Latest News - Page 1817

Borderlands 3's Epic Games Store exclusivity didn't stop it from moving huge sales on PC.

Borderlands 3 is a massive success for 2K Games and Take-Two. The sequel shipped over 5 million units in five days, and sold 50% more copies than Borderlands 2, making it the fastest-selling 2K Games title of all time. It's timed exclusivity on the Epic Games Store turned out to be a huge boon--not only did 2K enjoy a nice signing bonus and get to keep 85% of all game sales revenues, but Borderlands 3 sold more than any other 2K game on PC in that five-day period. Thanks to Borderlands 3's success, the series is now a billion-dollar franchise.

Take-Two notes that 70% of Borderlands 3 sales were digital, which is absolutely huge for total earnings. We don't know what percentage was from EGS sales, or how many copies actually sold on EGS, but we're betting most of the copies were on PS4 thanks to the system's massive 90-million strong install base. There's also no data on microtransaction earnings revenue but we'll probably get that in Take-Two's upcoming quarterly earnings report.

During the Sunday night Emmys a new trailer dropped for the upcoming Netflix film, El Camino: A Breaking bad Movie. The trailer follows the story of Jesse Pinkman the survivor of Breaking Bad's last episode.

From the teaser we can see that the movie starts straight after the events of the last episode in Breaking Bad's final season. We see a extremely distressed Jesse Pinkman sitting in the same car he drove off in, listening to the radio report about the events that had just been discovered by police.

The police are after a suspect who has fled the scene, and that is Jesse. Judging from this and the videos caption, I believe that the Netflix movie will focus around the events Jesse is going to have to experience, such as being on run from the police and moving on mentally from what has happened. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie will be released on Netflix on October 11.

U.S President, Donald Trump recently had a meeting with the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morison and discussed the future of space exploration.

During that meeting, Trump spoke openly about each of the countries roles that they will be playing when it comes to space exploration via the Moon and eventually Mars. He said that "We're stopping at the moon. The moon is actually a launching pad, That's why we're stopping at the moon. I said, 'Hey, we've done the moon. That's not so exciting.' So we'll be doing the moon. But we'll really be doing Mars."

Trump also reinstated that "We're going to Mars" and that U.S space program will eventually take them there, its just a matter of securing the Moon first. For those that didn't know, NASA plan on leaving Earth by 2024 as apart of their Artemis lunar mission, more on that here. Additionally, NASA will be working with other space exploration companies such as Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX.

As a Nintendo Switch user I'd definitely appreciate if I had the ability to be able to play Borderlands anywhere I wanted. The idea of having access to the looter whenever and where ever I want is definitely a big enough reason for me to re-buy the games.

This isn't the first time Borderlands being brought to the Switch has been brought up, as Gearbox Software boss Randy Pitchford once answered a fan reply saying that he "would love" to bring Borderlands to the handheld console. Since then it has been speculated whether or not the console could handle the title, and what kind of graphical downgrades it would have to undertake to see it run stable.

No announcements came for a Switch version, even after the release of Borderlands 3, but then during an interview on The Borderlands Show, Creative Director Paul Sage told Greg Miller, to "never say never". Could this mean that Gearbox Software are considering bringing the looter shooter over to Nintendo's console? Possibly, I could say positively that the company has considered the idea and when it would be possible for them to make it support the Switch, or if to hand it over to a porting company such as Panic Button.

It was only a matter of time before the awards started being thrown at Game of Thrones for its last season despite its controversial ending, and now the show has walked away from the Emmys with 12.

The Emmys which have just passed saw a number of different awards being handed over to the cast and production team of Game of Thrones. Peter Dinklage who players Tyrion Lannister in the show was awarded 'Outstanding Supporting Actor', he said that when he met Benioff and Weiss that "I had no idea what I was getting myself into." He continued and said "David and Dan, we literally walked through fire and ice for you, and I would do it all again in a heartbeat."

In total Game of Thrones was nominated for 32 Emmys and ended up walking away with 10 to its name. The awards were in the following categories: editing, makeup, costumes, sound mixing, sound editing, casting, music composition, title design, stunt coordination, and visual effects. Game of Thrones has created Emmy history now being the most decorated drama since the organization was founded.

Curve Digital and Kuju are collaborating as publisher and developer, respectively to release a new game based on the hit Netflix TV show 'Narcos'.

To celebrate the announcement of the new title two new trailers have been released, one for the cartel and one for the DEA. Judging from the trailers, players will be able to choose to play from a range characters from the TV show. Some of these characters include: El Mexicano, Murphy, and Primo.

Players will have to choose which side of history they are going to be on, the drug empire or the DEA. The game is a turn-based strategy title which means that each of the decisions presented to players could possibly have both positive and negative outcomes. This means that each decision presented to the player should result in the player carefully thinking out each play, as careless actions could have devastating outcomes. Narcos: Rise of the Cartels will be released on the Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4 and Xbox One sometime during the Fall of 2019.

According to NASA, their Pioneer Venus mission reached Venus back in 1978 and the craft discovered that Venus showed signs of past oceans on its surface.

Since that mission, NASA has discovered many more things about Venus' surface which gave them more data to be able to understand how the planet went from being "Earth-like" to what it is now. The data indicates that around 700 million years ago Venus experienced a Greenhouse Effect event that caused the now hot place it is. Which means that 2 to 3 billion years Venus could of had a habitable environment fit for life.

After the forming of Venus its development process was extremely similar to that of Earths, which means that the planets atmosphere at one stage consisted of a lot of carbon dioxide. Venus then went onto experience a massive outgassing event which is yet to be discovered by scientists. It is believed that this event was geological and was so massive that it caused 80% of the planet to resurface.

A new post on the PlayStation Blog has detailed the new partnership between the United Nations and PlayStation called Playing for the Planet.

The blog which is authored by the new Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) President, Jim Ryan states that SIE has made considerable commitments to reduce the amount of power consumpion their current and future consoles. They have done this by "utilizing efficient technologies such as System-on-a-Chip architecture integrating a high-performance graphics processor, die shrink, power scaling, as well as energy saving modes such as Suspend-to-RAM."

Ryan also says that as a result of these measures they have been able to avoid almost 16 million metric tons of carbon emissions, which would of also risen to 29 million metric tons over the next 10 years. Ryan also mentions the improvements that will be arriving with the PlayStation 5, according to Ryan "the next generation PlayStation console will include the possibility to suspend gameplay with much lower power consumption than PS4 (which we estimate can be achieved at around 0.5 W)."

Australia has formed and alliance with the US in NASA's upcoming space missions aimed towards re-landing on the Moon and eventually Mars.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently announced that Australia will be become involved with the United States' Artemis lunar program that targets a Moon landing by 2024. The announcement came out of the NASA Headquarters at a ceremony that was held in Washington. NASA Deputy Administrator, Jim Morhard, and Head of the Australian Space Agency, Megan Clark sat down and signed the new agreement (image above).

The agreement states that Australia will contribute to aspects of the lunar mission that they have a mutual interest in, such as "robotics, automation, and remote asset management". Morrison also stated that he will attempt to triple the Australian Space Agency budget to support the Artemis mission as well as the Moon to Mars mission that is planned for the future. Jim Morhard said "We are honored by today's statement and the commitment of our friends from Australia to support us in our mission to return to the Moon by 2024 with the Artemis program".

A recent study done by a team of psychologists released a new article in the American Psychological Association suggesting that if a school shooting occurred by a White person that people are much more likely to blame video games as a result.

The following researchers were apart of the team who conducted the study; Patrick M. Markey, James D. Ivory, Erica B. Slotter, Mary Beth Oliver, and Omar Maglalang. The study found that there is a stereotypical association between racial minorities and violent crime, which causes individuals to look for easily digestible explanations such as video games as the source of the problem.

The study also found that when a violent act of crime such as school shooting is carried out by White perpetrators that individuals are likely to blame video games more than if the perpetrator is Black. It is also stated that video games were talked about 8.35 times more frequently when the perpetrator is White than if he was Black. In other news about video games and their supposed link towards causing real-world violence, Oxford released a study at the start of the year putting the debate to bed, more on that here.

GALAX is doing things a little different with its new GeForce RTX 2060 Super Star graphics card -- offering a fully customizable shroud.

The company will be offering what seems to be a see-through cooling shroud with printable graphics underneath, meaning you can really create-your-own graphics card. You're limited to the GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER, so if it's a success we could see the company continue and expand it out to the RTX 2070 SUPER and RTX 2080 SUPER graphics cards.

Alternatively, if it takes off in any way I'm sure we'll see GALAX's competitors offer something similar. I think there is definitely a market for customization in graphics cards it'll just take the right company and the right way of handling it.

Microsoft has been making some great changes for gamers in Windows 10, and it looks like one of the best ones is now here -- an FPS counter built into the game bar.

The news broke with Mike Ybarra, the Corporate Vice President of Xbox Program Management, who tweeted the updated game bar with its FPS counter. The updated game bar will display real-time frames per second for your games, as well as an Achievements overlay.

Achievements in the overlay is a nice touch, a nice quality of life feature that will make keeping a tab on your achievements easier than going into a separate sub menu. I think the inclusion of an FPS counter is a much bigger deal, as more and more people like to keep a track of their in-game performance.

We've been wondering if it would even be unveiled, but yes -- AMD is indeed working on the third-gen Ryzen Threadripper range of CPUs, something that will be unveiled in November. The news comes after the delay of its R zen 9 3950X processor.

AMD has been shifting the goal posts on the release of the world's first 16-core gaming CPU, with the upcoming Ryzen 9 3950X expected this month but has been delayed into November.

The company said in its announcement on the delay: "We are focusing on meeting the strong demand for our 3rd generation AMD Ryzen processors in the market and now plan to launch both the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X and initial members of the 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen Threadripper processor family in volume this November".

AMD has just announced the latest and fastest-ever EPYC processor yet, the new EPYC 7H12 -- which beats out the previous flagship EPYC 7742 processor. The new continues to fill out the game-changing EPYC Rome CPU family.

The new EPYC 7H12 has been designed specifically for liquid-cooled servers and still maintains its industry-leading 64C/128T of CPU grunt, with 256MB of L3 cache, and 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes.

The big difference here with the new EPYC 7H12 is that it has a base CPU clock of 2.6GHz (the highest on any EPYC processor) and a boost CPU clock of 3.3GHz -- 100MHz short of the EPYC 7742. Power wise it is a much bigger beast, as it'll chew down a 280W TDP compared to the 225W TDP on the EPYC 7742.

Obsidian is already working on its next RPG for Microsoft, and it should have online live elements with possible monetization.

Now that Obsidian is wholly-owned by Microsoft as part of its new first-party Xbox banner, it's only natural live services fold into their upcoming games. Now we have more info on what the RPG masters are working on. The studio's next game will be RPG focused, it'll have some sort of multiplayer, it's being made in Unreal Engine 4, and it's likely a ways off.

The Fallout New Vegas devs put out a bunch of new job listings recruiting for a mystery RPG set in a new IP, calling for network engineers to "develop network and multiplayer gameplay systems using Unreal Engine" and combat designers to build first-person mechanics.

2019 marks Batman's 80th anniversary, a prime occasion for a big new game reveal. Now WB Montreal dropped some cryptic teasers for their upcoming Batman project.

WB Montreal has been developing a new Batman game for some time now. Evidence suggests the project is centered around the Court of Owls, but a series of new cryptic icons found in a WB Montreal Twitter video suggests the game will chronicle various villains, possibly even Ra's al Ghul.

Now an apparent insider says the new Batman game will be revealed during Sony's State of Play event this Tuesday. Warner Bros. has been exceptionally quiet on its new Batman games, including the rumored cancelled Suicide Squad title and Rocksteady's upcoming reported Justice League live game.

Minecraft is getting an RPG-like character creator that lets you customize your voxel avatar, complete with a microtransaction skin tab.

Minecraft was always prime for microtransactions and direct monetization. It has a dearth of skins to choose from, and both Mojang and Microsoft are eager to sell them in small piecemeal purchases. Now the devs revealed a new character creator that lets you customize face, hair, skin tone, emote-style expressions, skins, and much more. Of course there's a direct tab for the cosmetic microtransaction store, but the creator comes with a bunch of free skins and content to choose from. If anything, the creator is just a kind of quick start option, and it houses all of your owned, purchased, and downloaded skins too.

Mojang was careful to say you'll still be able to import your existing character/skins, and the creator is 100% optional. "We've got a little paid stuff in here, but most of it's free. We've got hundreds of free items," said the stream co-host. The intent is to provide new and existing users with an easy and convenient way to grab skins and jump right in versus having to download them.

We don't mean to rain on everyone's parade, but the recent Red Dead Redemption 2 classification denial in Australia probably doesn't mean what you think it means. It's likely not for a PC port.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is almost assuredly coming to PC. Missing out on PC sales is just leaving sales and microtransaction cash on the table. No one knows when, but Rockstar just rolled out its own proprietary PC games launcher to prep the platform for new titles. It could definitely be soon. But contrary to reports, the latest RDR2 classification denial in Australia likely isn't for a PC version of the game. The idea is the Australian Classifications board refused a listing for RDR2 on PC, but there's some holes in this theory.

Australia actually approved the Western shooter when it came out, giving it a restricted MA15+ rating. The original filing is for Red Dead Redemption II, the proper title of the game, and was submitted by Rockstar Games (see below).

Next-gen consoles like PlayStation 5 and Project Scarlett will be a boon for Take-Two's developers, and shouldn't skyrocket development costs for key titles.

Right now the entire games industry is gearing up for next-gen. Both the PS5 and Project Scarlett consoles pose interesting opportunities for big gameplay performance gains thanks to significant hardware jumps; the systems both sport high-end AMD Zen 2 CPU and Navi GPU tech, complete with built-in superfast PCIe 4.0 SSDs, full backward compatibility support, and a strong emphasis on visuals and frame rate perf.

With these new advancements it stands to reason developers will have to spend more to squeeze out even more performance from the hardware. But that's not exactly the case, at least for Take-Two, who's all but confirmed GTA 6 is in the works for next-gen. The non-substantial cost bump and next-gen's similarity with PC hardware could translate to a shorter development cycle, too.

Thanks to our friends at Universal Sony Home Entertainment, we have ten Blu-ray copies of the new release sci-fi blockbuster 'Men In Black: International' to give away!

The Men in Black have expanded to cover the globe but so have the villains of the universe. To keep everyone safe, decorated Agent H and determined rookie M join forces--an unlikely pairing that just might work. When aliens that can take the form of any human arrive on Earth, H and M embark on a globe-trotting adventure to save the agency--and ultimately the world--from their mischievous plans.

To go into the running to win a prize, post this article to your social media profiles, send your postal address to ben at TweakTown dot com and correctly answer the following question before the competition closes on 28 September.