Gaming - Page 1055

There had already been ruminations of a BioShock compilation coming out courtesy of game rating organizations from other parts of the world, but now the US's own ESRB has rated the BioShock: The Collection game in anticipation of its release. Even though 2K hasn't said anything about it quite yet.

The rating simply describes the upcoming compendium as "...a collection of three first-person shooters in which players assume the role of characters uncovering the mysteries behind the dystopian societies of Rapture and Columbia." Due to the "large bloods-splatter effects" and other depictions of violence therein it receives Mature rating form the ESRB to reflect the more mature way that the three games seem to depict this fantastical 1912 setting.

We heard of the impending release, or announcement, of the collection in September when it was outed on a South African site, which published a listing for it. Then some more details popped up on a Taiwanese game rating site a little later on, though we've had no mention or comment from 2K about any new collection, remastered or not, of the BioShock games. This might be April 1st, but the ESRB rarely plays jokes at all, even if they mistakingly release info before they should.

The next generation wave-riding extravaganza has just been announced by Vector Unit. Riptide GP: Renegade has a completely retuned graphics engine underneath, retuned mechanics, and promises to let us pull off some very crazy stunts in mid-air on just about every gaming platform imaginable.

The newest Riptide will let you show off to your friends with death-defying stunts over massive waterfalls in beautifully rendered scenes, outrun cops, and speed off at nearly reckless speeds across increasingly surging waves. If you're daring enough, you'll get the chance to evade police boats and drones while blasting through some rather vast and interactive race environments. Just like the previous Riptide games, there'll be no shortage of secret shortcuts, and animated obstacles to race around.

You'll also get a chance to battle your way through a variety of different race types and even boss fights to reach the top of the underground hydro jet racing circuit, which is totally a thing. Racing earns you XP and cash so you can upgrade and customize your hydro jet, unlock new stunts, and increase your rider's performance. There'll be online multiplayer plus local split screen multiplayer on consoles. And the best part is that it's supposed to run at 1080P and 60FPS on the consoles (much higher on the PC of course). It'll be available on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Android, iOS and through the Amazon app store.

EVE: Online has a spectacularly intricate political structure that's not unlike a sprawling sci-fi epic. Instead of a regal Padishah Emperor or Galactic Empire, the dreaded Imperium sits upon the throne of the EVE: Online universe, reigning over all other coalitions and clans. Thanks to the donations from an online casino, thousands of players have formed the Moneybadget Coalition to dethrone the space titan once and for all.

So why are EVE: Online players fed up with the Imperium? The Imperium apparently extorts players with the Viceroy System that has players paying cash for protection. Space is dangerous, after all, and it'd be a shame to see your hard-earned dollars wasted when your ship is utterly demolished. The Imperium also delights in earning the ire of its foes and stirring up other players: "We thrive on having our enemies be completely unhinged and hating us," Alex "The Mittani" Gianturco, one of the Imperium's leaders, said to Polygon. "We figured out a scalable way to conquer the galaxy without taking any territory."

The rebellion--in this case the Moneybadger Coalition--is now striking out against the nefarious Imperium. Online gambling site I Want ISK is funding the rebel's fleets, which measure in the thousands of dollars. Armed with its new fleet, Moneybadger swarmed Imperium space in an attack now known as the battle of M-0EE8, which actually broke the previous record for most PVP kills in a single battle.

The scope of the entire media project that is Final Fantasy XV is massive, with a full-length CGI movie, anime series and of course, the game itself. All of which cost a lot of money to make, increasing the amount that Square Enix has to sell in order for it to be considered a financial success.

The director for Final Fantasy XV, Hajime Tabata, explained to Kotaku that for it to be considered a commercial success, they'd have to sell 10 million units, or copies of the game, worldwide over the life of the game. 10 million is quite a bit, but needed if they want to recoup any losses. Kotaku notes that that number is more than any single Final Fantasy game has ever sold. Final Fantasy VII has sold 9.72 million copies since it was released, coming the closest. The Division has only sold 2.72 million copies since it was released, so while it's technically possible to sell that many, the number is rather large and the task somewhat daunting.

Final Fantasy XV is going to be released on the PS4 and Xbox One on September 30th 2016, with a PC version only being considered after the console launch and they can fully concentrate on porting it properly.

Square Enix hasn't ruled out a PC release for Final Fantasy 15, and the publisher promises that it'll seriously evaluate the platform in due time--but not before the console ports release. So we could be waiting well into 2017 before FF15 makes the jump to PC.

Square Enix game director Hajime Tabata says that the studio is "aware of the big call for a PC version." but the PS4 and Xbox One flavors take priority. The studio is committed to optimizing the console versions ahead of Final Fantasy 15's September 30 release date.

"Unfortunately we weren't able to do simultaneous development on a PC and console version for XV," Tabata told Endgadget. "We had to focus on the console version, and our goal was to maximize, optimize everything for the HD consoles. Once that's done, then we will definitely take a good, hard look at PC and what we need to do, and consider all our options. But right now we aren't decided, we're still considering a lot of things."

Epic Games has been at the forefront of VR since the Oculus went to Kickstarter to fund its Rift headset all those years ago, with Unreal Engine 4.11 being released - including bug fixes and updates for every major HMD on the market - including the Gear VR, PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets.

Unreal Engine v4.11 includes improvements to DX12 support as well as platform/SDK improvements for Oculus Mobile SDK 1.01 (Gear VR), PlayStation VR SDK 3 and SteamVR 0.9.12. Whilst a full version (1.3.0) of the Oculus Rift SDK is promised to take over from the current 0.8 Beta in an upcoming hotfix, reports VRFocus.

The team at Unreal Engine have said that the improvements have made the engine hit the "VR ship ready" state, which is perfect timing now that the Oculus Rift is shipping to consumers, and the HTC Vive is right around the corner.

After all of these years, Valve has finally announced Half-Life 3. The new first-person shooter will be exclusive to the PC and has support built-in for the soon-to-be-released HTC Vive headset.

Half-Life 3 will be powered by the Source 2.0 engine, with support for 4K monitors and DX12. Valve has boasted about its new skeletal animation system, as well as its motion-capture technology, ensuring that the in-game characters look insanely real - more real than any other game before it.

The full game will be unveiled at E3 2016 in June, where Gabe Newell will take the stage and play the Half-Life 3 trailer - after which he'll drop the mic to the ground and walk off the stage - whispering one last thing: Half-Life 3 is free, to all gamers everywhere.

After being completely disappointed with the news that Quantum Break won't be running at 1080p on the Xbox One, but instead 720p - and worse yet, with performance-related issues - the pre-launch reviews will be played by reviewers on the Xbox One. This isn't surprising at all.

All of the pre-launch reviews on Xbox One will be released in the coming days, as there are no Early Access codes to game reviewers for the Windows 10 version of Quantum Break. What does this mean? Well, either the Windows 10 version is not ready - and Remedy are still doing last minute work on it, or the Windows 10 version isn't ready. Yeah, that's going to be the issue - in that Remedy is putting all of its eggs in one basket, with that basket being the Xbox One.

We've seen PC releases like Gears of War: Ultimate Edition fall on its face, as well as other games released onto the Windows Store that don't support multi-GPUs or Eyefinity/Surround Vision at launch, and/or are plagued with bugs for months. Get your crap together, developers.

Endless Legend, a 4X strategy game developed by Amplitude Studios, is getting yet another content expansion coming up on April 7th.

The new faction, the Allayi, are a small civilization that seem to be bound to the changing seasons, with their allegiances shifting between the friendly faction you can easily trade with to the enraged thieves that seem to be a thorn in your side. They can also shift those allegiances at will, too.

Amplitude Studios is expanding the spirituality inherent in such a high fantasy setting, letting you spend pearls, a new resource found around the map during the winter months, at the new building they've added, the Altar of Auriga, in exchange for blessings which amount to defensive and offensive advantages in the form of city improvements or some pearl item sets. Part of those advantages is the ability to control winter in a way that brings whole new experience to the game. If you wanted, you can freeze lakes, or the sea, so you can walk your armies right over them, taking a more direct route to destroy your enemies.

The latest walkthrough from the folks at Creative Assembly take us on a tour of what the Vampire Count's campaign looks like inside Total War: Warhammer.

In the video, they explore some of the unique gameplay mechanics that the undead get to enjoy compared to their more colorful, living opponents. In particular, they show off how to raise the piles of dead bodies and reanimate them for your own nefarious purposes. It's an ability that can really turn the tide of your overall campaign, though you can only raise your dead army after the fact. A massive undead army to enact revenge sounds rather tantalizing.

They also introduce us to one of the hero characters, the Master Necromancer known as Heinrich Kemmler. He's has a massive roster of magic with which to pull from, being the one that can raise the dead, though after battles are waged. As with all hero units, he's capable of leveling up and learning gaining more abilities to become an invaluable member of your military campaign.

The second installment for the episodic Hitman is almost here. We'll be able to travel to beautiful Sapienza to complete our next official mission on April 26th. From the look of the short video on Twitter and the promo photo below, there might be some delightful ways to get to your target.

In this new mission, you'll have to infiltrate the fictional Italian town of Sapienza, which should prove to be a dense yet vast and open location with plenty of obstacles and opportunities to play in the sandbox environment. Within the coastal town, there are many different locations to explore, such as a medieval church a sprawling mansion and even a busy borough complete with dark alleyways and busy storefronts.

This location was originally going to be released at the launch of Hitman, but the decision was made to change the release schedule to be an episodic one just before it was released. This allows both us to fully explore and challenge ourselves in the new, larger locations and gives the developers more time to perfect each mission based on player feedback from each previous mission. So long as each release isn't too terribly far apart, it could prove very fruitful. After Sapienza, we'll be heading to Morocco sometime in May.

Perhaps one of the most underrated yet most remarkable genres that I've ever had the pleasure of playing is that of the intensely story-based RTS ship combat simulator. The epic story arc that follows the harrowing events that could very well shape the future of humankind.. Nexus: The Jupiter Incident is probably more entertaining than you might believe, even after 11 years.

The journey begins with a great tutorial that tries its very hardest to help you with an exorbitant learning curve. You're working for one of many corporations that have taken over control of space beyond the Moon. The first mission is quite simple, helping you along where necessary and willing you to pause it with the spacebar often to read the helpful messages and issue the appropriate commands. After you inadvertently run into a mine that didn't properly get disarmed, you'll then be thrown softly into some incredibly gorgeous combat scenes.

The action isn't fast by any stretch of the word. It's positively slow and deliberate. In fact it sometimes even feels a bit cumbersome with your big cruiser lobbying for position in the most aggravatingly slow way. But once in position and your fighters have been launched to ward off any enemy fighters, then you can commence the broadside. And it's all about control You've got options to take out these ships that are threatening you. Want to disable weapons first and then board them for

Hitman is a game that just came out and wasn't entirely broken at launch. Subsequent updates have been able to fix latent bugs that seem to have been sticking around well past their welcome, however. Patch 1.03 is out now on the Xbox One and PS4 with faster loading times, makes it more stable and adds in a Vampire Magician challenge pack because you can't just be only one of those archetypes.

The greatest new addition is that of the new challenge missions. They've made the new Vampire Magician missions in response to how they've noticed that people have been playing the game. Hilariously, you'll have to wear a Vampire Magician disguise while you complete the various tasks and take your specified targets using a variety of methods laid out in the mission briefing. If this isn't already in-game, they said it'll be rolling out shortly after the update goes live.

Other improvements include an increase in responsiveness for in-game menus through a better image caching system, a much improved and fixed scoring system and those better loading times. They're working hard on ensuring that load times improve with each update. The new scoring system will necessitate a leaderboard reset due to how you could inadvertently get a score of 210,000 with a 0-second time bonus. The game should be more stable with more bugs that lead to crashes having been hunted down and destroyed.

Tribes: Ascend is getting yet another patch that adds more maps, makes a few gameplay adjustments, and removes the Blueshift map from the standard rotation.

The new Hellfire map

The first patch in what seems like a very long hiatus came just this past January and was a bringer of big changes to help bring back the traditional fan base. Hi-Rez Studios has gained back it's momentum and wants to show the world what it can do, and this latest patch is a testament to how attentive they're being to fans.

Phil Spencer has previously made clear that a significant amount of future games that will most certainly be making it to both of Microsoft's gaming platforms, but some will be still be reserved for one or the other. Halo 5 might be one of the few games that won't be making an appearance on both platforms, says Phil Spencer himself.

The reasons are quite clear, though, given that the game, while a successful one on consoles, is the perfect recipe for a PC game. Phil said that "Halo 5 was shipped as a console game, If we're going to [bring Halo to PC] moving forward then we're going to plan on both platforms." He doesn't think it prudent to port the game or any game but wants to instead look to bringing development together for future games. That means we'll most likely see Halo 6 (or whatever is in store for the franchise) on the PC, but it won't be something necessarily looked at for past games. It's a natural fit for an FPS game with a competitive multiplayer element.

He does, and it makes sense from a certain point of view, think that some games are naturally suited for a particular platform. That something could be enjoyed better in front of a TV as opposed to sitting at a desk in front of your PC. It's entirely possible to have your PC be in your living-room, however, and Microsoft has acknowledged is important with previous Media Center functionality. Games are best played on the platform that we choose, and it would be best if that choice also included the PC and Windows (or Linux even). When the underlying hardware and even software is so similar, especially with the advent of the UWP, it shouldn't be a problem going forward, which it won't be according to Spencer. It just means that past games may not make the jump, but going forward we'll have a massive cross-playable library.

Forza Motorsport developer Turn 10 has said that all of their future games will be coming to both the PC through Windows 10, and Xbox.

This means that all future Forza games will be on Windows 10 and Xbox, which will have Forza fans more than pleased. In a video, Turn 10 said: "Moving forward, all of our games are going to be shipping on Windows 10 (PC) and Xbox".

The developer is knee deep in the development of Forza Motorsport 6: Apex for the PC, which will be a free game that will include new race modes that are designed to show off the excitement of Forza Motorsport 6, with 4K resolution support. Forza Motorsport 6: Apex is coming to Windows 10 later this year.

Well, 2K Games has just revealed the PC requirements for its upcoming game Battleborn - where 4K is an afterthought and won't be supported at launch. Neither will off-sized displays.

In a blog post, 2K explained the features on Battleborn, and that it'll include a repeatable story mode, that can be enjoyed on your own or with friends in cooperative mode. Hardcore mode will be available for those who don't like it easy, and there'll also be multiple competitive multiplayer modes. As for the PC requirements:

Minimum System Requirements:

Every Final Fantasy game has to have an airship--it's a significant staple of the series that allows players to navigate the map. But Square Enix has something special in store for Final Fantasy 15 fans.

As it turns out, the airship in Final Fantasy 15 isn't really an airship--it's actually Noctis' car. That's right, Noctis' svelte black speedster transforms into a fully-functioning sky-flier right before our eyes. Although I'm a huge fan of those majestic floating skyships that Square Enix cooks up, I think this is absolutely awesome.

Game director Hajime Tabata said that once we saw the airship, we'd think "this is the kind of airship that should be in Final Fantasy 15". I have to agree with him on this one. Let's just hope Noctis' jet-car isn't just limited to low flying zones, and we can soar in the heavens above the clouds. Also, I hope that we can actually drive the car once it's airborne, as the in-game footage seemed to show driving as an on-rails experience.

UPDATE: Pricing info for the two collector's editions has been revealed. The Final Fantasy 15 Deluxe Edition will cost $89.99, whereas the Ultimate Collector's Edition will cost a whopping $269.99. Original story as follows.

Square Enix has officially revealed two collector's edition sets for Final Fantasy 15, showing off some awesome extras.

At the Final Fantasy Uncovered event, Square Enix showed off some snazzy special editions for Final Fantasy 15. First up we have the FF15 Deluxe Edition, which comes with:

Ubisoft has just detailed its new update for Far Cry Primal, which is a free update that adds the awesome Survival Mode and 4K textures to the PC version of the game - which will be released on April 12. The company has confirmed the upcoming free update will also include 4K textures for the PC, which is exciting. We'll report back when the update has been pushed back to see what differences we've noticed.

Ubisoft explains the new Survival Mode as: "The biggest such option is the addition of permadeath. If you felt the stakes weren't high enough before, you can now turn on full permadeath, which means your game is over the first time you die (except in vision missions, which aren't "real"). If that seems too abrupt, there's also a second-chance option that gives you one backup life, which is then replenished at certain completion points".

"Permadeath is only the beginning. Survivor mode adds a stamina gauge, making protagonist Takkar slower and weaker when it runs out, and forcing him to sleep in order to replenish it", continues Ubisoft. Finishing off Survival Mode, the developer adds: "The minimap is now turned off by default, pushing you to pay more attention to your surroundings, and the fog of war has been strengthened, lessening the amount of the map you reveal as you explore. You'll encounter humans and animals less often as you explore, which means hunting takes a little more patience. Even fast travel is a little tougher, as it now consumes stamina and food".