Gaming - Page 313

NetherRealm revealed a new Mortal Kombat 1 trailer during the KombatKast stream today, showcasing some outrageous over-the-top brutality while confirming some new characters.

There really is nothing like a new Mortal Kombat game and MK1 is no exception. The franchise manages to blend humor, gratuitously absurd violence, and a serious compelling storyline all into one chaotic package. The latest Mortal Kombat 1 gameplay trailer showed off all of these elements, complete with a lot of middle fingers and swagger from Johnny Cage, a literal chest-chainsaw from Cyrax that just annihilated poor Kenshi, and some other devastating attacks.

The trailer delivered everything you'd want from Mortal Kombat footage, alongside some awesome reveals of classic returning characters. Gamers got to see Smoke unleash devastating combos with ninja accuracy, Cyrax explode some high-tech grenades that cooked brains, and Rain use shamanic sorcery to fight fire with water and summon brutal storms, and Frost, who attaches glacial spikes to her feet and performs a double jump-kick that pierces right through hapless Johnny Cage's chest.

IO Interactive has opened its fifth studio that will help with ambitious new projects like the 007 James Bond video game.

Hitman developer IO Interactive has launched a brand new studio in Brighton, England as it expands its ranks to assist with production in some major upcoming games. The independent developer currently has two big project sin the works, including the anticipated Project 007 James Bond origin story game, as well as Project Fantasy (aka Project Dragon), a new RPG that's said to be in the works for Xbox.

The Brighton-based branch joins other studios located in Copenhagen, Denmark, Malmo, Sweden, Barcelona, Spain, and Istanbul, Turkey. IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak says that the central idea with the company's myriad of studios is to have around 140-150 people in each branch. Abrak wants to avoid having many hundreds of people in a single location--Abrak tells GamesIndustry.biz that he doesn't want IO Interactive to feel like a video games factory.

Nintendo continues to increase its research and development (R&D) budget as its next-generation Switch console looms on the horizon.

Nintendo is currently working on its new console, which is believed to be an upgraded Switch handheld hybrid that allows for upscaled 4K gaming. A lot is unknown about the device--publishers like Activision don't even know specifications yet--but there's rumors of devkits being sent out to select developers. The new Switch, dubbed the Switch+, Super Switch, and Switch 4K, may be powered by a new Tegra Orin processor accompanied by the enhanced Switch OLED dock which has been updated to support 4K video output.

Speculation aside, we do know that Nintendo is steadily increasing its R&D budget to prepare for new hardware, software, and services. According to Nintendo's 2023 annual report, the company spent around $827 million on R&D throughout Fiscal Year 2023. This budget is for the entirety of Nintendo's operations and is not just for the next-gen Switch.

Capcom tells investors that it will take 'great care' in how it approaches new Mega Man game releases.

Mega Man was the first game that Capcom released on home consoles and the franchise remains a prized IP for the publisher. That's why Capcom has no real interest in rushing out new Mega Man products out the door in order to maximize sales. Even though Capcom wants to eventually hit 100 million game sales per year, the company still wants to be cautious with its revered platformer series.

In a recent shareholders meeting, Capcom management held a Q&A session regarding the future of the business. Investors were interested in knowing where Mega Man goes from here--will we see another mainline release?

Cheaters are an ever-present thorn in the side when it comes to online games, but Ubisoft has a seemingly effective way to tackle the menace they present called 'QB' technology - plus the company has been honing another feature (MouseTrap) to weed out mouse and keyboard players on console.

First off, let's look at QB, and as PC Gamer reports, this is attacking the problem at its source - namely the developers of cheats, and making life so difficult and tedious for them that they just give up.

We know very little about this QB tech, which is for the PC platform only, with Ubisoft kicking off with the idea back in November 2022, as part of a raft of anti-cheat initiatives.

One of the most popular video games in history is returning to Xbox Game Pass for the third time.

Today, Microsoft made a surprise announcement: GTA V is back on Xbox Game Pass, and it includes the higher-end Xbox Series X/S upgraded version as well. This marks the third time that Rockstar's best-selling Grand Theft Auto has been on the platform, and it really underlines how some publishers see the subscription service.

We've heard a lot of negative aspects about Xbox Game Pass and how the service cannibalizes game sales. Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan even went so far as to say that Game Pass is 'value-destructive.' While cannibalization is indeed an undesirable effect of the service, Xbox Game Pass can actually help elongate and boost earnings for older games. That's especially true for evergreen catalog games like GTA V, where a series of rotating promos on subscription services has actually helped push franchise revenues.

Xbox Game Pass is more than just a subscription--it's the foundation of the entire Xbox gaming business model.

At TweakTown, I've talked a lot about Game Pass and how it has transformed the video games industry. The introduction of Game Pass as the first multi-game content library subscription service (as the FTC refers to it) was a pivotal disruption point in gaming. The history of the world's largest entertainment industry is filled with disruption points.

First there were coin-op arcade machines (aka the original microtransactions), then the advent of the home console which brought the arcade to your living room.

Diablo 4 has seen some odd stuff cropping up from players - the recent fuss around the 'secret cow level' springs to mind - and now there's another outlandish theory about the game revolving around rats.

This one is simple - follow the rats, and they'll lead you to the good loot. We kid you not.

As PC Gamer reports, one player planted this seed of an idea, and there's been a huge flurry of chatter online about it since.

In the recent FTC v Microsoft evidentiary hearing, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick revealed key metrics around the mega-popular Call of Duty franchise.

Over the past 20 years, the $31 billion Call of Duty franchise has amassed significant popularity across all PC and console. But in just 4 years, mobile has become far and away the largest platform for the shooter series. COD Mobile is not only a revenue powerhouse with over $1.5 billion earned in direct free-to-play monetization (as of 2021), but the mobile version has also captured more than half of the total Call of Duty playerbase.

According to testimony from Activision CEO Bobby Kotick in Day 4 of the FTC v Microsoft evidentiary hearing, 51% of total Call of Duty users are playing on mobile devices. It was also revealed that Call of Duty has 70 million daily active users. That's more than Roblox, one of the most highly-engaged games on the planet; at the BIG Festival 2023 event, it was revealed that Roblox had 66 million daily active users.

Tim Cain, who created and served as lead programmer on the Fallout series and co-directed The Outer Worlds, says that Obsidian's newer spacefaring RPG was created with mainstream and casual RPG gamers in mind.

The Outer Worlds is a fantastic first-person shooter/RPG that builds off of Obsidian's strengths from Fallout New Vegas while establishing a new IP. The game has pretty much everything gamers knew and loved about New Vegas and the modern Fallout games, but with the distinct Obsidian look and feel.

This was by design. According to The Outer Worlds co-director Tim Cain, the sci-fi RPG was meant to cater towards a more mainstream audience. In a recent video on his channel, Cain talks about developing good game settings and how this advice pertains to The Outer Worlds...and he also says that the main elevator pitch of The Outer Worlds was "Fallout meets Firefly."

The Witcher 3 might be an old game now - it's coming on for a decade since it came out, in fact - but it can still look stunning with the right mods, as a new video has brought to our attention.

This comes from Digital Dreams (as flagged up by Wccftech), with the game carrying over a hundred mods to make it look this good.

That includes the 'beyond all limits' ray tracing ReShade preset, and the Immersive Lighting Mod version 2.2 - the latter of which does a lot of heavy lifting in ramping up the visuals.

With the FTC case looking to block Microsoft's planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard wrapping up and a decision expected any day now, which will determine if the deal goes ahead or not, a treasure trove of info related to Xbox, PlayStation, and titles like Call of Duty and Minecraft has emerged.

We learned that 200-plus million dollar budgets for exclusive AAA titles like Horizon Forbidden West and The Last of Us Part II for PlayStation consoles rivals big-budget movies. We learned Minecraft makes four times as much money on the Switch as on Xbox. And we learned that Xbox's Phil Spencer decided to make all future Bethesda titles exclusive to PC and Xbox - seemingly starting with Starfield.

But this is all 2023 news related to the current console war between Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony; what about the mid-to-late 1990s when it was all about Nintendo, Sega, and Sony, and consoles like the Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, and the fresh-on-the-scene Sony PlayStation. Well, a massive 272-page PDF of classified Sega of America documents from the era has made its way online with some cool revelations (via Sega Retro).

A new report from analyst firm Newzoo concludes that console gamers are more likely to go from players to payers.

Console gaming has more payers than mobile and PC gaming, a new report from Newzoo indicates. Based on the report, which measured a size of 59,040 gamers in a global weighted average across 36 markets, roughly 57% of people who played video games in the last 6 months actually spent money on them. This implies that around 43% of gamers, or over 25,000 people, play free-to-play titles and don't actually spend money on games.

The data is part of Newzoo's robust Global Gamer Study analysis, which can be found here.

Microsoft's Xbox games division helped Bethesda unlock the full potential for Starfield.

Following the Microsoft-ZeniMax buyout deal for $7.5 billion, ZeniMax is now a limited-integration company within Xbox, but that doesn't mean that Microsoft's game dev teams and technology specialists haven't helped with Starfield's development. In fact, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty confirmed that Xbox has been involved with Starfield's development since early 2022, with Xbox's ATG (Advanced Technology Group) assisting Bethesda Game Studios with various console-level optimizations.

In a recent interview with KFG, Bethesda Game Studios' Todd Howard says that Xbox's help has allowed the studio to reach its ambitions with Starfield. Howard responds to the pressures of Starfield essentially being a big proving point for the Xbox first-party games division, and how Microsoft's assistance helped accelerate Starfield's development and allow new improvements like the upgraded Creation Engine 2 optimizations on Xbox platforms. These ambitious new features include things like volumetric fog, the new global illumination lighting systems, physics effects, and more.

ZeniMax head of publishing Pete Hines is not confident Starfield could still release in September 2023 if it was not exclusive to Xbox.

During the FTC v Microsoft federal court case, we heard a lot about about exclusivity. It's a hot topic in the gaming world, particularly in the case of paying studios to skip Xbox--a practice that has earned Sony the designation as a "hostile" competitor against Microsoft.

Conversely, we also heard first-hand about the merits and benefits of exclusivity. These include upfront payments and royalty deals, closer access to console engineers, and, in ZeniMax's case, the ability to launch games more quickly.

The South African Competition Tribunal has approved the Microsoft-Activision merger without conditions.

Earlier this year, South Africa's trade regulator (SAC) recommended full approval of the $68.7 billion Microsoft-Activision on the grounds that it did not pose any significant threat to harm in the region's competition of the video games market. Today, the country's regulation tribunal, the SACT, has formally issued a decision to greenlight and approve the merger.

The regulatory tribunal has yet to publish a formal report on why it unconditionally approved the combination, but it could be similar to those published by other countries, including South Korea.

Reports indicate that the original source code for the first Far Cry game has leaked onto the website Internet Archive.

The file was uploaded to Internet Archive and titled "Far Cry 1.34 Complete", but according to reports, it's unclear if the source code contains updates or patches. However, the fact that the title contains .34, suggests that the files contain patches, but according to gamers who have downloaded the source code, it's "not complete, but close".

Some Redditors reminisced on playing Far Cry 1 for the first time and the difficulty of the game.

"We cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all the necessary rights," writes Valve in response to a game developer whose game was rejected from the Steam platform due to issues with AI-generated art. This info comes from Reddit user 'potterharry97', who made their written rejection public on the popular discussion forum.

The validity of AI-generated art has been a controversial subject of late due to AI models being trained using existing art, some of which is copyrighted, making the whole idea of the originality of AI-generated art a question of plagiarism in some extreme cases. And it's this idea that sits at the center of Valve's stance on AI art.

In its response to the developer, Valve notes that unless "you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game," it cannot sanction the use of AI-generated art. Or, at least, it's making it the developer's responsibility to ensure all artwork has been legally created - though one assumes small indie studios looking at AI-generated art wouldn't have access to data sets used to train AI models.

Bethesda's Starfield is a PC and Xbox exclusive and one of the most anticipated RPG releases in years, a brand-new sci-fi epic from the team behind Skyrim and Fallout. Recently, the studio announced its partnership with AMD for the PC release, where we learned that the game would support AMD's FSR 2.0 upscaling technology across PC and console alongside multi-threaded CPU optimizations.

This news arrived last week and was criticized due to recent reports indicating that AMD is actively blocking developers from adding NVIDIA DLSS support to its sponsored games. To the point where modders have confirmed that they'll add unofficial DLSS 3 and Frame Generation support to the game within weeks of its launch.

Although that controversy is limited to the Radeon and GPU side of the equation, it looks like the partnership is as much about CPU performance - which is great. And according to this placeholder page over at US retailer Newegg, Starfield is set to be bundled with all new Ryzen 7000 CPUs.

It's no surprise that Starfield will have mod support, but now we're hearing Todd Howard share his thoughts about Starfield mods.

Bethesda's new game Starfield is a perfect fit for mods. The space sim has a massive array of 1,000 planets, and most of these will be devoid of life. To faithful Bethesda RPG players, this sounds like a blank canvas for mods to unleash boundless creativity. Only 100 of Starfield's vanilla worlds will have life on them, but that will certainly change with mods.

There's few things more enjoyable than playing a Bethesda RPG on PC at launch. You get to see the game evolve in real-time thanks to the skills and imagination of the gaming community and we could see some very interesting things roll out with Starfield mods. Let's just hope the Creation Club is at least optimized enough not to break script extenders with new game updates this time (Bethesda has had a history of "breaking" Fallout and Skyrim mods with game updates, forcing modders to re-adjust their "script extenders" to ensure specific game-changing mods are supported in the new update).