Former Star Wars Jedi series director and God Of War developer Stig Asmussen has founded a new studio, Giant Skull, to work on "gameplay-driven, story immersed action-adventure games set in captivating worlds". Based in Los Angeles, Giant Skull are even now developing a new "AAA single-player-focused action adventure" that runs on Unreal Engine 5.
]]>I've been looking back over an entire year of RPS reviews and, well, we've written a lot. Over the past twelve months, the RPS treehouse and our merry band of freelancers have reviewed 168 games in total - and that includes early access reviews, PC-port reviews, group reviews, reviews-in-progresses, and your common or garden fully-fledged reviews. 168! Damn. Even though game releases are still suffering from pandemic pushbacks, 2022 has been a busy year for games. There wasn't a huge number of big name releases - although the ones that did come out were plenty big enough - but, as always, we've had a wealth of wonderful indies releasing all year round, and we scooped up as many of them as we could.
Out of all the games we’ve given any kind of review treatment throughout the year, only a handful of them recieved RPS’s coveted Bestest Best badge; just 23, to be exact. I've gathered them all in one big round-up bundle below (there are round-ups of our favourite bits from other sections of the site, too), and they make a great collection of games. Have a scroll and click on any that take your fancy for the full review. Enjoy!
]]>If the recent God Of War games weren’t cinematic enough, streaming providers and general tessellators of cardboard boxes everywhere Amazon have greenlit a TV show based on Kratos’ adventures. The Hollywood Reporter, erm, reports that Wheel Of Time’s Rafe Judkins is showrunner on the project, backed up by writers and executive producers Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby. Those two worked on The Expanse, and were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Children Of Men. No word on who will play the spartan goliath just yet, but the Clive Owen for Kratos campaign starts here.
]]>A surprise God of War PC update has made it one of just three games to support AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.0. This significantly improved upscaling option, introduced a few weeks back in Deathloop (and more recently making it to Farming Simulator 22), completely replaces God of War’s FSR 1.0 setting, giving Radeon GPU owners a performance booster that comes much closer to Nvidia DLSS on quality.
]]>Sony Interactive Entertainment boss Jim Ryan has revealed that the company expects around 30% of their PlayStation games to be released on PC by 2025. The comments were made during an annual business briefing today, which also revealed performance figures for core PlayStation games released on PC in the past two years.
]]>Through an entirely unplanned sequence of events, I'm currently playing two big action adventure games that couldn't be less alike. One is God Of War, a big, serious dadventure epic about an emotionally distant father trying his darnedest to connect with his (at times very irritating) son. The other is Kena: Bridge Of Spirits, an altogether more wholesome adventure about a young girl cleansing a lush, forested mountainside from a serious case of bad vibes and helping lost ghosts pass on to the other side.
About the only thing they have in common is that they both have what one might call 'cute' NPC companions. Dad Of War is joined by his eager archer "BOY!" Atreus, while Kena has her gaggle of black, fluffy Rot friends (above, right). According to the widely accepted law of big googly-eyes, I should find the Rot absolutely adorable and thus beyond reproach. Atreus does not have big googly-eyes (they are merely wide and naive), but he is certainly a lot cuter than God Of War's other main companion, a talking disembodied head. And yet. Even though Atreus has now reached that stage where he's doing all his adolescent whining and rebellion and "I know you are, but what am I?" nonsense in the space of about two hours, I would much rather have this sulky pre-teen by my side than the interminable Rot. Let me explain.
]]>As if ray tracing and DLSS weren’t big enough bonuses to owning a GeForce RTX graphics card, Nvidia has just dropped another toy in the chest: Deep Learning Dynamic Super Resolution, or DLDSR. It’s essentially an AI-fuelled upgrade to Nvidia’s DSR downsampling tool, aiming to more intelligently render the frames of your games so that they appear more detailed – without the same performance loss that comes with standard DSR. It’s an intriguing new feature that could make some of the best graphics cards even better, and I’ve been trying it out to see if it performs as effectively as Nvidia claims.
]]>I enjoy the sub-genre of meme about Sad Murder Dads as much as the next gal. Heck, I enjoy those lads themselves. From Kratos in God Of War, to Joel in The Last Of Us, and even less story-focused murder dads like Soldier 76, dudes rock. Successfully rehabilitated and reimagined as father figures struggling to inhabit that role and accept their emotions, in some very good games to boot. Developers who were hot young guns in the 00s are now tired middle-aged dads themselves, and as a result the art they consume and, more to the point, the art they want to make looks radically different. I'm not having a go at that; that's just life, is what that is.
But what I'm asking is, what's the mum equivalent? Because I really want to see someone give a mum story the same big budget, fun epic treatment that Kratos got in God Of War. At the same time, I also dread this coming to pass.
]]>Friday's long-awaited PC launch of God Of War was mostly received by people nodding their heads and muttering "Boy"—the highest praise a heavy heart can offer. A few would-be players, however, found themselves unable to play, with the game throwing up "out of memory" error messages when they really shouldn't be out of memory. The devs have been looking into the issue, and released a potential fix on an opt-in experimental branch on Steam. It sounds like it fixes the problem for some people, but not all.
]]>God Of War is out now, as of Friday at 5pm. This gives PC gamers their first chance to experience 2018's hottest memes, yelling "Boy!" at one another, and writing thinkpieces about videogame dads. It also gives them the chance to satisfyingly throw an axe through a lot of skeletons.
]]>Earlier this week, Nvidia quietly announced a kind of DLSS-adjacent downsampling tech: Deep Learning Dynamic Super Resolution (DLDSR). It aims to improve image sharpness and quality on GeForce RTX graphics cards, using AI to reduce the performance loss of Nvidia’s existing DSR feature, and it’s now available to install and enable through GeForce Game Ready Driver 511.23.
]]>Fatherly axe-‘em-up God of War is out on PC this week, and I’ve been dragging my disappointing son around the Nine Realms to see how it copes with the jump from PlayStation to Windows. The answer: pretty well! Like previous marquee Sony port Horizon Zero Dawn, this is a game that already looked lovely on console, and the extra muscle of even a modest PC rig can deliver sizeable boosts to both visual quality and frames-per-second.
]]>In the eight year gap between 2010's more conventional sexy gore fest God Of War 3 and this new and improved action-dadventure God Of War, the angry Ancient Greek warboy Kratos handed in his god-killing badge and gun to live in Norse mythology's woods with his wife Faye and their son Atreus. When Faye dies, Kratos & Son go on a journey to scatter her ashes from the top of a mountain. This becomes a micro rumination on familial relationships, a macro world-saving epic of legendary proportions, and a hack and slash fest that'll have you grinning from ear to ear. On balance, then, I am Team Fridge Faye.
I played this God Of War on its previously exclusive release on PlayStation in 2018, and it lived in my memory as a 70 hour poetic battle between gods and monsters. Revisiting it again on PC, it turns out that it's actually only about 20 hours long, but it looms so large as an experience that turning it off at the end feels like stumbling into daylight, having spent many weeks in a firelit, sweaty hunting lodge in a Norwegian pine forest, slamming mead and singing songs about warriors tearing goats in two. There are a lot of big warriors in God Of War. There are a lot of very big things in it in general: statues, dragons, big angry rocks. And a big man, because the titular Kratos, as a yardstick to measure size, is already incongruously big, just so many sacks of salted beef held together by leather armour.
]]>Remember how God of War is coming to PC? That would, to a keen mind, suggest the existence of some new PC features for it. And lo and behold, here’s a God of War PC features trailer, showcasing such enhancements as Nvidia Reflex and DLSS support, improved visuals and higher resolution support. God of War is out for PC on January 14th 2022.
]]>Ahead of God of War coming to PC on January 14th, an Nvidia blog post has laid bare the enhancements you can expect from the port, as well as the PC system requirements. In fairness it looks like a pretty comprehensive effort, combining expected tweaks like 21:9 ultrawide monitor support with performance-boosting Nvidia DLSS upscaling and even some general graphical upgrades. There’s a PC features trailer, too.
]]>As was rumoured, the dadtastic godstabber God Of War is indeed coming to PC. Sony today announced that the PlayStation-exclusive action-adventure game will launch for PC on the 14th of January, 2022. Good game, that. It'll have support for assorted PC technical fanciness too.
]]>Ever since Sony began releasing PlayStation-exclusive games on PC too, many have been clamouring for more of the big'uns: God Of War, Spider-Man, chuffing Bloodborne for god's sake please Bloodborne. While Sony are still being coy about which games are coming our way, hopes were raised by a recent leaked list of games pulled from the digital guts of GeForce Now, which included a mention of God Of War for Steam. I wouldn't get too excited just yet. While Nvidia have confirmed the list itself was real, they say some games on the list were "speculative".
]]>After watching the trailer a bajillion more times, I am extremely excited for Assassin's Creed Valhalla. It's been around 48 hours since the announcement and I cannot possibly retain this state for much longer. By the time the Christmas-ish release date rolls around I will either have exploded like a poor little meat balloon, or gone full circle and lapsed into a coma. Like the engines of the Enterprise, she cannae hold - definitely not for around six more months, anyway.
Thank god that Vikings are an enduring and popular theme for games, then! I can inoculate myself against disaster by playing a few of these existing ones while I wait. Such is the versatility of Vikings that they pop up in almost every genre imaginable, too. So if, like me, you are already on the edge of your seat (and that seat is in a longship), here are some recommendations for varied and quality video games that will get you prepared for Assassin's Creed Valhalla.
]]>If there's been one constant in Google Stadia's time on Earth, it's a notion that it's not really delivered the games. If I were Google, kicking about with more money than God and wondering how to pack more games onto my streaming platform's catalogue, I would simply develop my own. To that end, Google are setting up a new studio in Los Angeles, nabbing established local talent by putting long time God Of War studio head Shannon Studstill in charge of the development house.
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