Gaming - Page 1018

No Man's Sky can drop as far as 13FPS in some stages and suffers from distracting texture pop-ins on ship fly-bys.

I'm enjoying my time with No Man's Sky so far--the game is absolutely beautiful and is quite an interesting experience. However I am aware of its faults, some of which are glaring distractions that really break the immersion. Some of the major faults are the ugly texture pop-ins that occur when you're flying above land in your ship, and Digital Foundry has found that No Man's Sky can dip far below its 30FPS mark--as low as 13FPS in some cases.

Now before we start dismissing Hello Games' procedurally generated exploration sim as a "broken game," we need some context. The game handles its frame rates exceedingly well on Sony's PlayStation 4, providing near-consistent 30FPS in almost every moment--even during cluttered space battles with frigate ships, planets, asteroids and pirates blasting you down, as well as high-volume planets with tons of flora and fauna. But there's some moments that trigger some noticable FPS drops, namely when you're flying across a new planet's surface.

Sony is holding an official PlayStation Meeting event on September 7 where it will almost certainly unveil the new 4K-ready PlayStation 4 Neo console.

Just yesterday we reported that Sony would reveal its new upgraded PlayStation 4K (aka PS4 Neo, PS4.5) console on September 7, and now we have even more proof as Sony Interactive Entertainment has confirmed an official event for the same day. Thanks to leaked documents we know that the PlayStation 4 Neo will upscale 1080p games to 4K resolution thanks to its upgraded GPU, which is likely based on a heavily customized variant of AMD's new Polaris GPU tech, RAM bandwidth and an overclocked Jaguar CPU.

SIE has sent out official press invites for the PlayStation Meeting in New York that kicks off at 3PM EST on September 7. Expect official livestreams and tons of coverage/FAQs from Sony if the PS4K is revealed, and we'll keep you updated as well.

Dragon Quest X has been in the making for what feels like forever, where it was released during the slide of Nintendo Wii sales, and then hit the Wii U, 3DS and PC later.

None of them have been successful, but Dragon Quest X is now coming to Nintendo's next-gen NX console, according to Weekly Famitsu. Dragon Quest X producer Yosuke Saito and director Chikara Saito have confirmed that there's an NX version of the game coming, alongside the already announced PS4 version.

There are some changes and updates that will arrive with Dragon Quest X, but Dragon Quest XI "looks to be a more traditional, single-player entry in the series, and has already been announced for the 3DS and PS4", reports Destructoid.

DOTA 2 fans are some of the most hardcore gamers out there, with The International continuing to pull in more and more money. This year, DOTA 2's The International has a prize pool of over $20 million, and it will continue to expand throughout the week.

Rewinding back to 2011 with The International debuting with $1 million up for grabs, but then Valve changed things up in 2013 with the saleable Interactive Compendium which raises money from the crowd, and hit $2.8 million at the time. Last year, The International had a huge $18 million prize pool and now we're already past that and into unknown territory.

If we consider that the largest prize pool for Hearthstone hit $1 million, CS:GO with the same $1 million and Halo with $2.5 million, DOTA 2 blows them all away with money to spare.

Telltale has found itself in a web of utter crap surrounding the launch of Batman - The Telltale Series, with more than enough problems on the PC version of the game to keep the developer in gamers' bad books for years. But what about the console version, surely that's fine? Nope.

Digital Foundry's latest analysis on the game could see Batman - The Telltale Series as one of the worst performing games of recent memory, with the site reporting that the letterboxed presentation has the PS4 rendering the game at 1600x766 while the Xbox One version is barely capable of 1280x614. DF notes that the Xbox One version is utilizing some anti-aliasing, so there's that.

Digital Foundry writes: "[it] runs very inconsistently on both consoles", where the PS4 version of Batman - The Telltale Series hits 60FPS, but at times runs at below 20FPS. The Xbox One is much closer to the 30FPS average mark, but it's still not ideal at all.

We all know someone who has been playing Pokemon GO obsessively over the last month, but it comes as a huge shock that Niantic has pulled in a mammoth $200 million in its first month with Pokemon GO.

Thanks to a chart from Sensor Tower, we can compare it against Clash Royale and Candy Crush Soda Saga, which both made immense amounts of month in their first month of release, but they simply can't compete with the numbers that Niantic is throwing out.

Things get better for Niantic with the $200 million made up from worldwide iOS and Android revenue, and even more money is being made from microtransactions and deals signed with McDonalds in Japan, and others that haven't been announced yet.

Capcom is going the extra mile as usual with the upcoming debut of Dead Rising on PC.

The game will feature five save slots, native support for Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Dualshock 4 controllers, 4K resolution and beyond, uncapped framerate, 144Hz support via G-Sync, and key rebindings. In other words, pretty much everything you could ask for.

Graphics-wise, it's looking pretty good in screenshots and footage for a 10 year-old game, and of course will look even better in 4K.

DICE is nearly set for its next big Battlefield 1 reveal, and have teased what's to come and when on the game's official website.

On Tuesday, August 16 at 12PM PT/9PM CEST, a second livestream will debut alongside another trailer. Naturally, there is lots of new stuff to look forward to, including a new map, as well as train and horse gameplay.

"Will anyone blow up a tank from horseback?" asks DICE, implying you will indeed be able to throw explosives from horses as hoped.

It's about damn time that we have a PC only game that simply can't be done on consoles because for one, the Xbox One and PS4 are so severely underpowered, and two; the TVs we have right now can't handle anything above 60FPS.

During QuakeCon 2016 last week, Bethesda boss Pete Hines told GameSpot: "There is not a console that supports our vision for [Quake Champions]. You know, Quake Champions, maybe anybody else would've been like, 'No, you have to do it, and it's got to work on every platform.' We were like, 'No, it's a PC-only thing. It's this kind of game. It's got to have this kind of performance, and it's going to be on PC full stop.' We feel very comfortable in making those calls".

Hines continued: "I guess theoretically there's a chance [it could come to consoles]. Who knows what future consoles look like? But this is full stop a PC product: 120Hz, unlocked frame rate. That's the experience we want folks to have".

Niantic has updated Pokemon GO for iOS and Android, bringing the version numbers to 1.3.0 and 0.33.0, respectively. The new update adds some new stuff, and improves a lot of what people have been complaining about for a while now.

Here's the full changelog:

Much to the huge disappointment to its hardcore fanbase, Quake Champions could very well end up being a free-to-play arena shooter.

id Software turned quite a few heads when Quake Champions was announced at E3 2016. The multiplayer-only online arena shooter seemed to resurrect the long-lost art of blistering-paced visceral action, promising "no limitations" 120Hz action with unlocked frame rates. But all of that hype could be crushed by soul-sucking microtransactions.

PC Gamer recently asked id Software's Tim Willits about Quake Champions being retail or F2P, and here's what he said: "I can definitely say that is a really hard problem, and so for us we're trying to figure out exactly what people want more of, and how they perceive it. And I'm not even trying to be cagey! It's not like we know and just aren't trying to tell anybody, we don't know and we're still trying to figure this out."

Sean Murray is playing No Man's Sky right now on Twitch, showing exactly what you can expect from the new patch.

After years of development, No Man's Sky is almost upon us. Tomorrow it launches on PS4 and our long wait comes to an end. Hello Games boss Sean Murray has launched a livestream of the game to sample some of the new content added in by the massive day one patch, taking us on a tour of what we can expect with our journeys on the morrow. He's also revealing quite a bit about the game, showing us some interesting tidbits, including what happens when you die, planet-specific discoveries, and tons of items.

Square Enix has confirmed that popular MMORPG Dragon Quest X will be coming to Nintendo's new NX, hinting the NX will have its own console-like component.

Over the past few days there's been lots of speculation that Nintendo's new NX hardware will have its own dedicated console hardware and won't just be a transforming handheld. Now Square Enix has added some credence to the console argument by confirming to Famitsu (via DualShockers) that Dragon Quest X, a popular MMORPG, is coming to the NX. Some time ago Square Enix implied DQX would jump to NX, but then backpedaled. Now they've confirmed it.

There's just one huge problem here: MMORPG's aren't designed for handhelds. With tens of hours of grinding, MMOs are best played on dedicated central platforms like PCs or consoles. Oddly enough Dragon Quest X was released on 3DS and mobile phones in Japan, but the experience is absolutely awful as the game is streamed from Square Enix's servers, leading to constrained bandwidth and latency issues. So why would Square Enix even port Dragon Quest X over to NX if it's so bad on a handheld? Simple: because the NX could have a console portion.

Sony's new 4K-ready PlayStation Neo console will be unveiled during an official event in September, sources say.

The PlayStation 4 Neo console, which upscales original PS4 games to 4K resolution and features upgraded hardware, will be revealed on September 7 at a special Sony event in New York. The news comes from French gaming site Gameblog, and the same sources have confirmed the news to renowned industry sources like VICE Gaming's Patrick Klepek, who's well known for accuracy when it comes to leaks.

Sony president Andrew House officially confirmed the PlayStation 4 Neo (PS4.5, PS4K) before E3 2016, saying that the new console "is intended to sit alongside and complement the standard PS4. We will be selling both [versions] through the life cycle," and that the PS4 Neo will be fully backward compatible with all existing PS4 games: "All games will support the standard PS4 and we anticipate all or a very large majority of games will also support the high-end PS4."

One of the main worries about Nintendo's new NES Mini was the aspect ratio support, especially considering old NES games were built for old CRT TV's with 4:3 aspect ratio. Anyone who's played retro games on a HDTV can tell you the picture is quite bad. Now Nintendo has stepped in to clarify.

Nintendo kicked off a wave of NEStalgia last month by announce the NES Classic Edition console, a miniature NES that comes with 30 built-in classic games, connects to modern HDTVs via HDMI, and costs just $59.99. The system will launch on November 11, and we've broken down all the info here.

Although the NES Mini connects directly to HDTV's via HDMI, the system will have different built-in display modes that mirror gaming on older CRT tube TVs:

When No Man's Sky releases this Tuesday, it won't technically be complete: Hello Games' Sean Murray promises to continue evolving their interstellar space sim with major free content updates--the first of which will be the game's beefy day one update.

Hello Games just dropped a massive news update on No Man's Sky's expansive day one update, revealing just how much the update changes the game. The infamous Atlas Stones exploit has been fixed, so don't expect to fly to the center of the universe in 40 hours, and they've even adjusted the ugly texture pop-ins I complained about. Check here for a list of known bugs in the unpatched pre-release version, most of which have been now fixed. The day one patch will be available on Monday, August 8 when PS4 press review copies are sent out. We have a list of patch notes below.

Murray also reveals that this is just the first No Man's Sky update, and the studio will release a bunch of patches to add in future content and fixes--all of which the studio plans to offer for free. "Hello Games will continually update No Man's Sky this way. This is the first of many," he said in the update.

Battlefield 1 is shaping up so beautifully, and now EA DICE have released a new video of Battlefield 1 which details a bunch of the weapons in the game. EA expects to sell over 15 million copies of Battlefield 1, and this new trailer really cements that.

The developers at DICE have been waiting for nearly 10 years to work on a new Battlefield game in this setting, and since Battlefield 1 went into development, the developers have been testing and playing with real-life weapons to recreate in BF1 as best they can.

We have clubs, grenades, and the weapons that were at the time, at the peak of engineering. It's an interesting thing to remember, that these weapons were truly the best the world had to offer at the time of World War 1. Compared to now, and games of today, where we have guns with hundreds of rounds, super portable, space-based weapons, and more.

The online servers for No Man's Sky will be wiped clean upon launch so that gamers can experience a fresh universe, and anyone with a leaked copy will have to start over from scratch.

Many stores have broken street date, selling retail copies of No Man's Sky to gamers ahead of time. There's been tons of leaked video and content introduced over the past week--much of which we've covered--and even big game sites like Kotaku and Polygon got early copies and published their own gameplay streams. Players are already flying across the universe naming planets, creatures, discovering untold secrets, and generally causing havoc to Hello Games' attempts at secrecy.

As you could imagine, Hello Games isn't too happy about this. In order to make everything even for those gamers who are patiently waiting until release date, the studio will completely reset the game's servers. And leaked save game progress won't carry over to the final game. That means all the planet names, discoveries, aliens and creature names will be wiped clean, and the leaked owners' save game data isn't compatible with the day one update. So that means anyone with an early copy will have to start from scratch.

No Man's Sky won't launch on PC until August 12, three days after its release on PS4, Hello Games' boss Sean Murray has officially confirmed.

Since we already warned you guys about No Man's Sky's impending PC delay, this isn't exactly a surprise. Steam's listing for No Man's Sky now reads August 12 to reflect the new release date. Now Sean Murray has opened up about the situation on Twitter to reveal why the game was delayed a bit on PC, what's going on with the day one patch, leaked copies, and how he doesn't want anyone playing the pre-release version--even Kotaku and Polygon, who received an early copy from a store that broke street date.

There's been lots of confusion regarding No Man's Sky lately, but here's what you need to know (scroll down to see a big list of bugs/glitches that should be fixed in the final patched release):

Nintendo has quite a lot of excitement leading into its NX console, but now there is a new report that says Nintendo's NX console will feature three marquee titles within the first 6 months of its releases, according to "sources close to Nintendo".

Nintendo has already announced and teased The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but the report says that we could expect next-gen Mario and Pokemon games on the NX console shortly after launch. This fits neatly in with Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima's promise that the NX will launch with a "full software lineup," so this isn't exactly a surprise. We don't know what the new Mario game could be like, but MCV reports that the Pokemon NX game will come from the developer of the mainline handheld titles, Game Freak.

If Pokemon does land on the Nintendo NX, it will be the first Pokemon game released on a home system - as it is normally on Nintendo handhelds, and now smartphones with Pokemon GO. However the NX is believed to be a handheld-console hybrid rather than a traditional console, so this definitely fits with Pokemon's usual platform of choice.