Gaming News - Page 381

Activision today confirmed that its core mobile development teams are all collaborating on a new Call of Duty project.

Following the massive success of Call of Duty Mobile, Activision is further expanding the franchise into the huge market. Company president and chief operating officer Daniel Alegre confirmed that all of the Activision-branded mobile teams are coming together to work on an unannounced project in the Call of Duty universe.

"We recently acquired Digital Legends in Barcelona. They join our mobile development roster which now includes our new internal team, Solid State, as well as the mobile teams at Beenox and Shanghai, who are all coming together on an unannounced project in the Call of Duty universe that's very exciting," Alegre said.

Former Xbox executive Mike Ybarra now the captain of Blizzard Entertainment as it weathers a storm of lawsuits and accusations.

Today Jen Oneal, former boss of Vicarious Visions, announced she is leaving the company at the end of 2021. Mike Ybarra will now take over and lead Blizzard: "Mike Ybarra will take on Jen's leadership responsibility,"Activision said in its earnings call.

Ybarra and Oneal took the reins of Blizzard when ex-president J. Allen Brack left the company just a few months ago in August 2021.

Diablo IV, which never had a release date to begin with, and Overwatch 2 have both been delayed past their original internal launch periods.

Today Activision-Blizzard announced thunderous Q3 results amid a zero-tolerance policy to fire employees who harass others. Nestled in the earnings presentation was a few game delays, namely from Blizzard, a segment that's being affected most from a "frat-boy culture" that has kicked off multiple sexual harassment lawsuits.

The team announces that Overwatch and Diablo IV have been delayed...despite either one of them actually having release dates. "While we are still planning to deliver a substantial amount of content from Blizzard next year, we are now planning for a later launch for Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV than originally envisaged."

Dedicated modders are bringing the immortal Blood Gulch into Halo 3.

Halo modders are having a field day with the Master Chief Collection's new modding tools. We've seen awesome AI wars, sequences that break the enemy limit, and now Blood Gulch is making a triumphant combat in Halo 3.

Arguably the best CTF ever made, Blood Gulch has provided countless hours of chaos in the early LAN days of Halo CE. Now thanks to a community of modders including ex-Installation 01 lead TheChunkierBean, wwm0nkey, and Amit Bisember, Blood Gulch is being ported into Halo 3.

Xbox gaming will soon be integrated in the metaverse in some way, but not for a long time.

The metaverse is happening. First Facebook changed itself to Meta and is using Oculus VR as a portal to the new platform. Now Microsoft is jumping in and it's bringing Xbox into the new frontier. Today Microsoft announced plans to integrate its productivity software with Mesh, a platform that allows users to meet up with one another virtually with avatar representations. Mesh is now available for Teams, which allows users to show an avatar of themselves in video chats. Users can also project holographic images of themselves to others for a more realistic presence.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says the company's metaverse plans will bring 2D games like Halo, Minecraft, and Flight Sim into the 3D world.

Valve and AMD will reveal tons of more info about the Steam Deck's APU and capabilities during a special November 12 stream.

Today Valve announced a Steamworks Virtual Conference dedicated entirely to the Steam Deck handheld-PC hybrid. The event starts on November 12 at 10am PST / 1pm EST and covers a myriad of topics like deep dives on the Steam Deck's custom AMD processor, game support, and much more.

The Steam Deck utilizes a custom SoC built on AMD's new Van Gogh line of low-power Ryzen APUs, which is the first APU that uses the RDNA 2 architecture. The Steam Deck's SoC features a 4-core, 8-thread Van Gogh APU with Zen 2 CPU and an RDNA 2.0 GPU that's more powerful than the AYA Neo Vega handheld.

Nintendo will reportedly miss its Switch hardware production target as worldwide markets continue to squeeze limited chip supply.

Sources close to production lines tell Nikkei Asia that only 24 million Switch consoles will be manufactured for Nintendo. The company had originally planed to produce at least 30 million units and this new revision sees a significant -20% reduction in supply. If accurate, this also means Nintendo will miss its internal Switch shipment target of 25.5 million for Fiscal Year 22.

The reduction is caused by a component shortage that's affecting production, manufacturing, and shipments of electronics ranging from video game consoles to graphics cards and phone processors. Microsoft and Sony have warned consumers that their respective consoles will also be limited through 2021 and 2022.

Hideo Kojima is re-writing a script that was created nearly a year ago, and it's possible Death Stranding 2's development has been rebooted.

Earlier this morning Hideo Kojima confirmed he is revising an old project to reflect the significant changes in his creative process brought on by COVID-19. Kojima explains his new process here.

"I'm reworking a project & script I wrote almost a year ago. The world situation, my environment, emotions last year are quite different now, so I can't put myself in the same world I was thinking of then. I have to bring it to the present. If I don't, it won't become a living thing," Kojima explained.

If you can believe that Battlefield 2042 is nearly here, then you'll be pleased -- or maybe disappointed -- to know that the PC version of the game is the only one that will have support for ray tracing.

NVIDIA will be super-powering Battlefield 2042 with support for both DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) for AI-boosted performance, while Reflex technology will take care of your flick movement. Graphics-wise, EA DICE have used Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion into Battlefield 2042, and it's only on the PC.

Battlefield 2042's inclusion of Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion will "accurately adds shadows where game elements occlude light. Be that between a soldier and a wall, a tank and the tarmac, or foliage and the ground". You'll need the GPU chops to drive it: a DXR-capable graphics card, which of course is best on GeForce RTX with its dedicated RT Cores to boost ray tracing workloads.

It appears today is the day for the PC trailers of both of the largest first-person shooters of 2021: Battlefield 2042, and now Call of Duty: Vanguard. Check out the PC-focused trailer to Call of Duty: Vanguard below:

The PC trailer to Call of Duty: Vanguard was accompanied by the full PC system requirements, where we now know you won't need terabytes of storage to install Vanguard -- rather, 36GB of storage space is required for the Multiplayer/Zombie modes only, while 61GB is required for the Recommended/Competitive/Ultra 4K.

You're going to need an Intel Core i3-4340 or AMD FX-6300 processor or better, but the developer recommends an Intel Core i5-2500K or AMD Ryzen 5 1600X while competitive mode has the Core i7-8700K or AMD Ryzen 7 1800X processors, but at the top for Ultra 4K you're going to need an Intel Core i9-9900K or AMD Ryzen 9 3900X processor.