Gaming News - Page 1640

Written in conjunction with Simon den Bekker

Counter-Strike Global Offensive has a strange internal economy that's driven in large part by the weapon skins created by the community. It also attracts a lot of attention and players to the game. In essence, it's the backbone of the game, a reason why people play. To have these digital works of art and display them in-game. These player-contributed and professionally contributed works of art (and sometimes non-art) are sometimes a source of great pride among players, as they compare and compete in order to win or open a case with an expensive and sometimes beautiful looking weapon skin. Also, people can make money from these.

Valve oddly makes betting incredibly easy in the game itself. One can buy cases that have randomly won weapons upon opening, which the keys to open also cost money. Those weapon skins can be easily transferred to third-party pools, or websites, to be either sold or put into a 'pot' to be won by betting on different professional and semi-professional CSGO matches. There is a wide variety of websites that offer ways to use your weapon skins as collateral, and currency, to gamble and place bets.

As a die-hard fan of the Diablo ARPG series, I'm incredibly excited to report that Blizzard may be making a new chapter of the landmark franchise.

A batch of new job listings pretty much confirm that a new Diablo is in the works, with Blizzard hiring a senior concept artist, a lighting artist, and a senior character artist for an "unnannounced project". Blizzard pretty much gives it away by explicitly stating that the ideal candidates will be responsible for molding the Diablo universe.

"Blizzard Entertainment is seeking exceptionally skilled and passionate senior concept artists to help drive the vision of characters and world's in our next hit game! We're looking for artists that are self-starting, versatile, and enjoy being part of a collaborative environment. The ideal candidate shares our sensibilities, loves dark medieval world's, and feels there are countless stories left to tell in the Diablo universe!"

An adrenalin charged trailer for Io Interactive's upcoming Hitman was just released, and it shows off some of the settings and missions we'll be exploring when it releases on March 11th.

The first "season" as they're calling it is going to have a variety of very different and engaging missions to go through. Agent 47 is back and in the prime of his career in this new, live and almost re-imagined game. The amount of free-will and choices you'll have should be astounding. Even the beta, as short as it was, had a great many possibilities in how to accomplish it.

The episodic way that they're releasing this will give you new, fresh contracts and challenges to complete every week as well as new, major content appearing every month until the season ends. The plan for them is to continue to support the game with fresh content for quite some time. The base-mechanics are already in-place, and they're pretty good.

Steam is an oft-hacked platform for a number of reasons. The internal economy and lack of proper controls for trading the strangely valuable items makes it a very sweet target for scammers and hackers alike. Valve is committed to helping stop that from happening and is rolling out some new ways to help prevent you from outright losing your inventory.

On March 9th, a Steam update will add a number of new features to the trading mechanism to make it more difficult for scammers to steal from their intended victims. These changes are in response to the nearly 77,000 accounts that tend to be hacked or otherwise compromised in some fashion each month.

And for goodness sake, use Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator, it's relatively easy to setup and it helps tremendously. 2FA is a very effective tool in preventing both hacking as well as enabling a safer and more effective trading environment.

Star Wars has been a very successful franchise for EA this year with Battlefront alone having shipped more than 13 million copies worldwide since it released. Star Wars: The Old Republic has seen a revival in its player base thanks, in part, to a return to the highly successful narrative driven gameplay they reintroduced with the Knights of the Fallen Empire. Galaxy of Heroes, too, has been a smashing success.

And now EA wants to start teasing what they're planning on doing next with the franchise. During the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco, the companies CFO, Blake Jorgensen, talked elusively about how they plan on moving forward. "We've got a couple of things up our sleeve that we haven't talked about yet but you'll probably see them teased over the next six months," Jorgensen said. We already have an idea about the direction they're headed, with an Amy Hennig directed open-world RPG and even potential sequels to Battlefront itself.

The strong sales of Battlefront, regardless of the actual numbers of people playing at any given time, has show EA just how strong a franchise it can be for them, hopefully something that'll resonate and help to invigorate the development of well thought-out games that are true to the spirit of Star Wars.

In a move that certainly surprises no one but disappoints everyone, EA has officially confirmed that Mass Effect: Andromeda won't be releasing in 2016. The "best and largest ever" Mass Effect game will instead be releasing in the first quarter of 2017, which is from January 1 through March 31, 2017.

During a presentation at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen detailed the company's roadmap for 2016 and beyond. "We've got a great year ahead... we've got our Battlefield first-person shooter game coming in the third quarter, and our third-party title that Respawn, our partner, built, it's called TItanfall, it's the second title that they brought into that brand. We have our Mirror's Edge runner game this first quarter, and then we have Mass Effect, which is a sci-fi action game, in our fourth quarter. So big year ahead and we're pretty excited."

As EA's fiscal year begins with Q1 on December 15 and ends in Q4 on March 31, we can surmise that ME: Andromeda will be out by March of next year. Not so long ago we predicted that Andromeda would be delayed due to the departure of key talent, including Senior Development Director Chris Wynn and lead writer Chris Schlerf.

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End will be a cornerstone of Sony's massive PlayStation 4 dominance this year, but the game has been delayed... again. Uncharted 4 was delayed from 2015 into 2016, then it was delayed into April 2016, and now it has been delayed again - until May 10.

President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, Shawn Layden, explained on the PlayStation Blog: "In an effort to meet the considerable worldwide demand, and to ensure that all gamers worldwide have the opportunity to play the game on day one, we have chosen to postpone the launch of the game by two weeks to allow for extra manufacturing time. We know this news might be disappointing, and we are sorry to have to make you wait a little longer to play Naughty Dog's latest. The good news is that the game is phenomenal - we are fully confident that it will be worth the wait and the team at Naughty Dog is eager as ever for you to experience Nathan Drake's final adventure".

There will also be an Uncharted 4 open beta multiplayer that kicks off this weekend, which will give Naughty Dog and Sony a chance to test out the game's servers for its launch, hopefully, on May 10.

If there's one huge area where consoles lose out to PCs, it would be that they're not upgradeable. Console owners and fans would disagree, saying that it creates an ecosystem that allows Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo to develop, and let third-party studios develop games for hardware that is identical between consoles. So, if one person owns a PS4 - the other 25 million+ have the exact same hardware.

Well, according to Xbox boss Phil Spencer, this could all change in the future. Optional hardware purchases could happen, and they would be different to the "optional" microtransactions games have today, except you'd actually get value out of spending money. Speaking with Polygon, Spencer said: "When you look at the console space, I believe we will see more hardware innovation in the console space than we've ever seen".

He continued: "You'll actually see us come out with new hardware capability during a generation allowing the same games to run backward and forward compatible because we have a Universal Windows Application running on top of the Universal Windows Platform that allows us to focus more and more on hardware innovation without invalidating the games that run on that platform". So that makes sense, as we really do need hardware innovation in the console space, as it has been dead for 10 years now - we're still in the 720p-ish 30FPS-ish world, and that's shocking, as it's 2016 - not 1996.

Rise of the Tomb Raider has been enjoying huge sales on the PC, where it has smashed the sales of the Xbox One version - but what about the rumored DX12 patch for the game?

Well, it looks like it could be closer than we thought, with Microsoft teasing that Rise of the Tomb Raider was running in DX12 at its Xbox Showcase Media Event. Microsoft confirmed: "DirectX 12 Showcase: Rise of the Tomb Raider, Ashes of the Singularity, King of Wushu - Square Enix, Snail, and Stardock showcased their latest DirectX 12 enhancements for Rise of the Tomb Raider, King of Wushu, and Ashes of the Singularity on Origin PCs, iBUYPOWER Revolt 2, and Maingear PCs".

They continued: "Ashes of the Singularity is taking advantage the DirectX 12 multi-adapter technology, allowing PCs to use multiple GPUs, even from different manufacturers. Rise of the Tomb Raider was playable for the first time at the Xbox Spring Showcase running DirectX 12".

Killer Instinct is coming over to the PC through Windows 10, with Microsoft confirming the news earlier today. The game will launch on March 29, and thanks to a new FAQ posted on the official website, we know that if you buy the Xbox One version of Killer Instinct, you won't lose all of the content you've purchased.

If you want to keep your existing Killer Instinct content when you shift over from the Xbox One to Windows 10, you must "receive the Season 3 game update, available starting March 29, 2016. Simply login to your Xbox One console and launch Killer Instinct. Ensure you're connected to Xbox Live and follow the prompts to receive the update. Once the update is complete, launch Killer Instinct fully. Once the update is complete and you have launched Killer Instinct again, you will be able to login into Windows 10 to access your owned and earned content".

As for the minimum and recommended requirements, this is what you'll need: