Today, May 20, is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, an event meant to bring awareness to the digital accessibility struggles many still face with websites and technology. Microsoft has been making big strides to address these issues with things like the Xbox Adaptive Controller, and a new series of initiatives are designed to make the Xbox ecosystem even more welcoming.
At 11:30 AM PT / 2:30 PM ET, gaming accessibility program manager and gaming and disability community lead Tara Voelker will join Steve Saylor–a blind gamer and streamer–to discuss accessibility in gaming. It will be held on the Xbox Twitch page, which we’ve embedded here, and there will be a Q&A section to ask any questions you may have.
In a blog post on Xbox Wire, director of Xbox Accessibility Anita Mortaloni announced a new program called the Xbox Accessibility Insider League, or XAIL. This program is available to anyone with a disability and allows them to give accessibility feedback directly to both the Xbox engineering team as well as game developers. The Xbox customer support page has been refreshed, as well, making it easier to find the disability answer desk than before.
Other initiatives include a gaming and disability player experience guide, which gives game developers tools and areas to consider while designing their games. Accessibility guidelines have been updated, as well, with more guidance on things like screen narration, difficulty, UI, and captions. In the future, there will also be party chat options for both speech-to-text conversion as well as text-to-speech.
Some of Microsoft’s first-party games are getting more accessibility features, too. Gears 5’s Navigation Ping will let players with little or no vision make their way through areas using audio queues, and there are also options to disable camera shake or enable target lock. For Minecraft, the Achievement screen has been redesigned to make it easier to navigate and read–or have narrated–as well as offering more granular audio control. Ore patterns have also been adjusted to make them more distinct, which is helpful for players who have trouble differentiating colors.
To learn more about Global Accessibility Awareness Day, check out the official website. It offers resources for attending or hosting events as well as ways you can participate in projects.
Valheim continues to perform well commercially. It’s been confirmed that the popular Norse multiplayer game sold 6.8 million copies as of March 31, and it’s expected to shift a million more by the end of June.
This information came out as part of the latest earnings release from Embracer Group, the company that owns Valheim publisher Coffee Stain. “This truly amazing game continues to find new players globally,” Embracer said.
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The company expects Valheim to sell 1-1.2 million additional copies by the end of the current fiscal quarter ending June 30. This would bring the game up to 7.8-8 million sales in total.
Coffee Stain CEO Albert Säfström was taken aback by Valheim’s success, saying in an interview that he expected sales to slow down, but they didn’t.
“Normally you sell the most at the beginning and then it starts to taper down. For at least the first week, every day we outsold what we’d managed the previous day,” he said in April. “It was like if you knock over a glass of water on your desk. Most of the water comes out in the beginning, and that’s what your sales are like. This felt more like if you tried to tip over a bathtub full of water.”
A new trailer has arrived for Back 4 Blood, a spiritual successor to developer Turtle Rock’s Left 4 Dead series. This time the focus is on just who you’ll be playing as in the zombie apocalypse multiplayer game, as well as several of the enemies you’ll face. Just don’t call them zombies, as thanks to a viral worm infection, much of the planet’s populace has been transformed into what survivors call Ridden.
In the trailer above, Back 4 Blood breaks down its roster of characters, which all serve several different functions as part of the team. War veteran Walker gains increased accuracy from precision kills, team medic Doc has several healing perks, the quick-footed Karlee can sense hazards, and marksman Jim is perfect for players who prefer to eliminate Ridden from a distance.
Survivalist Hoffman can spawn ammo with every kill, the agile Evangelo can break out of grab traps, and Mom has an instant revive ability. Rounding out the cast is Holly, who recovers stamina with each kill and can hit a few Ridden heads out of the park with her modified baseball bat.
As for the Ridden, the Breaker is an infected enemy whose armor allows it to leap right into the fray of a party, the Snitcher summons more Ridden to swarm players, and the Ogre mashes several infected into “meatballs” that it throws at players. The most disturbing Ridden you’ll probably come across though is the Hag, which will literally attempt to eat a player whole. It even has a number of arms sticking out of its mouth, to make escape almost impossible.
Back 4 Blood launches on October 12 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, as well as PS4 and Xbox One. One of its more interesting mechanics is a new rogue-lite card system that makes each run different, which some fans were concerned that it could be used to push microtransactions on players. Turtle Rock addressed the matter in a separate post and insisted that the cards will not be available for purchase via any in-game storefront or first-party storefront.
Rumors swirling around Bethesda’s Starfield have been generating lots of discussion, with some even claiming that the game is imminent. While that doesn’t appear to be true, we are preparing to hear more about Bethesda’s sci-fi RPG sometime soon, possibly at E3. Here’s what we know.
Conversation surrounding Starfield sparked earlier this week, when journalist Jeff Grubb indicated that, at least according to his sources and understanding, Starfield will be exclusive to PC and Xbox platforms. That would be a major coup for Microsoft, which purchased Bethesda and subsequently said that the studio will make Xbox-exclusive games.
That, combined with proximity to E3, began speculation that we would see the game at Microsoft and Bethesda’s rumored combined press conference. Some even suggested this would be its big debut before ultimately releasing this fall, because the game is more-or-less already done. That’s not the case, though, according to journalists from multiple outlets including Game Informer’s Liana Ruppert and Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier.
Once more with feeling: Starfield is not coming out this year, guys. That rumor is false.
Schreier went into more detail, pointing out that most of Bethesda Game Studios has been focused on Fallout 76 until recently. The Starfield team only started to expand in 2019, so it’s not anywhere near complete enough for the release to be so imminent. He noted that he’s heard a particular release date in 2022, but naturally, that could move. He also indicated that his understanding is that the 2022 date will be teased at E3.
Let me make this very clear: Bethesda’s plan is to tease a release date for Starfield at E3. That date is in *late* 2022. I’ll leave the specifics to them. But please keep your expectations in check and refrain from sending death threats when the other rumors turn out to be false
All that puts to rest the idea that we’ll be playing Starfield later this year, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we won’t see it at all. It very well may be part of the possible Microsoft-Bethesda E3 press conference, the first time both companies will combine their forces for a big public-facing games event. Executives from both companies previously got together following the acquisition for a fireside chat, but that didn’t feature any new game trailers or announcements.
In August 2018, Nvidia’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang revealed the RTX line, the company’s first GPUs capable of real-time ray tracing. It marked an inflection point in video game rendering that is still gradually being adopted, with many of its lofty promises still needing to materialize. One of those was Metro: Exodus–one of the first games to adopt some form of ray tracing support, but not to the degree teased by Huang. It’s taken three more years to get to that, but Metro: Exodus Enhanced Edition delivers the most convincing example yet of why ray tracing is so exciting.
Ray tracing, if you’re unfamiliar, is a technique of sending out numerous “rays” (straight lines from in-game objects) into a scene and collecting data from other objects they come into contact with. This allows for more information for a game engine to digest from a scene, especially from game objects not currently in a player’s view. In many games, ray tracing is implemented in a variety of small ways. Some, like Control, focus heavily on reflections, be it off shiny surfaces or translucent glass. Others use it on lighting–in the case of Returnal, for its many, many particle effects. The reason ray tracing is implemented sparingly is that it can be a drag on graphical performance, and game engines are still working to catch up to support the full suite of options ray tracing offers.
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The Enhanced Edition for Metro: Exodus, through a free update to all players on PC, features a completely reworked version of the game running on a new version of its engine with ray tracing as a core feature, which leads to drastic changes in the game’s visual presentation.
The biggest change is the game’s Global Illumination system, which is now entirely handled by ray-traced lighting. That means every light source, from the sun to the bullet-shaped lighter in protagonist Artyom’s pocket, casts its own light rays onto surfaces in the game that bounce and illuminate the area. Combined with technically complicated emissive surfaces (allowing distinct objects like a lightbulb or a flame to propagate light according to their shape and size) and light color mixtures (the light from your flashlight and the nearby glow of a campfire can fuse in real time), it produces a lighting system that is one of the most impressive you might see in a modern video game. Just from a technical standpoint, it’s exciting to see Metro: Exodus’s ray tracing systems running in real-time at all, nevermind smoothly with appropriately powerful hardware (the Enhanced Edition requires a GPU with hardware-accelerated ray tracing support, which certainly helps).
Despite its advantage over traditional lighting techniques (commonly known as rasterization), it might be an improvement that’s not immediately apparent without a direct comparison to the original version of the game. Given how prominent rasterization has been for so many years, developers, like 4A Games, have become very good at faking lighting to look as realistic as possible without light sources physically interacting with one another. But when they do, the moods of certain scenes change entirely. The prologue through the dark tunnels of the metro seems less ominous, thanks to cracks in the ceiling and crackling bonfires flooding rooms with light in a way that wasn’t previously possible. Traditional lighting is a lot more finely tuned in its implementation in a way that this more physically accurate method doesn’t replicate. Developer 4A Games still had to adjust, as detailed in Digital Foundry’s extensive technical breakdown, but for the most part, the engine is letting light sources react off each other in a way that you’d expect from real life.
Games don’t often reflect reality in a way that is accurate, with saturations and embellishments used to intensify effects that are pleasing to the eye. That isn’t to say that ray tracing’s more accurate direction doesn’t produce those same moments of splendor. Once above ground and moving in and out of dilapidated structures, the true strength to Metro: Exodus’ new shine reveals itself. The way light produces soft, accurate shadows and ambient occlusion (the calculation made to determine how brightly lit a game object should be) on static and moving objects alike is mesmerizing, in a way that makes it difficult to look back to the heavily faked implementations of the same thing in most modern games.
This is especially true in the game’s open areas with a dynamic day/night cycle, where environments change in drastic ways based on the time of day. It makes sneaking into an enemy camp at night, for example, feel more immersive, as the absence of light sources shrouds you completely in darkness. Watching light sources glow in the distances and illuminate their surroundings with the correct color and intensity allowed me to make my way around areas more intelligently, while I took pleasure in extinguishing candles and lamps to disappear again from an enemy’s view.
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It’s something that needs to be seen to be believed, especially since most of the conversation regarding ray tracing centers squarely on its implementation of reflections. Metro: Exodus doesn’t skimp on this either, but it’s far less impressive than the game’s global illumination. Like other titles, reflections on surfaces like water are ray-traced rather than adapted from what is currently on screen, letting you see objects outside of your view rendered convincingly in reflections. There is a steep cut-off as to where this starts, however, and you might often see instances where objects around you disappear from reflections as if they’re being calculated using traditional screen-space techniques. Given that Metro: Exodus takes place mostly outdoors and not in an environment with thousands of reflective surfaces, it’s less noticeable than in a game like Control. And it’s still an improvement over the original, which had no ray-traced reflections at all.
All of this comes with a cost, however, and you’ll need a capable GPU to really keep up with the splendor that this Enhanced Edition offers. To ease things a bit, this new version also features the latest version of Nvidia’s DLSS technology, which is a big improvement over the initial implementation on the original game. When Metro: Exodus was released, DLSS was criticized for producing an extremely blurry image, as its AI-assisted reconstruction wasn’t fully optimized. Given that Metro: Exodus was the first game to support it, it’s great to see this latest, improved DLSS version in the game now, letting you extract many more frames per second without nearly as much of a hit to visual quality. It’s essential if you’re planning to play at higher resolutions or on older cards such as the RTX 2070. It makes more of an impact than the new Variable Rate Shading setting, too, which doesn’t really seem to improve performance all that much.
If you have the hardware to support it, Metro: Exodus Enhanced Edition makes an already visually stunning game more eye-catching while also providing a glimpse into a future where ray-traced lighting replaces all the great rasterization techniques of old. It’s the most all-encompassing attempt yet at proving why ray tracing is so exciting and provides more than enough reason to return to the survival shooter just to play around with its physically reactive systems. Considering it’s free, too, it’s hard not to recommend giving it another pass.
There’s a lot riding on WWE 2K22, after 2K20 released to abysmal reviews and 2K21 was cancelled outright. The development team at Visual Concepts has been sharing new behind the scenes clips teasing new systems and re-worked graphics, starting with a brand-new face scanning rig.
The clip shows WWE stars Booker T and Ric Flair being scanned into the game, with the two wrestlers pulling various faces for the cameras to capture. The tweet says the new rig includes “80 high resolution cameras and all-new software to map everything to a high-precision 3D sculpt.”
To make #WWE2K22 Hit Different, we built a brand new scanning rig, with 80 high resolution cameras and all-new software to map everything to a high-precision 3D sculpt. Can you dig it, sucka? WOOO! pic.twitter.com/a33bIxhoDo
Developer Patrick Gilmore also shared that the facial scanning for WWE 2K22 has been done on a larger scale than the game has seen in years. “I think at least five years since we’ve captured so many superstars,” he said, adding that they had been scanning “coast to coast in the US and even in Europe this year.”
To be ready to scan at a moment’s notice, we actually built a second trailer and sent it to Orlando and Tampa. But first we had to test it in California. Who can guess which amazing superstar volunteered to help us test–and became the first to be scanned for WWE2K22?
Gilmore added that the team built a second trailer to send over to Florida, though the rig was first tested by California-based Bayley, who became the first superstar scanned for 2K20.
It’s been around a year and a half since former Dragon Age writer David Gaider announced Chorus, a musical-themed game from his new studio, Summerfall. A new update from character artist Benjamin Ee explains how the game has grown and changed in that time, with the blog post going over some of the character’s evolving looks.
The first character looked at is Calliope–in Greek mythology Calliope is known as the “Chief of all Muses,” but in Chorus, she’s a little bit more punk rock. Ee says Calliope has changed a lot in the development process, with early feedback leading to her character and role in the story being revised. Her finalized look is an eclectic modern outfit that came about through “merging goth with rave aesthetics,” as explained by Ee in the blog.
The main character Grace, voiced by Laura Bailey, also received an outfit update. While the bones of her design haven’t changed, the outfit was updated to look more like what a woman would actually wear in 2021.
“Specifically, the low-cut denim and the lengthy elastic shirt she was wearing had been long abandoned in the eyes of women’s fashion,” Ee explained, saying that female developers at the studio had pointed out that Grace was previously pretty out of date.
The last update was done more for functionality than for aesthetic reasons–as development progressed, the team found that the intricate leaf patterning on Persephone’s luxurious silk coat was a challenge to reliably replicate. Rather than just changing the pattern, Ee went back to the drawing board to redesign the coat into a “full silk modern kimono” with more subdued patterning.
Chorus was fully funded on crowdfunding platform Fig, and the development team continues to share updates on the platform. Other posts have shared update on the game’s writing, songwriting, and romances–an important aspect for any game with David Gaider on board.
15 years ago, Kiyan Prince passed away after being stabbed in the chest while trying to break up a fight outside his school in London. The 15-year-old was a promising football player, an academy player at Queen’s Park Rangers–and now QPR has officially signed him in an initiative to raise awareness for knife crime, Video Games Chronicle reports.
Prince has been assigned the squad number 30, marking how old he would have been if he was still alive today, and has also been added to FIFA 21‘s QPR squad. The tribute is the result of a partnership with the Kiyan Prince Foundation, which was established by Prince’s family to educate young people about knife crime.
“Through this campaign my hope is that the world finally gets to glimpse Kiyan’s incredible potential fulfilled,” said Prince’s father and KPF founder Dr Mark Prince. “We get to honour his talent and, hopefully, we can inspire other kids to honour their own talent too.”
“Most of these guys, this generation, they play FIFA, they will see Kiyan and if that can change just one of their mindsets then it will be a benefit,” QPR Director of Football Les Ferdinand added.
Kiyan Prince is now included in FIFA 21‘s Kick-Off mode and career mode on PC, while console players will be able to access him from May 19.
