Gaming - Page 1787

Microsoft announced that they've changed their internal policies regarding cross-console play, but there's been the question of whether or not it was actually possible. The president of Sony Computer Entertainment, Shuhei Yoshida, says that the technical part of having the two platforms work together in games would potentially be the easiest part of the process. In fact, Sony has had cross-platform play available with the PC since the PlayStation 2 days, so they're definitely not against such an idea.

Yoshida is all for allowing gamers to play together whatever the platform, they've been pioneers since Final Fantasy 11 (which is still operational by the way). But connecting to the PC is much more straightforward with it being a much more open network. Speaking to Eurogamer, he said that "Because PC is an open platform it's much more straightforward. Connecting two different closed networks is much more complicated so we have to work with developers and publishers to understand what it is they are trying to accomplish." But it isn't an insurmountable challenge at all.

He continued by mentioning that the technical aspects of it were the easiest part to overcome. The challenge lies in whether or not it's in their best interest, from a business perspective, to actually allow it. It comes down to policy and business issues more than anything. But at least it's possible, and we're bound to eventually see Xbox One and PlayStation 4 gamers enjoying non-exclusive games harmoniously. Or at least semi-harmoniously.

Skyforge, an MMO that crosses the line between science-fiction and fantasy letting you play almost as a god, has received a new update called Dark Omen, and it's all about improving the quality of life for your pantheon (the equivalent of a guild) and bringing a bit more content before they drop an even larger and more substantial update coming very soon.

Overall this update is a quality of life update. In the update they've created a new operations system where higher level players can combine their powers to fight off any invasions much more efficiently, and spectacularly too. They've made this easier to use, and much better looking too. An Elder God questline has been added, so you have a chance to learn the backstory of what it actually takes to become a divine Elder God on Aelion. That questline culminates in a showdown with a massive boss battle unlike anything seen so far in the game.

One of the issues that players have noticed is that of merging their pantheon of warriors with another. Sometimes growth meant teaming up with others, but there was no easy way to accomplish this. Allods Team, the developer, have added a new Pantheon Fusion tool that makes it much easier to join forces against the invading forces that are trying to wipe you out.

A new online collectible card game is coming out of the gates swinging, and wants to capture your attention in a way that no other game of its genre quite has just yet. Star Crusade: War for the Expanse gives you a massive overarching story, where you get to be in control of one of the six different, powerful factions struggling for power.

Star Crusade offers a deep and highly customizable card battle experience with more than 400 playable cards and multiple different types of playable modes. They've got single-player matches and competitive battles against friends or random people. Four-player play, sharing and gifting of your deck is all coming soon as well.

Competitive collectible card games are a genre that's been growing as of late. The popularity is now crossing over into the digital realm with the likes of Hearthstone continuing to gain momentum since it was officially released in 2013. It's quite the phenomenon really.

Modder Kaldaien is at it again with a mod for the recently released JRPG Disgaea. While a decent port, Disgaea still has some room for improvement, particularly on the visuals front, and that's what the 'Pretty Prinny' mod, as he calls it, is primarily focused on.

Among other things, it adds 'proper' V-Sync support and removes the 720p internal resolution cap as well as artifacts related to sprite smoothing. Pretty Prinny is only at version 0.2.1 at the moment, so expect lots more to come, including additional visual enhancements as well as performance and stability improvements. Tonight version 0.3.0 will be released with SSAO and MSAA support.

Hit the source to download the mod and for configuration and installation instructions.

The Unity engine is one of the singularly most used game engines in the world. They've been working very hard at making game creation a more accessible endeavor, and that's paid off tremendously. Unity has been updated to version 5.3.4, which is stable, gorgeous and full of easy to use tools.

Unity has to keep up with the pace of innovation, so they're also introducing a more widely available public beta program for their unstable, yet advanced, beta versions. Which is now up to version 5.4. At their keynote at GDC they said that they're very committed to the future and evolving the engine to keep pace with the rest of the gaming community, and in order to better serve their users they've opted to open up beta testing to everyone. This way more people get to play with,and find all the things that could possibly go wrong with new implementations of technology, or new tech altogether.

Right now they estimate that Unity covers around 30% of the market. And that's across the 25 different supported platforms. That's a lot of games and developers that have their hands in the Unity pie. And so they're making it even easier to build games with improved collaborative functions that let you save assets to a cloud-based system to be shared among a team working far apart. And there's a lot in beta 5.4 to like and want to share with others. Just look at the difference above from version 5 to the 5.4.

It's been a few months since the hidden Cortana functionality was accidentally found in the November Xbox One update, but it seems that the full functioning digital assistant is getting much closer to being released. And the Xbox boss is quite excited about it too.

The Xbox One already has a great voice command system, one that's evolved upon their successful Sync and other speech recognition technologies, but in order to bring it into parity with the rest of their brand, they need to bring Cortana, a true digital assistance, into the mix. There's no release date quite yet, but Mike Ybarra did say that it was "coming along great."

Cortana would be just another feature that the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo's current lineup doesn't have. Just how useful it would be for a primarily gaming (re)focused device is unknown. It also means you'll need a microphone in order for her to hear you, which is either Kinect or through a headset plugged into your controller (or USB port). It'll be interesting to see just what kind of commands will be available and how they'll be used on the Xbox One. Just using your voice to launch a game isn't exactly exciting, or new, so there's hope that something more is coming from the infusion of Cortana.

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward added in something very special when it came out. Aside from the great addition to the story, they gave us the ability to fly about the different locations of Hydaelyn with customizable winged mounts. The process to create those and really integrate them fully into the greater game was a bit more difficult than you'd think, and that process of animating the mounts is detailed in the newest Developer Diary video from Square Enix.

It was a challenge to make sure that flying was a smooth process that didn't detract from the beauty of the game. The designers had to decrease the overall amount of data while flying so there wasn't any stuttering. That and adding in an element of elevation was tricky, you can't have the controls be jerky or unintuitive.

The most important part, naturally, was introducing the Fat Chocobo as a potential aerial ride. But how does one make a gigantic creature like that capable of flight? Well, with the right motivation; cake. Check out the video, it's a very enlightening look into the creative processes that they go through to bring things to life.

Blizzard isn't done with StarCraft 2 just yet, and their next expansion, called Nova Covert Ops, will have three episodes of content with the first one coming on or before June 19th 2016.

There'll be nine new missions across those three episodes, where you'll get to play as November "Nova" Terra, who's a psionic ghost. You'll get to use your abilities to infiltrate bases and try to find out what happened to the other ghosts that seem to have disappeared. There's a large consipiracy for you to unravel here.

Being almost entirely story and character based, it's supposed to bring some interesting new elements into the fold, things that aren't traditional "StarCraft" at all. You'll also get a chance to use some experimental technology to properly complete those missions, and maybe even save the entire Dominion itself.

There was one particular race that we were very interested to see just how they'd be integrated into Total War: Warhammer, the Vampires. Who, by the way, they've been able to keep very quiet about up until now. And it's been worth the wait.

They are undeniably evil and even take pleasure in that fact. The Vampire Counts, here led by Mannfred von Varstein, you can watch as he raises your once dead army to use them to wreck havoc over anyone in their path. As would be expected you'll get to call upon death magic, necromancy and take a zombie dragon into battle. One can imagine that anything else dead can also become their pets, and possibly a lot more. They're the opponents that you won't want to face, but inevitably will have to. The Vampire Counts won't be playable right away, and will only make a playable appearance on May 24th due to a small delay.

GDC 2016 - Battlezone fans are quite excited for Rebellion's reboot of the game, as it'll be including support for not just the PlayStation VR - which has just had its $399 pricing and October launch window revealed - but Oculus Rift support, and DX12.

AMD's Chief Gaming Scientist Richard Huddy revealed during GDC that Battlezone will have DX12 support, and during an interview with VRFocus, Rebellion CEO and Creative Director Jason Kingsley said: "We are doing a lot of work on DirectX 12, and it really depends on how well Oculus works on DirectX 12".