Gaming - Page 1912

Halo: Reach is finally on the Xbox One through backwards compatibility, but it's not all roses for the newest game to be revived. The story is still intact and the graphics are still more than acceptable, but the framerate can't even reach Xbox 360 levels at the moment. Players everywhere are complaining of the poor performance.

But that's perhaps expected given the added overhead of running the game in a virtual machine, or emulator. This is a new implementation that'll take a bit of time to mature before performance is near a 1:1 ratio or even higher. That being said, the Xbox One generally is around 10FPS less than the Xbox 360 version in the same level. That's not insignificant.

What's more is that performance still takes a hit when your gameplay is played back through the "Theater Mode", though higher than live gameplay. That's supposed to be saved gameplay, so it should hit the same framerates, even though it doesn't. Curiously the Xbox 360, again, takes no performance hit.

Over the holidays, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII got some love on PC with a new patch that adds support for extra high resolutions. Six new ones in total are now supported: 3840 x 2160 (4K), 3200 x 1800, 2880 x 1620, 2560 x 1440, 2400 x 1350, and 2160 x 1215. Note you can't select a higher resolution than your monitor supports for supersampling purposes.

As well, in response to negative user feedback about not being able to boot the game in Offline Mode, you can now do just that. Square seemed to think Steam Cloud support meant Offline Mode couldn't be supported too, but now all is clear and the game can be booted regardless of whether you have a connection or not.

Hit up Steam for the patch.

Far Cry Primal just received its official ESRB rating. The rating itself isn't so high at only Mature, though the synopsis provides some fairly gruesome details of what to expect, and it definitely isn't something you'd want your kids or younger siblings playing. We knew it was going to be violent, but perhaps not quite up to whats being described in the synopsis.

The game will feature blood and gore, intense violence, nudity and sexual content, though the last part won't be explicit, per-se. Based on the setting itself, it makes sense to include all manner of activities that might be conducted by our ancestors, so it's not unexpected. And of course we don't know just how these graphic scenes will be depicted, but they're graphic enough to warrant the rating.

We all know that there are some pretty damn intense young gamers out there, thanks to hugely popular games like CS:GO and League of Legends - but just how different are their brains?

According to brain scans from around 200 adolescent boys, evidence popped up that the brains of compulsive video gamers are very different. Chronic gaming is associated with hyperconnectivity between several pairs of brain networks, reports PsyPost. PsyPost said: "Some of the changes are predicted to help game players respond to new information".

Some of the other changes "are associated with distractibility and poor impulse control", thanks to research done by University of Utah School of Medicine, and Chung-Ang University in South Korea, was published online in Addiction Biology on Dec. 22, 2015. The study said that obsessed gamers are so consumed with gaming that they subsitute eating and sleeping in order to play.

Crytek has been in the headlines for their work in VR, but Warhorse Studios used Kickstarter to get their CRYENGINE-powered Kingdom Come: Deliverance off the ground - with the developer showing off some new graphical prowess.

Warhorse Studios has shown off Kingdom Come: Deliverance with SVOGI, with the video above showing you the difference between the SVOGI being enabled, and disabled in the game. Crytek's implementation of SVOGI is quite good, with the developer providing some details on the voxel-based global illumination technology:

Overview

I wish I didn't have to write stories like this, but unfortunately, it just happens. Reality Pump Studios, the developer handling Vendetta: The Curse of Raven's Cry, says that anything above 30FPS doesn't add to the gaming experience.

On the Steam forums, a fan asked if the studio would be optimizing its game to add SLI support - to which they replied: "On the one hand it is quite understandable, that a customer who spent 600+ bugs on a high-end card (e.g 980Ti) expects that a game runs faster than on a 2 years old (e.g.780 GTX) - on the other hand ... if you put two or four engines in a car it will be probably not run faster than with one powerful engine. It will for sure be more heavy and bigger, consume more fuel and be very expensive. Please notice, that the developers of the well known Benchmarks receive any support, money and any hardware they want from the video card manufactors ... we received the last free video card 5 years ago, never ever any money and have to purchase video cards like an end-user without any discount in retail".

It makes sense, as small studios don't receive much help in the way of hardware - but the next bit is the nail in the coffin for me. Raidor continued, adding: "And I may add something: it was not our intention to create a graphic benchmark. VCR is a complex RPG with unique characters and story driven. Our focus is on interesting quest chains (which are very difficult to create) and not on frames per second. Beside this I thing that anything above 30 FPS does not matter for the gaming experience. And on my PC i7, GF 780GTX the game runs with 4K never below 30 FPS. No idea what it does on a GF980ti â€" I heard it is sometimes slower".

Someone out there has managed to beat Fallout 4 without killing a single person, even the key characters that seemingly must be taken out in the name of the story. This is the first example of pacifism in a post-apocalyptic world that's ended peacefully.

Kyle Hinkley didn't want to give into the usual temptations and violence inherent in video-games, or at least he wanted to show you that in some open-world games there are truly a great number of different ways to play. Fallout 4 was even touted by Todd Howard as being a game that's inherently violent and one where you're expected to kill. Especially in the hardest mode, Survival.

And to prove that it's possible, Hinkley documented the entire thing to show that he did indeed get zero kills. There were some tricky situations that needed to be played a few times, to figure out the best non-violent solution, but every plot decision can apparently be made without violence. You can watch the whole attempt at his YouTube channel.

The highly anticipated new Mass Effect game may be delayed following possible internal strife at BioWare.

EA's upcoming Mass Effect: Andromeda is a fresh start for the franchise, and aims to completely reinvent the renown sci-fi saga for the current age of gaming. Shepard's mythos has been told, and now BioWare is spinning up something new for a targeted release in 2016. Although gamers are generally enthusiastic about the new game, the lack of solid information or visuals has tingled our collective warning bells, and many have suspected the game won't be ready in late 2016.

The possibility of a delay was reinforced by the departure of key BioWare dev talent. Senior Development Director Chris Wynn recently announced that he'll be leaving the Mass Effect: Andromeda team for unspecified reasons. "It is with a heavy heart today to say that I am moving on from BioWare and Mass Effect: Andromeda, and returning to the USA," Wynn wrote on Twitter.

More than 20 years later and the original Doom is still putting hardware to the test, thanks to the Brutal Doom mod which adds "advanced and unique features such as extra hitboxes for heads and legs, and more gore, fire, and smoke particles than any modern AAA game".

The new elements have rendered the game a slideshow in many circumstances, until now: v20b boasts massive performance improvements thanks to some clever optimization. See for yourself in the video above.

Head here if you'd like to get started playing Brutal Doom. v20b will launch alongside Starter Pack maps and gameplay improvements December 31.

Over the holidays the makers of Rocket League, Psyonix, revealed that they have nearly 9 million registered players worldwide across the PS4 and the PC. That's quite the amazing feat for a game that was just released in July of this year.

And Psyonix isn't quite done yet, either. In the coming year they plan on bringing on a number of new and exciting things into the fray. We can expect support on as grand a scale as they've had with a ton of new content to keep those 9 million coming back. There'll be new modes, new DLC, new arenas and of course plenty of new themed vehicles as time goes by.

That 9 million isn't a concurrent player number though, as that might just break the multiplayer infrastructure they have in place. But even having 9 million interested and playing throughout a month is no laughing matter. For perspective, on PC alone you can find 25K people playing at the moment with an average of 19.5K per day. That means you won't be waiting around for competition.