NetEase is getting more aggressive when it comes to cracking down on the use of third-party plugins while playing Marvel Rivals. It's now banning the use of an application called Blitz, although NetEase is being lenient in that it won't ban players who previously used the software.

A notice against using third-party plugins was put out on Marvel Rivals' website today, February 21. It specifically calls out Blitz, a third-party application that can be used while playing games like League of Legends or Fortnite to gain insight into informative data about competitive games that players can't typically see. In Marvel Rivals' case, NetEase says players using Blitz could see damage and healing statistics, predict the use of Ultimate abilities, and use it to help decide which heroes to ban in competitive play.

While it's not as aggressive as cheating software that helps players see through walls or always have precise aim, NetEase explained that "we deem this program as cheating software and will no longer allow its use during gameplay." Thankfully for the Marvel Rivals players who use Blitz, this ban is not retroactive.

It's not exactly a secret that Fallout 76's launch was a mess in 2018. Yet, almost seven years later, the online RPG has become a major success for Bethesda and Microsoft--and the source of pride for a former project lead on the game who witnessed first-hand the low lows.

Speaking with PC Gamer, Jeff Gardiner discussed the rollercoaster ride of making and maintaining Fallout 76. "Working on a live-service game comes with a lot of stress, because it just doesn't go away," said Gardiner, who was at Bethesda for 15 years before founding Something Wicked Games. In fact, Gardiner faced negative feedback while out and about in his daily life at one point. "I got yelled at in an Apple Store, I'll never forget," he said.

Gardiner left Bethesda in 2021, seeing the release of the Wastelanders expansion before exiting the developer. While Fallout 76 became even more popular thanks to the Amazon TV series, Gardiner still saw quite the turnaround for the online RPG. "When you put a game out that's that maligned, especially on a team that has had such success, the morale is doubly bad internally," Gardiner said. "So it was my job to make the people who are making the game like the game."

While recent reports have shown that WB Games is struggling and titles like Wonder Woman are years away from release, a new game based on DC Comics, DC: Dark Legion, is launching on PC, iOS, and Android next month.

DC: Dark Legion is based on the Dark Nights: Metal comic book storyline and lets players recruit superheroes and villains to fight off multiversal threats. In practice, gameplay is split into multiple parts. At the Batcave, players build rooms and train heroes. Then, players can explore places like Gotham City, Metropolis, and Atlantis to fight enemies in bite-sized real-time strategy battles or other players through PvP. With a cinematic trailer, developer FunPlus confirmed that DC: Dark Legion will release on March 14.

Pre-registrations are available now on the App Store and Google Play. FunPlus, which has worked on popular mobile games like State of Survival, is promising players special rewards if they hit certain pre-registration milestones. The following rewards were outlined in a press release:

Nvidia's new 50-series graphics cards just aren't as good at running certain older games as previous hardware generations were, some PC gamers have discovered. With its latest generation of GPUs, Nvidia has quietly removed support for PhysX, a physics simulation technology that was used in a number of popular titles in the early 2010s.

In a Reddit post, as spotted by The Verge, one user questioned why PhysX was suddenly turned off by default, or when turned on was forced to run on the CPU--causing major performance issues in games designed for GPU-enhanced PhysX. Responding to a post on the Nvidia forums, the company confirmed that PhysX has effectively been discontinued, due to Nvidia ending support for 32-bit CUDA applications for 50-series graphics cards and future generations. While the end of support for 32-bit CUDA was noted in a brief support article, Nvidia never explicitly mentioned the impact to PhysX, or noted which games might be impacted with the sunsetting of this technology.

PhysX's GPU-accelerated physics tech was acquired by Nvidia in 2008, and its realistic simulation of moving cloth, liquids, smoke and fog, and shatter particle effects was implemented in a number of popular AAA games of the time--including Borderlands 2, Assassin's Creed Black Flag, the Batman: Arkham trilogy, and the first two Metro games.

A couple of years ago, the idea of PlayStation-exclusive games being ported to PC would have seemed highly unlikely, but times have changed. Insomniac's Spider-Man games, Housemarque's Returnal, and the Horizon series are just a few of the big PlayStation properties that have recently made their way to PC since 2020, and former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida recently spoke about how doing so was almost like having a license to print money.

"Releasing on PC does many things: it reaches a new audience who do not own consoles--especially in regions where consoles are not as popular," Yoshida said in an interview with Sacred Symbols+ (via Push Square). "The idea is that those people may become fans of a particular franchise, and when a new game in that series comes out, they may be convinced to purchase a PlayStation. It also adds additional income, because porting to PC is way cheaper than creating an original title. So, it's almost like printing money. And that helps us to invest in new titles now that the cost of games has increased."

The benefit to Sony's push into PC gaming is that it has also allowed it to reach very lucrative markets like China, where PCs are far more popular than consoles. "China is a growing but very small console market. In order to reach the audience in countries like China then it's crucial to release on PC. So, I believe PC versions really reach a new audience," Yoshida added.

Author George R.R. Martin, who was involved in coming up with some of the lore of From Software's Elden Ring, has commented on the possibility of the game becoming a movie.

Speaking to IGN, Martin said he "can't say too much about it," but did indeed confirm that there is "some talk about about making a movie out of Elden Ring."

In Hollywood, nothing is certain, so no one should get their hopes up to see an Elden Ring movie soon, or ever. Martin acknowledged this, saying "we'll see" if the movie "comes to pass." Even if an Elden Ring movie does materialize, Martin said he's not sure what the extent of his involvement could be. "I don't know," he said, before going on to acknowledge that he's "a few years behind" on his long-awaited Winds of Winter. "So that limits the amount of things that I can do," he said.