Gaming - Page 1875

Epic Games has unleashed a new bit of gameplay footage for its rather amazing-looking MOBA Paragon, showing off some killer hero abilities.

The clip is short but rather sweet, and gives us a crash course in sci-fantasy chaos. We're introduced to six distinctly stylish characters and their deadly abilities, all of which can be combined for strategic synergies.

There's Howitzer, a robot that can spawn mini clones; Sparrow, the bow-shooting rogue who rains down a torrent of arrows on her foes; Gideon, who uses arcane magic to teleport across the map and slam down huge comets from cosmic rifts; Dekker, who wields a futuristic staff powered with electric doom that can trap enemies in a containment fence; Steel, a hulking automaton who can throw up huge defensive shields; and Grux, a rhino-slash-dino that wields dual clubs and unleashes fiery earth attacks.

It seems no one is safe from the mighty DDoS anymore, and you don't even have to use anyone's bandwidth to accomplish that feat either. A flaw in WordPress's pingback feature has allowed a layer 7 (the application layer) DDoS take down, and effect, nearly 26,000 different sites using the CMS.

The attackers are flooding the sites with HTTPS requests, in this case pingbacks, that the server will log to the database and try to process. Being HTTPS means that more resources are being used to establish an SSL session, which devotes those resources to those tasks. Enough requests and the site can slow down to a crawl because the physical server just isn't fast enough. Not as much network bandwidth is needed to send these packets, so at the network layer it may look like normal traffic. But even 10,000 HTTPS requests per second can take offline even a modestly powerful server.

Thankfully the solution is relatively simple. Just turn-off pingbacks on your site altogether. At the very least change your .htaccess file to whitelist only the known and good IP addresses that are within your own community, those that aren't part of a botnet. Apparently the application layer DDoS attack accounts for around 13% of all DDoS attacks according to Sucuri. That's a lot more than you might think.

Bethesda recently dropped a megaton nuke onto the Commonwealth by revealing the first wave of Fallout 4's DLC packs. The announcement not only triggered a wave of anticipation but also rocketed Fallout 4's season pass to the number one spot on Steam's best-seller list.

There's a very simple reason Fallout 4's season pass is selling like hotcakes. Bethsoft made some key changes to the game's all-access pass to reflect its new expanded DLC roadmap, hiking the price to $50. But the price isn't instantaneous, and gamers still have up until March 1 to grab the pass at $30, which accounts for the huge influx of pass purchases.

Bethesda's grace period strategy has worked out quite well, and pretty much every Fallout 4 player wants to grab the season pass for $30 before it jumps to $50. The devs promise that "more than $60 worth of Fallout 4 add-on content" is planned for 2016, and if you buy the pass at $30 you still get access to the full shebang--the first three DLC packs and every pack afterwards.

Activision knows that the multiplayer is what really sells the Call of Duty series, so they've taken the multiplayer-only approach from the older consoles and released a Multiplayer Starter Pack for Black Ops III for $14.99.

Even though have quite the large budget for creating a truly spectacular single-player productions, with triple-A actors and a story that could rival many good movies (but admittedly aren't always fun to play), the true fun is in the competing with your friends, and insult-hurling strangers across the Internet.

This lowers the price of entry into the competitive world of Call of Duty and lets you play the fun bits without having to have the extra large single-player campaign taking up precious hard-drive space. Of course, you won't be able to enjoy the delightful Zombies game mode, either.

NVIDIA is on a roll when it comes to game franchises arriving on their GeForce Now service, with Tomb Raider launching on GeForce Now... and even better, it's completely free.

NVIDIA adds that this is "the first of many Square Enix titles coming to SHIELD", teasing that "Sleeping Dogs, Lara Croft Guardian of the Light, Quantum Conundrum, Murdered Soul Suspect, and more that will be released soon on SHIELD for GeForce NOW members. Keep an eye out for SHIELD Tuesday updates!"

Right now, GeForce Now features over 80 games that you can play right now on Shield, with more major publishers stepping on board. Janet Swallow, Vice President of Licensing Worldwide for Eidos Label at Square Enix explains: "Square Enix is delighted to join the NVIDIA SHIELD platform and enable instant access for gamers to stream our award-winning franchises like Tomb Raider with GeForce NOW".

NVIDIA has made it official, announcing that its partners will be bundling free copies of The Division with certain GeForce video cards. It all kicks off this week and lasts for around a month with the deal taking place throughout the US, Canada, most European countries, and a few Asian countries.

Which GeForce cards will include a free copy of The Division? You'll be glad to know the GeForoce GTX 980 Ti, GTX 980 and GTX 970 will include a free copy, as well as the GTX 980 for notebooks, and the GTX 980M and GTX 970M-powered notebooks. The expensive GTX Titan X isn't included, and neither are the GTX 960 and GTX 950 nor are the GTX 965M and below for notebooks.

Earlier today we reported that NVIDIA has over 100 million GeForce gamers, with the company excited for the future of VR gaming. The company also announced record quarterly, and full-year revenue riding a huge wave of success in nearly every aspect of its business.

While speaking to The Guardian, Valve's veteran coder and designer Robin Walker, who has been working on the Steam Controller for three years now, explained that the company has been trying to make its hardware "more like software".

Walker said that the design team at Valve tried to visualize the controller as a piece of physical software, where it could be adjusted and tweaked to perfection. Walker added: "We're very interested in trying to make hardware more like software. With a traditional controller, people think of it as a solely physical object: you build the hardware, you build a thumbstick and the thumbstick says 'I'm being pressed right', and that information goes to the game".

She continued: "But there's actually a huge software layer that's doing a lot of work: how you interpret and filter for things like my thumb slipping off the pad; or if you want a character to move sideways, well, the reality is no one moves their thumb perfectly horizontally, so how do you adjust for that? It's all software work".

The original Deus Ex was one of the best first-person RPGs of all time, with its creator Warren Spector becoming a household name amongst gamers. Well, the legendary game designer has joined the developer of System Shock 3, Otherside Entertainment.

Spector joins Otherside Entertainment as the Studio Director, after being the founder of Ion Storm in the 90s, creating Deus Ex. He also worked on other iconic PC games like Wing Commander, Ultime, and even Thief. In 2005, Spector joined Disney to work on Epic Mickey, a steampunk Nintendo Wii title. Now at Otherside, Spector will be working on both System Shock 3, and Underworld Ascendant.

Spector talked with GamesIndustry.biz, where he said he was excited about working on System Shock 3. He said: "I've loved working with students as Director of the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy in the University of Texas' Moody College of Communication. But when the opportunity to have a bigger role in bringing Underworld Ascendant to life, as well as playing in the System Shock universe once again, helping to bring these games to a 21st century audience, I just couldn't say no. Working on System Shock was one of the most fulfilling things I've done in my career and it's hard to describe how much I'm looking forward to sharing with players what SHODAN has been up to since the last game was released".

Epic Games has been doing some great things for the community, announcing its second round of Unreal Dev Grants to 10 more contributors.

The developer launched its $5 million Unreal Dev Grants initiative nearly a year ago, with its second round of academic and educational funding for contributors. Education Evangelist at Epic Games, Luis Cataldi, explains: "A few months ago we awarded more than $75,000 in educational grants to individuals creating outstanding learning resources for Unreal Engine 4. We couldn't be happier with the results, and so today we are issuing $100,000 to instructors, tutorial creators, book authors and formal educators whose noteworthy contributions are helping people achieve success with Unreal. Keep it coming, folks. We love and support these amazing efforts".

As for the recipients, here's who will be receiving money from the recent round of funding:

The Division's DLC will be coming to the Xbox One a full thirty days ahead of the PlayStation 4. The latest timed exclusivity deal follows a long-running partnership between Ubisoft and Microsoft, which has since culminated in multiple promos like early access to The Division's beta tests.

A new promo video from Gamestop revealed the news, saying that "The Division content on Xbox One will be delivered 30 days before Sony will see it." We're not sure exactly which of The Division's DLC packs are timed exclusive to the Xbox One, but we're betting that the first three paid DLC packs--Underground, Survival, and Last Stand--are bound by the agreement.

It's interesting to see Microsoft continue pushing timed-exclusivity deals in an attempt to move more consoles. Sony's PlayStation 4 has dominated over the Xbox One, forcing Microsoft to change its traditional competitive approach and unify Windows 10 PCs with the Xbox brand. This approach hasn't worked too well for Xbox in the past, so I'm surprised to see it resort to these old tactics.