Gaming - Page 1069

Cyanide Studios and Game Workshop are hosting their World Cup for Blood Bowl 2 this year and registrations are now open. And to sweeten the deal, they've teamed with ASUS for some very interesting prizes.

Everyone who enjoys Blood Bowl 2 can participate but only the top 64 players will be able to move forward to the play off's. It's easy to enter, just register on the public league or join a private league that's governed by the official Blood Bowl 2 community.

The grand prize is $10,000 worth of cold hard cash, probably even in the gold depicted in the photo. But aside from that there are actually some good gaming related prizes. Three gaming PC's, of which two are laptops and enough accessories to replace everything you have. And you might be one of the lucky fellows to win a few good Steam games too.

Chinese gaming giant - which now happens to own League of Legends - will have AMD's TressFX technology powering Monster Hunter Online.

Not only that, but AMD will be bringing over a number of performance optimizations, too. Tencent Games will release a patch later this month for Monster Hunter Online, injecting AMD's TressFX technology. According to AMD, there are a bunch of new features headed to Monster Hunter Online, including TressFX, Eyefinity, Radeon Software updates, and more. Here's the full list:

The 2016 roadmap for Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers has been released by the developer, and they plan on adding a lot of cool stuff by the end of the year. Mostly, though, they want to concentrate on making it as playable and awesome an experience as possible.

What's on the roadmap? Improving the underlying netcode, decreasing lag, putting in a new animation system, speeding up rendering, create a new and better soundscape, put in better physics, and FPS element and a whole lot more. There's a long laundry list of what they want to do. Just keep in mind that this is a roadmap, and not everything is magically going to be implemented at the snap of a finger. Game development, especially in such a fantastic environment, takes time to do correctly.

My favorite feature they're adding is physically based rendering into the engine. That means more realistic looking lighting that shouldn't take too big of a GPU hit. The worst feature? Perhaps that they're considering using NVIDIA's GameWorks. Well, it's only a bad idea if it's implemented poorly. If they take the code and customize and execute it properly, then it could potentially be a good thing. Potentially.

When the first trailer for The Division came out at E3 in 2014 it was a spectacular example of the future of graphics. But just like Watch Dogs before it, the graphical fidelity slowly declined in quality as more trailers and gameplay snippets were released.

But now we're closer to release than ever, with the closed beta happening at the end of the month, which means a lot of hands-on time for various publications out there. Thankfully some astute gamers have taken the time to compare, as best as possible, the graphics between the original trailer and what's playable now.

The original showed us some very fantastic dynamic scenery with snow that melted over time and particle and weather effects that were just stunning. Models were full of polygons and textures were extremely sharp. Supposedly Ubisoft did downgrade the graphics slightly in order to make sure it ran at smoother framerates. But just how bad is the downgrade? Not terrible, actually.

We might not be getting Half-Life 3 at any point in the near or far future, but at least Valve has officially sanctioned a new expansion pack that's going to tell the story of what happened after the events in Half-Life: Opposing Force.

The story goes that the creators of Propekt took a huge risk and actually sent a copy of their concept to Valve, specifically to Gabe Newell himself. And once the included demo and the artistic direction and majesty was actually seen, then it was only natural to give the go-ahead. And now Valve is letting Richard Seabrook sell the expansion pack on Steam for $9.99.

The expansion is more than just the typical modification, and adds a significant amount of story, and back-story, to the universe. Gordon Freeman is being overwhelmed in Nova Prospekt and likely won't last long, until at the last minute you, Adrian Shepherd, get transported by the mighty Vortigaunt to save the future savior of mankind.

The latest patch for Diablo III on consoles was released four days ago that included a lot of new content and enhancements. What also seemed to tag along were issues of micro-stutter and menu-lag that have been simply incorrigible.

But Blizzard is aware of the issue and is asking everyone who experiences the problem to head on over to their forum to fill out a bit of information to help them track down the particular issue. At the moment the folks from Blizzard can't quite replicate the problems, and that's why they need your help.

So head on over to the forum and answer the following questions to help them. Diablo III is still one of the better ARPG's to grace consoles in a long time, despite its relative age.

The EA Vault is being opened to everyone with an Xbox Live Gold membership on the Xbox One starting next week. That means that anyone that meets those requirements will get access to the 14 games that have made their way into the vault recently.

That free access is for a limited amount of time, however, and will last from January 14th through the 24th. But that still gets you access to all the games that have been placed in the vault, and some of them are actually still quite enjoyable. You'll find Battlefield Hardline, Dragon Age: Inquisiition, Titanfall, FIFA 15, Madden 15, Battlefield 4 and more.

If you want regular access to the EA Vailt, and to the other features of EA Access, it's around $5 a month or $30 per year. There're other benefits as well, like being able to play games a few days before the actual release and giving you 10% off of EA games should you decide to make the purchase. This is one program that the PlayStation 4 doesn't have, as Sony has said it didn't see value in the EA Access program.

Codemasters will be hosting a session at GDC 2016, where they will be talking about their EGO Engine 4.0, which has support for DirectX 12.

The description of the GDC 2016 session teases: "Codemasters present a post-mortem on their new rendering engine used for F1 2015 detailing how they balanced the apparently opposing goals optimizing for mainstream processor graphics, high-end multi-core and DX12. The F1 2015 engine is Codemasters' first to target the eighth generation of consoles and PC's with a new engine architecture designed from scratch to distribute the games workload across many cores making it a great candidate for DX12 and utilise the processing power of high-end PC's".

It continues: "This session will show the enhanced the visuals created using a threaded CPU based particle system without increased the GPU demands and also cover the changes made to the engine while moving from DX11 to DX12. We will also discuss the graphics effects added using the new DX12 features Raster Ordered Views (AVSM and Decal Blending) and Conservative Rasterization (Voxel based ray tracing) adding even greater realism to the F1 world".

This will come as a surprise to everyone... yeah, probably not. The best-selling game of 2015 was Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, according to the latest data from market research firm, NPD Group.

In the US, the Call of Duty franchise has been the top-selling franchise for the last seven years. But, each year, the COD franchise hasn't topped the list of best-selling game, especially against Grand Theft Auto V in 2013. Black Ops 3 didn't launch until November 6, taking just two months to secure the best-selling game of 2015 award. According to Activision Communications Manager, Scott Lowe, the Call of Duty franchise has sold over 250 million copies to date.

As for the games that were also in the charts with Black Ops 3, we have Madden NFL 16 with second place, Fallout 4 with third place, and Star Wars: Battlefront in fourth position. Also included in the list, were NBA 2K16, Minecraft, Mortal Kombat X, FIFA 16, and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

Can you believe The Division is so close to release, that Ubisoft is launching the beta of The Division on Xbox One on January 28? PC and PS4 gamers get it 24 hours later on January 29, with the beta closing up shop on January 31.

Ubisoft's official Twitter account for The Division announced the news, tweeting "Your mission is about to start. The Division Closed Beta starts January 28th! Register on thedivisiongame.com/beta". The company also took to Facebook to announce the news, with a new "RPG Gameplay" trailer released recently, which we've got embedded above for your viewing pleasure.

The Division is getting its very own Xbox One bundle from Microsoft that gives you a 1TB Xbone combined with the game and a 14-day Xbox Live Gold trial so you can actually get online and enjoy the cooperative RPG to its fullest.

By pre-ordering the bundle (or the standalone game itself) you'll have guaranteed access to the beta that's going to kick off on January 28th, letting us all band-together (supposedly) to take back New York City in a format that, on the surface, looks very similar to Destiny. The gameplay should be different and hopefully is designed in the spirit of other Tom Clancy games, and of his literary works.

Playing The Division at E3 last year was a treat, though the frozen streets were surprisingly sparse. There's scuttlebut in the community about downgraded graphics from what was initially shown, but the examples that are coming out still do look good even if they aren't up to the pretty visuals of the first official gameplay trailer. This definitely isn't another Watch Dogs debacle, at the very least. If that's any consolation. So pick your poison and pre-order, or do the prudent thing and wait for it to release and be reviewed. Ubisoft has promised us that the PC version won't be just another port, but a game that they'll actually optimize so it runs well and looks spectacular, as it should on high-end PC's

Fresh from the Public Test Universe (PTU), Alpha 2.1 for Star Citizen is now available for download.

The focus of the new ~27GB patch is mainly on finding those gigantic bugs and stomping them so that the Star Citizen experience can be maintained. That is, you don't fall out of your ship randomly or crash to the desktop, as can sometimes happen in an alpha build. Thus 2.1 is far more stable than its predecessor.

And aside from the monumental task of fixing a tremendous amount of issues and bugs, there are now two additional flyable ships available, the Aegis Vanguard Warden, which is a flying weapons platform similar to the A10 Warthog, and the MISC Freelancer, a large multi-purpose ship that can be refitted for a variety of missions. The militia variant is particularly attractive, but you'll eventually be able to modify it in-game to suit your own specific needs. While not flyable, the Aegis Sabre will be available in your hanger module if you own it, which is only a cool $170 at the moment. New weapons and the Million Mile High Club are also available in this update.

David Bowie and his genius has unfortunately been lost to us as he becomes one with the Force, but his legacy will live on in a lot of different mediums. Even in the world of gaming,

For some it seems like only yesterday that his music, and his likeness, was used as a major plot point in Omikron: The Nomad Soul. That RPG changed the face of the genre forever, or at least I'd like to think it did, and in part because of David Bowie and his contributions. His music alone made it one of the most unique and enjoyable games of that era. And while Omikron itself was slightly buggy (read: very) when it first launched, I couldn't get enough of it. A recent playthrough I did reinforced how unique it was.

And David Cage, the founder of Quantic Dream, the studio that made Omikron, has been kind enough to share some of this memories of working with the iconic David Bowie. His battle with cancer might tragically be over, but we'll always remember him as being singularly unique and inspiring.

During a recent official PlayStation Blogcast it was revealed that the fantastic cell-shaded RPG, Dark Cloud 2, is going to join an already stellar cast of revived PS2 games on the PS4 via emulation on January 19th.

This came amidst a discussion on their favorite games of 2015, including the recently emulated that have been able to bring great value to the PS4. One of the greatest reasons to keep a PS3 is the large library of older games that some still find quite enjoyable, or that perhaps some haven't had a chance to enjoy quite yet. That issue is slowly being rectified, however.

Dark Cloud 2 follows two time-warped kids as they make their way through procedural generated dungeons to put a stop to an evil emperor whose hell bent on destroying the world, but from the past. It was unique in how it presented leveling up, where you leveled your weapons instead. Look for that and many more classic games coming soon via emulation to the PS4.

The monthly sales report for December from the NPD Group is now out and it shows that the PlayStation 4 enjoyed a nice healthy lead for the last month of the year, which was likely expected by many. That isn't to say that the Xbox One did poorly, just that the PS4 remained on top last month and throughout the entire year.

The PS4 was built upon the success enjoy over the first part of the year and was able the sell around 5.7 million units during the holiday season and over 35 million games. The holiday season covers the period between November 22nd all the way through January 2nd, though that's no easy feat.

While the PS4 didn't quite have the amount of exclusives or timed exclusives as the Xbox One, that apparently didn't stop it from being the leading console of the year. For the Xbox One, no numbers are quoted, though the VP of Xbox Marketing did note that they enjoyed a hefty 61% increase in sales over the same period last in 2014. So both consoles enjoyed great growth year over year and record profits.

Square Enix has made the leap to have Hitman be a fully episodic game, meaning that content within will be spread out throughout the year, released intermittently as it's ready for release.

The first portion of content includes a prologue mission and a Paris mission releasing on March 11th. The next location will be set in Italy and will release in April, followed by a mission set in Morocco coming in May. After that initial schedule we'll see content updates every month with at least three different locations spanning Thailand, the US and Japan.

The general idea is that they want to get it right and have each of the massive set pieces make their way to us in a more complete state, so as to avoid the problems that have occurred with other massively scaled games in the past who suffered a lot of criticism as a result. "We decided to take the full leap and publish HITMAN as a truly episodic game experience," said Hannes Seifert, Head of Studio at Io-Interactive. "Part of that decision is for that little bit of extra time to ensure every location we release is at the quality level fitting for a HITMAN game. But the main driving reason is that this will allow us to create a living game that will expand and evolve over time and establish a foundation for the future - this is the first game in a storyline which will continue and expand with future Hitman games."

The minimum PC specifications needed to enjoy Rise of the Tomb Raider, out January 28th, are now out. And for the bare minimum, it doesn't seem to require a whole lot for a good experience. Remember, the below specs are for minimum only, it's not even a recommended setup.

All you really need to just play the game, and of course not at 4K with everything on, is an older Sandy Bridge Intel i3-2100 or AMD equivalent and at least a GTX 650, or an HD 7770 from AMD. That's it. That means it should be playable, though at the lowest of settings, on a variety of hardware out there.

But that's just the minimum, and we know that with the plethora of options, we'll be able to dial in the experience and also dial it up a notch for some, hopefully, very impressive visuals at 4K and even above, for those with Eyefinity setups.

Just Cause 3 was developed to make good use of DirectX 12 by Avalanche Studios, with the studio talking about the use of DX12 in their engine in the past.

Well, during the Game Developers Conference 2016 event in March, a programming session will take place, organized by Avalanche Studios and Intel. The duo will be talking about the changes the developer made for Just Cause 3, with the session being presented by Intel's Graphics Software Engineer, Antoine Cohade.

The session teases: "Just Cause 3 is Avalanche studio's latest addition to the mind (and lots of other stuff) blowing open world action-adventure series: Just Cause. Published by Square Enix, the game released on December 1, 2015 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. During the development of the game, Intel and Avalanche have been working closely together to optimize the game on Iris graphics, but also to make use of DX12's features to improve the performance even further as well as bring additional visual quality to the game!"

Twitter now has its own gaming focused Twitter feed, but we're not entirely sure why they've done this. As we understand it, it's just a feed to tweet and retweet other gaming related topics and memes. So in other words, it's very similar to any other gaming site or other related feed, except super official and from Twitter themselves.

But this is an initiative to help gamers find what they're looking for in an easy to find package. "There are thousands of gaming-related Tweets sent on Twitter each day," Twitter said in a statement about their new venture. "Whether folks are discovering a new game, Tweeting at a gaming personality, keeping up with gaming news or following their favorite esport, we want want to make it easy for gaming fans to find and join the most vibrant conversations about games."

It's similar to their other official feeds about other topics, such as Twitter Music, Twitter Government and others, but it's a strange thing given that the search function is very useful and effective at finding the topics you want, with or without hashtags, which aren't really required anymore.

World of Tanks, the free-to-play online armored vehicle mayhem simulator, is completing it's console infiltration by releasing on the PlayStation 4 on January 20th 2016.

The Xbox 360 was the first foray into consoles for Wargamin.net's World of Tanks, and it was a rousing success. The Xbox One was next, and in it they added cross-play functionality between the two consoles so that you didn't have to leave your friends behind. Now the PS4 is the next to be blessed with what might be arguably the most fun free-to-play MMOTPS (massively multiplayer tank person shooter).

On PC and Xbox One alone there are around 12 million daily users that log-in, far more than the amount of concurrent Steam users on at any one time on an average day. The micro-transactions in-game aren't required by any means, and you can play, successfully, without spending a dime.