Night City is going to get bigger next year with Phantom Liberty, an expansion adding new characters and a fresh location to Cyberpunk 2077. It's a spy thriller starring V, the game's protagonist, and Johnny Silverhand, the ghostly character played by Keanu Reeves, and it involves espionage work for the New United States of America. However, Phantom Liberty is only heading to Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 5, PC and Stadia, skipping Xbox One and PS4 altogether.
CD Projekt RED's decision to drop last-gen console support isn't surprising, considering the difficulties developers had delivering a functional game on those platforms. Cyberpunk has received plenty of patches since its release in December 2020, with most of the focus on fixing major issues with the game's performance; itwas incredibly buggy and unplayable in some cases at launch, and it particularly struggled on older-gen hardware. Phantom Liberty is a narrative and world update featuring new content, locations and characters, and it marks a significant step forward in the game's post-launch development cycle, even though it leaves Xbox One and PS4 players in the dust.
Ahead of Phantom Liberty, Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a bit of DLC tied to Edgerunners, the coming anime based on the game. The anime, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, will hit Netflix on September 13th, and the game update is live right now. Patch 1.6 is known as the Edgerunners Update and it adds items from the Netflix show to the game, including the protagonist's jacket and another character's shotgun. It also unlocks new secrets to be discovered in Night City — but like the Phantom Liberty rollout, these won't be available on Xbox One or PS4.
"Due to some technical challenges, this change isn't available on the previous generation of consoles," the update blog reads.
The Edgerunners Update adds three new gigs, six new firearms and five new melee weapons, plus it unlocks cross-progression and brings a new mini-game called Roach Race to the arcade cabinets scattered throughout Night City. Roach Race is also available on Android and iOS today, no Cyberpunk required. On top of all this, there's a litany of gameplay, UI and other updates hitting Cyberpunk in Patch 1.6.
If you’re in the market for external storage, Amazon has discounted a handful of Samsung SSD products. Starting with the T7 Touch, the 1TB model in black is currently $125, down from its usual $160. With the $35 price cut, the T7 Touch is currently at the lowest price it has ever hit on Amazon. While there are faster external SSDs out on the market, Samsung’s portable drive hits the sweet spot between performance, features and affordability. Connected to a USB 3.2 Gen 2-compatible port, it offers sequential write speeds of up to 1,000MB/s. It’s also one of the more secure drives you can buy thanks to the inclusion of AES 256-bit encryption and a built-in fingerprint sensor. Another nice thing about the T7 Touch is that it ships with both USB-C and USB-A cables.
The T7 Touch is sturdy, but if you’re worried about how it will hold up on trips and your daily commute, Samsung also offers a ruggedized version. The T7 Shield is just as fast as its Touch counterpart, but it also comes with an elastomer layer that Samsung claims will protect the drive from 9.8-foot drops. It’s also IP65-certified against water and dust. At the moment, you can buy the 1TB model for $110, down from $160. That’s close to the lowest price we’ve seen on the T7 Shield. Amazon has also put the 2TB model on sale. After a 31 percent discount, it’s $200. You can buy the T7 Shield in three colors – blue, black or beige – and all three colorways are included in Amazon’s promotion.
Lastly, if all you need is a microSD card for your Nintendo Switch, action camera or Android phone, you’re in luck. Included in the sale are Samsung’s Evo Select microSD cards. The 512GB model is currently $47 after a 45 percent discount. You can also get the 256GB model for 50 percent off, making it $20 at the moment and just a few dollars more than the 128GB variant. I haven’t personally used an Evo Select memory card, but Samsung’s microSD has about all the features you would want in a mid-range memory card. It features a UHS-1 interface with Class 10-rated transfer speeds, meaning it can move data at up to 130MB/s.
Sony is losing one of the main architects behind its PlayStation consoles. The company has confirmed to Bloomberg News that Masayasu Ito, who led the development of the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation 5, is leaving Sony on October 1st. Ito has been with Sony for 36 years, joining the company way back in 1986 and starting with the development of in-car audio equipment those first years.
He transferred to the console division in 2000, and he's had a hand in developing Sony's PlayStation devices since then, including the PS Portable and the PS4 Pro. He eventually became the Executive Vice President of Hardware Engineering and Operation and representative director of Sony Interactive Entertainment. While Sony didn't elaborate on why Ito is leaving in its announcement, it told Bloomberg that the 60-year-old executive is retiring.
Over the past couple of decades, he represented Sony in interviews and other public appearances concerning the PlayStation. He talked to Engadgetabout the PlayStation Eye camera for the PS4 back in 2013 and told us in the same year that the company was releasing the Vita TV outside Japan. He was also the one who announced that Project Morpheus would be known as the PlayStation VR at Tokyo Game Show back in 2015.
Two years ago, Ito posted a teardown of the PS5 on the PlayStation blog. He said Sony had to make a "generational leap in terms of performance" for its next console generation and had to ensure that all elements of the device work together. it had to find ways to reduce the console's the noise level, for instance, and increase its cooling capacity to be able to prevent its components from overheating. "In this teardown video of the PS5 console, you will be able to see how we have thoughtfully integrated our technology into this console," he wrote.
Samsung's 32-inch Smart Monitor M8 can act not only as a monitor with a webcam, but a smart TV as well thanks to the built-in speakers and support for cloud gaming and streaming platforms. Now, you can grab one for $590 ($110 to $140 off) at Amazon in white or green and $590 at Samsung in all colors. That beats the previous low price we saw earlier this year at Amazon.
As a computer display, the Smart Monitor M8 offers UHD (3,840 x 2,160) resolution at up to 60Hz, along with HDR10+. With a VA panel, it's decently bright at 400 nits, offers a 4-millisecond response time and displays up to a billion colors, with 99 percent sRGB coverage. Input-wise, you get USB-C and Micro HDMI 2.0 inputs, along with a USB-C charging interface. Finally, it has a a detachable SlimFit Cam for video calls, making it a solid choice for work or light content creation.
That's just the half of it, though. It's a WiFi-capable smart TV that supports Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV, as well as cloud gaming platforms. It comes with built-in dual 5W speakers and a home hub that allows you to use it to control SmartThings-compatible IoT devices like lights and thermostats. It even has built-in support for Microsoft 365, so you can edit documents or browse the web without having to connect it to a computer.
Other features include the ability to change the angle and position with the high-adjustable stand, along with a game bar that makes it easy to switch between cloud services. Normally the white model sells for $700 and the color models for $730, so the latter (green at Amazon; green, pink and blue at Samsung) are a particularly good deal at $590.
DNS and internet security provider Cloudflare has blocked Kiwi Farms, an infamous forum known for its online and real-world harassment campaigns. CEO Matthew Prince announced the company’s decision on Saturday after it initially resisted calls to stop protecting the website.
“As Kiwi Farms has felt more threatened, they have reacted by being more threatening,” Prince told The Washington Post. “We think there is an imminent danger, and the pace at which law enforcement is able to respond to those threats we don’t think is fast enough to keep up.” On the company’s blog, Prince said that Cloudflare saw an increase in targeted threats “unlike we have previously seen from Kiwi Farms or any other customer before.”
Kiwi Farms was founded in 2013 by former 8chan administrator Joshua Moon. In the decade since it went online, at least three suicides have been linked to harassment campaigns that originated on the forum. In recent weeks, Kiwi Farms has gained widespread notoriety across both sides of the US political spectrum. After she was the target of multiple swatting attacks that originated on the website, trans Twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti began a campaign to shut down Kiwi Farms. She used the hashtag DropKiwifarms to urge Cloudflare and other critical internet infrastructure providers to stop serving the website.
“There are countless people suffering because of this website,” Sorrenti told The Post on Saturday, moments after police arrived at her home in the wake of another swatting attempt. “Kiwi Farms isn’t about free speech, it’s about hate speech. The majority of the content on the site is threads used for targeted harassment against political targets.”
Separately, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called for the forum’s shutdown after a user claiming affiliation with Kiwi Farms sent police to her home. “That website needs to be taken down,” Greene told Newsmax during an interview. “There should be no business or any kind of service where you can target your enemy."
Earlier in the week, it appeared Cloudflare would not take action against Kiwi Farms. The company published a blog post on Wednesday detailing its policies on abusive content. Without directly mentioning the forum, Prince and another executive argued that withholding security services from websites the company and public find reprehensible would ultimately harm oppressed and marginalized voices.
On Saturday, Prince described Cloudflare’s decision to block Kiwi Farms as a “dangerous one that we are not comfortable with.” He told The Post he would have preferred to take action in response to a court order but added it was an easier call than when Cloudflare decided to drop the Daily Stormer and 8chan. As of the writing of this story, Kiwi Farms is still online after moving to DDoS-guard and a Russian domain.
Sci-fi arena shooter Splitgateexploded in popularity after it hit consoles last summer, two years after it debuted on PC. It racked up more than 10 million downloads in the space of a month thanks to its blend of Halo and Portal gameplay. The fact it's free-to-play didn't hurt. However, developer 1047 Games is now winding down feature development, effectively putting the game into maintenance mode. Although Splitgate will move out of beta with its next update, that will be the game's "last major iteration," the studio said.
Splitgate became much more successful than 1047 expected. The studio attempted to turn a "college dorm dream project into a AAA game" that could compete with the biggest titles around. "But this also meant that as we've brought on top-tier talent from across the industry, we've spent a lot of our time trying to rework old content and systems that were originally built by a handful of people," 1047 wrote in a statement. "We are, in a way, bailing water while also trying to keep everyone who bought a ticket to board our ship happy, while also trying to turn our boat into a rocket ship."
The studio is now focused on its next project. It will again be a free-to-play shooter with portals and it's set in the same universe. 1047 will build the upcoming game from scratch in Unreal Engine 5.
Meanwhile, Splitgate, which has now been downloaded more than 18 million times, will stay online for the foreseeable future. As a thank you to players, 1047 will add a free battle pass with an infinite number of levels and new skins and characters when the final season starts on September 15th. 1047 will continue to make fixes and roll out smaller updates for Splitgate, but the game won't get any new features after the next big patch.
“After careful consideration and much deliberation the 1047 team has determined that in order to build the game that fans deserve — and to build it in a way that isn’t trying to retrofit our existing game — we are turning our attention away from iterative, smaller updates and going all-in to focus on a new game in the Splitgate universe which will present revolutionary, not just evolutionary, changes to the gameplay,” 1047 Games CEO and Splitgate creator Ian Proulx said in a statement. “Splitgate will remain online and supported for our dedicated community who have been the backbone of our studio from our earliest playtests on PC. Our community means everything to us and we can’t wait to share what’s next with them.”
Meanwhile, in an FAQ, 1047 acknowledged that players put time, effort and money into acquiring skins and other items. While it suggests that fans won't be able to carry those over to the next game, "we want to reward your efforts and time in Splitgate and we take that seriously. How we will do that is not decided at this time, but know that it is something we are focused on as we discuss the next game." It's also not clear whether the Splitcoin virtual currency will transfer over.
Aside from whether The Last of Us Part I is worth the $70 asking price, the question surrounding this remake is how much the original 2013 game was going to change. Would developer Naughty Dog treat this as a total do-over, changing the level design, gameplay mechanics and player upgrades? It has become obvious over the last few weeks, as Sony released a handful of preview videos ahead of today's release, that that wouldn’t be the case. Instead, the goal was to bring massively updated visuals and a host of quality-of-life improvements to a game that would otherwise stay true to its roots.
“This is a unique project for Naughty Dog. It’s the first time we’ve taken on a full remake,” said creative director Shaun Escayg in an interview. “We knew that we wanted to stay true to the original game as closely as possible, [to] add what we think will heighten and enhance the experience but not fundamentally change the experience.” That mindset permeates the game, from everything you can see in the environment down to the battles against both humans and the Infected.
“We didn’t feel like these combat encounters were dated and there wasn’t really anything we were looking at saying ‘we want a do-over here,’” added game director Matthew Gallant. “We love the combat in The Last of Us. We think those spaces are really iconic: They’re really strong, they afford a ton of different options for moving around and fighting. What often was dated was perhaps the technology underlying some of these fights.”
Gallant, who was a combat designer on the original The Last of Us, says the game could only handle eight AI “brains” at any given time, despite fights that often had more enemies than that. This meant that they had to reactivate and deactivate those brains based on where the character was and what they were doing. Similarly, he described a lot of the battles in the original game as “hand scripted.” “You move here, they react by doing this; that was just the level of technology that we had at the time and it was what made sense, and we got pretty good results,” he said. “Those are really great fights, and they hold up really well. But with our latest engine technology we can be a lot more flexible.”
The new AI, unsurprisingly, is far more advanced. “We have the option to use information in the [level] layout to tell enemies ‘this is a strong position to defend, this is a good flanking route, this is a good line of sight to other enemies, and there’s an encounter manager layer that’s assigning NPCs to roles within the fight,” Gallant said. “Who would be the best flanker right now, who would be the best person to defend this point, who should be pushing up on the player right now?” In my experience so far, the end result is a game that’s far less predictable than the original – if you get caught out of stealth, enemies advance quickly and mercilessly, especially on harder difficulty levels. “You should be able to play a fight ten different ways and get ten different results,” he added.
Another big question around combat was why Naughty Dog didn’t add some of the new mechanics it built in The Last of Us Part IIfrom 2020. In that game, players control Ellie and Abby, both of whom can lie on the ground to hide in grass or crawl under vehicles for cover. They can also dodge, a feature that added a whole new dimension to fights, giving you an out when a Clicker or Bloater is bearing down on you for a one-hit instant kill.
According to Gallant, the ripple effects of adding dodge to the original game would have been too significant. “Dodge isn’t something that lives in a vacuum,” he said. “You have to add tells to the enemy attacks, and now the enemies are going to be attacking differently. You also may need to change the encounter spaces; you need to give a little more room to have that dodge gameplay.” Beyond that, adding dodge would diminish the tension that Naughty Dog tried to infuse in the game’s battles.
“If you have dodge, you kind of have an out. Then all of a sudden, a fight that was very claustrophobic and tense and nerve-wracking – this thing’s bearing down on you and you have to land that headshot to kill it – you get a very different sensation if you have dodge,” Gallant said.
But most importantly, according to Gallant, playing as Joel fundamentally needs to feel different than playing as Ellie, and just porting over her moves would diminish those differences. “The way Joel plays tells you a lot about his character,” he said. “He is a bruiser, he’s a brawler, he’s an older man. The way that he fights is supposed to feel very different than the way Ellie fights in The Last of Us Part II. She’s a younger woman, she’s nimble, she has a whole skill set that’s very different.” Fans can continue to argue about whether Naughty Dog should have gone further with the changes it made to gameplay, but it’s also reasonable that they want to keep the characters in Part I distinct from those in Part II.
While it might take players some time to recognize the extent of the AI updates, the graphical improvements are immediately obvious. For me, the most striking change is the facial animations, but the extent to which Naughty Dog went in and looked at every aspect of a scene to improve it is equally impressive. For example, as Joel and Ellie make their way through the suburbs of Pittsburgh with new companions Henry and his teenage brother Sam, Ellie and Sam take a break on a couch in a ruined house. From looking back at old screenshots, I saw that the couch was totally redesigned. Why not just use the original couch design?
“We’re trying to update everything with the decade of artistic development and improvement in technology since the PlayStation 3,” Escayg explained. “Is this the most grounded-looking couch? Can it stand up in this environment? How does it wear and tear over time? How does it work with the lighting and the time of day in that setting? Does it actually focus your attention on Sam and Ellie, or does it detract?”
Speaking more broadly, Escayg notes that Naughty Dog went through thousands of “micro decisions” across the entire game. “Does anything distract? Let’s remove it,” he said. “Do we absolutely need it? Are fans really attached to it? Are we really attached to it?”
Gallant says that a lot of the re-evaluation that Naughty Dog did focused on why it designed sections of the game the way they did a decade ago. “This area is plain — is it plain because we want you to kind of move through it and it’s meant to be unremarkable, or is it plain because we were low on memory on the PlayStation 3 and this was kind of a transition area from one detailed area to a next one?”
Naughty Dog did make one major addition that will fundamentally change how The Last of Us Part I plays. There are now myriad accessibility options, none of which were present in either the PS3 game or the PS4 remaster. The feature set includes everything the developer put into Part II in 2020, along with a few new additions. Despite the fact that the game wasn’t originally designed with accessibility in mind, Gallant says that it was relatively straightforward to bring these features over – though some of the more unique scenes in the game were tougher to account for.
“One example is the arcade mini-game in Left Behind,” Gallant said. The mini-game in question requires you to make a specific series of directional and button presses in a limited amount of time, like you do in Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat. “We needed to design our text-to-speech there to tell you the instructions of what buttons to put in very quickly so you have time to put in the inputs. We worked with accessibility consultants and they tried some various revisions of that mini game. We did a couple rounds there to make sure that experience was accessible.”
The PS5’s DualSense controller and its extensive haptics system opened up one of those new accessibility options, dialog haptics. “This is a feature where we play the spoken dialog as vibrations on the controller,” Gallant explained, “and the intent there is to give deaf players a sense of how the line was delivered. Where was the emphasis, what was the cadence? And that along with the subtitles provides more of that story context and the performance to deaf players as well.”
While people will still continue to argue about whether The Last of Us Part I is worth $70, my conversation with Escayg and Gallant made it clear that Naughty Dog doesn’t believe things like the level design and core gameplay needed an overhaul. “We wanted anything we changed, anything we remade, anything that we adjusted to be in service of the original vision that was larger than what the hardware was capable of,” Gallant said. For better or worse, Naughty Dog’s mission was to make a version of The Last of Us that is, as Gallant puts it, “the best version of itself.”
Good TVs are always in high demand, so finding deals can be a fruitless quest. If you're on the lookout for one, Amazon is running a one-day sale right now on LG, Samsung and Sony sets, including OLED and other desirable models at all-time low prices. For instance, LG's 55-inch A1 OLED is just $797 instead of $1,300 for the biggest savings we've seen yet. Sony's A80J 65-inch OLED model is $1,399 or 44 percent off (a new low), and Samsung's 55-inch Frame TV with Quantum HDR is priced at just $980, also an all-time low.
LG's 2021 line of A1 OLED TVs first appeared at CES 2021, offering support for Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, Filmmaker mode, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and AirPlay 2. You can expect a color accurate picture with deep blacks, though some things are missing like a 120Hz display and HDMI 2.1. Still, at $797, the 55-inch A1 will deliver everything else you might want in an OLED TV.
Sony
Sony's A80J OLED TV also popped up at CES 2021, offering Sony's "Cognitive Processor VR" to improve picture quality on individual elements of a picture. It also delivers 120Hz 4K thanks to an HDMI 2.1 input, along with features like Dolby Vision, Google TV, Google Assistant and Alexa support. Again, it's available at an all-time low price of $1,400, or 44 percent off the regular price.
Finally, if you want a low-profile TV that also doubles as a picture frame and smart device, Samsung's 55-inch Frame TV is priced at $980, another all-time low. It can rotate between portrait and landscape modes and display up to 1,400 works of art, while offering features like 4K upscaling, HDR, Alexa and Samsung's Tizen smart TV interface.
Sony has unveiled a smartphone with both gaming and photo-taking powers that's (a bit) less expensive than its last few models. The Xperia 5 IV comes with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 Mobile Platform and 120Hz 6.1-inch 21:9 OLED display, while offering photo features from the Xperia 1 IV flagship like real-time eye AF and real-time tracking on all three rear cameras.
Taking advantage of its strong reputation in photography with models like the Alpha A7 IV, Sony is pitching the Xperia 5 IV as a content creation device. To that end, it comes with no less then four 12-megapixel cameras with three on the back (a 16mm 1/2.5-inch f/2.2 ultra-wide, 24mm f/1.7 1/1.7-inch wide and 60mm f/2.4 1/3.5-inch portrait) and one up front for selfies (1/2.9-inch).
The real-time eye AF promises that your subjects' eyes rather than their nose will stay in focus, and the real-time AI-powered tracking feature keeps fast-moving subjects in focus. It supports shooting speeds of 20 fps with AF and auto exposure for all lenses. The relatively large pixels (1.9 microns) on the main camera should allow for decent low-light shooting, too.
Sony
All three rear sensors have 120fps read-out speeds, letting you record 4K HDR at up to 120fps. Sony is also promising 4K HDR with "outstanding contrast grading" and the ability to take selfies or vlog in high glare or dark environments. As with the Xperia I IV, it comes with the Videography Pro feature that lets you livestream your content to YouTube and other streaming services.
The screen looks to be up to the job for creators as well. It's HDR10 capable (though doesn't support Dolby Vision) and supposedly 50 percent brighter than the last model. It also offers something called "Real Time HDR Drive" that can increase image quality by filling in details on over- and underexposed shots. Users of Bravia Core will also be able to access Sony's latest releases and classic films.
On the gaming side, the 120Hz display should allow for smooth gaming, and a 240Hz touch scanning rate allowing for rapid inputs. The Plus Game enhancer lets you customize picture and sound, and it offers live streaming on Sony's Social Networking Service (SNS), with high-frame recording up to 120fps. You can use it to check viewer's comments in real time and implement game commentary.
On the audio side, it supports both Dolby Atmos and Sony's 360 Reality audio, either via a wired 3.5mm jack or wireless Bluetooth LE. Other features include a 5,000mAh battery, 8GB of RAM, 128GB of memory and 5G capabilities. The Xperia 5 IV will be available at the end of October 2022 for $1,000 in black or a green color variation. If you pre-order starting today at 11AM ET, you'll be eligible to receive the WF-1000XM4 wireless earbuds, a $280 value.
Valve wants to help Steam Deck owners and folks interested in picking up the device easily find out what games can actually run on it. Through its verification program, it hopes to let people see at a glance whether a game is compatible. Although it will be a long process to test every game (assuming it goes that far), Valve just passed an important milestone. The company has now certified 5,000 games as Verified or Playable on Steam Deck.
If Valve slaps a Verified label on a game, the Steam Deck should be able to handle it with few, if any, issues. Should Valve determine that a title is Playable, it will work, but there might be a few caveats or niggling issues. On the other hand, Valve has listed nearly 2,000 games as Unsupported, according to SteamDB, meaning they probably (or definitely) won't work on Steam Deck.
Those numbers suggest Valve has tested at least 7,000 Steam games on the system. There's a long way to go to check all of them, though, since there are well north of 50,000 titles on the platform. It's worth noting that many of the games currently labeled as Unknown work just fine on Steam Deck, even without a Verified or Playable sticker.
Oh hey, another big milestone - we just passed 5,000 tested Verified and Playable titles on Steam Deck! Plenty more to go (so many games on Steam), but just wanted to take a moment to celebrate! 🎉 pic.twitter.com/el7iBWdEo8
Valve uses four criteria to check Steam Deck compatibility. It assesses whether a game has controller support (and an onscreen keyboard when needed) or any compatibility warnings. It also looks for support for the screen's native 1,280 by 800 resolution and if the game has any issues with the Proton compatibility layer Valve employs to run Windows games.
There's now a vast library of games that will work on Steam Deck, more than most people can possibly play in a lifetime — you might have a shot at getting through them if you can tear yourself away from Vampire Survivors for long enough. This should come as more good news for those waiting on a Steam Deck delivery after Valve ramped up production in the last few months. If you reserve one now, you should still be able to get a Steam Deck by the end of the year.
And just like that, August is over! Taking a quick look back, here are the top games on Steam Deck for the past month, sorted by total hours played. pic.twitter.com/FuDRLh2XaO
