Gaming News - Page 1

Massive Entertainment built a beautiful graphics engine with its Snowdrop engine, really shown off beautifully in The Division 2 -- but now Snowdrop goes next-gen with the just-introduced Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Check it out:

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is Ubisoft's first next-gen only game, with the "tech showcase" video above detailing the tech side of the game -- with no official gameplay shown so far. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora developer, which also made The Division 2 -- has shown off the technical prowess inside of the new Snowdrop engine.

Massive had to overhaul the Snowdrop engine for what was required in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, where the team introduced some very Unreal Engine 5 sounding technical tricks into the game. The new hardware inside of the next-gen consoles as well as the hardware available on PC, is now capable of doing what Massive wanted it to do, in order to deliver us Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

Hideo Kojima is reportedly in negotiations to make a new game for Xbox, and it might help kick off Microsoft's new cloud games.

It looks like Kojima's experimental new horror game-film hybrid has found a home at Microsoft. Stadia design director Kim Switch recently joined Microsoft to help lead new cloud gaming initiatives, namely courting studios to work on titles specifically for Project xCloud. Sources tell Games Beat that Kojima is one of the various devs being courted for xCloud's new push and that Kojima had previously pitched a game to Stadia.

Kojima has expressed interest in cloud streaming for a while now and has a few ideas for his new project. After P.T., Kojima says he wants to make a new interactive horror game using the cloud as the delivery system. His comments suggest the project will be a game/film hybrid similar to something like Bandersnatch with more interactivity, possibly with AI-based randomization or procedurally-generated scenarios.

Windows 11 will feature Auto HDR settings built natively into the operating system, Microsoft confirms.

Microsoft is going all-in on PC gaming with Windows 11. The new OS will come with a built-in Xbox app complete with Game Pass and Project xCloud streaming, and other features like Auto HDR that will help breathe new life into old and new games.

"Games will look better than ever thanks to Auto HDR, a unique capability we're offering with Windows 11 which automatically adds High Dynamic Range (HDR) enhancements to games built on DirectX 11 or higher that previously only leveraged Standard Dynamic Range (SDR)," Microsoft said in a blog post.

DirectX 12's new DirectStorage feature will be exclusive to Windows 11 and won't be available to Windows 10 users, Microsoft confirms.

Today's big Windows 11 info blowout confirms a major tech breakthrough is exclusive to the new OS. "With DirectStorage, which will only be available with Windows 11, games can quickly load assets to the graphics card without bogging down the CPU," Microsoft said.

"This means you'll get to experience incredibly detailed game worlds rendered at lightning speeds, without long load times. "DirectStorage Optimized" Windows 11 PCs are configured with the hardware and drivers needed to enable this amazing experience."

id Software, like every other game developer on the planet, is already planning their next game. What could it be?

In a recent Dropped Frames stream on Twitch, Xbox's Phil Spencer gives insight on how Microsoft runs its 23 game development teams. Xbox has a distinctly unique approach that ranges from hands-off all the way to direct cross-studio collaborations, financing and hiring sprees. Spencer is always meeting with first-party studios to discuss future plans, and he recent met with id to talk about what's next for the hellrazers.

"Marty Stratton and I were on a call yesterday and we were talking about id and the roadmap there, which was fun. I can't wait to get on the ground with the studios and talk to them about what they want to do,"Spencer said in the stream.

Microsoft is likely waiting on major competitors to announce their games before it commits to a Halo Infinite launch date.

Microsoft and 343i have narrowed down Halo Infinite's release date and are still confident in a holiday 2021 launch, but other big shooters like Battlefield 2042 and Call of Duty Vanguard might get in the way. It's likely that Microsoft is holding back Infinite's launch until after Vanguard's announcement so they can place the game in a free-ish slot during the holiday season. Holiday 2021 (October - December) will be quite congested with big competing cross-platform games like Battlefield 2042, CoD Vanguard, which should release in November, and Grand Theft Auto V's next-gen release.

In a recent Dropped Frames show on Twitch, Xbox's Phil Spencer said: "We know kind of our range in the 3-4 week range, we don't have yet the exact day, there's some other things with some other game timing that we're trying to look at. We'll have better clarity after the summer. This isn't a months thing, this its just down to a few weeks. So instead of picking a date and having to move it a week, which at this point would feel like a fail, we don't want to do that, let's just wait until we know what the date is."

NVIDIA and Bethesda have teamed up for a kick ass exclusive new DOOM Eternal bundle, to help celebrate the release of the new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and the new Game Ready drivers which add RTX ray tracing and DLSS technology support in DOOM Eternal.

The new DOOM Eternal GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Demon Slayer Bundle starts from $1450, and will include NVIDIA's latest flagship GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition graphics card, a DOOM Eternal game code, a $100 gift card, and more.

There are only 300 "winners" in this new bundle, which is an open reservation raffle -- it begins today at 5AM MST and ends on 7th of July at 11:59PM MST. The 300 winners of the DOOM Eternal GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Demon Slayer Bundle will be notified over email on July 8 and is open to gamers in the US, Canada, EU, and Australia.

WB Games studios like Netherealm, Avalanche, Monolith, and WB Games Montreal won't be sold off, a recent press release seems to confirm.

WarnerMedia is merging with Discovery to form a huge new mega-company. So what happens to the WB Games division that includes franchises like Mortal Kombat, Batman, and Superman? The games division will still be part of WarnerMedia and the parent will not sell its biggest studios or IPs.

Today WarnerMedia sold off its first games studio following the merger deal with Discovery. EA bought mobile dev Playdemic from WB for $1.4 billion in cash. This apparently is the only studio that will be sold: "The remaining Warner Bros. Games portfolio is included in the recently announced WarnerMedia-Discovery transaction and will become part of the combined media and entertainment company after the expected close of that transaction," reads the deal's press release.

After buying Glu Mobile and Codemasters for a combined $3.3 billion, EA makes another billion-dollar power acquisition.

EA is going all-in on mobile. The company recently bought Glu Mobile for $2.1 billion in an effort to solidify its smartphone gaming business, and Glu is expected to be the literal glue that holds this business together as developers focus on a myriad of projects. "We are forming a powerful growth engine that will expand our current games and deliver more amazing new experiences across sports, lifestyle, mid-core, and casual for players everywhere," EA said in a press release.

Now EA has made another billion-dollar mobile buyout. This time it's Playdemic, the developers behind the popular Golf Crash series. Warner Bros. Games has sold Playdemic to EA for $1.4 billion in cash.

The new Aliens Fireteam Elite shooter authentically captures H.R. Giger's bizarre art that inspired the classic horror franchise.

Action is at the core of the new Aliens Fireteam Elite third-person shooter, but the scenery is lifted straight out of a feature-length film. The environments pay great respect to the macabre paintings and bio-mechanical designs of H.R. Giger, who's responsible for the original Alien costume as well as the ship on LV-426. Giger's work was just as instrumental to the Alien franchise as McQuarrie was to Star Wars, and his art has defined the series ever since.

Aliens Fireteam Elite has lots of nods to Giger's work, and rightly so given his dark imagination set the tone for the films. Many of the environments feature Giger's curved metallic frames, glistening organic walls, and terrifying feline grace of the aliens themselves. Overall this game looks like the ultimate Alien multiplayer experience.