Last night during Capcom’s Resident Evil Showcase stream, the publisher announced that Resident Evil Village will indeed be getting a demo. Similarly to the RE 7 demo, players will get to play an hour of the game a few days before release.
Capcom producer, Tsuyoshi Kanda announced the demo, which won’t be limited to any specific platform. The RE Village demo will be available across Xbox and PlayStation consoles as well as PC and Google Stadia.
The demo is time limited, so your progress will come to a halt once an in-game timer reaches one hour of playtime. The demo will also only be live for a 24 hour time window, so you will have to clear some space in your calendar.
The Resident Evil Village demo will be live in the US at 5PM PDT on May 1st until 5PM PDT on May 2nd. In Europe, players will have access from 2AM CEST on May 2nd until 2AM CEST on May 3rd. Finally, in Asia, the demo will be live from 8AM HKT on May 2nd until 8AM HKT on May 3rd.
Resident Evil Village will get a full release on the 7th of May 2021.
KitGuru Says: The limited 24-hour window is disappointing but at least there will be a playable demo ahead of release, in keeping with past Resident Evil games. Are many of you going to check out the demo when its available? Or will you just wait for the full release?
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Resident Evil 4 will be rereleased in virtual reality on the Oculus Quest 2 headset. Resident Evil 4’s VR remake will be a collaboration between series publisher Capcom, Oculus parent company Facebook, and the independent studio Armature. While Capcom didn’t offer much detail, some early footage shows a first-person adaptation of the classic third-person shooter.
Capcom announced its news during a Resident Evil showcase that also included a new trailer for the non-VR Resident Evil Village. Oculus and Facebook Reality Labs will reveal more about the game on April 21st, when Facebook is holding its own VR showcase for the Quest.
The Resident Evil series has tried VR before. The 2017 first-person game Resident Evil 7 let you play through the entire game with a PlayStation VR headset, which made the game arguably scarier but also more difficult to play. Capcom also released a VR-only demo for that game. But this is the first full Resident Evil game that seems specifically designed for VR — and specifically for Facebook’s standalone Oculus Quest 2. (While it’s not clear whether Resident Evil 4 will also support the original Quest, Oculus has pushed to make Quest games compatible with both headsets in the past.)
This isn’t quite the Resident Evil 4 remake that fans have called for, and non-VR users may still want to focus on a fan-funded remaster of the original game. But it looks like the series’ first foray into making games specifically for VR — something that could provide a very different experience than adding headset support to a non-VR game.
During today’s Resident Evil Showcase, Capcom announced that a second demo for its upcoming survival horror game, Resident Evil Village, will release on May 1st. That’s six days before the game’s official release date.
Unlike the previous “Maiden” demo, this demo will be playable on all platforms the game will releases on, including PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X and S, Windows PC (via Steam), and Stadia. The demo will allow you to play for 60 minutes and explore both the village and castle areas, regardless of the platform.
PS4 and PS5 users will have the option to preload the demo beginning today via the PlayStation Store. Additionally, players on these two platforms will receive early access to the demo on two separate weekends — April 17th at 5PM ET through April 18th at 4AM ET, and April 24th at 5PM ET through April 25th at 4AM ET. Each demo weekend will provide up to 30 minutes of gameplay.
Capcom also released the fourth trailer for the game, which includes new footage and another look at Lady Dimitrescu. Resident Evil Village will launch May 7th on PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X / S, and Stadia.
The PS5 got its first major software update yesterday – but it seems Sony forgot to mention the new “HDR: On When Supported” setting, reports FlatpanelsHD. Perhaps because it works well for games but not apps…
Let’s rewind for a moment. Sony designed the PS5 to output all content in High Dynamic Range (HDR) when connected to an HDR TV. HDR delivers higher contrast and therefore a wider colour and brightness range than Standard Dynamic Range (SDR).
Problem was, any games, movies and TV shows in SDR were all automatically upconverted to HDR, making them appear very different from how they were intended to look.
The PS5 April Update addresses this issue by allowing the PS5 to match the output of a game or video to either SDR or HDR, according to how it’s flagged. “It appears to work well for games,” FlatpanelsHD says. “PS5 automatically switches to SDR output when opening games like Crash Bandicoot or WRC9, and it automatically switches to HDR output when opening HDR-compatible games like Astro’s Playroom or Spider-Man.”
And apps? Not so much. The same publication claims that support is “inconsistent”, and that the Apple TV app and Netflix app both continue to run in “forced HDR mode” on PS5. The YouTube app also failed to work properly, while Disney+ delivered a blank picture when the new setting was enabled.
Want to try it for yourself? You’ll need to manually activate “HDR: On When Supported” in the PlayStation settings menu. Head to ‘Screen and Video’, ‘Video Output’, and finally ‘HDR’ and you should see the new setting the in ‘off’ position.
The new software brings a host of (more successful) upgrades including support for USB storage, a fix for the Samsung 4K 120Hz HDR issue and cross-generational Share Play mode, which lets you pass a virtual controller to a friend with a PS4 or PS5.
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Battle royale shooter Apex Legends now has more than 100 million unique players globally, EA and Respawn announced on Wednesday. The free-to-play game surpassed the big milestone just over two years after its February 2019 launch.
Apex Legends’ success is just the latest indication that free-to-play battle royale shooters remain very popular, despite the genre becoming quite crowded over the past couple of years. Activision’s Call of Duty: Warzone hit more than 75 million players last August, reaching that mark less than five months after its March 2020 launch. And Epic Games said that its smash hit Fortnite had an eye-popping 350 million registered players last May — presumably, that number has only climbed.
Since Apex Legends’ launch on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC, Respawn has continued to add new content and updates to the game, and it even released a (delayed) port to the Nintendo Switch in March. The game now has 16 playable characters, three different maps, and is currently in its eighth season.
Before Fantasian launched on Apple Arcade, most of the discussion centered on how it looked. There was a good reason for that. Mistwalker, the studio helmed by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, pioneered a new technique that involved crafting more than 150 incredible, charming dioramas, which were then photographed to become the locations you explore in the game. Whether you’re venturing through a wind-swept desert, luxury cruise ship, or robot metropolis, every area you visit in Fantasian was handcrafted from real-world materials. It not only looks amazing, but it lends the game’s fantasy world a very particular vibe.
Fantasian is also just a great game. It’s not particularly original, hewing very closely to the Final Fantasy games that Sakaguchi built his career on. But it also takes those ideas and mechanics and changes them just enough to feel fresh, while also making some notable quality-of-life changes. Fantasian isn’t just an adorable handcrafted game from the creator of Final Fantasy; it’s the most approachable Japanese RPG I’ve ever played.
The premise is, admittedly, not very original. If you’re played a JRPG any time over the last two decades, it’ll probably feel familiar. You play as Leo, a hero who has lost his memory and quickly gets pulled into a quest for the fate of the world. It’s hard to talk too much about details of the story since, for most of the game, Leo doesn’t even know what’s going on. Early on, you’re mostly just following leads, as Leo goes pretty much anywhere he can in order to potentially learn more about who he is. You’ll explore mysterious and well-guarded vaults, visit gorgeous cities on the water, and eventually be transported to a mechanical realm ruled by robots. It’s a lengthy adventure, though what’s available now is actually only the first of two parts, with the second expected to release later this year.
The story itself is… fine. Fantasian certainly doesn’t live up to its spiritual predecessors in that regard. I never felt any real sense of urgency as I saved the world, and few of the main cast of characters are very memorable. It’s cute at times, and there are some interesting surprises and worldbuilding details to dig into. Mostly, it just gets the job done. Fantasian is much more about the vibe than the narrative. I loved poking around each and every location, seeing the buildings and landscape from different angles. I didn’t really care why I was doing it. The handmade diorama art style is reminiscent of the pre-rendered backgrounds from the PlayStation era, except with a much finer level of detail. An incredible soundtrack from frequent Sakaguchi collaborator Nobuo Uematsu only adds to the nostalgia. It’s a world you want to linger in.
Fantasian doesn’t just look and sound familiar; it also plays a lot like the classics it’s inspired by. That means random battles, turn-based combat, and a relatively straightforward character customization. The battles, in particular, do some interesting things. While there are familiar elements — like enemies with elemental weaknesses and bosses that change forms mid-fight — there are also some nice twists, like spells and weapons that you can aim to maximize your attack by hitting as many enemies as possible in one shot. It makes battles, particularly bosses, feel more strategic and less mindless. It’s really satisfying when you line things up just right.
Perhaps the best addition is the awkwardly named dimengeon — a portmanteau of dimension and dungeon — that lets you put off random battles for a short period. Essentially, when you turn the feature on, any monster you come across gets trapped in this device, and it can hold up to 30 of them at a time. Whenever you want — or whenever it’s full — you can then take on all of the trapped monsters in one giant brawl. It’s a great feature for when you just want to explore without fighting or when you’re in a rush to get to a save point.
There is a handful of other quality-of-life tweaks — plentiful save points, locations that are big but simple to navigate, touch and gamepad controls that work equally well, little need for grinding — that add up to an incredibly accessible take on the classic formula. Fantasian streamlines the genre, keeping the parts that work best, while updating the rest for modern tastes. There are a few small hiccups, like flat cutscenes and some jarring difficulty spikes toward the end. But at its best, Fantasian is everything Sakaguchi does best, just in a slightly smaller and more refined package.
The PS5 is getting its first major software update today. According to PlayStation.blog, the PS5 April Update “lets you store PS5 games on USB extended storage, share gameplay across PS5 and PS4 consoles, and more.” Here’s the scoop…
Fed up with freeing up space for new games? Today’s update allows PS5 titles downloaded to the internal SSD to be moved to a compatible USB drive and vice-versa. Handy. It’s worth noting, though, that this is purely a storage measure – games can’t be played directly off your external drive.
The other big news is that Share Play is now “cross-generational”, meaning that PS5 users can share their game screen with PS4 gamers while in a voice party. Better still, Share Play lets other players try out PS5 games by ‘passing them a virtual controller’. That way your friend can take control of your game and, say, show off their swinging skills in Spider-Man: Miles Morales.
(Image credit: Sony)
Sony has also streamlined the PlayStation user experience with a new “Request to Join” option in the PS5 and PS4 social menus. That should make it easier to join games without digging through the in-game menu. A similar shortcut allows you to disable in-game chat from the main PS5 menu. You can choose to cut out a loudmouth entirely, or just dial down their mic a couple of notches.
Last but not least, the PlayStation App, which connects to your console remotely, has been overhauled. You can now join a multiplayer session on PS5 from your phone or tablet, compare your trophy collection with a friend’s, and keep an eye on your storage space.
It’s not all great news, though. There’s no mention of the promised fix for the HDMI 2.1 bug that seems to prevent PS5 users gaming in 4K HDR at 120Hz on Samsung TVs. Nor is there any sign of support for M.2 storage drives – Sony says “we’re working on this feature and will keep you posted with any updates”.
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Those lucky enough to have got their hands on a PlayStation 5 despite the recent shortages can look forward to another large download in the near future, as Sony gears up for the release of the console’s first major update tomorrow, as announced on the PlayStation Blog.
(Image credit: Sony)
With the first PS5 update you’ll now be able to store PS5 games on external storage, but you won’t be able to play them from there. Copying games from a USB SSD sure beats deleting them and re-downloading, or reinstalling from a ‘disk’ (whatever one of those is) if you’re short of space on the internal SSD, but it’s not a perfect solution.
Elsewhere, there are some changes to social features and personalization options. The popup Game Base menu that covers parties and chat has been improved, you can hide titles you’re ashamed to own in your game library, and trophies are now handled better with (finally!) the ability to see a quick summary of your trophy stats. The PlayStation smartphone app is also getting some love, with added abilities including console storage management and notifications of when your friends are online.
While there’s quite a lot baked in to this update, it’s more notable for what it doesn’t contain: there’s still no way to expand the internal storage of the monolith, and Sony maintains it’s still ‘working on this feature’. For those of us used to whacking an M2 drive into any spare slot and it working first time, this seems like an unnecessarily drawn-out process, especially as Microsoft’s partnership with Seagate has seen expandable storage modules for the Xbox Series consoles become readily available.
Sony is reportedly working on another remake of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us — first released in 2013 for the PlayStation 3, followed by a PlayStation 4 remaster in 2014. The latest version of the game is intended for the PlayStation 5 and would reportedly feature the gameplay and graphical improvements introduced in 2020’s The Last of Us Part II,Bloomberg reports.
Bloomberg reports the remake’s status is part of a broader reorganization at Sony’s first-party development studios, which are struggling with the conflicting goals of the company’s desire for larger, blockbuster-scale projects from its major studios and the smaller, less lucrative passion projects from its smaller teams.
The Last of Us remake is one such project. The remake was originally started by Sony’s Visual Arts Service Group, an internal team that largely provided support work for art, animation, and development to Sony’s other studios on bigger projects like Spider-Man or the Uncharted games. But the Visual Arts Service Group aspired to work on its own games, and it figured that lower-cost remakes of popular Sony franchises would be a good place to start — leading to rumors last year of a “secret” new Sony studio in San Diego.
But Sony reportedly largely ignored those efforts. It tentatively approved the Visual Arts Service Group’s remake project but refused to give the team an expanded budget for the remake. The project was then moved back to series creator Naughty Dog, where it’s apparently still in development — with the Visual Arts Service Group assisting, as usual.
It’s worth noting that all these projects are still apparently fairly early on, so there’s plenty of time for Sony’s plans here to change regarding if, when, or how these games actually are released.
Bloomberg’s report notes similar issues with Sony’s Bend Studio, the developer of Days Gone. The Bend team reportedly tried to pitch a sequel to the open-world zombie game but was rejected — instead being tasked with helping Naughty Dog on a multiplayer project and a new Uncharted game. Bend’s leadership was apparently so concerned about being fully absorbed into Naughty Dog’s team that it asked to be removed from those projects; it’s now reportedly working on a new game of its own.
New filings show both sides’ legal strategies at work
On May 3rd, Fortnite publisher Epic Games will finally have its day in court, forcing Apple to defend kicking Fortnite off the iOS App Store last year. Epic’s antitrust lawsuit is bigger than a single game; it’s a direct challenge to the App Store model, the most significant legal challenge Apple has faced since the Xerox days.
Last night, both sides filed a document called a “proposed findings of fact,” essentially laying out every factual claim they’ll rely on in their arguments. The documents run more than 650 pages in total, giving a detailed roadmap of how each side sees the case — from the early days of the iPhone to Epic’s specific preparations for picking this fight with Apple. But the filings also bring the case into focus, raising three questions that will be central to the trial over the coming months.
The heart of the case is the so-called App Store tax — a 30 percent surcharge Apple collects on purchases made through the App Store. Fortnite was kicked off the App Store for dodging that tax by installing its own payment system, which is forbidden under App Store rules. Now, Epic is making the case in court that the rules should never have been put in place.
You often hear that this case is about whether the App Store is a monopoly — but Epic’s argument is more subtle than that, drawing on antitrust ideas around legal monopolies and abuses of market power. As Epic sees it, Apple’s monopoly over iOS is legal, but it’s using the market power from that monopoly to dominate the secondary market for app distribution. Epic compares the situation to Microsoft’s antitrust case in the ’90s: a legitimate monopoly over Windows, extended illegally to the secondary market in web browsers.
It’s a good theory, but it only works if you see the App Store model as fundamentally separate from iOS. In its statement of facts, Apple describes the exclusive App Store as a fundamental part of the iPhone, part of the broader offering that makes the devices valuable. “Apple wanted to ensure that iOS devices were more protected from those malware and instability issues and quality issues that the PC world was used to,” Apple claims in its filing. App Store exclusivity is part of that, but so are security measures like the code-signing and hardware root-of-trust systems. On the software side, there is a range of private APIs and OS-level entitlements that are only enabled after App Store review, tying the systems that much tighter together.
Of course, it’s inconvenient for this argument that Google is offering a competing mobile operating system with none of these restrictions — to say nothing of Apple’s own macOS, which allows side loading. Clearly, it would be technically possible to allow competing app stores on iOS. The question is whether the court sees that as changing Apple’s business model or changing iOS itself.
One of the biggest challenges for Epic is that the App Store model is fairly widespread. Consoles like Xbox and PlayStation operate on basically the same playbook, delivering games digitally through an open but curated digital store that’s locked to the hardware and controlled by the manufacturer. That alone doesn’t make it legal, but it adds credence to Apple’s claim that the App Store lockdown isn’t trapping consumers. If you don’t want to play Fortnite on an iPhone, you can play it on a console or a PC. Some devices come locked into a specific distribution channel and some don’t, giving users the chance to vote with their feet.
Epic’s counter to this argument, as explained in the filing, is that “video game consoles operate under a radically different business model than smartphones.” Development for console games is slow and expensive work, and consoles are useless without a steady supply of those games, so console manufacturers are under immense pressure to attract developers. That means hardware itself is often sold at cost, leaving App Store commissions as the primary source of profit.
Apple is different, Epic argues, because most of its profits still come from iPhone sales. “Developers do not participate in those profits,” the filing argues, “even though the availability of apps contributes greatly to the sale of devices.”
On some level, this boils down to the argument that console companies are nicer to developers, so their platform power is less of an issue. The constant competition between Xbox and PlayStation gives game developers leverage to extract more favorable terms. But iOS and Android don’t compete for app developers in the same way, and the lower cost of mobile development means the competition happens on vastly different terms. Apple has given people lots of reasons to buy an iPhone, which means there’s less pressure on any given line of business. But that’s well short of the standard for monopoly power, and Apple ultimately comes away from the console comparison looking pretty good.
Underneath everything else, Apple is facing a profound question of how much control it can exert over its own devices. For critics, this is Apple’s original sin, using industrial and graphic design to lure customers into a walled garden, then locking the gate. For fans, it’s Apple’s genius, integrating hardware and software to deliver a more purposeful and powerful user experience. But it all rests on Apple’s ability to maintain a closed stack, using hardware integration to control what happens in software.
This trial won’t undo that stack, but it could limit what Apple can do with it. The Epic Games fight started over payment processing, but the same legal standard could allow for alternative app stores or limit the restrictions Apple can place on rogue apps like Parler. It’s a first step toward setting regulatory limits on how tech companies operate, similar to the regulations on wireless carriers or banks. At its most basic level, Epic is arguing that Apple’s ecosystem has grown too big and too powerful for it to be run entirely out of Cupertino, and it’s time for it to be directly accountable to antitrust law.
Hundreds of pages in Apple’s filing are devoted to the benefits of that system for developers and iPhone owners, much of it undeniably true. There really is less malware on iOS devices because of Apple’s software controls, even if scam apps sometimes slip through. The system really does generate a lot of money for iOS developers, many of whom couldn’t compete outside of Apple’s walled garden. The shift to digital distribution really has saved money for developers who don’t need to distribute their product through brick-and-mortar retail anymore.
But in a sense, all of that is beside the point. Abuses of market power aren’t excused just because they’re sometimes helpful, and classical monopolies like Standard Oil or Bell Telephone had lots of side benefits, too. The bigger question is whether courts are ready to dive into the mobile software stack and start dictating the terms of how tech companies can set up their marketplaces. That’s a hard question, and it won’t be settled by a single ruling or a single case. But one way or another, it’s a question this court will have to take on.
Deathloop has been delayed again, with Arkane’s timed PS5 console exclusive moving from its previous May 21st release date to a fall release on September 14th. The news marks the second big delay for Deathloop, which was originally supposed to be out in the 2020 holiday season alongside the then-newly released PS5.
As with the earlier delay, Arkane’s Lyon studio is once again citing COVID-19-related delays, with an increased difficulty in development as it works to ensure “the health and safety of everyone at Arkane.”
Deathloop is the latest title from Arkane’s Lyon studio, best known for the Dishonored franchise and the rebooted Prey from 2017. Players assume the role of Colt, an assassin stuck in a time loop who must fight his way out by assassinating his eight targets using a variety of weapons and mystical powers — all while being hunted by a rival assassin, Julianna (who can be controlled by other players over the internet).
As a next-gen exclusive title, Deathloop is only set to be released on the PlayStation 5 (for a one-year exclusivity period) and PC — despite the fact that publisher Bethesda is now owned by Microsoft. Xbox studio head Phil Spencer told Bloomberg back in September that it’ll still be holding to that timed exclusivity for both Deathloop and GhostWire: Tokyo. Thatmeans, with the current delay, Xbox owners will be waiting even longer before they’re able to head to Blackreef.
(Pocket-lint) – If you were to pick out a gaming genre that’s hard to break into right now, online looter-shooters would be high up on the list. High-profile attempts like Anthem have shown how difficult it can be to upset the hierarchy.
That’s just what developer People Can Fly is trying to do with Outriders. And to its credit there’s clearly a solid foundation here. It’s built a looter-shooter that feels punchy and rewarding, with an endgame that has promising depth as it stands.
A survival story
Outrider’s framing story is refreshingly straightforward and intelligible. Escaping from a dying earth, your colony ship reaches its destination, a lush new planet called Enoch. However, all isn’t well and, after a scouting expedition on the surface goes awry, you wake up to find that decades have passed.
Enoch hasn’t been the welcoming paradise that was promised, and is instead home to a bizarre anomaly that’s altering the planet and its animals to fight back against the invasion of humans. The world you wake up to is war-torn and fractured, with factions battling over resources and a scarce few mutants gifted extraodinary powers by the anomaly, yourself included.
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It’s hokey stuff at times, but anyone who’s tried to understand just what on earth is going on in the Destiny universe will appreciate that simplicity can be a good thing.
People Can Fly previously made the raucous shooter Bulletstorm, so some of that game’s brash humour can be traced through to Outriders – but it sadly doesn’t always land. Your player character is, straightforwardly, a bit of a misanthrope. That attitude can make for pithy lines, but it can also mean a baffling lack of empathy and/or sympathy for non-playable characters (NPCs) that you’re supposed to care about.
People Can Fly
With acres of extra lore added into your codex at all times, there’s plenty of world-building to dig into here if you like, but keeping things simple in broader story terms is a welcome choice, in short. That said, Outriders could do without so many interrupting cut-scenes, given the hitch in loading that these seem to entail at present.
Class warfare
The core of the Outriders value proposition, though, isn’t really in how it delivers its side quests. It’s in how it feels to play, and this is an area where you can feel People Can Fly’s experience shining through.
Given the studio also worked on Gears of War Judgement, it’s no surprise that this is a third-person cover shooter that feels polished and fluid. After the game’s prologue, which you can later skip to create new characters quickly, you choose one of four classes.
People Can Fly
Pyromancers have flaming abilities that mark enemies for death; Technomancers can create turrets and heal allies; Devastators can tank loads of damage and hold areas more easily; and our personal favourite, Tricksters, can zip around the battlefield slicing and dicing foes.
There’s no swapping between classes other than by changing characters entirely, but running more than one character is very straightforward and well worth trying. This will help you get to grips with which you most enjoy, and each path offers up multiple skills to choose from to tweak your loadout.
Then you’ve got the actual guns, which are multitudinous and offer increasingly enjoyable modifiers as you progress. Things start off grounded but pretty soon you’ll be freezing enemies with bullets, or shooting an SMG that has explosive rounds, or any number of other variables.
These can be relatively easily mixed-and-matched using the in-depth crafting system, too, letting you find your favourite mods and keep them in your arsenal. One miss at the moment is the lack of transmogrification, a big word that basically means letting you keep exotic weapon skins while changing what they do, but it’s reasonable to hope that might come with time.
For now, guns and powers come together to make for a cover shooter than can also be plenty mobile and reactive, and kinetic when you find a power-set that agrees with you. That said, if you’re playing alone, we’d recommend you opt for the Trickster for your first character. Some of the other paths are a little harder to manage early on without backup keeping you healthy.
People Can Fly
There are periodically large bosses to contend with, which do a decent job of offering a different sort of battle, at scale, even if they can tend to be slightly bullet-spongey in practise. These fights still give a climactic feel to key moments.
It’s also up to you to decide what level of difficulty you want to set your game world at, with rewards corresponding to how far you can push yourself. This is another smart choice that lets you easily strap in for a more chilled session if you want to kick back with some friends, or make it tough as nails if you’re in it for top-tier loot.
Playing in solo mode is plenty fun and fairly well-balanced, but the game is really aimed at trios, where three players can pick loadouts that complement each other and dominate the chest-high cover battlefields that most fights take place in. Played like this, Outriders can be frantic good fun.
Smooth in patches
As with many cross-generation releases, the visual side of things is a mixed bag for Outriders, which largely depends on your platform. Playing on PlayStation 5, we had nice quick load times and the whole game plays at a smooth 60fps with only very rare stutters, just as it should on Xbox Series X and S.
On older-generation consoles the game runs at 30fps, something that’s hardly new for those platforms but still feels signficantly more sluggish when you try it. However, there’s no difference in what you can do and how you do it – it’s purely a visual disparity, also reflected by lower resolutions.
People Can Fly
In art direction terms, though, Outriders posts solid results without much to write home about. Enoch might be a raw alien world but the spaces it offers up to fight in, at present, aren’t the most visually ravishing you’ve ever seen.
Its encampments and forts are straight out of Gears of War, as are the chunky oversized weapons and, while you’ll fight across different biomes, none of them are all that fresh. You’ll see ice levels, forested areas, built-up ruins and lava-strewn wastelands, and it’s all serviceable without being memorable.
That’s not helped by the fact that every arena will inevitably need to feature the age-old maze of chest-high walls to fight around, something that really hamstrings any attempt to make levels feel really naturalistic.
Enemy design is also pretty ho-hum, with a whole bunch of burly blokes in armour sets charging at you for most of the game’s span, interrupted by occasional beasties.
People Can Fly
Still, the particle effects that your powers summon up look vibrant and jazz things up, and running on next-gen hardware the game can look great in big battles, especially when you’re in the more colourful locations.
As an always-online title, though, Outriders launched with some technical issues that were disappointing to say the least. With player numbers presumably inflated by its late-notice inclusion on Xbox Game Pass, server outages have been frequent since release, although the situation is improving all the time. Launch problems are nothing new for online titles, but that doesn’t make them acceptable, especially for those who paid full price for a game they couldn’t access.
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By Rik Henderson
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Verdict
As it stands (and assuming the servers straighten out after the launch troubles), Outriders is a good bit of fun for anyone who’s into third-person shooters or light role-players.
In a time when co-op experiences are thin on the ground it offers up a lengthy campaign you can play through with a couple of friends, and there’s a bombastic, if simplistic, time to be had while doing so.
With a loot and crafting system that can potentially offer up real depth for those who want something to sink into, there’s also plenty of promise in the endgame here, even before you unlock expeditions that offer up high-tier loot for the most dedicated players.
The fact that it’s a complete package is also a tonic compared to a full live-service offering, although whether it’s enough to keep people playing much beyond the campaign will remain to be seen.
Writing by Max Freeman-Mills. Editing by Mike Lowe.
Build-A-Bear has finally revealed what its new Animal Crossing: New Horizons-themed lineup will look like with two stuffed animal versions of fan-favorite Isabelle and infamous loan shark (loan raccoon?) Tom Nook, decked out in island outfits that match the game.
Of course, because it’s 2021, you simply can’t just buy a hot item like an Animal Crossing Build-A-Bear doll — you’ll need to sign up for a PlayStation 5-style queue, which will then randomly assign you a place on line to buy the bears (are they still bears if they’re a dog and a raccoon? How does Build-A-Bear’s taxonomy system work?) today, April 6th, at 11AM EST / 8AM PST.
Right now, Build-A-Bear has only showed off those two characters, although its possible that the company will have other outfits or merchandise as part of the collection, too. (Given the wealth of adorable Animal Crossing critters in the game, there’s plenty to choose from.)
Build-A-Bear is also to be commended for making the new stuffed animals actually look like cute real-life versions of their in-game counterparts, instead of the company’s vaguely horrifying Avengers: Infinity War bears from 2018.
If you are planning on buying an Animal Crossing Build-A-Bear, you should probably stop reading this post and get on line. If it’s anything like the Animal Crossing / Sanrio collaboration, things will sell out fast.
for the PC version on Steam. The sequel follows the saga of Ethan Winters, this time with some apparently very large vampire ladies. Based on what we’ve seen, you’ll benefit from having one of the
best graphics cards
along with something from our list of the
best CPUs for gaming
when the game arrives on May 7.
The eighth entry in the series (VIII from Village), this will be the first Resident Evil to feature ray tracing technology. The developers have tapped AMD to help with the ray tracing implementation, however, so it’s not clear whether it will run on Nvidia’s RTX cards at launch, or if it will require a patch — and it’s unlikely to get DLSS support, though it could make for a stunning showcase for AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution if AMD can pull some strings.
We’ve got about a month to wait before the official launch. In the meantime, here are the official system requirements.
Minimum System Requirements for Resident Evil Village
Capcom notes that in either case, the game targets 1080p at 60 fps, though the framerate “might drop in graphics-intensive scenes.” While the minimum requirements specify using the “Prioritize Performance” setting, it’s not clear what settings are used for the recommended system.
The Resident Evil Village minimum system requirements are also for running the game without ray tracing, with a minimum requirement of an RTX 2060 (and likely future AMD GPUs like Navi 23), and a recommendation of at least an RTX 2070 or RX 6700 XT if you want to enable ray tracing. There’s no mention of installation size yet, so we’ll have to wait and see just how much of our SSD the game wants to soak up.
The CPU specs are pretty tame, and it’s very likely you can use lower spec processors. For example, the Ryzen 3 1200 is the absolute bottom of the entire Ryzen family stack, with a 4-core/4-thread configuration running at up to 3.4GHz. The Core i5-7500 also has a 4-core/4-thread configuration, but runs at up to 3.8GHz, and it’s generally higher in IPC than first generation Ryzen.
You should be able to run the game on even older/slower CPUs, though perhaps not at 60 fps. The recommended settings are a decent step up in performance potential, moving to 6-core/12-thread CPUs for both AMD and Intel, which are fairly comparable processors.
The graphics card will almost certainly play a bigger role in performance than the CPU, and while the baseline GTX 1050 Ti and RX 560 4GB are relatively attainable (the game apparently requires, maybe, 4GB or more VRAM), we wouldn’t be surprised if that’s with some form of dynamic resolution scaling enabled. Crank up the settings and the GTX 1070 and RX 5700 are still pretty modest cards, though the AMD card is significantly faster — not that you can find either in stock at acceptable prices these days, as we show in our
GPU pricing index
. But if you want to run the full-fat version of Resident Evil Village, with all the DXR bells and whistles at 1440p or 4K, you’re almost certainly going to need something far more potent.
Full size images: RE Village RT On / RE Village RT OffAMD showed a preview of the game running with and without ray tracing during its
Where Gaming Begins, Episode 3
presentation in early March. The pertinent section of the video starts at the 9:43 mark, though we’ve snipped the comparison images above for reference. The improved lighting and reflections are clearly visible in the RT enabled version, but critically we don’t know how well the game runs with RT enabled.
We’re looking forward to testing Resident Evil Village on a variety of GPUs and CPUs next month when it launches on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation. Based on what we’ve seen from other RT-enabled games promoted by AMD (e.g. Dirt 5), we expect frame rates will take a significant hit.
But like we said, this may also be the debut title for FidelityFX Super Resolution, and if so, that’s certainly something we’re eager to test. What we’d really like to see is a game that supports both FidelityFX Super Resolution and DLSS, just so we could do some apples-to-apples comparisons, but it may be a while before such a game appears.
The new Apple TV is said to boast support for 120Hz frame rates – a capability you won’t find on any current Apple TV models. Details are thin on the ground, but the development could herald smoother gaming and a more responsive user interface.
According to 9to5Mac, the beta version of Apple’s upcoming tvOS 14.5 software contains multiple references to ‘120HZ’ and ‘supports 120Hz’ – the current Apple TV 4K set-top box is limited to 4K@60Hz resolution.
There have been rumours of a new Apple TV launching as soon as this month for some time. Recent leaks have tipped Apple’s next set-top box for a redesigned Siri remote control, HDMI 2.1, spatial audio, improved Apple Arcade integration and a speedier A14 Bionic chipset.
This latest development adds weight to the rumour that the new Apple TV will double up as a top-tier games console. In fact, some analysts claim Apple’s next set-top box could give the likes of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X (both of which offer 4K@120Hz support) a run for their money.
Given that most of the best gaming TVs already support 120Hz and HDMI 2.1, it could be that the forthcoming flagship Apple TV is upping its gaming game, so to speak.
The new Apple TV isn’t the only Cupertino-designed device tipped for a higher refresh rate either. The iPhone 13, which is expected to break cover in September, is said to use a range of LTPO displays with 120Hz support.
MORE:
Everything we know so far about the new Apple TV
Here’s our round-up of the best video streamers
And check out our Apple TV+ review
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