Coming This Week on Digital Foundry (Week 18, 2023) (Patreon)

Hi everyone, it's Rich here with your regularly scheduled update for what's happening here at Digital Foundry... only we've had to ignore the schedule this week for a couple of reasons. First of all, a public holiday in the UK meant that we were supposed to be taking some time off. Secondly, while we were meant to be taking time off, the fact is that we had to roll out our Star Wars Jedi Survivor content as quickly as we could. First of all, we needed to get the information we wanted to impart out there to the audience and secondly, because we all know that we're in for a barrage of patches that would potentially make the launch day data irrelevant.

We shared some 'war stories' about the game and our coverage in the last DF Direct Weekly, but looking back, I still think it's a shame that EA chose not to engage with us on the title until the day before launch - 24 hours after the review embargo had lifted. Here's the thing... the game has technical issues for sure, but it's pushing these consoles hard. You'll have noted that our console coverage is overall quite positive because we understand the ambition here and applaud it - and that would have been our focus for our first video. We actually received PC code from EA first and the rest is history.

Anyway, here's where we are this week:

* Rich (ie me) is still working on handheld PC coverage - AyaNeo Air Plus is still in development - but obviously we're looking ahead to ROG Ally.

* John is back and fully armed and operational. He's already spent some time with Redfall and aims to deliver an Xbox-focused piece this week, before moving onto embargoed content.

* Alexwill be keeping an eye on developments with Jedi Survivor - and he's already posted a quick update on the PC version of the game: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-star-wars-jedi-survivor-pc-worst-triple-a-port-of-2023-so-far

* Oliver continues to work on his background project on the latest games that are 'too big for Steam Deck' before moving on to the last-gen versions of Hogwarts Legacy. The issue on that front is that we won't receive code until launch. This isn't anything nefarious from Warner Bros - the fact is that smart delivery code for retail consoles only activates at launch.

* Tom is going to look into the Jedi Survivor console patches. As we expect this to be an ongoing thing, we're looking to standardise stress tests in the way that we do with The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077.

* Will is on vacation! 

I'm actually flying out of the UK on personal business on Thursday, but will be looking to take my work with me. So right now, I'm setting up a rather nice Razer Blade laptop with RTX 4090 to work as a portable editing station, with an Elgato HD60 X for capture. It might just work! I'm not entirely sure if I'll be able to participate in DF Direct Weekly for the next couple of shows, but let's see what this laptop can do eh?

On my return, I really want to go deep on the ROG Ally and - yes - actually produce that video on a prospective mobile Ampere GPU for Switch 2. Apologies for the continued delays on that. It's managerial friction getting in the way. Case in point: it's now 14:11 and after two meetings, I still don't feel I've actually achieved anything. 

Anyway, as usual, do let us know if there are any topics or titles you'd like us to take a look at. Have a great week!