Gaming - Page 281

Heading into 2023, The Day Before from developer Fntastic was one of Steam's most wish-listed games - hype and goodwill garnered from the game's impressive reveal trailer from 2021. A trailer that showed several minutes of what was described as an "open-world MMO survival set in a deadly, post-pandemic America." And it looked good, a little bit of Ubisoft's The Division, Naughty Dog's The Last of Us, and a dash of DayZ.

At a glance, it was easy to buy into the hype. However, those who took a closer look saw a game that was more concept than anything else, from shots copied and duplicated from popular game trailers to the revelation that its "gameplay" was all smoke and mirrors. Even the game's logo and artwork, being "inspired" by The Last of Us, were questionable.

Since its reveal back in 2021, some of the development milestones for The Day Before include being pulled from Steam due to not filing the proper trademark paperwork, gameplay demos and presentations looking worse than what came before, and revelations that the studio was exploiting "volunteers" to develop the game. This brings us to The Day Before hitting Steam Early Access on December 7, 2023-last week.

Free Radical Design, the studio behind the anticipated Timesplitters 4, has been shut down as video games industry layoffs continue.

The gaming market has cut over 6,000 jobs as publishers try to stabilize profits through cost control measures. Big-name publishers from Electronic Arts to Ubisoft have eliminated hundreds of jobs, but Swedish decentralized games empire The Embracer Group may lead the charge with over 900 people being laid off as of September 30, with more layoffs happening since.

At the time Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors warned that more layoffs are possible. Now parent company Plaion, who operates the Deep Silver publishing label, has apparently closed Free Radical Design (FRD). This comes shortly after Plaion also closed Volition, the developers of the Saints Row franchise. The FRD studio had been resurrected in 2021 after Embracer purchased the IP back in 2018, and Free Radical Design had been working on a new Timesplitters game.

Sony's beefed-up PlayStation 5 Pro console has been teased for a while now, where last week I pondered that the just-announced Grand Theft Auto 6 would be a huge system seller for an upgraded PS5 Pro console... and now we have more information on the PS5 Pro out of nowhere.

The new information on the PlayStation 5 Pro is coming from leaker Kepler and the ResetEra forums, where we've heard that the PS5 Pro is codenamed "Trinity". In contrast, the upgraded SoC inside of the console is codenamed "Viola". The APU will see the CPU side boosting at up to 4.4GHz, which makes sense as we heard about the "low 4GHz range" in rumors a couple of months ago now.

Viola still uses the Zen 2 architecture that is inside of the regular PS5 for compatibility, but the CPU will boost up to a higher 4.4GHz. There's also reportedly 64KB of L1 cache per core, 512KB of L2 cache per core, and 8MB of L3 shared cache (4MB per CCX).

Classic old-school Zelda games may become just a link to the past as Nintendo focuses instead on freedom, choice, and player agency.

It sounds like the open-world formula in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom will now be the standard for future Zelda games. In a recent interview with IGN, the Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma indicates that linear and restrictive games with a set progression path are relics of the past.

"So I am in complete agreement with what Mr. Fujibayashi said in that games where you need to follow a specific set of steps or complete tasks in a very set order are kind of the games of the past," Aonuma told IGN's Kat Bailey.

Despite the commercial failure of Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy, Disney is still open to future collaborations with Eidos Montreal and Crystal Dynamics.

Years ago, Japanese games publisher Square Enix made a surprise announcement: It was working on two games set in the Marvel universe, and its Deus Ex and Tomb Raider teams were leading production. One was a live service game based on the Avengers, which ultimately flopped, and the other was an excellent singleplayer Guardians of the Galaxy game that also "failed to meet expectations."

Back-to-back sales misses led to significant losses, prompting Square Enix to sell its entire Western games division including the devs of the Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy games, Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal. The Embracer Group snapped up these studios in a landmark $300 million deal, and Eidos is currently making a new Tomb Raider game with Crystal Dynamics believed to be returning to Deus Ex.

GTA 6 won't release on PC at launch, and now a former Rockstar Games animator explains why it takes so long to make PC ports of games.

Grand Theft Auto VI is only coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles in 2025. It's assumed a PC version is coming, but may not happen until years after launch. This revelation prompted PC Gamer to publish an article entitled "There's no technical reason Rockstar can give for why a PC version of GTA 6 isn't arriving with the console release." Now a former GTA animator explains why PC ports aren't made in tandem with console versions.

According to Mike York, who worked with Rockstar Games on titles like GTA 5 and RDR2, there's two main reasons why a PC port of GTA 6 will take a while: Focusing on what sells, and the large amount of meticulous and hard work that goes into PC versions of games.

Sony Interactive Entertainment has reportedly shipped out devkits to more distant third-party studios, and it may only be a matter of time before specs start to leak.

According to new reports from Insider Gaming, executives at Sony's game division expect the specs for its upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro console to surface throughout this month. Sources have told Tom Henderson that Sony is starting to distribute PS5 Pro devkits to third-party studios. It's assumed that some group, team, or studio will pass around the highly-confidential spec sheet for Sony's upgraded PS5.

Given this timing, it's highly likely that Sony has already distributed PS5 Pro devkits to its internal teams--studios like Insomniac Games and Guerrilla Games probably had early PS5 Pro iterations before the tech was matured. It's also possible that Sony has already shipped out PS5 Pro devkits to its closer third-party partners, including companies like Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, and Take-Two Interactive to name a few. It's typically unlikely that these closer publishers would leak specific portions of the PS5 Pro's capabilities.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom won't be getting a follow-up title; Nintendo has exhausted all possible additions to that iteration of Link's story and universe.

For those that didn't know, Tears of the Kingdom was originally conceived as a DLC for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but following its years in development and the ideas Nintendo was planning on carrying out, the DLC grew too large and earned itself the title of a sequel. Despite being leaked on PC at launch, Tears of the Kingdom went on to be extremely well-received by fans, earning it a place as a nominee for Game of The Year at The Game Awards 2023.

Despite the positive reception for Tears of the Kingdom and this overall iteration of Link and Hyrule, Eiji Aonuma, a 30-year-long producer on The Legend of Zelda franchise, said in a recent interview with Game Informer that Nintendo doesn't have plans for a follow-up game, and that Tears of the Kingdom is the "apotheosis," or the highest point of development of the series.

Sony has teamed up with accessibility experts to create a new controller that is designed for disabled gamers, removing the need to purchase additional third-party accessories and manually wire them into a controller.

Sony Interactive Entertainment has partnered with AbleGamers in the US to create a new controller called the "Access Controller," which features a "highly customizable kit" of various buttons and triggers, enabling the gamer to set up a controller that is specifically suited for their needs.

The release of the Access Controller is a first-of-its-kind product from Sony and the PS5, and the idea behind it is to remove the need to purchase additional third-party accessories and buttons and wire it all together, per Alvin Daniel, Senior Technical Program Manager at Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Very few games have development cycles that last longer than a decade, and if they do, it's often for reasons that can be boiled down to "development troubles." Skull and Bones is one of these games, with Ubisoft Singapore kicking off development on the pirate-themed game after it worked on all of the cool pirate-themed stuff found in 2013's Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.

Turning that into a full-fledged game was always an excellent idea, but Skull and Bones has been in a sort of development limbo since 2013 - and with Rare's Sea of Thieves and other open-world games with boats, it's no longer an original or fresh concept. But, after nine delays, a reboot, and a few closed beta tests, Ubisoft is finally ready to launch Skull and Bones on February 16, 2024.

The game is set to hit PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S on this day, with a Closed Beta coming this weekend - running from December 15 to 18.

Skyrim Together Reborn is a popular mod for Skyrim that adds co-op for up to eight players (with support for 30+) and has been downloaded well over a million times. With Bethesda Game Studios' Starfield release this year, many fans have been expecting to see a multiplayer Starfield Together mod arrive at some point.

If one does show up, it won't be from one of Skyrim Together's key developers, Robbe Bryssinck or Cosideci. It turns out that even though there were plans to port the Skyrim Together mod over to Starfield, that has changed. The reason? The game. It's no secret that the critical and fan response to Starfield has been mixed, with some loving the game, others liking it, and some outright disappointed by its shortcomings.

Cosideci falls into the latter camp, taking to Discord (via Reddit) to state, "When the game released, I was hyped, like a lot of people, but probably for different reasons. I spent launch day and a few days after reverse-engineering the game and porting over gameplay hooks from Skyrim Together to a potential Starfield Together mod. I ported about 70% of Skyrim Together reversed code to Starfield Together."

Former Epic Games creative exec shares the idea that unlocked Fortnite's billion-dollar success.

Fortnite was an ambitious game right from the get-go, and the free-to-lay sensation owes its success to a spoke diagram drawn on a dry-erase board way back in 2017. Ex-Fortnite creative officer Donald Mustard recently shared what appears to be Epic's 'north star' for the battle royale. I

t's called The Fortnite Hub, and it aimed to transform Fortnite from a game into a digital space with its own social ecosystem and game modes. This could be one of the earliest plans for gaming's growing metaverse aspirations. Fortnite has defined social gaming for years with its live concerts and in-game events, not to mention the plethora of crossovers with billion-dollar brands across multiple industries.

AMD is smiling proudly with its RDNA 3-powered Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs flying through the world of Pandora, pumping 100FPS+ inside of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Check it out:

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is powered by Ubisoft's impressive Snowdrop engine, the same engine that powers The Division 2 and other Ubisoft titles. It looks gorgeous, enabling beautiful ray-traced visuals that create immersive gaming environments like we see in Frontiers of Pandora.

AMD worked closely with Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment to ensure a smooth, high FPS gaming experience at Ultra settings with ray tracing enabled across its AMD Radeon graphics cards and AMD Ryzen processors. What kind of performance can we expect? Well, over 100FPS, starting with the Radeon RX 7600... here's the full list:

Following its loss in the Gen8 console race, Microsoft shifted its business towards content and services rather than hardware. The bet is paying off.

Xbox has changed in the years leading up to the Activision Blizzard King acquisition. Xbox went from a console to a service that bridges consoles, PCs, mobile phones, and even smart TVs. Xbox even has a very powerful presence on competitor systems thanks to heavy-hitters like Minecraft, Elder Scrolls Online, and Fallout 76. The company prepped its infrastructure throughout 2013-2015 by unifying Windows PCs and Xbox Ones, and now services have accelerated dramatically with the popular Xbox Game Pass subscription.

Microsoft's core strength has always been services, software, and subscriptions, and it made sense to adapt Xbox into this model--After all, hardware isn't a very high-margin business, and for Xbox, it's actually a negative-margin business because no Xbox console has ever been sold at a profit. Microsoft makes its money back from software, content, monetization, digital advertising, and subscriptions. Based on Xbox's recent record-breaking $16.2 billion revenues for FY22, ths plan appears to be working well.

Xbox financial exec Tim Stuart explains the core heartbeat of the games business, outlining a strategy that emphasizes expansion and utilization of high-margin models.

Xbox has grown tremendously over the past 10 years. To stay competitive, Microsoft has snapped up first-party studios, built its entire games business around content and services, and disrupted the market with Game Pass. This plan has seen Xbox's gaming slate expand horizontally as well as vertically, as Microsoft built and secured multiple millions-strong live service games with recurring revenue streams.

Wrap those live games alongside premium singleplayer titles into a content-delivery subscription service with a low monthly fee that's spread across multiple platforms, and you have Microsoft's main business ethos: diversity. Xbox's multi-faceted business incorporates numerous billion-dollar models centered around multi-access endpoints and digital online monetization, and after the ABK buyout, Microsoft has attained one of the highest-margin publishers on the planet.

Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 animator Mike York shares his thoughts on the recent GTA 6 trailer and hypes up Rockstar Games in the process.

It's not so often that we see actual game developers lend their expertise to YouTube trailer breakdowns. Mike York, who worked on two of Rockstar Games' highest-profile games, did a quick GTA 6 trailer reaction that's been making the rounds.

York's analysis is that the GTA 6 trailer is entirely in-game and has no pre-rendered footage--a declaration that has caused a bit of confusion among gamers.

Xbox gaming CFO Tim Stuart suggests that Microsoft could offer free game streaming over xCloud in exchange for ad viewership.

Ads could be the next phase step evolution in Microsoft's gaming content and services roadmap. Experts believe that a cheaper ad-supported Xbox Game Pass subscription tier could be offered, and we've heard Xbox president Sarah Bond discuss topics like ads and Xbox offering "slices of gameplay" to users.

Now we have very interesting quotes from Xbox chief financial officer Tim Stuart on the topic of ads, and how they could be used for Xbox cloud gaming. The following was transcribed with Stuart's interview at the Wells Fargo TMT Summit held late last month.

A group of Call of Duty developers have taken to social media to voice their concerns about the recent comments from God of War voice actor Christopher Judge at The Game Awards 2023.

The controversy started when God of War voice actor (Kratos), Christopher Judge took to the stage and said that his speech wasn't going to be long and that he wasn't going to be taking up too much of their time. Judge went on to say that his speech wasn't going to be eight minutes long "like last year," when the actor won Best Performance for his role as Kratos in God of War Ragnarok. No one, including the Call of Duty developers, didn't have a problem with any of those words from Judge.

What they did have a problem with is the following line, "But fun fact, my speech was actually longer than this year's Call of Duty campaign," he added. That cheeky comment from Judge, which was clearly done in jest, triggered a bunch of past and present Call of Duty developers that took to X to rebut Judge's comment. While Judge's comment was clearly a joke, many individuals working on Call of Duty didn't see it that way.

Jurassic Parks fans are rejoicing at the recent reveal at this year's Game Awards, as Jurassic Park: Survival hit the big screen for the first time.

The new horror-action title takes Jurassic Park fans back to Isla Nublar, and it appears that things will kick off right after the events of the first movie. So, what is Jurassic World: Survival? It's likely the style of the game Jurassic Park fans have been asking for, as it features horror elements, gore, iconic dinosaurs, and a fully-fledged single-player action-adventure.

The trailer showcases the main character, Dr. Maya Joshi, an InGen scientist who's been left behind on Isla Nublar, and players will be taken on a journey of escape as Dr. Joshi attempts to make her way off the island while avoiding the most iconic dinosaurs in the movies, as well as some from the original book. At the moment, there isn't a release date for Jurassic Park: Survival, but what we do know is that it will be coming to Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC.

Matthew McConaughey has revealed he is joining the world of gaming by voicing a character within Archetype Entertainment's new title called Exodus.

The trailer for the new game debuted at The Game Awards 2023, and the title was introduced by Matthew McConaughey, who took to the stage to explain how he became a part of the project. McConaughey explains that he will be voicing a character in the game, and this character will have a unique relationship with each player.

Additionally, McConaughey reveals that time will play a big factor in the game as it "moves differently. Days for you are decades for your loved ones back home. The choices that you make not only affect the people that you love, they will also affect your entire civilization for generations to come."