Latest Articles (Page 1368)

Four days after Destiny fans began grinding the game for a set of Valentine's week items, Bungie has admitted its reward rate is too low.

When Matthew Ritter found himself wandering through a cemetery a few years back, he discovered a grave that had his name on it. "The death date was very close to my birth date," he tells me. "That was odd."

Layers of Fear has been available on Steam Early Access for a while, but it launches on PS4 this week - the 16th of February to be precise. It's a psychological horror game in the same vein as Amnesia and the ill-fated Silent Hills demo P.T, you're stuck wandering around a creepy old mansion with nothing to defend yourself with, and nothing to keep you company but your own decaying mind.

With the biggest levels yet seen in a Hitman game, developer IO interactive gives the series a full reboot on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One - pushing for huge dynamically lit stages, teeming with hundreds of AI characters. The size of each level is taken up a gear over 2012's Hitman Absolution, and the studio claims over 300 characters are now fully simulated, as compared to the previous 40-50 limit. However, based on the PS4 beta, crowds of this size appear to take a toll on finite console resources - and this early taster puts a question mark over the state of the final game's performance.

The latest game in the venerable Dirt series is coming to Xbox One and PS4, and it looks like a worthy conversion from the Steam Early Access version PC players have had for months. The target of 1080p and 60fps on both consoles even seems feasible, judging by what we've played. The best part is that this is a hardcore rally game, the likes of which we rarely see on consoles.

Digital Foundry owes a small measure of gratitude to the PC tech media. Two years ago, journalists from The Tech Report and PC Perspective carried out an in-depth analysis of micro-stutter issues in multi-GPU gaming PCs. The end result was a new type of analysis based on FCAT - a system that sees every frame produced by the graphics hardware marked up with a coloured border. Frames are captured, the video analysed and from there, accurate frame-rates can be calculated - but more than that, the quality of the experience comes into focus. This manifests in the form of frame-time - the amount of time (typically measured in milliseconds) that each frame persists on-screen.

In Terry Pratchett's sublime parody of Faust, simply titled Eric, the Demon King of Hell Astfgl adopts a radical new approach to facilitating the suffering of the eternally damned. Rather than a chaotic nightmare of fire and brimstone where the air is filled with the screams of tortured souls, Asftgl's vision of hell is a bureaucratic heaven, one in which the demons wear cheerful name badges with "How May I Help You?" scribbled on them, and where, before a soul embarks upon a punishment of Sisyphean Labour, they must first be read all 1,440 volumes of the Unhealthy and Unsafety Regulations governing the Lifting and Moving of Large Objects.

In the gaming world, it's hardly new practice to offer complete editions of previously released titles but, between CD Projekt RED's The Witcher series and now Techland's Dying Light, it's fair to say that nobody does enhanced editions quite like a Polish development house. Combining the experience and insight gained from the original release with new content is what has come to define the best enhanced editions and, with Dying Light: The Following, that's exactly what you're getting. Features galore, an entire new world to play in and a whole lot more awaits potential buyers here but as this is Digital Foundry, we were most interested in what this means for presentation and performance.

In 1096, a small, grubby, angry man on a donkey led twenty thousand men and women - most of them half-armed peasants - over the Straits of Bosphorus into Anatolia. The angry man, Peter the Hermit, had led this rabble across Europe. He'd blagged transport across the Straits from the Emperor of Constantinople. He and his mob were the vanguard of the First Crusade.

UPDATE 12/02/2015 8.07pm: Apparently mashing the Caps Lock key can cause the game to crash, developer Firaxis has explained. Here's the developer's response to our query about if there's any reason players shouldn't use this trick:

Speedrunner FearfulFerret has set a world record for dashing through 100 per cent of The Witness' puzzles in three hours, 16 minutes and 21 seconds. At one point he leaves his apartment to drive to a restaurant, picks up a fish sandwich, and drives back. All while on the clock.

Firewatch is a very pretty game with a very nifty feature: It allows you to order physical copies of its screenshots if played on Steam. As such, players have snapped some very impressive in-game photos of Campo Santo's scenic debut.

In Play is a new column taking a weekly sideways look at new game releases. It's a bit like our old series Game of the Week, if you remember that.

Hot on the heels of Rock Band 4's failure to meet sales expectations, Activision has said Guitar Hero Live also didn't do the business.

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is released on PlayStation 4 this week. Here's our review dating from the Xbox One and PC release on 9th September 2015.

As a conclusion to the long-running Naruto saga, Ultimate Ninja Storm 4 delivers plenty of content for dedicated fans of the series. Over 100 playable characters appear in this latest release, while enhancements include tag-team fighting, clothing/weapon damage and wall-running in addition to a variety of different gameplay modes. It's a pretty comprehensive package but the situation is less impressive from a technical perspective, where developer Cyber Connect 2 could have done more to take advantage of the latest console hardware.

Capcom's outlined exactly what Street Fighter 5 will - and won't - feature when it launches next week.

Microsoft's announcement of a Windows 10 version of Quantum Break has sparked a debate about the rights and wrongs of previously Xbox One exclusives coming to PC.

Destiny will receive a fully-fledged sequel sometime in 2017, developer Bungie has announced.

Ubisoft has officially confirmed that there will not be a new mainline Assassin's Creed game this year.

Dying Light Spotlight Edition is a one-of-a-kind package that's easily the most expensive video game bundle ever conceived at a whopping $10,000,000.

Five Nights at Freddy's World has been re-released, this time as a free game.

Kanye West has announced that he's making a video game about his mother ascending to heaven.

Fallout 4 received a fair bit of criticism for its Survival Mode that made the game harder, but didn't factor in all the dangers that made the mode such a hit with hardcore New Vegas fans. That will be amended in a future update.

This review was originally written before locked Intel chips based on the Skylake architecture - like this i3 - could be overclocked. Feeling that our review is a little out of date, we went back to the Core i3 6100 and pushed our particular chip to its limits, and the results are remarkable. In fact, it's possible to match base Core i5 6500 quad-core performance - so we thought we would update this review accordingly with all of our findings. However, do bear in mind that Intel is looking to close down i3 overclocking, so exploiting the current loophole may not be possible on future motherboard purchases.

Ubisoft has confirmed that a second Watch Dogs title will be out before 31st March 2017.

Omitted completely in Bethesda's latest release notes, patch 1.03 has boosted Fallout 4's visual settings on PS4 and Xbox One. The update weighs in at 500MB on each console, and makes surprising improvements to draw distance settings for geometry and foliage. It's a great addition to the game that pulls it closer to the look of PC's higher 'fade' settings, but is there a trade-off in play on console - and does this advantage come at any cost to their performance?

Oh the countryside is so lovely is it? Well what about if I stuffed it full of roaming meat-sack zombies? How lovely would it be then? Mind you, I'd compensate you with a buggy you could drive into them with.

Quantum Break is no longer an Xbox One exclusive - it's coming to PC, too.

Remember Hatred, the confrontational, but ultimately sloppy and frustrating, twin-stick shooter from Polish studio Destructive Creations? Its developers are back with an equally antagonistic game: IS Defense.