The Gaming News Thread (for news that doesn't need a thread)


Microsoft has announced they will be ending the backward compatibility add-ons for the Xbox One, but they will make sure that all four generations will be compatible with Project Scarlett.

The final wave of titles has been announced and will be available starting this week.

For the Original Xbox, you can now play the following:
  • Armed and Dangerous
  • Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb
  • Sphinx
  • Splinter Cell
  • Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
  • Splinter Cell Double Agent
  • Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow
  • Unreal Championship 2
For the Xbox 360, you can now play the following:
  • Asura's Wrath
  • Battlefield 2 Modern Combat
  • Enchanted Arms
  • Enslaved
  • Far Cry Classic
  • Far Cry Instincts Predator
  • Infinite Undiscovery
  • King Kong
  • Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands
  • Skate
  • Star Ocean: The Last Hope
  • Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo
  • Syndicate
  • Too Human
  • Unreal Tournament III

In addition, 8 Rare games have been enhanced for Xbox One X:
  • Banjo Kazooie
  • Banjo Tooie
  • Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts
  • Kameo
  • Perfect Dark
  • Perfect Dark Zero
  • Viva Pinata
  • Viva Pinata Trouble in Paradise
Here's a complete list of every Japanese game made compatible for Xbox One via backwards compatibility:
Original Xbox:
  • Blinx: The Time Sweeper
  • Breakdown
  • The King of Fighters Neowave
  • Ninja Gaiden Black
  • Panzer Dragoon Orta
Xbox 360 (Retail titles):
  • Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation
  • Asura's Wrath
  • Bayonetta
  • Blue Dragon
  • Castlevania: Lords of Shadow
  • Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2
  • Catherine
  • CLANNAD [Japan only]
  • Dark Souls
  • Deadly Premonition
  • Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon
  • Earth Defense Force 2017
  • Earth Defense Force 2025
  • Enchanted Arms
  • Final Fantasy XIII
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2
  • Infinite Undiscovery
  • Killer is Dead
  • The King of Fighters XIII
  • Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII
  • Lost Odyssey
  • Lost Planet: Extreme Condition [Disc only]
  • Lost Planet: Colonies
  • Lost Planet 2
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
  • Metal Gear Solid HD Collection (MGS2: Sons of Liberty / MGS3: Snake Eater)
  • Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker HD Edition
  • Ninja Gaiden II
  • Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge
  • Persona 4 Arena
  • Rumble Roses XX
  • Shadows of the Damned
  • Silent Evil HD Collection (Silent Evil 2 / Silent Evil 3)
  • Sonic Generations
  • Sonic Unleashed
  • Star Ocean: The Last Hope
  • Steins;Gate [Japan only]
  • Steins;Gate: Darling of Loving Vows [Japan only]
  • Steins;Gate: Linear Bounded Phenogram [Japan only]
  • Street Fighter IV
  • Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo
  • Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition
  • Tekken 6
  • Tekken Tag Tournament 2
  • Vanquish
  • Zone of the Enders HD Collection (Zone of the Enders / Zone of the Enders: 2nd Runner)
 
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Anime1977 said:
Shenmue 3 is now an epic store exclusive what a shity move when people backed the Kickstarter with the promise of a steam key people are asking for their money back.
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Is downloading the Epic launcher and creating an account really such a massive deal for people? Didn’t we go through all this years ago when Steam was the only way to get Half Life 2, and everybody lost their sh*t over that? The Epic launcher’s well worth having for the free games anyway, I’d probably use it even if I hadn’t already been doing so for years just for UE4.
 
Personally I think having to create an account and installing a launcher/client is a quite a big deal. Steam is no exception to that. In an ideal world, one would be able to simply buy games, and any launcher/client would only serve as an optional convenience. Letting people choose which one they prefer based on features offered (achievements, community guides, matchmaking, etc...) and not based on exclusives.

Regardless, at this moment I still prefer Steam, not just because I've already "committed" to it, but also because it's one of the few that actually supports Linux. But the things that annoys me the most about Epic is that it's really apparent that they don't intend to win market share by offering a better service to the user, but with free giveaways and exclusives. Then they pretend that it's all a ploy against the 30% revenue cut of Steam.
 
Steam I always thought had a monopoly in PC gaming which I still think shouldn’t be allowed no wonder Valve isn’t making games anymore. But Epic has problems if it’s own. To me it’s just sad PC physical gaming has died.
 
I get that exclusivity can be maddening, but this is really far less of an issue when it comes to PC gaming. If a game is hardware platform exclusive (which has been a thing for a while now) then in order to play it you need to buy a whole other console in order to play it, running the price into the hundreds. If a game is exclusive to a particular software platform on PC, the cost is precisely nothing. Neither Valve nor Epic nor UbiSoft nor even EA (much as I dislike Origin) charge for the use of their clients.

Choice is absolutely a good thing, and while it would be great for all games to be available on all platforms, developers also have a choice in who publishes their games (unless they happen to be owned by a publisher, who will naturally push their own platforms) and that’s also a good thing. As Doc points out, if everyone felt compelled to publish via Steam that would be akin to a monopoly, and I don’t think it’s necessarily good for consumer choice for people to demand a game be available from a specific publisher.

Epic gives devs a bigger cut of the profits than Valve. It’s that simple. If you were publishing say, a book and one publisher said you could keep more of the profits from your creation, you’d choose them. And nobody would complain since you’d be able to buy the book from a bookshop just the same. Just like your PC can run all the clients.

The Epic store, as it stands, is crap. I agree. It needs to be improved massively if they actually want to compete with Steam, starting with the ability to friggin’ browse by category, something I can’t quite believe it still doesn’t have. But as a platform to play a particular game it’s perfectly serviceable, and I don’t view it as any different to the time I had to download Origin to play Mass Effect 3. An inconvenience, perhaps, but an incredibly minor one. And with any luck and a bit of time, Epic can hopefully become a real competitor to Steam which will be positive for consumer choice.
 
ayase said:
Epic gives devs a bigger cut of the profits than Valve. It’s that simple.
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I would also think that's an appealing reason for a developer (or realistically, a publisher) to choose for the Epic store. But for whatever reason that doesn't seem to be the main drive behind most Epic store exclusives. Just as in the book publishing example, there's a lot more to consider than just the revenue cut when deciding on a publisher. They help you promote your book, can aid in editing, designing and more.

I guess we'll see how the Epic store will fare in time. In my case it would only really be interesting if they started supporting Linux natively (and a solution similar to Steam's Proton would be nice). So for me the cost of an exclusive is not "precisely nothing", but one Windows license ;). I just fear that we end up with a plethora of launchers/clients that all provide only a handful of games. They constantly want to start at startup, auto-update, scan your hardware and send some "anonymized" telemetry, at which point I doubt one could call this positive for the consumer.

But with the advent of game streaming services, it's only a matter of time before we start seeing streaming exclusives, at which point I guess no one will complain about store exclusive anymore.
 
IdiomaticLynx said:
So for me the cost of an exclusive is not "precisely nothing", but one Windows license ;)
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Using Linux is a product choice you personally make though, just like someone choosing a Microsoft console over a Sony one (or vice versa) and having to accept they won't get the other console's exclusives. If you can manage to use a Linux PC for gaming kudos to you, but I would not have the patience. To me it's worth the price of a licence to make everything work with a minimum of fuss (disregarding the fact I need Windows for work-related software anyway). Thankfully I haven't had to pay for a licence in eight years, since I got the free Win 10 upgrade from 7.
IdiomaticLynx said:
They constantly want to start at startup, auto-update, scan your hardware and send some "anonymized" telemetry, at which point I doubt one could call this positive for the consumer.
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All stuff that's pretty easily disabled with only a few clicks though. It is irritating that you have to do so, but these days I just shrug, that's modern software for you. Woe to all the people who don't have much of a clue when it comes to Windows though, I remember being asked to have a look at a relative's laptop that was running slow and finding it took about five minutes to boot because of all the startup programmes...
 
ayase said:
Is downloading the Epic launcher and creating an account really such a massive deal for people? Didn’t we go through all this years ago when Steam was the only way to get Half Life 2, and everybody lost their sh*t over that? The Epic launcher’s well worth having for the free games anyway, I’d probably use it even if I hadn’t already been doing so for years just for UE4.
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It's the fact that nobody wants the console exclusivity crap to come to PC which is what Epic is doing along with the fact that the epic games store in an incomplete mess (it doesn't even have a shopping cart, and as a lot of people have found out that buying several games one at a time is likely to have them run foul of fraud protection coming down on them either through their bank or through Epic's own anti-fraud systems) and is a privacy nightmare.
 
demonix said:
It's the fact that nobody wants the console exclusivity crap to come to PC which is what Epic is doing along with the fact that the epic games store in an incomplete mess (it doesn't even have a shopping cart, and as a lot of people have found out that buying several games one at a time is likely to have them run foul of fraud protection coming down on them either through their bank or through Epic's own anti-fraud systems) and is a privacy nightmare.
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The exclusivity thing I covered above. And in a world where I'm caught on about a dozen security cameras just walking to the shops for milk, number plate recognition cameras can place me anywhere at any time and GCHQ can access any of our communications and browsing history without even needing permission, you'll have to forgive me for shrugging off the idea that Epic might know what video games I own on Steam, or who my pseudonymous "friends" are. Britain is already an Orwellian nightmare, that's the very least of our privacy concerns.
 
ayase said:
If you can manage to use a Linux PC for gaming kudos to you, but I would not have the patience. To me it's worth the price of a licence to make everything work with a minimum of fuss
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With Proton and SteamPlay some games tend to run better on Linux than they do on Windows.
 
I don’t really play multiplayer games much anyway, so that’s not really something I know a lot about (though personally, I blame the rise of all this “anti-cheat” software on competitive games being taken far too seriously, one of the main reasons I stay away from them) but from what I understand, it’s not hugely cost-effective for devs to spend time making them work for >1% of players who have, as I mentioned above, chosen to use Linux as their OS. I mean my preferred solution would be not to use anti-cheat software at all, but I imagine that would piss off a lot of the players who don’t like people cheating.
 
www.engadget.com

EA tells UK Parliament loot boxes are 'quite ethical'

With loot boxes receiving heavy scrutiny lately, EA has come up with a novel explanation for what the controversial game mechanic should be considered perfectly legal. Appearing before the UK Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee, EA's vice president of legal and government...
www.engadget.com www.engadget.com

EA tells UK Parliament loot boxes are 'quite ethical'
The company insists they are just "surprise mechanics" like Kinder Eggs.

That's a bloody lie and ea know it.
 
Anime1977 said:
www.engadget.com

EA tells UK Parliament loot boxes are 'quite ethical'

With loot boxes receiving heavy scrutiny lately, EA has come up with a novel explanation for what the controversial game mechanic should be considered perfectly legal. Appearing before the UK Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee, EA's vice president of legal and government...
www.engadget.com www.engadget.com

EA tells UK Parliament loot boxes are 'quite ethical'
The company insists they are just "surprise mechanics" like Kinder Eggs.

That's a bloody lie and ea know it.
Click to expand...
surprise mechanics? yea like surprise they own your house now.
I swear EA tells lies on the level of The Simpsons jokes
 
Been there done that.i went to ects twice in 90s I managed to get tickets even though I'm not involved in the game industry just a gamer and I got too play the n64 demo of turok the second time I went the ai was much better than in final version.
 
Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One owners are now able to check out DOOM, DOOM II: Hell on Earth, and DOOM 3 BFG Edition on those platforms digitally today. Except there's a problem, you need to have a Bethesda Net account in order to play them.

DOOM and DOOM II: Hell on Earth only require it once, while DOOM 3 BFG Edition requires it every time you want to play it. Because of this stupidity, it's now become the next internet meme.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1154857843499122688

If you want to play these DOOM games without the hassle, then I recommend picking up DOOM 3 BFG Edition on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 if you want to play them on consoles (even better the DOOM Complete collection on PSN which includes Final DOOM and DOOM II: The Master Levels). Of course these games are available on PC with the mods you can use to make the game even better.
 
There's actually another problem with the doom and doom 2 conversions apart from the DRM and that is that the audio has been slowed down.

 
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