But that’ll happen to all the fancy new games you think look good now too. I think I’d convinced myself, in part thanks to the first two GTA games, that it would be impossible to create an entire city in 3D. Tim Clark: SyndicateI think with certain games you actually feel something close to love at first sight. I played Half-Life 2 on PC the following year, and, bloody hell, did it look good. The scale of City 17 and beyond blew me away too, particularly against the first game’s sprawl of claust

The Star Control games are all about dealing with alien races: Putting up with their nonsense, convincing them to be pals, begging them not to shoot you, or shooting at them, as the situation requires. With every encounter, you make an impression, and as the new Star Control: Origins trailer makes clear, it’s not always going to be a good one. “You don’t have to be a white knight to save humanity,” Stardock said. Your mission has always been to save humanity by any means necessary. Star Control:

Nvidia spent the better part of Monday talking up how amazing ray tracing is, and how it has the potential to make video games even more realistic. During the company’s presentation earlier this week, the company revealed a handful of games that would soon support ray tracing on RTX cards —including Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Atomic Heart, Battlefield V, and others. If you’ve been itching to see more games on the new RTX graphics cards with ray tracing, we have you covered. Nvidia has been showi

A digital version of Commands & Colors: Ancients, developed by HexWar Games, should release on Steam by the end of the month. A scenario-driven game of historical battles, Ancients has 15 scenarios that span about 600 years of history. Ancients uses the series’ signature card-driven command system, introducing uncertainty and hesitation by limiting which units a player can activate at any given time. This digital port of Commands & Colors: Ancients follows HexWar’s digital version of Commands &

I’ve been referring to Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden as ‘Duck XCOM’ since Wes first covered it back in March. It’s also pretty tough, and I know this because as of about 4 PM on Wednesday August 22nd, I’m the only one (presumably except the developers) who has beaten its Gamescom demo. So far only @SamuelWRoberts has beaten the demo, but there’s still two days left of the show. I still failed this demo three times, and I think it’s because I initially tried to play Mutant Year Zero like XCOM. M

Joe liked it better, though, so he was pleased earlier this year when Focus Home Interactive announced that a sequel is on the way. Today the publisher served up the first look at the sequel’s new-and-improved sci-fi fisticuffs by way of the debut gameplay trailer, unleashed today at Gamescom. The video is set in the Park sector, a “new and enigmatic” location in the middle of a Surge-shocked city that’s patrolled by mercenaries called The Hunters. Much of that is a repeat of what it said when T

Nvidia is upgrading its GeForce Experience software to utilize the ray tracing capabilities of its recently announced GeForce RTX series graphics cards. GeForce Experience and Ansel leverage the tensor cores and RT cores found in new GeForce RTX cards to generate more detailed photos. This is highlighted in the photo above, which we cropped from one of Nvidia’s GeForce Experience slides. Compared to real-time ray tracing, Ansel RTX can process 30 times more rays since it’s only dealing with a si

The novelty, the fact that you’re going to be facing unknown quantities for awhile before you feel comfortable, is actually a benefit. That’s the core of the design of Dead By Daylight, not knowing what you’re going to face, where you’re going. To be fair, Dead By Daylight is one of the first asymmetrical multiplayer games that really caught. But Dead By Daylight really, really worked. That’s going to be fine, because it’s going to make the whole asymmetrical multiplayer experience better in the

This is the premise of Łukasz Woźniak’s 2013 board game, now ported to a digital edition by developers PlaySoft and publisher Asmodee Digital. The King player has to get the King across the board and into a castle space. The Assassin player has to hit the king twice with an assassin’s blade. The king has tools to avoid getting killed and can control the guards clustered around the King and the castle gates. If an assassin can both kill a guard and strike the king in one turn, that’s a devastatin

I’ve actually built the vine press to crush human fat into oil, and I’ve got a lot of human fat because I’ve carved up a lot of human corpses. There’s no difference between using sand to craft stained glass windows for my church and using human fat to craft prayer candles. I think another reason I don’t feel evil is that that my Graveyard Keeper character essentially has no character. The candle recipe calls for human fat, and I’ve got a bunch of human fat, so I make candles from it. It’s not an

On average, Nvidia expects the RTX 2080 to be around 50 percent faster than the GTX 1080. Nvidia also provided this second slide of data, showing 4K and HDR rendering on the RTX 2080 at more than 60fps. Depending on the settings used, performance on the RTX 2080 does appear to be around 50 percent faster than the GTX 1080. Based on these figures, RTX 2080 should easily beat the GTX 1080 Ti, and possibly the RTX 2070 could beat the GTX 1080 Ti as well. We’ll have full performance results in Septe

Training Mode will support 5-20 players on a new 2×2 km map with facilities that cover all aspects of the game: There’s a shooting range, as Joe speculated, plus practice areas for parachuting, melee, parkour, and “throwables,” multiple racetracks, an indoor CQC range, and more. “The map is broken up into different sections; short and long range combat, vehicle races, jump skills, vaulting, vehicle ramps, etc. Each one of these sections represent a gameplay situation players may become involved

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX Founders Edition graphics cards are supposed to run cooler and quieter than the previous generation of FE models, but if you prefer to liquid cool your GPU, Alphacool has you covered. The company announced a new line of full coverage waterblocks for the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and 2080 that Nvidia unveiled on Monday. It looks as though Alphacool is readying four new water blocks in all, including the GPX-N 2080 Plexi, GPX-N 2080 Acetal, GPX-N 2080 Ti Plexi, and GPX-N 2080 Ti Ace

Details are still pouring in on Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX cards based on its Turing architecture, and we know everyone is eager to compare performance numbers with Pascal. “The entire power delivery system has been rebuilt for GeForce RTX Founders Edition graphics cards, starting with the all-new 13-phase iMON DrMOS power supply. The new FE cards also sport more capacitors than before so they can run at lower voltages. According to Nvidia, this should make it easier for users to overclock FE card

The Busan map that’s now on the Overwatch PTR isn’t the only D.Va-centric newness to come out of Blizzard today. The studio also released a new animated short called Shooting Star that takes a behind-the-scenes look at the glamorous life of South Korea’s most famous esports superstar and Omnic-fighting mech pilot. And thank goodness for that, because when the Gwishin Omnics attack, she’s ready to hold the line! It makes me wonder why there aren’t rotating squads of pilots, and mechanics to ensur

Cyberpunk 2077 dropped a handful of new screenshots at Gamescom yesterday. Developer CD Projekt Red has now shared some new concept artwork. Similar to the art that surfaced in the immediate wake of E3, these new shots illustrate the beginnings of the FPS/RPG hybrid’s E3 trailer—which has now been viewed over 14.7 million times. Fourth, the chap who appears to be committing some sort of remote cyber assassination. For more Cyberpunk 2077, here’s everything we know about CD Projekt’s next RPG.

Set in summertime D.C., that play area will stretch to some of the US capital’s biggest tourist spots—including Roosevelt Island and the Air and Space Museum. “Roosevelt Island is a location we’re going to feature,” lead level designer Manny Diaz tells us at Gamescom. “Roosevelt Island is forested, people go walking in there, they go hiking and for us this is a mysterious place.” Diaz continues: “The Air and Space Museum is a lot of fun, too. When we started creating The Division 2, we thought w

As we first learned at E3, The Division 2 will be set in Washington, D.C. Speaking at this week’s Gamescom conference in Cologne, however, publisher Ubisoft said Seattle and New Orleans were also once in the frame. “First off, D.C. wasn’t always set in stone as the choice of the game,” lead level designer Manny Diaz tells Tom at Gamescom. Set in New York City, the first Division game was set on a grid—therefore the publisher was keen to push more environmental variety within the sequel’s setting

Odyssey is finally an Assassin’s Creed game where I might end up loving the combat. I like this, because in Assassin’s Creed, before Origins, there wasn’t much combat worth learning, besides counterattacking (naval combat aside). I don’t remember enjoying a good fight this much in Assassin’s Creed before, and the increased levels of combat abilities means this late part of the game feels meaningfully different to the E3 demo; set earlier on. If you’re wondering how Medusa crept into mainline Ass

Agave farmer Juan Aguacate is back to save the Mexiverse in platforming brawler Guacamelee 2, which is out now. It’s set seven years after the first game, and the follow-up has bigger maps, twice as many enemy types and tonnes more moves. It also has “trainers” dotted throughout the Mexican-inspired world who will set you challenges. Just like in the first game, you’ll split your time between tough platforming sequences and beat ’em up segments. I love the look of the colourful world, and the bo