Gaming News - Page 64

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom won't be getting a follow-up title; Nintendo has exhausted all possible additions to that iteration of Link's story and universe.

For those that didn't know, Tears of the Kingdom was originally conceived as a DLC for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but following its years in development and the ideas Nintendo was planning on carrying out, the DLC grew too large and earned itself the title of a sequel. Despite being leaked on PC at launch, Tears of the Kingdom went on to be extremely well-received by fans, earning it a place as a nominee for Game of The Year at The Game Awards 2023.

Despite the positive reception for Tears of the Kingdom and this overall iteration of Link and Hyrule, Eiji Aonuma, a 30-year-long producer on The Legend of Zelda franchise, said in a recent interview with Game Informer that Nintendo doesn't have plans for a follow-up game, and that Tears of the Kingdom is the "apotheosis," or the highest point of development of the series.

Sony has teamed up with accessibility experts to create a new controller that is designed for disabled gamers, removing the need to purchase additional third-party accessories and manually wire them into a controller.

Sony Interactive Entertainment has partnered with AbleGamers in the US to create a new controller called the "Access Controller," which features a "highly customizable kit" of various buttons and triggers, enabling the gamer to set up a controller that is specifically suited for their needs.

The release of the Access Controller is a first-of-its-kind product from Sony and the PS5, and the idea behind it is to remove the need to purchase additional third-party accessories and buttons and wire it all together, per Alvin Daniel, Senior Technical Program Manager at Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Very few games have development cycles that last longer than a decade, and if they do, it's often for reasons that can be boiled down to "development troubles." Skull and Bones is one of these games, with Ubisoft Singapore kicking off development on the pirate-themed game after it worked on all of the cool pirate-themed stuff found in 2013's Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.

Turning that into a full-fledged game was always an excellent idea, but Skull and Bones has been in a sort of development limbo since 2013 - and with Rare's Sea of Thieves and other open-world games with boats, it's no longer an original or fresh concept. But, after nine delays, a reboot, and a few closed beta tests, Ubisoft is finally ready to launch Skull and Bones on February 16, 2024.

The game is set to hit PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S on this day, with a Closed Beta coming this weekend - running from December 15 to 18.

Skyrim Together Reborn is a popular mod for Skyrim that adds co-op for up to eight players (with support for 30+) and has been downloaded well over a million times. With Bethesda Game Studios' Starfield release this year, many fans have been expecting to see a multiplayer Starfield Together mod arrive at some point.

If one does show up, it won't be from one of Skyrim Together's key developers, Robbe Bryssinck or Cosideci. It turns out that even though there were plans to port the Skyrim Together mod over to Starfield, that has changed. The reason? The game. It's no secret that the critical and fan response to Starfield has been mixed, with some loving the game, others liking it, and some outright disappointed by its shortcomings.

Cosideci falls into the latter camp, taking to Discord (via Reddit) to state, "When the game released, I was hyped, like a lot of people, but probably for different reasons. I spent launch day and a few days after reverse-engineering the game and porting over gameplay hooks from Skyrim Together to a potential Starfield Together mod. I ported about 70% of Skyrim Together reversed code to Starfield Together."

Former Epic Games creative exec shares the idea that unlocked Fortnite's billion-dollar success.

Fortnite was an ambitious game right from the get-go, and the free-to-lay sensation owes its success to a spoke diagram drawn on a dry-erase board way back in 2017. Ex-Fortnite creative officer Donald Mustard recently shared what appears to be Epic's 'north star' for the battle royale. I

t's called The Fortnite Hub, and it aimed to transform Fortnite from a game into a digital space with its own social ecosystem and game modes. This could be one of the earliest plans for gaming's growing metaverse aspirations. Fortnite has defined social gaming for years with its live concerts and in-game events, not to mention the plethora of crossovers with billion-dollar brands across multiple industries.

AMD is smiling proudly with its RDNA 3-powered Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs flying through the world of Pandora, pumping 100FPS+ inside of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Check it out:

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is powered by Ubisoft's impressive Snowdrop engine, the same engine that powers The Division 2 and other Ubisoft titles. It looks gorgeous, enabling beautiful ray-traced visuals that create immersive gaming environments like we see in Frontiers of Pandora.

AMD worked closely with Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment to ensure a smooth, high FPS gaming experience at Ultra settings with ray tracing enabled across its AMD Radeon graphics cards and AMD Ryzen processors. What kind of performance can we expect? Well, over 100FPS, starting with the Radeon RX 7600... here's the full list:

Following its loss in the Gen8 console race, Microsoft shifted its business towards content and services rather than hardware. The bet is paying off.

Xbox has changed in the years leading up to the Activision Blizzard King acquisition. Xbox went from a console to a service that bridges consoles, PCs, mobile phones, and even smart TVs. Xbox even has a very powerful presence on competitor systems thanks to heavy-hitters like Minecraft, Elder Scrolls Online, and Fallout 76. The company prepped its infrastructure throughout 2013-2015 by unifying Windows PCs and Xbox Ones, and now services have accelerated dramatically with the popular Xbox Game Pass subscription.

Microsoft's core strength has always been services, software, and subscriptions, and it made sense to adapt Xbox into this model--After all, hardware isn't a very high-margin business, and for Xbox, it's actually a negative-margin business because no Xbox console has ever been sold at a profit. Microsoft makes its money back from software, content, monetization, digital advertising, and subscriptions. Based on Xbox's recent record-breaking $16.2 billion revenues for FY22, ths plan appears to be working well.

Xbox financial exec Tim Stuart explains the core heartbeat of the games business, outlining a strategy that emphasizes expansion and utilization of high-margin models.

Xbox has grown tremendously over the past 10 years. To stay competitive, Microsoft has snapped up first-party studios, built its entire games business around content and services, and disrupted the market with Game Pass. This plan has seen Xbox's gaming slate expand horizontally as well as vertically, as Microsoft built and secured multiple millions-strong live service games with recurring revenue streams.

Wrap those live games alongside premium singleplayer titles into a content-delivery subscription service with a low monthly fee that's spread across multiple platforms, and you have Microsoft's main business ethos: diversity. Xbox's multi-faceted business incorporates numerous billion-dollar models centered around multi-access endpoints and digital online monetization, and after the ABK buyout, Microsoft has attained one of the highest-margin publishers on the planet.

Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 animator Mike York shares his thoughts on the recent GTA 6 trailer and hypes up Rockstar Games in the process.

It's not so often that we see actual game developers lend their expertise to YouTube trailer breakdowns. Mike York, who worked on two of Rockstar Games' highest-profile games, did a quick GTA 6 trailer reaction that's been making the rounds.

York's analysis is that the GTA 6 trailer is entirely in-game and has no pre-rendered footage--a declaration that has caused a bit of confusion among gamers.

Xbox gaming CFO Tim Stuart suggests that Microsoft could offer free game streaming over xCloud in exchange for ad viewership.

Ads could be the next phase step evolution in Microsoft's gaming content and services roadmap. Experts believe that a cheaper ad-supported Xbox Game Pass subscription tier could be offered, and we've heard Xbox president Sarah Bond discuss topics like ads and Xbox offering "slices of gameplay" to users.

Now we have very interesting quotes from Xbox chief financial officer Tim Stuart on the topic of ads, and how they could be used for Xbox cloud gaming. The following was transcribed with Stuart's interview at the Wells Fargo TMT Summit held late last month.