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Peak on consoles, hockey roguelites and other new indie games worth checking out
We may receive a commission on purchases made from links. Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. There are some neat new games you can play this weekend and we'll take a look at a few that are on the way. However, much of the attention this week is on Steam Next Fest. The latest edition of the event, which includes thousands of demos, runs until Monday.
Game developers cancel upcoming public demo out of fear of AI copycats
Mashable Selects Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Versus Trending Now Look Up In My Bag Mashable @Home Top creators, ranked Creator Playbook AI at School All Series That's where we are right now with AI. Alex Perry is a tech reporter at Mashable who primarily covers video games and consumer tech. Alex has spent most of the last decade reviewing games, smartphones, headphones, and laptops, and he doesn't plan on stopping anytime soon. He is also a Pisces, a cat lover, and a Kansas City sports fan. You can see the evidence of this in a recent development regarding the upcoming indie game .
A grief-stricken road trip, The Traitors on the go and other new indie games worth checking out
Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. As ever, we'll take a peek at new games you can jump into this weekend and others that are a bit further away. First, though, let's look at some highlights from showcases that aired this week along with a few other bits of news. All of the previous Triple-i Initiative showcases have been solid and the latest one is no different. As well as news of updates for the likes of Windrose and Chained Together, this year's second edition of the showcase revealed that Among Us Story: On Guard (a detective spinoff of the multiplayer phenomenon) will arrive on February 17.
Meta's new holographic avatars are here and they're surprisingly real
I'm almost embarrassed to admit that the first time I saw one of Meta's new holographic avatars today, during a WhatsApp call with a Meta rep I had just met a few minutes before, I didn't immediately clock that I was speaking to an avatar. That's how far the company's avatar technology has come in the last couple years. Meta announced at Connect that it's bringing its holographic avatars to its new VR glasses and to the Meta Ray-Ban Display frames. I got the chance to experience both ahead of the keynote and was surprised at how far the tech has come since the first time I experienced it on Meta's Orion prototype. Setting up an avatar is a bit different depending on which device you're using.
NVIDIA's DLSS 5 launches with NBA 2K27 on September 3, but there's little reason for excitement
It's hard to recall a feature that's been as instantly reviled as NVIDIA's DLSS 5, a new version of its AI upscaling technology that can modify character models and environments to chase the specter of "photorealism." NVIDIA calls it progress, but the initial examples from Resident Evil: Requiem and Starfield were uncanny misfires. Now, NVIDIA is gearing up to finally launch DLSS 5 alongside NBA 2K27 on September 3. And judging from the wildly negative responses to recent leaks of the technology, it's going to face a tough crowd. I had serious doubts about DLSS 5 at first, but after seeing some remote demonstrations of the tech from Gamescom, my hackles have cooled a bit. Sure, it's an AI tool that could be used to obscenely yassify a fragile character suffering from PTSD, like it did for Resident Evil: Requiem's co-lead Grace.
Steam Next Fest demos, a Virtual Boy-inspired shooter and other new indie games worth checking out
Plus, a timely soccer-related management sim that doesn't hit the back of the net. Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. As ever, we've got some new releases and news of upcoming games to share with you. However, it's Steam Next Fest time, so there are literally thousands of fresh game demos to jump into. One of the main aims of Steam Next Fest is to help players discover interesting games.
DeMo: Decoupling Motion Forecasting into Directional Intentions and Dynamic States
Accurate motion forecasting for traffic agents is crucial for ensuring the safety and efficiency of autonomous driving systems in dynamically changing environments. Mainstream methods adopt a one-query-one-trajectory paradigm, where each query corresponds to a unique trajectory for predicting multi-modal trajectories. While straightforward and effective, the absence of detailed representation of future trajectories may yield suboptimal outcomes, given that the agent states dynamically evolve over time. To address this problem, we introduce DeMo, a framework that decouples multi-modal trajectory queries into two types: mode queries capturing distinct directional intentions and state queries tracking the agent's dynamic states over time.
Gamers Hate Nvidia's DLSS 5. Developers Aren't Crazy About It, Either
Nvidia's new AI upscaling gaming technology struck gamers as uncanny and off-putting. Developers don't seem to like it, either, but it could be "the default" in a few years. Nvidia announced a new version of its DLSS AI upscaling technology for its graphics cards earlier this week at its GPU Technology Conference (GTC), which it calls the Super Bowl of AI . But unlike previous versions of DLSS that used AI to improve frame rates in video games, DLSS 5 has a much more ambitious calling: using generative AI to make character faces in games look more realistic and detailed. The demonstration received sharp blowback on social media, with many finding the effect off-putting, reacting with outright disgust, and calling it yet another example of AI slop .