Gaming - Page 636

The PS3's cell CPU is still more powerful than any of today's modern Intel desktop chips, Guerrilla Games co-director and technical director Michiel van der Leeuw says.

"Even desktop chips nowadays, the fastest Intel stuff you can buy is not by far as powerful as the Cell CPU, but it's very difficult to get power out of the Cell. I think it was ahead of its age, because it was a little bit more like how GPUs work nowadays, but it was maybe not balanced nicely and it was too hard to use. It overshot a little bit in power and undershot in usability, but it was definitely visionary," van der Leeuw said in a recent interview with GameInformer.

Thanks to its parallel computing design that forced devs to constantly re-write code for different cores, the PS3's Cell microarchitecture was a headache for creators.

Now that Doom Eternal has been delayed to March 2020, Bethesda plans to release a new Doom bundle for gamers to chew on in the meantime.

Bethesda's new Doom Slayer's Club Collection packs in a bunch of demon-slaughtering mayhem in one package on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. The bundle sports Doom, Doom II, Doom III, and the excellent Doom 2016 reboot in the same package for a cool $30. There's a catch, though: Dooms I-III are digital-only and aren't included on the disc. You'll have to download these to play.

Sadly Doom 64 didn't make the cut. Bethesda plans to release Doom 64 as a standalone game and is also free with every Doom Eternal pre-order.

It's been seven years since the last major Epic Mickey game, and new info spotted on a LinkedIn resume hints at a comeback.

Maltese indie developer PlayMagic, the same team remastering the pulpy Archer-esque shooter XIII, could be remaking the classic Epic Mickey games for current-gen systems. The info comes from the LinkedIn resume of PlayMagic CEO Giuseppe Crugliano, which states the studio has been working on a new action game remake set in a Disney IP since July 2019. The game is due out on the full spectrum of today's games hardware--PS4, Xbox One, PC and Nintendo Switch.

So what could it be? The resume also says PlayMagic is working on an "unannounced third person action remake" for the same platforms. Coincidence? Maybe. There's certainly a plethora of older Disney games that could be revamped, especially the third-person games of the old PlayStation era. But Epic Mickey was tremendously popular and lauded for its inventive use of platforming mechanics and stylish visuals. If Disney were to order a remake or a remaster, Epic Mickey would be a nice safe bet.

Reports say Konami is selling the official Silent Hill domain name for $9,800. But this site hasn't been used to promote Silent Hill games for quite some time.

SilentHill.com is up for sale for the low price of $9,800, strongly hinting Konami is done with the franchise. The truth is the website hasn't actually been used for Silent Hill games since 2003, the same year Silent Hill 3 came out. Konami let go of the domain in 2003 and used other domains for future Silent Hill games, as well as including listings on its own homesite.

Since then SilentHill.com has changed hands back and forth and has gone through many changes, all of which aren't related to the series. This is not a new development. The domain hasn't been associated with the Silent Hill franchise for many, many years now.

2019 has been a terrible year for digital collectible card games outside of, say, Magic Arena, with multiple discontinuations and PR nightmares.

Throughout 2019 we saw lots of games-makers try to capitalize on the CCG craze with their own microtransaction-funded card games. Some of these made sense, like CD Projekt RED's Gwent. Some, like The Elder Scrolls Legends, were a stretch. Despite massive audiences and big cross-platform releases, many of these games failed to gain traction--or were embroiled in worldwide political fiascoes punctuated with boycotts.

A lot of the CCGs are now being discontinued or put into maintenance mode, which is basically sunsetting the games for their inevitable death.

Rumor has it Ubisoft could tease its next-gen Splinter Cell game at The Game Awards 2019, but why not wait until E3 2020?

A bunch of new games will be revealed during next week's The Game Awards 2019, but no one knows which ones. Could we get more Dragon Age 4 info? Is it a bunch of indies? Maybe Rocksteady will show up to tease their new game? Hell, we might get the new Batman Court of Owls game too. Or maybe, just maybe, Sam Fisher will greet us with a gruff intro?

A recent 4Chan rumor says a new Splinter Cell game will be revealed at the show. The rumor itself is a bit shaky and can't be 100% trusted of course, but the info is interesting to say the least. The source, which claims to work at Ubisoft Blue Byte (a red flag as leakers never reveal the studios they work for), makes it sound a lot like a service game, complete with dynamic multiplayer elements including co-op campaign play.

Fortnite has been a billboard for other franchises and games for a while now, with tons of crossovers like Batman, The Avengers, John Wick, and even hosting a concert in-game. Now it's getting an exclusive scene from Episode IX.

On December 14, Fortnite gamers can watch an exclusive scene from Star Wars Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker at the in-game Risky Reels drive-in (it's next to Frenzy Farm in the north-east section of the map). J.J. Abrams will be in attendance at the event and could do a Q&A session of sorts and discuss the film.

This is a pretty big deal for Epic Games and the battle royale sensation. Fortnite is no stranger to blatantly advertising other games franchises, movies, and pop culture, but this marks the first time the game is being used as a kind of preview screen for films. The idea is simple: Lucasfilm and Disney want to capture Fortnite's hundreds-million strong audience and remind everyone to go see the new Star Wars movie.

So far Halo: Reach is a janky, but still-enjoyable experience on PC. It's far from perfect and needs a lot of work, but for $10 it's passable and addictive.

Right now Halo: Reach is far from the optimized experience that 343 Industries promised. It's got some rough edges like bad sound design, a barebones UI, a boring and unrewarding armor unlock progression system, input lag/bad hit detection, and some connectivity issues. It's not a complete package and is missing many important features, like co-op campaign matchmaking, split-screen play, and basic progression schemes.

But when it works, it transports you back to 2010. It's not a full total recall type of situation--you have to squint past a bunch of flaws--but it's good enough to keep you playing for hours and not realizing it.

Starbreeze Studios is no longer at risk of immediate financial ruin, and now has five years to pay back its debt.

Today Swedish creditors approved Starbreeze's request to pay back its $40 million in debt across a five-year period. The company entered reconstruction in 2018, and jettisoned all of its non-essential branches including StarVR while also selling rights to games like System Shock 3 as well as studios (for example, Starbreeze sold its majority stake in Dhurva Interactive to Rockstar Games). Starbreeze shut down all of its branches except for game development, and halted dev on all projects except for the Payday franchise.

To pay back its debt, Starbreeze expects to sign a big publishing contract in 2020 to fund a new Payday game, give more financial buoyancy, and set the Payday franchise up for long-term sales. Payday 3 is the key to Starbreeze's debt payoff and it's betting everything on the sequel--if Payday 3 doesn't take off, they could have to sell the IP and liquidate other assets. Payday 3 is due out by 2022 and will be optimized for PS5 and Project Scarlett next-gen systems.

Lockhart, the dialed-down next-gen Xbox SKU, will apparently have significantly less RAM than its ultra-powerful sibling.

So what exactly is Lockhart, and how does it fit in with Project Scarlett?

Microsoft has two next-gen Xbox consoles planned for 2020: Lockhart, a cheaper, disc-less mid-grade system that's basically a successor to the Xbox One S, and Anaconda, the higher-end enthusiast Xbox One X successor to counter the PS5. Anaconda is the console that Microsoft touted at E3 2019 with insane specs like 4x power than the Xbox One X, 8K playback, and it "eats monsters for breakfast".

A selection of Sony's first-party PS5 launch games will be next-gen exclusive and won't be held back by last-gen PS4 hardware.

Some of Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5 launch games will be exclusive to the next-gen console, giving developers total freedom to push the PS5's beefy Zen 2 CPU and Navi GPU tech to their limits.

Developer sources tell Kotaku's Jason Schreier that a portion of the PS5's first-party launch games won't be be cross-gen, and won't be playable on the PlayStation 4.

A new Sony patent was discovered by LetsGoDigital, who suggests it's for a PlayStation 5 controller. But the patent strongly indicates it's more of a family-friendly solution that connects to a home computer, not a dedicated games console.

For intents and purposes, the device is used as a kind of Remote Play receiver, but don't expect major PlayStation games to be playable on it. The patent apparently only plays mini-games and won't connect to a games console for remote game streaming.

It can connect to a host computer, and the patent mentions host computers can download games from the internet or play them via DVD ROMs, but don't expect this to be a DualShock 5/PS Vita hybrid. It won't play PS4 or godforbid PS5 games on the go. Everything about the patent suggests it's a barebones consumer product, not a gaming product.

Imgur has announced that they will be launching a new app that is targetted at gamers and streamers. This app will act as a middle-man between gamers' favorite streamers and gaming content, and viewers.

Imgur explains that they have about 300 million users each month, and that nearly half of those users use the platform to follow gaming-related content. So, in an effort to help those community members who are after gaming-related content, Imgur has decided to launch an app that purely focuses on improving the gaming experience through being the one place to find gaming news, streamers, short clips, memes, highlights and more.

I managed to get into contact with Imgur, where I asked them what kind of internal data do they have that indicates that this is a good move for the company. Here's what they said; "In a recent survey of 8,000 Imgur users, 92% said that they consider themselves gamers, and more than half said they spend more than 10 hours a week gaming. On Imgur at large, nearly half (46%) of our 300M monthly users follow gaming-related tags."

Ten years on, millions of gamers are coming together to watch billions of hours of Minecraft videos.

YouTube revealed some insane stats in today's Rewind 2019 video, confirming viewers have watched over one billion hours of Minecraft in 2019. In terms of raw YouTube views, Minecraft is leagues more popular than Fortnite, gaming's biggest billion-dollar breadwinner, beating the battle royale sensation by over almost 40 billion views. We can only imagine how much ad revenue Microsoft collected from those views.

Another surprise oldie-but-goodie star showed up in the list, too. Grand Theft Auto V might be six years old, but it still amassed 36.9 billion views this year and took third place in the top 5 most-watched video games on the platform.

We keep hearing all about the PlayStation 5 and its V-shaped developer kit that is floating around, but now we know for a fact that an Xbox Scarlett development kit is in the wild -- with Xbox boss Phil Spencer himself confirming he has an Xbox Scarlett at home.

Spencer took to his official Twitter, tweeting out: "And it's started....this week I brought my Project Scarlett console home and it's become my primary console, playing my games, connecting to the community and yes, using my Elite Series 2 controller, having a blast. Great work by the team, 2020 is going to be an incredible year".

Microsoft must be a good way into the development of Xbox Scarlett, as Spencer's unit would be plugged into (or connected via Wi-Fi) to his internet connection. Is he playing games at higher resolutions and frame rates? Is he playing unreleased next-gen games? I have so many questions.

In its original state as an early port, The Witcher 3 on the Nintendo Switch ran like dog poo. The handheld mode of the game ran at just 10FPS, which is not good at all -- unplayable, really.

In a new interview between GamesBeat and Saber Interactive, who is working with CD PROJEKT RED on the Nintendo Switch port of The Witcher 3, studio CEO Matthew Karch said the port ran at just 10FPS and took up a pretty hefty 50GB of storage space.

The team was forced to start making some cuts to the game, and one of the first was considering the culling of the NPCs in The Witcher 3 -- but nope, can't do that. From there the team had to work a little harder, so they took a closer look at shadows and vegetation, because there's so much of it in The Witcher 3, and began cutting away.

Remedy managed to create one of the most spellbinding, bizarre, and unique games of 2019 with a small budget--and a smaller development timeline.

Making games is an expensive, time-consuming process. But when you're an indie dev like Remedy, you have to make a lot with a little. Development has to be streamlined and efficient, progress can't be scrapped too often, and every dollar has to be stretched as far as it can go. It's tough and often sees games being cancelled outright--or developers closing down.

To make Control, Remedy had a 30 million Euro budget ($33 million) and a three-year dev cycle. That's not a whole lot of cash, or a lot of time to make a game, especially not one as awesome as Control (sadly, another few months could've probably prevented the disastrous performance on consoles at launch). Games can take $50-100 million to make and have insane dev cycles of up to 10+ years.

Today Riot Games announced Riot Forge, a new initiative that recruits third-party indie studios to help make new League of Legends games.

Under Riot Forge, the studio is essentially conscripting third-party teams to help make new League of Legends games. They definitely need all the help they can get. Riot currently has a metric ton of new games in the works, including a hero shooter FPS game (yes, really), a Diablo-like ARPG, a mobile version of League of Legends, a card game, and even a fighting game.

Riot won't be working alone on these projects. With Riot Forge, the studio aims to make League of Legends into a multi-faceted IP focused on making tons of cash, whether it be from game sales or engagement-driven microtransactions. The latter is right up Tencent's alley--the company makes billions every year from massively successful mobile games.

Capcom won't reveal Resident Evil 3 Remake at The Game Awards 2019, host Geoff Keighley confirms.

Just yesterday we spotted some PSN images that confirm Resident Evil 3 Remake is happening, but the game won't be shown off at TGA 2019 as expected. The news comes from showrunner Geoff Keighley, who says none of the show's planned reveals have been leaked ahead of time.

"There are no plans (never were) to do anything with Resident Evil 3 at the show. A lot of these 'leaks' are completely wrong. Nothing about our show has leaked as of this writing," Keighley said in a recent Reddit AmA session.

Well, it seems Razer is some trouble right now -- with Kotaku receiving a bunch of emails from Razer staff, which see Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan threatening and abusing his staff.

Tan was mad that his company had reached the milestone of being one of the "Most Innovative Companies" in Fast Company's 2014 top list, seeing the Razer CEO rage at his staff. In an email as "part of an exchange obtained by Kotaku", Tan said to one of his marketing staff: "Are you guys fucking off?"

In a huge email reply from Greg Agius, Razer's director of marketing, Agius had a plan to get Tan "in front of Fast Company" so he could be pushed into the limelight as the "Asian Steve Jobs". But it gets worse... Agius was doing his job and told Tan an in-person media tour would've given the Razer CEO a much better chance of making Fast Company's list of Most Innovative Companies.