The new Apex Legends Season 12 gameplay trailer gives us a better look at Mad Maggie's fiery abilities, and they seem perfect for flushing campers out of their hiding spots. This latest trailer, delivered as a piece of Silva Pharmaceuticals propaganda, also reveals the Sabotaged Olympus map update and Control mode coming in Season 12.
A new standalone singleplayer game of Gwent is coming this year, telling a new tale with the card game spun off from The Witcher 3. It's codenamed Project Golden Nekker and... that's about all we know for know. It's not another 'Witcher Tales' like the previous singleplayer Gwent game, like Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, and it is confirmed to have at least two (2) monsters. Possibly three (3) if you consider that man is the real monster. Or four (4) if you hate libraries.
Even with a bunch of post-launch performance improvements, Microsoft Flight Simulator is still the kind of game that can make most PCs sweat. Good news, then, for frequent flyers who happen to own an Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics card: Flight Sim is getting DLSS support this year.
Specifically, DLSS will be available when running the sim in DirectX 12, as part of a handful of upcoming DX12 enhancements that also include optimisations for playing on multiple monitors. Developers Asobo Studio confirmed the DLSS addition in a recent devstream, which you can watch in full below, though the feature is still being tested so there’s no specific date beyond 2022.
Square Enix first launched Final Fantasy VII 25 years ago today, introducing a new generation to big-sword bishies. In celebration, both the director of the original JRPG and the creative director of the recent FF7 Remake have posted messages looking back and forward. Along with several FF7 mobile games kicking about, they tease that more new FF7 things are coming. Hopefully this means he'll hear more about efforts to complete the remake, but I guess they could also be talking about merch or new movies.
It wouldn’t work without the sounds. The thwop of your whip, the thwick of your dagger. The electronic twinkle of health-restoring chicken, which sounds uncannily like the shield’s up sound from 1999 classic 3D Astro Blaster. The ‘boo boo de boo, boo boo de boop’ of the chest-opening jingle, to which my shoulders cannot help but shimmy. Best of all: the plink of picking up an XP-granting gem - at first a sporadic treat, soon a near constant hum as the tide of enemies grows from a trickle into a flood.
Vampire Survivors is a simple, early access, arcade-style game about dodging an ever-growing horde of monsters while acquiring spells that fire automatically. You can (and should) play it with one hand while eating a bag of crisps. It’s a very good way to spend £2.
Intel’s Arc graphics cards are, despite apparent delays, likely to launch this year. And not just with the expectation of being good GPUs, but with the hope that they can fix one of the biggest vexations in PC gaming: a years-long component shortage that’s made all of the best graphics cards nearly impossible to buy at fair prices.
Intel graphics chief Raja Koduri is at least well aware of the pressure, tweeting that the company is “working hard to find a path towards the mission - getting millions of Arc GPUs into the hands of PC gamers every year.” Koduri was responding to an open letter from our friends at PC Gamer, calling on Intel to finally toss an escape rope down the hardware hellmouth we’ve all found ourselves trapped in. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger also responded, claiming “We’re on it.”
Me, in 2000: ah, so shaders can make textures in Quake 3 look glowy or wibbly. Me, in 2016: oh, okay, so shaders can also be used to create shoals of fish in Abzu. Me, right now: wait, so shaders can also be used to tell the story of a planet over four and a half billions years, from a lump of molten rock to the formation of mountains, rivers, and human cities.
Humanity, an in-browser shader created by David A. Roberts, is worth the four minutes it takes to watch.
Halo Infinite has been having trouble with its Big Team Battle mode since launch. Attempts to fix it before Christmas and earlier in January largely failed, with the mode available but matchmaking issues making it near-impossible to play for some.
Now 343 Industries think they've fixed the issue, with a patch due to be deployed sometime after February 3rd.
Microsoft are making their auto-renewing subscriptions more flexible under pressure from the CMA, the UK's Competition And Markets Authority. The regulator's investigation began in 2019 and ended this past week, with the CMA saying they had "secured undertakings" that impact Xbox Live and Xbox Game Pass. The changes include Microsoft refunding and even cancelling subscriptions in cases where customers "haven't used their memberships for a long time."
This past week Blizzard announced a survival game set in an all-new universe. There were almost no other details about it and it was described as being at an "early stage", but it seems the studio have been working on it for close to five years already.
On February 4th, Path Of Exile's next expansion will launch. Siege Of The Atlas will revamp the action-RPGs endgame, letting you customise it by pick-and-mixing content from previous challenge leagues. There's a dramatic new trailer below.
Sundays are for snapping your glasses case shut with a very loud bang. Before you deafen yourself, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
This weekend I am looping the Assault On Precinct 13 theme to build the plodding determination I will need to survive the impending NFT bonanza. I do take some comfort in the fact that NFTs are so unpopular that Riot had scramble to cover after accidentally suggesting a Valorant character liked NFTs. And I especially enjoyed Yanis Varoufakis explaining why the metacryptofungiverse sucks. But more and more companies are talking about NFTs and things will get worse, and I'll need the energy I can only get from Precinct 13 (and the amazing unused Jimmy Chambers song based on it).
But the terrible future can wait, what are you playing this weekend?
Epic have put out their year-in-review, looking at how the Epic Games Store performed across 2021. The takeaways: the store now has 194 million PC users, up 34 million from 2020; the number of games on the store is now 917, nearly double from the year before; and the weekly free game giveaways will continue in 2022.
Hitman 3 had a rough launch on Steam last week, quickly gathering 50% negative user reviews. Many of the complaints related to price and confusion over the various editions on sale.
To make amends, IO Interactive are giving anyone who buys Hitman 3 on Steam before February 19th a free upgrade. If you buy the standard edition (£50/$60), you'll be bumped up to the Deluxe Edition (£75/$90). If you bought the Deluxe Edition, you'll get a free upgrade to the Seven Deadly Sins Collection (which on its own costs £23.73 with its 15% launch discount).
Be honest with me: when you read the words "Lovecraftian dating sim", did your mind go straight to a joke about tentacle porn? Horror-themed dating sims are not exactly new, but it's rare to be given the opportunity to date the eldritch gods themselves, and taken at face value, it's hard to imagine where else this could be going.
Well, allow me to dispel your illusions right away: Sucker For Love: First Date is not an H-game. It is, in fact, the most chaste dating sim I think I've ever played, while also managing to be the most obscenely graphic. You often hear games that straddle different genres accused of not knowing what they're trying to be. Sucker For Love does not suffer from this issue: it knows exactly what it wants to be. The challenge is for you, the hapless player, to keep the hell up.
Until recently, Mad Maggie's main claim to fame in Apex Legends was that she had a surprisingly spry 80-year-old mum, and loved to tell people about it. Now we know she'll be emerging from the backstory and joining the playable Legend roster with Season 12 (Defiance), and a new trailer gives us our first look at her rather destructive set of abilities.
