Gaming - Page 366

The SEGA Dreamcast turns 23 years old today, and to celebrate we take a look back at the system's legacy and it how it helped innovate the video games market.

The Dreamcast is 23 years old today. The system was one of the most interesting game consoles of all time thanks to its online connectivity with games like Phantasy Star Online and an actual web browser, and its awesome VMU memory cards that acted as storage as well as portable handhelds. The Dreamcast's VMUs interacted with specific games like Sonic Adventure, offering a separate playable mini-game called Chao Adventure that could translate over to the main game.

The Dreamcast was a big success at launch. SEGA had originally hoped to make about $41 million in sales, but managed to more than double that--the Dreamcast sold-through $97 million worth of consoles, games, and peripherals (source: The Baltimore Sun). In fact, the SEGA Dreamcast was so successful that it set a world record as the largest retail entertainment sales in U.S. history (source: Peter Moore).

Valve has opened its official Steam Deck repair centers and is ready to start fixing malfunctioning handled-PC hybrids.

Valve has announced that its Steam Deck fix-it-quick facilities are now operational and that gamers with faulty units can start requesting repairs. The company says that it will fix any and all repairs as long as the Steam Deck is covered by the system's one-year warranty (we've outlined some things that will void your warranty in a list below.

If your Steam Deck is on the fritz here are a few options:

Destiny, one of the most pivotal shooters of the Gen 8 console era, turns 8 years old today. How time flies when you're having fun!

While Bungie forges ahead with its ambitious live service plans under the ownership of Sony, today we'll take a look back when it was trying to forge its own Destiny. 7 years after Bungie broke away from Microsoft, the developer opened the door to a future sans Halo. That door was Destiny, an engaging shooter that merged MMO-style drop-in co-op and social features with the expert-level FPS combat Bungie was known for. It was an instant hit.

One of Destiny's biggest downfalls, though, was a massive re-write of the game's story that significantly disrupted gameplay flow. Gamers knew something was off back in 2014, and years later it was revealed that Activision was to blame for the re-write.

NetherRealm's Ed Boon just ran a poll asking gamers what they want to see next, and the winning answer is very interesting.

Since Mortal Kombat 11's release in 2019, NetherRealm has been steadily working on its next project. Many have speculated on what it will be; possibly Injustice 3? Mortal Kombat 12? Or something new? NetherRealm isn't ready to say just yet--and they did a funny MK12 leak spoof back in January--but head honcho Ed Boon isn't afraid to ask what fans are hoping to see.

The poll had four responses: Injustice 3, a Marvel game, Marvel vs DC, and the next Mortal Kombat. The most popular answer is a Marvel vs DC fighting game with 35.4% of the votes, which represents about 18,854 people's votes. This is pretty interesting and could change up the framework quite a bit. We've seen Capcom do excellent work with Marvel fighting games and NetherRealm's Injustice duo of games has made stellar work of the DC franchise.

The rumors were right: Amy Hennig's team is working on a new Marvel game starring Captain America and Black Panther.

Today Disney and Marvel gave a brief teaser on Skydance's upcoming new hero game. The project, which has yet to be officially named, will feature four playable characters including a young Steve Rogers (Captain America) and Azzuri, which was T'Challa's grandfather during the World War II era. Hydra is the enemy during the game, which is described as a "narrative-driven ensemble adventure game."

No release date or other details were announced with the project and it's likely that it's still in early phases of development. Listings on Skydance New Media's recruitment pages suggest the game will be singleplayer-only and not feature any sort of online multiplayer. Amy Hennig has said the new Marvel game will feel like other titles she's worked on, which includes Uncharted.

Activision today confirmed that Call of Duty Warzone Mobile is indeed happening, and that more information is coming during its COD Next event on September 15.

Call of Duty Warzone is the most important thing Activision has ever done. It's the purest proof-of-concept of Activision-Blizzard's costly new four-part plan, which sees more emphasis on live services, free-to-play, mobile games, and premium releases. Activision makes far and away most of its money from microtransactions and live games, and Warzone helped significantly boost its revenues since launching in 2020--in fact, Warzone helped Call of Duty make a record $3 billion in 2020.

Now after amassing over 100 million players on consoles and PC in less than a year, Warzone is coming to gaming's largest market: Mobile. Activision has formally announced Call of Duty Warzone Mobile as a rather sizable release that sees multiple studios working on the project. Four of Activision's studios are coming together to make Warzone Mobile including Beenox, Solid State Studios, Activision Shanghai and Digital Legends.

Uncharted visionary Amy Hennig is making a new Marvel game, and recent reports say it'll focus on Captain America and Black Panther.

Disney is set to host a video games showcase tomorrow, September 9 at 4PM EST. The big headliner is a fresh new game from Skydance New Media, a studio founded by ex-Naughty Dog and Visceral Games creative Amy Hennig (she was involved in Uncharted and the ambitious Project Ragtag Star Wars game that EA cancelled before shutting down Visceral Games).

Reports indicate that the new Marvel game will star Captain America and Black Panther as they battle Hydra in a World War II backdrop.

The PlayStation 5 now supports native 2560x1440 resolution output to compatible displays, Sony has announced.

It's finally here. Sony's latest PS5 firmware update allows gamers to hook up their consoles to a 1440p display and enjoy native WQHD resolution. There's just one trade-off: Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), which tightens up refresh rates between both the console itself and the display, isn't supported over 1440p. Adaptive sync solutions like G-Sync and FreeSync still aren't supported either.

"1440p video output on PS5 requires a TV or PC monitor that support 1440p/60Hz, or 1440p/60Hz and 120Hz. VRR on PS5 supports 1080p and 4K video output but not 1440p," Sony has said.

Returnal should be the next PlayStation 5 game to cross over to PC.

Sony is making a big splash onto PC gaming this year. Following the releases of Horizon Zero Dawn, Days Gone, God of War, and more recently Spider-Man 2018, Sony is bringing its once-guarded PS4 exclusives over to PC in an effort to establish supplemental revenues. 2022 will deliver at least two new PlayStation exclusives with Spider-Man Miles Morales--a launch game on the PS5--and the Uncharted Legacy of Thieves Collection. Now there's even more reason to believe another PS5 game will cross over with Housemarque's punishing shooter Returnal.

Housemarque gave a GDC 2022 speech with on-screen debut footage that listed PC as the output platform (about the 13:32 mark). This indicates Returnal is probably coming to PC, reinforcing previous claims. Returnal was found on SteamDB under the name Tower of Sisyphus, which is a direct reference to a section of the game.

It's official: Square Enix no longer owns major franchises like Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Legacy of Kain, and Thief.

Today is a big day for The Embracer Group and its newly-acquired studios, Eidos Montreal and Crystal Dynamics. The duo were previously owned by Square Enix, who notoriously shed its Western games division so it could double-down on more guaranteed hits and more tightly control budgets after major flops like The Avengers, which reportedly lost the publisher $200 million.

Now both studios have full creative control over major franchises--some of which have been on ice for many, many y ears. Crystal Dynamics has taken control over Tomb Raider and Legacy of Kain, and has begun pre-production on a new Tomb Raider game built in Unreal Engine 5. Eidos Montreal is now free to make more Deus Ex games--a big deal considering Mankind Divided's ending--and even jump back into the Thief franchise.

In a twist of fate, Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto is helping craft Battlefield's next campaign storyline.

Following Battlefield 2042's disastrous launch (which EA management reportedly blamed on Halo Infinite's success...but that didn't last long), EA has put significant investment in trying to save the franchise. One of Battlefield 2042's big controversies was that it had no campaign--it was a purely online-only live service game. This backfired tremendously due to unstable gameplay, lack of content, and 120-player maps that were far too big.

Now EA is making some big course corrections. In 2021, EA announced that Marcus Lehto, who helped create the world, vision, and scope for the Halo franchise, would lead a new Seattle-based studio to work on Battlefield. EA has now confirmed the studio is named Ridgeline Games and that Lehto and his team will be "focused on developing a narrative campaign set in the Battlefield universe."

We reported recently that Sony had some upgraded PlayStation 5 models going into the wild, but now they're hitting shelves in Australia and we are finding out just what makes them different... and you'd be surprised at the work Sony is putting into updating the PS5 design without bragging about it.

The new Sony PlayStation 5 model "CFI-1200" has been picked up and received the usual teardown treatment from YouTuber Austin Evans, where inside we find out about the new PS5 "CFI-1200" consoles and that they are not just much lighter -- which makes shipping millions of pounds less per year a big deal for Sony -- where we also find that the new PS5 models use less power, and they're also rocking a "totally different" motherboard.

The video details that the SSD enclosure has a "better" shield, while the motherboard has been tweaked, as too has the heat sink inside of the updated PlayStation 5 console that makes the reduction in weight very, very welcomed. Austin tested the PlayStation 5 models CFI-1000 vs CFI-1100 vs CFI-1200, where the launch version of the PS5 was using 218W of power, the 2021 version of the PS5 consumes around 229W of power, while the new CFI-1200 model is using only 201W of power in comparison.

EA is wanting to chew up more of your precious SSD space with its upcoming NBA 2K23 commanding a huge 152GB on the Xbox Series X/S pre-loads of the game.

2K Sports has unleashed pre-loading for NBA 2K23 on Microsoft's current-gen Xbox Series X/S consoles, with the pre-load taking up a huge 152GB of SSD space on the console. This is a rather alarming upgrade of 35GB from last year's NBA 2K22, so I do wonder where all that extra 35GB is being used as it's a massive chunk of storage for a single basketball game.

NBA 2K23 would be taking up one-sixth of the 1TB of SSD storage inside of Microsoft's current-gen Xbox Series X/S consoles, which is kinda ridiculous considering it's just a basketball game and not some next-gen Crysis-style AAA title on a next-gen Unreal Engine 5 visual masterpiece. But the 35GB increase in storage required over NBA 2K22 is absolutely ridiculous, 152GB in total for a basketball game is just bonkers.

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).