Gaming - Page 567

Fortnite is celebrating July 4 in style this year, with developer Epic Games adding Captain America to the game as a comic-themed skin for you to buy.

Captain America will cost gamers 2000 V-bucks, which equates to $20 in the real-world. For $20 you're going to get the slick Captain America skin, his iconic shield -- which by the way isn't just cosmetic, you wear it on your back in the game and use it as a pickaxe -- awesome!

Not only that, but there's a cool Captain America-themed fireworks emote for sale... perfect if you wanted to celebrate July 4 with a bang this weekend. If you want to celebrate Independence Day with a bang, that'll cost you 300 V-bucks on top of the 2000 V-bucks for the Captain America skin.

One of TV's most fearsome villains could show up in one of gaming's most popular franchises.

In a recent interview with Collider, Giancarlo Esposito, who played Gustavo Fring in Breaking Bad, said he's working on a big new video game project.

"It's been my year, so to speak. It started with The Mandalorian, and then a video game I did which is going to be huge, that I can't really mention," Esposito said in the interview (around the 11:06 mark).

Ubisoft's new free-to-play sci-fi battle royale shooter Hyper Scape could help revolutionize engagement by marrying streaming and viewers in a brand new way.

Hyper Scape isn't just an average battle royale game. Not only is it fast-paced, stylish, and quite fluid, it has the makings of an extremely powerful driver for long-term engagement (and, by extension, monetization). Ubisoft isexperimenting with features that could shake up the games industry as we know it, especially for big-name companies that focus strongly on live games.

The real secret sauce to Hyper Scape is the game's Twitch integration features. Viewers can see real-time data on streamers as they play, including loadouts and game stats, giving them instant info on-the-fly. With these tools, users can more easily emulate their favorite streamers' plays and strategies to become more skilled at the game, which will keep them playing for longer periods of time.

Sony is making a bid to buy Chinese games company Leyou Technologies, who currently owns a majority stake in Warframe developer Digital Extremes.

Sony wants to acquire Leyou Technologies, an overseas holdings company with a number of high profile IPs and developers attached to it, sources tell Bloomberg. The buyout would arm Sony with a plethora of major free-to-play breadwinners like Warframe, as well as other projects like the upcoming Lord of the Rings MMO.

Leyou is currently valued at over $1 billion, but Sony has deep pockets when it comes to gaming investments. The Japanese games giant earned over $18 billion from PlayStation gaming in 2019. Leyou's arsenal of licensed and F2P games would contribute greatly to these earnings and give Sony a more established foothold in the Chinese and global markets.

2K Games is monetizing cross-gen access by charging $100 for something that EA and CD Projekt RED give away for free.

Today 2K Games formally announced NBA 2K21 and confirmed the game will be $69.99 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles. In a bid to test the limits of the new generation and kick off an industry-wide price hike, the publisher is pricing next-gen optimizations at a premium while also clearly delineating current- and next-gen SKUs of the game.

The publisher is also charging extra for cross-generation access. Gamers who want to play NBA 2K21 on both current-gen and next-gen consoles have two options: buy each game separately, or purchase the $100 Mamba Forever Edition, which gives you a copy of the game on both platforms.

UPDATE:Games industry analytics firm IDG Consulting says other publishers are likely to raise next-gen game prices to $69.99 to offset game development costs, which have risen by as much as 300%.

Next-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X titles will retail for $69.99, representing a sizable $10 or 17% price increase from current-gen.

NBA 2K21 is the first next-gen game to raise its price tag from $59.99 to $69.99, and other publishers are expected to follow suit. The PS5 and Xbox Series X versions of the game are currently available for pre-order on the 2K Store for $69.99 which would bring the total cost to roughly $74.88 for states with 7% tax. Conversely, games cost roughly $64.18 with the same tax.

We knew it was coming, but now it is official: Worms Rumble has just been announced by Team17 and is a radically new take on the classic franchise.

Worms Rumble handles 32 players in a new twist: it's all done in real-time, versus the old Worms games from the 90s. In the older Worms games (which I loved) it was a much slower-paced game where you would plan your next move... but Worms Rumble is just all-out chaos.

You can dodge, roll, and even wall jump in Worms Rumble... with a bunch of different game modes to play. This includes the regular Deathmatch skirmish, a battle royale style 'Last Worm Standing' mode as well as a Last Squad Standing variant of the battle royale mode for Worms Rumble.

Death Stranding's release on the PC is right around the corner, showcasing the Decima Engine by developers Guerrilla Games. It has some gorgeous graphics, that are improved yet again on the PC and even more so with NVIDIA's DLSS 2.0 technology.

But the most important question is: how does it run?

Well we now have some benchmarks to share for Death Stranding on the PC, where starting on the GeForce RTX 2060 we have a huge 110FPS average at 1080p with everything maxed out. The test systems are an Intel Core i9-9900K, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, Windows 10 64-bit and NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 "Quality Mode" set.

Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best looking games of 2020 by far, and when it has all of its graphical bells and whistles enabled (thanks, NVIDIA) it truly looks out of this world.

Well, all of those pretty graphics are a DirectX 12 exclusive -- with PC gamers requiring Windows 10 for the most part, but will work with Windows 7 and its implementation of DX12. The reason? Marcin Gollent, Lead Graphics Programmer at CD PROJEKT RED says it's because of ray tracing.

During a recent interview with PC Games Hardware, Gollent said: "Thanks to the introduction of DX12 support for Windows 7 SP1 that Microsoft introduced last year, the game will run on this system. We do, and will continue to, test Cyberpunk 2077 on Windows 7 in an attempt to iron out any edge-cases that might arise. Unfortunately, Windows 8 didn't receive its variant of DX12 libraries".

Sony's Dreams game is getting full and native PlayStation VR support, allowing gamers to create and play unique levels and designs.

Dreams is a transformative game that basically lets you make your own personal games and experiences with a potent and flexible level editor. Think of it like the GECK that's used to make Fallout mods. But Sony is kicking things up a notch by adding full VR support for the game, complete with VR-specific creation tools

"When it comes to Create Mode in VR, sculpting is truly unique, allowing you to bring your Dreams to life around you. If you have PlayStation Move Controllers, you'll find sculpting in VR is a very one-to-one experience and lets you fully immerse in the creation process."

Superstar indie game publisher and industry rebel Devolver Digital will bring their signature mayhem to Not-E3 in mid-July.

Today Devolver Digital announced their annual direct showcase for July 12, 2020 at 12PM PST/3PM EST, and promised quite a bit of ridiculous content. These events are basically the Adult Swim version of E3 and offer absolutely hilarious satirical jabs at the games market while also dropping fresh reveals in the process. There's nothing like a Devolver Digital show and this one could be their craziest ever given the pandemic landscape.

Devolver plans to show off new games (of course) and do lots of overpromising and misuse their marketing budget. We'll also get to try out digital demos of games like Carrion and Disc Room. The show will be livestreamed on Twitchand within the Steam launcher.

The PS5's backwards compatibility will probably only include PS4 games, and shouldn't natively play PS1, PS2, or PS3 game discs.

Sony wants its next-gen PlayStation 5 to play thousands of PS4 games when it releases this holiday. The PS5's custom SoC, OS, and software architecture environment was built from the ground up with PS4 backward compatibility in mind. That doesn't include PS1, PS2 or PS3 games, though. At least that's what's Sony is hinting.

While Sony strongly indicates the PS5 will only be backwards compatible with PS4 games, the company isn't yet ready to disconfirm speculations. In a recent interview with GameSpark, a Sony rep says PS4 game support is currently the top focus:

Tencent is mostly known for its billion-dollar monetization and buying out devs, but now it wants to make a big splash in the AAA games market.

Tencent today announced Lightspeed Studio, a new development team that'll make big-budget AAA games for next-gen PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles. Lightspeed Studio is headquartered in the U.S. game dev mecca of Los Angeles and is helmed by ex-Rockstar Games San Diego director Steve Martin. Lightspeed has also courted seasoned devs from studios like Respawn, Insomniac, and 2K Games.

Reports say Lightspeed's first game will be a sizable open-world AAA title that's optimized specifically for next-gen hardware, so expect larger-than-life content. Tencent surely has deep enough pockets to make their debut first-party AAA game a dazzling and unforgettable experience. The company made over $16 billion last year from games alone, but most of that is from heavily monetized free-to-play games.

Crytek pulled a really dog move today, with the developer pulling the Crysis Remastered gameplay reveal literally in the last hour -- and then announcing it had delayed the entire game and its launch, too. The leaked images seem to be getting at least some of the blame, you can see those crappy screenshots of Crysis Remastered here.

The above tweet is from the official Crysis Twitter account, which reads: "As you know, Crysis Remastered will be coming into the world this year -- and at the same time the Crysis IP will debut on Nintendo Switch!" It sounds so upbeat, ending that first sentence with an exclamation mark, but it's all disappointment and sadness from here on in.

Crytek continues: "Your passion for the Crysis franchise deserves an undeniably high-quality game, and we are ccommitted to delivering just that. To ensure that we meet that commitment, we will need to delay the launch date (all platforms) and trailer premiere by a few weeks. Because they already started, pre-orders for Switch will stay open, but pre-orders for all other platforms will be delayed as well".

EA and Crytek are just hours away from unveiling Crysis Remastered in all its glory, but new leaked screenshots aren't really doing the game any favors.

The screenshots are from the Microsoft Store, so maybe they're for the Xbox One version of the game. It actually doesn't look good at all, and has that 'console gloss' as I like to call it, sprayed all over it. I'm expecting a much bigger graphical upgrade from the PC version of Crysis Remastered over the original Crysis.

But just check out these screenshots, they have to be from the Xbox version of the game.

Death Stranding will be hitting the PC on July 14 on both the Epic Games Store and Steam, with a bunch of PC-exclusive features included in Hideo Kojima's masterpiece.

The PC version of Death Stranding is now rumored to have NVIDIA's great DLSS 2.0 technology, or Deep Learning Super Sampling. This is on top of high frame rate support, a Photo Mode which I'm sure is going to result in some crazy posts online, UltraWide monitor support, and more.

But the introduction of DLSS technology will see it being the first Kojima Productions game to have DLSS 2.0 support. The rumor is coming from PCMRACE, with an NVIDIA rep reportedly telling the outlet: "Among the highlights is the long-awaited Death Stranding, a title that unfolds a grim post-apocalyptic future, devised by the creator of the Metal Gear series, Hideo Kojima".

Soon gamers will be able to add custom cosmetic skins to weapons and vehicles in Halo: Combat Evolved.

Custom skins are a big part of Halo 5's monetization, and are now one of the main components of any live games microtransaction system. But 343i had a different idea with their new Halo 1 skin customization scheme.

The feature will be added in the big new Season 2 progression update coming to Master Chief Collection on PC, and right now it's limited to Halo 1. The customization is limited to just three things: Weapons (both UNSC and Covenant weapons have different skins), visors (basic color swaps), and vehicle skins (again, both UNSC vehicles and Covenant have different skins).

Cyberpunk 2077 will be strongly censored in Japan with nudity and sexually explicit content edited out, Press Start Australia reports.

CD Projekt RED's latest sci-fi FPS RPG is as mature as a game can get. It'll feature brutal violence and crime, full-frontal nudity complete with genitalia customization, and explicit scene scenes, all of which are wrapped up in a bloody and chaotic story arc. Some regions like Japan don't take kindly to this content and plan to censor the game.

The reports come from Press Start Australia, who didn't link to any sources. So we decided to do a little digging on the Japanese CERO ratings board website to see what kind of designated rating Cyberpunk would get. Oddly enough Cyberpunk 2077 wasn't mentioned at all. The listings look stale and old, and mostly yesteryear titles popped up, so it's possible the site hasn't been updated in a while.

At a recent shareholders meeting, Nintendo was directly asked about a new next-gen Switch console. Stock owners want to know what's next: Can we expect the rumored Switch Pro with 4K capabilities and enhanced horsepower? Nintendo tempers expectations by asserting its age-old stance of fun over specs.

When asked about the Switch being limited by its form-factor design and hardware specifications, Nintendo senior executive officer and director Ko Shioda said:

"We are developing the game consoles that we make with a focus not on performance (high technical specifications), but on how comfortably customers can enjoy the fun software."

After a premature launch, Amazon's first-ever game release, is being pulled from sale and reverting back to closed beta state.

Crucible, the Overwatch-like hero shooter hardly anyone has heard of, clearly wasn't ready for a retail release. Amazon's internal game studios have pulled Crucible off of Steam and put the project back into closed beta phases. The idea is to revamp gameplay elements and use current owners as beta-testing guinea pigs. If they're still playing, that is--Crucible had abysmal concurrent player counts shortly after launching.

The news was announced in a recent developer blog post: