Deep Silver and 4A Games just announced a Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition alongside an update on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X upgrades on the horizon. 

Full ray tracing is on the horizon with the revamped versions of the games. As noted in the reveal, Metro Exodus was one of the first major titles to utilize ray tracing but it was only accessible for high-end PCs with the help of NVIDIA's latest RTX graphic card series. With the Xbox Series X/S and the PlayStation 5 both offering ray tracing support, the studio is making "radical" changes to revamp what ray tracing means and bringing it over to console. 

"We have built an all-new fully ray-traced lighting pipeline that brings a number of optimizations, upgrades, and new features to the ray-traced global illumination and emissive lighting that we pioneered with the original release of Metro Exodus, as well as an upgraded implementation of our powerful temporal reconstruction technology to further boost resolution, visual detail, and performance," says Deep Silver about the latest update. 

This update will provide the "ultimate" version for PC players, pushing past expectations with the vanilla ray tracing experience. So what does this mean for console players? According to the studio, "Metro Exodus will run at 4K / 60FPS with full Ray Traced lighting throughout on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. The base game and DLC expansions will feature both our ground-breaking ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) and the ray-traced emissive lighting techniques pioneered in The Two Colonels expansion across all content."

Deep Silver A summary of changes, click to enlarge image.

Players can also look forward to reduced loading times due to both consoles offering optimized SSD storage, in addition to platform-specific tweaks including spatial audio and improved latency on Xbox and haptic feature utilization for the PlayStation 5 experience. For Xbox Series S players, the team is aiming for 1080p, but the rest of the revealed improvements are confirmed at this time alongside 60 FPS and ray traced lighting. 

Quality of life and other more standard tweaks will also be arriving for all versions, including the additional option to alter the FOV (which is a first for the series). 

As for PC-specific changes, the new fully ray-traced lighting pipeline and the latest GPU-capable hardware from NVIDIA and AMD will be utilized for the Enhanced Edition. In fact, Deep Silver says that the Enchanced upgrade will be so "extensive" that it will require a ray tracing-capable GPU as the bare minimum spec and that this version will be delivered as a separate product. 

The studio also added, "The PC Enhanced Edition will offer additional ray tracing features, including advanced ray-traced reflections and support for DLSS 2.0 on NVIDIA hardware, which offers sharper image details and increased framerates and display resolutions."

"Applying the same philosophy as our Xbox and PlayStation upgrades, this PC Enhanced Edition will be free to all existing Metro Exodus owners on the Epic Games Store, Steam, and GoG. You can expect the PC Enhanced Edition to release later this spring."

Are you excited for the Metro Exodus improvements or all you all wrapped up with your time in-game? Sound off in the comment section below! 

[Source: 4A Games]

Valheim, the new early access Viking-inspired survival game, has been making its way into everyone’s Steam library since its sudden launch two weeks ago. Even now, the game continues to dominate Steam’s best-seller list and boasts fun base-building features, a plethora of useful collectibles, intense cooperative gameplay, and some truly terrifying enemies from the regular grunts scouring the landscape(s) to larger boss battles. However, a recent bug has been ruining the fun by erasing entire gameworlds and player characters along with them. 

In a recent Tweet, Iron Gate (Valheim’s developer) CEO, Richard Svensson, talked about the “world-destroyer” bug and urged players to take immediate precautions since the team hasn’t found any remedy for the issue as of yet. “If you are playing Valheim this weekend, please backup your world and characters,” Svensson said in his Twitter post. “The evil world-destroyer bug is still roaming free.” 

If you are playing Valheim this weekend, please backup your world and characters. The evil world-destroyer bug is still roaming free =( #valheim

— Richard Svensson (@dvoidis) February 12, 2021

Svensson would go on to offer his own take on why the bug occurs. Even though Iron Gate hasn’t been able to reproduce the glitch for de-bugging purposes, Svensson suggests that players stop exiting Valheim by clicking ALT+F4. Instead, they should be logging out the safer and more conventional way: By navigating to the exit tab in the game’s main menu. Additionally, if you’re unsure about how to backup your data, a short video has been provided  by a generous Valheim player in Svensson’s Tweet thread. 

Despite this dire issue, Valheim’s success has not wavered. Our very own Dan Tack has spent many hours roaming laying waste to Valheim’s most daunting enemies as well as mastering the game’s cooking mechanics. Tack has released guides on How To Spend Your Gold, Rubies, And Amber, How To Open Sunken Crypts And Find Iron, and How To Get Started if you haven’t even downloaded the game and initiated your harrowing journey yet. 

[Source: IGN]

Zack Snyder’s Justice League premieres March 18 on HBO Max, and the film’s latest trailer gives DC-loving hopefuls another look at the long-awaited “Snyder cut”. The four-hour epic serves as the definitive version of the 2017’s Justice League and features newly added scenes and narrative threads.  

The trailer provides glimpses of previously revealed plot elements, such as Darkseid’s involvement, Superman’s black suit, and Jared Leto’s reimagined Joker. The film is chock full of comic book goodness new and old but its narrative core remains the same: Following the events of Batman v Superman, Batman rallies DC’s finest heroes to band together and take on the invading Steppenwolf. For fans of Zack Snyder’s unique vision of DC’s pantheon, the bombastic trailer is about as Snyder-y as can be.

This extended cut of 2017’s Justice League puts Zack Snyder back at the helm to realize his original version of the film. For those unaware, Snyder departed Justice League’s production due to his daughter’s sudden passing as well as some existing creative conflicts with Warner Bros. Justice League released to an overall poor critical reception, and in the years since, reports have come out detailing just how troubled the film’s production was. Many of the problems have been attributed to Snyder’s replacement, Joss Whedon, who has faced abuse allegations from the film’s cast, Ray Fisher (Cyborg) in particular. 

As a DC fan who didn’t particularly care for Justice League (okay, I hated it), I’m becoming more curious, and somewhat apprehensive, about how this extended cut can improve the film’s fundamental issues. Despite my reservations, I'm already setting aside four hours to sit down with this beast of a film. How do you think the movie is shaping up compared to the original version? Let us know in the comments?