When we introduced last year's annual list of the best games in this space, we focused on how COVID delays led to a 2023 packed with excellent big-name blockbusters and intriguing indies that seemed to come out of nowhere. The resulting flood of great titles made it difficult to winnow the year's best down to our traditional list of 20 titles.

In 2024 we had something close to the opposite problem. While there were definitely a few standout titles that were easy to include on this year's list (Balatro, UFO 50, and Astro Bot likely chief among them), rounding out the list to a full 20 proved more challenging than it has in perhaps any other year during my tenure at Ars Technica (way back in 2012!). The games that ended up on this year's list are all strong recommendations, for sure. But many of them might have had more trouble making a Top 20 list in a packed year like 2023.

We'll have to wait to see if the release calendar seesaws back to a quality-packed one in 2025, but the forecast for big games like Civilization 7, Avowed, Doom: The Dark Ages, Grand Theft Auto 6, and many, many more has us thinking that it might. In the meantime, here are our picks for the 20 best games that came out in 2024, in alphabetical order.

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When Sony revealed the PlayStation 5 Pro a few months ago, some wondered just how many people would be willing to spend $700 for a marginal upgrade to the already quite powerful graphical performance of the PS5. Now, initial sales reports suggest there's still a substantial portion of the console market that's willing to shell out serious money for top-of-the-line console graphics.

Circana analyst Matt Piscatella shared on Bluesky this morning that the PS5 Pro accounted for a full 19 percent of US PS5 sales in its launch month of November. That sales ratio puts initial upgrade interest in the PS5 Pro roughly in line with lifetime interest in the PS4 Pro, which recent reports suggest was responsible for about 20 percent of all PS4 sales following its launch in 2016.

That US sales ratio also lines up with international sales reports for the PS5 Pro launch. In the UK, GfK ChartTrack reports that the PS5 Pro was responsible for 26 percent of all console sales for November. And in Japan, Famitsu sales data suggests the PS5 Pro was responsible for a full 63 percent of the PS5's November sales after selling an impressive 78,000 units in its launch week alone.

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© Kyle Orland

If you've been too busy fixing your video drivers to take part in this year's Ars Technica Charity Drive sweepstakes, don't worry. You still have time to donate to a good cause and get a chance to win your share of over $4,000 worth of swag (no purchase necessary to win).

In the first week or so of the drive, nearly 180 readers have contributed almost $16,000 to either the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Child's Play as part of the charity drive (Child's Play is barely hanging on to a small donation lead at the moment). That's a long way off from 2020's record haul of over $58,000, but there's still plenty of time until the Charity Drive wraps up on Thursday, January 2, 2025.

That doesn't mean you should put your donation off, though. Do yourself and the charities involved a favor and give now while you're thinking about it.

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© Kyle Orland

When Nvidia replaced the longstanding GeForce Experience App with a new, unified Nvidia App last month, most GPU owners probably noted the refresh and rebranding with nothing more than bemusement (though the new lack of an account login requirement was a nice improvement). Now, testing shows that running the new app with default settings can lead to some significant frame rate dips on many high-end games, even when the app's advanced AI features aren't being actively used.

Tom's Hardware noted the performance dip after reading reports of related problems around the web. The site's testing with and without the Nvidia App installed confirms that, across five games running on an RTX 4060, the app reduced average frame rates by around 3 to 6 percent, depending on the resolution and graphical quality level.

The site's measured frame rate drop peaked at 12 percent for Assassin's Creed Mirage running at 1080p Ultra settings; other tested games (including Baldur's Gate 3, Black Myth: Wukong, Flight Simulator 2024, and Stalker 2) showed a smaller drop at most settings.

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© Nvidia

Application developers who access OpenAI through its long-running API will now have access to the company's latest full o1 model, rather than the months-old o1-preview. The upgrade is one of a number of new features being rolled out to OpenAI's developer customers starting today.

OpenAI announced during a livestream today that the new o1 model would bring back many of the "core features you've been missing" from the API during o1-preview. This includes the ability to use developer messages to help guide your particular chatbot (i.e. "You are a helpful assistant for tax professionals.") and access to a "reasoning effort" parameter that tells the API how long to think about specific queries, saving time and money on simple problems so they can be used on the tougher ones. API users can also use visual information like scans of documents as input.

OpenAI also highlighted improvements to the new API's use of internal function calling, where the OpenAI model decides to call functions pre-written by outside developers to generate answers to certain queries, when appropriate. The new API is also more accurate in its use of structured outputs, which use a JSON schema to present information in a specific format outlined by the developer, OpenAI said.

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© Benj Edwards / Getty Images / OpenAI

Large language models have found great success so far by using their transformer architecture to effectively predict the next words (i.e., language tokens) needed to respond to queries. When it comes to complex reasoning tasks that require abstract logic, though, some researchers have found that interpreting everything through this kind of "language space" can start to cause some problems, even for modern "reasoning" models.

Now, researchers are trying to work around these problems by crafting models that can work out potential logical solutions completely in "latent space"—the hidden computational layer just before the transformer generates language. While this approach doesn't cause a sea change in an LLM's reasoning capabilities, it does show distinct improvements in accuracy for certain types of logical problems and shows some interesting directions for new research.

Wait, what space?

Modern reasoning models like ChatGPT's o1 tend to work by generating a "chain of thought." Each step of the logical process in these models is expressed as a sequence of natural language word tokens that are fed back through the model.

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If you've been too busy punching virtual Nazis to take part in this year's Ars Technica Charity Drive sweepstakes, don't worry. You still have time to donate to a good cause and get a chance to win your share of over $4,000 worth of swag (no purchase necessary to win).

In the first three days of the drive, over 100 readers have contributed almost $9,500 to either the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Child's Play as part of the charity drive (Child's Play is now leading in the donation totals by about $1,000). That's a long way off from 2020's record haul of over $58,000, but there's still plenty of time until the Charity Drive wraps up on Thursday, January 2, 2025.

That doesn't mean you should put your donation off, though. Do yourself and the charities involved a favor and give now while you're thinking about it.

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© Kyle Orland

On Monday, OpenAI released Sora Turbo, a new version of its text-to-video generation model, making it available to ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers through a dedicated website. The model generates videos up to 20 seconds long at resolutions reaching 1080 p from a text or image prompt.

Open AI announced that Sora would be available today for ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers in the US and many parts of the world but is not yet available in Europe. As of early Monday afternoon, though, even existing Plus subscribers trying to use the tool are being presented with a message that "sign ups are temporarily unavailable" thanks to "heavy traffic."

Out of an abundance of caution, OpenAI is limiting Sora's ability to generate videos of people for the time being. At launch, uploads involving human subjects face restrictions while OpenAI refines its deepfake prevention systems. The platform also blocks content involving CSAM and sexual deepfakes. OpenAI says it maintains an active monitoring system and conducted testing to identify potential misuse scenarios before release.

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Popular indie game platform itch.io says its domain was briefly taken down for a few hours Monday morning thanks to an "AI-driven" phishing report spurred by the company behind Funko Pop figures.

Itch.io management posted about the domain takedown on social media overnight, complaining of a chain of events that started because "Funko of 'Funko Pop'... use some trash 'AI Powered' Brand Protection Software called BrandShield that created some bogus Phishing report to our registrar, iwantmyname, who ignored our response and just disabled the domain," the post said.

In a Hacker News comment, Itch.io founder Leaf "Leafo" Cohran said that the BrandShield complaint seems to have originated from a single itch.io user who "made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game." That led to independent reports to Itch's host and registrar of "fraud and phishing" a few days ago.

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© Itch.io

It's once again that special time of year when we give you a chance to do well by doing good. That's right—it's time for the 2024 edition of our annual Charity Drive!

Every year since 2007, we've encouraged readers to give to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity, which provides toys and games to kids being treated in hospitals around the world. In recent years, we've added the Electronic Frontier Foundation to our charity push, aiding in their efforts to defend Internet freedom. This year, as always, we're providing some extra incentive for those donations by offering donors a chance to win pieces of our big pile of vendor-provided swag. We can't keep it, and we don't want it clogging up our offices, so it's now yours to win.

This year's swag pile is full of high-value geek goodies. We have dozens of prizes valued at over $4,000 total, including gaming hardware and collectibles, computer accessories, apparel, and more. In 2023, Ars readers raised nearly $40,000 for charity, contributing to a total haul of more than $506,000 since 2007. We want to raise even more this year, and we can do it if readers dig deep.

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© Kyle Orland

In March, Google showed off its first Genie AI model. After training on thousands of hours of 2D run-and-jump video games, the model could generate halfway-passable interactive impressions of those games based on generic images or text descriptions.

Nine months later, this week's reveal of the Genie 2 model expands that idea into the realm of fully 3D worlds, complete with controllable third- or first-person avatars. Google's announcement talks up Genie 2's role as a "foundational world model" that can create a fully interactive internal representation of a virtual environment. That could allow AI agents to train themselves in synthetic but realistic environments, Google says, forming an important stepping stone on the way to artificial general intelligence.

But while Genie 2 shows just how much progress Google's Deepmind team has achieved in the last nine months, the limited public information about the model thus far leaves a lot of questions about how close we are to these foundational model worlds being useful for anything but some short but sweet demos.

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© Google Deepmind

On Thursday during a live demo as part of its "12 days of OpenAI" event, OpenAI announced a new tier of ChatGPT with higher usage limits for $200 a month and the full version of "o1," the full version of a so-called reasoning model the company debuted in September.

Unlike o1-preview, o1 can now process images as well as text (similar to GPT-4o), and it is reportedly much faster than o1-preview. In a demo question about a Roman emperor, o1 took 14 seconds for an answer, and 1 preview took 33 seconds. According to OpenAI, o1 makes major mistakes 34 percent less often than o1-preview, while "thinking" 50 percent faster. The model will also reportedly become even faster once deployment is finished transitioning the GPUs to the new model.

Whether the new ChatGPT Pro subscription will be worth the $200 a month fee isn't yet fully clear, but the company specified that users will have access to an even more capable version of o1 called "o1 Pro Mode" that will do even deeper reasoning searches and provide "more thinking power for more difficult problems" before answering.

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© OpenAI / Benj Edwards

Longtime Valve watchers likely remember Steam Machines, the company's aborted, pre-Steam Deck attempt at crafting a line of third-party gaming PC hardware based around an early verison of its Linux-based SteamOS. Now, there are strong signs that Valve is on the verge of launching a similar third-party hardware branding effort under the "Powered by SteamOS" label.

The newest sign of those plans come via newly updated branding guidelines posted by Valve on Wednesday (as noticed by the trackers at SteamDB). That update includes the first appearance of a new "Powered by SteamOS" logo intended "for hardware running the SteamOS operating system, implemented in close collaboration with Valve."

The document goes on to clarify that the new Powered by SteamOS logo "indicates that a hardware device will run the SteamOS and boot into SteamOS upon powering on the device." That's distinct from the licensed branding for merely "Steam Compatible" devices, which include "non-Valve input peripherals" that have been reviewed by Valve to work with Steam.

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© Aurich Lawson | Steam

Historically, games based on popular film or TV franchises have generally been seen as cheap cash-ins, slapping familiar characters and settings on a shovelware clone of a popular genre and counting on the license to sell enough copies to devoted fans. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle clearly has grander ambitions than that, putting a AAA budget behind a unique open-world exploration game built around stealth, melee combat, and puzzle solving.

Building such a game on top of such well-loved source material comes with plenty of challenges. The developers at MachineGames need to pay homage to the source material without resorting to the kind of slavish devotion that amounts to a mere retread of a familiar story. At the same time, any new Indy adventure carries with it the weight not just of the character's many film and TV appearances but also well-remembered games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Then there are game franchises like Tomb Raider and Uncharted, which have already put their own significant stamps on the Indiana Jones formula of action-packed, devil-may-care treasure-hunting.

No, this is not a scene from a new Uncharted game. Credit: Bethesda / MachineGames

Surprisingly, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle bears all this pressure pretty well. While the stealth-exploration gameplay and simplistic puzzles can feel a bit trite at points, the game's excellent presentation, top-notch world-building, and fun-filled, campy storyline drive one of Indy's most memorable adventures since the original movie trilogy.

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© Bethesda / MachineGames

OpenAI has cut off testing access to its Sora video generation platform after a group of artists briefly shared their own early access in a publicly usable webpage Tuesday. The group, going by the moniker PR Puppets, claims the stunt was a protest against being asked to work as unpaid R&D and bug testers while participating in "art washing" of AI tools. But OpenAI says participation in the early alpha test is voluntary and has no requirements that testers provide feedback.

PR Puppets posted its "Generate with Sora" access point to Hugging Face at about 8:30 Eastern time Tuesday morning, according to Git commit logs. Quickly, AI experts on social media noticed the posting and confirmed that the page connected to endpoints on OpenAI's actual Sora API and hosting on a videos.openai.com domain, presumably with authentication tokens provided to testers by OpenAI itself.

OMG OpenAI Sora has been leaked!

Free to use now on Huggingface, link in comment

It can be shut down anytime, try it now! It can generate 1080P and up to 10s video! And the results are incredible!

9 Examples: pic.twitter.com/rIJJv5TQTo

— el.cine (@EHuanglu) November 26, 2024

That access was revoked within hours, but not before plenty of eager followers managed to generate their own videos and share them on social media. An OpenAI spokesperson told The Washington Post the company is temporarily pausing all test access to Sora to evaluate the situation. Other users dug into the code to discover hints of different modes and "styles" that might be in development for Sora.

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© Sora / Kol Tregaskes

Like a lot of children of the '80s, my early gaming nostalgia has a huge hole where the Atari 7800 might have lived. While practically everyone I knew had an NES during my childhood—and a few uncles and friends' older siblings even had an Atari 2600 gathering dust in their dens—I was only vaguely aware of the 7800, Atari's backward compatible, late '80s attempt to maintain relevance in the quickly changing console market.

Absent that kind of nostalgia, the Atari 7800+ comes across as a real oddity. Fiddling with the system's extremely cumbersome controllers and pixelated, arcade-port-heavy software library from a modern perspective is like peering into a fallen alternate universe, one where Nintendo wasn't able to swoop in and revive a flailing Western home video game industry with the NES.

Even for those with fond memories of Atari 7800-filled childhoods, I'm not sure that this bare-bones package justifies its $130 price. There are many more full-featured ways to get your retro gaming fix, even for those still invested in the tail end of Atari's dead-end branch of the gaming console's evolutionary tree.

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© Kyle Orland

At this point, anyone who has been following AI research is long familiar with generative models that can synthesize speech or melodic music from nothing but text prompting. Nvidia's newly revealed "Fugatto" model looks to go a step further, using new synthetic training methods and inference-level combination techniques to "transform any mix of music, voices, and sounds," including the synthesis of sounds that have never existed.

While Fugatto isn't available for public testing yet, a sample-filled website showcases how Fugatto can be used to dial a number of distinct audio traits and descriptions up or down, resulting in everything from the sound of saxophones barking to people speaking underwater to ambulance sirens singing in a kind of choir. While the results on display can be a bit hit or miss, the vast array of capabilities on display here helps support Nvidia's description of Fugatto as "a Swiss Army knife for sound."

You’re only as good as your data

In an explanatory research paper, over a dozen Nvidia researchers explain the difficulty in crafting a training dataset that can "reveal meaningful relationships between audio and language." While standard language models can often infer how to handle various instructions from the text-based data itself, it can be hard to generalize descriptions and traits from audio without more explicit guidance.

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Bloomberg reports that Sony is "in the early stages" of work on a fully portable console that can play PlayStation 5 software. The device is still "likely years away from launch," according to "people familiar with its development" that spoke to Bloomberg anonymously.

The report comes less than a year after the launch of the PlayStation Portal, a Sony portable device designed to stream PS5 games running on a console on the same local network. Recently, Sony updated the Portal firmware to let PlayStation Plus subscribers also stream PS5 games from Sony's centralized servers at up to 1080p and 60 fps.

Sony's reported PS5 portable plans also come after months of rumors that Microsoft has also been working on a new Xbox console with a portable form factor. In June, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer added fuel to those rumors by directly saying, "I think we should have a handheld, too... I like my ROG Ally, my Lenovo Legion Go, my Steam Deck... I think being able to play games locally is really important."

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© Sony

In the years since Dark Souls first hit the scene, the action RPG genre has been overrun with "Souls-like" games that emulate FromSoft's general vibe. That often applies not just to dark settings and punishing difficulty but also to the slow, deliberate management of every movement and attack to survive even simple encounters with your life and stamina intact.

While that approach definitely has its place, sometimes you want an action-RPG with a little more color, a little faster pacing, and a little more, well, action. After spending a few hours with Obsidian's Avowed, it already feels like just the thing for action-RPG fans who want something a little less Souls-like.

All politics is local

From the start, Avowed is layered with all of the vaguely medieval high fantasy tropes you'd expect from a game spun off from the Pillars of Eternity universe. Your protagonist is a "god-like," touched in the womb by mysterious immortal beings that gave you mysterious powers but also a disfigured face that led you to be bullied as a child. Eventually, you grow up to be an envoy to the King of Aedrys and are sent over the sea to the lightly civilized Living Lands to investigate a mysterious fungal plague that is turning animals and soldiers alike into unruly, rage-filled beasts.

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© Obsidian / Microsoft