Microsoft

Minecraft Gets Graphics Overhaul Later This Week On PC

Players will be able to explore Minecraft with dazzling new visuals when its RTX Beta gets underway on April 16. Nvidia announced it was working on bringing real-time ray tracing to the popular open-world crafting game at last year’s Gamescom, and according to a new blog post by the company, the fruits of that labor…

Minecraft Dungeons Is Like Family-Friendly Diablo

Minecraft’s transformation from an open-world crafting game into a linear dungeon crawler is an odd one, but Minecraft Dungeons is still shaping up to be a serenely welcoming loot-based hack n’ slash. Mojang demoed the game for me remotely last week due to the new work-from-home constraints imposed by the ongoing covid-19 crisis. These constraints…

Next-Gen Consoles Reignite An Old Argument Over Controller Batteries

Without electrical juice controllers are just paperweights, and Sony and Microsoft continue to take dramatically different approaches to solving that problem. Yesterday Sony revealed its PlayStation 5 controller: the DualSense. It’s chunkier than the current-gen DualShock 4 and comes loaded with a number of new features, including haptic feedback and a built-in microphone. People wasted…

Everything Shown During Today’s Inside Xbox

Here’s a roundup of everything Microsoft shared during today’s Inside Xbox stream. An early version of Grounded, the upcoming survival adventure game from Obsidian Entertainment, will arrive on Xbox Game Preview on July 28. We learned that while Xbox Series X games can be stored on any external hard drives, they’ll need to be moved to…

Sea Of Thieves Now Has A Steam Page [Update: Microsoft Says It’s Coming There ‘Soon’]

Micorsoft’s multiplayer pirate life simulator, Sea of Thieves, looks like it’s finally heading to Valve’s platform after getting its own store page complete with the words “coming soon.” The listing was spotted earlier this morning complete with system requirements, descriptive tags, and the option to wishlist the game. Unfortunately there’s no release date yet or…

Wasteland 3 has been delayed by several months due to new Covid-19-related work-from-home policies. Previously set to arrive in May, the game will now come out on August 29. “The reality is that with these new logistical challenges our release was going to be impacted,” inXile Entertainment said. 

The Xbox Series X Is Shaped Like A Fridge So It Can Vent More Heat

In a departure from past video game consoles, the Xbox Series X stands upright instead of laying horizontally. Microsoft says that design choice was part of an effort to make the hardware’s fan as big and efficient as possible. The company laid out its thinking in a recent interview with Digital Foundry over on Eurogamer.…

Sony And Microsoft Put Out Vague Statements About How Covid-19 Will Affect Their Games

In a press release on its website, Sony announced that it doesn’t expect the game and network services part of its business to be impacted during the current fiscal year, which ends March 31. At the same time, the company didn’t rule out that things could change in the future. Sony and Microsoft both put…

Microsoft’s AI Experiments Are Creating Unbeatable Raid Bosses

Raid bosses are the toughest fights in any massively multiplayer online game, but eventually players always find ways to crack them. Now developers are looking at ways to use cloud computing to give raid bosses a way of fighting back. During one of Microsoft’s Game Stack developer livestreams yesterday, software engineer James Trott said that…

PlayStation 5 Versus Xbox Series X: The Tech Specs

This week we learned the technical specs for the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5. How do the two consoles stack up so far? Despite only knowing what one of the two looks like, they are not so different, X and 5. Before we get into it, keep in mind these are just numbers…

Microsoft Adds More Stuff You Probably Won’t Use To Game Pass Ultimate

Today, Microsoft announced it’s expanding the Game Pass Ultimate subscription to include “perks,” extra goodies like in-game currency and cosmetic packs for certain games available through the service. While it’s a small gesture, it’s part of the company’s ongoing attempt to make subscribers feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. The first set of games…

The Xbox Series X Controller Is Subtly Different

There are obvious differences between the controller for the Xbox Series X and the current Xbox One controller. The directional pad has changed, and there is a share button now. Then there are features like new textures and rounded bumpers, small changes that could make a big difference in controller comfort for many people. In…

Here’s What’s Inside The Xbox Series X

Last month Microsoft posted a lengthy article talking about what the upcoming Xbox Series X console can do. Today the company details the hardware inside the box that’s getting it done, including a custom eight-core AMD Zen 2 CPU running at 3.8 GHz and its powerful RDNA 2 GPU. The technical jargon runs thick in…

Ori And The Will Of The Wisps: The Kotaku Review

During my time with an early reviewable version of Ori and the Will of the Wisps,, I experienced multiple lockups, intense framerate stutter, and a bug that warped me to the other side of the map after a death. I had a boss battle I’d attempted a half-dozen times reset completely as I landed the…

Microsoft, Nintendo, Ubisoft Respond To The News Of E3’s Cancellation

Earlier today, the Entertainment Software Association said it will cancel the video game trade show E3 this year amid growing concerns over the spread of COVID-19, aka coronavirus. Since the announcement, major game publishers have said they still plan to share news about upcoming games, but in a different format. Despite Sony pulling out of…

Microsoft, Bungie Enact Work-From-Home Policies In Response To Coronavirus [Update: Nintendo, Too]

The ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic has hit the video game industry in a major way, most notably resulting in the postponement of the Game Developers Conference last week. As a response to the virus spreading to Washington’s King County, Microsoft and Bungie, both of which have offices in the area, have decided to enact work-from-home…

I Like One Of Xbox’s Two New Controller Colors

Look at this beautiful piece of gaming equipment. Microsoft calls it Phantom Magenta, but we’re calling it “purple.” Not the Atomic Purple of Nintendo fame, but a richer, more mature hue. I want to uncork it and drink deeply from it’s hand oil-caked reservoirs. It’s up for preorder today, along with a white camouflage number…

Microsoft Drops Out Of GDC, Too [Update: And Epic]

Following in the footsteps of several other major tech firms including Sony and Facebook, Microsoft and Epic both said today that they will no longer be attending this year’s Game Developers Conference due to the growing health risks posed by COVID-19, better known as the coronavirus. “After a close review of guidance by global health…

Mass Effect Returns To Minecraft Seven Years Later

Minecraft players can now once again explore Mars as their favorite Mass Effect players on modern platforms. The Mass Effect Mash-Up Pack adds 36 unique skins for characters like Commander Shepard and Garrus, as well as a bunch of custom textures, menus, and some of the best music from Mass Effect 3 because what better…

The New Xbox One Home Screen Is A Lot Cleaner

Microsoft released a new update for the Xbox One home screen yesterday that makes recently played games easier to find and removes a lot of the extra junk that had previously been taking up real estate. The three rows that used to make up the home screen have been condensed and moved. Now, in the…