Gaming - Page 954

Despite Marvel's affirmations of a 2017 release, Insomniac Games isn't sure that its new Spider-Man game will launch this year.

Insomniac Games is currently working on a high-profile PS4 exclusive Spider-Man game with a "brand new authentic story" with a "seasoned Peter Parker." The game was revealed at Sony's E3 2016 expo, triggering tons of hype within the PlayStation community. So when will it release? No one knows for sure...maybe not even Marvel.

In a recent stream, Marvel Digital Media Group Vice President & Executive Editor Ryan Penagos said that Insomniac's Spider-Man game would release in 2017. "And there's much more on the horizon for 2017 like Spider-Man coming to the PlayStation 4." But Insomniac Games apparently didn't get the memo.

Eurogamer's Digital Foundry has confirmed that it will reveal Microsoft's new 4K-ready Project Scorpio console on Thursday, April 6 at 9AM EST (6AM PST).

In a rather bizarre move, it appears that an independent publication will reveal a big-name console rather than the company who made it. Eurogamer's Digital Foundry will have an 'exclusive reveal' for Project Scorpio, and we're not sure if Microsoft will also reveal the system's specifics.

In any case, Thursday will be one of the most important days in Microsoft's history. What Digital Foundry has to say about Project Scorpio could make or break the system's appeal. Can the 6TFLOP console really do native 4K gaming? Is it capable of 4K 60FPS? Will gamers have to download huge 4K asset packs that bloat out install sizes of games to insane proportions? What specs is Scorpio packing--is it Vega, or Polaris, or a mixture of both? Does it rock AMD's new Ryzen CPU?

Mass Effect: Andromeda's combat can be great, but it can also be quite overwhelming, especially when you don't know which skills are good. Having efficient skill synergy is absolutely essential in this game, and we've found an amazing pure biotic build that turns players into Jedi gods.

BioWare's latest Mass Effect game gives access to 24 different skills and abilities, but we can only use three skills at a time. Sure there's the Favorites bar that allows us to switch skill loadouts, but it's clunky and awkward, and your powers can't be used right away--they have to cool down first. So finding the perfect three-skill synergy is crucial. At first I tried to go with a jack-of-all-trades type of build...but it failed pretty badly. I just couldn't find the right skills. Then I tried to play as a full biotic, but that didn't go well either. I was just using the wrong skills.

Then I came across this biotic god build on Reddit, and I never looked back. I pretty much never die now, and all the enemies are pushovers--including the massive Architect boss. This build proves you don't need to complicate things with multi-skill synergies. It uses three skills and three skills only: Annihilation, Nova, and Charge. Barrier is used, too, but it's not an active skill per se.

Thanks to Wii U emulator Cemu, PC gamers can actually play Zelda: Breath of the Wild and push the game to awesome new heights.

Zelda: Breath of the Wild already looks amazing on Wii U and the Nintendo Switch, even at its 900p resolution. But what about 1440p, 3840 x 2160p or even a ridiculous 5K resolution? With the Cemu emulator, PC gamers can fire up Wii U games and use high-end video cards to experience Hyrule in crazy new ways.

The screenshot above was captured by Redditor alo81, who used Cemu to push Breath of the Wild to 5K with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080Ti GPU.

Earlier today I saw reports that Nintendo's new handheld-hybrid Switch console gets warped by compounded heat while docked, and I decided to check my system out. I can indeed confirm that my Switch console is no longer straight and is warped with a slight bow on the right side.

So what caused this warping? I've reported the Nintendo Switch doesn't get very hot when docked, even when playing multiple hour sessions of demanding games Breath of the Wild, but there is heat passing through the device. The Nintendo Switch is made out of rather cheap-ish material that easily deforms when it comes in contact with certain materials, including adhesive. The odds are the Switch's frame--which is made out of the cheap material--is slowly warping due to compounded heat generated while the system is docked.

Read Also: Nintendo Switch Review

We already know Mass Effect: Andromeda should've been delayed to fix the weird facial animations, but it looks like BioWare's artists might not even be directly responsible for the game's most mocked feature. Reports indicate BioWare outsourced all human most of the alien character models to other EA branches.

Anonymous BioWare devs who worked on Mass Effect: Andromeda told YouTuber Liam Robertson:

Yes we've been picking on Mass Effect: Andromeda a bit lately, but on the Mass Effect Reddit I came across an interesting tidbit that genuinely serves as a cautionary tale about hype. And this one is pretty ironic.

Back in 2016, BioWare's Mac Walters told OXM that the animations are at an "all time high" for the company as a whole. "The quality of the character animations is at an all-time high for us, and that's great because it means expressiveness, emotion and a connection with the player," Walters said.

Fast forward to the final release of the game with its terrifying, often wacky and freakish facial animations, this quote seems entirely ridiculous. And I'm not innocent in spreading hype for this game--I've written tons of articles talking about how impressive it looks and how excited I am for it. But all of that content seems to be written about a different game, the vision that BioWare had versus the janky game they shipped.

In a perfect world, consoles would be upgradeable and new games could come out with better graphics and higher resolution support, and you'd just upgrade your Xbox or PlayStation console - but no, the world we live in today isn't like that.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer has now come out saying that you won't be upgrading your Xbox any time soon, including Microsoft's next-gen Project Scorpio console. On Twitter, Spencer said that upgradeable components for consoles were "a stretch". He said: "The idea that users will open up a console and change compute components inside seems like a stretch to me".

Spencer continued: "Am I going to break open my console and start upgrading individual pieces of my console? That's not our plan. There is something special about what happens with a console. You buy an appliance-like device; you plug it into your TV; it works when you plug it in. It's not like I'm going to ship a screwdriver set with every console that comes out".

The Total War franchise has been a big one on the PC over the years, with Total War: Warhammer released in May 2016, but now Sega Europe has announced its sequel - Total War: Warhammer II, and that it'll be here before the end of the year.

Creative Assembly are back in the developer chair for Total War: Warhammer II, with four new continents to battle on: Ulthuan, Naggaroth, The Southlands and Lustria. CA teases that Total War: Warhammer II will be so big, the map covers the entire geographical areas of the first two games.

Total War: Warhammer II will give gamers the ability of playing four new races (High Elves, Dark Elves, Lizardmen, and another race that CA and Sega haven't revealed just yet), with each of them including their own unique campaign mechanics, and armies of Legendary Lords, Heroes, monsters, troops, and siege weapons. CA will also push out a post-launch update that will let people play through any campaign as any owned, or playable race from the first game in the Total War series.

ARK: Survival Evolved has been updated with a massive list of changes and tweaks, with the new v256 patch including vacuum-sealed underwater bases, aquatic creature breeding, TEK teleporter pads and wireless generators, and four new powerful creatures.

Studio Wildcard has also made some big changes to the menu of ARK, with the Inventory UI being completely revamped - making it easier to work with your inventory in ARK. Lead Designer, Lead Programmer, and co-founder of Studio Wildcard, Jeremy Stieglitz, explains: "The new ARK Inventory UI is a total redesign of the game's former clunky interface! This visual and functional overhaul brings right-click context menus and better organization for remote inventories. It's a significant step on the road of preparing ARK for its home stretch of Early Access!".

ARK: Survival Evolved v256 patch includes:

It's no secret that Mass Effect: Andromeda's faces are pretty bad. The internet has mocked it for weeks now, and for good reason: the faces are quite bizarre, inhuman and genuinely creepy at times. In an effort to gauge just how bad the faces are, we compare the game's faces to three other juggernaut titles. The results aren't too pretty.

We selected three games with dialog-heavy animations to test against Mass Effect: Andromeda: Horizon: Zero Dawn (yes, this one was a bit unfair, but we had to judge Andromeda against a high-caliber game just to see what would happen), Dragon Age: Inquisition (runs on the same Frostbite 3 engine as Mass Effect: Andromeda, but wasn't developed by BioWare: Montreal) and the original Mass Effect (the game has aged particularly well even on consoles).

The results just confirm what we already knew: Mass Effect: Andromeda should've been delayed. We'll have a video review up on our channel shortly that digs into the frustrations and truly bizarre decisions BioWare made with this new Mass Effect game.

Microsoft will unveil its "monster" 4K-ready Project Scorpio console sometime next week, according to reports, and we won't get vague PR speak like I expected. Microsoft is gearing up to drop tons of info on its mighty new system and trigger a "deluge" of coverage.

Microsoft usually has a problem conveying key information about its products, and wiggles around in vague PR-speak terms like "True 4K." But Project Scorpio should be different, and rightly so: considering it's the world's first enthusiast-grade games console gamers need in-depth specs.

According to Windows Centrals' Jez Corden, Microsoft will deliver actual specifications and showcase the system's raw 4K power with first-party games like Forza Horizon 7.

Update: Nintendo actually IS making a new Metroid game for Nintendo Switch! It's called Metroid Prime 4 (working title), and it's a first-person adventure game.

Breaking:Nintendo today announced Metroid: Dark Star, a new first-person shooter in the vein of Metroid Prime that will release exclusively on the Nintendo Switch.

Metroid: Dark Star will be a full high-def 3D FPS built using Unreal Engine 4 and will feature a "dynamic, immersive and action-packed sci-fi story" for solo play.

With buzzwords like "True 4K", promises of native 4K gaming, and reports of 4K 60FPS thrown around, Microsoft's new "monster" Project Scorpio can be a bit confusing. But in reality it's not that much different than the PS4 Pro in terms of functionality...just a lot more powerful.

Project Scorpio is Microsoft's way of blurring the line between consoles and PCs by making the world's first real enthusiast-grade system. While Project Scorpio's specs are impressive, with the box housing a custom AMD SoC with a 6 TFLOP GPU and an 8-core CPU likely built on its new 14nm Polaris/Vega GPU and Zen CPU architectures, the software side is just as important. Thanks to Windows 10's Universal Windows Platform and the beefy specs, Microsoft has an substantial edge in both halves.

Project Scorpio is an iterative console that will play all existing Xbox One games. But just like the PS4 Pro, older Xbox One games will play better on Project Scorpio thanks to dynamic frame rate and resolution upscaling. And even though Project Scorpio is designed for 4K gaming, regular 1080p HDTV owners will still benefit thanks to super-sampled resolution. Here's how it works.

The reveal of Microsoft's "monster" 4K-ready Project Scorpio is fast approaching, and as we said a long time ago, the world's most powerful console doesn't mean anything unless you have games that leverage the hardware to its full extent. Microsoft fully knows this and has selected a lineup games to showcase Project Scorpio's 4K gaming prowess--and two of them are hugely anticipated sequels.

Microsoft will use games like Xbox exclusive Forza 7, Rockstar's upcoming Red Dead Redemption 2, and EA's latest Battlefront 2 to demonstrate Project Scorpio's "True 4K" gaming performance, according to reports from Windows Central.

Monolith's new impressive-looking Shadow of War is also poised to fully tap the console's high-end 6 TFLOP console GPU and 8-core CPU.

It's no secret that Mass Effect: Andromeda is having some problems. Well...that's putting it lightly: the game is being ridiculed left and right, and for good reason, as it simply was released too soon. BioWare has heard the complaints and promises to roll out some fixes as part of its ongoing long-term support, but will it matter?

You only get one first impression when it comes to big triple-A games, and gamers don't forget. So when you release something that should've obviously been delayed (like the latest Mass Effect game) it becomes a known constant in the universe, not unlike a kind of math equation--maybe something like hype + terrible faces = memes for days.

Mass Effect: Andromeda's final release barely resembles the awesome next-gen action-packed space opera we were promised. The faces are pretty bad, and the game is fairly soaked with bugs as well as a weird casualized feel that just doesn't belong in a Mass Effect game. But BioWare says they're taking all of our complaints into consideration and will use the feedback to roll out a course of action to help fix the game.

Although Geralt of Rivia's story has been concluded, CD Projekt RED is open to more Witcher games--they exclusively own the rights to the franchise after all.

CD Projekt RED is currently working on three projects: its monetized free-to-play multi-platform card game Gwent, its insanely ambitious high-tech masterpiece Cyberpunk 2077, and a mysterious new unannounced triple-AAA RPG. What if the latter is another Witcher game?

At CDPR's 2016 yearly earnings conference, Adam Kicinski answered a question about The Witcher 4. Is it possible? Is the series dead?

Zelda: Breath of the Wild's latest update patch tightens up frame rates and reduces FPS drops on Wii U and Nintendo Switch.

While Nintendo's latest Legend of Zelda game is absolutely one of the best games I've ever played, it does have a few hiccups here and there including frame rate drops. I personally am not perturbed or bothered by the small FPS hitches, but I play the game on Nintendo's newest Switch console. Wii U owners have reported rather noticeable FPS drops in certain areas like Kakariko Village.

The game's latest update patch reportedly smooths out frame rate stutters across the board and improves FPS consistency on all platforms. This is welcome news to gamers who are playing on Nintendo's beleaguered--and now retired--Wii U system.

With Cyberpunk 2077 CD Projekt RED will smash barriers with their amazing talents and next-generation technologies, and the company teases some of the game's features and content.

We've known for a while that Cyberpunk 2077 will have an incredibly immersive "living breathing world," but CDPR isn't going to stop there: everything about the game will push the bar and redefine the standards in which games are judged--the same way The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt did for fantasy RPGS. CDPR currently has several hundred people working intensively on the game

CD Projekt RED was recently awarded a grant for 22.2 PLN or (5.6 million USD) of R&D funding under the GameINN program. The devs will use these funds to build new in-game engines and development tech that will not only power Cyberpunk 2077, but all of CDPR's future games (maybe even Witcher 4!).

Destiny 2 doesn't even have gameplay footage yet, but that hasn't stopped Activision from opening up pre-orders for five versions of the game--one of which costs as much as an actual console. Yes, really.

Destiny 2's collector's edition is definitely one of the most disappointing "premium" bundles I've seen in a long time. Not just because it costs the same as a PlayStation 4 Slim system (although that certainly has a lot to do with it), but because it's just so...frivolous. Most $200+ collector's editions come with something unique like a statue or a bust, or even a little remote controlled Nomad RC car. Not this one: all you'll get is a bag and a bunch of...junk.

Buying Destiny 2's collector's edition will set you back $250, and GameStop is apparently already sold out. For $250 you can get an entire PS4 console bundled with Uncharted 4, or even upgrde your video card to an AMD Radeon RX 480 with 8GB of VRAM.