Gaming - Page 1124

Microsoft and Turn 10 Studios have announced Forza Motorsport 6 will launch exclusively for the Microsoft Xbox One game console later this year.

The Ford GT, Shelby GT350 Mustang and F-150 Raptor will also make appearances in the video game, and 2015 is the 10th anniversary of the game franchise.

"Just as Ford has pushed the boundaries of car technology in GT, 'Forza Motorsport 6' will embrace that spirit of innovation as our most technically advanced racing simulation to date - offering a fun and realistic automotive experience for both car lovers and gamers," said Dan Greenawalt, creative director at Turn 10 Studios. "We're excited to unveil gameplay at E3 in June."

Minecraft: Pocket Edition has topped 30 million downloads, as the paid premium game reaches an impressive milestone. The mobile version of the game is available on Google Android, Apple iOS, Microsoft Windows Phone and Amazon Kindle Fire for $7.

To help celebrate the milestone, Minecraft fans are welcome to visit this reddit thread and submit questions, which will be answered during a live question and answer session later this week.

Also, more than one million desktop gamers played Minecraft simultaneously, Mojang noted, with the milestone reached at a non-peak time.

A couple of screenshots for the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V have surfaced, showing the difference between low and high settings. The screenshots are coming from NfoHump user 'Neon' who is surely going to have most of the Internet talking with these GTA V screenshots.

The two shots are in-game shots from the PC version of GTA V, but it was only a few days ago that the same user posted some shots of the Settings menu of GTA V on the PC (above), as well as a few other screenshots of the game. Now we have a a low quality, and high quality screenshot to see if we can spot a big difference in quality.

Above, we have the low quality and high quality screenshots (low is the top one, high the one below it). Both of these screenshots were reportedly taken on a GeForce GTX 970 with 4GB of RAM. As you can see, there is quite a large difference between the low and high quality settings in the game, such as draw distance, shadowing, reflections on the car, and much more.

Video game retailer GameStop has teamed up with Microsoft to use the Azure cloud platform to stream video game and promotional content to user mobile devices while they are in-store. Customers will be able to view video game catalogs, trailers, promotional materials, and other data.

"Microsoft has always been a fantastic and innovative company for GameStop to collaborate with, both in the technology space as well with their video game consoles and titles," said Jeff Donaldson, SVP of GameStop Technology Institute. "We are continuing to work closely with them to discover and aggressively elevate ways to enhance the retail experience for our customers today and in the future."

GameStop has become more creative in how it approaches gamers, as streaming and digital downloads continue to alter the PC and console gaming markets.

Instead of rushing Battlefield Hardline out as scheduled on October 21, Electronic Arts and Visceral Games decided to take their time and ensure a pleasant gamer experience at launch. The new cops-and-robbers style video game will be released on March 17, providing even more details and features to be added to the game.

"We got some pretty pointed feedback after our early beta that you wanted more," said Steve Papoutsis, executive producer and GM of Visceral Games, in a statement to fans. "And we listened. There's no doubt moving the game back was the right call."

When the game is released, there will be 51 weapons, 27 new vehicles, 28 gadgets, nine maps and seven modes immediately available - and EA is preparing to release new game details and in-play trailers every Wednesday.

It looks like Elite: Dangerous is doing quite well, with Frontier Developments making some nice revenue on the just-released space game. While it's doing well, their expectations for 2016 and beyond see the developer making some serious dosh.

The company made an announcement last week outlining the success of the game, with $26.1 million in revenue from 300,000 sales. The developer had a few possible scenarios for its sales, but they could be revised, the developer explains "Since late 2013 the Group has been using three scenarios to model performance of the game, created based on the growth of other non-subscription online games in their first three years, a "base" scenario, a "mid" scenario, and a "bull" scenario ... In terms of revenue Elite: Dangerous is tracking above the "bull" scenario; and on units sold, between the "mid" and "bull" scenarios."

Elite: Dangerous is coming to OS X, but it could arrive on Linux too - and hopefully Steam OS. As for profits, we can see that the developer is hoping to sell 30 million units in 2017, securing itself a huge $453 million.

Ministry of Gaming (MoG) are running yet another massive 'Pubstomp' located at the famous Crown Casino in Melbourne, Australia.

This craze started off with StarCraft II's massive popularity in 2011 - hundreds of nerds would pack out various pubs and bars to huddle around TV's and projectors and watch their favorite players go at it in tournament grand finals for massive wads of cash. Here in little old Australia we saw the biggest live viewing events as seen globally - with Silicon Sports in Melbourne often capping 300+ attendee's and the Sydney crews having to hire out two whole bars just to fit their 600+ spectators inside.

Now that Dota 2 has become a massive success globally, we've seen a transition to massive Pubstomp events being held at world-class establishments become the norm. During The International 2014 global finals, MoG ran a 450+ person pubstomp in Crown's Largerfield room, which is generally reserved for 'real life' sporting viewership and finals.

Originally reported by Kotaku, Riot Games are working on building their own network across North America and Europe to help combat and defeat lag in their popular MOBA title - League of Legends (LoL).

This goes to show how big LoL has really come. These days if you're travelling into the city on a train or bus, you can often hear the youngsters going on about a penta-kill they achieved last night, or how they think Teemo is the cutest and most annoying character on the planet.

The basics of this announcement is that Riot Games are working on their own direct network for LoL traffic, helping combat lag. Riot's official explanation of this implementation is as follows:

The Call of Duty $1 million 2015 Championship information has just been released, following their massive success during 2014.

Advanced Warfare is the platform this year, seeing the finals held in Los Angeles over March 27-29. This year's tournament is sponsored by Microsoft and Xbox One, alongside the popular tournament and event conductor, MLG.

The online qualifiers will be run on Xbox One consoles, seeing the finals streamed live over Xbox Live and 'other networks' - likely involving Twitch TV, Azubu and YouTube streaming platforms.

Based on the Games Workshop Warhammer board game, UK indie developer Chilled Mouse have just announced their Steam release of Warhammer Quest - due to hit the e-shelves on January the 7th, 2015.

The basics of this game have been described in their recently issued press release as - "Lead a party of brave adventurers through the dangerous winding dungeons of the Warhammer world in the search for wealth and glory, as players uncover and explore new settlements. In their quest for legendary weapons, players encounter enemies including evil Night Goblins, dangerous Orcs, gigantic River Trolls and hordes of the evil Skaven, hellbent on destroying the band of adventurers."

As with any game looking to keep its player base - You level up your heroes through battle, gaining new abilities, spells and blessings along the way as you continue on the path to become one of the Heroes of the Legend and play as various races including the Marauders, Dwarf IronBreakers, Grey Wizards and Wood Elf Waywatchers.

CES 2015 - Gaming peripheral company Mad Catz launched the TRITTON Swarm wireless mobile headset, designed for use with PCs, mobile and smart devices.

Swarm is a gaming headset but also can be switched as a method to receive and answer phone calls, since the headphones can be paired with two separate devices at the same time.

"TRITTON is known for its outstanding audio quality and we believe now is the time to further broaden the appeal of the brand," said Darren Richardson, president and CEO of Mad Catz, in a press statement. "We believe the Swarm will resonate with today's fashion conscious gamer, who typically plays across a variety of devices."

CES 2015 - Gaming peripheral company Mad Catz launched its F.R.E.Q. Stereo Gaming Headset, designed for Microsoft Windows PCs and Mac OS X. As part of the company's Tournament Edition range of gaming products, F.R.E.Q. was created with help from professional e-sports gamers.

The padded ear cups support precision 50mm speakers and the microphone is a uni-directional Boom Mic. The headset doesn't require any drivers or complicated software, a welcome decision as many gaming peripherals ship with occasionally complicated software.

"Our Tournament Edition range appeals to the passionate gamer who plays at a professional level," said Darren Richardson, President and CEO of Mad Catz, in a press statement. "By focusing on quality and only the features needed to win at a competitive level, we believe the F.R.E.Q. will prove a common fixture at LAN tournaments and allow us to grow our share in the rapidly growing e-sports arena."

CES 2015 - Gaming peripheral company SteelSeries has introduced the Apex M800, a product that the company says is the world's fastest, most customizable mechanical gaming keyboard.

SteelSeries says the keyboard has 25 percent faster actuation than current mechanical gaming keyboards, able to respond to every keystroke from PC gamers. Each key has a surface-mounted LED, and colors can be customized based on each gamer's particular needs.

The SteelSeries Apex M800 has a $199.99 MSRP.

In a case of 'why didn't Valve do this sooner' the creator of Half-Life has just unveiled a new in-game FPS counter that is baked into Steam. Gamers across the world, myself included, will be loving this new feature which allows for a much easier way of keeping an eye of your frame rate in-game, without using third-party software.

If you want to use the new in-game FPS counter, you're going to need to opt into the new Steam beta, something that can be done through the Steam client's settings menu. The beta of Steam is pretty damn stable these days, with options like this placed inside of Steam to play around with them before it hits the final version.

The in-game FPS counter is enabled by going to the in-game menu, and then clicking the box to add the in-game FPS counter - simple!

It's been a tough few months of connection and lag issues for Blizzard. If you're trying to login to their Battle.Net service to play any game they have on offer, it might be worth giving it a few hours.

As confirmed on their Customer Service Twitter account, Blizzard's login servers are experiencing connection issues and are developing long queues for users. Even more unfortunate for them was commenting on a time they expect the servers to be operational - four hours ago they stated a 90-minute wait, followed by a Tweet two hours ago claiming only 60 minutes until the servers are operational.

As you can see, their latest Tweets simply tells everyone to stay posted for updates, here's hoping they will be fixed soon.

To make up for a few days of PlayStation Network disruption because of the Lizard Squad distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, Sony has announced it a "holiday thank you" to gamers.

"Happy New Year! Since access to PlayStation Network was impacted during the holidays, we wanted to show our appreciation for your patience by offering all PlayStation Plus members that had an active membership or free trial on December 25th a membership extension of five days."

The extension will be automatically applied, and additional details will be published on the official PlayStation Blog. Also, all PlayStation Network gamers can receive a 10 percent discount code for a one-time purchase from the PlayStation Store. The discount is applicable towards new releases, indie games, game add-ons and season passes, along with select movies and TV episodes.

RAM drives and RAM caching have long been a secret of the gaming and overclocking elite to attain the fastest load times and smoothest gameplay possible. The advent of the SSD has reduced usage of RAM caching due to the SSDs similar performance, and overall simplicity. RAM drives and RAM caching have several hindrances, they require a lot of DRAM because they cache the entire OS, along with everything else, into the DRAM. RAM is also susceptible to power loss. For those with overclocked gaming rigs an errant BSOD can cause massive data loss and require complete reinstallation of the OS. This is not a tradeoff many are willing to make.

Enter Dimmdrive. This new program, which will be available for $34 on Steam today, takes a different approach that removes many of the disadvantages of typical RAM caching. Dimmdrive allows users to specify exactly which data is cached into the DRAM, so users can load just a single game into the RAM. This reduces the amount of RAM required, and also helps minimize exposure to data loss from any type of BSOD or power loss. It is much simpler to reinstall a game than an entire operating system. Once the game is loaded into RAM users can expect speeds up to 13 GB/s for any cached data.

Details are slight on how deeply the program is integrated in Steam. It will be available for purchase, and the best implementation would be for users to simply select a game in the dashboard to accelerate performance. If the program works separately the user will have to manually select the game folder.

A group called H4LT reportedly released the Microsoft Xbox One software development kit onto the Internet, to help "end 2014 with a bang." The leaked SDK could potentially open the door for developers to create their own apps and games for the Xbox One - but they will still be required to register with Microsoft beforehand.

H4LT noticed there is no "definite exploit" for the Xbox One, but hopes this will help coders to begin working on their own homebrew solutions.

"We leaked it to the community because if something is shared then... progress is achieved faster than alone.... The SDK will basically allow the community to reverse and open doors towards homebrew applications being present on the Xbox One."

After some Origin users reported fraudulent activity on their accounts, Electronic Arts launched an investigation to try to determine if a data breach occurred. The DerpTrolling hacker group said they compromised up to 1.7 million Origin accounts and passwords, which is why some users could be reporting unauthorized game purchases.

On gaming forums and Twitter, users are reporting Origin receipts in German and Russian appearing in their email inbox - it would seem likely that this isn't a direct breach of Origin's network, and the fraudsters accessed the stolen information posted online by DerpTrolling.

"We found no indication at this point of a breach of our Origin account database," an EA spokesperson told PCGamer. "Privacy and security of user account information are of the utmost importance to use. We encourage our players to use Origin user ID and passwords that are unique to their account, and to report any activity they feel may be unauthorized to EA customer support at help.ea.com."

Microsoft is currently tweaking its latest SDK for the Xbox One, something that Dying Light developer Techland has gotten its hands-on. We've heard that Dying Light will be running at 1080p and 30FPS on the Xbox One and PS4, but it looks like the Xbox One side of things received its 1080p 30FPS target thanks to the latest update.

The update in question provides developers with the ability of tweaking the Xbox One's eSRAM usage, where performance can be improved. The Lead Game Designer on Dying Light, Maciej Binkowski explains "We were using the latest version just prior to the new release that came out on December 12th. In terms of advantages, the main thing is just how much the ESRAM control has improved. The new API allows you to do a lot more with the ESRAM, things devs have always wanted to do but were not easily accessible. This together with better tools (PIX) allowed us to really improve performance and tweak ESRAM usage."

PIX, or Performance Investigator is a software tool used by developers on the Xbox One to analyze and debug their code in order to increase the performance of their titles. There have been a few developers that have been doing this, squeezing out as much performance as they can from the current (at the time) SDK. These developers include Bungie with Destiny, and Rockstar with Grand Theft Auto V, so Techland isn't the only one doing some tweaking with Dying Light.