gaming

Gearbox founder says Epic Games Store hopes were “misplaced or overly optimistic”

gaming / DJ Henderson / August 23, 2024

Nice try —

Pitchford’s prediction that Steam could be “a dying store” have not come to pass.

Kyle Orland – Aug 23, 2024 3: 19 pm UTC

Artist's conception of Randy Pitchford surveying the Epic Games Store landscape years after <em>Borderlands 3</em>‘s exclusive launch there.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/bl4-800×332.png”></img><figcaption>
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It’s been five years now since the PC version of Borderlands 3 launched as a high-profile timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store. At the time, Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford memorably mused that Steam “may look like a dying store” in “five or ten years” thanks to increased competition from Epic and others.

Fast-forward to this week’s announcement of Borderlands 4, and despite Pitchford’s old comments, the sequel will not follow its predecessor’s example of EGS exclusivity. The new game plans to launch on Steam and EGS simultaneously sometime in 2025 (alongside PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions).

When one social media user noticed that change this week, Pitchford responded with another lengthy message explaining why his early hopes for the Epic Games Store’s rise to dominance were “misplaced or overly optimistic.”

In the short team, Pitchford said his high hopes for Epic’s effort were initially “validated” by the launches of Borderlands 3 and 2022 spin-off Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (which was available on EGS for three months before its Steam release). “Borderlands 3 and Wonderlands demonstrated clearly that the customers show up for the games, not the storefront,” he said.

But Pitchford now says Epic didn’t “successfully press its advantage” to take a significant chunk of Steam’s dominant market power. “Famously, Steam does very little to earn the massive cut they take and continues its effective monopoly in the West while would-be competitors with much more developer friendly models continue to shoot themselves in the foot,” Pitchford said.

“The industry gives Steam their monopoly because publishers are afraid to take the risk to support more developer and publisher friendly stores,” he continued. “It’s all very interesting and there is a huge amount of opportunity in the PC gaming space for retail disruption, but no one seems to be able to make it happen.”

A limited success or an Epic failure?

Internal documents revealed in the Epic vs. Apple case in 2021 show that both Gearbox and Epic seemed to benefit from the Borderlands 3 exclusivity deal. Epic set a guaranteed sales floor of $80 million to help attract Borderlands 3 to the platform—if the game sold less on EGS, Epic would pay Gearbox the difference to reach that amount. But Gearbox’s game managed to hit that sales floor in just two weeks, bringing in more revenue on its own than the entirety of EGS had for the previous nine months while also attracting plenty of new EGS users.

Borderlands 3‘s exclusive launch was a huge revenue boost for the Epic Games Store.

Epic vs. Apple court filing
Epic recouped its $80 million upfront revenue guarantee for Borderlands 3 within two weeks.

Not all of Epic’s attempts to secure exclusives were so successful, though. In 2019, Epic paid roughly $542 million in minimum guarantees for exclusive titles projected to earn just $336 million over their lifetimes. That $206 million difference that amounts to throwing money at publishers in hopes that their exclusive games would help attract new users to EGS.

And that continuing effort hasn’t been a total failure for Epic; by the end of 2023, the company said there were 75 million active monthly users for its PC store, up from 68 million the year before. But that’s still relatively tiny compared to Steam, which had 132 million active monthly users back in 2021. While Valve hasn’t released monthly user numbers since then, Steam’s concurrent user peak has increased about 67 percent (per SteamDB tracking) since the end of 2021—from 21.17 million to 35.55 million. That suggests Steam’s current monthly user number could be well over 200 million.

Things look worse for Epic when you compare the $950 million spent by EGS players in 2023 to the estimated $8.8 billion Steam players spent that same year.

To be fair, pushing a new PC storefront from a standing start to about 10 percent of Steam’s massive revenue in about five years is impressive. But that result still has to be disappointing for Epic, which projected in 2019 that EGS could represent 35 to 50 percent of the entire PC games market in 2024.

It’s an open question whether Epic’s limited success is a result of the company’s failure to “press its advantage,” as Pitchford opines, or just a sign that Steam’s massive entrenched network effects have proven more resilient than he expected. Regardless, Borderlands 4‘s Steam launch— following the lead of other former EGS exclusive publishers—doesn’t mean Pitchford has given up hope that a Steam-killer could still come down the pike.

“I sincerely hope Epic keeps up the fight and makes headway,” Pitchford said. “Epic is going to have to prioritize the store and try some new initiatives while also doubling down on earning pivotal exclusives if it is going to have a chance. I also hope other viable competitors arrive. I am sure we will all be watching.”

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Tactical Breach Wizards weaves engaging tactics with lively dialogue

gaming, Gunpoint, heat signature, strategy games, tactical, tactical breach wizards, tom francis, turn-based strategy / Shannon Garcia / August 22, 2024

In case of boredom break glass —

An arcane combo of witty dialogue, turn-based tactics, and magical friendship.

Kevin Purdy – Aug 22, 2024 5: 00 pm UTC

Enlarge / The player has a lot of agency in this game to choose exactly how snappy their responses will be.

Suspicious Developments

Tom Francis and his Suspicious Developments team spent 6.5 years crafting the perfect finale to his defenestration trilogy, and it shows. If you liked blasting people out of windows in Gunpoint or Heat Signature—or snappy writing, endearing characters, wizards, turn-based tactical gameplay, and efficiency challenges—you are going to love Tactical Breach Wizards.

The game’s name is as efficient as its design, telling you a lot about its tone and distinct offerings. You play as a small team of magic wielders, each of which you can control, one at a time, in a world where magic use, mana, and all the rest have been militarized and corporatized. There are stasis hexes put on illegally parked cars and even a Traffic Warlock, who, after getting on his bad side, will try to mow you down with an entire ghost highway full of spectral drivers.

Tactical Breach Wizards launch trailer.

Luckily, bad guys like him can only hit you if you don’t plan accordingly. Owing to the powers of your teammate Zan, you can foresee everything that will happen within a round of combat (he’s a one-second clairvoyant). Move team member Jen to this square on the grid, have her chain-zap three guys, seal the door next to her, then see what that leaves Zan to do. Don’t like the outcome? Rewind repeatedly until you’ve gotten the most out of your team’s actions or maybe achieved one of the game’s optional achievements. You get “Confidence” for pulling off stunts like “knock three baddies out a window with one action,” but they’re entirely optional because Confidence only unlocks cool outfits, not powers or gameplay. The actual perks you unlock give you delicious choices to make, deciding which way to take each character’s powers to complement or offset one another.

Everyone in the red will get hit, but where do you move? What position provides both cover and the right blast angle?

Suspicious Developments
Another example of a tricky scenario for your team, and your mind.

Suspicious Developments
Everything in this game feeds into its feeling of escapist fun, even the “Mission Complete” screens.

Suspicious Developments
You’ll have to do a smidge of thumbtacks-and-string plotting, mostly so that you understand the plot. But there are rewards for reading.

Suspicious Developments
Here come the mid-game heavies.

Suspicious Developments
You can get extra-clever and earn “Confidence,” but, blissfully, it’s just a quirky costume reward, and just surviving a level is okay, too.

Suspicious Developments

Compelling wizard banter

I’ve cleared the first three acts, and I’m almost certainly going to get through the rest of what the developers think is a roughly 16-hour game (on Normal difficulty) in sessions on the couch or in transit. The only thing that breaks up its session-able nature is the dialogue between scenes, levels, and acts, but I mean that in a good way. My achievement-craving brain wants to skip through the banter, and that’s possible, but the buddy-cop banter is just too good to pass up. While your wizards are self-conscious enough to recognize how ridiculous the events around them are, there’s just enough vulnerability and actual development to keep the plot from folding under its own irony.

The game looks good and sounds good, too, and it runs well on pretty much any modern system with 1GB of graphics power (that’s most of them). It’s listed as “Playable” on Steam Deck, and that’s accurate. The Steam Deck’s trackpads help a lot here, though you can use the sticks on any controller if you’re willing to nudge them around a lot inside a UI that was very much meant for a cursor.

Like Zan, you should be able to look just a bit into Tactical Breach Wizards ($20 at launch on Steam) and foresee just how much you’re going to enjoy it. Experiences help forge friendships, and there are few bonding experiences quite like chucking one more crooked wizard cop out the window than you thought was possible.

Listing image by Suspicious Developments

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“We run a business”—why Microsoft’s Indiana Jones will be on PS5

gaming, Indiana Jones, Phil Spencer, xbox / Kelly Newman / August 21, 2024

PS5 Starfield when? —

Spencer: “There’s going to be more change in how… games are built and distributed.”

Kyle Orland – Aug 21, 2024 9: 32 pm UTC

So I'm not stuck on Xbox, eh? — Enlarge / So I’m not stuck on Xbox, eh?

Bethesda

Bethesda’s Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is the latest game from a Microsoft subsidiary that will make its way to the PlayStation 5. The game will hit Sony’s console in the spring of 2025, Microsoft announced yesterday, months after a planned December launch on Xbox Series S/X and Windows.

In an interview with YouTube channel Xbox On, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer expanded on that decision, implying that multiplatform releases for Microsoft gaming properties were important to the Xbox division’s bottom line. “We run a business,” he said, “It’s definitely true inside of Microsoft the bar is high for us in terms of the delivery that we have to give back to the company, because we get a level of support from the company that’s just amazing in what we’re able to go do.”

Phil Spencer’s comments come about three minutes into this interview.

Amid massive layoffs that have hit Xbox and other gaming companies in recent months, Spencer noted that there’s “a lot of pressure on the [game] industry” these days. “[The industry] has been growing for a long, long time and now people are looking for ways to grow,” he said. “And I think that us, as fans, as players of games, we just have to anticipate there’s going to be more change in how some of the traditional ways that games were built and distributed [ars] going to change… for all of us.”

“It’s just going to be a strategy that works for us”

Although Microsoft released four former Xbox exclusives on other platforms months ago, Spencer suggested that there hasn’t been any commensurate dip in total Xbox usage. “What I see when I look is our franchises are getting stronger; our Xbox console players are as high this year as they’ve ever been,” he said.

“So I look at it, and I say, ‘Okay, our player numbers are going up for the console platform, our franchises are as strong as they’ve ever been… So I look at this [as] ‘How can we make our games as strong as possible?'” our platform continues to grow both on console on PC and on cloud and I think it’s just going to be a strategy that works for us.”

Indiana Jones.” height=”360″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/xboxmulti-640×360.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / Microsoft’s last four multiplatform game releases were a bit smaller than Indiana Jones.

Microsoft

Microsoft has long prioritized maintaining a healthy number of overall Xbox players over selling more raw consoles than competitors like Sony. Still, the continuing cratering of sales revenue from Xbox hardware likely contributes heavily to Microsoft’s decision to release its games on competing platforms.

A big-budget, big-name Bethesda release like Indiana Jones could act as more of an Xbox system seller than the four older, smaller games that Microsoft recently let go multiplatform. Then again, The Great Circle‘s multiple months of Xbox exclusivity—which include the 2024 holiday buying season—could still provide a bit of a relative advantage for Microsoft’s consoles.

Indiana Jones and The Great Circle‘s PS5 availability may come as a particular surprise to readers who remember Spencer saying in February that neither The Great Circle nor Starfield were a part of the company’s current multiplatform plans. But a careful parsing of Spencer’s words at the time shows that he only promised those titles were not among the four multiplatform titles they were announcing at that time.

Back then, Spencer said that those four multiplatform releases didn’t represent “a change to our fundamental exclusive strategy.” But he added that there was a desire to “use what some of the other platforms have right now to help grow our franchises” to help “the long-term health of Xbox.”

“[I have] a fundamental belief that over the next five or ten years… games that are exclusive to one piece of hardware are going to be a smaller and smaller part of the game industry,” Spencer said in February.

“We run a business”—why Microsoft’s Indiana Jones will be on PS5 Read More »

Civilization VII hands-on: This strategy sequel rethinks the long game

2K Games, 4X, civilization, Civilization VII, Features, firaxis, gaming, strategy / DJ Henderson / August 20, 2024

One More Turn —

Classic turn-based gameplay meets a radical rethink of the overall structure.

Samuel Axon – Aug 20, 2024 9: 00 pm UTC

A Mayan city in Civilization VII — Enlarge / Firaxis has upped the ante on presentation for the cities. It’s still a bit abstract and removed, but they have more vibrancy, detail, and movement than before.

2K Games

2K Games provided a flight from Chicago to Baltimore and accommodation for two nights so that Ars could participate in the preview opportunity for Civilization VII. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

From squares to hexes, from tech trees to civic trees, over its more than 30 years across seven mainline entries, the Civilization franchise continues to evolve.

Firaxis, the studio that has developed the Civilization games for many years, has a mantra when making a sequel: 33 percent of the game stays the same, 33 percent gets updated, and 33 percent is brand new.

Recently, I had the opportunity to play Civilization VII, the next entry, which is due to launch in February 2025. The build I played was an early alpha build, but the bones of the game it will become were there, and it’s interesting to see which third Firaxis kept the same and which third it has reimagined.

It turns out that the core of the game that its developers won’t much want to change is the turn-to-turn experience. But in the case of Civilization VII, all bets are off when it comes to the overall arc of a long journey, from sticks and stones to space travel.

Rethinking the structure of a Civilization game

Most of the time, playing Civilization VII feels a lot like playing Civilization VI—but there’s one big change that spans the whole game that seems to be this sequel’s tentpole feature.

That’s the new Ages system. The long game is now broken into three segments: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. Each Age has some unique systems and gameplay, though most systems span all three.

Within each age, you’re given a handful of “Legacy Paths” to choose from. These map closely to the franchise’s long-standing victory conditions: Science, Economic, Cultural, and Military. The idea is that you pick the Legacy Path you want to pursue, and each Legacy Path has different success conditions that change across each of the three Ages.

These conditions are big and broad, and Firaxis thankfully hasn’t gotten too jazzy with them. For example, I played in the Age of Antiquity and pursued the Cultural path, so my goal was to build a certain number of Wonders before the end of the Age.

In some ways, this is similar to the boom-and-bust cycle of Dark and Golden Ages in Civilization VI, but I found it much more natural in VII. In VI, I often found myself making arbitrary-seeming choices I didn’t think made sense for my long-term strategy just to game the system and get the Age transition I wanted. In this new game, the Legacy Path objectives are likely to always be completely in line with the overall victory strategy you’re pursuing.

One of the advantages of this new structure is support for shorter games that aren’t just hyper-compressed versions of a larger game. Previously, the only way to play a game of Civilization that wasn’t a dozen or more hours long was to pick one of the faster game speeds, but that fundamentally changed how the game felt to play.

This is a Roman city, but you could have a non-Roman historical leader, like Egypt's Hatshepsut, at the helm. — Enlarge / This is a Roman city, but you could have a non-Roman historical leader, like Egypt’s Hatshepsut, at the helm.

2K Games

Now, Civilization VII gives you the ability to play a match that’s just one Age, if you choose to.

The new Ages system is integrated with another big change: your choice of leader and civilization are no longer tied together when you start a new game, and they’re not set in stone, either.

Now you pick both a civilization and a leader separately at the start—and you can do some weird, ahistorical combinations, like Greece’s Alexander as the leader of China. Each leader and civilization offers specific bonuses, so this gives more customization of your playstyle at the start.

It doesn’t end there, though. At the end of each Age, you can essentially change civilizations (though as far as I could tell, you stick with the leader). Firaxis says it took inspiration for this feature from history—like the fact that London was a Roman city before it became an English one in the Medieval era.

Which civilization you can transition to is dictated by what you did within the Legacy Path system, among other things.

The amount of time I had to play the game was just enough to almost finish the Antiquity Age, so I didn’t get to see this in action, but it sounds like an interesting new system.

Civilization VII hands-on: This strategy sequel rethinks the long game Read More »

Peter Molyneux is back with yet another new take on the “god game”

gaming, Peter Molyneux / Shannon Garcia / August 20, 2024

Black & White + Fable = ??? —

Masters of Albion promises “an open world… full of combat, choices, mysteries, and story.”

Kyle Orland – Aug 20, 2024 8: 49 pm UTC

Welcome back to Albion.

22cans
When gods play with Legos, they use building-sized pieces.

22cans
Crank up that tilt-shift filter, boys. We’re making a god game!

22cans
FIREBALL

22cans
Zombies. How original.

22cans
Running into battle with a flaming sword? In a god game?

22cans

If you’re a gamer of a certain age, you probably have fond memories of Peter Molyneux as the mind behind ambitious games like Populous, Dungeon Keeper, and the Fable series. If you’re of a slightly younger age, you probably remember him as the serial overpromiser behind Project Godus and a recent NFT game that somehow attracted $54 million in player pre-investment (it did actually launch in some form last year).

I bring up this history because, after years of keeping his head down, Molyneux made a surprise appearance at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live event. He was there to introduce Masters of Albion, a title that host Geoff Keighley said Molyneux has “secretly been working on for the past three years” and which Molyneux himself describes as “an open-world god game full of combat, choices, mysteries, and story.”

A short, early trailer for the game takes us back to Fable‘s “familiar vast world of Albion, packed with stories, quests, treasures, and monsters.” There, the residents of the town of Oakridge have to work to gather and process resources by day and then defend themselves from hordes of creatures by night.

You get to help those citizens out as the kind of disembodied god hand that will be extremely familiar to players of the Black & White games from decades past. That hand can help direct resources, design new buildings like Lego bricks, or cheekily drop villagers from high in the sky.

Players will also be able to leave god mode and possess characters like the “Town Hero,” who in the trailer engages in some extremely generic melee combat with some exceedingly generic-looking zombies. If your hero gets overwhelmed, don’t worry, you can just switch back to your god hand and unleash some powerful lightning and fireball attacks.

Do what you want

The trailer talks up the deep levels of micromanaging customization you can engage with, down to designing the resident’s food, clothes, weapons, and armor. “You can be as silly as you want,” Molyneux intones as the trailer shows a sword made of a loaf of bread (which “doesn’t cut it”) and well after a scene where he force-feeds rats to the town’s citizenry (who react with Sims-like overemotion).

Following some controversial funding issues for recent games, Molyneux is self-funding the development of Masters of Albion, leading a team of 20 that includes Bullfrog/Lionhead veterans like Mark Healey, Russell Shaw, and Iain Wright. “I think my first realization was I had to get the old team back together again,” Molyneux said of the developers he’s gathered to “make something new, unique, and different.”

You can already wishlist Masters of Albion on a fresh Steam page that goes on to promise “a world full of quests and moral choice” as you “unravel the mystery of the mages, defeat the enemy that lurks in the night and conquer a sorcery that could kill us all.” You’ll forgive us for waiting until the game is released to see if it lives up to that promise.

Listing image by 22cans

Peter Molyneux is back with yet another new take on the “god game” Read More »

The Great Circle is Indiana Jones for a post-Uncharted world

gaming / Shannon Garcia / August 20, 2024

A time traveler with a flashlight would blow Indiana Jones' mind. — Enlarge / A time traveler with a flashlight would blow Indiana Jones’ mind.

At first glance, Wolfenstein: The New Order developer MachineGames might seem like an awkward fit for the first (non-Lego) Indiana Jones video game since the Wii era. While there’s some overlap in the over-the-top Nazi villain department, the “shoot your way through every obstacle” nature of the new Wolfenstein games doesn’t seem to lend itself well to Indy’s more free-wheeling, adventurous exploration style.

For the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, director Jerk Gustafsson said that going from first-person shooter to a “MachineGames adventure” style change has been a difficult tightrope walk for the developers. While the team never wanted to prevent the player from using their revolver during action scenes, there was the potential that giving a player that freedom would allow them to “just shoot their way through” in a way that’s antithetical to Jones’ character.

To help avoid this problem, Creative Director Alex Torvenius said most of the game has been balanced so that “it’s dangerous to shoot your gun and it’s dangerous to be shot at.” Guns-blazing action will be a winning strategy in some in-game situations, but “[there are] many scenarios where you can go through the environment without using guns at all,” he continued.

The design is focused on “trying to make sure you should foremost try to use your wits and your whip… navigating around an enemy rather than through them,” Torvenius added. “The only solution in this game is absolutely not to shoot your way through.”

The hand-to-hand combat of the <em>Chronicles of Riddick</em> games was a big inspiration for MachineGames.” height=”480″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/riddick.jpg” width=”640″></img><figcaption>
<p>The hand-to-hand combat of the <em>Chronicles of Riddick</em> games was a big inspiration for MachineGames.</p>
</figcaption></figure>
<p>Gustafsson said this design was heavily inspired by <a href= — Enlarge / Scenery-chewing Nazi villain? Check!

Enlarge / Scenery-chewing Nazi villain? Check!

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Nvidia is ditching dedicated G-Sync modules to push back against FreeSync’s ubiquity

freesync, g-sync, gaming, GeForce, NVIDIA, Tech / DJ Henderson / August 20, 2024

sync or swim —

But G-Sync will still require specific G-Sync-capable MediaTek scaler chips.

Andrew Cunningham – Aug 20, 2024 7: 09 pm UTC

Back in 2013, Nvidia introduced a new technology called G-Sync to eliminate screen tearing and stuttering effects and reduce input lag when playing PC games. The company accomplished this by tying your display’s refresh rate to the actual frame rate of the game you were playing, and similar variable refresh-rate (VRR) technology has become a mainstay even in budget monitors and TVs today.

The issue for Nvidia is that G-Sync isn’t what has been driving most of that adoption. G-Sync has always required extra dedicated hardware inside of displays, increasing the costs for both users and monitor manufacturers. The VRR technology in most low-end to mid-range screens these days is usually some version of the royalty-free AMD FreeSync or the similar VESA Adaptive-Sync standard, both of which provide G-Sync’s most important features without requiring extra hardware. Nvidia more or less acknowledged that the free-to-use, cheap-to-implement VRR technologies had won in 2019 when it announced its “G-Sync Compatible” certification tier for FreeSync monitors. The list of G-Sync Compatible screens now vastly outnumbers the list of G-Sync and G-Sync Ultimate screens.

Today, Nvidia is announcing a change that’s meant to keep G-Sync alive as its own separate technology while eliminating the requirement for expensive additional hardware. Nvidia says it’s partnering with chipmaker MediaTek to build G-Sync capabilities directly into scaler chips that MediaTek is creating for upcoming monitors. G-Sync modules ordinarily replace these scaler chips, but they’re entirely separate boards with expensive FPGA chips and dedicated RAM.

These new MediaTek scalers will support all the same features that current dedicated G-Sync modules do. Nvidia says that three G-Sync monitors with MediaTek scaler chips inside will launch “later this year”: the Asus ROG Swift PG27AQNR, the Acer Predator XB273U F5, and the AOC AGON PRO AG276QSG2. These are all 27-inch 1440p displays with maximum refresh rates of 360 Hz.

As of this writing, none of these companies has announced pricing for these displays—the current Asus PG27AQN has a traditional G-Sync module and a 360 Hz refresh rate and currently goes for around $800, so we’d hope for the new version to be significantly cheaper to make good on Nvidia’s claim that the MediaTek chips will reduce costs (or, if they do reduce costs, whether monitor makers are willing to pass those savings on to consumers).

For most people most of the time, there won’t be an appreciable difference between a “true” G-Sync monitor and one that uses FreeSync or Adaptive-Sync, but there are still a few fringe benefits. G-Sync monitors support a refresh rate between 1 and the maximum refresh rate of the monitor, whereas FreeSync and Adaptive-Sync stop working on most displays when the frame rate drops below 40 or 48 frames per second. All G-Sync monitors also support “variable overdrive” technology to help eliminate display ghosting, and the new MediaTek-powered displays will support the recent “G-Sync Pulsar” feature to reduce blur.

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Your 10-year-old graphics card can run Dragon Age: The Veilguard

dragon age 4, gaming, NVIDIA / Kelly Newman / August 19, 2024

Still kicking —

2014’s Nvidia GTX 970 is still a “minimum requirements” workhorse.

Kyle Orland – Aug 19, 2024 3: 57 pm UTC

At this rate, it might be the only graphics card you'll ever need? — Enlarge / At this rate, it might be the only graphics card you’ll ever need?

When Dragon Age: Inquisition came out nearly 10 years ago, PC players could have invested $329 (~$435 in today’s dollars) in a brand-new GTX 970 graphics card to make the game look as good as possible on their high-end gaming rig. Surprisingly enough, that very same 2014 graphics card will still be able to run follow-up Dragon Age: The Veilguard (previously known as Dreadwolf) when it launches on October 31. If you’re using AMD cards, an even older Radeon R9 that you purchased back in 2013 will be able to run the game.

Veilguard‘s minimum specs are just the latest to show the workmanlike endurance of the humble GTX 970, which is currently available used on Newegg for as low as $140. Relatively recent big-budget PC releases like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 both use the old card (or the less powerful follow-up variant, the GTX 960) as their “minimum requirement” benchmark.

Not every big-budget PC game these days is so forgiving with its minimum specs, though. When Cyberpunk 2077 and Doom: Eternal launched in 2020, they both asked players to be sporting at least a GTX 1060, which had come out around four years prior.

For a bit of context, the GTX 970 was used as the “recommended” baseline spec for the mid-range “Oculus Ready” PCs needed to power the then-new Rift VR headset when it launched in 2016. Today, a $500 Meta Quest 3 headset gives you much better graphical performance in a self-contained portable package, no gaming PC required.

Veilguard players sticking with a GTX 970 shouldn’t expect to get the best graphical experience, of course. EA suggests an RTX 2070 (circa 2018) or a Radeon RX 5700Xt (circa 2019) to run the game at “recommended” specs. And you’ll need at least 16 GB of RAM and 100 GB of storage space.

Since work on Veilguard began in earnest in 2015, the game has suffered a string of high-profile staff departures: Creative Director Mike Laidlaw left in 2017; Executive Producer Mark Darrah and BioWare General Manager Casey Hudson left in late 2020; Senior Creative Director Matt Goldman left in late 2021; replacement Executive Producer Christian Daley left in early 2022; and producer Mac Walters left in early 2023.

The full requirements for Dragon Age: The Veilguard are as follows.

Minimum Requirements

OS: Windows 10/11 64-bit

Processor: Intel Core i5-8400 / AMD Ryzen 3 3300X(see notes)

Memory: 16GB

Graphics: Nvidia GTX 970/1650 / AMD Radeon R9 290X

DirectX: Version 12

Storage: 100GB available space

Additional Notes: SSD preferred, HDD supported; AMD CPUs on Windows 11 require AGESA V2 1.2.0.7

Recommended Requirements

OS: Windows 10/11 64-bit

Processor: Intel Core i9-9900K / AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (see notes)

Memory: 16GB

Graphics: Nvidia RTX 2070 / AMD Radeon RX 5700XT

DirectX: Version 12

Storage: 100GB SSD available space

Additional Notes: SSD required; AMD CPUs on Windows 11 require AGESA V2 1.2.0.7

Your 10-year-old graphics card can run Dragon Age: The Veilguard Read More »

Epic Games Store and Fortnite arrive on EU iPhones

Apple, dma, epic games, epic games store, EU, fortnite, gaming, iOS, IPhone, Tech / Mike M. / August 16, 2024

It’s still a mess —

Epic also launched its store on Android.

Samuel Axon – Aug 16, 2024 6: 48 pm UTC

Artist's conception of Epic dodging harm from Apple's decisions (and perhaps its own). — Enlarge / Artist’s conception of Epic dodging harm from Apple’s decisions (and perhaps its own).

It’s been four years since Fortnite, one of the world’s most popular games, was pulled from the Apple App Store in a blaze of controversy and finger-pointing. Today, it’s returning to the iPhone—but only in the European Union.

Today marks the launch of the Epic Games Store on Android and iOS—iOS just in Europe, Android worldwide. Right now, it just has three games: Fortnite, Rocket League Sideswipe, and Fall Guys. And you’ll have to be in Europe to access it on your iPhone.

The Epic Games Store is run by Epic Games, the same company that develops and publishes Fortnite. Most folks who have been paying attention to either Epic or Apple in recent years knows the story at this point, but here’s the quick summary and analysis.

Opinion: Users are still the losers after four years

At the direction of CEO Tim Sweeney, Epic knowingly made changes to Fortnite related to digital payments that violated Apple’s terms for developers on the platform. Apple removed Fortnite accordingly, and a long, ugly PR and legal battle ensued between the two companies in multiple countries and regions.

In the US, a judge’s decision granted some small wins to Epic and other developers seeking to loosen Apple’s grip on the platform, but it kept the status quo for the most part.

Things went a little differently in Europe. EU legislators and regulators enacted the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which had far-reaching implications for how Apple and Google run their app stores. Among other things, the new law required Apple to allow third-party, alternative app stores (basically, sideloading) on the iPhone.

Apple’s compliance was far from enthusiastic (the company cited security and privacy concerns for users, which is valid, but the elephant in the room is, of course, its confident grip on app revenues on its platforms), and it was criticized for trying to put up barriers. Additionally, Apple rejected Epic’s attempts to launch its app store multiple times for a few arcane reasons amid a flurry of almost comically over-the-top tweets from Sweeney criticizing the company.

Despite Apple’s foot-dragging, Epic has finally reached the point where it could launch its app store. Epic had already launched a relatively successful App Store on PC, where Valve’s Steam holds a strong grip on users. The new iPhone app store doesn’t offer nearly as many options or perks as the PC version, but Epic says it’s working on wrangling developers onto its store.

It also says it will release its games on other alternative app stores on iOS and Android, such as AltStore PAL.

It’s been a long, winding, angry path to get to this point. In the battle between Epic and Apple, there remains some debate about who really has won up to this point. But there isn’t much dispute that, whether you want to blame Apple or Epic or both, users sure haven’t been the winners.

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The Crimson Diamond is a wonderful EGA-like graphic adventure game for 2024

adventure games, gaming, graphic adventure games, Sierra Games, sierra online, text parser, text parsing, the crimson diamond / Shannon Garcia / August 16, 2024

But don’t get it wrong—you can definitely die —

The parser works much better than you’d think, and the mystery is pitch-perfect.

Kevin Purdy – Aug 16, 2024 6: 39 pm UTC

Cover art for The Crimson Diamond — In my mind, this image is slowly drawing into place, with the text arriving last.

Julia Minamata

A text parser? Typing in “Open drawer,” then “Look in drawer,” then “Take brochures,” in the year 2024, on a computer that can generate a 4K 3D model of the Acropolis if I ask it to? Is that really what The Crimson Diamond asks of us?

Yes, it is, and solo developer/writer/producer Julia Minamata is right to ask it. If you have text-prompt adventures from the likes of Sierra in your mental library (like, say, The Colonel’s Bequest), or if you’re willing to meet the parser halfway, it will work. The Crimson Diamond’s parser is fairly agile, accepting a range of nouns and verbs in most circumstances. You can still use arrow keys and a mouse to move and click a few useful shortcuts. And the parser has shortcuts, like typing “n” to look at your quest-tracking notebook or “o d” or “o c” for the very common actions of opening a door or cabinet.

There are a lot of cabinets and drawers in this game because it’s set in northern Ontario, Canada, in 1914. You are Nancy Maple, a junior geologist eager for some field work, sent by your museum to the mining town of Crimson to investigate a diamond that fell out of a river fish’s guts. Everything goes wrong with your trip, and you’re on your own to investigate this town, its odd inhabitants and visitors, and, eventually, a crime that may or may not have to do with potential diamonds.

The tutorial room does a great job introducing you to the control scheme: arrow keys or mouse cursor for movement and selecting, but typing for actual action.

Julia Minamata
You spend a fair deal of time in the lodge, talking and looking and picking up little things you know you’ll use later.

Julia Minamata
Cutscenes give the artist new angles from which to demonstrate their remarkable EGA prowess.

Julia Minamata
The characters in this game are richer than you might remember from more memory-limited days, usually having more than one note to them.

Julia Minamata

A few disclosures must be made. For one, Minamata crafted the EGA-style social avatar for Ars Senior AI Reporter Benj Edwards, who tipped me to this game’s existence. Another is that this is a game that costs $15 on Steam or Itch.io (and 10 percent off on Steam in this first week after release), was made by a solo Canadian developer, with music by notably cool keyboard person Dan Policar, and it evokes some of my earliest, pre-Maniac-Mansion adventure game memories. I also have not played the game to completion. I will not be taking a critical gem loupe to it; I just think more people need to know about it.

Release trailer for The Crimson Diamond

Nostalgia and underdog-cheering sentiments aside, The Crimson Diamond looks and sounds great. The creative constraints of an EGA-like color palette and pixel block size delivered some scenes that are just wonderful to look at. The soundtrack loops about in pleasant and occasionally ear-catching fashion. Alice Bell at Rock Paper Shotgun played much further into this (about six hours and near or at completion), and her major complaint is almost a throwback: a few puzzles with obscure solutions, entirely too easy to miss with text parsing and EGA graphics.

I’m eager to see where Nancy Maple’s journey takes her, even if I have to sometimes wrack my brain for the right text to do the obvious thing. The game so far has felt like spending time inside one of those non-violent mysteries you see on PBS (or CBC), just inside a familiar and evocative game form.

Listing image by Julia Minamata

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Saudi man earns world record for 444 game consoles hooked to one TV

gaming / Shannon Garcia / August 16, 2024

Still nothing good to play —

Ibrahim Al-Nasser said he got tired of juggling plugs just to play his collection.

Kyle Orland – Aug 16, 2024 4: 47 pm UTC

Those of us who collect classic game consoles and computers (here’s looking at you, AI reporter Benj Edwards) know the difficulty of keeping all that hardware not just working but instantly accessible with a simple press of a power button. Too often, large hardware collections end up languishing, boxed up on shelves, or sitting loose and unconnected to a display for long periods.

Saudi Arabia’s Ibrahim Al-Nasser grew tired of having that problem with his massive gaming collection, so he decided to hook 444 different gaming devices up to a single TV, earning a Guinness World Record in the process.

“After a while, I noticed that I had a big stack of gaming consoles that I couldn’t play,” Al-Nasser said in a video filmed by Guinness. “The TV ports are limited, and if I want to play, I either unplug the existing consoles or I’ll keep everything and add more switchers and of course more converters as well. By adding more switchers, the idea came to my mind to connect all of the gaming consoles I have to the TV, then contact Guinness World Records because this project is unique.”

Guinness says Al-Nasser makes use of “more than 12” HDMI switchers (so… 13?) to keep his collection connected, as well as “over 30” RCA switchers for pre-HD consoles (though some older consoles, like an N64 used in the video, apparently make use of converters for an HD connection). While the HD consoles seem to automatically switch to the correct input when turned on, Al-Nasser uses a massive spreadsheet to keep track of which button to push on which RCA switcher to connect the right cables.

Wait, there are 444 consoles?

A Nintendo-heavy section of Al-Nasser's collection. — Enlarge / A Nintendo-heavy section of Al-Nasser’s collection.

Al-Nasser’s collection seems quite extensive, including both common modern consoles and relative rarities like the Asia-exclusive Super A’Can. To get to a record-setting count of 444, though, Al-Nasser had to include a lot of non-traditional “game consoles,” including cheap plug-and-play devices, mini-console re-releases, gaming computers, Android-based HDMI sticks, “consolized arcades,” and more.

That’s all good enough to count for Guinness, which has faced controversy for letting would-be record holders pay for a chance at glory. In the gaming world, it famously removed and then reinstated Billy Mitchell’s scoring records amid a lawsuit threat.

Even if the hardware count feels a bit inflated, Al-Nasser definitely deserves credit for keeping so many pieces of gaming hardware clean and well-organized without any of the sloppy cable clutter you might expect. “I use all the tools available in the market… to organize the cables,” he said. “It’s like a museum, that’s why it took too much time for me [to organize].”

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Behold, Diablo is fully playable in your browser

Blizzard, Diablo, gaming, GitHub / Mike M. / August 15, 2024

Stay a while and compile —

It controls and looks great, though the game was outshined by its sequels.

Samuel Axon – Aug 15, 2024 9: 15 pm UTC

A browser window shows an old PC game — Enlarge / *Diablo* running in Firefox on macOS.

Samuel Axon

You can now play the original Diablo (and its expansion, Hellfire) in virtually any web browser on any computer with generally excellent performance and operating-as-expected controls. It’s all thanks to an open source project published on GitHub called Diabloweb that’s now being circulated by game developers on X.

In the README file in the project’s GitHub repository, the project’s developer (d07RiV) notes that it is based on DevilutionX, another open source project that did a lot of legwork to make Diablo run well on modern operating systems.

“I’ve modified the code to remove all dependencies and exposed the minimal required interface with JS, allowing the game to be compiled into WebAssembly,” writes d07RiV. “Event handling (especially in the menus) had to be modified significantly to fit the JS model.”

It’s pretty easy to set up; you just visit the website, upload a file, and get going.

You have to upload a file because the project doesn’t include the Diablo game files—you’ll have to provide those in the form of the DIABDAT.MPQ file in the Diablo install directory.

There are three above-board ways to source this MPQ file. First, you can, of course, own a physical copy of the original game. Alternatively, you can purchase the game on GOG and install it, then pull the file from the installation directory.

There’s also a shareware release of Diablo, and you can pull the SPAWN.MPQ file from that, and it works just fine. That’s not the full game, though, so that’s more for if you just want to try it.

This is the Diabloweb site, which offers brief instructions and prompts on how to get started.

Samuel Axon
I downloaded the Diablo installer from GOG and ran it in a Windows VM on my Mac…
Here’s the file we’re looking for.
It was just a click on the website to upload that file and behold, Diablo in a browser.

Samuel Axon

I played the game for about half an hour using the MPQ from the GOG version without any issues on Firefox on a Mac. (There’s no Mac version of the GOG installer, though, so I had to run the installer in a virtual Windows machine to get at the file.) The game is obviously primitive compared to more recent entries in the series (or even Diablo II), but it is an addictive blast to play regardless.

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