Just yesterday, developer FromSoftware rolled out a new Elden Ring update that introduced ray tracing (RTX). It’s been a highly requested feature since the game’s February 25, 2022 launch. Unfortunately, just hours after patch 1.09 dropped, RTX is breaking the popular Soulslike in all kinds of ways, from crashing the game to tanking its frame … Read more
Vesemir’s death in 2015’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt brought me to tears. Despite having very little familiarity with the games or the books before playing the third entry in this classic trilogy of RPGs, the moment my little band of misfit heroes lost an essential part of their found family was too much to … Read more
Ahead of tomorrow’s Diablo IV open beta, Blizzard warns that—as was the case last weekend—players will likely suffer from long waits and other server issues as even more folks than last weekend all queue up to try to play the super-hyped sequel. In case you missed it, yeah, upcoming dungeon-crawling action-RPG Diablo IV had a … Read more
Diablo IV, Blizzard’s upcoming loot-grinding RPG, featured a plethora of difficult bosses and trash mobs to kill during its early access beta last weekend. While players were stoked to jump back into the depraved world of Sanctuary to quell some demons, myself included, one jerk that the community is shooketh to face again is the … Read more
The just-released Bayonetta prequel side-story, Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon, is actually really good, a return to form after the disappointment of Bayonetta 3, as I noted in my impressions yesterday. But apparently I was off base in positing that it was intended to placate lore-starved Bayonetta players like myself, because her creator, … Read more
The first thing I did in the Diablo IV beta was try to roll. After playing games for 30 years I’ve internalized two important things: Always check behind the waterfall, and rolling is always faster than walking. So I rolled. And it was faster. And then I tried to roll again and I couldn’t…not for … Read more
Zombie-spotted action-adventure Dead Island 2 spent the last nine years pinballing between studios—original developer Techland, then Yager Development, then Sumo Digital, and finally Dambuster, which has ties to the TimeSplitters series in its former, ‘00s life as Free Radical Design. Recently, it gained enough speed to pick up a real release date for next month, … Read more
While Japanese games of varying genres are enjoying success these days, the 2000s and 2010s weren’t as kind, especially in Western markets. Since then, there’s been a lot of speculation as to why Japanese games struggled during these years, often from westerners themselves, with some pointing to key game design trends. But recent comments from … Read more