Gaming News - Page 1681

Chinese gaming giant - which now happens to own League of Legends - will have AMD's TressFX technology powering Monster Hunter Online.

Not only that, but AMD will be bringing over a number of performance optimizations, too. Tencent Games will release a patch later this month for Monster Hunter Online, injecting AMD's TressFX technology. According to AMD, there are a bunch of new features headed to Monster Hunter Online, including TressFX, Eyefinity, Radeon Software updates, and more. Here's the full list:

The 2016 roadmap for Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers has been released by the developer, and they plan on adding a lot of cool stuff by the end of the year. Mostly, though, they want to concentrate on making it as playable and awesome an experience as possible.

What's on the roadmap? Improving the underlying netcode, decreasing lag, putting in a new animation system, speeding up rendering, create a new and better soundscape, put in better physics, and FPS element and a whole lot more. There's a long laundry list of what they want to do. Just keep in mind that this is a roadmap, and not everything is magically going to be implemented at the snap of a finger. Game development, especially in such a fantastic environment, takes time to do correctly.

My favorite feature they're adding is physically based rendering into the engine. That means more realistic looking lighting that shouldn't take too big of a GPU hit. The worst feature? Perhaps that they're considering using NVIDIA's GameWorks. Well, it's only a bad idea if it's implemented poorly. If they take the code and customize and execute it properly, then it could potentially be a good thing. Potentially.

When the first trailer for The Division came out at E3 in 2014 it was a spectacular example of the future of graphics. But just like Watch Dogs before it, the graphical fidelity slowly declined in quality as more trailers and gameplay snippets were released.

But now we're closer to release than ever, with the closed beta happening at the end of the month, which means a lot of hands-on time for various publications out there. Thankfully some astute gamers have taken the time to compare, as best as possible, the graphics between the original trailer and what's playable now.

The original showed us some very fantastic dynamic scenery with snow that melted over time and particle and weather effects that were just stunning. Models were full of polygons and textures were extremely sharp. Supposedly Ubisoft did downgrade the graphics slightly in order to make sure it ran at smoother framerates. But just how bad is the downgrade? Not terrible, actually.

We might not be getting Half-Life 3 at any point in the near or far future, but at least Valve has officially sanctioned a new expansion pack that's going to tell the story of what happened after the events in Half-Life: Opposing Force.

The story goes that the creators of Propekt took a huge risk and actually sent a copy of their concept to Valve, specifically to Gabe Newell himself. And once the included demo and the artistic direction and majesty was actually seen, then it was only natural to give the go-ahead. And now Valve is letting Richard Seabrook sell the expansion pack on Steam for $9.99.

The expansion is more than just the typical modification, and adds a significant amount of story, and back-story, to the universe. Gordon Freeman is being overwhelmed in Nova Prospekt and likely won't last long, until at the last minute you, Adrian Shepherd, get transported by the mighty Vortigaunt to save the future savior of mankind.

The latest patch for Diablo III on consoles was released four days ago that included a lot of new content and enhancements. What also seemed to tag along were issues of micro-stutter and menu-lag that have been simply incorrigible.

But Blizzard is aware of the issue and is asking everyone who experiences the problem to head on over to their forum to fill out a bit of information to help them track down the particular issue. At the moment the folks from Blizzard can't quite replicate the problems, and that's why they need your help.

So head on over to the forum and answer the following questions to help them. Diablo III is still one of the better ARPG's to grace consoles in a long time, despite its relative age.

The EA Vault is being opened to everyone with an Xbox Live Gold membership on the Xbox One starting next week. That means that anyone that meets those requirements will get access to the 14 games that have made their way into the vault recently.

That free access is for a limited amount of time, however, and will last from January 14th through the 24th. But that still gets you access to all the games that have been placed in the vault, and some of them are actually still quite enjoyable. You'll find Battlefield Hardline, Dragon Age: Inquisiition, Titanfall, FIFA 15, Madden 15, Battlefield 4 and more.

If you want regular access to the EA Vailt, and to the other features of EA Access, it's around $5 a month or $30 per year. There're other benefits as well, like being able to play games a few days before the actual release and giving you 10% off of EA games should you decide to make the purchase. This is one program that the PlayStation 4 doesn't have, as Sony has said it didn't see value in the EA Access program.

Codemasters will be hosting a session at GDC 2016, where they will be talking about their EGO Engine 4.0, which has support for DirectX 12.

The description of the GDC 2016 session teases: "Codemasters present a post-mortem on their new rendering engine used for F1 2015 detailing how they balanced the apparently opposing goals optimizing for mainstream processor graphics, high-end multi-core and DX12. The F1 2015 engine is Codemasters' first to target the eighth generation of consoles and PC's with a new engine architecture designed from scratch to distribute the games workload across many cores making it a great candidate for DX12 and utilise the processing power of high-end PC's".

It continues: "This session will show the enhanced the visuals created using a threaded CPU based particle system without increased the GPU demands and also cover the changes made to the engine while moving from DX11 to DX12. We will also discuss the graphics effects added using the new DX12 features Raster Ordered Views (AVSM and Decal Blending) and Conservative Rasterization (Voxel based ray tracing) adding even greater realism to the F1 world".

This will come as a surprise to everyone... yeah, probably not. The best-selling game of 2015 was Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, according to the latest data from market research firm, NPD Group.

In the US, the Call of Duty franchise has been the top-selling franchise for the last seven years. But, each year, the COD franchise hasn't topped the list of best-selling game, especially against Grand Theft Auto V in 2013. Black Ops 3 didn't launch until November 6, taking just two months to secure the best-selling game of 2015 award. According to Activision Communications Manager, Scott Lowe, the Call of Duty franchise has sold over 250 million copies to date.

As for the games that were also in the charts with Black Ops 3, we have Madden NFL 16 with second place, Fallout 4 with third place, and Star Wars: Battlefront in fourth position. Also included in the list, were NBA 2K16, Minecraft, Mortal Kombat X, FIFA 16, and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

Can you believe The Division is so close to release, that Ubisoft is launching the beta of The Division on Xbox One on January 28? PC and PS4 gamers get it 24 hours later on January 29, with the beta closing up shop on January 31.

Ubisoft's official Twitter account for The Division announced the news, tweeting "Your mission is about to start. The Division Closed Beta starts January 28th! Register on thedivisiongame.com/beta". The company also took to Facebook to announce the news, with a new "RPG Gameplay" trailer released recently, which we've got embedded above for your viewing pleasure.

The Division is getting its very own Xbox One bundle from Microsoft that gives you a 1TB Xbone combined with the game and a 14-day Xbox Live Gold trial so you can actually get online and enjoy the cooperative RPG to its fullest.

By pre-ordering the bundle (or the standalone game itself) you'll have guaranteed access to the beta that's going to kick off on January 28th, letting us all band-together (supposedly) to take back New York City in a format that, on the surface, looks very similar to Destiny. The gameplay should be different and hopefully is designed in the spirit of other Tom Clancy games, and of his literary works.

Playing The Division at E3 last year was a treat, though the frozen streets were surprisingly sparse. There's scuttlebut in the community about downgraded graphics from what was initially shown, but the examples that are coming out still do look good even if they aren't up to the pretty visuals of the first official gameplay trailer. This definitely isn't another Watch Dogs debacle, at the very least. If that's any consolation. So pick your poison and pre-order, or do the prudent thing and wait for it to release and be reviewed. Ubisoft has promised us that the PC version won't be just another port, but a game that they'll actually optimize so it runs well and looks spectacular, as it should on high-end PC's