Gaming - Page 1119

Now that Microsoft is just over a week away from the launch of Windows 10, the company has just enabled game streaming from Xbox One owners to Windows 10-powered PCs and tablets. Not only that, but the company is also delivering improved features to the Xbox app on Windows 10 in the coming days.

Anyone who owns an Xbox One and a Windows 10-powered PC or tablet can play all of their games from their console on their PC, all by going to your Xbox One and then 'Settings', then 'Preferences' and then 'Allow game streaming to other devices'. Once you've done this, it will install the latest version of the Xbox app on your PC or tablet.

Once you open the Xbox app on your Windows 10 device, go to Connect and then '+Add a device', and you'll then have to select your Xbox One console. Once you have a Xbox 360 or Xbox One controller hooked up to your PC, you'll be close to being connected to your Xbox One. From here, you'll need to go to 'Home' and then 'Recently Played' to select a Xbox One game, and then select 'Play from Console' to start your streaming session. Voila; you're not playing Xbox One games on your PC!

Fallout 4 has kept voice actors Brian Delaney and Courtenay Taylor quite busy, with more than 13,000 lines of dialogue recorded over the past two years. There is a large amount of hype and gamer excitement regarding Fallout 4, and it's great to see Bethesda apparently taking things seriously.

It's an interesting addition to Fallout 4, as it's going to be fully voiced, with gamers able to choose a male or female character. It has been a logistical process for Bethesda, but will offer unique playability for gamers. Here is what game director Todd Howard recently told the Telegraph:

"We were lucky to find two great voice actors. And it's interesting because she may read things or act things differently than he does. So scenes play out differently depending on whether you are playing the game as male or female."

Explained as having an "odd mixture of damage, control and mobility" by Curse in a spotlight video, the Skeleton King is shaping up to be a formidable force on Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm battlefield.

Set as a warrior and team tank, this extra-tall hero comes with a trait which enables him to still partially function even after death, a 'skeletal swing' which deals damage and slows enemies, 'Drain Hope' which serves to drain a foe's hit points over a four second period and 'Wraith Walk' which enables you to travel as a ghost for a short time, allowing you to teleport to it before the time runs out - similar to an ability as seen in Sylvannas. Finally, his first ultimate allows you to create a medium-range barrier in order to lock all friends and foe within for a few seconds.

The other ultimate on offer is named 'March of the Black King' and puts your Leoric on a rampage, marching forward and swinging his weapon. If these abilities interest you, Heroes of the Storm is a free to play multiplayer online battle arena game and can be found here.

Ever wondered how some professional gamers keep their cool for so long at live events? Adderall is the answer, according to Kory 'SEMPHIS' Friesen (Nihilum and CLG Red coach) in a recent interview with Mohan 'Launders' Govindasamy at ESWC 2015.

The topic came about when Friesen was asked about a match and the crazy communications that went down during this performance. Alongside telling the interviewer that he doesn't "even care," Friesen went on to explain that "We were all on Adderall. I don't even give a fuck. It was pretty obvious if you listened to the comms. People can hate it or whatever."

Said to help those with ADHD focus, admitting to Adderall use may land players in hot water with the tournament organizer, ESL. With a harsh stance on drugs, ESL's rules read: "To play a match, be it online or offline, under the influence of any drugs, alcohol, or other performance enhancers is strictly prohibited, and may be punished with exclusion from the ESL One."

The development of Dead Island 2 looks like it has been bitten by a zombie, with Deep Silver saying that it has parted ways with the developer behind the game, Yager.

In a statement, a representative of Deep Silver said: "With Dead Island 2, Deep Silver has always been dedicated to delivering the sequel that Dead Island fans deserve. After careful consideration, today we announce the decision to part ways with development partner Yager". As for what's happening with Dead Island 2, Deep Silver said that it promises to "continue working towards bringing our vision of Dead Island 2 to life". The studio finished by saying that they "will share further information at a later stage".

We should hopefully hear more about Dead Island 2 in the near future.

We only just reported that Warner Bros was changing its internal review policies after the mess that is Batman: Arkham Knight on PC, but now we're seeing that Rocksteady isn't releasing the updated version of Arkham Knight on the PC until fall 2015 - so, September - December, 2015.

Batman: Arkham Knight's DLC on the PC will be delayed, with WB Games saying: "Our continued focus on getting the right PC fixes in place for the main game has had an impact on the development of all DLC content for the PC version of the game. This means that the Batman: Arkham Knight - Batgirl: A Matter of Family DLC will not be available on July 14th for those who are currently playing the PC version of the game. We apologize for the delay and only want to make sure that any content that we offer is up to the standards that PC players expect".

The company apologized to its fans in a post, where it said: "Again, we would like to apologize to you, the fans, and let you know that we are taking full responsibility for releasing a product that did not meet our quality standards, which is why we suspended sales of the game as soon as we understood the issues". As for future releases, we should hopefully not have to worry, with WB Games adding: "We can also assure you that because of this latest launch, we are modifying the internal review process for all of our games. For those who are waiting for the updated version of the game on PC, please know that we are working on this every day. For the players who are continuing to play Batman: Arkham Knight on PC, fixes are continually being made to the game as we await the final updated version".

With Ubisoft learning from its Watch Dogs crap at E3 a few years ago, the company is now showing games off at events on their target machines. But which platform are the sales being made on? The PS4 and PC!

According to Ubisoft's own numbers, for the company's fiscal year, which ended on June 30 - the PS4 makes up 27%, while the PC chews up 23%. The Xbox One lags behind with 11%, while the Wii and Wii U only make up 3% of Ubisoft's sales. This is a big swing in the last year, with the fiscal 2014 numbers showing that the PC only made up 14%.

Considering Ubisoft said a few years ago now that the piracy rate on the PC was somewhere in the vicinity of 93-95%, the sales of their games on PC are only getting stronger. And that's with worse PC ports in the last few years, following the mess that was Watch Dogs, oh and Assassin's Creed, oh and Far Cry 4, and so many more games that have been not as good as they should've been, on the most powerful platform.

With Sony winning the current-gen console race in terms of both performance and sales of the PlayStation 4, Microsoft reportedly has a trick up its sleeve to boost performance on the Xbox One later this year, according to the developer behind The Technomancer, Spiders.

Spiders' CEO, Jehanne Rousseau, a French game studio, said that Microsoft will soon be boosting the CPU performance on the Xbox One, something that will help developers meet their targeted performance goals. When GamingBolt talked to Spiders' CEO recently, Rousseau explained how the studio will squeeze additional performance out of the Xbox One for their upcoming Mars-based, post-apocalyptic RPG, The Technomancer.

Rousseau said: "We are not using it yet but this is only a matter of time! This is very interesting for us to have access to this processor. We will use it to do a part of our computations to smooth the frame rate. In fact we designed our new engine to be very flexible about the number of processors. With mainly in mind the numerous PC designs, but this will also be useful for this 7th processor".

We've seen Mario in all of his glory on Unreal Engine 4 not too long ago, but now the infamous plumber who never seems to be a plumber, he's now appearing in Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4-powered tech demo 'A Boy And His Kite'.

The tech demo runs beautifully well, and while Mario seems to be running at a very weird speed, this is just a tech demo with a bit of modding applied. Still, the beauty of Unreal Engine 4 is shown off incredibly well in this demo, but I now just want to play an Unreal Engine 4-powered version of Mario, dammit.

Now that Mirror's Edge Catalyst has been unveiled, we're finding out more information on the free-running first-person non-shooter. During an interview with Polygon, Senior Producer on Mirror's Edge Catalyst, Sara Jansson, said: "In Mirror's Edge Catalyst, you won't be using any guns at all".

Jansson continued: "We've completely removed that aspect of the game. You can't even pick them up". EA and DICE have reportedly developed an all-new combat system that emphasizes melee combat, where Jansson explained it in detail with Polygon: "Faith will fight, but she doesn't kill. Now the fighting is more of an extension of the movement. It builds on the flow. It fits a lot better with the game mechanics. When Faith is in flow, when she stitches together move after move without failing and keeps her momentum going, she's actually invulnerable to bullets. That can keep her out of harm's way. It's only when she stops that she can get hurt".

If you've got a spare $200, you could look at grabbing the Mirror's Edge Catalyst Collector's Edition version of the game, too. As for the release date on the game, we're looking at a February 23, 2016 release for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC.

The Coalition, the studio behind Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, has said that the PC version of the game, is not a port. The developer has said that while it's super-enhanced, it's "authored at a much higher rate".

We have 4K textures in nearly everything, and for the PC they could just "turn off those clamps and unlock it fully, and the world just becomes super crisp". The studio were teasing the game at Comic-Con, where Gears of War: Ultimate Edition was shown off in 4K on a huge 70-inch TV.

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition is an exclusive Windows 10 release, where it will be making use of DirectX 12. This means we're going to have improved performance when 4K is turned on, but we're also going to see 90 minutes of new campaign content for the PC version of the game, remastered Dolby 7.1 Surround audio, and much more.

The launch of F1 2015 hasn't been perfect, with some users reporting performance issues on the PC version of the game. There's no support for NVIDIA's multi-GPU SLI technology. We've seen the game running on PC at 1080p 60FPS, where it looked quite good.

Some users were quick enough to have the day-one patch rolled out to them, but Codemasters' Community Manager took to Reddit to write: "Hey everyone, just wanted to hop in and say we're aware of a lot of the issues users are facing at the moment and the team are working on getting a lot of these bugs squashed as fast as possible. As always we really do appreciate your feedback and patience with us while we get these sorted".

The day-one update for F1 2015 has fixed up a bunch of parts of the game:

The PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight has been such a mess for Rocksteady Studios (who palmed the development of the PC port of Arkham Knight to Iron Galaxy Studios) and Warner Bros, that it forced Warner Bros to pull the game until it was fixed. Now, Warner Bros has said that they have since modified their internal review process for all future games after the problems with Batman: Arkham Knight.

Warner Bros' Community Admin 'Yorick' said: "Addressing the PC performance issues is still our top priority and at this time, we believe we have identified a number of fixes for the larger issues that were affecting PC players at launch. These fixes are currently being implemented into the game and once we have been able to do some initial testing, we'll have a better idea on the status of our progress. We'll provide an update on how things are developing next week".

Since the issues of the PC port of Arkham Knight caused so many hassles, Warner Bros has changed their entire internal review process, as Yorick explains: "We can also assure you that because of this latest launch, we are modifying the internal review process for all of our games. For those who are waiting for the updated version of the game on PC, please know that we are working on this every day. For the players who are continuing to play Batman: Arkham Knight on PC, fixes are continually being made to the game as we await the final updated version".

Not too long ago we reported that the release of Star Marine, the first-person shooter module of the ambitious Star Citizen had been 'delayed indefinitely'. This was wrong, and Cloud Imperium Games is now talking about it all, clearing everything on Star Marine up.

Cloud Imperium Games' Director of Community Management, Ben Lesnick, took to the Roberts Space Industries forums to clear things up, addressing complaints point-by-point. Firstly, he said that the statement that Star Marine had been "delayed indefinitely" was not the same as not having a release date, adding that "delayed indefinitely" is a games industry PR term for 'cancelled'.

Lesnick added: "The weekly updates from the team will give you a better idea [of what's happening], but the short story is that Star Marine was not ready for launch when we had hoped (and planned). We spent several weeks expecting that resolving a then-current crop of blockers would allow a PTU publish. When this didn't happen, we conducted a full review of the module lead by our top technical folks from around the company. What they determined was what you read in Chris' letter two weeks ago: we need to rebuild several 'boring' backend pieces and we need to fix serious animation issues before there would be any benefit to a release". As for the release, Lesnick said the delay is "weeks and not months/years/decades".

Team17 has announced 'The Escapists' meets 'The Walking Dead', set as a fusion between The Walking Dead and The Escapists game. Developed thanks to the help of Skybound Entertainment, this new title will allow allow gamers to play as Rick Grimes and provides hundreds of 8-bit pixel art zombies waiting to be destroyed.

The aim of the game is to help your friends to safety, seeking escape routes in each area whilst juggling other complex tasks. Based on the comic book series, the story line is said to closely follow what you may have read - allowing for an immersive experience.

Skybound Entertainment's Daniel Murray says that fusing The Escapists and The Walking Dead is one of the best ideas he has heard in a long time, commenting that this title is "A playful interpretation that we believe fans of great games in general will love."

After the mess that was Watch Dogs, where Ubisoft was caught gimping the graphics of the PC version of the game and showing off footage from the game that was clearly not captured on consoles at the time, it changed its policies for E3 2015.

The studio has reassessed how it shows off pre-release games, with Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot telling The Guardian: "With E3 2015 we said, OK, let's make sure the games are playable, that they're running on the target machines. When we show something, we ask the team, make sure it's playable, make sure gamers can immediately see exactly what it is. That's what we learned from the Watch Dogs experience - if it can't be played on the target machine, it can be a risk".

Guillemot in a way blames the undefined early hardware of next-gen consoles (at the time) for the problems of Watch Dogs, where he added: "It's a real challenge to create those types of games. When they come out, especially the first iterations, they are not perfect on everything. We think we launched a good quality game for a first step in a new brand with a new technology. It's just so complex - seamless multiplayer, connectivity with mobile and tablets, so many things - it was maybe a bit too much for a first iteration".

During an interview with METRO's GameCentral, Marty Stratton, the Executive Producer of DOOM, gave out some details of the upcoming first-person shooter.

Strattong said that the studio will not be following in the footsteps of Doom 3, where he said: "We use this phrase all the time: 'Don't take ourselves too seriously!' I worked on Doom 3, I love Doom 3, but it took itself pretty seriously. Doom I and Doom II are a bit more outlandish, they're very comic book, they're very juvenile almost in their approach. That's definitely our inspiration for how we've gone with this one".

When it comes to the environments, DOOM will feature much more varied locations than we saw in Doom 3. Stratton continued: "Yeah, I think visually, because that was a pretty heavily industrial area, it kind of felt that way. There's a visual similarity to Doom 3 there. At that point in the game you are in a UAC facility, which basically all of Doom 3 took place on. But the game is very varied in its locations, and very much unlike Doom 3 that very first area - you put on your helmet, you go through that door, we chose a path where you jump over and get on that landing and go across...".

$100k for a single outing isn't a bad pay day indeed as the Swedes at Fnatic's CS:GO division took home the ESL ESEA Pro League Season 1 Finals with a 3-1 win over American team, Cloud 9.

Losing the first map (de_cobblestone) on a close 14-16 scoreline, Fnatic took the next three maps 16-6 (de_cache), 16-14 (de_overpass) and 19-15 (de_dust2) to win in a four map stunner. This win secured the title, $100,000 and the prestige of being the first team to take home the crown.

The Fnatic team of Flusha, JW, KRIMZ, Olofmeister and Pronax also had a great showing in the finals kill/death wise, seeing Flusha finish with a brilliant +21 kills to deaths across his 93 frags in total. Cloud9's Shroud certainly put up a fight of his own, posting 100 kills to 80 deaths at a massive +20 kill/death ratio.

F1 2015 is closer to release than ever before, with Codemasters and Bandai Namco releasing a new trailer showing off the features of the game, all while teasing the graphics engine powering the new racer.

Codemasters Game Director, Paul Jeal explains: "F1 2015 marks an exciting new chapter for Codemasters and FORMULA ONE; it's a shift in direction for the game series, on new formats and our brand new game engine, with the game set to be released earlier in the season, launching this June. The handling is a vast improvement from our previous games. In particular our new tyre model is a superb step forward towards realism, letting you explore where the limit is and allowing you to instantly feel much more connected with the car. You can now experience the changes in grip caused by temperature changes, wear, car set-up, debris and weather conditions".

He continued: "Our improved vehicle dynamics much more accurately convey the difference in performance and the feel between mechanical and aerodynamic grip. The new Force Feedback system adds to the feeling of connection with the car and track surface. The more natural and realistic nature of the game physics also serves to ensure that the racing experience is more accessible, enjoyable and rewarding for players of all skill levels".

The Chinese government's decision to allow foreign game consoles to be sold to consumers initially gave Microsoft and Sony hope - but both companies face a number of challenges while promoting the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

By the end of the year, both new generation consoles are expected to sell just 550,000 units combined, according to the Niko Partners market research firm. There could be a major sales boost when AAA games such as Call of Duty launch in the country, but game catalogs for both consoles are rather disappointing.

"Despite China being a predominantly PC online gaming culture, Chinese who are now 26-35 years old grew up in the days of Nintendo Super Famicom consoles and are accustomed to playing games with a controller via TV," said Lisa Cosmas Hanson, founder of Niko Partners, in a statement published by Bidness Etc.