Latest News - Page 2527

Cloud Imperium Games is steadily increasing their production load to get the single-player Squadron 42 finished and out to fans as fast as possible, and with their latest update they've started another Free Fly program for all everyone. You just have to create a free account at RSI.

Star Citizen is a controversial game due to it's ever increasing scope and development time. But the open-communication CIG has been able to maintain has been second to none compared to previous development cycles. But to help allay the fears of some and encourage the curiosity of others, you can play everything that's available right now. For free.

All free play accounts can access the persistent universe and the Crusader space station, which lets you fly around and complete a plethora of mission available, engage in random encounters and just have fun. Just watch out for people trying to steal your ship. You can also enjoy the social module, which is a planetside location complete with a nice bar. And of course there's Arena Commander, which lets you fly your ships in combat against friends and random people.

ARK: Survival Evolved has received quite the following on the Xbox One, even though it seems to have been plagued by rather dissatisfactory performance when compared to its PC counterpart. The level of detail and framerate have a lot of catching up to do, and the next patch from Studio Wildcard should do just that.

On Twitter they gave us a little preview of what's to come with patch v732 for the Xbox One. And it looks like a lot of content is being brought over from the PC, with a lot of small insects and beer coming over. But one of the most important fixes for Xbox One players is the improvement of the framerate. Hopefully they've been able to better optimize for a smoother experience. The stuttering that occurs is frequent, and breaks the immersion.

And this is also the patch that's going to get old-school split-screen multiplayer support, for those times when you want to brave the wild and wonderful land with your friends literally sitting next to you. The patch, which should be out around the 10th of February, will fix more than just what's listed in the Tweet below.

Adding to the lower-end of the smartphone market is LG Electronics with its new announcement of the K4 and K10 devices, aiming to offer "affordable mass-tier phones with advanced features" to the wider market, as claimed by President and CEO Juno Cho in a recent press release.

The K10 smartphone comes packed with LG's new 2.5D Arc Glass, a 5.3-inch HD touch display, an 8MP front camera, a 2,300mAh internal battery, a front camera that is claimed to be "up to 13MP" and finally a "woven back cover [that] provides optimal grip."

The K4 is a lower model and is marketed by LG to be a widely affordable and completely entry-level product. Brandishing a 4.5-inch FWVGA display, 8GB of memory and LTE connectivity, this device comes further packed with a 1,940mAh battery and cameras which offer 5MP on the rear-facing and 2MP on the front. Both devices come packed with quad-core-processors, however, the K10 offers up the ability for users to purchase an Octa-Core processor device with the LTE-enabled version. As for processor speeds, the K4 offers a 1.0GHz Quad-Core only, whereas the K10 can be optioned with either a 1.3GHz Quad-Core in the 3G phone, a 1.2GHz or 1.3GHz Quad-Core in the LTE or the previously-mentioned Octa-Core LTE which runs at 1.14GHz.

Homefront's development has been filled with drama, but the game is getting closer to release with a new multiplayer beta headed to the Xbox One to prove it - kicking off on February 11, ending on February 14.

Some of the gaming media out there have had some hands-on time with the 'Resistance Mode' for Homefront: The Revolution, with Polygon getting some of that time with Homefront. Resistance Mode sees players enter a mission, with the one Polygon played called "Infiltration". Infiltration has players raiding an enemy outpost, looking its food and ammo, and escorting some stolen trucks from the station, back to safety.

Homefront is powered by Crytek's impressive CRYENGINE, allowing for huge environments with buildings that you can enter, and they seem "to be a major part of what could set this game apart", reports Polygon.

We all know Fable Legends is one beautiful game, with baked-in support for the Windows 10-exclusive DirectX 12 - but what about the performance side of things?

Well, according to a new interview with Lionhead Studios Director, Stuart Whyte with BidnessETC, anything that helps out with increasing the visual side of things in a game, is loved by developers and gamers alike. Lionhead is making great use of DirectX 12, with the development team able to achieve "a significant amount of horsepower - resulting in increased visual fidelity, higher frame rates, and improved shadows and effects".

Whyte added that Lionhead is setting a performance increase of "up to 40%" when using DX12, compared to DX11.

Now that Rise of the Tomb Raider is out, people are finding out just how useless their second GPUs are - except now, someone has found a fix for SLI users with multiple NVIDIA GeForce video cards.

3D Center's "Blaire" found some things to play around with in the NVIDIA Inspector Tool for SLI, which enables awesome SLI results. In order to do it, you'll need to search for Rise of the Tomb Raider's profile, and then change the SLI bits (DX11) to 0x080002F5. After that, click the magnifier icon that will reveal NVIDIA's Undefined options, and search for 0x00A0694B and change it to 0x00000001.

After you've done this, you've enabled full SLI support for Rise of the Tomb Raider, with DSO Gaming reporting that they've noticed 95% scaling on their GeForce GTX 690 - a damn good result for SLI scaling.

To celebrate this week's release of the action romp 'The Last Witch Hunter' on Blu-ray HD and DVD, we have ten Blu-ray prize packs to give away thanks to our friends at eOne Films.

The modern world holds many secrets, but by far the most astounding is that witches still live among us; vicious supernatural creatures intent on unleashing the Black Death upon the world and putting an end to the human race once and for all. Armies of witch hunters have battled this unnatural enemy for centuries, including Kaulder, a valiant warrior who many years ago slayed the all-powerful WITCH QUEEN, decimating her followers in the process. In the moments right before her death, the Queen cursed KAULDER with immortality, forever separating him from his beloved wife and daughter. Today, Kaulder is the last living hunter who has spent his immortal life tracking down rogue witches, all the while yearning for his long-lost family. However, unbeknownst to Kaulder, the Witch Queen has been resurrected and seeks revenge on her killer, leading to an epic battle that will determine the survival of mankind.

To go into the running to win a prize, simply correctly answer the following question:

AMD was all systems go at VRLA last week, but during the VRLA Winter Expo keynote, the company teased its dual-GPU... the Radeon R9 Fury X2.

AMD's Roy Taylor said that the Radeon R9 Fury X2 has around 12 TFLOPS of SP, compared to the Radeon R9 295X2 which has 11.5 TFLOPS of SP compute performance. The big difference between the Fiji-based R9 Fury X2 and the Hawaii-based R9 295X2 is that the Fury X2 uses only 375W of power, compared to the R9 295X2 which would chew 500W. This means that the Fury X2 is around 40% more power efficient than the R9 295X2.

During his speech, Taylor said: "Last time I was here I also promised you that we would make the world's most powerful small computer for developers. We promised you we would take two of our highest end GPUs and put it inside that tiny box and if you go downstairs we actually have a demonstration of a dual GPU, 12 TeraFlops, fastest GPU solution in the world, inside of Tiki. It's a feat of engineering we are delighted with".

We aren't far from the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphones, with the latest rumor surrounding the 'new generation' battery Samsung is preparing for its new handset.

According to blogger Eldar Murtazin, the Galaxy S7 requires 100 minutes of charge to go from 0-100%, thanks to its 'new generation' battery. We don't know what the 'new generation' battery is just yet, so we could be looking at Samsung increasing the capacity of the battery without requiring too much room inside of the body - or, Samsung is using new technology that will charge the Galaxy S7 much faster.

The Galaxy S6 edge+ and Galaxy Note 5 already charge quick, taking around 110 minutes to get to full charge, so the 100 minutes on the Galaxy S7 would be pretty impressive to see. We should also expect the Galaxy S7 to rock wireless charging, so I'd like to see just how fast the new smartphones from Samsung charge over wireless charging. Give me 100 minutes of 0-100% on wireless charging, and I'll be very, very impressed.

With thousands of gamers entering The Division beta, Ubisoft has taken to the official Twitter account of The Division, announcing that the beta has been extended until Tuesday, February 2 @ 12PM CET, or 6AM EST, or 3AM PST.

Ubisoft opened up The Division beta for the PS4 and PC last week, with those who pre-ordered getting access, and those who were lucky enough to score a key from somewhere else. NVIDIA released their new GeForce 361.75 drivers for both Rise of the Tomb Raider and The Division, while Jeff gave his thoughts after his first day in the post-apocalyptic New York setting in The Division.

Let's face it: campaign modes in modern shooters are dying. But why would studios avoid the opportunity to flex their creative muscles and tell a riveting singleplayer story? Well, it's pretty expensive to make campaign modes, and coupled with the fact that most people just play multiplayer anyway, studios are moving towards MP-only releases.

According to FPS guru Cliff Bleszinski, the push away from singleplayer is simple: "campaigns cost the most money." But how much money does it cost to make a campaign? Sometimes more than half of the entire budget. "[Campaigns] usually cost 75% of the budget," Cliffy B said in a recent interview with PC Gamer. "And you burn through the campaign in a weekend, and then [players] go to multiplayer."

Cliffy B makes a good point, even if it is disappointing for campaign-lovers like myself. At the same time, however, there's a reason most people skip the campaign: they just don't care about it and want to get in on the action right away. What if devs put more effort into making the campaigns last longer? That would likely cost even more, so it's not bound to happen, but we know that the standard three-act story arc is antiquated in our age of constantly-evolving digital consumption.

Final Fantasy XV is looking outright incredible. Square Enix showcased a bunch of new content in its latest Active Time Report, including an interesting three-minute combat sequence, new story info, new details on magic, and confirmation that the game's release date will be revealed in March. We also have the final progress report for the game that details new changes and features.

The combat footage introduces a surprising mashup of Metal Gear Solid with modern Final Fantasy. Noctis and co. sneak into a nefarious Niflheim base, espionage style, and then go up against a hulking Magitek mech straight out of Kojima's imagination. We get to see how stealth will work in the game: users can warp from place to place without blowing their cover, and even stealthily warp-kill enemies.

The real fun happens once the all-out brawl begins, and once again we get a hefty glimpse at the svelte, almost beatific fluid grace of FF15's combat. We get to see Noctis perform some aerial warp combos that underline the potential and magic of the game's Active Cross Battle system. Gladius swipes his mighty blade to smash a whole line of soldiers, and the whole time the group works together in tandem with devastating results.

The OpenSSL project has found, and patched, an issue that was fairly serious though it likely didn't effect very many people, or businesses for that matter.

The problem seems to have stemmed around how the open-source implementation of SSL and TLS reuses prime numbers while the Diffie-Hellman key-exchange protocol is used, making it far easier for a would-be attacker to decrypt your information. The good news is that in order for that to happen, a particular setting has to physically be set on, because it's not on by default.

Even better is that in order to have enough information to actually crack the encryption, there the attacker would have to connect (and reconnect via separate handshakes) several times. So it's not something that's of too much concern, certainly not at the same level of the Heartbleed vulnerability of 2014.

The Ghostbusters franchise is no stranger to huge merchandising deals--Paul Feig's new all-female Ghostbusters has already lined up action figures from Mattel, and it looks like the reboot will be getting its own video game, too.

According to Retail Merchandiser, the new Ghostbusters is a "fully-fledged" game from Activision that will release alongside the movie in July of this year. The publication also says that the upcoming Ghostbusters game will be a movie tie-in, so the all-female cast will obviously reprise their ghost-busting roles, and it'll be available on PS4 and Xbox One.

But why is Sony taking this route? It all goes back to the 25th anniversary of the Ghostbusters franchise. To celebrate 25 years of the iconic paranormal investigators, Sony helped make the successful Ghostbusters: The Video Game in 2009. The game, which was written by Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis, featured voice acting from the original cast and was a big hit. Arkoyd said that the video game was "essentially the third movie."

If recent reports can be believed, Apple has a secret division that's been experimenting with VR and AR technology long enough to develop Hololens and Rift-like prototypes.

According to a report by Financial Times (via Macrumors), Apple's "secret research unit" consists of hundreds of employees who are actively studying virtual and augmented reality tech. The team is made up of field experts like Virginia Tech VR specialist Doug Bowman as well as others hired from Microsoft and Lytro--who developed a Light Field Camera similar to RealSense.

The evidence of Apple VR has been building in recent months, and specific clues hint what Apple might do with its VR/AR tech. The Cupertino tech giant recently snapped up key startups like the motion capture guru Faceshift, whose tech was used in The Force Awakens, and the German AR Metaio, which made augmented reality software and content. We know what the startups are, and what their tech does, but we just don't know how exactly Apple is using them--the Financial Times suggests the AR/VR tech could somehow mesh with Apple's Project Titan electric car.

In the games industry, delays are commonplace. When Platinum Games' Xbox One exclusive Scalebound was delayed into 2017, Xbox One gamers were of course let down, but Microsoft reminded us it's important to give devs the time they need for their projects.

Xbox One Marketing guru Aaron Greenberg recently sat down with IGN to talk about Xbox marketing strategies. At 32:17 Greenberg was asked about Scalebound's delay, and he revealed that it's both a marketing and development decision whenever a game is delayed.

"We were looking at our lineup for this year, and where [Platinum Games] is with Scalebound...that game is super aspirational and huge, and we want to give them enough time and resources to make their vision. From the production standpoint, it makes sense to delay the game. Strategically we think just give it time to breathe and let's make sure we give it enough space to ensure the game is great. First we have to make sure the game is ready, second we have to figure out when's the best time to launch it. Given our 2016 lineup, we decided Scalebound will launch in 2017--a timeframe that'll give it better success."

If you ever wanted to know the depths with which the universe was modeled in Evochron Legacy, well now you know that even the physics of gas giants have been put into the game. And now you won't just be crushed instantly from the high-gravity either, it'll be a more gradual death.

Evochron Legacy keeps getting updated, and not because it was broken on launch, but because there's always something that might not have been thought of by the one man development team, and he's open to feedback. This time he's fixed the physics for when you feel like flying through a gas giant, which is just one small part of the vast universe that's being procedural rendered in this game.

Other cool fixes are mainly quality of life based, with a change to how Fog works in planets, how the equipment list sorts things and a reduction in the chance that your hired crew will actually leave. It's sad to see people leave with no notice and for no reason.

It used to be that private gun sales were acceptable through any such medium on the Internet, Facebook included. But with the new laws in place in the US, Facebook is cracking down on overt advertisements for the private sale of firearms. Licensed gun-dealers are still fine, however.

Facebook is a burgeoning marketplace, it would seem."Over the last two years, more and more people have been using Facebook to discover products and to buy and sell things to one another," head of product policy Monika Bickert told Reuters. "We are continuing to develop, test and launch new products to make this experience even better for people and are updating our regulated goods policies to reflect this evolution."

And so as a result to help curb illegal activity, they've put programs (literal software) in place to check listings and flag them for review. I'd imagine they might be leveraging the deep learning projects they have going on, utilizing NVIDIA hardware to do so. It could allow for quick and timely identification with few errors (over time).

Buyer beware--if you pre-order The Division late, you still may not get into the game's ongoing beta test. Despite Ubisoft guaranteeing pre-buyers access to the beta, server space is filling up fast, and the devs are having a hard time keeping up with the demand.

Right now the web is full of articles talking about The Division beta (including us), and it's pretty much the hottest thing going on this weekend for gaming. These posts and videos and content have a way of changing your mind on pre-ordering the game: gamers who initially avoided pre-orders might second guess themselves. What those sites aren't telling you, however, that you may not get access to the beta if you're late to the party.

"We're working hard to let in as many people as possible, however, due to unprecedented demand we are no longer able to guarantee access to the Closed Beta," reads the game's official beta redemption site. Ubisoft promises that it's on the case and will try to let in as many players as possible, but ultimately it looks like there's a finite amount of space--so the worst possible scenario is that you'll be denied access. The least possible scenario has you waiting for an undetermined amount of time to jump in.

Bungie realizes you might love your firteam, it would seem, and has detailed their upcoming Crimson Doubles multiplayer mode that'll be running over Valentines day, from from February 9th through the 16th.

Crimson Doubles will be a 2 vs 2 Elimination requiring you to kill the other team. This is mode where you're able to enter the tournament with whomever you wish, not through the traditional matchmaking way. That's not new, necessarily, but they're adding a Broken Heart Bluff.

That works by bolstering your teammates maximum armor, agility, recovery and even weapon handling speed when you die, so that they can take revenge upon their fallen comrade. Of course there're new rewards like shaders, emblems and Ghost Shells to go along with the themed update.