Latest News - Page 2091

Some would say Assassin's Creed Origins revived the series with a new feel, and for those looking to replay the title all over again are in luck as a New Game+ or hardcore mode is on the way.

Community manager for Assassin's Creed Origins, Dominik Voigt answered a question on the Origins subreddit regarding the progression of bringing a New Game+ mode to the title. Voigt answered the question by saying "New Game + is coming. We'll have more information to share soon."

Voigt didn't specify any exact date, so it really isn't much to go off, but nonetheless Assassin's Creed Origins fans are more than happy with the statement as Ubisoft will "have more information to share" will us soon.

Human Head Studios has released a new trailer for Rune: Ragnarok, an open-world RPG based in the times of Nordic gods and epic battles.

We can see from the trailer that the game is entirely based around Norse mythology. Even though this is pre-alpha footage of the game we can see examples of gameplay such as: dragons, riding dragons, giant sea creatures and fighting.

It is quite clear from the title as well as from the trailer that Rune: Ragnarok is set in a time when Ragnarok is actually taking place, the gods are descending on earth as well as fighting and dying.

Atari want to see RollerCoaster Tycoon make its way to the Nintendo Switch this year, to do this they have started a crowdfuning campaign with a stretch goal of $1.07 million.

Atari has teamed up with a crowdfunding platform named StartEngine to bring a new version of the 90's themepark management game RollerCoaster Tycoon to the Nintendo Switch this year.

To hit the stretch goal of bringing the title to the Nintendo Switch this year, Atari have set a goal of reaching $1.07 million. According to the StartEngine website, investors or pledgers can only invest $250 or more as that is the minimum amount that has been set on the site.

Not too long ago we saw that Metal Gear Survive will feature micro-transactions and will also require a constant internet connection. Konami has now updated the information surrounding the game, by releasing the official PC requirements to run the title.

According to the official requirements listed on the Steam Store page, Metal Gear Survive won't require much power hardware wise to play. The minimum requirements are only a Intel Core i5-4460, 4GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 (2GB) graphics card, which isn't too bad considering some requirements for other games released these days.

For the 'recommended' requirements we are looking at an Intel Core i7-4790, 8GB of RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 graphics card. Metal Gear Survive will be using DirectX 11 and will also require 20GB of free HDD space. I have provided screenshots of the official Steam Store requirements below for those interested.

I love Audio-Technica products, I still have a pair of ATH-AD700 headphones that I've used for nearly 10 years and they still sound amazing. On the topic of Audio-Technica, they have recently unveiled a limited-edition version of their popular ATH-M50x, the ATH-M50xBB Professional Monitor Headphones.

Featuring bold metallic blue earcups, black accents and distinctive A-T trimming branded on the earpads and headband, the ATH-M50xBB is designed to produce an unmatched experience for the most critical audio applications, including recording, live sound, broadcast, DJ and personal listening. This is largely thanks to its 45mm drivers that incorporate rare earth magnets and copper-clad aluminum wire voice coils that is enhanced by sound-isolating earcups that together produce exceptional clarity throughout an extended frequency range, with deep, accurate bass response.

In the this day and age where mobility is critical, A-T have included a collapsible design space-saving portability and convenient storage along with detachable cables. But don't worry, professional-grade earpad and headband material ensure you that these headphones will deliver comfort and durability that I can personally vouch for.

Battlefront II didn't hit its projected 10 million copies sold during the holiday quarter, and EA affirms that monetization will return...when it's ready.

According to Wall Street Journal reporter Sara Needleman, Electronic Arts didn't meet its internal sales quota for Battlefront II during the massively important holiday season. During its third quarter of fiscal year 2018, EA wanted to sell 10 million copies of the game, but missed that figure by 3 million units and instead only sold 7m copies. In the same interview EA's CFO Blake Jorgensen affirmed that Battlefront II would sell another 1-3 million units before the end of the current fiscal year on March 31, 2018. Jorgensen also said in-game purchases would return to Battlefront II once the developers at DICE had made a proper solution.

"We'll do it when we think it's ready," Jorgensen told the Wall Street Journal.

EA says it's committed to the Star Wars brand--and as it should be--but what about a new Battlefront? The next couple of fiscal years should paint a more unique picture for the company's Star Wars focus.

In it's latest fiscal Q3'18 earnings, EA says it isn't sure when the new Battlefront will release. Remember that Respawn--who was just acquired by EA--is working on an action-based Star Wars game. Also there's Visceral Games' Star Wars game Project Ragtag, which was ultimately cannibalized by the publisher when Visceral was shut down, and will be re-shaped into something different.

"We haven't confirmed games for our Fiscal 2020 yet, but remember we have a Star Wars action game that the team at Respawn has been working on for the last few years, and most likely that would drop in our Fiscal '20 versus another Battlefront," EA CFO Blake Jorgensen said during the earnings call.

It Lurks Below is David Brevik's new game, and it's very Terraria-esque.

As a hardcore Diablo nerd who absolutely adores Diablo II (especially the Lord of Destruction expansion) and dies a little inside when thinking about how badly Blizzard botched Diablo III's launch, I'm always fascinated any time I hear about David Brevik, who helped the series come to light. While the veteran game dev isn't working on Diablo IV (or whatever Blizzard will call it), he's chipping away at a neat little indie game called It Lurks Below.

The game itself is a roguelike dungeon crawler that looks a whole lot like Terraria, and even shares a functional in-game world that can be destroyed or customized by players. Apparently Brevik is a huge fan of these types of games: "I wanted more of a point to a lot of those games," Brevik said in a recent interview with Polygon. "I wanted to make an RPG, with classes and leveling up, random items, where you get more and more powerful as you go down into the core of the world and fight baddies."

Electronic Arts' latest fiscal Q3'18 earnings show just how powerful live services are, especially when a big anti-publisher controversy hits.

In the third quarter of EA's Fiscal Year 2018 timeline, the publisher made three times as much from live services than full game downloads. Remember that live services include in-game purchases and microtransactions from PC, console and mobile games, as well as subscriptions like EA/Origin Access, DLC, and other digital non-full game purchases. In the three month period from October to December 2017, EA raked in a huge $787 million from live services, up 39% year-over-year. Full game downloads, however, were down by 27% year-over-year to just $260 million--that's over a half a billion dollar's difference.

Live services made up a whopping 64% of the company's digital segment revenues, whereas full game downloads pulled in just 21% of the quarter's segment earnings. In trailer twelve-month figures, which group the quarter with the last 9 months of earnings, live services have made EA $2.035 billion, up a mighty 30% year-over-year and representing about 60% of total trailing twelve-month digital earnings. Conversely, full game downloads didn't even break a billion dollars in the period, sitting at $682 million, or about 20% of total segment earnings for the period.

The engagement model is incredibly lucrative for companies like EA, who typically make billions a year from live services, so don't expect this trend to change any time soon.

In its recently reported its fiscal Q3'18 earnings, EA once again demonstrates its success with the player engagement strategy. This business model sees a multitude of optional in-game purchases (microtransactions, cosmetics, etc) being riddled into games with key online elements, such as Battlefront II and FIFA, and EA makes quite a bit of cash from this strategy. In fact, in the three month period from October through December 2017 EA made over $700 million from live services, a segment which includes subscriptions, DLC, and microtransactions.

According to EA's CEO Andrew Wilson, this trend isn't going to change: microtransactions are basically here to stay. Despite the big pushback from Battlefront II, in the earnings call Wilson said that the monetization model can basically enhance and expand their games--and he's really not wrong. But what could be construed as wrong is how EA decides to go about implementing their optional purchases.

Samsung have today launched their new 800GB SZ985 Z-SSD, this Z-SSD is designed for advanced enterprise applications that include supercomputing for AI analysis, IoT and other big data applications. Samsung's latest Z-SSD is able to deliver exceptional performance, reliability and ultra-low latency that state-of-the-art AI applications demand.

"With our leading-edge 800GB Z-SSD, we expect to contribute significantly to market introductions of next-generation supercomputing systems in the near future, enabling improved IT investment efficiency and exceptional performance," said Jinman Han, senior vice president, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering at Samsung Electronics. "We will continue to develop next-generation Z-SSDs with higher density and greater product competitiveness, in order to lead the industry in accelerating growth of the premium SSD* market."

The new single port, four-lane Z-SSD features Z-NAND chips that provide 10 times higher cell read performance than 3-bit V-NAND chips, along with 1.5GB LPDDR4 DRAM and a high-performance controller. This impressive hardware is able to provide random write speeds of up to 170K IOPS, 1.7 times faster random read performance at 750K IOPS and five times less write latency at an incredible 16 microseconds when compared with an NVMe SSD PM963.

Epic Games' worldwide creative director, Donald Mustard has answered a fans tweet about his thoughts on bringing Fortnite to the Nintendo Switch, Mustard replied with a solid "Yes."

It appears that cross-play between platforms might be the next step in the evolution of the gaming industry, as many developers are compromising with each other in hopes of connecting their audiences. Epic Games is one of these developers, as the worldwide creative director wants to see Fortnite go portable on the Nintendo Switch.

When Donald Mustard was asked by a fan if he was interested in bringing the title to the Switch, he replied with "Yes. Yes I am. Hopefully we do that at some point!."

EA has confirmed in their earnings call that Anthem will be postponed for release until Q1 2019, while CFO Blake Jorgensen insists there is no delay on development.

Jorgensen has said that "It's not a delay" but instead EA are more so concentrating on the release of their next Battlefield game which is a fair point considering what happened with Titanfall 2 and Battlefield 1 in 2016.

If EA are carefully planning out accurate release dates, that is more than a fair enough reason to postpone the scheduled date until early next year, as this would provide great benefit for Anthem's initial release.

EA recently had their 2018 earnings call with Andrew Wilson, CEO of EA revealing what kind of impact PUBG had on their company and how they are going to tackle the success of the Battle Royale genre.

Most people are wondering if EA are going to be adding a Battle Royale mode to their already existing games, and while Wilson did not rule out that option, he said that his team is working on "new and innovative ways to play" instead of making carbon copies. Wilson continued by saying that this is the primary goal for EA at the moment, as the company is dissecting the different aspects within games that drive player engagement.

"I think what you discover in this industry is that there's a lot of great vectors that drive player engagement, and one of those is just innovation in the core gameplay mechanic. What the team with PUBG have done is really delivered a new level of innovation that changed the way people were playing first-person shooter games. And we're very respectful and complimentary of what they've been able to do. We've seen that continue with Fortnite. It's clearly a mode of play that the global FPS population is interested in." said Wilson.

Monster Hunter: World is off to a great start selling 5 million copies in just the three days after release, according to an announcement from Capcom.

A press release from Capcom was released yesterday detailing the success of their new title. Capcom announce that across both PS4 and Xbox One, Monster Hunter: World has hit a new series record in sales.

The sales on both PS4 and Xbox One include digital downloads as well, and since the developer has already reached 5 million sales in just the first three days they kindly remind us that the game isn't even out on PC yet.

Bluepoint Games the developer handling the remake of Shadow of Colossus, has explained in a new video the lengths they have gone to remake the classic PS2 title for the PS4.

Bluepoint Games has taken the massive task upon themselves to remake the title for the PS4, the developers in the video say the mission of remaking the game has been an "honor" and more-so the PS4 release is a complete rebuild of the game but still harbours the classic PS2 feel.

Bluepoint talk about when they were remaking the title how important it was for them to respect the older release but still manage to incorporate upgraded textures without taking away from the original feel of the 2005 version of the game.

Rainbow Six Siege has recently tweeted on the games official Twitter page that their current roadmap includes support for both the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X.

Rainbow Six Siege or Ubisoft responded to a fans tweet saying support for the PS4 Pro/Xbox One X "would make the game even better." Ubisoft said that support for both consoles is "definitely on our road map" but sadly the company "do not have an ETA for it though."

It would not be surprising if the developer is working on 4K textures, HDR and lighting improvements before they add support. As this would account for the extra time being taken and also be a very smart move for the developer.

Sea of Thieves has got some of the best water effects we have seen in a game so far, and now to add to that amazement information has surfaced regarding more weapons being added, and also a kraken.

Reddit user m4rx has taken to the Sea of Thieves subreddit to reveal potential weapons, chests, potions, foods, enemies and much more after data mining the Sea of Thieves beta files.

The data mining has shown files regarding a Kraken, a boarding axe weapon, harpoon gun and even some ship customization options. It is not confirmed that all of these files will be made available once the game is fully released, but that doesn't mean it isn't a possibility. A full list of the datamined files can be found here.

Not too long ago we found out that the release date for Age of Empires: Definitive Edition, as players would of guessed, it will be released exclusively to the Windows Store.

In a recent interview with GameStar, Microsoft producer Jorg Neumann has claimed that the reason Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is a Windows Store exclusive is because of Valve's lack of cross-play.

"There are certain things that are important to us, and in multiplayer games, we want to make sure our fans can play together. Therefore it is not okay if someone buys the game in one store and another in the other, and then - for some strange reason - they cannot play together. We're totally against it, and our only way to make sure of that is Xbox Live."

On the Fortnite Battle Royale subreddit a disabled fan going by the nickname of RAOBJSheff posted a new thread describing how he goes about playing Fortnite, and how Epic Games can improve his experience.

RAOBJSheff explains that he is unfortunately one-handed but this doesn't stop him and his friends from jumping into a game of Fortnite. The problem is the auto-run feature that Epic Games has added, RAOBJSheff requested to reddit for this to a toggle option as this causes him to die more than he would like to.

Here is what he had to say on the reddit post: "I lack the subtle movements a thumb can provide on the left stick so have to press it hard against my cheek bone to play. The new autorun feature means I constantly run and now fall out of buildings, off walls and die way more than normal."