Gaming - Page 1893

It looks like Ubisoft's latest Rainbow Six shooter will continue the awkward trend that the games industry is moving toward, specifically the FPS genre. Rainbow Six: Siege might have microtransactions despite being a full-priced AAA game--a move we expect to see in F2P shooters.

Rainbow Six Animation Director Scott Mitchell hinted at the the news in a recent interview with Angry Joe, letting slip that Ubisoft's tactical shooter will leverage microtransactions in the form of "Rainbow Credits". "So the in-game currency is called Renowned, but we also have Rainbow Credits that can go towards unlocking things," Mitchell said, then asked an off-screen Ubisoft PR rep if he could talk more about the credits. The rep responded with a curt "no".

Renowned is the game's unlockable progression system, and Mitchell describes it as "essentially an in-game currency that you can use to buy skins, operators and weapons". Angry Joe caught the slip and pounced on it, trying to glean more info, but none was offered. Then he went on to ask if at any point gamers would be able to spend real money to buy Renowned or items, and Mitchell responded with a telling "we'll actually be going into this later with the DLC plan and all that kind of stuff very very soon."

In what has been described on Reddit as "a rough week for starcraft," the last seven days has seen the scene completely rocked by retirements, arrests, scandals and the extremely sad announcement of terminal cancer.

Starting with the arrests, news was posted just a few days ago about an official Police investigation which has now been thrown into public action, seeing PRIME head coach Park 'Gerrard' Wae-Sik and professional gamers Choi 'YoDa' Byeong-Heon and Choi 'BBoongBBoong' Jong-Hyuk arrested alongside nine other unidentified individuals. These arrests are allegedly due to major match-fixing scandals, seeing players lose games on purpose for financial gain - something that was also found out and acted against in the North American Counter-Strike scene, but not on this scale as there were no arrests made or charges placed. For more information on the StarCraft betting scandal, check a comprehensive thread here.

Sitting alongside the unexepcted arrests was the shocking and saddening announcement that YouTuber and eSports personality John 'TotalBiscuit' bain was not only closing his StarCraft II team, Axiom eSports, but has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Footage of the cancelled Battlefront 3 sequel has surfaced, giving us a look at the true successor of the franchise that we'll never get to play.

The ill-fated Battlefront 3 sequel originally started development in 2012 by the studio Free Radical, and it really looks to be everything we'd ever want in a Battlefront game. A NeoGAF user has tracked down new footage for the canned Battlefront 3, but bear in mind the video is from a 9 month old PC build of the game, and it's an early build at that.

The game looks as if it features much more than DICE's Battlefield-esque FPS action, including immersive galactic dogfights--real Rogue Squadron-level dogfighting with multiple tiers and massive Star Destroyers hulking in the background--as well as authentic third-person combat in the vein of the original series.

Xbox Australia plans to show off live Halo 5 gameplay footage on the world's most gigantic aerial screen in a bid to promote 343i's new shooter.

Microsoft really wants the world to know about Halo 5, and the Redmond-based tech giant is pulling out all the stops in one of the most memorable promotional showcases in gaming. At 7:30PM on the eve of Halo 5's launch, October 26, Xbox's Australia division will broadcast live Halo 5 gameplay onto a massive floating screen 2,000 feet in the air.

The huge floating screen has a projected path down the coastline from Curl Curl to Coogee, where it will fly back and forth a single time. The team boasts that the screen can be seen from over 3 kilometers (9842 feet) away. Plus Xbox affirms that the broadcast won't be sent from the ground: a fan will be picked to play the game remotely via helicopter, hinting that the player will be able to use the giant floating viewscreen. "A lucky fan in Australia will play "Halo 5: Guardians" from a helicopter flying over Sydney, as gameplay is broadcasted via a screen suspended from a second helicopter," reads the official announcement on Major Nelson's website.

Although Harmonix's latest entry in the acclaimed Rock Band franchise has been met with much fanfare and applause, the game still pushes an incredibly massive library of individually-priced downloadable songs onto players.

Nowadays video games have been plagued with a huge assortment of tricks and tactics aimed at separating you from the cash in your wallet: microtransactions, season passes and DLC being the main breadwinners. One of the biggest moneymakers has been music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero--and Rock Band 4 continues this trend in earnest.

Rock Band 4 has a total of 1973 DLC songs that are individually marketed at $1.99 a piece, and to buy all of them you'd rack up a tab of almost $4,000--or $3926 to be exact. That's a lot of money for any video game, let alone an interactive music simulator like Rock Band.

Silent Hills could've been one of the best horror games ever released, but the game will most likely never see the time of day. But what does filmmaker Guillermo del Toro have to say about the cancellation of his horror game that he collaborated with Hideo Kojima, the mastermind behind the Metal Gear Solid franchise?

During an interview with Bloody Disgusting, del Toro said that some of the stuff they were working on in Silent Hills was spotted in The Last of Us. He said: "We had a great experience and had great story sessions with hundreds upon hundreds of designs. Some of the stuff that we were designing for Silent Hills I've seen in games that came after, like The Last of Us, which makes me think we were not wrong, we were going in the right direction".

"The thing with Kojima and Silent Hills is that I thought we would do a really remarkable game and really go for the jugular", del Toro continued. He added: "We were hoping to actually create some sort of panic with some of the devices we were talking about and it is really a shame that it's not happening. When you ask about how things operate, that makes no f**king sense at all that that game is not happening. Makes no f**king sense at all. That's the randomness that I was talking about".

We've known for quite some time that Nintendo's new NX platform would have its own handheld controller, but new reports indicate that the second half of the NX could be a 3DS-like on-the-go handheld rather than being tethered to a central console.

Information gleaned from Nintendo's NX patent filings have already told us quite a bit about the Japanese console-maker's plans for the future. We know that the NX is made up of a stationary console and a handheld controller, and that the NX will have cartridge-based games much like the 3DS (which further adds credence to a mobile handheld). But it looks like the controller will be a cross between a 3DS and a Wii U.

"The exact shape of the NX hardware isn't yet clear," reads a report on the Wall Street Journal. "People familiar with the development plans said Nintendo would likely include both a console and at least one mobile unit that could either be used in conjunction with the console or taken on the road for separate use."

With regular sales on its entire library of games and huge widespread platform for communities and gamers, Steam is seen as the leading ecosystem for PC gaming. But the trade-off lies in Steam's customer service, which is extremely lacking--and that's putting it lightly.

If you have a specific problem with a Steam game, you have two choices: just let it go and avoid the game altogether, or contact Steam customer support. The latter of which can be the entry point to a whole new can of worms, leading to days upon days (sometimes weeks) of waiting for a reply. The platform still doesn't have a phone system, so millions of users are at the mercy of a support ticket system built around e-mail communication.

Valve knows that Steam support is pretty bad, and the company says it's working on optimizing the service, and plans to have some fixes in place by Christmas. "It's meant that training people in third-party has taken longer than we expected," Valve's Erik Johnson told Kotaku. "It bugs us, but it is what it is. We think we'll have the support wait time down to an acceptable point by Christmas time. That's our goal. It's a function of training up more and more people answer customer issues. We're not there yet. It's getting better internally; it's just that it hasn't yet translated to great support for users. We're gonna get there, though."

The Star Wars: Battlefront beta was seen as a huge boon for EA and DICE, with a huge portion of gamers having a blast in the 20v20 Walker Assault skirmish or Drop Zone PVP chaos. But all in all the beta was quite limited, but a recent leak shows how little content the beta actually offered.

As with any beta release of a popular AAA game, dataminers completely scoured every inch and cranny of the beta's core files, finding a treasure trove of content that will be released in the final game. The unearthed code was formatted for legibility by Reddit user me_and_my_johnson, and reveals the full array of heroes, weapons, traits, upgrades, maps and everything else that EA and DICE have planned for Battlefront's release this November.

Be aware that the list contains spoilers and is an entirely massive and comprehensive amount of data consisting of over 17 pages in Google Docs. One of the most amazing surprises is Leia's hero ability--we knew she'd be in the game from previous leaks, but her super is pretty amazing...however we won't spoil the fun.

While Valve has started to ship its new Steam hardware out to pre-orderers across PC and Mac, the tech only actually works on one platform. When Mac owners get their hands on Valve's new streaming box and controller combo they'll be sorely disappointed to find the tech doesn't function on their platform--but Valve is on the case, and they're making it right.

Due to "temporary software issues" Valve affirms the Steam Controller and Steam Link PC game streaming set-top box aren't compatible with OS X. The digital storefront giant says that these issues will be fixed via a number of firmware updates that will roll out in the next few weeks, but until then Mac users are out of luck.

To make up for the inconvenience and disappointment, Valve is starting to gift free copies of its huge $100 Valve Complete Pack that contains every released first-party game it released. Email correspondence between a frustrated Mac owner and Valve reveals more details: