Gaming News - Page 1884

We've now just had our first look at the new Unreal Tournament, with a bunch of detail talked about for the upcoming first-person shooter. There's a few videos you can get your hands-on, with the game's Art Director, Chris Perna, giving us a bunch of information.

All-in-all, there's 47 minutes worth of video from Epic Games' streamed reveal of brand new concept art on the next-gen Unreal Tournament. Perna discusses this in the video above, where he says they're going for a "Chris Nolan Batman Begins look" instead of a "Tim Burton Batman look". Perna wants "something more polished" with "more realism, without going over the top" and repeating what Epic "did with Gears of War and UT3" where those games were "dark and grungy".

Senior Designer Jim Brown jumps in, saying: "You start with a map that's just kind of the basic shell, and we just focus on the gameplay. Independent of us doing that, a lot of times, Chris and the art guys will make these little vignettes that are - what would you call them?" Perna continues: "There are many different environments in UT. There's going to be different colors and different environments, but what this does is give you, maybe, a quality bar. 'Hey, all those different things need to have a lighting quality and a mood about them that feels like this.'"

While on a research trip to Nepal, two Ubisoft developers experienced a legitimate ritual sacrifice of a goat. The two developers jetsetted off to Nepal for some research, as Nepal is the inspiration for Kyrat, the fictitious Himalayan setting of Far Cry 4.

Far Cry 4's Game Narrative Director, Mark Thompson and the Associate Producer on the game, Phil Fournier, made the trip with Vice's Krishna Andavolu. Once they arrived in Kathmandu, the group heard a rumor that there was going to be an animal sacrifice, so they found their way into the event. The sacrifice was made possible thanks to a man providing the goat on behalf of his family to Kali, who is the Hindu goddess of change and destruction.

The video, above, is the first of a three-part series that goes into the source material and inspiration behind the fourth outing in the Far Cry world. At Comic-Con, the Creative Director behind Far Cry 4, Alex Hutchinson, told the audience that another Vice documentary titled "The Vice Guide to Liberia" offered another inspiration, this one for the game's villain, Pagan Min.

Thanks to San Diego Comic-Con currently underway, we've just received the first look of the upcoming Ridley Scott-produced digital series, Halo: Nightfall. Microsoft, 343 Industries and Scott Free Productions have been working together, unleashing this trailer to the world just hours ago.

Halo: Nightfall is a live-action digital series with its story taking place between the events of Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians. At the center of it, is Agent Locke, who is a character that is new to the Halo universe. Locke leads a team of soldiers from the Office of Naval Intelligence as they are investigating terrorist activity on a distant planet known as Sedra.

The trailer doesn't inspire much, but we might just be seeing a bare tease of Nightfall, but let's hope things get better from here.

Respawn has just announced its new Titanfall DLC known as Frontier's Edge, but the company also took the time to tease that it is introducing something it is calling "The Black Market".

The Black Market is Titanfall's way of offering in-game currency, which will have two different sets of items that you can purchase: Burn Cards, and Titan Insignias. There are multiple sets of Burn Cards that are based around a theme, but the cards themselves you'll receive are random. There's a Weapons Pack, which should include some cards about weapons, for example.

The cards will be purchased using the new in-game currency known as "Credits". You can earn these credits by doing various things in Titanfall, with six ways of acquiring Credits: by winning a match, completing a match, for your first victory of the day, completing daily challenges, selling burn cards you don't want to use, and once you reach level 50, a portion of your experience will be converted into credits. You can only access The Black Market once you've reached level 11 in Titanfall.

EA has delayed a second game today, with the first being Battlefield: Hardline pushed back into sometime next year, but Dragon Age: Inquisition is also getting a little more time in the oven. Bioware's upcoming fantasy RPG has a new release date of November 18, 2014 - an extra month of waiting.

Executive Producer on the game, Mark Darrah, explains: "I'm writing to let you know that Dragon Age: Inquisition has a new release date of November 18, 2014 in North America (November 21st in EU). We appreciate the enormous support we've received from all of you to get to this point, and while this extra few weeks may not seem like a lot, I know the game you'll play will be all the better for it".

Darrah continued: "Since we began working on Dragon Age: Inquisition almost four years ago, our goal was to create the best Dragon Age experience ever. It was that goal that motivated many of our decisions: moving to Frostbite, bringing race choice and customisation back, improving tactical camera, building a team of characters whose relationships evolve based on your actions, and most importantly, crafting an epic, nation-spanning story that both draws upon past games and takes you to many new places in the realm of Thedas".

Electronic Arts has announced that it has delayed the release of the Visceral Games-developed Battlefield: Hardline until next year, citing that the development teams want more time to polish the game before it gets released to gamers across the world.

DICE's Vice President and Group GM, Karl Magnus Troedsson, explains: "Back at E3, we launched a beta for Hardline - we wanted to not only show you the game, but to let you play it for yourselves. Millions of you jumped in and had a great time. As a result, the Visceral Games team learned a lot from players about what they wanted in the game. We've been pouring over the data and feedback, and have already been putting a lot of it right into the game and sharing it directly with you".

He continued: "This feedback also spurred us to start thinking about other possibilities and ways we could push Hardline innovation further and make the game even better. The more we thought about these ideas, the more we knew we had to get them into the game you will all be playing. However, there was only one problem. We would need more time. Time that we didn't have if we decided to move forward with launching in just a couple of months". Troedsson said that the teams at DICE and Visceral Games wanted to spend more time on developing better innovation on the multiplayer side of things, as well as bake in "ideas direct from the community that will evolve the cops and criminals fantasy into a truly unique Battlefield Multiplayer experience".

We've all been there at birthdays or during the holiday season, someone gives you a gift card to a place you don't like and you silently think that gift card will sit in your sock drawer forever. GameStop has announced a new gift card exchange program that is powered by Cardpool that will let you trade those unwanted gift cards for credit for stuff you do want- games and accessories.

The new gift card exchange program allows users to exchange physical plastic gift cards and e-cards to get a digital GameStop gift card that can be spent online or in GameStop retail stores. The trade process is very easy with three steps to swapping unwanted cards for GameStop cards.

The page for the trade in program lets you check gift card balance, fill out your information to get a trade quote, and then get the GameStop card via email. It's unclear if this is a dollar for dollar exchange program; presumably, Cardpool is going to take a cut of the money in the trade.

One of the biggest issues Ubisoft had this year was gimping the PC version of Watch Dogs, something that a modder fixed in his spare time. Federico Rojas (or TheWorse) released a mod called 'TheWorse' that reverted the graphics on the PC version to what Ubisoft showed off at E3 2012, something that looked far better than the game did when it was officially released 2014.

Rojas explains in the release of TheWorse Mod version 1.0: "This is the last release of my modification. I did my best to improve graphics and performance as much as I could without degrading the quality". This release is split in two, the first includes the high resolution texture pack from another modded by the name of MaLDo, and the other does not include this high-res pack.

You can download version 1.0 of TheWorse mod for Watch Dogs right here.

We have been reporting on the still on-going issues over at Crytek, but things just got worse for the developer of Crysis. Tiago Sousa, Crytek's Lead R&D Graphics Engineer has left the company, joining the ranks of id Software.

Sousa is now working as the Lead Rendering Programmer on the new reboot of Doom and the engine that powers it: id Tech 6 game engine. Sousa was with Crytek for 11 years, so this is quite the loss for Crytek. According to Sousa's LinkedIn profile, he has contributed to work on CryENGINE 3, as well as all three Crysis games, Ryse: Son of Rome for the Xbox One, Warface and "undisclosed multiplatform projects".

Considering most of Crytek's UK-based staff have stopped going to work, and the studio isn't paying its staff on time, this is troubling times. This isn't considering that the studio has already lost key staff such as the game director for Homefront: The Revolution leaving, as well as its Development Manager, Ben Harris.

According to the latest research from SuperData, there is some serious money being made from MMOs. The top five subscription-based MMOs in the world as it stands are: World of Warcraft, Lineage 1, TERA: Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic and Lord of the Rings Online.

World of Warcraft leads this effort when it comes to revenues, with $1.04 billion made last year, securing itself a 36% chunk of the subscription-based MMO market share for 2013. Lineage 1 comes in at second place with $253 million for NCsoft and a 9% share, TERA: Online generated $236 million for NHN Corporation in third spot with an 8% share. Star Wars: The Old Republic sits in fourth place with $165 million made for EA with 6% of the subscription-based MMO market share, and Lord of the Rings Online made $104 million for Turbine, Inc. and secured them 4%.

Revenue subscriptions have dropped every year from 2010, from 30.6 million subscribers to 23.4 million this year. MMO publishers see this decrease in subscribers due to the increased offerings of free content, more payment tiers and microtransactions.