Latest News - Page 1715

Warcraft 3 Reforged seems to ultimately betray everything about its legacy playerbase by carving out some of the best parts of the classic RTS.

Classic Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne apparently doesn't exist any more. Anyone who fires up Warcraft 3 will be forced to upgrade to Warcraft 3 Reforged, the new remaster form of the beloved real-time strategy game. With this forced update comes the elimination of many core fan-favorite features including custom campaigns (yes, really, Blizzard killed this feature), which are user-created RPG campaigns shared across the community for over a decade, as well as a frustrating mess of bugs and aggravating UI changes.

Warcraft 3 Reforged also forces users to the Battle.net 2.0 framework, which eliminates features like profiles, so you can't check anyone's stats (including your own). The chat pane gets in the way of the game searching panes. For some reason clans have been nixed (a big, big mistake), and there's no way to play custom versus against players from other regions.

343 Industries originally wanted Halo 1 PC beta testing to start this month, but that's not going to happen. Neither Halo: Combat Evolved PC testing nor Halo: Reach's major bug fixes have a release date, and 343i warns gamers that it could be some time before the updates are out.

343i confirms it has made "great progress" on patching some of Halo: Reach's most notorious issues--crouch behaviors with M&K, lag, latency drops, audio issues, etc.--but the patches might not roll out for a while. This also goes for Halo 1's incoming PC beta testing. They've been delayed as the studio works on fixes for other games.

The team will actually beta test the updates before they're released, a process 343i calls "flighting". The tests will go through multiple phases before they're released to the public. Reach's update tests haven't actually begun yet, and won't start until it fixes up the current issues with Halo Wars 2. So Halo: Combat Evolved on PC and the Halo: Reach updates are pretty much waiting for testing, but the flights won't open until the team is done shoring up other issues.

Today Sony announced February 2020's free PlayStation Plus games, and they're pretty damn good.

Irrational Games' landmark BioShock trilogy headlines this month's free PS Plus offering. The full BioShock Collection is free starting February 4, complete with all three classics--BioShock, BioShock 2, and BioShock Infinite--with all singleplayer and multiplayer content also included. This is a great opportunity to experience the series before BioShock 4 drops for next-gen consoles.

The other main PS4 game is The Sims 4, EA's mega-popular hit that's generated hundreds of millions of revenue for the publisher. PlayStation VR owners are also getting a nice little bonus. 4v4 FPS multiplayer game Firewall Zero Hour is included to inject some enthralling gameplay for PSVR gamers.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer envisions a world where games feel and look amazing, and the Xbox Series X's new CPU is the key to making it happen.

The new 8-core, 16-thread Zen 2 CPUs found in next-gen consoles might be the biggest leap over current-gen. The new CPUs will enable tighter frame rates when paired with custom Navi GPUs and SSDs that feed textures and assets at a quicker rate. The Xbox Series X has been tooled from the ground up as a highly synergized system whose parts work together to fuel a new era of gaming spec, whether it be 4K 60FPS, 1080p 120FPS, or even 8K.

According to Phil Spencer, this gen is all about making games more streamlined and fluid. Xbox One X was about 4K, but it was missing the CPU headroom needed for near-universal FPS gains. Thanks to its new CPU, the Xbox Series X will do both, and marry high-end visuals with similar high-end frame rates.

The original game ArcheAge was released back in 2014 and quickly rose to success, garnering many loyal fans. However, many players were turned away from the Pay-to-Win aspects of the game, so the developers decided to offer something new and refreshing. With ArcheAge: Unchained there is no longer a subscription model, players simply need to purchase the game and they can play as much as they want!

Players get to experience the fantasy world they know and love but this time on equal ground. If you're looking forward to jumping into the game but you're not sure where to start, then we have you covered.

If you find yourself running low on storage you can buy the Otherworld Storage Chest from the credit shop. This chest is considered furniture and you can put it in your house. The chest comes with 100 slots where you can store all sorts of items that you don't want to carry around. The chest is also only accessible to you so you don't need to worry about another player sneaking into your house behind you, stealing all your gear, and selling it for ArcheAge Unchained gold.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of the most famous astrophysicists alive, has taken to his personal Twitter account to give everyone a friendly reminder about our solar system.

In the above Tweet, we can see an image of what appears to be our solar system, but something is strangely inaccurate. Earth appears to be a flat disk instead of a sphere like the rest of the planets? This is a depiction of what flat earth conspiracy theorists believe is the proper shape of Earth, instead of what established scientists have confirmed for years -- a sphere.

Tyson states that flat Earthers (flat earth conspiracy theorists) biggest fear is the "sphere itself". Here's the full statement: "It's well known: What flat-Earthers fear most is Sphere itself". Of course, this is just a friendly poke at a group of people's beliefs, but there is a string of truth to it. If the Earth happened to be flat, it would contradict all knowledge that we have of other planets being spherical shape. It would also put a lot established physics into question as well.

Facebook really wants to turn around the privacy controversy that has surrounded its platform for quite some time now. So, in the "next few weeks," Facebook will be asking its user base to review their privacy settings.

According to a blog post by Facebook Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, on Facebook's new website, Facebook wants to start the new decade off on the right foot by giving its users more control over their privacy. The post continues and says that "over the next few weeks," a privacy setting prompt will appear in users' news feeds that will encourage everyone to check out their privacy settings and make sure everything is secure.

The blog post says that "One of our main goals for the next decade is to build much stronger privacy protections for everyone on Facebook". To work towards that goal, Facebook has updated the Privacy Checkup tool to make it even easier for people to adjust who can see their posts, profile information, login locations, login alerts and generally any information a user would deem "sensitive". If you are interested in deep diving into the blog post, you can check it out here.

Nintendo has released update 7.0.0 for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, adding the last fighter for the first Fighters Pass and adding a bunch of changes to a range of different fighters.

Firstly, this is a large update, which isn't surprising because every rounded number update (5.0.0, 6.0.0) are large and come with a lot of changes. Update 7.0.0 contains Byleth, the new DLC character (screenshots below), the Cuphead Hat + Outfit, Atair Hood + Outfit, Rabbids Hat, MegaMan.EXE's Helmet + Armor and X's Helmet for Mii fighters. There have also been a bunch of Spirits added to the Spirit Board as well as a tonne of changes to most of the cast.

Getting into the fighter changes now. It seem that majority of the cast have gotten "Increased shield size". Fighters that received changes are as follows; Donkey Kong, Link, Samus, Dark Samus, Yoshi, Kirby, Fox, Pikachu, Captain Falcon, Bowser, Ice Climbers, Sheik, Zelda, Dr. Mario, Pichu, Falco, Young link, Ganondorf, Mewto, Mr. Game & Watch, Meta Knight, Pit, Dark Pit, Zero Suit Samus and Snake.

As expected, Pringles have taken over Rick and Morty in a new advertisement that recommends and a new flavor of Pringles.

The above ad has been released on the official Rick and Morty Twitter page and showcases Rick and Summer sitting in their house watching TV. On TV a Pringles ad just finishes showing off a triple-layer-dip-stick, Summer then asks Rick "how much do you think Pringles paid these people?", Rick then replies, "hardly anything". This is a tongue-in-cheek dig at Pringles not paying Adult Swim enough money for this advertisement.

Morty then enters the room, asking Summer and Rick if they want to combine some Pringles flavors to create a whole new flavor. Rick then realizes that Morty is, in fact, a robot and that everyone is trapped in a Pringles commercial. A bunch of more robot Morty's then enter the room chanting "stack Pringles and make endless new flavors".

British Airways has just announced it has suspended all flights to and from mainland China, a move made after Britain warned against all but essential travel to China because of the on-going coronavirus outbreak.

British Airways said in an email: "We apologise to customers for the inconvenience, but the safety of our customers and crew is always our priority. Customers due to travel to or from China in the coming days can find more information on BA.com". British Airways isn't the first airline to make a bold move like this, with South Korean airline Air Seoul stopping all flights to China over coronavirus.

Thai Lion Air also announced that it has stopped all flights between Thailand and Chengdu in southern China until February 10, while airlines including Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines letting crew wear masks on China bound flights. American Airlines is providing hand sanitizer wipes for flight attendants to use on all China bound flights.

The telescope we are talking about here is none other than the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is expected to launch in March next year.

According to the latest report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which does audits on government-funded programs, the JWST only has a 12% chance of hitting its March 2021 launch date. The GAO did an analysis back in October on those participants who are working on the project, they evaluated the current progress and came to the conclusion that NASA should figure out a new release date in Spring this year.

Here's a little history about the JWST. The telescope idea was first created back in the 1990's and was originally estimated to cost anywhere between $1 billion and $3.5 billion. Back then, scientists expected that it would have been completed and launched between 2007 and 2010. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened, and costs have gone up exponentially (95%), and the launch date has moved further down the yearly timeline.

Tesla really showed its colors in 2019, as the company recently hit $100+ billion in market value and became the second most valuable car manufacturer in the world.

Now, some new statistics have come out revealing how Tesla managed to take that second place, knocking off German car manufacturer Volkswagen. According to Learnbonds, Tesla had a massive increase of 40% increase in car delivery productivity in 2019 in comparison to 2018. The data provided on their website indicates that Tesla sold 367,200 vehicles around the world in 2019. This is quite a hike up when compared to 2018's 244,920 vehicles.

Since 2016, Tesla is on the exponential rise of delivering more and more vehicles out to new customers. These sales are so apparent that throughout 2019 Tesla sold more vehicles than both 2017 (103,020) and 2018 (244,920) combined. These statistics are really quite promising; at this rate, the electric car manufacturer is paving the future road of more environmentally friendly vehicle options that other car companies are already attempting to jump in on.

If a game gets a lot of attention, there's only a matter of time before other developers rip off the core aspects of the title and create their own. So, why hasn't there been a good Pokemon rip off yet?

TemTem is that Pokemon rip off, and it's surprising that other developers haven't already tried to do this. Temtem developer Crema has taken everything great about Pokemon (besides the nostalgia), and applied it to Temtem while also giving the title a fresh visual art style.

The game starts with the players' mom waking you up on the day you are meant to become a Temtem tamer. Then the local professor gifts the player with their very first Temtem (sound familiar?). After that, players kick start their journey of battling wild Temtem, training and capturing them, and, of course, leveling them up to evolve. If you are a Pokemon fan and want to give a Pokemon-inspired game a shot, Temtem is currently available in early access on the Steam Store. A link to the Steam page can be found here.

AMD hosted their FY2019 earnings call today, with some new information provided by AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su on the GPU side of things. We are now learning there will be a Navi refresh this year, as well as the next-gen RDNA architecture.

Our friends at AnandTech have transcribed the call, where Lisa Su said: "In 2019, we launched our new architecture in GPUs, it's the RDNA architecture, and that was the Navi based products. You should expect that those will be refreshed in 2020 - and we'll have a next generation RDNA architecture that will be part of our 2020 lineup".

She continued: "So we're pretty excited about that, and we'll talk more about that at our financial analyst day. On the data centre GPU side, you should also expect that we'll have some new products in the second half of this year"

DOOM Eternal will not have ray tracing support at its launch, and while that might disappoint gamers -- it will be coming. The team at id Software love new technology, but DOOM Eternal's launch will see ray tracing missed.

One thing that DOOM Eternal has for it over any other game is that it'll be the first game powered by id Tech 7, with developer id Software talking about the game in great detail through DOOM Eternal executive producer Marty Stratton. In a recent interview video with Stratton, he said the team at id Software "are the biggest fans of new tech".

Stratton said: "Our tech team, they are the biggest fans of new tech. So it was a little hard to pull everybody off of that because it was the shiny new toy, but when we're talking about getting the game out there and getting it out as close to on time as possible and at the highest polished quality, we kind of had to pull back on that effort".

Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 are some of the best-selling games of all-time, but now developer Rockstar Games and publisher Take-Two Interactive have a gigantic milestone to celebrate.

The two games have a combined total of over 150 million units worldwide, which is a gigantic milestone in itself. Grand Theft Auto V is the best-selling video game of the last 10 years in US dollar sales alone, while Red Dead Redemption 2 is the top-selling game of the last 4 years in US dollar sales. Both of these games were made by the unstoppable Rockstar Games, which has been on a roll for over a decade.

Now for the sales split, we know that in November 2019 that over 115 million copies of Grand Theft Auto V had been sold, while Red Dead Redemption 2 sales numbers were hitting around 26.5 million units 1 year into its release. This means that nearly 10 million more sales between GTA V and RDR 2 have tallied up in the last 3 months alone.

The first early reports on the Taipei Game Show teased the Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt RED would be showing off brand new footage from the game, but an update to VG247's original post has squashed those rumors.

CD Projekt RED has said that there are "no plans for new content" at the Taipei Game Show, with VG247 adding that there will be "fresh presentation of content" that "we've seen before". CD Projekt RED has been slowly showing off more and more of Cyberpunk 2077 as time goes on, where I was personally privvy to behind the scenes footage from the game at E3 2019 last year and was blown away.

Cyberpunk 2077 was recently delayed until September 17, 2020 -- but we will see more of it at the Taipei Game Show, and again at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in March, and then again at E3 2020 in June before its release in September.

EA and DICE teased the reveal of Battlefield V Chapter 6: Into the Jungle just over 24 hours ago, and now here we are -- the official overview trailer is available for your viewing pleasure below:

Battlefield V Chapter 6: Into the Jungle will see gamers thrown into a new map with Solomon Islands, which has been built from the ground up for close quarter combat. You'll be battling it out in a beautiful Frostbite-powered jungle environment with mangroves, water, and hidden bunkers.

It wouldn't be a new Chapter of Battlefield without new weapons and gadgets, so the team at EA DICE have teased the Type 11 LMG and Model 37 shotgun for the Support class. If you're an Assault class player then you'll be happy to hear you will get your grubby mits on the M2 Carbine, which is going to make for some messy fun in those jungle environments.

Canadian musician Neil Young is about to never receive another music contract, ever -- as he called Apple's MacBook Pro a "piece of crap" during a recent interview with The Verge.

Young did NOT have anything good to say about the MacBook Pro, telling The Verge: "It's a piece of crap. Are you kidding? That's Fisher-Price quality. That's like Captain Kangaroo, your new engineer. A MacBook Pro? What are you talking about? You can't get anything out of that thing".

The main criticisms with the MacBook Pro comes from the fact Apple say they have the "best speakers" in a notebook, but Young doesn't think so. He continued: "The only way you can get it out is if you put it in. And if you put it in, you can't get it out because the DAC is no good in the MacBook Pro. So you have to use an external DAC and do a bunch of stuff to make up for the problems that the MacBook Pro has because they're not aimed at quality. They're aimed at consumerism".

AMD will be making big waves in 2020 with its 'Big Navi' GPU, something that is rumored to have more power than NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card and add hardware ray tracing support, too.

But now AMD has provided some more details on Big Navi, where during the Radeon RX 5600 XT press briefing, AMD's Radeon Product Management Lead, Mithun Chandrasekhar talked about Big Navi. Chandrasekhar said: "With the Radeon 5000-series we are essentially covering 90-something-percent of the total PC gamers today".

He added: "And so that's the reason why no 4K right now, it's because the vast majority of them are at 1440p and 1080p. That doesn't mean a 4K-capable GPU isn't coming, it is coming, but for here and now we want to focus on the vast majority of gamers. Similar to Ryzen. All of us need a thriving Radeon GPU ecosystem. So, are we going after 4K, and going to similarly disrupt 4K? Absolutely, you can count on that. But that's all I can say right now".