Culture

Please Enjoy Breath Of The Wild In 8K (If You Can)

A few years back I was marvelling at Breath of the Wild in 4K. Now we are all free to admire the game running in 8K, and with some (shaded) ray tracing to boot. That’s if you’ve got an 8K monitor. Since that’s almost nobody, the video here by Digital Dreams still looks incredible in…

Valheim Mod Lets You Tame Any Creature, Including Trolls

While playing Valheim the other night, a friend and I spent an ungodly amount of time digging a trench and physically pushing Greylings through it, into a house, so they could be our pets. It was fiddly, sometimes infuriating work. Also, deeply unethical. If we had this mod, it would have at least been easier.…

Go, Fortnite Chicken, Go

Perhaps you, like me, forget which games have fall damage and which don’t. You get spoiled by the invincibility of Apex Legends, only to switch to something else and plummet to your death. At least you won’t be doing that in Fortnite anymore, if you can catch a chicken. Fortnite Season 6launched yesterday. Along with…

Xbox Gets New Suspend Feature To Help With Slow Download Speeds

Download speeds on consoles are notoriously bad, especially if your internet isn’t lightning fast to begin with. A new feature rolling out now on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S for Xbox Insiders is aimed at improving them by making it easier to suspend existing games while downloading new ones. “Suspend in the queue will…

More Game Companies Take A Public Stand Against Anti-Asian Racism Following Atlanta Shootings

A white man entered an Atlanta, Georgia spa yesterday and opened fire, killing four people and wounding another. He then drove across town and repeated this heinous act at two more locations, killing four more people. Six of the victims were Asian women, four of them of Korean descent. These shootings came hours after Bandai…

Twitch Star’s ‘Never-Ending’ Stream Shows No Signs Of Stopping, Despite Need To Eat, Sleep

Ludwig Ahgren, a Twitch streamer with nearly 2 million followers, has never been one to shy away from stunts. His latest is especially audacious, albeit probably not great for his long-term health: He’s running a “never-ending” marathon stream powered by subscriptions. Each subscription adds another 10 seconds to the total amount of time he’s required…

PSA: Next Week, You’ll Be Able To Claim A Bunch Of Free PlayStation Games

Earlier this month, Sony revived last year’s Play At Home initiative, a program designed to provide free games to PlayStation players in the hopes of promoting social distancing. Next week, Sony will expand the initiative by offering a whole bunch of games. Starting on March 25, you’ll be able to add the following PS4 games…

Disco Elysium’s Beefed-Up Director’s Cut Coming March 30

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut will launch on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, and Stadia on March 30, developer ZA/UM announced today. The cerebral adventure game, which was first released to critical acclaim in 2019, puts you in the shoes of a complete mess of a detective as he and his partner investigate a murder…

Activision Blizzard CEO To Get Even Bigger Bonuses While Others Get Laid Off

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick routinely gets millions in stock bonuses every year based on how the company is doing. Now he’s set to get even more, for a total payout of nearly $200 million according to CtW Investment Group, a union pension fund advocacy organization. And it’s all thanks to a clause in his…

A Short Film From Medal Of Honor Has Been Nominated For An Oscar [Update: It Won]

It’s not quite a video game winning a film award, but a short film that was part of Respawn’s 2020 VR game Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject). It’s possibly the first time a video game studio has been nominated for an Oscar.…

Xbox Game Pass For PC Finally Gets EA Play Tomorrow

Planned for release late last year but delayed until now, EA Play comes to Xbox Game Pass for PC tomorrow at no additional cost to subscribers, complete with the newly-added Star Wars: Squadrons. The cycle that started with an announcement last September is finally complete. Starting tomorrow, EA Play for PC becomes part of Xbox…

Doom Eternal‘s Next DLC Comes Out Tomorrow

Hell yeah! Doom Eternal’s next and final expansion, The Ancient Gods – Part 2, will come out tomorrow, developer iD Software announced today. The expansion, which picks up after last fall’s first chapter—The Ancient Gods – Part 1—appears inspired far more by typical fantasy than by the science-fiction that characterizes the main game. Many of…

Players Aren’t Happy About Assassin’s Creed Valhalla‘s Transmog Tax

A couple months after release, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla finally has transmog, but not as some players had originally envisioned it. The feature falls short of how it’s been implemented in past games, and comes with a 50 silver tax on each transaction to boot, leaving a lot of us, myself included, scratching out heads. Transmog,…

Eternal Sonata Literally Includes Some Of The Greatest Music Of All Time

Welcome to Morning Music, Kotaku’s ongoing hangout for folks who love video games and the cool-ass sounds they make. This morning I am totally cheating by presenting you with tracks from Eternal Sonata, the Xbox 360/PS3 Bandai Namco RPG that features music composed by 19th-century Polish classical superstar Frédéric Chopin. That’s right, come at me.…

Track: Under My Thumb | Artist: Anakelly | Album: Bossa n’ Stones 

Sony Chose PlayStation’s First Office Location With Late-Night Drinks In Mind

When Sony Computer Entertainment first established its flagship PlayStation brand in 1993, its executives’ chief concern was making sure the company’s first offices were located in an area with late-night bars. At least that’s the story Ken Kutaragi, who’s widely known as father of the PlayStation, told Bandai Namco’s Katsuhiro Harada on the latter’s new…

Chess Champion Plays “Bongcloud Attack”, Which Is Very Funny

Norway’s Magnus Carlsen is a chess grandmaster, the current world champion, as well as world #1 in rapid and blitz chess as well. He is very good at chess, but in this match against fellow grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, he opens by playing one of the worst possible sequences of moves in the entire game. The…

EA Trying New Technology To Fight FIFA 21‘s Racism Problem

While EA has issued over 25,000 warnings and suspensions, and banned over 9,000 accounts for “inappropriate or offensive content” since the launch of FIFA 21 last year, it may shock you to learn that the game still has a problem with racist white folks using certain systems and game modes to act like assholes. As…

The Best Clone Wars Cartoon Is Coming Back

I have no problem with the big, shiny Clone Wars cartoon that ran from 2008-2020. But that series’ success came at the expense of an older Clone Wars show that, having been thrown into Disney’s Great Pit Of Cartoon, is finally going to get the comeback it has long deserved. On April 2 Disney is…

Rockstar Pays Modder $10,000 For Fixing GTA Load Times

Remember how yesterday we told you about the modder who found a way to greatly improve GTA Online load times on the PC? That fix, identified and approved by Rockstar, has already gone live, and the modder responsible has been paid for their work. GTAV Title Update 1.53 is out now, and on PC it…