Gaming - Page 986

Bethesda's exec Todd Howard absolutely loves Nintendo's new Switch handheld-console hybrid, and confirms the publisher will "definitely be supporting it" in the future. Looks like Skyrim: Special Edition is jumping over!

Bethesda games typically don't arrive on Nintendo consoles; in fact, this will be the first time the publisher brings one of their modern games to Nintendo hardware. That's how impressed Todd Howard is with the Switch, and it kind of speaks volumes about the product in general.

In a recent interview with Glixel, Todd Howard revealed how much he enjoyed the Switch: "I love it. I got to play it. I will tell you - well, maybe that's an N.D.A. thing. One of the best demos I've ever seen. Probably the best demo I've ever seen."

Microsoft's new "monster" 4K-ready Project Scorpio console is poised to eclipse Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro in terms of raw power, and Xbox exec Aaron Greenberg affirms the system will deliver a new generation of 4K gaming that console gamers haven't seen yet.

According to Microsoft, Project Scorpio will rock "the most powerful graphics processor that's ever been put into a games console" to deliver high-end performance at "the highest res at the best frame rates without no compromises." Essentially the games-maker wants to meld the worlds of enthusiast PC gaming and console gaming together, using Windows 10 as the software glue and AMD's next-generation GPU and CPU hardware glue to hold it all together.

In fact, Microsoft aims to bring true and native high-performance 4K gaming to the living room, and the company is confident Project Scorpio will bring 4K gaming that console games haven't experienced yet, even with Sony's PS4 Pro.

Today in 1991, Nintendo released one of the most epic games of all time that ushered in generations of enjoyment: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

I actually didn't grow up with the Super Nintendo Enteratinment System (I was a Genesis kid), so I missed out on experiencing Link to the Past for quite some time. I eventually discovered its amazing RPG magic when I was about 12 or 13, and was hooked. I still play the game today and enjoy myself, and I must have beaten it half a dozen times...but it's one of those games that are truly timeless classics.

Sadly, Nintendo doesn't seem to actually care about the 25th anniversary of one if it's most popular games of all time, as the Nintendo Japan and Nintendo America Twitter accounts haven't even mentioned the anniversary. Hopefully they'll acknowledge the game in some form, maybe with a discount on the Virtual Console game.

Much to the disdain of Square Enix, who has labored on the game for quite some time, retailers have sold early copies of Final Fantasy 15 ahead of the game's November 29 simultaneous worldwide launch. As a result, the devs promise to do everything they can to block and remove all early and leaked gameplay footage to prevent spoilers.

One of the major milestones for Final Fantasy 15 was ensuring that the game released for every region in the world at the same time, which is an incredible feat for any publisher. Now that the team has not only mastered the final game but also locked down the simultaneous worldwide release, Square Enix is happily looking forward to the game's launch.

Sadly, many retailers in certain regions like the United Arab Emirates are selling early copies of Final Fantasy 15. Game Director Hajime Tabata is asking anyone who has an early copy not to upload footage, and pledges that he will do everything in his power to block the early footage that pops up online:

After a decade of waiting, fans will be able to enjoy Final Fantasy 15 in just eight short days. To prepare gamers for their epic journey into the magical world of Eos, Square Enix has dropped a new primer trailer that highlights the main points about their massive new RPG adventure.

Here at TweakTown we've extensively covered Final Fantasy 15 in the attempt to shed more light on the huge game, and if you've kept up with our coverage, you probably already have a great idea of what the game is about. Even still, it's great to see Square Enix roll out this kind of "101 Trailer" to break the game down into easily digestible chunks.

Read Also: All the Final Fantasy 15 gameplay footage you could ever want

Unlike most games of the "next-gen" console gaming era, Final Fantasy 15's day-one update will be entirely optional, but if you choose to grab it you'll enjoy a bunch of nifty extra features.

One of the big things that FF15 game director Hajime Tabata was concerned about was making the game run properly without a day-one update. To do so, Square Enix had to delay the game and give the team enough time to fully "master" the main game, which they have done.

Now the studio has taken more time to offer even more optimizations in the form of an optional day-one "Crown Update," which includes free content including scenes that tether Kingslaive and FF15 together, the ability to upload screenshots Prompto takes in-game to Twitter and Facebook, and a number of enhancements and bug fixes.

Killing NPCs has always been a macabre past-time in every open-world game, especially the Grand Theft Auto games. Slaughtering random characters in video games is nothing new; almost every game does it in some form, but its the open-world games that allow for a kind of morbid creativity to foster. The most ambitious of these, Grand Theft Auto V, has pushed this past-time into high gear, with players adopting a newfound interest in showing their creativity with bloody NPC kill videos.

In this day and age it's very easy to broadcast and post your in-game feeds, so it's no surprise that GTA V gamers are posting up tons of their favorite "kill cam" or "most brutal kill" videos. These videos are popular, pushing the past-time into a new evolution, and tons of gamers are competing with one another to find new inventive ways to kill NPCs. A portion of these videos are extremely popular, ranking in the tens of millions of views, showing just how alive and well this fascination with torturing in-game characters actually is.

Most of the time, players find killing NPCs to be humorous. Sometimes it's about pushing the limits of the in-game world to see what you can do, and who you can do it to. I think we've all done things like this, and I think this kind of thing happens when there's a big lull in any kind of singleplayer DLC for open-world games like GTA V: but even with all the DLC in the world, people would still occupy themselves with this past-time, playing a kind of virtual god in their own sphere of influence.

When Sony announced its new 4K-ready PlayStation 4 Pro would launch with mismatched hardware--a powerful new AMD Radeon Polaris GPU alongside the woefully outdated Jaguar CPU--we predicted the inevitable bottlenecking would occur. Lo and behold, we've just received some new evidence on the PS4 Pro's CPU.

Eurogamer's Digital Foundry has identified a clear instance where the PlayStation 4 Pro's CPU is preventing adequate performance, mainly in frame rates. Batman: Arkham City and Arkham Asylum actually have native PS4 Pro without any Forward Compatibility patches or updates, but their enhancements have been added stealthily and are solely focused at boosting raw performance; the upgrades are unoptimized and not very streamlined, with some scenes being entirely based on the PS4 Pro's overclocked 2.1GHz Jaguar CPU instead of the Polaris GPU, which more than doubles the original PS4's graphics processing power.

Digital Foundry finds that the scenes that only tap the PS4 Pro's 2.1GHz Jaguar CPU only provide a minimal bump in FPS, with one scene hitting just a 6FPS bump, which actually directly corresponds to the 31% boost in the CPU's overclock. The publication hints that if the PS4 Pro had a more optimized and powerful CPU, these specific scenes would have better frame rates.

Here we go... DICE is being ripped apart by PC gamers right now, as the latest patch for Battlefield 1 has downgrade the graphics - with screenshots below as proof, reports DSO Gaming.

The comparison between Battlefield 1 before, and after the patch were captured by Arrogant_Amigo, which shows that the latest version looks worse than BF1 did before it was patched. The post-patch version of Battlefield 1 doesn't have tessellation on muddy terrain, and less terrain quality/decoration, reduced HBAO+, shadow resolution or shadow draw distance.

Arrogant_Amigo claims:

As we get closer to the launch of Nintendo's next-gen Switch console, we find out more information on launch games through a Twitter post by Laura Kate Dale.

Dale tweeted that her lay out for Switch software throughout the first six months of the Switch launch, with a few ports coming soon. On the launch day of the Nintendo Switch, Dale reports that there will be:

In the first six months, we should expect:

Holy balls is Chris Roberts really shooting for the stars with Star Citizen, announcing changes to not only the development process of Star Citizen, but teasing the future of the game - and pulling the entire world, contributors, and fans of the game into the development process much more intimately.

Roberts used the 4th anniversary of Star Citizen's appearance on Kickstarter to announce major changes in the way the developer interacts with the world when it comes to the current development timeline of the game. Roberts wrote a very personal post on the official Star Citizen website, where he said: "Whether or not to share this kind of information has been a long running debate among the team here at Cloud Imperium Games. Target dates are not release dates, and everything you see will shift at some point, sometimes slightly and sometimes wildly. The danger in doing this has always been that casual observers will not understand this, that there will be an outcry about delays every time we update the page".

Roberts continued: "We've taken stock, thought through everything and decided that, while that is a risk, above all we trust the community that has given us so much support. The community that has let us focus our passions on this incredible project. You have allowed us to take this journey, you have tracked and followed so much of how game development works... and now we think it is right to further part the curtain and share with you our production process".

We already reported that Titanfall 2 sales were expected to be "beyond disappointing", but we didn't know exactly how disappointing the sales could be - and now, well - we do.

EA has slashed the price of Titanfall 2 heavily, with research firm Cowen & Company predicting the sales of Titanfall 2 to be bad, where they reported: "We think the game got squeezed between Battlefield 1 and [Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare]. We suspect EA believed that by launching two shooters next to Call of Duty it could put a large dent in its biggest competitor, but instead EA appears to have wound up shooting its own foot off".

PC gamers get it even better, with the Standard and Deluxe Edition already 33% off, but now there's another 20% discount by using the code 'TITAN20'. This drags the price down to 50% off of its original launch price, with the Deluxe Edition also benefitting from these price drops.

In an interview with Polygon, Tomonobu Itagaki - the designer who has worked on massively popular games like Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, hasn't got the best things to say about Sony's new PS4 Pro console.

He was asked about a sequel to his latest game Devil's Third, where he wasn't certain about the hardware coming after the PS4 Pro and Microsoft's upcoming Xbox Scorpio console. He said that Microsoft and Sony are pushing out the faster consoles because of VR, because the original Xbox One and PS4 were simply not up to scratch.

Itagaki said: "We don't know what the next hardware is going to be. So, there's a high chance [Devil's Third 2] will come out on the PC. I think that the future is stormy. It's difficult to see beyond that. I'm talking about the consoles past those, past Project Scorpio. I'd like to release Devil's Third 2 on PlayStation 5 and whatever comes after Xbox One. But I don't think that's the way it's going to happen".

I don't know how it has happened, but Mafia 3 has made it into the top 10 games of October 2016. The console version of the game was in a much better state than the beyond pathetic version on the PC, and according to NPD Group's report, it slotted into the second-best selling game of the month.

EA DICE took out the coveted #1 spot with the much-deserved Battlefield 1, and The Coalition take #3 with Gears of War 4. The digital sales of BF1, GoW 4, Skyrim, and Titanfall 2 weren't counted - so these numbers and positions would be much different with digital sales taken into consideration.

The top 10 list:

After a long, winding road of hardships, Fallout 4 mods are now available on Sony's PlayStation 4.

Bethesda today announced that Fallout 4's highly anticipated PS4 mods are now live. This is actually both good and bad news, considering Fallout 4 mods on PS4 are severely hampered compared to Xbox One: the mods cannot use new textures, meaning PS4 gamers can't enjoy new customized weapons, armors, or even user-created areas, and the mods can only take up a maximum of 1GB space.

Bethesda.net currently has almost 200 Fallout 4 PS4 mods up for gamers to sample, most of which are basic tweaks to game mechanics, items, quests and more.

When Remedy Games posted up a cryptic teaser showing Sam Lake, the entire gaming world thought that the studio was working on a new Max Payne, especially since the clip had some distinctly familiar elevator music at the end. We did too. As it turns out, we were so far from the mark it's not even funny (no really, it's not).

Instead of teasing a new game, Remedy's short clip was just a snippet from a whimsical recruitment video. The clip literally said "new teaser trailer coming soon" and Max Payne fans everywhere went nuts. But there's no new Max Payne game, or any hint of any other project from Remedy. The "new teaser trailer" is just a humorous bloopers clip that Remedy used to rile up the internet like an April Fool's Joke.

So if you were hoping for any kind of major announcement from the team, forestall your hopes. Personally I'm not too enthusiastic about a new Remedy game after the wasted potential of Quantum Break.

A major update is now available for Civilization VI, adding DirectX 12 support (meaning potentially improved performance), new maps, a new scenario, and a metric tonne of polish to every aspect of the game.

The new maps are "Four-Leaf Clover" and "Six-Armed Snowflake." Playable offline and on, they encourage conflict by forcing you to move to the center. The new scenario meanwhile, is named Cavalary and Cannonades, so it's not hard to imagine what's in store.

As for the polish, that touches on gameplay, balance, AI, bugs, graphics, multiplayer, interface, and audio, among other things -- like I said, every aspect of the game. The list is too long to post here, so hit the source if you want all the details.

Red Dead Redemption 2 will continue the distinct gritty and dramatic over-arching storyline found in John Marston's epic saga, even pulling at the heartstrings to invoke actual emotional investment from players.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick affirms that Red Dead Redemption 2 will be chock full of "incredible emotional depth," iterating that the sequel will be a massive undertaking compared to the already huge original. "You can expect there to be great story elements and gameplay elements," Strauss said at the recent MKM Partners event.

Zelnick went on to highlight that RDR 2 will be absolutely massive--probably big enough to support both singleplayer and a GTA Online-style online component at the same time.

Nintendo Europe announced that they will be offering gamers discounts and deals on the Badge Arcade app. The news came in correlation of celebrating the app's one year anniversary as it was delivered via Twitter earlier today.

The Badge Arcade is a free download for Nintendo 3DS and gives players the ability to win badges through a simple crane game. The winnings from this game allows the user to revamp their the system's Home theme.

Currently in Europe the deal offered to customers is:

Nintendo's new Switch console-and-handheld will reportedly get its own version of Pokemon Sun and Moon, unnamed sources at Nintendo have told Eurogamer.

Eurogamer reports that the Switch Pokemon game is codenamed "Pokemon Stars," and is in actively development for a release in 2017. The Switch's port is expected to have enhanced features that aren't found on the 3DS, including enhanced 1080p HD visuals while docked for console play and 720p gaming when the Switch is taken on the go.

If this is true, it somewhat contradicts assurances from Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima that the Switch wouldn't cannibalize the 3DS. Considering the Nintendo Switch has a 6.2-inch 720p display with 10-point capacitive touch, along with a beefy new Pascal-grade Tegra processor from NVIDIA, I'd expect its Sun & Moon port to have specific features and in-game performance not available on the 3DS. This disparity between content may actually create a rift between consumers, so Nintendo has to handle this quite carefully.