Obsidian today announced its maniacal “Tyranny” RPG, published in renewed partnership with Paradox Interactive. As was the situation with Epic Games’ Paragon upon first reveal, there’s not much information right now – but we’ve got the basics, and we’ll have a full preview live in a week’s time.

Tyranny runs on the Pillars of Eternity engine, so it’s fair to expect the same multi-character, single-player system as exists there. At least, that’s the probable foundation. As its name might suggest, Tyranny’s undertone is one of oppression and ulterior motives – the player’s actions are less aligned with “good” and tend to edge more on the realm of “possibly really evil” – a stark change from Pillars of Eternity.

Crytek announced at GDC 2016 its fifth iteration of CryEngine, cleverly suffixed with CryEngine “VR” in the teaser trailer. The new build of CryEngine makes a few major moves that impact gamers, but most interesting to us is a heavy focus on low-level API optimization, new particle FX processing procedures, cloud FX, and VR optimization.

AMD's GPU architecture roadmap from its Capsaicin event revealed the new “Vega” and “Navi” architectures, which have effectively moved the company to a stellar naming system. A reasonable move away from things associated with hot, at least – Volcanic Islands, Hawaii, and Capsaicin included.

AMD just announced a partnership with Total War developers Creative Assembly, highlighting the game developer's move to implement DirectX 12 with the upcoming Total War: Warhammer Grand Strategy game.

Multiplayer titles have become so complex and content-packed that gamers can no longer expect a perfect multiplayer without intensive user testing, alphas & betas, patches, and downloadable content. Perhaps that’s one reason why many multiplayer-only titles have gone free-to-play: they’re always a work in progress, no matter how enjoyable they are at a given point. British studio Edge Case Games is coming off its space combat game, Strike Suit Zero, and is now venturing into 5v5 multiplayer with Fractured Space. Players take control of one of several ship classes and work together to secure resources and ultimately destroy the opponents’ base.

Valve is known for taking its time on projects. The “Steam Machine” was announced a couple of years ago as a joint hardware-software PC solution for living room set-top gaming with, perhaps more interestingly, promised inclusion of a haptic-enabled Steam controller. This controller would be the cause of many delays in the pipeline as Valve faced design unique design and usability challenges.

Stepping into Valve’s full-room virtual reality experience resulted in a nervous excitement that's rare to come by. Seated quietly in the center of the room, HTC’s “Vive” HMD, a pair of controllers, and a headset all awaited my arrival.

At a GDC press event today, Intel showcased its first Iris Pro-enabled CPU on a desktop motherboard -- socketed -- alongside Dx12 updates and gameplay capture advancements. The spotlight reaffirmed Intel’s commitment to LGA-socketed CPUs for the immediate future, offering desktop users with low TDP requirements a high-powered CPU and IGP solution. Valve further emboldened its argument by pointing toward Steam’s hardware survey, which now shows Intel’s graphics solution as consuming approximately 20% of the GPU cross-section. NVIDIA holds the majority of GPU marketshare.

It's been ages since I brought up Sierra Entertainment when talking about PC gaming. To my surprise, Sierra has recently reborn itself as an indie publisher & developer, bringing the acclaimed Velocity 2X to digital markets. 

Sierra completes its re-entry to PC with a return to a beloved adventure franchise, King’s Quest. King’s Quest introduces the series to newcomers with a modern presentation and some tweaks to its mechanics, but it ties in the story, the puzzle-solving, and the King’s Quest personality to make it as close of a true successor as fans have seen from 1998-onwards.

In this article, we focus on chapter 1 of the new King’s Quest title but also wrap-up with some comments about other Sierra games including Shiftlings and Velocity 2X – launching for Xbox One and Steam.

Alongside the release of its Shield gaming console, nVidia showcased its GRID game streaming service – thought of as similar to on-demand TV services – in a more final form. The service has been known to exist for a number of years now, but hasn’t advanced beyond internal and partner beta testing phases. Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of nVidia, demonstrated cloud gaming using the GRID service and Shield console simultaneously.