Capcom spat a little squirt of news bile on us yesterday, like a hideous zombie vomiting up demos and release dates. One of the smaller chunks was a brief comment by Resident Evil 7 director Koshi Nakanishi, who confirmed that a new Resident Evil game is in the works. That's not too much of a surprise - big franchise gonna franchise - but still, it's nice to hear. "It was really difficult to figure out what to do after [Resident Evil] 7," he said, "but I found it. And to be honest it feels substantial."
]]>Capcom have unveiled the next generation of their in-house RE Engine, which came in alongside Resident Evil 7 in 2017 and has been used by a bunch of projects over the years, from the excellent Devil May Cry 5 to the forthcoming possibly-excellent Dragon's Dogma 2. RE Engine's successor, the REX engine, is a response to three things - 1) RE Engine productions getting bigger in terms of assets, and more diverse in terms of genre, 2) RE Engine games being increasingly made by overseas developers who speak different languages, and 3) unflattering comparisons with various commercial tools, like Unreal Engine and Unity.
]]>Boo! Did I startle you? GOOD. I'm currently competing for the title of trickster-in-chief here at RPS, and I'm never going to have a chance of receiving this promotion unless I reach my daily scare quota. If only there was a way I could package together a collection of scary stories as told my colleagues and claim them all as my own.
Aha! I got you again! They don't call me the Merry Trickster Of UK PC Gaming Websites for nothing! You've been Halloween'd, my friends! To celebrate spooky season, I gathered seven members of the RPS treehouse to tell me about one moment from a PC game that scared them the most. The results were exactly as I expected. Some recounted events in classic horror games that shocked them senseless, whereas others told me anecdotes about games that most wouldn't consider scary at all. The result is seven tales of spooks that are sure to chill your bones this All Hallows' Eve.
]]>Last time, you decided that ding! is better than the Howie scream. I have only word for that: yeeeuuuuaaaaauuuuughh! This week, I suppose it's a question of spectacle. Do you want to do ridiculous cool things, or have ridiculous horrible things done unto you? Tell me, what's better: ridiculous spell animations or the mangled hands of Ethan Winters?
]]>Resident Evil modders have had an eventful week. First, Capcom released a free update for Resident Evils 2, 3 and 7 Biohazard which introduced ray tracing and higher framerates. Unfortunately, the update also broke every existing mod for those games, with no quick fix available.
All's well that ends well, though. In response to "overwhelming community response", Capcom have made the previous versions of the games available again, so that those wishing to use mods can roll back if they wish.
]]>Despite being a self-professed wimp when it comes to horror games, it takes a fair amount to properly rattle me when I'm actually playing them. I tend to get more stressed than frightened when playing games like Resident Evil, and the only time I've ever been properly scared and actually screamed in my seat was when I was playing P.T, Kojima's short teaser game on PS4 for the now cancelled Silent Hills. I had the lights on, Matthew by my side, and yet when we turned a corner in that creepy, looping corridor house, a ghost suddenly rushed us out of nowhere. Both of us yelled in terror at the sight of it, and it took ages for us to calm down and work up the courage to carry on.
It's not like I've been chasing that feeling in the intervening years (I am, after all, an officially certified wimp), but playing Resident Evil Village's House Beneviento section this week put me right back in that tiny London flat where we both screamed ourselves silly. It's proper nightmare fuel that place, and of course I had the good foresight to play it just before I was about to go to bed. Well done, Katharine, bravo.
]]>Capcom, bless their hearts, really like the idea of Resident Evil multiplayer. They keep making multiplayer spin-off games and putting multiplayer modes into singleplayer games, even if few players are as enthusiastic about them as Capcom. The upcoming Resident Evil Village will have a multiplayer mode too, Resident Evil Re:Verse, and that will start an open beta test overnight - which you can preload now. Re:Verse is a third-person shooter with six-player deathmatch starring RE heroes who can transform into RE monsters because why not?
]]>Pack your bags, wrap the presents, put your scarf around your neck. And then sit down because, I'm sorry, you're going nowhere. It's bad, yeah. Even yours truly, a respected list goblin of note, could not make it back to his family in time for the holidays due to the ongoing vengeance of mother nature. But listen. What if I told you: "video games"? They have always had something for us in the past. What wonderful surrogate families can we join in this time of loneliness and separation to ease our troubled minds? Here are the 10 most wholesome families in PC games you may look to in this hour of need.
]]>Horror really isn’t my thing. I remember watching the 2012 adaptation of the Woman in Black after school, and leaving the cinema in a terrible state having just seen Harry Potter being put through the absolute ringer. So yeah, to my surprise, I played Resident Evil 7: Biohazard the other day and had a good time.
]]>What's a holiday if it doesn't come with a sale on games loosely related to its theme? A terrible trick, which is part of what makes Halloween a real treat—discounts on horror games galore. The Humble Bundle are joining in on spooky sales with their own Halloween offers. Some are, appropriately, horror games. Some others are just vaguely grim, I guess. But hey, they're all on sale.
]]>During Sony's PlayStation stream today, Capcom announced Resident Evil Village, the next in their horror series. As rumoured, Village brings back RE7 star Ethan Winters and does indeed have werewolves. Or bioweapons who just so happen to look like werewolves, or however RE dresses up monsters these days. It's due in 2021, and looks a little something like this:
]]>Let us wish a blessed Good Friday to all the Catholics in the house. Now, get out. Your fish-sharing magician cannot compete with these 9 videogame characters who see death as nothing but a passing nuisance. These 9 heroes of reanimated flesh. These 9 unkillable beings of limitless power and mystery. Where is your precious Holy Spirit now, loser? Look at these 9 luminous freaks who have monstered sinew and reality to their will. Read my list feature, disgusting mortal, and repent.
]]>According to new rumours, Resident Evil 8 will come out next year. It'll be in first-person, says serial leaker AestheticGamer, "and many purists are going to hate it" because "it's taking some serious departures [with] story/enemies and the like".
If you believe the rumour, it started life as Revelations 3, a more experimental spin-off game, but testers liked it so much that developers Capcom decided to turn it into a full fledged entry in the main series.
]]>If it's not baroque, don't fix it. Little architecture joke for you there, just to kick off a dry topic with a giggle. You see, appreciating architecture is for people in beige cardigans. Folks who subscribe to magazines printed on paper so thick you can still calculate the tree’s age. You know the type I mean. Spectacled couples with non-Ikea coffee tables. Thirty-year-olds. People like you! Here are 11 examples of very satisfying architecture in PC 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.
]]>A few of the things I have had to do in order to get a workable version of HDR (also known as high dynamic range), the new-ish display technology that significantly ramps up brightness, darkness and vibrancy, on my PC (not including the acquisition of a fancy monitor):
- Try four different display cables - Adjust as many as seven different brightness/contrast/colour etc shaders per game. (I have spent long, unhappy hours doing this to date) - Manually turn on HDR on the monitor, manually turn HDR on in Windows then manually turn on HDR in the game settings. Or sometimes HDR off in Windows but on in the game then alt-tab back to Windows and turn HDR on, and off, and on, and off. Or sometimes alt-tab and alt-tab and alt-tab and alt-tab and alt-tab until HDR suddenly, randomly kicks in. When I exit the game, I have to manually turn it all back off again or Windows is unusable. - Install an unfinished preview build of Windows 10 whose HDR isn't totally broken on Nvidia cards. - Almost completely lose my sense of whether anything is actually different after all of this.
The egg yolks in Final Fantasy XV were a bit shinier, though.
]]>Speedruns themselves can be mind-boggling, but it's the community behind them that interests me the most. There's an infectious joy that comes across in every video that's come out of Awesome Games Done Quick, the annual week-long charity speedrunning event that wrapped up over the weekend. It's an event that provides the triple-whammy of heart warming camaraderie, entertaining speedruns and a whopping $2,269,209.96 so far for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. That's more than $50,000 over last year's total and donations are still rolling in - you can chip in here if you're so inclined.
I've collected some of the best runs for ya after the jump.
]]>We've already seen which games sold best on Steam last year, but a perhaps more meaningful insight into movin' and a-shakin' in PC-land is the games that people feel warmest and snuggliest about. To that end, Valve have announced the winners of the 2017 Steam Awards, a fully community-voted affair which names the most-loved games across categories including best post-launch support, most player agency, exceeding pre-release expectations and most head-messing-with. Vintage cartoon-themed reflex-tester Cuphead leads the charge with two gongs, but ol' Plunkbat and The Witcher series also do rather well - as do a host of other games from 2017's great and good.
Full winners and runners-up below, with links to our previous coverage of each game if you're so-minded. Plus: I reveal which game I'd have gone for in each category.
]]>Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.
Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.
]]>The unexpectedly good Resident Evil 7 Biohazard has expanded again, last night launching one free new chapter and one paid one. The free bit is Not A Hero, the long-promised chapter starring veteran Resident Evil beefman Chris Redfield. That one is fairly action-focused, as you might expect, though it's not a pure blastfest. The new paid expansion is End of Zoe, playing as another Baker family member using his beefy fists to pummel swamphorrors and save Zoe. I believe that's the very end of Resident Evil 7, and what better send-off for the redneck horror game than backyard wrestling?
]]>Ahead of what can only possibly be the impending financial doom of us all - Black Friday 2017 - Humble has launched its Fall Sale. It's a fairly big sale range, too, featuring thousands of games with discounts on a selection from a varied selection of publishers. That includes Capcom, Focus Home Interactive, Rebellion, Konami, Rockstar, Adult Swim, THQ Nordic and many more.
]]>While tallying up which still-to-come games I want to shovel into my mind-hole before 2017 shrivels up and dies, I reckoned the last remaining DLC for Resident Evil 7 would be a surefire thing. Resi 7 pushed my buttons, by which I mean it made me feel almost unbearably anxious, and I hoped the long wait between it and this (presumably) final add-on meant it would seek to recapture the best bits rather than merely remix or just repeat the climactic shooty-bang section.
The bad news is that the upcoming Not A Hero pack, which will be free for anyone who owns Resi 7, sure looks like it repeats the climactic shooty-bang section to me. Which leaves me hanging on for the other final (but paid) DLC, End Of Zoe, which looks altogether a little weirder and returns the theme of creepy people living in the swamps and using the word 'family' like a threat.
]]>Let me qualify that title statement, for fear it merely conjures images of a game in which you're supposed to be endlessly surprised to find more zombies lurking behind the next hedgerow. A good (or, indeed, bad) b-movie is not someone sprinting aimlessly around and being constantly jumped by monsters, but rather it's scene-by-scene situational. What fresh horror awaits in the basement, what tricksy traps and obstacles must be overcome to make it out this house alive, and oh no what just happened to that helpful man in the sensible pullover?
In an hour spent playing Bethesda's upcoming survival horror sequel The Evil Within 2 [official site], I found a game that was striving to be a cat's cradle of micro b-movies, spun across a freely-explorable, monster-blighted town. I also found a game that was trying so hard to be scary that my only true fear is that it isn't scary at all.
]]>After years of escalating ludicrousness and ultraviolence, Resident Evil 7 Biohazard [official site] was a refreshing change of pace with its creepy spookhouse and hapless hero. But if you have missed burly blokes who work for shadowy organisations and murder their way through monsters with gay abandon, hold on another three months. RE7's free DLC mini-campaign Not A Hero will bring back Chris Redfield, we've known for ages, and watching a new gameplay vid I am surprised by quite how much of a bang-bang it all looks. Capcom also recently revealed a little about the third big RE7 paid story DLC, End of Zoe. First, Chris strikes back:
]]>The Steam summer sale is in full blaze. For a while it even blazed so hot that the servers went on fire and all the price stickers peeled off the games. Either that or the store just got swamped with cheapskates looking for the best bargains. Cheapskates like you! Well, don’t worry. We’ve rounded up some recommendations - both general tips and some newly added staff choices.
Here are the things you should consider owning in your endless consumeristic lust for a happiness which always seems beyond reach. You're welcome.
]]>Update: The year is finished, which means you can now read the final list of our favourite games of 2017.
2017 has already been an extraordinary year for PC games, from both big-name AAA successes to no-name surprise indie smashes. Keeping up with so much that's worth playing is a tough job, but we've got your back. Here is a collection of the games that have rocked the RPS Treehouse so far this year.
We've all picked our favourites, and present them here in alphabetical order so as not to start any fights. You're bound to have a game you'd have wanted to see on the list, so please do add it to the comments below.
]]>The free Resident Evil 7 [official site] story DLC 'Not A Hero' is delayed, Capcom have announced. The end of RE7 teased that Not A Hero would arrive in spring 2017, but now it won't. Capcom say it wasn't shaping up as good as the rest of the (great) game but they want it to be, so they'll work on it a while longer. No firm word yet on when it will arrive. For the benefit of folks who've not yet played RE7, I'll not say much about Not A Hero before the cut. Speaking of...
]]>I'll avoid open spoilers here (you can find those, and our thoughts on them, here, if you're so minded), but suffice it to say that the final act of Resident Evil 7 Biohazard [official site] is not the equal of the claustrophobic cat and mouse chase/escape room mash-up that makes the rest of the game such a terrifying triumph. It is, then, a relief to find that the first two rounds of DLC, now available on PC after temporary PlayStation imprisonment, broadly mark a return to what made the Baker house such a successful reinvention of the Resi formula.
]]>Two ghostloads of new scares arrive in Resident Evil 7 Biohazard [official site] today with the launch of the 'Banned Footage' DLC packs. Each adds a mish-mash of new story bits and modes, from escaping a room while in the watchful care of a cannibal to betting your fingers in a Saw-like game of Blackjack. Awful. These DLC packs have been out on PlayStation 4 for a bit because of exclusivity shenanigans but hey, this means I got to live a bit longer without seeing that awful Blackjack. Warning: it is awful. However, the monster wearing a jaunty hat is great. Swings and roundabouts.
]]>'Til all are one, it's only the weekly Steam charts! These are the ten games which sold best on Steam last week.
It's one of those 'just copied and pasted all the HTML from last week' kind of weeks. This is GOOD because I am lazy but BAD because there is little new to say. Fortunately, I've brought a friend along with me this time.
]]>Resident Evil 7 [official site] is a spooky-ooky good time, our Adam will tell you, but some would-be players suffered a f-f-fearul f-f-f-fright discovering their CPU was unexpectedly unable to run it. Good news, oldboxers! If your PC creaks like a spookhouse, crawling with cobwebs and powered by a CPU which doesn't support SSSE3 SIMD, you can now (potentially) play RE7 as Capcom have released a wee patch yesterday which changed that and nothing else. Short and sweet. Ghostboxes now welcome.
]]>Alec: Resident Evil 7 Biohazard Resident Evil 7 Biohazard Resident Evil 7 Biohazard Resident Evil 7 Biohazard Resident Evil 7 Biohazard Resident Evil 7 Biohazard [official site] is a new first person horror/action game that definitely has nothing whatsoever to do with anything else called Resident Evil, no siree. Definitely just some creepy people in a house. That’s all.
We’ve both played it now, Adam. Shall we throw all caution to the wind and go FULL SPOILERS as we discuss what works, what doesn't and how it does or does not tie into the rest of this stalwart survival horror series?
]]>By the power of Grayskull, it's only the weekly Steam charts! These are the games which sold best on Steam last week.
It's all gone a bit 2015-2016 in here again, I'm afraid, but fortunately cavalry of a sort arrives in the pendulous form of some big ol' swingin' dicks.
]]>For several years of this website's existence, our most-read post was my short, hasty, freeform, crude, drunken poem lamenting videogames' excessive use of locked doors to gate progress or pretend that an area is larger than it really is. I'm not proud, not even slightly. But it is a universal frustration, which is why the piece took off as it did. So very often, we play as action heroes capable of amazing feats of strength, skill and survival, but give 'em a wooden door or chainlink fence and they're totally confounded.
Resident Evil 7 [official site] is my favourite new game of January, a master-crafted slice of tension and gross-out excess, yet its over-reliance on evidently flimsy yet entirely impassable obstacles is very nearly its undoing.
]]>While Resident Evil 7 [official site] DLC has started creeping onto PlayStations, sadly we need to wait for a few weeks because of some lousy exclusivity deal ('sadly' because RE7 is great, yeah?). But as we've not mentioned the DLC before and it's out in the wild, rustling through the trees and rattling doorknobs, now seems a good time to have a gander at what's coming. So! Two paid DLC packs will add a mish-mash of new modes and ministories, followed by a paid new story episode, then finally a new little storyline will arrive free in the spring.
]]>Great Odin's beard, it's only the weekly Steam charts! That is to say, the ten games which sold best on Steam last week.
This week: new entries, old favourites, and a very dirty house indeed.
]]>An hour in to Resident Evil 7 [official site], lead character Ethan is having the worst day imaginable. Heading deep into the bayou to search for his missing wife, having received an email from her three years after her disappearance, he finds himself trapped in a horror house, taking part in a bizarre and brutal game of cat and mouse. He is the mouse and the various cats come in the form of local residents, The Baker Family. Ethan is your eyes, but it's the Bakers who are the stars of the show, and what a wonderful show it is.
Resident Evil 7 walks a difficult line. It's both a return to the series' horror house roots and a bold departure from the third-person puzzling and head-popping of the main entries in that series. It succeeds by delivering on both fronts, true to its origins but also eager to explore new ground.
]]>Adam's handling our full Resident Evil 7 [official site] review, but in the meantime I thought I'd share some more immediate thoughts on how it runs, what it looks and feels like and if it seems at all on course to be the series reinvention it strove for. (By which I mean: I really, really wanted to play it too and this is how I justify doing so in work hours.)
Note that this does not include any storyline spoilers outside of the barest facts of the setting, or anything specific about the threats you face, but does discuss the broader structure and nature of some early obstacles. If you want to in totally cold, don't read this yet, but if you already know basically what Resi 7 is about, you'll be fine.
]]>Resident Evil 7 shifting the core series into a first-person perspective is an interesting change, but what if it had been that way all along? One enterprising Evil Resident (as I imagine RE fans probably call themselves I guess) has whipped up a prototype of the first Resident Evil running in first-person, cutscenes and all. It is weird/cool to see something so very familiar from a new perspective. The prototype likely won't be completed or released publicly but here, have a look in these videos.
]]>Heavens to Murgatroyd, it's only the weekly Steam charts! That is to say, the ten games which sold best on Steam last week.
After a string of backwards-looking weeks, it's beginning to look a lot like 2017 at last.
]]>As Old Father Time grabs his sickle and prepares to take ailing 2016 around the back of the barn for a big sleep, we're looking to the future. The mewling pup that goes by the name 2017 will come into the world soon and we must prepare ourselves for its arrival. Here at RPS, our preparations come in the form of this enormous preview feature, which contains details on more than a hundred of the exciting games that are coming our way over the next twelve months. 2016 was a good one - in the world of games at least - but, ever the optimists, we're hoping next year will be even better.
]]>Debate's long raged/wanked on about whether we in the West should really call the Resident Evil series by its Japan-given name, Biohazard. With the demo for the upcoming Resident Evil 7 [official site], that debate is over. There could be no more fitting name for its new house of horrors than Resident Evil.
]]>The Resident Evil 7 [official site] demo 'Beginning Hour' is now out on PC after six months of haunting consoles. RE7 looks a curious one, ostensibly returning to the series' roots in spooky mansions but with hillbilly horror and an Amnesia-ish, PT-y first-person style. Most of what Capcom have shown so far is set inside one derelict spookhouse, and now we can visit that place ourselves in the demo. Beginning Hour isn't the game's first hour but rather a mood-setting piece, confusingly. As our Adam has written, It's certainly interesting to see such a bloated series stripped back.
]]>I've been avidly following the development of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard [official site], though I must say it's not been without some trepidation. Resident Evil 6 did so much to destroy the image of Capcom's venerable series I feared it may not be able to make a comeback.
Fortunately, the team behind Resident Evil 7: Biohazard seems to realize that the only way to go forward with the series is to go back. RE7 takes inspiration from the haunting atmosphere and foreboding loneliness of the original Resident Evil.
]]>I keep forgetting that Resident Evil 7 [official site] is coming out as early as January. It feels like one of those games that I should have been looking forward to for a couple of years by the time it's finally released, but the hype train has only just left the station, and hasn't had time to derail or run out of steam. That's perhaps why two tiny teaser videos actually seem like things worth posting. One of them, in particular, is worthwhile, confirming as it does the presence of inventory tetris, item boxes and a big ol' shotgun.
]]>The more I learn about Resident Evil 7 [official site], the less it sounds like a Resident Evil game. Sure, there will apparently be medicinal herbs and some kind of inventory management, and there will probably be puzzles involving coins or crystals standing in for keys, but the grimy first-person horrors of the demo do seem to be representative of the full game. As details emerge, including the video below, it looks more and more exciting, and it might be the scariest Resi game of the lot.
]]>Capcom have released some more “found footage” from the upcoming Resident Evil 7 [official site]. Their foray into first-person frights has seen a lot of comparisons to P.T. and with good reason. But this is a loyal sequel, the developers insist, or at least a story contained within the familiar universe of zombifying viruses, parasites and corporate nastymen. Come and see it after the jump.
]]>E3 2016 has been finished for a couple of weeks, giving us time to wash the taste of LA smog from our mouths and reflect upon the games we saw there. This seems like a good time to talk about what we want to see from those games next, when they no doubt appear at Gamescom 2016 in August. What games are we most hoping to play, to see new trailers of, or hoping will reveal a different side of themselves in Cologne?
]]>Resident Evil 7's [official site] demo, Beginning Hour, isn't available on PC but the final game will be in January 2017. I've played through the demo several times and have some doubts as to how it'd translate into a longer game, but I also think it's the most exciting thing to happen to the horror series since Resident Evil 4. The key to it all is found footage, an often maligned term thanks to the many movies that treat a handheld camera or webcam as a stand-in for a decent script. In Beginning Hour, however, VHS tapes hold the promise of something truly startling and sinister.
]]>"Capcom has heard fans’ masochistic cries for a Resident Evil game far more terrifying than anything that has come before it," said the publisher shortly after revealing Resident Evil 7 Biohazard [official site] during Sony's E3 press conference yesterday. In what is a pretty radical step for the series, it seems this one's fully first-person and "draws from the series’ roots of atmospheric survival horror," so say its creators. Having watched the first 20 minutes of the 'Beginning Hour' demo, courtesy of the folks over at GameSpot, I'm not entirely convinced by that last part. Have a look for yourself and I'll explain.
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