Gaming - Page 1128

When typing this news, I had to type the 'summary', where I fumbled and typed "Half-Life 2", because I'm not used to referencing Half-Life 3, and in my fanboy excitement, mistakes happen. I picked it up, and here we go: some very eagle-eyed developers at ValveTime have seen some discoveries worth posting some news about. It was also worthy of a new creation 'OMGTT', in the title of this news.

The discovery is that Valve are working on a next-gen Source engine, Source 2, the next version of their 10-year-old engine. Valve's Source engine has powered some of the biggest PC games of all time, such as Half-Life 2, Portal and its sequel, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead and its sequel, and more. Evidence of Source 2 comes from Valve's own Source Filmmaker, which is a free movie-making tool that allows users to create videos using the same assets from within the Source engine itself.

A comment was found on one of SFM's python files provides the best evidence of Source 2's existence to date:

According to Activision Blizzard's recently quarterly report, the powerhouse developer earned $1.1 billion in net revenue for the second fiscal quarter and a total of $2.2 billion for the first six months of the fiscal year.

These numbers were boosted by the huge sales of Diablo III, which saw 10 million copies sold and counting. 10 million copies is only until June 30, and there are sure to be more to come. This has made it "the #1 best-selling PC game in North America and Europe for the first six months of 2012".

Activision Blizzard also gave credit to other titles, such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure. All three of these games became "the top three best-selling games in North America and Europe", for the same period of time. Whilst these three games saw some insanely good numbers and praise, Blizzard's other game, World of Warcraft, did not.

Linux gamers rejoice! Valve, continuing to show its distaste for the upcoming Windows 8, has redoubled its efforts on bringing gaming to Linux. The latest example of this effort is the porting of Left 4 Dead 2 to Linux and with it came an interesting result: the Linux version performed better than the Windows version. What???

It's true! According to internal testing done by Valve, they found the Windows version performed around 14% slower, once the Left 4 Dead 2 Linux version was optimized. When the Linux version was originally ported to the high-end hardware, Valve only received 6 FPS. They say this is typical at the beginning of a successful port.

The hardware was a powerful system: Intel Core i7 3930k, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680, and 32 GB RAM. Valve optimized the engine to make use of the more efficient Linux kernel and then moved onto making it more efficient with OpenGL. Interestingly, they managed to optimize the Windows version that used OpenGL to the point where it also performed better than Windows and DirectX.

Activision has released the launch dates for the last two downloadable content packs for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. With the new packs come new multiplayer maps, game modes, and missions to the popular first-person shooter. Incredibly, these two packs bring the DLC count up to 29 in just under a year.

Collection #3 will be released on August 9 and is titled Chaos Pack. With it comes a new game mode: Special Ops Chaos Mode; three new Face Off maps: Vortex, U-Turn and Intersection; and four new Special Ops missions: Vertigo, Arctic Recon, Light 'Em Up and Special Delivery. The new game mode sounds somewhat similar to Zombies in Black Ops as it pits players against unending waves of enemies, helped by power-ups.

Collection #4 is due to be released on September 6 and is called Final Assault as it is the last DLC that is planned to be released for Modern Warfare 3. Final Assault adds five new multiplayer maps to the game. Boardwalk will see players fighting on a beach in Jersey Shore, Gultch will be set in a mining town, Parish will be set in the French district of New Orleans, and Decommission and Offshore will be set on an ocean liner and oilrig.

Kickstarter funded OUYA has passed $6.2 million in funding, and has also teamed up with VEVO to make sure that "music lovers have plenty of places to watch videos", even on an indie game console. OUYA also announced another partnership just a few days ago, inking a deal with cloud gaming company OnLive.

OUYA chief, Julie Uhrman, has said that OUYA is all about entertainment, and that means expanding "beyond gaming", and she is right. As for the VEVO deal, its SVP of Product and Technology, Michael Cerda, has said that the company supports "OUYA's vision that the future lies in being open and accessible for users looking for high quality entertainment experiences". OUYA also adds:

During Take-Two Interactive's Q1 FY13 earnings call, the company said that Rockstar were "making substantial progress" on Grand Theft Auto V, but weren't prepared to share a release date for the upcoming game. The company did acknowledge two screenshots for the game that were released earlier this month, which the company says shows off GTA V's "vast, detailed, open-world setting".

When pushed to reveal whether the game would see a release this financial year, Take-Two said that it hadn't "talked about a release date so can't talk about the credibility of a release date we haven't announced". According to a now-updated Take-Two release schedule, platforms for GTA V are still 'TBA'. This has now sparked the question of "will we see GTA V on next-gen consoles?"

Funnily enough, I mentioned that it would be great if Rockstar could release GTA V on next-gen consoles, over three months ago now. I think we'll see the beginning of console gaming split into two, which I've covered before in previous editorials. A high-end AAA title like this, with a multi-hundred-million-dollar budget, would be shooting themselves in the foot to release the game now with next-gen consoles most likely getting released next year.

It hasn't even been a year since the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic, yet the company is already moving the game to free-to-play status. Announced today, the game will become free-to-play up to level 50 using 8 different character classes this fall. Of course, this free-to-play will include some restrictions.

"Players want flexibility and choice," says Matthew Bromberg of BioWare Austin in a press release, "The subscription-only model presented a major barrier for a lot of people who wanted to become part of The Old Republic universe."

"Since launch, we've been listening to feedback from our fans and adding new content and refining The Old Republic at a breakneck pace. We believe we are in a position to help improve the service even more, not only by continuing to add new content, but also by expanding the game to many more Star Wars fans, increasing the populations on worlds and the vibrancy of the community," says executive producer Jeff Hickman.

The specifications of the Xbox 720 development kit leak out and provide us with a look at what to expect from the Xbox 720 when it finally launches, likely next year. DaE, his pseudonym, tried to sell a "Durango" developer kit for a massive $10,000 on the Assembler Games forum over the weekend. His account was quickly banned and the post removed.

But that didn't stop us from scrounging some details, first. The kit reportedly ran an eight-core Intel CPU, an Nvidia graphics card, and 8GB of RAM. Not to shabby, and likely to match many of the gaming computers running around when it comes out. The RAM is expected to be half of this amount, however, as developers usually receive a system with higher specs.

A Microsoft Visual Studio screenshot suggests that the CPU used is of the x86 variety and that it supports AVX. This indicates a move away from custom hardware that caused Microsoft so many red rings of death. The details are of course unconfirmed, but other sites have confirmed with people working on games for the 720 that they are correct.

The original Grand Theft Auto III is set to be released on the PSN store tomorrow, which is part of the PlayStation 2 Classics series. One of the seriously huge letdowns is that its being released without much change at all, so no HD support or trophy system. The game will sell for $10.

But, there's a fan remake on its way in the form of Grand Theft Auto III: Rage Classic. The Rage Classic version of the game is built from the RAGE engine that powered GTA IV, where the cars will reportedly drive better, and the on-foot combat is said to be world's better than the semi-mess GTA III was.

Rage Classic is built by the same people who bought you Vice City Rage, and San Andreas Rage with a forum thread for the project started last July, but doesn't have a release date for the first beta. If you'd like to read more on it, check out the 80-page thread for more details.

BT Games have sneakily posted the PC system requirements for the upcoming Treyarch-made Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. The system requirements are very modest meaning the game should run on even older systems:

Can you wait for COD: Black Ops 2? I don't think people will be buying it for the graphics, but the amount of production money that this games budget would be, could afford Activision to spend some money on a new graphics engine, don't you think?

With EA stock trading at a 52-week low, EA CEO John Riccitiello said during an interview with CNBC that the fundamental problem is not with the company itself, but with investors understanding the business.

Julia Boorstin sat down with the CEO for an exclusive interview at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference, where the Riccitiello said that he's currently in the process of shifting EA from being about packaged goods to digital revenue. We reported just over two weeks ago that EA saying it's "inevitable" that they'll become a 100-percent digital company.

Riccitiello said during the interview that the industry's focus on NPD's packaged game sales numbers is misguided, and overlooks the massive growth EA have been seeing in digital revenue. EA have had a number of social and mobile gaming acquisitions, with the company saying it had found success on the Facebook social games platform, as well as Apple's game store.

To be brutally honest, I didn't even know about Robotoki, until I received Project Update (#4) from Ouya, the Kickstarter-funded console. The e-mail that hit my inbox explained that the team had received their first exclusive game.

The game, Human Element, is from Robotoki, whose president of game development, Robert Bowling, is ex-Activision. You know, the good, old Call of Duty days. His Twitter account @fourtwozero hinted that he had some news, and this news is that Ouya gamers will get the very first access to his new game Human Element. Human Element is a post-zombie-apocalyptic game. Robotoki is the first studio to commit to building a game exclusively for Ouya: an episodic prequel that will set the stage for his eventual release of Human Element in 2015.

Human Element definitely sounds great, so after I found out about it, I did a bit of digging. Games Industry has an interview with Bowling, where he explains that the game seems to blur the lines between reality, and gaming. One thing that stood out from this interview, was that Bowling touched down on the fact that Human Element is a cross-genre, cross-platform 'experience'. Bowling notes in the interview:

Back in April, Arkane Studios' teased the debut trailer to Dishonored. Then, it was only last month that Arkane Studios talked of the PC standards being "a religion", and that the PC version will get its own interface. Now we're hearing more of the fruits of this developers labor.

We can now see just how much Arkane Studios' passion for PC gamers has leaked into Dishonored. The official Bethesda blog offers a look into Dishonored PC's customization options, and there is quite a lot of them. In the above screenshot, you can really see the length to which Arkane Studios have gone. UI options allow the gamer to disable HUD elements one by one. This allows the best balance between hand-holding, and immersion.

Arkane are also offering the following:

Well, who'd have thunk it? Valve have just announced Steam for Ubuntu. Yes, Steam is on a Linux distribution. Valve have used a new blog exclusive to its Linux-based goodness, where they've introduced the team, and talked about the future of the project.

The blog talks of Gabe's interest in moving Steam, and the Source engine over to Linux. But, at the time, Valve were supporting Linux by using Linux-based servers for Source-based games, as well as maintaining several internal servers for various projects, the OS on these servers? A 64-bit version of Ubuntu.

So, last year, Valve decided to take the next logical step, and form a new team. This team consisted of people who had the sole purpose of investigating the possibility of moving the Steam client, as well as Left 4 Dead 2 over to Ubuntu. After successfully getting it to work, interest grew within Valve, and the results of this interest were the expansion of the team, and projects they were working on. Their main focus is now the following projects:

During a recent Q&A session, Rockstar have claimed that the next entry in the Grand Theft Auto series will be the "biggest open world game to date". Grand Theft Auto IV's open world was already impressive, so how much bigger than GTA V get?

Well, how about Rockstar go vertical? Lots of flying, missions involving flying, etc could work. Rockstar have claimed that it was not possible for them to integrate an interactive high definition airspace that matched the ground because it took too much work. Rockstar stated:

A single image from Comic Con has just injected a very tasty amount of goodness into the rumors and talk of Metal Gear Solid 5, now revealed as Project Ogre. The image is simply a logo, but OGRE stands for Open Ground Reconnaissance Endeavors.

OGRE is the sub-title for Metal Gear Solid 5, with the text under it reading "The moment we were cast out of heaven, we became monsters". MGS mastermind Hideo Kojima has previous talked of the game, and stated that Project Ogre "is some game that has a very wide entrance, a very wide entrance". Kojima adds "rather than making something very cinematic, [I plan to] make something very free".

When the first screenshot for Project Ogre was shown, Kojima said that the title is:

The University of New South Wales housed competitive gamers and PC enthusiasts over the second weekend of July 2012. Nearly 300 gamers were competing against their friends to win a share of $20,000 AUD of cash and prizes. ESGN Winter had arrived!

Games that were featured at this event;

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (XBOX360 & PS3)

Those great Steam Summer Sales are on right now, where you can pick up some seriously cheap games, either individually, or in packs. But, a Reddit user has revealed what looks to be the full list of the Summer Sales for this year.

The list is unconfirmed, but it looks like 55 games will be up on offer over a period of 11 days, but we have no idea of pricing or any other details. The data reportedly comes from the team behind the Open Steamworks Database, which is a site that provides a description record database for every Steam game and subscription offered by Valve.

If you want a look at the unconfirmed list, take a look below:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 may have been cancelled, but it seems from survival MMOFPS, Survarium, will definitely suffice. Considering Survarium is from the same developers, Vostok Games, and the fact that it's destined to be a free-to-play, massively multiplayer first-person shooter that's all about, er, surviving, it should be the goods.

Of course, it all takes place in a post-apocalyptic environment (what else, it is 2012 after all), the developers have teased the world with a bunch of screenshots, and a developer's diary video talking about the game. The video goes for a nice eight minutes, but unfortunately doesn't feature any in-game footage.

So, what is Survarium, what do you do? Well, players in the game have to complete missions for different factions in order to earn money and status, pretty much how S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was played. Players can also work together for co-op missions, form teams for player-versus-player action, or play in "free play mode", where they'll be able to enjoy the freedom of interacting with human counterparts in the game. RPG elements will also be at play, such as leveling up and skill specialization.

[UPDATE: They've just hit $2 million!] If there's anything we know about the world, and technology, and everything around it, is that its in a constant state of change. Kickstarter is here to help that, and so are the guys and girls behind Ouya. What is Ouya?

Ouya is a kickstarter project, and a "new kind of video game console". Ouya love gaming on a bigger TV screen, they know that smart devices like smart phones and tablets are the current in-thing, but they also know that some of the best are abandoning the traditional platforms and moving toward where "it" is, and "it" is in smart devices. Ouya want to change this.

Ouya have raised (at the time of writing) $1,772,876 of their $950,000 goal. They have 14,144 backers, and 29 days of Kickstarting to go. Kickstarter has confirmed that Ouya has achieved the biggest first day ever for one of their hosted projects, and it's the eighth project ever to crack the $1 million mark.