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The World of
Warcraft Website announces a "Welcome Back Weekend" for the MMORPG will
kick off on Thursday, permitting everyone with an inactive account to spend a
few days in Azeroth for free. Blizzard is also offering the chance to spend some
money, should you choose, with their
Welcome Back Weekend
Sale. Here's word: Join the Welcome Back Weekend March 21–24
Battle for Azeroth™ is in full swing, and everyone is needed on the front lines.
This weekend, we’re upgrading all inactive World of Warcraft accounts, granting
returning players full access to the game* and all their characters—including
the Battle for Azeroth trial experience, for those who don’t own the latest
expansion—through March 24.
Spread the Word!
As the war in Azeroth rages on, the champions of the Horde and the Alliance look
to their in-game friends for help. Whether it’s levelling up for experience,
gearing up for combat, or mounting up to see the world, World of Warcraft is
always best enjoyed in groups, however big or small. If you have guildmates,
friends, or family who haven’t been in Azeroth for a while, let them know they
can play for free this weekend.
Toadman Interactive announces the I.G.I. franchise will resume in 2021 with the
release of a third game in this first-person shooter series that began in 2000
with the release of Project I.G.I., aka Project I.G.I.: I'm Going In. and
continued in 2003 with I.G.I.-2: Covert Strike. The new game is not due for a couple of
years, but they already offer
a teaser trailer. While this does not show much in the way of gameplay, it does reveal it will be
a prequel to the two previous games. There's more on their plans on the
Toadman Website where they
are soliciting suggestions. Here's the announcement: Toadman Interactive
is pleased to announce that the third game in the I.G.I. franchise will be
released during 2021.
The title is a tactical stealth FPS and a prequel to the previous games that
will uncover the origin story of the I.G.I. organization. Toadman has started
the development of the game and is now in the prototyping stage. The team is
really excited to have one of the original creators on board for the development
and is looking forward to being able to share more as development continues.
I.G.I. was originally released in 2000 and the first two games sold over a
million units combined. The games were developed by Innerloop Studios and the
first game was published by Eidos Interactive, the second by Codemasters.
”I'm so psyched to announce that the prototyping is going well and we already
have a fun base game to play in the studio. Today, we are releasing a teaser
showing a glimpse of our prototyping and many things will improve as we continue
the development. The reason we are sending out this update is so that we can
allow enthusiasts to provide ideas and feedback when we are in the early stages
of development. We want to hear from you fans to make sure you get to see the
most out of this game,” said Robin Flodin, CEO of Toadman Interactive.
Continue here to read the full story.
Apex Legends Season One is underway and the first Battle Pass for the battle
royale game is also now available
as promised
(thanks Don).
EA's Answer HQ has three videos to illustrate the news, a
Season 1 –
Wild Frontier trailer, a
Battle Pass trailer,
and an Octane trailer
to introduce the season's new character. There's also
this post with a full rundown on the battle pass and their plans for the
future. They summarize it with a TL;DR: TL;DR Season 1 is about keeping
it focused and allowing players to earn a lot of rewards at a great value (you
even get the cost of the base Battle Pass back if you reach level 97). We’ll
begin adding more and more innovations each season, as we evolve the Battle
Pass.
Continue here to read the full story.
A post
on the BioWare Blog by Casey Hudson offers a post-launch update on Anthem,
BioWare's mechanized action/RPG. He expresses their disappointment that the game
suffered from so many issues at launch, and says that it's been their top
priority to get things straightened out as quickly as possible. Here's where he
talks about what they have done and will do about this, acknowledging that they
understand why this will be met with some skepticism: In these first few
weeks, our Live team has worked hard on that, delivering over 200 improvements
through patches and live updates, across stability, loot and progression,
customization, and
more.
We also continue to listen to your feedback, with more improvements to endgame
loot and progression, game flow, and stability and performance coming soon – so
there’s a lot more work that we intend to do. This is all a learning experience
for us, and as we work to make sure the game is improved and perfected, we can’t
emphasize enough how much we appreciate you staying with us. Especially because
the next stage is where things really get exciting.
The Story is Just Beginning
As we move through this most difficult period of launching a new game and IP, we
are also working on the things that will really show what Anthem is capable of –
a series of world events, new story content, and new features, that
all build towards the Cataclysm
later this spring.
But we understand there is skepticism out there. We hear the criticisms and
doubts. But we’ll keep going anyway, working hard every day on Anthem – an
ever-changing world, constantly improving and growing, and supported well into
the future by our team of passionate developers.
With Anthem we’re trying something a little different than we’ve done before.
And likewise our upcoming games will be different from Anthem. But with
everything we do, we focus on staying true to our
mission, creating worlds that inspire you to become the hero of your own
story. So what’s most important to us is you, the players who have supported us
in this journey. And we’re excited to prove that with Anthem, the best is yet to
come.
Sin and Sacrifice is now available on
GOG.com and
Steam, offering a new expansion for
Battlestar Galactica
Deadlock, the space strategy game based on the sci-fi franchise.
This post explains that this concludes season one in the game, and it
provides a Season One
Finale Trailer to show off what to expect. Here's word: The new
expansion for Battlestar Galactica Deadlock marks the end of Season One: it
introduces a brand-new story campaign with 11 story missions set after the
original Deadlock campaign and Operation Anabasis. Telling the story of a
pivotal point of the First Cylon War, the new campaign is a must-have for all
Deadlock players. It will be the culmination of years of war for Lucinda Cain,
the Agathon sisters and all the other members of the Daidalos crew. Will they
endure the coming storm?
Sin and Sacrifice also adds a new Colonial Fleet radio chatter voice pack
featuring over 1100 unique recordings. Its goal is to inject more drama and
tension into the tactical battles, bringing your knife-edge encounters to life.
Radio chatter is present both in combat, and during your cinematic replays,
making your Battlestar Galactica fleet experience even more immersive.
On top of that, the expansion adds two new ships. On the Colonial side, you get
the new Heracles Heavy gunship, dating back to the Imperial Wars, a heavy
warship which emphasizes power over finesse. The Cylons get the new Gorgon, a
mobile support carrier with advanced squadron repair and support
functions.
Continue here to read the full story.
RollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures is now available for Windows, after launching
for Nintendo Switch. The PC edition of this casual installment in the theme park
series is available exclusively (and procometitively) through the
Epic Games Store. Here's
a new trailer for the
Windows edition and here are the details: In RollerCoaster Tycoon
Adventures, players have three distinct game modes to build their entertainment
empire — Adventure Mode (a spin on the classic Campaign mode), tricky Scenarios,
and the open Sandbox. Over 120 wonderfully wacky rides, restaurants, and shops
ensure parks burst with eye-catching action, and the intuitive coaster builder
lets players create wild, death-defying coasters with ease. Four unique themed
environments, along with water and terraforming options, ensure every park is
distinct and exciting. A streamlined simulation and game economy allow players
of all ages and skill levels to build the park of their dreams.
Continue here to read the full story.
Fate/EXTELLA LINK is now available for Windows and consoles, with the Windows
edition offered through
Steam.
This sequel to Fate/EXTELLA: The Umbral Star is on display in the
launch trailer, and
the announcement explains more: Picking up right where the 2017 smash hit
Fate/EXTELLA: The Umbral Star left off, Fate/EXTELLA LINK adds 10 Servants to
the original roster of 16. The high-speed action gameplay fans have come to know
and love has been even further refined as players are tasked with battling their
way through massive armies to protect the virtual world of SE.RA.PH at all
costs. As in the PS4™ system version, players on Nintendo Switch and Steam will
be able to engage in grand-scale 4-on-4 online battles, each assuming the roles
of their favorite Servants.
Continue here to read the full story.
Google made their big GDC announcement today, and it is indeed for their own
game streaming service which they call Stadia. This revives the original
promises rolled out with the first cloud gaming announcement, saying all the
computation and rendering will happen on the back end, allowing high-end games
to be played on any screen without a console or an expensive computer. An
article on NBC news relates the details, noting games need to be developed
for the platform: "Google needs game studios to build titles for Stadia. It says
developers can build on its cloud or in their own studios. id Software is
already building 'Doom Eternal' for Stadia and demoed it on stage. Another
developer, Tequila Studios, showed its game 'Rime' running on the platform."
Here's more: Google explained a bit how it will work. The company said
that if someone is watching a video of a game on YouTube, they could hit a
button that says "play now" and jump right into playing the game themselves in
as fast as five seconds. Today, gamers have to buy physical games or wait, often
hours, for the game to download before they can play. Even then, they also need
special hardware to play those games.
Google says Stadia will run on "any screen type" but it will work on desktops,
laptops, TVs, tablets and phones at launch. There's no box at all.
"With Stadia, the data center is your platform," Google said. A gamer can start
on one platform and then pick up where they left off on another devices, which
means you might game on your computer and then continue on your phone when you
leave the house.
People will be able to play with a keyboard and mouse or a special Stadia
controller that Google will sell. It has a capture button that lets people share
their games right to YouTube so that other people can watch. It also has a
Google Assistant button, which gives access to the microphone for speaking to
in-game features that developers will be able to build into their games.
Google said it will support 4K games at 60fps with HDR but that, in the future,
will support games up to 8K resolution. Most people don't yet own 8K TVs and
only the most recent gaming consoles from Microsoft and Sony currently support
4K HDR gaming.
AMD helps Google power Stadia's graphics rendering in the cloud. AMD shares were
up about 7 percent on news that it was partnering with Google on Stadia.
Another
tweet from Gearbox says "Time to tease another game for PAX!" (thanks
VideoGamer). It seems they are here to tease games and chew bubblegum, but
they are all out of bubblegum: Said tease is a new image which seems to promote something
related to Bulletstorm or Duke Nukem (or both). PAX East gets underway next
week, so we should find out soon enough. Continue here to read the full story.
A new System Shock 3
teaser trailer offers a look at OtherSide Entertainment's upcoming
continuation of the old school action/RPG series. This was part of the Unity
Game Developers Conference keynote, confirming that the game will use the Unity
engine, and more importantly confirms
recent indications
that development is soldiering on in spite of Starbreeze no longer publishing
the game. The clip is very brief, but shows off some enemies, including the
return of SHODAN, and
The Verge says it is "pre-alpha in-engine" footage. Continue here to read the full story.
A new patch for Heroes of the Storm is now available on the Play Test Realm,
with
this article offering the patch notes. This shows that despite dropping
esports support and shifting developers off the team, Blizzard is not done
refining their MOBA. To address lengthening Hero League and Team League queue
times, these modes are being combined into a single mode called Storm League.
They are also rolling out a new game event, reworking a couple of heroes, and
finally implementing the promised class rework that redefines how teams will be
composed. The new roles are Tank, Bruiser, Support, Healer, Melee Assassin, and
Ranged Assassin, and
this article has specific details on how these work.
The
DirectX Developer Blog introduces some new graphics technology called
Variable Rate Shading, calling this "a scalpel in a world of sledgehammers"
(thanks
[H]ardOCP). Here's word: What is Variable Rate Shading?
In a nutshell, it’s a powerful new API that gives the developers the ability to
use GPUs more intelligently.
Let’s explain.
For each pixel in a screen, shaders are called to calculate the color this pixel
should be. Shading rate refers to the resolution at which these shaders are
called (which is different from the overall screen resolution). A higher shading
rate means more visual fidelity, but more GPU cost; a lower shading rate means
the opposite: lower visual fidelity that comes at a lower GPU cost.
Traditionally, when developers set a game’s shading rate, this shading rate is
applied to all pixels in a frame.
There’s a problem with this: not all pixels are created equal.
VRS allows developers to selectively reduce the shading rate in areas of the
frame where it won’t affect visual quality, letting them gain extra
performance in their games. This is really exciting, because extra perf
means increased framerates and lower-spec’d hardware being able to run
better games than ever before.
VRS also lets developers do the opposite: using an increased shading rate only
in areas where it matters most, meaning even better visual quality in
games.
On top of that, we designed VRS to be extremely straightforward for developers
to integrate into their engines. Only a few days of dev work integrating VRS
support can result in large increases in performance.
NVIDIA announces that the
GeForce
Experience Ansel RTX and Freestyle are now available through a new in-app
version 3.18 update. The Ansel update brings a new version of the screenshot
tool to over 200 games without requiring and SDK update, while Freestyle offers
image adjustments that can be accessed on-the-fly from within games. Here's
word: NVIDIA Freestyle – Change The Look and Feel of Games In Real-Time
NVIDIA Freestyle gives you the power to customize the appearance of a game in
real-time through the application of post-processing filters. Add sharpening,
adjust color and contrast, or make your own filter by stacking and tweaking any
of the 17 available filters.
GeForce Experience Update Adds New Creative Tools For Your Games
To apply Freestyle filters in any of the
200+ games currently supported, simply press Alt+F3 during gameplay.
Ansel RTX – Even More Tools and Features For In-Game Photos
Ansel RTX expands select Ansel Photo Mode features to hundreds of games,
allowing you to add stackable filters, save in HDR format, and capture photos at
up to 8K resolution using AI Up-Res on
GeForce RTX graphics cards.
Here's more from team green, as
an article on the NVIDIA website has details on the project to add RTX
ray-tracing effects to QUAKE II. The centerpiece is
Quake 2 real-time path
tracing using RTX, a new trailer showing how a 22 year-old game can benefit
from a new coat of digital paint. Here's a bit on what we're seeing and how this
differs from the previous such project: Running on a Vulkan renderer, with
support for Linux, Quake II RTX is a pure ray-traced game. That means all
lighting, reflections, shadows and VFX are ray-traced, with no traditional
effects or techniques utilized.
“But what’s new with Quake II RTX compared to Q2VKPT?”, you ask. A lot. We’ve
introduced real-time, controllable time of day lighting, with accurate sunlight
and indirect illumination; refraction on water and glass; emissive, reflective
and transparent surfaces; normal and roughness maps for added surface detail;
particle and laser effects for weapons; procedural environment maps featuring
mountains, sky and clouds, which are updated when the time of day is changed; a
flare gun for illuminating dark corners where enemies lurk; an improved denoiser;
SLI support (hands-up if you rolled with Voodoo 2 SLI back in the day); Quake 2
XP high-detail weapons, models and textures; optional NVIDIA Flow fire, smoke
and particle effects, and much more!
Continue here to read the full story.
How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games on Nautilus is an interesting
essay exploring the topic (thanks Max). It covers the "responsibilities and
challenges of programmed luck" more than the mechanics, noting: "Lucky is fun,
but too lucky is unreal. The resulting, on-going negotiation among game players
and designers must count as one of our most abstract collective negotiations."
This discusses lessons learned and applied in the casino industry, and in one
fascinating bit, reveal how this is applied in free-to-play games to manipulate
players into taking risks: Persuading a player that he’s improving at a
luck-based game in turn increases the likelihood that he’ll take on unfavorable
odds. “For years the gambling industry has had the ability to track individual
players, create robust historical profiles on customers, and employ algorithms
that can tell when someone is likely to leave,” Schüll said. The operators of
digital gambling machines have the ability to change payout odds in the middle
of a gambling session based on these profiles, by giving a player a small payout
in order to tempt him or her to keep playing. Many states have laws that forbid
“luck” from being manipulated in this way. To get around that, casino operators
dispatch so-called “luck ambassadors,” who go onto the casino floor and hand
gamblers a cash bonus to keep them invested. Freemium games, which aren’t
currently subject to the same legal strictures that bind the gambling industry,
can freely give these bonus payouts during the game in order to make a player
feel lucky—and so keep them playing and spending.
Activision announces Call of Duty Mobile is coming westward as well as
to China, more gamers a chance to answer the
call on iOS and Android. The Call of
Duty Mobile Home is where to sign up to keep up with this and gain access to
a public beta that will launch in some regions this summer. Here's
a trailer and here's a
bit: Activision in collaboration with Tencent today announced that Call
of Duty®: Mobile is coming to previously unannounced regions, including North
America, South America, Europe, and more. Call of Duty: Mobile is a new
free-to-play game that brings together maps, modes, weapons, and characters from
across the Call of Duty franchise, including Black Ops and the Modern Warfare
series. Developed by Tencent’s award-winning Timi studio, exclusively for
Android and iOS, the game features multiple game modes pitting players in
head-to-head, competitive action as they test their skills against players all
around the world.
Continue here to read the full story.
- ASUS RT-AX88U (AX6000) router on
Guru3D.
- ASUS Zenith Extreme Alpha (AMD X399) Motherboard on
TweakTown.
- HyperX Cloud Mix Wireless Gaming Headset on
AusGamers.com.
- ID-Cooling Auraflow X 240 PCPU Cooler on
TechPowerUp.
- Lifted Productions The Game Head 70 Headset on
Gaming Nexus.
- MSI GeForce GTX 1660 GAMING X & VENTUS XS Graphics Cards on
TweakTown.
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU on
TechSpot.
- QNAP QSW-1208-8C-US 12-Port Unmanaged 10GbE Switch on
Modders-Inc.
- Zowie Divina S Series Mouse on
TechPowerUp.
Hey, today kicks off March Madness! Apologies for being too ignorant of college
hoops to set up a pool for this, as it would be at least as natural as the
football pools we have. That said, good luck to those with rooting or betting
interests. Here's hoping you picked the right upsets and don't bust your
brackets, as that sounds pretty painful.
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