Category: Video Games

New Black Panther, Captain America Game From Amy Hennig Unveiled at State of Unreal 2024

We already knew that Amy Hennig, the award-winning writer and director behind games such as Jak 3 and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, was working on a narrative-driven Marvel game focused on Captain America and Black Panther. And today, we finally learned some new details, including its official title: Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra. It’ll arrive sometime in 2025.

The reveal was made at Epic’s State of Unreal 20024 showcase, where we saw a cinematic trailer featuring Captain America and Black Panther in 1940s Europe. We also learned that the game will not only be powered by Unreal Engine 5, but it will include MetaHuman Animator, the same facial animation tool that Ninja Theory will be using for its upcoming project Hellblade 2: Senua’s Saga. MetaHuman Animator will allow any developer taking advantage of the tech to use an iPhone or stereo helmet-mounted camera to “reproduce any facial performance as high-fidelity animation” on its characters, providing more realistic facial animations.

We previously learned when the game was announced in late 2021 that Hennig would make an “original story” set in the Marvel universe. A year after its initial tease, a Disney and Marvel games showcase revealed that Hennig’s project would be set in WWII and would have an ensemble cast with four playable characters, including Steve Rogers / Captain America and Azzuri / Black Panther. We learned that this project would not feature co-op despite the four playable characters.

This is one of two projects that Hennig is spearheading, with the second being an untitled Star Wars project. While little is known about the game following its announcement nearly two years ago, last June, we learned that Dominic Robilliard, who was the director of the canceled project Star Wars 1313, was hired by Skydance Media to work on this new game.

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

Psst, one of Intel’s low-key best gaming CPUs is down to £108 for Amazon Spring Deal Days

While there are minor thrills to be had finding the very latest PC hardware in the Amazon Spring Deal Days sale, don’t underestimate the draw of an older favourite emerging with a new, knockdown price. So it is with the Intel Core i5-12400F: this was a great-value midranger when it was new, and now you get it at a true budget-tier price of £108.

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At Least We Know What the Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater Remake Main Menu Looks Like

Konami has revealed the Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater remake main menu as part of a new video series fronted by Solid Snake voice actor David Hayter.

The Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater remake, officially titled Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater (the Δ is pronounced ‘delta’), is set to bring “unprecedented new graphics” to Hideo Kojima’s 2004 sequel. The main menu screen, below, doesn’t reveal much, save a look at Snake Eater’s famous jungle environment. We also hear the classic Metal Gear Solid gun sound with a press of the start button.

Konami has revealed little of the Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater remake save the announcement trailer and Unreal Engine 5-powered footage, and it has yet to announce a release date. However, in January, PlayStation listed the Metal Gear Solid 3 remake as a 2024 game in a trailer advertising various PlayStation 5 games coming out this year. It’s also coming to Xbox Series X and S and PC.

Announced in May 2023 after a series of rumors, Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater promises to be a faithful retelling of the original game and will implement the original voice acting that featured David Hayter.

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.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 review: an action RPG anecdote generator

You know when you remember a game really fondly and instead of ageing alongside you, it becomes more modern in memory? The Dragon’s Dogma 2 experience is, essentially, how I remember its predecessor Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen. To me, DD2 feels like a remaster of the first, except it looks nicer, is more expansive, and features some rejigs to things like your AI pals.

Not that any of this is a bad thing! In fact, DD2’s closeness to the original makes it just as much of a joy as the first, where your grand adventure isn’t only grander, it’s still at the whims of a world governed by chaotic physics and the passage of time. Quirks remain, for good and bad, but ultimately this is an RPG where you make travel plans and the game does it best to dash them. It never gets old.

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YouTuber Says the Pokémon Company Copyright Struck Their 7-Year-Old Video Featuring Pokémon Modded Into COD Zombies

A hugely popular Call of Duty YouTuber has said their seven-year-old video featuring Pokémon modded into COD Zombies was hauled offline after The Pokémon Company issued a removal request.

NoahJ456, who has 5.21 million subscribers on YouTube, tweeted a warning to other content creators, advising that if their videos feature any sort of modded Pokémon content, “I would delete/unlist it ASAP.”

Tweeting a picture of the notice from YouTube, NoahJ456 said: “Just got a manual strike for a video I made seven years ago featuring Pokémon modded into COD Zombies. Two more strikes and my channel gets deleted.”

Replying to a user, NoahJ456 added: “They are technically within their rights to take this down, so unless they have a change of heart (lol) the strike will stay.”

It looks like The Pokémon Company is taking a renewed interest in content that shows Pokémon modded into other games after a modder showcased Pokémon in Palworld, the smash hit survival game dubbed ‘Pokémon with guns.’ Palworld features monsters called Pals, which some people have said “rip off” Pokémon. Indeed, the modder who put Pokémon into Palworld claimed “Nintendo has come for me” after a takedown of a tweet.

That creator, called Toasted Shoes, tweeted to say they felt responsible for the removal of NoahJ456’s video. “After the heat of Nintendo taking down my Palworld video I did a COD Zombies Pokemon video,” Toasted said. “My mindset was they wouldn’t take my video down since Noah and many others had made content on it in the past few years. However they still took action.

“I didn’t think they’d go scorched earth and I certainly didn’t think it would lead to a chain reaction of them punishing @NoahJ456 and every other creator. I am truly sorry that me being reckless may have played some part.

“Crazy that it took a month to go after everyone else but it seems they now have their sights set on other creators.”

IGN has asked The Pokémon Company for comment.

Last week, a former chief legal officer of The Pokémon Company shared a rare insight into its thinking behind fan project takedowns. Speaking to Aftermath, Don McGowan made clear that, at least during his time, The Pokémon Company didn’t actively seek out fan projects to shut down but only did so when they crossed a certain line.

“You don’t send a takedown right away,” McGowan said. “You wait to see if they get funded, for a Kickstarter or similar. If they get funded then that’s when you engage. No one likes suing fans.”

McGowan said he and the legal team at The Pokémon Company would typically only come across a project that used its copyright once it was raised in the press. “I would be sitting in my office minding my own business when someone from the company would send me a link to a news article, or I would stumble across it myself,” he said.

Despite this attitude, there are multiple examples of Pokémon fan projects that were issued a takedown notice, hauling them offline. In 2018, a popular fan-made creation tool players used to build their own Pokémon games bit the dust. In 2021, support for a Pokémon fan project called Pokémon Uranium ceased after nine years of development. And in 2022, The Pokémon Company removed almost all videos of a fan-made Pokémon hunting FPS that went viral on YouTube and social media.

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.

Overwatch 2 Season 10 will unlock all current heroes and make future additions free

In what’s quite the shake up for Overwatch 2, Blizzard have announced that starting with Season 10, all of its heroes will be unlocked for all players. And this includes all new heroes going forwards, too, so the next hero Venture will unlock immediately for everyone when the latest season drops. Otherwise, there’s changes to unlocking premium skins, earning premium coins, and some tidbits on what we can expect from Season 11.

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Talking Point: Should We Be Expecting More From Remakes And Remasters?

History in the making (of).

With Switch now into its eighth year and Nintendo’s head chefs deep into software prep for the next console, remakes and remasters are the order of the day, with a platter of old favourites being served up in this twilight period for the current system.

We got the excellent Super Mario RPG late last year and the Mario vs. Donkey Kong remake in February, which was preceded by the Nintendo-published Another Code: Recollection. In May GameCube classic Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is incoming, with Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD arriving the following month. And that’s only first-party stuff.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Don’t Expect PS5 Pro to Run GTA 6 at 60fps, Tech Experts Say

The leaked PlayStation 5 Pro specs have been verified and added to by the tech experts at Digital Foundry, who also deliver their prediction on how the unannounced console will run GTA 6.

This week, the PS5 Pro specs leak, also verified by IGN, revealed the power of the console Sony reportedly plans to release during the fourth quarter of 2024.

The PS5 Pro CPU is said to be identical to the standard PS5’s CPU but with a ‘High CPU Frequency Mode’, which amounts to a 10% increase to 3.85GHz. The GPU enables faster rendering and higher quality ray tracing powered by 33.5 teraflops. The standard PS5 offers 10.28 teraflops. However, a direct PS5 to PS5 Pro comparison would work out at around 10.28 vs 16 to 17 teraflops.

The release of the PS5 Pro is thought to be particularly enticing in the context of the 2025 release of GTA 6, which is set to boost the video game market beyond developer Rockstar Games and parent company Take-Two.

But according to Digital Foundry founder Rich Leadbetter, speaking in the latest episode of DF Direct, the PS5 Pro’s CPU means GTA 6 will probably run at 30fps, assuming GTA 6 runs at 30fps on the standard PS5. Given no GTA game has launched with a 60fps option, this one seems nailed on.

According to Leadbetter, if GTA 6 runs at 30fps on PS5, it’ll run at 30fps on PS5 Pro barring some kind of programming miracle, because the CPU handles simulation, and the PS5 Pro’s CPU only increases performance by 10%. In the unlikely event GTA 6 has a 60fps mode on PS5, it’ll run at 60fps on PS5 Pro.

While the PS5 Pro’s CPU looks like a modest improvement, the PS5 Pro is much better than the PS5 at rendering, according to Digital Foundry. PS5 Pro, Digital Foundry predicts, is capable of upscaling 1080p older PS5 games to 4K via its upscaling/antialiasing solution PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling), if the developer chooses to support the tech with a patch.

Digital Foundry says PS5 Pro will retain the same 16GB of GDDR6 memory as the standard PS5, but has an extra 1.2GB of system RAM for developers.

Last month, analysts signaled that Sony is “likely” to release the PS5 Pro later in 2024. Sony has form when it comes to releasing a Pro version of its consoles. The PS4 Pro, for example, launched in November 2016, three years after the PS4 came out. A PS5 Pro launch this November would come four years after the PS5 launched in November 2020.

Sony has revised its PS5 sales forecast for the current financial year, down from its lofty target of 25 million consoles sold to 21 million. This comes despite a year-on-year increase in PS5 sales for the holiday 2023 quarter, from 7.1 million sold to 8.2 million.

Elsewhere, Sony has said it will not release any major existing PlayStation franchise games before April 2025, ruling out big sequels in the God of War and Spider-Man franchises any time soon.

Last month, Sony announced a devastating wave of layoffs affecting over 900 staff at its gaming business. Sony’s London studio is to close.

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.

Ubisoft revealed an AI NPC prototype at GDC and everyone online made fun of it

It’s GDC week, and conversations are being had about AI. Ubisoft have blundered into this, in classic Ubi style, by revealing that they’ve had an R&D team beavering away on a project called NEO NPC. It’s the usual pitch. “Have you ever dreamed of having a real conversation with an NPC in a video game?”, asks Ubi’s official post about it. And what all people who make this fail to understand that the answer most normal people give if they think about it is “Erm, probably no, actually?”

Still, the internet made good hay from the prototype image Ubisoft shared on Xitter, as many people took the opportunity to make fun of the dialogue from Bloom, a prototype man in a prototype beanie who wants to be your friend.

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Surprise Red Dead Redemption 2 Patch Doesn’t Add the Update Everyone Really Wants

Rockstar has issued a surprise title update for Red Dead Redemption 2 — its first for nearly two years — which makes a number of improvements and fixes for the game, but it does not add the update the community desperately wants.

Red Dead Redemption 2 Title Update 1.32, out now for the game across PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, includes improvements for FSR (now updated to FSR 2.2), support for HDR10, and a fix for an infamous Red Dead Online glitch that caused the game to freeze when entering stables.

However, the title update does not add 60 frames per second to Red Dead Redemption 2 on consoles, perhaps the most-wanted update in all of video games.

In September, the explosive FTC vs Xbox leak sent shockwaves throughout the Red Dead Redemption community after a Red Dead Redemption 2 next-gen update was found listed by a Microsoft executive in a planning email.

In an email chain between Microsoft executives dated May 2022 is a list of third-party games earmarked as potential day-and-date Game Pass titles. One of the games mentioned is Red Dead Redemption 2 “D&D for gen9”, which Microsoft expected to come out during the second quarter of its 2023 financial year (October to December 2022).

“Gen9” refers to the ninth generation of consoles, aka the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S. Rockstar has yet to announce a next-gen update for Red Dead Redemption 2, despite the many calls from fans.

Then, in October, Rockstar quietly patched its Red Dead Redemption port to add a 60 frames per second toggle to the game on PlayStation 5 via backwards compatibility, which made Rockstar’s 2010 open-world western was officially playable at 60fps for the first time.

Red Dead Redemption 2 launched in 2018 on PS4 and Xbox One and in 2019 on PC, and is considered by some to be Rockstar’s greatest game. Fans have criticized Rockstar for a lack of meaningful updates in favor of support for GTA Online, but Red Dead Redemption 2 remains hugely popular, selling over 61 million copies to date.

Red Dead Redemption 2 Title Update 1.32 patch notes:

General Stability Fixes and Improvements

  • Red Dead Online General Fixes
  • Fixed an issue that resulted in Naturalist samples not being counted toward Daily Challenges
  • Fixed an issue in Dead of Night that resulted in Night Stalkers being able to collect the Night Stalker mask
  • Fixed an issue that resulted in ambient vehicles not appearing in certain content
  • Fixed an issue that resulted in Free Roam Missions not launching
  • Improved an issue that resulted in players becoming stuck when entering the stables
  • Improved an issue that resulted in players being unable to summon horses and wagons
  • Voice Chat now defaults to Off

Game Stability and Performance

  • Fixed various issues that could result in a crash

Game Stability and Performance (PC)

  • Fixed various issues that would result in the game crashing or failing to launch
  • Fixed an issue that resulted in Offline Mode not working due to Windows 11 updates
  • Fixed an issue that resulted in crashes after reporting other players
  • Fixed issues that resulted in Offline Mode not working correctly
  • Added support for HDR10+ GAMING, this will automatically set game graphics in HDR for HDR10+ GAMING displays on compatible graphics cards and monitors connected via HDMI
  • Updated AMD Fidelity Super Resolution (FSR) libraries to version 2.2
  • Fixed an issue that resulted in 3200×2400 resolution being unavailable

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.