Gaming - Page 1054

The much anticipated Eden update to ArmA 3 is finally here, and it's more than just the gorgeous new editor by the same name. Improvements to the already immersive audio, better graphics options and a new amphibious engine simulation have made its way in the game.

The foremost item added is the Eden editor, a new scenario editor within ArmA 3t that lets you manipulate things in full 3D, seeing the changes you make before you commit. This gives you greater control over the kinds of military actions you're planning. It's an incredibly robust experience that gives up nothing compared to the traditional 2D editor.

Under the hood improvements include the inclusion of HBAO+ to the engine and a more advanced parallax technology for better looking environments and of course more improved sound effects. Those sound effects, things like gun-shots and other environmental sounds, all have distance information and can be added in the Eden editor, giving a greater sense of depth to your creations. Or if you really want to feel like you're there.

The first Just Cause 3 content pack, Sky Fortress, is coming to us on March 2016 on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and the PC. If you happen to have the Air, Land and Sea Expansion Pass then you'll get to play it a week before it's out.

"If Just Cause 3 is over-the-top action then the Air, Land and Sea Expansion pass aims to stand on its shoulders and reach even higher," said Tobias Andersson, Senior Producer at Avalanche Studios. "An incredible amount of time has been spent ensuring every new item is fully integrated into the main game and can be used during existing missions. Rico's new Bavarium Wingsuit will fundamentally alter the core gameplay of Just Cause 3 and we can't wait to see the crazy stunts that players perform with it."

Sky Fortress contains a brand new set of missions that introduce a new threat, a gigantic, menacing Sky Fortress and an army of deadly robotic drones that don't seem to like you very much. You'll get to use a new upgradeable, rocket-powered, weaponised 'Bavarium Wingsuit' fitted with shoulder mounted machine guns and auto targeting missiles - alongside Rico's new 'Eviction' personal defense drone and 'Bavarium Splitter' assault rifle.

Epic Games has unleashed a new bit of gameplay footage for its rather amazing-looking MOBA Paragon, showing off some killer hero abilities.

The clip is short but rather sweet, and gives us a crash course in sci-fantasy chaos. We're introduced to six distinctly stylish characters and their deadly abilities, all of which can be combined for strategic synergies.

There's Howitzer, a robot that can spawn mini clones; Sparrow, the bow-shooting rogue who rains down a torrent of arrows on her foes; Gideon, who uses arcane magic to teleport across the map and slam down huge comets from cosmic rifts; Dekker, who wields a futuristic staff powered with electric doom that can trap enemies in a containment fence; Steel, a hulking automaton who can throw up huge defensive shields; and Grux, a rhino-slash-dino that wields dual clubs and unleashes fiery earth attacks.

It seems no one is safe from the mighty DDoS anymore, and you don't even have to use anyone's bandwidth to accomplish that feat either. A flaw in WordPress's pingback feature has allowed a layer 7 (the application layer) DDoS take down, and effect, nearly 26,000 different sites using the CMS.

The attackers are flooding the sites with HTTPS requests, in this case pingbacks, that the server will log to the database and try to process. Being HTTPS means that more resources are being used to establish an SSL session, which devotes those resources to those tasks. Enough requests and the site can slow down to a crawl because the physical server just isn't fast enough. Not as much network bandwidth is needed to send these packets, so at the network layer it may look like normal traffic. But even 10,000 HTTPS requests per second can take offline even a modestly powerful server.

Thankfully the solution is relatively simple. Just turn-off pingbacks on your site altogether. At the very least change your .htaccess file to whitelist only the known and good IP addresses that are within your own community, those that aren't part of a botnet. Apparently the application layer DDoS attack accounts for around 13% of all DDoS attacks according to Sucuri. That's a lot more than you might think.

Bethesda recently dropped a megaton nuke onto the Commonwealth by revealing the first wave of Fallout 4's DLC packs. The announcement not only triggered a wave of anticipation but also rocketed Fallout 4's season pass to the number one spot on Steam's best-seller list.

There's a very simple reason Fallout 4's season pass is selling like hotcakes. Bethsoft made some key changes to the game's all-access pass to reflect its new expanded DLC roadmap, hiking the price to $50. But the price isn't instantaneous, and gamers still have up until March 1 to grab the pass at $30, which accounts for the huge influx of pass purchases.

Bethesda's grace period strategy has worked out quite well, and pretty much every Fallout 4 player wants to grab the season pass for $30 before it jumps to $50. The devs promise that "more than $60 worth of Fallout 4 add-on content" is planned for 2016, and if you buy the pass at $30 you still get access to the full shebang--the first three DLC packs and every pack afterwards.

Activision knows that the multiplayer is what really sells the Call of Duty series, so they've taken the multiplayer-only approach from the older consoles and released a Multiplayer Starter Pack for Black Ops III for $14.99.

Even though have quite the large budget for creating a truly spectacular single-player productions, with triple-A actors and a story that could rival many good movies (but admittedly aren't always fun to play), the true fun is in the competing with your friends, and insult-hurling strangers across the Internet.

This lowers the price of entry into the competitive world of Call of Duty and lets you play the fun bits without having to have the extra large single-player campaign taking up precious hard-drive space. Of course, you won't be able to enjoy the delightful Zombies game mode, either.

NVIDIA is on a roll when it comes to game franchises arriving on their GeForce Now service, with Tomb Raider launching on GeForce Now... and even better, it's completely free.

NVIDIA adds that this is "the first of many Square Enix titles coming to SHIELD", teasing that "Sleeping Dogs, Lara Croft Guardian of the Light, Quantum Conundrum, Murdered Soul Suspect, and more that will be released soon on SHIELD for GeForce NOW members. Keep an eye out for SHIELD Tuesday updates!"

Right now, GeForce Now features over 80 games that you can play right now on Shield, with more major publishers stepping on board. Janet Swallow, Vice President of Licensing Worldwide for Eidos Label at Square Enix explains: "Square Enix is delighted to join the NVIDIA SHIELD platform and enable instant access for gamers to stream our award-winning franchises like Tomb Raider with GeForce NOW".

NVIDIA has made it official, announcing that its partners will be bundling free copies of The Division with certain GeForce video cards. It all kicks off this week and lasts for around a month with the deal taking place throughout the US, Canada, most European countries, and a few Asian countries.

Which GeForce cards will include a free copy of The Division? You'll be glad to know the GeForoce GTX 980 Ti, GTX 980 and GTX 970 will include a free copy, as well as the GTX 980 for notebooks, and the GTX 980M and GTX 970M-powered notebooks. The expensive GTX Titan X isn't included, and neither are the GTX 960 and GTX 950 nor are the GTX 965M and below for notebooks.

Earlier today we reported that NVIDIA has over 100 million GeForce gamers, with the company excited for the future of VR gaming. The company also announced record quarterly, and full-year revenue riding a huge wave of success in nearly every aspect of its business.

While speaking to The Guardian, Valve's veteran coder and designer Robin Walker, who has been working on the Steam Controller for three years now, explained that the company has been trying to make its hardware "more like software".

Walker said that the design team at Valve tried to visualize the controller as a piece of physical software, where it could be adjusted and tweaked to perfection. Walker added: "We're very interested in trying to make hardware more like software. With a traditional controller, people think of it as a solely physical object: you build the hardware, you build a thumbstick and the thumbstick says 'I'm being pressed right', and that information goes to the game".

She continued: "But there's actually a huge software layer that's doing a lot of work: how you interpret and filter for things like my thumb slipping off the pad; or if you want a character to move sideways, well, the reality is no one moves their thumb perfectly horizontally, so how do you adjust for that? It's all software work".

The original Deus Ex was one of the best first-person RPGs of all time, with its creator Warren Spector becoming a household name amongst gamers. Well, the legendary game designer has joined the developer of System Shock 3, Otherside Entertainment.

Spector joins Otherside Entertainment as the Studio Director, after being the founder of Ion Storm in the 90s, creating Deus Ex. He also worked on other iconic PC games like Wing Commander, Ultime, and even Thief. In 2005, Spector joined Disney to work on Epic Mickey, a steampunk Nintendo Wii title. Now at Otherside, Spector will be working on both System Shock 3, and Underworld Ascendant.

Spector talked with GamesIndustry.biz, where he said he was excited about working on System Shock 3. He said: "I've loved working with students as Director of the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy in the University of Texas' Moody College of Communication. But when the opportunity to have a bigger role in bringing Underworld Ascendant to life, as well as playing in the System Shock universe once again, helping to bring these games to a 21st century audience, I just couldn't say no. Working on System Shock was one of the most fulfilling things I've done in my career and it's hard to describe how much I'm looking forward to sharing with players what SHODAN has been up to since the last game was released".

Epic Games has been doing some great things for the community, announcing its second round of Unreal Dev Grants to 10 more contributors.

The developer launched its $5 million Unreal Dev Grants initiative nearly a year ago, with its second round of academic and educational funding for contributors. Education Evangelist at Epic Games, Luis Cataldi, explains: "A few months ago we awarded more than $75,000 in educational grants to individuals creating outstanding learning resources for Unreal Engine 4. We couldn't be happier with the results, and so today we are issuing $100,000 to instructors, tutorial creators, book authors and formal educators whose noteworthy contributions are helping people achieve success with Unreal. Keep it coming, folks. We love and support these amazing efforts".

As for the recipients, here's who will be receiving money from the recent round of funding:

The Division's DLC will be coming to the Xbox One a full thirty days ahead of the PlayStation 4. The latest timed exclusivity deal follows a long-running partnership between Ubisoft and Microsoft, which has since culminated in multiple promos like early access to The Division's beta tests.

A new promo video from Gamestop revealed the news, saying that "The Division content on Xbox One will be delivered 30 days before Sony will see it." We're not sure exactly which of The Division's DLC packs are timed exclusive to the Xbox One, but we're betting that the first three paid DLC packs--Underground, Survival, and Last Stand--are bound by the agreement.

It's interesting to see Microsoft continue pushing timed-exclusivity deals in an attempt to move more consoles. Sony's PlayStation 4 has dominated over the Xbox One, forcing Microsoft to change its traditional competitive approach and unify Windows 10 PCs with the Xbox brand. This approach hasn't worked too well for Xbox in the past, so I'm surprised to see it resort to these old tactics.

WWE 2K16 was hanging in the balance for some time, only available on consoles since its release. But now we know that the bourgeois wrestling game will make it's appearance on the PC on March 11th, with all the past DLC added in completely free.

2K Sports says that it's been a "great success across PlayStation and Xbox platforms since its worldwide launch in October of last year," and they're eager to expand upon that. The DLC included will also have what was supposed to be a pre-order exclusive bonus of Arnold Swarzenegger as The Terminator, now not so exclusive. You'll also get the New Moves Pack, Legends Pack, Future Stars Packa nd the 2015 Hall of Fame Showcase.

Theoretically the game will be optimized for the PC, letting you increase the fidelity by a good amount. Resolutions of at least up to 4K should be supported. For the age of the engine and its ability to scale on older and newer consoles, it's actually a surprisingly good looking game. WWE 2K16 will be on sale, and available for pre-order, via Steam and other retailers quite soon for $49.99. We couldn't find the listing quite yet, however, so look for it soon.

Announced recently, Call to Arms has now ascended into beta status, available through Steam's Early Access program.

Digitalmindsoft has given players the opportunity to complete the first half of its singleplayer campaign with this new update, further allowing for new multiplayer game modes, new menus, engine improvements and other various feature additions. Currently listed with 910 user reviews and 73% of those positive, many users have toted this game as somewhat of an 'arcade RTS' platform, rather than a strategy FPS as it is often claimed to be.

If you're interested in this title, expect to pay around $24.99 for the standard edition or $34.99 for the deluxe edition from Steam here.

A rather fantastic bundle of classic SEGA games is waiting on Steam for you, and it's completely free to download. No restrictions and no catches. Just click, download and enjoy some of the best games from SEGA's heyday.

What a nice surprise to wake-up to on a usually drab Wednesday morning. SEGA's historical catalog of games is full of some very interesting and unique games from back when they were competing in the console wars with the likes of Nintendo and even Sony. The games and ideas they had can sometimes be considered the pre-cursors to a lot of the

You can enjoy several of those classic games for free. In the bundle you'll find Golden Axe, Jet Set Radio and the Hell Yeah! series of games. Not a tremendous amount, nor does it include anything from the pervasive Sonic franchise, but the selection is a preview of the kind of mastery that SEGA was capable of when they put their collective corporate minds to making curious and compelling games. Retro they may be, but incredibly fun they certainly are. And free. Free is the best price ever.

Nintendo has opened up the preregistration for their new My Nintendo Account service so you can start reserving your names on the new system. This new account system is a way for them to unify their entire ecosystem, including their upcoming foray into other mobile platforms.

The first game to fully make use of this cross-platform integration is their first upcoming mobile game, Miitomo, a social experience centered around the creation and care of your Mii avatar.

Nintendo is intent on changing the social experience through technology. The site describes Miitomo as a way to learn more about yourself and to potentially open up more freely, and in a vastly different way than you might well be used to. Preregistering also lets you earn Nintendo Platinum Points, the new currency for their redesigned rewards program. The catch is that those earned with preregistration expire six months after the official launch of My Nintendo.

Sony is implementing their own preview program for software updates, letting the public sign-up to participate in future updates.

It seems that Sony was able to learn a lot from the huge response they received when they asked for gamers to lend a hand with the drastically new update that was released last September. Being able to test in large variety of situations and get data they otherwise wouldn't have been able to, to make sure the software update was as stable as possible, was a huge help.

So they're doing it again. But this time it's a proper beta test program that they're implementing that's open to a wider variety of people than the Xbox One Preview Program. All you have to do is sign-up at this link and join the forums. Just remember that they're looking for people to give actual feedback in addition to monitoring the vitals of your system when things go wrong.

We were promised so much with Street Fighter V, and now that the game is launched, it's a "complete mess" in the world's of DSO Gaming.

The online side of Street Fighter V is broken, as gamers are finding it hard to find opponents. The lounges are not working, so you can't even invite your friends into a match. Capcom promised cross-platform play between the PS4 and PC versions of Street Fighter V, but with the issues - this is hard, too. If you thought the PC version was the only one broken, the PS4 is in the same broken basket.

Street Fighter V also doesn't allow you to remap your keyboard, which is strange considering Street Fighter IV had support for this. The proper tutorial for characters is lackluster, so Street Fighter V doesn't even match up to its predecessor. Capcom needs to do damage control right now, as Street Fighter V is considered a KO in its current state.

The Division's closed beta was a success, but now gamers are preparing for the open beta - which kicks off this week. Now we've found out that The Division's open beta is available for pre-load, so get in now if you want to kick around in Ubisoft's open-world RPG.

The Division open beta will take place between February 18-21 for the Xbox One and February 19-21 for the PS4 and PC. The update is now pre-loading, weighing in at around 1.23GB using Ubisoft's Uplay service, or around 1.1GB if you're using Steam.

If you've had access to the closed beta and not deleted it, you'll be okay - you'll just need to update. But if you did delete it, or didn't get into the closed beta, you're going to need 27-28GB of space to install The Division's open beta.

Homefront: The Revolution's closed beta on Xbox One isn't actually a bad game. It's just held up by a shaky server foundation and some of the jankiest netcode you'll see in a modern shooter. There's stuttering animations, frame rate glitches, and intermittent lag that sometimes works in your favor, or sometimes kills you.

The first time you step into the game you feel as if you're submerged underwater: the controls are sluggish, and the aiming feels as though the joysticks were dipped in molasses. A quick tweak to the sensitivity fixed this for me, but there's nothing we can do about the awkward lag issues. Still, though, Homefront's core multiplayer experience is like a diamond in the rough--players just have to shovel through a lot of junk to get there.

After playing some 15 matches of the closed beta, I was convinced that Dambuster Studios has adequately tapped the chaos of guerrilla warfare. Rather than deliver more of the same competitive PVP we've seen time and time again, the Homefront beta is all about PVE-style co-operative teamwork. It's all about being a group of resistance fighters locked in a hopeless war against the might of North Korean warlords, working together to gun down hordes of soldiers and death-dealing war machines.