Gaming - Page 1028

Like pretty much any game released today, Ubisoft's new brutal dark fantasy game For Honor is getting a season pass that promises an entire year's worth of additional content and even some "exclusive" features.

According to a recent Xbox Store listing, For Honor's season pass will include "a year's worth of expansions, exclusive content, and more." No pricing info was shown on the listing, but Ubisoft has a For Honor Gold Edition that comes with the base game and season pass for $99 so I'm guessing it's priced at $40.

Now I'm a bit dubious about the "exclusive content" part as it hints a portion of the game's extra tidbits will be walled off behind a paygate, unable to be purchased a la carte. But the $40 price tag tells me that the pass will offer a substantial amount of content (hopefully at least!) so it could be worth it. You can't actually buy the pass just yet, and we have no clue what's exactly included, so be sure to wait before you pick up the Gold Edition.

Fallout 4's DLC packs are rather wacky: the now $50 season pass gives players access to only two pieces of meaningful story-based DLC content, with the rest being crafting chicanery. Given the state of the game's DLC packs, haven't you always wondered how Bethesda designs these "expansions"? Todd Howard finally reveals how its done, and the answer won't surprise you.

I love Fallout 4, and personally enjoy the DLC packs--on the surface, at least. But there's something rather...soulless and uncaring about the content, especially with Fallout 4's first $25 Far Harbor DLC pack, and it just feels like Bethesda isn't really investing itself anymore. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the studio just flings anything and everything against a wall to see what sticks. It turns out that's exactly what they do.

"We actually do a thing at the end of each project called a game jam. We let everyone on the team do whatever they want and they have to add it into the game. Alot of the folks on the team are very very creative and come up with great ideas, and we all look at it together and say 'okay, what are the best ideas in this game jam that we want to make DLC out of?' Survival Mode, for example, was a game jam idea that a few of the guys did. And that's how the ideas come across--really the entire team helps out," Bethesda exec Todd Howard said at an E3 2016 interview.

Blizzard's new massively-popular hero shooter Overwatch has hit a rich vein, conquering May's video game releases like Uncharted 4 and Gearbox's direct FPS competitor Battleborn.

According to analyst firm SuperData, Overwatch generated an incredible $269 million in total digital sales (including full game downloads and microtransactions) across all platforms in the month of May, utterly annihilating Battleborn's estimated $11 million digital sales. "Newcomer this month Overwatch tops May's revenue rankings with $269 million in earnings across PC and console. The new shooter game is proving to be a hit among online spectators and is currently the fifth most commonly streamed title across livestreaming channels," said SuperData analyst Joost van Dreunen.

Overwatch's influence is so potent that it actually boosted May's total digital video games sales by 11% year-over-year, totaling to a staggering $6 billion in-game sales across all gaming platforms. Overwatch outshined Uncharted 4, which hit $56 million in digital PS4 sales. Apart from being an excellent shooter, SuperData attributes Overwatch's impressive success to its creative "long-term monetization strategy" made up of skins and loot boxes.

Microsoft blew everyone away with the huge reveal of the Xbox Scorpio during E3 2016, but we still know that Nintendo has its NVIDIA-powered NX console baking in the oven, while Sony prepares its PS4 Neo console.

Wedbush Securities Analyst Michael Pachter was featured in the recent episode of the GamerTag Radio podcast, where he talked about E3 2016. Pachter praised Microsoft on announcing Xbox Scorpio a year and a half away from its release, adding: "The hardware reveals were great. The Xbox One S really does look great and obviously the big reveal of Scorpio at the end was a big deal. I think Microsoft confirming the leaks was a big move, a bold move".

Patcher continued: "I think the Xbox One S will be welcome at that right price, $299. The conspiracy theorist in me says, since Andrew House acknowledged the PlayStation 4 Neo to the Financial Times a few days before, Microsoft just said: "Screw it, we're not going to let Sony be ahead of us, we're just going to let people know we have something big coming too. You don't have a company in the gaming space that's better equipped to launch hardware than Sony. They've been making consumer electronics for 70 years. I think the fact that we didn't see Neo here means that it probably isn't coming out this Holiday".

Yesterday it came out that Battlefield 1 would feature a new interface for forming squads, finding maps and modes, and so on. Details were vague though and it was left unclear as to whether the web-based Battlelog would be receiving an update or something else.

Today the picture gets more clear: YouTuber Westie says on Twitter the game will feature a "new launcher", which DICE engineer Julian Manolov later clarifies will not utilize a web browser at all. So for those of you that hated having to boot a browser to get into matches before, that's no longer the case. Of course, it seems you'll have to boot a launcher instead, but SgtDangerCow (another YouTuber) claims it's "much better" than Battlelog, so maybe it will be an easier pill to swallow.

"New launcher" could mean a lot of things, but I'm going to go with something Battle.net-esque.

Modder Doug Keener has spliced two unlikely icons of pop culture: Doom and Seinfeld. His Seinfeld.wad mod sees Doomguy inside Jerry's apartment building, complete with the main cast (and Newman), all of which can be killed (when shot, they spout famous lines like, "Serenity now!").

Keener assures the mod is in no way hateful and that he loves the show.

"I am a massive fan of Seinfeld. The characters were put into the replica as a bonus to add to the tribute. The only reason they are killable is because I wanted to keep it in traditional Doom fashion, because what is doom without violence and death? This is in no way a hate video."

I still remember the first day that I played Quake, all the way back in 1996, I was just 13 at the time. Shortly after, I purchased a 3dfx Voodoo 1 video card, and grabbed GLQuake, which had better graphics and smoother performance.

id Software is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Quake, which was one of the first games you could play online, as well as rocking a soundtrack from Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor. There are a lot of gamers out there that don't realize that Team Fortress was born from Quake, as it was a very popular mod for Quake at the time, something I pumped countless hours into. QuakeWorld was also rather large, as it was a version of Quake that was optimized for slow internet connections.

At the time, Quake drove video card sales for 3dfx, NVIDIA and ATI - and without Quake, the first-person shooter revolution might have been very different. AMD and NVIDIA even now can be thankful to Quake and its sequels, as most of the PC master race would be filled with people who loved Quake.

Nintendo didn't tease its next-gen NX console at E3 2016, but it did tease gamers with a reveal of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and its official trailer.

People who have had hands-on time with Breath of the Wild have said that the game world is absolutely gigantic, and that the game mechanics and controls are top notch. Nintendo has huge hopes pinned on its next-gen Zelda game, which will hit both the current-gen Wii U and the next-gen NX console.

Nintendo believes that Zelda will be a system seller, especially for the new Nintendo NX console. Nintendo of America VP of Sales, Scott Moffitt, talked with The Financial Post about Nintendo NX and the new Legend of Zelda game recently. Moffitt said that Nintendo decided on focusing on Zelda at E3 this year, since that game deserved it. Moffitt said: "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a game that deserves this level of focus. You're right, it is our primary game we're showing this year, and it's just spectacular. For a game that immense and exciting we thought it deserved this sort of stage, and, frankly, this level of focus".

E3 2016 - Ubisoft has an obsession with towers. The studio uses tall, sky-piercing towers as a means to unlock new portions of in-game maps--if you've played any (god forbid all) Far Cry or Assassin's Creed game, you're all-too-familiar with this mechanic. Luckily our tower-climbing days are over--in Watch Dogs 2, at least.

Watch Dogs 2 is Ubisoft's big-hitter for 2016, so it can't afford to make the same mistakes. The game has to not only look and feel new, it has to be new, and that means a fresh approach. So far the devs are done everything in their power to distance Watch Dogs 2 as far as possible from the original--other than the name, open-world setting, and the basic hacktvist premise, the two share almost nothing in common. Apart from all of its other massive improvements, Watch Dogs 2 won't be bound to the traditional stale "climb a tower and unlock areas" mechanic.

"There are no towers. You just explore the world. It's not a game where you open your map and everything's there," Watch Dogs creative Director Jonathan Morin told Eurogamer at E3. But if the entire world isn't unlocked all at once, and there's no towers, how does the map progression work? Ubisoft actually has a rather ingenious plan for this.

E3 2016 - Sony is keen on making one thing clear about its new PlayStation 4K console: it isn't going to replace existing PS4s, and is meant to co-exist with the current consoles. But what about the future? Is the PS4's lifespan on a countdown timer now that the PlayStation 4K aka PS4 Neo is on its way?

In a recent interview with Gameswelt, President of Sony Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida was asked this very question. Is the generation gap of consoles shrinking? According to Yoshida, Sony will keep its iterative consoles in the same umbrella family--at least when it comes to the PS4 era. "No...PS4 is PS4. The new high-end PS4 is still PS4, so the life-cycle is not going to be shorter," Yoshida said.

This is an interesting answer that has a few implications. Yoshida's answer might hint that Sony has foresight planning with how they're going to proceed with the new console cycle roadmap. Sony's new PS4K and the Xbox One S (and, to a lesser extent due to its overwhelming power, Microsoft's Project Scorpio) signals a shift from the traditional 5-6 year console upgrade cycle to iterative, mid-cycle hardware upgrades/refreshes. So it stands to reason that Sony has laid out a timeline for its future consoles, and that the PS5 may follow a similar path by being an entire generational family of console hardware instead of being a single console.

Best Buy's Gamers Club Unlocked program can now be purchased and activated digitally, no longer requiring gamers to visit physical Best Buy stores.

Up until now if you wanted Gamers Club Unlocked, you had to visit brick and mortar Best Buy stores to get it. Now you can just purchase a one-time use code and apply it to your account, saving you a trip to the store--and for some that don't have local Best Buys, this is a pretty big deal. So no more having to drop into the store, or wait for your subscription card to come in the mail. Best Buy has likely expedited GCU to counter Amazon Prime's new 20% off games pre-order offering.

If you're a dedicated deal-hunter like myself and absolutely hate paying $64 retail prices for your games, then you know all about Cheap Ass Gamer and Best Buy's Gamers Club Unlocked program. Both Cheapy D's efforts and Best Buy's money-saving plan are absolute godsends to hardcore gamers; with GCU you get 20% off on all new game purchases, 10% bonus trade-in credit, 10% off used games, extra points earned when buying games (these stack up surprisingly fast), and more.

The long-awaited Competitive Play mode for Overwatch is now available for testing. If you're the beta type, find the Overwatch tab in Battle.net, select "PTR: Overwatch" from the Region/Account menu, and get to playing.

If you haven't been keeping up, Competitive Play means ranked matches with rewards (including golden weapons). While the jist of it has been known for awhile, with the beta launch comes some new details.

First up: you'll need to play 10 placement matches before diving in. Once complete, you'll be assigned a skill rating and then be matched against players of a similar rating when actually playing competitive matches. If you do well enough throughout a given season, you'll be matched against higher skill players as it progresses.

E3 2016 - Battlefield 1 footage in itself makes for incredibly entertaining World War 1 chaos, but 64-player carnage in glorious 3840 x 2160 60FPS is almost overkill. Key word: almost.

At this year's E3, EA livestreamed Battlefield 1's first-ever 64-player multiplayer session to give players a better idea of how truly dynamic and fluid the game's wide-scale combat really is. Now YouTuber jackfrags has uploaded 22 minutes of earth-shattering 4K 60FPS footage for our perusal, showing off biplane assaults, boots-on-the-ground skirmishes, booming tank destruction, and the amazing sky-burning havoc that ensues when a mighty zeppelin is annihilated. TweakTown's own Jason Evangelho tried Battlefield 1's multiplayer at E3, so be sure to check out his impressions here.

The entire experience is so alive and enthralling, and I highly recommend you watch the footage listening to headphones--you'll hear everything, from the tremulous tank-fire to the booming grenades and the shredding of assault rifle fire as players spray and pray like mad. The warzone itself feels alive with death, with ruins of buildings still aflame even though the dynamic rain drizzles down above.

Right now, I'm benchmarking two GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1080 G1 Gaming video cards in SLI, and I went online with a 1.5-hour Facebook Live video when I installed the second GTX 1080 G1 Gaming card. Check out my FB Live stream below!

I've been playing with the two GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1080 G1 Gaming cards in SLI for a few hours more now, and I've been pushing some hard benchmarks at them. With both cards hitting 98-100% scaling, our entire Core i7-5960X powered system consumed just 490W total. We've put the cards through their paces with some great results, and now I'm overclocking the cards and they're handling over 2GHz on the GPU, even with its single 8-pin PCIe power connector.

Comparing the 2 x GTX 1080 G1 Gaming cards in SLI using 490W of power, the Radeon RX 480 uses 100W under load - but in our system it might use slightly less, or more. Using the chart above, we see that the GTX 1080 G1 Gaming cards in SLI are only using 160W more power than a single Radeon R9 390X. The Titan X uses 315W, while the HBM1-powered Radeon R9 Fury X uses 300W.

Sony Santa Monica's new God of War game is going to be a huge playground for Norse mythology, incorporating tons of amazing mythical events like the Ragnarok, gods, fantastic magic, and massive legendary creatures like the World Serpent Jörmungandr. Just don't expect any Vikings.

The new God of War game was a surprising addition to Sony's E3 2016 press conference, and the reveal footage left fans with many questions. Luckily Sony Santa Monica has jumped in to explain a few things, emphasizing that the game is all about the pre-Viking era where gods and fantastic, world-breaking beasts roamed the Earth.

"It's a fun space to be in because it allows us to paint our own image of Norse mythology as opposed to anyone else's," Sony Santa Monica game director Corey Barlog told GameSpot.

Mass Effect: Andromeda's morality won't be clear-cut into "black" and "white": players will be able to embrace "grey" moral choices in their intergalactic adventures.

BioWare has revealed that the new Mass Effect: Andromeda will have a unique morality system that's not constrained to just Paragon and Renegade, giving players even more ways to handle specific encounters with "shades of grey" responses. Essentially the game won't separate choices into clear-cut good vs. evil, allowing gamers to reflect on the characters and the situations on a case-by-case basis.

"I think in general, with all this sophistication of games or engaging in any kind of entertainment right now, [gamers are] looking for more of those shades of grey," Andromeda's creative director Mac Walters told GamesRadar.

When the fine folks at Volition and Deep Silver scheduled me for a hands-on appointment with an "unannounced game" at E3, my heart started racing. "Saints Row V! Saints Row V" I shrieked to no one in particular. I even got my wife's hopes up. She's played through Saints Row IV about four times at this point and believe me when I say that's a testament to how ridiculously fun that game is. As you know, that unannounced game wasn't the latest insane adventures of the Third Street Saints, but an entirely new IP called Agents of Mayhem. I'll be honest: I was disappointed. But after 30 minutes with Volition's latest romp, I've done a complete 180.

If you had any concerns about the irreverent and bombastic Saints Row DNA disappearing because Volition's developed a new IP, you probably haven't seen the Agents of Mayhem trailer. Aside from the game being set in the larger Saints Row universe, believe me when I tell you that Volition's "secret sauce" is simmered to perfection here. 3rd person, over the top action? Check. Amoral characters with big personalities? Check. Plenty of colorful language and downright wacky scenarios? Check.

Agents of Mayhem takes place in an open world Seoul, Korea and follows the exploits of M.A.Y.H.E.M. (Multination Agency For Hunting Evil Masterminds) in their attempt to assemble the best damn heroes on the planet. Why? Because they have to stop L.E.G.I.O.N. (that's obviously the League of Evil Gentlemen Intent on Obliterating Nations) of course.

Last week we learned the upcoming Competitive Mode for Overwatch would feature golden guns among other things as rewards. Courtesy of the Korean Public Test Realm (PTR), we now know exactly what they look like.

Slick indeed. To see all of them, head here.

Korean player 'itstake' explains Competitive Mode rewards you with competition points, which you can then use to buy the weapons. Each will cost 300 points. It's assumed you'll be able to keep the weapons indefinitely once you've acquired them.

DICE's patch rate and polish with its Battlefield series had been lacking for years until the Community Test Environment (CTE) launched six months after Battlefield 4's launch. With it, it assigned its DICE LA outfit to attend to the long-term health of the game. They were helped in part by the community, which got to try out balance changes and new features among other things before offering its feedback. Once both parties were happy and quality assurance was complete, the results were released to all players. This process repeated many times, and the result is Battlefield 4 as you see it today, which is to say infinitely more polished than it was at its launch three years ago.

It'll no doubt come as welcome to the community then to know that the CTE is returning for Battlefield 1. YouTuber and long-time Battlefield fan XFactor Gaming (formerly known as rivalXfactor) confirmed this today in a reddit AMA while noting the CTE is a point of pride for DICE.

"I believe the relationship between gamer and DICE/EA is better than it has ever been," he said. "Let's face it. It was beyond horrible 3+ years ago. [The] game was broken and we had no communication between the developers. Now, we have developers that are open, honest, and transparent, and [we have] the CTE servers. DICE/EA know how big of a hit CTE was at not only helping fix their own game but building an actual relationship with the community. The developers take pride in this and it will be moving forward with BF1."

Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness aka Star Ocean 5 producer Shuichi Kobayashi says the latest installment in the beloved JRPG series may make its way to PC. In a recent interview with FFDream (translated from French by NeoGAF), he indicated it's more a matter of when and not if, and depends mostly if not entirely on whether they can make it work on a technical level.

FFD : Do you plan to make a PC port of Star Ocean 5?

S.K. : Because it's a fast paced action title, I'm wondering what would be the best way to play it on PC... According to you, what would be the best way to play it?