|
|
 |
Archived News:
The Escapist has a statement from Electronic Arts confirming an unspecified
number of layoffs at EA Salt Lake, developer of some Tiger Woods PGA Tour games
and Sims 3 expansions among other things. "EA Salt Lake is becoming largely
focused on mobile development, including The Sims and other projects. Recent
shifts unfortunately resulted in the reduction of a few teams," the publisher
said in a statement. "As we look to match skills with opportunities, some staff
will be offered other positions at EA, while others will leave the company."
The
Bethesda Blog announces QuakeCon 2014 will be in July this year, the only
other month when the Dallas area is as hot as it is in August, when the id
Software-centric LAN party/game convention normally takes place. Here's word: Returning
for its 19th year, North America’s largest BYOC LAN party returns to the Hilton
Anatole in Dallas, TX — taking place Thursday, July 17th – Sunday, July 20th.
For regular QuakeCon attendees, you’ll immediately notice that we’ve moved the
event forward by a couple weeks. As such, we’re already making this year’s room
reservations at the Anatole available. Figure out your plans with friends on the
QuakeCon forums and then
dial 1-800-Hiltons (or visit
this link) to take advantage of the $159/night special rate. Just be sure to
reference QuakeCon 2014!
Moving the event ahead by a month, we’ll also be sharing updates on the event
earlier than ever. Expect the first updates on registration in the coming month.
Each day of QuakeCon is packed with game presentations, contests, entertainment,
announcements, panel discussions, parties and more. Come check it out for
free!
1C Company announces King's Bounty: Warriors of the North - Ice and Fire
is now available via digital distribution, saying the boxed version of this DLC
for King's Bounty: Warriors of the North will also come to some territories in
the future. Here's a feature list outlining what this adds:
- Creature skill system – lead your troops through
dozens of battles and they will become stronger than ever!
- Snow Elves – a new Elven nation that prefers snow
and blizzard of the Ice Gardens instead of the green forests of Merlassar.
- Necrolizards – a new kind of the undead, Lizardmen
that have risen from the dead.
- New locations to explore.
- Over 20 new creatures.
- Revamped creatures of King’s Bounty: Warriors of
the North.
- New items with unique attributes.
- Over 20 hours of additional gameplay.
The Steam page for
Epigenesis reveals it is on sale for 75% off during what is a free weekend
for this multiplayer first-person shooter that won Epic's "Make Something Unreal
Live" competition last year. Here's word on the game, which is still in Steam
Early Access: Epigenesis is an online multiplayer sports/FPS game in which
two sides are locked in a never-ending fight for world domination by playing
ball. In this non-lethal ballgame of the future, players leap across platforms
suspended high up in the air trying to get a ball located in the middle of the
arena and score goals against their opponents. Each player carries a gravity
cannon capable of pushing enemies (and friends) down from the heights of the
arena.
When a player scores, he receives a genetically modified super-seed and gets the
opportunity to plant it onto a platform to capture it. To win the game you must
capture towers and construct a node system from your goal post all the way to
your opponents' goal post. If this hasn't happened by the time that the clock
reaches zero, the team with the most scores win!
Teamwork, tactics and precision is key to win eternal glory in a game of
Epigenesis!
Octodad: Dadliest Catch is now available via
GOG.com and
Steam and likely other
distributors as well. Here's word on this offbeat action/adventure: Octodad:
Dadliest Catch is a game about destruction, deception, and fatherhood. The
player controls Octodad, a dapper octopus masquerading as a human, as he goes
about his life. Octodad's existence is a constant struggle, as he must master
mundane tasks with his unwieldy boneless tentacles while simultaneously keeping
his cephalopodan nature a secret from his human family.
In this sequel to the splash hit Octodad, our cephaloprotagonist has gotten
himself in a bind between his wife’s mounting mistrust, and a disastrous trip to
the local aquarium! Are you dad enough to control the titular octopus father as
he strives to hide his nautical nature from his family while keeping his tangled
tentacles intact?
This new trailer shows
almost nine minutes of raw gameplay footage from Dark Souls 2, From
Software's upcoming action/RPG sequel. Various gameplay mechanics and lots of
combat is included along the way. Continue here to read the full story.
- Humble Weekly Sale: Codemasters on
Humble Bundle.
- Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning on
Steam. Save 70%.
- The Ship on
Steam. Save 80%.
- Splinter Cell Franchise on
Steam. Save up
to 75%.
Link of the Day:
Things to do in GTA V - Frogger (NSFW). Thanks nin via
Kotaku.
The Star Swarm demo for Windows is now available
on Steam, offering the
chance to experience Oxide's Nitrous Engine, a 64-bit cross-platform strategy
game engine that's been described
as "stunning." This is not a
game, but a tech demo of the Stardock-funded project (the Steam page calls it a
"benchmark"), described thusly: "Star Swarm is a real-time demo of Oxide Games’
Nitrous engine, pitting two AI-controlled fleets against each other in a furious
space battle. Star Swarm shows off Nitrous’ ability to have thousands of
individual units on screen each running their own physics, AI, threat
assessments and pathfinding." Word is this is optimized for AMD Mantle (due
today, but not yet available
here), but it is not required.
Paradox Interactive now offers this
this tongue-in-cheek
trailer showing off gameplay in Warlock 2: The Exiled, the upcoming
fantasy-themed wargame sequel in the works at Ino-Co Plus. For those who like
what they see, a livestream of the game should kick off in about two hours at
2:00 pm EST on the Paradox
Interactive Twitch channel. Finally, Paradox also announces plans to support
the game with the release of level editing tools and Steam workshop support,
saying this will provide "fans with a simple way to alter the game with custom
scenarios, allowing magical modders to edit quests and place resources and
cities on customized maps, weaving all of their changes together into unique
Warlock 2 campaigns which can then be shared with mages throughout the world via
Steam Workshop." Continue here to read the full story.
Twisted Pixel Games reveals plans for a PC edition of Lococycle amid
a post about plans for the Xbox 360 edition of the Xbox One motorcycle game,
saying they've been "secretly" working on a version to release on Steam. They
say the Steam and Xbox 360 editions are both due on February 14th, and each
edition will be priced at $10.00. They celebrate the news with a giveaway of a
"highly customized, one-of-a-kind, Xbox 360 console and controller," and by
reposting the game's
live-action launch trailer. Here's an official description:
Newly self-aware, I.R.I.S. the martial-arts wielding assassin motorcycle, has
begun a cross-continent escape to freedom. I.R.I.S.’s only ally is her engineer
Pablo, who gets conscripted into the quest after his pant leg gets caught in her
chassis. Hunted by the psychopathic motorcycle S.P.I.K.E. and a multinational
weapons cartel, I.R.I.S. and Pablo face long odds, but they are riding for
‘Murica and freedom - so how can they lose?
Continue here to read the full story.
EA's
Battlelog announces the delayed "Mantle" renderer is now available for the
Windows edition of Battlefield 4 for owners of AMD graphics cards, though
for some reason this comes in advance of the new AMD beta drivers to enable
support of the new API (when they're released they should show up
on this page). They offer benchmarks to show the performance improvements
seen running the military shooter sequel under Mantle, and the following
explanation: Mantle is a new low-level graphics API that we’ve been
working very closely with AMD on over the last 2 years and it is a major change
& improvement to how we are able to program & use modern GPUs in order to get
the most out of them.
Battlefield 4 on PC is already quite heavily optimized using DirectX 11 and
DirectX 11.1, but with Mantle we are able to go even further: we’ve
significantly reduced CPU cost in our rendering, efficiently parallelized it
over multiple CPU cores and reduced overhead in many areas.
The biggest performance gains can be seen when the game is bottlenecked by the
CPU which can be quite common even on high-end machines and this was main goal
to improve on with Mantle. We’ve also been able to streamline and optimize some
of the GPU workload. The end result is that game performance is improved in
virtually all scenarios in Battlefield 4 on both Windows 7 and Windows 8 when
running with Mantle!
This update is the first release of our new Mantle renderer, and we will
continue to provide more tuning for different types of configurations in future
updates. Still, we are really happy with the performance improvements that we
are seeing with this update and we believe you will be as well.
Bugbear announces the Early Access to their Next Car Game offered through
Steam and the
Next Car Game website surpassed $1 million
in sales in its first week of availability (there's also a free tech demo of the
game available for those who
sign up for their
newsletter). They point out what a triumph this is for the demolition game
which many publishers thought would crash and burn: This is an amazing
success for a racing game, especially considering our tough road to the
success. Along the way we pitched the game to numerous publishers in the hopes
that the game would eventually get released. Unfortunately we receive the same
response all over again – there were no market for a game like ours. Come on,
who would want to race and crash with such old beaters? Well, we would!
Because of that we didn’t give up, but instead chose to seek crowd-funding on
Kickstarter. However, we experienced another setback when our Kickstarter
campaign didn’t reach the goal we were aiming for.
However, we still believed in the game, and we decided to release a playable
technology sneak peek. We were literally awe-struck by the great response the
sneak peek received. The pre-order sales skyrocketed, and we reached and
actually topped our original Kickstarter funding goal in just week! And
most importantly: the success showed us that the players believed in the
game.
Here's
a Kickstarter aimed at raising $50,000 to develop Wayward Terran Frontier,
a single-player and multiplayer trading- and exploration-themed action/RPG set
in space with an FTL feel (thanks Justin). They offer
this "Ambition" trailer
to show things off, and here's an explanation of the game from their Kickstarter
pitch: The game takes place inside a procedurally generated galaxy filled
with dynamic events, making each game a brand new adventure.
At the every galaxy’s heart is a handful of human worlds which act as safe
havens, and commerce hubs with functional economies. The core planets are
brimming with life, surrounded by space stations and NPCs going about their
daily lives (yours to bother and exploit). Out in the wilds of frontier space,
there is more opportunity for profit—but also far greater danger.
Play How You Want
Wayward Terran Frontier lets you experience content the way you choose. You can
be an honest freighter captain, delivering cargo and winning the galaxy over
with charm and diplomacy from the safety of the core planets, or take to the
wild frontier as a pirate in pursuit of plunder and glorious explosions. WTF
will initially be a Windows-only release, but a port for Mac and Linux are both
long-term goals.
Continue here to read the full story.
Eurogamer has a "Next-Gen Face-Off" for the recently released Tomb Raider
Definitive Edition, which ups the ante for the action/adventure prequel on
next-gen (current-gen?) consoles. While they focus on how the Definitive Edition
looks on Xbox One versus the PlayStation 4, they also compare the PS4 version to
the regular PC edition, which in spite of being non-definitive previously
boasted the best visual depiction of the game. As they note, and demonstrate in
this video, for the
most part, the PC edition still sets the bar for the series. Here's the
explanation: A direct comparison with the PC version set to the ultimate
quality preset reveals some large discrepancies between the Definitive Editions
compared with the full-fat PC experience. Aspects such as tessellation are
missing on the characters and environments, with some of these elements
appearing more blocky on the PS4 and Xbox One as a result. Meanwhile, motion
blur is used much more sparingly, while texture resolution is noticeably lower
in some cases. On the flip side, all the Definitive Edition graphical extras -
such as the dynamic foliage and the impressive sub-surface scattering - are
absent from the PC, which represents another (albeit smaller) compromise.
The differences here are interesting, because they suggest that the developers
of both PS4 and Xbox One versions of Tomb Raider have made some sacrifices to
allow for the key range of upgrades on offer in the Definitive Edition. We feel
that TressFX may be the main culprit here, given how much impact the older
iteration of the tech has on the PC game, where frame-rate can be halved by its
inclusion in certain scenarios. Looking at the cut-scene performance analysis on
PS4, we can see frame-rates drop significantly when Lara is on-screen,
particularly in close-up. Another indication that TressFX sucks up considerable
console GPU time concerns the sub-native cut-scene resolution downgrade we
occasionally see on Xbox One. Again, we suspect that it's the close-ups on the
TressFX-enabled Lara that incur the hit.
Continue here to read the full story.
CCP plans to take to their Twitch channel
today at 2:00 pm EST (19:00 UTC) to discuss the latest happenings in
EVE Online, their space-based
MMORPG. Topics will include the
Rubicon 1.1 patch that just went live, the game's just
concluded epic space battle, Fanfest 2014, the upcoming New Eden Open, the
latest Council of Stellar Management Summit, and more.
Thursday Night Football is long done for this season, but I still want to remind
participants that there's one last game to pick on
Beat the Insiders,
since I know at least one person who wasn't aware this extended into the
playoffs (or at least that was their excuse for falling behind me in the
standings). Sadly, the latest weather reports make it seem less and less likely
there will be snow for the Super Bowl, though I guess with talk of possibly
rescheduling it in the case of bad weather makes this for the best.
|
Twitter 
