Gaming - Page 510

PUBG is still one of the biggest games on the market right now, with a super solid playerbase that is able to still battle new Battle Royale giants like Call of Duty: Warzone, Fortnite, and Apex Legends. But now we have some juicy rumors on the next-gen PUBG 2 that is reportedly in development.

Korean media outlet MTN has teased that PUBG 2 is an "authentic sequel" to the original PUBG, which reportedly started development back in May 2019. The team that developed PUBG Lite for low-end PCs is working on PUBG Mobile 2, but these projects are separate to PUBG 2.

PUBG 2 is reportedly a next-gen game for PC, console and mobile and will be most importantly cross-platform which should have lots of gamers happy. It'll be interesting to see what PUBG 2 eventuates into, and how many upgrades, features, new graphics and more that we'll get from it.

In the early days of Xbox, Microsoft had no idea what it was doing. So it tried to throw its billions around and buy up companies that had experience. Nintendo was one such company, but instead of selling, they just laughed.

In Bloomberg's excellent history of Xbox article, key Microsoft executives talked about Xbox's humble beginnings. The content is filled with lots of surprises like Microsoft trying to buy out EA, Square, and even Nintendo. Needless to say that nobody sold, and in response to the offer, the staunchly conservative Japanese company practically laughed Microsoft out of the room.

"Steve Ballmer made us go meet with Nintendo to see if they would consider being acquired. They just laughed their asses off. Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went," ex-third-party Xbox exec Kevin Bachus told Bloomberg.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is one of the most photorealistic games ever made, and sometimes it can even look better than real life.

Microsoft Flight Simulator (left) vs real-life footage (right).

Recently a quick side-by-side video clip made the rounds on Twitter that showed just how impressive Flight Simulator looks on PC. The video, which compares a real-life and in-game landing at Gatwick airport, was put out by YouTuber Tropical Tech 2. The results are eye-opening to say the least.

After weeks of investigating, New York-based law firm Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz has filed a class-action lawsuit against CD Projekt S.A. for possible securities fraud.

Today U.S. legal team Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz announced they have filed a lawsuit against CD Projekt over the Cyberpunk 2077 controversy. Four law firms are now suing CD Projekt S.A., including:

All of these law firms were previously investigating CD Projekt for securities fraud.

Nintendo recently acquired a new studio for the first time in 13 years in an effort to fortify its first-party studio lineup.

Nintendo just purchased majority shares in Canadian game dev Next Level Games, the studio behind Luigi's Mansion 3, for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition is very strategic on Nintendo's part, and the company is typically quite reserved with its buyouts. As Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad notes, the last time Nintendo acquired a company was Monolith Soft back in 2007.

Next Level Games has a strong relationship with Nintendo that dates all the way back to 2005 with the Super Mario Strikers game on GameCube. The dev studio has been working exclusively with Nintendo since 2011, where it helped make the Luigi's Mansion games on 3DS and Switch. Next Level Games has developed three games for Nintendo so far: Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, Metroid Federation Force, and Luigi's Mansion 3.

The PlayStation 4 Pro is officially dead in Sony's domestic Japanese market, the company told Japanese publication Game Watch.

The reports were true: Sony has discontinued all PlayStation 4 Pro models in Japan, and the system will no longer be in production in Sony's home country. The discontinuation comes just 4 years after the PS4 Pro's rollout in 2016, and makes sense from a market standpoint as the Pro has the same $399 MSRP as the PlayStation 5 all-digital edition. The PS4 Pro's 14nm Polaris-Vega SoC is also more specialized than the more widely available (and cheaper) Jaguar SoC used in the base PS4 model.

Sony will now offer only a single PlayStation 4 SKU in Japan, the Jet Black 500GB PS4 Slim model. Sony's Japanese manufacturing facilities will start ramping up PlayStation 5 production, and reports say as many as 18 million PS5 consoles will be made available worldwide in 2021. Sony's Kisarazu-based plant is nearly autonomous and can assemble a PlayStation console every 30 seconds.

People Can Fly, the devs behind Bullestorm, are working on a new third-person sci-fi shooter called Outriders. Originally planned to release next month, Outriders has been delayed to April 2021.

The new shoot-and-loot co-op game Outriders has been delayed to April 1, 2021, the game developers today revealed. This marks the second delay for the game (first from December 2020 to February 2021, and now February 2021 to April 2021), which is becoming more normalized as developers work entirely from home.

Instead of a final release, People Can Fly will launch a free playable three-hour demo for Outriders on February 25, 2021 so gamers can try it out before they buy. This could go two ways for Square Enix. Publishers like EA have learned the hard way not to release too many game demos (Andromeda's demo practically killed the release), and the early consensus from trailer comments is that Outriders looks fairly generic and uninspired.

Anyone who grew up with a PlayStation 1 probably remembers Tenchu. Now the original devs want to bring the ninja franchise back with a new release on PS5.

It's been 12 years since the last Tenchu game. Well...technically that's not true. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice originally started off as a Tenchu game, but morphed into the brutal Souls-like we know today. That might not be the end of the franchise though. Acquire, the original Japanese developer/publisher behind the Tenchu IP, wants to create a fully-fledged Stealth Assassins game for the new generation of console hardware.

In a recent interview with Famitsu, Acquire president Takuma Endo says he's interested in building a new Tenchu game "from the ground up" for the PlayStation 5. This could prove difficult as the company only has half of the necessary pieces. Acquire owns the trademark rights to the Stealth Assassins name, but FromSoftware owns the publishing rights to the Tenchu series (FromSoft teamed up with Activision to publish/distribute Sekiro, for example, but that was a new IP).

Arkane Austin, the dev team behind 2017's Prey reboot, is working on a new unannounced game. It could be a Prey sequel, and the original series developers could be involved.

In a recent interview with Spanish website Vandal, Dishonored and Deus Ex series designer Harvey Smith confirmed Arkane's Austin, Texas-based studio is making a new game. This isn't really surprising news as game devs are always making new unannounced projects (it's their job after all). Arkane Lyon, the other UK-based studio, is working on Deathloop.

"Raph stayed in Austin and worked at Prey with Ricardo Bare and Susan Kath and the people I'm working with now. At the end of Dishonored 2 I went back to Austin. I'm not in Deathloop , I'm in something else, working with the guys who made Dishonored and Prey," Smith said.

Valve really wants to get into our heads more in their future games, with the developer hiring another psychologist to join the team.

The new psychologist will help Valve craft the future of some of their games, with the developer noting: "We hire people with broad skill sets who also exhibit deep expertise. Psychologists at Valve contribute to a wide variety of initiatives across the company and are trusted to prioritize their work in collaboration with their peers".

Valve is hoping the new staffer can help the developer:

Well, Crytek has let the cat out of the bag when it comes to its new unannounced AAA game, which seems to be a sandbox game given its new job listings out in the wild.

Crytek is looking for a new Game Director and Lead Game Designer for its unannounced AAA project, with the developer looking for someone who has years of experience in game design and has had a (preferably) FPS game that has sold over 1 million copies.

The developer is looking for someone with "sandbox" game experience, so we could see a totally next-gen FPS in a sandbox experience. Sounds interesting if Crytek can drive those graphics up through the roof, but we have no idea what to expect. Could it be Crysis related? Who knows... maybe?

Cyberpunk 2077 made some major headlines when it had the most concurrent Steam users EVER for a paid game, with a peak player count of just over 1 million on Steam at once. But now? Now that has fallen by a whopping 79%...

Githyp is behind the Cyberpunk 2077 numbers, with the game struggling to crack 250,000 -- and at the time of writing was sitting just shy of 119,000 players on Steam. The average daily high is dropping, at 493,000 or so -- while it still has an 8.07% share of players on Steam playing Cyberpunk 2077.

But this isn't strange for a single player game, as it won't have as many returning players jumping back in for 'just another round'. Most players would finish Cyberpunk 2077 in under a couple of weeks, hell under a few days if you were playing it all day every day for days in a row -- which many gamers, including myself, do.

Have you ever stopped and wondered what if CD PROJEKT RED used massive Hollywood actor, Matrix and John Wick star Keanu Reeves in Cyberpunk 2077, as a marketing stunt? Of course they did, but were they covering up some of the issues with the game throwing KEANU REEVES into Cyberpunk 2077? Possibly.

Now there's reports stating that someone "outside CDPR" -- translation: investors -- wanted a huge star in Cyberpunk 2077. Keanu Reeves was chosen, but it wasn't CD PROJEKT RED's original choice, not was it their inspiration for the chaotic character that is Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077.

The CD PROJEKT RED employee said: "I don't want to hate on Keanu, but f***ing hell, our original Johnny was way cooler and sounded like a maniac. Think Foltest on crack. Our original Johnny was heavily inspired by David Hayter's Solid Snake from the first MGS and believe it or not, Cillian Murphy".

Another month brings another rotation of new games to Xbox Game Pass. Here's what's coming to (and leaving) the subscription in January 2021.

January 2021's rotation for Game Pass is a nice one. Injustice 2 and Torchlight 3 headline the new arrivals, and the latter will give gamers a chance to try out the updated aRPG series for themselves. Sadly, the service is trading one fighting game for another. Tekken 7 rotates out a week after Injustice 2 joins the roster, so be sure to get your revenge on Heihachi ASAP. All in all, there's 3 games coming to PC and 4 games coming to consoles.

Here's the breakdown of what's coming and going, and when:

Mobile gaming continues its dominance over the industry with nearly $80 billion earned in 2020 alone.

Mobile gaming generated an incredible $79.5 billion in 2020, a new all-time historic record for the market. A new report from analyst firm Sensor Tower highlights the sizable spike in earnings, which were up 26% year-over-year. As Epic Games noted in its recent antitrust case against Apple, App Store users spend significantly more on games than Android users; gamers spent $47.6 billion on games via the App Store, and Android gamers spent $31.9 billion on Google Play monetization and pay-to-play mobile titles.

As previously reported, PUGB Mobile dominated the charts with $2.6 billion in worldwide earnings. Tencent's Arena of Valor/Honor of Kings took the top spot on the iOS platform and pulled in 47% more revenues, or $2.5 billion, in 2020.

Like Mass Effect, certain Cyberpunk 2077 NPCs only swing one way. Gamers have now uncovered cut romance option in CP2077's source code to remove these restrictions and unlock steamy scenes. Sadly this trick is only available on PC as it requires a mod to change the game's code.

Your body type in Cyberpunk 2077 determines who you can and can't romance. By default, characters like Panam and Kerry can only be romanced by V. if they have a male body. Conversely, Judy Alvarez and River only respond to characters with a female body. This wasn't always the case, though.

CD Projekt RED had originally explored all romance options, and the game has lines of code where male V. could sleep with characters like Judy. Users can simply change the line of code with the Cyber Engine Tweak mod on PC and woo Judy as a male, complete with male voice dialog and everything.

The PlayStation 5's new DualSense controller has a beefy 1560mAh battery, but it can be needlessly drained when you're streaming movies and shows. This quick trick will help preserve the battery life.

Read Also: PlayStation 5 Review: The golden era of console gaming

Just like the DualShock 4, the PS5's DualSense controller can quickly be turned off by holding down the PS button for 10 seconds. This is a nice quick feature that ensures the battery isn't being wasted while idling.

Another U.S. law firm is suing Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt RED, making for a total of 3 lawsuits against the company.

California-based law firm Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C. recently announced they have filed a class-action lawsuit against CD Projekt SA over the Cyberpunk 2077 controversy. The suit was filed just days after the firm starting investigating possible securities fraud, and shows confidence in the case against CDP.

Right now the troubled Polish developer is getting sued by three U.S.-based legal teams; Rosen Law, Schall Law, and now Bragar Eagel & Squire. The suits allege the same thing: CD Projekt willfully mislead investors by withholding information and caused shareholders to lose money.

We already know Microsoft Flight Simulator has some of the best graphics ever seen, but the Live Weather feature has to be one of the best things about the game -- and soon, it'll have snow. Check out some early footage of it:

Asobo Studio teased the footage recently, with real-time snow coming to Flight Simulator and coating environments of the fluffy white snow. It looks beautiful on trees, snow-topped mountains, and a million-and-one other locations around the world where you can have it snow.

The new update for Flight Simulator will include VR support, the new tweaks to live weather that add snow effects, as well as new training missions, challenges, and livery.

Sony has an absolutely mammoth console with the PlayStation 5, with some people not being able to fit them into their entertainment units.

So the brains at IKEA have come through for us all, with some mock consoles available in some stores so you can see how big they'd be against some home furniture and entertainment units. The physical size guides are also semi-styled to the PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles -- captured and uploaded to Reddit.

IKEA explains on the box of the PS5: "Which Ikea media storage unit will be able to fit my new, meme-ishly oversized, gaming console?" I think this is a fantastic idea, especially if you're buying some new furniture for your living or gaming room and need to have dimensions, literally in front of you.