Latest News - Page 2359

Twitchcon today yields three new games from an unlikely source: Amazon. The online retail and other stuff company's newish gaming division is currently working on a unique sports title, a sandbox MMO, and a survival MMO.

Breakaway is the sports title and features the basic 'put the ball in the hole' premise, except players can fight each other, place structures, and use various abilities and items along the way. As well, the ball will behave differently depending how long you hold it. Amazon is giving it the eSports push, too -- it will be exciting to see if it takes hold or not.

Next is New World, a sandbox MMO with a supernatural 17th century theme. In it, you work with others to build societies or lone wolf it while fighting off monsters and bandits; dynamic weather, time of day, and different seasons keep it interesting.

The expectations Microsoft had for the Xbox One seem to be impossibly high, according to Xbox boss Phil Spencer saying that they had hoped for 200 million sales of the [at the time] next-gen Xbox One.

Stevivor recently spoke with Spencer, where he said: "The goal that the team had was to figure out how could we sell 200 million game consoles. We've never seen a console sell that many units. The biggest individual console, the PS2, did 120 million or something like that. The approach the team took was people are moving to OTT Video Services [over-the-top, like Netflix and Stan] and television's getting disrupted--and if we could build a console that could be at the center of this transition and really embrace not only people playing video games, but also people with the changing habits in television, you really take the console market and the gaming market and you expand it potentially".

Microsoft had an original vision for what would become the Xbox One, where it was to "start up building TV content as a first-party capability", said Spencer. Xbox Entertainment Studios was a division Microsoft created for TV and film content on the Xbox One, but once Spencer replaced Don Mattrick - who left for Zynga, he repositioned the Xbox brand with gaming, and Xbox Entertainment Studios was closed.

An Apple customer in Dijon, France was apparently so unhappy with the company's customer service that he decided to smash equipment in his local Apple Store this morning.

In the video below, you can see him in the store using a steel ball like the one used in the French game Pétanque to destroy Macs and iPhones, while talking about his rights as a customer and how poor Apple's customer service has been in his case. It doesn't take long before security shows up and escorts him out, at which point he becomes difficult and later, tries to escape.

It's said police have since taken the man into custody.

Battlefield 1 is my most anticipated game of 2016, but my obsession of Overwatch will have to stop... at least for a few days. EA has released some new screenshots of the single-player campaign for Battlefield 1, days after that awesome new trailer.

DICE has also detailed each of Battlefield 1's new unique War Stories campaign structure, with each having an anthology-style setup with different perspectives and nations throughout the war. Sadly there's only five campaign missions--our original estimates put it at six.

The five War Stories include:

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is looking better and better as new screenshots are released, but the latest ones are the best ones yet. The developer also announced its new distribution plans, with the news of Deep Silver stepping up and joining Koch Media to distribute Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

Koch Media has been, and will continue to handle the worldwide distribution channels and main publishing of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, while developer Warhorse Studios is "solely responsible for worldwide PC digital distribution", leaving Deep Silver to handle the physical PC versions of the game.

Warhorse Studios said: "we stand behind the vision of Kingdom Come: Deliverance and retain freedom in the development of our game. We will keep our communication as open and honest as we did from day one of our Kickstarter campaign".

When the news broke that there was movement on a Portal movie two years ago now, gaming fans began letting themselves quietly excited, and now that excitement ramps up with J.J. Abrams teasing there will be a Portal announcement "fairly soon".

When speaking with IGN at the red carpet premiere of Westworld, the Star Wars: The Force Awakens director said: "We have a meeting coming up next week with Valve, we're very active, I'm hoping that there will be a 'Portal' announcement fairly soon". IGN asked if the upcoming Portal movie would be a continuation of the world in the game on the PC, with Abrams not wanting to spoil anything, he said that he's working with writers who understand and love the world of Portal, and will "get" the game and storylines.

Abrams continued: "We are having some really interesting discussions with writers, many of whom...once you said you're doing a movie or show about a specific thing that is a known quantity you start to find people who are rabid about these things. As someone who loves playing Half Life and Portal, what's the movie of this, it's incredible when you talk to someone who just 'gets' it, it's like, oh my god, it's really the seed for this incredible tree you're growing".

So after a bunch of our readers and Facebook fans told me to get Forza Horizon 3 for testing my extensive range of PC hardware, and just finding the damn game in my library after I purchased it was more hassles than I've had since the DOS days of PC gaming.

Seriously. Once you find the damn game, it takes so long to load after you're logged into, and approving 50 different accounts. This is how long it takes to load into Forza Horizon 3, on a Core i7-6700K, 16GB of G.Skill 4000MHz DDR4 RAM, and a super-fast Kingston HyperX Predator 480GB PCIe-based M.2 SSD. Ridiculous.

It throws up a message to let me know my drivers aren't the latest set, too.

Microsoft has been making big inroads into the laptop and tablet markets with its Surface brand of products, but now it looks like the company is making a move for your desktop with an all-in-one Surface desktop PC.

It makes sense, since Microsoft is the creator of Windows - so a Windows 10-powered Surface-branded desktop PC would be an eventuality. According to The Verge, Microsoft is going to announce its Surface AIO PC imminently, as soon as late October at a launch event in New York City.

Microsoft will announce its all-in-one Surface PC alongside various Surface-branded accessories, like the purported Surface Ergonomic Keyboard that turned up on a listing for the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG). The Surface Ergonomic Keyboard makes more sense with an AIO PC, versus a new keyboard for the current Surface.

We all know how superior the PC is to console hardware, with even future consoles from Microsoft and Sony not being able to begin a thumb war against PC hardware, let alone beat them - and now Microsoft has admitted it, too.

Microsoft's Senior Director of Product Management & Planning, Albert Penello, recently spoke with The Guardian about PC gaming's renaissance, and the huge leap in technology happening on PC. Penello said: "In the last five years, there's been a real renaissance in PC gaming, and that's happening with NVIDIA and AMD investing in really high-end performance - to the point where PCs have eclipsed consoles much more significantly than ever before. In fact consoles used to lead PCs and it would take a while for them to catch up".

Well yeah - duh, Microsoft. You're putting APUs into consoles that are slower than mid-range PCs from 5-6 years ago, and even Xbox Scorpio with all of its 'power', can't compete against a new mid-range card. This is all without the next-gen GPUs launching in 2017 that promise a good leap in performance over the current-gen cards, which already stomp all over the consoles.

Spotify could swell in size significantly if the reports of the company looking to acquire SoundCloud, with rumors that Spotify is in "advanced talks" to buy the company.

If the acquisition of SoundCloud goes ahead, Spotify would need to throw a pretty hefty amount across the table, but the deal makes sense from a business perspective. Spotify has been expanding constantly, from just albums to wider ranges of catalogs of DJ sets, demos, and other rough tracks, reports Engadget.

Spotify acquiring SoundCloud would give it a considerable edge against competitors Google, Tidal, and Apple Music that are always trying to get you into their services with artist exclusives (which sucks, by the way). Spotify's new acquisition of SoundCloud would allow for a future where you would listen to in-development songs, and then scope out the artist's commercially available music right away.

We're finally starting to see the performance of NVIDIA's purported GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, with the leaked information teasing that we're to expect GTX 960 like performance, without a PCIe power connector.

NVIDIA is expected to pack its GeForce GTX 1050 Ti with 768 CUDA cores, 48 TMUs, and 32 ROPs. We should see the GP107 GPU clocked at 1318/1380MHz for base/boost, respectively - a 250MHz increase over the GM107 GPU that powers the GeForce GTX 960. The texture fill rate on the GTX 1050 Ti is nearly doubled over the GTX 960, hitting 84 GTexel/s, while 4GB of GDDR5 at 7Gbps will be placed on a 128-bit memory interface providing around 112GB/sec memory bandwidth.

A post on Chiphell teases GTX 960 performance in 3DMark 11, but it'll be the price that determines if the GTX 1050 Ti is a winner. If it's priced at $149, it could be a great card for mid-range gamers, especially with a TDP of just 75W and no PCIe power connector required.

With all of the teases of NVIDIA's upcoming Volta architecture and Pascal 2.0 refresh aiming for 2017, we now have news of Team Red and their upcoming Vega GPU architecture. Our friends at Fudzilla have said that their "well-informed sources have confirmed that Vega 10, AMD's first HBM 2 card will by announced before the end of this year, at least for the professional market".

Now, the professional market launch arriving before the consumer Vega graphics cards makes sense, especially with HBM2 in tow. NVIDIA did the same thing with the Tesla P100 earlier this year, their first Pascal-based graphics card powered by HBM2, except it launched for the professional market first. Consumer graphics cards with HBM2 are still a while away, so expect them sometime in 2017.

AMD's upcoming high-end Vega 10 graphics card would feature 16GB of HBM2, the same type and amount of HBM2 used on NVIDIA's Tesla P100 professional graphics card.

It looks like the launch of AMD's new Polaris GPU architecture is doing wonders for the company, with Wells Fargo's David Wong taking a detailed look at Mercury Research's latest numbers on the discrete GPU market.

After reviewing the data on GPU market share from Mercury Research, Wong noted that AMD has already made significant gains. He said that the data proves AMD is stabilizing, where he said: "According to Mercury Research, AMD's unit share of the discrete GPU market increased from 26.2% in the December 2015 quarter to 29.4% in the March 2016 quarter. AMD's discrete GPU market unit share increased 4.8pp sequentially to 34.2% in the June 2016 quarter".

When it comes to the high-end graphics cards, AMD still isn't competing against NVIDIA yet, at least not with the Polaris architecture. AMD's new Vega architecture is the one that will compete with NVIDIA's enthusiast graphics cards, but won't hit consumers until 2017. Wong added: "Despite having apparently reached a plateau in unit graphics market share some quarters ago, NVIDIA's gaming GPU continued to demonstrate good revenue growth, in the 17-25% year/year range in each of the last 4 quarters (Oct 2015 through July 2016). AMD began to regain unit share in the graphics card market in 1H2016".

In the same purchase that bagged them the 'Star Wars' franchise, Disney now holds the rights to LucasFilm's 'Indiana Jones' too and while they've promised that a fifth film is on the way in 2019, what I'd really love to see is more of this.

Developed by animator Patrick Schoenmaker acting without approval by Disney, the minute long short shows how freaking awesome an animated 'Indiana Jones' adventure could be. And with star Harrison Ford pushing 80, who knows - maybe he'd be open to voicing the classic character for a few years.

Schoenmaker's YouTube channel says the short was five years in the making, but with the support of Disney, this could happen pretty fast. Fans can dream.

CD Projekt RED plans to completely one-up themselves with Cyberpunk 2077, smashing the likes of Witcher 3's amazing open world with an extremely ambitious new type of city-building technology and seamless multiplayer that will likely make Destiny's social hubs look like child's play.

Cyberpunk 2077's open world and city hubs could be the most immersive spaces ever created in a video game. CD Projekt RED has filed for a grant to help fund its new City Creation technology, which features "living cities" with real-time interactions with dynamic AI. That's not it, though: CDPR is also crafting a new kind of seamless multiplayer for the futuristic RPG.

City Creation is described as: "Comprehensive technology for the creation of 'live' cities of great scale playable in real-time, which is based on the principles of artificial intelligence and automation, and takes into account the development of innovative processes and tools supporting the creation of high-quality games with open worlds."

Remedy's recent overhyped time-busting Quantum Break won't be pushing any of your rigs to their limits any time soon.

Months after launching as a hot mess on Microsoft's Windows 10-exclusive storefront, Quantum Break is now available on Steam. But even after this long sojourn between the Windows Store and Steam, some of the game's most disappointing technical issues are still intact and haven't been fixed: Quantum Break's Steam port won't support multi-GPU setups in SLI or CrossFire and is locked at DirectX 11 instead of leveraging the new DirectX 12 API.

"Like mentioned on other topics, the game doesn't support SLI. But even with one GTX 1080 and the right settings, you should be able to get an enjoyable experience out of the game. I recommend comparing visual differences between 'high' and 'ultra' options in different areas of the display settings page," said a Remedy dev on the Steam forum page.

Nintendo's mysterious new NX console will propel the Japanese console-maker into the big leagues dominated by Microsoft and Sony, says Ubisoft.

Ubisoft has seen Nintendo's new NX hardware, which is purportedly a transforming console handheld hybrid, and the publisher is extremely impressed. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has praised the NX vocally in the last few months, delivering practically the only real meaty bits of information outside of unverified rumors and reports. Now Guillemot drops even more praise in Ubisoft's most recent earnings report, saying that the NX will be good enough to put Nintendo back in the Big Three.

"Nintendo will be back in the race with the NX," Guillemot said. Just a few weeks ago the Ubisoft CEO called the NX a "fantastic totally new approach," strongly hinting at the unique handheld hybrid theory that's been rolling around.

For those old enough to remember the Commodore 64, can you believe that one is still being used to run a small auto repair shop?

Commodore USA's official Facebook page reads: "This C64C used by a small auto repair shop for balancing drive shafts has been working non-stop for over 25 years. And despite surviving a flood it is still going...". That's a great achievement, because most PCs wouldn't last 25 more years and still be operational like that (for the most part, anyway).

The Commodore 64 was released all the way back in 1982, featuring a whopping 64KB of memory at the time, with its CPU running at a blistering 1MHz, with a 16-color graphics chip. It was the highest-selling single computer model of all time according to the Guinness World Records.

Apple has unleashed its iPhone 7, so now its onwards towards the next-gen MacBook Pro laptops which are looking to be announced sometime next month.

The new MacBook Pro is expected "some time in the second half of October", with Apple working on macOS 10.12.1 so that it fully supports the purported Touch ID sensor, and OLED touchbar. Apple is expected to fully revamp their 13-inch and 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, which should rock Intel's new Kaby Lake CPUs - making for thinner, lighter MacBook Pros.

Apple is expected to unveil their Touch ID fingerprint sensor onto the next-gen MacBook Pros, borrowing the security side of things from the iPhone and iPad. The fingerprint sensor would allow MacBook Pro owners to log-in to their laptops using their fingerprint, or they would allow for Apple Pay purchases with your fingerprint, which is now supported by macOS Sierra, and iOS 10.

Microsoft has been touting the 4K gaming abilities of its new Project Scorpio Xbox console, but when Microsoft's Albert Penello spoke with The Guardian recently, he talked about Microsoft's full 4K gaming on the Xbox Scorpio, and how developers will have to deal with new challenges.

It looks like we won't be seeing 4K 60FPS on the Xbox Scorpio anytime soon, and nowhere near the launch in 2017, as it will be up to developers to decide where to use the additional horsepower provided by Xbox Scorpio, in their games. Penello said: "But we've said very clearly that it's up to the developers how they want to take advantage of that power. Some developers focus on effects, some on frame rate some on resolution - it's up to them what they want to do".

Penello continued, saying that developers will be able to meet, and master 4K gaming on the Xbox Scorpio after a while. He added: "If you look at game engines like Frostbite and Unreal, developers have got really good at scaling - they're excellent at figuring out how to build textures at very high resolutions, then being able to optimise that artwork for various platforms. With that in consideration, it will be easier to take advantage of the performance difference of Scorpio because these guys are already building games that far surpass what consoles can do today".