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From a technological perspective, Ascendant Studios' Immortals of Aveum is a highly important game. Excluding Fortnite, created by Epic Games itself, it's the first triple-A game to ship with all of Unreal Engine 5's cutting-edge features in place. That's the microgeometry-based Nanite, capable of astonishing levels of detail, along with Lumen - a ray tracing-based global illumination solution plus virtual shadow maps. Prior to Fortnite, The Matrix Awakens was the only console-based UE5 release we saw with those features - looking amazing but with obvious performance concerns.

Hello! Welcome to Captain's Log, a mini-series on the things we love about space - and how video games so brilliantly engage with it. You can read all of our pieces in the series in one place as they go live, here at the Captain's Log archive. Enjoy!

Blizzard has a new challenge for World of Warcraft players looking for a "challenging and perilous journey" – Classic Hardcore Realms.

Baldur's Gate 3 drew on the expertise and motion-capture of 248 actors to bring its cast – including NPCs – to life.

Destiny 2 players are pre-ordering the game's next expansion and annual pass, The Final Shape, and cancelling it again when a code for an in-game Exotic fusion rifle comes through.

Mortal Kombat creator Ed Boon has called the balance between delivering the violence fans want and the need to sanitise games in order to stream them a "dilemma".

The Chinese Room has dropped a fascinating short documentary about how it is constructing the worldbuilding in its upcoming 70s horror, Still Wakes the Deep.

Rockstar Games' vice president of writing, Mike Unsworth, has departed the company.

Cast your mind back to the halcyon days of July 2022 (PowerWash Simulator came out, it was fab) and you might recall developer Digital Extremes unveiling its first new property since Warframe's release back in 2013: a free-to-play fantasy action-MMORPG going by the name Soulframe. One and a bit years later, and the studio is finally ready to give it a proper showing, airing 30 minutes of gameplay during its TennoCon 2023 fan convention this weekend.

As part of its big TennoCon 2023 fan convention news blowout, developer Digital Extremes has pulled back the veil on Warframe's next big expansion, Whispers in the Walls, as well as detailing the free-to-play sci-fi shooter's mid-term future as its celebrates the big one-oh - including perhaps its wildest expansion yet in next year's Warframe: 1999.

Clash of Heroes really clicked for me when I stopped seeing the screen as a top-down view of the battlefield. This is somewhat counter-intuitive, because the screen is literally a top-down view of the battlefield, your troops on one side, your enemy's on the other. But the game started to sing for me when I forgot all that and I started seeing this as the side-on view of a battle. A strange battle perhaps, but one which I could grasp quite cleanly on an emotional level. And that's because now, my enemies weren't in front of me but were instead above me. Much more frightening. Much more energising! I was at the bottom of the screen and all my enemy's attacks were like daggers hanging overhead. And there's a truth to this. Clash of Heroes is often a game about impending doom, about the terrible thing you know is coming your way. This is often a game about violence, suspended.

As part of its recently publicised cutbacks, BioWare has "let go of" Lukas Kristjanson, the lead writer behind Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and the writer of the first three Dragon Age games, Mary Kirby.

After five years of development, Immortals of Aveum has landed, with the distinction of being the first non-Epic game to ship on Unreal Engine 5 using all of its next generation features. There's Nanite micro-geometry and ray-traced Lumen lighting, along with virtual shadow maps. Not only that, the developers are aiming for 60 frames per second exclusively, meaning there's no 30fps fidelity option. Some might say that developer Ascendant has made a rod for its own back here, bearing in mind that UE5 is still a nascent technology, so can the game deliver on its promise? Does image quality hold up? Does it sustain 60 frames per second - and what about Xbox Series S?

Bad news, RoboCop fans – Rogue City has once again been delayed, this time slipping to 2nd November 2023 (and not November 2024, as detailed on some of the game's promotional materials).

Sega has confirmed plans to host a "special broadcast" with Atlus at next month's Tokyo Game Show.

After "diligently monitoring your feedback", Blizzard has posted the notes for its upcoming 1.1.3 Diablo 4 patch, which is set to roll out on all platforms next week.

Genshin Impact fans are reporting that malicious players are using its co-op feature to infiltrate other players' worlds and delete in-game items like seele, chests, and elemental totems, preventing them from progressing.

Dark and Darker is coming to mobile.

PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S owners eagerly awaiting the previously announced August release of ghost hunting hit Phasmophobia will now have a bit longer to wait; developer Kinetic Games has opted to push launch back to October after a "recent fire incident".

What's happening with Hyenas? Announced a year ago but still without a release date, Creative Assembly's team-based sci-fi extraction shooter was playable publicly this week for the first time at Gamescom in Cologne, following a somewhat eye-opening summation of its status last week from Sega top brass.

A little over three years after acclaimed construction and automation sim Factorio left its lengthy early access with a 1.0 release, developer Wube Software has shared details of its first expansion, Space Age, which will be picking up right where the base game stops.

Mortal Kombat 1's two single-player modes have been detailed and were playable at this year's Gamescom event.

A man who gained notoriety for leaking 45 minutes of Starfield has been arrested for handling stolen goods - reportedly including copies of the game he attempted to sell online.

Following Nvidia's DLSS 3.5 announcements at Gamescom, AMD has finally revealed FSR 3 - along with a separate frame generation solution that works on all DX11 and DX12 titles. In a meeting with AMD, Digital Foundry saw both technologies in action and came away impressed.

AMD has officially unveiled its RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT graphics cards, finally completing its RDNA 3 lineup after announcing its first GPUs in November last year. Both cards are intended to target 1440p displays and run games at max settings, including ray tracing, above 60fps. They'll also support AMD's exciting new frame generation technologies, which we've written up as a separate article after going hands-on with FSR 3 and Fluid Motion Frames at Gamescom.

Excitebike 64 will be roaring onto consoles via Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack next week.

Epic's latest freebie is Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak.

Pokémon Sleep, the new nap-tracking app that hopes to help us all catch some Zzzzs as well as some Pokémon, has hit 10m downloads. That's across iOS and Android.

Larian has released its first "major" update for Baldur's Gate 3, and when the studio said major it wasn't kidding.

Bethesda's Todd Howard is currently taking part in the great big Starfield marketing push of 2023. But, it isn't just the studio's upcoming space game that we have all been waiting for. Another of Howard and Bethesda's flagship series is Elder Scrolls, and ever since it was announced that The Elder Scrolls 6 was indeed in the pipeline, many have been eager to hear more about what's next.