Latest News - Page 2157

Death Stranding is progressing on schedule and should be ready for its scheduled release date.

In a recent interview on Portuguese TV show La Noite, Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima drops a few new details about Death Stranding, his new weird/bizarre action game. It's been a while since we've heard any tidbits about Death Stranding--we know that Kojima Productions is in full development mode on the game, and that it stars Mads Mikkelsen, Norman Reedus, and Guillermo del Toro (among a few others who haven't been revealed yet). But all in all it's somewhat mysterious.

Thanks to Reddit user Gonicalized who translated and transcribed the video, we know that Kojima divulged a few new details including the game is currently in a playable state, development is currently on schedule, and all of the motion capture scenes have been recorded. Kojima also says that the game is currently in its "details" phase, hinting that the core engine work might be at least halfway done, but he's constantly shifting details and thinking up new things to incorporate.

Battlefront II almost had a similar skin-based lootbox monetization path similar to Overwatch, sources tell Venture Beat.

I'm sure by now you've heard about Battlefront II's hugely controversial lootboxes and progression system. DICE has been forced to not only overhaul the monetization system but they've actually pulled in-game purchases from the game altogether in a bid to make big changes and quell fan push-back. But according to anonymous sources, all of this could've been avoided.

Sources familiar with the matter told Venture Beat that Battlefront II's microtransactions were originally planned to be entirely cosmetic rather than the layered and intricate paying for the chance to win with StarCards, weapon upgrades, and more. But more importantly the game was originally meant to emulate a more consistent and balanced monetization path--something more straightforward.

Here at TweakTown we've covered CD Projekt RED's new game Cyberpunk 2077 for quite some time, but following the developer's recent remarks, some gamers think that Cyberpunk 2077 will be an entirely singleplayer experience. But our growing library of content on the game seems to say otherwise.

Given the current state of the games industry I've long thought Cyberpunk 2077 would be online-based and have some sort of monetization. But CD Projekt RED's recent comments on Cyberpunk 2077 have monetized games-as-a-service elements seems to have led people to believe it'll be singleplayer only. Of course CDPR knows exactly what they're planning and we can't contest that. But everything I've reported on the game so far tells me it should have online components of some kind--it'll be hard for the devs to reach their planned scope without them.

First up we have CDPR's grant from the Polish government. This $7 million grant is to help the studio build next-gen level worlds with "real-time AI and living cities" while also incorporating "seamless multiplayer" into the mix. In fact, everything about the grant seems to directly affect Cyberpunk 2077 in a number of ways. When combined the components give us an idea of what to possibly expect from Cyberpunk 2077.

Battlegrounds and Fortnite get all the Battle Royale hype right now, but that doesn't mean that we won't see more interesting... and maybe even on your feet, Battle Royale games.

Enter this ridiculous new creation 'Last Man Sitting' from Kevin Suckert, with the new game set as a battle royale-like game that sees you sitting in office chairs. The objective of Last Man Sitting is that you stay in your chair while throwing yourself around the room, with the game offering you a bunch of guns to fight with while you dodge other players.

Kevin teases the game on Twitter as "Last man sitting - a game about trust, friendship and the endless question about the meaning of life... Nah, just kidding, your booty is mounted on a chair and the only way to move is the recoil of your gun".

Apple's new iMac Pro is right around the corner, but now we're hearing that it will feature Apple's own mobile A10 Fusion processor that will be used for always-on 'Hey Siri' functionality.

The use of the A10 Fusion mobile processor is a first for Apple, but it isn't all sunshine and rainbows according to developer Steve Troughton-Smith, who took to Twitter to say that the A10 "Seems to handle the macOS boot & security process, as expected; iMac Pro lets Apple experiment with tighter control without the rest of the userbase freaking out". The developer added that unlike the Touch Bar, the inclusion of the A10 processors means the new iMac Pro might "always be running, even when macOS is shut down".

Furthermore, the developer adds that it "looks like the A10 in the iMac Pro is what boots up the x86 and passes it an EFI firmware to load. One could say that the x86 is the coprocessor, and the A10 is in control...".

EA has made a fool of itself yet again, which really shouldn't come as a surprise anymore, but have no seen hundreds of millions of dollars wiped off their stock prices over the microtransaction debacle in Star Wars: Battlefront II.

EA temporarily removed microtransactions from Battlefront II after an explosion of hate from fans, which would see some gamers forking out $2100 to fully unlock everything in the game. Well, Wall Street noticed a huge drop in EA's stock price at the end of trading on Friday, down some 2.5% which is a huge deal. CNBC reports that Bank of America Merrill Lynch are now predicting that Battlefront II sales are likely to "disappoint investors".

Analyst Justin Post wrote in a note to investors on Friday: "The escalation of EA concessions over the past month are a potential negative indicator of pre-order sales trends and overall unit confidence. In-game purchases benched the night before launch". Yeah, not good at all. He continued: "We think the strength of Ultimate Team could offset a 2-3 million unit shortfall for Battlefront, and remain comfortable with our FY18 estimates".

Tesla blew the world away with the announcement and reveal of their new Semi electric truck, with the first customer pre-order coming in from Canadian grocery chain, Loblaws.

Loblaws ordered 25 of Tesla's new Semi electric trucks, with 15 of them coming earlier to test, all without Tesla stating a price of their new Semi truck. Tesla's first sale coming from Canada is big deal for the American company, but it's a big one. These trucks will surely be some of the highest-priced trucks in the industry, but they seem to be worth it.

Especially when you consider that Loblaws has previously committed to a huge 30% reduction in its total carbon footprint by 2030, so the new electric trucks will be a very large party of that. Considering there's $200,000 in promised fuel savings every 1 million miles, Tesla's new Semi electric truck could change companies' carbon footprint in a very big way, all within a decade.

HTC has just announced they've opened up pre-orders for their new range of products based on the Vive Tracker, something that allows any real-world object to be tracked in VR. This will open up many doors in the VR world, especially in gaming.

Vive Tracker will see third-party products compatible with HTC Vive's tracking system; Lighthouse. The tracking system will plot their location and orientation, just how Lighthouse works with the bundled Vive controllers. The best use of the Vive Tracker right now would be with guns, with demonstrations showing off rifle handling and firefighting simulations with real equipment. Just imagine the next generation of arcades with AR/VR elements mixed with real weapons and Vive Trackers... mmhmm.

HTC has just shown off the first batch of Tracker-ready devices, something that will be ready for Santa to stuff into your Christmas sack. The first one that is being hyped is the new Hyperkin Hyper Blaster that will give you some nostalgic memories of Nintendo, CRT TVs and the original NES Zapper and Duck Hunt. Hyperkin is going as far as building a VR game based entirely around Duck Hunt.

To celebrate the upcoming home video release of 'Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,' we have ten Blu-ray copies to give away thanks to our friends at eOne Home Entertainment!

A universe without boundaries needs heroes without limits. In the 28th century, Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne) are a team of special operatives charged with maintaining order throughout the human territories. Under assignment from the Minister of Defense, the two embark on a mission to the astonishing city of Alpha-an ever-expanding metropolis where species from all over the universe have converged over centuries to share knowledge, intelligence and cultures with each other. There is a mystery at the center of Alpha, a dark force which threatens the peaceful existence of the City of a Thousand Planets, and Valerian and Laureline must race to identify the marauding menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe.

To go into the running to win a prize, post this article to your social media profiles and send your correct answer to the following question (along with your postal address), to ben at TweakTown dot com before the competition closes on November 24.

Intel has just increased its threat against Qualcomm in a very big way by announcing their new XMM 7660 LTE modem, something that will really push the limits of download speeds over our mobile devices.

The new XMM 7660 LTE modem from Intel is capable of reaching 1.6Gbps which is an incredible leap from the 1Gbps offered under Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 processor. Intel's new LTE modem will be one of the fastest in the world, and could be inside of the iPhone 9.

Intel will need to provide some real-world tests of the 1.6Gbps teased by its XMM 7660 LTE modem, but I think seeing 1.5GB/sec downloading onto my phone will be so scary I'd pass out. My 100Mbps fiber connection at home is already mighty fine, but 1.6Gbps from my phone? Holy hell.

Now that Bethesda's titanic RPG Skyrim is available on the Switch, many gamers are asking the million dollar question: does it run well or did the team botch the job?

Eurogamer's Digital Foundry dove right into the Nintendo Switch port of Skyrim for answers, and the results are actually pretty surprising. Bethesda apparently put lots of effort into scaling the massive game onto the portable platform. Of course the Nintendo Switch's Tegra X1 SoC doesn't match the PS4 or Xbox One's hardware, but it has an added bonus of portability that makes it a massively attractive platform for gamers. Sure the Switch's mobile hardware means Skyrim will have some drawbacks, compromises, and scaled tweaks, but ultimately the game looks and plays quite well in both handheld and docked mode.

Skyrim on Switch runs at native 1600 x 900 resolution while docked, and actually doesn't feature any dynamic resolution scaling while running the game in TV Mode. There are some trade-offs when compared to the PS4 version of the game, but the Switch port is definitely the remastered Skyrim Special Edition revamp that includes nice shadow, fog, lighting, texture and other effect tweaks. While in handheld mode, however, Switch runs at 1280 x 720 resolution (which is to be expected given the max panel res) with dynamic resolution scaling...but only on the horizontal axis. When running around in big open spaces the game can drop to 896 x 720 resolution with a few texture pop-ins and lowered effects.

Biomutant, an interesting-looking indie starring a bipedal sword-toting fox with a grasshopper companion, has been acquired by publisher THQ Nordic.

Experiment 101, the team behind the celebrated Biomutant, has been snagged up by THQ Nordic along with the rights to the game's IP. The team is made up of ex-Just Cause and Mad Max developers who bring a lot of talent into the fold (as evidenced by this creative, vibrant, and strikingly visual new IP).

"THQ Nordic is announcing today that it has acquired 100% of the shares from Experiment 101 AB, as well as the intellectual property of Biomutant the open-world, post-apocalyptic Kung-Fu fable RPG, which is now part of the THQ Nordic portfolio," the publisher said in a press release.

EA is one of the top games-makers in the space and has a large retinue of service games under its belt--in fact most of its current titles have a live component, and that's not a mistake. The publisher has found predictability in the software service model and will continue tapping this rich vein of potential for quite some time.

In the wake of Battlefront II's current controversy around lootboxes and progression issues, key EA execs remind us that live services are here to stay because of their advantages. Remember games are expensive to make, and publishers are risk-averse, so microtransactions, season passes, subscriptions and other schemes help mitigate that risk while giving a measure of power over its slate of games. We need not look far to see evidence of this mounting trend, but whereas companies like Ubisoft are somewhat new to the live service game, Electronic Arts has refined it to a science so to speak thanks to years of proven, calculated results.

Thanks to careful management, flexibility, and experimentation, EA says that live services that power games like FIFA and Madden have become more predictable, thus giving the publisher a very real control over its business.

French media titan Vivendi recently stated that it will not pursue a hostile takeover of Ubisoft for at least half a year, putting an interesting pause on the Vivendi vs Ubisoft saga.

In its latest quarterly filings Vivendi affirms that it will not keep purchasing Ubisoft shares to trigger a formal acquisition bid for the company. As of June Vivendi held 26.87% of Ubisoft shares and 24.47% of voting rights. Under France's Florange Law, Vivendi's stake in Ubisoft could double this month, which would force Vivendi to make a public bid. Experts say that Vivendi could expect to pay as much as $6 billion to acquire Ubisoft.

Now Vivendi states that its aggressive stance has shifted; the titan won't make a move on Ubisoft at least for the next sixth months. "Vivendi's investments in video games are generating value. Gameloft is the worldwide leader in mobile gaming downloads. The current unrealized capital gain on the Ubisoft investment is more than €1 billion. Given that this sector is the second largest in the content industry after music, the Group confirms its intention to continue to develop in this sector," the company wrote in its earning filings.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has sold over 20 million copies and sees over 2.5 million concurrent people playing the game each day, but thanks to NVIDIA we have three new screenshot of PUBG's upcoming desert map.

NVIDIA showed off the new work-in-progress shots of Battlegrounds' new map and I can't keep looking at them. They are a big change from the current map which is 8x8km, the upcoming desert map is smaller at 4x4km.

GameInformer explains the new Battlegrounds map as "The second map is 4x4km, and is located in a desert city. It was once a beautiful place to visit, but war ravaged its streets and sandstorms buried much of what remained. The south and east areas feature a canyon with a river running through it. Water from the river supports the small villages that remains after the city was destroyed. The north area of the island features hillside slums".

Tesla has officially unveiled its electric semi truck, something that goes by the simple name of Tesla Semi. The new Tesla Semi truck is a super-tall big rig that has Tesla's infamous minimalistic design. The side mirrors are the only thing on the Tesla Semi that protrude from the side of it, alongside the wing-like sensor array on the rear of the truck.

Tesla CEO and real-life Tony Stark, Elon Musk said that Tesla Semi has been "designed like a bullet".

Tesla Semi is capable of a 500-mile range, with a ton of built-in technology like Enhanced Autopilot. There are plenty of the usual big rig-specific features like jackknifing prevention, sensors for blind-spot detection and data logging for fleet management. Tesla has said that its new Semi truck will bne going into production in 2019, which isn't too far away - but with giants like Toyota and others starting in the electric truck business, Tesla needs to nail it quickly.

PowerColor is working on a new custom Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card, with the fully-custom PowerColor Radeon RX Vega 64 Red Devil featuring a huge triple-fan cooler and massive heat sink array that covers the entire PCB.

As you can see, the fan is quite chunky with the RX Vega 64 Red Devil being a 2.5-slot card, featuring two DIP switches that give you access to changing BIOSes and controlling the LED lighting on the 'Red Devil' branding at the top.

PCB wise it's not much different to the reference Radeon RX Vega 64 from AMD, with the same number of V-Core phases, but the PCB is wider to handle the beefed up cooler. We can expect 2 x DP and 2 x HDMI ports on the card, shifting away from the 3 x DP and 1 x HDMI on the reference card.

Samsung will most likely experience the biggest smartphone launch of all time when it launches its flagship Galaxy S9 smartphone next year, but with the increased threat from Apple with the new iPhone X, the South Korean giant could reveal the new Galaxy S9 in a few months time.

Italian tipsters are now teasing that Samsung will unveil the Galaxy S9 early, but didn't specify when. If we look back at previous Galaxy smartphone reveals, Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S8 in March around a month later than expected; at MWC in February. They delayed it to let the flames die down a little bit surrounding the explosive problems of the Galaxy Note 8 at the time.

India Today reports that Samsung will unveil the Galaxy S9 at MWC 2018 in February, but cites no sources. This is probably all rumor, but it's not going to be unexpected that Samsung launches the Galaxy S9 in March-April, with a reveal 2-4 weeks earlier at either MWC 2018 or its own Samsung Unpacked 2018 event in March.

Qualcomm is blazing towards its 5G dominance in the near future with a team up between ZTE and China Mobile, with the companies testing their systems for 5G networking which will deliver speeds like nothing we've seen before.

The companies have created an end-to-end 5G NR test system that is capable of a data connection based on the 3GPP R15 standard, meaning the companies are testing the quality of data transmissions over 5G networks that will one day replace 4G LTE networks. The upcoming 3GPP standard will be a big part of the global 5G radio rollout, marking the first time that a compliant data connection has been made between multiple vendors.

The demo was completed at China Mobile's 5G Joint Innovation Center and used ZTE's new 5G NR pre-commercial base station alongside a prototype 5G NR sub-6GHz chip from Qualcomm, which uses the 3.5GHz spectrum and supports 100MHz bandwidth.

Right after I published my story on the full unlocking of Star Wars: Battlefront II costing $2100 or over 4500 hours of playing the game, EA has temporarily pulled microtransactions from the game, a never-before-seen move from the company that has been voted Worst Company in America... something EA said they didn't want to be anymore.

DICE, the developer behind the game, has been quick to react with studio boss Oskar Gabrielson writing in a blog post: "We hear you loud and clear, so we're turning off all in-game purchases. We will now spend more time listening, adjusting, balancing and tuning. This means that the option to purchase crystals in the game is now offline, and all progression will be earned through gameplay. The ability to purchase crystals in-game will become available at a later date, only after we've made changes to the game. We'll share more details as we work through this".

This is why this story is so important, coming in off of my previous story on Battlefront II's ridiculous DLC system. EA has heard the backlash being shouted to from every corner of the internet and is reacting, a better way to do this would be not ripping gamers off in the first place. It's nothing new for the company, as they have been voted Worst Company in America before, but this is a new low... or high of $2100, depending on the way you look at it.