Gaming - Page 1148

We knew it was coming, but Avalanche Studios has confirmed it: Just Cause 3 is coming. JC3 will be released next year, for current-generation consoles and PC.

Xbox One and PS4 users will be over the moon, but Xbox 360 and PS3 users? Not so much. Just Cause 3 will throw gamers into the fictional Mediterranean islands, which are ruled by a dictator. We did hear about microtransactions for Just Cause 3, but the developer has ruled them out, as well as a free-to-play model.

The leaked screenshots? Don't worry about those, according to the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Avalanche, Christofer Sundberg. He said: "Those leaked screenshots were taken from an ancient version of Just Cause 3. Like most games, this one went through an exploratory phase where we looked at different control schemes, different technologies, different business models. Those leaked screenshots show aspects of that process, and in no way reflect the game we are making today".

Telltale Games is teasing more of its Game of Thrones series, confirming that it is coming to the Xbox One and PS4. We knew it was coming to the Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Mac and iOS - but now the current-gen consoles get some A Song of Ice and Fire love.

Where does the Game of Thrones game take off? It starts at close to the end of season three of the HBO smash hit TV series, and will end right on the bar of the start of season five. The game world is created from the Game of Thrones series, instead of the books written by George RR Martin. The story will focus on House Forrester, where throughout the season, gamers will play five members of House Forrester, either direct family, or servants of the House.

Telltale teases: "Playing as five characters not only reflects the epic scope of Game of Thrones, but is also something that the player needs to be mindful of. This is because the actions of one character can ripple out to affect the rest of House Forrester. Multiply the actions of one character by five, and you're truly playing the Game of Thrones ... where you win, or you die".

Far Cry 4's Creative Director, Alex Hutchinson, is making headlines again today - but not for the argument that resolution is "certainly not something" he cares about in a game, but that there will not be a sequel to the surprise-hit Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.

The announcement happened during the IGN Pubcast, where Hutchinson said: "The cool thing about Blood Dragon was that it was a surprise. It was a great use of the Far Cry 3 base, and had an awesome soundtrack. So the answer is no, you won't be getting another one of those. Hopefully we can come up with something that surprises you as much as the original Blood Dragon".

He did add that the company will get pounded about it, where he added: "And if we did make one, I'd probably get told on Twitter 'are we going to get a Blood Dragon every year? You're just in a factory churning things out'".

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare has been available since last week, and Sledgehammer Games is preparing a patch that will resolve bug problems and fine-tune other issues, based on input from the gaming community. Since launching on November 3, the game was met with mainly positive reviews from game sites and gamers, and Sledgehammer Games wants to continue appeasing customers with fast changes.

The update will address: in-game chat notification location, prestige reset problems, optimize connections, resolve leaderboard stat problems, fix round-based game modes that affect Win/Loss ratios, and other

"Our team has been working hard on improvements to the game," said Michael Condrey, studio head and Sledgehammer Games co-founder. "We've also had our ears to the ground, listening to your feedback. Our commitment to continuing to support the game and community is as strong as ever, and we have the whole team focused on making the experience the best it can be."

The current console market is fully consumed by the Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One devices, though many often overlook Nintendo's Wii U. It's true that there are similarities in the game catalogs for both the PS4 and Xbox One, but that's because game developers want their titles on the two more popular consoles.

Here is what Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime said: "If you look at the other two competitive platforms, fundamentally, what's the difference? They have a lot of shared content. Look at it from the standpoint of, what don't they have? They don't have our games. They don't have Mario and Zelda. I'd much rather be where Nintendo is, with a differentiated platform, differentiated set-up experiences that we can provide uniquely to the consumer."

It's true that the PS4 and Xbox One don't have Mario or Zelda - but a counter to that argument is that many game studios would rather develop games for Sony and Microsoft. Nintendo relies heavily on a small handful of game franchises, while the PS4 and Xbox One can provide a diversified product offering.

Brittany Levasseur's husband has had seven brain surgeries over the last 12 months, where she took to Reddit to post about how their doctor recommended playing Destiny as a form of mental therapy. She wrote: "It's been a joy to watch him. It's been a little over a week, and the game's effect on him has been so strong. Weak for months, he is flourishing in more than just the game world. He has been going out more, doing chores, making jokes. The effect of playing the game on his mood has been almost staggering".

It was shortly after Levasseur's post on Reddit that Bungie's Community Manager got in contact with her, offering her husband a package at the Tower: a one-of-a-kind rifle for Destiny. The Fate Of All Fools isn't in the game yet, unavailable to normal Destiny gamers. This means that this gamer is the only non-Bungie employee in the world to have this gun.

How does Levasseur feel about the gun? His wife said in an email to Kotaku: "He adores the gun. It's his first exotic, and he has been actively enjoying it all day. It seems like my entire night has been on repeat - it's been nothing but 'BANG! God I love this gun. BANG! This is awesome. BANG! Did you see that shot!?'".

Blizzard may have cancelled Titan, but it has just announced Overwatch, a team-based, first-person shooter that is the company's first new IP in quite a few years. Blizzard unveiled the game during BlizzCon 2014, with a pre-rendered video showing off Pixar-like animation, teasing its upcoming shooter.

If you thought Overwatch would be years away, think again, as Blizzard's Chris Metzen has said that Overwatch is coming "sooner than you think". CEO and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, Mike Morhaime said: "Our goal with Overwatch is to create an awesome FPS experience that's more accessible to a much wider audience while delivering the action and depth that shooter fans love". The game world itself is set many years in the future where an "international task force" known as the Overwatch, has brought peace to the world, but this has since finished, with new heroes needing to rise up to the job.

Overwatch is a team-based multiplayer shooter, which is "a game and genre" that Blizzard has wanted to play with for a while. It features cartoon style visuals, similar to other team-based shooters like Team Fortress 2, and RPG-like FPS games like Borderlands. We have some weird and wonderful characters to play with, including Hanzo, a bow-wielding ranger; Winston, the gorilla; Torbjorn, a dwarf engineer; Widowmaker, the sniper; and Bastion, the robot/turret.

Massive Entertainment, the developer behind The Division, recently sat down with Open World Games, talking about its open-world tactical shooter. Martin Hultberg, Head of Communications at Massive, said that the developer will be optimizing The Division for all three platforms: Xbox One, PS4 and PC, instead of optimizing for a single platform.

He added that the game will not be "downgraded" from consoles to the PC, with each version receiving its own attention, utilizing each platform's strengths. With a capable PC, it means that the best version of the game will again be on the PC. Hulberg said: "Downgrading is a weird term to use. Obviously, we want to make a game that looks the best it can on its respective format, so Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. So I think the term downgrade is a bit confusing and weird because we're trying to get the most out of every machine we use. So Xbox gets its attention, PlayStation gets its attention, and PC of course will be able to cram it up a bit more depending on the hardware you have".

Hulberg continued: "We address every console, every platform, as its own version, so we try to stay away from the thing where you go for the least common denominator, and everybody suffers for it". Hulberg added that each version of The Division will be handled individually, with resolutions and frame rates decided on a platform-to-platform basis, instead of pushing one standard across multiple platforms to hit uniformity. He added: "We want to make a good experience on all respective formats". Remember, the last time we heard about The Division was that it was locked at 30FPS, so this is a 180-degree change in direction for Massive and Ubisoft, but it's not confirmation that we should expect over 30FPS, which is what we need to hear most of all.

DICE has been working on something behind the scenes, porting its Frostbite engine over to iOS, the engine that powers its Battlefield games. Kristoffer Benjaminsson, Product Owner for Mobile at Frostbite has talked about the ways of getting Frostbite on iOS on the Frostbite blog.

Parts of Frostbite are already working on iOS, with DICE and its Battlefield 4 Commander app, but the company also showed off Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare on an iPad Air earlier this year at Apple's WWDC event, which is powered by its Frostbite engine. After that, the company wanted to see Battlefield 4 running in iOS, which has been quite the task.

With the Frostbite engine handling dynamic features like destruction or moving light sources in real-time, rendering all of this on a mobile device is extremely hard. But, DICE says that this "puts extra demand on performance to be able to deliver large, highly detailed world's with superb visual quality. We were making great progress feature-wise, but hardware and software limitations forced us to either scale down the number of objects and their complexity to retain visual fidelity, or accept lower visual fidelity to cope with a larger number of objects".

Far Cry 4, The Crew and Assassin's Creed: Unity are some of Ubisoft's biggest games coming out this year, and early 2015 have all but disappeared from Valve's digital distribution service, Steam.

A representative for Ubisoft UK told PCGamesN: "We've been in discussions with Valve about Assassin's Creed Unity but for the time being the game is not available via Steam in the UK". I've just checked Steam here in Australia, and all of those games do not show up, but I did see them just two days ago. This could be because Valve takes a cut of the sales, while Ubisoft has games big enough they'll still sell through their own distribution software: uPlay.

With everything going on surrounding Ubisoft pissing PC gamers off, you'd think the company would be trying all attempts to make up for it, and not dig the hole deeper. This move feels like the company has hired machinery to help dig its hole quicker from a construction company called 30FPS Construction, which would probably have a slogan like: "Digging At 24FPS Is More Cinematic".

Far Cry 4 will be released by Ubisoft later this month, and the official minimum and optimal PC requirements were recently released. The game will be available on November 18 for the PC, Microsoft Xbox 360 and Xbox One, Sony PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4.

Minimum system requirements:

OS: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8/8.1 (64-bit only)

It looks like we should expect Just Cause 3 to be announced soon, if the leaked screenshots are anything to go by. Four leaked screenshots from the alleged title are coming in from the Xbox One version of the game, which popped up on the Xbox-Underground forums now too long ago.

The four shots show the main character, Rico, and an overview of a massive, massive island. Eurogamer is reporting that it has a source close to the game itself, confirming that we are looking at images from Just Cause 3, going on to say that it is showing off the game's "Black Market". The anonymous source added that the PC version was meant to be entirely free-to-play, while the console version of Just Cause 3 would be financed through microtransactions.

Eurogamer has added though, that "the plan changed and this may no longer be the case". When it comes to the microtransactions argument, Avalanche Studios' boss, Christofer Sundberg, said last year on Twitter: "Microtransactions, subscriptions, and other biz models will be the next generation of games. It is that simple. We'll never compromise on quality or sell our souls for a quick buck. Things are changing and we need to adapt".

We already know that there should be a new Xbox One next year, based on AMD's shrunken 20nm system-on-chip, but thanks to Sony using the same APU from AMD, the PlayStation 4 should receive a similar upgrade.

Rumors are now floating around that Sony will adopt the 20nm SoC sometime next year, which should see Sony release a refreshed PS4 sometime in 2015. We're already seeing 16nm technology on the other side of the fence, so a shrink down to 20nm for the consoles would usher in more performance, slimmer consoles, and reduced power consumption. Right now, both consoles are using AMD APU's based on the 28nm process.

Microsoft and Sony haven't had any competition in the console space this year, but 2015 is going to be a very different year for the two tech giants. Oculus VR is positioning itself to release their first consumer version of the Rift VR headset, and Valve should usher in the Steam Box, Steam OS, Steam Controller and much more - competing in the living room directly against the likes of the Xbox One and PS4.

Four years ago, the Unity Asset Store opened its doors, and by the end of the year it should see close to one million users. The Unity Asset Store is a marketplace for user-created development tools, services, assets and more, including environment art, animation tools, sound effects, shaders and more.

In the first three months of it opening, the Asset Store saw 10,000 users sign up, and fast-forwarding to today, the top sellers are making over $30,000 a month from their creations. Unity took to their Asset Store blog to announce the news, adding that the store has over 15,000 pieces of content right now, from over 3,800 creators.

Unity said in its press release: "Unity estimates that the Asset Store ecosystem, empowering Unity developers to create games and apps with a more efficient and effective production process, saves developers 6 million workdays over a 12-month period, which roughly equals a savings of $1.4 billion".

Major League Gaming (MLG) has partnered with ESPN and will host a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive gaming tournament during the winter X Games Aspen in January. Eight teams consisting of five players per team will compete in the first MLG CS: GO tournament.

"Our fan base was really electrified with the idea of having MLG competitions at the X Games and having our pro players earn X Games medals in Austin, where it was a tremendous success," said Mike Sepso, MLG co-founder and president. "We're thrilled to announce that Austin wasn't a one-off."

It's a rather unique offering after ESPN president John Skipper said eSports is "not a sport," and doesn't have interest in showing it on ESPN. However, with a large crossover in X Games and video game demographics, the X Games Aspen tournament could be a lot of fun.

A couple of months ago now, we reported that Rockstar would reveal a first-person mode for Grand Theft Auto V on the Xbox One, PS4 and PC and now we're here: with official confirmation from the developer.

Due to technical reasons, the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game won't enjoy the first-person mode, but the current-gen consoles and PC will. During a recent interview, Animation Director Rob Nelson said that one of the most compelling things that they could add to the game was a first-person mode, something that caused Rockstar to "pretty much change everything" in order to get it right. Nearly every aspect of GTA V had to be changed in order for it to work properly, as virtually everything you interact with is seen from a totally different perspective.

Sitting down in a car now displays a fully functional dashboard with a working speedometer, tachnometer, and even the track title of the song playing on the stereo. Jumping onto a motorbike will have your character putting on a helmet, which cuts off your field of view, as well as suppressing the amount of noise hitting your ears, just as it does in real life.

PAX AU 2014 - After the 'A Chat With Chris Roberts - The Original Wing Commander' at PAX AU, we interviewed the man himself, hitting him up with some questions about Star Citizen.

Roberts said that the big publishers "shouldn't have been ignoring the PC gamers, they're a much more powerful group than you think". He continued, saying that "publishers have been dropping the ball on supporting the PC", and that it "pisses me off when I see a deliberately gimped game on PC, just because we can't make it look better than the Xbox One or PS4 version". When I asked Chris about the 30FPS stories we've been hearing from Ubisoft and others lately, he had much better things to say about Star Citizen. Chris said that he "wants it all", where he wants to see Star Citizen "look as detailed as possible, in the highest resolution, at the highest frame rate" possible.

We asked about the insane level of detail that Star Citizen will feature, where he said that we should expect up to 8K textures, and beyond. Chris said that they're not building a game that is "baked down" as the biggest bottleneck right now is texture memory. The biggest memory hog of Star Citizen right now, are "the textures" according to Roberts. He said that "rivets, panel lines" and more are not in the textures, they're all modelled, freeing up precious texture memory. It needs to be done this way, because there are massive 1km long ships in the game, and if everything was done the traditional way, texture memory would run out very quickly.

Sony has reported a nice $2.77 billion in sales for its Game and Network Services division, which is where the PlayStation just so happens to live. These sales represent an 83.2% increase year-over-year, which is all thanks to the PlayStation 4.

PlayStation 4 shipments totalled 3.3 million for the quarter, reaching a total of 13.5 million. When it came to operating income for Sony's Games and Network Services Division, it was at $195 million, compared to the $43 million for the last quarter, and up from the $37.6 million loss from the same three-month period of 2013.

Sony may be seeing success on the gaming side of its business, the company as a whole isn't doing too well, with operating losses of $766 million. The Japanese company has increased its loss forecast in September, pegging the blame on lagging smartphone sales.

Just how popular is Watch Dogs? Ubisoft has said that it has shipped 9 million copies of the open-world hacking adventure game, detailing the massive number of titles in its recent earnings report.

The company posted a 65% increase in sales year-over-year, with $605 million being made in the first six months alone, compared to the $366 million it made in the same six-month period of last year. Ubisoft said that its back catalogue is still making big money, with games like Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Far Cry 3 and Rayman Legends helping it make $142 million from its back catalogue alone.

In the first week of Watch Dogs' release, Ubisoft sold 4 million copies, and reported that it had sold 8 million copies some three months ago now, so sales of the game are definitely slowing down.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare will be publicly released tomorrow, Tuesday, November 4, and runs at 1080p and 60 fps on the Sony PlayStation 4. However, the Microsoft Xbox One version runs at 1360x1080 and 60 fps, as some gamers have been frustrated that video game titles are capped to a certain frames per second.

Here is what Sledgehammer Games co-founder Michael Condrey confirmed: "Minimum Xbox One resolution is 1360x1080, and dynamically scales from there to full 1080p. That's over 50 percent increase from last year. Advanced Warfare runs native 1080p on PS4."

Gamers that can't wait to get their hands-on Advanced Warfare can purchase a Zero Day edition, though some Xbox One gamers complained of download problems.