Latest News - Page 2350

After the mindblowing sale of Overwatch during Black Friday, Blizzard announced today's patch that they are going to put a new control map on PTR along with changes to Symmetra and Zarya.

The new control map, named Oasis, is based in the Arabic deserts. According to the patch description, it's one of the most sophisticated cities in the world of Overwatch. " A monument to human ingenuity and invention, researchers and academics from around the region came together to found a city dedicated to scientific progress without restraints. The city and its inhabitants are governed by the Ministries, a collection of brilliant minds who possess many secrets that have attracted the interest of powerful organizations from around the world." ,the post added

Oasis looks like a map with a blend of arabic culture and a futuristic decor with a busy traffic road beside it. Be careful players as getting hit by one of those cars can result in your death as this Lucio player finds out at the 0:38 mark. This map also features jump pads to help players avoid the dangerous driving of the local population.

After the foundation update and numerous curious fans returning to the game, No Man's Sky might have a chance of coming back, according to the steam reviews where it's "mostly negative" in contrast of "overwhelmingly negative".

Reddit user "ForeverANinja" noticed this change and posted it in the No man's sky subreddit in which he claims it's a "Victory" for the game.

Yet, as other reddit users commented, they would hold out on the claim and see if Hello games continue their effort to make the game better.

Well, it isn't new that fellow dataminers reveal to us future updates or events in games like what they did in Overwatch. This time, they reveal to us that maybe buggies are coming to No Man's Sky.

Redditor "eegandi" from the No Man's sky subreddit found a folder named BUGGY in the game files. With 'eegandi' explaining: "It seems that there are only material files in there, and no actual models". But as he digged in a bit further, he found a tire texture and manage to import the model in the game as you can see in the video.

Here's the tire texture he found:

AMD has been on the up and up this entire year, with the Radeon Technologies Group team reaching for the stars with its first new GPU architecture release under RTG: Polaris.

Polaris powered the Radeon RX 400 and Radeon Pro 400 series graphics cards, including the Radeon RX 480, RX 470, and RX 460. AMD aimed at the lower/mid-range markets where gamers are spending less than $300 on a graphics card, with around 80% of gamers falling into this category, concentrating on this market and owning it was an important first step for RTG.

But what about the high-end? The older Fiji-based Radeon R9 Fury X is an underwhelming card now with its limiting 4GB of VRAM, but impressive engineering work with the 4GB of HBM1 and the 28nm GPU on an interposer (the interposer sits under the GPU and HBM1, and is made like a chip as well). The work AMD did on the tiny Radeon R9 Nano at the time was just as great, my favorite card of the Fiji family.

A tragic accident shook the world three days ago. A chartered plane with a Brazilian division soccer team crashed near Medellin, Columbia, killing 71 people, leaving only six survivors.

The world is mourning all the tragically lost lives, and Brasil had declared three days of national mourning, while people around the globe are paying their respects to the victims.

As a response to the tragedy, Electronic Arts is giving all FIFA 17 players a free Chapecoense kit and crest so they can pay tribute to the tragically lost lives in-game.

The second day of the European Business Angels Network (EBAN) was dedicated to one of the most interesting technology topics and breakthroughs in recent years - artificial intelligence. The main speaker was IBM's Peter Hedges, one of the main experts in charge of the development of the famous Watson and head of IBM's cognitive computing in Europe.

Hedges started his keynote by saying that they started the Watson project ten years ago because they wanted to develop a system that can understand natural language. Just five years later, Watson has beaten the best players in Jeopardy.

"That was just the beginning. We later went on to teach Watson about medicine, finance, law...not so it could replace doctors or lawyers, but because it could be a great help to them", said Hedges, who has worked at IBM for over thirty years and still talks with the same enthusiasm like it's his first day at work.

In November, Elon Musk announced that he plans to choose a location for Gigafactory 2 in Europe next year. He also said that the factory would combine both the production of batteries and complete cars.

Of course, many European countries would be thrilled to become the home of the Gigafactory 2. And rightfully so because the Gigafactory would create between 6,000 and 10,000 direct jobs, and an investment of around $5 billion, says Electrek.

Portugal is using social media to try to attract Elon to their country. They formed a Facebook group called 'Bring Tesla Gigafactory to Portugal!' and they already have more than 25,000 members, and growing. The group description states: "Let's bring the European Tesla Gigafactory to Portugal! Invite your friends to this group, including Tesla employees. Let's show Tesla how welcome they will be in Portugal and how Portugal is the place to be for their new factory in Europe."

World AIDS Day, designated on 1 December every year since 1988, is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of the HIV infection. Governments, non-governmental organizations, and individuals around the world mark this day, often by organizing educations on AIDS prevention and fundraising.

In honor of World AIDS Day, Apple is offering ways for customers to join (RED) in its mission to create an AIDS-free generation. Apple is the world's largest corporate contributor to the Global Fund, founded by, among others, Melinda and Bill Gates and Kofi Annan. This year marks Apple's 10th anniversary supporting (RED) in the fight to end AIDS.

Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, said in an official statement:

Thanks to Redditor "bunnybowing" from the Rainbow Six Siege subreddit, we now know the countries that those 4 new CTUs from gonna come from.

The image comes from the Ubisoft China blog of weibo.com. According to it, year 2 DLC pass gonna be available on the 1st December. (That's the Chinese release date and not the North America one.) 4 new CTUs gonna be added coming from Spain, Hong Kong (China), Israel and South Korea.

For more information on this year 2 season pass, please read our post here.

2016 was a gigantic year for gaming, with literally too many games to list - but it's not the AAA titles that are driving digital distribution platforms on the PC like Steam, it's the new indie games that are blowing up on Steam.

38% of all games on Steam were released this year, a number that should have you gasping - 4207 new games have been released onto Steam this year, and remember - the year isn't over yet. Last year, 2964 games were released, while in 2014 there were 1772 new games, and compared to 2013 the number of games released has skyrocked from 565 in 2013.

Valve has been working with gamers since its inception, but in 2012 the company launched its Steam Greenlight initiative that saw Steam gamers voting on which games would be submitted into the Steam store. Valve didn't need to spend so much time going through all of the games submitted, and it gives gamers a more hands-on approach with what games were approved.

My brother, nephew, and I have prepared ourselves for today - the first day of the third season of competitive play in Overwatch. Blizzard has opened the competitive flood gates on both the PC and console versions of the game.

The new competitive season will include some changes that aren't quite here yet, and lets Overwatch players built up points that can be used to rank up, and be traded in for golden weapons, sprays, icons, and more. The changes include starting Overwatch players in lower ranks, where they can work their way up, instead of falling for the first few games thanks to half-baked matchmaking.

One of the things that Blizzard did, that I liked, is that you could still play "Off Season" competitive matches. Playing the off season matches allowed people who love the format, rules, and play style of competitive mode aren't waiting so long between seasons.

Capcom has a lot riding on the new Resident Evil 7 game, but during an interview with Eurogamer, game director Kōshi Nakanishi explained large golden nuggets of details on Resident Evil 7: Biohazard.

Nakanishi said that Capcom might have reached the original Resident Evil concept, saying: "It almost feels like this time around we were able to achieve the ideal image of what Resident Evil 1 could be. Given that you have all these photo-realistic environments and you're able to traverse through them with a first-person perspective, having that level of immersion, with all the latest technology, it was kind of cool to be able to be like, here's that very, very original concept from the very beginning, and we're able to take that vision and really apply".

Nakanishi talked about the enemy count in Resident Evil 7 "more frequent, more abundant, and at the same time it almost lessened them, almost cheapened the feel of each encounter". The team has put a lot of thought into what the adversary means to the gamer, with Nakanishi continuing: "At the end of the day, each adversary should represent a fear. Something that means when you encounter them you are scared. At the same time, because you're scared, when you do overcome them you feel a greater sense of triumph, so that's definitely something that we were trying to strive for".

MSI is no stranger to cooling technology, with the company announcing it has added a heatspreader to the M.2 slot on future - and I'm guessing, Z270 motherboards - as M.2 drives have been running very hot in some PCs.

MSI will unveil the new M.2 Shield cooler with its next-gen motherboards that will support Intel's upcoming Kaby Lake CPU architecture, led by the Core i7-7700K - which seems to be running into its own temperature-related problems. MSI's upcoming M.2 Shield SSD heatspreader is a metal cover with a pre-applied thermally-conductive gap-filling pad.

It won't matter which M.2 SSD you have, MSI's new M.2 Shield will fit onto it as it is hinged at the bottom, clamping down onto the M.2 drive as it's the larger surface - meaning it can take more heat from the NAND flash.

You can now buy Rainbow Six Siege next year season pass if you want to get all those DLCs at their day of release. Yet, if you still want the items from year one, you gotta buy that year one season pass or unlock them with in-game cash. Eugh...

The year 2 season pass gonna cost you $30. It will include every bit of content for Xbox One, PS4 and, of course, PC. According to Gameranx, here's what you can expect for year 2 content:

Operators and bonus DLC

Last Tuesday, Respawn Entertainment detailed the content of Titanfall 2 first DLC but, we only got a glimpse of the Ion Prime Titan. We only got words of it. Well, the studio have awarded us with an jaw-dropping trailer today.

The trailer show us in the first part how the new elite wingman pistol gonna look, follow by an execution animation from the new Ion Prime Titan, the newly integrated phasing into your enemy execution and finishing with another execution from the Scorch Prime Titan.

Here are some pictures of the content if you don't have the time to watch the trailer:

I can only imagine those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are reading news that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the use of MDMA (ecstasy) in large-scale trials.

The new Phase 3 research will see 230 patients involved, funded by Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), an organization that pushes for the medical use of marijuana, LSD, and MDMA. MAPS funded the Phase 2 studies of MDMA with 130 PTSD patients. One study showed that out of 19 patients, 56% said that their PTSD symptoms weren't as strong after taking ecstasy with just three doses of MDMA - by the end of the study, two-thirds of them no longer met the criteria required for having PTSD - impressive.

Andrew Parrott, a psychologist at Swansea University in Wales said: "It sends the message that this drug will help you solve your problems, when often it just creates problems. This is a messy drug we know can do damage". But it's not as cut and dry as that, with a C.J. Hardin - a veteran who did three tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, said: "I just felt hopeless and in the dark. But the MDMA sessions showed me a light I could move toward. Now I'm out of the darkness and the world is all around me".

We're swimming in a world with 14nm and 16nm products on the market, with AMD's new Radeon RX 400 series built on the 14nm FinFET process while NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 10 series and new Titan X are using the 16nm process - it's awesome. But, we're constantly looking to the future, right?

TSMC is said to be planning the production of 12nm technology, a new process technology that our friends at Fudzilla report will "enhance competition with 28nm and lower process nodes that have been adopted over the past few years". The new 12nm node will sit alongside the 16nm product portfolio, as a smaller option from TSMC that will better compete against Samsung and GlobalFoundries' offerings.

There are three different 16nm FinFET variations that TSMC makes, with high-performance options and ultra-low power uses where only 0.6v is used. 12nm should provide us with around 50% less power consumption, and 15% more power over current FinFET technologies, at least that's according to GlobalFoundries' recently-announced 12nm process utilizing Fully Depleted Silicon-On-Insulator (FD-SOI) planar technology.

The website and digital preservation service known as the Internet Archive is moving house to Canada in response to the election of Donald Trump. A known opponent of open internet, Trump has claimed he will close "certain areas" of the web in order to help curb terrorist communication.

"On November 9th in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change," the site writes in a blog post. "It was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change."

"For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and perpetually accessible; it means preparing for a Web that may face greater restrictions; it means serving patrons in a world in which government surveillance is not going away; indeed it looks like it will increase."

Netflix now allows subscribers to download specific content on mobile devices to watch offline.

Streaming giant Netflix today announced that subscribers can now download movies and TV shows to their mobile devices to watch offline, saving precious MBs in their data plans. Every subscriber of every plan will be able to download content for free, but you'll have to update the Netflix app to version 4.12.0 on both iOS and Android phones and tablets to use it. The feature is not available on desktops.

"While many members enjoy watching Netflix at home, we've often heard they also want to continue their Stranger Things binge while on airplanes and other places where Internet is expensive or limited. Just click the download button on the details page for a film or TV series and you can watch it later without an internet connection," Netflix Director of Product Innovation Eddy Wu said.

With Battlefield 1 smashing barriers and lauded as a triumphant FPS achievement, EA has no plans to make another Battlefield game for at least a couple of years. But the reason why isn't so obvious and straightforward: it's less about disturbing the actual series than it is about disturbing the game's engagement.

EA Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen details a critical look at the company's strategic plans when it comes to future games and the Battlefield series. Jorgensen affirms that EA's business model is focused on long-term engagement, which encompasses monetized content like microtransactions, DLC packs, downloads, and overall interest-driven content. So EA has no plans to quickly interrupt Battlefield 1's long-term engagement plan with another annualized release in the franchise--plus it doesn't want to "cannibalize" Battlefront 2.

"We won't have a new Battlefield back for a couple years. Next year we'll have Battlefront 2. But we're looking at all of our games and asking how might we provide additional opportunities for the player to engage them. The players want to engage deeply in the games. Our model internally isn't a financial model, it's purely 'how do we drive engagement,'" EA CFO Blake Jorgensen said at the Nasdaq 35th Investor Program.