Gaming - Page 496

Soon Xbox players will be able to boost their game download speeds with a new console-level feature.

A new Xbox quality of life feature improves one of the most annoying things about modern gaming: Download speeds. According to Microsoft, the new feature unlocks the full download bandwidth speeds available on your network. The only catch is that you can't play a game while you're downloading something.

The feature will show up in the Xbox's queue section that manages downloads and uploads. Toggling it on will suspend any gaming session you currently have running, but the console creates a suspend and resume point (or a Quick Resume point if the game supports it) to ensure you don't lose any progress.

Following months of radio silence and a recent scathing report, Dying Light 2's future was pretty grim. Now Techland has stepped in to clear thing sup.

Dying Light 2 has been confirmed to launch in 2021, Techland today announced. Sadly, no exact release date nor platforms were revealed, but expect a current- and next-gen version. During today's stream, the developers gave a brief explanation on what's happening behind the scenes and call for support of fans everywhere

"This is a huge and complex project, and we've needed time to ensure it will live up to our vision. All of us here are putting our hearts into delivering a game you will continue to play for months. We'll be ready to talk about Dying Light 2 very, very soon.

Rip, tear...and smash. id drops a new trailer for Doom Eternal's final expansion that encompasses every metalhead's power fantasy.

Doom Eternal's Ancient Gods Part 2 expansion release tomorrow, and to celebrate, id is completely redefining the word epic. The latest Ancient Gods trailer is like a Dethklok metal saga, complete with dragons, demons, buff sci-fi warriors, gigantic hell-powered mechsuits, towering Godzilla-sized archdemons battling against Pacific Rim/Gundam mechs, and a new fiery war hammer that annihilates everything.

Before the epic showdown with the Dark Lord, Doom Guy has to rip, tear, and (thanks to the new Hellbreaker hammer) smash his way through hordes of monstrosities. The whole thing looks like a testosterone-boosted Lord of the Rings battle scene and we can't wait to try it out.

One of the actors in Call of Duty was hosting some Warzone on Twitch when she noticed something very interesting about a couple of streamers.

The streamer Alex Zedra is the face behind one of the characters in Call of Duty, Cade Janus, and was hosting Sarah "Icy Vixen" Belles and BearedBanger. Zedra's community of watchers noticed some quite peculiar behavior as both of the players seemed to have an aim that just wasn't possible. An example of what I'm talking about can be seen above.

Both Belles and BeardedBanger have denied all claims of using any hacks in Warzone, but both have since had their channels suspended for cheating. The pair of streamers were accused of using wallhacks that allow the player to see through solid objects and aimbot hacks that automatically aim the player's cursor at enemy players. For more information on this story, visit this link here.

Activision-Blizzard is firing dozens of employees as it pivots away from live-based esports events in the Overwatch and Call of Duty Leagues, sources tell Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.

Activision made more money in 2020 than it's ever made before, raking in $8 billion in revenues (and over $2 billion in profits). That hasn't stopped the company from continually firing employees and chasing digital revenues. Activision-Blizzard plans to fire 50 employees across multiple divisions, including its esports live events teams and even developers at King, the maker of the mega-popular Candy Crush games.

"Players are increasingly choosing to connect with our games digitally and the e-sports team, much like traditional sports, entertainment, and broadcasting industries, has had to adapt its business due to the impact the pandemic has had on live events," a rep told Bloomberg.

In a new paradigm-shifting policy, Google will now let app developers keep more of their initial revenues earned on the Play store.

Google today announced a new revenue split in favor of app developers. The company will now let devs keep 85% of revenues made on the first $1 million in earnings. Google has halved its collection rate from 30% to 15% for this range, but devs who make over $1 million will owe Google 30% of their revenues.

This new model will help smaller-scale developers avoid the current loss loop, which sees many of them paying out more to Google than they receive from apps and in-app purchases made on the Google Play store.

Industry vet Jade Raymond (producer on Assassin's Creed II, Watch Dogs) has opened up a new indie studio in Montreal called Haven. The team's first project is a game for Sony's PlayStation platform.

Today Sony and ex-Stadia leader Jade Raymond announced a new games studio based in Montreal, Canada. The new team is called Haven, and it's working on a new unannounced IP for the PlayStation ecosystem. Next to nothing is known about the game itself, however we expect it to target the PS5.

Raymond originally helped lead the team behind the first Assassin's Creed games and founded Ubisoft Toronto, then moved to EA to lead its Motive studio on a new unannounced project. Raymond left EA in 2018 when the company shook up management and added Motive to EA Worldwide Studios. She found a home at Stadia where she led the first-party games division, but also left after Google cancelled all first-party games and closed its games studios labels.

Lack of quality games is the major reason PS Now subscribers move away from the service, analyst firm Ampere Analysis has found.

Sony may have to add more value to its PlayStation Now service to keep gamers interested. According to a new consumer survey from Ampere Analysis, PlayStation Now subscribers are churning out--that is, not re-subscribing and leaving the service--and the main culprit is the game selection according to Ampere analyst Louise Shorthouse, 25% of U.S. and Japanese users who choose not to re-subscribe make that decision because of the games offering.

"Ampere Games consumer research indicates that a lack of enjoyable games is the most common reason why users churn from PlayStation's cloud gaming and download subscription service, PS Now. Other popular churn rationales include perceived poor value for money and friends being on other services," Shorthouse wrote.

Nintendo expects to sell 250 million games next fiscal year, up 25% from the current goal, sources tell Bloomberg. If this growth trend continues at even a 57% rate, the Nintendo Switch will dethrone the Wii in mid- to late 2022.

Nintendo has lofty aspirations for the Switch in Fiscal Year 2022 (ending March 31, 2022). The company expects to sell 250 million games next year, an increase of 50 million units from the current game sales target. This trajectory could crown the Switch as the king of Nintendo's game sales.

First, we need to do a bit of math. As of Q3'21, Nintendo has sold 176.1 million games out of its conservative 200 million goal. Nintendo currently has to sell 23.9 million more games in Q4 to meet this goal. Past trends show this is undoubtedly doable (Nintendo sold over 45 million games in Q4'20, for example).

Toby Fox's legendarily weird indie Undertale is dropping on Xbox for the first time ever, and will also be included on Xbox Game Pass.

Undertale is coming to Xbox tomorrow for $9.99, with all of its hilarity, skeleton memes, and pixellated pacifism intact. The beloved indie is also dropping on Xbox Game Pass on the same day as an added bonus for GP users. Not much is different with the Xbox version, but there is a special exclusive area with a neat little slot machine that gives some extra bonuses.

Sadly, your existing PC saves won't be compatible with the Xbox version, and Undertale won't be a play anywhere title so you'll have to rebuy it for Xbox even if you bought it from the Microsoft Store.

Outriders, the new online co-op shooter-looter from Square Enix and People Can Fly, is coming to Xbox Game Pass at launch. This could be a risky move.

Game Pass is a powerful service for all kinds of games. Indies, singleplayer-only titles, and online games can benefit a lot from the massive exposure. Live games in particular can mesh well with the Game Pass subscription model and keep players stuck to the online network as they play--and pay--over time. But with great reward comes great risks.

Whether or not Outriders launching day one on Game Pass is risky comes down to a few basic things. Have the devs scaled Outriders so gamers won't consume all of the game's content during the free window? Is there a satisfying gameplay loop that adheres to the critical Engagement Cycle? Square Enix has two reasons to launch Outriders on Game Pass: To sell games and boost exposure.

While FPS Boost may seem like magic, the new feature can actually raises in-game frame rates at the cost of resolution.

Last-gen console game performance is all about balance. Higher FPS typically means lower resolution--or vice versa. Despite its technical wizardry, the new magical FPS Boost feature is still bound by these rules.

FPS Boost is exactly what it sounds like: Devs have updated old-gen Xbox One era games to run at double frame rates (sometimes even quadruple) on the Xbox Series X/S. Five Bethesda games support the feature and have been boosted from 30FPS to "nearly 60FPS," but there's a catch: resolution takes a hit at the cost of increased FPS. Games like Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 run at reduced resolution with FPS Boost turned on.

Ever wanted to take Final Fantasy 7 on the go, but can't afford a Switch? Just load it up on your smartwatch.

Emulation lets you do some awesome things, like loading up Diablo 1 on an Xbox Series X for example. Or you could be like YouTuber Lucky Seven GTR and get old-school PlayStation games running on your smartwatch.

The smartwatch in question is the Android-powered DM2019 that features a quad-core 1.1GHz ARM Cortex-A53 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of onboard space--perfect for running older PS1 titles and games from older generations too. It's likely the watch is running the Google Play version of Retroarch which offers straightforward and seamless setup.

NVIDIA's impressive Reflex latency reducing technology is making an appearance in Overwatch, with up to a gigantic 50% reduction in latency when NVIDIA Reflex is enabled.

Blizzard has provided an NVIDIA Reflex public test in the Overwatch PTR, with the March 11 update for the game boasting the new Reflex upgrades. You'll need to follow a few steps that I've got below in order to get it working, but once it's up and running you will see up to 50% less latency on the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER.

There's close to 50% latency reduction on the GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER and close to that on the flagship GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card and the new NVIDIA Reflex upgrade for Overwatch.

After nearly 8 years, Sony is pulling the plug on the PS4's Communities feature.

Sony confirms the PS4's Communities social feature will be removed in April 2021, displacing many gamers who still use the platform to communicate. Communities are a way that everyday gamers can come together and share screenshots and text messages in an open Discord-style chat. I myself have used them to discuss details, share info on how to beat certain quests, and discover new content and even make new friends with strangers.

Here's what Sony said in an email to PlayStation Network users:

Bungie plans to eventually rotate Forsaken content to Destiny 2's new content vault to keep the game more player friendly.

Destiny 2 can be pretty confusing and overwhelming to new players. There's so much to do, and the freedom to tackle expansions in any order means continuity errors can be prevalent--playing Forsaken before the original Destiny storyline, for instance. That's why Bungie is also moving story campaigns like those in the Forsaken expansion to the Destiny Content Vault, a separate storage section that carves off pieces from the main game in order to reduce bloat and improve streamlined access.

"Forsaken content will be vaulted at some point. I think in the same way we don't want eight raids, it's the same thing with storylines. We don't want when a new player enters into Destiny, there's five different competing storylines that they could start playing and in some of them, Uldren's a good guy, and in some of them he's a bad guy, and it's not clear if you're playing them out of order. We want to curate that experience," Destiny 2 general manager Justin Truman told Eurogamer.

Remember Konami's old-school TMNT arcade game from the early 90s? It's coming back. Well...sort of.

Dotemu, the publisher that brought Streets of Rage back to the mainstream market, is working their retro revitalization magic on TMNT. Introducing Shredder's Revenge, a spiritual successor to Konami's beloved TMNT beat-em-up from the golden arcade era.

The game is based on the old 1980s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series and not the newer films or TV shows. The beat-em-up features classic baddies like Rocksteady, Bebop, Baxter Stockman, and of course Shredder. It'll feature four-player co-op including online multiplayer and split-screen couch play, and also has a brand new story arc not associated with existing TMNT media.

Dying Light 2's big new info blowout is right around the corner, but in the meantime Techland shares a rather illuminating tidbit that gamers knew for a while.

Techland said something pretty interesting in a recent Tweet. According to the Polish developer, Dying Light 2 was announced way too early. The studio hasn't had enough time to prepare the sequel since its E3 2018 world reveal. Contrary to popular belief, however, the game isn't in so-called "development hell," a place of limbo where failed or interrupted projects fester and slowly wither away.

"Afaik the definition of a dev hell requires the game to not make any development progress, while DL2 keeps moving forward, we announced the game too early but it's far from being in a dev hell :P," the official Dying Light Twitter said on Friday.

Even with stock limitations, the PS5 is still breaking sales milestones in the United States.

According to the NPD Group's Mat Piscatella, the PlayStation 5 is currently the fastest-selling console of all time in the United States. In its first four-months on the market in the U.S., the PS5 has sold faster than any other console in the region's history. This news comes months after the NPD Group confirmed the PS5 had the best launch in U.S. history and helped push November 2020's games earnings to a record $1.4 billion.

"PlayStation 5 ranked as the 2nd best-selling hardware platform in February in both unit and dollar sales. PlayStation 5 is currently the fastest selling hardware platform in U.S. history (total dollar sales after 4 months in market)," Piscatella said on Twitter.

Key Bethesda games like Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Skyrim Special Edition, Dishonored Ultimate Edition and Prey are all getting FPS Boost support on Xbox Series X consoles.

Xbox Series X/S backwards compatibility is the single biggest advantage over the PS5, adding in native upscaling and system-wide performance boosts to a bunch of games. Microsoft is going one step further by supercharging specific games with its new FPS Boost feature, which raises frame rates up to 60FPS and beyond.

Now Microsoft confirms that certain Bethesda titles will soon run at "nearly 60FPS" on Xbox Series X consoles, including Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition, both of which were natively locked at 30FPS on Xbox One (the latter required a mod to fully unlock).