Gaming - Page 1151

Microsoft India hyped the launch of the Xbox One in India last month, inviting media and those who have pre-ordered the console. The company signed up with Amazon India as en exclusive seller (for now) where they delivered Xbox One units to pre-ordered customers at the stroke of midnight on September 23.

However, ever since the launch of Xbox One console in India, the price of the unit has reduced within few weeks along with couple of freebies. When the console was launched, the cost was Rs. 39,990 ($652), while the units with Kinect version was priced for Rs. 45,990/- (US$ 750). This was accompanied with a Rs. 4,000 ($65) gift card.

Now, as a 'Diwali Dhamaka' offer, Amazon India is selling the Xbox One console for Rs. 35,990 ($587). Along with the console, FIFA 15 with DLC is pre-bundled and throwing in Rs. 3,000 ($49) Amazon India gift card. Xbox One consoles with Kinect are still priced for Rs. 45,990 ($750) - but is bundled with FIFA 15 with DLC and Dance Central Spotlight (also with DLC). Xbox One can be purchased from here.

Nothing makes gamers more angry than a poorly-executed port of a game over different platforms, fixed resolution and lack of graphic options, at least for the PC gamers. Square Enix recently announced the PC port version of its fantasy-based JRPG Final Fantasy XIII, but gamers are not amused with the stifling performance of the PC variant.

The digital download via Steam requires 59GB of hard drive space, mostly due to huge cutscenes. Gamers who have already installed the game are complaining about that issue with the resolution and lack of basic graphic options that you'll usually find in a PC game.

Many gamers have started ranting and raising genuine complaints about the problems they're facing while playing the game. According to a pinned article in the Steam forums, there is no proper way to quit the game. The game apparently exits when you press the ESC button, but no pause scene with menu options provided at all. Final Fantasy XIII also doesn't provide an option to change antialiasing, anisotropic filtering, tesselation, V-sync, Shadow resolution and many such options. Though the game does come with dual audio support, many want the option to uncheck the audio file before downloading the game to reduce the download size.

Dragon Age Inquisition is all set for release in the United States on November 18th, but Bioware just released the official PC specification requirements for the upcoming game. Previously, it was reported that BioWare and EA were giving away Dragon Age: Origins which should help them to get newer players on board their fanbase.

While Dragon Age is available for the consoles, the older and the newer generations from Sony and Microsoft, PC is where it should be interesting, assuming the game is made to please to PC master race. Along with the PC specification requirements, three screenshots of the game from its PC variant have been released.

But according to what is posted EA Origin's company's blog, the PC version is 'the real deal' since BioWare's roots are in PC gaming. EA and BioWare promises 'fine-tuned' for mouse and keyboard gameplay, along with many visual options for tweak and a support for 4K resolution and AMD Mantle support. The blog post goes on, saying that Dragon Age: Inquisition is a true testament to BioWare's love for PC gaming.

As it stands, the PlayStation 4 seems to be winning the 'next-gen' and now current-gen console war, with the Xbox One lagging behind. Microsoft obviously wants to change this, something that was pointed out in an interview with The Inner Circle Podcast, with the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer.

Spencer said during the interview: "I'll announce it here: I was told themes and background [pictures] are something that we are working on. And screenshots, I know people beat me up on screenshots". Spencer is aware that Xbox One gamers want to be able to personalize their dashboards, and do things that PC gamers can do easily, such as taking in-game screenshots without having to have the game have a built-in screenshot-taking feature.

He wasn't willing to tell the world when these new themes, backgrounds and screenshot-taking abilities would be appearing, but he did say "people should know that they're in development".

EA is doing something good for PC gamers and it's something that a lot of people would appreciate. The company is giving away Dragon Age: Origins for free via Origin. The best part is that this does not come with any strings attached - no gameplay time limits, no restrictions such as minimum purchase/regular Origin user - just a free copy of DA: Origins for all.

You will have to claim the free copy of Dragon Age: Origins before October 14th and you will need an Origin account. The game can be claimed from here

Dragon Age: Origins is developed by Bioware in 2009 and its an action-based RPG game. The game retails for $20. EA is going to release the sequel of the game Dragon Age: Inquisition On November 18th and there's no better way to increase the fan base before the sequel release by providing the first instalment up for the grabs, for free.

Earlier, we've reported that Ubisoft's upcoming game Assassin's Creed: Unity will be running at 30FPS at 900p for both consoles- Sony's PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. To justify the move, Ubisoft's Creative Director Alex Amancio said that selling the game with different levels of experience would be unfair.

However, Nicolas Guerin, the World Level Design Director for Unity is giving a different reason. He said: "At Ubisoft for a long time we wanted to push 60 fps. I don't think it was a good idea because you don't gain that much from 60 fps and it doesn't look like the real thing. It's a bit like The Hobbit movie, it looked really weird."

He continued by saying that series like Rachet and Clank also dropped the 60FPS standard. Another reason is that its twice as hard as 30 fps, and its doesn't make it look good when the game is rendering. On the other hand, 30 FPS feels more 'cinematic' while 60 FPS is perfect for FPS and action-adventure genres.

The lack of backwards compatibility between the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Xbox One isn't lost among Microsoft designers, and will be something that could lead to a solution later down the road.

"Back compat is always a hot topic at the turn of a generation, and I get why, especially on [Xbox 360] so many people bought so much digital content and it means that a lot of us, we're holding on to our 360s," said Phil Spencer, head of the Microsoft Xbox division, in a recent interview. "I get the question. I totally respect the question. There's nothing I can say about it right now, but I'll just say 'I hear you.' I definitely hear you and I'll continue to try to work to build something that can help people out."

The problem is probably less significant for Sony with its PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 owners - as the Japanese console dominates sales charts - and allows gamers to play older titles using PlayStation Now. The Wii U supports backwards compatibility but hasn't been as popular among hardcore gamers.

Straight up: Ubisoft, whatever you are smoking, please share it with me. Maybe it'll help me with the stress of what I'm about to report to the world. Ubisoft has confirmed that Assassin's Creed Unity, the first game in the series to be built from the ground up for the new consoles, will be running at 900p and 30FPS on both the Xbox One and PS4.

Worse than that, is what Nicolas Guérin, World Level Design Director on Unity, told TechRadar. Guérin said that decision of 30FPS was to give the game world of AC: Unity a more cinematic feel. He said: "At Ubisoft for a long time we wanted to push 60 fps. I don't think it was a good idea because you don't gain that much from 60 fps and it doesn't look like the real thing. It's a bit like The Hobbit movie, it looked really weird". He continued: "And in other games it's the same - like the Rachet and Clank series [where it was dropped]. So I think collectively in the video game industry we're dropping that standard because it's hard to achieve, it's twice as hard as 30fps, and its not really that great in terms of rendering quality of the picture and the image".

Guérin had backup from the 30FPS camp, with Assassin's Creed Unity's Creative Director, Alex Amancio chiming in, saying: "30 was our goal, it feels more cinematic. 60 is really good for a shooter, action adventure not so much. It actually feels better for people when it's at that 30fps. It also lets us push the limits of everything to the maximum. It's like when people start asking about resolution. Is it the number of the quality of the pixels that you want? If the game looks gorgeous, who cares about the number?".

Earlier on today we reported about The Evil Within on PC being locked to 30FPS for the reason of it "Makes more sense for a survival horror game" but now Bethesda has come out and discussed the upcoming horror game on PC, and much more detail.

Bethesda has now addressed the 30FPS lock on the PC version, saying that the developers have locked the frame rate at such a low point because the game was built around that, as the quote above says, but it can be unlocked through debug commands. A FAQ on the game reads: "Shinji Mikami and the team at Tango designed The Evil Within to be played at 30fps and to utilize an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 for all platforms. The team has worked the last four years perfecting the game experience with these settings in mind. For PC players, we'll provide debug commands on how you can alter the framerate and aspect ratio, but these commands and changes are not recommended or supported and we suggest everyone play the game as it was designed and intended for the best experience".

The developer has aimed for 1080p as its resolution, but 4K is supported. PC gamers have the option of turning off the cinema-like letterboxing in order to render it at full screen, but this option is not fully supported. PC gamers do get a few additional graphical options to play with, which include fullscreen or window support, AA settings (FXAA, MLAA and SMAA), Shadow Quality (High, Medium, Low), Motion Blur, SSAO, and Reflections.

Microsoft, Sony and Activision want to see the forthcoming Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare become to best-selling Call of Duty yet, with Activision announcing a cross-buy deal.

This cross-buy deal sees the digital versions of the Xbox 360 and PS3 including a Xbox One or PS4 version, for free. Better yet, this includes all of the purchased DLC and season passes, and all of the stats you will tally up on the previous-gen hardware. Once you've secured yourself a copy of the looks-like-Titanfall-meets-COD first-person shoote,r you just need to enter in a code that you'll receive with your copy.

This deal expires at the end of March 2015, so you'll have plenty of time to get your free current-gen copy of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. This is how the companies should be dealing with all games, as it encourages people to buy a new console without having to fork out the money for it right now. Better yet, I don't see why you couldn't buy this on the Xbox 360 or PS3 for yourself (or a friend) and then use the code for a Xbox One or PS4 version. I guess we'll find out more details on this deal closer to the release of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

A week ago, CD Projekt Red released few screenshots of its upcoming game 'Witcher 3: Wild Hunt' which created sheer disappointment within many of its fanbase. As a result, CD Projekt Red had to respond to assure gamers that the graphics shown in demo videos which was showcased at E3 2013 and a week-old screenshots are not a final version. An anonymous member on the NeoGAF forums also claimed that the CD Projekt Red and its PR are creating an overblown vision of a game that doesn't exist.

It was also assumed that the preview was going to be as good as the final version. It was also speculated that the game's graphics showed in a NVIDIA PhysX Middleware demo would be the same result in console variants. The demo was displayed to display HairWorks, specifically relating to rendering of hair and fur with PhysX enabled.

CD Projekt Red's Community Manager Marcin Momot said: "Please keep in mind that the game is still in production phase. Certain things are still being worked on. The final version of the game will look better than what can be seen in the latest screenshots - no matter the platform. As you probably know, when publishing screenshots, some of them can be subjectively less appealing than others (depending on one's opinion), that's perfectly normal. The most important thing here is that the game will come out looking gorgeous when we are done working on it. There will be no downgrade."

Have you been waiting for a gaming PC that can sit in your living room, that you can have sitting somewhere that it can't be seen? Well, the G-Pack sits on the back of your TV, powering as a "Steam-optimized PC".

There are three different configurations on offer, with Configuration I on offer starting at $1,695, Configuration II at $2,095 and Configuration III at $2,695. We have a Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 processor, 4GB/8GB/16GB RAM, 1TB/2TB/3TB HDD for storage, and 32GB SSD, 250GB SSD and 500GB SSD for each system, respectively.

For $445, 20 backers were able to buy the Early Bird Empty Chassis, which was their "all-aluminium, custom designed case & brackets - put your current machine in there, or make something new".

Myst developer Cyan has inked a deal with Legendary Entertainment to bring Myst to TV, with Variety claiming that the two creators behind the island-based adventure game, Rand and Robyn Miller, to be directly involved with the creative direction of the TV series.

We shouldn't just expect a "compelling TV drama" but it will expand Myst into a "true transmedia franchise" that could involve tablet support, as well as a tie-in video game. What we don't know, is where it will debut. Could we sit it hit Netflix? Traditional cable or free-to-air TV? Are you excited to see this materialize? I know I am.

MSI has revamped his GT Stealth/Ghost Series and GT Dominator Series gaming laptops using NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 900M Series video cards, the company has announced. The new gaming units ship with the Intel Core i7 processor, Killer E2200 Game Networking, Sound Blaster Cinema, Dynaudio Technology, XSPlit Gamecaster, 4K HDMI output, Matrix Display and NVIDIA Surround.

All new MSI gaming laptops using the NVIDIA GTX 900M video cards are available now, with prices starting at $1,599.

"MSI's newest gaming laptops showcase breakthroughs in mobile gaming technology that improve graphics performance, increase gaming comfort, and transport gamers into an unbelievable gaming journey," said Andy Tung, MSI Pan America president. "NVIDIA's GTX 900M Series GPU delivers mobile graphics that are up to par with desktop video card models and superior to anything we've ever seen."

Assassin's Creed: Unity has been confirmed to be running at 900p at 30FPS on both the Xbox One and PS4, according to Senior Producer Vincent Pontbriand in an interview with VideoGamer.

Pontbriand said: "We decided to lock them at the same specs to avoid all the debates and stuff". Weirdly, the new Assassin's Creed title is not held back by the GPU side of the AMD-powered APU found inside of both of the consoles, but the CPU side of the silicon. Pontbriand explained: "Technically we're CPU-bound. The GPUs are really powerful, obviously the graphics look pretty good, but it's the CPU [that] has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen, all these systems running in parallel".

"We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating, because we thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise, and we realised it was going to be pretty hard", he continued. "It's not the number of polygons that affect the framerate. We could be running at 100fps if it was just graphics, but because of AI, we're still limited to 30 frames per second".

It looks like we can expect Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes to hit the PC on December 18, according to multiple Russian sources who attended their local video game exhibition, IgorMir.

We know that both Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain are coming to PC, with series creator Hideo Kojima officially announcing the Steam versions of the game just a couple of months ago. Ground Zeroes is a prologue to the full deal: The Phantom Pain, and is already out on the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is due out on the aforementioned platforms, and PC, in 2015.

Rebellion has just updated Sniper Elite 3, with the game now joining the ranks of AMD's Mantle compatible games. The Head of Programming at Rebellion, Kevin Floyer-Lea explained that switching to a different API, is important not only for the gaming industry, but gamers, too.

Sniper Elite 3 runs on the Asura engine, with Rebellion having to find a way to bake Mantle support in with the assets the developer had made for the DirectX version of the game. With Asura being a cross-platform title, it was easier than some engines, but a big task nonetheless. The Mantle-powered version of Sniper Elite 3 lowers the CPU overhead, thanks to more efficient calls within the Mantle API. You can see in the image below, that the Mantle version of the game uses less CPU power, but also provides increased FPS.

We can see that using the Intel Core i7 3770K processor at stock speeds (3.5GHz), the DirectX 11 version of the game uses 23% of the 8 available threads, and provides 88FPS. The Mantle version of the game on the other hand, uses 21% CPU - 2% less than DX11 - and provides 100FPS, just over 10% added performance. Not bad, considering its free performance for Radeon users.

Monolith's new Shadow of Mordor is pushing PCs a little harder in the graphics department, but the effects are good enough to require a 3.7GB download of the games Ultra HD texture pack. This texture packs increases the in-game graphics with higher resolution textures, recommended only for GPUs with 6GB of VRAM, like NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan.

But as it stands, there is an issue with the texture pack, as users are reporting that even with the Ultra preset for textures enabled, the game still runs on High quality. There aren't many GPUs on the market with 6GB of VRAM (or more) on them, apart from a select group of Radeon HD 7970s and R9 290Xs, and a couple of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 780 and 780 Ti, apart from the company's higher-end GTX Titan series.

The game has a built-in benchmark which is easy for comparing your system against friends, and to see the averages, etc increase with an upgrade to your system. We will have benchmarks using Shadow or Mordor shortly, so check back over the weekend.

It wasn't long ago that NVIDIA used its GAME24 event to officially unveil its new second-generation Maxwell-based GPUs, the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970, but also celebrated PC gaming for 24 hours across the world.

NVIDIA had over 1.3 million gamers from over 120 countries jump into the live stream for the various streams NVIDIA had going, from a 24-hour modding competition, to the Maxwell launch itself, to a DotA 2 tournament, and more. 1.3 million gamers tuning in over 24 hours show that NVIDIA pulled something popular here, so it'll be interesting to see another event in the near future from the company.

Star Citizen has raked in over $55 million in crowdfunding since it went live last year, which has seen the game enter the Guinness Book of World Records "not as the largest crowdfunded game of all time, but as the largest crowdfunded anything of all time", according to Roberts Space Industries' founder and Wing Commander's father, Chris Roberts.

Funding for the space simulation game began last November, with a $6 million Kickstarter project. When Star Citizen reached $50 million in funding, Roberts said: "Ship sales and new members of our community are the two main fund raising sources". Roberts talked about the success of Star Citizen, and its seemingly endless campaign which just isn't running out of steam, he reiterated to fans that "there is no venture capitalist wanting a massive return in three years".

This is great news for gamers and fans of the game, as well as backers and funders of the game, as the profits aren't all for RSI, but Roberts said that his "intention is for all the money we bring in before launch to be spent on development". RSI now has a team of over 280 people, with Roberts adding: "It is the community, from the existing backers who continue to support the game, to new members who join every day who are setting the level of ambition and budget for Star Citizen".