails of Cold Steel: NW เกมมือถือ RPG ในซีรีส์ Trails ท้าทายภารกิจ พิชิตดันเจี้ยน เปิดกาชา พร้อมเปิดให้บริการเวอร์ชั่น Global ผ่านทั้ง Apple App Store และ Google Play Store ไทยเป็นที่เรียบร้อยแล้ว
[อัปเดต : 28 พ.ค. 2567] ล่าสุด USERJOY Technology Co., Ltd. ได้ประกาศเปิดให้ดาวน์โหลดล่วงหน้า Trails of Cold Steel: NW เกมมือถือ RPG ในซีรีส์ Trails ท้าทายภารกิจ พิชิตดันเจี้ยน เปิดกาชา เวอร์ชั่น Global ผ่านทั้ง Apple App Store และ Google Play Store ไทยเป็นที่เรียบร้อย โดยมีแผนเปิดให้เข้าเล่นในวันที่ 29 พ.คคำพูดจาก
Dragon’s Dogma 2, like its predecessor, handles parties in a cool and novel way—through its “pawns” system. Basically, there are soulless people-shaped adventurers you can summon from beyond the rift, often created by other players. You get a main pawn that you get to customise, while your remaining two party slots are filled out by rentals.
Getting your pawn rented gives you rift crystals (RC), which can be spent on in-game items or to hire pawns above your current level. As a bonus, players can send your moonlighting mate back with a gift or two. Or just a rotten hunk of meat, if they’re feeling vindictive.
As discovered by players on the game’s subreddit (thanks, GamesRadar), however, your Pawn might be getting pity-rented by Capcom itself.
“You can tell whether an actual player rented your pawn by attempting to view their profile while looking at your pawn’s report. If the option is greyed out, it’s a ‘fake player’,” writes user MrFoxer, linking to a FAQ on Capcom’s website. Sure enough, said FAQ reads:
“Your main pawn may return from their travel beyond the rift, even if your pawn is not borrowed by another player. Under these circumst…
EVE developer CCP games announced last year it was working on a blockchain-based game set in the space MMO’s universe, codenamed Project Awakening, and has now revealed the first details and an upcoming playtest. The Icelandic studio rather boldly says this is the next step in its quest to “create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life.” Goodbye to my children: I love you but you really oughta try this new CCP joint.
Project Awakening is a “single-shard survival experience” and seems to share a lot of DNA with EVE’s principles: player freedom, consequences, and “a universe that will evolve from the actions and efforts of its players.” It is unsurprisingly set in space, “where civilization has decayed in the ruin of its own ambition”, and promises a hostile cosmos in which players have to survive and rebuild.
So, what does it need the blockchain for? Well the $40 million in funding didn’t hurt, but it’s not enormously clear beyond a promise that “composability and programmability will enable players to build and collaborate on top, outside of and within the emergent game environment.” If you know what that means then please drop me an email.
Helldivers 2 is probably been the biggest surprise hit of 2024 so far but not everyone has been happy with it. A response by Arrowhead’s CEO Johan Pilestedt, to criticism over the lack of the option to use DLSS/FSR upscaling, was first interpreted as meaning that it wouldn’t be implemented at all. Pilesedt quickly shot that notion right down, simply replying that “gameplay > cool tech”.
All of these shenanigans took place over at X, of course, with it all starting with one run-of-the-mill spot of negative criticism. That particular person appears to believe that upscalers, such as like DLSS and FSR, are “basic features” in today’s PC games, but Pilestedt responded by calling it “cool tech but not necessary” before going on to expand that he’d prefer to use the coding time required to improve the game’s fundamental gameplay.
Naturally, that was completely misconstrued to imply that Helldivers 2 was never going to get DLSS. Cue yet another reply from Pilestedt to shoot that idea out of the sky.
Helldivers 2 isn’t an especially graphically-demanding game, compared to the likes of Alan Wake 2. The PC hardware requirements are very modest and it will run…
According to recent benchmarks of AMD’s Radeon 780M iGPU—the very same integrated RDNA 3 graphics attached to the ROG Ally’s assumed custom Ryzen 7 7840U SoC—we should see the red team’s next generation of mobile chips playing the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 at 60fps at 1080p. At least, when overclocked.
What that means for the ROG Ally is still nebulous, but if the custom SoC’s iGPU is anything close to the one being tested here, we’re expecting great things from Asus’s upcoming gaming handheld.
The numbers come from YouTuber ETA Prime’s time with the Asus TUF A15, and its Ryzen 9 7940HS Zen 4 APU (via WCCFTech). While that’s not the exact CPU we’re expecting to see in the ROG Ally, its Radeon 780M integrated graphics are what we’re most interested in. Asus has been teasing us with the ROG Ally since April Fools, and the latest rumours place its custom SoC somewhere between the Ryzen 7 7840U and the Ryzen 5 7640U—either way it’ll be touting the 780M.
Just to make things clear, the TUF’s Ryzen 9 7940HS was initially supposed to come with a 3GHz base clock, though AMD cut it back to 2.8GHz. That’s closer to what we’re expecting from the…
Helldivers 2 players are at it again: Arrowhead nerfed the fan-favorite flamethrower in the recent Escalation of Freedom patch, and the community has not taken it well. But in the eyes of Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani, it could be worse.
“I’d take this ANY day of the week over nobody giving a shit,” Jorjani said recently while chatting with fans on the Helldivers Discord. “And to be clear—I have no problem with what’s happening now. We want people to tell us what they like and not.”
“What’s happening now,” as Jorjani put it, is a pretty fierce blowback to flamethrower nerfs that drastically reduced its effectiveness against Chargers. As PCG Diver Morgan Park noted yesterday, the pre-nerf flamethrower was a prime choice as a support weapon because “its power justified the risk of burning yourself and your teammates” in the midst of combat. That’s no longer the case, and it’s led to an uproar on Reddit and Discord, and, as usual, a fresh influx of negative user reviews on Steam—more than 2,500 of them over the past three days.
Some of the discontent is no doubt a flare-up of the unhappiness that followed anger over Helldivers 2 balance changes in June, …
Little things can often matter a lot and when it comes to streamlining a game’s memory usage, every gigabyte counts. One of the developers at Larian, makers of Baldur’s Gate 3, has shown that the team’s recent hard work has resulted in a 34% reduction in VRAM usage for the forthcoming Xbox Series S version.
The good news was shared by Swen Vincke on Twitter, via a short post with two graphs showing how the RAM and VRAM loads of the Series S port of Baldur’s Gate 3 have been significantly reduced in recent weeks.
It’s worth noting that out of all the platforms that Larian has developed its masterpiece for, the Xbox Series S is probably the most restrictive. This is because it only has 8GB of high-bandwidth memory, to store the game while running and use as VRAM (the remaining 2GB gets used for system functions).
The graphs start at the beginning of September, with the game using just over 5.2GB for general game RAM and around 3.5GB for VRAM. By November, though, Larian had shaved this down to 4.7GB and 2.3GB respectively. The RAM reduction is a pretty decent 10% drop but the reduction in VRAM usage is a massive 34%.
Clearly, we have no idea what Larian has…
Final Fantasy 14 has a lot of cool mounts up for grabs—there’s a cosmic jellyfish that makes your character tiny, the Regalia from FF15, a tiny fluffy sheep, and even one where your character gets trapped in a T.V. They all share one thing in common, though: your character’s there, either riding them or caged inside them like the victim of some cautionary fairy tale.
That rule’s being broken this year with the upcoming in-game event The Rising 2023, which celebrates FF14’s ten year anniversary. These happen annually, usually featuring some fireworks and a cute thank-you cutscene with characters that look suspiciously like the dev team.
This year you’ll be able to claim the Rising Phoenix mount. Instead of keeping your poor warrior of light trapped in some digital prison, though, it’ll turn just straight-up turn you into a bird. All traces of your adventurer vanished, consigned to a feathery fate. The implications are somehow more concerning than being locked behind a T.V screen.
“Take a good look at this mount. Notice anything in particular?” asks community team member Minaryne in an official blog post. “If you noticed that no one is riding it…
When Path of Exile 2 was announced four years ago, it was going to expand on and overtake Path of Exile 1. The original action RPG’s campaign was still going to be playable, but PoE’s transformation into Path of Exile 2 would add in a new campaign and alter the endgame—sort of like how Overwatch 2 replaced Overwatch. Well, plans change.
During this year’s ExileCon keynote, developer Grinding Gear Games revealed that it has changed its mind, and Path of Exile 2 will now be a separate game that runs in its own client.
“PoE2’s scope has continued to grow and grow” since that 2019 announcement, said Grinding Gear Games co-founder Jonathan Rogers. The sequel so far adds six new classes, 36 ascendancy classes, 600 new monsters, 100 bosses, 240 active skills, 1,500 passive skills, new mechanics (a dodge roll with no cooldown got one of the biggest applauses), and more.
“This thing is just freaking huge,” said Rogers. “There was a point where we realized that our plan to replace PoE1 with PoE2 would essentially be getting rid of a game that people love for no real reason. So we made a decision: Path of Exile 1 and 2 will be separate, with their own mechani…
In a fireside chat with AMD’s Dr. Lisa Su, the super-popular CEO has some words for anyone who might be feeling a little bit concerned about the inexorable rise of modern AI and what the impact of the rabid adoption of the tech might be: “we must go faster, we must experiment, but do it with a watchful eye.”
Maybe that’s not the most reassuring thing for the AI-concerned among us, the idea that actually things aren’t going fast enough, but think for a second… do you really want things to stay as they are right now in the world of AI? Do you want to be in this limbo state where the data used to create the AI models of today comes from some wild west scraping of vaguely private and kinda public data?
Though, to be fair, if you are worried about where AI is going and what it is going to do, slowing down with the current models as they are might actually be more reassuring. For all their proponents and flashy demos, they’re currently, fundamentally, a bit rubbish. Sure, they can approximate some text output, and they’re getting a bit better at figuring out the right number of fingers and joints in a human hand for image generation, and they’re even …
I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a sucker for celebrities who are big gamers. From Terry Crews building his own gaming PC to Chloë Grace Moretz asking for desktop-building tips—seeing big names getting down and nerdy is the way straight to my heart. I’m not sure anything will ever beat Keke Palmer though, whose dramatic Sims 4 playthroughs are peak relatability for anyone who’s ever played the game.
Multiple clips of Palmer—an actress known for her roles in films like Nope and Hustlers as well as the Nickelodeon show True Jackson VP—playing The Sims 4 have been popping off on social media. She’s been sharing her playthroughs on Instagram Live, providing hours of entertainment. Her dramatic narrations of her sims going about their business are iconic, spinning elaborate relationship problems with short breaks while each sim has to go for a quick pee break in between arguing.
The thing that caught my attention, and the attention of many other regular Simmers, was how decked out Keke’s Sims game is with custom content and mods. Specifically Wicked Whims, a rather spicy mod that adds nudity, sex animations and tweakable options for pregnancy…
Just when you think you’ve seen every variation of survival game imaginable, along comes a game like Duckside. Developed by Tinybuild Riga, Duckside is a multiplayer survival sim in the style of Rust and DayZ, only everyone plays as a duck.
“Over 10 million ducks get killed per year by hunters, a statistic that would be much lower if ducks were combat trained,” states the game’s Steam page. “Enter Duckside, a persistent world survival game like DayZ or Rust… but you’re a duck, and so is everybody else.”
As reported by IGN, Duckside is developed by Tinybuild Riga, and aims to offer a familiar blend of resource gathering, tool and weapon crafting, base-building, and open ended combat against human NPCs and other player ducks.
Beyond the novelty value of its player characters (which, let’s face it, represents 90% of this game’s raison d’etre) the most interesting wrinkle here is that being a duck means that you can fly around the map from the start. Such freedom of movement could add a fresh dynamic to Rust-style survivalism. Granted, you can fly in Rust too, but only after you’ve built a helicopter, which isn’t easy in a game where you start of…
A Pokémon that has been absent from the Pokémon TCG for over two decades is finally returning, after illusionist Uri Geller (who claimed the Pokémon was based on his likeness) seemingly got a new perspective on life. Geller first sued Nintendo in 2000 after seeing an image of the Kadabra cards in Japan, which has the name “Yungerer” or “Yungeller”(a clear reference says Geller to his own name), demanding $60 million in damages. While the suit was dismissed in 2003 in America, Geller continued to pursue it in other regions.
Nintendo remained tight-lipped about the matter, though fans noted that Kadabra began to be used more sparingly outside of the games and, in the case of the cards, eventually not at all. The Pokémon was removed from the trading card game in 2002 but will return in this year’s Pokémon Card 151, which features the very first game’s roster (including Kadabra).
This news was broken by the website PokéBeach, which also received a message post-publication from Geller.
“I am pleased Pokémon fans are excited to see Kadabra return to the card game,” said Geller. “Look, I want to thank…
Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish-founded studio behind the Angry Birds games, has agreed to its purchase by Japanese gaming giant Sega. Sega Sammy Holdings will pay $776 million (€706m / £625m) for the acquisition, which includes all eight of Rovio’s global studios, and it’s buying the company to “strengthen its position” in mobile gaming, which has always been Rovio’s main focus.
Rovio is known as the Angry Birds studio because, well, it hasn’t had another hit on the same scale. Later titles like The Croods, Nibblers and Retry enjoyed moderate success in some cases, but nothing like the grumpy avians. Angry Birds was released in 2009, as a paid app, and over the first six months of release became a word-of-mouth viral smash, eventually hitting the #1 spot on the App Store. By mid-2012 it had been downloaded over a billion times (Rovio claims it was the first game to reach such a milestone).
Rovio has released dozens of Angry Birds games, including direct sequels and the likes of Angry Birds Star Wars, as well as two Angry Birds movies. It went public in 2017 with a valuation of around $1 billion, and the lower price paid by Sega arguably reflects this ina…
Update: A few hours after it was pulled, Only Up! is back on Steam.
Original story: One of the most popular new games on Twitch can no longer be purchased on Steam. It’s not known why Only Up! was delisted, but it happened not long after an artist accused the game of using a 3D model they made without permission, leading to speculation that Valve gave it the boot over copyright infringement concerns.
Shortly after the delisting, developer SCKRgames said on Twitter that Only Up! will return to Steam “soon.”
Only Up! takes after games like Getting Over It and QWOP, and more directly the Counter-Strike obstacle course map-making tradition. It’s one of those finicky platforming games that keeps the player in constant suspense and ends again and again in catastrophic failure, which makes it fun to watch. Although Only Up!’s Steam reviews were “Mixed” before its store page was zapped, it remains one of the most watched games on Twitch, with over 85,000 viewers at the time of writing.
A day before Only Up!’s store page disappeared from Steam, digital artist Aboulicious accused it of using a 3D model that they made. “Th…
In October of last year, a remake of Silent Hill 2 was announced. It’s been over a year since, and news of how the project’s coming along has been as quiet and as foggy as the titular town of Silent Hill itself.
These development draw-distance blues came to a head on Twitter last week when the studio, after being asked when they could expect some news, bluntly replied that it’s Konami’s job to handle that sort of thing.
Reading between the lines, you might see some frustration there. But I’m willing to take it at face value, especially since Bloober Team doesn’t hail from Konami itself—Silent Hill games are all partner projects, since the in-house studio “Team Silent” no longer exists. Still, Bloober’s CEO has some faith, saying Konami “knows what [it’s doing].”
The recent disasters of Silent Hill: Ascension has created an atmosphere of doubt, though. In fairness, Konami’s weird discount chatroom experiment has been made by a completely different set of devs. Bloober has the chops to pull a remake off, making a game we gave a 90 in our Layers of Fear review. Still, there’s enough anxiety that Bloober Team felt the need to make a second statement thi…