Happy WRUP day everyone. Lots of interesting tidbits in the world this week.
Later this month Steam will release a beta program allowing any game that has a local co-op mode to be played as online co-op. So your friends in different parts of the world can play couch co-op on their individual couches. That's cool on it's own but also, only the person hosting the session is required to have a copy of the game. The caveat really only comes in the form of what's required in order to make this remote co-op play successful and that's the fact that the host has to stream the game to their partner and also handle all incoming button commands etc from said partner. The promise is that there will be 1080p streaming available and all that's required is a 10Mbps internet connection to keep things nice and smooth. No info on whether on that's the down speed or up speed, but I would hazard a guess to that being a up speed. I can stream at 720p, 30FPS with my 3Mbps up speed but it's not a very smooth experience. Still, that's a pretty cool feature coming to Steam and I'm curious to see how it performs. It should start showing up around October 21st so keep an eye out for updates. It sounds like it'll handle like watching a broadcast, right click your friend's portrait and the option for an invite to remote play should be there.
Of course you probably know now that Red Dead Redemption 2 is coming to PC pretty soon. November 5th, in fact for Rock Star's launcher and the Epic Games Store with Steam getting a launch some time in December. It looks like it'll run on a pretty low-mid range system even for recommended specs, asking for a mere Ryzen 5 1500X CPU and an RX480 4GB video card for the 1080p 30FPS standard metric. Hopefully we'll see an unlocked frame rate and higher resolution support along with tons of good port options in the settings menus. So the requirements to run the game are easy-peesey but, you may have to clear some space on that drive because Red Dead 2 wants 150GB of HDD space. That's a serious chunk of data real estate. Something around twice the size of the largest PC titles already out there. Gears 5, for instance is a heaping 67GB and that's a big game. Before it was compressed via patches, Doom 2016, was around 80GB, now it's around 60GB. Still huge. So 150GB is a substantial inflation of space required. I've been looking at getting a bigger HDD anyway...
And Speaking of Doom, the newest iteration, Doom Eternal, has been delayed until March of 2020. Initially the release was supposed to come our way in November, around my birthday actually, and I was looking forward to more of that fast paced demon slaying greatness. But you know what -the delay is okay. On the one hand it sucks to have to wait longer, but on the other hand I'm sure can all agree that yet another release of a not-quite-complete and possibly broken and buggy game (Of which there have been plenty this year), is not what we want. Hopefully that means that id is taking their time and really polishing things up. I'm equally hopeful that it doesn't mean Bethesda is stepping in and tearing out chunks of the game to sell as microtransactions and crap DLC, forcing id to readjust balance and so on.
Sony has confirmed a holiday 2020 release date for the PS5. No huge surprise there. It looks like it'll contain some decent hardware including an 8 core AMD CPU and that rumored Navi GPU and an interesting feature that will allow for trimming game files down while playing to keep space on the hard drive a little more available. The PS5 will likely not be fully backwards compatible with PS4. Again, no huge surprise, but it's not awesome. In any case this stuff isn't set it stone as there's still a year left before we're going to see it on shelves.
Unrelated: Keep an eye out for some new content on Twinstiq. Sounds like Yoda has something interesting in the works.
So What are You Guys Playing?
Greywolfe: i am done with spyro 2. not even going to think about the skill point challenges, because those make the minigames [the worst part of that particular game] even worse. i've picked up momodora: reverie under the moonlight to replace that. it's not bad. it's a little metroidvania with dark souls-y combat. i'm also winding down the current set of chapters in etherlords 2 - thank god - so i can move onto something else. might try rime again. i dunno. as for kyrandia 3, i've seen basically all the extra little sights and sounds i can, so i'm going to be actually playing the game. this isn't true of quest for glory 4, where i'm grinding stats until my clicking finger falls off :P
Yoda: I spent the week getting a TON of new Warframes and weapons to try out for the weekend. Including a Bard type Frame that LETS YOU COMPOSE YOUR OWN MUSIC!! Gahhh this game is so cool, and free. Did I mention it's free?
Dr. S: :zzz:
AJ: Batman: Arkham Knight and more Ghostbusters to continue my Halloween month festivities. I will also likely be taking my son to the Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta on Saturday for some pretty good food, fun things to do and lots of rad cars to see and exciting racing to watch.
Scroo: Again, this week has been super busy so I'm not sure what's going on with game time. I still want to start The Surge 2 so if I get a chance I'll probably give that shot. Hopefully the Briceburg Fire near by gets taken care of and PG&E stops shutting off everyone's power.