Gaming - Page 348

Microsoft has taken a play from Stadia's strategy book by adding one of the most innovative features for instant gaming access.

Using the cloud, Microsoft is gearing up for its inter-connected empire of multi-platform online gaming. A big part of cloud gaming is reducing friction and providing easy access to content--that's actually the main selling point, being able to play games without having a console or a gaming PC. This new Xbox feature adds another way to streamline access and discovery.

Gamers can now instantly launch games directly from shared screenshots and video, not unlike Stadia's instant game-sharing feature. The idea is simple: Microsoft wants everyone to play as soon as possible as easily as possible. A friend can share a clip or snapshot on their Xbox LIVE feed, and you can click on it and launch the game directly from the message or activity feed UI. This only works on PC and mobile for now, and connects via cloud streaming similar to Stadia.

CD Projekt Group management affirms that The Witcher 3 is still planned for a holiday 2022 release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles.

The Witcher 3's next-gen version is still coming in 2022--or at least that's the strategy that CD Projekt is sticking to. The game is expected to be a major driver for CD Projekt's Q4 period, which corresponds to the calendar holiday period, after the company's traditional Q3 sales lull (July-September).

"The main event for us in Q4 will be The Witcher 3 next-gen release, which Adam confirmed is going to happen by the end of the year in Q4," CD Projekt's Adam Kicinski said in a recent Q2 earnings call.

Call of Duty will eventually be removed and kept off of PlayStation systems, Sony gaming boss Jim Ryan has officially confirmed today.

Call of Duty will not remain on PlayStation after all. Following multiple nebulous statements with lots of PR speak from Microsoft and Xbox's Phil Spencer (and a non-answer to Bloomberg regarding the topic of exclusivity), Sony has officially responded and outlined the terms of the Microsoft's proposed non-exclusivity deal.

Sony's Jim Ryan confirms that Call of Duty would be removed from PlayStation hardware three years after Sony's deal with Activision ends. In a recent statement to The Verge, Phil Spencer said as much without actually explicitly saying that Call of Duty would be kept off of PlayStation after this time.

CD Projekt management has confirmed that Cyberpunk 2077 is only getting a single expansion, and that it's being treated as a AAA game while in production.

Cyberpunk 2077's new Phantom Liberty expansion will be the only major post-launch story content the game receives. Instead of releasing two expansions like The Witcher 3, CD Projekt appears to be doubling down on Phantom Liberty and creating a kind of mega-expansion that might be just as big as The Witcher 3's Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions.

"We decided to develop one major expansion of Cyberpunk which is going to take advantage of all capabilities of new-gen consoles," said CD Projekt's SVP of business development Michael Nowakowski.

The new Witcher saga will include more than one game, but CD Projekt isn't yet sure if it'll be a trilogy of games like Geralt's adventures.

In a recent Q2 earnings call, CD Projekt Group management confirms that it has plans to release multiple new Witcher games. The newly announced Witcher saga is a multi-part series of titles, but the first game is still in very early pre-production phases.

"We said that this will be a new saga. We have in mind more than one game. The first saga was 3 games, now we are thinking about more than one game," CD Projekt president Adam Kicinski said in the Q&A session of the call.

Sony has lost a long-time employee in Masayasu Ito, who led the development team on both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 consoles.

Masayasu Ito will be leaving Sony on October 1, after joining the company all the way back in 1986 meaning he's been with the company for 36 years now. When Ito first started at Sony, he was working on the development of in-car audio equipment, but later transferred to Sony's console division in 2000.

Ever since he joined the PlayStation team, Ito has had an influence on Sony's consoles since the early days -- including the PS Portable and the PlayStation 4 Pro. In the end, and the position he is retiring from, Ito was the Executive Vice President of Hardware Engineering and Operation and representative director of Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Intel is giving away one of the biggest -- if not the very biggest -- games of 2022 with its 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" desktop and laptops, and Arc GPUs in the form of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II is valued at $70, and is just part of the $370 worth of applications and games that you could be applicable to get... if you have purchased the right components, desktop, or laptop from Intel. The brand new Intel Software Advantage program includes applications and games, but there are limitations.

But first, let's go over what Intel is putting on the table. On the games side of things, we have the biggest in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (valued at $70), but there's also Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed (valued at $40), Gotham Knights (valued at $60) and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt (valued at $20).

Red Dead Redemption 2 didn't launch with support for AMD's new FSR 2.0 (FidelityFX Super Resolution) upscaling technology when it hit the PC, but modders quickly added FSR 2.0 support... and now, the developer has added official FSR 2.0 support into the game.

The latest v1.31 update for Red Dead Redemption 2 on the PC adds support for AMD FSR 2.0, with developer Rockstar Games noting in the 1.31 patch notes: "AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.0 has been implemented". Ahhh, also... Rockstar, that would be "FidelityFX, not 'FidelityX' as you've noted here'.

You'll need to download the 433MB update, which will also add Reflex to reduce lag on the gamepad only (there's no help here for the mouse and keyboard input). Red Dead Redemption 2's new 1.31 update also sees Rockstar Games making improvements to Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA). So it's not just AMD FSR 2.0 in the new update, but that's the biggest deal here for sure. There's also plenty more in the patch notes, these three here are just the PC-only tweaks in the RDR2 patch.

Halo Infinite's latest September update sets the stage for the future of the live service game, but many fans aren't happy with the plan.

343i is at a crossroads with Halo Infinite. In a new Halo Infinite update video, studio has laid out a new strategy that will establish a foundation for Infinite with an emphasis on five main priorities including: seasonality, rewards, inviting social gameplay, balanced competitive PVP, and stability. The devs had to sacrifice in order to move forward on these goals, though, and executing on this plan lead to the cancellation of Halo Infinite's promised split-screen co-op.

Fans weren't happy about this. 343i's Sean Baron also raised controversy with comments that Halo is a competitive shooter first and foremost. Many fans objected to this, saying that Halo was a fun party game before anything else, and this comment sparked multiple YouTube responses adequately attributing Halo's early success to split-screen co-op and in-house, local PVP with friends.

Ubisoft will show off four new Assassin's Creed games during its special Ubisoft Forward event on September 10, sources have told Bloomberg's Jason Schreier and TryHard's Tom Henderson.

Ubisoft has ambitious plans for the Assassin's Creed series and is ready to start branching off into mobile while executing on Assassin's Creed Infinity, which will be the franchise's games-as-a-platform ecosystem. The first game will be Assassin's Creed Mirage, a smaller-scale game compared to Valhalla that is set during 8th century Baghdad and stars Basim, one of the titular characters of 2020's mainline game. Mirage is expected to launch in 2023.

The other three games are where Ubisoft starts differentiating its slate. There's two main games and then one mobile game. The first main game is codenamed Red, and will be set in Japan, possibly with samurai-style armors and playable male/female protagonists. Red is being developed by Ubisoft's Quebec team.

Tencent has made a strategic purchase that could pave the way to a buyout of Ubisoft in the future.

Ubisoft has fended off a potential hostile takeover from Tencent by selling shares of the Guillemot family's company instead of Ubisoft stock. Tencent has purchased a 49.9% stake in Guillemot Brothers Limited, a company run by Ubisoft's founding Guillemot family. The Guillemot brothers have the largest individual shares of Ubisoft stock out of all shareholders, so this technically gives the founders a way to sell their shares if they decide to.

"Post transaction, Guillemot Brothers Limited will hold 17,086,199 Ubisoft shares, including 9,086,199 shares held via derivative contracts," reads a press release.

CD Projekt RED today announced that it is officially dropping PS4 and Xbox One consoles in regards to new Cyberpunk 2077 content.

The new Patch 1.6 Edgerunners update will be the last major content drop for PS4 and Xbox One versions of Cyberpunk 2077. CD Projekt RED will no longer provide new content updates or features to these older consoles. That also means Cyberpunk 2077's newly announced expansion Phantom Liberty will not release on PS4 or Xbox One.

"There's going to be some smaller updates primarily focusing on tech support to keep it all running smoothly, but yes all new future features and content are only coming to current-gen consoles as well as PC," Phantom Liberty game director Gabriel Amatangelo said in the recent Night City Wire stream.

Cyberpunk 2077's first major expansion is arriving in 2023 on PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC, and it's called Phantom Liberty.

Cyberpunk 2077's new expansion Phantom Liberty is described as a sci-fi spy thriller where V enlists as an agent of the New United States of America. This kind of espionage action wasn't something I had expected from CP2077, but CD Projekt RED says they're having a lot of fun with the expansion, possibly drawing upon pop culture references to craft a story of intrigue, betrayal, and assassinations.

"We're having a lot of fun with it. It's a new kind of style of a plot that we're having fun with. A new cast of characters expanding on a district in Night City, where it primarily takes place," said game director Gabriel Amatangelo.

CD Projekt RED has confirmed it will reveal "what's next for Cyberpunk 2077" as part of a special Night City Wire stream tomorrow, September 6 at 11AM EST.

Cyberpunk 2077's long-awaited expansions could be formally unveiled--or at least teased in a meaningful capacity--during tomorrow's big Night City stream. The new Cyberpunk anime Edgerunners will be the star of the show, and rightly so since the show premieres on September 13 on Netflix, but CDPR also teases some tidbits on Cyberpunk 2077 as well.

Studio management has previously said the first Cyberpunk 2077 expansion will not release until 2023, which is years after the game's original controversial launch in 2020. No specific details were revealed about the expansion but we do know that CD Projekt spent roughly $19 million on the expansion's development so far.

Microsoft's first-party studios hold special game summits, which are internal mini-conferences were experts come together to share expertise and technology while opening the doors for collaboration on new projects.

Iteration is one of the most exciting things about game development, especially when it comes to first-party studios that are linked together under the same banner. We've seen this kind of collaboration between Sony's first-party studios with Insomniac's machine learning inference object deformation on the PlayStation 5, and the collaborations between Kojima Productions and Guerrilla Games with the Decima Engine, which powered both Horizon and Death Stranding.

The same kind of higher-level collaboration also exists at Microsoft's internal studios, and rightly so given the depth of the DirectX 12 in-house API toolsets and SDKs. Different devs have their own unique ways of doing things and will often share tips with other studios. Microsoft exec Matt Booty says that the company holds game summits where teams will gather and work together to solve problems and iterate on many different things.

Talented modders are recreating the cancelled 2001 Duke Nukem Forever build that could've revitalized the franchise.

Back in 2001, 3D Realms started work on their own version of Duke Nukem Forever. The result was a chaotic mix of old-school FPS sentiments with the crude humor and flashy bombastic thrills the series is known for. 3D Realms didn't have an actual game, though--they had created a prototype demo build using Unreal Engine. The finalized game, released in 2011 from Gearbox, was markedly different.

Naturally fans want the original 2001 game, and while the source code for the old build has leaked, after a while they might just get it. With the Duke Nukem Forever 2001 Restoration Project, a team of modders and tech wizards are meticulously piecing together a playable version of DNF2001 and trying to create something that 3D Realms may have released way back when.

Back when Halo 3 was on the misty horizon, Bungie put out one of the most incredible pre-release teasers ever made. It had a simple tagline: Believe. The UNSC was overrun. Everyone was dying, the Covenant was unstoppable. Even Chief, the indomitable Demon, was being held up like a trophy kill. But Chief wasn't dead--he woke up, ignited a plasma nade, and that was that. We believed. It was pure magic.

It's been a long time since I felt that kind of magic with Halo. Like a lot of things these days, Halo just isn't the same. It's not bad, it's just...different. It's harder to get excited about live services, you know? But there's one silver lining: Halo mods. 343i is just one team, but there's a veritable army of talented modders out there who are creating such impressive things that I believe in Halo games again. These wizards are sparking that old-school feeling that has been asleep for a long time--if you grew up with the original Xbox, you know what I'm talking about. It's the feeling you got when you booted up Halo CE and tried the campaign for the first time, or your first 16-player local LAN party with system link multiplayer.

For the past 2 years, VKMT has held a community showcase to highlight some of the best Halo mods that are either ready to play or currently in development. It's kind of like an E3 for Halo mods. The most recent showcase for 2022 is just amazing. There's some really impressive stuff in here that can add a new dimension of play to the Halo MCC games, including a fully playable recreation of Star Wars Battlefront II built into Halo MCC, Halo Doom Evolved, which merges Doom and Halo together in pixelated glory, and an incredible restored version of Halo 1 multiplayer with cut weapons as well as a bunch of extra surprises. There's even a standalone mech shooter called Wolves that's presumably a nod to the original Spartan I ORION suits.

Grand Theft Auto V, one of the best-selling games of all time, was made with the help of thousands upon thousands of people.

Rockstar Games recently put up a new post thanking the massive army of developers, specialists, and staffers who worked on one of the most popular and best-selling games of all time. With nearly 170 million shipments worldwide across three console generations, GTA V is less of a game and more of a kind of mini franchise in of itself; the game has generated at least $7.68 billion since 2013, and much more when the full scope of GTA Online's microtransactions are included.

That massive success came at a heavy investment of both manpower and funding. The Rockstar Games thank you post highlights just how many people it takes to make something like GTA V. By our count, more than 5,000 people worked on the game. We selected all the names and copied them into Excel to see how many columns there were, and Excel clocked in 6,820. Headers/job titles account for a sizable portion of these columns so keep that in mind.

Kadokawa Group, the Japanese multimedia giant who owns FromSoftware, confirms that Elden Ring will expand with transmedia content.

With 16.6 million copies sold, Elden Ring is an incredible success that took the gaming world by storm in early 2022. The RPG has made a long-lasting impression with its incredible and unique environments, meaningful exploration, hard-as-nails boss fights, and social engagement--it's so big that Bandai Namco has recognized it as an official franchise.

Now according to the Kadokawa Group, who wholly owns Elden Ring's developer FromSoftware, the landmark fantasy franchise will cross over into other media. In a recent Q1 earnings report, Kadokawa briefly mentions that it will "maximize the lifetime value of Elden Ring with a media mix," strongly indicating that the series will get its own cross-over media.

Sony and Tencent have made strategic investments in one of the most lauded Japanese video game developers on the planet.

FromSoftware is one of the most unique studios in gaming. The team, led by Hideaki Miyazaki, is renowned and infamous for the punishing Dark Souls and Bloodborne games--a series that's been so transformational that it has created its own "Soulsborne" genre. FromSoftware just released their most popular game ever with Elden Ring, which has amassed 16.6 million sales, and the team is now gearing up for big new projects like a new Armored Core title.

The studio has larger ambitions, though, and it needs more funding to reach them. That's why FromSoftware owner Kadokawa Group has allowed FromSoft to directly sell its shares in exchange for funding. Sony and Tencent have bought a combined stake of 30% (Sony bought 1,476 shares for $120.47 million equating to 14.09% of total shares, and Tencent bought 1,703 shares for $138.97 million equating to 16.25% of total shares).