Grand Theft Auto V (aka GTA 5 or GTA V) is the fifteenth Grand Theft Auto game in the Action/Sandbox genre. The player is given almost complete freedom of action – he can travel around the city and its environs, rob passers-by, steal cars – or he can live the simple life of an ordinary person. We all know this very well, but why has this game suddenly come to the forefront? The answer is simple – full RP servers!

If you’ve ever played role-playing games (not to be confused with the 18+ connotations), you know what the catch is. A few years ago, RP servers started to appear on GTA V servers, where you have to fully enact your character, be it a bandit, police officer, or health worker. For failure to comply with the rules of the server – a fair punishment. Such servers have ripped off huge popularity, especially among the audience on Twitch.

Otherwise, it’s both its classic online multiplayer and the players who simply fool around in the offline mode of the classic company that give the game such a place.

Release date: 2013

League of Legends

League of Legends is an addictive MOBA in which the player can control their chosen champion and smash their enemies in 5vs5 battles on classic maps. We all know the game and we all love it, at least for the existence of Pentakill, K/DA and a few other musical groups. It’s probably the first game to be loved for the music not of the game, as paradoxical as that may sound.

The game always ranks high on the charts, but there is an important reason for the second place in September – the game has the biggest eSports tournament of 2021 ahead of it, The World Championship 2021, where dozens of teams from around the world will meet.

Well, apart from cybersports, as such, players will be treated to heaps of gifts, freebies and events. And, as far as I’m concerned, it’s gifts like these that give League of Legends such a worldwide popularity in the fall.

Release date: 2009

VALORANT

VALORANT is another game from Riot Games that got its foot in the gaming industry, trying hard to push Counter Strike: Global Offensive from its Olympus of the shooter world. Is the game succeeding? Not always successfully, but the results are there – a huge amount of views on Twitch and YouTube, as well as a solid online presence that rivals that of CSGO.

As for popularity in general – the game has been ramping up for a year now, but it can’t quite hit peak speed. And no, this is far from a problem, on the contrary. Developers are trying to simultaneously develop eSports (which they have already had their seasons and regional leagues) and the game itself, adding new characters, adjusting the balance and so on.

What will come out of this – we can only watch. It is possible that by 2023 we will know “the winner” of this little competition.

Release date: 2020

Minecraft

Minecraft is a virtual sandbox that gives players all the tools they need to explore and change the vast world, gather resources and create almost anything they can imagine. Literally – the most perfect sandbox that still exists and draws a huge audience, from Japanese schoolgirls to rugged steelworkers from Cheboksary!

There’s not even much to say here – this game is still popular, even despite its simplicity in gameplay. A special popularity of Meinkraft gives support for mods that allow you to change the gameplay almost beyond recognition. And the mods themselves can be anything – from simple visual and to horror mods.

The game is about to celebrate its tenth anniversary, perhaps even showing us something new. I don’t know what it will be, but I bet a tenner on the round cubes. If anyone wants to argue along with me, you’re welcome.

Release date: 2011

PUBG Mobile.

PUBG Mobile is the little brother of the classic PUBG, which has suddenly outgrown its big brother and shown who the real head of the family here is. As it turns out, PUBG’s mechanics work fine on mobile phones, and money from Tencent can even make things work that were insanely laggy on PC in the first month of launch. But is that a problem now?

PUBG Mobile is evolving, just like VALORANT, in all directions at once – cyber sports, new maps, new weapons, balance tweaks and donation. Yeah, there’s not too much donation, but it’s here, so take care of your wallets. Otherwise, spend it all on skins in PUBG Mobile!

The game is feeling great at the end of the year and has a consistently high online presence and a lot of fans among streamers. For it is on the streaming platform from Zuckenberg that PUBG Mobile streamers gather.

Release date: 2017

Apex Legends.

Do you still remember HOW Respawn Entertainment released their best shooter yet, Apex Legends? Yes, it was a great spectacle: here you have November 4, absolutely peace, and then bam, and November 5 comes out a shooter that no one expected or asked for. Millions of players in a day, a huge marketing campaign with streamers and voila – a place in the top is guaranteed!

Apex Legends is an award-winning, free-to-play hero shooter from Respawn Entertainment that boasts dozens of unique heroes, several maps and some of the most unique mechanics of any Battle Royale (and there aren’t that many on the market anymore)!

A major part of Apex Legends’ popularity is its availability on multiple platforms at once, including consoles, as well as multiple shops. No matter what anyone says, Steam gives a pretty good online presence even for a game that is primarily sold in the Origin shop.

Release date: 2019

Garena Free Fire.

And here we have the first purely mobile shooter that’s been around since 2017, and it’s still just as good! Garena Free Fire is one of the best shooters available for mobile. Each 10-minute game takes you to a remote island where you battle 49 other players who are striving to survive. Players freely choose their starting point with a parachute and aim to stay in the safe zone for as long as possible. In short – a typical Battle Royale, but one that managed to take over the mobile platform before all your PUBG Mobile and Call of Duty Mobile.

The game is insanely simple, not particularly replete with unique mechanics that other projects don’t have, but it does have one incredible advantage that sets it apart from other members of the genre on mobile – the unofficial “First” game status. The notional World of Warcraft was one of the first, and managed to snatch up an audience that caused others to have to poach it, and that’s tough.

That’s what happened with Garena Free Fire – everything that’s in that game is also in others. But the extent to which they’ve honed their mechanics, and – how they hold up to their audience, has guaranteed this game a place in the top 10 of our list!

Release date: 2017

PUBG

Have you guys even seen – how many reviews PUBG already has on Steam alone? 1,515,545 reviews! And the reviews are written by only a tiny percentage of the total number of players who have bought the game. And if you compare that to the game’s current online presence on other platforms, the online presence from other shops, and most importantly the online presence from China, you get numbers that could give you a headache. It’s also almost impossible to calculate, because China is very reluctant to tell you how many games are played there.

If Garena Free Fire is considered one of the first Battle Royale on mobile phones, then PUBG is a similar leader on PC. Yes, we had mods for Arma 2 and Arma 3, but they came from the same developer, so it doesn’t count. Plus, it was the release of PUBG that triggered such a boom in battle royale that led to Fortnite and other members of the genre.

Yes, the game doesn’t look its best – bugs, cheats and not the most sophisticated gameplay – but many people get enough of that. Not everyone wants to do the real “piano-playing”, erecting a factory, a castle and a few more hotel houses around them in seconds, as Fortnite likes to do.

Release date: 2016

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

So what’s the top popular game of the month without Counter-Strike: Global Offensive? Valve’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive debuted in 2012, building on a wealth of experience in multiplayer first-person shooters, including Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source. Now, nine years later, the dynamic PC game is still on par with more modern games, due in part to established core gameplay and an active community.

In terms of visuals, CS:GO is starting to show its age. Nevertheless, many players enjoy CS:GO precisely because of its lack of frills and competitive scene, which is still incredibly strong.

Much of its success is due to the sheer number of cybersports fans. The game is at the top of Twitch, has good online and regular tournaments that take place annually.

Genshin Impact

The surprise game, which came out in 2020, has a classic gacha format, but has such a large audience that it easily rivals games that came out much earlier and had a few years’ head start on audiences. The game has been released on the PC platform, as well as mobile devices running Android and iOS. It is set in the world of Teyvat, where everyone practises the religion of the Seven.

What are the main features of the game that allowed it to so firmly entrenched in the tops? Promo code giveaways, a pleasing visual style and a good storyline are some of its main components, but that’s not all.

Despite the game’s one-year anniversary problem, the game performed well in September 2021 with the release of Raiden Ai and a collaboration with Ella, the release of Inazuma and a bunch of new in-game events that allowed players to rack up in-game currency for the gacha itself.

Release date: 2020

The post What to play right now… appeared first on Pouetpu-Games.

I’m first and foremost a PC gamer, and I’m speaking from the perspective of a PC gamer. I’ve been playing PC since the late nineties, first bought a console in 2014 and it never became my main gaming platform. Now it’s time to upgrade the hardware on my home gaming computer and I’m looking towards consoles again. Why is that?

I’m comfortable playing on a PC and fiddling with it doesn’t stress me out, especially since there’s no fiddling at all these days. After all, I know that Microsoft releases all their games on PC, and recently even on Steam at regional prices. And I generally don’t get the top Sony exclusives, so I can do without them just fine, and if I can’t, I have the option of borrowing a friend’s PlayStation for a month or two. Why seem to bother with the console in the first place?

I’m confused by the architecture of the new consoles, primarily the organisation of the memory system, and how it might affect PC gameplay. There is speculation that if game developers start realising the full potential of the new consoles memory system, PC system requirements could rise very seriously. But the question is whether and how much they will start to do so…

So how are the new consoles different from the PC?
So, the main architectural features introduced in the new consoles, which modern gaming PCs are deprived of and which, in my opinion, can play an important role:

a high-speed NVME SSD, something not every gaming PC these days can boast, even those home PCs that do have an SSD are often equipped with relatively slow SATA models
Hardware data decompression, which averages 1.5 to 2 times the transfer rate of an already fast SSD
Direct loading of data into the video memory, bypassing the RAM intermediate stage as on PCs
New technologies reducing the required amount of video data by optimizing rendering algorithms, such as Sampler Feedback Streaming, Variable Rate Shading, Primitive Shaders, Mesh Shaders, etc.
All of these goodies increase memory utilization dramatically, allowing you to do with less memory and fill a scene with far more detail than was previously possible.

A high-speed SSD lets you load data into memory faster, so you can hold less data in memory.

Hardware decompression speeds up data transfer to disk by allowing compressed data to be transferred and decompressed on the fly without the need for a CPU. This is especially important for texture data that can be compressed up to two times, such as on the Xbox Series X using the specially developed BCPack algorithm.

Diagram of the SSD data exchange block on the PS5
Loading data directly into the video memory is not a new thing for consoles. Both current and previous generations of consoles are built on this principle – they have a single undivided memory pool which is used simultaneously for video and all other data. Whereas on the PC the video data from the hard drive is first loaded into RAM and from there into the graphics card memory. This, in turn, significantly increases the need for RAM, which in this case serves as a buffer.

And lastly, there are all sorts of tricky technologies to reduce the amount of data needed. They minimize the use of GPU resources and video memory idle, preventing downloading of picture details that will not be visible on the screen. The technologies listed above, such as Sampler Feedback Streaming, Variable Rate Shading and Mesh Shaders, are part of DirectX 12 Ultimate and will also be available on PC, but whether developers will be able to leverage them in PC versions of games at the same time as console versions is a question. And will they be, considering that not all PC’s will be equipped with graphics cards with support for the latest version of DirectX.

As a result, all other things being equal, the memory size, required for the game with the above mentioned features on next-generation consoles and without their usage on PC, can differ greatly. Sampler Feedback Streaming technology alone can reduce the amount of textures loaded in memory by 2.5 times according to Microsoft estimates.

The post Console or PC? appeared first on Pouetpu-Games.