Gaming - Page 1091

Ubisoft has confirmed that the upcoming open-world caveman action game Far Cry Primal won't feature co-op or multiplayer, and will instead be entirely focused on story-driven gameplay.

"We are focusing entirely on creating the best possible Far Cry experience for our fans. Bringing the Stone Age to life and providing players with a strong gameplay experience based off of the Far Cry legacy meant we had to reinvent our core gameplay loop. This was definitely not a small undertaking. Our focus was on delivering this fantasy which required clear priorities for the team. Therefore, in the early stages of the project, we made the difficult choice of focusing our efforts on the single player experience," an Ubisoft developer wrote on Steam.

Personally, I'm torn by this news. When Far Cry Primal was unveiled, I had a clear image of hunting a mighty mastodon with a team of online friends in order to feed the rest of the tribe. Other scenarios whirled in my mind--taking on a streak of vicious sabertooth tigers, or even going dino-hunting just like ARK: Survival Evolved. Sadly these fantasies won't manifest.

It had been rumored for some time that the release date for Rise of the Tomb Raider on PC was imminent, but we finally have word from Square Enix that we'll see Lara Croft return to the PC on January 28th 2016.

What's new for the PC version of this former timed-exclusive? Updated graphics that'll support resolutions up to 4K and the inclusion of "many" different new features. The hope is that the updated TressFX used by Square Enix (an offshoot of TressFX modified by an internal Square Enix team) is included for even more flowing hair effects.

You'll be able to find Rise of the Tomb Raider on Steam, Amazon or through the Square Enix e-store or your favorite retailer. A Collector's Edition, which includes the Digital Deluxe version of the game, a 12-inch Lara Croft statue, replicas of Lara's journal and jade necklace, and a steel case, will also be available from the Square Enix e-store for $149.99.

The voice actress behind Lin, a character from Xenoblade Chronicles X that has decidedly different outfits in the Japanese version of the game compared to the western version, has given her thoughts about the changes that have been made to her character. She speaks out in favor of them and refers to them as localisations as opposed to outright censorship.

The actress, Cassandra Lee Morris, enjoyed her time that she spent recording the lines for the western release. There was a lot of secrecy surrounding the project due to how large it was. She also thinks that Lin is a great role-model for teenage girls due to the strength of character she displays and her wide swathe of abilities. But of course there's that elephant in the room that seems to spark a little controversy.

Morris doesn't see it as censoring anything, just localizing the content for different markets. There's definitely a cultural difference between Japan and the west that make certain things appropriate in one area, and not in another. Does that mean that the west is less open-minded and we need to have things censored? That's perhaps a question of semantics, but the differences in comfort levels do exist.

The rumor mill has pushed out yet another report; this time focused on Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed franchise. According to the rumor, the next AC game is codenamed "Empire, it will skip 2016 and instead release in 2017, and it'll take place in Egypt.

According to the reports, a dev who's working closely with the project recently posted some interesting tidbits on 4Chan:

"[It'll take place in] Egypt. There won't be an AC in 2016. You may screencap this and refer to it when nothing is shown in E3 2016. You'll have to wait until 2017 for it. The reason: It will be a complete revamp of the series. The game is going for a Witcher feel, with player progression, freeform combat system. Horse is back, and boats too. It's made by the Black Flag team. You play as a slave or ex-slave. He looks a lot like Altair, but with a darker skin. He is not edgy, from my understanding. He's a nobody that barely speaks. The biggest difference about this one is how colorful it looks. Like holy fuck, blue skies, lush vegetations and desert sequences where you get mirage and shit. Also, you have a pet eagle you can control."

A new rumor suggests that Ubisoft will release a sequel to 2014's bullshot disappointment, Watchdogs, later this year.

According to reports from Kotaku, Ubisoft's annual Assassin's Creed franchise will skip 2016 with a new release in 2017 instead, leaving room for another game to come in and pick up the slack.

If rumors can be believed, that game will be Watch Dogs 2, which will reportedly take place in San Francisco and release in Fall 2016. Watch Dogs 2 will likely see a cross-platform release across PS4, Xbox One and PC, but let's hope Ubisoft has learned its lesson and won't deliver any bullshots at E3 2016.

Something rather exciting might be happening with the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise this year. A new game could be in development, if certain now deleted Facebook posts are to be believed.

A band that has worked closely with Sonic the Hedgehog and have provided music for some of the later games, Crush 40, posted on Facebook that "We are planning a few performances to commemorate the anniversary of Sonic," but that wasn't the exciting part. They continued "We might participate in writing new songs for the anniversary game...stay tuned." indicating the existence of a new anniversary game. The post was promptly deleted, though not before we were able to see it. Even better is the graphic released by Sega commemorating the occasion, shown above.

It doesn't necessarily mean an entirely new game is being commissioned, but it might point towards something else. Whether that be a web-based game, a new mobile game or something on an even smaller scale. The formula for a successful Sonic the Hedgehog game seems to be directly tied to the older games. The newer more free-roaming and 3D titles were never quite as accepted, though they didn't do that poorly either. Our bet is on a remake of the original, given the logo that's come out.

The first DLC for Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, as part season one or Operation Black Ice, has been delayed for season pass holders until February 2nd, a slight delay if anything.

Originally the new content, which includes new operators from the Canadian Joint Task Force 2 Counter-Terrorism unit, a new map and some new weapon skins, was originally planned for release on January 26th for those that have purchased a season pass.

Ubisoft confirmed the slight delay on Twitter while answering a question from a fan, and they reiterated that season pass holders merely have early access to the new content, and everything will be available for free for all players of the game. If you're a PC gamer, we highly recommend downloading the Ultra HD texture pack while waiting for the DLC to arrive.

A blind gamer has done something rather remarkable, proving that no disability can stand in the way of enjoying the world of gaming. He was able to complete The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time after five years, no easy feat.

Terry Garrett's journey started nearly five years ago in 2011 when he started a YouTube channel to show that being blind doesn't stop a person from playing video games, regardless of how open-world they might be. And since that time he's been making steady progress by using sound as a means to navigate and know where things are in the world.

Garrett plays an emulated version of The Ocarina of Time so that he can take advantage his emulators ability to save game states for quick trial and error in particularly troubling spots. To navigate the world he places his speakers directly in front of himself so that he can more easily hear the auditory cues from the in-game world. This way he can locate enemies, Links fairy friend Navi and can even find his way by listening for his weapon striking a nearby wall.

Far Cry Primal is going to feature a language you've probably never heard of in the game, but the best part is that it's going to be based off a real proto-European language dating back to around the Stone Age.

The developers actually went and sought out linguists who specialize in languages from around the stone-age, or proto-European languages. But oddly, what was initially presented to them was seen as too "modern" for the setting they were going for, even though the language likely actually represented spoken words from the time-period they're portraying.

The creative director, Jean-Christophe Guyot, went back to the linguistic experts and asked them to attempt to devolve the language in a logical manner so that it could more easily align with with the overall creative vision they wanted to share with Far Cry Primal. To them, they wanted something even more primitive than the languages spoken during that time-period portrayed.

Platinum Games's heart is heavy with the news that they're going to delay the release of Scalebound until 2017. They want to get it right, and with a game of this size and scale, that means they need more development time.

A statement on the Platinum Games website from the Scalebound team reads that "In order to deliver on our ambitious vision and ensure that Scalebound lives up to expectations, we will be launching the game in 2017." it goes on saying that "This will give us the time needed to bring to life all the innovative features and thrilling gameplay experiences that we have planned." It certainly can't be an easy decision to make, but with so many games from 2015 having had the appearance of being unfinished, Scalebound and the amount of ingenuity they want to bring to gaming will have to wait until it's done right. Though we are always skeptical, more time to perfect things from good companies generally results in awesome things.

They also say that there will be plenty more to share in the upcoming year, so that we won't be completely in the dark during these longer days of development. We're particularly excited to see more specifics with the way you interact with your friend and companion, not to mention seeing more gameplay mechanics throughout the year.

Even more records are being broken now. Garry's Mod, the highly addictive physics sandbox has sold over 10 million copies since it debuted as a standalone game in November of 2006, breaking that mark just over the New Year holiday.

And who would have thought that such a modification could have become what has today? What was once a simple free mod that let you play with the assets in Half-Life has turned into a massively entertaining game in it's own right. According to Garry Newman, the creator of this fine addition, 4 million copies were sold just last year alone.

And it's likely not going to stop there as more and more fans are created due to the weird and wacky creations that you can find all over YouTube. What the future holds for Garry Newman and if he has plans to expand his masterpiece into more franchises would be delightful, but unknown. I'm sure there's plenty of nostalgia from gamers of all ages with his mod. Anyone have any creations they'd like to share?

Rumors about Nintendo's NX have been floating around though nothing truly concrete has made its way from Nintendo themselves. Until now.

Speaking to Sankei West, Kimishima Tatsumi talked a little, though not too specifically, about the future of the NX console. Apparently they're well into development and they're already planning how to best break into the market again by bringing over their best franchises.

It was also mentioned that the aim of the NX is to provide a different, and new, experience when compared to the Wii U and the 3DS. Tatsumi said (with a very rough translation from Google Translate) "With the aim of what can be a new experience different from the current WiiU and 3DS, it is recommended a steadily developing." What this'll mean is anyones guess. But it wouldn't be too far off to think that Nintendo wants to innovate in similar ways that they have with 3D, touch and with motion controls. It wouldn't necessarily be a stretch if they planned on making a first party VR experience even unlike the upcoming PSVR.

What happens when a massive flock of 1,000 deathclaws take on 10 hulking robotic behemoths? Chaos, of course!

The Brotherhood of Steel's massive Liberty Prime robots are pretty much like titanic suits of power armor, and as such they're regarded as the most destructive force in the Fallout universe. Well, besides maybe the fearsome monstrosities known as deathclaws. But who would win in a square go? YouTuber EZPlays aims to answer that question in his newest video, pitting 1,000 rancorous deathclaws against 10 Liberty Primes in a destructive battle scene that reminds us how great PC console commands really are.

If you'd like to set up your own Fallout 4 battles, we've put together a great step-by-step tutorial that will show you how to create epic monster showdowns with the game's console commands.

The devs at Guerrilla Games have recently explained why Horizon Zero Dawn just doesn't have room for multiplayer, as it's a story-driven RPG akin to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

In a recent interview with IGN Latino America, Horizon Zero Dawn's executive producer Mark Norris iterated that the game wants to build a strong connection to players, and multiplayer will just get in the way. "There are questions as to why a multiplayer will not do. The reality is that we are putting together a new IP. We are making a new franchise for the first time in 10 years and what we really want to do is improve the experience for the player. When you get to face these machines as Eloy, with this great character, who is the real star of the story and everything that happens, have this connection with her. But what happens when you take the elements of multiplayer? You play as a supporting character? How does that work?."

In the current age of gaming, it feels like multiplayer components are thrown in on a whim as a means to keep gamers buying new DLC and season pass content. Mega publishers always want to tap the rich vein that is paid add-ons, and often a game's base singleplayer game type suffers as a result.

Steam just smashed a record today with over 12 million concurrent users online worldwide. This is naturally during another successful Steam Winter sale that's likely inspired people to take it easy today just before the post-holiday work week begins.

As of around 1:55PM EST 12,333,557 people were playing something on Steam, split mostly between DOTA 2 at 940,373 players logged in and Counter-Strike with 652,925 players vying for domination. Fallout 4 was a distant third with "only" 116,827 individuals wandering through the wasteland. This totals nearly 10% of the total user-base online at any one time.

This is far more than is normal for this time of year, though not nearly as high as the concurrent user count in November, with over 13.4 million concurrent users. The Winter Sale, which ends on the 4th of January, is the likely culprit as people find the time to try out the spoils of the sale.

Homebrew creations never cease to amaze me. Just this week we saw hackers jailbreak a PS4 to run Linux and play a Pokemon handheld game, opening the doors for current-gen homebrew creations. Now those enterprising console-crackers have found a way to get Windows 95 to successfully run on Nintendo's New 3DS XL handheld, showing the versatility of today's gaming hardware.

The honors go to a modder named Shutterbug2000, who posted up proof of Windows 95 running on the handheld onto the GBA Temp forums. How exactly would you go about getting a 20-year-old Windows operating system to run on a modern video game system? Shutterbug explains:

"Back a while ago, I tried compiling the dosbox from libretro, and using retroarch to emulate dosbox. Yet, every time, it froze on a rainbow glitchy mess. [Then] I tried it on my n3ds, and it just worked," Shutterbug2000 said in a forum response. "So, I think the o3ds just isn't powerful enough to run dosbox, or there's not enough RAM. At it's core, this is just libretro/retroarch dosbox. But I figured, hey, everyone want's Windows on their 3DS, right?"

During an end-of-year livestream by Roberts Space Industries last month, Chris Roberts gave some more details on the VR side of Star Citizen.

Roberts said that RSI would be refocusing its VR efforts for Star Citizen in the coming months, adding "The status of VR integration is that we've been pretty busy with getting [Alpha] 2.0 [out] and we're trying to get 2.1 so I would say we still have some stuff to integrate from the most recent CryEngine drops. They've been actually doing quite a lot of VR, I'm pretty sure you guys have noticed that they've completely doubled down and they're all VR now".

Roberts continued: "So there are some updates on VR that we need to integrate in. It's a little more complicated because we've changed the engine so much, we've changed the rendering pipeline to enable us to do a lot of things that we need to do so it's not very easy. Nowadays we've diverged from CryEngine where we don't take regular updates from them any more although we will cherry pick certain features that maybe we're not working on that we think would help out well and VR is a good example of that".

Mirror's Edge Catalyst will be released this year, and we're finally hearing more information on the next adventure of Faith from EA and DICE.

According to DICE's senior concept artist, Per Haagensen, Faith will look "more mature" in Mirror's Edge Catalyst. Haagensen added that DICE wants to show off "her skill, confidence and attitude in a dynamic manner, without her looking like a martial artist or super hero".

He added: "When I set out to sculpt her for the Key Art, aside from the realistic aspects of her appearance, more than anything it was to convey the pose with enough action, tension, and interest to make the audience curious about who this person is".

It was only a couple of days ago that we heard that AMD's next-gen GPU architecture would be called Polaris, but now we're hearing about a refreshed Xbox One that would feature this new GPU.

The news is coming from a rumor posted on the Overclock.net forums, where you can see the device model listed as "Xbox One Polaris", but the software version is also something worth noting: "Polaris-222". Now, this could just be a huge coincidence, that Microsoft's updated Xbox One software is called Polaris - but with a rumored Polaris architecture in the works from AMD? Well now. Keep in mind that AMD's APUs power the Xbox One, it makes sense.

We definitely have the rumor stamp out for this one, but if it turns out to be true, you can bet we'll hear more about this in the coming months.

Fans have been waiting almost a decade for Final Fantasy XV, and Square Enix has finally locked in a 2016 launch for the open-world adventure.

In a recent blog post, beloved Final Fantasy director Hajime Tabata rang in the new year with some great news: Final Fantasy XV will release in 2016. "We will finally release FFXV this year, in 2016! In development, previous phases required wisdom and strength. However, moving forward the final phase will focus on effort and willpower."