World of Warcraft subscribership has once again surpassed the 10 million
mark,
announces Blizzard, saying the surge comes after the
Warlords of Draenor
expansion sold more than 3.3 million copies on its first day of availability.
The MMORPG
most recently
reported 7.4 million subscribers after a low point of 6.8 million
over the summer. "We’re
thrilled that so many players jumped in to play Warlords of Draenor on day one
and are having a great time with the new content," said Mike Morhaime, CEO and
cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "We poured a lot of hard work and passion
into this expansion, and we appreciate all the kind words from players and the
overwhelming support they continue to show for World of Warcraft." Here's more
on the resurgence:
On November 13, millions of Azeroth’s champions
enlisted for the war against the Iron Horde with the launch of World of
Warcraft®: Warlords of Draenor™, the fifth expansion to the world’s #1
subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game.* Blizzard
Entertainment today announced that as of the first 24 hours of the expansion’s
availability, more than 3.3 million copies had sold-through† and the game’s
global subscriber base had passed 10 million, with growth across all major
regions.
The release last week in North America, Latin America, Europe, Australia, New
Zealand, and Southeast Asia brought some technical and demand-related issues
that made the first few days especially challenging for many players. To address
the issues, Blizzard worked around the clock to roll out a series of updates and
increase realm capacity across the board, and performance has remained solid
since then. The expansion launched today (November 20 local time) in South
Korea, mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.
The
Steam page for
METAL GEAR SOLID V: GROUND ZEROES
now offers the following system specifications for the upcoming PC edition
of the action/adventure game:
Minimum Specifications:
OS: Windows Vista 64-Bit or later
Processor: Core i5 SandyBridge 4Core (4 Thread) 2.7GHz or above
Memory: 4 GB RAM or above
Graphics: GeForce GTX 650 or above
DirectX: Version 11 or above
Recommended Specifications:
OS: Windows Vista 64-Bit or later
Processor: Core i5 SandyBridge 4Core (4 Thread) 2.7GHz or above
Memory: 8 GB RAM or above
Graphics: GeForce GTX 760 or above
DirectX: Version 11 or above
The
Titanfall Deluxe Edition is now available
on Origin, offering a new discounted bundle. In addition to the base game,
this includes all the DLC from the season pass for the mech shooter. Word is:
"Delivering the complete Titanfall experience, the Titanfall Deluxe Edition
includes the award-winning game featuring agile pilots and massive titans
battling it out in fast-paced future warfare. In addition to the base game,
players will also receive all three Titanfall DLC packs including Expedition,
Frontier’s Edge and IMC Rising, adding nine maps designed to allow fans to
continue the fight on the edge of the frontier."
Basketball Pro Management 2015 is now available
on Steam, offering a new
installment in Cyanide Studios' hoops simulation. There's
a launch trailer to
show this off, and here's an outline of what to expect:
From Umix Studios and Cyanide Studio, Basketball Pro Management 2015 puts you
in control of managing and coaching your own basketball team, including leagues
and regulations from around the globe. From recruiting and coaching players, to
setting training schedules and budgets, the team's success is all riding on your
shoulders.
"This marks the fourth installment of Basketball Pro Management, and we can't
wait for players to try out all the new features," said Victor Da Costa of Umix
Studios. "Cyanide Studio has been a tremendous partner, using its expertise in
sports management games to enhance the series with an all new interface and 3D
simulations."
New for this year, 3D visuals bring the game to life while the upgraded AI
pushes your tactical abilities like never before. With 43 leagues and a wide
range of competitions, real-time coaching, and over 13,000 fully customizable
players, Basketball Pro Management 2015 is the premier name in basketball sims.
Continue here to read the full story.
An
update on the Assassin's Creed Unity Live Updates blog reports the
results of an investigation into the "no face" bug some users are reporting in
Assassin's Creed Unity, saying this is only occurring for users of a couple of
specific video cards, but that this no longer strikes those who have applied the
game's day one patch. There is also
another update to let us know they are currently testing some optimizations
to improve performance, and they claim they are addressing problems in the live
game that somehow did not show up during testing:
We can tell you that we
have detected a distinct discrepancy between what we observed in the pre-launch
versus post-launch environment. In spite of our testing, it looks like the
instruction queue is becoming overloaded and impacting performance. We have
several fixes we are exploring right now and will continue to update you with
our progress of what is working and how quickly we can implement these fixes in
the game in the weeks ahead.
Meanwhile, we are looking at the following revisions that should improve
framerate stability for all players:
- Streamlining some technical aspects of
navigation: We’ve fixed a number of edge cases with our detection system
to smooth certain behaviors during parkour. We’ve fixed a few objects which
were improperly tagged to smooth navigation.
- Improving task scheduling: We’ve tuned the
way the computing tasks are prioritized and parallelized by the processor
cores to improve framerate in certain edge cases.
- Tweaking performance for Reach High Points:
We’ve optimized the reach high points, during the camera swooping sequence
to improve framerate a little bit.
Though crowd size was something we looked at extensively pre-launch, it is
something we continue to keep a close eye on. We have just finished a new round
of tests on crowd size but have found it is not linked to this problem and does
not improve frame rate, so we will be leaving crowds as they are.
We’re working very hard to see these changes rolled out in Patch 3, but as we’re
still testing our fixes we need to be conservative with any estimates as far as
ETA is concerned. We hope to have further updates on this topic before the end
of the week.
A
Steam Community Announcement has details on a new patch for
Starpoint
Gemini 2, which adds a couple of freelance missions to the tactical space
simulator. Word is this also addresses bugs and improves the game's artificial
intelligence: "The highlight, I'd say is definitely the improved NPC AI,
specifically aimed at their behavior in combat. We're not done with it yet
however and the following updates should bring it all up by a few notches more."
Our car saga took a turn for the worse yesterday, as all attempts to remove the
damaged axle proved futile. This left the possibility that forcing it would
damage the transmission (sorry, Cutter, "tranny" has a different meaning in the
big city), and replacing that would represent half the beaten up car's remaining
value. So we found a gently used replacement, took a beating on our trade-in
over the pending repair, and washed our hands of the whole situation. It's a
shame, because I had fully planned on driving that car into the ground, and it
hadn't quite gotten halfway to the 200K mile mark I hoped to eventually reach.
Oh well, maybe I'll get there with this one.
R.I.P.:
Ken Takakura Dead- Japanese Actor Was 83.
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