Daily Briefing, Thursday 10th December 2020

Hello, friends, and welcome back to another issue of the Bellular Daily Briefing - industry news at your fingertips

Microsoft tease multiple "surprises" for during The Game Awards

Geoff Keighley's Game Awards is set to air today (6:30pm ET/3:30pm PT/11:30pm GMT) and Microsoft have teased a "couple moments" during the show - but have warned fans that they won't be on the same scale as last year's bumper Xbox Series X announcement.

• Microsoft are smart to warn folks in advance because they've suffered the weight of unmet expectations a number of times this year - but what could the surprises be? The Game Awards will feature 12-15 new game reveals according to Geoff Keighley, so buckle up!

Steam introduce new discovery tools

A new Steam Labs Experiment is seeking to further improve how people find interesting things on Steam - new Categories allow for genres to be more specifically subdivided, and a new "New and Noteworthy" menu is intended to give a more comprehensive overview of events and sales on Steam.

• Valve have been tinkering with Steam's discoverability functionality for a while now and every iteration makes things a little better. There are a huge number of games on Steam so it's easy to get lost - but Valve's efforts should mean more new, interesting games hitting your feed.

Some UK retailers won't have any more PS5 stock before the end of the year

The PlayStation 5 had an amazingly successful launch last month and the console has been sold out in a lot of places ever since. While Sony have promised that more stock is on the way, UK retailers like Argos and Smyths Toys don't expect any more units until 2021.

• A number of retailers took additional preorders recently and, while these will be being fulfilled over the next couple weeks, it does look like that's all we'll be getting in terms of new PS5 stock. Fingers crossed things become a little less cut-throat in 2021, eh?

BioShock 4 could be an "emergent sandbox world"

Several new job listings for developer Cloud Chamber Games have given us a bit of an idea of what to expect in BioShock 4 - calling the game an "ambitious, narratively-driven project full of character and personality."

• The listings call for someone to help implement the game's dialogue systems, which suggests a branching dialogue style in the same vein as Fallout. Mentions of "sandbox" suggest that BioShock 4 could be returning to the more open-ended approach of the first two games after Infinite was more linear.

Surprise Spider-Man: Miles Morales patch boosts performance

The new patch introduces a new graphics setting called Performance RT, which adds ray-tracing to the game's existing 1080p 60fps performance mode - which it achieves by " adjusting the scene resolution, reflection quality, and pedestrian density."

• Before now, PS5 users could choose between a Fidelity mode to run the game at native 4K resolution with ray-tracing at 30fps or Performance Mode, which dropped the fidelity a touch to put out 60fps gameplay. Both options were solid, but with a third option now splitting the difference Insomniac should be commended.

That's everything for today, folks - catch us back here tomorrow for another batch of daily news and have fun at The Game Awards!