Other notable benefits include SSD optimization for “a seamless experience with faster streaming and loading.” It utilizes the console’s “advanced CPU and GPU capabilities” to deliver 60 FPS at a “high-quality resolution” with ray-traced global illumination.

As for PS5 Pro support, the Great Circle promises native 4K and “advanced” ray tracing on the console alongside “higher and more consistent frame rates.” How this will compare to the Xbox Series X version should be interesting, so stay tuned for more details.

If that wasn’t enough, PS5 players can leverage Community Game Help and obtain tips for completing certain sections. This includes support for Activities with different objectives outlined.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle launches on April 17th for PS5, with Premium Edition owners receiving two days early access. Head here for more details and check out our review of the Xbox version.

Additional Updates and Fixes

The PS5 version brings some cool new features which will be available to all platforms. Most notably, whips get two new abilities: ‘Open Season’ and ‘Sleight of Hand’. Open Season causes a kind of debuff which renders foes more susceptible to attacks, while Sleight of Hand conveniently disarms opponents, flinging their weapon right to Indy. And since the game’s December release, there’s been three updates fixing up a long list of bugs and issues, ensuring a glitch-free experience for first-time PS5 players.

DualSense Functionality

One of the things that differentiates the PS5 from other consoles is the tactile feel of its DualSense controller. This is something Machine Games is making sure to harness with its upcoming port. Not much has been said regarding specifics, but the PlayStation Store page does indeed highlight that DualSense vibration effect and trigger function are supported. Going off of other games with DualSense support, we can expect haptic feedback that changes with terrain as well as dynamic resistance levels with the triggers when  shooting different guns and priming a well-aimed grenade.

PS5 Pro Enhancements

You’re especially happy if you’re an Indy fan with a PS5 Pro since some the great visual updates exclusive to high-end PCs will translate the advanced Sony console. While Bethesda has been rather hush-hush concerning specific PS5 Pro enhancements, we know via the PS Store that this Indy adventure has the ‘enhanced for PS5 Pro’ label and will most likely harness things like PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), advanced ray tracing, and (fingers crossed) a 120 FPS option.

PS5 Editions

There are three editions for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PS5. The standard edition comes in at the standardized $69.99 price and only includes the game. The $99.99 Premium Edition includes access to the future story DLC titled ‘The Order of Giants’ as well as a new Temple of Doom outfit and a digital artbook. The modern trend of including early access play in higher tiered editions continues here as Indy’s foray onto the PS5 allows access for premium edition buyers. But that’s not the cream of the edition crop. There’s also an expensive $189.99 Collector’s Bundle giving players a bevy of physical goodies. This bundle includes an 11 inch globe that hides a secretive storage compartment, in addition to a leather-bound adventure journal, and the all Premium Edition content.

Pre-order Bonuses

Regardless of edition, any PS5 version pre-order includes a new Traveling Suit outfit for Indy to wear and a whip. These two items are purely cosmetic and it’s unlikely they’ll become available through the store at a later date for those who didn’t pre-order.

Release Date and Early Access Times

And there’s not much time left to secure a pre-order since the game releases April 17^th which falls on a Thursday. Early access begins two days before the official release date, so Premium Edition players can look forward to playing it on April 15^th.

Is a Microsoft Account Needed to Play?

While it’s not confirmed whether or not PS5 users will need a Microsoft account to play Indy and the Great Circle, previous Xbox exclusive games as well as the upcoming Forza Horizon 5 indicate that it’s likely. That said, some of Microsoft’s single-player offerings didn’t require a Microsoft account sign-in (neither Hi-Fi Rush nor Pentiment required it), so we’ll have to wait and see if this particular single-player adventure does.

Disc Versions Require Internet Download

Unfortunately, we do have confirmations that disc versions of the game require an internet download in order to play the game. Bethesda’s images of the highest-priced Collector Bundle states in the fine print that a disc is still included, but “internet connection is required to download game and content”.

Voice Talent

As for the game itself, there’s quite a lot to love. Any Indiana Jones project has to have top-tier voice talent in order to succeed, and this game nails that aspect. Troy Baker surprisingly sold us on his Indy voice. It’s charming and personalized, yet still has that Harrison Ford identity. Indy’s partner in uncovering the Great Circle mystery happens to be a woman named Gina Lambardi, who is excellently portrayed by actress Alessandra Mastronardi. The main villain is my pick for best performance though. Emmerich Voss is the perfect Indiana Jones villain and actor Marios Gavrilis captures his creepy and deranged personality too well.

Exploration

One distinction this game has to other’s in the genre is the first-person perspective. This heightened immersion allows for more intricate exploration and problem solving. Indy uses a camera and journal to jot down hints and notes as he explores the game’s diverse environments. The diegetic UI with Indy looking at his journal maps and whatnot really add to the immersion of stepping into his shoes as an explorer. And the game is teeming with collectibles around well-hidden nooks and crannies, giving players a compelling reason to go off the beaten path.

Wide Environments

This emphasis on exploration is owed in large part to the game’s wide environments. Exploration is satisfying because there’s just a lot of open space to wander around through. That said, this is still a fairly linear adventure, at least in story terms. Plenty of set piece moments and cinematics dot the game’s progression, but its accompanied by a wealth of slower paced exploration in wide areas.

Stealth

The game’s more methodical pace exemplifies itself perhaps most of all in its stealth. A large portion of combat strategy revolves around sneaking up to enemies for a silent knock-out. Routing past patrols and sneaking around guarded zones is a big part of this Indy adventure and it’s done really well thanks to excellent level design and smooth controls.

Combat

But there is visceral combat in this game too, though it’s not your traditional Machine Games high-paced shooter. Instead, combat in The Great Circle revolves around found melee weapons, Indy’s whip, and a limited amount of small firearms. The famous whip is used to great effect here, being employed to stun and disarm foes.

Oodles of Melee Weapons

Since ammo is so scarce throughout the game, you’re often relegated to picking up random melee weapons through the environment. There’s a lot of wacky objects used for melee here: oversized flyswatters, pipes, pots and pans, and much more. But there’s one trusty melee weapon you always have access to: your fists. The game has a big emphasis on brawling, and while it can be somewhat sloppy, there’s something satisfying about KO’ing Nazis in the face.

Game Length

It’s good that the game has such variety in its gameplay because it has an average run time of around 25 hours. Howlongtobeat has an average completionist playthrough sitting around 38 hours and a rushed story run taking 15. This makes Indiana Jones and the Great Circle one of Machine Games’ most lengthy titles, giving PS5 players with an Indiana Jones craving plenty to dig into and explore.

The picture shows a player playing the game using a keyboard and mouse on the Nintendo Switch, which is certainly fascinating. What’s more interesting is the fact that the patch notes do not mention any such thing, nor has Bethesda made any official posts or communications regarding this addition.

Quake is an exceptionally fast first person shooter, and without a doubt plays best with a keyboard and a mouse. Fans on consoles are now getting the opportunity to enjoy the game in the same way, which is, simply put, great. The remaster also includes a couple of brand-new expansions developed by MachineGames, the studio behind the excellent Wolfenstein games.

Quake supporting keyboard and mouse on Nintendo Switchhttps://t.co/ulJqox70HP pic.twitter.com/ca5QFNyRUC

— Agent Strange (@PoweredbyidTech) October 11, 2021

We all know how this story ended. Microsoft went on a shopping spree, snapping up developers and IP all around the place, culminating in the eye watering $7.5 billion acquisition of Bethesda earlier this year. As of right now, Xbox Game Studios enters the next generation with 23 studios under its wing – making Microsoft, ironically, the biggest first-party of the three console manufacturers in the market.

Now, this hasn’t done Microsoft any good going into the actual launch of their next generation Xbox Series consoles. With most of these acquisitions being fairly recent, it will be a while before we see anything meaningful come of them. Microsoft doesn’t have any big first party game at launch, then – that spot was going to be Halo Infinite’s, but we all know what happened there, and its delay into next year means Microsoft is launching the Series X with… a lot of third party games, but nothing else, really.

But the immediate weakness of Microsoft’s first party situation aside, I want to take a step back and take a bigger picture view, because doing so leads us to some very interesting insights – predicated on suppositions and assumptions to some degree, sure, but very grounded in empirical data otherwise.

With 23 studios, I’ve already talked about how Microsoft has the biggest network of studios under its belt now, but I think the more important thing we may not be looking at here is that, in terms of broader mass market value, Microsoft may actually have more compelling and appealing exclusives than Sony does at this point, as a result of their acquisitions. Sure, Sony has Uncharted and Spider-Man and God of War, and those are great, mass market sellers – but Microsoft now has more. And they are spread across a wider array of genres, game types, and aesthetics than Sony’s marquee games.

First off, let’s be clear upfront – The Elder Scrolls and Fallout are bigger than any IP Sony has, flat out. Maybe Spider-Man can match up to Fallout starting next generation, but nothing Sony has matches The Elder Scrolls at all. The Elder Scrolls (and to a lesser extent, Fallout) series is that rare thing, garnering rave critical acclaim and selling an obscene amount of copies. These games don’t just sell to enthusiasts – they cross demographic boundaries. Fallout 3 and Skyrim became cultural phenomena, spawning memes and iconography that is instantly recognizable by anyone plugged into pop culture, and managing to appeal even to the kinds of players who otherwise are content buying FIFA and Call of Duty every year. And unlike most games on the market, sales of Bethesda’s titles aren’t just front-loaded; these games continue to sell for years, with the possibility to become evergreen fixtures the way Nintendo’s games do (recent sales charts in Japan, North America, and Europe are dominated by Nintendo games, dating back to more than three years ago).

Sony doesn’t have anything remotely coming close to this – so right off the bat, as far as the peak of these first parties go, Microsoft comes out ahead of Sony, and in fact, The Elder Scrolls specifically also comes out ahead of quite a lot of Nintendo’s stuff. In terms of sheer brand value, The Elder Scrolls is probably ahead of everything Sony has (except Spider-Man, which derives most of its value from non-game related media), and only Uncharted, The Last of Us, and God of War manage to match up to Fallout. Nothing else Sony has, does.

The thing though is that Microsoft isn’t just winning on the basis of two big IP and nothing else – that would basically be a repeat of their early mistakes with their overreliance on Halo and Gears, and literally nothing else to fill in the gaps. Thankfully, this is where the wealth of other studios and IP comes into play, giving Microsoft an insane range and spread of games that seems to hit basically every possible niche and genre imaginable. DOOM and Wolfenstein hit the singleplayer shooter mark, Double Fine provides compelling and well written adventure games, Ninja Theory provides cinematic third person action adventure titles, Tango Softworks provides horror games, World’s Edge covers strategy, Arkane covers stealth and immersive sims, inXile give us even more RPGs on top of Bethesda Game Studios, Turn10 delivers racing sims, Playground Games delivers arcade racers (and also, more RPGs), Rare is behind a lot of experimental, non-traditional fare (Sea of Thieves and Everwild both come to mind), and all of this is on top of Halo and Gears providing the multiplayer oriented first and third person shooters that built up Xbox to begin with.

The scary thing about that breakdown above is that it still does not cover all Microsoft studios. Developers like Compulsion Games and Undead Labs have been left out of this, owing to their record of delivering mixed results, and The Initiative, which is a brand new studio Microsoft set up, is also not counted among these because we have literally no idea what they are capable of, or what they will deliver. This also does not count XGS-headed games that Microsoft develops in conjunction with contracted third party studios, such as Gears Tactics or Microsoft Flight Simulator, which cover additional genres and styles on top of all the ones named above. That Microsoft is able to boast such an incredibly varied lineup in spite of all these exclusions alone speaks wonders to what a strong position they find themselves in.

All of this, of course, is contingent on these studios delivering (or continuing to deliver, in some cases), and on Microsoft not ruining them – which the company has an unfortunate track record of doing. Bungie left Microsoft because they did not want to become an IP farm, Lionhead ended up being shut down after being forced into projects they had never been that interested in to begin with, Platinum were almost driven to the brink of bankruptcy thanks to Scalebound, Darkside Studios (the folks who were going to bring us the ambitious Phantom Dust reboot) ended up ve`ry literally gutted because of their dealings with Xbox, Rare very nearly died under Microsoft and only recently started to pull back, and even a developer as legendary and as crucial to the development of video games as a medium as Ensemble could not survive being shuttered by Microsoft.

Now most of these incidents happened in a different time – when Xbox was clearly not a priority for Microsoft, when the leadership was (mostly) different, when Xbox itself was changing direction every other week chasing some fad or trend or the other. We have been repeatedly told that Xbox Game Studios under Phil Spencer and Matt Booty is an entirely different entity. That Microsoft respects creative freedom, that it doesn’t force anything on studios, and that it mostly facilitates development of games via budget and backing.

If all of that is true, meaning if Microsoft is able to manage its studios well this time, and if those studios, in turn, deliver, then, yes, my analysis is going to ring true, because that network of 23 studios being managed well, and producing the peak of their output, is beyond anything Sony has currently (beyond, even, a lot of what Nintendo has). The entire dynamic of the industry has been altered in one move – if Microsoft plays its cards right, they could be looking at a far stronger lineup of exclusives than PlayStation can offer, at least in-house. In that case, what a reversal of roles that will end up becoming from the current status quo.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Earlier in the year, we got a bit of a bite sized Nazi killing with Wolfenstein: Youngblood. The shorter game looks to bridge the game between the acclaimed The New Colossus and hopefully a third game. The co-op shooter came out with a few issues here and there, but has since seen a lot of additional updates that’s added new content. Today, there’s more that adds a good deal to your Nazi killing ways.

The newest update, 1.0.7, is free and adds a new quest called Treasure Hunt, along with new areas of a Parisian reservoir and a secret Nazi bunker that contain new enemy types that you can slaughter and bathe in their Nazi blood and tears. Along with that will come new abilities and a host of new skins to buy when your newly acquired Nazi gold. You can read full details on the update through here.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch and PC. The 1.0.7 update is live now on all systems except the Switch, which will go live at a later date.

With all the talking about the upcoming streaming future and how its going to change the industry, and if people are ready for it above all else, it can be kind of easy to forget that Sony has been there long before anyone else. Their PS Now service is, in many ways, a precursor to the upcoming Stadia and xCloud, and it’s still getting content. And it looks like August is going to be a dozy of a month, too.

10 games will join the service next month, and it seems Bethesda has the cake here as they will have three games from three classic franchises joining Now. But that’s not all there is to August’s haul as the fighting hit Tekken 7 is also coming. It’s quite a who’s who even without including the last three major Castlevania releases and MotoGP 17.

You can check out the entire list below or check out the official PlayStation blog for details here. PlayStation Now is available now, and the listed games will be available starting August 6th.

• Castlevania Lords of Shadow (PS3)
• Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2 (PS3)
• Castlevania Lords of Shadow: Mirror of Fate (PS3)
• Doom (PS4)
• Fallout 4 (PS4)
• Monster Energy Supercross (PS4)
• MotoGP 17 (PS4)
• Tekken 7 (PS4)
• The Raven: Remastered (PS4)
• Wolfenstein: The New Order (PS4)

Despite being on the budget side due to its shorter development time, Wolfenstein: Youngblood is promising a lot of content and just as much stone cold slaughtering of Nazi scum as its predecessors. And today those who are getting their hatchets ready on PC get an idea of what they’ll need to run the game.

First and foremost, the game will need 40 GBs of space on your machine (it will most likely be similar on PS4 and Xbox One versions, though the Switch version will probably be much smaller). The specs aren’t too intensive, but you’ll need a decent machine to get it running well as minimum requirements are AMD FX-8350/Ryzen 5 1400 or Intel Core i5-3570/i7-3770 with 8GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GTX 770 or AMD equivalent. The entire list of minimum and recommended requirements are listed below, and you can also go to Bethesda’s support website.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood will release July 27 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch and PC. For some cool features that you’ll need to know going into the game, check here.

Minimum:

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: Win7, 8.1, or 10 (64-Bit versions)
• Processor: AMD FX-8350/Ryzen 5 1400 or Intel Core i5-3570/i7-3770
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GTX 770 4GB (Current available GPU GTX1650) or AMD equivalent
• Storage: 40 GB available space

Recommended:

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: Win7, 8.1, or 10 64-Bit
• Processor: AMD FX-9370/Ryzen 5 1600X or Intel Core i7-4770
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB (Current available GPU RTX2060) or AMD equivalent
• Storage: 40 GB available space

Machine Games’ Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus had a fairly decent release with critics lauding its overall story and characters. For those who want even more to play, the game’s first major DLC The Adventures of Gunslinger Joe is now available. This is separate from Episode Zero which is available to those who pre-ordered or purchased the Season Pass.

The Adventures of Gunslinger Joe places you in the shoes of Joseph Stallion, a professional quarterback turned soccer player who must battle back against the Nazis. With the Ram Shackles ability, he’s able to charge through his enemies. The DLC will take place in Chicago, which has seen better days, but will eventually travel to space (which seems like a cliche for Wolfenstein these days but we’ll allow it).

Wolfenstein 2’s The Adventures of Gunslinger Joe can be purchased for $10 standalone or for $25 along with the Season Pass. The Season Pass also enables access to two more DLC packs coming in January and March 2018.

Bethesda and MachineGames released the follow up to their hit 2014 game Wolfenstein: The New Order, which rebooted the grand daddy of first person shooters for a modern era, with Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus earlier this year. It was a great game, and a worthy follow-up to the original- but not many people appear to have played it.

Well, Bethesda is going to sweeten the pot in hopes of inducing you into spending money on the game. They are now offering a free trial for the game on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, which will let you play through the first level of the game; if that wins you over, and you decide to buy the final game, you will find that your save carries over.

It’s a great way to give one of the best games of the year a chance; do make sure to give it a go for yourself. The game is currently out on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, with a Nintendo Switch version planned for next year.

Bethesda has gone ahead and dated all the post launch DLC for Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, its fantastic sequel to the 2014 reboot of the Wolfenstein franchise that it released a couple of weeks ago. For those of you who have played through the game’s (fantastically over the top) story already, the good news is you will soon have more Wolfenstein to look forward to.

Bethesda has confirmed that the first DLC for the game will be launching in exactly a month from now, on December 14; you won’t have to wait too long for the second DLC pack to drop after that, either, because that one is due on 30th January, 2018. Finally, the third and last DLC pack is currently slate for March 2018, though that one didn’t get a concrete release date just yet. If we extend the month and a half gaps between each DLC pack’s release to it, however, I’d predict it will be on March 16 2018 (though, again, that’s just a guess- that is not confirmed).

Until then, if you haven’t played it already, play Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus. It’s out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, with a Nintendo Switch version on the way next year.