J4MES OX4D

Valve are releasing a new controller, new VR kit and a console Valve announces a new Steam ‘console’, controller and VR headset | VGC WWW.VIDEOGAMESCHRONICLE.COM The Steam Machine, Steam Controller and Steam Frame have all been revealed… Lots of information in the above.

Game looks and runs great! I think I paid £27 for this which is a total bargain. In contrast, Fallout 4 Anniversary is £52.99 and the upgrade alone for existing users is £35. This is stupidly good value.

Did not expect something like this but its early access release is imminent Assetto Corsa Rally on Steam STORE.STEAMPOWERED.COM Assetto Corsa Rally is a high-fidelity rally sim built for precision and challenge. With 3D laser-scanned stages and cars, professional co-driver support, and dynamic conditions, it delivers a demanding...

Just when you thought Bethesda couldn't sink any further, they've just released Fallout 4 Anniversary for £53/$60 and in the process broken the majority of established mods. They are also now offering 'their' own paid mods for an extra £20. So basically they have repackaged something you could've bought for £14.99 a month ago, butchered every mod in the process - some of which had 6+ years of work on them so they can reintroduce their paid mod fetish which has failed 3 times already. This company is beyond being creatively and morally bankrupt. I can't see how they will survive beyond 2030 even with a new Elder Scrolls game. Microsoft also need to shoulder a huge portion of the blame as they've done nothing for the studio who still rely on outdated tech and concepts.

Not good and another big loss for Sony. Crazy how many studios are screwing up so much when they have all the resources and backing they could ever need. Sony Says Bungie Hasn’t Brought in as Much Money as It Thought It Would When It Bought the Developer, as Destiny 2 Falls Off a Cliff - IGN WWW.IGN.COM It’s a tough time for Bungie and Destiny 2, with parent company Sony saying the studio has failed to meet its sales and user engagement expectations.

They are basically using the same 20hz tick rate servers COD Warzone adopted in 2022 which is why the experience feels garbage. MW3 from 2023 uses 60hz servers which is why it's infinitely smoother and more responsive. BF4 had the same issues at launch along with the ropey netcode and invisible wall glitches but many private ranked servers on PC since then use up to 90hz servers and the difference is absolutely nuts. Many players in BF6 are just using casual servers now because they are better quality despite halved progression rates. In some cases you can have a better experience joining a server in Chile from Eastern Europe than playing on a DICE server in Paris. EA cheapskating it to the max.

I grabbed this and have really enjoyed it so far. Really refined game that looks great and runs incredibly well. I've done just under 5 hours so far with 7 successful extractions in 8 attempts. I've only killed one human so far and have mostly just been focused on obtaining essential loot and doing a few quests. Unlocked the second location this evening and am currently level 6. The action can be really tense at times but the most scariest thing about this game is the tumbleweed🤣

The maps are largely (excuse the pun) bad Battlefield maps but I don't think they are all atrocious MP maps in general. These are what COD maps used to be 15 years ago. After 75 or so hours, here's my final thoughts on them:- Blackwell Fields - now this map is an atrocity. Terrible visibility, way too open, aesthetically nasty and just a hideous layout. Cairo - decent map and plenty of destruction. Drone glitchers galore though. Works well in several modes. Manhattan Bridge - good layout and decent size. C flag is well-positioned for a good battle. Action on and off the ground and it works well in all modes. Empire State - really small and frantic. There's very little room for any tactics and squad play is irrelevant. Decent MP map but not a good Battlefield experience. New Sobek City - one of the bigger maps but still really small. Pretty fun in Breakthrough but lacks any scale or complexity like the Gulf of Oman map. Mirak Valley - tries to be a BF1 map but feels mostly like a barren land. Big but not huge. Still fun in breakthrough but hardly feels like a traditional map from this series. Iberian Offensive - not a very good looking map. It's really basic but has a decent enough flow. Doesn't feel like a Battlefield map. Operation Firestorm - 30% smaller than the older variants and it feels really watered-down. The inflated colours make it look really off too. A horrible remake. Liberation Peak - A good size and finally a map where vehicles can utilise the landscape. Still feels a bit compact on how the action flows but a good all-rounder. No naval maps in inexcusable and it's clear the developers don't like water because it fragments the action and they are probably worried people will get bored if they don't have a gun fight every 10-15 seconds. I think there is probably only one half-decent Battlefield map in this game and the rest are detrimental to the series although they aren't terrible in MP terms and how the game is designed. One map per season is not good enough either especially if it is as bad as the Blackwell Fields. Considering how bad the maps were in 2042, there really hasn't been many good maps out of this franchise for a very long time. Most of the maps also negate squad play that made the series so special. You can literally ignore your squad the whole game and still end up top with 45-60 kills and 20 captures. In older BF titles, squads were imperative especially for maintaining territory and pushing objectives. In this game flags change hands so often, if you ain't got double figures of captures come the end of the game, you've barely played the objective.

Agree. I'd consider looking at Arc Raiders as it's made by the same people who used to make the old Battlefield games like BC2, BF3 and Battlefield 4. Looks a unique concept that's insanely optimised and has some stunning visuals. Almost 500k playing on Steam and it's really cheap too. The only good future mainstream games will come from publishers like these. The likes of EA, Activision and co are all doomed beyond repair.

I've been playing for 75 or so hours, reached level 70, done the campaign, played the BR and overall, this game is just a pile of shit and so far below the standards we deserve it is truly laughable. This is far worse than the WW3 game from a few years ago that flopped. I've uninstalled BF6 and will probably just go back to either BF4 or BF1 which are both vastly superior games in every sense. Terrible map design, desync galore, completely broken challenges, conflicted design philosophy and just a general lack of refinement across the board. It feels like a Chinese knock-off published by Tencent or something. Season One offering of the worst map in Battlefield history along with 50% challenges related to the BR has just killed it. The battle pass is utterly miserable and devoid of any worthwhile content and they've shifted to low-budget servers since the second week which has butchered the experience further. The campaign is a joke - feels like a lame tacked-on narrative from 2008 but rather than have a highly cinematic and polished spectacle like Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3, it feels like you're just doing generic missions on multiplayer maps with boring objectives like surviving waves and activating/destroying points. The story is totally predictable and the main villain you only see about 3 times and don't even know what their motive is. This game is also in a far worse state in terms of the netcode than Battlefield 4 was but it just isn't as noticeable and gamers are used to being served games of such mediocre technical quality so it's become the norm now. It would've been absolutely horrific 10-12 years ago and likely killed the game after a fortnight. Even Call of Duty at its worst should comfortably beat this. It's barely an improvement on how BF2042 ended.

I may finally grab it on Steam but it all depends on the price and the state of the game. It feels a bit late in the day to be releasing it on Steam but I can still see it doing well, certainly better than that Gray Zone Warfare.

Same people that will now ply Rockstar even more money for the online mode whilst they wait plus will buy the GTA V Enhanced Definitive Game of the Year Remastered edition that will probably come out. My hype for this game is zero and has always been. It probably will be good but when it is due out, I couldn't care less.

They apparently sacked an entire studio for gross misconduct in relation to confidential information leaked online. Those employers are backed by a union but it's hard to tell whether this actually happened in which it is a severe breach of contract or Take2 are looking for an easy way out to cull more employees now the job is 95% done. I'd say it's the latter because I can't see how 40 individual people would collectively leak such information at this stage. It'll probably go to a tribunal and then Rockstar will just frustrate the process and try and pay them off limited compo and piss them off to such a degree, they wouldn't ever want their jobs back.

Another 6 months until 19th November 2026 which is more than a year away.

Battlefield 6 Campaign

BF6 challenges be like

I think it is because when you fuse all these Codified ingredients together, you essentially get a completely different game. There is very little difference between this and what we played 3 years ago in Call of Duty and it's clear this game was developed off the back of that and by ex-COD devs. Battlefield maintaining its identity with all the originality it created was far more important but they've clearly wanted to entice COD players to the series when COD was at its most vulnerable, but this has come at the cost of BF's core design and without doing anything new or innovative. This game is miles off MW2019 and doesn't have much room to manoeuvre in terms of innovation. It just feels like they are recycling so much that we've seen the past 6 years. I don't mind Battlefield moving away from its identity and evolving but there is nothing here that we haven't seen in many other live service games in the past several years and all the padded-monetisation is really piss poor too. These changes could hurt the game because if they lose 50% of players back to COD then all these changes were in vain and then the developers will have to cling on to the alienated Battlefield community to rework things - something they did for 4 years straight after they screwed up royally with 2042.

I think it also is reflected in the general pacing and the amount of engagements players find themselves in. Stims, knee sliding and very generous mechanics make it blur more and more into COD. There are also little consequences for loss of territory and objectives, and even the squad system lacks identity. Plus the challenges and progression system is a carbon-copy and is nowhere near as rewarding or interesting. The interface and how the BR is framed is a ridiculous clone of MW2 back in 2022.

Apparently they were quite taken aback when questioned about it so I'm guessing they just said that to keep people happy and probably don't have anything planned or developed currently. Naval maps should've been in there from the off but with there being no naval maps even in Battlefield 2042 then I can't see it happening anytime soon. Seems like these developers want things strictly Codified and boots on the ground outside of land and air vehicles.

Doesn't surprise me sadly. Games like these need consistent and clear development and they need to get decisions correct from the get-go. When you piss players off early on, lose a huge chunk of them and then spend the next two years trying to recover to a small population, it's kinda game over really.

There's no real standout maps for me but the larger New York one is quite good. The rest are all pretty meh in Battlefield terms and even the two bigger ones are pretty small and rather bland. You compare these to the staggeringly detailed and carefully scaled and constructed ones from from older titles - even BFV, and they are very plain and compact in comparison. Sure, you can get into gunfights aplenty but that isn't what this series is all about and you can tell from interviews that the developers are petrified of modern gamers getting bored because they aren't in a firefight every 15 seconds. Flags also change hands so often that even conquest has become arcade domination. You look at the Sobek City map compared to the Gulf of Oman one and it's pretty embarrassing in comparison. No naval maps is absolutely criminal also. I don't think there is a truly terrible one aside from the new one oil released in season one, as they are all playable to what Battlefield has become in its design philosophy, but there's is zero that radically changes how matches play and in the roles you choose. The watered-down Operation Firestorm is another huge showcase of how inferior maps can be in the wrong design hands.

Dishonored (2012) This game is pure art still and timeless

So Season 1 launched today along with the Battle Royale mode and the game has nosedived into an absolute tacky mess and has gone full-Call of Duty. The user interface is absolutely atrocious and resembles that of MW2 back in 2022 with its TV streaming-style panel menus. It was bad before but now the bloat is horrendous especially with monetisation and locked items. They said the BR mode was standalone yet progression and challenges have been forced into the core BF6 game so it really is nothing more than a shameful bait and switch hook to get people playing that. I want challenges for things like conquest, breakthrough and escalation and not shite attributed to the BR like getting 100 kills within 10 seconds of landing. I played on the new Blackwell Oil Fields map which was an extremely dissatisfying experience. Another very small environment with a terrible layout that is way too open and has absolutely shocking visibility. In BF4 we were getting themed map packs of the highest quality but this is just a shameful offering even for free. This is what the map looks like and it's just so uninspired and hideous. I think this game will ultimately lose a lot of players in the next couple of weeks. The battle pass is a pathetic cash grab and the progression in core and on the pass is just so tedious and boring. The maps are fast becoming stale and even new gimmick modes wont change anything. The battle royale will split the community further and I expect a fair few people will go running back to COD irrespective of how potentially poor that may be also. This isn't Battlefield anymore by gameplay or its design framework - it's another Call of Duty in a slightly different skin. I have zero interest in BO7 but that game does have a strong launch line up and the season one content offering seems solid also.

Subscriptions are unviable for both the consumer and the content publisher in most cases. I have zero and if I see something I want to watch, play or listen to, I will buy it outright if it's worth the money and that way everyone gets paid a fair price. The likes of Spotify have bloated in the music industry so much so, talent is becoming buried and some artists barely get paid £90 for 50,000 plays. Even top artists have reportedly only seen about $1500 after deductions whilst reaching 1m listens to a song. We already know what a shambles Microsoft have made of their Game Pass in killing most of their in-house developers and reducing income to laughable levels, all in the aim of trying to take a slice out of Sony. TV is probably the most attractive form of subscription but that's riddled with bloat between services and content. You can spend more time trying to find something to watch than actually watching. The Xbox subscription will cost $360 for a year next month and if people are also paying $150 for music and another $150-300 on TV and retail subscriptions then it tots up to huge levels of expenditure for consumable products you don't own and wont be able to revisit. I can't support streaming as a concept or the damage it does to the 'small people' aka developers and musicians who don't have much of a choice but to go down this route and see income potential crumbling to laughably low levels. The likes of Microsoft and Spotify will never reveal the income dividends which says it all.

9/11 Operator FREE on Steam Save 100% on 911 Operator on Steam STORE.STEAMPOWERED.COM Game about the difficult work of people that manage emergency lines and services. Answer incoming calls and react properly - give first aid instructions, advise, dispatch correct number of firemen / police /...