Gaming - Page 601

DOOM Eternal will be the first game to be powered by id Tech 7, with developer id Software talking about the game more before its launch on March 20. In a recent video interview with DOOM Eternal executive producer Marty Stratton, we find out a bunch more details -- check it out:

At the 2:30 mark Stratton talks about DOOM Eternal's destruction, something that the new id Tech 7 engine will provide, as well as the team aiming for a target 60FPS in the game across all platforms. DOOM Eternal looks like the best-looking game id Software has ever made, and that is thanks to the use of the id Tech 7 engine.

Stratton adds: "The size of the world, the scope of the world, our levels are twice as big as they were in DOOM 2016. That was to really establish a sense of scale and epicness to DOOM Eternal. You know, one of the things that we established coming out of DOOM 2016 was that we really wanted to take players to places that they'd never seen before".

Today 4A Games announced Sam's Story, the final major story expansion to Metro Exodus.

The new DLC is set to release February 11, 2020 on all platforms, and stars ex-Marine Sam Branskill on his arduous journey back to post-apocalytpic US. The expansion takes players to the irradiated port city of Vladivostok, the terminus of the Trans-Siberian railroad that's roughly seven days from Moscow.

Across his journey, the devs say Sam will face intense trials that push his survival skills to their limits. No trailer or screenshots were released, but we should get some more info shortly.

Doom Eternal's grind-based replayability might be prime territory for monetization, but id Software confirms no microtransactions are included.

Doom Eternal is a pretty grindy and layered game with some distinct RPG systems. There's tons of upgrade paths to forge, mats to collect, and places to explore. These systems usually means live service games, which in turn usually means monetization. But that's not the case, and Eternal isn't a live game. Unlike Wolfenstein: Youngblood, Doom Eternal won't have any kind of storefront with in-game purchases.

The assertion comes directly from Doom Eternal game director Hugo Martin as a direct response to the supposed battle pass worries. Eternal has a very battle pass-esque XP progression system that unlocks various goods like icons and playsets, prompting worries. These worries were compounded by the Fortress of Doom's unlockable armor skin variants.

One of Doom Eternal's core themes is progression, and that means grinding crystals and other materials to beef up the Doom Slayer.

Doom Eternal isn't just a linear FPS game. It's meant to be played for a long time, and has deliberate systems in place designed to keep you grinding for materials to make Doom Slayer as powerful as possible. The game has all the trappings of a live service title, including massive replayability that's incentivized through power enhancements, just without the constantly online play and microtransactions.

A lot of these systems are very RPG-esque and borrow quite a bit from Bethesda's new focus on service games and its penchant for massively customizable role-playing titles. Let's make one thing clear: Doom Eternal is not a live service game, but it acts like one nonetheless. Doom Eternal's progression system has quite a few upgrade screens with tons of options, complete with a slew of material and tokens spent to ramp up passive and active stats of weapons, armor, and basic things like health and ammo.

Atari will soon merge gaming arcades with hotels across the United States, creating its own Atari-branded resorts that offer everything from classic gaming to VR.

Today Atari announced a rather interesting move: It's going to jump headfirst into the hotel business and bring video games along for the ride. The idea is pretty simple. Atari wants to make a place where you not only stay, but where you play too. The lodging will be an attraction complete with games, probably with retro old-school Atari arcades as well as the new Atari VCS consoles, AR/VR hardware, and sizable theaters to host specific esports events (this last part is critical and aims to make the hotels potential venues for big tournaments).

The first hotel will open in Phoenix, Arizona, and Atari plans to open eight locations across major cities including: Las Vegas, Denver, Chicago, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, and San Jose. The venture is being spear-headed by Atari, strategy firm GSD Group, who specializes in revitalizing legacy brands, and True North Studio, an Arizona-based reality firm.

Today Arc Games announced Torchlight: Frontiers is now Torchlight III, a more traditional buy-to-play game with offline singleplayer and no in-game storefront.

Torchlight is back. Not the imitation Torchlight that tried to heavily monetize its audience and gear itself up to be another live service game, but the isometric grind-fest ARPG before the days of rampant in-game purchases. Under the new banner of Torchlight III, Arc Games is morphing Frontiers into an authentic sequel to the original games that goes back to the series' roots, complete with the linear act-based structure. It's also coming to Steam and won't be exclusive to the Arc launcher.

Once you buy Torchlight III, you own the full game. There's no storefront, no premium currency, and no cosmetics to buy. Offline singleplayer is also included, but any characters made offline can't be used for online play (likely due to the game's traditional mod support). The new classes (railmaster, dusk mage, and forge) and collectibles from the Frontier alpha tests are crossing over to the main game, but progression is getting massively overhauled.

Age of Empires fans will have to prepare themselves for a new Definitive Edition, as news has just surfaced regarding the Age of Empires III Definitive Edition beta.

According to the official Age of Empires Twitter account, "THE TIME HAS COME" for the Age of Empires III Definitive Edition beta announcement. If you didn't know, the definitive edition for Age of Empires II has already been released, and it has been extremely well received by players. I can personally say after sinking some hours into it that the game is fantastic, and if Age of Empires III Definitive is anything like Age of Empires II Definitive Edition it should also be great.

The announcement reveals that within the next couple of weeks, a multiplayer beta test will be sent out to players who sign up for the beta. If you are interested in signing up for the coming beta test for Age of Empires III Definitive Edition, click this link here and follow the instructions. See you on the battlefield!

The Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Genesis 7 has just concluded, and against all the odds Marss has beaten the top Super Smash Bros. Ultimate player, MKLeo.

At the time of writing this, there are currently 78,000 players watching the tournament on Twitch.tv, and against what fans expected, Marss took out the championship with Zero Suit Samus. Marss went up against MkLeo, who played his notorious Joker. Marss ended up smashing MkLeo, going three games to zero.

In other Super Smash Bros. Ultimate news, Nintendo recently announced the fifth DLC fighter to close out the first Fighters Pass. That character is a Fire Emblem: Three Houses representative, Byleth. Byleth will be arriving in the live game with version 7.0.0, which is expected to drop on January 28th.

EVE Online is a super-popular game and while it doesn't have 50 million active players in games like Fortnite, Apex Legends and League of Legends -- it has a rabid, and very dedicated player base.

Well, in EVE Online right now developer CCP are donating all donations in their "PLEX for Good" event towards the devastating Australian bushfires. CCP are asking EVE Online players to donate any spare in-game currency to an official CCP-owned character, and at the end of the PLEX for Good event they will convert it into real-world money, and donate it to the Red Cross.

And then in steps Scott Manley, a YouTuber and former EVE Online player that was eyeing off Kelon Darklighy's super-rare ship -- and opened bidding at 1 million PLEX, which converts into 3.5 trillion ISK which then converts into an insane 160 years of EVE game time. This is worth around $40,000 and is what is making the big headlines. If the transaction goes through, it would represent the largest single-ship transaction in EVE Online's entire history.

A new GDC 2020 survey shows developers still don't agree with Steam's 70-30 revenue split.

Unless your game makes millions of dollars, Steam keeps 30% of all sales revenues for everything sold on the platform and developers pull in 70%. This number is further dissected when publishers are involved.

According to the latest GDC State of the Industry survey, most developers think Steam's 30% cut is quite archaic. Roughly 25% of respondents, or 1,000 developers, think Steam's revenue split should be 85-15 in their favor. This is the same split the Epic Games Store offers devs.

Mass Effect 2 celebrates its 10th anniversary today, showing us how far the series has come (and how much it's changed).

If the original Mass Effect was good, then Mass Effect 2 was great. It's still among my favorite BioWare games, only second to Dragon Age: Origins, but definitely the best Mass Effect title ever made. The sequel had it all: Intrigue, mystery, a kind of dark sci-fi allure that made you want to explore its hidden depths, interesting characters (with the exception of Jacob) that you felt bonded to and wanted to actually get to know. The Illusive Man (probably one of the best NPCs ever made), Jack's harrow backstory, the suicide mission...Mass Effect 2 had it all.

The best part of the game was that it's a middle ground that promised more to come. Mass Effect 2 is a bridge rather than the end, and keeps you wondering. It doesn't squash or resolve the potential like many other sequels, but ignites your imagination to what's to come. The reapers are on the way--they're not here yet--and the sense of unease and anxiety is palpable.

Why didn't Valve ever talk about Half-Life 3? Simple: A new Half-Life game hasn't been in development for quite some time.

Half-Life: Alyx marks Valve's return to proper games development, and more importantly, a return to the series altogether. But why did it take so long? Why didn't we ever hear about any other Half-Life projects? According to Valve's recent Reddit AmA, these projects simply didn't exist until now. Half-Life was pretty much in stasis for the longest time as Valve focused on its VR hardware endeavors and managing the billion-dollar Steam storefront.

"We didn't talk about Half-Life for a long time because we weren't actively working on a Half-Life game. Once Half-Life: Alyx became a reality internally, it was already clear to us that this was something we wanted to involve the community in. We're going to be doing more of this in the next few weeks as we prepare to launch it," the devs said in the AmA.

Bluepoint Games' new PlayStation 5 project will be even more titanic than Shadow of the Colossus.

The so-called masters of remasters at Bluepoint are working on something big for the PlayStation 5. No one knows what it is just yet (rumor has it they're working on a Demon's Souls remake) but we do know it's their crowning achievement. This speaks volumes given Bluepoint's strong pedigree with Shadow of the Colossus, The Nathan Drake Collection, and Titanfall on Xbox 360. The dev team has swelled to 90 people to help manifest this new project.

"Established in 2006, with a team now over 90 people, Bluepoint has developed a history of delivering the highest quality remasters and remakes in the industry. But that's not enough for us. Our latest project is the largest in our history, and aims to define the visual benchmark for the next generation of gaming hardware," reads Bluepoint's updated website.

I'm sure that you have all heard about Coronavirus by now, with China shutting down cities and conspiracy theories spreading, but now game sales are spiking because of it. Game sales, you ask?

You might remember (or even play) Plague Inc: Evolved, an outbreak management simulation available on Steam and mobile that was made by Ndemic Creations. The Steam player count has spiked just like cases of Coronavirus, with the developers coming out and saying that people shouldn't be using their game as a basis for real-world disease control... like people needed to know this.

Using data on the Steam Charts we can see that in the last 30 days that Plague Inc: Evolved peak players have increased by 84% to 15,823 players up from 1988 players back in December 2019. This is the highest peak players the game has ever had, highlighting the fact that Coronavirus is spreading on Steam faster than it is in real life.

Back in December, hackers were wiping out and stealing Fallout 76 player inventories en masse. Now Bethesda has restored those items.

Fallout 76 is no stranger to hacking, but one nefarious spree deleted gearsets and inventories for lots of players, a move that threatened to basically destroy the game's playerbase. Thankfully Bethesda had a backup plan. The team cloned previous versions of gamers' characters to replicate their compromised gear and return it back to the owners. The clone can then be used to transfer the gear to a user's main.

"A clone of your character will be restored on January 22, 2020. Once restored, this character will have the entire inventory of items, gear and scrap (100% of your stuff) that it posessed on December 20, 2019," Bethesda wrote in a support ticket.

UPDATE: The video has been confirmed fake, and the console is a CGI render, not an actual prototype PS5 system revision.

A new PS5 devkit video purportedly shows a bootup screen complemented by a complete console hardware form-factor revision. But there's a chance it's fake.

The purported PS5 video was specifically uploaded to gather feedback on a QR code error, but was accidentally made public by the uploader. The footage might've revealed the PS5's new secondary devkit revision, hinting that development testing hardware is accelerating past the V-shaped devkits with their stackable chassis and elaborate ventilation.

Epic Games is ramping up into Chapter 2 - Season 2 of Fortnite, and with the new v11.50 update for the game the developer is adding in support for Unreal Engine 4's awesome Chaos Physics System.

If you don't know what the Chaos Physics System is, I've embedded the above video to bring you up to speed. I've been a huge fan of destruction in games since the days of Red Faction and later, some of the Battlefield games (Battlefield: Bad Company 2 had awesome destruction).

Epic Games notes that while it has just launched, they have goals to keep Fortnite feeling like Fortnite even with the introduction of the Chaos Physics System. The developer explained: "Along the way there will be some bumps, so we're starting tests with a small group of players. We'll also closely monitor feedback and make improvements over time".

Activision-Blizzard will now host its games from Google's cloud infrastructure, a move that could have massive implications for future games.

Activision-Blizzard will use Google Cloud as a new delivery mechanism to expand its games. We'll see high-octane online multiplayer games like Overwatch and Call of Duty tighten up with improved latency, but the real possibilities go beyond boosted connectivity. The publisher could use Google Cloud to tremendously boost engagement by directly reaching gamers on a personal level.

For example, Google Cloud's AI will constantly monitor and develop behavior profiles based on how and what you play. That data could be compounded if you link your YouTube account to the game for, say, extra in-game currency. The cloud could even enable native YouTube video/stream embeds right into the games themselves--and give gamers rewards for watching specific content.

Activision-Blizzard's upcoming esports events won't be streamed on Twitch, and are now exclusive to YouTube.

Today Activision-Blizzard signed a huge multi-year deal with Google to make all Overwatch, Hearthstone, and Call of Duty esports events available exclusively on YouTube. This is an obvious slam to streaming competitor Twitch and could represent a massive win for YouTube's advertisement and engagement revenues. Esports is a thriving billion-dollar business that millions of people watch every year, and helps massively boost in-game spending, full game purchases, and overall play time.

The move is all part of Activision-Blizzard's new engagement-first strategy. Choosing YouTube is actually a multi-layered decision that will allow the publisher to do more than they could on Twitch, including using Google's cloud infrastructure to specially target users with advertisements, offers, and more (ie discounts to gamers who haven't played Call of Duty Modern Warfare yet, etc).

There's a rumor going around that Rocksteady is developing a new Superman game, and it'll be exclusive to the Xbox Series X. This isn't happening.

Rocksteady's new project has yet to be announced, but we know one thing: It's not a Superman game. Way back in 2018, studio co-founder and creative director Sefton Hill officially confirmed Rocksteady isn't making a Superman game.

Reports indicate Rocksteady's game will instead be a live-service based Justice League with monetized online play, in which of course Superman could still show up. But the game won't be centered around the Son of Krypton.