Carzy Zarx’s PC Gaming Emporium - Catch Up on All the Latest PC Gaming Related News

[JEMC]

The Monday news:

SALES /PLAYER COUNT & DEALS

GOG has three new Deals of the Day and a new sale:

• These are the DotD, available until Wednesday:
  • The first one is Dawn of the Monsters, 50% off: https://www.gog.com/en/game/dawn_of_the_monsters
  • Space Haven, still in development, also gets a 50% discount: https://www.gog.com/en/game/space_haven
  • The last DotD is Democracy 4, 57% off: https://www.gog.com/en/game/democracy_4
• And the new Weekly Sale features up to 90% discounts during 7 days: https://www.gog.com/en/promo/20230710_weekly_sale https://www.gog.com/en/promo/20230710_weekly_sale

Fanatical has a new Star Deal and new bundles:

• The Star Deal is Persona 5 Royal, 48% off. It started yesterday and will run for another 24 hours, or until it runs out of keys (50% left): https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/persona-5-royal
• These are the new bundles that will last 3 days:
  • Rimworld with all expansions will be 12% off: https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/rimworld-with-all-expansions
  • Miraculous Rise of the Sphinx Ultimate Edition gets a 75% discount: https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/miraculous-rise-of-the-sphinx-ultimate-edition
  • And S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Complete Bundle is going to be 82% off: https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/stalker-complete-bundle
• By the way, the Red Hot Sale has entered the Encore stage, which means that it wll end soon. If you haven't done it yet, you should check it out now

SOFTWARE & DRIVERS

Denuvo plans to offer independent benchmarks in an attempt to prove its DRM doesn't cause performance problems
https://www.pcgamer.com/denuvo-plans-to-offer-independent-benchmarks-in-an-attempt-to-prove-its-drm-doesnt-cause-performance-problems/
It's still common for big-budget games to launch with Denuvo's Anti-Tamper anti-piracy software, and it's also common for those games' performance problems to be blamed on said DRM. Irdeto, the digital security company that bought Denuvo in 2018 (and previously tried to force Overwatch porn offline), has denied its software is responsible for those issues, most recently in an interview with Ars Technica.
Steve Huin, chief operating officer of videogames at Irdeto, claimed that comparisons using cracked versions of games that load faster and run more smoothly are inaccurate, because they're rarely based on the exact same version of a game. "There might be over the lifetime of the game a protected and unprotected version," Huin said, "but these are not comparable because these are different builds over six months, many bug fixes, etc., which could make it better or worse."
Huin is aware that simply saying this won't prove anything to the legion of players who blame Denuvo for every framerate drop they experience. "Our voice is unfortunately not sufficient to convince people because we're not trusted in their mind as a starting point in that debate," he said.
Irdeto has a plan, however: a program that will offer media outlets two versions of games to benchmark independently, with and without Denuvo Anti-Tamper, which he believes will prove "the performance is comparable, identical" between both. Apparently they hope to begin it within the next few months.

MODS, EMULATORS & FAN PROJECTS

Fallout: Nuevo Mexico, DLC-sized expansion for Fallout: New Vegas, gets first gameplay trailer
https://www.dsogaming.com/videotrailer-news/fallout-nuevo-mexico-dlc-sized-expansion-for-fallout-new-vegas-gets-first-gameplay-trailer/
The modding team behind Fallout: Nuevo Mexico, a DLC-sized expansion for Fallout: New Vegas, has released the first gameplay trailer for it.
This gameplay trailer will give you a glimpse at what you can expect from this upcoming fan expansion. Since this is a mod for Fallout: New Vegas, though, you should keep your expectations in check. In other words, don’t expect it to look better than Fallout 4.
>> The video is close to 20 minutes long.

You can't polish a turd, but you can comprehensively upscale its textures in Red Dead Redemption 2
https://www.pcgamer.com/you-cant-polish-a-turd-but-you-can-comprehensively-upscale-its-textures-in-red-dead-redemption-2/
Nexus Mods user garbageman42069—you read that right—uploaded a mod titled "Comprehensive Sh-t Upscale" today, which is something that at least 42 people in the world want according to the downloads statistics at the time of writing.
"Ever ride through Valentine and wish it was MORE IMMERSIVE??" garbageman42069 writes in big, bold letters. "I PAINSTAKINGLY upscaled SEVERAL SHIT textures for the benefit of the whole RDR2 community."
The page itself has several wonderfully arranged advertisement images, promising a "comprehensive overhaul", which makes Red Dead Redemption 2s dung "shinier than ever". "Even wolf poop!" it boasts. Comprehensive indeed.

Lore-friendly Skyrim mod fixes its most glaring realism error: The pheasants
https://www.pcgamer.com/lore-friendly-skyrim-mod-fixes-its-most-glaring-realism-error-the-pheasants/
Skyrim has plenty of oddities. There's the goldfish memory of your enemies, the way you can get good enough at pickpocketing to literally steal the shirt off someone's back, and how it's possible for NPCs to attain a level of narrative importance sufficient to ward off death . But those are nothings. Trifles. Mere bagatelles compared to the game's most major inconsistency: The pheasants.
Think about it. Pheasants are all over the place in Skyrim, but only ever as corpses. They hang in kitchens and linger in food halls, but you can count the number of living ones you see on no hands at all. Are we to believe that the denizens of Skyrim, like the hunters of the Dodo, reduced the region's pheasant population to a set of cold bodies and warm memories? How long have they been gone? Are those corpses you can take giblets from decaying by the time the game takes place?
Put these unpleasant thoughts from your mind, because Skyrim modders are here—once again—to preserve logic and save the day. A mod called Ring-necked Pheasants - Mihail Monsters and Animals returns the humble pheasant to its natural home: Skyrim's wilderness, not its pantries.
>> There's a comparison picture... between an in-game dead and living pheasant.

Here's a mod that makes your Skyrim forests all dense and lovely
https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-a-mod-that-makes-your-skyrim-forests-all-dense-and-lovely/
In videogames sometimes "forests" have like two or three dozen trees. That's too few trees. Or they have lots of trees, but the trees are really widely spaced out. Twenty or thirty feet apart. Obviously, all of these forests are nonsense. We won't even begin to address the forests where the trees are too dense to travel through except on the main path the developers want you to follow.
For all its strengths, Skyrim is a game without good forests. Too few trees, and they're too small. No more! Building on work done in earlier mods, Fabled Forests for Skyrim Special Edition gives you "tall, dense, FPS-friendly forests to get lost in."
Modder Kojilama offers up two versions: One is just nice, dense, lush woodlands with tall trees. Not so tall that you can't have sunlight through the trees, however. Fabled forests also tweaks the sizes of the trees a bit, randomly, so that there's diversity in how they show up.
The other, Fabled Forests of Mythic Proportions, uses huge trees akin to those giants that populate the west coast of North America, turning your woodlands into "a dark and inescapable labyrinth." These are forest so dense, with trees so huge, that they're maze-like and dark at the roots. It transforms the area around Riverbend to be nearly unrecognizable.
>> There's one screenshot.

GAMING NEWS

To the surprise of no one, NBA 2K24 is still old-gen on PC
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/to-the-surprise-of-no-one-nba-2k24-is-still-old-gen-on-pc/
A few hours ago, we informed you about the new crossplay feature that NBA 2K24 will support. As its leaked trailer suggested, crossplay will be only available on the Next-Gen version of NBA 2K24. And, according to the game’s official FAQ, NBA 2K24 PC will be once again based on the old-gen version.
As the game’s official FAQ confirmed, only the PS5 and the Xbox Series S|X versions will support crossplay. What this ultimately means is that the PC version will be once again based on the old-gen version of NBA 2K24. I mean, you don’t have to be Albert Einstein to put two and two together.