2K Games is expected to show the first trailer footage of the upcoming Civilization VII as part of this weekend’s Summer Games Fest marketing extravaganza after a logo for the game leaked on 2K’s website this morning.
Eagle-eyed gamers at ResetEra and Reddit both noticed the Civ VII banner atop the publisher’s official site early this morning, alongside a “Coming Soon” label and inactive links to a trailer and wishlist page. The appearance comes just ahead of the trailer-filled Summer Games Fest livestream, which will premiere at 5 pm Eastern Friday afternoon.
In May, the Summer Games Fest Twitter account teased that 2K would be using the event “to reveal the next iteration in one of [its] biggest and most beloved franchises.” Civilization VII now seems primed to fill that pre-announced slot, which may be unwelcome news for fans of 2K-owned franchises like Borderlands, Bioshock, and NFL2K (which was first publicly mulled for a revival in 2020).
Last year, developer Firaxis announced that it had started development on the “next mainline game in the world-famous Sid Meier’s Civilization franchise,” under the guidance of Civilization VI Creative Director Ed Beach and newly promoted studio head Heather Hazen (who previously worked with Epic Games and Popcap). “We have plans to take the Civilization franchise to exciting new heights for our millions of players around the world,” Hazen said in a statement at the time.
Enlarge/Civilization namesake Sid Meier holds forth with fans at a Firaxicon fan gathering in 2014.
Kyle Orland
Civilization VII will be the first entry in the storied strategy franchise in at least eight years, a historically long gap for a series that has seen a new numbered entry every four to six years since its debut in 1991. When Civilization VI hit in 2016, we praised the game for its smoother, more easily accessible interface and focus on fraught decision-making.
In an interview with Ars just after the launch of Civ VI, series namesake Sid Meier said his official role as franchise director has evolved over the years into more of a support structure for younger designers. “I’m there to kind of represent the history of the game,” Meier told Ars. “My role is just to be supportive. Designers have huge egos, and they’re easily bruised. Making a game can be a painful process. Part of my role is to be encouraging—’that idea didn’t work, try something else.'”
The new PS5 packaging, as seen on the PlayStation Direct online store, is missing the “8K” label in the corner.
The original PS5 packaging with the 8K label, as still seen on the GameStop website.
When we first received our PlayStation 5 review unit from Sony in 2020, we reacted with some bemusement to the “8K” logo on the box and its implied promise of full 7630×4320 resolution output. We then promptly forgot all about it since native 8K content and 8K compatible TVs have remained a relative curiosity thus far in the PS5’s lifespan.
But on Wednesday, Digital Foundry’s John Linneman discovered that Sony has quietly removed that longstanding 8K label from the PS5 box. The ultra-high-resolution promise no longer appears on the packaging shown on Sony’s official PlayStation Direct store, a change that appears to have happened between late January and mid-February, according to Internet Archive captures of the store page (the old “8K” box can still be seen at other online retailers, though).
A promise deferred
This packaging change has been a long time coming since the PS5 hasn’t technically been living up to its 8K promise for years now. While Sony’s Mark Cerny mentioned the then-upcoming hardware’s 8K support in a 2019 interview, the system eventually launched with a pretty big “coming soon” caveat for that feature. “PS5 is compatible with 8K displays at launch, and after a future system software update will be able to output resolutions up to 8K when content is available, with supported software,” the company said in an FAQ surrounding the console’s 2020 launch.
Well over three years later, that 8K-enabling software update has yet to appear, meaning the console’s technical ability to push 8K graphics is still a practical impossibility for users. Until Sony’s long-promised software patch hits, even PS5 games that render frames internally at a full 8K resolution are still pushing out a downscaled 4K framebuffer through that HDMI 2.1 cable.
Enlarge/ A slide from TV manufacturer TCL guesses at some details for the next micro-generation of high-end game consoles.
At this point, though, there’s some reason to expect that the promised patch may never come to the standard PS5. At the moment, the ever-churning rumor mill is expecting an impending mid-generation PS5 Pro upgrade that could offer true, native 8K resolution support right out of the box. If that comes to pass, removing the outdated “8K” promise from the original PS5 packaging could be a subtle way to highlight the additional power of the upcoming “Pro” upgrade.
Enlarge/ A slight majority of participants in a double-blind study saw no discernible difference between a 4K and 8K image video clips.
So will console gamers be missing out if they don’t upgrade to an 8K-compatible display? Probably not, as studies show extremely diminishing returns in the perceived quality jump from 4K to 8K visual content for most users and living room setups. Unless you are sitting extremely close to an extremely large display, it’s pretty unlikely you’ll even be able to tell the difference.
Members of the Legendary Computer Bugs Tribunal, honored guests, if I may have your attention? I would, humbly, submit a new contender for your esteemed judgment. You may or may not find it novel, you may even deign to call it a “bug,” but I assure you, you will find it entertaining.
Consider NetHack. It is one of the all-time roguelike games, and I mean that in the more strict sense of that term. The content is procedurally generated, deaths are permanent, and the only thing you keep from game to game is your skill and knowledge. I do understand that the only thing two roguelike fans can agree on is how wrong the third roguelike fan is in their definition of roguelike, but, please, let us move on.
NetHack is great for machine learning…
Being a difficult game full of consequential choices and random challenges, as well as a “single-agent” game that can be generated and played at lightning speed on modern computers, NetHack is great for those working in machine learning—or imitation learning, actually, as detailed in Jens Tuyls’ paper on how compute scaling affects single-agent game learning. Using Tuyls’ model of expert NetHack behavior, Bartłomiej Cupiał and Maciej Wołczyk trained a neural network to play and improve itself using reinforcement learning.
By mid-May of this year, the two had their model consistently scoring 5,000 points by their own metrics. Then, on one run, the model suddenly got worse, on the order of 40 percent. It scored 3,000 points. Machine learning generally, gradually, goes in one direction with these types of problems. It didn’t make sense.
Cupiał and Wołczyk tried quite a few things: reverting their code, restoring their entire software stack from a Singularity backup, and rolling back their CUDA libraries. The result? 3,000 points. They rebuild everything from scratch, and it’s still 3,000 points.
detailed in Cupiał’s X (formerly Twitter) thread, this was several hours of confused trial and error by him and Wołczyk. “I am starting to feel like a madman. I can’t even watch a TV show constantly thinking about the bug,” Cupiał wrote. In desperation, he asks model author Tuyls if he knows what could be wrong. He wakes up in Kraków to an answer:
“Oh yes, it’s probably a full moon today.”
In NetHack, the game in which the DevTeam has thought of everything, if the game detects from your system clock that it should be a full moon, it will generate a message: “You are lucky! Full moon tonight.” A full moon imparts a few player benefits: a single point added to Luck, and werecreatures mostly kept to their animal forms.
It’s an easier game, all things considered, so why would the learning agent’s score be lower? It simply doesn’t have data about full moon variables in its training data, so a branching series of decisions likely leads to lesser outcomes, or just confusion. It was indeed a full moon in Kraków when the 3,000-ish scores started showing up. What a terrible night to have a learning model.
Of course, “score” is not a real metric for success in NetHack, as Cupiał himself noted. Ask a model to get the best score, and it will farm the heck out of low-level monsters because it never gets bored. “Finding items required for [ascension] or even [just] doing a quest is too much for pure RL agent,” Cupiał wrote. Another neural network, AutoAscend, does a better job of progressing through the game, but “even it can only solve sokoban and reach mines end,” Cupiał notes.
Is it a bug?
I submit to you that, although NetHack responded to the full moon in its intended way, this quirky, very hard-to-fathom stop on a machine-learning journey was indeed a bug and a worthy one in the pantheon. It’s not a Harvard moth, nor a 500-mile email, but what is?
Because the team used Singularity to back up and restore their stack, they inadvertently carried forward the machine time and resulting bug each time they tried to solve it. The machine’s resulting behavior was so bizarre, and seemingly based on unseen forces, that it drove a coder into fits. And the story has a beginning, a climactic middle, and a denouement that teaches us something, however obscure.
The NetHack Lunar Learning Bug is, I submit, quite worth memorializing. Thank you for your time.
Enlarge/ How well do you know your friends and family? Can you smack a 2010-era controller in their hands to win intangible points?
Die Gut Fabrik LLC
If there is any reason to head into your garage or attic and dig out that PlayStation Move controller, it’s Johann Sebastian Joust. Actually, there’s a second good reason: that game, and three others with the same spirit, are all free now on Steam for PlayStation, Windows, Mac, and Linux.
The reason and timing are unfortunate, as Die Gute Fabrik, the Danish developer collective behind Sportsfriends, can no longer support or update the 10-year-old game. But the group is doing the right thing, making the game free on all platforms, including Steam, transferring ownership of the game to Bennett Foddy (Getting Over It), and working to open-source a version of the JS Joust game for Linux so that perhaps it can be fit to work with other motion-sensitive controllers or through some other scheme.
Sportsfriends launch trailer.
Sportsfriends, previously described at Ars as a “stellar pack of multiplayer-only gems,” are four games meant for “couch co-op,” i.e. playing in the same room as other folks holding controllers (or glowing Move sticks, in the case of JS Joust). Each one is a little masterwork of clever design and hard to encapsulate briefly, but if you don’t have time for the deeper dive, here goes:
Super Pole Riders, by Bennett Foddy, has you use the left PlayStation stick for your feet, and the right stick to angle and pivot a vaulting pole, then attempt to knock a ball through a hoop to score points or knock an opponent off their pole. (There’s an early web version.)
Baribariball is a one-on-one or two-on-two Smash Brothers-like experience, but with more old-school arcade dynamics and in-air movement.
Hokra, a kind of soccer game with Atari-esque visuals and deceptively simple controls.
JS Joust, in which you try to not get your Move controller jostled while goading or physically nudging other players’ controllers, with your ability to move dictated by Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.
Johann Sebastian Joust.
There are no solo versions of any of these games, and Joust does not work with Windows, because Windows does not support the Move controller. With any luck, this can be worked around. And while no controller may yet provide the kind of perfect combination of motion sensitivity and glowing colored orb that the Move controller does, opening Joust up to more hardware can only be beneficial. More people need to try to lightly assault their friends in the name of camaraderie.
Enlarge/ After nearly four years of the PS5, a lot of people are still using their old PS4s.
If you’re still getting use out of your aging PS4 after nearly four full years of PS5 availability, new data from Sony shows you are far from alone. The Japanese electronics giant says that both the PS4 and PS5 currently have about 49 million monthly active users, suggesting a significant number of PlayStation players have yet to spend $400 or more to upgrade to the newer console.
Despite the parity in active consoles, Sony also points out that the PS5 is responsible for significantly more gameplay hours than the PS4: 2.4 billion for the new system compared to 1.4 billion for its predecessor (it’s unclear what time period this comparison covers). Sony’s monthly user numbers also include any console “used to play games or [access] services on the PlayStation Network,” so an old PS4 that serves as a convenient Netflix box in the spare bedroom would still inflate the older system’s numbers here.
Still, it’s pretty impressive that nearly 50 million people are still regularly using a console first launched in 2013 (even considering 2016’s Pro upgrade). That could be in part because the PS4 is still seeing plenty of software support well after the PS5’s release; Sony’s PSN Store listings currently include 189 “just released” PS4-compatible games, including many “best-selling” titles that don’t require a PS5 at all. The fact that those PS4-compatible titles are also playable directly on the PS5 has probably helped convince some publishers to target the older console for their less graphics-intensive games.
Enlarge/ PS5 owners are spending less money on full games and a lot more money on “add-on content.”
The PS4’s longevity doesn’t seem to have had a significant negative impact on the PS5’s bottom line, either. Sony’s gaming division has already earned $10 billion in profit off of $106 billion in sales across the nearly four years of the PS5 generation, compared to $9 billion in profit off $107 billion in sales across seven years of the PS4.
PS5 owners have spent an average of $731 each across games, services, peripherals, and add-on content. That’s up significantly from $580 in nominal spending from the average PS4 owner at the same point in that console’s life cycle, though what sounds like a big increase is actually pretty flat when you take inflation into account.
That per-console gaming spending is now concentrated less on “full game” purchases—which are down 12 percent between the PS4 to PS5 generation—and much more on so-called add-on content—which is up 176 percent between generations. We’re guessing that big-spending, loot-box-chasing “whales” have something to do with that increase.
Enlarge/ Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, seen here not questioning the accuracy of a PR interview.
Sony has taken down an interview with Naughty Dog Studio Head Neil Druckmann (Uncharted, The Last of Us) that the company now says contains “several significant errors and inaccuracies that don’t represent his perspective and values.” The surprising move comes after Druckmann took the extreme measure of publicly questioning a portion of the PR interview by posting a lengthy transcript that conflicted with the heavily edited version Sony posted online.
The odd media saga began last Thursday, when Sony published the interview (archive here) under the heading “The Evolution of Storytelling Across Mediums.” The piece was part of the Creative Entertainment Vision section of Sony’s corporate site, a PR-driven concept exploring how Sony will “seamlessly connect multi-layered worlds where physical and virtual realities overlap to deliver limitless Kanto—through creativity and technology—working with creators.” Whatever that means.
Druckmann’s short interview started attractingattention almost immediately, primarily due to Druckmann’s apparent promotion of using AI tools in game development. Such tools “will allow us to create nuanced dialogues and characters, expanding creative possibilities,” Druckmann is quoted as saying. “AI is really going to revolutionize how content is being created, although it does bring up some ethical issues we need to address.”
Not so fast…
By Friday, though, Druckmann ended a months-long drought of social media posting by noting that, in at least one case, the words posted by Sony were “not quite what I said. In editing my rambling answers in my recent interview with Sony, some of my words, context, and intent were unfortunately lost.”
As evidence, Druckmann posted this “rambling” 457-word response to a question about a “personal vision or dream project” he hoped to create:
Well, I’ve been very lucky, in that I’ve already had that. I got the chance to make several of my dream projects. I am working on a new one right now. And it’s maybe the most excited I’ve been for a project yet. I can’t talk about it or our bosses will get very mad at me.
And I guess in general, there is something happening now that I think is very cool. Which is there’s a new appreciation for gaming that I’ve never seen before. Like when I was growing up, gaming was more of a kid’s thing. Now it’s clearly for everyone. But it’s like, if you’re a gamer, you know about the potential of games, and non-gamers, they don’t really know what they’re missing out on.
But my hope was, when we made The Last of Us as a TV show that we could change that. And why I became so involved with it. I wanted so badly for it to be good, because I wanted this to happen, which is like someone who will watch the show and really like it. And fall in love with those characters the way that we have fallen in love with those characters and their story. And then realize at the end, “Wait, that’s based on a video game?” and then go and check out the game and just see the wealth of narratives and everything that’s happening in games.
So now I feel like there’s kind of a spotlight on gaming. And you know, Fallout just came out. And that’s a big success for Amazon. And I find that really exciting. Not because games need to be movies, or they need to be TV shows, but I think it just kind of opens the eyes of a bunch of people that just weren’t aware of the kind of experiences that exist in games. I think right now we’ve hit a tipping point where it’s about to take off where people realize, “Oh my God, there’s all these incredible moving experiences in games!”
So, I’m not only excited for this game that we’re making—and it’s, it’s something really fresh for us—but I’m also excited to see how the world reacts to it. Because of The Last of Us, and the success of the show, people even outside of gaming are looking at us to see what it is that we put out next. I’m very excited to see what the reaction for this thing will be—and l’ve already said too much about it. I’ll stop there. So, you’re asking me for my dream projects. I’ve been very lucky to have worked on my favorite games with incredible collaborators and I’m very thankful for them.
For reference, here is the 127-word summary of that answer posted by Sony:
I’ve been lucky to work on several dream projects and am currently excited about a new one, which is perhaps the most thrilling yet. There’s a growing appreciation for gaming that transcends all age groups, unlike when I was growing up. This shift is highlighted by our venture into television with The Last of Us, which I hoped would bridge the gap between gamers and non-gamers. The show’s success has spotlighted gaming, illustrating the rich, immersive experiences it offers. This visibility excites me not only for our current project but for the broader potential of gaming to captivate a global audience. I’m eager to see how this new game resonates, especially following the success of The Last of Us, as it could redefine mainstream perceptions of gaming.
While the gist of Druckmann’s original answer is more or less preserved, the condensed version loses a lot of the specific details and flavor Druckmann highlighted in his answer. The edited version also inserts some key phrases and ideas that Druckmann didn’t use at all, such as his supposed hope that his new project “could redefine mainstream perceptions of gaming.”
Though we don’t know how much Druckmann’s other answers were clipped or amended in the editing process, Druckmann’s public annoyance with the edits was apparently enough to get Sony’s attention. Sometime after Tuesday night, the PlayStation-maker replaced the public interview with the following message:
In re-reviewing our recent interview with Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, we have found several significant errors and inaccuracies that don’t represent his perspective and values (including topics such as animation, writing, technology, AI, and future projects). We apologize to Neil for misrepresenting his words and for any negative impact this interview might have caused him and his team. In coordination with Naughty Dog and SIE, we have removed the interview.
Journalists often edit interview responses for concision and clarity, but this interview skips the usual step of noting the existence of those kinds of edits near the top of the piece. And while press releases often contain executive quotes that have been carefully crafted in consultation with PR professionals, there was no indication in this article that the responses here were anything other than Druckmann’s own thoughts and words.
Game publishers and console makers have a long history of sharing developer interviews directly with the public rather than having those developers’ views filtered through the press. This is the first instance we can remember where the promotional process itself has become a source of controversy.
Enlarge / But… but I was just about to check out Tacoma.
Getty Images
With Valve’s Steam gaming platform approaching the US drinking age this year, more and more aging PC gamers may be considering what will happen to their vast digital game libraries after they die. Unfortunately, legally, your collection of hundreds of backlogged games will likely pass into the ether along with you someday.
The issue of digital game inheritability gained renewed attention this week as a ResetEra poster quoted a Steam support response asking about transferring Steam account ownership via a last will and testament. “Unfortunately, Steam accounts and games are non-transferable” the response reads. “Steam Support can’t provide someone else with access to the account or merge its contents with another account. I regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will.”
This isn’t the first time someone has asked this basic estate planning question, of course. Last year, a Steam forum user quoted a similar response from Steam support as saying, “Your account is yours and yours alone. Now you can share it with family members, but you cannot give it away.”
Potential loopholes
As a practical matter, Steam would have little way of knowing if you wrote down your Steam username and password and left instructions for your estate to give that information to your descendants. When it comes to legal ownership of that account, though, the Steam Subscriber Agreement seems relatively clear.
“You may not reveal, share, or otherwise allow others to use your password or Account except as otherwise specifically authorized by Valve,” the agreement reads, in part. “You may… not sell or charge others for the right to use your Account, or otherwise transfer your Account, nor may you sell, charge others for the right to use, or transfer any Subscriptions other than if and as expressly permitted by this Agreement… or as otherwise specifically permitted by Valve.”
Eagle-eyed readers might notice a potential loophole, though, in the clauses regarding account transfers that are “specifically permitted by Valve.” Steam forum users have suggested in the past that Valve “wouldn’t block this change of ownership” via a will if a user or their estate specifically requests it (Valve has not responded to a request for comment).
Donating all those 3DS and Wii U games to someone else might be difficult for Jirard “The Completionist” Khalil.
There also might be a partial, physical workaround for Steam users who bequeath an actual computer with downloaded titles installed. In a 2013 Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal article, author Claudine Wong writes that “digital content is transferable to a deceased user’s survivors if legal copies of that content are located on physical devices, such as iPods or Kindle e-readers.” But if that descendant wanted to download those games to a different device or reinstall them in the case of a hard drive failure, they’d legally be out of luck.
Beyond personal estate planning, the inability to transfer digital game licenses has some implications for video game preservation work as well. Last year, Jirard “The Completionist” Khalil spent nearly $20,000 to purchase and download every digital 3DS and Wii U game while they were still available. And while Khalil said he intends to donate the physical machines (and their downloads) to the Video Game History Foundation, subscriber agreements mean the charity may have trouble taking legal ownership of those digital games and accounts.
“There is no reasonable, legal path for the preservation of digital-born video games,” VGHF’s then co-director Kelsey Lewin told Ars last year. “Limiting library access only to physical games might have worked 20 years ago, but we no longer live in a world where all games are sold on physical media, and we haven’t for a long time.”
Enlarge/ VideoCardz’ leaked image of a ROG Ally X, seemingly having gone through the JPG blender a couple times.
Asus’ ROG Ally was the first major-brand attempt to compete with Valve’s Steam Deck. It was beefy and interesting, but it had three major flaws: It ran Windows on a little touchscreen, had unremarkable ergonomics, and its battery life was painful.
The Asus ROG (Republic of Gamers) Ally X, which has been announced and is due out June 2, seems to have had its specs leaked, and they indicate a fix for at least the battery life. Gaming site VideoCardz, starting its leak reveal with “No more rumors,” cites the ROG Ally X as having the same Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU as the prior ROG Ally, as well as the same 7-inch 1080p VRR screen with a 120 Hz refresh rate.
VideoCardz’ leaked image, seemingly from Asus marketing materials, with the ROG Ally X’s specifications.
The battery and memory have changed substantially, though. An 80-watt-hour battery, up from 40, somehow adds just 70 grams of weight and about 5 mm of thickness to the sequel device. By increasing the RAM from 16GB to 24GB and making it LPDDR5, the ROG Ally X may be able to lend more of it to the GPU, upping performance somewhat without demanding a new chip or architecture. There is also a second USB-C port, with USB4 speeds, that should help quite a bit with docking, charging while playing with accessories, and, I would guess, Linux hackery.
How does it feel? Only Sean Hollister at The Verge knows, outside of ASUS employees. The sequel has lost the weirdly sharp angles on the back, and more of your hand fits around the back, without the rear buttons being accidentally triggered so easily. The triggers and buttons all seem to have received some feedback-based upgrades to durability and feel.
Expanding the viability of handheld PC gaming means more developers targeting these systems, in specs or just accessibility. More demand for new types of handhelds makes the whole field more interesting and competitive. Microsoft, which is keenly aware of this developing market and is contemplating a more cloud-based and less Xbox-centered gaming future, can only make Windows better on handhelds because the bar is pretty low right now.
All of that gives me more games to play on the couch while the rice is cooking, whether or not the device I’m holding has more and faster RAM and better USB-C ports than my gaming PC.
Enlarge / In the recent past, you’d have to rely on your kid sibling to deliver Minecraft commentary like “Oh no, it’s a zombie. Run!”
Longtime gamers (and/or Game Grumps fans) likely know that even single-player games can be a lot more fun with a friend hanging out nearby to offer advice, shoot the breeze, or just offer earnest reactions to whatever’s happening on screen. Now, Microsoft is promising that its GhatGPT-4o-powered Copilot system will soon offer an imitation of that pro-social experience even for Minecraft players who don’t have any human friends available to watch them play.
In a pair of social media posts Monday, Microsoft highlighted how “real-time conversations with your AI companion copilot” can enhance an otherwise solitary Minecraft experience. In the first demo, the disembodied copilot voice tells the player how to craft a sword, walking him through the process of gathering some wood or stone to go with the sticks sitting in his inventory. In another, the AI identifies a zombie in front of the player and gives the (seemingly obvious) advice to run away from the threat and “make sure it can’t reach you” by digging underground or building a tower of blocks.
Real time conversations with your AI companion Copilot, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o. pic.twitter.com/Ug7EWv2sah
These kinds of in-game pointers aren’t the most revolutionary use of conversational AI—even a basic in-game tutorial/reference system or online walkthrough could deliver the same basic information, after all. Still, the demonstration stands out for just how that information is delivered to the player through a natural language conversation that doesn’t require pausing the gameplay even briefly.
The key moment highlighting this difference is near the end of one of the video demos, when the Copilot AI offers a bit of encouragement to the player: “Whew, that was a close one. Great job finding shelter!” That’s the point when the system transitions from a fancy voice-controlled strategy guide to an ersatz version of the kind of spectator that might be sitting on your couch or watching your Twitch stream. It creates the real possibility of developing a parasocial relationship with the Copilot guide that is not really a risk when consulting a text file on GameFAQs, for instance (though I think the Copilot reactions will have to get a bit less inane to really feel like a valued partner-in-gaming).
Just hanging out with my AI buddy
It’s unclear from the video clips whether Copilot is reading data directly from the Minecraft instance or simply reacting to the same information the player is seeing. But the social media posts came the same day as Microsoft’s announcement of “Recall,” a coming feature that “take[s] images of your active screen every few seconds” to provide a persistent “memory” of everything you do on the computer. That feature will be exclusive to Copilot+ PCs, which use an integrated Neural Processing Unit for on-device processing of many common generative AI tasks.
The casual cursing is what really makes an AI gaming buddy feel real.
Speaking of Her, we can’t help but think of one particular scene in that movie where Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore asks for gaming advice both from the titular AI and a hilariously potty-mouthed NPC. Maybe Microsoft can add a casual cursing module to its Copilot gaming companion to really capture the feeling of hanging out with a dorm room buddy over a late-night gaming session.
Enlarge/ Battles get a wee bit involved as you go on in Songs of Conquest.
Coffee Stain Publishing
There are games for which I have great admiration, pleasant memories, and an entirely dreadful set of skills and outcomes. Heroes of Might & Magic III (or HoMM 3) has long been one of those games.
I have played it on just about every PC I’ve owned, ever since it chipped away at my college GPA. I love being tasked with managing not only heroes, armies, resources, villages, and battlefield positioning but also time itself. If you run around the map clicking to discover every single power-up and resource pile, using up turn after turn, you will almost certainly let your enemy grow strong enough to conquer you. But I do this, without fail. I get halfway into a campaign and the (horse cart) wheels fall off, so I set the game aside until the click-to-move-the-horsey impulse comes back.
With the release of Songs of Conquest in 1.0 form on PC today (Steam, GOG, Epic), I feel freed from this loop of recurrent humbling. This title from Lavapotion and Coffee Stain Publishing very much hits the same pleasure points of discovery and choice as HoMM 3. But Songs of Conquest has much easier onboarding, modern resolutions, interfaces that aren’t too taxing (to the point of being Verified on Steam Deck), and granular difficulty customization. More importantly for most, it has its own stories and ideas. If you love fiddling with stuff turn by turn, it’s hard to imagine you won’t find something in Songs of Conquest to hook you.
Songs of Conquest launch trailer.
Songs of Conquest has you move your horse-riding Casters (the Heroes of its inspiration) and their armies around a world map, using each limited movement point to liberate a new resource, pick up some treasure, get a temporary power-up, or engage in battle. When it’s battle time, you switch to a hexagonal grid, where your troops trade blows and you choose spells so your Caster can help. Win the battle (either manually or with an automatic “quick” decision), unlock a new area, harvest new resources, recruit more troops, and repeat until the map is clear or some other condition is met. You’ll get multiple Casters, new kinds of troops, and tons of new spells and artifacts as you progress, and you’ll follow a very swords-and-dragons story.
Moving click by click through a dark world, choosing paths, stopping by fountains for temporary boosts—the overworld is heavy with Heroes of Might & Magic III memories.
Coffee Stain Publishing
But not everything is the same. Building your central hub is more visually appealing, and likely more complex as you go on.
Coffee Stain Publishing
Your caster can do a lot to affect battle outcomes. You’ll have complete control over which spells they can wield, branching off into different schools of magic.
Coffee Stain Publishing
A map editor lets you torture your friends and random downloaders with constant which-way-to-go decisions.
Coffee Stain Publishing
The game’s campaigns have short cinematics and evocative stills.
Coffee Stain Publishing
The art is a mixture of intentionally granular (and pleasant) pixel art, throwback scroll-and-stone interface elements, and cutscenes and dramatic stills with a deliberate hand-painted look to them. Even if each element looks nice, I’m glad the game mixes it up, and you get a break from each. The properly medieval music seems well done, although it’s at a disadvantage, as my brain is making 45 decisions per minute and tends to block out brass, strings, and choirs.
There are four campaigns in the game, each with its own lands, enemy casters and units, spells, and lots of other new things to uncover and throw into your mental strategy RAM. It’s a good variety, especially combined with the difficulty and other campaign options you can set. Coming to this game from HoMM 3 memories, I’ve found the variety of map items, town/castle building, and Caster types new and engaging. My biggest quibble with the game is that managing the spells and upgrades of the Casters is too rich a field for me, somehow just one rich system over the line. Deciding which type of magic a Caster should specialize in and remembering the huge variety of spells available to put into their quickbar overwhelmed me.
As I noted up top, however, I’m not actually good at these games, I just enjoy the spell they put on me. Songs of Conquest is a rich new chapter for Heroes of Might & Magic fans, but it’s also a good jumping-in point if you’ve never been tempted before by the series with the unwieldy title and harsh difficulty ramp. Unlike your Casters, you can roam about its thousand little things at whatever pace you like.
Apple’s initial pitch for the tvOS and the Apple TV as it currently exists was centered around apps. No longer a mere streaming box, the Apple TV would also be a destination for general-purpose software and games, piggybacking off of the iPhone’s vibrant app and game library.
That never really panned out, and the Apple TV is still mostly a box for streaming TV shows and movies. But the same App Store rule change that recently allowed Delta, PPSSPP, and other retro console emulators onto the iPhone and iPad could also make the Apple TV appeal to people who want a small, efficient, no-fuss console emulator for their TVs.
So far, few of the emulators that have made it to the iPhone have been ported to the Apple TV. But earlier this week, the streaming box got an official port of RetroArch, the sprawling collection of emulators that runs on everything from the PlayStation Portable to the Raspberry Pi. RetroArch could be sideloaded onto iOS and tvOS before this, but only using awkward workarounds that took a lot more work and know-how than downloading an app from the App Store.
Downloading and using RetroArch on the Apple TV is a lot like using it on any other platform it supports, for better or worse. ROM files can be uploaded using a browser connected to the Apple TV’s IP address or hostname, which will pop up the first time you launch the RetroArch app. From there, you’re only really limited by the list of emulators that the Apple TV version of the app supports.
The main benefit of using the Apple TV hardware for emulation is that even older models have substantially better CPU and GPU performance than any Raspberry Pi; the first-gen Apple TV 4K and its Apple A10X chip date back to 2017 and still do better than a Pi 5 released in 2023. Even these older models should be more than fast enough to support advanced video filters, like Run Ahead, to reduce wireless controller latency and higher-than-native-resolution rendering to make 3D games look a bit more modern.
Beyond the hardware, tvOS is also a surprisingly capable gaming platform. Apple has done a good job adding and maintaining support for new Bluetooth gamepads in recent releases, and even Nintendo’s official Switch Online controllers for the NES, SNES, and N64 are all officially supported as of late 2022. Apple may have added this gamepad support primarily to help support its Apple Arcade service, but all of those gamepads work equally well with RetroArch.
At the risk of stating the obvious, another upside of using the Apple TV for retro gaming is that you can also still use it as a modern 4K video streaming box when you’re finished playing your games. It has well-supported apps from just about every streaming provider, and it supports all the DRM that these providers insist on when you’re trying to stream high-quality 4K video with modern codecs. Most Pi gaming distributions offer the Kodi streaming software, but it’s frankly outside the scope of this article to talk about the long list of caveats and add-ons you’d need to use to attempt using the same streaming services the Apple TV can access.
Obviously, there are trade-offs. Pis have been running retro games for a decade, and the Apple TV is just starting to be able to do it now. Even with the loosened App Store restrictions, Apple still has other emulation limitations relative to a Raspberry Pi or a PC.
The biggest one is that emulators on Apple’s platforms can’t use just-in-time (JIT) code compilation, needed for 3D console emulators like Dolphin. These restrictions make the Apple TV a less-than-ideal option for emulating newer consoles—the Nintendo 64, Nintendo DS, Sony PlayStation, PlayStation Portable, and Sega Saturn are the newest consoles RetroArch supports on the Apple TV, cutting out newer things like the GameCube and Wii, Dreamcast, and PlayStation 2 that are all well within the capabilities of Apple’s chips. Apple also insists nebulously that emulators must be for “retro” consoles rather than modern ones, which could limit the types of emulators that are available.
With respect to RetroArch specifically, there are other limitations. Though RetroArch describes itself as a front-end for emulators, its user interface is tricky to navigate, and cluttered with tons of overlapping settings that make it easy to break things if you don’t know what you’re doing. Most Raspberry Pi gaming distros use RetroArch, but with a front-end-for-a-front-end like EmulationStation installed to make RetroArch a bit more accessible and easy to learn. A developer could release an app that included RetroArch plus a separate front-end, but Apple’s sandboxing restrictions would likely prevent anyone from releasing an app that just served as a more user-friendly front-end for the RetroArch app.
Regardless, it’s still pretty cool to be able to play retro games on an Apple TV’s more advanced hardware. As more emulators make their way to the App Store, the Apple TV’s less-fussy software and the power of its hardware could make it a compelling alternative to a more effort-intensive Raspberry Pi setup.
Enlarge/ Valve has its own canon of games full of artifacts and concepts worth emulating, as seen in a 2018 tour of its offices.
Sam Machkovech
“Basically, fast-paced interesting ADHD gameplay. Combination of Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, Overwatch, Valorant, Smite, Orcs Must Die.”
That’s how notable Valve leaker “Gabe Follower” describesDeadlock, a Valve game that is seemingly in playtesting at the moment, for which a few screenshots have leaked out.
The game has been known as “Neon Prime” and “Citadel” at prior points. It’s a “Competitive third-person hero-based shooter,” with six-on-six battles across a map with four “lanes.” That allows for some of the “Tower defense mechanics” mentioned by Gabe Follower, along with “fast travel using floating rails, similar to Bioshock Infinite.” The maps reference a “modern steampunk European city (little bit like Half-Life),” after “bad feedback” about a sci-fi theme pushed the development team toward fantasy.
Since testers started sharing Deadlock screenshots all over the place, here’s ones I can verify, featuring one of the heroes called Grey Talon. pic.twitter.com/KdZSRxObSz
Valve doesn’t release games often, and the games it does release are often in development for long periods. Deadlock purportedly started development in 2018, two years before Half-Life: Alyx existed. That the game has now seemingly reached a closed (though not closed enough) “alpha” playtesting phase, with players in the “hundreds,” could suggest release within a reasonable time. Longtime Valve watcher (and modder, and code examiner) Tyler McVicker suggests in a related video that Deadlock has hundreds of people playing in this closed test, and the release is “about to happen.”
McVicker adds to the descriptor pile-on by noting that it’s “team-based,” “hero-based,” “class-based,” and “personality-driven.” It’s an attempt, he says, to “bring together all of their communities under one umbrella.”
Tyler McVicker’s discussion of the leaked Deadlock content, featuring … BioShock Infinite footage.
Many of Valve’s games do something notable to push gaming technology and culture forward. Half-Life brought advanced scripting, physics, and atmosphere to the “Doom clones” field and forever changed it. Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2 lead the way in team multiplayer dynamics. Dota 2 solidified and popularized MOBAs, and Half-Life: Alyx gave VR on PC its killer app. Yes, there are Artifact moments, but they’re more exception than rule.
Following any of those games seems like a tall order, but Valve’s track record speaks for itself. I think players like me, who never took to Valorant or Overwatch or the like, should reserve judgment until the game can be seen in its whole. I have to imagine that there’s more to Deadlock than a pile of very familiar elements.
