Gaming - Page 296

Rumors surrounding the upcoming launch of the still-to-be-announced Nintendo Switch 2 (if it ends up benign called that) have been ramping up in recent weeks. According to multiple sources, the new console was shown to developers at Gamescom in September, with demos showcasing 4K visuals thanks to new NVIDIA DLSS-powered hardware. And with that, several insiders and industry analysts are predicting a second-half of 2024 launch for the Switch 2.

Where does this leave the current Nintendo Switch? According to a new interview with Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa over at the Japanese publication Nikkei (translated via VGC), it's business as usual for the current Switch. For the current fiscal year ending March 2024, the company will focus primarily on the Switch, with support and game releases continuing to the next financial year ending March 2025.

"We are still working on software for the Switch for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2025," Furukawa said in the interview. "In the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024, we hope to sustain the momentum of Zelda and the [Super Mario Bros] movie, with a focus on the holiday sales season. As for hardware, we will maximize not only new demand for the hardware but also for those buying second consoles and replacements."

Diablo IV's second season, the Season of Blood, is set to kick off on October 17 and is set to be alongside the massive Patch 1.2.0. Outside of details on Class and balance changes and new item details, Blizzard has lifted the lid on a big chunk of the new content coming with Season of Blood, including some big updates to the endgame.

With each new Diablo IV season bringing a character wipe (meaning you need to start leveling up with no access to existing items, some recent complaints about the game have centered on how grindy the late-game leveling feels and how there's not much variety to the endgame outside of running dungeons and picking up the same gear.

Well, Season of Blood is bringing new and returning 5 Endgame bosses and the Boss ladder, which will allow players to target farm Uniques and Uber Uniques with a higher drop rate at these boss battles. Blizzard notes that Legion Events and World Bosses will frequently spawn alongside other "endgame improvements."

When you think about playing a Blizzard title on PC, whether that's World of Warcraft or even something like the original StarCraft - you think of Battle.net, the developer's PC launcher and online service that it has been running ever since gamers first went online to matchmake in Diablo II.

And with the long-awaited release of Diablo IV this year, its PC release was naturally on Battle.net. However, in a surprising (and very cool) move, the game is officially coming to Steam on October 17, coinciding with the release of the game's second season, the 'Season of Blood.' And yes, this means Steam Achievements for the game are coming, and the option to invite Steam friends to play.

Blizzard notes that it's all about opening up the game to a wider audience, and with seamless cross-play and cross-progression, Diablo IV is playable on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. As with the game's console versions, those who purchase the game on Steam will need to link their account to an existing or new Battle.net account to enable the cross-play features.

Publishers and developers are using Xbox Game Pass subscriptions to help catalyze growth of newer monetization methods, signalling another disruptive shift across gaming.

Xbox Game Pass is kind of like a river of revenue, and like a major river, there's all sorts of smaller tributaries and streams that feed into the flow. The main draw of Game Pass is being able to access hundreds of games for a flat fee, but it's the myriad of smaller synergistic monetization paths that help turn the river's flow from a meandering waterway into white water rapids.

The temporary-access, all-you-can-play model behind Game Pass gives way to other avenues, two of which are being leveraged to what appears to be great success. These include early access and incredibly attractive pricing discounts.

A new hotfix has been applied to Baldur's Gate 3, the eighth one to be issued for the RPG (with some major patches in-between, too), and it has some important fixes - as well as a rather more off-the-wall tweak.

There are some cures for crashing here, including the resolution of a multiplayer crash that happens after listening to a dialogue following an active roll. The game could also fall over when re-assigning characters in split-screen play, and that issue has been cured.

Another important one is that Larian has fixed a problem which was causing saved games to be invalid - nasty indeed.

September marked the tenth anniversary of Grand Theft Auto V, and even though the game (specifically Grand Theft Auto Online) continues to be extremely popular, selling over 185 million copies - fans are clamoring for that official Grand Theft Auto VI reveal.

Developer Rockstar Games has acknowledged that it is working on the highly anticipated sequel. However, release windows, setting, and how it will look and feel - are all a mystery outside of leaks, suggesting a return to Vice City.

Rockstar is known for placing cryptic hints and teasers in games and other places, and some fans are convinced that Grand Theft Auto Online's Moon Festival event holds the key to when we'll officially get that big GTA 6 unveiling. Per the event's naming, the clues are about the moon and its connection to the Waning Gibbous phase.

Microsoft sees the path to achieve 100 million+ Xbox Game Pass subscribers by 2030.

The recent FTC v Microsoft trial leaks were some of the biggest in the history of interactive entertainment. The erroneously-uploaded files offer a candid look at upcoming plans for Xbox, including new mid-gen refreshes and a potential hybrid compute console that could change the future of gaming.

The leaked documents show that Xbox Game Pass is a big part of this plan. Microsoft eventually wants to lead the Big 3 hierarchy and help usher the industry into a new age of disruption, and it wants to use Game Pass to help make it happen.

A throwback post from one of PlayStation's former bosses gives a quick reminder of Sony's handheld production numbers.

There was a time when Sony challenged Nintendo in the handheld market. We all know how that went (while Sony has exited the dedicated handheld business, the spirit of the PSP and Vita live on with the new $99 PlayStation Portal remote play tablet), but gaming was way different nearly 20 years ago.

Sony's first handheld, the PlayStation Portable, was a big success. Official Sony shipment records show that the PlayStation Portable sold-in/shipped "over 76.4 million units." Now thanks to Shawn Layden, who was president of Sony Computer Entertainment America from 2014-2018, we know how many PSP units that Sony actually produced.

SEGA has officially cancelled its first Super Game, and it's possible that the new business model is now under question.

SEGA has an ambitious vision. The Japanese publisher wants to create an entirely new genre to provide long-term sustainability--not exactly an original idea, but SEGA did come up with a term to describe this new genre: Super Games. So what is a Super Game? It's kind of a spin on the live service/games-as-a-service model, but there's some criteria.

To qualify as a Super Game, a title will target $1 billion in lifetime revenues. That's a pretty lofty target that takes publishers years to achieve--however, some like Activision can achieve it in a single year--and the closest thing that SEGA has right now is Phantasy Star Online 2.

Meta's metaverse avatars have come a long, long way, showing that the company's billion-dollar loser is starting to look like a winner.

At the behest of Mark Zuckerberg, Meta has spent tens of billions of dollars on mixed reality. The company is trying to create the metaverse, a nascent concept that combines digital avatars with mixed reality peripherals to deliver realism in a digital space. For Meta, the goal is to create a new digital world that can be monetized over time through advertising while also linking up to entertainment services, content delivery, and social experiences.

Meta has lost over $33 billion on the metaverse so far, burning through Facebook revenue in an attempt to grow the new digital realm. In the past, Meta has faced ridicule for its cartoony metaverse avatars--the digital representations of people in that metaphysical space. Now Mark Zuckerberg shows off just how far Meta has come with its new hyper-realistic code avatars...and things are looking pretty impressive.

Xbox has had a capture problem for two console generations, and Microsoft's solution isn't a great fix.

Capturing screenshots and video on Xbox is fairly straightforward. You press the button, and the console will record what happened in video or picture form. Unfortunately for gamers, the Xbox Series consoles will automatically overwrite and/or delete captured content that is stored natively on the SSD if storage runs low. The console does not notify users that this is happening; screenshots and video will just disappear.

Users had some choices to help mitigate this. The most convenient solution was to just have the console upload screenshots and content to the Xbox network. These files were safe once they were uploaded. You could even fire up the Xbox Console Companion App and download any screenshots or videos that were stored on the Xbox network.

Fortnite makes billions of dollars a year and is one of the most popular video games ever made. So why is Epic Games firing hundreds of workers due to overspending? The answer lies in Epic's multi-faceted ambitions.

Epic Games is one of the most interesting companies in the video games industry. While Epic is the maker of Unreal Engine, one of the most widely-used multimedia graphics engines on the planet, this engine doesn't define Epic's ambitions. The reality is that Epic wears many hats. It's not just an engine-maker that licenses its tools out to a sizable portion of games, films, TV shows, and even cars; Epic is also a major disruptor for video game economics and pledges to shake up the status quo.

Epic appears to follow the whims of CEO Tim Sweeney, a legendary programmer who created the Unreal Engine. Sweeney is staunchly opposed to certain games industry trends, including the business practices of Valve, Google, and Apple, the last two of which constitute a "mobile duopoly" on gaming's most lucrative billion-dollar platform. Sweeney has been vocal and consistent in his opposition of these companies, and Epic's specific business decisions have followed Sweeney's beliefs.

Cyberpunk now has its Phantom Liberty expansion - with patch 2.0 update in tow - and some benchmarking of the game has produced some surprising results in terms of a Linux distro performing much faster than Windows 11.

Okay, so upfront, we should note that this is just one test, and the conclusions we can draw are limited - but the difference is quite eye-opening, when running Nobara (a spin on Fedora) compared to Windows 11 on the exact same PC.

YouTuber Maximum Fury conducted the test runs which found that Nobara was just over 30% faster than Windows 11 at Full HD resolution (high textures).

"The largest technical leap forward in Counter-Strike's history" is here, with Valve officially launching the highly anticipated successor to CS:GO, simply called Counter-Strike 2. After an extensive Limited Test or Beta period, the Source 2-powered version of the popular online shooter presents map overhauls, new dynamic smoke grenades (that behave realistically), and more.

Counter-Strike 2 was officially announced and unveiled in March 2023, and the hotly anticipated launch has been on the cards for quite some time. With the official launch coming without much warning on the first day, the game has seen close to 1.5 million peak concurrent players, with around 750,000 playing the game as I write this.

Considering the age and pedigree of Counter-Strike (even though this slaps a '2' on the end, it's not the second release or major overhaul to the game), the most immediate and noticeable change comes in the visual department. With new lighting, textures, and map detail all being upgraded without affecting the core gameplay - this is still the same old Counter-Strike, albeit much better looking.

There are big changes coming to your Xbox, with game captures set to be deleted after 90 days - and the clock starts right now.

In a blog published yesterday Jonathan Hildebrandt, Principal Group Product Manager, Xbox Experiences, confirmed that game captures stored on the Xbox network will automatically be deleted after 90 days. But don't worry, Microsoft already has a plan to make sure that you don't lose anything.

In the same blog post, it was confirmed that new changes will also allow the bulk upload of files to OneDrive or an external hard drive. Beyond that, the Xbox system can also be configured to automatically upload new captures to OneDrive to make sure that they're kept safe and sound. Making the change is pretty easy and there will be a "Tell me more" option in the Captures area of the Xbox software that will offer details on how to get started.

PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan is leaving the company in 2024, Sony has officially announced.

Today marks the end of an era for PlayStation. Sony's gaming CEO Jim Ryan will depart the company when the FY23 timeline ends on April 1, 2024. Ryan will be temporarily replaced by Sony's Hiroki Totoki, who will step in as interim CEO of the games division while the board approves a new leader for SIE. Totoki also leads as Sony Corp's president, chief operating officer, and chief financial officer.

Jim Ryan leaves behind a decades-long legacy at Sony. Having joined Sony's European games division in 1994, eventually rising to become president of Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe. Ryan then became deputy president at the consolidated games branch in 2018, and eventually succeeded Shawn Layden when Layden left PlayStation in 2019.

Horizon Forbidden West is coming to the PC platform, and soon enough, Sony has just revealed.

The Complete Edition of Horizon Forbidden West will pitch up next year, and we're told it'll be early 2024, too. So, we haven't got that long to wait at all for the PC port.

This is, of course, the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn, the original PlayStation game which was ported to the PC back in the summer of 2020 (three years ago, now, shockingly - has it really been that long?).

Racing sim addicts who are after a dedicated chair, but don't have the space for a full setup - and maybe not the wallet capacity either - might be impressed by a new offering from Logitech in this space.

That would be the Playseat Challenge X racing chair, which folds away to be easily stored in a cupboard somewhere.

The chassis of the racing chair is nicely lightweight at just under 12kg in total, and you can, of course, attach a steering wheel and pedals. Crucially, as part of the compact setup, those peripherals can be left attached when you fold up the Playseat Challenge X, for a good deal of added convenience.

Capcom is among the last publishers to avoid the new $70 price hike for video games, but that may change soon.

Every new console generation comes with change--updated features, tech innovations, new tools, etc. But the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S also introduced higher costs for gaming's most profitable product: Software. From the get-go, publishers like Sony Interactive Entertainment, Take-Two Interactive, Activision-Blizzard, and Electronic Arts priced their new Gen9 games at $70. It took a little while for others to catch up.

Now after years of holding out, it looks like Capcom could be the latest publisher to raise its game prices to $70. At Tokyo Game Show 2023, Capcom President Haruhiro Tsujimoto shares a sentiment that most publishers will agree with: "Game prices are too low."

Chris Metzen, the original creative director of the mega-popular World of Warcraft MMORPG, has officially returned to Blizzard Entertainment.

Today Blizzard announced some big news: Chris Metzen is back in a leadership role and will now oversee the entire Warcraft franchise. Metzen's current duty is to help shape the future of World of Warcraft as the game moves closer to its 10th anniversary.

"We are excited to share that Chris Metzen has taken on a full-time role as Executive Creative Director of the Warcraft universe. Right now, his main focus is supporting our World of Warcraft leadership in crafting the next generation of adventures," reads the announcement.