Gaming - Page 258

A battle royale mode for World of Warcraft? Yes, this one feels a little out of left field with the new limited-time, pirate-themed Plunderstorm event now live as part of the game's 10.2.6 update. And yes, it is indeed a battle royale, with Blizzard's description stating, "The last one standing on a shrinking map will be declared the winner, but everyone who participates will make progress on reward tracks."

The mode is open to all active WoW players, including WoW Classic players - so it's not limited to the latest Dragonflight expansion. Plunderstorm supports Solo and Duo, with watch matches lasting roughly 10 to 15 minutes with a maximum of 60 players. So then, with WoW being an MMO, you might be wondering how it works.

First, you won't actually be taking your characters into the mode. Instead, you'll select a character, level up, and acquire abilities as you plunder the Arathi Highlands. You're also limited to a handful of abilities, so unlike traditional WoW, there's no hot bar with dozens of skills.

One of the most talked about and exciting gaming hardware stories of the year has been Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro (codenamed Trinity) specs, which were leaked via internal documents. Multiple sources, including Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson, confirm the information as correct. The specs show a powerful ray tracing console with AI hardware to deliver Sony's custom DLSS upscaling tech, PSSR, or PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution.

The PS5 Pro is on track for a holiday 2024 release. It is 45% more powerful for rendering than the existing PS5 and has up to 3X the ray-tracing performance due to its potential use of the new AMD RDNA 4 architecture. Sony has yet to announce the console formally, and leaks have stolen some of its thunder. Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson suggests that Sony is currently in damage control.

Taking to X, he says, "Sony has launched an internal investigation into the leaked documents on Trinity as it leaked during a third-party rollout."

Respawn Entertainment, the developers behind Apex Legends, responded to the recent mid-game hack that occurred during the Apex Legends NA regional finals.

For those that don't know, here's a quick rundown of the events. The Apex Legends Global Series is currently underway and is in the stage of regional finals. North American teams were going up against each other in an online match and during that match at least two players were injected with cheats such as aimbot and wallhacks.

This hack sparked a grave warning for millions of gamers as it was unknown if the security vulnerability, reported as an RCE issue, was within Apex Legends or Easy Anti-Cheat, the software the game uses to prevent hacking.

Yesterday, we examined AI's use to create digital human characters (NPCs) as part of a new Covert Protocol tech demo from Inworld and NVIDIA. Using the Inworld AI engine with NVIDIA ACE, which includes NVIDIA Riva Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and NVIDIA Audio2Face (A2F) for speech and animation, the demo gave a glimpse at a potential AI-powered future for games.

At GDC 2024, Ubisoft and its developers at Ubisoft Paris presented their demo, Project NEO NPC, in partnership with NVIDIA and Inworld. Using Inworld's extensive Character Engine with LLM technology, the team created NPCs with complete backgrounds, knowledge, and distinct conversational styles Ubisoft leveraging NVIDIA Audio2Face.

"Characters are programmed to react to player prompts in certain ways, or not react, depending on their personalities," Ubisoft writes in its blog post. Narrative Director Virginie Mosser at Ubisoft Paris adds, "For the first time in my life, I can have a conversation with a character I've created. I've dreamed of that since I was a kid."

Sony's new PS5 Pro is expected to deliver surprising upgrades including a beefy 45% GPU performance increase, but the CPU hasn't been adjusted much.

New PlayStation 5 Pro spec leaks paint an interesting picture for Sony's new mid-gen upgrade. The PS5 Pro will have a RDNA 3 GPU with 60 Compute Units, an increase of 67% compared to the PS5's 36 RDNA 2.0 GPU with 36 Compute Units. But the PS5 Pro's CPU is a different story--it's not expected to actually change outside of a frequency bump.

Reports indicate that the PS5 Pro will use the same Zen 2 CPU found in the base PS5 and PS5 Slim models. Instead of making big changes to the CPU, Sony slightly raised the PS5 Pro's CPU clock speeds to 3.8GHz, compared to the 3.5GHz of the original PS5. This 300MHz increase is to help streamline performance, namely helping games that are bound/limited by the CPU maintain more stable frame rates within the confines of their respective caps. But developers can't get the 300MHz CPU boost without taking a 1% GPU performance hit--Sony has provided new upscaling tech to help devs mitigate this performance hit, and if everything goes right, gamers won't even notice the GPU downclocking.

Sony's mid-gen PlayStation 5 Pro is expected to deliver beastly performance with 4K 120FPS targets, but the Pro's new custom chip may not see any major efficiencies from a die shrink.

New reports sourced from Sony's internal developer network portal suggest that the PlayStation 5 Pro will bring a hefty upgrade over the existing models. According to leaked info, the PS5 Pro's specs will enable higher-end gaming thanks to built-in machine learning and advanced new upscaling technologies like PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), which is Sony's custom answer to NVIDIA DLSS or AMD's FSR. Reports suggest the GPU will also leverage RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 tech from AMD to deliver up to 33 TFLOPs of power.

But what about the SoC itself? The PS5 Pro is built on a new Voila SoC, but this new chip may not benefit from a process reduction like Sony's other mid-gen PS4 Pro, which leveraged significant advantages from a production die shrink (the Pro shrank from the stock PS4's 28nm to 16nm). The PS5, conversely, is built on TSMC's N7 node family, which includes 7nm, 7nm+, and 6nm processes.

Sony has temporarily paused production on the PlayStation VR2 gaming headset due to oversupply, sources tell Bloomberg's Takashi Mochizuki.

Reports indicate that Sony's new PSVR2 headset isn't selling as fast as the company had hoped. The virtual reality headset released in February 2023 to strong sales, and sales of the second-gen HMD even managed to significantly outpace its predecessor at launch. That momentum apparently has been short-lived, and unsold units are starting to stack up in Sony's warehouses.

Sources tell Bloomberg that Sony produced 2 million PSVR2 headsets, but exact sell-through to customers remains unknown. Analyst firm IDC estimates that the PSVR2 has shipped around 1.699 million units worldwide. Some hurdles that Sony faces to speed up PSVR2 adoption is the headset's higher $549 price tag, as well as the requirement of extra hardware like a PlayStation 5 console to power the device.

It sounded like a slam dunk, taking the beloved multiplayer game series from 2004 and 2005 and bringing it back online in remastered form with support for modern PC hardware and consoles.

Not to be confused with EA and DICE's recent reboot, the original Star Wars Battlefront (2004) and Star Wars Battlefront II (2005) took iconic settings from the original and prequel trilogies and gave them a massively multiplayer Battlefield-style makeover. Although fans have kept these games alive on PC with mods and private servers, they were primed and ready for a comeback.

When news dropped that Aspyr and Lucasfilm Games were releasing a remastered Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection on March 14, 2024 - with support for up to 64 players - many gamers got their nostalgia glasses ready for a fun trip down memory lane. Except it was anything but.

When you think of the fighting game genre, odds are you're thinking about Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, two franchises that date back to the early 1990s and are still going strong. Suppose you grew up during that period and spent many afternoons at the local arcade. In that case, there is no doubt you'd be aware of SNK and its iconic output, including series like Fatal Fury, King of Fighters, and Samurai Shodown.

Interestingly, Fatal Fury, the SNK fighting game franchise that began in 1991 (making it one of the oldest fighting games in video game history), hasn't received a new entry since 1999, when Garou: Mark of the Wolves was released.

Fast-forward to 2024, and SNK has announced that Fatal Fury will return in early 2025 after a 26-year absence.

In what seems like a first, Apex Legends professional players were hijacked by a hacker during the Apex Legends Global Series to be given cheats, resulting in the NA finals being postponed.

The Apex Legends North American finals were infiltrated by at least two hackers named "Destroyer2009" and "R4andom", who managed to somehow gain access to at least two professional players' PCs during a match. As the match was being streamed to thousands of fans around the world, a message box briefly popped up and then disappeared, which was followed by the player realizing that they had aimbot, wallhacks, and other cheats. Shortly after the discovery, the match was promptly ended.

Following the shutdown of the match Anti-Cheat Police Department, a group of volunteers that specialize in gathering intelligence on cheats to detect and disrupt cheating vendors, took to its X account to provide a public service announcement, stating that an RCE exploit was used to gain access to the players' PCs. For those that don't know, an RCE exploit is a "remote code execution", which means the hackers were able to execute codes on the target machines remotely.

Sony reportedly awarded AMD with the contract to build a next-generation SoC for its next-generation PlayStation 6 console... which could be capable of 4K 120FPS or 8K 60FPS gaming.

We've had plenty of leaks and rumors about the beefed-up PlayStation 5 Pro console coming later this year, as well as Sony's new PlayStation Spatial Super Resolution (PSSR) technology, which is "currently aiming" for 4K 60FPS and 8K 30FPS gaming, with leaker Tom Henderson reporting "but it's unclear if those internal milestones can be passed".

The upgraded PlayStation 5 Pro playing games at 4K 60FPS and 8K 30FPS will most likely be driven with PSSR upscaling, and that makes sense: 45% more rendering power, with 2-3x the ray tracing performance in PS5 Pro-powered games at 4K 60FPS... and some, not all, at 8K 30FPS would be huge for Sony.

Balatro emerged a month ago on Steam and is the latest game on Valve's service to swiftly build up an immense amount of traction from out of nowhere, really grabbing the attention of PC gamers.

The big announcement for Balatro (which is also out on consoles: PlayStation, Switch and Xbox) is that the game has just sold a million copies.

It's a compact and streamlined game, a deckbuilder based on poker - although the mention of the traditional card game might well put you off. However, all the critics and reviews say don't worry about the poker influence, you don't need to know, or like, poker to enjoy Balatro.

The rumored PlayStation 5 Pro is apparently set to use a fresh take on upscaling from Sony (PSSR) and it could push 4K gaming at 60 frames per second - or indeed 8K at 30 fps.

In case you missed it somehow, there's been some major spillage on the purported specs of the PlayStation 5 Pro recently, which has included info on PSSR. The tech is likened to DLSS or FSR and is an AI-powered upscaling feature, a pepped-up version of TAAU (Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscale).

PSSR stands for PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, in case you were wondering (let's hope it doesn't cause ghosting artifacts).

Steam users have been on a steady climb since the platform's inception, with only a few dips in user numbers across the years it has been active, and now the PC-based platform has reached a new milestone.

Prior to 2020, Steam hadn't broken through the 20 million user mark, but presumably, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and everyone being locked in their homes, the platform's numbers began to skyrocket, only taking a few dips here and there. Overall, Steam has been growing exponentially, breaking through the 30 million user mark in October 2022, and now it's on its way to cracking the 40 million mark as the platform has reached a new all-time peak of 36,354,393 concurrent users.

Notably, it was only a couple of weeks ago that Steam recorded a new concurrent user record of 34 million players online at once, and then on March 2, the platform hit another new milestone with 35.3 million concurrent users. Now Steam has pushed through the 36 million mark for the first time, with the average concurrent player count being 25 million over 30 days. Judging by these trends it won't be long at all before Steam hits 40 million.

The previously leaked PlayStation 5 Pro hardware specification may just give a clue as to whether Sony will decide to add backward compatibility to its next-generation console.

A well-known leaker that goes by the name Kepler has commented on a recent X thread discussing the recent PS5 Pro hardware leak, specifically the 10% CPU speed increase. Kepler explained that they have a "theory" as to why the CPU speed increase is so little. The leaker speculated that the backward compatibility is more complicated than you might think and that the way Sony handles it is "very complex".

Notably, Kepler writes that backward compatibility requires new hardware to "run at the same or higher clock speed, even if the new HW is faster at lower clock speeds." Kepler goes on to explain that if Sony decides to use Zen 6 dense cores for the PS6, they won't be able to target 4GHz and above for the PS5 Pro as that could "break backward compatibility".

It was only a few hours ago that the Apex Legends North American finals had to be shut down due to hackers infiltrating at least two professional players' PCs mid-game.

The hackers gave the two professional players cheats such as aimbot and wallhacks, resulting in the game being postponed and the security of Apex Legends being thrown into question. Notably, this story is still developing at the time of reporting as it is only a few hours old, so details are subject to change. Volunteers at the Anti-Cheat Police Department took to X to warn the public that "There is currently an RCE exploit being abused in Apex Legends. It's unsure whether it comes from the game of the actual anti-cheat (Easy Anti-Cheat)."

The anti-cheat account goes on to recommend gamers not to play any games protected by Easy Anti-Cheat, or any Electronic Arts titles until they have fixed the issue or have publicly commented on the security of their games. The RCE (Remote Code Execution) exploit is currently being used to inject cheats into streamers' machines, but it means the hackers are able to execute codes on the target machine remotely. This could mean anything from installing ransomware and malware to anything else the hackers want.

Seemingly, two individuals named "Destroyer2009" and "R4ndom" were responsible for hacking professional Apex Legends players during the North American Finals of Apex Legends.

The hack isn't one that you would typically expect as it didn't appear to be harvesting data or coming from within the professional players that were participating in the tournament. Instead, professional players were being given hacks from presumably two outside sources, and these hacks included classic cheats such as aimbot, wallhacks, and more. The hacks were given to specific pro players while they were in-game competing, raising massive concerns for the security of all accounts and the safety of the game.

The hackers targeted specific professional players mid-tournament, such as ImperialHal and Genburten, forcibly giving cheats, resulting in the players having to leave the game. In one instance, a professional player was given cheats and then immediately banned by Apex Legends' cheat-detection system.

Like others, we had high hopes for the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake project until it seemingly ran into one development issue after another. Announced back in 2021, with Sony's full backing, the PC and PlayStation 5 exclusive would remake and rebuild one of the greatest BioWare RPGs in a modern engine with modern cinematic visuals.

Our original concerns stemmed from the fact that the ambitious project fell under the umbrella of the Embracer Group, with one of its smaller studios - Aspyr - leading development. Aspyr, best known for porting older Star Wars games to platforms like the Nintendo Switch, hadn't tackled a project of this size and scope before.

In 2022, Embracer announced that development had shifted to Sabre Interactive, a studio with a fairly consistent track record. Since then, the industry has been tumultuous, with layoffs and cancellations. Embracer Group recently sold Saber Interactive, "one of its best-earning games divisions," for $247 million.

Helldivers 2 is an incredible success for developer Arrowhead, and now a TD Cowen analyst estimates that 8 million copies of the game have been sold so far, and things aren't slowing down.

Helldivers 2 launched without huge fanfare, but the game has been a runaway success with some in the industry comparing the game to the likes of Guitar Hero with its virality. In a new report from Bloomberg, the outlet reports that TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz estimates that over 8 million copies of Helldivers 2 have sold so far, and those numbers are growing weekly. Creutz said: "We believe the game has performed well ahead of expectations" in a note on Thursday.

The game is only out on Sony's current-gen PlayStation 5 console and on the PC... leaving Xbox gamers unable to spread Democracy. I can only imagine those numbers going up by a couple of million if Helldivers 2 was unleashed onto the Xbox Series X/S consoles.

Star Citizen used to be one giant leap from release, but now, according to Roberts Space Industries boss Chris Roberts, we're seemingly one small step from the game hitting version 1.0.

In a new "Letter from the Chairman" on the official Star Citizen website, Roberts said that the commercial launch of Star Citizen "twinkles on the horizon". This is the point the developer wants to reach when the game is polished enough and ready to leave the alpha or early access stages.

Cloud Imperium Games has been spending a lot of time on getting Star Citizen to v1.0, which Rich Tyrer is leading in his new position as Senior Game Director of both Star Citizen and the single-player Squadron 42 release alongside Roberts himself. Tryer was one of the team's key members in getting Squadron 42 to feature-complete status, something CIG announced in late October 2023.