By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
JEMC on 02 June 2025
Edit Thread

Welcome to the Monday gaming news:

SALES/PLAYER COUNTS & DEALS

Honoring its Pride Month tradition, Tell Me Why is free to keep until the end of June for the fifth year in a row
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/adventure/honoring-its-pride-month-tradition-tell-me-why-is-free-to-keep-until-the-end-of-june-for-the-fifth-year-in-a-row/
If you've been craving a choice-driven narrative experience with a supernatural kick, you might have your weekend plans set: Tell Me Why, an adventure game from the studio behind Life Is Strange, is free to keep on Steam right now.
There didn't seem to be an explanation on Dontnod's socials, but it follows a pattern that's persisted the last five years. When Pride Month rolls around, Tell Me Why goes free to keep. In a post on X last year, the studio asked that players spend what they might have on the game giving to a trans-inclusive charity. A couple you might consider are the Trevor Project or TransActual.
As for the game, it's an episodic story about Tyler Ronan, a trans man, and his sister Alyson. They have a psychic bond which proves crucial in investigating their mother's death in "small-town Alaska." It's the sort of thing you'll be familiar with if you played Life is Strange or the more recent Lost Records: Bloom & Rage; as adventure games go, it's less about neuron-searing puzzles and more about watching your narrative choices ricochet off each other.

More than 2 million people have played/been brutalized by Elden Ring Nightreign in its first 24 hours
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/more-than-2-million-people-have-played-been-brutalized-by-elden-ring-nightreign-in-its-first-24-hours/
Elden Ring Nightreign is here, and as I write this there are nearly 300,000 players roaming Limveld in pursuit of statistically-unlikely success in FromSoft's roguelike remix. The launch hasn't been without criticisms, many of which we shared in our Nightreign review, but that apparently hasn't slowed the influx of newly-christened Nightfarers.
In a tweet from the official Elden Ring X account, Bandai Namco announced that two million people have played Elden Ring Nightreign in its first 24 hours. "Darkness fell over Limveld, and two million Nightfarers rose up against it," Bandai Namco said. "Thank you for your support."
The spinoff title might have only reached a third of Elden Ring's day one player count, but that's still a huge number of players, equating to sales that many games published on Steam would be thrilled to attract in total across their entire lifespans.

GOG has launched the Plug In Digital Publisher Sale, featuring up to 90% discounts during 14 days: https://www.gog.com/en/promo/20250602_plugin_digital_publisher_sale.

Steam has three new deals and a few events:

Humble Bundle presents its Power Up Pride Bundle, featuring up to 7 games to get during the next 28 days: https://www.humblebundle.com/games/power-up-pride.

And Fanatical has the following deals:

SOFTWARE & DRIVERS

INTEL Arc Graphics 32.0.101.6874 driver
https://videocardz.com/driver/intel-arc-graphics-32-0-101-6874

HIGHLIGHTS
>Intel Core Ultra Series 2 with built-in Intel Arc GPUs:

  • Power management optimization previously introduced in 32.0.101.6734 for handheld gaming devices now available for all Intel® Core™
    Ultra 200V series (codename Lunar Lake) devices. Delivering improved performance and frame pacing with lower power modes.

FIXED ISSUES
Intel Arc B-Series Graphics Products:

  • Farming Simulator 25 (DX12) may exhibit flickering textures during gameplay
  • Google Earth may experience an application crash

Intel Arc A-Series Graphics Products:

  • Autodesk Motion Builder may exhibit intermittent flickering on certain materials

Intel Core Ultra Series 2 with built-in Intel Arc GPUs:

  • Farming Simulator 25 (DX12) may exhibit flickering textures during gameplay
  • The Last of Us Part II (DX12) may exhibit black pixel corruptions
  • MechWarrior 5: Clans (DX12) may experience an application crash with certain XeSS presets enabled
  • Blender 4.4 may fail to complete rendering while using Cycles render engine

MODS, EMULATORS & FAN PROJECTS

Elden Ring: Nightreign Gets Seamless Co-Op & Unlocked Framerate Mods
https://www.dsogaming.com/mods/elden-ring-nightreign-gets-seamless-co-op-unlocked-framerate-mods/
Elden Ring: Nightreign has just been released on PC, and the first cool mods for it have appeared online. So, let’s take a closer look at them.
(...)
NIGHTREIGN does not have an unlocked framerate on PC. Instead, the framerate is locked at 60FPS. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, the base game is also at 60FPS. Thankfully, though, there is a mod that allows you to unlock the framerate. It also lets you unlock the refresh rate for your monitor. You can download the mod from this link.
The second cool mod that you can download for Elden Ring: Nightreign is the Seamless Co-Op Mod. The first version of the Seamless Co-Op Mod adds a 2-player mode to the game. The good news is that Seamless Co-Op is compatible with the FPS Mod. As such, you can use both of them. Modder ‘Yui’ also plans to expand the capabilities of the mod in the future. So, curious to see what other features the modder will add to it. Still, if you want to play right now with a friend, this is a must-have mod.
Oh, and there is no reason to fear a possible ban. Seamless Co-Op prevents you from connecting to the game’s servers. Instead, the mod uses save files different from the vanilla version. Thus, there’s no way to get banned using this mod. Unless, of course, you modify it with the intent of connecting to vanilla players.
>> The article has one video.

Classic Resident Evil got amazing high-quality AI-enhanced FMVs
https://www.dsogaming.com/mods/classic-resident-evil-got-amazing-high-quality-ai-enhanced-fmvs/
Last month, we informed you about the RE:Enhance Mods for the first three classic Resident Evil games. And today, I’m happy to report that SonicB00M has released a new version of his mod for the first RE game that overhauls all of its FMVs.
Going into more details, the modder carefully upscaled and interpolated the original 15fps FMV sequences to 960p24. He also color graded the live-action FMVs to make them feel less like ‘VHS tapes’ and more like 16mm grindhouse horror cinema. Plus, he completely redone the credits sequences that were left out of the SHDP.
The end result is truly amazing. At the end of the article, you can find a couple of shots from these new FMVs.
But wait, some of you will say. Does this look better than the original FMVs? Well, see for yourselves. SonicB00M has shared a comparison shot between the original and the upscaled videos. And, as you will see, the difference is night and day.
Not only do the FMVs look sharper, but they also retain the colors and art style of the original FMVs. We’ve already seen modders trying to improve the pre-rendered videos or FMVs for various games. However, this is by far the best AI FMV mod I’ve seen. So, take notes, modders. This is how you upscale the original low-quality videos of older games.
As said, this is part of the RE:Enhance Mod for Resident Evil 1. For those unaware, this mod enhances the pre-rendered backgrounds of RE. To achieve this, SonicB00M used AI tools. Moreover, he made thousands of manual edits to the backgrounds. The result is a game that can look crisper and more detailed than before.

XWVM, the X-Wing mod that lets you play the Star Wars classic remade in Unity, is finally available to download
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/xwvm-the-x-wing-mod-that-lets-you-play-the-star-wars-classic-remade-in-unity-is-finally-available-to-download/
Though we preferred TIE Fighter when it came to listing the best Star Wars games on PC, we did rate X-Wing quite highly on one important metric: it lets you fly a bloody X-Wing. The fantasy of flying to the rescue when a guy with a codename like Red Two shouts "I can't shake him!" is a highly specific one, but if you watched Star Wars at the right age you absolutely have that fantasy. X-Wing lets you fulfil it.
Unfortunately, it has some problems on modern PCs. The Special Edition won't even launch if you don't have a joystick plugged in, and while the Classic version and the Collector's CD-ROM version will let you play with mouse and keyboard, they run like butt. It's a 32-year-old game, but even on a high-end PC the framerate's inconsistent. And of course the spaceship models do look quite flat and blocky in the way you'd expect from 1993 graphics.
Which is why X-Wing Virtual Machine (XWVM) is such a glorious mod. At the base level it's a wrapper that lets you play X-Wing in Unity, meaning that it runs smoothly and at modern resolutions with adjustable settings—and it doesn't ask you to plug in a joystick even once. But add the HD asset pack on top, and you get new 3D models for not just the spaceships, but also the cockpits, and even the previously 2D planets that were there as backdrops. Oh yeah, and there's a full 3D model of the Death Star too.
Bonus features include VR support, a remastered digital version of the dynamic "iMuse" soundtrack, and improved in-flight mouse control. There's more to come, including support for TIE Fighter, but this first release is enough to get you playing. Note that if you don't install the HD asset pack you'll have menus replacing the 2D concourse and a virtual cockpit a la X-Wing Alliance, as apparently those were a struggle to get working at variable resolutions. So yeah, I highly recommend downloading the 2.5GB HD asset pack.
You'll need to own a copy of X-Wing, which you can find at Steam and GOG today, and then download the core mod for either Windows or Linux, and your optional extras (as well as HD assets there's a mod that adds additional in-flight mission dialogue). Unzip and run the downloaded exe to install XWVM, unpack the HD assets to the xwvm_Data directory, and finally run xwvm.exe. It should find your X-Wing install directory automatically, and then you'll be ready to enjoy X-Wing in glorious high-res 3D. At least, if you remember all the keyboard controls. Was it Alt-E to eject?
>> The article has an over 3 minutes video of the mod and boy, does it look better.

'The complexity of mods we can make just shot up big time': Oblivion Remastered modders breach a new frontier even without Bethesda support—making it play nice with Lua scripts
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/the-elder-scrolls/the-complexity-of-mods-we-can-make-just-shot-up-big-time-oblivion-remastered-modders-breach-a-new-frontier-even-without-bethesda-support-making-it-play-nice-with-lua-scripts/
As a man who writes for a living, I have no actual useful abilities. That means that—while I keep close track of the Bethesda modding scene—I often don't really understand what all the very smart people who work in it are actually speaking about. As far as I'm concerned, a 'script extender' means putting a load of white text into your screenplay to buff up the final wordcount.
So it must mean something if even I know it's a big deal that creators from the Oblivion Remastered Modding Community have just cracked getting the game to play nicer with Lua, announcing in a giddy Reddit post that "we just figured out how to make Oblivion's scripting engine call any function we want from a UE4SS Lua script."

GAMING NEWS

Hell is Us PC Requirements revealed, requires an NVIDIA RTX 4090 for 4K/Ultra/30FPS with DLSS
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/hell-is-us-pc-requirements-revealed-requires-an-nvidia-rtx-4090-for-4k-ultra-30fps-with-dlss/
Rogue Factor has revealed the PC system requirements for third-person action-adventure game, Hell is Us. And, from the looks of it, this will be a really heavy game, especially on Ultra Settings. So, let’s take a closer look at the PC specs.

Here is some concept art from EA’s canceled Black Panther
https://www.dsogaming.com/screenshot-news/here-is-some-concept-art-from-eas-canceled-black-panther/
Last week, EA decided to cancel the Black Panther game that Cliffhanger Games has been working on. And from the looks of it, some concept art from it has been leaked online.

New leaked Battlefield 6 gameplay video shows off its destruction
https://www.dsogaming.com/videotrailer-news/new-leaked-battlefield-6-gameplay-video-shows-off-its-destruction/
Battlefield fans, here is something for you. YouTube’s ‘Shadi BF Veteran’ has shared a video from the alpha phase of Battlefield 6, showcasing its destruction system. This is a video that every BF should watch.

Elden Ring Nightreign Patch 1.01.1 Released & Fully Detailed
https://www.dsogaming.com/patches/elden-ring-nightreign-patch-1-01-1-released-fully-detailed/
FromSoftware has just released Title Update 1.01.1 for Elden Ring: Nightreign and has shared its full patch notes. So, let’s see what this new update brings to the table.

The Witcher 4’s tech to be featured at State of Unreal 2025
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/the-witcher-4s-tech-to-be-featured-at-state-of-unreal-2025/
CD Projekt has announced that it will showcase some of the tech and features of The Witcher 4 at the upcoming State of Unreal 2025 event. As such, we might get some pre-alpha in-engine footage from it.



Please excuse my bad English.

Former gaming PC: i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070

Current gaming PC: R5-7600, 32GB RAM 6000MT/s (CL30) and a RX 9060XT 16GB

Steam / Live / NNID : jonxiquet    Add me if you want, but I'm a single player gamer.