You're about to get an exciting look at some of the incredible games ahead with Xbox, as we present a new edition of Developer_Direct. On Thursday, January 18 at 12pm PT / 3pm ET / 8pm UK, fans will get an inside look at a selection of highly anticipated games coming to Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Game Pass. Shortly after, ZeniMax Online Studios will host The Elder Scrolls Online 2024 Global Reveal at 1pm PT / 4pm ET / 9pm UK to preview 2024's biggest update.

Presented by the game creators themselves, Developer_Direct offers an in-depth look at upcoming titles, how they're being created, and who's creating them. We'll visit MachineGames in Sweden to check in on their Indiana Jones game, swing by Obsidian's Irvine offices to see more from Avowed, head to Oxide Games' Maryland home to learn about Ara: History Untold, and take a trip to Cambridge, England to see Senua's Saga: Hellblade II from Ninja Theory. Please note that while this show won't have updates on games from Activision Blizzard, you can look forward to news from those teams later this year.

Microsoft today dropped a giant bomb on the balance of game development: the company announced the acquisition of ZeniMax Media, parent company of Bethesda Softworks, and all its related IP. The purchase, which is expected to close for a tidy $7.5 billion, will carry over all ZeniMax Media subsidiaries. This includes Bethesda (The Elder Scrolls, Fallout), id Software (DOOM), Arkane Studios (Prey, Dishonored, upcoming Deathloop), MachineGames (Wolfenstein), among others.

The deal is the costliest acquisition for Microsoft (to date) in its push to increase the number of in-house development studios (up to 23 from 15 prior to this deal). Microsoft has announced that as part of the deal, games published by ZeniMax Media and subsidiaries (and in the future, by Microsoft) will be available on its Xbox Games Pass subscription service for Xbox and PC gaming. Microsoft is acquiring some of the most iconic gaming franchises ever with this deal, including all in-development IP. It's a huge boon for the company; it remains to be seen exactly how will this evolve over the years. But one thing is for certain: Microsoft isn't slowing down on its doubling down on game development.

Bethesda has confirmed that they will be having their own presentation even before the actual E3 (Entertainments and Electronics Expo) kicks-off. Bethesda's presentation, which will be live on June 9th, will, according to Bethesda, offer an "in-depth look at DOOM Eternal plus much, much more." The company also teases that they want to "be together" with the community this year - likely because of one particular interstellar journey that dwells in such a team - perhaps in the form of Starfield?

You may remember that we covered in detail the new technologies being implemented on NVIDIA's new brainchild, Turing, back when the architecture and its whitepaper were initially announced. One of the pieces of technology we talked about back then was Content Adaptive Shading, a new technique that would allow for smart trade-offs in image quality for added performance - potentially allowing for increased overall rendering resolutions at a much lesser impact cost.

The tech is now simply known as Adaptive Shading, and it basically works as a post-process step that looks at previous frames to calculate which determine quality conditions for the next one - lowered detail areas such as skies, flat walls, or even shadowed portions of objects require lesser amounts of shading detail, and thus, their shading rates can be reduced from a per-pixel shading to four pixels per shading ratio. And this new feature, which was originally showcased on MachineGames' Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, will finally be implemented in working form on that particular game, via a patch that's being released on November 19th. This is the first title to make use of this technology - and hopefully, it isn't the last.