The new Dead Space is a great remake of a survival horror classic. I have few complaints about my first 90 minutes of necromorph chopping on PC: It’s grand, gorgeous, gorey, and maybe a little too easy on default difficulty. But up until yesterday’s 1.03 patch, it also had one annoying graphical flaw—forced variable rate shading (VRS) that created fuzzy, flickering textures in the darker corners of the Ishimura.

Digital Foundry specifically called out Dead Space’s problems with VRS in an in-depth technical analysis video. Just a day later, EA has already issued a patch allowing PC players to turn off VRS entirely and disabled it on consoles. In fact, the option now appears to be off by default on PC.

Honestly, I can barely spot the difference on my setup. The game defi…

I love a good choreographed kill video. There’s something so crunchy and satisfying about seeing someone elevate a game like Starfield—similar to the rush you get watching your favourite wrestler or a movie like John Wick. You know it’s all been pre-planned, you know there’s some kayfabe involved, but it’s sick enough that you don’t care. 

That’s exactly what Benjamin_Winters has pulled off with this video: tearing through a Spacer base, telekinetically launching mines, headshotting fools with a silenced pistol, and descending on the game’s poor redshirts with a Katana from above. It’s raw, unfiltered main character energy—especially when they hit the low-grav and pull out a minigun to carve through foes as they dangle helplessly in the air.

Some Baldur’s Gate 3 players are reporting issues with the game’s save system. Namely, that they can’t save or load at all, which is a bit of an issue in 2023’s Game Most Likely to Spark Discourse About Save Scumming. The good news is that, if you’re running into this, Larian is directing you to a help page on its website that should hopefully solve the issue. The bad news is that you aren’t getting any of the progress you lost to a busted save back.

The issue seems to be tied to BG3’s cloud sync service for its many, many save games. Players encountering the bug report the game becoming trapped in an endless sync loop, preventing them from saving or loading while the game works fruitlessly to offload data to the cloud.

Larian’s support page for people unabl…

As part of the Tekken World Tour 2022 Global Finals, Tekken 8 game director Kohei “Nakatsu” Ikeda and executive director Katsuhiro Harada gave a keynote on the upcoming game’s fighting mechanics. Bandai Namco also took the opportunity to show a new trailer featuring returning character Nina Williams, no long dressed in the bridal gown that was her default outfit in Tekken 7 and instead wearing an outfit more like something Ada Wong would rock in a Resident Evil game.

During the keynote, Nakatsu and Harada emphasized that the keyword for Tekken 8 is “aggressive”, which informed all the changes made to the next game in the series. They highlighted four elements that have been changed or added to Tekken 8: the Rage System, the Recoverable Gauge, the Heat System, and Controller Style.…

Steam appears to have been cracking down on rule violations recently, particularly towards users who attempt to bypass regional restrictions by the use of VPNs and Steam code and gift reseller sites. 

The immense popularity of Helldivers 2—in combination with a large number of users attempting to subvert pre-existing restrictions on Sony game activation in Russia and Belarus—appears to have kicked off a wave of bans, with an estimated 20,000 Steam accounts facing the wrath of Valve in response.

Russian and Belarusian Steam accounts were no longer able to activate games developed by Sony as of February this year, mirroring a pre-existing 2022 ban on PlayStation sales in Russia as a response to the Ukraine war. Still, that doesn’t appear to have stopped many f…

On March 13, CD Projekt released the second big patch for The Witcher 3’s somewhat-beleaguered next-gen update. “Among various fixes, it also improves the overall stability and performance of the game,” the patch notes begin, burying the lede. A little further down, you can find The Whopper:

“Restored horizon-based ambient occlusion. Players who had previously turned Ambient Occlusion off will need to do so again. You can find it in Options → Video → Graphics.” We’re saved. They fixed the grass shadows.

The next-gen, 4.0 version of The Witcher 3 has been a confounding thing. The new quests, gear, and zoomed-in camera especially are game-changers, but its implementation of DX12 graphical features is sloppy at best. Turn ray tracing on, and the eight-year-old game br…

I’ve really appreciated how Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 treat us like adults: that’s right, baby, our RPGs have tasteful premium cable nudity now, throw that formerly de rigueur loincloth diaper in the trash and feel the breeze. Both games, however, have a censored mode for more impressionable audiences, and while Cyberpunk just slaps a pair of briefs on V and calls it a day, Baldur’s Gate 3’s solution had me cackling when I saw it in action.

Brave cyber sojourner Traditional_Put8471 on the BG3 subreddit went where no gamer has gone before, sampling the more chaste side of things in Larian’s notoriously horny masterpiece out of sheer curiosity. I turned the option on in my own game as well, and yep, it’s that simple: gone are Baldur’s Gate 3’s smorgasbord of custom…

Shadow Man, a game about a possessed voodoo warrior who protects the world of the living from the land of the dead, was originally released in 1999, and was brought back to life by Nightdive Studios in 2021 as Shadow Man Remastered. And now an all new game is on the way: Shadowman Darque Legacy, a tale of an all-new Shadowman that’s set to launch next year.

This time around, Shadowman is Jack Boniface, a newcomer to the job who must face off against a growing evil that threatens everything his predecessors have fought for. 

“Clash with the fanatical Brethren cultists, from hammer-wielding brutes to sorcerous necromancers, and battle truly wretched creatures that have slithered forth from the most desolate depths,” developer Blowfish Studios said. “Deliver brutal and blo…

Update: In our hands-on impressions of Bleak Faith: Forsaken, complete with bug videos galore, writer Lincoln Carpenter calls it “a cautionary tale written in jank.”

The makers of the indie soulslike Bleak Faith: Forsaken have removed assets that were allegedly lifted from FromSoftware games. Archangel Games says Epic Games has now removed the third-party listings from the Unreal Engine marketplace, but it still hasn’t told the studio whether or not they were actually stolen.

The similarities were noticed almost immediately after Bleak Faith: Forsaken launched on March 10, and they weren’t just kind of alike, they were virtually direct copies. For instance, below is a comparison of the claymore in Bleak Faith and the straight sword in Elden Ring. T…

World of Warcraft: Classic’s Season of Discovery has been a success so far, outperforming most of Blizzard’s metrics—but its experimental nature has also caused no shortage of problems. Most recently, those problems have surrounded an unassuming orb.

But first, some context: Season of Discovery (SoD) proceeds in ‘phases’, which are sort of like seasons in a live service game. The level cap’s bumped in bite-sized level bands, an old dungeon is retrofitted into a 20-player raid, and a whole bunch of new runes hit the established meta like a swarm of meteors. 

Phase 3 began recently, raising the cap to level 50—but it also put players in punting distance of Enchant Weapon – Crusader. I use the phrase “punting distance” here because “in reach” isn’t exactly accu…

It takes some real detective work to figure out the mystery that is Zenless Zone Zero, the upcoming action (roguelike?) game from Genshin Impact developer MiHoYo.

A Persona-style calendar icon showed up in the latest trailer for the game during Gamescom Opening Night Live. Different times of day seem to affect which characters will be hanging out in its urban environments. You can choose to chill with them and presumably earn their trust, but I have no clue what it has to do with the roguelike parts of the game. Maybe it’ll unlock new attacks or outfits to wear.

The middle of the brief trailer focuses on playable arcade minigames that resemble classics like Dig Dug and Snake. Maybe you will get to play these for bonus rewards when you’re not taking on missions to fight with …

July 25, 2024: While further info is still under wraps, Larian studios has announced that the ‘dice are now rolling’, making the Patch 7 Baldur’s Gate 3 closed beta available for those participating. The original story, as well as current details on the patch itself, can be found below.

If you’re wondering why the closed beta for Baldur’s Gate 3’s seventh patch is delayed, picture this: You’ve sat down to play D&D with your mates. You’re all excited to toy with some new homebrew content your DM has organised. You go to make a Wisdom (Perception) check to spot anything amiss in the room when, unprompted, your DM reaches across the table, grabs your dice, and throws them out of the window.

That’s basically what’s going on with Baldur…

In an event that future historians will point to as evidence of our hubris and decadence, a spendthrift player has splashed a six-figure sum on a single AK-47 skin in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Spotted by Dexerto, a CS:GO player over on the Chinese version of Buff—a marketplace for players to trade digital doodads like skins and stickers—spent ¥1,095,000 (that’s Chinese yuan) on a “factory new” Wild Lotus skin bedecked in four rare stickers. That’s about $160,000/£131,500.

The Wild Lotus skin is rare—there are fewer than 3000 in existence—and the fact that it was “factory new” made it even rarer. CS:GO skins don’t wear through use (thankfully), but they do have a chance of dropping in a state ranging anywhere from “Battle-scarred” to, well,…