Gaming - Page 1039

The open-beta for Battleborn is coming on April 8th for the PS4 and the 13th for the PC and Xbox One. Both will last all the way until the 28th, but only one of those platforms will be getting the full progression system and all 25 heroes available. And it isn't the PC.

Gearbox Software is leaning heavily towards those that wish to partake on the PS4, letting you enjoy more content than is going to be available on the Xbox One or the PC. If you're able to, you're allowed to progress to the top level and grab, and use, the full compliments of gear available in the game. And you can do that with every hero that's been announced for the MOBA so far.

All platforms will be able to enjoy two story-mode missions and have access to two of the three different competitive multiplayer modes across two maps; Overgrowth and Paradise. The two story missions can both be played completely solo, or taking advantage of co-op play. You'll get the chance to take on the Algorithm mission that was shown in the closed, technical test from last year. The second missions is called Voids Edge, and pits you (and maybe another) against a veritable invasion force while you race to blow up a portal.

Nintendo may reveal its mysterious new NX console during its next investor's meeting on April 27, claims a renowned industry insider.

Despite tons of info from the rumor mill, Nintendo has been careful to keep official details of its new NX console quite vague, but the Japanese games maker will soon break the silence with a full reveal of the hardware. That's according to NeoGAF insider Orgen, who says that fans will "get more NX info before E3", and that a reveal during Nintendo's next April 27 shareholders meeting would "match the timeframes". Orgen rightly predicted Pokemon Black and White 2, so his claims may be accurate.

"You can bet that you're going to get more NX info before E3. I think it'll be more of a full reveal than a 'we're working on it, and we'll see more at E3'," Orgen said in the NeoGAF post. "I don't know if it's going to be the result briefing or some sort of direct but the 27th of April would match the timeframes."

The fate of Driveclub is no longer a mystery, as it's been revealed by Jamie Brayshaw, the community manager for the game, that it'll live on under the auspicious care of a team (hopefully bolstered by members of Evolution Studios) at PlayStation itself.

In an open letter to fans on Twitter, the Sr. Community Manager thanked the community and told us all that while Evolution Studios is no longer, the best is yet to come, of Driveclub and likely of the people from the now defunct studio. It's still not clear whether we'll see more, regular, DLC in the future or if the new team will be maintaining the servers and looking to fix bugs and glitches that come along. Whether or not there's still plans for a sequel, we don't know. That certainly shouldn't be ruled out regardless of the circumstances of the studio. The game was a success and the consolidation of the personnel could lead to rethinking that new game. Or more DLC and expansions.

This is good news for those that still quite enjoy the racing simulator, which happens to feature some of the best rain effects in any racing game on console.

Valve is doing some Spring Cleaning in Dota 2, getting rid of the fat and all those dust bunnies that have built up over the years. That is, they've detailed an absolutely massive update that's been designed to make some significant changes throughout just about every aspect of the game.

Chief among those are fixes that address some quality-of-life issues that have been annoyances, yet never quite taen care of in any previous update. There are now neutral spawn indicators, where you can view Neutral Creep spawn boxes when selecting Observer and Sentry Wards to place on the map. Camera control hotkeys are also making it into the update to help make switching between views a bit easier. The settings menu has been streamlined and the armory has been vastly expanded and updated as well. They've made nearly 200 different fixes in this particular update, all of which are shown below.

IO Interactive is asking a very important question to setup for the very first Hitman interactive contract. Who would you rather kill? Gary Busey, or Gary Cole? The video they've prepared features the two Gary's as they explain just how terrible they actually are with, hopefully, fictitious arguments.

This "Choose Your Hit" campaign is a way to kick-off their dynamic elusive targets contract mode, which puts high-profile individuals in the game for a limited amount of time. Those individuals will be decidedly harder to take care of due to not having nearly as much time to prepare, or redo a mission should something go awry.

You can head over to the Choose Your Hit website and see more media and reasons why you should choose each Gary, and there's going to be more videos coming in the future from the two, explaining why they're the best one for you to choose. The winner will be decided with the use of the hashtags #KillBusey or #KillCole.

With the Nintendo NX on the way, Japanese news outlet The Nikkei delivered not-so-surprising reports that Nintendo would cease production of the Wii U console in 2016. The Japanese games maker stepped in to squash these reports, putting Wii U fans at ease.

"That's [Nikkei's report], not an official announcement. We plan to continue production through the rest of the year," Nintendo said in a statement to ITMedia. The company's response was quite vague and only confirmed that the Nintendo NX isn't going to instantly kill off the Wii U when it launches in 2016.

Given that the NX will be compatible and interact with the Wii U and existing Nintendo hardware, it makes sense that the current console would still be in production. That being said, the NX will be a "very different experience" than the WIi U. Nintendo continues to push out new Wii U games regardless of extremely underwhelming sales, but big upcoming hits like Zelda Wii U have been delayed to coincide with the NX's 2016 launch.

Some more sad news rocks the industry as the developer of Driveclub, Evolution Studios has been shut down. Their parent company, Sony, has reviewed their assets and have determined that it's in their best interest to shut the studio down.

The company had an internal review process as part of a restructuring and has determined that there is some redundancy in the staff and function at Evolution Studios. "Regular reviews take place throughout SCE Worldwide Studios, ensuring that the resources that we have in such a competitive landscape can create and produce high quality, innovative and commercially viable projects," Sony said in a statement. "As part of this process we have reviewed and assessed all current projects and plans for the short and medium term and have decided to make some changes to the European studios structure. It has been decided that Evolution Studio will close."

Some of the positions will be shifted to other internal studios, but as is the case the majority of time, it also means that there will be some redundancies and thus layoffs as a result. "It is regrettable that this decision will lead to compulsory redundancies. We accept that this decision will mean that we risk losing high calibre staff but by focusing on other Studios that already have exciting new projects in development we believe we will be in a stronger position going forward and able to offer the best possible content of the highest quality for our consumers."

The renowned Cryengine gets an upgrade with a new, fifth version, as shown off in the new video below. Some of it is developer-centric and won't interest you, but quite a bit will be exciting to gamers of all kinds.

Graphically, Cryengine V offers support for DirectX 12 and VR and advanced particles and clouds with much less of a CPU hit, among other things. The latter you can see an example of in the video; the clouds are pretty realistic and impressive, particularly those seen in the distance.

In an intriguing twist, Crytek has adopted the pay what you want model with this version, with the option to contribute as much as 70% of your payment to its Indie Development Fund, much like the Humble Bundle setup. For more information, head to the website.

Rise of the Tomb Raider has a very good base-game story, with a lot to explore and do in former Soviet Russia. But the final piece of DLC is going to add something that was clearly missing; zombies. Or zombie-like creatures that seem to be very blood-thirsty, for both your death and likely your brains as well. Even though that isn't explicitly mentioned. Zombies, in some form or another, seem to be a tradition with DLC.

The Cold Darkness will be the absolute last content pack coming along and can be purchased separately from all the other DLC. In this, though, there are nightmarish predators that are actually soldiers from an abandoned Cold War base in Russia. The Trinity soldiers have been transformed and are extremely dangerous. This'll present new dangers and challenges to Lara as she has to shut down the decommissioned base.

It's $9.99 by itself for the new DLC, or you can opt to get the Season Pass for $29.99, which includes the entire set of DLC that's been released thus far. The newest, and last, will be available on March 29th 2016 via Steam, the Windows Store or through your Xbox One's store as well. Good luck with those zombies.

Sometimes it stings a little when you see a game that was supposed to be, but never quite made it out of development. Especially one like the cancelled Superman game from Factor 5, best known for their very well done Star Wars games. It could have been a great game, should have been. But it's no more. You can watch some footage from the unreleased game, however.

The game was being developed for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and even the Wii, though it really never exited the concept stage, of the most part. A good portion of Metropolis has been created and a number of models to showoff the ideas they were working on, as a tie-in to the also cancelled sequel to Superman Returns.

At the stage that it was finally left, a story hadn't been created yet, though it would be fairly simple to translate any number of different story arcs from the comics into a viable backdrop. Factor 5 was working on finding and developing interesting gameplay elements to add to the game, and had some very interesting Superman specific ideas. Of course there would be a slew of his enemies that you would eventually face-off against, and you'd be able to grapple with them while flying furiously through buildings, with destruction being dynamically rendered in real-time in your wake.

According to Xbox marketing exec Aaron Greenberg, Microsoft has absolutely no plans to allow Xbox gamers to trade in unwanted digital games back to the company's digital storefront for credit.

"Yeah we are not actively planning such a thing, surprised it was even asked in a survey," Greenberg wrote in a Tweet response to industry analyst Michael Pachter, who criticized the trade-in policy as "playing with fire". As Greenberg is Microsoft's chief marketing exec, he'd be on the up and up when it comes to new storefront features.

The whole idea was kicked off by an official Microsoft user survey that asked gamers if they'd like to be able to trade in digital Xbox games for 10% of their purchased value. The news spread like wildfire, engulfing the entire Xbox community within days. Suddenly every Xbox One owner saw dollar signs when eyeing all those old digital games they never play.

Square Enix today revealed that its upcoming JRPG Star Ocean 5: Integrity and Faithlessness now has an official summer 2016 release window for North America and Europe.

As part of its new Star Log live stream, the publisher further revealed key details about Star Ocean 5 including story tidbits, character info, and tons of gameplay footage. Star Ocean 5 mirrors the unique JRPG battle mechanics found in the previous games, and players will unleash streams of devastating combo attacks in the game's dynamic real-time battle system.

Based on the heaps of screenshots and footage released thus far, Star Ocean 5 is ever the fantasy mashup, featuring a brilliantly-hued spectrum of colors and an enchanted world rife with magic and mayhem. Japan will get the game on March 31 so we should see a ton of gameplay footage all over the place, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled if you're looking forward to Square Enix's latest RPG masterpiece. Also, remember that Europe and North America only get the PS4 version when summer rolls around--the PS3 port is exclusive to Japan.

Recently there's been much controversy regarding the reduction in native resolution in Quantum Break from the promised 1080P at 30FPS to 720P and performance that still wasn't quite what we expected, or rightly wanted from a Microsoft platform exclusive game that's making use of DirectX 12. Remedy has spoken up about the resolution dispute, explaining, for better or for worse, their decision and also the actual techniques used to render at their target resolution, which is technically 1080P, though doesn't quite start that way. It's... complicated it seems.

Quantum Break is a very good looking game, there's really no denying that fact outright. There are aspects that are quite stunning given the base hardware configuration that Remedy is working with. The scenes we've seen in the various trailers, demos and screenshots are, thankfully, accurate to the actual game. That is, there's no "downgrade" that's happened in the slightest, it's just that the final perceived resolution differs from the initial resolution, and can vary wildly in-between.

It's 1080P, sort of. But initially, any given scene seems to begin life as a 720p frame with 4X MSAA added to it (which actually looks great by the way). But it's upscaled and reconstructed from four frames to make the final output that we see. This is a way to save on power by making it the resolution we want with a decent amount of visual quality thrown in.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown has been rumored to be making a debut on the PlayStation Vita sometime this year, but it's been somewhat mired in mystery, at least the release date has been. It's on nearly every platform, including mobile devices with potentially less powerful hardware than the PS Vita, but not on Sony's premier portable gaming console. But now it's been spotted on the UK PlayStation Store for £15.99.

The original release date was going to be in December of 2015, though that was pushed back until around January 26th 2016, but was pushed even further back with a hitherto unknown date of "later this year". It's a perfectly sensible option to delay a port if the studio needs to focus on releasing XCOM 2, which released in February. But apparently the game has now shown up on the UK PlayStation Store. Though it's curiously absent from the North American PlayStation Store.

Though it was released just today and we might end up seeing it in the NA store sometime later than might be considered usual. The game itself should run fairly well given the (still) surprisingly stout PowerVR SGX543MP4+ that's inside. The interface of the game was well suited for both controllers and a keyboard w/ mouse, so that should not be an issue. It'll be interesting to see if this version retains the touchscreen enhancements found in the Google Play Store version. Hopefully we do actually find it out throughout the world sometime later today, or at the very least within the week.

With Dark Souls 3 just around the corner, we thought you could use a refresher on Hidetaki Mizayaki's final punishing RPG.

Namco was in attendance at this year's SXSW festival to show off Dark Souls 3, which culminated in a surprisingly informative live stream. The stream has a particularly energetic Namco commentator that highlights tons of features that From Software's latest cult offering has to offer, so you'll likely learn a thing or two. Plus you get to revel in the visual style; that overpowering sense of awe-inspiring woe is still ever-present, mingling with the haunted, eldritch darkness that permeates from the entire franchise.

In other news Namco Bandai has officially confirmed that Dark Souls 3 will hit 1080p 60FPS on PC, which is pretty important in games like these where every split second matters. Dark Souls 3 is slated to release on April 12, 2016 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

Right now (as of this writing) the servers for The Division are back up from undergoing necessary maintenance while patch 1.02 was applied worldwide. The patch focuses on addressing the a lot of the small complaints that people have brought up regarding quality of life items. UI elements are slightly improved and nearly 14, appreciated, gameplay-affecting issues have been found.

One of the bigger changes is that named enemies, who were roaming New York and were considerably tougher than they appeared (cuddly), will now drop actual good loot instead of something more normal. They'll also disappear and won't return after you kill them. There's incentive to taking a bit of time to take them out, as opposed to avoiding them.

The Dark Zone has also gotten a bit of an overhaul. Instead of being at the mercy of your teammates when down, any other neutral player can heal you, and vice versa. You'll also lose far less credits and experience if you die, even if you decide to go rogue.

GDC 2016 - This year's Game Developers Conference was so popular it broke records, with UBM Game Network reporting that it was a record-breaking GDC with 27,000 attendees.

GDC GM Meggan Scavio explains: "This year's GDC, paired with the inaugural VRDC, allows us to look both backwards at the legacy and lessons of previous years, and forward to the future of games and VR experiences. Even in its 30th edition, GDC continues to evolve and grow to encompass all of the key lessons, advancements and artistic strides that the industry makes. Once again, the staff, volunteers, speakers, students and attendees have made GDC 2016 an amazing, fun and safe show all around".

She continued: "As technologies mature and tastes in games change, we're happy have a place for all of our friends, colleagues and soon-to-be-friends to meet about, learn about and discuss the games and VR experiences that we love. Games are becoming the most popular form of entertainment in the modern world, so it's only appropriate that GDC carry with it the same spirit of fun, adventure and discovery as the games themselves, just as it has since its beginning".

I'm thoroughly disappointed and actually quite infuriated with both Remedy and Microsoft over Quantum Break and their deception over the render resolution and performance-related gameplay problems, something that shouldn't happen in 2016, or - ever.

The developer has now released the soundtrack to the game, with 28:53 of audio to listen to across 9 tracks. The 9 tracks on the Quantum Break soundtrack include:

Bethesda's Pete Hines reveals that Fallout 4's first DLC pack, Automatron, will get a midnight release across Xbox One and Steam. PS4 gamers will have to wait until 1PM tomorrow.

If you're not familiar with Automatron, it centers around the nefarious Mechanist who has "unleashed a horde of evil robots into the Commonwealth, including the devious Robobrain". The DLC is straight out of a nostalgia 1960's sci-fi flick, and features that same definitive Fallout style all the way through. Apart from the level 15+ story quests--which will probably be brief--, players will be able to build their own custom robot companions using "hundreds of different mods".

Automatron is priced at $9.99 but will be free for season pass holders. It's the first of three announced DLC packs, with the other two being the smaller Wasteland Workshop and the significant story-driven Far Harbor.

Blizzard has just released the first eight-minute animated short for Overwatch, giving players much-needed backstory for the game's scientist gorilla Winston. Since Overwatch is multiplayer-only, its' super important that Blizzard releases these clips to tell the stories of the game's many characters--and so far it's quite magical.

The clip, entitled Recall, not only gives us a look at Winston's backstory but also tells the main story of Overwatch. Winston is a super-badass scientist gorilla (who very much reminds me of Beast from X-Men) that runs an advanced labratory tied with the International Justice Commission, a government arm. Essentially, Overwatch is a group of super elite operatives who are sent in to solve problems--kind of like the Justice League. But instead of being hailed as heroes, Overwatch agents are now treated as dangerous weapons, with international sanctions against the order.

The video is touching, revealing, and rather entertaining all at the same time, and gives key inference to the multiplayer-only arena shooter. Blizzard plans to release a bunch of these animated shorts in the future to highlight the game's various characters, so keep an eye out.