Gaming - Page 1108

Avid Persona fans have been glued to Tokyo Game Show 2015 news in hopes of seeing more Persona 5, and Atlus has delivered with a brand new gameplay trailer. The bad news? The trailer reveals that Persona 5 has been delayed to Summer 2016. Ouch.

Since it was revealed all the way back in 2013, Persona 5 has been one of the most talked-about games in Atlus' label. It's been a while since anyone's heard about the game, and gamers have had to wait since February for a new trailer. Now everyone finally gets a fresh blast of stylish goodness and the excitement is sullied with the crushing disappointment of a delay.

Due to the lapse and disruption of Persona 5 news, fans and community members started to pass along word of an impending delay. The RPG was set to release in 2015 but everyone had their doubts, and Atlus spills the beans in an offhand way--the equivalent of a Dear John letter to millions of fans across the globe.

In a new update post DICE has shed light on some new info on next month's Star Wars: Battlefront beta, revealing that it will be available for everyone across all three platforms.

As far as game modes, the Battlefront open beta will ship with both online and offline split-screen co-op play with bots. So far we know that the online offerings will include 40-player Walker Assault mode on Hoth with skirmishes on the ice floor with AT-AT's and Snowspeeders, as well as dogfights in the skies. The newly unveiled Drop Zone gametype on Sullust will be available online as well.

For offline play, the beta features the Missions gametype centered around teaming up with a friend via couch co-op to tackle bots. The update lists a survival-based deathmatch Mission on the craggy dunes of Tattooine as one of the primary modes in the Missions archtype. DICE mentions the Fighter Squadron gametype but doesn't confirm it will be in the beta.

Square Enix's sprawling MMORPG gem Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn might very well find its way alongside the PlayStation VR's launch selection--or at the very least some sort of inclusion on the virtual reality platform.

Attendees at this year's Tokyo Game Show will get the chance to play FF14 within a VR space, breaking barriers that could pave the way for full-on VR MMORPG experiences. The VR demo sees a team of players working together to fight Titan, a primal boss who reigns in the magma-filled pit called The Navel.

This might very well be the first functioning multiplayer MMORPG VR demo ever showcased, and it's a pretty big deal. Thankfuly Square Enix and Sony do it in style and pick one of the best games in the genre today. While the spectacle itself is quite noteworthy, things get really interesting when we think about what the demo could lead to.

At this year's annual Tokyo Game Show event, Sony unveiled a name and a release date for Bloodborne's anticipated expansion: it's called The Old Hunters and it releases November 24.

"The Old Hunters is set in a nightmare world where hunters from the past are trapped forever, explore brand new stages full of dangers, rewards, and deadly beasts to overcome," a new post on the PlayStation Blog affirms. "You'll find multiple new outfits and weapons to add to your arsenal as well as additional magic to wield and add more variety to your combat strategy."

Sony also revealed that Miyazaki's macabre PS4 exclusive has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide, which isn't surprising due to the hardcore fanbase that worships the dark altar of Miyazaki's cruel splendor. Interestingly enough the master himself said that Bloodborne's limited nature was one of the reasons he was excited about returning to Dark Souls 3.

Without a firm release date from Eidos Montreal, we don't yet know when Deus Ex: Mankind Divided will be released exactly, except for sometime in 2016. But something we do know, is that it will ship with support for DX12 on day one.

I had a lengthy chat with AMD's Chief Gaming Scientist, Richard Huddy, earlier today about all things DX12 and Asynchronous Shaders, where AMD talked about having their technology and support in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Since they used Mankind Divided in their own internal materials, I thought I'd ask if we'd see DX12 support at launch. Huddy replied, saying that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided would indeed launch with DX12 support.

Not only that, but Mankind Divided will also include AMD's own TressFX Hair 3.0 technology alongside DX12. The news to take away from this is that we've just had a confirmation of DX12 support in Mankind Divided out of the box. I had a suspicion that it would launch with DX11 support and would later be patched with DX12 support, but it looks like we can expect DX12 support straight off the bat. Additionally, I pushed Huddy to see if we will see a built-in benchmark for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, as it would be the best example of testing the differences between DX11 and DX12. Huddy confirmed that Mankind Divided will include a built-in benchmark, too.

With the release of Halo 5: Guardians getting closer and closer, we're receiving more details on what will make the game tick. 343 Industries, the developer behind the game, has let out some information on the visual side of the game.

A post on the Xbox Wire blog from Josh Holmes says "framerate is king" for the team. Dinges added that "Gameplay is defined by the way that players experience the game from controller to screen. We want the connection between you and the game to feel seamless and instantaneous. From the beginning, we set ourselves the goal of delivering consistent 60fps gameplay across all modes of play. Delivering on this goal meant re-engineering the gameplay systems at the core of our engine. It required sustained commitment from the entire team as we continually optimized the experience, and the difference it makes to the play experience is immediate and obvious".

He continued: "60fps gameplay is supported by a new progressive resolution system that allows us to dynamically scale the resolution at which we render the game (up to 1080p) based on the needs of the scene. This enables us to deploy resources where they have most impact across a diverse series of experiences throughout the game while delivering the most visually stunning Halo game ever".

At this year's annual Tokyo Game Show, Sony announces a pretty hefty price drop for the PlayStation 4 across the Japanese market.

Starting October 1, the PlayStation 4 will be marked down from ¥39,980 to ¥34,980 in its home country of Japan, which equates to ~$291 or €258. Sony Computer Entertainment Japan and Asia President Atsushi Morita iterate the price cut will "provide an opportunity for users who have not yet been exposed to this device to dive into the world of PlayStation 4."

Considering the console retails for $399 in the U.S. that's a pretty significant cut and if you're in the market for a new console it might be worth shipping it overseas. It's worth mentioning that this price drop is just for the base console and excludes bundles--it ships with the 500GB PS4 and a DualShock 4 controller only.

Earlier today a rumor that EA was planning to buy out popular Witcher developer CD Projekt RED sprung to life, striking fear and disdain into the hearts of gamers everywhere. Now CDPR has fully squashed the rumor and denied the allegations completely.

The false rumor was cited by DSO Gaming, who reported that an anonymous CDPR employee revealed that EA was currently meeting up with the studio's top execs to discuss takeover negotiations.

"I'm an employee of CDProjekt Red and I have some bad news to share with you. Our management is probably talking with Electronic Arts about potential take over," the fake employee wrote. "Electronic Arts representatives are currently visiting our studio and meeting with top management. We are not going to release any game soon, so for sure it's not about any publishing deal, so the only possible reason for EA guys being here is that they want to buy us."

First EA revealed the Need For Speed reboot would "require an internet connection at all times" to play, then Ghost Games said that the game was capped at 30FPS on PC, leading to massive backlash from PC gamers everywhere. Now Ghost Games has heeded the call and promises to boost the frame-rate...but it's going to take some time.

"For any driving game a steady frame rate is incredibly important, and an unlocked frame rate in Need for Speed is a massive priority for you. We fully agree," Ghost Games said on a new update post. "To deliver this, we've made the decision to move the PC release date to Spring 2016. Our PlayStation 4 and Xbox One release dates will remain the same, starting November 3, 2015 in North America and November 5 worldwide."

The developers continue to affirm that the extra time will be spent "increasing the visuals we can deliver on PC" and maintains that PC gamers will get retroactive access to all of the updates released on PS4 and Xbox One in the interim. Since the game is being developed on the Frostbite engine it's quite odd Ghost Games couldn't maintain 60FPS on PC...especially in a racing game.

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".