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Our verdict on 4A's gorgeous post-apocalyptic shooter
Top teams fight for glory in the grand finale
Bigger, bloodier battles from World War 2's frozen front
CD Projekt RED’s icy open world RPG
High-fidelity warplay returns in 2013
Remember when Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg took to the stage during the Xbox One event and said “We wanted to press the (Call of Duty) franchise forward with a new world and a new engine”? Well, you might want to scratch out that last part.
Rift is one of the few, rather excellent subscription MMOs still remaining, so its conversion to free-to-play is a little scarier than the usual case. But you can relax, okay? Things will be just fine. Trion Worlds has released an FAQ detailing the three different payment levels, and they ensure us that “free-to-play” is not a euphemism for pay-to-win—”the best items in the game will always have to be earned in Telara.”
The number of much-needed soup kitchens and speakeasies has plummeted, and now the City of Gangsters wants you back to do your thing in this bad town. A free update’s making its way to the game today, fleshing out both the tactical and tycoon aspects. Check out this trailer for some gameplay from the updated version, or to get your foot tappin’ to some ragtime—whichever grabs your fancy.
Sometimes a sequel wants to say more than the original ever could. Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes, a new standalone expansion to the Stardock strategy game, puts you at the helm of a fantasy empire in a hostile world filled with flaming corpse monsters and wailing undead banshees.
Former Microsoft Corporate VP and current EA Chief Technology Officer Rajat Taneja has claimed in a LinkedIn post (thanks, GamesIndustry) that the Xbox One and PS4′s architectures are “a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market.”
After almost a three year hiatus, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn—Square Enix’s second go after botching the first attempt in 2010—is releasing on Aug. 27, 2013 on the PC and PlayStation 3.
An incredible new trailer has been released for SIGGRAPH 2013, a long-running technical papers program focused on computer graphics and interactive technology. While most of the voiceover narration went completely over my head, I did enjoy looking at the pretty pictures.
Battlefield 3 loves a good multiplayer event, but the whopping 96-hour double XP event planed for the beginning of May had to be postponed when the game’s servers were hit by a DDOS attack. Everyone loves a good multiplayer shindig, it seems, except the hackers.
Just as we were warming up for Intel’s Haswell CPU, Nvidia go and drop a whole new generation of graphics cards on our laps, with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 at the vanguard.
Well, when I say “whole new” that needs to be qualified just a touch. Nvidia haven’t suddenly forgotten all those roadmaps they’ve been showing off. This isn’t one of the new Maxwell GPUs. The GTX 700 generation is essentially a refresh with the same basic graphical technology that we saw in the GTX 600 series, though the GTX 780 is itself a bit of an exception to that. It’s actually taking the Titan’s GK 110 GPU and shaving a little power off the top, giving us a card that performs slightly below Nvidia’s state-of-the-art monster at a lower price point, ostensibly making the GTX 780 the oft-rumoured GTX Titan LE.
An Nvidia spokesperson pitched it as being “for everyone who loved Titan but couldn’t stump up to an £800 graphics card.” Does that claim stand up?
There is a dead body in the cockpit of my MH-9. In my haste to get into the cerulean sky above Arma 3’s Stratis island I accidentally spawned a chopper with a pilot in it and he wasn’t budging. I could have hopped back into the editor and fixed it, but I was keen to see the island. And I had a rifle.
So I shot the pilot and then the co-pilot to save him from having to explain to the pilot’s widow, and hopped in. The co-pilot remained, dead, slumped in his seat, his hand still gripping the joystick, as I flew around the rugged little Greek island cooing at the sights.
My girlfriend, who started to watch after hearing me giggle at the hunched dead figure, found this distasteful. To placate her, I popped back into the editor and switched a few things around. Like Craig the Magnificent, I produced a bunny. I began hopping around the island, showing her how the game allowed me to control the body of a rabbit. Arma 3, the newest version of the world’s most famous milsim, is still ridiculous and I love it for that.
