After a couple of slow weeks of new game releases, we're finally back on track with a wealth of new game releases this week. We even have a AAA title, although some of you might disagree with it being such, mainly due to the blue aliens and there being four different editions of the game. When it comes to the rest of this week's releases, we have a city builder with sacrifices, a medieval inspired MMO, a very sandy game that has nothing to do with giant worms, a Viking inspired online co-op game, a DLC for a very popular RPG game and a dystopian city builder.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora coming to Steam / This week's AAA release / Monday 17 June
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a first-person, action-adventure game set in the Western Frontier. Abducted by the RDA, you, a Na'vi, were molded to serve their purpose. Fifteen years later, you are free, but find yourself a stranger in your birthplace. Reconnect with your lost heritage and discover what it truly means to be Na'vi as you join other clans to protect Pandora. Steam link

GUNNIR unveiled the Photon Arc A770 and Arc A750 Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree special edition graphics cards. The two cards are based on the Arc 7-series Photon OC triple-fan common board design GUNNIR launched in 2023. You get a themed backplate, and gold-colored embellishments on the front-side of the card, such as the three fan hubcaps, and the illuminated brand notch. At this point it's not clear if the special edition package include a copy of the game. The Photon OC Arc A770 is the variant with the 17.5 Gbps 16 GB GDDR6 memory, while the A750 is the one with 8 GB of 16 Gbps GDDR6. It's not clear if this card will be globally available.

Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree is the second chapter to the feverishly popular fantasy action RPG by Hidetaka Miyazaki, with world-building by George RR Martin. Publisher Bandai Namco is going to publish its first gameplay trailer later today. A reliable source with franchise leaks, billbil-kun, claims that the the game releases on June 21, 2024. It's likely that this date is part of the gameplay reveal trailer which the studio is posting today. The trailer is said to contain some three minutes of gameplay footage captured within engine.
We will update this story with more insights when the trailer comes out.

FromSoftware and Bandai Namco Entertainment's Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon is due for release this summer - many fans are looking forward to jumping back into mecha-heavy combat scenarios with a linear progression system. This long-running action game series has stuck to a traditional mission-based format (for the most part) since premiering on the original PlayStation console back in 1997. FromSoftware's sixth mainline entry is set to be no different, although the design team has recently revealed that other options were explored at the beginning of development.

Masaru Yamamura, director of Armored Core VI, stated in an interview conducted by South Korea's Ruliweb: "In the process of developing the sequel, there was also an opinion to make it in a different game style. However, as a result of discussions, it was concluded that it should not be made into a title centered on movement and exploration, such as the Elden Ring or Soul series. In the Armored Core series, depending on the assembly, the movement performance of the character changes and affects the play. Because that is the charm of the series." His team has taken the traditional design route in order to concentrate on assembling detailed and fun gameplay environments: "I think you will be able to feel a different pleasure from exploring every nook and cranny of the carefully crafted map as you move."

A recent Bandai Namco investor report has indicated that FromSoftware's hugely popular action action role-player has sold a total of 20.5 million units, which is highly impressive when you consider that the game launched last February. The publisher and developer's preceding Dark Souls series, as a whole, was reported to have sold 27 million copies in total by mid-2020. Bandai Namco states that uptake of its recently released games titles have not met company expectations, but FromSoftware's smash hit seems to be picking up the slack: "Repeat sales of existing titles such as Elden Ring were strong, especially overseas, worldwide sales reaching 20.5 million. New worldwide titles got off to slow starts, but smaller more medium-sized products moved steadily."

The report suggests that interest in Elden Ring is expected to dip: "We expect a pullback in repeat Elden Ring sales, which made a particularly large contribution to this previous year." The Elden Ring twitter account boasted about hitting the 20 million sales mark back in February 2023, so it can be assumed that a mere 500,000 units have been sold in the interim period between then and this month's investor report. Bandai Namco's document states that an Elden Ring DLC/expansion is in the works, but no further details are provided about the content or release time frame.

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, the latest high-octane action game by FromSoftware, Inc. and Bandai Namco Europe S.A.S. will release globally on August 25. Combining the 25 years of experience developing the ARMORED CORE franchise and action games in the Elden Ring, and Dark Souls franchise, Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon is full of mech action, including fast-paced battles, in-depth customization, and thrilling boss fights. The game is coming to PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC via Steam, and is now available to pre-order at participating retailers and on Bandai Namco Store.

A mysterious new substance called "Coral" was discovered on the remote planet, Rubicon 3. As an energy source, this substance was expected to dramatically advance humanity's technological and communications capabilities. Instead, it caused a catastrophe that engulfed the planet and the surrounding stars in flames and storms, forming a Burning Star System. Almost half a century later, Coral has resurfaced on Rubicon 3, a planet now contaminated and sealed off by the catastrophe. Extra-terrestrial corporations and resistance groups fight over control of the substance. The player infiltrates Rubicon as an independent mercenary and finds themselves in a struggle over the substance with the corporations and other factions.

FromSoftware and Bandai Namco have released a new major patch for Elden Ring, implementing ray tracing on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X, as well as adding some gameplay improvements and fixing some bugs. Unfortunately, the game still does not support any upscaling technologies, so there is no support for DLSS or FSR, meaning that those ray tracing effects will have a rather high impact on frame rates.

The ray tracing patch for Elden Ring was announced back in November last year, and it certainly took a while before it was implemented. As detailed earlier, the ray tracing update for Elden Ring adds ambient occlusion and ray traced shadows, but does not include ray traced reflections.

A Steam Deck enthusiast has done what Steam would not (at least not in the first rendition of its popular Steam Deck handheld console): he went and added an external GPU to the mix. The owner of the ETA Prime YouTube channel managed to increase the Steam Deck's APU-powered graphical oomph with a much more powerful AMD RX 6900 XT graphics card. To do so required sacrifices however: since the SteamDeck doesn't feature a proper Thunderbolt 3/4 connector, ETA Prime had to remove the Steam Deck's SSD from its M.2 port, instead mounting a special M.2 to PCIe adapter in the SSD slot itself.

This, of course, required that installed games be run off memory cards, which generally offer lower speeds (a less than stellar experience) than the onboard SSD. It also required butchering the Steam Deck's OS by replacing it with Windows 11. But it did allow the Steam Deck's APU to tap onto power otherwise unavailable to it, unlocking playable framerates with maxed out detail settings on games such as God of War, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and others.

NVIDIA has recently released their latest GeForce 512.15 Game Ready drivers adding optimizations for Ghostwire: Tokyo, and Shadow Warrior 3 in addition to bringing DLAA to three new titles and supporting 11 new G-SYNC Compatible Displays. This Game Ready Driver adds day-0 support for Ghostwire: Tokyo featuring ray-traced reflections and NVIDIA DLSS support for up to a 2x performance boost. The drivers also see the introduction of NVIDIA DLAA support for Chorus, Jurassic World Evolution 2, and No Man's Sky which can improve image quality at native resolution.

The list of G-SYNC Compatible Displays has been extended with the addition of 11 new models from Acer, ASUS, AOC, I-O DATA,MSI, Phillips, and ViewSonic. NVIDIA has also added GeForce Experience's Optimal Settings support to six new games including Elden Ring, Expeditions: Rome, Mortal Online 2, Shadow Warrior 3, Sifu, and Total War: Warhammer III. The complete changelog and driver download link can be found below.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 512.15 WHQL

Elden Ring launched in late February to rave critic and consumer reviews. The game is an excellent showcase of From Software's gaming design ethos, but ultimately proves that the company's rendering engine still requires work after years of installments due to widely-reported stuttering issues - irrespective of hardware configuration. A fix for Elden Ring's stuttering issues has surfaced on late Monday - courtesy of Valve and its Proton wrapper, and only applicable to the Steam Deck. In a way, this turns Steam Deck into the smoothest device to play Elden Ring on.

The issue with Elden Ring's stuttering has been linked to the games' continuous shader loading. Apparently, Elden Ring allows users to enter its vast open-world without pre-compiling the required shaders (something that we've seen other games do through usually lengthy boot-up processes) for the specific hardware. This forces the game to constantly compile shaders as they're required (due to world loading, animation loading, among other triggers), which is responsible for the stuttering issues gamers on PC have been encountering.

It seems that someone at Intel forgot to press "post" on the company's promised day-0 driver update for one of this year's most anticipated games - Elden Ring. The company previously announced a partnership with Elden Ring developer FromSoftware in the development of an updated driver that wold give Intel-based Elden Ring players streamlined performance and a (hopefully) bug-free experience when it comes to graphics rendering. But Elden Ring's launch day of February 24th has come and gone - and Intel is mum on where exactly its updated driver lies. For now, the latest available Intel graphics driver stands at version 101.1121 - released in November last year.

It may be the case that the driver development hit an unexpected snag, or perhaps Intel has simply opted to delay the driver's launch until there are actually some discrete-level graphics cards available for purchase - the company's initial Arc Alchemist lineup is expected to be announced and launched later this month. That would make sense - especially considering how a driver update this close to release might include some interesting data on the upcoming graphics cards that could be pursued by data miners. Even so, it doesn't seem like a good PR move for Intel to have loudly promised an updated driver and then fail to release it - especially as Intel's uphill battle in the discrete GPU market is just beginning. Perhaps the driver developers are having too much fun with the critically and consumer-acclaimed latest installment from FromSoftware?

AMD has today released version 22.2.3 of their Adrenalin Radeon drivers adding support for Elden Ring and improving performance for Shadow Warrior 3 and GRID Legends. The drivers are reported to increase performance 5% - 6% in Shadow Warrior 3 when running at 4K High settings compared to Radeon Software Adrenalin 22.2.2 while in GRID legends at 4K Ultra High settings this ranged from 7% - 15%. The known issues remain identical to those from version 22.2.2 with the complete change-log listed below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 22.2.3

If you're a fan of From Software's games - and that requires that you have slight masochistic tendencies and enjoy evocative world building more than most - there are good news for you. From Software has confirmed that the game will be released come January 21st 2022 in all major platforms - including the all-dominating PC sphere. The game's worldbuilding has been crafted by both From Software's veteran Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R. R. Martin (of Game of Thrones fame), and will feature an open-world game with horse riding and the usual From Software design philosophy. Check out the game's trailer after the break, and as always: prepare to die.