Gaming - Page 1099

Ubisoft is getting ready for the release of Rainbow Six: Siege, which deploys on December 1 for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC with a new trailer highlighting the NVIDIA GameWorks features - check it out.

Rainbow Six: Siege will feature HBAO+ for deeper and richer shadows and improved occlusion, TXAA, 'enhanced graphics', and much more. For NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M (notebook), GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, you can grab yourself a copy of Rainbow Six: Siege or Assassin's Creed: Syndicate for free, by checking out the "Bullets or Blades" promo that NVIDIA is running.

Let's hope it launches without multi-GPU issues, unlike Batman: Arkham Knight and Assassin's Creed: Syndicate.

Avalanche Studios' deliciously chaotic open-world explosion-sim Just Cause 3 releases in just little over a week from now, and we've spotted some new details that concerns PC gamers.

According to a leaked shot of Just Cause 3's back cover, the game will use NVIDIA's expansive GameWorks effects suite. GameWorks offers a slew of impressive enhancements across the board, from destructible environments and real-time physics to ambient smoke and fog effects. Considering Just Cause 3 is based around a wide, open world of fiery havoc, some of the GameWorks effects like PhysX, Destruction, Enhanced Horizon-Based Ambient Occlusion and Turbulence are a no-brainer.

The back cover also highlights the game's PC requirements, which we've included below. Neither Square Enix, Avalanche or NVIDIA have revealed the full list of GameWorks effects used in Just Cause 3, but we can make some quick deductions.

Fallout 4 is one of the few big-name Bethesda RPG's that didn't come with a huge fold-out poster map, and we don't even get with Prima Games' basic guidebook. Sure you can shell out some extra caps to get the fancy hardback edition...or you can make your own. One amazingly-skilled gamer opted for the latter choice and created a spectacular feat of cartography that will fuel your adventures for months to come.

The sprawling Fallout 4 map was created by a Redditor named koolkyle802, and it exposes the hidden treasures and terrors that post-apocalyptic Commonwealth has to offer. The map has everything from cities, settlements, locations, bobbleheads, holotapes, magazines and a chromatic tide that denotes enemy threat levels.

KoolKyle802 used GIMP to create the map and has since been awarded four different instances of Reddit Gold for his contributions to the Fallout community. Essentially the map provides top-tier navigation for gamers who don't have or don't plan to buy Prima's guidebook.

With both companies working together to provide multiple ESL/ESEA CS:GO tournaments recently and having rumors mount that a buyout talk was in progress, ESL has now confirmed that it has acquired ESEA for an undisclosed amount.

With the confirmation of this buyout hitting the public, ESEA will continue to operate separately of ESL, with HLTV explaining this renewed relationship is set up for ESEA to benefit "from the products and services provided by ESL, which is owned by Swedish digital entertainment company MTG."

This purchase is said to be yet another move by MTG to solidity its position in eSports, previously purchasing 75% of ESL for $83 million and the world's largest LAN, DreamHack, for $28 million.

While Warner Bros. has pretty much given up on multi-GPU setups for Batman: Arkham Knight, even after the game being so bad at launch the developer had to pull it from sale Ubisoft is up the same creek without a paddle.

Ubisoft has acknowledged the issues with multi-GPU setups on Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, with Ubisoft's Community Manager "Mr_Shade" posting on the Ubisoft forums with "The team are aware of the issue and are working to resolve it - it's possible that NVIDIA will release driver updates to correct this, but in the mean time - please try using just one GPU for the game so you can play if that solution works for you".

The Xbox One's backward compatibility feature was heralded with much fanfare when it was announced, but when it actually started rolling out, the games library was quite underwhelming. Instead of the heavy-hitting Xbox 360 titans like Red Dead Redemption, we were delivered a slew of Kinect and Xbox LIVE Arcade games. Now Microsoft has stepped forward to explain why key games are missing from the lineup.

"It's really up to publishers to approve [backward compatible] games," said Microsoft engineer Richard Irving in a recent interview with Eurogamer. "Publishers are super engaged and responsive to that stuff, the response was overwhelming from fans. It's just that some of the content takes longer than others to organise, so we weren't able to get all of the top 50 or 100 games, but we have a good number of them."

Irving also said that Microsoft has to "re-engage" publishers and effectively show incentive to convince games-makers to fork up the licensing to a new console. "It didn't seem fair to ask our partners to go off and find licenses for all this Xbox 360 content so what we opted to do instead was to give fans the opportunity to prioritise which games they want. So then we can re-engage with publishers and ask about specific games and say, 'please let us know if this is something you can do'. As you can imagine, publishers have cut very specific deals on some of that content. For example Madden--you can imagine how many licenses go into a game with the players, the NFL, sponsors, and so on. And there's over 1000 games at this point on Xbox 360."

We knew they were coming, but according to the latest rumors the next-gen consoles should be released in 2018 - much earlier than the roadmaps Microsoft and Sony had before the current gen consoles were released.

Before the Xbox One and PS4 were released, 4K gaming wasn't really solidified - but now it is. It's getting cheaper and cheaper to get on the 4K bandwagon, and over the next year or two, the current-gen consoles are going to look very aged next to mobile, VR and PC gaming. The Xbox One and PS4 are barely capable of 900p let alone 1080p (and then let alone 60FPS), with AMD set to beef up the APU powering the Xbox Two and PlayStation 5 consoles.

The biggest thing that we need to think about is VR. Sony is already onboard with PlayStation VR, but the PS4 is underpowered to really push 1080p (or higher) at 90FPS (or higher). This is where the PS5 and Xbox Two will be better equipped, but another thing to consider is backwards compatibility. Thanks to the new consoles being powered by AMD technology again, and an x86 architecture, the Xbox Two and PS5 should be backwards compatible with the Xbox One and PS4, so you won't lose your game library like you did from the Xbox 360 and PS3.

Microsoft's Xbox 360 is a mighty machine; even today the Xbox One is far eclipsed by the functionality, games library, and general UI setup of its yesteryear predecessor. Today the Xbox 360 celebrates its tenth birthday, signalling that the console's lifecycle is starting to wind down, but the system will forever remain one of Microsoft's crowning achievements.

Originally released on November 22, 2005, the Xbox 360 propelled console gaming forward to new heights. I've shared thousands upon thousands of hours with my Xbox 360, and regard it as one of the most momentous gaming systems in my gaming history. I still remember how magical it was playing Oblivion for the first time, taking in the enchanting scenery of Cyrodiil--this was the first time that I really felt like "next-gen" gaming was here.

The Xbox 360 still has one of the best games libraries in gaming; it's so good, in fact, that Microsoft has brought it over to the Xbox One via backwards compatibility. It's rather strange to think about how Microsoft got so many things right with the Xbox 360, and so many things wrong with the Xbox One. The system has served for an entire generation of gaming, spawning a huge assortment of memorable exclusives and amazing experiences that we might never see again.

Like most AAA games, Fallout 4's game code is littered with secrets and hidden gems. Quite often we see dataminers and code-combers unearth buried treasures, and now an intrepid Nexus modder by the name of xxdeathknight72xx has dug up one of the most hilariously fun weapons Fallout 4 has to offer.

The hidden Fallout 4 weapon is a harpoon gun that uses powerful pressure to propel cruel harpoons into the faces and heads of unsuspecting baddies. Using the harpoon rifle in VATS is quite amusing and honestly I have no clue why Bethesda scrapped the gun. Maybe it's an item that will be unlocked by upcoming DLC? I hope so, because the weapon is so immensely satisfying thanks to its headshot animations, which rips an enemy's head clear off their shoulders and pins it to a nearby object to make a macabre trophy of sorts.

In order to use the hidden gun, you'll need to download an install a special mod. If you plan to start the massive journey that is mod collecting, be sure to pick up the Nexus Mod Manager to keep things organized. To enable mods you'll have to do some tinkering with the game's .ini files. Here's a quick step-by-step walkthrough on how to get started.

For the last month or so, the first 1000 or so backers of Star Citizen have been playing around with the alpha 2.0 of the game. Alpha 2.0 provides some big upgrades on the game, fixing countless problems, with improved animations, smoother performance and more.

The video above was shown off at the CitizenCon 2015 presentation last month, where we can see that the ship exploration is improved, and the graphics look much smoother, too. There seems to be some improved lighting and environmental effects, which I'm incredibly excited over. This is a game for the PC, something that simply couldn't be done at this scale on the consoles.

At four minutes into the video, Quantum Drive gets activated, and it gave me goosebumps. Awesome.

Any veteran Destiny player will tell you that Bungie's open-world social FPS still has its problems. Since it's started to rake in serious cash thanks to Destiny's new microtransactions, Bungie is planning to roll out free content updates in an effort to shore up the game's rough edges and give players enough new gear to keep them going.

In a recent Weekly update, Bungie has revealed its plans for Destiny's immediate future. A new trove of exotics will be bestowed upon Guardians to fuel their interstellar firefights. The bad news is that not all of these "new" exotics will exactly be new, and it's not really a trove. Only two of them will be completely fresh whereas the others are upgraded Year One items like the recently revealed Mida Multi-Tool. Sadly we still don't have any stats for the upgraded Mida Multi-Tool, but Bungie promises that the gear will be scaled to be usable with level 40 characters.

Next up we have yet another weapon rebalance. That's right, the tired old scheme that creates the illusion of depth has returned. Destiny fans have had to re-acclimate themselves to the game many times now, with nearly every weapon "tune-up" phase making a good portion of our favorite weapons nearly useless. I'm all for balancing, except when it's used as a trick to create the illusion of change and "new" content.

If you're a gamer, one of the major highlights of any season is Steam's rotating sales. The digital marketplace throws huge sales for various occasions, offering steep discounts on a smattering of PC games during the summer and holiday months alike. This time around Valve is trying something new and has confirmed some key changes to its sales format.

In a recent post in the Steamworks Developer Group, Valve has confirmed that it won't be holding Daily Sales and Flash Sales simultaneously with its big-name seasonal sales. Basically this means that all the discounts will be unleashed all at once, rather than being timed via countdowns. These changes will take place during the upcoming Autumn Sale, which starts on November 25th, and the huge Holiday Sale, which starts on December 22.

"In past sale events, we've asked for two discounts-a duration discount that runs for the length of the sale, and a feature discount that runs in the event that a game is featured on the front page. This year, to optimize the sale for customers and to allow us to feature and recommend your products in more ways to more customers, we're asking for just one discount, to run the length of the sale.

Hidetaka Miyazaki is responsible for creating one of the most dedicated cults in video game history. The Souls universe has given way to a tremendous following that transgresses the normal bounds of fandom; in a way, it's a kind of religion. But like all great things, the Souls franchise has to come to an end, and Miyazaki affirms that Dark Souls III will indeed be the blood-soaked elegy of the harrowed universe.

"I'm considering Dark Souls 3 to be the big closure on the series," Souls creator and macabre master Hidetaka Miyazaki said in a recent interview with Gamespot. "I don't think it'd be the right choice to continue indefinitely creating Souls and Bloodborne games. Dark Souls 3 will mark the last game where the development project began before I became president. "

The devs at From Software made their mark with a number of games, facilitating their medieval style with the King's Field games, but became most famous for the Souls series. Thanks to Dark Souls--and Demons Souls--From Software has become revered, but the team is eager to try something new and fresh. That's not to say that their next project won't have mythical and phantasmal aspects to it.

Bethesda has announced through a new blog post that the PC version of Fallout 4 will be patched first, with the Xbox One and PS4 patches to follow after. It feels like we're living in a Bizarro world right now.

The developer says that Fallout 4 is its "most robust and solid release ever", but knows that the game is far from polished. In a blog post, Bethesda said: "It's true that the freedom our games offer you can lead to unintentional consequences that are sometimes bad, when the game combines too many unexpected elements at once. Given the scale and complexity of the systems at work, especially when allowing you to build your own settlements, we're happy that Fallout 4 is our most robust and solid release ever, and we'd like to thank our amazing QA staff who worked as hard as anyone to break the game so we could fix it during development".

Bethesda added: "Our process for updating the game will include releasing a beta patch on Steam, followed by full release on PC, then release on the consoles. This process has worked well for us in the past and allows us to get more fixes out faster". Bethesda also added that we should "[e]xpect to see more updates, that are smaller and more frequent, than a few big ones. This allows us to make sure each fix is working right, as any change can have unintentional side effects in a game this huge".

Blizzard kicked off a closed beta of Overwatch a few weeks ago, but there'll be an open beta for select players between November 20 at 9AM PST and November 23 at 9AM PST.

The Overwatch beta is an invitation-only event, with Blizzard saying it would invite "a lot more players in North America and Europe". The developer has also published the minimum and recommended requirements for the Overwatch beta, with some strong GPU requirements at 60FPS on medium details.

Minimum (targeting 30fps):

Update: Sony has delivered the following statement to Wired, but hasn't officially confirmed disc-based PS2 support on the PS4: "We are working on utilizing PS2 emulation technology to bring PS2 games forward to the current generation. We have nothing further to comment at this point in time."

With Microsoft opening up its next-gen console to new heights with the oft-requested backward compatibility feature, Sony has been left out in the cold with its paltry and unpopular PS Now rental service. Now it looks like Sony could be reversing this with a major effort to make PlayStation 2 era games backward compatible on the PS4--a move that could hit Microsoft pretty hard.

The PS4 release of EA's new Star Wars: Battlefront brought something even more exciting that galactic conquest. Certain bundles of DICE's new shooter comes packed with a download code for PS1 and PS2 classics like Star Wars: Bounty Hunter, Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter, and Super Star Wars, which are all playable on the PS4. If Sony can do it with these games, what's stopping it from unleashing fully disc-based PS2 support?

The recent major patch for Batman: Arkham Knight improved the performance among other things, but multi-GPU support was still nowhere to be seen, leaving some to wonder if it would ever arrive. Well, developer Rocksteady has confirmed on the Steam forums that it's been axed.

"We've been working with our development and graphics driver partners over the last few months to investigate utilizing multi-GPU support within Batman: Arkham Knight," they write. "The result was that even the best case estimates for performance improvements turned out to be relatively small given the high risk of creating new issues for all players. As a result we've had to make the difficult decision to stop work on further multi-GPU support. We are disappointed that this was not practical and apologize to those who have been waiting for this feature."

It's a pity, but also expected given even single-GPU performance is still a source of grief for some.

For all of its time-absorbing tinkering, Fallout 4 has been aptly described as "Settlement Simulator 2015". Many gamers have spent thousands upon thousands of hours perfecting their digital homesteads and massive cities (myself included), pushing the limit as far as possible while giving birth to amazing feats of ingenuity.

This latest creation is a prime example of simulation mastery. Reddit user Theowest has created a gigantic working Rubik's Cube with Fallout 4's workshop system, putting a good portion of workshop creations to shame. The Rubik's Cube creation took over 25 hours to build and is powered by an absurd power matrix consisting of some 180 generators and thousands upon thousands of power cords. The sheer scope of the project is awe-inspiring, especially since most people can't keep track of a single power grid...not to mention hundreds of them.

This Rubik's Cube is absolutely amazing, and I'm beyond impressed with this creation. Fallout 4 lets you push your creative skills to the next level, but I have to say that this kind of thing is much easier on PC as you can simply use console commands to add infinite materials. Let's hope Theowest contemplates a job in structural design--he's a pure natural.

Star Wars: Battlefront is finally here, and while gamers might be torn on the first-person shooter from EA and DICE, the PR boss of Remedy had some choice words to add. Remedy Entertainment is the developer behind huge hits like Max Payne, Alan Wake and the upcoming Xbox One exclusive Quantum Break.

Remedy PR boss Thomas Puha posted on his Twitter account some of his thoughts on Battlefront, where he said: "[I'm] really glad #StarWarsBattlefront is simple and has less modes and stuff. I don't get into many games anymore since they have so much stuff". Now, while I understand that in a way, we don't want watered down games because some people are too busy, or find it hard to get a handle on the game.

Puha added: "Having a lot of features and 'stuff' in a game doesn't mean it's giving lotto value for my money. Less is more". Now this is a quote to keep... "less is more". We should remember that for Quantum Break, as it will most likely be a play once and forget it game, so maybe this is why Puha hints towards this type of mantra. To finish it off, Puha said it's fine to "complain Battlefront does not have a lot of features, but don't be surprised. Game had to be made in about two years". He added: "Its stunningly good considering that".

Microsoft has made good on its promise to bring customized button-mapping to all Xbox One controllers, adding a new level of interaction to the platform. The Xbox community requested the feature as part of the feedback program, and Redmond decided to cater to its fans and roll it out to the console. But as most Xbox fans already know, any good Xbox One news is accompanied by the inevitable bad news disappointments.

The button mapping appears to be universal for all Xbox One games; rather than having different control schemes on a game-by-game basis, it's a hard preset that games will recognize, meaning you won't have to reconfigure anything in-game. Being able to map your control scheme is a nice addition as it lets players change things up and universally tune up their controls to funky settings. The mapping feature also returns functionality to those controllers with broken buttons. Thankfully, we can now swap out the horrible analog-breaking sprinting control for games like Destiny and assign it to something less destructive.

Unfortunately, this feature has a caveat, just like nearly every functionality on the Xbox One. You can customize every in-game button but the left and right triggers, which can only be swapped. Games like Halo 5 already let you swap out different controller presets, but if you were hoping to use the left or right triggers to do something different, then you're out of luck.