Latest News - Page 2082

This weekend gamers will be glad to know that Mohawk Games and publisher Stardock will be deeming their title Offworld Trading Company completely free-to-play.

Players will have to option of enjoying the titles single-player campaign or they can jump into the multiplayer features that are available. Unlike most real-time strategy games, Offworld Trading Company uses economics as the basis of weapons, where players will have to balance unique resources and make difficult decisions to see their civilization prosper.

The free-to-play weekend begins on May 6th at 1PM ET and during this weekend the title will also be discounted by 50% for anyone that wants to pick up a good deal. If you are interested in Offworld Trading Company check out the official Steam Store page here.

E3 2018 is going to be absolutely massive this year, and as usual we should expect a bunch of new and exciting stuff from Microsoft and their Xbox presentation at E3.

In a new blog post today, Microsoft's Mike Nichols said that the company has a "great briefing filled with new games" to unveil, continuing: "We're hard at work on exciting plans for E3, from what will be a great briefing filled with new games to the fan experience at the Microsoft Theater. This is our biggest E3 yet, and we look forward to a great week for gamers. Again, thank you to the amazing Xbox community".

Microsoft will kick off its E3 2018 event on Sunday, June 11 at 1PM PT / 4PM ET. Last year we expected the Xbox One X but now that's here and there's no next-gen Xbox expected this early, what will Microsoft show off? A next-gen Halo that pumps away at 4K 60FPS on the Xbox One X would be killer, but what else could steal the show?

It's not just Fortnite going through its new Season 4 update, but competing Battle Royale giant PUBG is having its Update 12 written to servers, too.

PUBG Corp is saying that Update 12 will have a bunch of new, balanced, and fixes in Battlegrounds. We can expect the new SLR, a new marksman rifle thats more powerful than the SKS, with 3x and 6x scopes, new grips, and a new muscle car that will be awesome to drive around in.

PUBG will see nearly every weapon in the game buffed or nerfed, with the developer tweaking assault rifles so that they do less damage, but then increased the damage of submachine guns. Level 3 helmets are now found exclusively in airdrops, which is going to change the game in a big way.

Intel and AMD are preparing new chipsets that are sure to confuse customers in the coming months, with AMD planning their beefed up Z490 chipset while Intel do the same with a suped up Z390 chipset.

AMD's upcoming Z490 chipset will be very similar to the just-released Z470 chipset, except the new Z490 chipset will rock new PCIe lanes when it drops in June. We should expect an 8C/16T variant of Intel's Coffee Lake CPUs, so think the Core i7-8790K, which will debut alongside the refreshed Z390 chipset.

Intel will be keeping its HEDT chipset around for a while, with X299 staying with us through 2H 2018.

Oculus has just unveiled its latest prototype VR headset, something it calls Half Dome. The new headset has an interesting twist in the world of VR HMDs by using varifocal displays.

These new displays move up and down depending on where you're looking in the VR world, with a tease of eye-tracking technology from Oculus in their new Half Dome prototype VR headset. Right now all VR headsets have trouble displaying items close to your eyes in a good way, with these new varifocal displays showing them much sharper and in more clarity.

Oculus has a wider 140-degree field of view compared to the Rift with its smaller 110-degree FOV, which lets you see more at the corners of your eyes in your peripheral vision. Even with all of the new tech on-board, Half Dome is the same physical size and weight of the current Rift headset.

Valve has such a good thing going with its Steam Hardware Survey, as it gives us a great glimpse into how the split between AMD and Intel on the CPU side of things, and AMD and NVIDIA on the GPU side of things, when it comes to PC gamers.

We now have the April 2018 data to look over, so I decided to take a closer look at mainstream graphics cards being used with NVIDIA still sitting at #1 with the GeForce GTX 1060 absolutely dominating the charts. NVIDIA holds the top 14 positions with GeForce GPUs, and then they're met with the Intel HD Graphics 4000 as their only competitor at #15.

AMD's first appearance in the charts is with their Radeon R7 Graphics in position #19, while the Radeon R5 Graphics takes #24, and then the RX 480 slides into a much lower position at #27. What about the new mainstream Radeon RX 580? Yeah well that has only appeared in the Steam Hardware Survey for the first time in March, with just 0.29% of Steam gamers using AMD's mid-range champion.

We know that NVIDIA will be launching their next-gen GeForce GTX 11 series graphics cards in the coming months, but the mobile series arriving soon after would be quite the surprise.

According to a GIGABYTE UK notebook rep that posted on the OverclockersUK forums, NVIDIA has scheduled the mobile GTX 11 series "towards the end of the year". Someone asked if there would be a higher-spec Aero 15X laptop coming out soon, as they didn't want to buy something now if a new product was around the corner.

'Atom80' replied, saying: "the range coming in now will be stable and not having any additional refreshes until the next gen of GPUs is announced. Currently scheduled more towards the end of the year".

With God of War, Sony Santa Monica now holds the mantle for the fastest-selling exclusive of all time.

In just three days time the newest God of War game sold over 3.1 million units worldwide, Sony today announced, making it the quickest-selling PlayStation 4 console exclusive. The game has been hailed as a near-perfect experience from countless critics and remains sits at a highly coveted 94 on Metacritic.

Apart from hardware sales, like most hardware-makers Sony puts strong emphasis on software sales on its PlayStation Network and in retail stores. It'd be interesting to see the digital/retail mix for God of War and I'm sure Sony is glad it's focus on singelplayer-driven games keeps paying off.

It feels like forever since we've had a super crazy fast graphics card released, with the 1-year anniversary of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti already here, and we're inching towards the 1-year anniversary for the Radeon RX Vega, too.

But what advancements do we have to drive us into the world of 4K 120FPS on a single card? It looks like TSMC might have something upj their sleeve with the Taiwanese manufacturing giant unveiling something new: Wafer-on-Wafer (WoW) technology.

WoW technology stacks layers vertically instead of horizontally, meaning multi-GPU graphics cards could be stacked similar to HBM2 technology.This means that we can have even faster single graphics cards packing dual-stacked GPUs and one lot of VRAM, truly pushing the boundaries of what is possible without worrying about multiple graphics cards.

Hi-Rez Studios has announced that their hero based shooter Paladins, will be debuting from Steam Early Access in the very near future.

The Executive Producer for Paladins, Chris Larson has commented on the games full release, here is what he had to say "Even now, with Paladins a million times more polished than it was at the start of Early Access, we do not consider Paladins a truly "finished" product. We know there's still work to be done. We are going to keep polishing, keep refining, keep fixing bugs, and keep putting out awesome new content on a regular patch cycle."

At the moment there is over 25 million Paladins players and to keep those players happy Hi-Rez Studios has said that they will not be implementing anymore system changes to the title. Paladins will be fully releasing onto the Steam Store on May 8th.

After yesterdays leak of Taki joining the Soulcalibur VI roster Bandai Namco has followed up with a official release of the trailer as well as a bunch of screenshots.

The above video is the official character reveal for Taki returning to the Soulcalibur roster after not being in the previous game. From the released screenshots we can see that there has been some changes to Taki, the glowing symbols on her skin tight spandex is quite a nice touch as well as the color effects for her short swords seem to look very good.

Currently Soulcalibur VI is planned for release on PC sometime closer to the end of the year. For now though, if you are interested in anymore character reveal trailers check out Nightmare's big introduction and his other half Siegfried, as well as the CD Projekt RED character Geralt, as he ventures into the universe of Soulcalibur. Screenshots of Taki are located below and if you would like to view the many more that are released visit Bandai's website here.

At the beginning of April we heard about Steam Link adding support for the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, now we have official confirmation that Steam now supports the Switch controller.

Valve has come out and said on a post on their news section "We're pleased to announce that the latest Steam Client Beta adds support for the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller. We think it is a great device with a feature set that pairs nicely with your Steam catalog. The d-pad is ideal for fighting games and platformers and the gyro enhances aim in your action/FPS titles. If you'd like to test it out you will need to opt into the Steam Client Beta then follow the steps below. We hope you enjoy and, as always, we welcome your feedback."

They also have provided users with a step-by-step tutorial on how to enter into the Steam Client Beta as well as the configuration steps to get your Nintendo Switch Pro Controller to work on Steam. "First, opt into the Steam Client Beta then enable support globally by checking the 'Nintendo Switch Configuration Support' option in the Controller Settings page. In case you missed it, this is the same page to enable PS4 and Xbox Configuration support. By checking this box, you are able to create, share, and browse Switch Pro Controller configs on a per-game basis. The Controller Settings page also contains a global option to 'Use Nintendo Button Layout'. This will swap the A/B and X/Y buttons of your loaded config - something that will come in handy if you choose a Steam Controller, Xbox, or standard template config."

Not to long ago we heard about the release date for the Summerset expansion coming to the Elder Scrolls Online. Now, Bethesda has released a new trailer introducing the Psijic Order.

In the above video we get introduced to the Psijic Order, which is detailed to be a old faction that was dormant in Tamriel. Players will have the choice of joining the Psijic Order and will be able to utilize their abilities to defend against the enemies on the island of Artaeum.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Summerset DLC is releasing on PC May 21st and will also be coming to both Xbox One and PS4 on June 5th. For anyone interested in picking up the expansion the link to the official website can be found here.

There has been quite a stir of whispers and rumors regarding Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, but it seems Activision is much closer to the full reveal that is said to take place on May 17.

The company has sent out invitations to its upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Community Reveal Event, something that kicks off on May 17 at 10AM PT / 1PM ET. Activision hasn't said what exactly will take place on the day, but we should expect a deep dive of sorts into Black Ops 4.

Treyarch is developing the game once again, but outside of that we don't know much. We've heard that Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 has been inspired by Overwatch, another property that Activision owns through Blizzard. I can see Black Ops 4 having a Battle Royale mode to get in the huge frenzy that is Fortnite and Battlegrounds, but we'll have to wait and see what we get on May 17.

The hype is building for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, with Eidos Montreal boss David Anfossi revealing some very interesting details about the game in an interview with Electric Playground.

Anfossi said that they have optimized Shadow of the Tomb Raider for the Xbox One X so that it hits 4K 60FPS, but didn't provide any exact details. This means it could run at up to 4K but not native 4K, and up to 60FPS but not locked 60FPS, something I hope the developer confirms sometime soon.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider will be the "most beautiful game on the Xbox One S ever" according to Anfossi, so it's not just the Xbox One X that gets that optimization lovin'. The PS4, PS4 Pro and PC versions will all be tuned to their benefit, but Microsoft has a much closer relationship with Eidos Montreal and gets the special sauce.

Facebook has announced that there is a complete redesign of Messenger on the way, something that will make the chat app that is used by over 1.2 billion people much easier, and cleaner to use. Great news, especially after Facebook started throwing in everything but the kitchen sink into Messenger over the last few years.

Mark Zuckerberg, robot overlord and Facebook founder explains: "When you're messaging, you really want a simple and fast experience. We're taking this moment to completely redesign Messenger to focus on these ideas".

Messenger VP David Marcus said that the redesigned Messenger app will be coming "very, very soon" and it's something that the team has been slugging away at for a few months now. Facebook is doing something new by offering a dark mode, which is perfect for those who chat while in bed or dark areas, and those with OLED-based displays.

Intel is preparing for an earlier launch of its discrete graphics card than people know, at least according to my sources, and now we're seeing more proof of that with new GPU drivers.

Intel has launched its first-ever launch day graphics driver in history, something that marks the start of something truly new when the company launches its new GPU. The new driver has improved HDR support, Vulkan 1.1 support, fixes graphics problems in a bunch of games and other general issues.

We should begin to hear more about Intel's next-gen GPU technologies in Arctic Sound and Jupiter Sound, with these new GPU drivers the first step in a new direction for Intel.

Facebook Messenger is one of the most-used messaging clients on the planet, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that the social networking giant unveiled an AI-powered feature at their annual F8 developer conference.

Facebook announced that Messenger's built-in assistant 'M' will soon use AI to help you chat with people talking in different languages, translating it on-the-fly. The AI will detect which language you or your chatting partner are speaking, where it will pop up and offer automatic cross-translation.

The company will limit M to translating on the Facebook Marketplace for now, before shifting to deeper parts of Messenger and beyond. Facebook is rolling out across the US at first, which should happen in the next couple of weeks.

Overwatch fans will be pleased to know that Blizzard have announced their latest map, Rialto, will be going live this week after being used in the PTR in April.

Rialto will launch off the back of the start of Season 10 of Competitive Play, which started on May 1. Blizzard couldn't get Rialto ready for S10 and won't be addeded into competitive play for a little while yet, with the developer explaining: "This will help provide the community with plenty of time to learn how to play with the new map".

Brigitte is the latest hero to enter the realms of competitive play, with the new character enabled for Season 10. I'm a big fan of Overwatch as it's all I've played for the last few months, and she is already beginning to bug me. I can't counter her very well, and when a good player is playing Brigitte, it can really swing matches quickly.

Sony has filed a new patent that could use blockchain technology to better secure games sold on the PlayStation Store.

Blockchain is a unique avenue that can be used for a number of different applications, and even game publishers like Ubisoft and EA are experimenting with the tech. Interestingly enough Sony's latest patent aims at using the versatility of blockchain to safeguard its own games--and potentially those sold on its digital online network.

As is customary for patents, the document is quite long and meticulous, covering lots of iterations, methods, and permutations of use. The main focus "relates to digital rights management (DRM), and more specifically, to implementing the DRM using blockchains," according to the patent.