Gaming - Page 1184

Sony has confirmed to Eurogamer that used games will not be blocked on the PlayStation 4, allaying fears that the next-gen console would look to stuff out the used game market. "They purchase physical form, they want to use it everywhere, right? So that's my expectation," Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida said.

Yoshida faltered a bit when directly asked if Sony was going to block used games from being resold. After consulting his Japanese PR adviser, he responded back, "used games can play on PS4. How is that?"

This is good news for everyone who had seen and heard the rumors that the next-gen consoles from Microsoft and Sony were going to block used games. Microsoft could still take that route, though this would likely hurt sales.

With the official PlayStation 4 announcement about halfway over, we'd thought we'd bring to you a list of rumors that ended up being true. Without further ado, let's take a look at the rumors that panned out.

Click on any rumor listed below to be taken to the original post.

In the end it looks like most of the rumors that we posted ended up being accurate. Of course, this was just a quick look over some of the past posts--I'm sure our readers could dig up more that ended up not coming true. If you know of one off hand, let us know in the comments!

Sony are poised to launch the PlayStation 4 today, and we're going to cover it live, continue to check back as much as you can! The event is live right now in New York City. Nothing on the PS4 so far, but it shouldn't be long - I'm incredibly, incredibly excited right now - how about you?

16:05 US PST: I did forget, we didn't even get to see the actual PlayStation 4... what's with that? This was just a bit of a tease, I guess, but it would've been nice to see the PS4 itself.

16:04 US PST: PS4 comes "Holiday 2013" and with that, it's all over - what did you love the most? The controller? The graphics? The tease of games? The future of gaming is sure looking bright, and the future of gaming is PC. AMD-based architectures being baked into these consoles shows just how incredible the PC is - and our games should only look better now that the minimum spec is now the PS4 for future game development.

The flip-flopping developers of Crysis are at it again, with Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli under an NDA from both Microsoft and Sony, where he can't reveal the details of next-gen consoles from the respective companies.

Yerli has still come out and spilled at least a couple of beans on the next-gen gaming powerhouses, saying that the hardware gap between PCs and next-gen consoles makes it "impossible" for the next-gen consoles to match, or beat current-gen PCs. Yerli says:

The latest installment in the Gears of War series has leaked out into the wild this morning. Copies of Gears of War: Judgment were spotted on torrent sites early this morning, leading Microsoft to threaten some harsh ramifications to anyone who downloads and installs a pirated copy.

A spokesperson for Microsoft said:

From the makers of Halo, we have a new game unveiled by Bungie - Destiny. Destiny is an always-on, persistent-world adventure game which the developers have signed up with Activision on a 10-year publishing deal.

The video above shows off a few quick glimpses at the otherwise bland first-person shooter bits (which I'm sure it's not a full-fledged FPS just yet), but it also unveils some of the more social integration Destiny will have, where you can create and customize your identities and gear to venture across an alternate universe to our own.

The big difference between Bungie's last massive game, Halo, and Destiny, is that it's not a lone soldier who saves the world - but a community of Guardians. Destiny will be more of a multi-player game than a singleplayer game, but this doesn't mean that those looking for a single-player game will miss out. Single player gamers can finish the quests off as a Guardian, but in order to "realize the vision of the game", Destiny will require an always-on Internet connection on all platforms regardless of play style.

Crysis 3 gets released in just over 48 hours, and is looking to do some good business as usual. First up, we have some download numbers on the beta, which was downloaded over 3 million times.

Most beta players will end up buying the full game, so we should expect at least 2-3 million sales just there. Crysis 2 sold 3 million units, so we should expect more sales this time around. Pre-order numbers are looking great too, where according to EA's end of January financial report, pre-orders for the third Crysis game are sitting at 40% higher than its predecessor.

Crysis 3 gets released on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on February 19 in the US, and two days later in Australia and Europe. Japan will have to wait until March 7 to get their nanosuit soldier gaming on.

Are you getting excited? I'm a huge fan of PCs, but next-gen consoles are always exciting and they should push the bar of games up much higher since games are developed on consoles and ported on PCs.

What should we expect from the next-gen console from Sony? Sony are holding an event this week where they've said we'll "see the future" - most people, myself included, are expecting an announcement of the PlayStation 4. If this is true, here's some things you should expect from the PS4.

5.) Price. This is one of the most important parts of the PS4. The original PlayStation 3 launched for $600, where we saw 60GB included. The PS4 should hopefully hit the $300-$400 price, and include 500GB of storage. We should hopefully see a decently fast HDD inside, or some form of flash storage - maybe 64-128GB of SSD to help the OS feel snappy.

We're not hearing much about Aliens: Colonial Marines other than its abysmal reviews - but there are some out there voicing their opinions on Gearbox Software's latest flop.

I purchased the game after watching videos months ago, getting just a little excited that we might have another cool game to play - but after the first few minutes of playing it, I felt like I had been robbed of my $50. The demos shown off months ago were of much better quality in terms of graphics and physics within the game, with the final version feeling like it has gone back in development time.

The video above does a very good job of walking you through some of the different parts that have been changed - from the dynamic lighting to the explosions and pre-scripted scenes. I ran the game on my EyeFinity setup and it is so poor with its field of view it's unplayable.

Sony have said we'll see the future on February 20, but before that we're seeing leaks of a purported PlayStation 4 prototype controller. The photo comes courtesy of an unknown source who sent it in to Destructoid.

As you can see, it looks quite familiar to the current controllers, but the directional pad buttons are placed further apart - with what seems like a touchscreen slapped in between. If you can see that glowing part on top of the controller, this could be a Move-related part of the new controller.

There's also a small button to the left of the touchscreen, in the upper right hand corner of the d-pad. This could be the rumored share button, or something associated with the Move part on top of the controller, or the touchscreen. Just above the PlayStation button in the bottom center, looks to be a speaker and underneath the PlayStation button is an audio jack for some headphone connectivity.

Next-gen consoles are nearly here, not including the Nintendo Wii U, and we're hearing that the next-gen Xbox might not be capable of playing used games. Just how much does this piss off gamers? Well, according to the GameStop CFO, a lot.

Rob Lloyd, CFO of GameSpot during his recent speech at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference said that 60% of customers said they would not buy the next-gen consoles if they meant they couldn't play used, or second hand games. Lloyd told those at the event that consumers like the ability to play pre-owned games, as well as having the portability and physicality in games.

Not having these abilities, such as buying a pre-owned game, would stop consumers - nearly 60% of them - from buying a next-gen console that isn't capable of playing used games. Lloyd noted that around 4% of GameStop's used game sales are for games that had been released in the last 60 days - this is a huge fact for used games.

If you've been waiting around for the Skyrim DLC to come to PlayStation 3, your wait can finally come to an end. Over the next three weeks, Sony will be releasing one DLC pack per week. First up for release is Skyrim's Dragonborn DLC which is available for only $9.99 for the first week. After which, it will set you back $19.99.

Users will be able to pick up Hearthfire next week, so stay tuned for news about when that is released. The PlayStation blog has more details on the Dragonborn DLC, since it has been a while since it originally released on other platforms:

Crytek, the developer behind Crysis are no stranger to wanting to push free-to-play (F2P) titles, but it looks like we should expect the entire company to shift over to F2P titles in the next 3-5 years. Company CEO, Cevat Yerli told VentureBeat last week:

At the moment, F2P titles aren't anything to really write home about - sure, there are some great ones - but they don't compete with the likes of the big AAA games. Crytek on the other hand, is willing to throw big money at F2P titles, with production budgets of between $10 million and $30 million in order to help them actually compete on the AAA playing field.

EA's Origin game management software (a competitor against Valve's Steam) features some of the biggest titles in PC gaming and up until now, it has been limited to Windows PC users only. That all changed today as EA officially announced Origin for Mac (Alpha).

In a release this morning, Origin said "With Origin for Mac we'll be able to offer the same Origin experience and features that define our PC app - cloud storage, auto-patching, friends list, and more". While the alpha testing is open to the public, don't expect to download Battlefield 3 just yet. The game store is blocked until the official launch.

I've been meaning to post this for a while now, but I believe we've seen the recent delay of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto V so it can be released on next-gen consoles. Yes, that's what I think and I'm sticking with it. I talked about it happening all the way back in April of last year, where I said

I said this because Grand Theft Auto is one of the, if not the biggest franchise on consoles today. The franchise has grown out of control, and is so big that it is truly a system seller. Why release one of the biggest games ever on current-gen consoles if next-gen consoles are only months away? So you read it here, we think Rockstar and Take-Two are pushing back GTA V to release it on next-gen consoles.

J.J. Abrams already has his finger in a bunch of franchises, Mission Impossible, Star Wars, Star Trek and countless TV shows, but what about gaming? Well, Polygon have the scoop on the director and TV guru reportedly working with Valve, yes - that Valve.

The news comes from the 2013 DICE Summit, where Abrams announced with co-founder of Valve, Gabe Newell, that they two gods of media were in discussions together about making a video game together. Abrams said "there's an idea we have for a game that we'd like to work with Valve on". Newell adds "We're super excited about that and we also want to talk about making movies, either a Portal movie or a Half-Life movie."

At the end of the on-stage talk, Newell said that the DICE lecture was just a public rehash of discussions behind closed doors with Abrams, where he added "what we are actually doing here, we are recapitulating a series of conversations going on."

Markus 'Notch' Persson, the guy behind Minecraft made approximately $100 million last year, not bad for what most people consider an "indie" game. Making $100 million pits him directly against mode huge games, and even nipping on the heels of AAA titles.

Notch was answering some questions through a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), where readers unearthed (geddit?) some information on him, and how he was able to acquire so much cash, so quickly. Notch isn't too sure what to do with it all, as would most people that aren't born into money, but he'd like to provide for his family and finally get his drivers license and maybe buy a car, but he's still a bit uneasy about it all, he wrote:

It would appear that detailed specifications of the Xbox 720's GPU have been leaked online. While there is no guarantee that these specifications are authentic, they are along the lines of what we would expect from the next-generation console. Couple that with the fact we are only a few months away from the expected announcement and these specifications get a bit more credence.

As you can see in the picture above, the GPU is said to have an 800MHz clock speed. The GPU reportedly features 32MB of embedded ESRAM, similar to the EDSRAM on the 360. However, this ESRAM is said to be free of some of the many restrictions placed on the 360's ESDRAM.

The GPU is also reportedly able to do 2x, 4s, and 8x MSAA antaliasing, which means picture quality should be vastly improved in games. The Xbox 720 is widely expected to be announced by Microsoft in June at E3, which is a couple of months after Sony is expected to announce the PlayStation 4.

I'm sure there are some of you out there, like me, who remember the class adventure series from Sierra, Police Quest. Well, the creator of Police Quest, Jim Walls, was interviewed by Chris Pope, the Executive Producer of Guys from Andromedia LLC where he had something interesting to announce.

Walls announced that he is to soon join some of his ex-Sierra buddies, where they'll begin a new Kickstarter project where they hope to raise enough funds to start a new Police Quest-like game. We won't see a proper Police Quest game as Activision own the rights to it, but something like Police Quest would still be great.

Walls is asking for help, and would like people who are interested in helping to contact him through his website, but still has full intentions of starting a new Kickstarter-funded project sometime this year.

Microsoft is doing a rare deed by unlocking Xbox's Netflix app for all members of Xbox Live. Normally to use the Netflix app, you'd have to be an Xbox Live Gold member. However, Netflix is debuting their new original series House of Cards and they obviously want all the eyes on it they possibly can, so it appears Microsoft worked with them to allow anyone to use the Netflix app for this weekend only.

All the episodes of season one will be uploaded at the same time, so you should have just enough time this weekend to watch them all. Thankfully, you can do so on your Xbox, even if you aren't a Live Gold member. I've never understood why you should have to pay Microsoft to use the Netflix app, and apparently neither do commentors on the blog post: