Gaming News - Page 1609

UPDATE: Sony has just announced the full PlayStation Plus lineup for PS3, PS4 and PS Vita, which can be found below.

Original story is as follows.

Sony has yet to reveal next month's free PlayStation Plus games, but the cat's out of the bag thanks to a leaked advertisement on Sony's PlayStation Store.

Gears of War 4 is a very well anticipated game, being one of the titular franchises of the Xbox consoles. The Unreal Engine games have never failed to at least provide hours of violent entertainment, and a good to boot. And thankfully the creator of the series is very satisfied with the direction the games writing is going in.

Unfortunately Cliff isn't exactly kept too much in the loop once the franchise was sold to Microsoft in 2014, but it seems that those working on Gears 4 are at least appreciating his creative genius enough to inform him of the progress they're making. And that's great news.

The first three games have done very well, featuring a harrowing story combined with a very well done cover system that evolved appreciably throughout. Gears of War 4 is riding on a wave of expectation from fans who want it to live up to the rough anticipation in their minds. And who wouldn't at least expect it to blow our minds a little bit. Graphically it should be a nice upgrade, considering Gears of War Ultimate Edition looks, and plays, quite nicely on the Xbox One.

This past December at The Game Awards we were delighted to hear that we'd be graced with another, modern Tron game from Disney. But only the PC was mentioned, leading some to believe that consoles, which would be a perfect medium for such a competitive game, were being overlooked.

Now we have confirmation that Tron will be released on the PS4 as well as the Xbox One. On February 16th Tron Run/r, as it's called, will be released on all platforms for $20. Right now it's currently in Early Access on Steam.

In Tron Run/r you'll get to customize your own avatar and participate in all the classic activities from both of the Tron movies, with a lot of the familiar neon environments being recreated. There'll be upwards of 30 different levels to play through. And there's even a Stream mode which remixes existing levels into far more difficult creations.

Microsoft and Sony have both opened up 7 out of the 8 CPU cores that power their respective consoles, giving devs a bit more processing power to play with. Now that developers are starting to harness the extra CPU power, it's time to put the extra boost into perspective to see if the added core will make a difference or not.

According to the devs at Techland, who used the extra cores while developing The Following DLC for Dying Light, the 7th core adds a "good reserve of CPU power" for demanding situations. Given the limited nature of both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, devs are keen to use any extra power they have access to.

"Dying Light was made and optimized to work on six cores since that's what was available when we made the game. So the opening up of the 7th core CPUs on both platforms simply gave us a good reserve of processing power. It essentially gave us a helping hand in dealing with more processor intensive situations, but given when Dying Light was developed, it simply means we use the additional CPU power as a nice to have and not something we need have to rely on," Techland dev Tymon Smektala told Gamingbolt.

Star Wars Battlefront just received it's January update and it brings a lot of changes to weapon and hero stats, finally bringing about the nerf we've been waiting for.

EA has also started to bring new content into the game with this update, keeping inline with their promise to add something each month. Private matches and daily challenges are added along with Hoth-themed skins for Luke and Han.

Also, no longer are Han Solo or Boba Fett quite as OP as they used to be. If you played smart, you could last for nearly half the match as either, even one-shotting people from a distance. But EA and DICE of made some much needed changes, lowering the damage they put out. The re-balancing of weapon stats has also commenced, something that has been requested for some time.

We only just reported that the Call of Duty franchise generated $570 million in digital revenue throughout 2015, but League of Legends made nearly 3x that money in the same period of time.

Riot Games and Tencent (the latter company purchased the former company late last year) made an insane $1.62 billion in digital revenue from League of Legends in 2015, eclipsing every other game on PC. The closest to League's $1.6 billion was CrossFire from SmileGate, which made $1.1 billion while Dungeon Fighter Online made $1.05 billion, according to digital games industry analyst firm Superdata.

Superdata CEO Joost van Dreunan said: "The top 10 PC games earn more than the top 10 mobile games. Despite a heavy industry focus on mobile gaming, the combined earnings of digital PC games for the top titles came in higher, totaling $6.3B in sales compared to $6.18B for mobile. PC-based gaming - consisting of free-to-play MMOs, subscription-based games like World of Warcraft, social games and PC downloadable games - earns over $32 billion annually, well above the $25.1 billion generated by mobile games. Three of the year's top five digital PC games (Grand Theft Auto V, Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3) were released in 2015, indicating that PC gamers have made significant progress transitioning to purchasing games digitally".

With the Call of Duty franchise making $1.6 billion in revenue over 2015, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Activision made an insane $570 million in digital revenue for the year, just from COD.

Thanks to digital games industry analyst firm Superdata, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare pulled in $355 million in digital revenue while Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 made $224 million - a total of $579 million for the Call of Duty franchise in digital revenue, for 2015. FIFA 15 didn't do too bad, pulling in $332 million in digital revenue for EA, while Grand Theft Auto V made $322 million for Take-Two Interactive.

With Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare making $355 million in digital revenue for 2015 - you probably think that's a lot. Wrong. League of Legends made a whopping $1.6 billion in digital revenue for 2015, which overshadows anything COD did by a long shot. Even CrossFire made $1.1 billion, Dungeon Fighter Online pulled in $1.05 billion, World of Warcraft made $814 million and World of Tanks commanded $446 million in 2015.

Announcing their game completely out of nowhere, Three Fields Entertainment has unveiled Dangerous Golf. The developer is a British studio made up of former Criterion developers, with Criterion being the developer behind the infamous Burnout series.

Dangerous Golf, as TFE explains: "Dangerous Golf is an irreverent, silly, fun approach to golf games that challenges players to break the rules and wreak havoc on more than 100 holes in four unexpected locations. It's as serious a golf game as Burnout was a serious simulation to driving games. We wanted to mix the attitude of Burnout with the destruction of Black whilst setting the golf ball on fire - a nod to NBA Jam. This type of gameplay is part of our DNA, and something we think our fans will truly enjoy".

The game features the latest technology, where it's powered by Unreal Engine 4 and uses NVIDIA's PhsyX, APEX and FleX technologies. TFE added: "Our team worked closely with both Epic's Unreal Engine 4 team and NVIDIA to not only push the boundaries of their PhysX, Apex Destruction and Flex technologies, but also to deliver a truly physics based game experience. As such, players will enjoy causing amazing destruction by smashing thousands of physically simulated rigid body valuables, shatter priceless heirlooms into small pieces and paint the environments with physically simulated liquids".

EA has released all of the details about the forthcoming DLC for Star Wars Battlefront as part of their Season Pass. And there's even some free content on the way as well.

The Season Pass, controversial as it is, seems to bring the infusion of content that the game should have had when it was released. There's going to be four new expansions coming out starting in March of this year. Each one will slowly introduce us to more maps, 16 in total, weapons and vehicles to choose from. They're also bringing new game modes for us to play with that should help to keep things interesting.

Aside from the paid Season Pass content, EA and DICE plan on releasing some free goodies to those that don't want to pay for the DLC. They'll have a new Survival mission set on Hoth and a new Hoth multiplayer map that'll support larger game modes as well, such as Walker Assault and Supremacy. The full details of everything coming out is below, after the break.

Thankfully LucasArts and Raven Software released the source code for Jedi Knight - Jedi Academy letting modders have the power to do some pretty amazing things with an already great base game. And already people have been re-exploring the game with some interesting results.

One of the most interesting mods to come from the generosity of Raven Software is Jedi Fighter, a mod that transforms the game into something that plays homage to some of the more classic fighting games, like Street Fighter II. It's a battle of good versus evil, with five different locations from a TIE hanger bay to Hoth and more. They've added in 10 characters from the expanded universe, ones that might be familiar. And of course it has the obligatory dynamic camera so you can have a cinematic view of the action.

It's the Star Wars fighting game we've been waiting for, the one we never knew we really wanted. It's fast paced and looks quite nice actually. In order to play the mod, you'll have to download the OpenJK engine to get it to work.