Latest News - Page 2393

DICE is taking a different approach with Battlefield 1's singleplayer campaign in order to tell "many different war stories."

Instead of following the traditional campaign formula with the same protagonists following a linear course, Battlefield 1's six-chapter campaign is now called War Stories, and will be a kind of shifting anthology with each chapter letting players experience the Great War through the eyes of a different nation.

Some time ago EA announced that Battlefield 1's storyline would be multi-perspective and be flavored with real-life historical figures (Lawrence of Arabia, the Harlem Hellfighters, etc), so this news isn't exactly a surprise. We have evidence that Battlefield 1's War Stories singleplayer campaign might only be six chapters at launch, but we could see more chapters added via DLC packs. We're also not sure if the chapters themselves will be comprised of smaller missions, or of it's a one-off style episode.

The UK's Advertisement Standards Agency has asked Valve and Hello Games to remove No Man's Sky's misleading screenshots and trailers from the Steam marketplace.

Almost everyone already knows that the screenshots and trailers for No Man's Sky are total lies and represent a game that doesn't exist. However, the misleading advertisements are still up on Steam, the PlayStation Store, and GOG.com, and everyday casual gamers might fall prey to the trap and buy the game.

Now the UK's official Advertisement Standards Agency has stepped in, contacting both Valve and Hello Games and calling upon them to either defend the bullshots (ha!) or pull them and replace them with screenshots and video that reflect the real game.

Square Enix has just announced that their latest update for Final Fantasy XIV, is now available for gamers to access. Patch 3.4, revealed to audiences as 'Soul Surrender' is now available. The hottest patch features a vast range of playable content, state-of-the-art items/equipment, battle system tweaks, new adventure quests, side quests and loads more.

The update provides players with modernized scenery and visually enhanced environments for which new raid dungeons and high-level arenas are situated within the game. Square Enix released Final Fantasy XIV: Soul Surrender with truck-loads of features but none more exciting than the reunion of the famous sibling duo: Alphinaud and Alisaie Leveilleur. Here together players can conquer quests and explore into the story of antagonist quintet, the Warriors of Darkness.

Soul Surrender will furthermore provide Final Fantasy players with an option to battle against one another in fierce all-out duels, though the multiplayer mode is just one of two player features in the patch to have been altered. The latest 'Spectator Mode' created for those wanting to sit on the sidelines and watch, rather than participate in the game is now available. It provides gamers with the ability to spectate entire battles and view the results without have to step foot into the arena.

Destiny 2 will come to PC and it'll feature a ton of improvements and overhauls to make it into a fully-fledged new game, according to multiple sources.

Most of Bungie's 750 strong development team is working on Destiny 2, which will launch in late 2017 across consoles and PC. In order to get the game's debut on PC just right, Bungie apparently plans to scrap existing content and start from scratch to create all new character classes, regions, and refine the mechanics to meet expectations of enthusiast PC gamers. That means no exploitative DLC nonsense, no weird experimental junk--native 1080p 60FPS and 4K 60FPS enthusiast PC FPS gaming.

Sources familiar with Bungie's plans have reportedly told Kotaku's Jason Schreier that Destiny 2 will feature major content revamps similar to how Diablo II made dramatic changes from the original Diablo game, leaving old character classes, levels, and content behind. Destiny 2 may feature more feature-rich environments with towns, dynamic quests, and actual inhabited areas instead of the plastic and one-dimensional environs of the base game. The way it sounds to me is that Destiny was the big beta test experiment, and Destiny 2 will see Bungie doing everything they should've done in the first game.

XCOM 2 was released on the PC earlier this year, but the game has now just reached the Xbox One and PS4, with console gamers also receiving XCOM 2's season pass, the Reinforcement Pack.

The season pass for XCOM 2 sells for $25, and includes Anarchy's Children, which provides more customization for your soldier. There's also a new introduction called Alien Hunters, which includes new Ruler aliens, and Shen's Last Gift, which Gamespot reports: "adds a new soldier class and a mission where Chief Engineer Lily Shen accompanies your squad to find her late father's secret project".

XCOM 2's Digital Deluxe version costs $75, but includes the full game and the Reinforcement Pack.

The Walking Dead is one of the biggest shows on TV, so it should come as no surprise that co-creator Frank Darabont is now suing AMC for $280 million, after he was fired from the network in the middle of The Walking Dead's second season.

Darabont alleges that AMC denied him profits from The Walking Dead "by producing the series and then licensing it to its cable network affiliate for not enough money". AMC says the lawsuit is without merit, adding: "Plaintiffs' damages claim has no basis in reality and we will continue to vigorously defend against this lawsuit".

THR reports: "Considering that Darabont was contractually entitled to as much as 10 percent of certain Walking Dead profits after deductions, the damages figure suggests the series has made billions. The lawsuit asserts, however, that a low license fee formula has been designed to ensure that the show would never be in the black for profit participants".

We've heard from Raja Koduri, the boss of Radeon Technologies Group tease 16K per eye in VR headsets, but now Samsung is getting close to making it a reality with teasing 10K mobile displays.

Samsung President & Chief Strategy Officer, Young Sohn, talked about smartphone-focused VR headsets and standalone VR solutions. Samsung's decision to market, and ship a dedicated all-in-one VR headset would require a VR market that changes in the next few months, and throughout 2017. Sohn said: "Is [virtual reality] hype or mainstream? I don't have a good answer for you today".

Sohn talked about the battery efficiency, latency needs and display technology areas of where Samsung needs to improve, for future VR products. He said that next-gen VR headsets need pixel densities that are "at least two times" that of the current-gen displays on the market. Sohn said that VR would be a massive driving force for the company to "move faster" in making next-gen displays, but he added that making a 10K mobile display would require a hefty investment of $5-$10 billion.

Gears of War 4 is close to release, and we're finally finding out how much HDD space The Coalition's latest game will require: 54.6GB on the Xbox One, and a pretty damn hefty 80GB on the PC.

Xbox One gamers can pre-load the game starting now, according to the official Twitter account for Gears of War. The PC pre-load is "coming soon and will be well ahead of launch", the GoW account tweeted. Gears of War 4 is shaping up to be one of the best-looking games of the year, right alongside Battlefield 1.

The full game launches on October 11 for both the PC and Xbox One, and thanks to it being an Xbox Play Anywhere title, you can buy it digitally and enjoy it on the Xbox One or the PC. Awesome sauce.

EA and DICE are ramping up towards the impending launch of Battlefield 1 on October 21, releasing a new trailer showing off the Frostbite engine in all of its glory for the single player side of BF1.

EA teases: "Battlefield 1 takes you across multiple and varied locations in a bid to fight your way through immersive battles. From tight urban fights in a besieged French city, to big open spaces in the Italian Alps and frantic combats in the deserts of Arabia, discover a world at war through an adventure-filled campaign. In a true multiplayer sandbox experience, take to the skies and engage in high-octane dogfights through treacherous landscapes, or have a battleship obliterating the coast from the sea, and engage in some of the biggest battles ever seen as empires clash for supremacy".

Senior Producer at DICE, Aleksander Grøndal: "The game will deliver a fresh experience full of what makes Battlefield great, with a multiplayer sandbox, immersion, epic scale, authenticity, team play and an ever-changing world full of unexpected Battlefield moments. We're inviting players on an epic journey across a war-torn world, taking them to the Great War and providing something both varied and unique in Battlefield 1".

We've just heard that NVIDIA will unveil a Pascal refresh in 2017, but the next-gen Volta GPU architecture is what everyone wants to know about on the high-end/enthusiast level of the scale.

Volta is expected to be unveiled at NVIDIA's own GPU Technology Conference, which takes place between May 8-11 next year. NVIDIA is expected to follow in the steps of its Tesla P100 unveiling at GTC 2016 earlier this year, unveiling Volta on a new HPC part first, with the Volta-based HPC product expected to be powered by the ridiculously fast HBM2 tech.

NVIDIA boss Jen-Hsun Huang is also rumored to unveil an updated GPU roadmap, which will include new codenames and technology details for future GPU technology ffrom NVIDIA. NVIDIA is expected to dive away from the 10nm node, and go right into 7nm once Volta is here and established on the 14nm node. Not only that, but the future GPUs will have support for both HBM3 and GDDR6.

NVIDIA is not only expected to unveil a Pascal 2.0 refresh in 2017 on Samsung's 14nm FinFET node, but the company is expected to make a big splash at its GTC 2017 event in May by unveiling their new Volta architecture, and more.

Well, today is the day of NVIDIA leaks, with the company reportedly aiming at a 2018 release for its consumer-focused GeForce graphics cards based on the next-gen Volta GPU architecture. These new cards will reportedly rock a huge 16GB of GDDR6, the new standard from Micron that's quite a large step on the already impressive GDDR5X standard that powers the GeForce GTX 1080 and new Titan X.

Micron's new GDDR6 has over 14Gbps of bandwidth, compared to the 10Gbps on GDDR5 and just 7-8Gbps on GDDR5. GDDR6 is much more efficient than GDDR5X, with lower power consumption allowing for more VRAM on higher-end graphics cards. The new 16GB GDDR6 cards will be based on the upcoming Volta-based graphics cards with a 256-bit memory bus, while the higher-end GV102 will use a faster 384-bit memory bus and possibly 24GB or even 48GB cards thanks to GDDR6.

A treasure trove of details on NVIDIA's GPU plans for 2017 and beyond have surfaced, courtesy of Baidu user USG Ishimura, who said that there is a Pascal refresh on the way, which will be followed by Volta, and so much more.

Starting with the Pascal 2.0 refresh, which will supposedly see more GPUs released on the GP102 core, meaning cheaper versions of the incredibly fast Titan X and GTX 1080 graphics cards. This is similar to what NVIDIA did with the GTX 700 series based on the Kepler architecture. NVIDIA recently inked a deal with Samsung to have their Pascal architecture made on the 14nm FinFET process, with the current Pascal cards being made on the 16nm FinFET node by TSMC.

Micron has been providing the super-fast GDDR5X clocked at 10GHz for the GTX 1080 and Titan X, but the yields didn't start well, and will only improve as we get closer to the purported Pascal refresh. GDDR5X would find its way onto the entire Pascal refresh, except for the entry-level GP107-based cards. NVIDIA has also had its 16nm-based Pascal cards hitting 2GHz GPU clocks easily, so we could see GPU Boost 3.0 keeping the clock speeds higher than we have now, allowing for proper differentiation between AIB partner cards.

AMD has been spreading their new Polaris architecture throughout the different markets that they serve. That started out with the RX 480, a gaming graphics card, and continued into the professional arena with their newly branded Radeon Pro brand of graphics cards. AMD also updated their data center GPUs with Polaris graphics cards with their MxGPU line of products, so the last place for AMD to update their lineup was in embedded.

AMD's embedded graphics products generally tend to sit within a few applications where the company has traditionally done well. These applications include the use of graphics in medical imaging, digital signage and casino gaming. These are all familiar applications for AMD embedded graphics chips, however those use cases are expanding beyond the standard expected applications with these new AMD embedded graphics chips.

Because the new Polaris architecture delivers up to 2.8x performance per watt compared to the previous generation, there are many new applications for AMD's newest embedded GPUs.

Google is celebrating its 18th birthday today (feeling old yet?) with an appropriate Google Doodle full of balloons. Google's birthday varied during the years, but September 27th is its official birthday since 2006.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California. Their goal was to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". 18 years ago Google's headquarters was in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, Larry's and Sergey's friend, and today Google is situated in Mountain View with over 57,000 employees.

In the 18 years of existence, Google has become one of the biggest companies in the world and our daily lives are unimaginable without it.

Germany's privacy regulatory body has taken issue with Facebook collecting WhatsApp user data, ordering the company to delete the data and cease the practice, calling it "an infringement of national data protection law."

"It has to be [the user's] decision, whether they want to connect their account with Facebook," says Hamburg data protection commissioner Johnnes Caspar. "Therefore, Facebook has to ask for their permission in advance. This has not happened."

Germany -- which boasts 35 million WhatsApp users -- isn't the only European country to take issue with Facebook's approach: France and Britain have both done so, with the former stating it would monitor the situation "with great vigilance."

It's a hard life if you're an AMD user and like to stream and record. Whereas NVIDIA users enjoy the sleek, performance-light, and feature-rich Shadowplay, there's really nothing as good for the other camp.

The gap narrows somewhat today though as Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) Studio (the new and improved version of OBS) gains support for AMD's Video Coding Engine (VCE). Essentially, this means fast, high-quality recording and streaming, in contrast to Windows Media Foundation offered, particularly at 1080p and 60 FPS.

VCE support has been in testing for awhile now and today marks the first stable release. To download it, hit the source link below, or if you're in no hurry, wait until the next OBS Studio release with which it will be bundled.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA, launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and to this day it stays a vital research tool for astronomy. Hubble is meritorious for some major discoveries and photographs that have shown us the beauties of the universe.

Today, NASA announced that Hubble has imaged what may be water vapor plumes erupting off the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. It appears that the icy moon erupts with high altitude vapor plumes. Scientists estimate that the plumes rise about 200 kilometers before falling back onto Europa's surface.

The observation increases the possibility that missions to Europa may be able to sample Europa's ocean without having to drill through miles of ice.

Google's self-driving car was involved in yet another accident and this one was the worst so far. The autonomous Lexus sustained major damage in an accident involving a commercial van.

According to the report, the van driver ran a red light and collided with the modified Lexus SUV. The van hit the passenger side of the door and damaged it heavily but no one was hurt. The accident occurred in Mountain View and Lexus had to be towed from the scene.

Apple announced their new phones this month and the prices are as expected - the iPhone 7 starts at $649 and iPhone 7 Plus at $769. But, do you know how much Apple has to spend to manufacture those phones?

A report from IHS Markit, an analyst company based in London, shows that Apple's total cost to manufacture the iPhone 7 (32GB) is $224.80, which is around 18% more than the cost of the iPhone 6S.

"Total BOM (the bill of materials) costs for the iPhone 7 are more in line with what we have seen in teardowns of recent flagship phones from Apple's main competitor, Samsung, in that the costs are higher than in previous iPhone teardown analyses. All other things being equal, Apple still makes more margin from hardware than Samsung, but materials costs are higher than in the past", said Andrew Rassweiler, senior director of cost benchmarking services.

There's a new Dota 2 tournament that's about to take place, with some of China's best Dota 2 teams taking to the seas and participating in a LAN tournament that is being hosted on a cruise ship. Yes, you read that right.

The Nanyang Cruise Cup will see four Dota 2 teams, including TI6 champions Wings Gaming and Newbee, competing against each other on a cruise ship sailing across the Pacific Ocean for four days. Sapphire Princess will take the Dota 2 players from Shanghai on October 13, stopping by Japan and South Korea, before it returns to port on October 17.

Sapphire Princess will be hosting all of the LAN matches with its crew of 1100 and guest capacity of 2678, with the two other teams joining the Nanyang Cruise Cup through qualifier matches before the end of the month.