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I knew I'd be spending a good chunk of my time in Two Point Museum decorating, but nothing could have prepared me for how invested I'd become in carefully curating every floor tile, wall panel, and set dressing item to make the exhibitions I plucked from faraway lands really pop. Sure, it's a management sim first and foremost, but after several hours perfecting each poster, vending machine, and info board, I realised just how good a job the game was doing at scratching the ***** in my rabid Sims build/buy sicko brain... Read more.View the full article

On the 2nd floor of Capcom’s R&D1 building in Osaka, Japan, we’re offered only the slightest of glimpses at the secrets inside. Beyond a tour of the building’s motion capture studio (one of three in the city), and a nearby audio department, our time here is confined almost entirely to a large, typical meeting room, where we spent several hours playing Monster Hunter Wilds. From my experience visiting various ********* companies over the years, the aesthetics of corporate offices are usually unremarkable, and bar some kind of Street Fighter-themed cafeteria hidden beyond one of the many locked doors, Capcom appears to be no exception. However, one thing stood out: the various employee signage around the office, instructing staff not to slam doors, put their trash in the incorrect waste bin, or even fall asleep on the *******, is displayed in both ********* and English. In public, most ********* street signage has been in English for over a decade, but within the halls of the Street Fighter and Resident Evil creator, the addition still feels somewhat significant. Read More... View the full article

From Software has said it’s not currently considering making an Elden Ring sequel. Elden Ring director and From Software president Hidetaka Miyazaki discussed the studio’s future projects during an appearance at the PlayStation Partner Awards 2024, where the game’s Shadow of the Erdtree expansion received the Grand Award. “We’re not really considering developments such as an Elden Ring 2,” Miyazaki said, as reported by IGN Japan and translated by Automaton. Read More... View the full article

Sprinting, sliding, and throwing grenades all sound way too familiar in almost any hero game. In SUPERVIVE, Ghost is a soldier-type hunter who uses an ******** rifle and can deal great damage if you play him right. Here’s everything you need to know about Ghost in SUPERVIVE, including his abilities, best items, and teams. View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Bungie confirms a recently discovered issue with Tomb of Elders related tonics in Destiny 2, providing increased drop rates for the wrong weapons. Act 2 of Episode Revenant is in full swing, giving Destiny 2 players the next piece of the narrative against Fikrul, though it also brought with it other new content, activities, and gear to loot. View the full article

Intel Arc GPUs have appeared in the Steam Hardware Survey for the first time, nearly three years after Intel first announced the lineup. This latest November survey points to a modest increase in Intel Arc adoption, but it appears to be limited to gaming laptops with integrated Intel Arc GPUs, rather than due to a wider success on desktop gaming PCs. It's safe to say that Intel Arc GPUs haven't quite been accepted as the best graphics cards on laptops or gaming PCs. However, as we found in our Intel Arc A770 review, Intel can now build a competitive lower mid-range GPU, even if it's had a struggle with compatibility issues. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: This toaster-shaped gaming PC fits an Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU, doesn't make toast New Intel Arc Battlemage gaming GPU range coming in just a few days, says report The Intel Arc B580 price just leaked, and this new gaming GPU could worry Nvidia View the full article

Microsoft has announced the first wave of the Xbox Game Pass lineup for December 2024, which consists of eight titles. Most of them are new additions to the service, while a few are existing offerings that are only expanding to the Standard tier of Xbox Game Pass. View the full article

The Elden Ring series will live on, but Elden Ring 2? That's slightly more in doubt. So says Hidetaka Miyazaki, the original Elden Lord, in a new interview about From Software's current projects, which apparently span a variety of genres. Read more View the full article

Arcen Games creators of AI War, AI War 2, The Last Federation and other games have announced their new sci-fi 4X RPG Heart of the Machine will launch January 31st, 2025. There's also a new demo available that you can try right now. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

The end of the year is finally upon us. It’s hard to believe we’re about to be halfway through this decade. Time truly has flown by. Hopefully these games don’t simply fly past you as we try to close out 2024 with a bang. Here’s our full list of Niche Games coming in December: ANTONBLAST […] Source View the full article

Elden Ring director and FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki has said the developer is not currently considering making Elden Ring 2 but won't shut down the possibility in the future. Miyazaki said at the PlayStation Partner Awards 2024 Japan Asia, attended by IGN Japan and translated by Automaton, that FromSoftware has several projects in the works but none are continuations of Elden Ring, its most successful game to date. "We’re not really considering developments such as an Elden Ring 2," Miyazaki said, though made clear FromSoftware is open to returning to the Elden Ring franchise "in some form in the future." The projects in development are works in progress at the moment but diverse in genre, with some directed by Miyazaki himself, he said. FromSoftware has a varied history in game development but has become known for defining the Souls genre over the last 15 years. These games have varied in theme somewhat though are all role-playing games with a similar format of, at their most simple, progressing through an area before taking on a challenging boss. The giant mech battling Armored Core series is also developed by FromSoftware though, and outliers to the traditional dark fantasy themes of its Souls games include the gothic horror entry Bloodborne and ********* mythology-set Sekiro: Shadows **** Twice. None of the incoming projects have been revealed by FromSoftware as of yet, though one of them is almost certainly the next signature Souls game akin to Elden Ring. Many fans are hoping for a return to the Dark Souls franchise, which has been dormant for close to a decade, while others are desperate for a Bloodborne sequel (and think an announcement is imminent). Elden Ring would have been the most obvious choice for a continuation, not just because its FromSoftware's best received game so far but, perhaps more significantly, it sold a staggering 25 million units. In our 10/10 review, IGN said: "Elden Ring is a massive iteration on what FromSoftware began with the Souls series, bringing its relentlessly challenging combat to an incredible open world that gives us the freedom to choose our own path." Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day. View the full article

A new ***** for Genshin Impact 5.5 has revealed an NPC’s title, which may be pointing toward a leaked Version 5.3 character that may have a much larger role in the story than originally believed. Version 5.5 is still many months away as the action RPG by HoYoverse is still in the midst of Version 5.2. Despite this, some leaks about future patches are starting to arise, even if the majority of them revolve around Version 5.3, the next update. So far, it’s been leaked that players will get access to four new characters in Genshin Impact 5.3. View the full article

In recent years, several mangas have been banned in school libraries in ************* districts after receiving complaints from Moms For Liberty. ************** Classroom was removed from South Carolina school districts earlier this month due to its violent themes, after having previously been banned in Wisconsin and Florida, while ****** Butler and Soul Eater were banned […] Source View the full article

Sounds like we're in for a big serving of eating your best friends with Yellowjackets season 3, as its co-creator has warned viewers to "buckle up". Read more View the full article

A 49-inch, 240Hz Samsung monitor could be in your future, thanks to this gaming monitor deal on Amazon. This curved Samsung Odyssey G95C display now has a cool 43% discount, making it the perfect Christmas present for yourself (or a loved one) at just $739. There have been some incredible Samsung monitors released in recent years, as our Samsung Odyssey G95SC review shows. While this G95C model isn't quite the best curved gaming monitor that the G95SC is, it can still hold its own, thanks to some seriously impressive specs. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Save 47% on this 2TB Steam Deck gaming SSD deal from Crucial this Cyber Monday This Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 gaming GPU repair video is incredibly satisfying Logitech's top wireless gaming mouse is half price this Cyber Monday View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

PUBG has been out for almost seven years already and in that time plenty has changed, from great new maps and weapons to the introduction of seasonal battle passes. For a game to survive this long though, it's not all about cramming in new toys. Sometimes you have to look back at the existing content and bring it up to standard, and that's exactly what PUBG update 33.1 has done. Bringing destructible environments to the jungle, it's time to relearn Sanhok all over again. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: PUBG system requirements Best PUBG settings for max fps Best PC games you can play on mobile View the full article

Two uncommon Magic: The Gathering cards have leapt up in price in the past few weeks, reaching surprisingly high values for cards so lacking in scarcity. In terms of percentage increase, the biggest jump has been for Pawpatch Formation, a green instant card which has gone up from $0.40 when Foundations came out to $3.50 - a jump of 775%. Meanwhile, Sheltered by Ghosts - already a pricey uncommon at $2.10 - has risen to an impressive $6.75. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: All MTG sets in order, as of November 2024 MTG Arena codes for December 2024 Rarest and most expensive MTG cards 2024 View the full article

We haven't got long, so I'll keep this briefing brief, soldier. Call of Duty's just dropped a cheeky teaser for a crossover with Squid Game, that TV show everyone and their mum was utterly obsessed with a few years ago, and you've got a mission you need to complete before it drops. Read more View the full article

Developer Infold Games has revealed the preload and global release times for Infinity Nikki, the open-world dress up role-playing game from former The Legend of Zelda director Kentaro Tominaga coming to PlayStation 5, PC via the Epic Games Store, iOS, and Android. The highly anticipated sequel, which logged more than 35 million pre-registrations in its lead up to launch, is now available to preload, meaning players can download it ahead of time to begin playing the moment becomes available on December 5, or even December 4 in some locations. Infold Games released a story trailer to celebrate this preload availability, which can be watched below, and also announced some bonuses players who pick up Infinity Nikki at launch can enjoy in the game. Infinity Nikki: Official Release Trailer - About Wishes Pre-download on the official website: ➤ [Hidden Content] This journey, designated "INFINITY", marks both a new beginning and a long-awaited reunion. We look forward to seeing all of you stylists in Miraland!… [Hidden Content] — Infinity Nikki (@InfinityNikkiEN) December 3, 2024 Infinity Nikki Global Release TimesLos Angeles - 6pm on December 4New York - 9pm on December 4Rio De Janeiro - 10pm on December 4London - 2am on December 5Amsterdam - 3am on December 5Cape Town - 4am on December 5Kuala Lumpur - 10am on December 5Tokyo - 11am on December 5Sydney - 12noon on December 5 "With over 35 million pre-registrations, and even more players signing up today, Infinity Nikki and the development team are incredibly excited to welcome players with open arms to the breathtaking world of Miraland," Infold Games said of the imminent release. Bonus items include a special stylist background, a camera pose, two 4-star outfits, and enough crystals to fuel up to 126 total pulls across the limited and permanent banners. These come alongside a handful of rewards made available for hitting so many pre-registrations, including 50,000 Blings, 300 Threads of Purity, 20 Resonite Crystals, and a 4-star outfit. IGN's preview of Infinity Nikki certainly had positive things to say. "We never knew dressing up could be so much fun," we said. "Our time with Infinity Nikki left us eager to try on the finished game when it eventually arrives." Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day. View the full article

Now that Windblown, the new roguelike from original ***** Cells developer Motion Twin, has been out for some time, the first feature patch of the game's Steam Early Access ******* is almost here. I've been thoroughly enjoying Motion Twin's isometric co-op spin on what it does best, but there's been one looming problem. The current Sudden ****** mechanic, which activates when a co-op ally *****, is far too brutal. With Windblown's first big patch of new features, though, that's going to change. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Windblown early access release date, trailers, and latest news ***** Cells dev's Windblown to get mechanic rework after community feedback The Windblown demo is here, and the ***** Cells dev's new roguelike is a blast View the full article

William ******, the man behind the 'This 'Effin GM' DnD YouTube channel, has shared the painful story of his brother's ****** by ********, to help explain the value of safety tools in tabletop roleplaying games. Via a thirteen minute video, ****** explains both the circumstances of his brother's ******, and how safety tools helped him participate in a dark horror TTRPG while still grieving. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: All DnD races and species explained This 97% off TTRPG bundle leaves DnD Beyond's Cyber Monday deals in the dust One of DnD's best books in years is half price for ****** Friday View the full article For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Warning: Spoilers for Fallout New Vegas lie ahead. Read more View the full article

In Sony's latest bid to get you to buy some tickets to see Kraven the Hunter, it's released the first eight minutes online for you to watch completely for free. Read more View the full article

As confirmed in the newest COD POD, the next Call of Duty: ****** Ops 6 Zombies map, Citadelle des Morts, is bringing back the Vulture Aid perk. View the full article

GSC Game World creative director Maria Grygorovych shows me a message on her phone. It’s proof, she says, that she’s telling me the truth about Stalker 2’s A-Life 2.0 system. The message is about why mention of A-Life 2.0 was pulled from Stalker 2’s Steam page and replaced with a generic description about the way AI works in the game. It turns out that Maria found out the description had changed when she saw players complaining about it on Reddit. Stalker 2 launched late last month to a positive reception on Steam and one million sales. It’s a success for the Ukrainian studio, a miracle, really, considering the harrowing circumstances that followed Russian’s full-scale invasion of the country in 2022. Stalker 2 suffers from well-documented bugs; GSC knows this and is working as hard as it can to fix them. But it’s A-Life 2.0 — or its apparent absence — that has gained the most attention from fans. A-Life was a key feature of the first Stalker game that governed AI behavior across the game world. At a high level, it is a system for simulating life in the Zone that works its magic seemingly independently of the player’s actions or whereabouts. It helps to create convincing AI and the emergent gameplay Stalker is famous for. GSC had said A-Life 2.0 would make the Zone feel alive as never before, that it would fuel emergent gameplay on a scale previously thought impossible. Indeed for some fans, A-Life 2.0 was Stalker 2’s biggest selling point. Unfortunately, now Stalker 2 is out in the wild, A-Life 2.0 hasn’t quite lived up to that billing. In fact, it feels as if A-Life 2.0 isn’t even in the game. Players have found little evidence to suggest anything approaching a life simulation is in operation at any scale, with NPCs and enemies spawning around the player and sometimes in obvious ways. This, players have said, lends Stalker 2 a more scripted feel than its predecessor, with emergent gameplay sorely lacking. So, what happened? GSC CEO Ievgen Grygorovych and creative director Maria Grygorovych offer an explanation during our interview, which takes place at BAFTA in Piccadilly, London following a screening of War Game: The Making of Stalker 2. The 90-minute documentary, which includes interviews with GSC’s Ukrainian staff as they contend with the invasion, reveals the remarkable circumstances surrounding the extremely difficult development of Stalker 2. It’s with this in mind that Ievgen and Maria explain what went wrong with A-Life 2.0, revealing for the first time how the studio's battle to optimize the performance of Stalker 2 in the months before release caused the feature to break down. A-Life 2.0 is in Stalker 2, the pair insist, it’s just bugged. Massively bugged. Ievgen offers a technical explanation of what happened. In short, optimization issues ahead of launch forced GSC to shrink the area around the player in which A-Life 2.0 works. It is supposed to extend much farther in virtual distance terms than it currently does, but to get Stalker 2 into a decent place performance wise across PC and Xbox Series X and S, the developers had to reduce this distance. then came the bugs on top. “This system to work properly requires a much larger area for spawn NPCs, and it requires much more memory resources," Ievgen says in English, which isn't his first language. "We were fighting with optimization. To optimize, you have a lot of things that need your resources, and you try to cut things from different directions to properly optimize the game well. “But to make it work we had to optimize some things, and they make A-Life work in many situations not as it should. Also, we created some bugs not long ago before release with NPCs spawning in the air and dropping back to the bottom. They should actually spawn in the terrain. Why it happened, I don’t know! And also we had some bugs with AI behavior. “So, all these things connected make it look like it's very broken and not working. But we are now continuing working on the optimization part to bring more resources for the A-Life system, to increase the range where A-Life is actually visualized. “There are NPCs outside of the range of the player and they are in offline mode. And when the player reaches some distance, they are going to online mode and they pop back up. The distance is dictated by our optimization range, where we stream the real world and not real world with all the collisions. It was tough work, and because of these optimization problems and bugs, it's become broken.” OK, so now we know what went wrong with A-Life 2.0. The question is, can GSC fix it? Or, can it get A-Life 2.0 into a place where it realizes the developer’s ambition and makes good on that initial promise? Absolutely, Ievgen and Maria insist. In fact that’s exactly what the developer is working on now. “For now we committed to players to make it work and it can be done from directions both optimizing, giving more resources to A-Life, fixing bugs, making it work properly, and then putting more efforts to make it more advanced,” Ievgen says. All this brings us nicely back to A-Life 2.0’s mysterious disappearance from Stalker 2’s Steam page upon the game’s release. Its original description, which mentioned A-Life 2.0 by name alongside promises about how game-changing it would be, was removed and replaced by another description that fails to mention A-Life 2.0 at all. "Advanced artificial intelligence systems that will keep engaged even the most hard-boiled players,” it now reads. That’s not particularly exciting to fans, who are at best worried about the future of A-Life 2.0, at worst accusing GSC of misleading them. He did that without any discussion or permission. He didn’t ask, ‘Do we have some bugs with A-Life or something?’ Because we had. Maria tells me someone on GSC’s marketing team took it upon themselves to change the A-Life 2.0 description to make it easier to understand. The thinking, apparently, was that Stalker newcomers wouldn't have a clue what A-Life meant and might dismiss it. But this marketing person didn’t run the change by Maria first before pushing it live. “He told me there will be a lot of new players who don’t know what A-Life is,” Maria says. “They need to understand what we’re talking about in this description. So I will try to change it to a more understandable form. He did that without any discussion or permission. He didn’t ask, ‘Do we have some bugs with A-Life or something?’ Because we had. We knew that. It’s a really huge and difficult system. But, when he did that before release, it was a surprise for me, because I noticed it because of Reddit. We did the Steam page in 2021. So for me, I was shocked, honestly.” Maria admits her explanation of events might sound unconvincing or suspicious, and suggests I probably don’t believe a word she’s saying. “People think it looks like it’s connected to us releasing the game with broken A-Life,” she says. “But it’s not. Even now, I’m talking about it to you, and you’re thinking, 'Hmm, yeah yeah, it was some guy in the marketing team.' I understand it sounds suspicious!” So she pulls out her phone and scrolls for a bit before showing me a screenshot of the inter-company message proving she was telling the truth about this marketing person changing the Steam page without her knowledge. I tell her I believed her anyway, but she insists on showing me her phone screen and yep, it’s there, in ****** and white. So, will GSC put that A-Life 2.0 description back on Stalker 2’s Steam page? Not until the feature itself is fixed, Maria says. But there’s no timeframe for that, and it’s hard to push for one given half the development team is still working out of Ukraine and faces week-long power cuts that turn blanket the country in darkness and cut off internet access. "We have relationships with our players and players wanted to see something," Maria says. "We have to do it for them." To help you survive in the Zone, we've got a list of Essential Stalker 2 Tips and Tricks, plus a guide on Things to Do First in Stalker 2 to help you through the early game, and Things Stalker 2 Doesn't Tell You - everything we wish we knew before we started playing. Save time scouring the wasteland with our Artifacts checklist and locations guide, and every Stash location we've found so far. Wesley is the *** News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at *****@*****.tld. View the full article