Gaming News - Page 1711

In an effort to better serve its player base and use gamers' ideas to pave the future, Sony is always asking its users what kinds of features and functionality they'd like to see added on the PS4. The ability to play physical PlayStation 3 games on the PlayStation 4 is on the top of that list, but that feature probably isn't ever going to see the light of day.

When asked if PS3 games would ever be playable on the PS4 Sony exec Shuhei Yoshida responded with a simple "no". This is a common response from Sony on the subject of backward compatibility, but in the past Yoshida said that the feature would be quite challenging...but not necessarily impossible.

"PS3 is such a unique architecture, and some games made use of SPUs very well," Yoshida said all the way back in June when Microsoft revealed the Xbox One's backward compatibility feature. "It's going to be super challenging to do so. I never say never, but we have no plans."

The eSports market is really lighting up thanks to awesome startups like Unikrn, but big business is getting involved too with the likes of Activision securing the former CEO of ESPN, and the co-founder of MLG to head its eSports venture.

But according to SuperData, the eSports market should be worth $1.9 billion by 2018 - for now, it sits at $748 million. Not too bad for professional gamers, eh? This is being driven by bigger and bigger sponsorship and advertising, which equates for a nice $579 million of that total from this year.

Brand advertising accounts for 77% of the market, which SuperData notes could reach $1 billion by 2016. SuperData's Director of Research and Consumer Insights, Stephanie Llamas, said: "eSports are becoming more mainstream and that has attracted traditional media channels like TBS and ESPN. So far, fans have had to seek out platforms to watch tournaments and players, but now people can stumble upon eSports while flipping through channels. Even old-fashioned brands are taking notice and there is a growing interest in advertising to the coveted millennial male demographic on a medium they know well".

Nintendo today unveiled a new step towards its plans for the future, announcing its first smartphone game, a unified new cross-platform account service, and the replacement loyalty program for Club Nintendo.

The Japanese console-maker will make its debut into the freemium mobile market with Miitomo, a free-to-play smartphone game that sports microtransactions. The Wall Street Journal notes that Miitomo sounds more like a "communications app" built around Nintendo's Mii avatars, which will let users interact with one another via Miiverse-style digital characters. Interestingly enough Miitomo seems to give the Miis their own personalities and lives, animating them in specific ways and letting them interact with other players, but it will all be built around actual player data. Sadly Miitomo has already been delayed until March 2016 so Nintendo can build up awareness on the game, and is the first of five smartphone games Nintendo will launch leading up to March 2017.

The new Nintendo Account hub service spans across all platforms, including console, mobile and PC. Using the new service users will be able to upload saved data and content onto the cloud and share it across different platforms. We've known for a while that Nintendo was going to make a service to unify all platforms, and this will carry over to the new NX console.

Sony's PlayStation 4 has traditionally dominated console sales charts over Microsoft's Xbox One and Nintendo's beleaguered Wii U, and that trend shows no signs of slowing. At Paris Games Week 2015, a Sony exec let slip that the PS4 still reigns supreme in terms of global consumer adoption and has overshot the 25 million sales milestone by a margin.

"I don't think there's a better time to buy into PlayStation - PS4 particularly. Our installed base now is well over 25 million," said Sony exec Michael Denny in an interview with Games Industry Biz. "That gives us a massive community of gamers, supported by a lot of new community features. We've got great games out there, more coming through. We're looking forward to 2016, it's an exciting time."

Interestingly enough, VG Chartz notes the PlayStation 4 has sold 25.45 million units worldwide, but Sony probably has more specifically updated sales data on-hand. In light of the stalwart sales, the Japanese console-maker bumped its fiscal year PS4 projections from 16 million units to 16.5 million units sold.

Hello Games' procedurally-generated space sim No Man's Sky is one of the most anticipated games in recent memory, and now studio founder Sean Murray finally has a release window planned for the game.

According to an announcement made at Sony's showcase at Paris Games Week, No Man's Sky will be available on June 2016 for the PlayStation 4. We still have no word on when the PC version of the game will release, and we might even see another timed-exclusivity deal for No Man's Sky on PS4. Hello Games' founder and boss Sean Murray also announced the news on the PlayStation Blog, and affirms that Sony and the studio will reveal a ton of new information in the coming months.

"Since E3 our release date has now become clear. The game, our ambition and some key developments have fallen into place. It's incredibly hard work, but development is going really well," Murray said, iterating that No Man's Sky is the studio's swan song, their ultimate pipe dream fantasy made into a reality. "This is a game that means everything to our team. I have wanted to play something like No Man's Sky since I was a kid, and many of you have told me you feel the same. For all of us, we get one shot to make this game and we can't mess it up. Our small team knows the world is watching, we've come from the bottom and we don't take it lightly."

Xbox One gamers have been looking forward to the console's new Xbox One Experience update for quite some time. Not only does the update bring much-needed UI changes, it introduces backward compatibility, opening up new doors for a host of yesteryear games. While we've been told in the past to expect the update in November, Microsoft has finally revealed a specific date when the NXOE will roll out.

During last night's Halo 5 livestream celebration, Xbox boss Phil Spencer unveiled that the substantial Xbox One update will hit on November 12, just two days after the anticipated launch of Fallout 4. The update is set to completely optimize the Xbox One in a slew of different ways, including offering backward compatibility across 100 different Xbox 360 games, letting users set their own specific customized button-mapping profiles via controller settings, and a cleaner, much more responsive Xbox One UI.

One of the biggest additions comes with Windows 10 integration, which will come wrapped up within the console's big update. In order to bring the new OS to the Xbox One, Microsoft developed a console-specific kernel called OneCore, which aims to boost productivity and further optimize the Xbox One's cross-platform unification into the Windows 10 ecosystem. OneCore will also plant the seeds for DirectX 12 integration onto the console, which could boost the console's ESRAM performance by 15%.

Bethesda has just confirmed that Fallout 4 will be preloading onto the Xbox One, PS4 and PC very soon. In an official post on the Bethesda Softworks Twitter page, the developer said: "We can confirm that #Fallout 4 will have pre-loading on Xbox One, PS4, and PC so you have a few days to download the game before 11/10".

When exactly can we expect it, if Bethesda says gamers will have "a few days" before launch to get it preloaded? Bethesda boss Pete Hines posted on Twitter, saying: "We will be preloading for Fallout 4 on PC, Xbox One, and PS4. Exact day/time TBA. All should be available a few days before launch day".

As for the size of Fallout 4, we should expect it to weigh in at around 28GB (on the Xbox One at least). It might be a bit bigger on other platforms, however.

We've known for a while that both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will have mod support for Fallout 4, allowing console owners to tap the wealth of potential that user-created mods bring to any Fallout game. But now Bethesda has confirmed that the mods themselves will still need a PC to create.

Bethsoft exec and wise Fallout guru Pete Hines revealed the news in a Twitter interaction, iterating that mods will indeed be playable on consoles, but the PS4 and Xbox One won't be getting the mod tools required to create mods.

Fallout 4's modding suite will be pretty expansive and matches the exact same software that the studio used to create the game. Sadly users will have to wait until 2016 before the modding tools are released. "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."

Despite being more powerful than Microsoft's Xbox One console, Sony's PlayStation 4 leaves much to be desired; its Jaguar APU is quite outdated and matches up to yesteryear PC builds in terms of performance. But it looks like Sony might consider refreshing the PlayStation 4 with new hardware to meet and go beyond the 1080p 60FPS standard.

In a recent interview with Japanese publication 4Gamer, Sony exec Masayasu Ito said that the PS4's x86 architecture opens up the possibilities for expanded hardware in the future. "The PS4's x86 architecture makes the console forward compatible, making it possible to incorporate performance enhancements required at any time," Ito said, answering the query on a possible enhanced PS4.5 console. "[As such], the possibility of a high-performance version of PS4 is an idea that can be considered."

It's been no secret that consoles have always lagged behind PC's in terms of hardware, and consoles traditionally ship with outdated hardware. With today's blistering-fast evolution of tech, that disparity has become pretty obvious, especially with mid-range PC's easily maintaining 1080p 60FPS, and let's not even get into 4K gaming which is becoming more mainstream with 4K displays dropping in price as each month passes. It'd be great to see the PS4 adopt dedicated GPU and CPU solutions to help significantly boost performance, but that would likely compromise the console's unified 8GB GDDR5 RAM system and call for a complete overhaul.

Thinking back to when I started 'gaming' in 1994 and beyond, games like WarCraft II, Age of Empires and Red Alert series filled up my childhood gaming experiences, with Real Time Strategy (RTS) games being king of the times. Advancements saw awesome games like StarCraft: Brood War and WarCraft III blossom into flourishing eSports titles, played around the world by gamers who were vying for thousands of dollars in prize money.

Skip ahead to 2015 - where is the RTS scene right now? As written by Evil Genius' Geoff 'iNcontroL' Robinson, it would seem that RTS is now a completely dying genre. With Robinson pointing out StarCraft as "the last stand," he makes mention that while we have Call of Duty titles being sequentially released yearly, when's the last time you saw consistent, competitive, RTS releases?

With WarCraft 4 quite possibly far away on the horizon, Robinson made mention that he believes "the RTS genre is just not what people get excited about these days," reasoning that "RTS games require patience, deep thought, speed, a bit of a gamble and so much more."