Gaming News - Page 127

The Witcher 3 might be an old game now - it's coming on for a decade since it came out, in fact - but it can still look stunning with the right mods, as a new video has brought to our attention.

This comes from Digital Dreams (as flagged up by Wccftech), with the game carrying over a hundred mods to make it look this good.

That includes the 'beyond all limits' ray tracing ReShade preset, and the Immersive Lighting Mod version 2.2 - the latter of which does a lot of heavy lifting in ramping up the visuals.

With the FTC case looking to block Microsoft's planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard wrapping up and a decision expected any day now, which will determine if the deal goes ahead or not, a treasure trove of info related to Xbox, PlayStation, and titles like Call of Duty and Minecraft has emerged.

We learned that 200-plus million dollar budgets for exclusive AAA titles like Horizon Forbidden West and The Last of Us Part II for PlayStation consoles rivals big-budget movies. We learned Minecraft makes four times as much money on the Switch as on Xbox. And we learned that Xbox's Phil Spencer decided to make all future Bethesda titles exclusive to PC and Xbox - seemingly starting with Starfield.

But this is all 2023 news related to the current console war between Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony; what about the mid-to-late 1990s when it was all about Nintendo, Sega, and Sony, and consoles like the Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, and the fresh-on-the-scene Sony PlayStation. Well, a massive 272-page PDF of classified Sega of America documents from the era has made its way online with some cool revelations (via Sega Retro).

A new report from analyst firm Newzoo concludes that console gamers are more likely to go from players to payers.

Console gaming has more payers than mobile and PC gaming, a new report from Newzoo indicates. Based on the report, which measured a size of 59,040 gamers in a global weighted average across 36 markets, roughly 57% of people who played video games in the last 6 months actually spent money on them. This implies that around 43% of gamers, or over 25,000 people, play free-to-play titles and don't actually spend money on games.

The data is part of Newzoo's robust Global Gamer Study analysis, which can be found here.

Microsoft's Xbox games division helped Bethesda unlock the full potential for Starfield.

Following the Microsoft-ZeniMax buyout deal for $7.5 billion, ZeniMax is now a limited-integration company within Xbox, but that doesn't mean that Microsoft's game dev teams and technology specialists haven't helped with Starfield's development. In fact, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty confirmed that Xbox has been involved with Starfield's development since early 2022, with Xbox's ATG (Advanced Technology Group) assisting Bethesda Game Studios with various console-level optimizations.

In a recent interview with KFG, Bethesda Game Studios' Todd Howard says that Xbox's help has allowed the studio to reach its ambitions with Starfield. Howard responds to the pressures of Starfield essentially being a big proving point for the Xbox first-party games division, and how Microsoft's assistance helped accelerate Starfield's development and allow new improvements like the upgraded Creation Engine 2 optimizations on Xbox platforms. These ambitious new features include things like volumetric fog, the new global illumination lighting systems, physics effects, and more.

ZeniMax head of publishing Pete Hines is not confident Starfield could still release in September 2023 if it was not exclusive to Xbox.

During the FTC v Microsoft federal court case, we heard a lot about about exclusivity. It's a hot topic in the gaming world, particularly in the case of paying studios to skip Xbox--a practice that has earned Sony the designation as a "hostile" competitor against Microsoft.

Conversely, we also heard first-hand about the merits and benefits of exclusivity. These include upfront payments and royalty deals, closer access to console engineers, and, in ZeniMax's case, the ability to launch games more quickly.

The South African Competition Tribunal has approved the Microsoft-Activision merger without conditions.

Earlier this year, South Africa's trade regulator (SAC) recommended full approval of the $68.7 billion Microsoft-Activision on the grounds that it did not pose any significant threat to harm in the region's competition of the video games market. Today, the country's regulation tribunal, the SACT, has formally issued a decision to greenlight and approve the merger.

The regulatory tribunal has yet to publish a formal report on why it unconditionally approved the combination, but it could be similar to those published by other countries, including South Korea.

Reports indicate that the original source code for the first Far Cry game has leaked onto the website Internet Archive.

The file was uploaded to Internet Archive and titled "Far Cry 1.34 Complete", but according to reports, it's unclear if the source code contains updates or patches. However, the fact that the title contains .34, suggests that the files contain patches, but according to gamers who have downloaded the source code, it's "not complete, but close".

"From my educated guess, this is some source tree leak for the PC version of the game to add support for the Ubisoft game launcher / DRM," posts one gamer.

"We cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all the necessary rights," writes Valve in response to a game developer whose game was rejected from the Steam platform due to issues with AI-generated art. This info comes from Reddit user 'potterharry97', who made their written rejection public on the popular discussion forum.

The validity of AI-generated art has been a controversial subject of late due to AI models being trained using existing art, some of which is copyrighted, making the whole idea of the originality of AI-generated art a question of plagiarism in some extreme cases. And it's this idea that sits at the center of Valve's stance on AI art.

In its response to the developer, Valve notes that unless "you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game," it cannot sanction the use of AI-generated art. Or, at least, it's making it the developer's responsibility to ensure all artwork has been legally created - though one assumes small indie studios looking at AI-generated art wouldn't have access to data sets used to train AI models.

Bethesda's Starfield is a PC and Xbox exclusive and one of the most anticipated RPG releases in years, a brand-new sci-fi epic from the team behind Skyrim and Fallout. Recently, the studio announced its partnership with AMD for the PC release, where we learned that the game would support AMD's FSR 2.0 upscaling technology across PC and console alongside multi-threaded CPU optimizations.

This news arrived last week and was criticized due to recent reports indicating that AMD is actively blocking developers from adding NVIDIA DLSS support to its sponsored games. To the point where modders have confirmed that they'll add unofficial DLSS 3 and Frame Generation support to the game within weeks of its launch.

Although that controversy is limited to the Radeon and GPU side of the equation, it looks like the partnership is as much about CPU performance - which is great. And according to this placeholder page over at US retailer Newegg, Starfield is set to be bundled with all new Ryzen 7000 CPUs.

It's no surprise that Starfield will have mod support, but now we're hearing Todd Howard share his thoughts about Starfield mods.

Bethesda's new game Starfield is a perfect fit for mods. The space sim has a massive array of 1,000 planets, and most of these will be devoid of life. To faithful Bethesda RPG players, this sounds like a blank canvas for mods to unleash boundless creativity. Only 100 of Starfield's vanilla worlds will have life on them, but that will certainly change with mods.

There's few things more enjoyable than playing a Bethesda RPG on PC at launch. You get to see the game evolve in real-time thanks to the skills and imagination of the gaming community and we could see some very interesting things roll out with Starfield mods. Let's just hope the Creation Club is at least optimized enough not to break script extenders with new game updates this time (Bethesda has had a history of "breaking" Fallout and Skyrim mods with game updates, forcing modders to re-adjust their "script extenders" to ensure specific game-changing mods are supported in the new update).