Author: Game Infliction

Nintendo Reportedly Demoed Switch 2 at gamescom 2023, Visuals ‘Comparable’ to PS5 and Xbox Series

Nintendo reportedly revealed Switch 2 behind closed doors at gamescom 2023 last month, showing off the power of its upcoming next-gen console.

According to Eurogamer, the Switch 2 was shown running a ‘souped up’ version of Switch launch title Zelda: Breath of the Wild, although there’s apparently no suggestion the game will be re-released.

Meanwhile, VGC reported Nintendo showed off Epic’s The Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 tech demo running on hardware with the specs Nintendo is targeting for its future console. The site said this demo ran using Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling technology alongside ray tracing, with visuals ‘comparable’ to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles.

Nintendo is reportedly set to release its next-gen console during the second half of 2024, with development kits now with partner studios.

Apparently this new next-gen console can be used in portable mode, like the Nintendo Switch, and has an LCD screen as opposed to an OLED screen in order to keep costs down. It also comes with a cartridge slot for physical games. However, the crucial question of backwards compatibility with Nintendo Switch games remains unclear. Nintendo has yet to comment on the reports.

In May, Nintendo said it’s the long-rumoured Switch successor wouldn’t release until April 2024 at the earliest. Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa explained during an investors presentation that the company isn’t considering new hardware in the 2023/24 financial year, which ends March 31, 2024.

This comes despite a decline in Switch sales. The console sold close to 18 million units in the last financial year, down from 23 million sold the year before and 28 million the year before that. Nintendo isn’t looking to rush a new console out to tackle this decline though, as it has forecast another drop for the coming year.

“Sustaining the Switch’s sales momentum will be difficult in its seventh year,” said Furukawa during the presentation. “Our goal of selling 15 million units this fiscal year is a bit of a stretch, but we will do our best to bolster demand going into the holiday season so that we can achieve the goal.”

Rumours surrounding a new console have been circulating for years. The new console was said to offer boosted graphics akin to the PlayStation 4 and its Pro model, but there is no official information regarding the next piece of Nintendo hardware yet.

This week, Nintendo said it had moved on to a brand new The Legend of Zelda game, ruling out Tears of the Kingdom DLC. It seems likely this new Zelda game will launch on Nintendo’s next console. But will Nintendo re-release Tears of the Kingdom on Switch 2?

Meanwhile, Nintendo has announced a raft of games for Switch due out between now and the end of its fiscal year. These include Detective Pikachu Returns, the aforementioned Super Mario Bros. Wonder, WarioWare: Move It!, a Super Mario RPG remake, Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet DLC, a visually enhanced version of Nintendo 3DS game Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, and an untitled Princess Peach game. Nintendo still lists the MIA Metroid Prime 4 as a Nintendo Switch game.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Under The Waves’ submarine 70s grief flat is nicer than my home

Oft’ am I struck by the fact that video game homes belonging to characters in the depths of despair are nicer that all of the homes I’ve lived in myself. Granted, I’m a thirty-something in a country with a years-long housing crisis, so even the Baker House in Resident Evil 7 is of “I think I could just about afford that one day” status. But it comes to something when a 70s depresso-capsule at the bottom of the sea has more square footage and storage space than I do.

Under The Waves (which got patched today, and not before time because I’ve had one fatal error crash per play session since it came out last week so far) is about a deep sea diver called Stan, who is living and working at the bottom of a big wet metaphor for grief. You will know this because a) its Steam page says this up front, and b) it’s not super subtle (this game is published by Quantic Dream). But, as newsman Edwin pointed out to me today, when was the last time the sea wasn’t a metaphor for grief? It’s never a metaphor for enjoying a nice raspberry ripple ice cream. And despite Stan making reference to “what [he’s] been through” half an hour in, I think it does a great job with its chthonic sadness. You float about in your tiny little sub in a great misty darkness, listen to the extremely melancholy music, and you start thinking about sad stuff in your own life. But you get into Stan’s capsule living area and you think “this guy has a carpet and a book nook, what the hell?”

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Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 Revive Age-Old RPG Debate About Encumbrance

It’s a debate as old as role-playing games themselves: should players have to deal with encumbrance?

The recent release of Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 and Bethesda’s Starfield have thrust the encumbrance debate back into the headlines, with both games employing a system that restricts how much stuff you can carry.

While each game employs systems and mechanics that let you carry more and more, it is inevitable that as a player, you’re going to have to spend a decent chunk of your time fussing with managing your character or characters’ carry weight limit.

In Starfield’s case, encumbrance is a big enough issue for some that they are willing to lose access to gaining achievements in order to increase the carry limit via console commands on PC. This in turn has made a mod designed to prevent the achievements from being disabled one of the most popular on NexusMods.

It’s a different situation on Xbox Series X and S, of course. Starfield on console does not grant access to console command cheats, leaving players faced with the dreaded encumbrance mechanic.

Fans of role-playing games are well used to encumbrance, of course, however much they might hate it. Bethesda’s own The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games all have it. But why does it exist in the first place? There’s an argument to be made that encumbrance adds a sense of place to a virtual world, that it makes characters and objects more believable. There’s a game in resource management, too. If you can’t bring everything to a fight, what do you bring? Perhaps there are interesting choices to make with encumbrance.

Beyond that, there are logistical reasons video games use encumbrance. Again, if you can carry everything, how do you visualise everything in an inventory screen? How do you help the player find what they want? Starfield’s inventory user interface is awful. Imagine if all the items in the game world were suddenly weighing it down?

However we feel about it, encumbrance looks like it’s here to stay. People complained about it when Fallout 4 came out eight years ago, and Bethesda will be intimately familiar with the debate surrounding it. With all that, Bethesda made the decision to stick with it for Starfield. Larian, too, seems keen on it. Until such time developers ditch encumbrance, it’s a case of carry on with all that carry on!

There’s a lot going on in the world of Starfield. Its full launch saw over 1 million concurrent players. Players are using Starfield’s ship creator to recreate famous vessels from the likes of Star Wars, Serenity, and Star Trek, and many hidden references to other games like Skyrim have already been discovered. Savvy speedrunners have even figured out how to complete it in under three hours.

However, if you’re still just getting started, here are all the things to do first in Starfield.

IGN’s review explains the pull to seek out Starfield’s “immense amount of quality roleplaying quests and interesting NPCs” is strong, despite a rough start and some core aggravations.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Watch a robot parry a nuke in this Nier and Devil May Cry-influenced indie actioner

I like to think that I’m above the lure of Cool Violent Thing in Videogame these days, but when I see a lanky robot parry a nuclear shockwave with a katana as though swatting a wasp, I find myself Enthused.

The videogame in question is Pyrolith’s V.A. Proxy, which I’ve had my eye on for a while, on account of it being inspired by Nier: Automata and Devil May Cry, with a landscape of megastructures and bruised and rusty art direction that faintly call to mind The Signal from Tölva. In this moody open world action game, you play one of three robots who awaken to find their memories gone, and promptly set out in search of their creator. It’d be an eye-catcher even without the atomic parry, which you can witness for yourself in the embedded clip below.

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Toree Saturn Looks Set To Provide Even More Adorable Low-Poly Platforming Next Year

Très chick.

After being teased last month, developer Siactro has now provided a first look at the follow-up to Toree 3D, Toree Saturn, and yes, it’s looking just as adorable as we would expect.

Much like the prior games in the Toree universe, Saturn is a low-poly platformer that will see you guiding a sweet little chick (and its awesome shades) through a series of vibrant courses. There are a handful of new moves to play with this time including a neat homing attack and a ground dash.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Starfield Xbox Players Are Using Cross-Platform Saves to Gain Access to PC Console Commands

One of the best things about playing Starfield on PC is the access to console commands.

In Starfield, cheat codes are enabled via console commands, but they only work on the PC version of the game. These cheat codes let you do everything from spawning any item in the game to toggle god mode. Check out IGN’s Starfield console commands guide for a comprehensive rundown of how the cheats work.

Xbox Series X and S owners, however, do not have access to console commands. But players have discovered a workaround that, while limited, does let console players get in on some of the cheating action.

If you own Starfield on Xbox or Xbox Game Pass, you can download it on any PC for free via the Xbox App. Even if your PC is a potato (Starfield and potatoes is an actual thing), just run the game using the same Microsoft account so that your save files from Xbox are transferred across. Then get stuck in to the console commands.

Thanks to Microsoft’s cross-platform save system, the next time you run Starfield on Xbox, your modified save file from PC, along with its enabled cheats, carries over.

Players are using this trick to, for example, get around Starfield’s frustrating weight limit. You can also use commands like add more digipicks, medipacks, and credits on Xbox with this method.

As redditor dimmanxak pointed out, if you use console commands on PC Starfield automatically turns off achievement progress. Thankfully, there’s already a mod on PC that prevents this.

There’s a lot going on in the world of Starfield. Its full launch saw over 1 million concurrent players. Players are using Starfield’s ship creator to recreate famous vessels from the likes of Star Wars, Serenity, and Star Trek, and many hidden references to other games like Skyrim have already been discovered. Savvy speedrunners have even figured out how to complete it in under three hours.

However, if you’re still just getting started, here are all the things to do first in Starfield.

IGN’s review explains the pull to seek out Starfield’s “immense amount of quality roleplaying quests and interesting NPCs” is strong, despite a rough start and some core aggravations.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Starfield modders are trying to join up maps into complete planets, cue memories of Minecraft’s Far Lands

Are Starfield‘s planets continuous spaces? Are they just collections of sealed-off maps that fake the presence of landmarks such as named cities beyond their invisible boundaries? I just don’t even know any more, but Starfield mod creators are looking into it. One intrepid soul, Draspian, has tinkered with the code to disable said invisible boundaries, and in the process, revealed that planetary maps do, in fact, join together, though as you might be expecting, Starfield doesn’t take kindly to being treated this way.

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Introducing our new Wordle Solver tool

Here’s a thing. RPS now has a Tools section! But what does that mean for you, our readers? Well, it will depend if you’re the kind of person who consults our daily Wordle answer guides, as our first tool is, in fact, a Wordle Solver. It’s a new experiment we’re trying that’s been put together by our guides and tech teams, and the aim is to help you arrive at those sometimes tricky Wordle answers without, necessarily, just resorting to looking up the answer. We’ll see how it goes! And if you want to find out more about what it is and why we’re doing it, read on below.

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Nintendo Is “Evolving” Into An Entertainment Company, According To Doug Bowser

“With gaming as a nucleus of the overall business model”.

Nintendo has mentioned on a number of occasions in recent years how it wants to go beyond video games and the company’s American president Doug Bowser has now reiterated this during an interview with the Washington Post.

Bowser mentioned how Nintendo is currently “evolving into being an entertainment company with gaming as a nucleus of the overall business model”. While Nintendo has dabbled in other areas such as love hotels and playing cards throughout its history, its recent push in other areas like theme parks and the movie industry have been significant game changers. It’s also teamed up with toy icons like LEGO and released multiple mobile games.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com