If (like me) you found developer Ironwood Studios’ wonderfully weird four-wheeled survival game Pacific Drive just a bit too exhausting when it launched earlier this year, now might be the time to go back: its new Drive Your Way update introduces a whole bunch of custom difficulty settings and presets to make things easier – or masochistically more difficult, if you prefer.

With Pacific Drive’s new update installed, players can immediately choose from seven presets enabling them to tweak the difficulty of their adventures across the Olympic Exclusion Zone. These range from the standard Pacific Drive experience to Joyride – which retains the same fundamental core but reduces gathering, crafting, and research requirements – to presets that lean hard in the other …

Bungie has “resolved” a plagiarism accusation after an artist accused the studio of lifting their alternative design of an “iconic” Destiny 2 weapon.
Earlier this week, Bungie revealed a physical Nerf LMTD blaster based upon Cayde-6’s hand cannon, Ace of Spades.
Shortly after the blaster was revealed, artist Tofu_Rabbit called out the developer on Twitter/X, stating the Nerf design was not merely “similar” to a design they did back in 2015, but essentially a carbon copy, down to the “same brush strokes and scratches/smudges”.

Eurogamer Newscast: When it costs £700, who exactly is the PS5 Pro for?

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Super Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai is “so sorry” to players who have spent “hundreds or even thousands of hours” in the Nintendo fighting game.
In the latest video of his Creating Games YouTube series, Sakurai discussed the importance of being mindful of the time players give to developers.
“There are plenty of people who have spent hundreds or even thousands of hours in Smash Bros., for example,” said Sakurai. “I’m so sorry!”

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Gameplay – Overview Trailer Featuring The Announcer

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Yesterday Sony finally announced the long-rumoured PS5 Pro in a technical presentationn hosted by Mark Cerny. The console is a more advanced version of the PlayStation 5 that boosts its graphics capabilities, and even improves backwards compatibility with some PS4 games.
Yet the biggest catch of all is its £700 price tag. What’s more, with this being a digital-only console, the £100 disc drive add-on is required for physical games, not to mention the additional £25 needed for the optional stand just to hold the console vertically. That’s a total of £825 – without games, as well as the fancy TV necessary to really show off those extra pixels.
The reaction so far has been overwhelmingly negative, predominantly thanks to that audacious price. …

Among the many questions observers had following this week’s shock shutdown of PlayStation 5v5 shooter Concord (albeit not necessarily at the top of their list) was if the now-defunct live-service title would still make an appearance in Amazon’s upcoming animated video game anthology series Secret Level – and the answer, according to a new report at least, is yes.

Secret Level, if you haven’t been following along, is a 15-episode series from the creators of Love, Death & Robots that’ll feature original stories set in the world of games. More specifically, it’ll include episodes centred on Armored Core, Crossfire, Dungeons & Dragons, Exodus, Honor of Kings, Mega Man, New World: Aeternum, PAC-MAN, Sifu, Spelunky, The Outer Worlds, Unreal Tournament, Warha…

With Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s October release looming, BioWare is starting to discuss the finer details of its latest fantasy RPG. And its newest deep-dive provides a look at how progression will work for protagonist Rook and the companions they’ll meet along the way.

Rook’s progression systems won’t, it has to be said, be much of a surprise to anyone that’s had even the faintest brush with a video game in the last decade. Players do stuff, earn XP, gain a new Skill Point each level, then spend them to unlock new abilities on a skill tree.

BioWare’s latest blog post does, however, go a little deeper into the minutiae of things – explaining, for instance, that the biggest experience boost comes from completing quests, although there’s still XP to be earn fr…

The mobile release for the supremely popular card roguelike Balatro is later this month.
The game will be available on both the iOS App store and the Google Play store from 26th September. Further, it’ll be included as part of the Apple Arcade subscription from the same date.
Playstack has released a new trailer to celebrate the release, which you can watch below.

Balatro Mobile – Official Release Date Trailer

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Microsoft is kicking off the cooler months with its next batch of Xbox Game Pass titles.
Day one additions within September’s first wave of games include Star Trucker, which is available today, as well as Age of Mythology: Retold and Train Sim World 5.
Here is the full list of titles heading to Game Pass in the coming weeks:

3rd September: Star Trucker (Cloud, Console, and PC)
4th September: Age of Mythology: Retold (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X/S)
5th September: Expeditions: A MudRunner Game (Cloud, Console, and PC)
11th September: Riders Republic (Cloud, Console, and PC)
17th September: Train Sim World 5 (Cloud, Console, and PC)

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The Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 team has laid out those all important PC requirements, ahead of the game’s release this autumn.
Those jumping in on PC will need a minimum of 8 GB RAM, although Activision recommends 16 GB.
Players will additionally need an SSD with a minimum of 149 GB available space on the game’s launch. Activision notes that it comes down to 78 GB if COD HQ and Warzone are already installed on your PC, however.

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