It was revealed that Tango Gameworks would be enjoying a happier ending last month, when the news broke that Krafton—publisher of PUBG—would be taking the studio in, saving as many developers as possible from its shock closure.

While Krafton wanted to “inherit the entire development team” (as per a statement from Krafton PR, shared by Stephen Totilo in both his GameFile newsletter and on Twitter) the publisher hasn’t managed to get the full breadth of talent it made the “acqui-hire” for. Here’s the full statement:

“KRAFTON plans to transfer approximately 50 development staff from Tango Gameworks to KRAFTON’s Japan subsidiary. These transferred staff will continue to work on new projects, including the expansion of the HI-FI RUSH IP, at KRAFTON.”

That’s almo…

I’m pretty stoked for the Chaos Dwarf DLC that’s coming to Total War: Warhammer 3 on April 13, but that’s not the only thing to look forward to if you’re a hammer-head (a Warhammer nerd, that is, not a kind of shark). As Creative Assembly explains in the latest Total War blog, the Chaos Dwarfs will arrive alongside update 3.0 and a free add-on called Mirror of Madness.

Mirror of Madness contains a pair of game modes that will be added to the Battle menu. First is The Trials of Fate, which expands on Warhammer 3’s survival battles to make a mini-campaign in which you play a time-traveling daemon prince of Tzeentch. You’ll have to survive four battles from the history of Warhammer, then defeat Tzeentch’s faction leader Kairos Fateweaver. 

It’s a kind of wave defense mode …

Against a wall in the lobby of the Firaxis office, there are two objects: An old leather desk chair, and an equally aged PC and CRT monitor in beautiful ’90s beige. These obviously aren’t just any old bits of retro junk. They’re the kinds of relics game history archivists dream of, given how much has been lost over the years to bankruptcies, acquisitions, and carelessness. 

Over 30 years ago, Sid Meier sat in that very chair and used that PC to create 1991’s Civilization, the first game in a grand strategy series that’s getting its 7th numbered release in February. The computer is a Compaq Deskpro 386 which, according to Firaxis learning and development manager Pete Murray, cost $10,000 when it was purchased. That’s somewhere over $23,000 in today’s dollars.

It was mone…

As of its last update, multiplayer horror game Evil Dead has a new mode that’s not quite battle royale, but instead is being called “Splatter Royale”. Up to 40 players fight to be the last deadite standing, choosing from uglied-up deadite versions of the game’s existing Survivor and Demon characters.

As well as scavenging for loot it can be earned through special events, some of which demand you take on elite or boss NPCs. At the end of each round you advance up Splatter Royale’s four skill trees, which let you get better at being an Assassin, Butcher, Commando, or Marksman.

The same update also adds two new weapons. The grenade launcher does pretty much what you’d expect, i.e. it launches grenades that explode, while the scythe looks like a particularly brutal limb-lopper t…

Programmer and Nintendo Jedi James Lambert has spent the last couple of years working on a demake of Valve’s first-person puzzler Portal for the Nintendo 64, a machine I wasn’t sure could even display a proper circle let alone a moveable hole in reality you can use to teleport through 3D space in real-time. That project, Portal 64, was recently canceled after Valve’s lawyers asked Lambert to take it down.

In a new video Lambert made it clear that he expected this, and he doesn’t want people who were excited about the project to be upset at Valve. “I don’t blame them at all,” he said, “and I don’t think you should either. Don’t be mad at Valve here. The project was probably doomed to be taken down from the beginning.”

Portal 64 was being made in Libultra, the official Nintend…

Update 2nd August, 2023: AMD has issued a new Adrenalin graphics driver specifically to solve the issue its GPUs had been experiencing with Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart when ray tracing was enabled in the settings menu.

The release notes state the fixed issue as: “Application crash or driver timeout may be observed while playing Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart with Ray-Tracing and Dynamic Resolution Scaling enabled on some AMD Graphics Products, such as the Radeon RX 7900 XTX.”

There are still several known issues, such as the high idle power that can reportedly be solved by enabling variable refresh rate if you monitors are capable, but you can download the new driver today.

Original story 27th July, 2023: Ray tracing technology has be…

The Asus ROG Ally isn’t going to ship with any form of game validation system because you “should be able to play all games without needing validation from either our team or the game publishers.”

That’s a confident statement, and a confident stance as to the power of the custom AMD silicon at the heart of the new gaming handheld and the Microsoft OS. The Steam Deck has a specific Deck Verified rating system to give gamers confidence a given game will run well on its hardware, on its Linux OS, and on a handheld device.

But Asus believes the combination of a Windows 11 OS and a powerful Zen 4/RDNA 3 APU will be all the validation you need to know your games will just work.

Asus has confirmed the ROG Ally will launch on May 11 this year, and that it will be sporting cust…

N 7 Day, the annual celebration of all things Mass Effect, is one again upon us, and BioWare is once again teasing the next Mass Effect with codes, encryption, and video clips—but whether or not we’ll get any insight into what’s actually coming in the next game remains to be seen.

The whole thing started with a message salted into the BioWare’s N7 Day announcement: A series of 0s and 1s that fans on Reddit quickly translated into “Epsilon.” That led to a site with a countdown, which eventually opened up to a small “Access code: Epsilon” site containing a mysterious tease about an encrypted distress signal from Andromeda.

That’s interesting. BioWare has previously indicated that the next Mass Effect won’t be a direct sequel to either Andromeda or the original trilogy, b…

Dave the Diver is a game we didn’t see coming. On the surface it’s a cute indie management game about going fishing and running a restaurant, but underneath all of that lies a compelling narrative, varied and delightful gameplay, and one of the best games of 2023. And now it’s even better, thanks to a major new quality-of-life update.

The update adds functionality for automated quick time events, an under-acknowledged accessibility issue in gaming for people with RSI or other disabilities,  so players will have the option to just push a button and be done with it. 

The overall UI size has been adjusted to make it more usable on both PCs and Steam Decks, an inventory sorting function has been added that enables players to easily ditch unnecessary items while diving,…