I’ve recently fallen in belated love with Assassin’s Creed: Origins, in large part because exploring such a beautifully recreated chunk of Egyptian landscape feels like some kind of incredible time travel holiday. The mix of actual history and antiquarian mythology make Origins the richest open world since The Witcher III, but the scenery is only part of what makes it special. It also helps that the AI was designed to prevent the kind of shambles most of us are familiar with from open world game

In the tradition of many games these days, Sea of Thieves has a Day 1 Patch. The patch is an eyepatch with a red ‘1’ on it, and you can buy it for your character for a single gold piece in any Sea of Thieves clothing store. See, it’s a Day 1 Patch. If you’re not playing Sea of Thieves on its first day of release, no worries, matey. You can pick up the patch until March 29, which is 10 days, by my count.

A few minutes into the stream, however, the devs broke my heart by showing off a new sprint meter. For me, that line is squarely on the sprint meter. You can see a recording of the developer stream below, with the sprint meter discussion beginning around three minutes in, followed by two hours of them talking about other new features that I didn’t watch because I was so upset about the sprint meter. A sprint meter isn’t something I will save up for certain situations, which is why I prefer there

Image source: MobygamesA remastered release of the 2005 action-adventure cult hit Killer7 may be in the works: Grasshopper Manufacture founder Suda51 said during an event celebrating the studio’s 20th anniversary that he hopes to be able to put out an updated version of the game “in the near future.” The report, from NicoVideo.jp, is translated by Google and thus predictably mangled, but the meaning seems clear enough. “I am not in an environment where I can play much [now], but in the near futu

AMD has just released its latest drivers, Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.3.3. The driver release notes call out support for the retail launch of Sea of Thieves and A Way Out, along with support for the latest Vulkan 1.1 specification. Final Fantasy XV may experience flickering or disappearing objects during some gameplay in multi GPU enabled system configurations. Star Wars Battlefront 2 may experience a system hang on the initial splash screen in multi GPU enabled system configurations. T

Tyler Blevins, better known to the videogaming world as Ninja, very recently stated that Fortnite is “the hottest game right now”—hot enough that he brings in a half-million dollars per month streaming it. That’s a mind-boggling sum of money, and also no doubt a big part of why mega-popular YouTube streamer Logan Paul recently announced his plan to start streaming Fortnite on Twitch . “I see Drake playing Fortnite on Twitch with this dude Ninja—he’s a ninja, he’s very good at Fortnite,” Paul say

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth isn’t out until September at the latest, but dataminers have already picked through an early alpha version of the expansion to discover some tasty secrets. New Allied RacesWhen Battle for Azeroth was first announced at Blizzcon 2017, we knew that each faction would initially get three allied races. Like all allied races, Mag’Har orcs also have a unique set of Heritage Armor. Not much else is known about the Kul’Tiran allied race at this point, but dataminers

Sea of Thieves officially arrives tomorrow, though there a number of folks playing Rare’s open world pirate game a day early, and some have already faced off against the game’s biggest monster. However, if you’re curious and don’t mind having the battle spoiled for you, check out the video below (around 1:15 in is a good point to start watching). You can see that, first, the ocean around the ship turns inky black and the ship loses speed. And then the towering tentacles appear. We’re hoping to s

Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, who recently teamed up with Drake to destroy Twitch’s concurrent viewer record, confirmed in an interview with CNBC today that he earns roughly $500,00 per month—that’s right, per month—as a streamer. Blevins said that much of those revenues come from Amazon and Twitch Prime subscribers, as well as a massive number of followers on YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. This deal that Amazon Prime and Twitch Prime have together is incredible. Tyler ‘@Ninja’ Blevins says he makes

A wave of 24,000 emails threatening bomb attacks against more than 400 schools in the UK led to evacuations but were not found to constitute a “viable threat,” according to police investigating the matter. Some schools were evacuated as a result, according to a separate Express report, which also said that the threatening emails appeared to originate from the US. This message actually evacuated 400 schools in the UK https://t.co/med1VfQ3R8 pic.twitter.com/9pkBFZhLsYMarch 19, 2018The emails conta

“Blitz,” a limited-time game mode for Fortnite that promises “faster and more intense matches,” is now live. Blitz mode matches feature boosted treasure and ammo spawns, increased resources and health, begin with the storm circle already closing in, and are capped at a maximum of 15 minutes in length. Swift storms and lots of loot ⏱️ Blitz Limited Time Mode available now! Resources found in loot increased from 30 to 100. Ammo box health increased from 120 to 250.

Newegg is bundling a 16GB kit (2x8GB) of Crucial Ballistix Sport LT DDR4-2666 RAM with a Crucial MX500 500GB solid state drive for $275. Purchased separately, these two items come to $324 on Newegg, giving you a tidy savings of $74. The MX500 uses 3D NAND flash memory and is rated to deliver up to 555MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 515MB/s of sequential write performance. 4K random read and write operations are listed at up to 95,000 IOPS and 90,000 IOPS, respectively. Some online

Coinciding with the announcement, Nvidia is talking about its support for DXR, plus its own GameWorks Ray Tracing / RTX that offers raytracing features built on DXR’s functionality. (RTX is apparently the acronym for Ray Tracing for Gameworks, as in ‘gameworX.’) But perhaps most interesting in all of this are the hints of how Volta hardware will help accelerate DXR and RTX. Then we get this bit: “Highly optimized ray tracing technology on Volta GPUs.” It might be a bit of a tenuous link, but if

Nimbus Data, a company you probably never heard of, just launched what it claims is the world’s largest capacity solid state drive, the 100TB ExaDrive DC100. In case you’re having trouble wrapping your head around that amount of solid state storage, Nimbus Data provides some reference points. It ships in a 3.5-inch package rather than the more commonly found 2.5-inch form factor for SSDs, but uses a SATA 6Gbps interface. For datacenters, the pitch from Nimbus Data is that the HDD form factor and

Today at GDC, Microsoft is announcing the next generation of it’s DirectX API, called DirectX Raytracing (DXR). The new API is intended to bridge the gap between rasterization and raytracing, allowing for new and increasingly realistic renderings to take place. You can read about the details on Microsoft’s DirectX blog, but let’s talk about what this means for games in practice. What’s great about DXR is that raytracing isn’t some crazy idea that game developers don’t want and will never use. So

Depending on your vantage point, it was a relatively weak year for AR and VR adoption in 2017. International Data Corporation (IDC) blames the overall “headset market retreat” on the decline in shipments of screenless VR viewers, which are headsets built for smartphones like the Gear VR. Despite constricting shipments, IDC is confident we are in for a rebound this year, followed by significant growth over the course of the next several years. One of the issues that current generation VR headsets

Despite multiple efforts to reinvent Paragon, Epic Games announced the free-to-play MOBA’s indefinite closure earlier this year. Now, Epic is giving away $12 million-worth (so it claims) of the game’s assets free-of-charge to Unreal Engine 4 developers via its Marketplace. “We are extremely excited to announce that we’ve released $12 million worth of assets from our action MOBA Paragon on the Unreal Engine Marketplace,” says the dev in this forum post. “They’re all free to use in your Unreal Eng

Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom’s launch trailer is bursting with discernable JRPG traits, and it looks rather wonderful. I played roughly half of the first Ni No Kuni in early 2013, got sidetracked by BioShock Infinite, and never returned. By that stage, I’d grown weary of the genre’s archetypal explore town/visit dungeon/fight boss cycle, therefore the promise of a rock, paper, scissors skirmish mode and surplus base-building mechanics here sounds promising. On top of normal third-person fights

Without Evermore, Ni No Kuni 2 would have been good. An open-world action JRPG built around a great kingdom building sim. NoLink: Official siteNi No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom has done a fabulous job of hiding its best feature. Studio Ghibli wasn’t directly involved with Ni No Kuni 2 like it was the original game, but it looks the part. But its crowning achievement is tying all that and more into an involved and deeply satisfying kingdom building sim, one that enhances every other part of the game

The Resident Evil 4 HD Project has now introduced tweaks to The Island location overhaul, including adjustments to its dynamic lighting. These days, RE4HD updates are coming at us faster than a brain-munching Las Plagas undead—and while I’m hardly complaining, I’ve found it a wee bit difficult keeping up. Like this ‘un:”Here’s a new round of Island area comparison shots showing the latest refinements,” explains Albert. The creator adds that all Village and Castle area and lighting effects are co