Gaming - Page 1109

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.

Early next month, EA will unleash the Star Wars Battlefront beta, and while registration isn't open just yet, some people are scamming foaming-at-the-mouth gamers with fake beta sign-up sites.

Of course, these sites are just total traps, which has seen Electronic Arts Community Manager, Matthew Everett, taking to Reddit. Everett said: "Registration has not been made available yet. Do not be fooled by fake beta sign-up sites. Our beta registration will live on our official site here: starwars.ea.com. I will also be sure to post a link once it is available".

Star Wars Battlefront launches on the Xbox One, PS4 and PC on November 17 while the beta arrives sometime in "early October".

If you have bad internet and are thinking about buying a disc version of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain on PC, don't bother.

It looks like Konami has shipped retail PC DVD-ROMs of MGSV with only a single 8.8MB installer file, meaning you still have to download the full 20GB+ game via Steam. This is a pretty harsh roadblock to PC gamers with terrible internet speeds and one has to wonder why the Japanese publisher didn't just nix physical PC releases altogether.

While this is pretty frustrating, this kind of thing is nothing new. A lot of companies ship "physical" games with a download key to use on Origin, Steam, etc. Using this method the publishers are saving money packing in downloads via digital distribution networks like Steam rather than shipping the required 2-3 DVD discs required to fit the full game.

Now that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is out, some gamers are noticing that there's a 60FPS frame rate cap. While 60FPS is still a great achievement, especially in the age of 'next-gen' consoles, there are a plethora of 120Hz and 144Hz monitors that gamers want to see fully utilized.

Thanks to the users of the NeoGAF forums, with user 'Alo81', who has provided a guide on how to unlock the framerate on MGS V: The Phantom Pain. First you'll need this file, then to follow these instructions:

Update: Michael Gapper, the PR and Communications Manager for Frontier Developments reached out to us after this story went live, correcting us. He said: "We've chosen not to do crossplay between Xbox One and PC for Elite: Dangerous because we don't want to throw those communities up against one another in direct competition. PC and Xbox One players occupy the same galaxy, but not the same play space. This means everyone shares the same story, and experiences the same economy, interstellar wars, exploration, diplomacy and Powerplay state throughout the galaxy. Whether you play on PC, Mac or Xbox One, everyone will contribute to and benefit from sharing the same galaxy, without necessarily colliding head-to-head".

If you're an Elite: Dangerous player, did you know that Frontier Development will be ushering in cross-platform play between the Xbox One and PC versions of the game on October 6? Exciting stuff, huh?

Elite: Dangerous launches on the Xbox One on October 6, so from day one it will be cross-platform capable with the PC version of the game. But, the Xbox One version of Elite: Dangerous will not have Kinect support for headtracking, which is a disappointment, but it will feature support for the upcoming Xbox Elite controller that's priced at $150.

Avalanche's new Mad Max game is an explosive rip-roaring high-octane romp through the bloody post-apocalyptic series, and these 8K screenshots show that the havoc-filled wastes are actually a thing of beauty.

The 8K image gallery was shot using the game's quite amazing built-in photo editor as well as a combination of other third-party software and SweetFX shaders. You can see the full uncompressed 8K gallery here.

To hit full 8K, PC gamer k-putt used a tool called SRWE to resize the game's window to 8000x4000, and the program matched its internal renderer to the set resolution. K-putt also had to use DeadEndThrills' cheat table to expand the photo editor's set 16:9 aspect ratio.

Fallout 4 will have an incredibly huge span of dialogue that consists of over 100,000 lines of voiced text.

The news comes straight from Bethesda, who issued a Tweet yesterday confirming that the studio was in fact done recording all the dialogue. Fallout 4 features approximately 111,000 lines that took multiple years to record, and we have to wonder just how much of the game's data is taken up by the huge helping of voice-overs.

In Fallout 4 players have been given a voice, and a good chunk of that dialogue will be made up of the player character's responses. The game's text options have been consolidated from a list into a short-and-sweet response menu made up of a controller's four face buttons. Voice over actors Courtenay Taylor and Brian T. Delaney will portray the game's male and female protagonists.

PC gamers will be relieved to find that Batman: Arkham Knight is finally playable on the platform, but with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Mad Max on Steam, WB might have been too little too late.

"Good news - testing for the interim patch has been completed and it is now available for those who already have Batman: Arkham Knight for PC," read the official patch notes. "As a reminder, the patch brings major performance improvements including consistent frame rates and VRAM optimization."

The patch is targeted to fix the game's crippling latency issues and crashes by beefing up system memory and VRAM optimization as well as adding "improved performance on all GPUs". Other messy blemishes like low-resolution texture bugs have been supposedly smashed, and Arkham Knight will now run better on HDD's.

Out of the six Steam games that have reached over a million sales in 2015, three of them are still in Early Access.

As more and more PC gamers move towards original games, amateur indie developers are actually starting to overtake AAA game sales on Steam. According to info gleaned from Steam Spy, a site that analyzes sales and downloads on Steam, three of the six million-selling PC games of 2015 are still unfinished--but that hasn't stopped them from hitting the top charts.

The top-ranking games are the open-world zombie survival sim H1Z1, the dinosaur survival game ARK: Survival Evolved, and the RTS siegecraft game Besieged.

It looks like the futuristic saga of Capcom's iconic 8-bit hero in blue will be the latest in Hollywood's push on video game adaptations.

Reports from Tracking Board indicate that Fox has backed Chernin Entertainment as a producer for the film, with development on the project underway. But is Chernin a good fit to handle Mega Man's immortal legacy? The company is also currently working on the upcoming War of the Apes film for 2017, and is responsible for producing a boatload of The New Girl episodes and a handful of Terra Nova episodes.

Mega Man--also known as Rockman in Japan--has been one of the most popular icons in gaming history with a franchise that spans back to 1987 with the NES classic. With over 50 games as source material, Chernin and Fox will have their work cut out for them, but we can't see them starting anywhere but the very beginning in 200X with the clash of Dr. Light and the nefarious Dr. Wily.

The v1.05 patch for Rocket League will arrive in "two weeks or less" bringing with it the start of the first season, not only that, but Rocket Leaguers will be able to filter out PS4 players in matchmatching on PC, and to search for new ranked matches at the endgame screen.

The new patch will also do the usual bug fixes that saw PC players to not have a name, fix chat issues, and improve corruption protection for saved games. The update will also have Middle Eastern servers that "will still come at some point" according to developer Psyonix. The developer will also be adding in a music player interface in the near future.

If you didn't already know about, is a vehicle-driven, off-the-wall soccer game where players attempt to score goals in hotted up cars and trucks.

With the release of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided set for February 2016, gamers need to get into the world of Deus Ex, and what better way than by getting every Deus Ex game released for just $6.59 from Steam?

The $6.59 bundle includes Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition, Deus Ex: Invisible War, Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Director's Cut) and Deus Ex: The Fall. This is a steal, considering it would cost close to, or just over $200 if you paid nearly full price for all of the Deus Ex games when they were released.

The sale lasts for another 14 hours or so, so you will want to jump in quick.