Coming This Week to Digital Foundry (Week 35, 2025) (Patreon)

Hello there and welcome to the latest weekly news post from Digital Foundry, written in the wake of a pretty hectic visit to Gamescom 2025. As usual, it's Rich at the keyboard for this one and I'd like to thank the many comments about my health in the Direct comments! Started to feel "cold-like" late on Thursday afternoon, tested negative for Covid on Friday and then started to feel a little better late on Saturday. Sunday? Well, John needed some assistance testing VRR performance modes for Gears Reloaded using our new VRR workflow and from there, it's back to work. Feeling mostly OK now, just a bit tired.

But #content laughs in the face of fatigue and so here we are with the reports of today's #content meeting - and it's safe to say that there's a lot going on. Let's crack on with the person by person breakdown.

Oliver is working on his analysis of the Xbox port for BMW - Black Myth Wukong. We were expecting the unexpected and so it is. The Xbox Series X version doesn't use frame-gen for a 60fps mode. Instead, per the image above, it radically downgrades settings to the point where Lumen lighting disappears! Post-BMW, Oliver will be staying on Xbox, checking out Helldivers 2.

Tom spent a day working on Kirby and the Forgotten Land, but having figured out that Metal Gear Solid Delta is available today on early access, I've bought the Xbox version so we can review it. Beyond that, back to Kirby, I guess, but there are a LOT of new games coming.

Alex is back from his various vacations and then Gamescom and yes, he also is looking at Metal Gear Solid Delta - this time on PC, naturally. He's also pitching Microsoft for an interview about Advanced Shader Delivery.

John is completing work on his Gears Reloaded review today before circling back to produce a some quick #content on some of the stuff he saw at Gamescom - like Silent Hill F and Phantom Blade Zero.

Rich (ie me) aims to get back to the Strix Halo video this week as well as potentially putting something together on the ROGGGGG Ally (which I did play at Gamescom), but there's still a lot of independence/transition work to do! We're going to attempt to move our channels out of IGN's multi-channel network this week, kicking off with DF Clips to see how quickly we can manage it and what the unpleasant side effects might be. It's also our first payday as an independent, which should hopefully pass without issue. There's other weird stuff, like getting the public podcast version of DF Direct Weekly out of IGN's Spotify/Megaphone enterprise account and into our own... which isn't easy as it looks like you need to be vetted to even have a Megaphone account. So, the process of leaving IGN continues then. Oh! And merch! Had a meeting this morning with the suppliers there to figure out how much merch is sitting on shelves. Once we know, perhaps some kind of independence sale might be in order before we consider rebooting the whole thing.

Lots going on then! As usual though, I'd welcome your input on things you'd like us to take a look at. The point is that the release schedule is looking extremely packed going forward, so we're going to need to figure out how to cover and when. And yes, I've not forgotten about Fortnite or No Man's Sky on Switch 2!

Hope you have a great week!