Gaming News - Page 1630

With the performance-related issues surrounding Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, it's good to hear that the upcoming patch for the game will address at least some of the performance problems. The upcoming patch will have performance optimizations, Ambient Occlusion tweaks, and more. Here's the full list:

As for what's coming in the future, The Coalition will be adding 21:9 support, NAT problems and more. We should expect these improvements in the coming weeks.

Textures not loading

EverQuest next was supposed to be a return to form for the MMORPG that started it all, but Daybreak Games has decided instead to just cancel the project.

The decision hasn't been made lightly, it seems, but it hasn't quite been meeting the expectations that have been set both internally, and by fans. That said, they thought it best to just cancel this project and to instead focus on somethign completely new.

"Watching EverQuest's ability to entertain and bring people together has inspired and humbled us. It's shaped our culture and has emboldened us to take aggressive risks with our game ideas and products." Russ Shanks, the president of Daybreak Games said. "When we decided to create the next chapter in the EverQuest journey, we didn't aim low. We set out to make something revolutionary." And so they'll have to take a bit more time to make sure that the next EverQuest meets the high standards that people have for such a prolific MMORPG.

Courtesy of PC port masters Nixxes Software, DirectX 12 support has arrived for Rise of the Tomb Raider in the game's fifth patch.

"For Rise of the Tomb Raider the largest gain DirectX 12 will give us is the ability to spread our CPU rendering work over all CPU cores, without introducing additional overhead," Jurjen Katsman, Studio Head at Nixxes Software, says of the patch. "This is especially important on 8-core CPUs like Intel i7's or many AMD FX processors."

"When using DirectX 11, in situations where the game is under heavy load - for example in the larger hubs of the game - the individual cores may not be able to feed a fast GPU like an NVIDIA GTX 980 or even NVIDIA GTX 970 quick enough. This means the game may not hit the desired frame-rate, requiring you to turn down settings that impact CPU performance. Even though the game can use all your CPU cores, the majority of the DirectX 11 related work is all happening on a single core. With DirectX 12 a lot of the work is spread over many cores, and the framerate of the game will run at can be much higher for the same settings."

Titanfall may have fallen off the charts fairly early, but it still has a healthy following of gamers with plenty of servers up and running. And now the 2014 mechanical shooter is making its way into EA's Origin Access Vault on the PC side.

It's already available on the Xbox One version of the Access Vault, but now you'll be able to enjoy Titanfall and all the expansions on the PC if you happen to subscribe to the monthly EA Access service. The game will be playable without restrictions of any kind, as well. Just recently EA confirmed that Titanfall is on track for a release sometime in the 2017 fiscal year, and will have a single-player campaign that features a well written and very grounded story.

This will be the 17th game to enter the Vault, coming just after Torchlight II joined the family at the end of February. The $5 a month service has proven strangely popular with it's value increasing with every game added. The catalog now includes Battlefied 4, Battliefield 3, Dragon Age: Inquisition, The Sims 3, Dead Space and Plants Vs. Zombies Garden Warfare, among others. All of fantastic games that warrant even a paying full price for.

It was tragic news this week for PC gamers and Xbox One gamers when we heard of the shuttering of Lionhead Studios. But shutting down a studio isn't the end of the talent that worked there. Sony, in this case, is looking at opening its doors to the now former employees, to pick up some of the talented people that are now free-er agents.

In fact, they're specifically targeted those employees to see if they'd be a good fit and have taken to social media to voice their interest. There's a lot of talent in that studio, such that has worked on a number of high-profile and very well remembered games. The Fable series in particular was well received and Black & White nearly helped create the God-game genre, or at least refined it into something very enjoyable. It would be a shame to have such talented individuals fade away.

Sometimes even older games need some love from the original developer. Diablo II is getting just that with a new update. Though 16 years old, it was actually last updated in 2011 with varaious fixes that made it more reliable on modern systems.

This update, version 1.14a happens to concentrate on fixing even more glitches and bugs that might have made it completely unplayable on any modern PC or Mac. And, they say you can finally move onto a modern Mac, just in case you've been saving that PowerPC based one just for Diablo II.

They're also hard at work looking to catch up on preventing new and improved hacks and cheats from ruining the game. But that's an ever evolving project and they'll have a good solution soon.

Oculus has announced that one of their launch titles is going to be the very fine Internet spaceship simulation game, Elite: Dangerous. That means the game will support the latest Oculus SDK when the headset releases at the end of the month.

Elite: Dangerous is a game that had a VR experience at the heart of it from the very beginning. It's a natural fit for a simulator to be able to move your head around and, at least, track targets, and even interact with menus that'll light up when you look at where they'll be. It's a natural fit, and it already had Oculus support when the DK 1 was released what seems so long ago. This means it'll have underlying support for the latest SDK.

This'll be a natural fit for the release of the Oculus Rift which is happening on March 28th. The $600 price tag for the consumer version of the Rift might seem prohibitive, but it compares to the cost of a good gaming monitor that might be bought instead, though offering a far different and potentially better experience. Just make sure you have a PC that's up to snuff to play Elite: Dangerous in VR, with it's more intense processing requirements.

Mirror's Edge Catalyst is shaping up nicely, with EA sharing a new developer diary on the game recently, detailing the reasoning behind Catalyst featuring no weapons, and how gameplay connects with the music dynamically, as well as how the movement in the game has changed from Mirror's Edge.

The developer diary video also tackles the combat in Mirror's Edge Catalyst, as well as the free roaming side of City of Glass. The fluid movement in Catalyst, mixed with the first-person combat create an experience that's different to traditional games - something that will be amplified by the dynamic audio. During the DICE art panel at the National Museum in Stockholm, Mirror's Edge Catalyst's concept artist, Per Haagensen explained that the team wanted to show off "her skill, confidence and attitude in a dynamic manner, without her looking like a martial artist or super hero".

He continued: "When I set out to sculpt her for the Key Art, aside from the realistic aspects of her appearance, more than anything it was to convey the pose with enough action, tension, and interest to make the audience curious about who this person is". Haagensen continued, saying that DICE wanted Faith to look "more mature" than she did in the first game. He finished off by saying: "She also needs to appear more mature than in the first game, so there was some work on getting a focused look on her face, maybe even some concern about the situation she is in".

CD Projekt RED promises that Cyberpunk 2077 is going to eclipse The Witcher 3 in every possible way--a feat we didn't know was possible.

Cyberpunk 2077 is the most ambitious project that the Polish devs have ever taken on, and CDPR has taken many opportunities to open up about the game's depth. At a recent earnings meeting, company president Adam Kicinski and studio head Adam Badowski said that Cyberpunk 2077 will be "even better, even bigger, even more revolutionary" than The Witcher 3.

All of that effort will take time, however, and Badowski says that the studio still has "a lot of work to do", and Cyberpunk 2077 is "still a long ways away from the premiere". CDPR is taking their time to make the game as amazing as possible, stating that the darkly futuristic game will be absolutely huge and push the bar even higher.

It was a bit concerning when it was annoucned that only the newest of Nintendo's 3DS models could support playing SNES games through the Virtual Console, but apparantly there's a really good reason for this.

And those reasons are technical in nature. The CPU, though only slightly less powerful than the new 3DS, just isn't quite powerful enough to actually handle SNES games at all. Those games are emulated using a Perfect-Pixel mode which allows you to play them at the original resolution that they were made in, which theoretically shouldn't be such a technical hurdle. But with the added overhead of emulation in an already limited environment, that just adds to the processing requirements, making it a bit more difficult.

But then, perhaps it's that they don't want to compromise on the experience that users would have. Why let the original 3DS users play it with a horrible experiences, because that would only lead to accusations of "unoptimized" games and poor development when in fact RAM might be limited by just enough to make a substantial difference, or that one more usable core is needed to make it run at the original framerate, and not a frame below. In retrospect, it's not really a bad idea to limit it if you want your customers to actually enjoy the experience and not complain too much.