Gaming - Page 1122

While The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt might not be coming out for a little while yet, CD Projekt Red and Fuero Games are working together for a MOBA title being released this week on Android and iOS.

The Witcher Battle Arena is a new mobile MOBA title, which is set within the universe of The Witcher. In the free-to-play MOBA game, gamers will battle it over a 3-on-3 game, but you can also play the singleplayer side of things which is available, too. Heroes within The Witcher Battle Arena will feature their own special, distinct abilities and skills that will allow players to find the characters that work best for their play style.

The developers have said that The Witcher Battle Arena is not a "pay-to-win" experience, as it is a fully free-to-play title. Gamers can unlock any of the purchasable in-game content through playing the game. The developer explains: "Everything in the game is unlockable for free, just by playing the game. Our system is honest, well balanced and doesn't keep you playing for ages to unlock something. If you want to get something unlocked faster, you can purchase it for a reasonable price. It's that simple".

During its Windows 10 event, Microsoft teased so much that we've had to cover it in multiple stories, but one of the more PC centric talks was about DirectX 12.

DirectX 12 will ship with Windows 10 later this year, and will provide developers with more power and control over their games, which will provide them with the ability to give gamers more complex, and better performing games. Microsoft's Phil Spencer teased that DX12 will reduce the power consumption of DX11 by 50%, which will allow many more mid-range mobile devices to run "high-end" mobile games.

Spencer also announced that Unity has adopted DirectX 12, which is big news in itself. This will allow games like Fable Legends to use DX12 to work between Windows 10 and Xbox One owners, and even cross-platform play, which is super exciting.

eSports are on the rise worldwide, and competitive leagues are beginning to see problems that plagued traditional sports in the past. A recent Counter Strike: Global Offensive match organized by the CEVO gaming league was rigged, with the losing team placing over $10,000 dollars in bets that paid off if they lost.

The fixed match was apparent as it unfolded, members of the iBuyPower team were laughing as they were blown up by the other team and went for knife kills in an unusual fashion. The team chalked the loss up to jet lag and being unfamiliar with the map, but two pro members on the team spilled the beans on the match fixing.

Gambling on the matches is quite popular, and the betting site CS:GO Lounge did some digging to see if they could ferret out evidence of the thrown match. They confirmed that all nine accounts, which each placed the maximum bet, were all from a single user or people on his Steam friends list. Every one of the bets won $1,200, for a total of $10,800.

Xbox One owners will get a four-day head start on Battlefield Hardline thanks to the preview program EA access offers, which should have owners of Microsoft's now current-gen console very happy.

The previews themselves are limited to just six hours of gameplay over the four days, but any of the save games and other files generated over that time will transfer over to the full release on March 17. The preview is free, but EA Access costs $5 per month, or $30 for the year.

Battlefield Hardline will launch on the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC on March 17. But before the full launch, we are to expect another open beta, which there are no specific dates for just yet.

Remember the pang of regret and depression you felt deep in your chest when typing /played into your pre-Burning Crusade World of Warcraft account? Experience this wonderful feeling yet again when you see how long it would take you to complete every game in your Steam library from start to finish.

SteamLeft will tell you exactly how long it's going to take to finish every game that you currently own, letting you know that continuous Seam sale binging probably wasn't the best idea - but who cares, right?

We've seen a few users hit the 1,000 hour mark - please submit yours below and let us know how many hours you need to slog it out for.

Sony will be debuting its PlayStation-exclusive original series Powers on March 10, with the first season taking part over 10 episodes. The first episode will be teased to all PSN owners for free, after which you'll need to be a PlayStation Plus subscriber to watch the rest.

The show itself is based on the ongoing Image Comics series from writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Michael Avon, with the world of Powers set in a police show based in Chicago where two homicide detectives investigate cases that citizens with superhuman abilities, or, well, powers. Better yet, the show stars Sharlto Copley, who was in District 9 and Elysium, who plays Christian Walker.

Walker is a former superhero who becomes a detective after he loses his powers, while his partner Deena Pilgrim, who is played by The Following's Susan Heyward. Eddie Izzard also stars, playing as the villain 'Wolfe'.

Microsoft had to grind its way to the top of the sales chart, with the Xbox One outselling the PlayStation 4 game console in November and December last year.

"Most important thing was Xbox fans sticking with us, they kept believing," said Phil Spencer, Microsoft's top Xbox overlord, in a statement on Twitter. "More work to do but it was a good holiday."

Spencer also responded to a fan via Twitter pointing out the PS4 still outsold the Xbox One: "PS4 is also doing very well. Console and game sales are strong, which is a good thing for the industry."

Steam for Linux has a nasty bug, one that can wipe entire drives of all information in a matter of moments. The problem stems from users that have moved their installation directory from the default location. Steam for Linux features a command, 'rm -rf "$STEAMROOT/" that is used to refresh the Steam directory, which is usually required if there are installation problems with a game.

Unfortunately, many users move their game directories to SSDs, or to other locations on the computer. This removes the part of the code that specifies the correct directory, instead issuing a 'rm -rf "/"' command. Users opening the app trigger a deletion of the entire contents of their drives, including external devices. Valve has confirmed the issue affected a "handful of users". Valve also states they are unable to replicate the issue internally, and are still attempting to do so.

Steam for Linux users are best to stay with the default Steam installation directory until Valve has either ruled out the bug, or corrected it.

BioWare has taken to a new blog post, stating that the third patch for the PC version of Dragon Age: Inquisition is nearly ready, and that it is "close" to release. Mark Darrah, an Executive Producer with BioWare spread the news on Twitter over the weekend.

The upcoming patch will fix up some of the issues with the multiplayer problems, balance issues, and adds fan-requested features like key binding that will allow walking on PC, armor upgrade menus and a new push-to-talk option in the multiplayer end-of-match summary. BioWare wrote on its blog post: "Based on feedback from our players, we tweaked the banter system to be less random in order to prevent extra-long periods of silence".

The studio continued: "We fixed quest blockers in the personal quests of Dorian and Sera as well as a spawning issue in Solas's personal quest (I won't elaborate to avoid light spoilers). [...] We continue to listen to feedback from our players, and we thank everyone for working with us to create an even better Dragon Age experience".

Project CARS isn't too far away from its March release window, so the developer has just unveiled a delicious new trailer for their upcoming highly detailed racing title.

As you can see, Slightly Mad Studios has been doing some great things to the game, showing off some damn impressive technology. The game looks incredibly detailed, with some truly detailed vehicles, slow motion drifting and much more. Slightly Mad Studios is teasing that Project Cars is "the most technically-advanced, beautiful, intense and authentic racing game on the planet that's been tested, guided, and approved every step of the way by both gamers and real-life pro drivers alike".

Project Cars slides onto the Xbox One, PS4, and PC on March 20. The Nintendo Wii U will also see a release, but no firm date has been announced Will you be picking this up in March? I know I will.

Destiny has been super successful for Activision and Bungie, with the former company investing some $500 million into it before things even kicked off. Well, gamers across the world are addicted, but I think we just found one that takes the cake.

'yavin427' has constructed himself a "servomechanism" that make meleeing automated, while the character in Destiny stands in one place. This leaves Yavin with the ability to open up an early Ocean of Storms level on the moon, and just let the 'robot' have at it. Enemies will rush the character, while the bot either performs a melee attack, or shoots until it dies. Once it has died, it will reload the level to that checkpoint, and let the character do it all over again.

This leaves Yavin to sleep and level up, and once he wakes up he enjoys the higher level, and all of the glorious weapon drops and experience rewards, all while he rests. Yavin took to Reddit, where he wrote: "Woke up this morning to a brand new 20! Had about 3600 kills, and 900 deaths (lol), and like 50 green engrams. I started at level 16.5 yesterday afternoon, and reached 20 sometime while I was asleep. With the armor I had waiting for him he is now a 26. Seems to be getting anywhere from 15 to 215 exp per run, depending on timing".

Diablo 3 gamers are reporting problems with "major lag" while trying to play online, with the issue first surfacing over the weekend.

"We've been asked to collect some information for our network engineers on this issue," a Blizzard support rep said in a Battle.Net forum thread. "We'd like to have your trace route info when you trace to 12.168.209.68. We'd also like to see the results when you run our Looking Glass utility to see the return path of the trace from Blizzard to you."

Blizzard also wants gamers to identify their ISP and geographic location when reporting data in the public thread. With that information, Blizzard engineers will work as quickly as possible to solve gamer lag problems.

Microsoft Xbox One gamers can now sign up for the Neverwinter closed beta, beginning on February 5 and running for just three days, according to Perfect World Entertainment. Gamers are required to have an Xbox Live Gold subscription to play the title.

Neverwinter is scheduled to launch sometime during early 2015, and is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). "Consoles are a perfect fit for action-oriented MMORPGs like Neverwinter, and we are thrilled to be one of the first publishers to bring premium free-to-play titles to leading next-gen platforms," said Alan Chen, CEO of Perfect World, in a statement.

Neverwinter originally launched on the PC in 2013, with the Tyranny of Dragons expansion released in August 2014.

According to posts on both MMO Champion and the Battle.net forums, serious veteran World of Warcraft gamers are receiving a "tenth anniversary physical gift" from Blizzard.

Just who is receiving this physical gift? In order "to be eligible for this gift, a player must have created a World of Warcraft account within 60 days of the game's release in America or Europe" which falls between November 23, 2004 and February 11, 2005 according to the post on MMO Champion.

Over on the Battle.net forums 'Smitti' posted a picture of the physical gift, which is a small scale version of the orc statue that was erected on Blizzard's campus.

We've heard rumors of a redesigned, or slim PlayStation 4 to be announced in the future, but Samsung looks like it has just unveiled what will turn out to be one of the new components of the refreshed PS4 console: high-density 8Gb GDDR5 memory chips.

Samsung's latest GDDR5 VRAM chips are built on the company's 20nm technology, and are the first 8Gb density modules to hit mass production. Not only could these chips find their way into Sony's PS4 console, but it will also be a great next step for gaming laptops, as they can start baking mass amounts of VRAM into them.

Joo Sun Choi, the Executive Vice President of Memory Sales at Samsung electronics arm said: "We expect that our 8Gb GDDR5 will provide original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) with the best graphics memory solution available for game consoles as well as general use notebook PCs". In the company's press release, Samsung said: "Combining only eight of the new 8Gb chips will achieve the same density as the 8 gigabytes (GB) needed in the latest game consoles". So we can see from these two quotes, game consoles seem to be a big part of the announcement of the 8Gb GDDR5 VRAM chips, which is an interesting turn.

One of the biggest launches on the PlayStation 4 this year is definitely 'The Order: 1886' from Ready at Dawn and SCE Santa Monica Studios. The game has been delayed, but it provided the developer with more time to get used to the additional power under the hood of the PS4, as well as fix up the game before it was released instead of launching it and it being broken like most games of 2014.

The studio has announced the game has gone gold, and released a new trailer to the game to tease fans before the big launch on February 20. Between the last couple of videos of The Order: 1886 and this latest trailer, we can see some improvements in the graphics and the game itself. Something that's nice to see after it was delayed, providing the studio with more time to get things right.

We've seen the last year or so filled with games that are requiring 6GB of RAM or more, such as Assassin's Creed: Unity, Watch Dogs, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and more. Well, CD Projekt Red's delayed title The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt also requires 6GB of RAM.

The developer actually recommends that you have 8GB of RAM, but 6GB of RAM is required at a minimum. As for the CPU side of things, you'll need an Intel Core i5-2500K or an AMD Phenom II X4 940 to run the game at a minimum, while the developer recommends gamers to have an Intel Core i7-3770 or AMD FX-8350.

The GPU side of things isn't too bad, with the minimum requirements at an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 or AMD Radeon HD 7870 while the recommended specs want you to have a much higher-end GTX 770 or R9 290. A 64-bit version of Windows 7 or Windows 8/8.1 is required, as well as 40GB of free HDD space.

In an official statement, Devolver Digital and Dennaton Games have publicly stated that "in response to the report itself, we are concerned and disappointed that a board of professionals tasked with evaluating and judging games fairly and honestly would stretch the facts to such a degree and issue a report that describes specific thrusting actions that are not simply present in the sequence in question and incorrectly portrays what was presented to them for review."

Unhappy with the Australian Classification Board and their decision to refuse Hotline Miami 2 classification in Australia, the Devolver Digital and Dennaton Games teams have pointed out misconceptions revolving around the apparently classification report. They state that "the opening cinematic that was first shown in June of 2013 has not changed in any way. We also want to make clear that players are given an choice at the start of the game as to whether they wish to avoid content that alludes to sexual violence. The sequence in question is presented below in context, both after choosing the uncut version of the game and after choosing to avoid content that alludes to sexual violence."

Not only is the public quite annoyed thanks to the boards standings, but it seems the developers are claiming fair-play was not on the agenda. It's been further noted that a Reddit user has captured a screenshot of an email sent from the co-creator of this title, Jonatan Söderströmm, in which he tells people to "just pirate is after release" if "it ends up not being released in Australia." He went on to state that there is "no need to send us (the developers) any money, just enjoy the game!."

Australian residents have been, once again, told to take a long walk off a short pier - with Hotline Miami's long-awaited sequel being refused classification in Australia due to sex and drug usage.

What does the Australian Classifications Board have to say for themselves?

The launch of Watch Dogs was filled with controversy, with a delay, and then a deliberate bake down of graphics. But, we all knew Ubisoft were only beginning to start its downhill sprint toward pissing gamers across the world off.

Now we have Jonathan Morin, the Creative Director behind Watch Dogs talking about the sequel to the action adventure hacking title. Morin spoke with GamesTM about Watch Dogs, saying the team won't be keeping things the same when it comes to the sequel. Morin explains "I don't think Watch Dogs is perfect in any way and there's a lot of room for improvement. But you don't always see this when you ship a game. We deliver what we believe the brand should be at the time".

Morin continued "But afterward, when you cool down after five and a half years [of development] and take your vacations and people play the game, certain elements become clear. They let you continue to bring what you envision to the next level with the fans included this time, which is where I think it really gets interesting. When you start a new project [and new IP], it's a blank page and everything you do is what you want to do. With a sequel, there is more pressure to push a brand forward and we now have to appeal to fans in a new way". Morin added: "We have to give [the development team] something hard to do. If we don't, they could fade out, which means you don't benefit from their knowledge or they will leave. Our team is really assimilated with the challenge we have and who knows where it will lead us next".