Gaming - Page 1167

Greenheart Games ran an interesting test last year, where the indie developer released its very first game, Game Dev Tycoon, into the world. What the team did, was release a cracked version of the game, minutes after upcoming up their Store.

Where it gets interesting, is that Game Dev Tycoon is about, well, you guessed it - a simulation of being a game developer. What the pirated version of the game does is let players spend hours and hours building up their studio, but messages begin to pop up, warning the player that piracy is causing their studio to lose money, and sales.

Over time, players' studios begin to bleed money, with newly created games having a high chance of being pirated. Greenheart Games had some hilarious responses that they found online, with gamers asking for help. One of them even said "why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me!" Obviously this gamer means it ruins his game studio, within the game - all from a pirated copy of the game itself. Alanis Morisette would even be proud of this one, folks.

DICE is still trying to keep Battlefield 4 fans happy, with yet another apology: this time, in the form of special community missions, and daily giveaways that start on February 1.

During the month of February, Battlefield 4 gamers who log into the game will receive a Bronze Battlepack during the week, and a Silver Battlepack on the weekends. These Battlepacks will give gamers random XP boosts and camouflage skins. There will also be two shortcut bundles, which will unlock all grenade types and handguns.

If you're a Premium owner, you'll receive two additional shortcut bundles that will unlock all the DMRs and shotguns. DICE will also have another double XP weekend sometime during the month too.

PC enthusiast company Cooler Master has announced the Trigger Z mechanical gaming keyboard, a fully programmable keyboard able to support up to five custom gaming profiles. The keyboard includes 128KB onboard memory and includes a detachable wrist rest with a non-slip rubber coating to increase comfort.

The keyboard can register up to 64 button presses at a time, so users don't have to worry about the keyboard responding with any lag. The Cooler Master Trigger Z Gaming keyboard will launch globally next month. It will launch in Cherry MX Brown, but Cherry MX Red or Blue will become available later this year.

Mechanical gaming keyboards are still more expensive than a traditional gaming keyboard, but continue to prove popular among gamers.

The last time we heard about Far Cry 4 was when an ex Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer teased it - but now we're back, with the latest tease of the upcoming first-person shooter from Ubisoft.

The latest comes from Xavier Plagnal, who is Ubisoft Shanghai's Studio Design Manager, where his LinkedIn profile teases that he worked from September 2013 to present as Content Director on "the next Far Cry." This isn't 100% yet, but it is getting awfully close. I'm hoping for a reveal sooner rather than later, myself.

Uh, so this kinda came out of nowhere, but the Source 2 engine has been shown off in a post on NeoGAF by 'CBOAT'. The user posted a screen cap from what appears to be a leaked Valve slideshow.

The slideshow shows off Source 2.0, which is Valve's next-generation graphics engine. The presentation in question shows Left 4 Dead 2's plantation level, rebuilt in the new engine. If this is real, it might open up older games to be re-painted under Source 2.0, which would be incredibly awesome. We should hopefully hear and see more info on Source 2.0 as time goes on, especially with the lead up to E3, and of course SteamOS, Steam Box, Steam Machines and more.

As with Battlefield 3, DICE is tweaking in-game settings to make Battlefield 4 a more well-rounded and enjoyable experience, and today DICE has listed out its latest round of tweaks coming soon in patch form. DICE says that the tweaks are based on user feedback and are designed to make the battlefield a more level and even playing field.

DICE says that all of the forth coming tweaks involve vehicles that are considered overpowered and a reduction in their power, feed rate, or blast radius will occur with the upcoming patch. Notably the amount of missiles carried by mobile Anti-Aircraft vehicles have been reduced from 6 to 4, and the velocity of the MAA's 20mm cannon has been reduced from 1200mm/s to 800mm/s which matches the vehicles 30mm cannon. This reduces the effective range of the vehicle and should prevent players from camping in the spawn area with the vehicle.

Direct damage inflicted by the attack helicopters gunner's cannon has been increased slightly and the new effect is said to feel more like how it did in Battlefield 3. Additionally the scout chopper's 25mm cannon's splash damage has been reduced as it caused too much damage to the infantry over the 7.62mm mini gun.

The Gears of War franchise has a following unlike no other in the console gaming community, and today Microsoft took a big step in making its fans much happier. This morning, Microsoft announced that it has purchased all rights to all existing and future games bearing the Gears of War moniker as well as all entertainment experiences and merchandising rights.

The company also announced that a new Gears of War game has already entered production and is being developed by Black Tusk Studios located in Canada. While no official announcement was made regarding which platform the new game will launch on, we can almost bet that it will be exclusive to the Xbox One, and will arrive on PC sometime after console sales begin to fall off. Microsoft says that the franchise's former director of Production, Rod Fergusson, will take on oversite of the new game.

Now that Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition is out on next-gen (or current-gen consoles now that they're here), we can get a feel for the performance of the re-done Tomb Raider.

Definitive Edition runs at 1080p at 60FPS on the PlayStation 4, but what about the Xbox One? VideoGamer.com spoke with a Square Enix rep who said: "Delivering the core Tomb Raider gameplay at native 1080p and running at 30fps was always our primary goal given the type of experience Tomb Raider is and the exploration we want players to do. Anything beyond 30fps for this version is gravy".

Then there's the fact that two different studios worked on each version of Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition for each console, with Nixxes taking care of the PS4 version, and United Front Games working on the Xbox One version.

DICE is asking for gamers' feedback to help balance Battlefield 4 gameplay, something that will be baked into future patches for the first-person shooter.

The developer said in its blog: "We have a wide range of tweaks planned to further balance the core gameplay of Battlefield 4 in upcoming patches. But we need your help in identifying next steps". Players can provide feedback on five potential changes that are being worked on.

These changes include the way weapons and vehicles take and receive damage, with simple yes/no voting. The five tweaks include improving air defense for attack boats, increasing the FGM-148's damage against tanks, changing damage on the stealth jet cannons, altering fast attack craft cannons, and buffing certain shells on the MBT and IFV.

Microsoft has something to cheer about after the company saw strong year-over-year sales for the Xbox 360 game console, with the next-generation Xbox One also posting strong sales figures. The company sold 7.4 million Xbox 360 and Xbox One game consoles during the holiday shopping season, as Microsoft competes with the Sony PlayStation 4 in the game console market.

In addition, the Microsoft Surface line of tablets saw revenue double, reaching $893 million from the previous quarter, as the company continues to try and invade the mobile market. Overall device revenue increased a massive 68 percent, reaching $4.73 billion, outpacing investor estimates.

However, Microsoft is still dealing with Windows revenue shrinking, as consumers and business users still waffle about embracing Windows 8/8.1, which will be a continued battle. The company once dominated software sales offering its products on CDs and DVDs, but expanding to the cloud - and increasing hardware sales - has continued to be a slippery slope for the tech giant.

When Valve first launched SteamOS late last year, many enthusiast in the community were a bit annoyed that the operating system required a fairly modern motherboard that supported UEFI BIOS. Additionally the ability to dual boot was not present as well and that too rubbed some people the wrong way.

Today Valve released an update to SteamOS Beta that now allows the operating system to run on motherboards that ate not UEFI-based and the ability to dual boot has been restored. However, Valve says that Dual Booting setup will take place in "Expert Mode," and that very little testing has been done with dual booting. So keep that in mind and back up any important files on the hard drive you will be using.

You thought free-to-play games made nothing? Think again: Tencent's free-to-play first-person shooter made $950 million last year. This is quite the sum of money, considering Riot Games' League of Legends only managed $624 million.

The remaining top 10 popular free-to-play titles were from developers Nexon, Electronic Arts and Blizzard. Nexon's fantasy title, Dungeon Fighter Online, made $426 million in revenue, while World of Warcraft made $372 million. For EA, Star Wars: The Old Republic made $138 million, after the developer's decision to shift away from its subscription-based model.

Super Data Research, the company behind these numbers, noted that the digital free-to-play market grew by 45% in the US last year. With free-to-play titles making $2.9 billion total, with earnings from subscription-based titles dropping 21%, to just $1.1 billion.

Thief will be released in just over a month's time, but Eidos Montreal have decided that now is the time to unveil the PC hardware specifications required to play its reboot of the stealth title.

Square Enix have used Nixxes for the PC version of Thief, the same team who did the great PC port of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and many more over the years. Thief will be released on February 25 in North America, and three days later in Europe, on February 28. It will reach the Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS3, PS4, and PC.

There will also be support for AMD's Mantle technology, which will provide performance improvements on GPUs that are compatible. Eyefinity support will be included, as well as AMD's impressive TrueAudio codec.

If you were to download Dead Rising 3 from the Xbox Games Store, it would be around 30GB to download. This sounds huge, but we're in an age of massive games - and this comes as no surprise. But massive DLC? No.

Dead Rising 3's latest patch weighs in at 13GB, which is just massive. This represents 56% of the full-size game itself from the Xbox Games Store, which I think is ridiculous. Dead Rising 3's Executive Producer, Josh Bridge, explains that Capcom Vancouver, the developer behind the zombie title, has been "actively engaging and monitoring fan feedback" in regards to bugs and issues in the game, since it dropped in November 2013.

Capcom Vancouver then brewed up the 13GB patch "in reaction to everything we could find." The patch is 100% mandatory, so you need to download it, or you won't be able to play it with an Internet-connected Xbox One. The full list that the patch covers is for your convenience, below:

Steam Dev Days has kicked off, with announcements flowing - we just heard that Alienware will launch its Steam Machine in September - but now we're hearing about some massive growth on Steam.

Over the past three months, Valve has seen an additional 10 million users join Steam, which has seen its total user base climb from 65 million to 75 million users. Breaking this down into geographical locations, 41% of sales come from the US, and 40% from Europe. Russia and Brazil's markets grew the most year-over-year, with Russia's market increasing 128%, and Brazil's market 75%.

What about the Steam mobile app? Well, that has a total of 7 million people using it, and a split of 55% and 45% for Android, and iOS, respectively.

We reported yesterday that EA finally announced an offline mode for its SimCity reboot - something I think is too little, too late - but the update is at least here now. But, it took EA quite some time to get it here.

The developer has explained how much work it did to provide offline mode in SimCity, where Lead Engineer, Simon Fox, explains: "The original creative vision for SimCity was to make a game where every action had an effect on other cities in your region. As such, we engineered the game to meet this vision, setting up the player's PC (client) to communicate all of its information to the servers. That means that our entire architecture was written to support this, from the way that the simulation works to the way that you communicate across a region of cities. So yes, while someone was able to remove the 'time check' shortly after launch, they were unable to perform key actions like communicating with other cities that they had created locally, or with the rest of their region(s), or even saving the current state of their cities."

Fox says it took over six months of coding to get here, which is a massive effort for the developer. Fox continues: "My team did, however, see a path forward towards Offline, one that would maintain the integrity of the simulation. Lucy once said that Offline wouldn't be possible 'without a significant amount of engineering work,' and she's right. By the time we're finished we will have spent over 6 ½ months working to write and rewrite core parts of the game to get this to work. Even things that seem trivial, like the way that cities are saved and loaded, had to be completely reworked in order to make this feature function correctly."

A small update was pushed out by DICE for Battlefield 4 on the PC yesterday, which includes a bunch of stability, balancing and player spawning fixes. Stealth jets have also been tweaked, with a 25% increase in the amount of damage their cannons can do. A full list of fixes is below:

EA announced today that it would be adding a long awaited offline mode to SimCity nearly a year after the games launch. EA originally required the game to have an always online connection to contact EA's authentication servers. This requirement caused many issues with the game launching and rendered it unplayable for many.

The issues with the always online requirement caused many users to call for its removal, but EA refused to budge on the matter, but less than a year later, the company is saying that it will be issuing an update to bring an offline mode to the game. Unfortunately offline mode may have came a little to late as many of us have forgotten about the game entirely.

AMD's Mantle is coming, and when it comes, it should really shake up the performance for Radeon users in Battlefield 4. AMD have said it'll drive 45% more performance in Battlefield 4 when compared to DirectX 11.

AMD said at CES 2014: "It's up to 45% faster than the original version on this same hardware." The big thing we have to take away from this is, if AMD can deliver a 45% performance improvement from Mantle, what is NVIDIA going to do? You can rest assured, as soon as the Mantle update is released, I'll be re-running my SAPPHIRE Radeon R9 290X Tri-X GPUs in CrossFire at 4K, and my triple 1440p setup (4320x2560 and 7680x1440).

There were more than 9.7 million Sony PlayStation 4 video games sold to support the impressive 4.2 million consoles sold before the end of December 2013. Sony officials "couldn't be more thrilled" with the early success of the PS4, and it will be a great battle to see the PS4 compete with Microsoft's Xbox One game console.

The global demand for the PS4 is outpacing the Xbox 360, as Microsoft finds success in the U.S. market, while overseas shoppers tend to jump onboard with Sony. Both Microsoft and Sony will battle to control the next-generation gaming market, though it looks like Sony has the initial international upper hand.

Video games were on full display during the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), where Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo showed off their latest product innovations. Sony's PlayStation Now streaming game service, which is scheduled for launch this summer, will be a cloud-based game streaming service for PS4 gamers.