Gaming News - Page 1742

Explained as having an "odd mixture of damage, control and mobility" by Curse in a spotlight video, the Skeleton King is shaping up to be a formidable force on Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm battlefield.

Set as a warrior and team tank, this extra-tall hero comes with a trait which enables him to still partially function even after death, a 'skeletal swing' which deals damage and slows enemies, 'Drain Hope' which serves to drain a foe's hit points over a four second period and 'Wraith Walk' which enables you to travel as a ghost for a short time, allowing you to teleport to it before the time runs out - similar to an ability as seen in Sylvannas. Finally, his first ultimate allows you to create a medium-range barrier in order to lock all friends and foe within for a few seconds.

The other ultimate on offer is named 'March of the Black King' and puts your Leoric on a rampage, marching forward and swinging his weapon. If these abilities interest you, Heroes of the Storm is a free to play multiplayer online battle arena game and can be found here.

Ever wondered how some professional gamers keep their cool for so long at live events? Adderall is the answer, according to Kory 'SEMPHIS' Friesen (Nihilum and CLG Red coach) in a recent interview with Mohan 'Launders' Govindasamy at ESWC 2015.

The topic came about when Friesen was asked about a match and the crazy communications that went down during this performance. Alongside telling the interviewer that he doesn't "even care," Friesen went on to explain that "We were all on Adderall. I don't even give a fuck. It was pretty obvious if you listened to the comms. People can hate it or whatever."

Said to help those with ADHD focus, admitting to Adderall use may land players in hot water with the tournament organizer, ESL. With a harsh stance on drugs, ESL's rules read: "To play a match, be it online or offline, under the influence of any drugs, alcohol, or other performance enhancers is strictly prohibited, and may be punished with exclusion from the ESL One."

The development of Dead Island 2 looks like it has been bitten by a zombie, with Deep Silver saying that it has parted ways with the developer behind the game, Yager.

In a statement, a representative of Deep Silver said: "With Dead Island 2, Deep Silver has always been dedicated to delivering the sequel that Dead Island fans deserve. After careful consideration, today we announce the decision to part ways with development partner Yager". As for what's happening with Dead Island 2, Deep Silver said that it promises to "continue working towards bringing our vision of Dead Island 2 to life". The studio finished by saying that they "will share further information at a later stage".

We should hopefully hear more about Dead Island 2 in the near future.

We only just reported that Warner Bros was changing its internal review policies after the mess that is Batman: Arkham Knight on PC, but now we're seeing that Rocksteady isn't releasing the updated version of Arkham Knight on the PC until fall 2015 - so, September - December, 2015.

Batman: Arkham Knight's DLC on the PC will be delayed, with WB Games saying: "Our continued focus on getting the right PC fixes in place for the main game has had an impact on the development of all DLC content for the PC version of the game. This means that the Batman: Arkham Knight - Batgirl: A Matter of Family DLC will not be available on July 14th for those who are currently playing the PC version of the game. We apologize for the delay and only want to make sure that any content that we offer is up to the standards that PC players expect".

The company apologized to its fans in a post, where it said: "Again, we would like to apologize to you, the fans, and let you know that we are taking full responsibility for releasing a product that did not meet our quality standards, which is why we suspended sales of the game as soon as we understood the issues". As for future releases, we should hopefully not have to worry, with WB Games adding: "We can also assure you that because of this latest launch, we are modifying the internal review process for all of our games. For those who are waiting for the updated version of the game on PC, please know that we are working on this every day. For the players who are continuing to play Batman: Arkham Knight on PC, fixes are continually being made to the game as we await the final updated version".

With Ubisoft learning from its Watch Dogs crap at E3 a few years ago, the company is now showing games off at events on their target machines. But which platform are the sales being made on? The PS4 and PC!

According to Ubisoft's own numbers, for the company's fiscal year, which ended on June 30 - the PS4 makes up 27%, while the PC chews up 23%. The Xbox One lags behind with 11%, while the Wii and Wii U only make up 3% of Ubisoft's sales. This is a big swing in the last year, with the fiscal 2014 numbers showing that the PC only made up 14%.

Considering Ubisoft said a few years ago now that the piracy rate on the PC was somewhere in the vicinity of 93-95%, the sales of their games on PC are only getting stronger. And that's with worse PC ports in the last few years, following the mess that was Watch Dogs, oh and Assassin's Creed, oh and Far Cry 4, and so many more games that have been not as good as they should've been, on the most powerful platform.

With Sony winning the current-gen console race in terms of both performance and sales of the PlayStation 4, Microsoft reportedly has a trick up its sleeve to boost performance on the Xbox One later this year, according to the developer behind The Technomancer, Spiders.

Spiders' CEO, Jehanne Rousseau, a French game studio, said that Microsoft will soon be boosting the CPU performance on the Xbox One, something that will help developers meet their targeted performance goals. When GamingBolt talked to Spiders' CEO recently, Rousseau explained how the studio will squeeze additional performance out of the Xbox One for their upcoming Mars-based, post-apocalyptic RPG, The Technomancer.

Rousseau said: "We are not using it yet but this is only a matter of time! This is very interesting for us to have access to this processor. We will use it to do a part of our computations to smooth the frame rate. In fact we designed our new engine to be very flexible about the number of processors. With mainly in mind the numerous PC designs, but this will also be useful for this 7th processor".

We've seen Mario in all of his glory on Unreal Engine 4 not too long ago, but now the infamous plumber who never seems to be a plumber, he's now appearing in Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4-powered tech demo 'A Boy And His Kite'.

The tech demo runs beautifully well, and while Mario seems to be running at a very weird speed, this is just a tech demo with a bit of modding applied. Still, the beauty of Unreal Engine 4 is shown off incredibly well in this demo, but I now just want to play an Unreal Engine 4-powered version of Mario, dammit.

Now that Mirror's Edge Catalyst has been unveiled, we're finding out more information on the free-running first-person non-shooter. During an interview with Polygon, Senior Producer on Mirror's Edge Catalyst, Sara Jansson, said: "In Mirror's Edge Catalyst, you won't be using any guns at all".

Jansson continued: "We've completely removed that aspect of the game. You can't even pick them up". EA and DICE have reportedly developed an all-new combat system that emphasizes melee combat, where Jansson explained it in detail with Polygon: "Faith will fight, but she doesn't kill. Now the fighting is more of an extension of the movement. It builds on the flow. It fits a lot better with the game mechanics. When Faith is in flow, when she stitches together move after move without failing and keeps her momentum going, she's actually invulnerable to bullets. That can keep her out of harm's way. It's only when she stops that she can get hurt".

If you've got a spare $200, you could look at grabbing the Mirror's Edge Catalyst Collector's Edition version of the game, too. As for the release date on the game, we're looking at a February 23, 2016 release for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC.

The Coalition, the studio behind Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, has said that the PC version of the game, is not a port. The developer has said that while it's super-enhanced, it's "authored at a much higher rate".

We have 4K textures in nearly everything, and for the PC they could just "turn off those clamps and unlock it fully, and the world just becomes super crisp". The studio were teasing the game at Comic-Con, where Gears of War: Ultimate Edition was shown off in 4K on a huge 70-inch TV.

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition is an exclusive Windows 10 release, where it will be making use of DirectX 12. This means we're going to have improved performance when 4K is turned on, but we're also going to see 90 minutes of new campaign content for the PC version of the game, remastered Dolby 7.1 Surround audio, and much more.

The launch of F1 2015 hasn't been perfect, with some users reporting performance issues on the PC version of the game. There's no support for NVIDIA's multi-GPU SLI technology. We've seen the game running on PC at 1080p 60FPS, where it looked quite good.

Some users were quick enough to have the day-one patch rolled out to them, but Codemasters' Community Manager took to Reddit to write: "Hey everyone, just wanted to hop in and say we're aware of a lot of the issues users are facing at the moment and the team are working on getting a lot of these bugs squashed as fast as possible. As always we really do appreciate your feedback and patience with us while we get these sorted".

The day-one update for F1 2015 has fixed up a bunch of parts of the game: