They have kind of snuck it in without any fanfare, but Ubisoft has updated Tom Clancy’s The Division with DirectX 12 support. Microsoft’s fledgling graphics API can now be enabled if you play the public test version of The Division.

In terms of performance the difference is extremely marginal, often in the realm of 1 or 2 frames per second gained so nothing major. Those likely to see the biggest benefit are those with lower-end CPUs. The CPU will be able to give instructions to the GPU faster and more efficiently, offloading some of the heavy work.

Every little helps though so everyone should be able to enable DX12 once it rolls over to the live version, presumably alongside the Survive DLC.

It makes Tom Clancy’s The Division the 16th game to support DirectX 12, with Watch Dogs 2 and Star Citizen to come. A slow but steady start and Microsoft’s graphics API is slowly gathering momentum. Whether gamers will notice a difference another matter entirely.

Release Games With DirectX 12 Support

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition
Caffeine
Star Wars Battlefront
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Hitman
Ashes of the Singularity
Quantum Break
Total War: Warhammer
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Forza Motorsport 6: Apex
Halo 5: Forge
Forza Horizon 3
Gears of War 4
Battlefield 1
Civilization VI
The Division

If you were wondering where 4A Games has been the last three years, wonder no more. Tucked away on Metro author Dmitry Glukhovsky’s website is a timeline of the books and games. And right down at the bottom? ‘The next Metro video game’, coming in 2017.

The last book in the trilogy, Metro 2035, was published in 2015, so it’s presumed the sequel will follow the events in the latter half of this book, or perhaps pick up after. (Metro 2035 was based on the events of Metro: Last Light). In Glukhovsky’s brief description he says “It all adds up to something. Where the books end their story, the game will pick it up. An era of great discoveries lies ahead.”

 

4A Games has certainly built a bit of a name for itself in terms of creating graphical powerhouses so we’ll certainly be interested to see what it can do next. They use the custom 4A Engine so there’s nothing really to compare it to, but I’d imagine 4A has been busy beavering away on a host of visual upgrades.

That’s not to forget as well that both Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light are sublime first-person shooters. Deeply atmospheric and with the sole focus on single-player, they’re the sort of shooter campaigns which are a bit of a lost art these days.

From the looks of things then we can expect to see Metro 2035 launch in 2017. A PC version is an absolute cert but we’ll have to wait and see about PS4 and Xbox One.

Excited to see the return of Metro? Where do you hope to see 4A Games take the series next?

Arkane Studios is launching Dishonored 2 this very Friday (Thursday if you brave a pre-order), this time with two playable characters and more corpses to send your rat army to munch on than you can shake a bloodfly at. Unsurprisingly it's joined by a launch trailer. Even less surprising is it looks incredible. That's not all though, because we've got also got a look at Dishonored 2's graphics options and video settings, detailing every little tweak you can make in order get optimum performance in Dishonored 2.

Dishonored 2 Video Settings

• Screen resolution

• Windowed mode: Windowed, Fullscreen, Borderless windowed

• Brightness

• Field of vision: 65 > 110

• V-sync: Yes / No

• Adaptive resolution: 50% > 100%

• Nvidia HBAO+: Yes / No

 

• Presets: Auto; Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• Texture details: Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• Model details: Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• Environment details: Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• Water quality: Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• View distance: Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• Shadow quality: Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• Decal quality: Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• Fog quality: Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• Anti-aliasing: Off / FXAA Low / FXAA High / TXAA 1x

• Bloom: No / Yes

• Depth of field: No / Yes

• Lens flare: No / Yes

• Volumetric lighting: No / Yes

• God Rays: No / Yes

• Rat shadows: No / Yes

• Bloodfly shadows: No / Yes

A very decent select of graphics options for Dishonored 2, all said and done. What is particularly interesting is there are a total of six presets. Normally we have three or four, but Arkane Studios has allowed for a very granular approach to visual settings. It does mean it could require a little more effort on your part to achieve desire performance but it does also allow you more accurately tune Dishonored 2’s graphics settings to the capability of your hardware.

All the anti-aliasing options are resource light but not terrible effective so there might be a slight blurriness to image quality. Your best bet here is to crank up the resolution as high as you can.

Rat shadows and bloodfly shadows seem to be extremely specific. It's unlikely these are going to be very noticeable at all so these probably be your first port of call when it comes to disabling settings.

We've seen with the original Dishonored that Arkane has a real knack doing a lot with a little, presenting beautiful environments through a unique artstyle and gorgeous lighting (on PC at least). Enabling God Rays and Volumetric Lighting is key to this, but the latter in particular is likely to be hugely demanding.

Fingers crossed we'll be able to put all these settings to the test for you tomorrow so keep your eyes peeled for a Dishonored 2 performance breakdown.

Ah, and the video I promised you. Feast your eyes on this little lovely.

Steel yourself for some feather ruffling because Bethesda has updated the Steam store page for Dishonored 2 to highlight the upcoming stealth-em-up will be burdened with the dreaded Denuvo anti-tamper DRM. You know, the infamous DRM which developers have said can affect performance but has already been busted wide open by crackers. So, er, not really seeing the benefit of this situation here. As per usual with Denuvo Antitamper, you will be restricted to activating Dishonored 2 on a maximum of five different PCs with a 24 hour period. Denuvo has built up quite a reputation for itself over the years. Not only for being extremely effective but also due its purported impact on game performance and the requirement of an internet connection. Should the Denuvo servers ever close down for whatever reason, you would lose access to the games you have bought. Over the last three or four months Denuvo has been cracked successfully for the first time however, so it was presumed it would be falling out of favour with the big name AAA publishers. Bethesda’s taken a very different approach to that taken by Shadow Warrior 2 developer Flying Wild Hog, who said last month “Denuvo means we would have to spend money for making a worse version for our legit customers. We don’t support piracy, but currently there isn’t a good way to stop it without hurting our customers.” Dishonored 2 is out this very Friday, November 11th, for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Due to Bethesda’s new fangled review code restrictions, don’t expecting many reviews to crop up before next week. Fortunately it does look awesome, so there probably isn’t a great deal to worry about on this front.

The Steam Store front page has been overhauled with an makeover Valve is calling Steam Discovery Update Update 2.0.

Obviously you can just, you know, go to Steam to look at it, but Valve has also provided a visual guide to new features.

In the left column you’ll find links to a bunch of useful sections as well as short list of recently-viewed items, which is handy indeed.

The rest of the page is composed of modules like carousels and lists, but what makes them interesting is that every game tile offers quick access to a personalisation menu where you can add a game to your wishlist, mark it as “not interested”, or go off to edit your preferences. This should make it quicker and easier to hone Steam’s recommendations so you see stuff that interests you more often.

The main real estate of the page seems to be devoted to two carousels – one of featured games and another of featured deals. There’s more information on these panels than the old banner ad-style ones. We know Steam front page placement can be vital to the success of PC games so hopefully the new carousels encourage more diverse discovery.

Down below are some big blue buttons – Valve’s description – which give you different ways to browse, and then a section devoted to Steam curators for those who want someone else to help them make purchasing decisions (alas, there’s no “financial advisor” curator who cuts up your credit card and makes you finish doing your budget for the month).

Further down there’s a sub-$10 queue, a second list of deals and offers, and the option to keep browsing recommendations. If you’re logged in, you’ll also see what’s trending among your friends, your personalised discovery queue, and more tailored selections in each module.

Wow, it’s easier than ever to find things to spend your money on. I have very mixed feelings on this. One the one hand, I’ll be so glad to see worthwhile and interesting games getting more love. On the other, I’m desperately going to miss my grocery budget when I start digesting my own organs.

As a lot of you have probably noticed already, there have been some major changes sweeping into Steam overnight. Valve has totally overhauled the Steam store, rejigging just about on the home page in what is presumably an effort to get you all buying more games.

Down on the left column you’ve now got access to a lot more of the most popular Steam pages and game tags, including new releases, VR games, specific genres and tags based on the games you buy and play.

 

Up top the featured section has been rejigged a little. This presents a scrolling selection of 10 games based in a combination of new releases, special offers and genres you may be interested in. Each of the games here now also has a selection of preview screenshots and details on why it was recommended for you. If you head to your account preferences you can actually personalise this to your taste, excluding specific tags or games you’ve marked as ‘not interested’. I’ve already blocked ‘anime titties’ and my life is infinitely better.

Below that you now get the biggest special deals which used to sit in a box on the right-hand side. Rather than scrolling between these they now all sit in a row so you can see them at a glance.

After that it’s an array of curator recommendations, trending among friends, recently updated titles and then, finally, the new releases section. If you’ve been complaining there’s too many releases on Steam you’re now in luck; they’re so far down you’ll probably never get to them.

 

Below this and you can keep scrolling and keep getting recommendations, pretty much forever. It looks like recent Steam sales in this session, presenting an ever changing list based on an algorithm of the games you like / hate but can’t stop playing.

It’s not often I get to bring you news of an ‘un-delay’ but it looks as if Watch Dogs 2 has been brought forward from its November 29th release date on PC, to launch day and date with the PS4 and Xbox One editions on November 15th. That’s two whole more weeks Watch Dogging (ooh er) in the year 2016.

The news, such as it were, comes via a number of sources. Steam, the Ubisoft Store and the US Uplay have all independently been updated to "Available November 15 on PS4, Xbox One & PC". Ubisoft previously said Watch Dogs 2 would be coming to PC on November 29th, saying this was “To ensure that these and other features are polished and optimized to meet the development team’s standards, the PC version of Watch Dogs 2 will now be released on November 29.”

There is no official confirmation from Ubisoft on the matter, but you’d suspect it wouldn’t go changing its release date at the last minute if this wasn’t happening.

Potentially great news for PC players if true. It’s always a little disheartening to see console players jump in early so any parity is good news. What it does also do however is heap pressure on Ubisoft to push out a very capable PC version. If it performs like it could have done with another few weeks in the oven for the some fine-tuning and bug testing, fans are going to question why Ubisoft didn’t stick to the original schedule.

Would you like to see Watch Dogs 2 come out a fortnight earlier than you expected on PC? Or would you like to see Ubisoft give itself more time to optimise PC performance and push out the best version if possibly can? Let us know!