Gaming - Page 693

Nintendo is taking an extremely proactive and consumer-friendly approach to recent JoyCon drift issues, and plans to fix them for free.

Bad press has a way of making companies fix things they might ignore...but dozens of damning news articles usually leads to change. Following thousands of reports of JoyCon drifting and malfunctioning, Nintendo will now repair defective Switch controllers free of charge. Gamers affected by JoyCon drift can send their devices into Nintendo free of charge. They won't have to give proof of purchase or be in the warranty window, nor will they have to pay outright for the repair itself. Old repairs will even be refunded.

"Customers will no longer be requested to provide proof of purchase for Joy-Con repairs. Additionally it is not necessary to confirm warranty status. If a customer requests a refund for a previously paid Joy-Con repair, confirm the prior repair and then issue a refund," reads a support document acquired by Vice Games.

Despite grilling EA and Epic Games at a recent gaming addiction meeting, the UK Gambling Commission says lootboxes aren't gambling.

While undeniably psychological, lootboxes technically aren't gambling, the United Kingdom's Gambling Commission reiterated in a statement to the BBC. For a bit there it looked like the UK would pass regulations on lootboxes in the country. MPs and key government officials put immense pressure on billion-dollar devs like EA and Fortnite during a Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee meeting, strongly criticizing the companies over their addictive online games.

While lootboxes will likely stay under scrutiny in the UK, they won't be classified as gambling. Nor will they be illegalized. It comes down to the official definition of gambling, which states there must be direct winning of money or the items themselves must have monetary value outside of the game itself. The latter part is true thanks to black market skin trading, which swaps real money for digital goods--something that companies like Valve have cracked down on.

Even though Techland is right in the middle of their development for Dying Light 2, the studio isn't going to leave its first Dying Light game in the dust.

According to an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Tymon Smektala, the Lead Designer at Techland spoke about the studio still being in creation for a DLC to come to the original Dying Light.

Smektala gave some reasoning behind the decision to still support Dying Light, here is what he had to say: "We supported the game for two reasons. The first is that we believe in our community, and we really believe they will be the most essential part for us getting the word out about Dying Light 2. The other thing is that supporting a game like Dying Light for such a long time allows us to be slightly more crazy, and slightly more creative with some things, and also test some ideas and gameplay elements that we're not sure about."

The battle royale genre has amassed that much popularity, that games that you would never think of adopting the game mode are considering the thought. Should Gears of War 5 follow the hot-game trend?

According to multiplayer director Ryan Cleven, Gears of War 5 will not have a battle royale mode when it launches, even though The Coalition are 'big' fans of the battle royale genre. "Gears 5 does not include a battle royale mode. We're big fans of the battle royale genre, but we would want to ensure we bring a battle royale mode to Gears in a meaningful way. We're actively listening to our Gears community and will look to further evolve our game modes based on player feedback post-launch."

Even though Gears of War 5 won't have a battle royale at launch, the developers haven't ruled out the possibility of it coming at a later date. According to Cleven who told IGN, "As a fan of the genre I would love to see it, but bringing the intimate combat of Gears to the open kind of organic encounters of a battle royale is difficult. They're two very different modes of combat. It's not that it's impossible. It's just to do it right would require really focusing on it." Gears of War 5 launches in September.

If you played Dying Light you are most likely keen for the sequel that is coming out of Techland. The game looks incredible, and with the new decision system that has been implemented gamers will be running a muck.

According to an interview with Techland's Lead Designer, Tymon Smektala, that the complexity that you see in Dying Light 2 wasn't always planned and that it started "simpler". The inspiration for the decision system came from "analysing Dying Light, we realised we had created this game that was quite sandboxy. It gives you a lot of options on how to solve the gameplay problems. However, the narrative was very linear. Also with the narrative, which was not so cool, the main protagonist [Kyle Crane] was making a lot of decisions that were quite controversial."

He continued and says: "There were a lot of times in Dying Light where you wanted Kyle to choose something but the scriptwriters had decided something different. So the dream with this game is that we could give you the same amount of freedom in the narrative as we have in the gameplay."

The PC version of Wolfenstein: Youngblood is coming 24 hours early, dropping on July 25 for the PC versus July 26 on the consoles. Bethesda confirmed the news over Twitter.

QuakeCon 2019 begins on July 25 so it makes sense to hype gamers up with an early PC release of Wolfenstein: Youngblood, with QuakeCon itself concentrating around DOOM and the impending release of DOOM Eternal, with DOOM-inspired custom gaming PCs, a panel dedicated to 25 years of DOOM and its influence on the world, and world exclusive Battlemode gameplay from DOOM Eternal.

We'll be grabbing Wolfenstein: Youngblood and testing it in all sorts of manner when it drops, which now isn't far away for us PC gamers.

We will be finding much more about DOOM Eternal at QuakeCon 2019, with its new multiplayer mode 'Battlemode' to be detailed on July 26.

DOOM Eternal's new Battlemode will see one player as the DOOM Slayer, while two other players deploy into the round as demons. The DOOM Slayer gets his full arsenal of weapons -- including the jetpacking Revenant, in a best-of-five fight. Each of the demons have their own "unique movement options, attacks and abilities" that will allow them to battle the DOOM Slayer, making the games nice and quick.

The DOOM Slayer might have weapons but the demons will be able to access the literal armies of Hell, as demon players can spawn hellish AI-controlled reinforcements to battle the DOOM Slayer. The DOOM Slayer can use this to his advantage as he has more enemies to kill, with Glory Kills gaining the DOOM Slayer health, so you don't want to spawn demons at the wrong time.

All of Remedy's projects affect one another in a unique way--even the ones that never got made like Alan Wake 2.

Games development is an intensely iterative industry. Developers constantly build on what they know and what they've made to make new games, and new projects are almost always tied to previous games, whether directly via physics engines and UI or indirectly via early concept ideas. In a recent interview with IGN, Remedy writer Sam Lake gave some interesting insight into Alan Wake 2 and how the unreleased sequel led to new IPs like Quantum Break and Control.

According to Lake, the studio made various concepts for Alan Wake 2 in between projects. Think of this as an incubation phase when games are on the drawing board, pulling from existing designs while simultaneously iterating on them. Remedy's an indie studio so it must constantly churn out new ideas for games on a regular basis and then sell them to stay afloat. Some, like Quantum Break, get funded, and others like Alan Wake 2 don't. Even though Alan Wake 2 never happened, many of these early concepts inspired future games like Quantum Break, American Nightmare, and even its big new supernatural IP Control.

As is the case with most non-official Rockstar Games info, those Red Dead Redemption remaster rumors are 100% fake.

Red Dead Redemption isn't getting remastered. The anonymous Redditor behind the claims now admits the rumors are entirely fabricated; Red Dead Redemption 2 isn't getting aliens DLC (kind of preposterous) nor is John Marston's iconic gunslinging adventure coming to current-gen systems. The Redditor says the rumors were a social experiment.

"There is no DLC for Red Dead Redemption 2 or remake of the first game as far as I know," they said. "This was an experiment I have always wanted to do regarding the spreading of rumors in video game culture."

MachineGames' next big Wolfenstein game could follow Youngblood's example, complete with some sort of online play.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is a big departure for MachineGames. Typically the newly revamped Wolfenstein series is singleplayer-only chaos, but Youngblood is a live game with microtransactions, online co-op, and a winding story-based campaign. Youngblood, which clocks in at 25-30 hours, is the latest example of Bethesda's newfound focus on engagement-driven live games (ESO, Blades, Fallout 76, and now Youngblood).

Now MachineGames studio head Jerk Gustafsson says Wolfenstein 3 could also have online modes...but not at the expense of singleplayer. Wolfenstein will always be a singleplayer game first and foremost.

Team Liquid is on top of the Counter-Strike: GO world right now, conquering every challenger and reigning victorious at this year's Intel Extreme Masters tournament.

Copyright: ESL | Helena Kristiansson

To a roaring audience, Team Liquid raised their sixth trophy in a row last weekend after vanquishing Finnish challengers ENCE 3-0 in the IEM 2019 grand finals. Liquid managed to steal the entire show with only a single map loss, but ENCE put up a good fight in the finals and won out two pistol matches in a row. At the end they lost 14-16 to Team Liquid in a thrilling 1v1 battle between Stewie2k and xseveN.

We've already heard a fair amount of rumors and base specs of Sony's next-gen PlayStation 5, and it seems now is the time to learn about the new SoC inside of the next-gen Xbox console codenamed Project Scarlett.

A new SoC has turned up in a UserBenchmark sample as the AMD 'Flute' which is based on the Zen 2 architecture with 8C/16T and a low base clock of 1.6GHz and maximum boost of 3.2GHz. It was always expected to see next-gen consoles see their CPU clocks lower than what the PC versions of the Zen 2 processors pack, to keep that all-important TDP down inside of a small console.

AMD will be providing a custom Navi GPU on the Flute SoC, something that is listed as 'NAVI 10LITE' and has turned up previously in AMD's Linux display driver release. We should expect a cut down Navi GPU to once again keep the TDP low, while it should see 16GB of GDDR6 shared memory, as per previous rumors on Scarlett.

QuakeCon is famous for its stylish modding PCs, and this year's show will focus on Doom Eternal.

(Photo: IGN)

Every year thousands of dedicated fans come together to celebrate the demon-slayer that ignited the FPS revolution, complete with insane customized builds. The show is a chance to highlight some of the craziest modded cases in gaming with a set theme (usually hell-on-Earth Doom action or the medieval brutality of Quake). QuakeCon 2019 will be no different.

Nintendo was recently called out en masse for its cheap JoyCon controllers, and now it's delivered a very Nintendo-y response.

The Switch's JoyCons have a few issues. They're wonky analog sticks that're just a step above nubs and they seem to wear out fast. And when they wear out they don't just get funky, but they can make games nigh unplayable thanks to controller drifting. Despite thousands of gamers reporting drift issues on Reddit, Nintendo isn't really ready to acknowledge the problem with a definitive blanket statement promising to do better. Instead they've done the predictable Nintendo thing and dropped a business-like PR response.

"At Nintendo, we take great pride in creating quality products and we are continuously making improvements to them. We are aware of recent reports that some Joy-Con controllers are not responding correctly. We want our consumers to have fun with Nintendo Switch, and if anything falls short of this goal we always encourage them to visit https://support.nintendo.com so we can help," a Nintendo rep told Kotaku.

Microsoft is ramping up into the release of its streaming service known as xCloud, with public trials kicking off in October but before then, we're getting a glimpse into what hardware is baked into the data center.

In a new interview with Fortune, Xbox streaming boss Kareem Choudry walks us through the inside of the server rack that will be powering xCloud games. Inside we'll find the insides of 8 x Xbox One S consoles that are crammed into a 2U rack unit that has been designed specifically to slide into a data center.

It seems as though the first runs of Microsoft's baby steps into cloud gaming will begin with xCloud using physical Xbox One S consoles to pump the game to the consumer, so they don't need the physical console in their house. While Microsoft would be paying a lower price for Xbox One S boards (as they are the supplier) it could eventuate into supercomputers emulating Xbox One S consoles.

The biggest fighting game tournament in the world is without a doubt EVO, or Evolution Championship Series. This year things are a little different as Super Smash Bros. has managed to knock off long standing Street Fighter games as the headlining tournament.

The news has come from the President of Evo, Joey Cuellar who recently took to Twitter to reveal the Evo 2019 finals order. According to Cuellar, on Friday Evo participants will see Soulcalibur VI finals be played out, on Saturday we will get Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[st], Dragon Ball FighterZ, Samurai Shodown, and Mortal Kombat 11. Sunday will be BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, Street Fighter V, Tekken 7 and finally Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

This is quite unprecedented as the newest Street Fighter game usually holds the headlining spot at Evo, but this year Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's overwhelming popularity has swooped in and dethroned the long-running fighter. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was also the most registered title at this years Evo, check out more on that here. If you didn't know, Super Smash Bros. Melee was dropped from this years Evo competition, find out why here. Evo 2019 will be held in Las Vegas on August 2nd.

10 years since its release, Red Dead Redemption is still a masterpiece title, but what if Rockstar Games gave it a fresh coat of paint? A recent rumor has suggested just that and the release date for the purported title is teed up for release in 2020-2021.

The rumor has originated on Reddit by an anonymous user who allegedly knows one of the Rockstar Games environment artists. According to the rumor, Rockstar Games is currently remaking Red Dead Redemption and is planning on adding a bunch of new features into the classic title that are present in Red Dead Redemption 2. The rumor also suggests that the story will be slightly change to have a better transition into the sequels story.

The anonymous user also discussed some details regarding a Red Dead Redemption 2 single-player DLC, saying that its "alien centered like people have rumored (this was hinted by the ufo Easter egg). You're still Arthur in this DLC." The full quote is located in the entirety of this post, and I must say before you go an believe this news that since this isn't an official announcement please do take the information with a healthy amount of skepticism. Nothing of this sort has been confirmed as of yet.

QuakeCon 2019 kicks off on Friday, July 26 and it will be centered around DOOM and its influence on the world over the last 25 years, leading right into the release of DOOM Eternal.

DOOM Eternal will be playable at QuakeCon, which will be the first time the public will get their hands-on the game. The opening keynote to QuakeCon 2019 this year will see its welcome message "focus heavily" on DOOM Eternal, with the keynote starting at 11AM CT on Friday, July 26.

Right after the keynote is the first panel titled "The Influence of DOOM" which will feature an "all-star lineup of Bethesda developers from MachineGames, Bethesda Game Studios, and id Software will discuss the impact of DOOM's release 25 years ago on games and the video game industry".

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is right around the corner with a release date of July 26, but it will be launching without its ray tracing with the developer working with NVIDIA engineers in last-minute crams.

Executive Producer of Wolfenstein: Youngblood, Jerk Gustafsson, said during a recent interview with GamesBeat: "We're working together with NVIDIA on that, but raytracing won't be available at launch. The engineers at NVIDIA are still hard at work getting that solution to look as good as possible for the game, and the date is still to be determined. But from what we've seen so far, it'll be good".

It's a bit of a kick in the teeth considering Bethesda Softworks and NVIDIA announced at Computex 2019 that Wolfenstein: Youngblood would include ray tracing, and now 4 days before its release it is announced that it won't be included at launch. We don't know when it'll be launched apart from the date "still to be determined". Weeks? Months? How long do you think it'll be?

If you want to blow a huge chunk of money on a game then look no further than Dead or Alive 6, which is a money pit of a game with $670 worth of DLC on the Steam store page for DOA6. But it gets worse.

The second season pass for Dead or Alive 6 should cost around $90, the same as the original season pass -- something that cost more than the full game itself. What do you get with the new season pass? There's the new Seaside Eden area, with a bonus costume for both Marie Rose and Honoka.

You'll also get some Seaside Eden costumes, two additional costume sets, a Vacation to Paradise BGM set, and a new character with five costumes. But don't worry, world! Between July 23 and July 29 the two new characters are free, so it makes that $670 easier to swallow.