Gaming - Page 885

Square Enix has provided those hardcore Final Fantasy fans with an epic Bahamut statue, something that is available to pre-order now and has a release date of July this year.

The statue which has been sculpted by Takayuki Takeya and has been designed with articulated jointing, meaning the statue is fully configurable to whichever pose is decided.

Behind the statue is the Bahamut stand which instead of being a boring plastic rod, Bahamuts stand features crystals that are emerging from the ground around him. The statue itself will cost around $135 USD and will be released later this year in July, for those wanting to pre-order the link can be found here.

A new short trailer has been released for the upcoming Nintendo Switch release, Bayonetta 2. The new trailer showcases the game running at a smooth 60FPS and gives more of a tease into the gameplay of Bayonetta 2.

The above trailer shows us some plot points that can be noted as well as gameplay from which Bayonetta seems to be taking on some very large enemies. The gameplay of Bayonetta 2 fighting is at 60FPS, this could of been achieved by reducing the FPS of cut-scenes to 30FPS, when looking at the trailer this is what seems to of happened.

Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 will release together on the Nintendo Switch on February 16th.

The PC version of Final Fantasy XV will release next month, ahead of the launch we have found out that the Windows version of the game will be supporting cross-play co-op with Xbox One players.

Yesterday we discovered the PC version of Final Fantasy XV is a generation ahead of the 2016 console release and now cross-play co-op has been revealed to us on the Microsoft Store listing.

According to the listing, Final Fantasy XV players will be able to play with Xbox One users if they have purchased the game through the Windows Store client, meaning that Steam users will not have this feature available.

NVIDIA has been pushing the PC version of Final Fantasy XV for a while now, but with the PC version of the game right around the corner - March 6, we're now hearing just how good the PC version will be versus its console counterparts.

In a new video message from the director of Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition, Hajime Tabata, who said that the PC version is not a port, and that it has been developed for the PC from the ground up. This means that the PC version of Final Fantasy XV will be very, very special when compared to the console versions.

Square Enix will be unleashing Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition on March 6, and will include all of the released DLC, as well as additional content that is made for the Windows Edition - and will launch on the same day for the PS4 and Xbox One versions.

Final Fantasy XV will be one of the biggest releases on the PC this year, with the Windows Edition of the game to be the definitive version as Square Enix built the game from the ground up for the PC, and have confirmed it is not just a simple PC port.

Square Enix has released a benchmark tool so that you can see how your PC will handle Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition, which takes over six minutes to run. There are some NVIDIA GameWorks features in the game, with NVIDIA providing serious support to Square Enix for the PC version of Final Fantasy XV.

Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition launches on Steam, Origin, and the Windows Store on March 6, and will cost $50.

With the recent release of Dragon Ball FighterZ, Bandai Namco have proudly announced Dragon Ball FighterZ has already reached the 2 million total units sold mark, just within the first week of release.

What is more surprising though, is that this number has not been even been influenced by the Asia or Japanese markets, as Bandai is releasing the title into those regions a couple of days ago. It can be almost guaranteed that once Dragon Ball FighterZ hits both of those markets that the 2 million units sold will turn into something much higher.

Already with the recent success of the title, Bandai Namco has deemed Dragon Ball FighterZ the fastest selling Dragon Ball game ever, across all platforms.

The head of Minecraft, Helen Chiang has told PopSugar that their game has reached an all time high in terms of active monthly players, she has said that Minecraft has pulled in 74 million active players in December.

Even with the massive growth that Minecraft is experiencing Chiang has said that their goal is to keep bringing more content to players which will both apply to older players as well as the new.

Here is what Chiang had to say: "We just recently set a new record in December for monthly active users, so now we're at 74 million monthly active users - and that's really a testament to people coming back to the game, whether it's through the game updates or bringing in new players from across the world, that's really our goal, to keep building the community that we have."

I never thought I'd see the day that I'm writing that the co-creator of CS:GO has been accused of the sexual exploitation of a minor, with Jess Cliffe appearing in a King County courtroom on Friday where his bail was set to $150,000.

King County Prosecuting Attorney's office originally set Cliffe's bail at $250,000 "for the community's safety and the victim's safety", after Cliffe allegedly talked to at least one minor on the internet, where he said he paid for sex "multiple times". During one of these events, Cliffe purportedly recorded the sexual contact with the anonymous witness "against her will".

When the court set the $250,000 bail, Zachary Wagnild, the defense attorney for Cliffe, said: "Even if the facts are true as claimed, this was a meeting on an adult website. He was not looking for underage women and had no idea this woman was underage".

Ubisoft has unveiled new details from the Far Cry 5 season pass, something that will include a bunch of goodies including a detailed DLC path, and a free copy of Far Cry 3.

Instead of continuing the storyline of Far Cry 5 with the DLC, Ubisoft will be providing three different pieces of DLC with Dead Living Zombies, Hours of Darkness, and Lost on Mars. This move gives me the same feels as Blood Dragon did, and I'm truly digging what Ubisoft is doing with Far Cry 5 and its season pass.

Dead Living Zombies will throw Far Cry 5 players against "hordes of the undead" in a "zombie-infested wasteland", while Hours of Darkness will throw you into Vietnam where you will fight the Viet Cong. Lost on Mars sounds the most interesting, as it will put players into a spacesuit and have you fighting giant spiders on Mars.

First Red Dead Redemption 2 was to release in 2017, then it got delayed to Spring 2018...not Rockstar Games has delayed the game once again but also attaches a firm release date as well.

Today Rockstar Games announced that Red Dead Redemption 2 will release on October 26, 2018, ahead of the big annual holiday season sales blitz. "We apologize to everyone disappointed by this delay," the dev wrote on the blog post. "While we had hoped to have the game out sooner, we require a little extra time for polish."

The Western sequel looks like Rockstar's most ambitious game yet thanks to its graphical fidelity and effects, as well as the online-based component that will likely mirror GTA Online's sentiments, mechanics, and microtransactions. The team released a few new screenshots (see below) to highlight just how much effort they're putting into the project. In fact Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive says that the dev has built Red Dead Redemption 2 from the ground up specifically for consoles, hinting that it might skip PC.

Recent news coming out about the New Game+ mode being on the way to Assassin's Creed Origins has been toppled by Ubisoft releasing patch 1.21, bringing improvements all round.

The patch fixes a variety of things, an example is the bug where quest objectives would not be correctly updated. Another fix that has been implemented is the scaling down of enemy level progression when players are in Horde Mode, while also improving character animations at the same time.

Gamers that are interested in what their hardware can do on Assassin's Creed Origins benchmark will be glad to know that the patch also adds a 'save results' button when the results are shown. Also within this patch, is a fix for the game still running in the background after closing it by ALT + F4.

Some would say Assassin's Creed Origins revived the series with a new feel, and for those looking to replay the title all over again are in luck as a New Game+ or hardcore mode is on the way.

Community manager for Assassin's Creed Origins, Dominik Voigt answered a question on the Origins subreddit regarding the progression of bringing a New Game+ mode to the title. Voigt answered the question by saying "New Game + is coming. We'll have more information to share soon."

Voigt didn't specify any exact date, so it really isn't much to go off, but nonetheless Assassin's Creed Origins fans are more than happy with the statement as Ubisoft will "have more information to share" will us soon.

Human Head Studios has released a new trailer for Rune: Ragnarok, an open-world RPG based in the times of Nordic gods and epic battles.

We can see from the trailer that the game is entirely based around Norse mythology. Even though this is pre-alpha footage of the game we can see examples of gameplay such as: dragons, riding dragons, giant sea creatures and fighting.

It is quite clear from the title as well as from the trailer that Rune: Ragnarok is set in a time when Ragnarok is actually taking place, the gods are descending on earth as well as fighting and dying.

Not too long ago we saw that Metal Gear Survive will feature micro-transactions and will also require a constant internet connection. Konami has now updated the information surrounding the game, by releasing the official PC requirements to run the title.

According to the official requirements listed on the Steam Store page, Metal Gear Survive won't require much power hardware wise to play. The minimum requirements are only a Intel Core i5-4460, 4GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 (2GB) graphics card, which isn't too bad considering some requirements for other games released these days.

For the 'recommended' requirements we are looking at an Intel Core i7-4790, 8GB of RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 graphics card. Metal Gear Survive will be using DirectX 11 and will also require 20GB of free HDD space. I have provided screenshots of the official Steam Store requirements below for those interested.

Battlefront II didn't hit its projected 10 million copies sold during the holiday quarter, and EA affirms that monetization will return...when it's ready.

According to Wall Street Journal reporter Sara Needleman, Electronic Arts didn't meet its internal sales quota for Battlefront II during the massively important holiday season. During its third quarter of fiscal year 2018, EA wanted to sell 10 million copies of the game, but missed that figure by 3 million units and instead only sold 7m copies. In the same interview EA's CFO Blake Jorgensen affirmed that Battlefront II would sell another 1-3 million units before the end of the current fiscal year on March 31, 2018. Jorgensen also said in-game purchases would return to Battlefront II once the developers at DICE had made a proper solution.

"We'll do it when we think it's ready," Jorgensen told the Wall Street Journal.

EA says it's committed to the Star Wars brand--and as it should be--but what about a new Battlefront? The next couple of fiscal years should paint a more unique picture for the company's Star Wars focus.

In it's latest fiscal Q3'18 earnings, EA says it isn't sure when the new Battlefront will release. Remember that Respawn--who was just acquired by EA--is working on an action-based Star Wars game. Also there's Visceral Games' Star Wars game Project Ragtag, which was ultimately cannibalized by the publisher when Visceral was shut down, and will be re-shaped into something different.

"We haven't confirmed games for our Fiscal 2020 yet, but remember we have a Star Wars action game that the team at Respawn has been working on for the last few years, and most likely that would drop in our Fiscal '20 versus another Battlefront," EA CFO Blake Jorgensen said during the earnings call.

It Lurks Below is David Brevik's new game, and it's very Terraria-esque.

As a hardcore Diablo nerd who absolutely adores Diablo II (especially the Lord of Destruction expansion) and dies a little inside when thinking about how badly Blizzard botched Diablo III's launch, I'm always fascinated any time I hear about David Brevik, who helped the series come to light. While the veteran game dev isn't working on Diablo IV (or whatever Blizzard will call it), he's chipping away at a neat little indie game called It Lurks Below.

The game itself is a roguelike dungeon crawler that looks a whole lot like Terraria, and even shares a functional in-game world that can be destroyed or customized by players. Apparently Brevik is a huge fan of these types of games: "I wanted more of a point to a lot of those games," Brevik said in a recent interview with Polygon. "I wanted to make an RPG, with classes and leveling up, random items, where you get more and more powerful as you go down into the core of the world and fight baddies."

Electronic Arts' latest fiscal Q3'18 earnings show just how powerful live services are, especially when a big anti-publisher controversy hits.

In the third quarter of EA's Fiscal Year 2018 timeline, the publisher made three times as much from live services than full game downloads. Remember that live services include in-game purchases and microtransactions from PC, console and mobile games, as well as subscriptions like EA/Origin Access, DLC, and other digital non-full game purchases. In the three month period from October to December 2017, EA raked in a huge $787 million from live services, up 39% year-over-year. Full game downloads, however, were down by 27% year-over-year to just $260 million--that's over a half a billion dollar's difference.

Live services made up a whopping 64% of the company's digital segment revenues, whereas full game downloads pulled in just 21% of the quarter's segment earnings. In trailer twelve-month figures, which group the quarter with the last 9 months of earnings, live services have made EA $2.035 billion, up a mighty 30% year-over-year and representing about 60% of total trailing twelve-month digital earnings. Conversely, full game downloads didn't even break a billion dollars in the period, sitting at $682 million, or about 20% of total segment earnings for the period.

The engagement model is incredibly lucrative for companies like EA, who typically make billions a year from live services, so don't expect this trend to change any time soon.

In its recently reported its fiscal Q3'18 earnings, EA once again demonstrates its success with the player engagement strategy. This business model sees a multitude of optional in-game purchases (microtransactions, cosmetics, etc) being riddled into games with key online elements, such as Battlefront II and FIFA, and EA makes quite a bit of cash from this strategy. In fact, in the three month period from October through December 2017 EA made over $700 million from live services, a segment which includes subscriptions, DLC, and microtransactions.

According to EA's CEO Andrew Wilson, this trend isn't going to change: microtransactions are basically here to stay. Despite the big pushback from Battlefront II, in the earnings call Wilson said that the monetization model can basically enhance and expand their games--and he's really not wrong. But what could be construed as wrong is how EA decides to go about implementing their optional purchases.

Epic Games' worldwide creative director, Donald Mustard has answered a fans tweet about his thoughts on bringing Fortnite to the Nintendo Switch, Mustard replied with a solid "Yes."

It appears that cross-play between platforms might be the next step in the evolution of the gaming industry, as many developers are compromising with each other in hopes of connecting their audiences. Epic Games is one of these developers, as the worldwide creative director wants to see Fortnite go portable on the Nintendo Switch.

When Donald Mustard was asked by a fan if he was interested in bringing the title to the Switch, he replied with "Yes. Yes I am. Hopefully we do that at some point!."