Gaming - Page 451

Ubisoft is doubling the frame rate of one of the best Assassin's Creed games on consoles.

Today Ubisoft announced Assassin's Creed Odyssey is getting a surprise upgrade to support 60FPS on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles. This effectively doubles the base 30FPS frame rate of the 2018 best-seller on PS4, PS4 Pro, Xbox One, Xbox One S, and Xbox One X hardware. What's even more surprising is that this isn't a next-gen optimized patch, but an upgrade made through each console's backwards compatibility functionality.

That being said. don't expect other massive improvements like upgrade visuals, ray tracing, or even a significant reduction in loading times (although the PS5's PCIe 4.0 SSD starts Odyssey 67% faster and loads up a save game 57% faster than the base PS4's slower HDD). The patch clocks in at less than 500MB on both platforms which is a nice touch.

Xbox One owners will soon be able to play Gen 8 Xbox Series X games via game streaming, Microsoft today announced.

Project xCloud game streaming is coming to Xbox consoles in Holiday 2021, bringing performance at up to 1080p 60FPS to both Xbox One and Xbox Series gen systems. Gamers will be able to jump right into any game with the press of a button without any downloads, offering a unique way to try and sample new titles.

One of the biggest benefits is that Xbox One owners can try out Gen 8 games without needing an Xbox Series X or S console. Microsoft confirmed that game streaming allows the 8 year-old Xbox One to be forward compatible with all upcoming next-gen exclusives when they start releasing in 2022, including the new Fable and Obsidian's Avowed RPG.

Google had a very definitive response to Epic's staged uprising: To force a hostile takeover with a mass share buyout.

Epic Games has earned the ire of mobile titans Apple and Google, leading to two very prominent monopolization court cases. It all started when Epic added its own payment processing system to both iOS and Android, and both Google and Apple responded by kicking Fortnite off their platforms. Now both are missing out on microtransaction millions. Ever since then, Epic has been a thorn in both companies' sides as court cases air their dirty laundry--like the time Google almost took over Epic.

A recent court documentfrom the Epic vs Google case confirms that Google was exploring options to subdue Epic. One of these possibilities including a hostile takeover with majority share buyouts. According to the document, Google thought about teaming up with Tencent to "buy 100% of Epic":

343 Industries has fallen into the age old trap of live games, juggling the catch-22 of updating a game and having to fix it at the same time.

Halo Infinite is a live game, and that means it can and will evolve over time. This offers many advantages like lucrative online monetization and being able to shift the game's meta, add new content, and adjust content on-the-fly. The disadvantages are also prevalent--live games are exceptionally hard to make because they take so much effort across a variety of spectrums. Developers have to inhabit three different timelines for a live game to be successful--the past, the present, and the future.

They have to look at the past and see what worked, keep the present intact and maintain servers, and continue planning for the future with new content. To put it simply: Developers have to keep a rickety ship afloat in a hurricane storm as they add and build new things that make it heavier and potentially more unstable.

Today Bungie will outline Destiny 2's ambitious future with its new Witch Queen expansion, which is unlike anything we've ever experienced before.

This year, Destiny turns 7 years old, a magical and mystical number for Bungie. The developer says its new Witch Queen expansion will deliver something new and mysterious and has been hyping its new expansion, The Witch Queen, for weeks now. Something big is on the horizon for Destiny 2 and there's speculation this could be Destiny 2's game-changing The Taken King moment.

Apart from the expanded content we also got our first look at Savathun, the macabre witch queen herself. In the teaser, Savathun, one of the most dreaded hive gods in existence, tells us "truth is a funny thing" amidst a sea of dead hive corpses. Bungie has also confirmed the Queen of the Reef, Mara Sov, will be coming back.

PlayStation gamers are once again pushing back against the new $70 Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut re-release by review bombing the game on Metacritic.

Ghost of Tsushima is one of the most universally lauded PlayStation exclusives of our time. It's received a handful of perfect scores, and gamers give near-unanimous praise of the colorful and mystical samurai slasher. But gamers were upset when Sony announced Ghost of Tsushima's PS5 upgrade would be locked behind a $70 paywall--unlike most games that offered free next-gen upgrades, including Hellblade which now has raytracing on Series X.

It turns out that Ghost of Tsushima's Director's Cut doesn't offer many performance benefits outside a boost in fidelity resolution. There's other features like a lock-on system and DualSense haptic feedback. Now gamers are review bombing the Director's Cut on Metacritic to send a message to Sony and developer Sucker Punch. At the time of writing there is 191 negative review scores--mostly 0's--and 341 positives to help offset the bad reviews.

Epic's digital games store isn't profitable--and hasn't been profitable since it launched in 2018--but new court documents show how much the online marketplace is making.

We've already gleaned a fair amount from the Epic vs Apple trial documents. The case has revealed how much Fortnite has made, and how the storefront isn't profitable because of the myriad of promotions, sales, coupons, freebies and exclusivity deals that Epic pays millions for. Case in point: The Epic Games Store made just $232 million in 2019, which isn't that much for an entire online distribution storefront for an entire year of sales.

Taking a closer look at Epic's 2019 year gives critical perspective on the numbers. The company made $232 million throughout the year, driven by strategic releases and sales. Borderlands 3, which was EGS exclusive for 6 months, was the single biggest contributor for 2019's revenues, making up 38.6% of total earnings and driving Q3's sizable $90 million revenues. The holiday sale and Red Dead Redemption 2's timed exclusivity on the Epic Store

Borderlands 3's successful launch on PC helped the Epic Games Store earn $14 million on one day.

New court documents from the Epic vs Apple trial reveal all sorts of new tidbits about the Fortnite owner's business. We've known for a while that the Epic Games Store isn't profitable, and that Epic has been taking yearly losses on the marketplace as it trades money for a larger userbase.

There are breakout successes though. Epic's timed exclusivity buyouts have worked quite well and some, like Borderlands 3, have led to skyrocketing sales revenue. The court documents confirm that Borderlands 3 made a whopping $14 million on the Epic Games Store in one day, and ultimately helped spike September's revenues to a substantial $72.6 million. This was undoubtedly driven by Borderlands 3, which released on EGS in September. In fact, Borderlands 3 made up 38.6% of all Q3'19 revenues, or about $34.7 million.

Many gamers think Halo Infinite should be delayed so it can launch as a complete package with co-op campaign and forge included.

Yesterday 343 Industries confirmed Halo Infinite will be missing two big features when it launches in Holiday 2021: Co-operative campaign on both PC and consoles, and Forge, the toolset used to make custom games and maps. These features have been delayed by up to half a year.

343i says it plans to release co-campaign 3 months after launch, and forge is coming six months after launch. That's if everything goes according to plan, and with live games, things usually don't (just ask BioWare with Anthem or Bethesda with Fallout 76). That means Halo Infinite will be the first mainline Halo FPS not to launch with co-op campaign on consoles, and that the game will technically release as an incomplete package.

Activision is basically a Call of Duty factory now--how soon until the billion-dollar publisher hits a wall?

Activision is going all-in on Call of Duty, complete with annualized releases, Warzone, and new mobile games. The IP far and away its most lucrative franchise, and the company has conscripted all of its major studios to contribute with big mainline releases.

Call of Duty Vanguard, this year's new WWII-themed shooter, is no different. Vanguard's campaign and multiplayer is principally developed by Sledgehammer games, but Treyarch made the zombies mode and Raven Software is leading Vanguard's Warzone integration. All of these studios are very busy, and by November 2021, three games will connect to Warzone--Modern Warfare, Black Ops Cold War, and Vanguard.

Halo Infinite will only have singleplayer campaign when it launches this Holiday season.

Halo Infinite won't have campaign co-op play at launch, becoming the first Halo game in the entire franchise to break this long-running tradition. Campaign co-operative play is being delayed a minimum of 3 months after launch and will instead release sometime in 2022, during Infinite's second season.

The reason? Co-op simply isn't ready yet due to the complexities of Halo Infinite's nonlinear Far Cry-esque campaign structure. The game is actually more reminiscent of an RPG now, complete with lots of replayability and gun/character upgrades.

It's 2021, and Skyrim is being re-released for the sixth time to celebrate the RPG's huge 10-year anniversary. The new re-release carries forward one of Bethesda's most unpopular decisions to help breathe new life into the game.

Skyrim's new Anniversary Edition comes packed with 78 of the best Creation Club mods available for the game, which means the contentious program is being propagated with the new release.

The Creation Club program was massively controversial when it launched in 2017. Many saw that Bethesda was trying to sell paid mods to console and PC gamers who could literally enjoy the same content for free on both platforms. The idea was to give mod creators a way to monetize their creations and kick back something extra for Bethesda in the process. This was during the company's messy time of strange monetization tactics, which found their way into lackluster games like The Elder Scrolls Blades, and Fallout 76, which charges a premium for the kind of in-game cosmetics that Fallout 4 players can get for free.

The content in the next Halo Infinite beta has been confirmed by 343 Industries...and this one is going to be good.

Halo Infinite will get at least another wide-scale flighting test before launch, 343i today announced. This time around the beta will feature PVP baked right in and players will have an array of gametypes to choose from.

The next Infinite test will have the bots and weapon drills featured in the technical test, along with live human-on-human FPS carnage with 4v4 PVP and even big team battle. 343i has previously confirmed Infinite's BTB will feature 12v12 matches, up from the classic 8v8 in previous Halo games.

Epic's freebie strategy is working and millions of people are signing up every month to grab free games.

The Epic Games Store hasn't been profitable since launch. Epic is first focusing on building out a playerbase and then moving to long-term profits. To help build out a playerbase outside of Fortnite users, Epic has created two loss-leading initiatives: huge multi-million dollar deals to snag PC exclusives and monthly promotional freebies, not unlike those on Xbox LIVE Gold and PlayStation Plus. The freebies are working quite well, especially in the case of GTA V.

According to new court documents from the Epic vs Apple case, over 7 million people signed up for new Epic Games Store accounts to grab Grand Theft Auto V for free.

The next Saints Row game will be revealed at Gamescom's Opening Night Live event this Wednesday, and it's not what we expected.

Volition's new Saints Row game isn't a sequel like Saints Row V, but a reboot of the hilarious crime-addled franchise. The developers teased the reboot on the Saints Row webpage but didn't make any major announcements or feature reveals--the team is saving that for the Gamescom event.

So when is the game coming out? Probably not until 2022. Neither Embracer nor Koch Media (Deep Silver's parent company) have disclosed any new info, and Embracer's latest financials don't give that many clues. In March 2021, Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors said FY2022 (ending March 2022) will be the company's best year, driven by "numerous significant releases towards the second half of the year."

With over 30 million sales across half a dozen re-releases, Skyrim is one of Bethesda's biggest cash crops. A new harvest is coming in 2021.

Skyrim will turn 10 years old in November. Bethesda is celebrating by re-releasing the game for the sixth time on a new generation of consoles (PS5 and Xbox Series X/S). The new Skyrim Anniversary Collection features a ton of Creation Club mods and upgrades on next-gen console hardware. Like Grand Theft Auto V, Skyrim will also have spanned three major console gens in 2021.

Taking a look back at Skyrim's timeline shows impressive sales elasticity across multiple platforms. In November, Skyrim will have released seven times in the last 10 years, including six re-releases across Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and even console and PC VR headsets.

Halo Infinite's final release will perform a lot better than the insider flight, 343i confirms.

In a recent dev update, 343i says the Halo Infinite insider test flight was two months old and that the game will perform much better at launch. Since time works differently in game dev--two months can lead to radical changes--343i says playing the flight was like going back in time. This is to be expected because the test was a technical run to flex the infrastructure and network systems.

In the dev update, 343i live ops producer Sam Hanshaw confirmed a 20% perf gain on PC: "One of the things that was pretty painful for everyone was a misconfiguration in how the executable was running. That was resulting in about a 20% performance drop. That's been addressed, and gamers can expect at least a 20% improvement in performance. We also had issues with GTX 900 series graphics cards."

It's been 10 years since Skyrim released. You know what that means--time for another port.

Surprise: Skyrim is being re-released on next-gen consoles. At Quakecon, Bethesda announced two bits of Skyrim news: A free next-gen upgrade for anyone who owns Skyrim Special Edition on PS4 and Xbox One, and a fully-fledged new Skyrim Anniversary Edition SKU.

The Anniversary Edition will be a separate paid re-release but Special Edition owners can pay to upgrade to the new version.

It looks like NVIDIA will be bundling EA DICE's next-gen Battlefield 2042 with its GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards, teased by Inno3D.

The company has announced it will be bundling Battlefield 2042 with its GeForce RTX 3070, GeForce RTX 307 Ti, GeForce RTX 3080, GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, and GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards. The offer includes the standard edition of Battlefield 2042, as well as early access to the upcoming Battlefield 2042 open beta.

Not only that, but you'll also get some Battlefield 2042 pre-order bonuses that include Mr. Chompy -- an epic weapon charm, the Baku ACB-90 tactical knife, and special player cards and in-game tag for online profiles.

Call of Duty Vanguard will take up an insane 270GB on Xbox consoles with everything installed. Eventually Activision will just start shipping the game on SSDs (joking but also not joking).

A new Microsoft Store listing confirms the new Call of Duty Vanguard requires an eye-opening 270GB of install space for the entire experience--campaign, multiplayer, zombies, and Warzone. We don't know how much the game will take up on PS4 or PS5 because for some strange reason Sony has removed all size requirements in PS Store listings (Battle.net also doesn't confirm install sizes).

Here's how that stacks up with console HDD and SSD space: