Updated: Dec 09, 2020 7:53 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

Wednesday, Dec 09, 2020

Cyberpunk 2077 Launches

Cyberpunk 2077 is now available for Windows, offering the chance to play CD PROJEKT RED's eagerly anticipated sci-fi role-playing game. You can find where to pick this up on the official website and there's more support for the launch on GOG.com. Here's the previously released Launch Trailer and here's a refresher in case you've been sleeping in the Matrix:
Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world, action-adventure story set in Night City, a megalopolis obsessed with power, glamour and body modification. You play as V, a mercenary outlaw going after a one-of-a-kind implant that is the key to immortality. You can customize your character’s cyberware, skillset and playstyle, and explore a vast city where the choices you make shape the story and the world around you.
Continue here to read the full story.

GRAVEN and More Game Awards Demos

There is now a playable demo for GRAVEN on Steam, offering the chance to sample this HEXEN-inspired first-person shooter from Slipgate Ironworks. Don't hesitate if you're interested, as this is a limited-time demo in conjunction with tomorrow's Game Awards, and it will go away on December 13th. Here's a GRAVEN Game Awards Trailer to celebrate the occasion. Publisher 1C Entertainment also notes this demo is playable through GeForce NOW, and a visit to that link reveals there are other demos there and on Steam in conjunction with these awards. Some of these may follow that unfortunate trend of being time-limited, so this may be a test of your time-management skills, depending on how many of them are of interest:

Browsing Steam Experiment

Valve is testing out a feature called Browsing Steam as their latest Steam Labs Experiment. This features new views of games on Steam, which they say "aims to provide greater exposure to the breadth of games available on Steam through new useful points of entry such as sub-genres, themes, and player modes." The details are in this post, which is also where to sign up to participate, and they are monitoring the feedback in this discussion thread. Here's more:
Introducing New Ways to Browse Steam
With this experiment, we aim to increase the surface area of the store by introducing a broader set of ways to browse Steam’s catalog of games from the outset—no login or complex searching required. Our new views provide greater exposure to the breadth of games available on Steam through new useful points of entry such as sub-genres, themes, and player modes. We hope you’ll opt into our Store Browse Experiment to give these news views a try, then let us know what you think in the discussions.

New & Noteworthy
Many users rely on our charts for quick snapshots of what’s new and popular on Steam. These are now accessible from one menu, New & Noteworthy, which also provides direct access to the biggest events currently running Steam—including game festivals, publisher sales, and other seasonal celebrations.

Control Sells 2M

Remedy's Thomas Puha tweets that Control has now sold more than two million copies, saying November was the best sales month to date for their action/adventure:
My boss just revealed in the @remedygames CMD stream that the past November was Control's best selling month (15 months after launch). In total, Control has sold over 2 million copies to date.

F1 2020 Gets Free F2 Update

Codemasters announces a new free update is now available for F1 2020 to add the F2 2020 season to the open-wheel racing simulation. This is for PC and consoles, and the Windows edition is available on Steam. There's this accompanying post on Steam with details and screenshots. Here's an overview:
After the 2020 FIA Formula 2 Championship™ went down to the thrilling final race weekend in Bahrain, Codemasters today allows players to rewrite history with a free F2™ 2020 season update as part of F1® 2020, the official videogame of the 2020 FIA FORMULA ONE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP™. Players can now compete with the full 2020 line-up featuring all 11 teams, cars, and drivers including the new FIA Formula 2™ Champion, Mick Schumacher.

The F2 game option replicates its real world counterpart with 12 weekends, each made up of two races. The first, known as the Feature Race, follows a standard format with drivers lining up based on their qualifying times, and points awarded to the top 10 placings. The second, Sprint Race, sees the Feature Race top eight positions reversed in a shorter race, with fewer points awarded to the top eight drivers. For both, there are two additional points available for the fastest lap.
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Minecraft Dungeons Howling Peaks Released

The Minecraft Website has the news that the Howling Peaks DLC is now available for Minecraft Dungeons, the dungeon crawler based on Minecraft. Take a peak at the Launch Trailer and read on for more:
Climbing a mountain has been the peak of my bucket list for years now, so imagine my surprise when I was finally offered the chance without ever leaving the comfort of my couch! It’s all thanks to the newest DLC for Minecraft Dungeons, Howling Peaks. For everyone with the ambition of reaching a mountaintop (but with the physical stamina of climbing over a pile of laundry) this is a perfect way to experience the summit views you’ve always dreamed of. Forget airline tickets, all you need is access to a Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, or Xbox One!

But just as a mountain range has many peaks (and just like I get endless mileage out of this metaphor), this release has even more to deliver. We’re also releasing the new Season Pass and a free update (including six new enchantments) – all available today! For more information on everything that is releasing today, please check out our previous announcement post here.
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Unto The End Begins

Unto The End is now available for Windows and consoles, and you can find the Windows edition of 2 Ton Studios' combat game on Steam. Here's the Launch Trailer showing off the game's throwback graphics, and here's more on the game:
Unto The End is a challenging combat adventure game in the style of a cinematic platformer. The story is simple: get home to your family. Master read-react combat in intense sword fights. Spot opportunities to trade and use items. An adventure told through your actions, how will you make it home?
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Evening Crowdfunding

Into the Black

Last Link of the Day: The world’s largest organism. Oh, "organism?" Never mind.

New NVIDIA GeForce Drivers

NVIDIA now offers new version 460.79 GeForce Windows drivers. Unsurprisingly, these are the game ready drivers for the release of Cyberpunk 2077, which comes at 7:00 pm EST tonight. These also support the release version of Minecraft with RTX, more G-SYNC compatible displays, and one-click optimal settings for more games. This article has specifics on all that's new. Here's what they say about Cyberpunk support:
Game Ready For Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077, perhaps the most anticipated game of all time, launches later today. On PC, it features numerous ray-traced effects, and its performance is boosted by 60% or more by NVIDIA DLSS, GeForce RTX’s critically acclaimed AI-powered tech.

With the performance provided by DLSS, you can enable Cyberpunk 2077’s immersive ray-traced effects on any GeForce RTX GPU, as shown in our trailer:
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Desperados III Gets Bounty Mode and Editor

A new update for Desperados III is now available on Steam, adding a new bounty mode to the wild west strategy sequel as well as a "Level Editor Light" to allow some gentle modding. The Bounty Mode Update Trailer shows this off and there's a tutorial playlist of videos to help you with the editor. Here's the explanation from this post:
Desperados III gets another free update - the Bounty Mode is now part of the game and lets you choose, which of the five Desperados you want to play in almost every major mission.* Either you make it easier for yourself or spice the mission up a bit - or you try to finish the game with Hector all over the place!
* similar to the Baron's Challenges, this mode will unlock during the second chapter

Also, the newly activated "Level Editing Cheats" allow you to create your own mission setups and share the savegames with all other Desperados III players. Basically, it's a level editor light. By using the cheat codes, players can easily clean a map and then spawn all types of enemies in any location on the map and have fun by placing different objects throughout the level. You want to use 20 dynamite crates and 10 Gatling guns in Flagstone for maximum chaos? You got it! Get creative and share your own mission setups as savegame files with other players!
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El Hijo - A Wild West Tale Released

The post above includes a "shameless cross-promotion" for a new release. El Hijo - A Wild West Tale came out last week on Steam, offering a "spaghetti-western stealth game" for Windows. Put on your poncho and your Ennio Morricone playlist, check out the Release Trailer, and read on for what this is about:
The journey begins when a farmer and her son El Hijo are attacked by bandits who raze their farm to the ground. The mother decides to leave "El Hijo" at a secluded monastery in order to protect him. However, El Hijo decides that the monastic life is not for him and decides to escape. "El Hijo - A Wild West Tale" is a non-violent stealth game. Violence is instead exchanged with the mischievous, playfulness of a young child. Shadowplay is in the core of the game and "El Hijo" will often have to hide. Without needlessly adding new mechanics, the gameplay is extended naturally, as variations of existing mechanics are gradually introduced and then combined with each other to increase the challenge. These twists on familiar mechanics are often a product of the varied, increasingly dangerous environments that "El Hijo" must traverse to reach his ultimate goal.

Features:

  • Survive the Wild West with the cleverness of a young hero
  • Explore dark monasteries, deserts and boomtowns in a spaghetti-western world
  • Merge with the shadows to hide from the lawless
  • Solve playfully tricky environmental puzzles
  • Use a playful arsenal of tactical toys to bypass and distract diverse desperadoes
  • Inspire other children towards the path to freedom
  • Enjoy the gripping storyline of a brave son searching for his mother
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Learning Factory Demo

Learning Factory is an upcoming game about machine learning, factory building, and... cats. As if it couldn't be more unusual, the game is also set on Mars. You can learn all about this offbeat project through this blog post and see it in action in this video. It is coming to in 2021 to Steam, where there's a free alpha demo you can sample right now. Here's more:
Learning Factory is a factory automation game where you have to build an increasingly bigger and complex factory, named KOTOVOD and located on Mars, to make goods for cats. Then you get data about sales analyzing what cats liked or disliked, and use this data with machine learning models to optimize prices and make sure you’re selling what cats really long for.

But just as with while True:learn(), there’s more to this game: backed by actual specialists in the matter and using real-world machine learning models, the game aims also at teaching how big data is collected and processed in machine learning. You will be learning about two of the most relevant technologies of our time while you play a super fun strategy game -- if you want to, that is; because at its true heart it’s above all a quirkily engaging factory automation game with lots of cats in it!
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Woodsalt Delayed Again

Team Woodsalt announces another delay to Woodsalt. Like last time they waited until the actual release date to reveal the setback. And yes, this sci-fi JRPG is the latest (and last?) release to fall victim to the Cyberpunk 2077 juggernaut. But they also admit there are some quality of life fixes they want to add before getting this out there. Here's word:
When we chose December 9th, it looked lovely and clear. Then Cyberpunk was postponed and they announced their release on December 10th. As confident as we are in Woodsalt, we can’t possibly compete for media space with that behemoth. We don’t have that Keanu money. We barely have Kevin James money (lol jk, we’re dirt poor).

To everyone who has been waiting and were aware of Woodsalt, I’m sorry if you’re deflated by this and I do totally get it, but I hope you understand that while this is our passion, we also need to keep the lights on. If this game tanks, we’re out of jobs and my choices affect our team as well as myself. Ultimately they’ve been by my side and supported me, and I can’t risk my impatience causing them to lose their future employment.

The other reason is that through testing, there have been a number of “quality of life” changes suggested that we think would really benefit the title. So far the reception has been really, really good and these little changes seem to just add a bit of intuitiveness into the gameplay.
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Gatherings & Competitions

Out of the Blue

Today is the release date in the US for Cyberpunk 2077, as midnight GMT December 10th is today at 7:00 pm EST. As a jaded old school gamer I tend to be fairly immune to hype these days, but I won't deny I'm looking forward to this. I can't recall the last time I preordered a game, but I did so for Cyberpunk.

Preordered Round-up
Thanks Ant and Neutronbeam.

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Tuesday, Dec 08, 2020

Halo Infinite in Autumn 2021

343 Industries announces the release of Halo Infinite will not come until fall 2021. The next installment in the shooter series was first expected by the end of this year, but then this summer it was announced it was being pushed back into 2021. Now a development update that update that includes details on where things stand includes word from Joseph Staten is to expect it in autumn:
After Reach shipped, I became a Halo fan, cheering-on 343i from the sidelines. But I’ve spent the last four months immersing myself back into the Halo universe, and it’s my honor as creative director to help our team ship Halo Infinite in Fall 2021.

Yep, that’s when the game is coming out. And from now until then, every one of us at 343i and our great partner teams will be building, testing, and polishing an experience we hope all of you love.

I joined 343i right as the team was wrestling with feedback from the July campaign demo. This discussion boiled down to one fundamental truth: we needed more time to do things right. That included pushing hard in the Fall, giving the team time to recharge over the Holidays, and then coming back in January to finish the game at a healthy pace.

Because Halo Infinite in the Fall of 2021… is just the beginning of the adventure.

Marvel's Avengers Operation: Kate Bishop – Taking AIM Released

Operation: Kate Bishop – Taking AIM is now available for Marvel's Avengers, offering the promised post-release free content for the superhero adventure game. This is out on all platforms, and you can pick it up for the Windows edition on Steam. The recent WAR TABLE Deep Dive Video takes a look at this in action, and more details follow:
Today, SQUARE ENIX® announced that the first new playable Super Hero, and star of the all-new Marvel’s Avengers Operation: Kate Bishop – Taking AIM, is now available for free download for all game owners. In addition to Kate Bishop, the new playable Super Hero performed by Ashly Burch, and the new chapter in the game’s ongoing and expanding Avengers Initiative story, Marvel’s Avengers Operation: Kate Bishop – Taking AIM also introduces a powerful new villain, the Super-Adaptoid, that will challenge players with a combination of skills and weaponry that mimic the Avengers’ own attacks.
Continue here to read the full story.

Cyberpunk 2077 Launch Trailer

A new Official Launch Trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 attempts to fill the conspicuous hype vacuum for the impending launch of CD PROJEKT RED's augmented role-playing game. This features narration from Keanu Reeves and a very brief addition to the standard description:
Would you rather live in peace as Mr. Nobody... or go down for all times in a blaze of glory?
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CDPR Working on Cyberpunk 2077 Epilepsy Solution

CD PROJEKT RED tweets that as they work on a "more permanent solution" for the potential for Cyberpunk 2077 to cause epileptic seizures, they will add a warning to the EULA for their imminent sci-fi RPG:
Thank you for bringing this up. We’re working on adding a separate warning in the game, aside from the one that exists in the EULA (https://cyberpunk.net/en/user-agreement/). Regarding a more permanent solution, Dev team is currently exploring that and will be implementing it as soon as possible.

Prince of Persia Sands of Time Remake Delay Confirmed

Ubisoft tweets a confirmation of this morning's report that the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake is being delayed. Here's the official statement:
During our Ubisoft Forward digital conference, we proudly announced the return of the Prince with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake.

We are excited to put this game in your hands, as we retell the story of the Prince and Farah in a reimagined 11th century Persia. However, 2020 has been a year like no other. Today we wanted to let you know that we are taking additional time to work on the game. With that, the release date for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake has been moved to March 18, 2021. We believe this is the right call to ensure we will deliver a game you will enjoy.

Thank you for your patience and continued support for Prince of Persia and we hope you stay safe and healthy this holiday season.

The Division 2 Warlords of New York Season 4 Live

Ubisoft announces End of Watch is live in Tom Clancy's The Division 2 for owners of the Warlords of New York expansion. This comes along with Title Update 12, which includes quality of life improvements for owners of the base game. Here's an overview trailer along with just a bit of all that the new season has to offer:
What else lies in store for Season 4? Here’s what you can expect:

  • Season 4 – End of Watch is filled with Leagues, Global Events, Manhunt Targets, and more. Tuesday of each week will bring the beginning of a new event as we move through Season 4.
    TCTD2 WONY Season 4+Branding Calendar 960x540 final
  • Seasonal Levels – As in Seasons past, 100 levels are available to earn throughout the season. Prior season experience does not count here – as all 100 levels are reset to be earned again. Season XP is earned from all activities and difficulties, so take the Season at your own pace and enjoy!
    • After reaching Season Level 100, every SHD Level increases will also yield a Field Proficiency Cache!
  • Season Pass - The optional Season Pass is available for 1000 Premium Credits ($10 or your regional equivalent) in the in-game store, granting additional cosmetics and opportunities for season gear as you progress. The Season Pass also adds a Daily Project for a hard difficulty Main Mission that grants extra XP to help you get those level rewards!
  • Seasonal Manhunt Targets – A new target unlocks every 3 weeks, alongside a double XP event, providing an opportunity to progress quicker for the first 15 levels gained that week. Take down all four Lieutenants, Viper, Kestrel, Magnus, and Circe, to unlock the Prime Target, Faye Lau. Upon finishing the Manhunt, you’ll earn the new unique Skill variant, the Achilles Pulse.

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Sands of Aura Announced

How you dune? Chashu Entertainment announces Sands of Aura, an upcoming souls-like set on a sand-covered world coming to Early Access on Steam next year. "Sands of Aura is a dream project for us," explains Eric Zheng, co-founder of Chashu Entertainment. "We’re holding nothing back: Every second of every minute is being poured into development as if the game were a living thing. Of course, it helps that basically everyone in the studio is immensely talented and a serious fan of both Diablo and the Dark Souls franchise!" Here's a Reveal Trailer with a first look at the game's Unreal Engine 4 graphics, and here's the nitty gritty:
In Sands of Aura, a powerful spell has covered Talamhel in a sea of sand. From the depths of the dying world to the tallest spires of crumbled civilizations, those who have endured now live in the waning memories of a once lush, bountiful realm.

Armed with hope for the future and little else, navigate the sands surrounding the ruins, loot challenging dungeons, and head off evil by acquiring powerful weapons and items. You won’t be alone on your journey: Others will help you along your path, if you’ve proven yourself in their eyes.
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Luciform Announced

Luciform is a fantasy platformer in the works at Chaos Minds for release on Steam next Q1 of next year. Word is: "A precision platformer with an endearing protagonist, Luciform’s colorful graphics and beautiful environments provide the perfect backdrop for some truly intense color-coded platforming action." The trailer can help us decide if this is luciform over lucifunction. Here's more:
In Luciform, a family of mythical creatures has been captured by the Red-Eyed Gorilla. To regain their freedom, they pool their energy together to summon Luci – the one individual who can rescue them. Thanks to a unique gift, Luci has the ability to change colors at will!

The game demands quick reflexes and nerves of steel. Timing jumps with the utmost precision is a must; the alternative is ... not pretty. Those who’ve mastered Super Meat Boy and Celeste will find themselves right at home :)
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Get Seven: Enhanced Edition for Free

What's in the box? It's Seven: Enhanced Edition, which is now available for free on the Humble Store (thanks Ant and Acleacius). This is one of their Humble Freebies for those who subscribe to their newsletter. It's yours to keep as long as you head over to this page and claim your copy before tomorrow. Here's a bit on this indie action/adventure for Windows:
Seven: Enhanced Edition is an open-world, isometric stealth and action role-playing game, in which you play as Teriel, a master thief sent on a mission that will shake the foundations of the Vetrall Empire. Free roam across the vibrant prison island of Peh and explore the sea depths on board of a submarine in the Drowned Past expansion.

New AMD Adrenalin 2020 Edition Drivers

As mentioned above, AMD Support now offers new version 20.12.1 Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition drivers. These include support for Cyberpunk 2077 and the new Radeon RX 6900 Series graphics cards. Here's word from the patch notes:
Support For

  • Radeon™ RX 6900 Series
  • Cyberpunk 2077™

Fixed Issues

  • Gaming applications can sometimes get stuck running at lower than expected graphics clocks on Radeon RX 6800 series graphics products.
  • The HP Reverb G2 VR headset may fail to sync or may have a black screen when run with Radeon RX 6800 series graphics products.
  • Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six® Siege may experience corruption in Hybrid Graphics scenarios when using the Vulkan API on an extended display.
  • Crossfire™ may experience issues when attempting to change the games resolution to a 16:9 ratio.
  • Performance Metrics Overlay and the Performance Tuning tab incorrectly report higher than expected idle clock speeds on Radeon™ RX 5700 series graphics products.

GOG Galaxy Rewards for Cyberpunk 2077

CD PROJEKT RED announces digital goodies and in-game items they are giving to all owners of Cyberpunk 2077 through GOG GALAXY. This is not just for those who buy the sci-fi RPG from GOG.COM, it does not matter what vendor you use. Nor is it PC-exclusive as you can get in on this with the console editions as well. Here's the deal:
What digital goodies and in-game items are available?
Every copy of the game, regardless of the platform, comes with a set of digital goodies, such as the original score, an artbook, a digital comic “Cyberpunk 2077: Your Voice”, a Cyberpunk 2020 sourcebook, and a set of wallpapers. The GOG.COM version of the game also includes additional digital comic “Big City Dreams”, print-quality posters, and more wallpapers and avatars. And for the cool Cyberpunk 2077 in-game items there are: The Witcher-inspired Wolf School Jacket and T-shirt, GOG GALAXY t-shirt, Black Unicorn blade or Shupe the Troll Plushy. All of the above rewards can be claimed just for connecting the game with your GOG account.
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More on Epilepsy and Cyberpunk 2077

Rock Paper Shotgun has a follow-up to the report that Cyberpunk 2077 has portions that could trigger seizures in epileptics. They have a statement from charity Epilepsy Action:
“We are alarmed and saddened that a game reviewer had a seizure triggered by Cyberpunk 2077, before it was even launched,” said Louise Cousins, Epilepsy Action’s director of external affairs. “The game features rapidly blinking lights and other animations that could cause seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy. These features are unsafe and should have been avoided to make the game more accessible. With huge demand and excitement building for its release, it may pose a serious risk to people with photosensitive epilepsy. The developers CD Projekt RED should consider how they can update the game to make it safer. A disclaimer warning at the beginning isn’t enough.”

Blizzard: World of Warcraft: Shadowlands "Fastest-Selling PC Game of All Time"

Blizzard announces that the new Shadowlands expansion for World of Warcraft has surpassed their own Diablo III to become the fastest-selling PC game of all time. Here's their justification for the claim:
Starting November 23, World of Warcraft® players around the globe began their journey into the unknown reaches of Azeroth’s afterlife in Shadowlands, the game’s highly anticipated eighth expansion. Today, Blizzard Entertainment announced that as of the first full day of Shadowlands’ launch, more than 3.7 million units had sold through globally, making it the fastest-selling PC game of all time industry-wide.*

The previously announced industry record-holder, Blizzard’s own Diablo® III, sold through more than 3.5 million copies as of its first day of release. Today’s announcement confirms that Shadowlands has surpassed that milestone as well as any other reported sell-through achievement for the same time frame among all PC games historically.

*Sales and/or downloads, based on internal company records and reports from key distributors.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake Possibly Delayed

Gematsu translates a since-deleted Facebook post from the original Czech to that indicates the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake will not make its announced January 21, 2021 release date. According to the unconfirmed report, the game using its time-shifting mechanic to push back its launch to March 18th:

Greetings, Prince of Persia fans!

During our Ubisoft Forward digital conference, we proudly announced Prince’s return from Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake.

We are excited to be able to put this game in your hands again as we retell the story of Prince and Farah in the amazing 11th century Persia. However, 2020 was a year like no other. Today we would like to inform you that we need more time to complete the game. With that, the release date of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake has been moved to March 18, 2021. We believe this is the right decision to ensure we deliver a game you enjoy.
Continue here to read the full story.

Minecraft with RTX Full Launch and More DLSS Titles (Including Cyberpunk 2077)

NVIDIA has a couple of announcements related to GeForce-specific features. They announce that the beta for Minecraft with RTX has concluded, and this ray traced version of the sandbox building game is in official release. They say: "To celebrate, we are releasing 2 new worlds, bringing the total number of official RTX worlds for Minecraft to 15." RTX support now integrated into the Windows 10 edition of the game sold through the Microsoft Store. Here's an Official Full Game Release Trailer showing off the RTX visuals. They also announce the addition of NVIDIA DLSS support to four titles: CRSED: F.O.A.D., Moonlight Blade, Scavengers Tech Test, and coming soon to Mount&Blade II Bannerlord. Finally, with Cybepunk 2077 launching this week, they tout the game's DLSS and RTX support:
Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City Glistens with DLSS and Ray Tracing
Cyberpunk 2077 is coming too, and is loaded with tech including ray-traced shadows, reflections, diffuse illumination, global illumination, and ambient occlusion, along with NVIDIA DLSS.

Ray tracing enables visually next generation graphics which make Cyberpunk 2077 look and feel more cinematic and immersive. Sunlight shadows, global illumination, sky lighting, emissive surfaces and reflections all look strikingly realistic. And DLSS is a must-have feature to play with ray tracing, boosting frame rates while delivering beautiful, crisp image quality.

With realistic shadows and lighting and the added performance of NVIDIA DLSS no other platform will compare to the Cyberpunk 2077 experience on a GeForce RTX-powered PC.
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100B Hours of YouTube Gaming Viewed in 2020

YouTube Gaming offers some statistics on the surge of gaming content on YouTube in 2020. In a blog post they call this their biggest year ever, saying over 100 billion hours of game content were viewed across over 40 million active gaming channels. Here's an overview:
Some highlight moments include:

  • Globally, there were over 100 billion hours of gaming content watched on YouTube
  • Live Gaming Streams created more than 10 billion watch time hours on YouTube
  • We’ve seen more than 40M active gaming channels on YouTube
  • Over 80,000 YouTube Gaming content creators hit 100,000 subscribers, over 1,000 creators hit 5 million subscribers and over 300 reached a whopping 10 million subscribers!

GWENT: The Way of the Witcher Released

The Way of the Witcher expansion is now available for GWENT: The Witcher Card Game. This free add-on for the free-to-play game is shown off in the Launch Trailer. Here are the details:
Way of the Witcher is the sixth expansion for GWENT. This time around the theme focuses on the origins of witchers and their creator, one of the most powerful sorcerers on the Continent — Alzur. New additions include 70 cards spanning 60 faction-specific ones and 10 neutrals, as well as powerful fresh abilities and mechanics — among them Adrenaline, which triggers whenever the player has a specific number of cards or less in their hand.

Learn more about Way of the Witcher
In celebration of the expansion’s launch, a variety of time-limited offers featuring Way of the Witcher Premium Kegs and unique ornaments have been made available. The latter include the Laboratory Border, as well as the avatar bearing the likeness of Cosimo — Alzur’s teacher and the sorcerer who helped create the first witchers. Additional details regarding these launch offers are available via the in-game store.
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Three Telltale Games on GOG.COM

GOG.COM announces they've added three Telltale titles to their DRM-free marketplace:
Create your own stories by making challenging decisions along the way. Today three unique titles from the legendary Telltale Games make a comeback on GOG.COM for you to enjoy. Let’s take a look at them:

So, take your seat and get ready for some wild adventures - all three above Telltale titles are here to take you on engaging journeys.

Call of the Sea Calls

Can you hear it? It's the call of the sea, as Call of the Sea is now available for Windows on GOG.com, Steam, the Microsoft Store, and Xbox Game Pass for PC, as well as for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. This offers a mystery/adventure game set in the South Pacific in the 1930s. Here's a Launch Trailer and here are the details:
An otherworldly tale of self-discovery and mystery set in the 1930s, Call of the Sea is a love letter to the adventure genre. Players will follow Norah, a charming and determined young woman, to a lush island paradise in the uncharted reaches of the South Pacific on the search for her missing husband. On this mysterious island, you’ll unearth the remnants of a lost civilization, investigate clues, and solve a variety of clever puzzles to piece together the fate of Norah’s husband’s expedition. Explore stunning tropical environments on this immersive voyage inspired by the surreal emotion, suspense and surprises of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories. What secrets will you find in this beautiful, enigmatic world?
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Ultimate ADOM: Caverns Of Chaos Delayed

Publisher Assemble Entertainment and developer Team ADOM announce Ultimate ADOM: Caverns Of Chaos will hit Steam Early Access for Windows, macOS, and Linux on February 11, 2021. During the summer it was announced that this would arrive by the end of the year, but they treat this like a new game announcement, so the delay goes unexplained. Here's a new Announcement Trailer and here's word on the updated version of the game: "After 25 years, we're continuing the story of ADOM and bringing that experience into the modern realm," says Thomas Biskup, Creator of ADOM. "Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos offers plenty of depth for seasoned vets of the genre but with all the tweaks, options, and quality of life adjustments that ensure a smooth and enjoyable experience for the contemporary player." Here's more:
Publisher Assemble Entertainment and developer Team ADOM announced today rogue-like dungeon crawler Ultimate ADOM - Caverns of Chaos, headed to Steam Early Access on February 11, 2021, for Windows PC, Mac, and Linux. Ultimate ADOM is a traditionally-inspired reimagining of the beloved genre and features endless procedurally generated dungeons, monsters, and crafting options, allowing for ultimate replayability.
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Headbangers in Holiday Hell Released

Headbangers in Holiday Hell is now available on Steam, offering a retro top-down shooter that celebrates the holidays in a most violent manner. Here's what this offers:
Headbängers in Holiday Hell takes the player on a roguelite journey through 15 levels of procedurally generated neighborhoods, malls, parking lots, minibosses, and special levels.

Headbutt elves that just fell in love with an inflatable sex doll or take them down with a nailgun while they are hypnotized by a TV. And what about electrocuting them with a toaster while they hop in pool of water?
Tame a possessed reindeer vomiting ectoplasm, burst naughty little grinches into pieces, and bring the fight to the Big Red One himself while headbanging to some crazy heavy metal riffs by Reign of Fury (UK).
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