Souls-like games have earned a reputation for their skills-based combat and for being particularly challenging, but as they have made it into the mainstream gaming scene, discussions have sprung up about the genre's accessibility. In a recent interview with Game Informer, Onimusha: Way of the Sword producer, Akihito Kadowaki explains that Way of the Sword will include granular difficulty sliders. He explains that

"We've built this game with the intention of essentially creating a new swordplay experience—the pinnacle of swordplay action games," he explains. Souls-like games are still intimidating to many players, and Capcom's intention with the difficulty sliders is to bring in as wide an audience as possible. According to the executive, the game will have "modular difficulty settings for that—we have story, we have action difficulty settings, and even between those, you can change the settings."

Back to school means balancing assignments, deadlines and downtime. GeForce NOW makes it easy to have it all. With cloud gaming, everyday laptops used for class can also become GeForce RTX-powered gaming setups. When it's time to switch from studying to gaming, members can jump into Halo: Campaign Evolved, as GeForce NOW is bringing one of the gaming world's most celebrated titles to nearly any device through the cloud, alongside eight total games joining the GeForce NOW library this week.

From A+ to AAA Gaming
This back-to-school season, the easiest upgrade isn't replacing laptops in backpacks. It's unlocking even more from these same laptops, from creating to gaming. With a GeForce NOW membership, Chromebooks, Macs and Surface devices can become GeForce RTX-powered gaming PCs in the cloud. The GeForce NOW library features thousands of supported PC games, letting members stream titles they already own from digital stores like Steam, Xbox PC Game Pass and Epic Games Store in just a few clicks.

We've previously reported on expected price increases for NVIDIA GPU kits that the company sells to OEMs, thanks to the AI boom and its resulting impact on the DRAM supply chain. Now, thanks to a report by Taiwanese publication, Economic Daily Times, it's been revealed that NVIDIA's price hike could see consumers paying up to 20-30% more for their GPUs.

This is the third price hike for NVIDIA in 2026, and it's important to note that the prices appear to be affecting the whole RTX 5000-series, and not just the high-end variants. Unless NVIDIA spreads the cost burden across the whole line-up of graphics cards, higher-end GPUs should see steeper price increases, since those are the models in which DRAM makes up a larger portion of the BOM cost.

Following the recent launch of the Keychron K5 Ultra, Keychron has announced the TKL version of its latest K Ultra keyboard line-up, the Keychron K1 Ultra 8K. The K1 Ultra 8K uses the same elegant low-profile design with wood side panels and aluminium case reinforcements, but it swaps the K5 Ultra's 100% layout for a more compact TKL layout. The K8 Ultra 8K is available on the Keychron online store for $109.99.

As with other versions of the K Ultra keyboards, the K8 Ultra features ZMK firmware for extreme wireless efficiency, claiming 490 hours of battery life over 2.4 GHz from a 2,600 mAh battery at 8 kHz polling with the backlighting disabled. While the K1 Ultra 8K features an ABS plastic case, it has double-shot PBT keycaps and aluminium rails along the front and back edges to complement the real rosewood accent panels on the sides. There is also a small programmable knob in the F13 position that is assigned to volume control by default.

It's no secret that Pragmata was a success, with the game selling over 1 million units on launch day and a reported 2.5 million total sales. As reported by Bloomberg, Capcom Corporate Officer, Yoshikazu Shimauchi, said that Pragmata's performance exceeded the company's internal expectations, adding that the likelihood of a sequel is high.

While this is not a confirmation that Capcom will be working on Pragmata 2, the strong performance is an indication that the game may become another one of Capcom's long-standing franchises, like Resident Evil. It should also be noted that Pragmata was Capcom's first new IP in over a decade. Capcom also has more than enough on its roster currently, with rumors pointing to potential Resident Evil 1 and Code Veronica remakes in development.

In recent years, community-supported work on components like drivers and kernel improvements have made Linux distributions like SteamOS especially viable as gaming operating systems. Now, a new set of driver patches has been shared to the Linux kernel mailing list, and the developer behind the patches, David Vernet, claims to have improved 1% lows on AMD CPUs by as much as 31%. The new patches, which introduce the epp_boost feature to the AMD P-State driver, aim to improve CPU performance by improving CPU scaling and CPU boost behavior through identifying busy cores and enabling EPP boost on a per-core basis as needed. As per the explanation in the Linux kernel mailer:

When the epp_boost module parameter is enabled, an update-util hook samples each core's C0 residency (delta MPERF over delta TSC) at most once every 10 ms. If a sample shows the core at least 50% busy, the EPP field of its MSR_AMD_CPPC_REQ is set to performance (0) and held there until 300 ms pass without another busy sample, at which point the hook restores the request that policy management last stored in cppc_req_cached.

Double Fine Productions was one of a handful of game studios that managed to regain their independence during the recent massive Xbox reset that saw a handful of studio closures, a massive number of layoffs, and additional collateral damage to studios not even under the Microsoft umbrella. The studio, which recently launched Kiln and previously developed the Psychonauts series, announced the layoffs in a post on Bluesky, noting that 23 staff members have been affected.

23 staff members represents roughly a quarter of Double Fine's staff, and the studio notes that the contraction is only necessary due to company financials. In a statement to Kotaku, Xbox said that "Double Fine fully returned to independent management earlier this week, with their IP, catalog, and runway for their next games. As they begin their next chapter as an independent studio, we look forward to seeing what they create next." It's currently unclear if Double Fine has any projects in the works, but it seems likely that there will be delays down the road if anything is in active development.

Ball x Pit is one of those indie games that kind of came out of nowhere in 2025, racking up peak player counts of over 35,000 players on Steam and an Overwhelmingly Positive review rating from over 23,000 reviews on the platform. Now, though, it seems as though the developer of the game, Kenny Sun and Friends, may be taking a step back, signing off with its final free content update, The Naturalist Update.

According to the game's Steam update notes, the Naturalist will add two new unlockable characters, 11 new balls, and five new passive abilities to the bullet hell roguelite. The game studio has previewed the new content in a teaser available below, and the update is scheduled to land on August 6 on macOS, PC, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, and Xbox Series consoles. It will be a free update on all platforms.

A little over a year ago, Nexus Mods changed hands, with the new owner and lead developer promising to keep the ship running without changing the core philosophy of Nexus Mods. Now, in a year-one update blog, the new owner, Victor Folmann, has detailed his plans for the mod platform going forward.

One of the major points Folmann brought up in his update was the future of Nexus Mods, with planned changes including a wholesale redesign of the Nexus Mods infrastructure. According to Folmann, Nexus Mods "has been modeling mods as files," and he goes on to explain that "Mods are not files. Mods are systems." In order to address this, Folmann says that Nexus Mods will be redesigned to treat mods as systems.

Months after promising to better support the Linux community, GOG has confirmed that the GOG Galaxy launcher is officially coming to Linux as a native application. According to GamingOnLinux, GOG co-CEO Krzysztof Papliński stated that Linux support is a priority for the company, and they have even hired a specialist to lead the GOG-on-Linux project. Since the release isn't expected anytime soon, the company has refrained from posting any timelines or schedules. It requires significant engineering effort to release a port that includes all of the GOG Galaxy storefront features while maintaining the stability that gamers expect.

Interestingly, there are already ways to use the Windows-compiled version of GOG Galaxy on Linux. These include using Lutris, Heroic Games Launcher, or running Valve's Proton compatibility layer to execute the .exe application directly on Linux. However, a native application is always the better choice. As we wait for GOG to work its magic and release a native port, gamers will have to rely on these workarounds in the meantime.

The Dragon Age franchise has had its ups and downs throughout the years, with Dragon Age: Inquisition being BioWare's best-selling game to date, and, despite The Veilguard's mixed reception, the series still has loyal fans asking for more games, whether they be sequels or remakes. However, in a recent interview with FRVR, the series's creator, Mark Darrah, suggests that it is unlikely that Dragon Age will return in any form whatsoever.

Darrah explains that he had approached EA to make another game after Inquisition's success, but the gaming giant still took over a decade to release Veilguard. He also says that the lackluster performance of Veilguard means that a sequel is unlikely to be pitched at all, never mind be approved.

The recent slew of live-service games biting the dust—The Crew, Bungie's Destiny, and Highguard being the most prominent of the lot—has raised questions about the longevity of the games we play and what happens to them after the publisher is no longer around or no longer wants to maintain game servers to support online play. Running counter to the arguments often heard from major game publishers, Pocketpair has effectively built in a post-support plan into the game's core design.

In response to a question about the game's end of life on Discord, Pocketpair's head of publishing and communications, John Buckley, explained that although Pocketpair will not host the game's servers forever, "Palworld isn't a live service anyway so...why would you assume it had an "end of service"?"

After the launch of Marathon's new Vault Breakers PvE mode, which Bungie was seemingly implementing as a way to improve player retention, the game saw a sizeable improvement in concurrent player counts, peaking at 14,771 concurrent players on Steam (via SteamDB). Since Vault Breakers launched, however, the numbers have started trending down again.

The Steam player tracker shows that, immediately after the Vault Breaker update launched, Marathon's player count peaked at 14,809 concurrent players—the highest it's been since mid-June following the free week. At the time of writing, daily concurrent player counts are fluctuating between 2,000 and 7,000 players, with even those numbers trending down just a week after the PvE update.

Ubisoft recently tipped that there were two Far Cry games in the works. Although the game studio hadn't revealed what those two Far Cry projects were, they were believed to be Far Cry 7 and a new extraction shooter internally referred to as Maverick. According to a new report by Insider Gaming, Maverick has officially been scrapped, with a new game popping up in its wake.

Supposedly, the new game, codenamed Kodiak, has passed the conceptualization phase and entered production. It will be built on the same bones as Maverick—likely to avoid wasting already spent development resources, but it will no longer be an extraction shooter. Instead, Kodiak has been reported to be an open-world FPS in which "player interactions and player-driven stories take center stage."

Keychron already has a number of wireless gaming mice available, including both affordable productivity mice and high-performance gaming peripherals. The latest gaming mouse launch from Keychron appears to be the G6 HE UltraLight. The new G6 HE is a wireless gaming mouse that comes in at 46 g and uses the PixArt PAW 3955 sensor and Nordic 54LM20A MCU. It will be available in seven colors in total, many of which have that translucent retro tech charm.

The G6 HE was recently reported on by Gizmodo Japan, where it appears to be launching soon, but Keychron also responded to that Gizmodo post confirming that the mouse would be launching globally at "around $90." There are two standout features, in particular, that are particularly relevant in the 2026 gaming landscape, those being magnetic switches and a swappable battery.

Welcome to the last week of July and this week is packed with new releases. We kick off a major release of what is technically a remake of a 2001 game, but back then it was Xbox exclusive and now it'll be available on PC and Playstation 5 as well as Xbox. We kick off the regular release schedule with a Monday ARPG followed by some problematic Orcs and then a quick detour with a WWII action RTS. This is followed by a misty, online ARPG, before we round off the week with a pirate themed city builder. We also have a few other games for you if none of these tickle your fancy.

Halo: Campaign Evolved / This week's major release / Tuesday 28 July
Halo: Campaign Evolved is a faithful yet modernized remake of Halo: Combat Evolved's campaign. Experience the original story rebuilt with high-definition visuals, updated cinematics, refined controls, plus a brand-new three-mission adventure featuring the Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson. Steam link

Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls officially started an open beta test on the morning of July 24, but shortly after the beta went live, users started reporting that they could not access the game due to a PlayStation Account error. The beta, went live across PC, PS5, and Xbox platforms, has reportedly been inaccessible to many players for much of the day, with Downdetector showing between 1,500 and 7,000 error reports every 15 minutes by users since the early hours of the open beta. Errors don't seem to be limited to any specific system, which makes sense, since the PlayStation Account login is required for all platforms. Arc System Works and PlayStation have acknowledged the issue, commenting in a post on X that there will be server maintenance until 16:00 PST (01:00 UTC).

Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls on XThe MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls Open Beta will be temporarily taken offline for maintenance. The maintenance end time is 4PM PST. Updates will be shared through the game's official channels.

We apologize for the inconveniences this may cause. Thank you for your patience.

ASRock, the global leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, mini PCs, gaming monitors, power supply units, and AIO liquid coolers, today announced the launch of the new Phantom Gaming PGO27QSA and PGO27QSA-W OLED gaming monitors. Featuring a 27-inch QHD QD-OLED panel, the new series is available in both classic black and Minimal White, combining high-performance gaming capabilities with refined aesthetics to deliver an exceptional visual experience while further expanding ASRock's Phantom Gaming OLED monitor lineup.

The PGO27QSA series features a 27-inch QHD (2560 × 1440) flat QD-OLED display with a 240 Hz refresh rate and an ultra-fast 0.03 ms (GTG) response time, minimizing motion blur and ghosting during fast-paced gameplay. Whether playing FPS, MOBA, or other competitive titles, gamers can enjoy smooth, responsive visuals that help them react with confidence in every critical moment.

It's been pretty clear, judging by the player count figures alone, that Assassin's Creed Black Flag: Resynced has been at least decently successful. However, a recent Q1 sales report from Ubisoft has just confirmed that the game has been a commercial success as well as being a hit with gamers and reviewers alike. Ubisoft reports that Assassin's Creed Black Flag: Resynced has sold more than its expected annual volume in its first 14 days on the market. In those 14 days, Assassin's Creed Black Flag: Resynced sold an impressive 3.5 million units.

UbisoftStrong launch of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced in July, achieving 84 on OpenCritic and Metacritic, with 3.5 million copies sold-in to date, exceeding annual expectations within its first 14 days.

Wallhack, the niche gaming accessory brand, recently showed off its first gaming mouse, the M-001, which will feature wireless connectivity, swappable batteries, and a bit of a retro twist, but more recently in a post on X, the brand also gave us our first look at the gaming keyboard it's been teasing for weeks.

The Wallhack K-001 is a 65% Hall-effect keyboard with what looks to be a solid CNC machined aluminium case and much of the same retro-minimalist-meets-industrial aesthetics as the mouse's base station. It will use a compact 65% layout, meaning there is no space between the alpha cluster and the navigation keys on the right edge of the keyboard. It officially launches on July 24, but Wallhack has already unveiled some of the details of the keyboard for the keen-eyed observer.

A recent update to Valve's gifting requirements and rules has made gifting games on Steam a little easier. For starters, buyers will no longer need to have a Steam account in order to purchase gifts for a Steam user. They can now check out as guests, and the recipient will receive an email with their Steam gift, as per usual.

Additionally, and more pertinent in the modern gaming landscape, where people may play with friends across the globe, Steam no longer restricts gifts to the same region. In other words, buyers can now purchase gifts for friends in different regions.

Since the launch of the Steam Deck, Valve's Proton translation layer used to play Windows games on Linux systems has been instrumental to the rise of many gaming distributions, and Linux developers like the CachyOS development team, have made their own forks of Proton, which often include new fixes and tech that the Valve version still does not have.

This is the case with the latest build of proton-cachyos, which now bakes in support for NVIDIA's Reflex latency reduction API via the vkd3d-low-latency DX12-to-Vulkan translation layer. Previously, other versions of vkd3d included AMD's Anti-Lag feature, but not Reflex. The Reflex implementation in proton-cachyos can work on both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, but not on Intel GPUs, however it still depends on in-game support to work on both brands.

Gaming peripheral brand ATTACK SHARK has announced the upcoming launch of the RS6 ULTRA, its most advanced wireless gaming mouse to date. Designed for competitive FPS players and the premium esports peripheral market, the new model combines a lightweight carbon fiber structure, flagship sensing technology, low-latency wireless performance, and a magnetic hot-swappable battery system.

The RS6 ULTRA's magnetic hot-swappable battery system is designed to eliminate the compromises associated with conventional wireless gaming mice. Unlike integrated lithium battery designs that require wired charging and eventually suffer from battery aging, or conventional removable battery systems that depend on battery doors and latch mechanisms, the RS6 ULTRA features a proprietary magnetic alignment design with gold-plated contacts, enabling fast, tool-free battery replacement without disrupting wireless operation. Its dual-battery system further ensures uninterrupted gameplay by allowing one battery to power the mouse while the included 8K receiver simultaneously charges the spare, providing continuous wireless performance and a longer product lifecycle through easily replaceable batteries.

News recently broke that NVIDIA had published the first native Windows-on-Arm toolkit for its RTX Spark platform, and it didn't take long for a Chinese developer, VoidTech, and modder to use NVIDIA's work to get an NVIDIA RTX 4060 working on an Arm-powered Huawei Qingyun desktop with a Kunpeng 920 CPU.

In a video on Bilibili, the developer explains that he managed to get the device supported by extracting NVIDIA's ARM64 driver from the Spark software. He adds that, while the device is recognized by both NVIDIA's driver and TechPowerUp's GPU-Z, and is able to accelerate graphics tasks, there is no video output, so he notes that it is "suitable for use with streaming" (machine translation).

When Tides Turn is the name of a new game studio started by Fiona Sperry in order to launch Wreckreation 2, a sequel to the "open-world driving playground" that had more than its fair share of Burnout energy. Wreckreation 2 will be an open-world arcade racing game that hopes to capture that frenetic moment-to-moment energy that Sperry believes are unique to the arcade racing genre. The new studio is taking something of a different approach to game development, with Sperry stating that the studio aims to develop Wreckreation 2 "out in the open".

Fiona SperryRather than disappearing for years and emerging with a finished game, we're going to develop in the open—sharing our progress, listening to the community, and letting players help shape what comes next.