Gaming - Page 1776

The Coalition is making some great progress on Gears of War 4, bringing back the cover-based shooter to its overarching roots. Some new information regarding how the game will be played has surfaced. Notably a new cooperative play mechanism and just how the story will unfold.

Cooperative play has been a hallmark of the series over the year, where you and three other friends can play through the game together, suffering through some of the worst of times, and the best of times. That co-op has been reduced to only support two total players. Player one is always JD Fenix, and the second person can play as either Kait or Del.

Gears is now taking a page out of the book of some very successful series', where the action unfolds in real-time. That is, the entire story unfolds over a 24-hour period, which starts 25 years after the events of Gears of War 3. Does that mean that there's only 24 potential hours of gameplay? Possibly, but then again, the replay value is most notably going to be in the multiplayer.

A lot of controversy and speculation as to the health and the future of the Xbox One after the closure of Lionhead Studios. Phil Spencer used Twitter to help reassure fans that shutting down Lionhead Studios and Press Play studios don't mean the end of the Xbox, nor is it the end of the world, either.

Furthermore, he continued to explain how important first party studios are to their business model. "I'm proud of the games our 1P Studios have shipped on XB1," he told a fan via Twitter, "our plan is continue to build new IP and expand our franchises."

Despite the outlook seeming grim, closing of studios and consolidating resources is a normal procedure. Without further information as to why we can only speculate based on what we know. Which simply that a studio now no longer exists. Spencer further reiterated their commitment to strong first-party designs in another tweet, explaining that specific information just can't be released at the moment. "It's impossible to go into all the detail and I apologize for that. Just know I'm committed to our 1P."

According to Microsoft's former Xbox community manager, Raj Patel, Hello Games' upcoming title No Man's Sky looks "stale". With No Man's Sky explained as a "science-fiction game about exploration and survival in an infinite procedurally generated universe", I don't see how that can be.

In a few tweets, Patel said: "Every gameplay image I've seen of No Man's Sky looks like it could take place on the same planet. 'Infinite universe' eh? I don't see it". Then someone tweeted him, saying "procedurally generated games don't interest me too much after about an hour you've seen most possible biomes and creatures etc".

Patel tweeted a reply, saying "Yeah, I mean it has potential and COULD be great but from what I've SEEN so far, it already seems stale. I haven't seen the fun". Someone asked Patel "have you seen all hundreds of trillion planets or half a dozen?" with Patel tweeting back "I've seen everything that has been publicly shown. As my tweet indicated I'm commenting on what I've seen".

As a kid, I played the hell out of point-and-click adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Full Throttle, Leisure Suit Larry and Day of the Tentacle. DOTT holds a special place in my heart, so the news of Day of the Tentacle Remastered got me excited, and now we're nearly here - the day of its release.

Day of the Tentacle Remastered will arrive on March 22, with pre-orders now open on GOG.com with a 10% discount offered for the first two weeks of its availability. Day of the Tentacle Remastered will allow players to relive their youth through the game, all on modern hardware with new features that weren't in the original release - such as a new interface, in-game developer commentary and more.

The game is explained as: "Day of the Tentacle Remastered is all the adventure you may remember with an optional layer of sweet improvements on top. You can mix and match between the unmistakably 1990s pixely art and a fresh high-res coat of paint, remastered audio, and an all new interface. There are extra goodies in the Remastered release as well, including in-game developer commentary and a fully playable version of the original Maniac Mansion. Your pre-order also comes with three exclusive Day of the Tentacle wallpapers, available right away to fuel your anticipation".

We thought it was coming, and now the day is here - Kingdom Come: Deliverance has been delayed, with consoles to blame. Developer Warhorse Studios wants a simultaneous release on consoles and PCs, and has delayed the PC version of the game so it can do just that.

PR manager Tobias Stolz-Zwiling said earlier this month: "The idea was to release the game in the summer and then to follow up with the console versions. Right now we are still indie developers but we are in negotiations with publishers to, well, we need someone to bring the games into the shops, so we need a distributor, and he kind of wants us to synch it with the console versions. We are still in negotiations, we will see. Best case for you will be summer this year for the PC version and then with the follow-up for consoles; or if the publisher wants us to synch it we will release everything let's say by the end of the year, so we will see about that".

But now Polygon is reporting that Kingdom Come: Deliverance has been delayed, so that Warhorse can release the game onto the consoles and the PC at the same time.

It's always nice to see the inner creative processes that go on when making a video game. Getting behind the scenes can help you to appreciate the game even more if you hadn't before, or even help give insight into the difficulties a developer goes through to bring us the final product. The latest developer diary for Final Fantasy XIV is all about the narrative and creating the overarching story.

The creative process is different for everyone and is always, almost, a sacred process to be cherished. In the case of the stories that are in Final Fantasy XIV, the main loremaster, Kazutoyo Maehiro, doesn't ever write scenarios around characters, but that they naturally emerge as he's working.

The end result is a very well put together narrative that's coherent with not only the entire Final Fantasy XIV story, but with past games from the franchise. It all comes together quite nicely. And this MMORPG is one that will likely continue to call upon the inspiration from previous games to make for a very personal and exciting experience.

SEGA and Creative Assembly are going to delay the launch of Total War: Warhammer for a month longer than they originally intended. It'll now be launching on May 24th 2016 instead of the earlier April 28th release date.

The developers are very excited about the game and want us to be able to get the most out the game. Namely they want it to be as polished as possible before they release it, hoping to avoid the pitfalls that some recent releases have suffered. "This could be the best Total War game we've ever made. We don't want to rush it," said the creative director, Mike Simpson.

This is the first foray into high fantasy for Total War, with a lot of excitement surrounding it. That said, because it's a PC only game, and previous Total War games have had some performance issues, they're looking at making sure that it's optimized on a variety of hardware. Specifically, they want us PC gamers to have a chance to enjoy it at 60FPS in even the most massive of battles at the highest of settings.

The Khronos Group's open source Vulkan API launched publicly last month, which brought some to wonder if Star Citizen would come to support it. Development subscriber Kyran inquired on exactly that for the '10 for the Chairman' Q&A video series, to which Chris Roberts, Chairman of developer Cloud Imperium Games, responded with what could be interpreted as a yes.

"We have looked at Vulkan; we're pretty excited by it," he says. "So we are considering our options between Vulkan and DirectX 12. We haven't made a full decision."

He continues: "Vulkan has some advantages, the biggest one being as long as it works properly that it can work on a PC but also work on Linux and work on other platforms, whereas DirectX 12 is specifically just for Windows. They are both very similar architectures; essentially Vulkan's not that different from what Mantle was originally set up to be. So we're considering it. You never know whether we will do DirectX 12 or Vulkan first."

Far too often publishers milk games franchises to the point where the cash cow dries up. We've seen this with Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed franchise, whose lukewarm reception led the publisher to rethink its annual strategy. Thankfully, Take-Two Interactive affirms that we won't ever have to worry about Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption games going down this path.

In a recent presentation in New York, Take-Two president Karl Slatoff discussed why the company doesn't ship out annual sequels. "We don't intend to change annual strategy because of product fatigue. We create franchise value and games have to be managed deliberately. It's tempting to have continuous releases and milk a franchise as far as you can, [but] we've seen that fatigue in other franchises in the games industry. With almost every single franchise for us, the latest release is bigger than the one before."

Take-Two Interactive understands that there's a delicate balance when it comes to the games industry. A high-profile AAA has to be carefully curated and managed in the marketing sector, and it's important that the companies build up as much hype and interest as possible. If you saturate the market with too many franchise releases, interest starts to wane, and the whole thing falls apart rather easily.

In the games industry, it's only natural that any high-profile online game is accompanied by a rocky launch. In The Division's case, though, dastardly gamers have already found a way to grief other players by simply standing in their way.

In The Division, players can stand in the way of doorways and block them off from other players. Ubisoft made the decision to make all in-game avatars solid rather than allowing players to pass through one another, which is standard for any huge MMO-style online game. This oversight has caused a substantial amount of grief in the community, and armed trolls with an effective way to frustrate just about every would-be Division agent in New York.

Sadly, griefers can inhibit progress right at the game's start. Right after the opening cutscene, players start off in a safehouse that has only one exit. By simply standing in the way, griefers are pretty much denying access to the rest of the game, taunting other players by dancing and waving in place.