Gears 6 will be announced on June 9th, according to a report by The Verge.
]]>Microsoft have announced that a new Game Pass tier will replace Xbox Live Gold on consoles. The new Xbox Game Pass Core tier will cost £7/$10 for a monthly subscription and £50/$60 for an annual one. Microsoft haven’t announced plans to bring Game Pass Core to PC players, although the new tier costs almost the same amount as the (frankly much better value) PC Game Pass variant - for now, at least.
Starting on September 14th, Xbox Live Gold subscribers will be automatically converted to Game Pass Core, which allows access to online multiplayer, exclusive discounts, and a compact collection of games. Xbox’s monthly freebie program Games With Gold is also getting axed, although you can still play previously redeemed games as long as you’re subscribed to either the Core or Ultimate tiers.
]]>Netflix’s take on chonky soldiers vs. equally chonky underground aliens is, excuse me, gearing up. Last November, the streaming service announced plans to adapt Gears Of War’s chainsaw-swinging into an animated series and a live-action film. The latter has now tapped a writer. Jon Spaihts is the Oscar-nominated screenwriter behind Dune, Prometheus, and Doctor Strange, and he’s now writing the Gears Of War film, Netflix announced today.
]]>Gears 5 has been out for nearly a couple years now, but don't start thinking about Gears 6, or Gears anything, for a while. The Coalition still have plans to bring more maps and characters to Gears 5 in two more Operations, they say, but the studio is also focusing on transitioning to the newest Unreal Engine. That's going to take most of their attention, so we shouldn't be expecting to hear about new Gears games for a while, they've warned.
]]>Gears Of War is a juggernaut: Microsoft have made tons of money from it, critics have heaped praise on almost everything (including Judgement) with COGs on the box, and fans love it so much that they often get horrible tattoos of the logo all over their bodies.
]]>Regularly your recap of the last seven days in PC video gaming, this week's show is a little different as you'll hear us mainly chatting about all of the lovely video games we'll be getting our hands on over the course of the next twelve months.
]]>I don't particularly like the idea of being purposefully captured by aliens in order to kill them from inside their big scary lairs, but this appears to be exactly what The Coalition will have you doing in the first story expansion for Gears Of War 5. The Hivebusters DLC arrived today, dropping players in with a familiar team ready to get going on their debut mission to bust some hives.
]]>Continuing Gears Of War's weird dalliance with celebrity, Gears 5 is adding Dave Bautista as a replacement actor for John DiMaggio's Marcus Fenix. They've made Dave's face and had him re-record all of Fenix's lines so your man Drax The Destroyer fully replaces the old man of Gears, because reasons. Mystifying. It'll be optional, mind. Some more-substantial newness is coming in the form of the first Gears 5 story DLC, named Hivebusters.
]]>GDC may be cancelled for now, but that isn't stopping Microsoft from releasing all the talks they had planned for the event. On March 17th and 18th they'll be streaming all the sessions they had ready for the Game Developers Conference over on Mixer, meaning those who wouldn't have made it their in the first place will be able to listen in, too.
The developer-focused sessions include a bunch of talks on accessibility in games (like Gears 5), some info on Project xCloud, and there's even a talk from Rare about Sea Of Thieves (which, naturally, I'm unreasonably excited about).
]]>Rod Fergusson has worked on every Gears Of War game over the last 15 years, from starting the original Gears Of War with Epic, to helping establish The Coalition studio to work on the rest of the series. But now he's heading to pastures new, joining Blizzard to oversee all things Diablo.
"Leaving is bittersweet as I love our Gears family, the fans, and everyone at The Coalition and Xbox," he tweeted. "Thank you, it has been an honor and a privilege to work with you all."
]]>Playing games with other people is one of the beloved traditions of liking video games at all, and if you're the friendly type like us at RPS, then you'll enjoy games where you work with others, rather than against them. That's why we've put together our list of the best co-op games on PC for you to find common ground with your besties. Whether you want to shoot monsters together, shoot robots together, or get a divorcing couple to work together as they run around their own home as tiny doll versions of themselves, then you can find something to enjoy on this list of co-op games.
]]>HDR on PC hasn't improved much in 2019. Despite there being more HDR gaming monitors than ever before, the very best gaming monitors for HDR continue to be quite expensive compared to non-HDR monitors, and the situation around Windows 10 support for it is still a bit of a mess. However, provided you're willing to fight through all that, then the next step on your path to high dynamic range glory is to get an HDR compatible graphics card.
Below, you'll find a complete list of all the Nvidia and AMD graphics cards that have built-in support for HDR, as well as everything you need to know about getting one that also supports Nvidia and AMD's own HDR standards, G-Sync Ultimate and FreeSync 2. I've also put together a list of all the PC games that support HDR as well, so you know exactly which PC games you can start playing in high dynamic range.
]]>We've had a few people asking how to get these stupid annoying articles out of the news feed for their favourite games on Steam. Read on to learn more...
]]>Those of you chained to the churning wheel of the internet might have seen this facial recognition algorithm thingo doing the rounds. It's called ImageNet Roulette, and it's basically a website where you feed in a photo of your human face and see what the cybergods of our terrible future make of you. But it's probably not safe to show the neurohive your real face. So we showed it 13 pictures of videogame characters instead, to see if the machine lords of the net realm can tell who they are and what they are all about. The short answer: not really, but sometimes. The neural net, it turns out, is a dangerous idiot.
]]>Gears 5 features a full campaign that will take hours to play from beginning to end normally, but is filled to the brim with components to upgrade your hover bot - Jack. These aren't the only collectibles as there are tons of hidden trinkets which are not immediately obvious to find. We now have directions and images for all of the Gears 5 collectibles and the whereabouts of most of the Gears 5 components.
]]>It's a strange thing, this Gears 5 benchmark. Unlike other in-game benchmarks, which simply play the same scene over and over again, the final third of this one sees our beefcake heroes Kait and Del take on a bunch of Swarm in an icy blizzard - and the variance in their AI-driven shooty tactics means the result of their wintry battle is different every time I run it.
And that has been quite a few times, now, as I've been trying to work out how I can get my ancient R9 270 card to run the game at a decent speed. Over the repetitions, I've become quite invested in their unending struggle, to the point where I've decided to chronicle it with some screenshots. Yes, that's right: it's time for another round of 'Weird Things I Notice While Benchmarking!'
]]>Time to ready your chainsaws, folks, because Gears 5 is finally out on PC. As you may remember from my Gears 5 Tech Test performance piece a couple of months ago, developers The Coalition seem to have done an excellent job keeping their latest cover shooter all slick and spangly this time round, as even ageing graphics cards such as Nvidia's GTX 970 and AMD's R9 290 are more than capable of running the game at 60fps on High at 1080p. But what if your graphics card is so old it doesn't even meet the game's minimum PC requirements? What then? Is there any hope for getting smooth, waist-high shooty fun times, or should you just throw your GPU in the bin and resign yourself to that long-awaited upgrade?
Well, I thought I'd put my five-year-old 2GB AMD Radeon R9 270 graphics card to the test to find out. It might not be able to run Control and Metro Exodus on Low at 1920x1080, but with a bit of tinkering in Gears 5's excellent graphics options menu, it's surprising what you can achieve - so much so that I was even able to keep things like character and world texture details on High and still a playable frame rate. Here's how:
]]>The Gears Of War gang are back once again to scurry around behind waist-high cover and take pot-shots at... wait hang on, is that some kind of desert surfsled up ↑ there? Tell me more, Gears (Of War) 5. Following an early launch of its fancy Ultimate Edition last week, Microsoft's latest grand spectacle launched properly overnight. I haven't played Gears since 2, the one where you run around inside a miles-long worm chainsawing its hearts, though what I've heard about this one's story campaign does have my interest.
]]>Exciting news! Steam Charts is proud to announce it's to be an Epic exclusive! From now on you can read your favourite article about the top selling games on Steam exclusively on the Epic Store!
But don't worry, long-term readers - you'll still be able to read the articles right here on RPS, after just one year. Everyone's a winner!
]]>"Family is all", a wise man once said. And then he half-drowned his nephew in a bucket of ice water, but let's forget about that bit. The sentiment is what's important. Families can be good and bad, dysfunctional or helpful. This is as true in videogames as in life. So that's what we're podcasting about this week. The brothers, mothers, aunts and cousins we have grown to like or who we watch with a wary eye any time we visit the local volcano. Come listen.
]]>I did not expect Gears 5 to feature an extended Hamilton parody. And yet here we are: escaping a besieged city by hunkering down in a theatre, its walls pasted with the iconic image of Alexander Hamilton pointing to the stars. Only it’s not Hamilton, but Nassar Embry, who ‘Gearspedia’ tells me was the founder of the Coalition of Ordered Governments. And it’s not just an easter egg, but a committed bit: rooms full of Georgian era wigs, collectible lyric sheets (Lin-Manuel Miranda has nothing to fear) and a fight with a meat beast on a rotating stage set to Embry’s soundtrack. Squint and it’s another room of waist-high cover, sure, but the jazz hands are a jolly distraction.
]]>Appropriately enough for a game with a chainsaw as one of its main weapons, Gears 5 will give players the opportunity to do a little DIY. Escape is a cooperative, Hive-bursting PVE mode, enabling teams to stalk through a series of levels and splatter the Swarm, and the map maker will let players customise that carnage. Would you like to know more?
]]>Good news for anyone looking forward to playing Gears of War 5 later this year, as this weekend's multiplayer tech test has been showing some very promising results in the old graphics card performance department. I played a chunk of it yesterday and saw lots of lovely high frame rates from both my 6GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 970 GPUs, showing you don't need to shell out for a shiny new graphics card (*cough*Control*cough*) just to get a stable 60fps. Here's how I got on.
]]>If you like your dudes (or ladies) beefy, guns improbably en-chainsawed and your Ps versus other Ps, there's a Gears 5-flavoured slab of it landing this weekend, starting July 19th, 6pm BST. If you've got around ten gigabytes of bandwidth and an Xbox Game Pass subscription (or trial), then you can squirt it onto your PC right now in preparation for this weekend's multiplayer tech test. It's running until 6pm BST on July 22nd, and repeating on July 26th. It'll include Escalation, Arcade and King Of The Kill modes, as well as the tutorial Boot Camp. See the test trailer below.
]]>It's clear the tide of loot boxes and map packs is turning when expensive big-studio games feel a need to defensively shout "I didn't fuck it up!" before launch. The latest to declare "I might not have royally muffed it!" is Gears Of War 5, which I keep forgetting is coming to PC because I keep forgetting Gears still exists. It came, it was fun, it accidentally inspired a decade of mediocre shooters, it... continued, apparently? With Gears 5, loot boxes are gone, everyone will get to play every new multiplayer map, and cosmetic bits sold aren't random.
]]>While Microsoft's other flagship series has taken its sweet time coming to PC, Gears 5 marks the second time we visit the infested world of Locusts and chainsaws. There will be a beta happening relatively soon and we have details on how to get in on the beta, as well as release date information, trailers, and details on the new Escape Mode and the Terminator: Dark Fate collaboration.
]]>I’m frozen to the ground, unable to run, unable to move at all. A big hulking alien is lurching towards me. It was the icy blast of his frosty cannon has immobilised me. I would have shot him to death to avoid this, but I ran out of bullets a while ago, and I tried to make up for this by charging headfirst into the cold spray of his blizzard gun. I think the plan was to stab him. It doesn’t matter. He has just cracked me in the face. I’m dead, and my poor teammates will soon follow. This is Gears of War 5’s co-op multiplayer Escape mode. And it is all about hearing your gun go “click”.
]]>Trying to keep up with E3 2019 is a fool's errand, and the foaming river of content streaming down the internet's face doesn't always make it easier. So here's a round-up of every news story from the show we think matters to you, with links to our full stories (and bantful liveblogs) where relevant. We'll be updating this hourly, so keep coming back.
]]>Brendan: Our deep thirst for videogame trailers remains unslaked. Yesterday we chatted live as EA delivered force powers and football in their E3 livestream. Today, it's Microsoft's turn to run the hype gauntlet, with the absurd gait only a multinational conglomerate can perform. But that means we must again divide the labour. So Matt, as the conference gets ready to start below, who would you like to be this time? The hopeful cheerer, or the grumbling jeerer?
Matt: Sign me up for jeery duty.
]]>Microsoft had a lot of games to announce at E3 2018, but it's a little murkier this year to find out what was relevant for PC users. Some games were coming to both, others only to their Xbox One consoles. You could of course watch the entire conference right here, but for some there just isn't enough time to wade through the entire show.
Not to worry though, here are all the trailers and news for you in one place. There's a surprising amount of variety in the announced titles: from an old favourite making a return, much celebrated developers showing off their new series, to even a completely free game launching very soon. The games below aren't in any particular order but you're in for a long ride.
]]>Gears of War is coming back in a big way. Today's Microsoft E3 presser ended with a huge blast of Gears reveals. The first: a Funko based Gears of War game called Gears POP! which is... just bewildering? I don't know. Are any of you Gearheads also big Funko collectors? Seems like a weird place to start bridging games into the Funkoverse, but it is also a mobile game so what am I even complaining about? The second announcement is Gears Tactics, which is an XCOM style game set 100 years before Gears 1. That... that makes a lot more sense than Funkos. And finally, there's the big daddy announcement you all were waiting for: Gears of War 5 is indeed coming. We have two trailers and some storybits to enjoy today.
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