Gaming - Page 900

French media titan Vivendi recently stated that it will not pursue a hostile takeover of Ubisoft for at least half a year, putting an interesting pause on the Vivendi vs Ubisoft saga.

In its latest quarterly filings Vivendi affirms that it will not keep purchasing Ubisoft shares to trigger a formal acquisition bid for the company. As of June Vivendi held 26.87% of Ubisoft shares and 24.47% of voting rights. Under France's Florange Law, Vivendi's stake in Ubisoft could double this month, which would force Vivendi to make a public bid. Experts say that Vivendi could expect to pay as much as $6 billion to acquire Ubisoft.

Now Vivendi states that its aggressive stance has shifted; the titan won't make a move on Ubisoft at least for the next sixth months. "Vivendi's investments in video games are generating value. Gameloft is the worldwide leader in mobile gaming downloads. The current unrealized capital gain on the Ubisoft investment is more than €1 billion. Given that this sector is the second largest in the content industry after music, the Group confirms its intention to continue to develop in this sector," the company wrote in its earning filings.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has sold over 20 million copies and sees over 2.5 million concurrent people playing the game each day, but thanks to NVIDIA we have three new screenshot of PUBG's upcoming desert map.

NVIDIA showed off the new work-in-progress shots of Battlegrounds' new map and I can't keep looking at them. They are a big change from the current map which is 8x8km, the upcoming desert map is smaller at 4x4km.

GameInformer explains the new Battlegrounds map as "The second map is 4x4km, and is located in a desert city. It was once a beautiful place to visit, but war ravaged its streets and sandstorms buried much of what remained. The south and east areas feature a canyon with a river running through it. Water from the river supports the small villages that remains after the city was destroyed. The north area of the island features hillside slums".

Right after I published my story on the full unlocking of Star Wars: Battlefront II costing $2100 or over 4500 hours of playing the game, EA has temporarily pulled microtransactions from the game, a never-before-seen move from the company that has been voted Worst Company in America... something EA said they didn't want to be anymore.

DICE, the developer behind the game, has been quick to react with studio boss Oskar Gabrielson writing in a blog post: "We hear you loud and clear, so we're turning off all in-game purchases. We will now spend more time listening, adjusting, balancing and tuning. This means that the option to purchase crystals in the game is now offline, and all progression will be earned through gameplay. The ability to purchase crystals in-game will become available at a later date, only after we've made changes to the game. We'll share more details as we work through this".

This is why this story is so important, coming in off of my previous story on Battlefront II's ridiculous DLC system. EA has heard the backlash being shouted to from every corner of the internet and is reacting, a better way to do this would be not ripping gamers off in the first place. It's nothing new for the company, as they have been voted Worst Company in America before, but this is a new low... or high of $2100, depending on the way you look at it.

There's already a mountain of controversy at EA over the release of Star Wars: Battlefront II, and this is only going to fuel that fire. According to some estimates, Battlefront II will requires 4528 hours of playing or alternatively $2100 to fully unlock everything in the game.

$2100 sounds ridiculous, but let's break it down. You'll need to already have all of the Star Cards in the game at level three, with all other one-time rewards like challenges not factoring into these calculations.

One player has broken it down, explaining: "Cards from loot crates are assumed to be level 1 55% of the time, level 2 40% of the time, and level 3 5% of the time. Duplicate credit values are assumed to be 200 for a level 1, 400 for a level 2, and 600 for a level 3, this makes the average card level 1.5 and makes the average duplicate worth 300 credits".

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has been one of the most-talked about games of the last decade, and sits at a peak of broken records in many different areas, one of which is the 2.5 million concurrent players on Steam alone. A mighty achievement.

Battlegrounds is still in Early Access but thast hasn't stopped it from being nominated for 'game of the year' in the upcoming The Game Awards event, but some people aren't happy about it. There are concerns that the game isn't technically finished so it shouldn't be eligible to win game of the year. Even PlayerUnknown himself, Brendan Greene, doesn't think the game should win game of the year as better games have been released in 2017.

Greene said that Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Horizon: Zero Dawn are game of the year worthy, saying: "While I would love to win it for the team, I think this year there have been far better games".

As one of the leaders in the digital gaming space, EA has successfully tapped a rich vein of earnings with its engagement-heavy model. But how does it work exactly? We've discussed these matters a number of times on TweakTown, but here's an explanation in EA's CFO's own words.

EA makes a ton of money each quarter from live services from games like Madden, FIFA, Battlefield and undoubtedly the new Battlefront II that launches this week. In fact, the publisher recently affirmed that unit sales were less meaningful than live services, and they're not wrong: these live games are now the major driver for digital growth and have been integrated in a smattering of 2017's games.

Engagement is the major driver for a live service game. Players won't continue playing the game for a long period of time unless you give them something to do--unless you engage them--and roll out new content. But how do you fund that new content? With optional in-game microtransactions, lootboxes, etc. The engagement is put there and strategically monetized with in-game rewards, crafting, RNG--you name it and that mechanic has probably been monetized in some way. Thus publishers have made a self-spinning wheel that churns many of today's most popular online games.

On the heels of big, spiraling-out-of-control controversy for Battlefront II, DICE developers recently jumped on a Reddit AmA to answer some of gamers' most burning questions. The results? Mostly PR-speak affirmations of things that most analysts, games press, and gamers already know: some of Battlefront II's mechanics aren't set in stone.

One of the best advantages of games-as-a-service is that the titles in question are much more flexible than singleplayer-only experiences. Armed with a live team, devs can issue out quick hotfixes and changes that can dramatically change the experience--on top of extra content that players consume to further said experience. This advantage will be tapped in full with Battlefront II. EA has a long history of service games and is one of the best in the business when it comes to not only monetizing players but also engaging them with practical, balanced content (well more-balanced anyway). There's no way this trend will just stop with Battlefront II...but there will be some compromises such as lootboxes being here to stay.

During the Reddit AmA session, DICE developers gave a number of answers that strongly reinforce that the team is listening to players, and they'll make adjustments and changes to Battlefront II over time. Here's some of the more choice tidbits:

EA recently acquired Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment for $315 million in mixed cash and stock options, and according to EA's CFO Blake Jorgensen, the devs were all too eager to jump into EA's pool.

EA and Respawn have been working together for a long while: EA financed both Titanfall and Titanfall 2, and are working closely on a brand new third-person action Star Wars game with emphasis on character development. So the acquisition really wasn't a surprise, but now we have an idea of Respawn's motivation to accept the deal.

According to EA's Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen, Respawn was eager to join EA for a number of reasons including better financing, being able to leverage EA's pooled team of devs, and access to the integrated Frostbite engine that powers the company's slate of games.

On the heels of its push into mobile gaming and theme park ventures, Nintendo will reportedly make good on its talks to bring its classic franchises to the big screen (again).

Illumination Entertainment, the Universal-owned studio responsible for Minions, Despicable Me, and The Secret Life of Pets, has been in talks with Nintendo for more than a year on a new animated Mario film, sources tell The Wall Street Journal. It's believed that this venture is a result of Nintendo's theme park deal to host Super Mario attractions at Universal parks (aka Nintendo World).

Nintendo's trepidation with a new Super Mario movie stems from the company's desire to control nearly all aspects of the film. The source says the project has yet to be greenlit, but if it were, it'd take years before release. Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima recently affirmed the company is looking towards theme park and movie deals in a bid to organically weave its lucrative IPs into a cross-promotion business model--ie people will see the Super Mario Bros. film and then go and buy a Switch or 3DS handheld.

If there weren't enough flavors of Hitman in the gaming and movie world, there's a new Hitman TV series in the works from the creator and writer of the legendary John Wick movies, starring Keanu Reeves.

Deadline is reporting that FOX and Hulu have asked John Wick series creator and writer Derek Kolstad to pen a pilot episode of Hitman, in the hopes that it will be a big attraction for the subscription service. Deadline reports that the project will be "overseen at Fox 21 by Bert Salke, Jane Francis, Gloria Fan and Kira Innes, and at Hulu by Jordan Helman. The hope is for Hitman to become a flagship series".

I absolutely adore MachineGames' marketing direction with its Wolfenstein games: the Liesel video and the Terror Billy collector's edition were both amazing. Now the studio one-ups their nostalgic charm with Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus' post-launch DLC roadmap.

Bethesda and MachineGames have revealed the Freedom Chronicles, a four-part post-launch campaign DLC series that takes players to the early alternate World War II timeline and introduces three absolutely awesome new characters: Joseph Stallion, Captain Wilkins, and the femme fatale Agent Silent Death. The Freedom Chronicles' marketing materials are straight out of an old pulp comic and tap that rich vein of peculiar Wolfenstein-y nostalgia we know and love.

The DLC promises nine hours of content to enjoy--and plenty of Nazis to annihilate in creative, unique ways (please let us throw a weaponized football at swastika-wearing malcontents!) as characters that only MachineGames could dream up.

With Call of Duty: WWII, Sledgehammer Games has put stability above microtransactions.

Activision's latest World War II-based Call of Duty game has roared out of the gate with over $500 million in launch sales, but despite these huge figures, the game is still suffering from disconnections and some other pretty gnarly online issues. In a typical world this means the dev team scatters to put out the fire as soon as possible while those who can actually play have the chance to buy into microtransactions and lootboxes. But Sledgehammer Games is taking a different tact.

In a bid to fix the game as soon as possible the team is suspending the rollout of Call of Duty: WWII's premium COD Points (CP) currency that's used to buy lootboxes until next week, November 21. This effectively means players can't spend real money on CP to buy lootboxes, cosmetics, weapon skins, etc. Sledgehammer explains this delay is "so the team can focus on our top priority items."

Electronic Arts has once again made good on its promise to consistently balance Battlefront II's features around gamers' preferences, and has now made the second major change to the game before release (the first change dealt with Star Cards).

Battlefront II originally caught lots of flak from its lootbox monetization scheme, which is something we predicted months before confirmation. Now just yesterday EA was hit with a fresh wave of backlash due to the high credit costs of in-game heroes like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. The previous costs were about 60,000 credits and ensured players had to grind quite a bit before unlocking their favorite characters for play in the game. EA has once again relented and has dropped the costs of heroes to better suit players' needs.

This new change sees hero unlock prices dropping by 75%. Popular characters like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader are just 15,000 credits now, and other heroes have been dropped too. This adjustment highlights the versatility of service-based games as EA can simply roll out a quick hotfix and make a dramatic change to the game's progression path.

Blizzard has now confirmed that Overwatch will be running at the glorious 4K resolution on the new Xbox One X, but it will take them a little more time to prepare the first-person phenomenon for the Xbox One X.

During a chat with WindowsCentral, Blizzard said: "Overwatch team is excited with great possibilities Xbox One X opens. The team is currently exploring how the game experience can be enhanced on this platform to leverage the console's incredible hardware, and is working on implementing 4K resolution in the game on Xbox One X. It is very important for the team to make sure the user interface looks natural on a truly big screen. We will share more details about our plans for 4K support on Xbox One X later".

4K isn't new for the PS4 Pro version of Overwatch, but Sony's beefed up console only renders the UI at 4K, while the actual game is rendered at 1080p and features improved depth of field and anistrophic filtering.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has reached a new peak 2.5 million concurrent gamers on Steam, breaking another record: being the first and only game on Steam to breach the 2.5 million concurrent milestone.

PUBG has continued to break records since its release with over 20 million copies sold, making developer Bluehole over $600 million in the process. The company has had so much success from Battlegrounds that it formed PUBG Corp. to handle everything PUBG.

It's an incredible milestone to reach for a PC-only game, with the Xbox One receiving Battlegrounds on December 12 these numbers will only skyrocket, and even more so as we reach Battlegrounds v1.0 towards the end of December.

AMD's partnership with Bethesda on fine tuning their massive library of games is really coming into effect, more so on the AMD-powered Xbox One X that was released last week. The new Xbox One X is capable of 4K gaming with much higher-end graphics and sustained 50-60FPS performance in some games, especially the Xbox One X optimized ones.

Digital Foundry has completed its awesome work (as usual) on their Wolfenstein II content, comparing the PC, Xbox One X, and even PS4 Pro versions of the game against each other.

On both the Xbox One X and the PS4 Pro, Wolfenstein II runs at a dynamic resolution of up to 4K on the Xbox One X, and up to 1440p on the PS4 Pro. During Digital Foundry's testing, they were able to get Wolfenstein II to reach its lowest recorded pixel count on the Xbox One of 2944x1656, while the PS4 Pro Pro drops to 2304x1296. This means the Xbox One X is pumping away at 63% more pixels, while maintaining higher fidelity graphics. DF notes that PS4 Pro version "starts to look just a little too blurry for our tastes".

CD Projekt RED has frequently affirmed Cyberpunk 2077 will be beyond anything it's ever done before: the game is above ambitious and should have incredibly complexity and dynamism that ushers in a new era of next-gen gaming. But just how far is the team wanting to go?

Besides dreams of a massive game far and above The Witcher 3, we don't know much official info about Cyberpunk 2077. But CD Projekt RED President and Joint CEO Adam Kicinski recently discussed the team's aspirations for the game and says it will ideally be better than The Witcher 3 in every single way. CDPR has a history of consistently one-upping itself with its games releases, but the jump between 2015's amazing The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 should be a leap that spans oceans.

When asked how Cyberpunk 2077 should or may be better than The Witcher 3, Kicinski replied: "Everything. Every time we make a game we want to make a better one than before. We want to experiment in new fields, of which were not yet explored in The Witcher. I can't say much about Cyberpunk, but our ambitious are set really high because that's our style of work. We want to go even higher, and especially seeing how we're having a business chat, we're interested in Cyberpunk being even more commercially significant [than The Witcher 3]," the company president said in a recent interview.

EA is doing its best to stem the tide of backlash over Battlefront II, but the dam is breaking and the gaming community presses back.

EA recently made some big changes to Battlefront II's monetization strategy. Now that review copies have been sent out, information on how long it'll take to unlock heroes like Darth Vader and Boba Fett is starting to drip out...and it's bad news. Gamers will need to grind quite a bit to unlock each of the game's 14 iconic heroes and spend 60,000 credits to unlock certain characters. Pre-release review copies lower the hero cost to just 10,000 units for press convenience.

Electronic Arts' community team responded to the backlash with a specific quote telling players that the grind is there to add a sense of accomplishment, and that the credit costs were balanced out based on per-day credit rates. This quote has now apparently become the most downvoted post in Reddit's entire history, earning Battlefront II yet another wave of bad press.

Square Enix and Bandai Namco have partnered to bring an unexpected Final Fantasy x Tekken crossover to the latest fighting game.

Prince Noctis Lucis Caelum, Final Fantasy 15's main character, is coming to Tekken 7 as a playable fighter. Noctis' moves incorporate his special Armiger attacks and a nice variety of Royal Blades to slice and dices foes, along with the classic Engine Blade. All in all Noct looks pretty svelte and his moves are a very faithful recreation of the base game that seem to expertly fit into the Tekken series.

Noctis will be a playable character as part of Tekken 7's third DLC pack, which is included in the $24.99 season pass. The pack launches in Spring 2018.

Obsidian Entertainment is known for making great RPGs like Icewind Dale, Planscape: Torment and the beloved Fallout New Vegas. Now the studio recently teased a new project, and we've a few clues on what it could be.

When Twitter upped the character limit to 280 a number of developers and publishers took the opportunity to make jokes and tease a few things. In Obsidian Entertainment did the latter by affirming a new game was coming after Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. While this shouldn't come as a surprise--developers have to keep making games to continue operations--things get pretty interesting once we combine our reports with the news.

Anonymous sources familiar with the matter told us in May that Fallout creator Tim Cain is working on a new project for Obsidian, and the project will essentially be Obsidian's own version of Fallout. Next to nothing is officially known about the project. Sources say that Obsidian is pushing more towards creating its own IPs rather than adaptations of publisher-owned franchises in an effort to have full creative control over the content.