gaming

return-to-moria-arrives-on-steam-with-mining,-crafting,-and-a-“golden-update”

Return to Moria arrives on Steam with mining, crafting, and a “Golden Update”

crossplay, epic game store, gaming, jrr tolkien, Lord of the Rings, return to moria, steam, steam deck / /

You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm —

Changes to combat, crafting, and ambient music came from player feedback.

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Screenshot from Return to Moria showing two dwarves dancing in front of a roaring forge

Enlarge / It’s hard work, survival crafting, but there are moments for song, dance, and tankards.

North Beach Games

The dwarves of J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing are, according to the author himself, “a tough, thrawn race for the most part, secretive, retentive of the memory of injuries (and of benefits),” and “lovers… of things that take shape under the hands of the craftsmen rather than things that live by their own life.”

Is it secrecy and avarice that explains why The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria spent its first year of existence as an exclusive to the Epic Games Store? None can say for certain. But the survival crafting game has today arrived on Steam and Xbox, adding to its PlayStation and EGS platforms and bringing a 1.3 “Golden Update” to them all. Steam Deck compatibility is on its way to Verified, with a bunch of handheld niceties already in place.

The Golden Update grants new and existing players a procedurally generated sandbox mode to complement the game’s (also generated) campaign, new weapons and armor, crossplay between all platforms with up to eight players, specific sliders for difficulty settings, and… a pause function in offline single-player, which seemingly was not there before.

Launch trailer for Return to Moria on Steam and consoles (and its Golden Update).

What are you actually doing in Return to Moria? You, a dwarf in the Fourth Age of Middle-Earth, are tasked by Gimli Lockbearer with heading into Moria (i.e. Khazad-dûm) to recover its treasures. Except every Moria is different, generated from random generation seeds. You mine for materials, use materials to make gear and goods, set up base camps with stations and fixtures, and, of course, fight the things you awaken in the depths.

  • The campaign is procedurally generated, but it tells a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. And runes—lots of runes.

    North Beach Games

  • Dwarves? Underground? Making stuff? Yes, of course.

    North Beach Games

  • There will be goblins.

    North Beach Games

Not only does a release on new cross-compatible platforms give you a chance to check out a potentially overlooked gem, but this is also version 1.3 of the game. Reviews of the game at release in October 2023 were closely aligned around one point: it needed more time to cook.

PC Gamer found the game authentic to Tolkien’s lore, intriguing in its depictions of underground spaces, and alternately goofy and harrowing in building and fighting. But bugs, stuttering, clipping errors, and disbelief-shattering oddities brought the experience down a good deal. Polygon was more critical of the game’s tile-based layouts and laborious backtracking. “A few patches could see this become a survival game that can hold its own against the more popular entries in the genre,” wrote Ford James.

In a “Quality of Life Showcase,” Game Director Jon-Paul Dumont details how the game has advanced over the past 10 months. The map is color-coded and easier to read, the ambient music and transitions are improved, combat improvements make it feel better and more grounded (another point of review contention), and player gripes about inventory management, cooking, building, and crafting have been tackled.

I haven’t played enough of the game to render any kind of verdict on it, but I’m always eager to see the work of a team actively fixing after launch—digging in, if you will.

Return to Moria arrives on Steam with mining, crafting, and a “Golden Update” Read More »

tetris-forever-includes-15-classic-versions-alongside-documentary-footage

Tetris Forever includes 15 classic versions alongside documentary footage

gaming, NES, steam, Tetris, Tetris Forever / /

Retro Puzzles —

Collection includes a new game called Tetris Time Warp, too.

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  • Tetris Forever includes several versions of the game that had been released over the years.

    Nintendo

  • There’s also a new game called Tetris Time Warp that combines gameplay styles from several prior entries.

    Nintendo

A combination documentary and classic game compilation called Tetris Forever is headed to PC, Nintendo Switch, and other platforms later this year, according to an announcement.

The game will include 15 Tetris games, from an “accurate” version of the first Tetris for the Electronika 60 to an NES version of the game and more, including Tetris 2 + Bombliss, Super Tetris 3, and Tetris Battle Gaiden, among others.

In addition to that, it will feature a new take called Tetris Time Warp, which will see players jumping “between gameplay styles from across the series” in real time as they complete each board. The game will support up to four players.

The game is developed by Digital Eclipse, which previously made waves with a docu-game called The Making of Karateka that combined the classic game with documentary footage. It also made a remaster of the original Wizardry.

Tetris Forever is the latest in the same docu-game series that included The Making of Karateka. As such, the classic games will be presented in an interactive digital museum-like format and will be accompanied by over an hour of documentary clips “about the history of Tetris and its key players.”

Tetris Forever was announced as part of a Nintendo Direct stream this morning. The reveal focused on the experience of playing the game on the Nintendo Switch and also noted that the original NES version of Tetris is coming to Nintendo Switch Online’s classic game library this winter.

However, the game also appeared on Steam, so there will be a PC release. Releases on other consoles are likely as well. The Steam page says the game is coming sometime before the end of this year but doesn’t get more specific than that. There’s no pricing information yet, either.

The Tetris Forever announcement video from Nintendo Direct.

Listing image by Nintendo

Tetris Forever includes 15 classic versions alongside documentary footage Read More »

valve’s-worst-kept-secret-is-no-longer-a-secret

Valve’s worst-kept secret is no longer a secret

gaming / /

Officially official —

Deadlock is now on Steam and on streams.

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Look! A wild Valve game appears!

Enlarge / Look! A wild Valve game appears!

Valve

If you read Ars Technica regularly, you’ve known since May that Valve is working on Deadlock, a mishmash of genres that has been slowly amassing SteamDB-tracked players through an invite-only playtest. Over the weekend, Valve took the “hiding” part out of that “hiding-in-plain-sight” test, launching a bare bones Steam page for Deadlock, the company’s first attempt at developing a new gaming franchise since collectible card game Artifact launched in 2018 (and fell apart in 2021).

The new page, which went up on Saturday, has precious little information about Deadlock, save for a description as “a multiplayer game in early development” and a 22-second trailer that essentially pans over a piece of concept art. Everything from the game’s system requirements to the release date is still “TBD,” and players who are lucky enough to get “friend invites via our playtesters” are promised “temporary art and experimental gameplay” on the Steam page.

Not that a Steam page is strictly needed for more info on Deadlock at this point. Since the first leaks months ago, the playtest has slowly expanded from hundreds of players to tens of thousands, including some who have posted extensive impressions of the game. Valve has also reportedly lifted rules regarding streaming for invited playtesters, leading to a surge of players showing off live gameplay on Twitch.

See how many genres you can pick out.

Enlarge / See how many genres you can pick out.

Valve

Those extended streams and impressions show a six-on-six hero shooter (a la Overwatch) but with teams of NPC drones protecting Dota 2-style battle lanes as well. There’s also the requisite Fortnite-style cover construction, Titanfall-style double-jumping and air-dashing, melee attacks and parries, and all the unlockable abilities you could hope for.

Given all that direct info, the presence of a new Steam page mainly serves as an anchor for Wishlist-based reminders, user-defined tagging (bot “MOBA” and “cute” are currently popular), and a lot of spammy/scammy invite-begging in the Community hub and forums. Still, it’s not every day that a completely new title appears on Valve’s old Steam developer page—we’ve set a reminder to check for the next one in 2030 or so.

Valve’s worst-kept secret is no longer a secret Read More »

gearbox-founder-says-epic-games-store-hopes-were-“misplaced-or-overly-optimistic”

Gearbox founder says Epic Games Store hopes were “misplaced or overly optimistic”

gaming / /

Nice try —

Pitchford’s prediction that Steam could be “a dying store” have not come to pass.

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Artist's conception of Randy Pitchford surveying the Epic Games Store landscape years after <em>Borderlands 3</em>‘s exclusive launch there.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/bl4-800×332.png”></img><figcaption> <p><a data-height=Enlarge / Artist’s conception of Randy Pitchford surveying the Epic Games Store landscape years after Borderlands 3‘s exclusive launch there.

It’s been five years now since the PC version of Borderlands 3 launched as a high-profile timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store. At the time, Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford memorably mused that Steam “may look like a dying store” in “five or ten years” thanks to increased competition from Epic and others.

Fast-forward to this week’s announcement of Borderlands 4, and despite Pitchford’s old comments, the sequel will not follow its predecessor’s example of EGS exclusivity. The new game plans to launch on Steam and EGS simultaneously sometime in 2025 (alongside PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions).

When one social media user noticed that change this week, Pitchford responded with another lengthy message explaining why his early hopes for the Epic Games Store’s rise to dominance were “misplaced or overly optimistic.”

In the short team, Pitchford said his high hopes for Epic’s effort were initially “validated” by the launches of Borderlands 3 and 2022 spin-off Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (which was available on EGS for three months before its Steam release). “Borderlands 3 and Wonderlands demonstrated clearly that the customers show up for the games, not the storefront,” he said.

But Pitchford now says Epic didn’t “successfully press its advantage” to take a significant chunk of Steam’s dominant market power. “Famously, Steam does very little to earn the massive cut they take and continues its effective monopoly in the West while would-be competitors with much more developer friendly models continue to shoot themselves in the foot,” Pitchford said.

“The industry gives Steam their monopoly because publishers are afraid to take the risk to support more developer and publisher friendly stores,” he continued. “It’s all very interesting and there is a huge amount of opportunity in the PC gaming space for retail disruption, but no one seems to be able to make it happen.”

A limited success or an Epic failure?

Internal documents revealed in the Epic vs. Apple case in 2021 show that both Gearbox and Epic seemed to benefit from the Borderlands 3 exclusivity deal. Epic set a guaranteed sales floor of $80 million to help attract Borderlands 3 to the platform—if the game sold less on EGS, Epic would pay Gearbox the difference to reach that amount. But Gearbox’s game managed to hit that sales floor in just two weeks, bringing in more revenue on its own than the entirety of EGS had for the previous nine months while also attracting plenty of new EGS users.

  • Borderlands 3‘s exclusive launch was a huge revenue boost for the Epic Games Store.

    Epic vs. Apple court filing

  • Epic recouped its $80 million upfront revenue guarantee for Borderlands 3 within two weeks.

Not all of Epic’s attempts to secure exclusives were so successful, though. In 2019, Epic paid roughly $542 million in minimum guarantees for exclusive titles projected to earn just $336 million over their lifetimes. That $206 million difference that amounts to throwing money at publishers in hopes that their exclusive games would help attract new users to EGS.

And that continuing effort hasn’t been a total failure for Epic; by the end of 2023, the company said there were 75 million active monthly users for its PC store, up from 68 million the year before. But that’s still relatively tiny compared to Steam, which had 132 million active monthly users back in 2021. While Valve hasn’t released monthly user numbers since then, Steam’s concurrent user peak has increased about 67 percent (per SteamDB tracking) since the end of 2021—from 21.17 million to 35.55 million. That suggests Steam’s current monthly user number could be well over 200 million.

Things look worse for Epic when you compare the $950 million spent by EGS players in 2023 to the estimated $8.8 billion Steam players spent that same year.

To be fair, pushing a new PC storefront from a standing start to about 10 percent of Steam’s massive revenue in about five years is impressive. But that result still has to be disappointing for Epic, which projected in 2019 that EGS could represent 35 to 50 percent of the entire PC games market in 2024.

It’s an open question whether Epic’s limited success is a result of the company’s failure to “press its advantage,” as Pitchford opines, or just a sign that Steam’s massive entrenched network effects have proven more resilient than he expected. Regardless, Borderlands 4‘s Steam launch— following the lead of other former EGS exclusive publishers—doesn’t mean Pitchford has given up hope that a Steam-killer could still come down the pike.

“I sincerely hope Epic keeps up the fight and makes headway,” Pitchford said. “Epic is going to have to prioritize the store and try some new initiatives while also doubling down on earning pivotal exclusives if it is going to have a chance. I also hope other viable competitors arrive. I am sure we will all be watching.”

Gearbox founder says Epic Games Store hopes were “misplaced or overly optimistic” Read More »

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Tactical Breach Wizards weaves engaging tactics with lively dialogue

gaming, Gunpoint, heat signature, strategy games, tactical, tactical breach wizards, tom francis, turn-based strategy / /

In case of boredom break glass —

An arcane combo of witty dialogue, turn-based tactics, and magical friendship.

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The player has a lot of agency in this game to choose exactly how snappy their responses will be.

Enlarge / The player has a lot of agency in this game to choose exactly how snappy their responses will be.

Suspicious Developments

Tom Francis and his Suspicious Developments team spent 6.5 years crafting the perfect finale to his defenestration trilogy, and it shows. If you liked blasting people out of windows in Gunpoint or Heat Signature—or snappy writing, endearing characters, wizards, turn-based tactical gameplay, and efficiency challenges—you are going to love Tactical Breach Wizards.

The game’s name is as efficient as its design, telling you a lot about its tone and distinct offerings. You play as a small team of magic wielders, each of which you can control, one at a time, in a world where magic use, mana, and all the rest have been militarized and corporatized. There are stasis hexes put on illegally parked cars and even a Traffic Warlock, who, after getting on his bad side, will try to mow you down with an entire ghost highway full of spectral drivers.

Tactical Breach Wizards launch trailer.

Luckily, bad guys like him can only hit you if you don’t plan accordingly. Owing to the powers of your teammate Zan, you can foresee everything that will happen within a round of combat (he’s a one-second clairvoyant). Move team member Jen to this square on the grid, have her chain-zap three guys, seal the door next to her, then see what that leaves Zan to do. Don’t like the outcome? Rewind repeatedly until you’ve gotten the most out of your team’s actions or maybe achieved one of the game’s optional achievements. You get “Confidence” for pulling off stunts like “knock three baddies out a window with one action,” but they’re entirely optional because Confidence only unlocks cool outfits, not powers or gameplay. The actual perks you unlock give you delicious choices to make, deciding which way to take each character’s powers to complement or offset one another.

  • Everyone in the red will get hit, but where do you move? What position provides both cover and the right blast angle?

    Suspicious Developments

  • Another example of a tricky scenario for your team, and your mind.

    Suspicious Developments

  • Everything in this game feeds into its feeling of escapist fun, even the “Mission Complete” screens.

    Suspicious Developments

  • You’ll have to do a smidge of thumbtacks-and-string plotting, mostly so that you understand the plot. But there are rewards for reading.

    Suspicious Developments

  • Here come the mid-game heavies.

    Suspicious Developments

  • You can get extra-clever and earn “Confidence,” but, blissfully, it’s just a quirky costume reward, and just surviving a level is okay, too.

    Suspicious Developments

Compelling wizard banter

I’ve cleared the first three acts, and I’m almost certainly going to get through the rest of what the developers think is a roughly 16-hour game (on Normal difficulty) in sessions on the couch or in transit. The only thing that breaks up its session-able nature is the dialogue between scenes, levels, and acts, but I mean that in a good way. My achievement-craving brain wants to skip through the banter, and that’s possible, but the buddy-cop banter is just too good to pass up. While your wizards are self-conscious enough to recognize how ridiculous the events around them are, there’s just enough vulnerability and actual development to keep the plot from folding under its own irony.

The game looks good and sounds good, too, and it runs well on pretty much any modern system with 1GB of graphics power (that’s most of them). It’s listed as “Playable” on Steam Deck, and that’s accurate. The Steam Deck’s trackpads help a lot here, though you can use the sticks on any controller if you’re willing to nudge them around a lot inside a UI that was very much meant for a cursor.

Like Zan, you should be able to look just a bit into Tactical Breach Wizards ($20 at launch on Steam) and foresee just how much you’re going to enjoy it. Experiences help forge friendships, and there are few bonding experiences quite like chucking one more crooked wizard cop out the window than you thought was possible.

Listing image by Suspicious Developments

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“we-run-a-business”—why-microsoft’s-indiana-jones-will-be-on-ps5

“We run a business”—why Microsoft’s Indiana Jones will be on PS5

gaming, Indiana Jones, Phil Spencer, xbox / /

PS5 Starfield when? —

Spencer: “There’s going to be more change in how… games are built and distributed.”

–

So I'm not stuck on Xbox, eh?

Enlarge / So I’m not stuck on Xbox, eh?

Bethesda

Bethesda’s Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is the latest game from a Microsoft subsidiary that will make its way to the PlayStation 5. The game will hit Sony’s console in the spring of 2025, Microsoft announced yesterday, months after a planned December launch on Xbox Series S/X and Windows.

In an interview with YouTube channel Xbox On, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer expanded on that decision, implying that multiplatform releases for Microsoft gaming properties were important to the Xbox division’s bottom line. “We run a business,” he said, “It’s definitely true inside of Microsoft the bar is high for us in terms of the delivery that we have to give back to the company, because we get a level of support from the company that’s just amazing in what we’re able to go do.”

Phil Spencer’s comments come about three minutes into this interview.

Amid massive layoffs that have hit Xbox and other gaming companies in recent months, Spencer noted that there’s “a lot of pressure on the [game] industry” these days. “[The industry] has been growing for a long, long time and now people are looking for ways to grow,” he said. “And I think that us, as fans, as players of games, we just have to anticipate there’s going to be more change in how some of the traditional ways that games were built and distributed [ars] going to change… for all of us.”

“It’s just going to be a strategy that works for us”

Although Microsoft released four former Xbox exclusives on other platforms months ago, Spencer suggested that there hasn’t been any commensurate dip in total Xbox usage. “What I see when I look is our franchises are getting stronger; our Xbox console players are as high this year as they’ve ever been,” he said.

“So I look at it, and I say, ‘Okay, our player numbers are going up for the console platform, our franchises are as strong as they’ve ever been… So I look at this [as] ‘How can we make our games as strong as possible?'” our platform continues to grow both on console on PC and on cloud and I think it’s just going to be a strategy that works for us.”

Indiana Jones.” height=”360″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/xboxmulti-640×360.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / Microsoft’s last four multiplatform game releases were a bit smaller than Indiana Jones.

Microsoft

Microsoft has long prioritized maintaining a healthy number of overall Xbox players over selling more raw consoles than competitors like Sony. Still, the continuing cratering of sales revenue from Xbox hardware likely contributes heavily to Microsoft’s decision to release its games on competing platforms.

A big-budget, big-name Bethesda release like Indiana Jones could act as more of an Xbox system seller than the four older, smaller games that Microsoft recently let go multiplatform. Then again, The Great Circle‘s multiple months of Xbox exclusivity—which include the 2024 holiday buying season—could still provide a bit of a relative advantage for Microsoft’s consoles.

Indiana Jones and The Great Circle‘s PS5 availability may come as a particular surprise to readers who remember Spencer saying in February that neither The Great Circle nor Starfield were a part of the company’s current multiplatform plans. But a careful parsing of Spencer’s words at the time shows that he only promised those titles were not among the four multiplatform titles they were announcing at that time.

Back then, Spencer said that those four multiplatform releases didn’t represent “a change to our fundamental exclusive strategy.” But he added that there was a desire to “use what some of the other platforms have right now to help grow our franchises” to help “the long-term health of Xbox.”

“[I have] a fundamental belief that over the next five or ten years… games that are exclusive to one piece of hardware are going to be a smaller and smaller part of the game industry,” Spencer said in February.

“We run a business”—why Microsoft’s Indiana Jones will be on PS5 Read More »

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Civilization VII hands-on: This strategy sequel rethinks the long game

2K Games, 4X, civilization, Civilization VII, Features, firaxis, gaming, strategy / /

One More Turn —

Classic turn-based gameplay meets a radical rethink of the overall structure.

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A Mayan city in Civilization VII

Enlarge / Firaxis has upped the ante on presentation for the cities. It’s still a bit abstract and removed, but they have more vibrancy, detail, and movement than before.

2K Games

2K Games provided a flight from Chicago to Baltimore and accommodation for two nights so that Ars could participate in the preview opportunity for Civilization VII. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

From squares to hexes, from tech trees to civic trees, over its more than 30 years across seven mainline entries, the Civilization franchise continues to evolve.

Firaxis, the studio that has developed the Civilization games for many years, has a mantra when making a sequel: 33 percent of the game stays the same, 33 percent gets updated, and 33 percent is brand new.

Recently, I had the opportunity to play Civilization VII, the next entry, which is due to launch in February 2025. The build I played was an early alpha build, but the bones of the game it will become were there, and it’s interesting to see which third Firaxis kept the same and which third it has reimagined.

It turns out that the core of the game that its developers won’t much want to change is the turn-to-turn experience. But in the case of Civilization VII, all bets are off when it comes to the overall arc of a long journey, from sticks and stones to space travel.

Rethinking the structure of a Civilization game

Most of the time, playing Civilization VII feels a lot like playing Civilization VI—but there’s one big change that spans the whole game that seems to be this sequel’s tentpole feature.

That’s the new Ages system. The long game is now broken into three segments: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. Each Age has some unique systems and gameplay, though most systems span all three.

Within each age, you’re given a handful of “Legacy Paths” to choose from. These map closely to the franchise’s long-standing victory conditions: Science, Economic, Cultural, and Military. The idea is that you pick the Legacy Path you want to pursue, and each Legacy Path has different success conditions that change across each of the three Ages.

These conditions are big and broad, and Firaxis thankfully hasn’t gotten too jazzy with them. For example, I played in the Age of Antiquity and pursued the Cultural path, so my goal was to build a certain number of Wonders before the end of the Age.

In some ways, this is similar to the boom-and-bust cycle of Dark and Golden Ages in Civilization VI, but I found it much more natural in VII. In VI, I often found myself making arbitrary-seeming choices I didn’t think made sense for my long-term strategy just to game the system and get the Age transition I wanted. In this new game, the Legacy Path objectives are likely to always be completely in line with the overall victory strategy you’re pursuing.

One of the advantages of this new structure is support for shorter games that aren’t just hyper-compressed versions of a larger game. Previously, the only way to play a game of Civilization that wasn’t a dozen or more hours long was to pick one of the faster game speeds, but that fundamentally changed how the game felt to play.

This is a Roman city, but you could have a non-Roman historical leader, like Egypt's Hatshepsut, at the helm.

Enlarge / This is a Roman city, but you could have a non-Roman historical leader, like Egypt’s Hatshepsut, at the helm.

2K Games

Now, Civilization VII gives you the ability to play a match that’s just one Age, if you choose to.

The new Ages system is integrated with another big change: your choice of leader and civilization are no longer tied together when you start a new game, and they’re not set in stone, either.

Now you pick both a civilization and a leader separately at the start—and you can do some weird, ahistorical combinations, like Greece’s Alexander as the leader of China. Each leader and civilization offers specific bonuses, so this gives more customization of your playstyle at the start.

It doesn’t end there, though. At the end of each Age, you can essentially change civilizations (though as far as I could tell, you stick with the leader). Firaxis says it took inspiration for this feature from history—like the fact that London was a Roman city before it became an English one in the Medieval era.

Which civilization you can transition to is dictated by what you did within the Legacy Path system, among other things.

The amount of time I had to play the game was just enough to almost finish the Antiquity Age, so I didn’t get to see this in action, but it sounds like an interesting new system.

Civilization VII hands-on: This strategy sequel rethinks the long game Read More »

peter-molyneux-is-back-with-yet-another-new-take-on-the-“god-game”

Peter Molyneux is back with yet another new take on the “god game”

gaming, Peter Molyneux / /

Black & White + Fable = ??? —

Masters of Albion promises “an open world… full of combat, choices, mysteries, and story.”

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  • Welcome back to Albion.

    22cans

  • When gods play with Legos, they use building-sized pieces.

    22cans

  • Crank up that tilt-shift filter, boys. We’re making a god game!

    22cans

  • FIREBALL

    22cans

  • Zombies. How original.

    22cans

  • Running into battle with a flaming sword? In a god game?

    22cans

If you’re a gamer of a certain age, you probably have fond memories of Peter Molyneux as the mind behind ambitious games like Populous, Dungeon Keeper, and the Fable series. If you’re of a slightly younger age, you probably remember him as the serial overpromiser behind Project Godus and a recent NFT game that somehow attracted $54 million in player pre-investment (it did actually launch in some form last year).

I bring up this history because, after years of keeping his head down, Molyneux made a surprise appearance at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live event. He was there to introduce Masters of Albion, a title that host Geoff Keighley said Molyneux has “secretly been working on for the past three years” and which Molyneux himself describes as “an open-world god game full of combat, choices, mysteries, and story.”

A short, early trailer for the game takes us back to Fable‘s “familiar vast world of Albion, packed with stories, quests, treasures, and monsters.” There, the residents of the town of Oakridge have to work to gather and process resources by day and then defend themselves from hordes of creatures by night.

You get to help those citizens out as the kind of disembodied god hand that will be extremely familiar to players of the Black & White games from decades past. That hand can help direct resources, design new buildings like Lego bricks, or cheekily drop villagers from high in the sky.

Players will also be able to leave god mode and possess characters like the “Town Hero,” who in the trailer engages in some extremely generic melee combat with some exceedingly generic-looking zombies. If your hero gets overwhelmed, don’t worry, you can just switch back to your god hand and unleash some powerful lightning and fireball attacks.

Do what you want

The trailer talks up the deep levels of micromanaging customization you can engage with, down to designing the resident’s food, clothes, weapons, and armor. “You can be as silly as you want,” Molyneux intones as the trailer shows a sword made of a loaf of bread (which “doesn’t cut it”) and well after a scene where he force-feeds rats to the town’s citizenry (who react with Sims-like overemotion).

Following some controversial funding issues for recent games, Molyneux is self-funding the development of Masters of Albion, leading a team of 20 that includes Bullfrog/Lionhead veterans like Mark Healey, Russell Shaw, and Iain Wright. “I think my first realization was I had to get the old team back together again,” Molyneux said of the developers he’s gathered to “make something new, unique, and different.”

You can already wishlist Masters of Albion on a fresh Steam page that goes on to promise “a world full of quests and moral choice” as you “unravel the mystery of the mages, defeat the enemy that lurks in the night and conquer a sorcery that could kill us all.” You’ll forgive us for waiting until the game is released to see if it lives up to that promise.

Listing image by 22cans

Peter Molyneux is back with yet another new take on the “god game” Read More »

the-great-circle-is-indiana-jones-for-a-post-uncharted-world

The Great Circle is Indiana Jones for a post-Uncharted world

gaming / /
A time traveler with a flashlight would blow Indiana Jones' mind.

Enlarge / A time traveler with a flashlight would blow Indiana Jones’ mind.

At first glance, Wolfenstein: The New Order developer MachineGames might seem like an awkward fit for the first (non-Lego) Indiana Jones video game since the Wii era. While there’s some overlap in the over-the-top Nazi villain department, the “shoot your way through every obstacle” nature of the new Wolfenstein games doesn’t seem to lend itself well to Indy’s more free-wheeling, adventurous exploration style.

For the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, director Jerk Gustafsson said that going from first-person shooter to a “MachineGames adventure” style change has been a difficult tightrope walk for the developers. While the team never wanted to prevent the player from using their revolver during action scenes, there was the potential that giving a player that freedom would allow them to “just shoot their way through” in a way that’s antithetical to Jones’ character.

To help avoid this problem, Creative Director Alex Torvenius said most of the game has been balanced so that “it’s dangerous to shoot your gun and it’s dangerous to be shot at.” Guns-blazing action will be a winning strategy in some in-game situations, but “[there are] many scenarios where you can go through the environment without using guns at all,” he continued.

The design is focused on “trying to make sure you should foremost try to use your wits and your whip… navigating around an enemy rather than through them,” Torvenius added. “The only solution in this game is absolutely not to shoot your way through.”

The hand-to-hand combat of the <em>Chronicles of Riddick</em> games was a big inspiration for MachineGames.” height=”480″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/riddick.jpg” width=”640″></img><figcaption> <p>The hand-to-hand combat of the <em>Chronicles of Riddick</em> games was a big inspiration for MachineGames.</p> </figcaption></figure> <p>Gustafsson said this design was heavily inspired by <a href=the early 2000s Chronicles of Riddick games, which many of the MachineGames team worked on directly. As in those games, the combat focus in Great Circle is more on hand-to-hand fights or using improvised weapons gleaned from the immediate environment.

Gustafsson said he “likes to see the whip as the entry point to combat,” and during a short gameplay session viewed by Ars Technica, we saw that whip being used to disarm unaware enemies, trip them up from a sentry position, or simply to swing in from above to get the jump on them. We also saw Indy doing the tried-and-true “throw a bottle to make the guards think I’m over there” trick and using nearby hammers and even rolling pins as handy melee or throwing weapons. The revolver only came out occasionally during the demo, such as to take out a sentry on a far-off scaffolding.

The change in style from the guns-first Wolfenstein games has been a fun one for the studio, Gustafsson said. “You can see on the team the step from going from what we are so used to doing—the guns blazing, crazy shooting experience that we have done—to something that is much more lighthearted… It has taken some time to shepherd that transition for sure, but it has been refreshing for the team, for the studio.”

“Ignore the shooting part”

To help shepherd that transition, Gustafsson said the team decided to just “ignore the shooting part” early in the game’s development, in part because “we know that we can do it well, we know that we can get that right.” Instead, the early focus was on a scene that incorporated the many types of non-shooting tasks that would be integrated into the game, such as exploration, stealth, and traversing around trap-filled environments, as well as the aforementioned hand-to-hand combat.

Scenery-chewing Nazi villain? Check!

Enlarge / Scenery-chewing Nazi villain? Check!

Set in 1937 during the gap between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, The Great Circle starts with a break-in that focuses on a priceless relic in Jones’ home. Pursuing that break-in leads Jones and a team of unlikely allies to a set of mystical stones arranged in the titular “great circle” of locations that map a full arc around the globe. In pursuing those stones, the team is trying to outrun Dr. Emmerich Voss, a Nazi scientist who sees the artifacts as an otherworldly force that’s key to a grand global conspiracy.

The scenery-chewing villain and McGuffin-filled plot are all in service to gameplay focused heavily on exploration. Using a period-appropriate camera, Indy can take photos of various clues and detritus around the environment, providing the player with important spoken and written background information as he does (it’s like an old-fashioned version of Metroid Prime‘s scan visor). All those photos and clues go into a continually updated scrapbook that the player can consult at any time to solve minor mysteries and figure out what to do next.

The Great Circle is Indiana Jones for a post-Uncharted world Read More »

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Nvidia is ditching dedicated G-Sync modules to push back against FreeSync’s ubiquity

freesync, g-sync, gaming, GeForce, NVIDIA, Tech / /

sync or swim —

But G-Sync will still require specific G-Sync-capable MediaTek scaler chips.

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Nvidia is ditching dedicated G-Sync modules to push back against FreeSync’s ubiquity

Nvidia

Back in 2013, Nvidia introduced a new technology called G-Sync to eliminate screen tearing and stuttering effects and reduce input lag when playing PC games. The company accomplished this by tying your display’s refresh rate to the actual frame rate of the game you were playing, and similar variable refresh-rate (VRR) technology has become a mainstay even in budget monitors and TVs today.

The issue for Nvidia is that G-Sync isn’t what has been driving most of that adoption. G-Sync has always required extra dedicated hardware inside of displays, increasing the costs for both users and monitor manufacturers. The VRR technology in most low-end to mid-range screens these days is usually some version of the royalty-free AMD FreeSync or the similar VESA Adaptive-Sync standard, both of which provide G-Sync’s most important features without requiring extra hardware. Nvidia more or less acknowledged that the free-to-use, cheap-to-implement VRR technologies had won in 2019 when it announced its “G-Sync Compatible” certification tier for FreeSync monitors. The list of G-Sync Compatible screens now vastly outnumbers the list of G-Sync and G-Sync Ultimate screens.

Today, Nvidia is announcing a change that’s meant to keep G-Sync alive as its own separate technology while eliminating the requirement for expensive additional hardware. Nvidia says it’s partnering with chipmaker MediaTek to build G-Sync capabilities directly into scaler chips that MediaTek is creating for upcoming monitors. G-Sync modules ordinarily replace these scaler chips, but they’re entirely separate boards with expensive FPGA chips and dedicated RAM.

These new MediaTek scalers will support all the same features that current dedicated G-Sync modules do. Nvidia says that three G-Sync monitors with MediaTek scaler chips inside will launch “later this year”: the Asus ROG Swift PG27AQNR, the Acer Predator XB273U F5, and the AOC AGON PRO AG276QSG2. These are all 27-inch 1440p displays with maximum refresh rates of 360 Hz.

As of this writing, none of these companies has announced pricing for these displays—the current Asus PG27AQN has a traditional G-Sync module and a 360 Hz refresh rate and currently goes for around $800, so we’d hope for the new version to be significantly cheaper to make good on Nvidia’s claim that the MediaTek chips will reduce costs (or, if they do reduce costs, whether monitor makers are willing to pass those savings on to consumers).

For most people most of the time, there won’t be an appreciable difference between a “true” G-Sync monitor and one that uses FreeSync or Adaptive-Sync, but there are still a few fringe benefits. G-Sync monitors support a refresh rate between 1 and the maximum refresh rate of the monitor, whereas FreeSync and Adaptive-Sync stop working on most displays when the frame rate drops below 40 or 48 frames per second. All G-Sync monitors also support “variable overdrive” technology to help eliminate display ghosting, and the new MediaTek-powered displays will support the recent “G-Sync Pulsar” feature to reduce blur.

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Your 10-year-old graphics card can run Dragon Age: The Veilguard

dragon age 4, gaming, NVIDIA / /

Still kicking —

2014’s Nvidia GTX 970 is still a “minimum requirements” workhorse.

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At this rate, it might be the only graphics card you'll ever need?

Enlarge / At this rate, it might be the only graphics card you’ll ever need?

When Dragon Age: Inquisition came out nearly 10 years ago, PC players could have invested $329 (~$435 in today’s dollars) in a brand-new GTX 970 graphics card to make the game look as good as possible on their high-end gaming rig. Surprisingly enough, that very same 2014 graphics card will still be able to run follow-up Dragon Age: The Veilguard (previously known as Dreadwolf) when it launches on October 31. If you’re using AMD cards, an even older Radeon R9 that you purchased back in 2013 will be able to run the game.

Veilguard‘s minimum specs are just the latest to show the workmanlike endurance of the humble GTX 970, which is currently available used on Newegg for as low as $140. Relatively recent big-budget PC releases like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 both use the old card (or the less powerful follow-up variant, the GTX 960) as their “minimum requirement” benchmark.

Not every big-budget PC game these days is so forgiving with its minimum specs, though. When Cyberpunk 2077 and Doom: Eternal launched in 2020, they both asked players to be sporting at least a GTX 1060, which had come out around four years prior.

For a bit of context, the GTX 970 was used as the “recommended” baseline spec for the mid-range “Oculus Ready” PCs needed to power the then-new Rift VR headset when it launched in 2016. Today, a $500 Meta Quest 3 headset gives you much better graphical performance in a self-contained portable package, no gaming PC required.

Veilguard players sticking with a GTX 970 shouldn’t expect to get the best graphical experience, of course. EA suggests an RTX 2070 (circa 2018) or a Radeon RX 5700Xt (circa 2019) to run the game at “recommended” specs. And you’ll need at least 16 GB of RAM and 100 GB of storage space.

Since work on Veilguard began in earnest in 2015, the game has suffered a string of high-profile staff departures: Creative Director Mike Laidlaw left in 2017; Executive Producer Mark Darrah and BioWare General Manager Casey Hudson left in late 2020; Senior Creative Director Matt Goldman left in late 2021; replacement Executive Producer Christian Daley left in early 2022; and producer Mac Walters left in early 2023.

The full requirements for Dragon Age: The Veilguard are as follows.

Minimum Requirements

OS: Windows 10/11 64-bit

Processor: Intel Core i5-8400 / AMD Ryzen 3 3300X(see notes)

Memory: 16GB

Graphics: Nvidia GTX 970/1650 / AMD Radeon R9 290X

DirectX: Version 12

Storage: 100GB available space

Additional Notes: SSD preferred, HDD supported; AMD CPUs on Windows 11 require AGESA V2 1.2.0.7

Recommended Requirements

OS: Windows 10/11 64-bit

Processor: Intel Core i9-9900K / AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (see notes)

Memory: 16GB

Graphics: Nvidia RTX 2070 / AMD Radeon RX 5700XT

DirectX: Version 12

Storage: 100GB SSD available space

Additional Notes: SSD required; AMD CPUs on Windows 11 require AGESA V2 1.2.0.7

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Epic Games Store and Fortnite arrive on EU iPhones

Apple, dma, epic games, epic games store, EU, fortnite, gaming, iOS, IPhone, Tech / /

It’s still a mess —

Epic also launched its store on Android.

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Artist's conception of Epic dodging harm from Apple's decisions (and perhaps its own).

Enlarge / Artist’s conception of Epic dodging harm from Apple’s decisions (and perhaps its own).

It’s been four years since Fortnite, one of the world’s most popular games, was pulled from the Apple App Store in a blaze of controversy and finger-pointing. Today, it’s returning to the iPhone—but only in the European Union.

Today marks the launch of the Epic Games Store on Android and iOS—iOS just in Europe, Android worldwide. Right now, it just has three games: Fortnite, Rocket League Sideswipe, and Fall Guys. And you’ll have to be in Europe to access it on your iPhone.

The Epic Games Store is run by Epic Games, the same company that develops and publishes Fortnite. Most folks who have been paying attention to either Epic or Apple in recent years knows the story at this point, but here’s the quick summary and analysis.

Opinion: Users are still the losers after four years

At the direction of CEO Tim Sweeney, Epic knowingly made changes to Fortnite related to digital payments that violated Apple’s terms for developers on the platform. Apple removed Fortnite accordingly, and a long, ugly PR and legal battle ensued between the two companies in multiple countries and regions.

In the US, a judge’s decision granted some small wins to Epic and other developers seeking to loosen Apple’s grip on the platform, but it kept the status quo for the most part.

Things went a little differently in Europe. EU legislators and regulators enacted the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which had far-reaching implications for how Apple and Google run their app stores. Among other things, the new law required Apple to allow third-party, alternative app stores (basically, sideloading) on the iPhone.

Apple’s compliance was far from enthusiastic (the company cited security and privacy concerns for users, which is valid, but the elephant in the room is, of course, its confident grip on app revenues on its platforms), and it was criticized for trying to put up barriers. Additionally, Apple rejected Epic’s attempts to launch its app store multiple times for a few arcane reasons amid a flurry of almost comically over-the-top tweets from Sweeney criticizing the company.

Despite Apple’s foot-dragging, Epic has finally reached the point where it could launch its app store. Epic had already launched a relatively successful App Store on PC, where Valve’s Steam holds a strong grip on users. The new iPhone app store doesn’t offer nearly as many options or perks as the PC version, but Epic says it’s working on wrangling developers onto its store.

It also says it will release its games on other alternative app stores on iOS and Android, such as AltStore PAL.

It’s been a long, winding, angry path to get to this point. In the battle between Epic and Apple, there remains some debate about who really has won up to this point. But there isn’t much dispute that, whether you want to blame Apple or Epic or both, users sure haven’t been the winners.

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