Game Tech News

After the collapse of THQ in 2013, the fate of well-loved franchises like Darksiders was in peril. The company’s intellectual properties scattered to the winds, devs moved to other endeavors, and fans were heartbroken. But all these years later, Darksiders is back from the dead right alongside the name of its former publisher.

Vigil Games developed the first two Darksiders games under THQ, and much of that team ended up at Crytek after the bankruptcy. The rights to Darksiders went to Nordic Games though, so regardless of interest, the original devs couldn’t simply deliver a follow-up whenever they felt like it.

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Interest in artificial neural networks has skyrocketed over the years as companies like Google and Facebook have invested heavily in machines that can think like humans. Today, an AI can recognize objects in photos or help generate realistic computer speech, but Nvidia has successfully built a neural network that can create an entire virtual world with the help of a game engine. The researchers speculate this “hybrid” approach could one day make AI-generated games a reality.

The system build by Nvidia engineers uses many of the same parts as other AI experiments, but they’re arranged in a slightly different way. To goal of the project was to create a simple driving simulator, but without using any humans to design the environment.

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Life is strange sometimes. Three days ago, I was openly wondering what gaming service might emerge to provide a better set of features and capabilities than Steam. This week, Epic Games announces that they’re coming out with their own service — and they’ve got at least one serious hook ready to land right between Gabe Newell’s eyes.
This is a true store, not just a landing page for Epic’s own products, though obviously, it’ll take time to populate things. Where Steam takes a 30 percent cut of all developer earnings, Epic has slashed its own take, to just 12 percent. The company writes that developers will receive 88 percent of revenue, with no tiers or thresholds. Epic takes 12 percent, and if a developer uses Unreal Engine, Epic will cover the 5 percent engine royalty for sales on the Epic Games store out of Epic's 12 percent, the company said.

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Epic has, as promised, launched its new Store. While the service is obviously intended to take Steam on head-to-head, with a 12/88 revenue split for Epic and developers as opposed to Valve’s 30/70 split, gamers who are used to the literally thousands of titles available on Steam may be surprised to see just how few titles are currently available on Epic’s service. There are three, not counting Fortnite itself: Ashen, Hello Neighbor, and an exclusive game, Hades, built by Supergiant Games, which is also responsible for Bastion and Pyre.

Darksiders III will join the service on December 14, with future games including Genesis Alpha One, Journey (a former PlayStation 3 exclusive), Maneater, Outer Wilds, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, Satisfactory, Super Meat Boy Forever, The Pathless, and World War Z. It wouldn’t be surprising to see more titles move to Epic, despite the currently anemic selection, for a very simple reason: discovery. One of Steam’s largest problems, and an issue that’s been identified by a number of current developers, is that the avalanche of titles on the service makes it extremely difficult to create any kind of buzz or consumer awareness of a new game unless you have access to a AAA game’s marketing budget. Granted, people aren’t going to fight to be on a platform that no one is using, but the sheer success of Fortnite means Epic has a vast potential audience of players already. Launching a store effort when its game is enjoying such phenomenal success is a shrewd move by the company.

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And hard as it is to remember, Steam itself launched with just a handful of titles, once upon a time. Granted, it had more than four — Valve didn’t launch Steam until Half-Life 2 was available, which means it also shipped out with Half-Life and its expansion pack, and various mods like Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. At the very least, it’ll be interesting to see how the market responds to the availability of a new service intended to serve as a distribution point for multiple publishers rather than focusing on a single company the way uPlay or EA’s Origin do. As we’ve previously discussed, GOG is the closest competitor to Steam — and that company’s insistence on a DRM-free gaming experience, while laudable, also limits its ability to compete commercially with a service that does integrate DRM capabilities. Epic will allow games to use their own DRM solutions, as well as supporting games made with both Unreal Engine 4 and Unity.

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After the knockout 2017 release schedule, many of us thought 2018 would be a quiet year of recovery. Instead, it was stuffed with far too many excellent games for any one person to play. Some games stood head and shoulders above the competition though, and we want to take a moment to praise our most beloved titles.
This year, we’re featuring top five lists from Ryan Whitwam, David Cardnal, and Grant Brunner. Not everyone here prioritizes the newest releases, but these lists will give you a good idea of which games meant something to us in 2018.
If you enjoyed a game that didn’t make our lists, feel free to give it some love in the comments below. After all, 15 slots aren’t nearly enough to cover all of this year’s superb releases.

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The PlayStation Classic clearly didn’t turn out to be the must-have hit for Sony that the NES and SNES Classic were for Nintendo. As we wrote at the time, both of those consoles hit the market and became collector’s items, practically impossible to find, almost at once. The situation was worse for the NES Classic, but neither platform was plentiful on or after launch day.

The PlayStation Classic, in contrast, has just received a $40 price cut online in all its territories. One could draw conclusions about how the NES and SNES have larger fan bases, but the more likely theory is that Sony shipped a half-baked offer and was rewarded with an entirely proportional level of sales.

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As the new year begins to sink in, let’s pump the brakes, and highlight a few standout games from 2018. We were pleasantly surprised to have yet another year squeezed full of sensational games, so trimming down the list to 10 technically impressive games was a true challenge.

We’ve done this style of list in years past, but it’s always worth having a refresher here for new readers. This list isn’t primarily focused on the use of raw GPU horsepower or the most innovative mechanics – it’s a celebration of technical achievement in every conceivable way.

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Now that it’s the most popular game in the world, Fortnite has become a target for both lawsuits and hackers. Security firm Check Point Software says Fortnite developer Epic Games had a major vulnerability in its system that could have allowed an attacker to play as the victim, purchase items, and even listen to the player’s microphone.

The vulnerability, which Epic Games confirms it has fixed, is part of its website rather than the game client itself. Like many hacks, it begins with getting the target to click on a malicious link. The attacker’s site doesn’t have to deposit any malware on the system, though. All it has to do is copy the Fortnite login token.

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Humans tend to think we’re adept at the games we create, but computers have proven time and time again that we’re just not fast enough to stay on top. Machines have defeated us in chess, Jeopardy!, and even the deviously complex board game Go. Google-owned DeepMind gets credit for that last one, and now it’s dominating another game: StarCraft II. After just 18 months, DeepMind has an AI that beats the world’s best StarCraft II players, and it’s not even close.

DeepMind called its Go-dominating AI “AlphaGo,” and the StarCraft-playing bot got a similar moniker. It’s called AlphaStar, and it has more than 200 years of practice under its belt. Back at Blizzcon in November, DeepMind said its machine learning platform had managed to beat the “Insane” difficulty in-game AI about half the time. Well, it’s gotten much better since then.

AlphaStar is a convolutional neural network. The team started with replays of pro matches, giving AlphaStar a starting point to begin playing the game. Through intensive training with competing models, DeepMind was able to teach AlphaStar how to play the game as well as the best human players. Over time, it whittled the AI down to the five best “agents,” and that’s what it deployed against some of the most skilled StarCraft II players in the world.

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Bandai Namco hasn’t exactly been the best steward of the Ace Combat series. After the somewhat controversial mainline installment early in the Xbox 360’s lifespan, we’ve only had spin-offs and experiments to tide us over. But after a decade of thumb-twiddling, arcade flight enthusiasts finally have something to crow about with Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown.

The Digital Foundry team analyzed Ace Combat 7, and the results are mostly good news. The developers opted for the tried-and-true Unreal Engine 4 to create an undeniably attractive world, and they’re targeting 60fps to live up to the PS2-era legacy. Fantastic, right? Right?!

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Epic is currently drowning in Fortnite cash, and it’s using this opportunity to mount a challenge to Steam. For more than a decade, Steam has been the uncontested king of online game distribution, and developers have been griping about that with increasing frequency. The Epic game store offers some free titles (in addition Fortnite) to entice users, but one recent release has been crashing because it was missing some “steam” files. No, not Steam files, but files called “steam.”

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You might think spending $60 on a new AAA video game is a lot, but three video game enthusiasts just spent more than $100,000 on a single game, and they don’t even plan to play it. The record-setting price for the game makes a bit more sense when you find out it’s an ultra-rare sealed early copy of Super Mario Bros. for the NES.

The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) launched in Japan in 1983 as the Famicom, but it wouldn’t come to North America until two years later. Nintendo wasn’t sure how the NES would be received in the US, so it started the rollout in several “test markets” like New York and Los Angeles. The games produced for this initial run are known as “test market games,” and that’s what makes the newly sold copy of Super Mario Bros. so valuable.

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I remember the first time I heard about Diablo. The game had actually already been ought for a year, but I and my college-age friends didn’t hear about it until the beginning of 1997. Most of our college campus shut down in January for Winter Term, but freshman were required to stay on campus to complete a course of our choosing. I don’t remember what I studied. I do remember Diablo.

That’s why it’s more than a little odd to see Diablo returning to the screen in all its pixelated glory on GoG. Not that there’s anything wrong with GoG — in fact, up until Epic launched its own game store earlier this year, GoG was the closest thing in existence to a Steam competitor. But it’s a little odd to see Blizzard, which owns its own digital distribution service, ponying up to put one of its own games on a competitor’s storefront.

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It’s hard to predict what the next big trend in consumer technology will be. A few years ago, everyone was convinced it would be home 3D displays. Companies raced to get 3D TVs and monitors into stores so we could all watch Avatar and play 3D games. Even smartphones started to launch with 3D screens. It’s unlikely you have any 3D displays in your home because they were expensive, impractical, and lacking content. Nvidia is finally admitting defeat in 3D — it will end support for 3D Vision after the next driver update in April 2019. That driver will also be the last for Kepler mobile GPUs.

There are several ways to do 3D on the small screen, and that was actually one of the problems. You had to commit to one version of the technology, and getting matching devices and content could be a real hassle. Heaven help you if you wanted to buy a 3D Blu-ray player. What little interest there is in 3D gaming has moved on to VR, but even that has limited consumer appeal.

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Star Wars: Dark Forces enjoys an iconic reputation among PC gamers. It was the first major video game title set in the Star Wars universe to adopt first-person Doom-style controls — and unlike the myriad number of Doom clones that were flooding the market at the time, Dark Forces was actually good. Even better than that, it told a completely original story in the Star Wars universe at a time when the EU was barely in its infancy and nerds were hungry for new Star Wars, in any form.

Now, that classic game is getting a remake — but not an official one. Jason Lewis, a senior developer at Obsidian, is working on recreating the game and has posted art to his ArtStation page. All images shown are his property.

The artwork is gorgeous. Lewis isn’t a character artist or modeler, so it’s not clear when we’ll see a playable game, or if it can even secure a release at all (he’s working on a stormtrooper, according to PC Gamer). Not all companies have been willing to play nice with fan remakes and recreations. But Dark Forces is an iconic, incredible game, even if it’s somewhat overshadowed by its sequel. So why do I call it “terrible” that we’re seeing this happen?

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Numerous rumors have pointed to Nintendo’s intention to launch a revamped Switch hardware variant as the console enters its crucial third year. The rumors have bounced back and forth between a more powerful Switch and a budget model. Now, a report from the Wall Street Journal claims that both devices are coming later this year.

The third year of a console’s life cycle is considered make or break for its long-term success. Most gamers have made their choices for that generation, so it gets harder to attract new customers. This is usually when new hardware variants launch, generally with smaller form factors and lower prices. However, there have also been some more expensive and powerful mid-cycle consoles like the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X.

Nintendo has reportedly been in talks with partners about the new hardware for months. Those who have used the new Switches say they include numerous feature changes. So, this isn’t just a Switch “Slim” release. One or both consoles will likely have a new LCD from Sharp instead of the current JDI screens.

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Daedalic Entertainment has announced that it’s working on a new adventure game centered around one of the most iconic characters in all of fantasy. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum — unfortunately the only art or asset available is the logo shown above — will focus on the titular character’s life before at least some of the events discussed in JRR Tolkien’s novels.

In a recent interview, Daedalic Entertainment CEO Carsten Fichtelmann discussed the developer’s plans for the character. “We’re concentrating on the character of Gollum, and we’re telling his story before we learn about what happens to him in the books,” Fichtelmann said. “So it’s definitely new content that we’ll see.”

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Anyone who played computer games in the 1990s probably spent a good deal of time doing battle in Warcraft and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. These classic real-time strategy games have never been available digitally, but that ends today. Both games are on sale at GOG.com. You can even play Warcraft II online — Blizzard’s servers are still running all these years later.

The first game (Warcraft: Orcs and Humans) launched in 1994, taking place in Azeroth and consisting of just human and orc characters. The sequel came out just a year later featuring more unit types. The GOG version of Warcraft II also includes the “Beyond the Dark Portal” expansion pack.

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The trailer for Episode XI: The Rise of Skywalker has dropped. When we last saw our heroes, the Rebellion — excuse me, the Resistance — had seemingly been reduced to something that could fit inside a YT-1300 freighter. One of the questions for Episode IX has been how the Resistance could possibly mount a credible assault on the First Order in this kind of condition.

The new trailer does not answer this question. In fact, it doesn’t really tell us much about the final chapter of the Skywalker saga, beyond that this is the final chapter of the Skywalker saga.

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Gamers have been curious about what Sony might have up its sleeve for months. The PlayStation 4 era is drawing to an end, with a new console expected by the fall of next year. Questions about what the PS5 might look like, or what kind of capabilities it would have, however, have remained uncertain. As he did with the PS4 generation, Mark Cerny is making the rounds to talk about the new platform. Some of what he’s disclosed so far sounds like a doozy.

The as-yet-unnamed console (referred to here as the PS5 for simplicity’s sake) is built on third-generation Ryzen with Zen 2 architecture and is built on 7nm CPU technology. This isn’t surprising — the sharp improvement in power consumption that AMD CEO Lisa Su described at CES is going to be very interesting to console manufacturers, who want to save every milliwatt of power they can.

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The team behind the Mortal Kombat series is one of the most reliable fighting game developers in the world. They’ve been cranking out well-liked fighters on the regular for nearly 30 years now, and Mortal Kombat 11 might be their best game to-date with the exception of its ugly lootbox implementation.

Mitchell Saltzman gave MK11 an amazing score of 9/10 at our sister site IGN – the highest score any MK has ever received from that outlet. The story mode, intricate mechanics, incredible visuals, and even the online performance receive incredibly high praise from Saltzman, but the shocking amount of grinding needed to unlock customization items from the krypt prevents the game from reaching its highest highs.

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Blizzard has announced the ship date for WoW Classic, a 15-year-old game that is, by virtually every measure, a more inferior version than the WoW that exists today. I’m both excited for it and genuinely annoyed at how excited I am. Facts first, wangst to follow.

On August 26 at 3 PM PDT, WoW Classic will go live on a staggered schedule across the world. Blizzard writes:
[INDENT]Beginning May 15, select WoW players will be invited to participate in a small-scale, focused closed beta test. Players will also get a chance to help put our servers and technology through their paces in a series of stress tests running from May through July—you can opt in now through Account Management and select the WoW Classic beta. Subsequent stress tests will extend the opportunity to even more players. Level caps will also be in place to ensure we’re emphasizing the “stress” in “stress test.

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One of the most interesting releases of the year isn’t a modern game at all — it’s a refreshed look at a 22 year-old title. Quake II probably isn’t a game a lot of modern players are even familiar with, which adds to some of the interest around the work Nvidia has done to refresh this decidedly ancient game with a massive facelift.

According to NV, the RTX-enabled version of Quake II will play on a GeForce RTX graphics card “or other capable hardware,” which likely means this release is essentially an NV exclusive. It is, however, a smart idea to allow people to experience ray tracing on older GPUs. Virtually any NV GPU that supports RTX ray tracing (and Nvidia has enabled the capability on its Pascal family of GPUs) should be able to handle Quake II, given the game’s absolutely anemic requirements in every other category. We’ve already seen how games with modest GPU requirements can be upgraded to stunning effect with a recent mod that added path tracing to Minecraft.

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Microsoft launched its subscription-based Xbox Game Pass in 2017, and the service has proven popular with avid console gamers. There has always been limited PC integration with Microsoft-developed titles, but the company’s new initiative goes a step further. The new PC version of Game Pass will bring more than 100 games to PC on a subscription basis.

On the Xbox console, those on the Game Pass subscription have access to a few dozen games, including some new releases like Mortal Kombat X and Forza Horizon 4. These games usually appear on Game Pass on the same day as they arrive at retail. It’s important to note that this isn’t a streaming system like Microsoft’s upcoming xCloud product. Game Pass titles are downloaded in a traditional manner and played on your local hardware. You can continue playing them for as long as you keep paying the $10 monthly fee.

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Game streaming has been tried before, and it’s never been a smashing success. Google thinks now is the time to launch its own game streaming platform. It unveiled Stadia at GDC several months back, but it left out many key details. In a new live-streamed announcement, Google has revealed pricing, games, and the launch date for Stadia. The service won’t be cheap, especially if you want to use it when it launches later this year.

Stadia is in the same vein as Nvidia GeForce Now and the now-defunct OnLive. Rather than rendering a game locally, a Stadia instance in the cloud does the heavy lifting and streams video of the gameplay down to your device. Your control inputs go back up to the cloud to control the gameplay. Google is using a lot of custom hardware and video compression in hopes of making the process smoother than past attempts.

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Companies like Nvidia and OnLive have tried to make game streaming technology work for years, but we may finally be reaching critical mass. Google is getting ready to launch its Stadia platform, and it might have a shot at succeeding. Meanwhile, Nvidia is testing a revamped GeForce Now, and Microsoft promises xCloud will launch soon. Bethesda is preparing to roll out its own game streaming technology called Orion. However, this isn’t an alternative to current game streaming platforms. Instead, Orion will integrate with games to make streaming services better.

All game streaming services work on a similar premise. Instead of rendering frames on your local hardware, a server someplace in the world renders the game for you. What you see on your screen is essentially a compressed video stream of the gameplay. Your control inputs go back up to the server to interact with the game. It’s a bit like playing a game with very, very long wires.

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At first glance, Velocity Micro’s Raptor Z55 (starts at $1,249; $2,999 as tested) could easily be mistaken for your everyday home computer. Slap a Dell logo on the front and many people would accept it as just another office PC. But underneath its almost entirely black aluminum exterior rests some of the best gaming hardware money can buy, as our sister site PCMag.com found in its review.

Build Specs

Caged inside of these metal walls rests an Intel Core i9-9900K processor that has eight CPU cores overclocked to blistering fast 5.1GHz. Immediately noticeable after unlocking the cage and removing the side-panel is the system’s CPU closed-loop water cooler that rests near the front bottom of the case.

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This system is also packing a powerful EVGA Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card and 16GB of DDR4 memory on an MSI MPG Z390M Gaming Edge AC motherboard. A 512GB NVMe Samsung 970 Pro SSD and a 1TB 7,200RPM HDD are included for storage, and the system is powered by a 750W EVGA 750BQ power supply.

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You might be able to play World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. with your eyes closed, but can you play it at lightning speed while other Marios hurl turtle shells at you? Maybe, someone else is probably better. You can find out by playing Mario Royale in your browser right now. Don’t wait too long, though. Nintendo is sure to get this game purged from the internet soon.

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One of the areas where reviews sometimes fall short is in providing perspective on how component performance evolves over time. While the yearly new hardware launch cadence provides periodic opportunities to revisit how older components stack up to newer ones, the focus in any given launch is going to be on the CPU or GPU that’s being launched, not previous cards. Title-specific coverage, meanwhile, is typically measured and written in the days immediately following a launch, often as part of a game or product review. Stack these two trends together, and it can be more difficult than it ought to be for gamers to figure out how performance has changed over time and to tease out which GPUs are holding their value better than others.

With this in mind, we’ve completed an analysis of the data sets we gathered in our recent review of AMD’s Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT, as well as the Gigabyte Aorus RTX 2080 Xtreme 8GB. We updated all of our GPU data sets in late June / early July of 2019, which makes this a good time to look back at how Pascal, Turing, and GCN performance have each evolved over the past nine months.

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Growing up, I was not a console gamer. My parents steadfastly refused my entreaties for an NES or any console and only grudgingly tolerated my affection for computer games. I suspect they felt computers were going to be Too Important to the future to smash my primary means of interacting with them, and they respected the idea that I had the right to spend my own money on hobbies of my choice, but there were limits to their tolerance. Computer games fell on the right side of the line, barely. Console games did not. As a result, my own introduction to gaming came squarely from classics of the mid-to-late 1980s PC space — Space Quest III and Ultima IV were the two titles I remember playing first.

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I played through Final Fantasy I, II, and III at a friend’s house, but I didn’t ever log much time on the side-scrollers that were popular. I played enough Super Mario Bros. to beat 1-1 and 1-2 and that’s about it. Recently, thanks to emulators, I’ve picked up some SNES games that I never played before — games like Castlevania IV, Super Mario World, and Super Metroid.

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I genuinely wasn’t sure what I’d think. Mostly, I’ve been impressed. The skills required to play these titles well — and to be clear, I don’t play them well, having never acquired more than a rudimentary level of skill with a controller — are about more than just quick reflexes. They demand the player become intimately familiar with the position and movement of enemies through 2D space, timing certain attacks and jumps precisely. The games often challenge you with cleverly placed gotchas, like a Mario bullet that flies through the exact space you will be occupying if you attempt to grab a certain power-up. These puzzles can be maddening. The game developers leave hints to tell you that something can be done, but figuring out exactly how to do it is a challenge.

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There’s a long-standing, good-natured feud between the different gaming factions on the internet. The console people bicker over who has the best exclusives, but all of them can unite against the PC gamers. A new project from custom PC builder Origin could bring everyone together in awe — the Big O has all three current-gen consoles and a gaming PC in a single box. You can’t buy it, but it really is a thing to behold.

The first step was figuring out if all the components would even fit. There is an almost endless assortment of custom PC components, but the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro are immutable — if they don’t fit in the case, the project isn’t happening. Origin liberated the Xbox and Playstation from their original cases, and lovingly integrated the guts in its custom full-tower Genesis chassis. To keep the consoles cool in the confined space, Origin turned to a hard-line liquid cooling setup from Cryogenic. The only major drawback to putting the consoles inside the case like this is that the optical drives had to go. That means the PS4 and Xbox are digital-only. That’s the way things are going anyway.

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There are precious few first-person shooter franchises as iconic or beloved as Doom. With the series enjoying a resurgence of late, gamers are increasingly interested in going back to replay the classic games that got it all started. They can do that now on current-generation game consoles. However, these decades-old games include some very modern frustrations.

The Doom games follow the exploits of the unnamed “Doomguy” as he does battle with the forces of Hell in the distant future. Doom’s unrelenting action and creepy visuals made it a massive success. Along with Wolfenstein 3D, Doom helped define first-person shooters with features like 3D graphics, multiplayer, and more.

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Loot boxes have been controversial since they were introduced. That controversy was turbo-charged back in 2017, when EA and DICE decided to make the entire economy of Star Wars Battlegrounds II entirely dependent on randomized loot box drops and insanely long grinds. That particular shameful cash grab may have exploded in the company’s face like the Death Star over Endor, but it kicked off an investigation into how loot boxes work across the globe. The FTC held a workshop on gaming loot boxes on Wednesday, August 7, to discuss issues surrounding this method of dispensing in-game loot. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo announced a new initiative at said workshop — one that will require all games published on their platforms to disclose the chance of receiving rewards.

Publishers have similarly rallied to state they’ll support the initiative, including Activision Blizzard, Bandai Namco, Bethesda, Bungie, EA, Take-Two Interactive, Ubisoft, Warner Bros., and Wizards of the Coast. All of these announcements and statements, however, apply to consoles — not PCs. Valve updated DOTA 2 to show loot box disclosure data last year, but it hasn’t made disclosing this information mandatory for games on its platform. Neither have smaller game stores like Epic or GoG, at least not yet.

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Last week, Mojang announced that the Minecraft Super Duper Graphics Pack (SDGP) that Microsoft had promised back in 2017 was canceled, permanently. No additional information was offered on why the update was canceled, or what the team had been working on for the past two years before canceling it. As of today, Nvidia has announced that it will be developing an exclusive ray tracing pack for Minecraft for Nvidia GPU owners.

Mojang’s announcement states: “It’ll be playable on Windows 10 with devices that are capable of DirectX R, such as with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU (and we plan to expand it to future platforms that support DirectX R raytracing).”

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When World of Warcraft Classic launched this week, no one was quite sure what the player response would be. The amount of interest in the launch has been massive, but how many people would show up to play?
The answer: Tons. So many, that the question is now “How many will stick around for the long haul?”
The game is mobbed, to put it politely. I managed to log on Monday for a few hours, probably because people weren’t aware that the official North American opening was on Monday, not Tuesday. Tuesday night, the queues were basically impossible — an attempted log in at 8 PM found me stuck in a 3-hour queue. Even at 10:30 PM — when sane people on the East Coast are headed for bed — I was looking at a half-hour login queue.

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It turns out that video games may be an excellent method of teaching skills to artificial intelligence assistants. That’s the theory of a group of researchers working for Facebook, who have focused on Minecraft as a potential teaching tool for building generalist AI — a so-called ‘virtual assistant.’ The research team isn’t trying to build an artificial intelligence that’s super-good at classifying images or other content — it wants to build a generalist AI that can perform a much larger number of tasks reasonably well.

This is, to-date, an under-studied area of research. The authors’ write:

There has been measured progress in this setting as well, with the mainstreaming of virtual personal assistants. These are able to accomplish thousands of tasks communicated via natural language, using multi-turn dialogue for clarifications or further specification. The assistants are able to interact with other applications to get data or perform actions.
Nevertheless, many difficult problems remain open. Automatic natural language understanding (NLU) is still rigid and limited to constrained scenarios. Methods for using dialogue or other natural language for rich supervision remain primitive. In addition, because they need to be able to reliably and predictably solve many simple tasks, their multi-modal inputs, and the constraints of their maintenance and deployment, assistants are modular systems, as opposed to monolithic ML models. Modular ML systems that can improve themselves from data while keeping well-defined interfaces are still not well studied.

According to the team, they picked Minecraft because it offered a regular distribution of tasks with “hand-holds for NLU research,” as well as enjoyable opportunities for human-AI interaction, with plenty of opportunities for human-in-the-loop research. Minecraft, for those of you who haven’t played or heard of it, is a block-based crafting and exploration game in which players explore a 3D voxel grid universe populated with various types of materials, neutral characters, and enemies. The team’s goal is to build an AI virtual assistant that can be given instructions in natural language by a Minecraft player, and that can reliably complete some of the primary tasks that player might engage in, including gathering materials, building structures, fighting mobs, and crafting items.

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The Guinness Book of World Records has given EA a prestigious award in its annals of history. A sharp-eyed Redditor noticed the award, given to the video game publisher for one of its initial responses to the Star Wars Battlefront II loot crate controversy.

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You’d have to be living under a rock with no internet connection to be unaware of how popular battle royale-style games have become. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was the first major success in this genre, but then there was Fortnite, which has gone on to be the most popular game in the world. Now, every game seems to have a Battle Royale mode, even games that don’t need them. Case in point: Civilization VI. The latest update to the game adds a new mode called Red Death, a 12-player battle royale.

Civilization VI is the latest entry in the long-running strategy franchise, initially launched in 2016. Like past games in the series, Civilization VI puts you in the shoes of a great leader, guiding a civilization from ancient times into the modern era. Along the way, you have to battle barbarians, establish a culture, spread religion, and hold off the advances of hostile civilizations elsewhere on the map. This all takes place in the framework of a turn-based game, which makes the move to battle royale rather perplexing.

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To date, Sony has kept pretty quiet about the PlayStation 5. Thanks to a new interview with PS5 system architect Mark Cerny, we can now confirm one detail — the machine will officially be known as the PlayStation 5. That’s not exactly unexpected, but given that companies occasionally like to toss a wrench in things, it’s nice to know. The launch date, as expected, is “Holidays 2020” — another expected-but-nice-to-have-confirmed data point.

The interview with Cerny, published in Wired, touches on an array of details rather than being a deep technical discussion. He confirms that the PlayStation 5 has hardware-level support for ray tracing, not some kind of software-only solution. It’s not clear why people thought there wasn’t; AMD has confirmed that hardware ray tracing is baked into its upcoming 2020 GPUs, and the feature is expected for consoles in at least some form (it isn’t clear yet what kind of hardware solution this is).

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One of the problems facing Google Stadia — beyond Google’s habit of slaughtering every project that doesn’t become an instant, industry-dominating hit — is that there’s an intrinsic latency baked-in to using it. There’s simply no way to send data over hundreds to thousands of miles and not have intrinsic latency attached. This may not be a problem if you live near a Google Stadia datacenter, but it’ll definitely impact the experience to some degree for everyone who doesn’t.
According to Google, it has a plan to beat this problem, an approach that will allow it to actually make games faster remotely than they can be locally. “Ultimately, we think in a year or two we’ll have games that are running faster and feel more responsive in the cloud than they do locally,” Google VP of engineering Madj Bakar told Edge Magazine, via PCGamesN, “regardless of how powerful the local machine is.”

How will they achieve this? By using extensive machine prediction to model what players are going to do, and then doing it for them, before they actually start doing it. This “negative latency” will be governed using machine prediction. In some cases, the game might accelerate displayed FPS to reduce lag between button inputs and displayed outcomes. In others, it may predict button-presses before the player actually commits to them.

It’s not clear if this technology is functional yet. Tests of Google Stadia have often identified latency as an issue, including this report from PC Gamer from back in March. But while this may help make Stadia successful, there are serious questions about whether this approach is suitable for every type of game.

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