Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 19, 2024) (Patreon)

Hi there everyone, and welcome to your belated update on everything that is happening at Digital Foundry this week. The #content meeting this morning happened, and I wanted to write this up sooner but the Xbox news today took the wind out of my sails somewhat - shocking, saddening, and incomprehensible. At this point, I'm really starting to wonder just how bad are things really? Whatever happened to accountability? What actually is the Xbox strategy at this point? Was the AKB acquisition a case of biting off more than Microsoft could chew?

I'm going to attempt to put that aside for now to tell you what we're up to. To begin with, I didn't see any point putting the Final Fantasy 14 video live today - the publication time coincided almost exactly with the Xbox news being revealed. I'll take a view on whether we publish it tomorrow, but of course, it's on early access for all Supporters at this point, so take a look at digitalfoundry.net to watch it if you feel inclined.

• John is back from vacation now and we spoke yesterday about his plans for the month. He is in line to review Hellblade 2 for us, and we're also considering an accompanying Heavenly Sword DF Retro piece. We don't have Hellblade 2 code right now, but he's very keen on doing a video on Penny's Big Breakaway since that slipped through the cracks. It's an astonishing game and we're also keen on a developer behind-the-scenes on it.

• Alex is feeling better now and is back on the Unreal Engine 5.0 vs Unreal Engine 5.4 video. He's looking to cover Hellblade 2 and Ghost of Tsushima on PC, but we don't have those yet. He's considering a new DF Retro Time Capsule video on Halo 2's fascinating Windows Vista release!

• Oliver has just handed in a first draft of his Switch vs iPhone 15 Pro mobile face-off, is keen to take a look at some of the last-gen triple-A fare we've missed and will also be tackling Starfield's performance mode upgrades when the time is right.

• Tom stands ready to take a look at Fallout 4's next-gen upgrade - again - should the need arise as surely a patch must be coming that will address the lack of quality modes on Xbox? While we wait, he'll be handling our Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door coverage.

• Rich (ie me) is still focusing on some behind-the-scenes R&D but I'm also working on some memory benchmarking in association with Corsair, which essentially amounts to rebuilding our CPU benchmarking suite from scratch with new games. Benchmarking a memory kit in games essentially means finding CPU limited scenarios, after all - not easy when the target chip is a 13900K and when I'm also using a 4090 at 4K resolution on maxed settings (with RT where appropriate).

  I'm also still keen on the budget PC piece - which is looking like an all-Intel build - but it does now occur to me that with games like Starfield, Dragon's Dogma 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 in the CPU benchmarking suite, I'm very tempted to benchmark the Series X versions up against the Windows versions... running on the Series X CPU on the AMD 4800S Desktop Kit!

• Will continues the sterling work on our revamped merch line-up with more products coming through development, while continuing to hold the fort on Eurogamer with the majority of our DF articles and video adaptations.

Anything more you feel we should be looking at? Per last week, we're still looking to pivot away from focusing purely on software - especially as it seems there won't be much for the foreseeable future beyond that mentioned on this page - so don't be shy with any ideas. In the meantime, I hope you all have a good week.