Latest News - Page 2011

Guerrilla Games has poached key Rainbow Six: Siege development talent for its new secret game, and it could be multiplayer-driven.

Like most dev studios, Guerrilla has been quite busy in the last few years. First it crafted its new-ish high-end Decima engine that powered the excellent PS4 exclusive Horizon: Zero Dawn, and now the team is working on something new. Based on who the studio has hired indicates it's probably a next-gen Killzone game.

Two key players have joined Guerrilla to work on the new unannounced: Simon Larouche, who helped develop Killzone 2's multiplayer maps, and Chris Lee, who served a pivotal role in designing and implementing Rainbow Six: Siege's multiplayer. Both devs crossed over from Ubisoft where they worked on online-based MP experiences. Do you see the trend here?

Microsoft has formally announced its new Project xCloud game streaming service, which will stream console-grade Xbox games to mobile devices, laptops, PCs, and consoles, but it's still a ways off from release.

Using the power of Microsoft's cloud infrastructure, the Xbox brand is expanding past gaming hardware and will bring a new era of accessibility to gamers worldwide. Ever keen on making new subscription services and future-proofing its engagement strategy, Microsoft's new Project xCloud will essentially let players turn their smartphones into a portable Xbox One for on-the-go gaming. When it's ready. Right now it's far from finished and beta testing will begin in 2019.

The service has lots of hurdles and limitations in the way. It's still in early stages of development while Microsoft tweaks and hones its servers to tackle hard obstacles like latency, frame-rate dips, and preserving graphical fidelity while streaming. Remember the stock Xbox One (which isn't even sold any more) already requires lots of caveats to get games running on it, namely dynamic resolution scaling, and these trade-offs may be present in Project xCloud too. Thankfully the service will use Xbox One S console specs, and games like Halo 5 and Forza are already playable on smartphones via streaming.

Intel has finally unveiled the new 9th gen Core CPUs with the first processors off the new 9th gen series rank including the Core i9-9900K, Core i7-9700K, and Core i5-9600K. All of the 9th gen CPUs will work on current 300-series motherboards, as well as the new Z390 motherboards coming soon.

Intel is using a Solder Thermal Interface Material (STIM) on the new 9900K, something that should make some people happy with integrated USB 3.1 gen 2 and integrated Intel Wireless-AC connectivity. We also have up to 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes on tap, with Intel Optane memory and Optane SSD support a given, as well as Thunderbolt 3.

The new Core i9-9900K marks the very first time Intel has introduced an 8C/16T processor in the mainstream desktop market, with the CPU having a base clock of 3.6GHz and boost clock of 5GHz when in single/dual operation. Intel has the 4-core boost at 4.8GHz while 6/8-core CPU boost reaches 4.7GHz. Intel is keeping the TDP of the Core i9-9900K at 95W.

Intel has hosted its event in New York City to unveil their new 9th generation Core range of processors, with the introduction of the new 9th Gen Core and Core X-series CPUs.

The new flagship Core i9-9980XE is a beast, offering 18C/36T of CPU power with a base CPU clock of 3GHz and boost of up to 4.5GHz. There's a whopping 24.75MB of L3 cache on it, with a huge 68 PCIe 3.0 lanes and 165W TDP. Intel is pricing the new Core i9-9980XE at $1979, and it'll be available in the coming months. The company unveiled a full stack of Core X-series processors, ranging from 18C/36T down to an 8C/16T processor.

Under the flagship Core i9-9980XE we have five more Core i9 processors with the 9960X, 9940X, 9920X, 9900X, and 9820X. The last CPU in the Core X-series of processors is the Core i7-9800X. There's a lot of Xs here, especially when you consider its the Core i9-9980XE X-series CPU. X marks the spot, I guess.

Intel is expected to unveil its next-gen Core i9-9900K flagship processor really soon, with multiple teases of Z390 motherboards from the likes of ASUS, ASRock, GIGABYTE, MSI and more and now we're seeing the 9900K pricing for real.

According to an early listing on Amazon, the new Core i9-9900K will cost $499 and offer 8C/16T at up to 5GHz. The lower-end Core i5-9600K will be a 6C/6T processor at up to 4.6GHz with a price of $263. You should be able to buy the new Core i9-9900K processor on October 19, which isn't too far away from now.

This price could change and I definitely expect it to, so we could see Intel have an MSRP of $499 on the Core i9-9900K and that price could change rapidly with there not being much stock of the CPU. The Amazon listing has been pulled, while the Core i5-9600K listing on Amazon remains.

Global entry! We have teamed up with Antec this week to give away an awesome prize pack to one lucky winner. If you are looking at building a new gaming rig, you are going to want to pay attention to this prize pack for a chance at getting you well on your way to getting the job done.

Up for grabs is the Antec P7 chassis in beautiful red, the Antec High Current Gamer Bronze Series 750 watt power supply, and Antec's Prizm 120 ARGB 3-in-1 pack with fan controller and ARGB LED strips.

How to Win

The official gameplay trailer for the S.O.N (South of Nowhere) has been released by developer RedG Studios. The trailer brings a uneasy and uncomfortable vibe to potential players.

S.O.N immerses players within the story of Robert Alderson who is looking for his missing son Jay who disappeared deep into the Pennsylvania forest. From the trailer we can see that this title is definitely a psychological horror experience, as players move throughout the game there is undead corpses attached to tree's to create a unsettling environment, ambient sounds of potential threats approaching you, deafening silence and trails of where to go only lit by dull candles.

S.O.N is developed by RedG Studios and will be released exclusively for the PlayStation 4 on December 11th. For further information regarding the psychological horror title, visit the official S.O.N website here.

Most gamers that love cheap prices for games are quite familiar with the Humble Bundle monthly service, for those that aren't now is your chance to jump onto the bandwagon and pick up some great titles are some very low prices.

For those that don't already know about Humble Bundles, the Humble store gives players the opportunity to sign up to a monthly subscription service that offers around 10 games each month for just $12. Users that sign up to the service will acquire these 10 games that are valued at over $100+, to get the ball rolling Humble has issued their latest monthly bundle and it includes Hollow Knight, HITMAN: The Complete First Season and 7 DAYS TO DIE.

Other bundles found on the Humble website are the Square Enix bundle which includes NieR: Automata, Life is Strange Just Cause 3 and more. The bundle comes in at up to 85% off and includes numerous highly regarded titles, if you are interested check out the store listings for yourself here. Not interested in Square Enix titles? Well, Humble has another bundle that might just be for you, titled the 'Female Protagonist' bundle Humble has assembled a selection of titles such as Celeste, Tomb Raider GOTY Edition and Bayonetta. The bundle has been discounted up to 90% off and can be found here. If you are interested in any of the Humble Bundles a direct link to the website can be found here.

Dark Souls developer, FromSoftware has announced their stage line up for their game event held in Osaka Japan this coming fall.

According to the announcement, the developer will be holding their FromSoftware Game Event 2018 in Osaka Japan and the event will be completely free to anyone who decides to enter. During the event FromSofware will be addressing: Deracine, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Dark Souls Remastered, Metal Wolf Chaos XD and Armored Core.

If you happen to be around the location and want to jump into some early access playing, FromSoftware will also have playable games at the show. Games that will be available to the public are the following: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Deracine, Metal Wolf Chaos XD and the notoriously late Dark Souls Remastered for the Nintendo Switch. For further information regarding FromSoftware, visit their official website here.

Now that Assassin's Creed Odyssey has had some time to shine we can take a look towards how the title has faired up against its predecessor, Assassin's Creed Origins.

Ubisoft released Assassin's Creed Odyssey on October 5th and since the titles release gamers have taken quite a liking to the fresh installment into the Assassin's Creeed franchise, even despite its high level of grinding. According to the games Steam statistics, the title has already passed the maximum number of concurrent players that Origins had. Odyssey has already brought in a peak of 61,984 players, while Origins only had 41,541, meaning that Odyssey brought a 66% increase in players when comparing the previously released game in the series.

If you happened to miss the Assassin's Creed Odyssey 'defy fate' trailer be sure to catch up on that here. In other new about Odyssey, Ubisoft are also bringing out a new patch for the title, below you will find the full patch release notes. Assassin's Creed Odyssey is currently available on the Xbox One, PS4 and PC. If you want to check out the Steam listing for the title a link to the page can be found here.

Insomniac Games' Spider-Man is arguably the best Spider-Man game released to date and with many gamers picking up the title a whopping 10% of them have acquired the platinum trophy status.

It seems that many of the gamers that decided to pick up Marvel and Insomniac Games' Spider-Man have been attracted to full completion of the title. Despite the game being a open-world RPG many gamers have pushed the boundaries of trophy completion by not stopping for just for the golds, the goal seems to be the road to platinum and ultimately full completion.

Discovered by ResetEra member 'Certinfy', players can jump onto the trophy list and see that for Spider-Man 10% of players that purchased the title have played the game to the very end, resulting that pretty platinum trophy. In comparison, other Insomniac Games titles such as Ratchet and Clank have only achieved 2.8% completion rate in the platinum category. The fact that Spider-Man is sitting on 10% is quite impressive, even if platinum status isn't overly hard to acquire it seems many players have been attracted to completion which shows quite a substantial level of enjoyment for Insomniac's latest release. Spider-Man for the PS4 is currently available.

AMD is rumored to be refreshing the refresh of their Radeon RX 500 series with PCOnline reporting that AMD is preparing Polaris 30 to launch in mid-October which is strange, considering that's only days away.

Polaris 30 will first power the Radeon RX 570 successor which I'm guessing will be the Radeon RX 670, with 2048 stream processors on the new 12nm node. We should expect higher GPU clocks thanks to the shrunken node, with Polaris 10 and 20 being made on the 14nm process.

This card would feature 8GB of GDDR5 on a 256-bit memory bus and should be somewhere in the $200-$250 price range and will reportedly launch on October 12-15.

We're only a few days out from the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, with developer Treyarch posting a new community update on Reddit addressing some of the things to expect in the game.

COD: Black Ops 4's upcoming battle royale mode 'Blackout' will be frame rate capped on the PC at launch, with Treyarch limiting the PC version to 120FPS at first. There will be an uncap to 144FPS "as soon as the servers are stable" and a total removal of the frame cap in the days post-launch/.

The normal multiplayer and zombies modes in COD: Black Ops 4 will be uncapped at launch, so if you have a 144/165/240Hz monitor you will not have a problem.

Square Enix's big new Avengers game may tap the power of next-gen systems like Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5 and Microsoft's new Xbox Scarlett family of systems.

Crystal Dynamics has been working on its new Avengers project for quite some time now, and a recent job listing hints the game could target both current and next-gen systems. A senior software engineer job opening wants candidates to have "experience with current and next gen platforms: Xbox, PlayStation, and PC," which is particularly interesting because those systems aren't out yet. This could simply be a mix up in terminology, or it could point to next-gen devkits being out in the wild.

This shouldn't be a surprise, however. Devs typically get access to scaled devkit tech years ahead of release as to optimize their games and become familiar with the hardware. This also helps platform-makers innovate and iterate on the system using valuable feedback gleaned by devs. Depending on how the next-gen console landscape works--whether its iterative or a full leap ahead of the PS4 and Xbox One--we could see two outcomes: games released on both platforms with different generational versions, e.g. the Xbox 360 version of GTA V versus the Xbox One flavor, or the same game that's scaled to use more hardware power, e.g. a game running on PS4 versus PS4 Pro.

As the latest screenshots show, Red Dead Redemption 2's Old West territories haven't been fully tamed just yet. Outlaws prowl the prairies ready to rob you at gunpoint.

Danger, mayhem, and general savagery are prevalent themes in any Western. Rockstar's latest Red Dead Redemption 2 won't disappoint in this regard: as outlaw Arthur Morgan you'll do plenty of stick-ups and murdering in 1899 frontier America. Everything we've seen thus far shows a world on the cusp of a more civilized time, but bands of ne'er-do-wells like the Van Der Linde gang are ready to go out with one last explosive bang. And that means guns, lots of guns.

Rockstar Games just released a new batch of screenshots that further shows us what to expect from RDR2's gritty world. Gunfights and duels, madcap robberies, bar-room brawls, and dead men walking with clinking boots and fast shootin' hands--all of these things and more are waiting for you in Rockstar's new opus.

In a creation that defies the laws of nature, YouTuber Shank Mods has jammed a Wii into an Altoids tin.

Described as the "worst thing ever" and aptly named the Kill Mii, Shank's console-in-a-tin is one the most interesting madhouse creations from the modding community. The Kill Mii is a portable Wii whose guts have been recompiled to fit into an Altoids box (a feat Frankenstein might be jealous of), and features a 2.5-inch composite screen with two 3DS sliders as analog sticks. Inside the curiously strong mint-box is a "heavily trimmed" Wii motherboard with re-wired components.

"In our community the joke 'can you fit into an Altoids tin?' has been a long-running joke. And only recently have we figured out that with a Wii it's actually possible," Shank said in the video.

Rather than being a big grand adventure into the heart of ancient Greece culture during a tumultuous historical period, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey feels like a grind-fest that only gets more demanding over time.

Ubisoft's big new Grecian Assassin's Creed game is quite layered with ways to soak up your entertainment time. Now I know all games in the series are time sinks, but Odyssey feels like it's been specifically designed to prolong gaming sessions through artificially stretching things out. I find myself lost in the plethora of distractions, whether it's gathering materials, discovering loot, buying new items and upgrading old ones, and questing--all of which don't feel engaging or necessarily rewarding. In short, Odyssey feels like busywork at the beginning, and it probably doesn't get much better as time goes by.

Right from the start Odyssey felt a bit off. Origins started out with an interesting and rather exotic look and feel, and pulled me right into Bayek's life. But Odyssey starts off rather drab in this respect. After beating up a few bad guys I ran around the island, looting and exploring. Picking up a group of mats, I realized that old familiar chore would be back--looking for deposits, killing fauna for skins, and looting millions of containers for random rewards. All so I could get better so I had a chance of taking on enemies and progressing the story.

Telltale Games is no more, but there's a silver lining: their last creation will be finished and released.

The gaming division of Robert Kirkman's Skybound Entertainment announced that they will help complete The Walking Dead: The Final Season. This makes a lot of sense considering Kirkman's company licensed the horror IP to Telltale, and the negative press surrounding the game studio's closure has likely bled through to the franchise in general. But this move is more than just avoiding bad press: it's an effort to wrap up Clementine's feels-ridden story and conscript Telltale devs for one last hurrah.

Past reports indicated that "scab" studios would step in to help Telltale develop the final chapters of the series. Skybound Games has stepped in to take control and is working to get past TTG veterans on the project. The season pass for The Walking Dead: Final Season was removed from the storefront as Telltale wasn't sure if the remaining chapters would actually happen, and reports indicate it fired the "skeleton crew" that would've finalized those missing releases.

Text: To celebrate the release of 'Solo: A Star Wars Story' on home video, we have five Blu-ray copies of the film to give away thanks to our friends at Disney Home Entertainment!

Young Han Solo finds adventure when he joins a gang of galactic smugglers, including a 196-year-old Wookie named Chewbacca. Indebted to the gangster Dryden Vos, the crew devises a daring plan to travel to the mining planet Kessel to steal a batch of valuable coaxium. In need of a fast ship, Solo meets Lando Calrissian, the suave owner of the perfect vessel for the dangerous mission -- the Millennium Falcon.

To go into the running to win a prize, post this article to your social media profiles, correctly answer the following question and send your postal address to ben at TweakTown dot com before the competition closes on October 10.

Fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson (of Mistborn fame) really likes CD Projekt RED's dedication and prowess, and has expressed interest in handing off the Mistborn IP if the game dev should want to adapt it.

On the heels of the Witcher author Andrzej Sapowski's demanding more money from CD Projekt RED, well-respected and popular writer Brandon Sanderson contemplates giving the beloved developer free access to the Mistborn IP. What follows could be a wondrous new high fantasy series that taps the rich vein of Sanderson's work using the studio's incredible interactive storytelling.

"I'd love to do something with CDPR. They've made by far the best book-to-video game adaptations ever. It's the sort of thing the rest of us salivate over--if for the simple reason that the entire genre (books, film, and games) benefit from something high-quality on the market like the Witcher games," Sanderson said in a recent Reddit post surrounding CDPR's recent legal issues with Sapowski.