Gaming - Page 1094

Everyone seems to be having a blast with Hideo Kojima's swan song Metal Gear Solid V, but for the past three weeks Xbox One gamers have been plagued with crippling performance hitches and frame-rate drops that can ruin any session.

In a game as big as MGSV: The Phantom Pain it's natural to find glitches...but the consistent and game-breaking frame-rate drops is something that should have been noticed in QA testing. After AC: Unity these issues have left a bad taste in gamer's mouths, and for good reason. There have been dozens of separate incidents reported across Reddit, NeoGAF and even Giant Bomb's forums that articulate gamers' frustration.

The glitch effectively makes the game unplayable in certain situations, especially when players lose control of Snake's action and he walks right out into a searchlight instead of stealthily melting into the shadows. Metal Gear Solid V is all about making those perfect infiltration runs, and it's the kind of game where a single mistake can ruin the entire session. Precision and functionality are extremely important and the player has to be able to maintain control at every second or else the whole experience just falls apart.

Nintendo is no longer a ship without a captain: the Japanese gaming titan has selected 65-year-old Nintendo veteran Tatsumi Kimishima to fill the late Satoru Iwata's position as President and Representative Director of the company.

While this is probably your first time hearing about Kimishima, he's been with Nintendo for 15 years after being appointed as Representative Director of the Pokemon Company back in 2000. The former Pokemon director will have his work cut out for him filling the shoes of beloved former Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, who's death in July sent a shockwave throughout the entire gaming sphere.

The announcement of Kimishima's new appointment is actually two-fold, as Nintendo reveals that a "large-scale revision of the organizational structure of the company" will take effect on September 16. In the new structure, Zelda alum Shigeru Miyamoto is set to become Nintendo's Creative Fellow, and Genyo Takeda, who helped develop the hugely successful Wii console, is now Nintendo's new Technology Fellow. Both Takeda and Miyamoto now cast a wide arc of influence over Nintendo's games and hardware and based on their respective achievements I'd say that this is a great move.

The Xbox Platform Team has fabricated a "highly customized" version of Windows 10 to bring some dramatic changes to the Xbox One's architecture, allowing for a 50% speed boost, backward compatibility and DirectX 12 integration.

The New Xbox One Experience "NXOE" isn't just a simple UI overhaul. It's a complete evolution of the console's speed and responsiveness, and it's made possible with a new customized Windows 10 kernel called OneCore. "This isn't a small change in the front-end of the console or the UI, this is a massive change to the architecture, to the under-pinnings of the system," Xbox spokesman Larry Hryb said in the latest Major Nelson Radio podcast.

"NXOE brings massive change to the Xbox One," Xbox Director of Program Management Mike Ybarra said in the podcast. "We're bringing in Windows 10 and the whole Xbox One architecture will change Windows 10 is allowing us to bring a new level of speed and responsiveness to the Xbox One. Windows 10 on Xbox One is a highly customized version of the OS. It's called OneCore, and you can think of it as a kernel. It's a higly customized build of Windows 10 specifically built to optimize the things players do on the console, including playing games and other features."

We all know that the new Mass Effect game is in development, with Mass Effect: Andromeda set to be the best one yet. BioWare's Creative Development Director, Alistair McNally, has taken to Twitter to tease his feelings on the game.

McNally said: "Spent today reviewing creative process on #MassEffectAndromeda. I believe it to be the best (and certainly largest) Mass Effect ever! #Hype". BioWare is tapping DICE's incredible Frostbite 3 engine for Mass Effect: Andromeda, which is coming out in holiday 2016.

We don't know much on Andromeda, but BioWare Canada's General Manager, Aaryn Flynn, said when the game was revealed: "When we wrapped up the original Mass Effect trilogy with Mass Effect 3: Citadel in early 2013, planning and design on Mass Effect: Andromeda was already well underway. We knew we wanted to start with a foundation composed of the best parts of any Mass Effect game: exciting new worlds to discover, great characters, and intense action. At the same time, we clearly wanted to expand the definition of what you should expect from a Mass Effect game".

StarCraft II's last expansion, Legacy of the Void, doesn't just wrap up the second game: it promises to wrap up the entire decades-spanning saga.

Blizzard today announced that Legacy of the Void, StarCraft II's final expansion, will release on November 10, 2015. The expansion is all about the Protoss' harrowed conflict against the menacing Zerg swarm that has overtaken their homeworld, and will wrap up the series as well as expose the fates of the Protoss culture as well as iconic characters like Kerrigan and Jim Raynor.

"Legacy of the Void provides an epic conclusion to a story more than 17 years in the making," said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "It also brings tremendous enhancements to StarCraft II's definitive real-time strategy gameplay, with new units, automated tournaments, collaborative game modes and more. We can't wait for players to experience it all this November."

The release of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for the PC is getting closer, with it being one of the first DirectX 12 titles in development for the PC. The Coalition, the developer behind the game, has talked with Eurogamer recently with some interesting things to say.

Cam McRae, the Technical Director for the Windows 10 version of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition has said that the use of DX12 and Asynchronous Compute will help them provide a stellar PC release. McRae said: "We are still hard at work optimising the game. DirectX 12 allows us much better control over the CPU load with heavily reduced driver overhead. Some of the overhead has been moved to the game where we can have control over it. Our main effort is in parallelising the rendering system to take advantage of multiple CPU cores".

He continued: "Command list creation and D3D resource creation are the big focus here. We're also pulling in optimisations from UE4 where possible, such as pipeline state object caching. On the GPU side, we've converted SSAO to make use of async compute and are exploring the same for other features, like MSAA".

"The Xbox One is literally a Windows device," says Microsoft's Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela, illustrating how Microsoft doesn't see a distinction between the Xbox One and other platforms like Windows-powered phones and PCs.

"A core power metric for us is Windows 10 devices. That's not PC statement.That will be phones, that will be tablets, that will be laptops, that will be desktops, that will be big surface hubs that will be Xboxes," Capossela said at this year's Citi Global Technology Conference. "Xboxes today run Windows and so every time we sell an Xbox we're actually creating a Windows active device that hopefully people love it; it's a gaming device in their living room. It is not a separate animal. It is literally a Windows device."

While the Redmond-based tech giant has a role for every Windows 10 device, the OS acts as a glue to connect and cement each platform to a unified scope. The seeds of Windows 10 kernal will be planted into the Xbox One in November as part of the console's major new update, opening up new functionality like extensive backward compatibility with Xbox 360 games, Cortana support, and up to "thousands" of Windows 10 apps in the future.

Indie devs already have it pretty hard, and getting the attention of the gaming community can be even harder. Some devs turn to YouTubers as a natural way to advertise their games...but when you're asked to pay $22,000 for a single sponsored video, it makes your jaw drop.

"On one of my normal PR rounds I received an email from a very popular YouTuber with a few million subscribers offering to have one of our games featured on their YouTube channel for a rate of either $17,600 for 2-3 talking points or $22,000 for 2-3 talking points AND a description link," Ben Tester, whose indie studio Wales Interactive is responsible for games like Soul Axiom and Master Reboot, said on Reddit.

This kind of huge payoff isn't anything new. YouTubers have done promos and sponsored videos all over the place, earning up to $15,000 to $30,000 for a single video. This kind of cash is enough to fund an indie game and it's as much as some people make in a year. It got to the point where advertisements and original content bled so closely together that no one could tell what content was promoted. Eventually the Federal Trade Commission had to step in and force regulations on YouTube's multi-million dollar system, ruling that YouTubers now have to make promoted videos explicitly clear to viewers.

Yep, this isn't a joke. Devolver Digital's Dropsy the Clown hit Steam not to long ago, allowing users to become a heavily misunderstood love-filled clown in this "non-traditional take on the classic point and click adventure formula."

Complete with a sing-along trailer (seen above), this title can be played in an open world adventure, puzzles and hugs or text free experience mode. Seeing each option set on a similar path, Dropsy's goal is to turn this community around through the power of pixelated love.

Including the ability to talk to animals, Dropsy will "help those in need, hug total strangers, and unravel dark and shameful secrets from his past on the way to redemption" as stated in a recent press release.

The Xbox One's new November update is pretty significant and isn't just about a faster UI. A huge library of backward compatible Xbox 360 games will be supported, and every single one of them will have the full range of functions afforded to Xbox One games.

Backward compatibility is one of the most-requested features in the current generation of consoles, and Microsoft has one-upped Sony by adding the feature to Xbox One consoles. Come November, all Xbox One owners will be able to play 100 different Xbox 360 games on their consoles, with "hundreds more" coming in the months ahead.

Rather than just adding the feature and calling it quits, Microsoft has gone lengths to make the transition from curent-gen to last-gen as smooth as possible. Users will be able to upload their saved Xbox 360 game data to the cloud and download it to the Xbox One to pick up where they left off. But the most impressive feature is that all 100 backward-compatible games will be treated just like Xbox One games with integrated DVR recording and customization via Upload Studio, screenshot snapping and sharing, and cross-platform streaming to Windows 10 PCs.

Microsoft has released new details on the major changes that are coming to the Xbox One, starting with backward compatibility and planting the seeds for Windows 10 integration.

When the update launches in November it will unlock backward compatibility for approximately 100 Xbox 360 games, and Xbox exec Mike Ybarra affirms that support will expand with "hundreds more in the months to come". The Xbox One's awkward Kinect-centric tile UI will be overhauled as well, bringing a new dashboard and quick-launch scheme that's entirely focused on speed. The framework for full Windows 10 support will likely be laid out, leading to Windows 10 apps and Cortana support, but so far Microsoft has been vague on the details, saying that the UI is "powered by Windows 10" and that it "integrating the speed of Windows 10" to make loading times up to 50% faster.

There's speculation that Windows 10 could give the console access to "thousands of apps" that will bridge PC and Xbox One. But Xbox division head Phil Spencer has said in the past that gamers "won't see Excel on the Xbox One", and that Microsoft will implement Windows 10 apps "where they make the most sense".

After reports of Gaming Paradise in Slovenia seeing participant Passports confiscated, players ill and hotels unpaid, news has come to light of issues at the next-held global CS:GO tournament - ESL ESEA Dubai.

ESL is well-known for hosting not only the largest CS:GO tournaments around, but always presenting them professionally, gathering the full support of the CS:GO community and Valve alike. Set to offer a respectable prize pool of $250,000, the fans expected this event to be no different.

The first issue was raised when the pricey spectator tickets ended up with fans being unable to watch most of the tournament in person. Charging approximately $68 for a one day pass (and up to $272 for a 3-day VIP), spectators were told that the originally-planned outdoors venue would only be used after 7pm - with players located inside due to extreme heat (In excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit). As the spectators were told that they were unable to watch any games until after 7pm local time, this means they were only able to see, at most, three group games plus the finals series.

While we've been hearing about other game engines being powered by DirectX 12, we haven't heard much from the developer of the Battlefield series and Star Wars Battlefront.

The news is coming directly from Technial Director Stefan Boberg on Twitter, where '@CentroXer' asked "when is DX12 going to be part of frosbite?" with Boberg replying that "it already is, no word on which game will be first though :)". With DICE working very closely with AMD on Mantle, which was used in Battlefield 4, it's only a few steps away from Battlefield 5 being announced on the latest Frostbite engine with DirectX 12 capabilities.

Then we have to think about the amount of Frostbite-powered games in the next year or so, with Mass Effect 4 at the end of 2016, Need for Speed on November 3, and Star Wars Battlefront two weeks later on November 17. Let's not forget Mirror's Edge Catalyst on February 23, 2016. So we should expect a next-gen Battlefield game to be announced early next year, with a release date later next year, hopefully.

As if there was ever any doubt, Bethesda has revealed that Fallout 4 will have its own season pass for future DLC...and even calls the pass a "reward for our most loyal fans". The real reward, though, is the full unrestricted set of modding tools that gamers will get across consoles and PC.

While just about every gamer feels that season passes are a terrible scheme on par with the pre-order gamble that sadly funds the industry, Bethsoft affirms that the pass will unlock access to "all DLC ever released for Fallout 4". There's no Evolve-style multi-passes going on here.

On the up-side Bethsoft plans to give players the very same construction software that the studio used to create the game. So the paid season pass DLC could end up being a non-issue. But there's a catch...the tools won't be up at launch. "Early next year we'll release for free the new Creation Kit for the PC. This is the same tool we use in the studio. You'll be able to create your own mods and share them with others. We're especially excited these same mods will then be coming to Xbox One, and then PlayStation 4."

The USC Institute for Creative Technologies and Imperial College London showed off a new technique for "synthesizing the effects of skin microstructure deformation by anisotropically convolving a high resolution displacement map to match normal distribution changes in measured skin samples" during SIGGRAPH 2015.

In a more simple way, it is a new technique that will hopefully one day find us with games with super-realistic dynamic skin, that will have characters in games that look ultra-real. The USC Institute for Creative Technologies and Imperial College London noted that the technique can be used in real-time, with the videos we have embedded including both real-time renders, that have used GPU shaders and offline renders.

Gaming Paradise has turned into 'Gaming Hell' for the teams and commentators in attendance, with people taking to Twitter and Reddit in order to explain their frustration about what is going on. The event has not only been accused of failing to pay for its equipment hire, but has avoided paying for the venue and hotel expenses while providing food unfit for human consumption.

Gaming Paradise kicked off as a sub-par tournament in the eyes of the players, offering 60Hz monitors, tournament computers without video cards, massive lag issues on the MLGtv live stream and a delay of up to 25 hours on most matches. If this wasn't bad enough, the computers weren't actually there to begin with - the tournament organizers ordered these new VGA-less PCs after the tournament was set to kick off.

Adding to the heartache, player passports were confiscated by local police due to hotel and food non-payment. However, they were given back to the players after it was determined as unnecessary.

Court documents gleaned from Halo composer Martin O'Donnell's case against Bungie and Activision reveal that Destiny's story arc was "significantly changed" from the original, and strongly hints that Activision is responsible.

When the first chapter of Destiny's five-part franchise launched in 2014, gamers found that it wasn't the intergalactic opera they were expecting. The story elements were (and still are) very light and players finally understood what kind of series Activision and Bungie have created--the kind of piecemeal bits that can be strewn out over a decade of releases. But Destiny wasn't always like this.

The court papers of Martin O'Donnell's lawsuit against Bungie show that the game went through a phase of "substantial revision" which led to the first year-long delay. "Although Destiny as planned for release in September 2013, the story was substantially revised beginning August 2013, requiring a new release date of March 2014 and edits to much of the work previously completed," the documents read. "After a brief vacation/sabbatical in early fall, o'Donnell returned, worked on the story and recorded dialogue, but wrote no additional music. For reasons unrelated to O'Donnell's performance, the release date was again moved, to September 2014."

According to a banner on Japanese sites that some members of NeoGAF spotted, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain sales have been quite good: smashing through 3 million units since its release last week.

The hype around the game has been nothing but massive, with Hideo Kojima's very public departure from Konami being a large part of this hype. Not only that, but it has been seven years since the release of Metal Gear Solid IV: Guns of the Patriot, which was an exclusive to Sony and its console at the time; the PlayStation 3. We also just reported earlier tonight that sales of the PS4 version of the game have been smashing the Xbox One version, nearly 3-to-1.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is available right now for the Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4 and PC.

Now that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is here, we can see what the first-week sales numbers are like. GfK Chart-Track, a market research company that tracks sales of multiple forms of media across the UK and Ireland, has MGS V: The Phantom Pain coming in a third-best in first-week sales of any game released in 2015.

The company announced: "It also marks the series' return to the top of the All Formats chart for the first time since 2008". But more importantly, how are the sales between the consoles? The company wrote on its blog: "PS4 takes a commanding 72% share over Xbox One which has 22%, while PS3 edges to a 3% share over Xbox 360 with just 2%".

It looks like AMD are confident in their position in the market, even with NVIDIA scooping up most of the discrete GPU market with 82% being GeForce products. But, AMD's position could be a good one with DX12 now out, and developers jumping into the new Windows 10 exclusive API.

AMD's Head of Global Technical Marketing, Robert Hallock, took to Reddit, where he said: "You will find that the vast majority of DX12 titles in 2015/2016 are partnering with AMD. Mantle taught the development world how to work with a low-level API, the consoles use AMD and low-level APIs, and now those seeds are bearing fruit".

Even though AMD can only talk about Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, which is one AAA game, and a benchmark in Ashes of the Singularity, it feels a bit rushed to have AMD claiming this. But, Hallock could be eluding to unannounced titles that we haven't heard about yet.