Microsoft has revealed the second wave of Xbox Game Pass titles for September.
Members will soon be able to get their hands on:
Wargroove 2 (Cloud, Console, and PC)
Frostpunk 2 (PC)
Ara: History Untold (PC)
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Blizzard has shared more on Overwatch 2’s previously announced World of Warcraft collaboration – which arrives as part of the MMO’s 20th anniversary celebrations – confirming the event begins next Tuesday, 17th September.
Word of its start date arrives alongside a nifty new trailer featuring a first-person ride through a theme-park-style attraction called Blizzard World. As the trailer unfolds, a number of unseen Overwatch 2 characters comment on the ensuing crossover mayhem, and we’re given a glimpse at the hero shooter’s new World of Warcraft collaboration skins.
Those skins include Sylvanas Windrunner Widowmaker, Lich King Reinhardt, Thrall Zenyatta, and Diamond Magni Torbjorn. Whether Blizzard has anything more planned for Overwatch 2’s big World of Warcraft event beyond a handful of skins remains to be seen, but all will likely be revealed when the event gets underway next week.
Overwatch 2 x World of Warcraft | Collaboration Trailer
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Game studio Odyssey Interactive is launching a playtest for its latest “crazy” project but it may not even release if players aren’t into it.
Byte Breakers, as it’s currently known, is a 40-player Smash Bros-style Battle Royale. The studio shared a look at gameplay on social media alongside the playtest announcement.
However, this is one of many prototypes the studio has developed as it aims to “find a blend of genres that you haven’t seen before, because as a studio we’d rather try something crazy and fail than just make a game that you feel that you’ve already played”.
Introducing Byte Breakers | New Playable Prototype
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Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics and Capcom Fighting Collection 2 are both now set to launch for Xbox next year following “technical discussions” with Microsoft, after the platform was omitted from Capcom’s original release announcements.
Word of an Xbox release was conspicuously absent when Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection and Capcom Fighting Collection 2 were announced for PS4, Switch, and Steam back in June and August respectively, frustrating fans on Microsoft’s platform.
Now, however, with Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics’ 12th September release looming, Capcom has taken to social media to reveal both upcoming titles will be making their way to Xbox after all. “We’re excited to announce that after technical discussions with our partners at Microsoft, we can confirm that Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics will release on Xbox One,” the publisher wrote.
MARVEL vs. CAPCOM Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics – Announcement Trailer
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Annapurna Interactive says there’s “been a glitch in the time loop”, and the PS5 physical edition of its Outer Wilds: Archaeologist Edition has been printed with “the wrong version of the game”.
As the Echoes of the Eye expansion was unknowingly not included on the disc, Annapurna invites players to contact iam8bit’s customer support team with proof of purchase to receive a DLC voucher code.
Outer Wilds: Archaeologist Edition – Launch Trailer – Nintendo Switch
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Doom has been ported to dozens of devices, but it’s never been playable quite like this.
Google researchers have now generated an AI version of the retro first-person shooter classic entirely via neural network, based on ingested video clips of gameplay.
It’s a milestone, if a grim one, recorded in a paper published this week entitled “Diffusion models are real-time game engines” (thanks, VentureBeat). This documents how a small team from Google were able to “interactively simulate” a version of Doom, with only a “slightly better than random chance” of humans being able to tell the difference.
Humans are still (currently) required to play Doom first, to provide the video clips of gameplay that are then fed into GameNGen, the research team’s game engine which is “powered entirely by a neural model”. It’s the same principle as the now-commonplace ability for AI to learn from and then generate static images, based on ingesting huge amouts of dubiously-sourced data online.
GameNGen then produces sequential frames based on its learnings of ‘watching’ that gameplay, which are then output at 20fps with a visual quality “comparable to the original”. Here…