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What to expect

When is it coming out

We know that Astro Bot DLC is on the way to expand the cute PlayStation mascot’s adventures further, so even if you’ve already managed to cross the universe to rebuild the Mothership and rescue all of your little bot chums, this isn’t the end of the story. There are fresh features, new collectibles, plus much more on the way, and the best news is that the first big content drop will be completely free! For the lowdown on what’s to come with the Astro Bot DLC, here’s everything we know so far.What can we expect from Astro Bot DLC Astro Bot guidesAstro Bot outfits
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Astro’s Playroom Special BotsThanks to a recent interview given by Astro Bot studio director Nicolas Doucet, we already have some details about what will feature in the first Astro Bot DLC. This is going to be free DLC including more VIP bots to rescue and speedrun levels, along with online leaderboards so players can…

Super Smash Bros Ultimate and Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai says sorry to the players who have spent thousands of hours in his games.The apology comes courtesy of the famed director’s most recent Creating Games episode, in which he reconciles with the idea that a game’s playtime is basically a cost that players need to weigh. “Play time – especially how it’s conceived before starting a game – is better thought of as a cost of sorts,” he explains. “In the modern world, you’re constantly competing with everything else,” Sakurai continues. “It’s a battle for people’s time. Even if someone has lots of free time on their hands, that means something different now than it did in the past. There are always things to do. The question is: how do people choose to spend the time?”

Be Mindful of the Time Players are Giving You [Planning & Game Design] – YouTube

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I find it funny that footage from infamous timesinks Vampire Survivors and Powerwash Simulator play in the backgr…

The PS5 Pro is launching this November for the low, low price of $700 – and Sony has shown what the souped up console can do by updating some of its back catalogue.During the PS5 Pro Technical presentation below, lead architect Mark Cerny began by demoing The Last of Us Part 2 running on the upcoming console. “It has huge amounts of detail and targets a super smooth 60 frames per second,” he said, while Ellie runs through an overgrown city. The same scene is then shown running on a normal PS5 at 30fps, which Cerny reckons is “therefore much choppier.”

PS5 Pro Technical Presentation hosted by Mark Cerny – YouTube

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Cerny then shows how Sony has reached “this goal of delivering almost fidelity-like graphics and performance frame rate” by doing the same side-by-side comparisons for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. “We can see that the PS5 Pro is close to doubling the power of the PlayStation 5,” Cerny continues as dual-screened Ratchet causes some m…

We’ve officially hit the endgame of big damage numbers in Diablo 4, folks. Thanks to a busted combo in the action RPG’s latest PTR server, one dedicated player cooked up the biggest number the game can feasibly handle, and then blew straight past it into the realm of literal infinity. The game just throws out the symbol for infinity instead of an actual damage number, like a white flag in the face of unfathomable DPS.Regular Diablo scientist Rob2628 shared this mathematical breakthrough this week, after a Chinese player shared it via bilibili, and I’m knowingly breaking the laws of news writing just to express these unholy numbers to you in full. Rob reckons the biggest number that Diablo 4 can register, on account of this being the limit for what “can be represented by a 128-bit unsigned integer,” is this:340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,455The largest single number he was able to capture on camera was this:333,515,323,498,366,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

HIGH…

Do you believe in life after love? What about love after life? As it turns out, that’s what all the cool spirits are up to beyond the veil. Ghostina tells us as much early on in Love, Ghostie when I first appear before her as a newly-departed soul, set to pay my dues to humanity from the beyond. I’ll be doing so from my very own manor house, mine to haunt for all eternity – or at least, until I run out of new tenants to match up and watch as they fall in love with a little phantasmic help.Love, Ghostie is part dating sim, part management sim, and part muli-ended visual novel, but it’s all heart. There’s something so calming about watching love blossom between two strangers, seemingly from nothing at all, while having had a hand in the proceedings all along. Some might call it a thankless task, stealing little items and “gifting” them to residents while crediting it to a would-be admirer, but that’s kind of the point. This is not just a game about making others fall in love. Love,…

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle developer MachineGames has a specific design philosophy when it comes to crafting villains. Speaking to Edge magazine, lead writer Tommy Tordsson-Bjork explained how the studio – responsible for both The Great Circle and the Wolfenstein games – brought its bad guys to life.”We’ve gone into every project with the philosophy that a properly characterized villain is what makes the hero shine. I always try to find some characteristics that make the villains feel more real, whether it’s giving them some quirk or flaws that they try to compensate for – even a sliver of humanity or empathy.”Grounding a villain with relatable flaws helps players connect with the character, but it’s also used to prop the hero up and bring out their best qualities. When writing Emmerich Voss, the calculating main antagonist of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Tordsson-Bjork mentioned that “his personality has been incredibly fun to write. But also, since I am not hyper-…

Anyone who’s played Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth probably remembers its outrageous Sicko Snap minigame – a spin on Pokemon Snap that has our protags taking pictures of muscly half-naked men  – but it wasn’t included purely for the shock value.According to the game’s director Ryosuke Horii and game design supervisor Hirotaka Chiba who spoke to Automaton about the minigame, Sicko Snap actually fixed a very real problem elsewhere in the Yakuza RPG, even if it made the producers ask, “What the hell is this?” “Sicko Snap was not originally planned, as opposed to minigames like Crazy Delivery and Dondoko Island, which were a part of the original proposal,” Horii explains. “Sicko Snap was the result of our attempts to solve a problem that arose during development.”When developer RGG began implementing trolleys, a common form of public transport in the game’s real-life Hawaii counterpart, the team soon discovered that the rides “felt kind of boring” because the sluggish v…

Video game combat has a lot of components that need to work in tandem for players to feel the satisfaction of a visceral hit, and that’s why Indiana Jones and the Great Circle developer MachineGames has set out to ensure that everything comes together to make the fist-fighting feel impactful.Speaking to Edge magazine, design director Jens Andersson recalls how the team at MachineGames worked on first-person fist-fighting 20 years ago. “This isn’t the first time this team has entered the arena of first-person fist-fighting. Back when the foundational core of MachineGames worked at Starbreeze, they won acclaim doing the same with The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay.” He goes on to say “It’s really hard.” Harder than they felt it should have been, in fact. “We’ve done this before – we should know how to do it.” Yet in the two decades since that game, “the bar has been raised considerably.”Technology has evolved rapidly in the two decades since MachineGames attempted th…

MMOs and private servers go together like peanut butter and legally questionable jelly, and few MMOs can match RuneScape, now the resurrected and retrofitted Old School RuneScape, for the sheer volume and variety of unofficial fan-made variants. These “private servers” usually boiled down to a much faster way to obtain rare items and high levels compared to the actual game, but they came in all shapes and sizes, from imbalanced PvP badlands that had worse economies than the 1930s, to serious role-playing and quest hubs that were legitimately thoughtfully designed. The most iconic RuneScape private server may be Moparscape, its 2000s-tinged black-and-white launch screen ingrained in the minds of countless OSRS players. If I shut my eyes, I can still see the car. But we may see a new server claim the throne in the years ahead, because OSRS developer Jagex has just revealed official “community servers” under the banner of Project Zanaris, which would give the MMO’s player base “full …

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How to access the beta

Beta start date and times

If you want to know what time the Black Ops 6 beta ends, then you’ll probably have realised that the end is nigh for the Open beta period and are working out if you can squeeze a few more matches in before the servers are taken offline. The Black Ops 6 beta ends at 10am PDT / 1pm EDT / 6pm BST on September 9, which at the time of writing means there’s fewer than eight hours left to try out the new Omnimovement system and Training Course to get to grips with it. That also means time is slipping away to unlock the Black Ops 6 beta rewards by levelling up before the end of the Open beta, though you won’t have missed out on any Black Ops 6 Zombies as that menu option will remain grayed out until the full game launch in late October.Unlike previous betas that had a PlayStation exclusive period, BO6 is happening at the same time on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, so it will release simultaneously across PS5, Xbox Series…