Amelia Tyler, the voice behind Baldur's Gate 3's narrator, revealed her favorite line from her favorite subplot in Larian Studios' critically acclaimed role-playing game (RPG).
17.11.2023 - 12:13 / pcgamer.com
I think a crucial test of a game's visual identity is how well it holds up to a demaster. Bloodborne, for instance, manages to remain recognisably and wonderfully itself when you turn it into some kind of PS1-style kart racer, and it's in no small part down to the talent of both the demaster's makers and FromSoft's art team. And hey, perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that applies to other games in the studio's catalogue too.
Pixel Souls: Demastered is a mod for Dark Souls: Remastered that «changes all textures, icons, fonts, and visual effects into pixel art based on the original game textures.» On top of that, it also puts the game's sound effects through a fuzzy, lo-fi filter to give the game a «fun, somewhat cursed, 'retro' feel.» It was done using author thegreatgramcracker's own «custom image processing algorithm,» with a little bit of personal input and tweaking from the modder themself. AI wasn't used for any part of the mod.
It works incredibly well, if you ask me, turning Dark Souls into a weird PSP version of itself soundtracked by the hottest tunes a sound card from 2005 can handle. Most of those tunes, by the way, are just de-rezzed versions of the original DS soundtrack, but the author secured permission from Soulsborne YouTuber and musician Illusory Wall to use their 8-bit remixes of the Firelink Shrine and Gwyn's Theme tracks from original Dark Souls. They're looking for more like those, too, if you happen to have a generous heart and some retro Dark Souls remixes lying around.
Installing the mod is pretty straightforward, you just need to download the main mod file from Nexus Mods and extract the contents over to your Dark Souls: Remastered Steam directory, overwriting whatever files are already in there. If you don't fancy the low-fi tunes to restore humanity to, you can skip the «sound» folder (do the same for the «font» folder if you don't want to replace the usual DS fonts, too).
If you want the low quality models for things like your equipment, just download the optional extra file from Nexus and extract that over after you've installed the main mod. The author is a little bit iffy on these, though, saying that they're not all at a quality they'd like just yet. Still, I think they look pretty good for the most part, and I'd recommend installing the whole thing if you're determined to embark on a low-res Dark Souls playthrough.
Amelia Tyler, the voice behind Baldur's Gate 3's narrator, revealed her favorite line from her favorite subplot in Larian Studios' critically acclaimed role-playing game (RPG).
In what is either a very blatant marketing strategy or a case of Icarus soaring too close to the sun, the Cult of the Lamb developers at Massive Monster put out a tweet earlier this week saying «we will add sex to the game if we hit 300k followers by the end of the year.»
I'm genuinely pretty excited for Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, shown off earlier today at our PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted showcase, and that's due to its fun position of being a sort of 'second-generation soulslike'—which is a term I just now made up and already cannot wait to stop using when we think of better words for this stuff. See, Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn gives off some major Star Wars Jedi: Survivor energy. In that it takes the slow, methodical combat of its inspirations and loosens the restraints enough to let the player feel flexible. Even calling Survivor (or Flintlock, for that matter) a soulslike feels weird. Sure, Survivor still has Meditation point bonfires, difficult bosses, an Estus Flask-style health system, a sprawling metroidvania-style labyrinth of shortcuts and blocked areas. But it also meets with modern action game sensibilities. Everything I've seen from Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn follows in the footsteps of that philosophy. Developed by A44 Games and published by Kepler Interactive, the game aims for that same cake mix of weighty, timing-focused combat, but looks like it'll top it with a more God-of-War style icing. You even get your very own cute sidekick: a little magical fox thing, Enki. Setting-wise, Flintlock is a bold mash-up of high-magic fantasy and renaissance goodness, giving you an axe, a gun, and deities to fight. The core concept is that the door to the afterlife has opened (bad) but you're part of the coalition army that's here to stop them (good). It's straightforward, sure, but if you're going for god-slaying action fantasy, straightforward works. It's also nice to see a game taking influence from the soulslike genre straying away from 'the world is screwed, we're all upset, watch a video essay to make sense of why' brand of storytelling. Instead, you're cobbling together a rag-tag resistance group to commit deicide with. These are big-budget shoes I'm expecting Flintlock to fill, but the developers A44 did also develop Ashen, a solid game we gave an 85 to in our Ashen review. It's had five years to brush up on its act since then, so I'm pretty confident that A44 Games are in with a chance of making a smashing edition to the genre's history, even as that genre splinters off into its own subcategories and becomes even more of an impossible nightmare to talk about.
In a genre as oversatured as city builders, it's sometimes hard to find original concepts, but Ironhive is attempting to reinvent the tried-and-tested formula through deck-building. In this colony survival game, you're tasked with overseeing the Iron Hive; a rusting bastion where the last remnants of humanity huddle together against the end of the world.
If you’re a fan ofDark Souls and want to try experiencing FromSoftware’s brutal role-playing game in a whole new way, then Steamforged Games' newly announced Dark Souls: The Board Game — The Sunless City might be for you. It’s set to release on February 14, 2024, so that’s Valentine’s Day sorted.
It’s been a busy year for Taika Waititi. As an in-demand producer, he’s had a lot of projects hit screens in 2023, including season 2 of Our Flag Means Death (which he starred in as well as producing), season 3 of Reservation Dogs, season 5 of What We Do in the Shadows, and the indie films Frybread Face and Me and Red, White & Brass. As a writer and director, he’s midstream on Apple TV Plus’ reboot of Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, with irons in the fire on everything from a Star Wars movie to a series adaptation of Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown. And on top of it all, he has a new movie in theaters: Next Goal Wins, a sports comedy adapting the documentary of the same name about the real-life comeback of the American Samoa soccer team, after a record-breaking 31-0 World Cup qualifier loss.
Prepare to die. Or rather, to work together amicably with friends and family. Steamforged Games, known for its lavish strategy board games based on Japanese-made video games, is back with another take on Dark Souls. This time it’s a spin-off cooperative game titled Dark Souls: The Board Game — The Sunless City, with “refreshed rules driven by community feedback.” If that’s the case, it could help revitalize what has been a challenging franchise for the British publisher.
One hilarious Starfield bug has made the entire city of New Atlantis orbit a player’s ship.
Mass Effect, as we all know, has always hungered in its secret heart to become a twitchy first-person shooter. To cast aside the aged moniker of «RPG», whatever that means, and to transform into the helter-skelter, thrill-a-minute Call of Duty-like it was always meant to be.
OpenAI reinstated Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman after hundreds of workers threatened to quit over the ChatGPT creator's ouster, highlighting just how much leverage the tech industry's most valued workers hold right now.
Doom always takes the crown, but that doesn’t detract from Wolfenstein 3D‘s influence as a key part of FPS history. The series is still going to this day (maybe not as strong in some cases), and people are continuing to modify the OG 1992 release.
The 2023 Steam Autumn Sale is now live, bringing new and returning deals on PC games. The event is live for a week, running until November 28 at 10:30pm IST, slashing prices by up to 85 percent on select titles. Blizzard's Diablo IV, which recently came to Valve's storefront, has gotten a 40 percent discount — Rs. 3,359 — tossing you into the hellish landscape of the Sanctuary to battle bloodthirsty monsters as a legendary horned demon Lilith, Queen of the Succubi comes into power. Lacklustre post-launch content has tarnished this game's reputation, so why not give it a test run with the six-day-long free trial? Bethesda's expansive space RPG Starfield has also received a first discount, setting you centuries into the future where humanity has begun thriving on other planets. It's available at Rs. 3,999 at a 20 percent discount.