Gaming Dispatch 22-28th of January 2017

Welcome to Gaming Dispatch, the weekly series where I bring you the most important news from the world of gaming. On this week's platter we have, among other things, Project Scorpio, Pillars of Eternity II, Nintendo Switch, Oculus lawsuit, and a rollercoaster through the Death Star.

Pillars of Eternity 2

Obsidian Entertainment announced their sequel to the the Kickstarter success Pillars of Eternity, bearing the name Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. As the last one it is being crowdfunded, albeit not on Kickstarter this time around. The new campaign is hosted on the “Fig platform” where backers can choose to either pledge in a familiar way as on Kickstarter, or they can invest in the game, potentially getting returns if the game is doing well. It would be an understatement to say that the campaign is going well as it reached its goal of 1.1 million dollars in under 24 hours. Shortly after the developers posted on Twitter that stretch goals are coming, and the team is encouraging people to continue to pledge money in order to make a bigger and more diverse dungeon.

Source: http://www.polygon.com/2017/1/27/14415330/pillars-of-eternity-2-deadfire-campaign-hits-goal

And on the topic of Pillars of Eternity, you can now watch the making of said game over on YouTube.

Everywhere

Leslie Benzies, a former employee at Rockstar North and a central producer of the renowned Grand Theft Auto series, together with two other ex-Rockstar employees has announced a new game currently going under the name Everywhere. In an interview with Polygon, Benzies told that they are aiming to make a game that that is less restrictive than other games. Additionally it will have a very different tone to it, as compared to GTA, Benzies said. For the full story check out the Polygons article.

And on the subject of GTA, modders are bringing Liberty City to GTA 5.

Project Scorpio

You have probably already heard by now about the upcoming console from Microsoft, code named Project Scorpio. In recent events Microsoft has stated that all first-party games on launch will run on native 4K. By comparing the apparent “6 Teraflops of graphical power” to, say the GTX 1080 which has a performance of 9 Teraflops I can’t imagine these launch titles will run very well (What I mean by that is to run at 60 fps), and if they should manage to do so I would believe that the graphical fidelity must be turned down by quite a bit. I mean there are several games that even the 1080 can’t run at 60 fps at 4K resolution. However, 6 teraflops is a big increase compared to the Xbox One, and this increase in power will hopefully lead to an advancement in games in general and it being a “Next-gen machine” as said by the developer of Ori and the Blind Forest. It is also important to note that it is much easier to optimize a game to run on a console than on PC, as every Xbox or Playstation is identical while a PC can come in thousands of different configurations.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/project-scorpio-news-and-rumors/

Nintendo Switch

And when we are already on the topic of game consoles, let’s talk about the Nintendo Switch (although not everything here is from the last week). Firstly it is going to have an international release on March 3rd for $299.99, prices for additional accessories can be found here. As for technical specifications it has been unveiled that it will feature a 6.2” 720p multi-touch display, 4GB of RAM, an internal memory of 32GB but is expandable to 2TB by using Micro SDXC cards, and a custom Tegra chip. The battery has been rumored to last for about three hours when being used as a handheld.

In the latest news it was announced that the switch will not support streaming services such as Netflix (at least at launch), reason being that Nintendo is first and foremost focusing on making a gaming system. And as for games for the system you can find all currently confirmed titles here. From the look of the list it seems like there is at least a decent amount of third-party titles, additionally EA is claiming that Nintendo is making a bigger effort on bringing third-party titles to the platform, which if true good news. Not so good news however is the fact that I you want to play online you will have pay a fee, just in a similar manner as on PS4 and Xbox One starting in the Fall of 2017, meaning that you at least get a free trial.

And if you would like to see what a complete wii collection looks like, Kotaku has an article about it.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/13/the-5-biggest-announcements-from-the-tokyo-nintendo-switch-event.html

http://www.techradar.com/news/nintendo-switch-release-date-news-and-features

Oculus vs. Zenimax

In the world of virtual reality there is currently an ongoing legal dispute between Oculus and Zenimax. Zenimax claims that Oculus could not have had the success that it got had it not been for stolen technology, trade secrets and the collaboration between former Zenimax employee and id Software co-founder John Carmack and the founder of Oculus VR Palmer Luckey. Zenimax is claiming that the collaboration started while Carmack was still working at Zenimax is requesting $2 billion in compensation and an additional $2 billion in damages from Facebook, the owner of Oculus. Oculus on the other hand is claiming that the VR headset was technology exclusively created by Oculus.

http://www.polygon.com/2017/1/26/14403302/oculus-vr-case-jury

https://gamerant.com/zenimax-facebook-oculus-lawsuit-6-billion/

Flash stories:

PC gaming has never been bigger according to recent report.

Square Enix and Marvel is teaming up to create multiple games over the course of several years, called Avengers Project.

Sega is adding classics soundtracks such as Sonic to Spotify.

Ni No Kuni II is coming to PC sometime in 2017

Apocalypse Now might be getting a video game adaptation as it currently has an ongoing Kickstarter.

And Windows 10 is getting a “Game mode”

DiRT 4 has been announced and will be released on June 6th.


And for a fun bonus someone has made a roller-coaster through the Death Star: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHYjNE1QvY4


This has been this weeks Gaming Dispatch, so stay tuned for next week.