Microsoft

This Is What Xbox Series X Graphics Look Like

Here’s what Playism’s Bright Memory: Infinite looks like running on the Xbox Series X, or at least in-game footage representative of Xbox Series X performance. Not too shabby. The first game shown during Microsoft’s Xbox Series X gameplay reveal event was this first-person shooter from developer FYQD-Studio. Note that the official stream version carried a…

Watch The Xbox Series X Gameplay Reveal Live Right Here

This morning Microsoft is giving us our first look at next-generation gameplay on the Xbox Series X, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in action. Let’s watch. It should be an interesting show, full of footage from games looking slightly to significantly better than they would on standard Xbox One hardware. Many of the games coming to…

Microsoft Will Show Xbox Series X First-Party Games In July, Still Promising Halo For Launch

Microsoft says it plans to show updates on its first-party games some time in July and is still planning on launching Xbox Series X and Halo Infinite later this year. The company shed more light on its plans for the rest of 2020 in a blog post today, including announcing a series of “monthly moments”…

Xbox Series X Gameplay Reveal Set For May 7

Microsoft will finally show gameplay from Xbox Series X games, including our first look at Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in action, on a new episode of Inside Xbox airing May 7. While Microsoft has already shown the console itself, as well as shared deep dives into its specs, this will be the first opportunity to see…

Game Pass now has over 10 million subscribers. Xbox boss Phil Spencer announced the stat in a new blog post outlining the downloadable game service’s continued growth. That’s up from 9.5 million monthly users last year. Spencer said subscribers are playing games twice as much since the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic. 

Sea of Thieves Bug Causes Ships To Pull Sick Flips

This is the Tony Hawk x Sea of Thieves crossover nobody asked for. For a little while now, Sea of Thieves has had a bug that takes previously regular sailing ships, comfortable in their designed space on top of the water, and launches them suddenly into the sky like Poseidon hit a comically large EJECT…

Red Dead Redemption 2 Comes To Game Pass

Red Dead Redemption 2 goes free to download as part of Xbox Game Pass starting May 7. The blockbuster western, which former Kotaku editor Kirk Hamilton called “exhaustively detailed and exhaustingly beautiful” in his review, is the latest in a series of big games that have recently come to Microsoft’s subscription-based download library. The Witcher…

This Cyberpunk 2077 Xbox Is Too Much

Happy Friday: this special edition Xbox One X comes with glow-in-the-dark graffiti that says “No Future.” It’s probably right. I wasn’t down with this Cyberpunk 2077 Xbox One X when it leaked on the Canadian Walmart website yesterday. Instead of something bright and neon-fueled, it looked to me like the sort of colorful scrap metal…

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…