Maxis on the future of Sims: "If Sims 4 isn't successful, there won't be a Sims 5"

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The Sims 4 has been out for less than a week and Maxis has made it clear they’re entirely focused on the success of The Sims 4, before even thinking about the next game. On The Sims official forums, producer Grant Rodiek quelled suggestions for the next Sims game from fans with some definitive statements.

“We're not working on Sims 5. We're not thinking about Sims 5. If Sims 4 isn't successful, there won't be a Sims 5.”

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Bomb's been planted: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive dethrones Dota 2 on Twitch for August views

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August was a surprising month for Twitch - and not just because Amazon had officially snagged them for $970 million dollars. The monthly top game ranking reveals that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, along with Hearthstone beat the likes of Dota 2 and Minecraft as the most watched games. Naturally however, League of Legends remained firm at position one.

To find out why, some small detective work is required.

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Combat has arrived in Landmark; "This update introduces death"

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Remember when Landmark was about building extraordinary things? Well there’s a new kid on the block: combat. Now you can hit other people with swords, and fire various projectiles at another persons face. Mind you, it’s all done within the relative safety of an arena, so you don’t have to worry about someone murdering you in your lovely house.

Yet...

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TV-Series ‘Friends’ – Environments + Characters – Recreated In The Sims 4

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MWO Devs Announce New Game – Being Called Out By Community For Not Delivering What They Had Promised

September 7, 2014 John Papadopoulos 25 Comments

Well, talk about frustrating and betraying your fan-base. Piranha Games, creators of MechWarrior Online, has revealed that it is currently working on a new sci-fi game. This should be good news, right? Apparently not as MechWarrior Online still lacks features that were promised a year ago, and is still considered an unfinished product. Continue reading →

http://videocardz.com/52166/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-gtx-970-gtx-980m-gtx-970m-3dmark-performance

I know that synthetic benchmarks don't tell the whole story and that sometimes can be a bit misleading.

With that said, if those numbers are true AND the performance in games from the new cards can be extrapolated from those results, Nvidia should come up with awesome power consumption and thermal numbers and/or lower prices. Otherwise, I don't see many willing to upgrade from their 770/780 to the 970/980.

Edit: Maybe it's related to this, or maybe it's just coincidence, but this last week AMD has lowered the price of the 295 X2 by $500. I hope other cards will also get a price cut soon.

http://techreport.com/news/27014/radeon-r9-295-x2-gets-a-500-price-cut-to-999

The main target group will probably not be the ones which already have a 770/780/780ti/Titan but people with a 570/580/660/670/680/760 willing to upgrade.

Like me... my 580 is now over 3 years old (the longest time ever a graphic card was in my PCs) and was enough so far for most games. But I want to play Dead Rising 3 and GTA V without too much compromises.

That's true, but it's also true that the users of high end cards are also those that are more likely to upgrade every gen. Hell, many made the jump from a GTX 680 to a 780.

That's why I see this gen of cards (which are nothing more than a stop-gap until 22nm is ready) performing very well in sales unless they offer some tangible benefits in the fields of power savings, temp. and/or price.

I fell this is a stopgap because the next die shrink isn't ready. I am pretty sure the plan was to have this be at 20nm. But as it turns out the fabs are just not ready and but they still need to launch new products so this is what we get. If the 750 Ti is any indication power consumption should be down tho and yeilds on the old process should be good by now so that should allow them to lower prices. It sounds like they are also finally moving to 4Gb RAM chips so these cards are shipping with 4GB VRAM as standard, and the increased caches in Maxwell should allow them to use 256-Bit bus without much of a performance hit.

^Another interesting question is, yes, the 980 is faster (at least 19% faster) than the 780, but almost on par with the 780Ti, so how will Nvidia market it?

They can't put it as the 780Ti successor as there's (at least in that benchmark) a negligible improvement in performance, right? But if they market it (and price it) as the 780 successor, they will find themselves with no market for the 780Ti or even the Titan Black among gamers.

I don't think they need a replacement for those cards at the moment. They are not that old yet and without a new manufacturing process getting a card that is a significant enough upgrade to spur people into upgrading would need an insanely massive die and would have nightmarishly low yeilds. They have the Titan Z for insane people anyway. This refresh will be more targeted at the mid to high market segment, the fact that Maxwell was lead with a lower mid part and is focused on effeciency is pretty telling IMO.

Warlords of Draenor trailer tells the ugly origin story of Grommash Hellscream

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Perhaps Blizzard will make us a Warcraft IV yet - but for now they’ve resolved to fill WoW’s Warlords of Draenor expansion with fan service.

You’ll remember Papa Hellscream from Warcraft II’s Beyond the Dark Portal campaign. Thanks to the intervention of his son Garrosh, he’ll now be one of Draenor’s titular warlords and, it is rumoured, one of its final raid bosses. Here’s his story.

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PopCap's final founding member leaves EA to "give something back"

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PopCap has lost its last remaining co-founder. John Vechey is leaving both the Peggle purveyors and EA - but made clear that he still puts faith in his publishing overlords and the deal that saw PopCap become an Electronic Arts subsidiary three years ago.

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ESPN president says eSports is "not a sport": "Mostly, I'm interested in doing real sports"

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Oh, ESPN - you were doing so well at internet comms. First, Valve triumphantly announced the news that the 2014 Dota 2 International would be broadcast live by the monolithic US sports network. And later, an unnamed source close to ESPN reported they were “delighted” by their inaugural Dota 2 viewing figures.

For a while there, it really looked like the MOBA had established a foothold for games in mainstream sports coverage. At least until somebody slid a dictaphone in front of ESPN president John Skipper.

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Backwater Bay: Respawn talk the Titanfall DLC map where pilot moonshine is made

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The third DLC pack for Titanfall is named IMC Rising, but you’re unlikely to see pilots of the great industrial conglomerate rise earlier than midday on Backwater. Based on concept art and designs that didn’t quite make it into the original game, this new map is set on the same ramshackle planet where washed-up parkour soldiers brew their brain cell-baking alcohol.

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Bedlam asks ‘What if I could take Doom’s BFG into a fantasy RPG?’

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Back in February, 2013, Christopher Brookmyre’s book, Bedlam, hit the shelves. A story about a scientist sucked into virtual network of interconnected video games, Bedlam saw its characters jumping from Quake-like Starfire, through WW2 shooters, sandbox games akin to GTA, and even making a brief diversion into a god game.

18 months on, developer RedBedlam’s ready to show off the game of the book. Finally we’ll be able to see what happens when you take the weapons cache from a 90s sci-fi shooter and take it into a fantasy RPG.

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League of Legends lore rewrite will stay true to the "soul" of characters in the old canon

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Riot Games prompted applause and alarm over the weekend with the announcement of a partial retcon of League of Legends lore. The game’s very premise, an institute where political conflicts could be resolved in orderly and relatively bloodless fashion, had proven too restrictive for LoL’s narrative designers.

They’ve resolved to push their character bios and event plotlines beyond the boundaries of the League - but have reassured concerned fans that their favourite champions will only benefit.

“We believe in a philosophy in which story should spring from the characters naturally, not from a very arbitrary plot built around them,” said Riot writer Devon Giehl. “Character drives plot.”

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A man finished Dark Souls on PC using only a Rock Band controller

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The Dark Souls challenge run community are a talented, bonkers bunch - and even for them, beating Dark Souls with a guitar controller was just a joke. But it was a common one, and it got Bearzly to thinking.

“So I figured why not give it a shot?,” said the Twitch streamer. All in all, the run took just 11 and a quarter hours.

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World of Warships is quietly brilliant

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On the first day of creation, Wargaming separated the heaven and the earth. The earth, they named World of Tanks, and unleashed small steel bungalows to shoot at each-other. They named it World of Tanks, and saw that it was good. 

The heaven, they named World of Warplanes, which was like World of Tanks, but with metal buzzards. But it wasn’t quite as good as World of Tanks, and it didn’t leave beta for like a bazillion years and suddenly everyone’s making tank games and good grief, Wargaming got rich enough to hire a troop of skydivers to create their logo in the sky, because fuck it, when you’ve got this much money what else is left? 

And then they created the seas, and on them, they floated ten storey steel ducks, and let them shoot at eachother. 

And at GamesCom, I saw that it was also, very good. 

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Building gaudy ships in Gratuitous Space Battles 2

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There was a great deal of fun to be had in designing ships in Gratuitous Space Battles, but the system was limited to installing various practical modules on fixed hulls. Variety came in the form of species specific ships rather than the ability to create your own from scratch. 

In Gratuitous Space Battles 2, things will be different. Not unlike Galactic Civilizations II (and its upcoming sequel), countless cosmetic components can be slapped on the hulls of ships, from things that spin to things that blink. You’ll be able to create properly hideous sci-fi disasters if that’s your cup of tea.

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Batman: Arkham Knight due out in June next year, complete with a tiny Batmobile for your desk

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Batman is everywhere. Hanging around on gargoyles, watching you in your home. Mucking about in alleys, crying about his dead mum and dad. Sometimes he even puts on a moustache, and could be standing right next to you and you wouldn’t even know it. Batman doesn’t have a release date, because Batman is with you always. 

Video game Batman, however, only appears at certain times. He’s a totally different phenomenon. Like an eclipse. His next expected appearance isn’t for a while. Almost a year! Think of all the crimes he’s missing. Clearly Rocksteady didn’t think of that when they decided to make the release date for Arkham Knight June 2nd, 2015. 

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Capcom will infect Steamworks with a zombie virus

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As Games for Windows Live continues to be dragged to its grave - to the sound of jubilant cheering - another trio of games are making their way over to Steamworks. 

Capcom’s moving Resident Evil 5, Dead Rising 2 and Dead Rising 2: Off the Record from Microsoft’s much hated platform - which has less life than the zombies in these games - and onto Steamworks, according to a post on the Capcom Unity Blog. 

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Paradigm: an adventure game that pits a mutant musician against an evil sloth

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There are a fair number of video game protagonists who are also unapologetic arseholes. Uncharted’s Nathan Drake, most of the playable characters in the Grand Theft Auto series, my Commander Shepard from Mass Effect and now Paradigm, the titular “hero” in Australian developer Jacob Janerka’s upcoming dystopian adventure game. 

But Paradigm has an excuse for being an arsehole: he’s a hideous mutant and he’s stuck in a post-apocalyptic crap hole. Where the future world of Fallout - one of the inspirations for the game - was based on 1950s America, Paradigm takes place in a world inspired by Eastern Europe in the ‘70s & ‘80s. 

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Road to Worlds documents the journeys of League of Legends pros

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The final of League of Legend’s 2014 World Championships is little over a month away. It’s unlikely that - given that the arena in Seoul is expected to sell out - you’ll get to see it in person, so you’ll probably just have to enjoy the streams. 

Starting today, you can also follow some of the pro players as they work to earn their spot in the championships. The first episode of the Road to Worlds documentary is available already, and you can take a gander below. 

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We're breaking up: Rome II's Imperator campaign map is a fractured mess of warring factions

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Total War: Rome II’s free Imperator Augustus campaign offers up one of the most interesting periods of antiquity as a stage for war. While Caesar established the foundations that would allow his adopted son, Octavian, to ascend to the position of Emperor, it was after the war between Octavian and Marc Antony that he would actually become ruler of the Roman world. And in the Imperator Augustus campaign, you can try to stop him if you want. 

Creative Assembly has released the campaign map, revealing the playable factions available in this war - which managed to be both a civil war and an international one. Slap your eyes on it below. 

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Death To Spies 3 – Stealth Action Hitman meets Splinter Cell – Kickstarter Launches Tomorrow

Haggard Games informed us today about the launch of a Kickstarter campaign on September 9th for the third part of its legendary game series “Death to Spies”. The team aims to raise $85000 by October 24, 2014 with a plan to release the game a year later, in October 2015. Continue reading →

 

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Assassin’s Creed Birth of a New World – The American Saga Announced, Features The Three Latest AC Games

September 8, 2014 John Papadopoulos 4 Comments

Ubisoft announced today that Assassin’s Creed Birth of a New World – The American Saga will be available for X360, PS3 and PC versions of the game on October 3rd. Continue reading →

 

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GTAV – PC Version Has Been Under Development Since 2012, May Be Lead Platform For New-Gen Version

September 8, 2014 John Papadopoulos 28 Comments

And here comes a major leak. Today, almost all logs for GTA V’s internal builds have been leaked. According to the logs, the PC version of GTA V has been under development since 2012. This obviously does not surprise us, as we’ve all known that this game was coming to the PC (sooner or later). Still, this leak somehow explains why the game appeared on AMD’s drivers out of nowhere. Continue reading →

 

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FIFA 15 PC Requirements Revealed – 64bit Only, Requires Quad-Core CPU, Recommends 8GB RAM

September 8, 2014 John Papadopoulos 13 Comments

Electronic Arts has revealed the PC system requirements for FIFA 15. According to the publisher, PC gamers will need at least a quad-core CPU and a 64bit OS. Thankfully, this is not another COD: Ghosts, meaning that 4GB of RAM is the minimum RAM requirement. In addition, FIFA 15 will only support DX11 GPUs, meaning that you will at least need an ATI Radeon HD 5770 or an NVIDIA GTX 650. Continue reading →

 

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GTAV – New-Gen Release Date Announcement Imminent? Testers Already Playing PC Version On Steam

September 8, 2014 John Papadopoulos 8 Comments

And it’s alive. It’s alive everyone. According to SteamDB’s GTA V info, two game testers have been playing the PC version this month. To be more precise, two game testers have been playing the PC version of GTA V this Saturday from 18:00 to 23:00. That’s 5-6 hours, meaning that the game might be nearing its final stages. Of course, this does not mean that the game will come out tomorrow or next week, but we should be hearing more about it later this month. You can view below GTA V’s PC stats, and kudos to our reader ‘Rayden02′ for spotting it! Continue reading →