Latest News - Page 2504

Square Enix hasn't ruled out a PC release for Final Fantasy 15, and the publisher promises that it'll seriously evaluate the platform in due time--but not before the console ports release. So we could be waiting well into 2017 before FF15 makes the jump to PC.

Square Enix game director Hajime Tabata says that the studio is "aware of the big call for a PC version." but the PS4 and Xbox One flavors take priority. The studio is committed to optimizing the console versions ahead of Final Fantasy 15's September 30 release date.

"Unfortunately we weren't able to do simultaneous development on a PC and console version for XV," Tabata told Endgadget. "We had to focus on the console version, and our goal was to maximize, optimize everything for the HD consoles. Once that's done, then we will definitely take a good, hard look at PC and what we need to do, and consider all our options. But right now we aren't decided, we're still considering a lot of things."

Epic Games has been at the forefront of VR since the Oculus went to Kickstarter to fund its Rift headset all those years ago, with Unreal Engine 4.11 being released - including bug fixes and updates for every major HMD on the market - including the Gear VR, PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets.

Unreal Engine v4.11 includes improvements to DX12 support as well as platform/SDK improvements for Oculus Mobile SDK 1.01 (Gear VR), PlayStation VR SDK 3 and SteamVR 0.9.12. Whilst a full version (1.3.0) of the Oculus Rift SDK is promised to take over from the current 0.8 Beta in an upcoming hotfix, reports VRFocus.

The team at Unreal Engine have said that the improvements have made the engine hit the "VR ship ready" state, which is perfect timing now that the Oculus Rift is shipping to consumers, and the HTC Vive is right around the corner.

I didn't think we'd see this for at least another 10 years, but the world's first cyborg Olympics (or Cybathlon) will happen in Zurich in October, this year. The event was created as a way of creating innovation in the industry, where only a few eligible for prostheses actually use them. A trial event took place last year, and was a success.

The Cybathlon will measure the performance of the latest developments in technology that assist people with disabilities in everyday tasks. The modifications done to humans are encouraged at the Cybathlon, compared to the normal Olympics where athletes with enhancements are considered to have an unfair advantage - and as I write this, it feels like I'm explaining some future DLC of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) is organizing the event where in a cycling race (as an example) paraplegics will be pushed forward using electrical stimulation systems that will move their legs by stimulating the muscles. If competitors have prosthetic arms, contests will see them slicing loaves of bread and opening jars of jam. Other events will include people climbing up and down stairs, or walking across stepping stones.

Netflix has some of the best TV shows around, with original series like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black - but did you know their original content creation has increased by 185% per year? That's impressive.

According to data published by AllFlicks, which has mined Netflix's online catalog and cross referenced it with Wikipedia's list of Netflix original programming - Cordcutting.com created a chart that shows the sharp rise in original content from Netflix. From Q1 2012 to Q2 2016, Netflix added 111 original series and films, an impressive feat to say the least.

We see a quarterly growth rate of 34.22%, and an average annual growth rate of an astonishing 185.41%. The future growth rate should be higher, with Netflix announcing it will spend a huge $6 billion on original content in 2016 alone.

After all of these years, Valve has finally announced Half-Life 3. The new first-person shooter will be exclusive to the PC and has support built-in for the soon-to-be-released HTC Vive headset.

Half-Life 3 will be powered by the Source 2.0 engine, with support for 4K monitors and DX12. Valve has boasted about its new skeletal animation system, as well as its motion-capture technology, ensuring that the in-game characters look insanely real - more real than any other game before it.

The full game will be unveiled at E3 2016 in June, where Gabe Newell will take the stage and play the Half-Life 3 trailer - after which he'll drop the mic to the ground and walk off the stage - whispering one last thing: Half-Life 3 is free, to all gamers everywhere.

After being completely disappointed with the news that Quantum Break won't be running at 1080p on the Xbox One, but instead 720p - and worse yet, with performance-related issues - the pre-launch reviews will be played by reviewers on the Xbox One. This isn't surprising at all.

All of the pre-launch reviews on Xbox One will be released in the coming days, as there are no Early Access codes to game reviewers for the Windows 10 version of Quantum Break. What does this mean? Well, either the Windows 10 version is not ready - and Remedy are still doing last minute work on it, or the Windows 10 version isn't ready. Yeah, that's going to be the issue - in that Remedy is putting all of its eggs in one basket, with that basket being the Xbox One.

We've seen PC releases like Gears of War: Ultimate Edition fall on its face, as well as other games released onto the Windows Store that don't support multi-GPUs or Eyefinity/Surround Vision at launch, and/or are plagued with bugs for months. Get your crap together, developers.

Intel has just unleashed its new Broadwell-EP family of processors, starting with the huge Xeon E5-2600 V4 which features a huge 22 CPU cores. Thanks to Hyper-Threading technology, we have a total of 44 threads of CPU power, which is simply insane for the prosumer market - especially those who work in video editing.

The new Intel Xeon E5-2600 V4 hasn't been completely detailed by the company, but the enthusiast part will be the Xeon E5-2699 V4 which packs a base clock speed of 2.2GHz, 55MB of cache, and a pretty tame 145W TDP. What will this 44-threaded processor set you back? A hefty $4115, which works out to $187 per CPU core. If we consider the 8-core/16-threaded Core i7-5960X costs $1059 (which works out to $132 per CPU core) then the new Xeon E5-2699 V4 isn't too badly priced at all.

The new Broadwell-EP powered Xeon processors can take DDR4-2400, with up to 12 DIMMS per CPU socket. If you're using registered DIMMs, you can cram in up to 385GB of RAM per CPU, using 32GB DIMMs of DDR4. To put it simply: I want one, well - probably two.

Oculus opened up the preorders on the Rift headset on January 6 at 8AM PST, promising that any preorders up until 8:10AM that morning were to be included in the March shipment batch. Well, plenty of people on the Oculus subreddit, including myself, ordered before 8:10AM that morning and haven't received any shipping notification. I think 'WannabeTesla' puts it best, by saying: "Any communication at all. They've been silent for a week. That is absurdly unacceptable".

Furthermore, no communication from Oculus has been received, period. Countless people on /r/Oculus haven't heard anything - with 'kami77' saying:

'kami77' continues, saying: "I wouldn't say "f***ing furious" but I would say "f*** frustrated." I was so excited for this week, and Oculus just took a big shit on that. The launch was a disappointment. I thought this week would be filled with a million unboxing videos and everyone talking about their awesome experiences. Instead we get this. The store opens when almost no one has a Rift, developers must be wondering why no one is buying their games, and now everyone is just angry or frustrated. All I want is communication from Oculus. If that makes me an entitled brat, then I am an entitled brat...".

Endless Legend, a 4X strategy game developed by Amplitude Studios, is getting yet another content expansion coming up on April 7th.

The new faction, the Allayi, are a small civilization that seem to be bound to the changing seasons, with their allegiances shifting between the friendly faction you can easily trade with to the enraged thieves that seem to be a thorn in your side. They can also shift those allegiances at will, too.

Amplitude Studios is expanding the spirituality inherent in such a high fantasy setting, letting you spend pearls, a new resource found around the map during the winter months, at the new building they've added, the Altar of Auriga, in exchange for blessings which amount to defensive and offensive advantages in the form of city improvements or some pearl item sets. Part of those advantages is the ability to control winter in a way that brings whole new experience to the game. If you wanted, you can freeze lakes, or the sea, so you can walk your armies right over them, taking a more direct route to destroy your enemies.

The latest walkthrough from the folks at Creative Assembly take us on a tour of what the Vampire Count's campaign looks like inside Total War: Warhammer.

In the video, they explore some of the unique gameplay mechanics that the undead get to enjoy compared to their more colorful, living opponents. In particular, they show off how to raise the piles of dead bodies and reanimate them for your own nefarious purposes. It's an ability that can really turn the tide of your overall campaign, though you can only raise your dead army after the fact. A massive undead army to enact revenge sounds rather tantalizing.

They also introduce us to one of the hero characters, the Master Necromancer known as Heinrich Kemmler. He's has a massive roster of magic with which to pull from, being the one that can raise the dead, though after battles are waged. As with all hero units, he's capable of leveling up and learning gaining more abilities to become an invaluable member of your military campaign.

Nintendo has launched an app for Android and iOS in the US and Europe that lets you interact with your Mii and your friends' Miis. Miitomo, as it's called, features Mii creation, customization, photography, and social media sharing.

Also included: a minigame called Miitomo Drop where you 'drop' your Mii and depending on which platform it lands, you win a given prize (sometimes clothing). Drop costs coins which can be obtained through in-app purchases.

Miitomo can be downloaded here for iOS users and here for Android users.

The second installment for the episodic Hitman is almost here. We'll be able to travel to beautiful Sapienza to complete our next official mission on April 26th. From the look of the short video on Twitter and the promo photo below, there might be some delightful ways to get to your target.

In this new mission, you'll have to infiltrate the fictional Italian town of Sapienza, which should prove to be a dense yet vast and open location with plenty of obstacles and opportunities to play in the sandbox environment. Within the coastal town, there are many different locations to explore, such as a medieval church a sprawling mansion and even a busy borough complete with dark alleyways and busy storefronts.

This location was originally going to be released at the launch of Hitman, but the decision was made to change the release schedule to be an episodic one just before it was released. This allows both us to fully explore and challenge ourselves in the new, larger locations and gives the developers more time to perfect each mission based on player feedback from each previous mission. So long as each release isn't too terribly far apart, it could prove very fruitful. After Sapienza, we'll be heading to Morocco sometime in May.

Smart home company Nest hasn't been doing well. Last year, it brought in about $340 million in revenue, according to three sources familiar with the matter. It's no small figure, but it's still below expectations, keeping in mind Google purchased the company for $3.2 billion in 2014, and that its initial budget was said to be $500 million annually.

This puts Nest in a difficult position, as its allocated budget is said to expire at the end of 2016. Whatever happens, it will be known before long whether now-parent company Alphabet chooses to soldier on or part ways.

As for why the company has struggled, some might say the high price tag is difficult to justify (Nest's thermostat is $250, and most home want more than one).

Perhaps one of the most underrated yet most remarkable genres that I've ever had the pleasure of playing is that of the intensely story-based RTS ship combat simulator. The epic story arc that follows the harrowing events that could very well shape the future of humankind.. Nexus: The Jupiter Incident is probably more entertaining than you might believe, even after 11 years.

The journey begins with a great tutorial that tries its very hardest to help you with an exorbitant learning curve. You're working for one of many corporations that have taken over control of space beyond the Moon. The first mission is quite simple, helping you along where necessary and willing you to pause it with the spacebar often to read the helpful messages and issue the appropriate commands. After you inadvertently run into a mine that didn't properly get disarmed, you'll then be thrown softly into some incredibly gorgeous combat scenes.

The action isn't fast by any stretch of the word. It's positively slow and deliberate. In fact it sometimes even feels a bit cumbersome with your big cruiser lobbying for position in the most aggravatingly slow way. But once in position and your fighters have been launched to ward off any enemy fighters, then you can commence the broadside. And it's all about control You've got options to take out these ships that are threatening you. Want to disable weapons first and then board them for

AMD is readying the more professional and scientific oriented version of the dual Fiji Radeon Pro Duo; the FirePro S9300 X2. This is the first time we're seeing Fiji in a professional capacity such as this.

The dual Fiji-based card mirrors nearly every aspect of the consumer (arguably still professional) focused card except that the TDP has been reworked to have a maximum of 300W, now running each GPU at a modest 850MHz. The FirePro is also trading in the great cooling solution for a passive method of keeping the card cool. It's designed to fit into any number of HPC compute applications, where a large water-cooling solution may not always fit properly. And for the 300W TDP, it still manages to be a startlingly powerful card with up to 13.9 TFLOPs of compute power at its disposal. It can potentially be a very powerful card in the right situations.

Fiji presents an interesting choice for the scientific market. The FP64 performance of Fiji is significantly lower by nature of being limited to 1/16th of the FP32 performance. That performance is only really significant for those applications that make use of double precision math, which is selective at best. The great thing is that AMD seems to have found its niche, regardless of that limitation. The higher memory bandwidth afforded by HBM might also be appreciated in these applications as well, even though it also lacks ECC RAM as well.

Hitman is a game that just came out and wasn't entirely broken at launch. Subsequent updates have been able to fix latent bugs that seem to have been sticking around well past their welcome, however. Patch 1.03 is out now on the Xbox One and PS4 with faster loading times, makes it more stable and adds in a Vampire Magician challenge pack because you can't just be only one of those archetypes.

The greatest new addition is that of the new challenge missions. They've made the new Vampire Magician missions in response to how they've noticed that people have been playing the game. Hilariously, you'll have to wear a Vampire Magician disguise while you complete the various tasks and take your specified targets using a variety of methods laid out in the mission briefing. If this isn't already in-game, they said it'll be rolling out shortly after the update goes live.

Other improvements include an increase in responsiveness for in-game menus through a better image caching system, a much improved and fixed scoring system and those better loading times. They're working hard on ensuring that load times improve with each update. The new scoring system will necessitate a leaderboard reset due to how you could inadvertently get a score of 210,000 with a 0-second time bonus. The game should be more stable with more bugs that lead to crashes having been hunted down and destroyed.

Tribes: Ascend is getting yet another patch that adds more maps, makes a few gameplay adjustments, and removes the Blueshift map from the standard rotation.

The new Hellfire map

The first patch in what seems like a very long hiatus came just this past January and was a bringer of big changes to help bring back the traditional fan base. Hi-Rez Studios has gained back it's momentum and wants to show the world what it can do, and this latest patch is a testament to how attentive they're being to fans.

Ben Affleck's performance in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was one of the standout parts of the movie, and now news has broken that Affleck has already written a script for the standalone Batman movie.

The news is coming from William Morris Endeavor co-CEO Patrick Whitesell, which is the agency that represents Affleck. While talking with the Hollywood Reporter on how many movies in the DCEU that Affleck has signed on for as Batman, Whitesell said: "He's contracted to do at least Justice League [Part] One and Two, so at least three times wearing the cape. There's a script that he's written that is a really cool [Batman] idea, so that's out there as an option".

There was news a little while ago that Affleck was attached to the standalone Batman movie as the co-writer, director and star - but Whitesell's comments seem to point to the fact that this has changed, and that Affleck will only star in the Batman movie. Affleck commented a while ago, saying that the movie is "in development" and that his completely focused on finishing his adaption of Dennis Lehane thriller Live By Night. Affleck said: "I tend to be a one-movie-at-a-time guy. So, when I'm finished with this movie, I'll then focus on my next movie and figure out what that will be".

Phil Spencer has previously made clear that a significant amount of future games that will most certainly be making it to both of Microsoft's gaming platforms, but some will be still be reserved for one or the other. Halo 5 might be one of the few games that won't be making an appearance on both platforms, says Phil Spencer himself.

The reasons are quite clear, though, given that the game, while a successful one on consoles, is the perfect recipe for a PC game. Phil said that "Halo 5 was shipped as a console game, If we're going to [bring Halo to PC] moving forward then we're going to plan on both platforms." He doesn't think it prudent to port the game or any game but wants to instead look to bringing development together for future games. That means we'll most likely see Halo 6 (or whatever is in store for the franchise) on the PC, but it won't be something necessarily looked at for past games. It's a natural fit for an FPS game with a competitive multiplayer element.

He does, and it makes sense from a certain point of view, think that some games are naturally suited for a particular platform. That something could be enjoyed better in front of a TV as opposed to sitting at a desk in front of your PC. It's entirely possible to have your PC be in your living-room, however, and Microsoft has acknowledged is important with previous Media Center functionality. Games are best played on the platform that we choose, and it would be best if that choice also included the PC and Windows (or Linux even). When the underlying hardware and even software is so similar, especially with the advent of the UWP, it shouldn't be a problem going forward, which it won't be according to Spencer. It just means that past games may not make the jump, but going forward we'll have a massive cross-playable library.

Acer has just released a new member of its Predator gaming products, with a new gaming projector known as the Predator Z850. Acer's new Predator Z850 projector is something Acer says is the world's first ultra-wide HD laser projector designed specifically for gaming.

The new Acer Predator Z850 boasts an interesting 24:9 aspect ratio, with a resolution of 1920x720 - yeah, that's not a typo. This is much wider than the traditional 16:9 format, and even wider than the 21:9 format offered by UltraWide displays with 2560x1080 and 3440x1440 resolutions. The laser diode inside of the Predator Z850 is good for 30,000 hours and offers images up to 3,000 lumens, with a great 100,000 contrast ratio.

Acer includes a top-mounted lens and mirrorless ultra-short-throw technology that makes the Predator Z850 capable of blasting 120 inches of screen - at a minimum distance of only 18.5 inches. This is great for rooms that might be too small for a traditional projector setup, such as your gaming room or smaller lounge room. Something that's quite unique, is that the Predator Z850 can be packed up and moved immediately after use, without needing time to cool down. On the back, we have a slew of connectivity and even an optional wireless kit that will provide 1080p lossless streaming without the cables needing to be connected to your PC.