Gaming News - Page 1630

While we've been hearing about other game engines being powered by DirectX 12, we haven't heard much from the developer of the Battlefield series and Star Wars Battlefront.

The news is coming directly from Technial Director Stefan Boberg on Twitter, where '@CentroXer' asked "when is DX12 going to be part of frosbite?" with Boberg replying that "it already is, no word on which game will be first though :)". With DICE working very closely with AMD on Mantle, which was used in Battlefield 4, it's only a few steps away from Battlefield 5 being announced on the latest Frostbite engine with DirectX 12 capabilities.

Then we have to think about the amount of Frostbite-powered games in the next year or so, with Mass Effect 4 at the end of 2016, Need for Speed on November 3, and Star Wars Battlefront two weeks later on November 17. Let's not forget Mirror's Edge Catalyst on February 23, 2016. So we should expect a next-gen Battlefield game to be announced early next year, with a release date later next year, hopefully.

As if there was ever any doubt, Bethesda has revealed that Fallout 4 will have its own season pass for future DLC...and even calls the pass a "reward for our most loyal fans". The real reward, though, is the full unrestricted set of modding tools that gamers will get across consoles and PC.

While just about every gamer feels that season passes are a terrible scheme on par with the pre-order gamble that sadly funds the industry, Bethsoft affirms that the pass will unlock access to "all DLC ever released for Fallout 4". There's no Evolve-style multi-passes going on here.

On the up-side Bethsoft plans to give players the very same construction software that the studio used to create the game. So the paid season pass DLC could end up being a non-issue. But there's a catch...the tools won't be up at launch. "Early next year we'll release for free the new Creation Kit for the PC. This is the same tool we use in the studio. You'll be able to create your own mods and share them with others. We're especially excited these same mods will then be coming to Xbox One, and then PlayStation 4."

The USC Institute for Creative Technologies and Imperial College London showed off a new technique for "synthesizing the effects of skin microstructure deformation by anisotropically convolving a high resolution displacement map to match normal distribution changes in measured skin samples" during SIGGRAPH 2015.

In a more simple way, it is a new technique that will hopefully one day find us with games with super-realistic dynamic skin, that will have characters in games that look ultra-real. The USC Institute for Creative Technologies and Imperial College London noted that the technique can be used in real-time, with the videos we have embedded including both real-time renders, that have used GPU shaders and offline renders.

Gaming Paradise has turned into 'Gaming Hell' for the teams and commentators in attendance, with people taking to Twitter and Reddit in order to explain their frustration about what is going on. The event has not only been accused of failing to pay for its equipment hire, but has avoided paying for the venue and hotel expenses while providing food unfit for human consumption.

Gaming Paradise kicked off as a sub-par tournament in the eyes of the players, offering 60Hz monitors, tournament computers without video cards, massive lag issues on the MLGtv live stream and a delay of up to 25 hours on most matches. If this wasn't bad enough, the computers weren't actually there to begin with - the tournament organizers ordered these new VGA-less PCs after the tournament was set to kick off.

Adding to the heartache, player passports were confiscated by local police due to hotel and food non-payment. However, they were given back to the players after it was determined as unnecessary.

Court documents gleaned from Halo composer Martin O'Donnell's case against Bungie and Activision reveal that Destiny's story arc was "significantly changed" from the original, and strongly hints that Activision is responsible.

When the first chapter of Destiny's five-part franchise launched in 2014, gamers found that it wasn't the intergalactic opera they were expecting. The story elements were (and still are) very light and players finally understood what kind of series Activision and Bungie have created--the kind of piecemeal bits that can be strewn out over a decade of releases. But Destiny wasn't always like this.

The court papers of Martin O'Donnell's lawsuit against Bungie show that the game went through a phase of "substantial revision" which led to the first year-long delay. "Although Destiny as planned for release in September 2013, the story was substantially revised beginning August 2013, requiring a new release date of March 2014 and edits to much of the work previously completed," the documents read. "After a brief vacation/sabbatical in early fall, o'Donnell returned, worked on the story and recorded dialogue, but wrote no additional music. For reasons unrelated to O'Donnell's performance, the release date was again moved, to September 2014."

According to a banner on Japanese sites that some members of NeoGAF spotted, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain sales have been quite good: smashing through 3 million units since its release last week.

The hype around the game has been nothing but massive, with Hideo Kojima's very public departure from Konami being a large part of this hype. Not only that, but it has been seven years since the release of Metal Gear Solid IV: Guns of the Patriot, which was an exclusive to Sony and its console at the time; the PlayStation 3. We also just reported earlier tonight that sales of the PS4 version of the game have been smashing the Xbox One version, nearly 3-to-1.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is available right now for the Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4 and PC.

Now that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is here, we can see what the first-week sales numbers are like. GfK Chart-Track, a market research company that tracks sales of multiple forms of media across the UK and Ireland, has MGS V: The Phantom Pain coming in a third-best in first-week sales of any game released in 2015.

The company announced: "It also marks the series' return to the top of the All Formats chart for the first time since 2008". But more importantly, how are the sales between the consoles? The company wrote on its blog: "PS4 takes a commanding 72% share over Xbox One which has 22%, while PS3 edges to a 3% share over Xbox 360 with just 2%".

It looks like AMD are confident in their position in the market, even with NVIDIA scooping up most of the discrete GPU market with 82% being GeForce products. But, AMD's position could be a good one with DX12 now out, and developers jumping into the new Windows 10 exclusive API.

AMD's Head of Global Technical Marketing, Robert Hallock, took to Reddit, where he said: "You will find that the vast majority of DX12 titles in 2015/2016 are partnering with AMD. Mantle taught the development world how to work with a low-level API, the consoles use AMD and low-level APIs, and now those seeds are bearing fruit".

Even though AMD can only talk about Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, which is one AAA game, and a benchmark in Ashes of the Singularity, it feels a bit rushed to have AMD claiming this. But, Hallock could be eluding to unannounced titles that we haven't heard about yet.

Early next month, EA will unleash the Star Wars Battlefront beta, and while registration isn't open just yet, some people are scamming foaming-at-the-mouth gamers with fake beta sign-up sites.

Of course, these sites are just total traps, which has seen Electronic Arts Community Manager, Matthew Everett, taking to Reddit. Everett said: "Registration has not been made available yet. Do not be fooled by fake beta sign-up sites. Our beta registration will live on our official site here: starwars.ea.com. I will also be sure to post a link once it is available".

Star Wars Battlefront launches on the Xbox One, PS4 and PC on November 17 while the beta arrives sometime in "early October".

If you have bad internet and are thinking about buying a disc version of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain on PC, don't bother.

It looks like Konami has shipped retail PC DVD-ROMs of MGSV with only a single 8.8MB installer file, meaning you still have to download the full 20GB+ game via Steam. This is a pretty harsh roadblock to PC gamers with terrible internet speeds and one has to wonder why the Japanese publisher didn't just nix physical PC releases altogether.

While this is pretty frustrating, this kind of thing is nothing new. A lot of companies ship "physical" games with a download key to use on Origin, Steam, etc. Using this method the publishers are saving money packing in downloads via digital distribution networks like Steam rather than shipping the required 2-3 DVD discs required to fit the full game.