Gaming News - Page 1713

The Star Wars Battlefront open beta is nearly wrapped up, with DICE announcing that the first-person shooter will receive four post-release expansion packs, which is all part of the $50 season pass. Considering DICE said there would be no microtransactions, this is quite the fork in the road.

These expansions haven't been detailed, nor do we have a release window, but EA teases that they will be "filled with new content". EA is giving season pass holders a couple of reasons to plonk down $50, where Star Wars Battlefront gamers can enjoy a two-week early access to the expansion packs, and an exclusive "Shoot First" emote.

The season pass to Star Wars Battlefront is nothing new for EA, with the company really driving the post-release content home with their Battlefield franchise. This means if you buy Star Wars Battlefront Ultimate Edition, and the $50 season pass, you'll be paying a total of $119.98.

Roberts Space Industries has opened a free trial of Star Citizen's Arena Commander module, letting would-be space pilots test their mettle with intergalactic dogfighting and simulations for a full two weeks.

Now the devs originally opened up the free trial for those who watched CitizenCon 2015, but we have you covered even if you weren't able to check out the livestream. Simply enlist and sign-up here, and then enter CITCONFLIGHT2K15 in this field here.

Test pilots will have access to a slew of ships to choose from, and will get a good feel of the game's free-roaming and ship-to-ship combat. The Star Citizen trial will last up until October 25, so if you sign up now you'll get almost two weeks of free play.

343 Industries has just released the official launch trailer for Halo 5: Guardians, giving a tease at the events that made Master Chief go rogue and trigger an intergalactic manhunt.

The footage is a delicious mix of in-game action and cinematic flair, giving viewers a satisfying look at the new Spartan abilities like the devastating ground slam, as well as setting the somber tone of the campaign. The montage has it all--first-person chaos in a battlefield of Covenant baddies, vehicular insanity with explosive Scorpion tanks, new weapons being teased, and a glimpse at the high-tech Promethean overlords that look as deadly as they do stylish.

Sadly we don't get to see Blue Team in action very often in the trailer. It's most Locke's new Fireteam Osiris ripping and shredding through snowy precipices, skillfully gunning down baddies like a hot knife slides through butter. As an avid fan of the Halo books I'm more interested in sticking with the classic Spartan II's, but the trailer does allude to the exact cause of Master Chief's disappearance, hinting at a mysterious mission with the rest of Blue Team.

Roberts Space Industries has just put another notch on the belt of Squadron 42, the first-person shooter module of Star Citizen, by announcing some serious Hollywood talent for the game.

Gary Oldman of The Dark Knight Trilogy, Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame, and Mark Hamill who should need no introduction (and was featured in the Wing Commander games made by Chris Roberts) have joined Squadron 42 with their likeness and voice talent. RSI also announced that they will have John Rhys-Davis, Andy Serkis, and many more joining the cast. Oldman will be playing Admiral Ernest Bishop, but we'll have more updates on the game and hopefully its development soon.

Squadron 42 is due out in 2016.

We know that Sony is ahead of Microsoft in this generation of consoles, but to hear it directly from the boss of Xbox feels weird. During the 2015 GeekWire Summit, Xbox boss Phil Spencer had some choice words on the future of gaming, Microsoft's competition with Sony and Nintendo, and more.

When asked about whether Microsoft could beat Sony with the current generation consoles, Spencer said: "You know, I don't know. You know, the length of the generation... They [Sony] have a huge lead and they have a good product. I love the content, the games line-up that we have. One thing that probably I didn't realize as much as I should have when I started in this role was the impact that the launch had on our team here in Redmond, the Xbox team".

So what's Microsoft's goal with the Xbox One? For once, the company isn't trying to beat Sony, as they just want to reach as many consumers as possible with their platform. Spencer continued: "Every time I sit down and I do a product review, mostly every time, the team comes in with surprise and delight around the momentum that they have, more than I'm able to add. And when I see that transformation of a team that's questioning the leadership of the organisation to a team that's motivated by the customers that we have and their ability to delight them, I see a team that's making amazing progress. [Backwards compatibility] was one".

The Uncharted series is a staple of gaming on the PlayStation, but did you know that around 80% of PS4 owners haven't played an Uncharted game? That's a number that is too high for Naughty Dog.

During an interview with MCVUK, Naughty Dog's Community Strategist Eric Monacelli talked about the upcoming Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, where he said: "We did a lot of research and discovered that about 80 per cent of the people that own a PS4 have never played Uncharted, period. That was one of the reasons why we thought remastering it would be a good idea". He added: "The other reason is we decided we wanted to do it; especially when we got The Last of Us Remastered done, we thought 'Oh man, this would be cool if we could go back'".

Considering the success behind The Last of Us, the hints of Naughty Dog's next big project could be surprising. Monacelli teased: "We tend to work on one game at a time. Uncharted 4 is what everybody's working on. After that, we're going to be working on Uncharted 4 DLC. Beyond that, there's been tons of ideas bandied around - everybody knows the rumour about The Last of Us 2. There could potentially be - who knows? We could go back to Jak and Daxter 4 if it seems right, or there could be something else in the future on our horizon. We tend to work with an idea always on the board and then once we have time to devote the right amount of attention to it, then we'll tackle it".

Sony's PlayStation 4 remains triumphant over this generation of consoles, with its long-standing sales streaks only intermittently broken up by the Xbox One. Faced with the PS4's momentum and the system's new price drop to $350, Xbox boss Phil Spencer doubts whether or not Microsoft's Xbox One can even catch up--not to mention overtake--to Sony's console.

At this year's GeekWire Summit, Phil Spencer was asked if he thinks the Xbox One can beat the PS4. "You know, I don't know," Phil Spencer answered with candor. "In terms of the length of the generation, [Sony] has a huge lead over us and they have a good product. [But] I love the content and the games line-up that we have. I'll say we're not motivated by beating Sony. We're motivated by satisfying our current customers and gaining as many customers as we can."

The Xbox One's disastrous E3 announcement seriously harmed the trust that gamers had in the company, and thus pushed them towards the PlayStation 4. Spencer went on to chronicle how the original Xbox One announcement was a catastrophe for the company and how he came in to pick up the pieces.

Studio Wildcard, the developer behind ARK: Survival Evolved has come out talking about a new update promised for next week, where they said: "Hello Survivors, It's been a long week here at Studio Wildcard as the programming team has been grinding to get the DX12 version ready for release".

They continued: "It runs, it looks good, but unfortunately we came across some driver issues that we can't entirely tackle ourselves :(. We've reached out to both NVIDIA and AMD and will be working with them to get it resolved as soon as possible! Once that's tackled, we'll be needing to do more solid testing across a range of hardware with the new fixes. Sadly, we're gonna have to delay its release until some day next week in order to be satisfied with it. It's disappointing to us too and we're sorry for the delay, really thought we'd have it nailed today but we wouldn't want to release ARK DX12 without the care it still needs at this point. Hang in there, and when it's ready for public consumption, it should be worth the wait!"

SO it looks like the DX12 version of the game will be delayed for a while, with Studio Wildcard adding: "After we found out it was heavily dependent on drivers and the hardware vendors progress we slowed ours a bit. It's still being worked on, but we have no plans on releasing it until it at least runs better than the DX11 version. And that is a hard thing to generate an ETA for".

The Witcher 3 has just been updated, dragging it up to v1.10 with the patch weighing in at up to 15GB on the consoles and between 6-15GB on the PC. But it's the changelog that has us surprised, with CD Projekt Red including an insane 13-page, five-part changelog.

You can check out the elaborate changelog on Steam, with the studio saying there are over 300 improvements in the v1.10 patch. As for the improvements, there are a lot of them, so we're not going to paste them all here. However, we will include just a handful:

Most gamers have their attention placed directly into Star Wars Battlefront right now, but there's a huge Xbox One exclusive first-person shooter launching later this month; Halo 5: Guardians. Halo 5 has been reported to be running at a 'dynamic resolution' of 1080p (meaning it will scale up and down to 1080p depending on the on-screen action) at 60FPS.

343 Industries and Microsoft have announced that Halo 5 has gone gold, meaning that 343 Industries' work on the game is now finished - most likely for now, with a huge day-one patch to come in my opinion. The developer will continue to work on Halo 5, but it has some of its studio shifted over into the development of Halo 6 already.

Halo 5 producer Josh Holmes explains: "Of course launch is just the beginning. Our dedicated live team will be focused on supporting the game with monthly releases of new content and experiences". When it comes to the length of the single-player campaign, we can expect the 15-mission campaign to take somewhere between 8 and 12 hours to complete. Of course, Halo 5 is going to be huge on the multiplayer front, so expect all of the carnage to take place there.