Gaming - Page 775

Although it might be a stretch to think it, Batman's iconic Court of Owls story arc could be adapted into video game form.

Warner Bros. Montreal is currently working on two big DC games, and sources say one of them is Batman related, possibly a title centered around Damien Wayne. The team, who developed Batman: Arkham Origins, pivoted towards a Batman game after cancelling its Suicide Squad project. Not much has been confirmed about the projects, but the studio's production coordinator Valerie Vezina might've teased something interesting: a Batman Court of Owls game.

Vezina's early November Twitter post ignited speculation that the project could revolve around the Batman comics' dark and iconic storyline. The post shows Vezina wearing an owl shirt that resembles the nefarious Court of Owls' insignia in the New 52! graphic novels. It's not an exact match, however, and it may just be a coincidence.

343 Industries is making good on its promise to include split-screen with all future Halo games, and has already implemented it Halo: Infinite.

Halo: Infinite (aka Halo 6) is still in very early stages of development--the game's engine still hasn't been fully fleshed out--but that didn't stop 343i from already adding in split-screen multiplayer. The devs confirmed that 4-player split-screen is indeed playable right now in early internal builds of the game.

"We have [four player] split-screen working. We made a promise to the community that we'd have it in our next game that we make, and it's working. We can play on it, and it's a huge accomplishment for the team this year," 343 Industries FPS head Chris Lee said in a recent Halo social stream.

It's been years since a Halo game came to PC, but Halo 6 will make the jump and 343 Industries affirms it'll be scaled to meet the platform's demanding standards.

Halo has always been a system-selling franchise, but Microsoft's goalposts with Xbox now transcend the console realm and sees a union between PC and console gaming. This evolution means major first-party exclusives will release on PC too, and that includes 343i's next big shooter Halo: Infinite (aka Halo 6). The devs are taking PC development seriously, but it's working on both versions simultaneously and consoles will get first dibs on alpha and beta testing phases.

"We take PC as a full first-class citizen," 343 Industries technical director David Berger said in a recent social stream. "The PC audience expects more things than a curated console experience, and so it definitely goes into our philosophy of making sure we can allow scalability of things on different PC hardware. It's just something we have to think about going forward."

In a recent press release from Nintendo Europe, Super Smash Bros. has been deemed Nintendo's fastest-selling home console game ever.

Nintendo Europe has announced on the official Twitter page that the recently released Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has become Nintendo's fastest selling home console ever. Since its release, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has clocked record number sales within its first three days of being live. The total sales of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in that same frame were 30% higher than that of Mario Kart Wii, which progressed to sell more than 37 million copies.

The COO of Europes Nintendo commented on the success of the title, saying "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the biggest Super Smash Bros. ever, and not only is it the fastest-selling game in the series we've ever seen in Europe, it's become our fastest-selling home console game ever. Nintendo Switch owners have a lot to look forward to in 2019, including new games in the Animal Crossing and Pokémon series, Yoshi's Crafted World, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and more." Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is currently available exclusively on the Nintendo Switch, for more information visit the official Super Smash Bros. website here.

One of the most anticipated titles for Nintendo's Switch line-up for next year has got to be Yoshi's Crafted World, and with no official confirmed release date set, Amazon may have spilled the beans early.

We first heard about Yoshi's Crafted World when Nintendo accidentally leaked the name for the game back in September of this year. Then the games vague release date window of "spring 2019" was revealed by Nintendo during their Direct, it now seems that date has been further clarified by a mysterious Amazon listing.

It should be noted that Amazon has done with with many game titles and this should hold in no way state or form a confirmed release date for Yoshi's Crafted World. With that in mind, this release date given by Amazon does coincide with the originally planned "Spring 2019" set by Nintendo themselves. So we could actually be looking a legitimate release date, or at least something close to it. For more information regarding Yoshi's Crafted World, check out its official eShop listing here. Yoshi's Crafted World will be arriving on the Nintendo Switch Spring of 2019, I will be sure to update you when an official release date is set.

For Honor players will soon be suiting up as Ezio Auditore as Ubisoft has debuted an Assassin's Creed crossover event to For Honor. Prepare your hidden blades and longswords, Templars and Assassin's are about to battle it out.

The event titled 'For The Creed' will be bringing an Assassin's Creed-themed twist on "dominion mode, new map visuals, and new outfits, gear, executions, and emotes." The event will last for three-weeks and within that time players will be able to jump into a special version of dominion mode that puts Templars and Assassin's in a head-to-head scenario. The principles will still remain the same for dominion, players will fight for capture points but when the point that is closest to your home base is taken the commander for the defending side will come out.

Players will have to deal with Ezio Auditore da Firenze as the Assassin's commander, the Templars will feature Cesare Borgia as their commander. Each commander will have "massive health pools and devastating area area-of-effect swings, these commanders won't be easy to take out, but doing so nets your team 300 points and propels you that much closer to victory." To successfully win a game, a side must reach 1000 points, the first side to do this is deemed victor. To find out more about what Assassin's Creed themed changes are coming in the 'For The Creed' event, check out the official Ubisoft blog post here.

Indie developer Nik Nak Studios is the developer of a GTA 2 inspired title called Geneshift. Geneshift has now recently taken the 10th spot as Steam's 'most played' title.

Ben, the developer behind Nik Nak studios has been working on his title 'Geneshift' for a solid 9 years now, after recent popularity spike of the Battle Royale mode Ben decided to create a version of it for his game and give it away to Reddit to for free. His giveaway platform was Steam, and after some debates with Valve they gave him the go ahead. Ben proceeded to post onto /r/gaming with this gif, eventually the post made it to the front page of Reddit for a few hours and then Ben to his shock saw a 9000% increase in traffic to his game.

It wasn't just redditors that were giving his game a try, but bots and not just a small amount of them either. Since Ben's game was originally $10, it was still possible for the people playing to receive trading cards and sell them on the marketplace for just a couple cents. This motivated a bot farm to hijack Ben's game and become idle within it, Valve eventually caught wind of what was going on and disabled trading cards for Geneshift, not before the title could reach 213,000 concurrent players. After this fiasco, Geneshift now sits on the 10th spot on Steam's 'most played' game, and despite the bot hijacking I hope the publicity gets some well deserve player attention to this developer. Check out Geneshift here. Read the full story from Ben himself here.

Blizzard are getting into the full festive swing with a new stop-motion animated short, this time round Tracer is on 'cookiewatch' duty as a pesky Reaper attempts to steal Santa's cookies.

Back in May, we saw the first stop-motion animated short for Overwatch to celebrate the games second year anniversary. Blizzard must of taken in all the positive feedback and decided to create another for us to enjoy, introducing Tracers 'cookiewatch' and her mission to save Santa's cookies.

The short which would of been hours and hours of frame-by-frame work is about two and half minutes long and we can see Reaper jumping down to rob Santa of his cookies. Tracer see's what Reaper is up to and enforces the Christmas tradition of leaving the cookies for Santa. Dashing around the room and all around the Christmas tree with multiple shots fired from Reaper, Tracer and Reaper end up getting interrupted by Santa himself. Check out the above video for yourself, Overwatch is currently available on the PC, Xbox One and PS4.

Fortnite now has its own merch store, with developer Epic Games offering a bunch of different shirts, onesies, and other Fortnite-related goods for people to buy. One of those is the new Durr Burger Onesie.

The new onesie should be a big attraction for thousands of Fortnite fans, available for $70 and shipping in late-January 2019. There's also otehr things like the Skull Trooper pullover hoodie for $60, and a bunch of other Skull Trooper tees for $25 a piece.

There might not be much on the Fortnite merch store right now, but Epic will go into 2019 adding more to the store. I'm sure this is a test run to see how successful it is, and just how many of the tens of millions of Fortnite players in the world react to Fortnite merch. The onesie on the other hand, should sell like hotcakes.

Atari today announced its total earnings for the first six-month period of its financial year, and reiterates a 2019 launch for its new Atari VCS console.

Atari is a curious business. It once reigned supreme in the early days of console gaming, but now its massive brand awareness is spent on licensing IPs and releasing games like Rollercoaster Tycoon. The company's earnings don't reflect a titanic industry force, but more so a company that's found its comfortable niche in the market. In the six-month period ending September 30, 2018, Atari made just 10.8 million Euros or about $12.7 million in total earnings, up 27% year-over-year. Operating income is up a mighty 87% YoY to 2.2 million Euros, and shareholder's equity spiked by an astronomical 194% to 23.1 million Euros.

For perspective on these numbers, the company's new crowdfunded Atari VCS generated $3 million on Indiegogo, or about a fourth of its half-year revenues.

Bethesda's gamble with Fallout 76 didn't exactly pay off in terms of digital launch sales, but EA's Battlefield V was also soft in November.

According to findings from SuperData, both Fallout 76 and Battlefield V saw weaker sales throughout November when compared to previous series entries. The analyst firm estimates that Battlefield V sold 1.9 million units digitally on consoles and PC, whereas the only-only Fallout 76 sold 1.4 million copies. For clarification, EA's shooter released on November 9 and Fallout 76 launched on November 14. Both games are down from Battlefield 1 and Fallout 4, but SuperData didn't say by how much.

Star Citizen's singleplayer campaign is still a long ways off and a beta won't be released until 2020 at the earliest.

As Roberts Space Industries adds more muscle to its online-driven space titan, the game's development time grows at the same time. Today the company released an updated roadmap for its upcoming Squadron 42 singleplayer campaign, confirming a targeted Q2 2020 release for a beta test.

Although its been in development for some time, the campaign is quite monumental and features a 28 chapter story with a star-studded cast including Mark Hamill and Gillian Anderson. The chapters are also being worked on at the same time. That 2020 timeline is just for the beta and not the final game, but RSI notes that it's the "final stage of polishing and bug fixing before release."

DICE and EA offer a rare glimpse at Battlefront II's concept art to give an idea how imagination is translated to dynamic video game worlds.

I absolutely love concept art, especially video game concept art. There's something magical about these early windows into fabulous worlds: they speak of limitless possibility and potential, fanning the flames of creativity and hope. Quite often I've looked at concept art and been able to capture the overall tone and feel of a game--other times it's been a surprise. But there's always something special about these slices of captured imagination, and Battlefront II is no exception.

With Battlefront II's concept art, the talented artists at DICE have recreated the early works of Ralph McQuarrie to a tee. McQuarrie's original concept art is directly responsible for the iconic aesthetic of Star Wars' favorite characters and locales, from the Cloud City of Bespin to Darth Vader's imposing samurai-esque helmet, and even X-Wing fighters, the Death Star, Star Destroyers and so much more. McQuarrie's talent envisioned what Star Wars is today.

KING Art Games, the developers for the upcoming World War I real-time strategy title Iron Harvest have announced a bunch of new features for the multiplayer alpha that has just been released.

The developers for Iron Harvest have launched the multiplayer alpha on Steam today and to celebrate the launch they have released the above 'Alpha 2 Gameplay' trailer. Since the release of Alpha 1, KING Art Games took all of the feedback from players and funneled it back into the game, implementing new features to the title such as; 1v1, 2v2, co-op, five new mechs, a second weapon system and much more.

Not only have weapons and multiplayer seen an upgrade, but buildings have also gotten some love. In alpha 2, players can enjoy upgrading their buildings through new build options, some of these options even include additions to the fortification and bunker systems. Many more features have also been added and they have been listed in the entirety of this post. Iron Harvest is currently available for pre-order, visit the official website here. In other news about Iron Harvest, the developers started a Kickstarter campaign and that ended with a whopping $1.5m+, more on that story here.

Warframe recently released on the Nintendo Switch and since then Warframes developers, Digital Extremes have issued a hotfix to the Switch version of the game. The update brings changes to the camera controls and more.

The update has been announced on the official Warframe Twitter page and also has been detailed on the Warframe forums. The hotfix has been titled 'Mask of the Revenant (23.5.0) Hotfix 3' and brings changes to volumetric lighting, motion controls, ambient occlusion, crashing and camera movement. Within the forum post, it is detailed what specific changes were made to the camera movement.

What was also detailed in the forum post was the specifics for aiming being fixed, the developers coded "deadzones to allow for more refined, precise aiming and removed the inherited velocity when shifting directions." Digital Extremes says that players "should now notice an immediate falloff in camera movement once input is no longer applied to the control sticks." If you are interested in checking out the full patch notes they can be found in the entirety of this post, or a direct link to them can be located here.

Right on queue, Nintendo have detailed the next event to come to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, it's titled 'The Fire Emblem Fest' and will be arriving on December 20.

Last weeks event was titled "A Spectacle to Behold!" and just like this event will run for a total of three days. Throughout those three days, Fire Emblem characters will take over the Spirit Board and appear much more frequently. Players that fight these characters throughout the time frame of the event will be rewarded with bonus SP.

It should be noted, Nintendo have detailed that the spirits that players encounter at the beginning of the event could be subject to change in part 2. The Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Fire Emblem Spirits event will commence on 20th of December 10pm, and will finish on the 23rd of December, 10pm.

The new upcoming real-time strategy game 'Conan Unconquered' from developers Petroglyph Games, and published from Funcom have confirmed that next year we will be getting some gameplay footage.

For those that don't know, Petroglyph Games are the developers behind Star Wars: Empire at War and Command & Conquer. Last week, Petroglyph Games and publisher Funcom announced that they will be bringing gamers a new real-time strategy game based in the universe of Conan the Barbarian.

We have already seen a cinematic trailer which you can check out here, but more importantly we can now expect some gameplay footage for the title sometime next year. In a reply to my above Tweet to the official Conan Unconquered Twitter page, we have confirmation that that "Sometime next year" we will be receiving some brand new gameplay footage. Hopefully its sometime in the early year that we get this new gameplay footage for Conan Unconquered, as this upcoming real-time strategy game looks very promising. To check out the official Steam listing for the title, click here.

Progress on Square Enix's massively anticipated Final Fantasy VII: Remake is going smoothly, but it could be a while before it's released.

Although it was announced in 2015, it's been a while since we've heard anything about the Final Fantasy VII: Remake. Gamers are worried development has stalled due to the massive overhauls the team is making. But now key game devs Yoshinori Kitase and Tetsuya Nomura say new updates are coming in 2019, and that the game is being built at a steady, smooth pace.

"Development on Final Fantasy 7 Remake is progressing smoothly! I would like to try hard to meet the expectations of fans," Kitase said in a recent interview with Famitsu.

343 Industries admits its made a few mistakes with the Halo franchise, but it pledges to do better with Halo 6.

Following my frustrations with Halo 5, I've been pretty critical on 343i and how they've handled the sci-fi universe I grew up with. The franchise has such promise, such possibility for interesting stories and content...and it feels like it devolved into a live service shooter aimed at the billion-dollar microtransaction market. But that could change with Halo 6 as 343i says they're not shrugging off the Mantle of Responsibility any time soon.

In a recent interview with GamesBeat, 343 Industries head Bonnie Ross affirms the studio will take its role more seriously than ever. "Honestly, we have made mistakes along the way. The community has helped us by creating good learning experiences for us. But I think that when I look at Halo, the universe is the most important character and we are stewards of the universe."

Not much is officially know about Halo 6 (aka Halo: Infinite) but a recent job listing paints an interesting picture of the game's future.

Halo 6 could be a hybrid that merges first-person shooter with RPG mechanics in some way, a new Microsoft Senior Systems Designer job listing hints. The ad, which describes Halo 6 as a systems-driven game, calls for the candidate to have "familiarity with RPG and Shooter game mechanics." Combined with Microsoft's strong focus on live service games, this opens the doors for all sorts of possibilities.