Gaming - Page 1122

During Bethesda's first ever keynote at E3, the company showed off the latest Doom video game, Fallout 4, and introduced Dishonored 2. Grabbing attention during a major press conference and keynotes are simply more effective at this year's E3 over trying to woo people to the studio's on-floor booth.

"I don't know if we'll do one next year," said Pete Hines, VP of Bethesda, in a statement to the Telegraph. "I don't know if we'll do one again. This year felt like the right time to do this kind of thing. Honestly, [this is] where my focus is: execute on this stuff that we're talking about and work with the MachineGames and Tangos and all the other studios to say 'OK, how do we do the next thing with you guys even better?' What does that look like? And how do we push ourselves forward?"

It's an honest opinion from Bethesda, as many large game companies strive for press conferences and keynotes at E3 and other major events - it allows them a small windows where all of the attention is on just their products and hardware.

Warner Bros. Games has temporarily suspended sales of Batman: Arkham Knight for PC gamers, as there were just too many performance issues. To help get things fast-tracked, it looks like NVIDIA is going to help the game studio identify what's going wrong.

"We are working with WB Games and the development teams to address the performance issues of the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight," NVIDIA confirmed. "We have made our QA and engineering resources available will provide updates when they are available."

Meanwhile, Warner Bros. offered a public apology related to performance issues: "We want to apologize to those of you who are experiencing performance issues with Batman: Arkham Knight on PC. We take these issues very seriously and have therefore decided to suspend future game sales of the PC version while we work to address these issues to satisfy our quality standards."

Nintendo has announced that Splatoon, a colorful squid-based game for the Wii U game console, has topped 1 million copies sold worldwide. The multiplayer version of the game features four players competing as the squids try to spray ink in the digital world.

There were 476,000 physical and digital units sold in the Americas, at least 368,000 units sold in Japan, and more than 230,000 units sold in Europe - along with 20,000 units moved in Australia and New Zealand.

"Ever since Splatoon launched on May 29 in the United States, we've seen thousands of people go online to have fun in this colorful, chaotic competition," said Reggie Fils-Aime, company president of America at Nintendo, in a public statement. "This milestone puts us in a nice position as we prepare to launch 11 more exclusive Wii U and Nintendo 3DS games before the end of the year, plus amiibo, digital offerings and games from our third-party partners."

Bethesda will hook a fanatical gamer up with a copy of Fallout 4 after he mailed over 11 pounds of bottle caps to the studio. It turns out the Fallout team over at Bethesda do have a great sense of humor!

"He told me since I was the first person to do this, I would be receiving a copy of the game this November, and that he would be running my caps over to deposit them at the People's Bank of Point Lookout," GatorMacheteJr said in an update. In case you forgot, the People's Bank of Point Lookout is a pre-apocalyptic bank that was in Point Lookout Fallout 3 add-on.

Matt Grandstaff, Global Community Lead at Bethesda, offered the following tweet:

With gaming on the rise, ESL has just announced its latest ESL One Frankfurt event cracked the 1,000,000 concurrent viewer milestone, spread across Twitch TV and MarsTV in China.

Featuring many of the worlds best Dota 2 teams fighting for sponsorship cash thrown in by GIGABYTE, G2A, NVIDIA, Corsair Gaming, NEEDforSEAT and more another large feature was the $5,000 cosplay competition which saw Timbersaw from the Czech Republic take home the gold.

Managing Director Pro Gaming at ESL, Ulrich Schulze, is certainly happy with the results, stating "It was very important to us that we make ESL One Frankfurt 2015 more than just an esports competition. We're looking to continually build on this with future ESL One events."

With this leak shared on popular image website Imgur by a user named AgriosEndendros, depicted is the then-proposed Red Bull and Destiny partnership for 2015.

What you're reading here is the plan to ensure gamers must purchase specialty Red Bull cans in order to unlock 30 minute windows of XP gain and a new Destiny mission, which we shared news on recently. Want more bonus XP? You're going to need to buy another can.

An interesting part of this leaked document is slide number 5, which is about the "360* Marketing Campaign" and outlines the fact that there has been "300+ Opinion leader Kits seeded." In non-marketing terms, this means that people who are likely of strong opinions or influence (often people ranked high on the social or online ladder) have been sent some special information and possibly compensation in order to ensure they are always positive about this campaign.

There was a time when Doom 4 was a thing, but Bethesda decided to cancel the project after the team wasn't happy with what they were making. Bethesda boss Pete Hines talked about Doom 4 during E3, where he said during a video interview with Polygon: "We weren't happy with the game that was being made".

He continued: "We decided that it wasn't Doom enough and needed to be thrown out and started over. Some folks left and some faces changed at the studio. Out of that change - which was not easy for those guys to go through - some amazing things happened. You can probably close your eyes and imagine a 'Call of Doom' or a 'BattleDoom' game, where it starts to feel way too much like: 'Wait, this doesn't feel like Doom, it feels like we're playing some other franchise with a Doom skin on it".

Hines had more to say, adding: "It wasn't fast enough. The way that the demons worked. The visceralness of the combat. A lot of the stuff that you see with the finishing moves wasn't part of it at all. The combat was more disconnected, you almost found yourself taking cover at times and using things from other FPSes, which might be fine for them, but for Doom it just doesn't feel right".

Slightly Mad Studios might have just announced Project CARS 2 nice and early, but the original game is being patched up as we speak. Patch 2.0 for Project CARS is massively extensive, offering up to 5% more performance on the PC when under Ultra settings. But that's not all, check out the full Patch 2.0 release notes below:

Performance Improvements

Physics & AI

It was only a few days ago that we reported that the PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight was a pile of... well, you can use any word you want there. So much so, that Warner Bros. has just announced that they're suspending any and all sales of the PC version until the technical issues can be ironed out.

The company took to their company blog, saying:

It seems the 'Greentext' memes are becoming real as an "epic, new quest" explained as a "never-before-seen, multistage mission in The Taken King that will test the speed and strategic abilities of Destiny players in new ways" will require a Redbull can purchase and specialty code in order for gamers to participate. People certainly aren't happy about this new 'experience', as seen on Games Radar.

Once entered, the code will unlock this quest for all alongside bonus experience points soaring at a rate of 50% for only 30 minutes. How do you unlock more experience bonus? Buy more Red Bull cans! The experience bonus will be made available on the 1st of July, with the quest launching on September the 15th.

Released alongside The Taken King expansion which will cost us all $40, the quest will be exclusive to Red Bull drinkers only until January 1st, 2016. It also seems this is a US-only promotion at this stage.

Bethesda Softworks publicly unveiled Doom during E3, the studio's latest attempt at renewing the famed gaming franchise - and things are going so much better than when Bethesda tried to put together the failed Doom 4 project a few years ago.

"We weren't happy with the game that was being made," said Pete Hines, VP of PR and marketing at Bethesda, in a statement to Polygon. "We decided that it wasn't Doom enough and needed to be thrown out and started over. Some folks left and some faces changed at the studio. Out of that change - which was not easy for those guys to go through - some amazing things happened."

It seemed like nothing went right with the original Doom 4 project that was underway years ago, with demon and enemy AI all the way to "the visceralness of the combat," which was "more disconnected." Instead, gamers would have had to work through the game in the same fashion as Call of Duty and other war-style games - take cover and be extremely strategic in gameplay.

Sony has announced the 1TB PS4 Ultimate Player Edition will launch in Europe and other markets starting on July 15. Gamers had the chance to upgrade their storage capacity with the PS4 if they wanted to, but this is a stock option from the Japanese electronics company.

The debut of a 1TB PS4 is an answer to the Xbox One receiving 1TB storage - and designed to help gamers cope with the growing number of digital game downloads. Pricing information wasn't released by Sony.

In addition to the 1TB PS4 Ultimate Player Edition, Sony also has modified the 500GB model so it's lighter and more power efficient. The new 500GB models will be available in Japan before the end of June, and will be released worldwide in staggered launches.

Microsoft just can't catch a break while promoting the Xbox One in Japan, selling just 100 units from June 8 to June 14, according to 4Gamer. The PlayStation 4 sold 10,822 units - and the aging PlayStation 3 managed to rack up 2,633 sales during the same hellish week for Microsoft.

It's not a surprise that Japanese gamers prefer hardware from Sony and Nintendo - and Microsoft knew it'd be a major fight to sell the Xbox One in Japan - but this is a new all-time low for Microsoft. However, the original Xbox and Xbox 360 didn't struggle this much in Japan, where a tech and gaming savvy population loves embracing new technologies.

Late last year, Xbox boss Phil Spencer noted that Japan isn't an easy market for the company's consoles, but vowed to try to "conquer Japan." Well, keep trying Microsoft...

If you're looking forward to using the Cortana intelligent personal assistant on the Xbox One, it looks like you'll need a Kinect unit. Cortana integration is expected with a new Xbox One dashboard update sometime in 2015, which is scheduled for some time in the fall.

At the end of this teaser trailer, the following small print is displayed: "Kinect required for Cortana speech recognition."

Even though Cortana responds to voice commands, it's curious since Microsoft didn't spend much time promoting the Kinect during E3. In addition, the Xbox One and Kinect were unbundled in 2014, which allowed Microsoft to cut Xbox One prices.

Electronic Arts and other major game companies are fascinated by mobile game development, even though casual gaming has been successful. It looks like the overall quality of mobile games is increasing, with more development funds and focus on creating a popular new Apple iOS or Google Android offering.

Following Take-Two transitioning Grand Theft Auto for mobile devices via premium sales, studios aren't showing as much interest in live services. However, a free-to-play live-service gaming trend could eventually draw some attention:

"Some will. It'll vary. The Grand Theft Auto game has been relatively successful over the last two or three years," said Bill Mooney, VP and GM at EA Mobile, in a statement to GamesBeat. "It would be a question of whether it's the halo or the experience itself. I'm not capable of answering that. EA believes that some of those hardcore gamer brands - you'll see us explore - in a methodical - committed fashion, stuff like sports. Some of our other brands I expect we'll do. We're actively working on it. I myself am working on brands that gamers love."

Well... after Rocksteady Studios' kick ass work on Batman: Arkham Asylum, many gamers including myself, were excited to see the studio take control on Batman: Arkham Knight. Well, it looks like they've borked the PC port of it up, with the word 'disappointing' being a true understatement. The NeoGAF forums are filled with posts on Batman: Arkham Knight, with both AMD and NVIDIA owners both noticing issues.

Batman: Arkham Knight seems to be plagued witih multiple issues, with some gamers reporting their hitting a 30FPS performance wall. A workaround has been discovered, but what the hell is Rocksteady doing releasing a game like this with a performance cap of 30FPS in the first place? Did they not test it on PCs?

Other problems with the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight are massive performance issues, with stuttering and audio glitches being noticed by many gamers.

Slightly Mad Studios has officially announced a sequel to Project Cars is entering development, with Project Cars 2 to follow its predecessor in being crowdfunded. Project Cars 2 will hit the Xbox One, PS4, PC and Steam OS. You can check out all the details, and fund Project Cars 2 right here.

Project Cars 2 will be much bigger and better than the original, with 50 unique locations, 200+ courses, dynamic time of day and weather, 40+ different vehicle classes and a cooperative career. Slightly Mad Studios teases: "Building upon the huge success of Project CARS being one of the highest-rated and fastest-selling racing games of this generation, Project CARS 2 continues to expand, innovate, and dominate with:"

Microsoft wasn't shocked when Activision announced Sony would become the new 'home' of Call of Duty, giving PlayStation 4 gamers the chance to receive all content first.

Not surprisingly, Activision wants to make sure its games have a good playing experience, regardless if a gamer is using a PC, Microsoft Xbox One or PS4 - however, now is the time to partner with Sony, as the company has "a lot of momentum" with the PS4.

"Maybe Sony's the one that made an interesting switch? The thing behind it, it was the right partnership at the right time, for the right reasons, for all parties involved," said Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision, in a statement to GamesBeat. "I'd rather not talk about the inside baseball stuff. Both platforms matter to us. We want to create great experiences on both platforms. We're going to do that. No matter where you play Call of Duty or Destiny or any of our games, we'll deliver the best possible experience on each platform as we always have. In the case of Call of Duty, everyone gets all the content as well."

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will feature extremely developed artificial intelligence, so gamers will get to enjoy a more unique playing experience.

Ideally, AI is able to pose a challenge to gamers, and be a bit more dynamic - but the studio had to be careful not to make the AI too difficult to overcome:

"The enemies make a reasonable, intelligent choice at all times," said Jason Blundell, Black Ops 3 campaign director at Treyarch, in the latest issue of Edge magazine. "One soldier may have an SMG, but his mentality could be 'I want to keep my distance,' 'I want to protect this point' or 'I need to flank.' The problem was reining that system in so the AI agents weren't too good."

Nintendo is best known as a gaming company with a focus on video game consoles and handhelds, but company officials want to embrace new technologies. It looks like Nintendo wants to help create a gaming ecosystem that combines gaming hardware, video games and the gaming community - and everything is on the table.

"We're a development-driven company," said Charlie Scibetta, senior director of corporate communications at Nintendo, in a statement to Forbes. "With the people that make the games back at NCL and our localization staff here, they're always thinking, 'Is this fun to play or not?' They're not thinking about increasing market share, trying to branch into new areas of entertainment. It really comes back to, 'Is this a fun experience?' If everything goes through that filter, then we think we're going to stay on the right course."

Nintendo has spoken publicly about its desire to focus more on mobile gaming opportunities, with at least five mobile game titles expected by March 2017.