Gaming - Page 1892

NVIDIA has just unveiled GeForce Now, its rebranded game streaming service that was until now, known as Grid. NVIDIA plans to compete against PlayStation Now, but at a much cheaper price point.

GeForce Now will be offering gamers the chance to stream games from their servers at 1080p 60FPS, blasting the titles to their Shield console, Shield Tablet, or Shield Portable. NVIDIA has more than 50 games on their GeForce Now service, with games like Alan Wake, Ultra Street Fighter IV, Grid 2, Dirt 3, Borderlands and multiple Batman titles. If you want to purchase games outright and play them instantly, you can get some hours pumped into titles like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Saints Row: Gat out of Hell and Resident Evil: Revelations 2.

NVIDIA is launching GeForce Now on October 1 in the United States, EU and Japan for $7.99 per month. The company is including a free three-month trial membership which will allow gamers to try out the service before they dive head first into it.

With the non-stop growth of digital downloads physical media has its days numbered, or not. According to GameStop CEO Paul Raines, "disc-based games will be around forever".

During a chat with Fortune, Raines added: "The market has seen physical music sales down 50 per cent from its peak and physical movie sales down 60 per cent from its peak, but even in a doomsday scenario, disc-based games will be around for a long time. I see a complimentary business where we sell discs plus download like the current console mode".

What about VR headsets? Raines had something to say about that too, adding: "Analysts believe there could be 10 million VR users by the end of 2016, and there are hardware forecasts of $30 billion by 2020. We're going to be the destination for VR". He said that GameStop customers will soon be able to stop by their stores to test out the three main VR headsets: the Oculus Rift, Sony's PlayStation VR and the HTC Vive.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 is a colossal failure: the game is riddled with glitches, terrible graphics, physical bugs and is just a heaping hot mess of bad game. But who's to blame? Taking a closer look reveals that Activision should have known better.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 is one of the most memorable failed games in recent memory, and it only just launched. It's been hailed as broken on all accounts and is utterly embarrassing in every capacity. If anything Tony Hawk 5 should be sold as a $10 game on the Xbox LIVE Arcade--that Activision charges $59.99 for it is quite telling. Even the game's 7.7GB launch day update, which is actually bigger than the total 4.4GB of the game itself, couldn't fix things. Yes, it's worse than Assassin's Creed: Unity. But why? How did this happen?

The game crashed simply because Activision once again handed off a big-name franchise to another amateur developer. The publisher did this with the last-gen ports of Black Ops 3, leading to the game's entire campaign being gutted out on Xbox 360 and PS3. Despite the fact that Robomondo Games was responsible for the critical failure that was Tony Hawk: Shred, the $120 game with a skateboard controller, Activision went ahead and entrusted Tony Hawk 5 to Robomondo. And it completely backfired.

It should come as no surprise, but Riot Games is working on a new game. It probably isn't something new to know, but until now it had not been confirmed if the League of Legends developer was going to follow up from one of the biggest eSports games ever.

Riot Games' R&D boss Ryan Scott took some questions from fans about what's coming next for the developer, and when asked about what he's working on, Scott said: "No deets for a while, but trying to get the 's' in the Riot Games name". Another fan questioned Scott's Twitter profile, which said that he's a "turn-based strategy and FPS fan", eluding to which genre Riot Games is working on. Scott added: "Genre-wise [it's] pretty broad. The important thing for us is to make something meaningful, not a 'me too' game".

I'm not sure if I'd have confidence in Riot only working on a single game right now, but I'd say there are multiple games in the pipeline and the one that is closest to being revealed, is being eluded to here. It would be silly for Riot to not want to release another game that will surely make the company hundreds of millions of dollars like League of Legends has and continues to.

While Konami continues to find itself between a rock and a hard place concerning its reputation in the gaming sphere, the overseas publisher has asserted that it's not giving up on AAA games. The Metal Gear brand will continue without Hideo Kojima, and console games won't be jeopardized in favor of freemium mobile schemes.

"We've said in the past that the Metal Gear brand will continue," said Konami's UK community manager Graham Day in an interview with GameOn Daily. When asked if Metal Gear can maintain its luster without Hideo Kojima at the helm, Graham responded in the affirmative: "Of course, Metal Gear can definitely continue without Hideo Kojima. Metal Gear is about the story, it's about the characters. We look at things like Metal Gear Rising and that was an example of the title being taken in a new direction by separate teams."

The Day also iterates that Konami wants to keep bringing games to the console realm, and a new mobile focus doesn't mean all other platforms will be shut out. "Yeah, we're still committed to console gaming. That's never changed. I think some things are being taken out of context. Just because [Konami] is embracing mobile gaming it doesn't mean everything else has to quit. Konami has a history of making the best games around, and that is something we'll continue and that won't change anything going forward."

In the current age of console gaming, we've seen this outrageous trend of carving out a portion of a game and only making it available to a specific console. It's called timed exclusives, and it's a new way to make exclusive content without actually having to make an exclusive game. Activision has done it with Destiny, Square Enix has done it with Rise of the Tomb Raider--but Bethesda has affirmed it won't be participating in this ridiculous charade with Fallout 4.

In a recent Twitter exchange, Bethsoft's VP of Marketing and PR Pete Hines officially declared that Fallout 4's content won't be locked behind a console-gate, suggesting that the game will be the same across all platforms. "We aren't doing a DLC exclusive with anyone," Hines said poignantly.

Bear in mind that Fallout 4 does have a $30 Season Pass that unlocks all of the game's planned DLC. Bethsoft isn't about to pull an Evolve and shell out multiple passes either; this is a one-off purchase that grants "all DLC ever released for Fallout 4".

Just how well did The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt do on the PC? Not too shabby; DSOGaming reports that from their calculations, "at least 30%".

In their recent article, GSOGaming said: "This means that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt sold, at least, 1.8 million copies on the PC. This basically means that the minimum percentage of the PC sales - compared to the total sales - is 30%. Again, this is pure speculation as we don't have the full picture here".

Then we have Karolina Gates from CD Projekt Red, who said that as of June 30, 30% of the sales were on PC. This means that the PC version of the game has been doing quite well, even up against the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game.

Fallout games have always been tremendous timesinks that demand hundreds of hours of play, but Bethesda has usually been pretty good about optimizing install sizes for all its games. Fallout 4 won't be any different: according to a listing on the Xbox Marketplace, Fallout 4 only weighs in at 28GB on the Xbox One.

While the file size hasn't been revealed for PlayStation 4 or PC just yet, most multi-platform games stay within the same storage requirement ranges. We shouldn't see any major discrepancies other than a few gigabytes or so difference. With a number of high-profile games releasing on the coming months, Fallout 4 fans can at least rest easy knowing they won't have to make too much room for Bethesda's post-apocalyptic adventure.

Then again, Fallout 4 doesn't really tap that well of incredible fidelity that we see in most AAA games, so the devs have a lot less layered data to optimize. The lack of pristine graphics should shave off a good portion of the game's required storage. Bethesda has outright admitted that they had to water down the graphics as a trade-off to maintain other parts of the game.

Xbox One owners have speculated for quite some time that certain features could dramatically improve the console's everyday performance, being led to believe that things like DirectX 12, Windows 10 implementation and giving developers access to the system's seventh core could change everything. With the help of Microsoft, one dev team has tapped the Xbox One's seventh core and reveals that the performance gains are anything but dramatic.

"Yes, we are using [the seventh core]," Larian Studios' co-founder and CEO Swen Vincke said in an interview with Gamingbolt. "Not a lot [of benefits] apparently but we are using it. You can only use 60 or 70% of it so that is not big of a difference. Essentially it won't make much of an impact."

Right now Larian Studios is working on a PS4 and Xbox One console port of the cRPG Divinity: Original Sin, and during the dev cycle Larian has spent a lot of time getting intimately acquainted with current-gen console architecture. The bump in processing speed granted by the Xbox One's seventh core didn't seem to help very much, despite the speculation that the extra core could be responsible for some Xbox One games hitting PS4-level performance.

In an age where free to play mobile games dominate the handheld gaming space, Sony is extremely reticent to release another PlayStation Vita handheld. At EGX 2015, Sony exec Shuhei Yoshida said that the current mobile climate "isn't healthy" for a new PS Vita because the Japanese gaming titan would have a hard time finding a foothold in the competitiv emarket.

"That's a tough question," Yoshida said when asked outright if Sony is considerating a new PS Vita handheld. "People have mobile phones and it's so easy to play games on smartphones. Nany games on smartphones are free, or free to start. So I hope, like many of you, that this culture of playing portable games continues but the climate is not healthy for now because of the huge dominance of mobile gaming."

Although the PlayStation Vita is a big part of Sony's next-gen PS4 ecosystem, with Remote Play letting gamers stream PS4 games right to the handheld, sales for the Vita have flagged in all markets except for Japan. This is largely due to Sony's favoritism for their native homeland, with Japan seeing a steady influx of quality games and content that just don't come overseas. This lack of focus has made many PlayStation Vita owners feel abandoned throughout the years.