Friday, December 3, 2021

The Verge - Entertainments

The Verge - Entertainments

Pokémon Go now runs much smoother on iPhones

Posted: 02 Dec 2021 10:42 PM PST

Pokemon Go
James Bareham / The Verge

A new update to Pokémon Go for iOS lets you run the game at higher frame rates. With version 1.191.0, the "advanced settings" section of the app now includes an option that reads "Unlock your device's native refresh rate for higher FPS."

I tried it out on my iPhone 13 Pro and it makes a huge difference. Pokémon Go isn't the most visually complicated game, of course, but there's a lot of scrolling and camera movement, and the smoother touch response feels a lot better when you're lining up a pokéball throw with your finger.

Here's how the feature appears in the game's menu:

Pokémon Go was previously locked to 30fps on iOS devices. Many Android phones are already capable of running the game at a higher frame rate, though in my experience testing across several devices the support can be hit and miss. Still, Pokémon Go generally ran better on Android until now.

The new iOS feature isn't limited to the 13 Pro and Pro Max, which are the only iPhones with 120Hz "ProMotion" displays. I also tried it on my old 8 Plus and it's possible to unlock the frame rate there, too, though the aging A11 processor doesn't always keep up a steady 60fps.

Niantic isn't making a big deal out of the feature; it's switched off by default and it isn't mentioned in version 1.191.0's release notes, beyond a vague mention of "various quality-of-life improvements." It's possible that enabling it for all users would cause complaints about battery life, considering that Pokémon Go is already a pretty heavy app in that regard. But if that's not a concern for you, it's worth giving the option a try.

The next N64 game for Nintendo Switch Online is Paper Mario

Posted: 02 Dec 2021 09:00 PM PST

Nintendo launched its "Expansion Pack" for the Switch Online service back in October, which brought Sega Genesis and Nintendo 64 games to the library of playable retro titles. The first new addition has now been announced, and it's just one game: Paper Mario. It'll be available on December 10th.

Paper Mario was released for the N64 in 2000 and was the first entry in what became a popular spin-off series featuring Mario characters and RPG-style turn-based combat. The most recent game, Paper Mario: The Origami King, came out on the Switch last year.

The launch of Nintendo's Expansion Pack was somewhat contentious. The $49.99 annual fee does also include a big Animal Crossing expansion, but it's still a big hike over the regular $29.99 service that includes NES and SNES games, and the quality of the N64 emulation has also come under scrutiny. While Paper Mario is a popular game, adding just one release at a time isn't likely to change many people's opinion of the service.

Paper Mario is one of a list of upcoming N64 games that Nintendo has already confirmed to be on the way. Others include Banjo-Kazooie, Pokémon Snap, and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.

All 53,000 attendees of Anime NYC urged to get tested after one got Omicron

Posted: 02 Dec 2021 04:28 PM PST

US-ANIME-CONVENTION
Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images

Were you one of the 53,000 attendees of the Anime NYC 2021 convention in New York City, or know someone who did? New York City authorities and Anime NYC organizers are urging every single attendee, exhibitor, artist, and staff member to get tested for COVID-19 — because one of the United States' first confirmed cases of the new omicron variant was a man who attended the convention and likely caught it there (via Kotaku).

Omicron is the new coronavirus variant whose first known US case made the news only yesterday, but is now also identified in California, Minnesota, Colorado and New York State as well, less than a week after being classified by the World Health Organization. Several fully vaccinated people have tested positive. In a press conference today, New York governor Kathy Hochul said her state alone now has five confirmed omicron cases, and NYC mayor Bill de Blasio warned New Yorkers that they should assume there's community spread. Hochul suggested that so far, all the US cases of the omicron variant have been minor, with very light symptoms; the man who attended Anime NYC has reportedly already recovered.

The man is from Minnesota; the Minnesota Department of Health says he had already been vaccinated, and developed mild symptoms the day after the convention. He hadn't been outside the United States recently, according to The New York Times, suggesting he may have gotten it at the convention.

"Anyone who attended the AnimeNYC conference, especially anyone experiencing symptoms, should get tested immediately and take additional precautions including social distancing," reads part of a statement from de Blasio. "I urge all New Yorkers to get vaccinated, wear a face mask while indoors and in public, and help our city beat this virus once and for all."

This is the Steam Deck’s box

Posted: 02 Dec 2021 03:35 PM PST

The Steam Deck in its box. | Image: Valve

Valve has shared a preview of the Steam Deck's final package design ahead of the handheld gaming PC's recently delayed launch date.

Each Steam Deck comes with the console and a carrying case, and Valve revealed in these photos that each device also comes with its own USB-C power supply, meaning you won't have to source your own like you have to with many recent smartphones. The box also has a handful of fun Easter eggs for Valve superfans — I've spotted a few Portal references myself.

Image: Valve
The Steam Deck's box, closed.

Valve says it's testing the packaging design, so there could be some changes from what you see in the pictures when the Steam Deck ships next year. The company also says it has completed its design validation manufacturing build of the Steam Deck and that there will be "additional minor changes in the final product."

In November, Valve delayed the Steam Deck's launch by two months, from December 2021 to February 2022, due to global supply chain issues. The company revealed a lot of details about the device at a developer summit just a couple days later.

Correction, December 2nd, 6:54PM ET: Valve delayed the Steam Deck's launch date last month, not this month as we originally stated. We regret the error.

My mad dash to catch up in time for Final Fantasy XIV’s Endwalker expansion

Posted: 02 Dec 2021 02:23 PM PST

Endwalker is coming, and I'm not ready for it. I came to Final Fantasy XIV only this year, ravenously tearing through A Realm Reborn and Heavensward before abandoning the game somewhere in the middle of Stormblood, which is generally considered to be inferior to the other FFXIV expansions.

Then news of a new expansion hit, rekindling my desire to restart my journey, hopefully finishing in time for Endwalker's launch. I harbored no illusions about my ability to power through one-and-a-half expansions' worth of content before December 8th, but I could try, and trying meant getting through Stormblood first. So I proposed an experiment: Final Fantasy XIV will go down for maintenance at 4AM EST in preparation for a new patch and to open up Endwalker early access for the lucky chosen. If I could finish Stormblood before the servers go down, I'd be in a good spot to get close to the end of Shadowbringers in time to start Endwalker, if not by launch day, then that same week. Could I do it?

Without knowing where I was in the Stormblood main story questline and dedicated to the foolish idea of keeping my tank and healer jobs evenly leveled, I said yes.

One thing I appreciate about Final Fantasy XIV is that it respects your time. If you want to play multiple classes in other MMOs — like World of Warcraft — you have to level different characters for each class, often forcing you to repeat content. Final Fantasy's job system lets you level as many classes as you want on the same character seamlessly. I can bounce between my gunbreaker tank and astrologian healer while progressing through the main story quest with relative ease. I've even developed a method by which I kept those two classes close in level. I'd gain two levels on my gunbreaker, then switch to my astrologian and catch up, rinse and repeat. It's not a perfect system. Sometimes I'd get too far ahead in the main story quest on one class such that when I switched to the other class, I didn't meet the level requirement to continue, forcing me to stop progression and grind a little bit to make up for lost XP.

Now you'd think in the mad dash to finish Stormblood before server maintenance locks me out of the game that I'd give up this quirky leveling dance in favor of picking one class and powering through. You would be wrong.

I, like Thanos, am a creature of balance. If my class levels fall too far out of sync, there's a greater chance that one class would be left behind to toil in meaningless side-quests to catch up. I hate grinding with a passion. There's a reason I've only created one character in a decade of playing World of Warcraft. I enjoy both classes too much to leave one behind because of my stubborn refusal to grind, and that rule stuck even when time was of the essence.

My gunbreaker, cute as a button she is.

At around midnight, I had about 700,000 XP to go to even out my class levels and unlock the next main story quest. I decided to hop across the map completing fates, which are timed quests with large XP rewards anyone can participate in. I was alone, finishing a fate, when a player joined me. I didn't catch their name, but when we finished the fate, they performed the kiss emote in thanks. I went to the next fate, and there they were again, and again for the fate after that. I loved it. Our purposes were temporarily aligned (they were probably in need of a quick grinding session like I was), and we had this very human connection and cooperation while never actually speaking to each other, communicating only in emotes. For a moment, there was a bond forged — and just as quick as it came, it was over.

Most of my MMO-playing life has been dedicated to being a damage dealer because I didn't think I was capable of handling the responsibility that comes with being a tank or a healer. You can generally muddle through with a bad damage dealer, but if the tank or healer sucks, it's game over. I decided to step out of my comfort zone by playing those classes in FFXIV, and while my confidence in these roles has improved, I still get anxious when it's time to do a story dungeon. I spent an incredible amount of time last night trying to level my healer to 70 because, even though my tank was already at level 70 and could go on to finish the final dungeon, thereby finishing Stormblood with time to spare, I was terrified of tanking that dungeon. The dungeon's single boss fight was so complex with so many mechanics to remember and watch out for that I thought there was no way I'd get through it without killing the party, wasting precious time. I spent a lot of time I couldn't really afford to spare getting my healer to 70 so I could do the much easier (but still incredibly stressful) job of healing.

I reached 70 on my healer by 3AM. The servers go down in an hour, I'm bleary-eyed and hunched over my keyboard, but I made it. Once I finish this dungeon, I'm done. And that should be a quick task because while damage dealers have to wait exceedingly long times to get into a dungeon, healers don't, as they are generally in higher demand with a lower supply. I entered the queue, and I waited.

And waited.

Oh shit.

What I thought would be an instantaneous queue stretched on and on because my dumb, sleep-deprived ass didn't realize that most people still playing Final Fantasy XIV an hour before server maintenance probably have better things to do than queuing for a dungeon from an expansion ago.

I waited 20 minutes — an unimaginable amount of time as a healer — thinking that my quest to finish Stormblood before time ran out would end here in failure. Of course, I could come back after maintenance and try again, but I was disappointed because I had come so close to achieving my absolutely bonkers goal. I looked away to tweet my failure, my hand moving toward the escape button as I finished so I could log out in shame. I almost missed the "Duty Commenced" box letting me know the party was full and the dungeon awaited. I very nearly clicked "withdraw" in surprise.

Queue popped at 3:17 AM

Turns out, my fears about this dungeon were unfounded. My group made light work of the boss, Shinryu, with barely a scratch, let alone a death. We just blew through it like wet tissue paper, even though the dungeon guide video I watched made me believe this boss would wipe the party for the tiniest mistake. To the seven of you who queued for a Stormblood dungeon in the final minutes before server shutdown, thank you.

Once Shinryu lay dead, and after several dramatic cutscenes, I arrived at Stormblood's end with less than 30 minutes to spare.

I won't miss Stormblood. It was a typical revolution story that didn't seem to match the grandioseness of the stories that came before it. And while Stormblood didn't move me the way Heavensward and A Realm Reborn did, this experience definitely improved my overall impression of it. For me, Stormblood was an expansion about the journey, not the destination, and this time, the end of the journey was the best. I will look back on the traveling companions who accompanied me through the final minutes of Stormblood fondly, even though I'll never remember their names nor much else of what happened in this expansion. Now only Shadowbringers stands between me and my trip to the moon in Endwalker, and from what I hear, it's the best of the best.

Will I make it through Shadowbringers in time for Endwalker? Probably not. But I've made ill-advised sprints through Final Fantasy content before, and by the Twelve, I can do it again.

EA puts Apex Legends boss in charge of Battlefield as part of internal shakeup

Posted: 02 Dec 2021 12:25 PM PST

Electronic Arts Inc. Event Ahead Of 2019 E3 Electronic Entertainment Expo

EA is making a big change to the management of the Battlefield franchise by putting Vince Zampella, the CEO of Titanfall and Apex Legends-maker Respawn Entertainment, in charge of the series, according to a GameSpot article published Thursday.

Alongside Zampella's new oversight of the franchise, EA plans to build an interconnected Battlefield universe, he told GameSpot. To help support that, EA is creating a new Seattle-based team focused on "injecting more storytelling into the Battlefield universe" headed up by Halo veteran Marcus Lehto, while Ripple Effect, which made Battlefield 2042's customizable Portal mode, is working on a "new Battlefield experience in the Battlefield 2042 universe."

The changes arrive shortly after the November 19th worldwide launch of Battlefield 2042, which has been rocky. The multiplayer-only game released with some significant bugs, and EA has released three major updates in an attempt to clean things up. But the Battlefield 2042's Steam player count has already dropped 70 percent since the launch, which could be a worrying signal that people are already moving on from one of EA's biggest titles of the year.

Zampella's new role could indicate that EA wants to inject some of what's made the free-to-play battle royale shooter Apex Legends so successful into the Battlefield franchise. While Zampella didn't confirm to GameSpot that Battlefield will be going free-to-play, he did say EA is "exploring every possibility." And as both Apex Legends and Battlefield are coming to smartphones, perhaps EA is considering similar strategies for expanding each series.

As part of the shakeup, Dice's GM, Oskar Gabrielson, is departing the company to "pursue a new endeavor outside of EA," according to GameSpot. "I'll be here to support the transition over the next few months before I head out on my new adventure," Gabrielson said on Twitter.

Twenty percent of Xbox Cloud Gaming players only use touch controls

Posted: 02 Dec 2021 08:00 AM PST

Over the past year, Microsoft has been steadily adding custom Xbox touch controls to more than 100 games that can be streamed to Android and iOS phones using its Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) service. While these controls may seem gimmicky to some, Microsoft is now revealing that 20 percent of players use these touch controls exclusively.

"[Twenty] percent of our Xbox Cloud Gaming users use touch as their exclusive method of playing games," explains Monty Hernandez, a senior program manager at Xbox. "As such, it's important to us that the touch-enabled games we launch are relevant and, most importantly, play well with touch controls."

It's a surprising stat and there are even individual games where 30 percent of players use touch controls exclusively:

  • Hades
  • New Super Lucky's Tale
  • Yakuza: Like a Dragon
  • Scarlet Nexus
  • Dragon's Quest XI
  • Minecraft Dungeons
  • Football Manager 2022 Xbox Edition

Given the amount of usage, it's not surprising that game developers have been keen to add these custom touch controls over the past year. Microsoft has made it relatively easy to do so, allowing game developers to build on top of a sample layout from GitHub that can be customized to each game.

"We've seen, on average, a 2x increase in usage for titles available via Xbox Cloud Gaming, across genres, that implement touch controls," says Hernandez. A lot of Xbox Cloud Gaming titles now have some impressive touch controls, with custom styling and iconography that helps players who are purely using a touchscreen.

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge
Xbox touch controls on a Surface Duo.

Xbox touch controls started off with Minecraft Dungeons support, before expanding to 10 more games a month after the initial launch of xCloud. Microsoft has also been using Xbox touch controls for its dual-screen Surface Duo handset, turning its Android-powered device into more of a Nintendo 3DS with Xbox games.

With more than 100 games now supporting these custom touch controls, and players apparently keen to use them, it's clear we're going to see many more games implement Xbox touch controls in the months ahead.

The quest to make an AI that can play competitive Pokémon

Posted: 02 Dec 2021 07:00 AM PST

Image: Nintendo

AI wanna be the very best, like no one ever was

An AI can beat a chess grandmaster. An AI can become the StarCraft esports champion. But creating an AI that could play Pokémon at the competitive level has been a more elusive problem.

Thanks to the variety of monsters, stats, moves, and items, a Pokémon battle has hundreds of thousands of factors for any player — or machine — to consider. But that hasn't stopped some people from trying. Most recently, Future Sight AI, created by computer scientist Albert III, successfully made it into the top 5 percent of the competitive ladder.

Albert posted a video explaining how it all works, but to summarize, the bot takes in all the information it can about the current state of the game, extrapolates the possibilities for all the turns it could take, looks a couple of turns ahead to how these would play out, and then chooses the option that can lead to the highest number of best outcomes. By doing all of that within 15 seconds, turn after turn, it can beat all but the very best human players.

That's pretty impressive, especially when you consider that Albert had almost no experience with artificial intelligence or other major aspects of the program before he started working on it. "I took classes in college about machine learning, [but] the real question is: was I paying attention?" he laughs. "The main software that it runs on is called Node.js. I hadn't touched that at all before I started this project."

"Even though computer science is my day job, it's something that I love so much that I can't help but do it in my free time, too," he says. That passion, combined with pandemic boredom, propelled him to look into an idea that was first inspired by his interest in basketball. "[Some websites] would do this thing where you'd be able to watch a game and see the team's current chance of winning, and I thought about doing that for Pokémon," he says. "Then just kind of one thing led to another and then I ended up with an AI on my hands."

One thing leading to another is a pretty good summary of Albert's work on Future Sight AI. He says he wanted to learn new skills and simply broke them down into small enough tasks until he was able to create his vision. "This is such a bad reference but there's that song in Frozen 2, called 'The Next Right [Thing].' It's just that. Just keep doing that until you get somewhere," he says. Nowadays, for example, he knows Node.js so well that he can use it in projects at his day job, too.

His step-by-step approach means that he actually wasn't aware of previous attempts to make similar AIs. Earlier projects are not as well documented as Albert's, though there have been a few varying success levels that gained some attention within the community.

An early example was Technical Machine, first created in 2010. Though it was updated through 2019, Technical Machine only ever fully supported Pokémon up to Generation 4 and did not create its own teams, one of the key features of Future Sight. Additionally, at the time of its release, the competitive ladder base was not established in the same way, so it's difficult to tell how successful Technical Machine was overall. One Reddit comment, however, stated that "Technical Machine at its smartest was still leagues worse than a normal player."

Another example was posted on Reddit in 2015 by a user who went by onmabd. Comments indicated that it was "one of the stronger bots to date." The competitive ladder gives players a ranking of 1,000 to begin with, which then goes up or down depending on wins and losses. There's no public way to view the data, and it changes over time, so it's tricky to evaluate what a "good" rank is. However, during his creation process, Albert found that the average player's ranking settles at around 1,170. Onmabd's AI managed to reach 1,300, which would put it in the top 30 percent.

Pokemon European International Championships Photo by John Keeble / Getty Images

More recently, a user on Pokémon community forum Smogon going by pmariglia shared another attempt. Their AI beat Technical Machine in a best of three and was able to reach a rating of between 1,250 and 1,350 — again, around the top 30 percent.

Future Sight AI ranked at 1,550 on average during testing. Though Albert apologized on Smogon "for making it seem in my video that [Future Sight] is the first bot of its kind or the first to get as far as it did," (as well as detailing where the two projects take different approaches) he says that ultimately he's glad he didn't know that other people had already attempted his project. "I don't know why I never thought to look into it [but] if I'd gone down their path I might have ended up with the same results," he says.

He also was never expecting the video to gain as much attention as it did. For starters, when I ask about its creation, he laughs. "I have to reveal something," he says. "That entire video was animated in Powerpoint. I have to say I don't have much video production experience [so] I had an idea for what I wanted the video to look like and I just kind of kept working on it until I could get the tools that I knew how to use to do it."

Then, there was the delayed reaction. Posted in July, it was only viewed about 100 times in its first three weeks. The next week, it jumped up to 300,000. (As of late November, it's almost at 600,000 views.) Albert thinks that it was picked up by somebody in the Pokémon community who posted it to Twitter, causing it to blow up, but he never found out who.

He says that it was difficult to process the sudden influx of viewers, but that he was appreciative of how supportive the Pokémon community was. "I kind of just had to take a step back a bit because the whole point of what I'm doing is that I want to teach people about computer science," he says.

In particular, as a Black man, Albert wants to be the kind of representation he never had in the field. "I figured I have experience in public speaking, I like doing projects that people might find interesting, so really I wanted to put out a channel that said, 'This can be an example of someone like you doing fun things in computer science.' That's genuinely the core of why I'm doing all of this."

For now, his focus is on getting Future Sight playable in actual Pokémon games. Thus far, it has used Pokémon Showdown, a community-created simulator that allows online battling and functionally forms the center of the competitive scene. But early on Albert was hinting that he wanted to make something that could tie in with the releases of Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. Most recently, he's managed to get it to beat the final boss of Sword and Shield, despite not having any code to deal with Dynamaxing, which is banned in common competitive settings.

Beyond that, he doesn't have too many concrete goals. "I mean this is such a corny thing, but I want it to be the very best like no one ever was," he says, echoing the old Pokémon anime theme tune. "But seriously, I don't know. I just started this for fun and I want to take it as far as I still find joy out of making it."

Nvidia GeForce Now ‘RTX 3080’ membership tier arrives in Europe

Posted: 02 Dec 2021 06:00 AM PST

A selection of the devices GeForce Now streams to. | Image: Nvidia

Nvidia's GeForce Now game streaming service is getting an RTX 3080-themed upgrade in Europe. Nvidia announced the new membership tier in October, and it's already available in the US. But, as of today, gamers in Europe can start streaming from the company's new higher-performance servers, which offer improved resolutions, frame rates, and less latency.

The RTX 3080 membership tier offers up to 1440p / 120fps gameplay through PC and Mac, or up to 4K HDR / 60fps when streamed to an Nvidia Shield TV. That's up from 1080p at 60fps with the current Priority tier. Session lengths can also extend up to eight hours long rather than six, and Nvidia also says the tier offers lower latency. The big tradeoff is price, with the new tier costing £89.89 / $99.99 for a six-month subscription in the UK, up from £44.99 / $49.99 for six months of the Priority tier. But in our testing the results are impressive.

I should note that despite its name, the RTX 3080 membership tier doesn't stream from servers literally equipped with retail RTX 3080 cards. Instead, it's an Ampere GA102 chip on a server with an eight-core AMD Threadripper CPU, 28GB of DDR4 memory, and a Gen4 SSD. It's a hardware combination that Nvidia says offers 35 teraflops of GPU performance, around three times what an Xbox Series X is capable of and actually more in line with the performance of an RTX 3090.

Nvidia is starting the new tier's rollout for people who've preordered the membership tier in Europe and says that "rollouts for accounts will continue until all requests have been fulfilled." It's accepting new orders "pending availability." As well as the expansion of the membership tier to Europe, Nvidia is also announcing the 20 games that are coming to its service this month, which include indie darling Untitled Goose Game.

The PS5 and Xbox Series X are available now at Target (update: sold out)

Posted: 02 Dec 2021 05:54 AM PST

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Update 8:50AM ET, December 2nd: Target appears to have sold out of consoles for now.

Shopping for a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X these days is starting to feel like hunting for toilet paper during the early days of the pandemic. Thankfully, however, if you still haven't been able to land one, right now Target is giving you another shot, with online ordering for in-store pickup at stores near you.

Listings for the $499.99 PS5 with a disc drive went up first, followed by the $399.99 PS5 digital edition. Sales for the $499.99 Xbox Series X are live now too, but online the only option is the $34.99 All Access subscription package, as the page notes that direct purchases are in-store only. For all of these, availability will depend on your local supply.

And if you already have a next-gen console (or don't need one to play last-gen games) the page for Microsoft's novelty $99.99 Xbox Series mini-fridge shows it's due for a restock as well.

We recommend making sure you sign in to your Target account early while you wait, preload any payment information, and make sure your billing and shipping information is current. It'll reduce the time it takes to check out, thus increasing your chances of landing the console. Because these orders are for in-store pickup, keep trying to add your items to the cart even if they appear to be sold out at first — stores near you may load their available stock a few minutes later, or reload it in waves.

If you don't manage to nab one today, don't worry – we will continue posting updates as more restocks happen. We are also happy to save you money on everyday purchases – which include the hottest video games, gaming peripherals, and more – so feel free to subscribe to our newsletter. Our team has also included some great gaming accessories below you can enjoy in the meantime as well, some of which are even on sale.

Accessories to go along with your console

Update December 2nd, 8:30AM ET: Added availability info for Digital Edition, Xbox Series X and Xbox mini fridge.
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