From Software president Hidetaka Miyazaki has acknowledged that members of the Dark Souls studio had misgivings about Elden Ring‘s shift to a full-blown open world format, while qualifying that Elden Ring’s vision for an open world was never “traditional”. Rather, Elden Ring is an “open world” game in the same way that Dark Souls is a “hard” game, Miyazaki feels. Confused? Well, this is the godfather of the notoriously unforthcoming Souls series we’re talking about. I’ve never interviewed the guy, but I suspect he composes his responses using the game’s soapstone messaging system.
Intel’s Optane drives are legendary in PC tech circles, offering random performance and low latency that remains unmatched amongst PCIe 3.0 drives. This Intel Optane 905P drive is the biggest they ever made at 1.5TB, and now it’s reduced to $380 when you use code SYADP2Z384 at Newegg.
For systems that accept PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 5.0 drives, I’d recommend sticking with our usual gaming SSD recommendations, but for PCIe 3.0 systems this is a fascinating option that emphasises random performance against sequential speeds. I recorded some of the very fastest game load times with this drive when I tested it against other PCIe 3.0 options, and its random write speeds are competitive even with later generation PCIe 4.0 alternatives.
Nvidia’s RTX 4070 is a popular mid-range graphics card that delivers good rasterised performance with best-in-class RT and upscaling/frame generation features. Normally it costs around $550, but today you can get a three-fan Gigabyte Windforce model for just $530 thanks to a $20 off voucher at Newegg. To get this price, just use code VGAEXCGBET625 at the checkout.
Project L, Riot’s long-gestating fighting game which is focused on 2v2 tag team fights, finally has a real name. It’s “2XKO”, which is both awkward to type and to say.
Satan has vanished, the throne of hell lies empty, and eight Archfiends are all jostling to be its chief seat warmer. It’s a great setup for a role-playing strategy game, and the allure of plotting, scheming, backstabbing and shmoozing your way to victory remains as enticing today as it did when Solium Infernum first came to PC in 2009. At the time, it launched to relative obscurity, and was mostly kept alive by dedicated play-by-email multiplayer groups. It was through one of these groups that Armello developers League Of Geeks first came into contact with it, and now, years later, have taken on the task of remaking Solium Infernum for a modern audience.
The original Solium was, by all accounts, an intensely knotty and dense affair, impenetrable to newcomers, or at least to those who were unprepared (or unwilling) to study and absorb all the countless variations and statistics involved in creating your own unique Archfiend. It was a bit like creating a D&D character sheet, only about ten times more complicated, and whose strategic implications may or may not have made themselves apparent until it was far too late. You could biff yourself before you began, in other words, and League Of Geeks have made admirable attempts to tame and streamline this unruly hell beast, doing away with a lot of that initial fussiness. As is perhaps fitting for the theme here, there are unfortunately still a few pesky gremlins causing mayhem behind the scenes at time of writing (I’m pointing the finger at literal bug queen Beelzebub for this), but for the most part, there’s good fun to be had in this new incarnation of Solium Infernum – and particularly if you have some willing friends who you soon hope to call enemies.
As Helldivers 2 continues to be struggling with its own success, suffering wildly overloaded servers that make it sometimes tricky to even log in, a new patch today has added a feature to help alleviate the pressure. Having previously capped the number of players to 450,000, developers Arrowhead have now added an auto-kick to stop people hogging those precious slots while not playing. After 15 minutes, AFK players will now get booted. It’s clearly not the big fix needed but hopefully fresh duct tape will help hold the co-op shooter together until more permanent solutions arrive.
This week on a spotlessly cleansed Electronic Wireless Show podcast: Alice takes the opportunity to make everyone talk and think about PowerWash Simulator, which also means Nate gets to talk about Warhammer 40K bloody loads, because that’s the next DLC pack for PowerWash Sim. We also reminisce about our other favourite gaming crossovers, and try to dream up some cross-universe mashups of our own.
Plus! We talk about what we’ve been playing this week, consider whether we would “RoboCop ourselves,” and I disgust Alice with a confectionary confession.
The PS VR2, Sony’s currently PS5-exclusive VR gaming headset, looks like it’ll be latching onto the faces of PC owners as well. Tucked away in a PlayStation blog post about upcoming PS VR2 games, Sony Interactive content communications manager Gillen McAllister confirmed that Sony are “currently testing the ability for PS VR2 players to access additional games on PC” and that the plan is have this extra support ready within 2024.
Yesterday’s Nintendo Direct got rather overshadowed by a certaintrailer for Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree, but there were still plenty of good news nuggets to be had in there for us PC folks – which I’ve summarised for you below. The long and short of it is: more release dates! Loads of ’em! And they’re all coming in the first half of 2024 as well. I love it when a schedule comes together.
As expected, Microsoft yesterday confirmed that four of their games are headed to rival consoles: Pentiment to PlayStations 4 & 5 and Nintendo Switch; Hi-Fi Rush to PS5; Grounded to PS4, PS5, and Switch; and Sea Of Thieves to PS5. It’s nice to see barriers between systems coming down and all, and it’ll likely have consequences of note to serious businessheads, but what relevance does this have for us as a PC gaming website? Well! Grounded and Sea Of Thieves will support cross-platform multiplayer, so we’ll be able to play them with our consolatory chums. That’s nice.
