During a recent 2017 financial results debrief, CD Projekt president Adam Kiciński revealed a few telling details about Cyberpunk 2077. And while the company isn’t prepared to spill the whole beans just yet, we now know that the futuristic RPG will have character classes, rather than a single protagonist, ala The WItcher’s Geralt of Rivia, aka the bath haver. Responding to a double-barrelled audience question regarding character classes and the potential for multiplayer, Kiciński said that “it w

In February, around 850 games launched on Steam, which is about 40 a day,” said Mike Rose, the indie publisher behind downhill biking game Descenders. Earlier this year he gave a similar talk, “It’s time to be realistic about PC sales figures,” with slides you can look at here . The biggest change to the Steam landscape comes from Steam Direct, which has dramatically increased the number of games landing on Steam. The takeaway from Rose’s talk was simple: have a plan for the worst-case scenario.

A PC version of Zone the Enders: The 2nd Runner, a third-person hack-and-slash shooter originally released for the PS2 in 2003, was announced last year as Zone the Enders: The 2nd Runner Mars—or M∀RS, as it’s more technically called. The video puts the spotlight on the 4K graphics of this version by comparing them side-by-side with the original release and, in some cases, the HD version that was put out for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It’s a dramatic improvement—unsurprising, I suppose, give

Now, more than 30 major gaming companies, including Blizzard, Riot, CCP, Twitch, Discord and Epic are teaming up to tackle the problem collectively through an organization called the Fair Play Alliance. Many of these companies are not new to tackling toxicity. With the Fair Play Alliance, those teams are now collaborating with each other, too. Voll and many other designers from the Fair Play Alliance hosted a day-long summit at GDC this week, mostly sharing insights from the work they’ve been do

The video feed snows up, the probe’s mics picking up the roar of entry, and then the noise fades. I watch my ship appear on the probe’s video feed, and then watch it out the window. At the research terminal I start the computer analyzing them. I switch the arc projector on, but the video feed keeps blacking out because my probe isn’t generating enough energy. I research artifacts and read logs.

The Humble Store has kicked off weekend sales on Bethesda and Codemasters games, and to attract your interest (and hopefully your attention) it’s giving away the Codies racing sim F1 2015 for the next two days. You might say that F1 2015 is “weird,” and in fact we did say that in our review. We called it “the best representation of F1 racing to date,” but hit it with a middling 61/100 score because of a “lack of content, unstable multiplayer suite, and unchanged foundations.” Still, there are so

And that’s without taking things a step further by putting on special footwear and pretending to kick a virtual ball around. Shows how much I know: what I found was that having virtual feet in a demo of Mi Hiepa Sports’ VR football platform was the most natural-feeling and utterly convincing VR experience I’ve ever had. Looking down in VR, I see my virtual feet and calves and nothing else. One by one, footballs are slowly rolled in my direction, and I’m meant to kick them whichever next is highl

The next expansion to Bethesda’s CCG The Elder Scrolls: Legends will be called Houses of Morrowind, and as the title suggests it will feature the sights, sounds, and strangeness of the ancestral homeland of the Dunmer. First, though, let’s have a look at the relatively conventional Ebonheart Oracle. Normally the amount healed is equal to the damage dealt, but Ebonheart Oracle doubles the amount of health gained. The Houses of Morrowind expansion will include 149 new cards in all. It The set will

Oxygen Not Included is a sci-fi management sim about clones building an underground base inside in asteroid, currently in Early Access. The Ranching Upgrade Mark 1 is the first of two planned updates, with the second to follow in six weeks time. (And maybe there’ll be a new species…)”As for what’s in the Mark 1 update, there’s quite a lot to it. Here’s Klei again to explain: “Critter ranching allows you to interact with critters in a variety of new ways and integrate them into the daily routin

This has always been the case with the ‘Weapons’ and superbosses from Final Fantasy games of the past: they’re usually giant horror creatures, representing the game’s ultimate challenge. Final Fantasy 10 was the first entry I played, back in 2002—I’ve since played them all. That almost horror movie-like reveal technique is used in a few other Final Fantasy games, too. Final Fantasy 7 has arguably the spookiest superboss of all: Emerald Weapon. Final Fantasy has many obvious traditions: chocobos,

Yesterday Blizzard said that Hearthstone: The Witchwood card reveals would kick off next week. (To be fair to Peter, it’s not like he’s ruined everything, I just wasn’t expecting new cards quite so soon.) “Now we had repeatable cards in a haunted forest, and Echo was born,” Whalen says. “Ghostly cards return to your hand after they’re played. As long as you have the mana, you can play them multiple times in the same turn.”

A good set of headphones might rattle your eardrums, but if you want room-rocking audio that will wake the neighbors and scare the kids, Logitech’s Z906 5.1 surround sound speaker set is your ticket. Not that we recommend buying a speaker system for either of those purposes. That’s a good price for this 5.1 speaker system. This speaker system consists of four 67W satellite speakers, a 67W center channel speaker, and a 165W subwoofer. Follow this link to grab this speaker system on sale.

Open-back headsets for gaming are a little harder to come by than more commonly found close-back headsets, but if that’s what you prefer, Sennheiser has you covered with its new GSP 500. The pitch from Sennheiser is that the headset’s “incredibly realistic, natural sound places you at the heart of the action.” If you’re not familiar with open-back versus closed-back headphones, there is a distinct difference between the two. Open-back earphones leave part of the earcup open to let outside noise

During a GDC panel about how the team at Giant Sparrow used 13 different game prototypes to provide the foundation for What Remains of Edith Finch’s story (our favorite of 2017), Creative Director Ian Dallas revealed what their next game will be about. The final slide of the presentation features two birds, a wacky cube toad, and a school of fish. You can apply at Giant Sparrow’s website, which is also housing a few more details on the new project. Exciting stuff, given how effective Edith Finch

Jalopy is a lovely road trip simulator that wheels players around the territories of the former Eastern Bloc. It’s been in Early Access since April 2016, and has now set March 28, this Wednesday, for full release. When I first discovered former Formula 1 developer Greg Pryjmachuk was partly responsible for Jalopy, I was intrigued. As explained in the article’s intro, Miodrag grew up in ’90s Yugoslavia, an Eastern European country that no longer exists. Jalopy will launch in full on March 28, and

We’ve been waiting patiently for a 4K resolution monitor with a 144Hz refresh rate and HDR support, and G-Sync would just be icing on the cake. So says Anandtech, which heard from Nvidia at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this week that it expects HDR-compatible displays with G-Sync support to finally materialize in Q1 of its fiscal year 2019. Apparently that is where Nvidia set the bar for G-Sync displays with HDR, and it’s hard to argue with that feature-set. It’s not clear if monitor mak

I hope you weren’t too terribly excited for those Tomb Raider remasters that were announced earlier this month, because they’ve been canceled. The teaser videos are gone and Realtech VR, the company that was purportedly handling the remasters, said in a cryptic tweet that it is now focused on new AR and VR projects. “While we always welcome passion and excitement for the Tomb Raider franchise, the remasters in question were initiated and advertised without seeking approval. “But our recent resea

Wipeout for the Sega Saturn is the first racing game I remember being obsessed with. Antigravitator may feel slightly more F-Zero than Wipeout, but it does what it needs to do: It’s a beautiful and overwhelmingly fast sci-fi racer. In a demo of just a few races on the show floor at GDC, I could tell Antigravitator had the stuff. But there’s no hard limit on how fast you can go if you can keep laying on the boost. It’s a testament to how good the racing feels, and how pretty Antigravitator is, th

I feel like Michael B. Jordan, because I’ve got the physique of Michael B. Jordan, and all it took was a VR headset and boxing game Creed: Rise to Glory, which puts you into the virtual body of Michael B. Jordan. Creed is being developed by Survios, makers of FPS VR game Raw Data, and I had a chance to play a demo of the work-in-progress Creed at GDC in San Francisco. I can report that this boxing game is not messing around. I work the heavy bag, which at first doesn’t even register that I’m con

Oh it’s Anti Flame listening to Travis while he beats the crap out of Slay the Spire in five minutes and six seconds. Anti Flame picks “Enemies in your next three combats have 1HP” which is obviously great for quickly getting through the first tier of the tower. Flex: Flex costs nothing and gives you a strength buff that increases the power of your attack cards. If Anti Flame had gone right here the run could have come in under five minutes. Endgame: The final boss falls to Flex, Offering, Thund