Steam has announced the full list of Best of Steam games for this year across several categories. The list does not include a lot of big surprises but it is nice to see that some indie games also made it to the list. Categories include Top Sellers, New Releases, Most Played, Early Access, Steam Deck, Controller, and VR.

The Top Seller list include Baldur's Gate 3 from Larian Studios, which is also the Game of the Year winner, Hogwarts Legacy, which was a big game this year, DOTA 2 and Counter Strike 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Starfield, Lost Ark, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, Apex Legends, PUBG Battlegrounds, Destiny 2, and Sons of the Forest. Some of the Top New Releases category, which is measured by gross revenue, include Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, Cities: Skylines II, Resident Evil 4, Payday 3, Remnant II, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, FC 24, as well as a few titles that are also top sellers like Starfield, Baldur's Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy. and Sons of the Forest.

Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment have today issued Patch No. 7 for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, arriving roughly two and a half months after the last batch of fixes and improvements. The most significant update for PC gamers running NVIDIA GPUs is the addition of official DLSS support, likely coinciding with the end an agreement between EA and AMD to advertise Star Wars Jedi: Survivor as a Team Red sponsored title—their FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.1 system was the only upscaling technology available on day one. Community modders managed to implement unofficial DLSS support a few months later.

It is encouraging to see the game's developer and publisher rolling out a semi-regular release of patches—parts of the gaming community were worried about Respawn Entertainment's recruitment cycle pointing to work starting on a potential sequel two months ago—with priorities shifting to the new project. It seems that a number of team members (software engineering and QA) are still working on refinements for Jedi: Survivor—hopefully we will see further work undertaken following today's release of performance and optimization improvements on PC, as well for Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 consoles.

Respawn Entertainment is actively recruiting for a new game project—the Los Angeles studio is looking to fill a "Principal Game Writer" position—the job description (posted on LinkedIn) hints that a sequel to Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is already in development: "We're looking for a highly skilled Principal Game Writer who will embrace our philosophy and share their hard-earned expertise to help us create an incredible Star Wars experience for our players in a fun, third-person action-adventure setting. We're picturing an avid gamer who is passionate about storytelling through interactive narratives. Under the direction of the Lead Writer, the Principal Game Writer will be responsible for writing dialogue, scenes, story treatments, and supporting text for the game."

A portion of the Star Wars Jedi fan base, particularly players on PC, will be questioning Respawn and EA's apparent swift decision to shift their priorities to the making of a sequel to Survivor. The second entry in the series released on multiple platforms back in late April, following a delay to address technical issues—the extra time allowance did not result in a perfect launch. The game debuted with major problems across PC and current generation consoles—with apologies and fixes appearing soon after. Respawn's latest patch—number six—was made available on June 20. We can assume that several departments (Art, Design, Production etc.) are not required to provide ongoing support for the current game since there are no announced plans for DLC, but fans would appreciate a continued stream of improvements issued by QA and software engineering staffers.

Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment has released the latest patch version 6 for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor that fixes some issues across all platforms, and it should be already available for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Unfortunately, there is no word on DLSS support or any visual improvements with Ray Tracing effects, so hopefully, we'll see these in future updates.

According to the release notes, the new Patch 6 should fix various crashes across all platforms, fix some general game issues like collision improvements, blaster handling, and holomap map data, various mission issues, and brings other "various bug fixes and improvements."

Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment have released its latest Star Wars Jedi Survivor Patch 5, this is a major one as it is 3.2 GB in size, and brings quite a few performance improvements and fixes. Unfortunately, EA is still working on fixing the issues that should improve the performance on newer Core i7 and Core i9 CPUs with efficiency cores, hopefully these will come with a future update.

According to the full release notes, Patch 5 also improves content caching to reduce hitching, improves thread handling when ray tracing is turned off, and brings a fix where lowering the PC visual settings incorrectly lowers the resolution scale if the FSR is disabled. The release notes also list various performance fixes and stability improvements, as well as a couple of gameplay fixes.

Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment have detailed the upcoming Star Wars Jedi Survivor Patch 4 that should be coming later today for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, and for PC later this week. Previous updates already brought performance improvements for non-raytraced rendering, and this time around, it should update the raytraced performance, at least on the PC.

The Patch 4 brings a handful of both PC-only and PS5-only improvements, and further fixes data handling when toggling ray tracing, improving non-raytraced performance, updates occlusion behavior for ray tracing, updates the streaming budget that should improve traversal hitching, and brings performance improvements for some VFX. There are also several gameplay fixes, various crash fixes, save state errors fixes, and more.

Respawn Entertainment, the Star Wars division at Electronic Arts and Lucasfilm Games have today released their first patch for the PC version of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor - some folks must have been working like mad over the weekend in order to address some of the problems encountered shortly after the game's launch last Friday (April 28). The EA Star Wars Twitter account issued a statement regarding the initial batch of patches for all platforms affected: "Today a patch has become available for the PC version of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and tomorrow (5/2) we'll also be issuing a patch for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. We are hard at work on patches that will further improve performance and fix bugs across all platforms. There are more updates to come across all platforms, and we will share that timing when it is available."

The patch notes for today's PC update only mention "performance improvements for non-raytraced rendering" so it seems the developers have a lot more work to do over the coming weeks. The situation on current generation PlayStation and Xbox consoles looks to largely the same, and tomorrow's fix list is extensive (the same problems have already been addressed on PC with today's patch). TPU's own resident reviewer extraordinaire went in-depth and explored Star Wars Jedi: Survivor's technical issues this weekend - part of W1zzard's conclusion was very unkind: "We're now paying $70 to beta-test an unpolished turd that they call an AAA game—not the first time this year. I'm starting to wonder if these companies aren't slowly eroding their customer base by delivering broken products over and over again."

Respawn Entertainment boss Vince Zampella has been engaged in press duties for the Star Wars Jedi: Survivor marketing cycle this week, and is likely having to field questions about the sci-fi action adventure's poor technical performance on PC and consoles alike. In an interview conducted by Barron's Magazine a few days ago, Zampella was probably relieved to have the focus shift to a happier topic - the Titanfall franchise. He seemed to be quite open to the prospect of making a third game: "I hate to say yes, then people latch onto that, and then skewer you when it doesn't come. But I would love to see it happen is the real answer." His studio was founded in order to develop the (multiplayer only) first-person shooter Titanfall (2014), a platform exclusive on PC/Origin and Xbox One. Prior to starting Respawn Entertainment in 2010, Zampella and colleague Jason West were lead designers on the mainline Call of Duty series at Infinity Ward/Activision.

A sequel to the original Titanfall arrived in late 2016 to rave reviews from the press and hardcore fans of the series - the inclusion of a single player campaign was considered to be a highlight - this story campaign borrowed gameplay ideas (to the surprise of many) from Valve's Half Life series, and added time traveling elements to an already mind-bending mobility system. In an unfortunate move for Zampella and Respawn, publisher Electronic Arts decided to launch Titanfall 2 during a very busy release window - the main competition at the time being Activision's Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and (EA's own) Battlefield 1. A mainstream crowd proceeded to ignore the Titanfall sequel thanks to poor marketing on EA's part and a crowded games market - sales figures were underwhelming, even with a PS4 version, and the game was heavily discounted within a couple of months of release. Respawn moved on to create a spin-off multiplayer shooter - the smash hit free-to-play battle royale Apex Legends, and the Star Wars Jedi series.

AMD today released the latest version of its Adrenalin drivers. Version 23.4.3 WHQL comes with optimization for "Star Wars: Jedi Survivor." It also comes with fixes for display corruption in "World War Z: Aftermath" when using the Vulkan API; and longer than expected shader compilation times with "The Last of Us: Part 1." AMD has disabled the Factory Reset feature in the installer to fix issues noticed during PC upgrades. In the meantime, AMD recommends using the AMD Cleanup Utility during PC upgrades. Some glaring bugs with "Hogwarts Legacy" with Radeon RX 580 "Polaris" are being addressed with the developer.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 23.4.3 WHQL

It appears that Electronic Arts' Star Wars Jedi: Survivor game will be yet another title that will need multiple patches to make it playable on the PC, as the game appears to have major CPU and GPU optimization issues. The situation is not better on either the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X consoles. As EA has lifted the review embargo, first details have started to show up online, including rather troubling information that the game can utilize up to 18 GB of VRAM at 1440p resolution.

Gamestar was running the game on AMD Ryzen 9 5900X with 32 GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090, and it was not able to maintain 50 FPS at 1440p, let alone 4K/UHD resolution. What makes it strange is that the graphics card utilization was around 35 to 60 percent, which means the game has major CPU bottleneck issues. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is officially launching tomorrow, April 28th, so hopefully, we won't have to wait long for EA to release a patch or two.

As we're heading into the last week of April, we have a much anticipated AAA title launching, which involves light sabres and thus shouldn't be too hard to guess. Other games this week include forest rangers, lights and shadows, dead things that are evil and much more. Something for almost everyone in other words, we hope.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor / This week's AAA title / Friday 28 April
The story of Cal Kestis continues in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, a third person galaxy-spanning action-adventure game from Respawn Entertainment, developed in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games. This narratively-driven, single player title picks up five years after the events of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and follows Cal's increasingly desperate fight as the galaxy descends further into darkness.

NVIDIA has released the latest iteration of its GeForce Game Ready drivers - Version 531.68 WHQL. This latest update provides optimizations for the upcoming Star Wars Jedi: Survivor - an action adventure title, and Dead Island 2 (out this Friday) - a gory first person action RPG zombie shooter - ensuring the best possible in-game performance. Version 531.68 WHQL also implements a fix for Immortals Fenyx Rising, where crashes to desktop were reported following a previous driver update (531.41). A conflict between ShadowPlay and the EA Play application has been resolved, and another fix addresses a performance issue linked to the enabling of Reflex within Counter-Strike 2 Limited Test's graphics settings.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready 531.68 WHQL

Electronic Arts has updated the listings for PC system requirements for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and the gaming community has reacted to the refresh of the game's minimum installation storage requisite. It calls for a whopping 155 GB of disk space, for the base game alone, not including the expected routine of patches and extra story content (via DLC). The publisher suggests that an SSD is best used for an optimal in-game experience. The slightly older PC requirements specified a minimum of 150 GB for HDDs, and 130 GB for SSDs.

As it stands, the Respawn Entertainment developed action adventure game has one of the larger minimum storage requirements among modern titles - all the more surprising given that it will offer a relatively short and linear single player experience. Current installations of the PC version of Red Dead Redemption 2 will occupy 150 GB of disk space. Jedi: Fallen Order (2019), Survivor's preceding title in the series, demands a comparatively modest install base of 55 GB. It will be interesting to observe whether Jedi: Survivor will drive sales of larger storage solutions - in the recent past, gamers have scrambled to acquire higher capacity SSDs and HDDs in order to accommodate the ever-growing installations and content drops required to play the Call of Duty/Modern Warfare series.

Electronic Arts has released the official story trailer for its upcoming Star Wars Jedi: Survivor game, that is scheduled to launch on April 28th. The new trailer not only shows the story behind the new Star Wars game but also has some in-game parts.

Developed by Respawn Entertainment in cooperation with Lucasfilm Games, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is a third-person, action-adventure game, set five years after the events of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and puts the player again in the role of Cal Kestis, who has now grown into a powerful Jedi Knight.