Gaming News - Page 1651

The nine year-old action RPG Titan Quest: Immortal Throne has received a major update from developer Iron Lore Entertainment, bringing it more in line with current games.

First up: they've removed GameSpy -- shut down since 2014 -- and replaced it with a new multiplayer and lobby system. (A follow-up patch has fixed LAN support, too.) Then on the graphics end, support has been added for 1280x720 resolution, as well as a new shadow mapping rendering technique. Lastly, improvements have been made to shaders and rendering. In short: you can play multiplayer again (without having to use GameSpy, no less), and better visuals.

The update is currently in beta. To access it, follow these steps:

There might be quite a few different survival games to choose from on the marketplace, but you shouldn't confuse The Solus Project with just any run-of-the-mill survival game. In this, it's your task to find a habitable place to keep humanity alive. And this is available in a preview status on the Xbox Live store for $13.49.

You get to move into brave new frontiers to save the human race, which is on the brink of extinction. There's a little bit more at stake than just your making it through the hostile landscape and surviving. You have to set up a colony to welcome the rest of humanity.

And to make it even more unique than the average survival, it isn't just the aggressive aliens that pose a threat, but the entire environment. A constant shifting environment built on Unreal Engine 4 where the world around you goes through changes and you have to find ways to overcome all of those novel challenges. It's available now, though it's not complete and it's an early preview, so be mindful of that. You can download a free preview if you just want to check out what it's about and see how a science-fiction FPS melds with survival game.

Deck 13 has finally released more than just concept art for their upcoming science-fiction version of Lords of the Fallen. The Surge now has two rather promising looking in-game screenshots.

The Surge is the second game from Deck 13 and is going to follow a similar open-world survival type perspective. It's set 60-70 years into the future when technology has turned against us. You'll get to utilize an exo-suit, which upgrades can be crafted for it to suit your play-style. It's not necessarily a military shooter, but you can certainly go in that direction.

You'll be able to harvest the technology of your enemies and mold it into parts for your suit, upgrading them to better survive and take on the various challenges in the world. And like Lords of the Fallen, it's likely to be very difficult.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Far Cry Primal is the number one selling game on the UK sales charts for the period ending on February 27th.

Perhaps it was the setting or even the promise of being able to live a somewhat true-to-life amalgamation of the violent and fearful lifestyle of a prehistoric human that led it to be an instant success. It sold like hotcakes overnight. Coming up close behind is Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2, something we expected to do fairly well, and it seems to be meeting expectations thus far.

Interestingly, Street Fighter V sunk down to the number 10 spot, which was previously sitting confidently as the second best selling game since it launched.

Gears of War 4 is coming closer to release, and with that comes a beta test on the Xbox One in the Spring of 2016. If you'd like to secure your place in that beta test then all you have to do is play Gears of War Ultimate Edition while signed-in your Xbox Live account by March 1st. So you only really have a few hours left to make sure you can play it.

Unfortunately we don't have many details about what'll actually be playable in the beta, but we'd imagine the first one will be a multiplayer-centric experience to test the networking backend among other things. A few games that have released recently have had issues when faced with large amounts of players all online at the same time. But of course they'll want to show-off how fantastic the graphics are at this point, since it's set to be a graphical showcase of the Xbox One's capabilities.

If you're interested, it's easy, that is if you happen to own the Ultimate Edition, if not, then you can wait patiently and enjoy watching others navigate the intricicies of the beta test this spring.

Games downloaded and played from the Windows Store seem to be a very limited and poorly executed experience when compared to using other launchers and platforms. The list of limitations are deal-breakers for many gamers, but Microsoft is acknowledging those disadvantages and are working towards updating their home-grown gaming experience.

Mike Ybarra, the Xbox technical director has responded to criticism on Twitter surrounding those features that are lacking, promising to fix the v-sync issue in a future update. One of the more pressing concerns was a lack of SLI or CrossFire compatibility with games from the Windows Store. Ybarra also clarified that support for those technologies works and that each game needs to separately support it. That being said, the profiles for Rise of the Tomb Raider which hasn't been available might not have been added to the Universal Windows Platform version, or NVIDIA's and AMD's drivers don't recognize the store at a lower-level.

This positive news follows similar comments by Phil Spencer about wanting to improve the entire PC gaming sphere from feedback and advice given by players. Behind the scenes, it seems, they're working hard at correctly implementing the features we all want to see, and they definitely have plans to improve.

The creative director for Turn 10 Studios, the developer that's behind the impressive and very popular Forza series of racing games says that we'll see something new about the franchise coming up this March. The information comes at a curious time, shortly after Microsoft announced their initiative to bring gamers on their platforms together, breaking through historic exclusivity-based walls.

The message alone tells us nothing, but previous actions by Microsoft seem to indicate a willingness to bring franchises from the Xbox One to the PC. We're already seeing an interest in making those titles available. Quantum Break is coming to the PC with much enthusiasm, as plenty more titles will eventually make their way to the PC, some even having been significant symbols of the console in the past. But it does make sense to expand to the exclusivity to across both their platforms, if for sales alone. Rise of the Tomb Raider sold nearly three times more than the Xbox One version despite the latter actually be profitable as well. So we might end up seeing news regarding either a historic Forza game coming to the PC or a future game having cross-platform compatibility. It's only natural.

And the advent of Windows 10 across all their disparate platforms, Universal Windows Applications and DirectX 12, it seems that the Xbox One is nothing more than a less powerful PC anyway. As each update is released, it runs more and more PC applications as it is, so why not take that capability and make the whole platform exclusive. It could help grow the entire Microsoft brand and instill more confidence in gamers with graphics that are more adaptive, with a wider selection of graphical options for a variety of levels of systems. Phil Spencer himself has been very adamant about breaking down previous barriers that have been in place, bringing together the two contrary world's. They aren't so different, after all.

Nintendo is going to get some huge attention this year at gaming-related events like Game Developers Conference next month, and E3 later on in the year in June. Their next-gen NX console is reportedly quite powerful, and according to the latest rumors, requires "near-zero modification" of Xbox One and PS4 games to get them working on NX.

The new rumors are coming from Dual Pixels, with some huge detailed spilled on Nintendo's next-gen console. Dual Pixels reports: "I don't have many details on the device itself but I do have some background for it and some PR techniques they will use for it. A thing to note about this device is that much of it's production was started in 2014 and many of the stuff I list here was outlined by the late Satoru Iwata before his passing. Hence in the company, the NX is considered the last project of their late president. Employees since his passing utter a phrase at the end of meetings and during idea brainstorms which is "岩田のために!" which roughly translates 'For Iwata!'".

Now, if you want the full skinny on Nintendo's next-gen console, Dual Pixels has quite the purported scoop. Here's what they had to say in detail: "The importance of this is that this "new" Nintendo is highly motivated in delivering a fantastic system and games, something that I quote from an employee 'have not seen this much forward momentum on a project since they launched the original Famicom'".

Doom is set to be one of the biggest releases of the year, but how will it perform on the ultimate gaming platform? Well, the idTech 6-based game runs entirely on OpenGL, which really changes things up. Why? Because AMD and NVIDIA optimize their drivers and goodies inside for DirectX, and with nearly all games being based on DirectX, id Software is changing things up with Doom.

Early benchmarks using the Doom alpha have been performed by GameGPU, where we see AMD dominating NVIDIA. These benchmarks are from an early build of Doom, without any platform-specific optimizations done, so things will only get better from here on out. As for the specs on the PC running the Doom alpha, this is what was used:

From these specifications, the benchmarks were run at 1080p (1920x1080), 1440p (2560x1440) and 4K (3840x2160). In both benchmarks, AMD dominates completely. AMD hits the 60FPS barrier in both minimum and average frames per second, with nearly all of its high-end and enthusiast GPUs. This includes the R9 290, R9 290X, R9 295X2 (dual-GPU), R9 Fury X, and R9 Nano. NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980 Ti fall behind the R9 290 - which is a strange thing to see indeed.

A new development regarding the trademark dispute between Ubisoft and EA regarding the word "Ghost" in relation to video games has just come up. It seems that EA has completely withdrawn their dispute, "without prejudice," meaning they won't be allowed to pursue legal action in the future regarding this issue.

At the beginning of the month, we found out that Ubisoft had filed a trademark for the word Ghost in conjunction with gaming, to help to identify their Ghost Recon series of games from the mind of Tom Clancy, specifically Ghost Recon: Wildlands. EA filed an opposition to Ubisoft's application on the grounds that their internal studio, Ghost Games was the first to use the word in association with video games.

Now it seems they've resolved to withdraw that opposition entirely, letting the trademark, if it passes through further scrutiny, become Ubisoft's. Because of the association with the trademark, it might have an impact on Ghost Games, forcing them to change their name, or it could have little to no impact depending on how strict Ubisoft is regarding their win. We had thought the battle could be long and drawn out, but it seems to have been completed amicably, which is a surprise.