Game Tech News

Video game developer Blizzard is using the currently running BlizzCon event to talk about its plans for the future and one of the big launched coming in 2015 is Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void, the final installment for the strategy sequel, which received a trailer that's designed to suggest the complexity of the single player campaign.

There's no actual in game footage included but the studio is using some impressive visuals in order to show the high stakes that will be feature in the coming narrative, which will see a Protoss faction led by Zeratul and Artanis working with the Queen of Blades and Terran leaders to oppose the force of the Xel'Naga.

Mike Morhaime, the chief executive officer and co-founder of Blizzard, states, "Legacy of the Void will deliver the quintessential StarCraft 2 experience. The new single-player campaign will wrap up the massive story, and we’re excited to share new game modes that will open up different ways to play the game and additional units that will expand the rich strategic depth of StarCraft 2 multiplayer."

It's unclear how many missions the game will include but Blizzard says that Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void will be offered as a standalone package in order to make it accessible to as many gamers as possible.

A focus on new modes for multiplayer matches

Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void will introduce at least two new modes for gamers who enjoy multiplayer: Archon Mode and Allied Commanders.

The first one is designed to allow two gamers to control one base at the same time and Blizzard says the setup will allow them to execute more complex strategies as each one focuses on one aspect of the battle.

Allied Commanders is a cooperative experience focused on objectives that allows players to become the most important commanders from the series, each with its own set up bonuses and special abilities.

Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void will also include a range of new units, with the Lurker returning for the Zerg and the Protoss getting access to a new Disruptor.

There are also new abilities for already existing troops, with the Terran battlecruisers now able to use Tactical Jump to move to any place on the map, with more reveals coming during the BlizzCon event.

At the moment Blizzard is now talking about the launch date or the price which will be attached to Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void.

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After an absurd 12-hour gap between the release of Assassin’s Creed Unity and the end of the review embargo, one thing is clear: this game is a hot mess. It’s limited to 900p on consoles, it suffers from poor draw distance, the frame rate sees dramatic dips, and there are some truly hideous glitches causing faces to disappear. By all accounts, this game was half-baked, and Ubisoft pushed it on consumers anyway.

Over on NeoGAF, there is an entire thread dedicated to the performance of Assassin’s Creed Unity on the PC. Unfortunately, it seems that even relatively beefy rigs are running into some serious issues. The creator of the thread is running the game on a very respectable Nvidia GeForce GTX 780, and cutscenes still dip below 30 fps. The thread is filled with other posters running into similar issues, and the screenshots being posted of some of the bugs are absolutely nightmare-inducing.


Sadly, these problems aren’t exclusive to the PC. Ubisoft sent out the Xbox One version to most review outlets, and the situation is dire. According to Joystiq, both the PS4 and Xbox One versions of Unity suffer from a number of game-breaking bugs, and the frame rate drops frequently. Unsurprisingly, the frame rate is noticeably worse on the Xbox One. Both consoles are locked to 900p, but there’s no getting around the fact that the Xbox One’s GPU has drastically fewer compute units.

So, why is this game so flawed from a technical aspect? Surely, Ubisoft has some of the best software engineers in the world, right? Ubisoft certainly has the talent pool and the bank account to make amazing games, but the incredibly short turnaround time given to the dev teams is hurting the final product. When you consider that additional internal resources were used to create an entirely separate game for the PS3 and Xbox 360, the picture suddenly comes into focus. Ubisoft did this to itself by shipping Assassin’s Creed Unity before it was fully baked. If the executive team would have delayed this release by a few months, the game would have definitely benefitted from the extra time.

The worst part? It seems that Ubisoft knew ahead of time that the game wasn’t going to receive glowing reviews. Despite the fact that the game was available for purchase at 12am ET last night, the review embargo wasn’t lifted until 12PM ET today. It’s an exceedingly slimy tactic to boost day-one sales, and it serves no purpose other than to shield Ubisoft from bad word-of-mouth for a few extra hours. This is an embarrassment, and I recommend that everyone refrain from purchasing this game as it stands.


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Clearly, something is not quite right with Assassin’s Creed Unity – but rather than talk about Ubisoft’s disgusting 12-hour delay on reviews, or what appears to be a shoddy PC port, we’re going to focus on something rather interesting: The Xbox One version of Unity runs at a higher frame rate, and feels more responsive, than on the PS4. Given that the PS4 has a considerably beefier GPU, and should generally be capable of higher resolutions and frame rates than the Xbox One, this is a puzzling finding to say the least. What’s going on?

This early analysis comes from Digital Foundry, which is as nonplussed by the Xbox One’s superior performance as we are. Digital Foundry double-checked that the day-one patch was installed, and even ran the benchmarks on a second PS4 — but sure enough, the Xbox One has a ~5 fps advantage over the PS4, both in busy crowd scenes while barging past dozens of NPCs, and while free-running across the rooftops. Digital Foundry says that performance is still “a major issue” on the Xbox One, but it impacts gameplay less on the Xbox One than the PS4. Reading between the lines, it actually sounds like the guys at Digital Foundry found Ubisoft’s latest game to be a pretty jarring and unpleasant experience.

The big question is, why does Assassin’s Creed Unity run better on the Xbox One? We know that the Xbox One has slightly more CPU power available — and that Ubisoft has previously said that Unity is CPU-bound, due to the general complexity of the game and the number of NPCs requiring AI. This doesn’t fully explain why the Xbox One beats out the PS4 in rooftop sequences, though.

Another possibility is that the Xbox One version of Unity is more optimized — either due to Ubisoft spending less time on the PS4 version, or simply because Microsoft’s developer tools and compiler create better code than Sony’s. Given how the game was clearly rushed out in time for the holiday season, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ubisoft just didn’t get around to optimizing the PS4 version.

It’s also worth pointing out that the PS4 has a consistent lead over the Xbox One of a few fps during cutscenes — which would definitely seem to indicate the CPU is involved in the Xbox One’s advantage during gameplay (cutscenes are almost purely GPU-bound), but it doesn’t tally well with the PS4’s frame rate drops during sparse rooftop sections. It’s actually also possible that the consoles’ differing DRAM/ESRAM setup could be a factor, too — new engines can definitely stress memory bandwidth.

Ultimately, it mostly sounds like Assassin’s Creed Unity is just a bit of a mess. The game — which is powered by a new version of Ubisoft’s AnvilNext engine — certainly looks good, but perhaps Ubisoft didn’t leave itself an adequate amount of time to tune the game/engine so that it runs well across the consoles and PC. It goes without saying, but it’s just downright sad that the next-gen consoles can’t stick to 30 fps, even when running at the low resolution of 1600×900.



Assassin’s Creed Unity, at 4K on a PC with dual Nvidia GTX 980s in SLI — shared on the NeoGAF forum.



Another 4K screenshot of Assassin’s Creed Unity. It looks good, but perhaps not quite as good as the screenshots/bullshots shared by Ubisoft prior to the game’s release.

The good news is, most of Unity’s issues can probably be fixed with some patches, and on the PC side of things new graphics drivers from AMD and Nvidia might help things along as well. Something tells me this won’t be the last time that we talk about Assassin’s Creed Unity.


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Sony’s PlayStation 4 is enjoying a massively successful first year, flipping the PS3’s dismal launch script around. While the PS4 is enjoying more success than the PS3 did, the PS3 still has one distinct advantage over its descendent: media playback. With today’s announcement of the PlayStation Vue, a cloud-based TV streaming service, Sony aims to close that media gap.

Despite all of the Xbox One’s problems prior to, during, and after launch, the console had one distinct feature it could lord over its competitor: live TV playback. Last generation, the PS3 was far and away one of the best media hubs on the market — it effortlessly streamed media from your PC, could play external media, had a variety of music, movie, and TV apps, introduced Remote Play, and of course, had a library of great games. On top of that, someone may even lean over to you, look around for any eavesdroppers, and tell you in a hushed tone that, thanks to the PC streaming and external media playback, the PS3 is also one of the easiest ways to get pirated media onto your television.

Perhaps in an effort to not only curb potential piracy, as well as to obviously force more people onto paid services, the PS4 removed DLNA support and external media playback. PlayStation Vue should help alleviate the PS4 user’s inability to use their fancy game console as their one true entertainment hub.



The beta, which will be available on the PS4 and PS3 by the end of November, will contain content from 75 channels per market, including major players like NBC, Fox, CBS, Discovery, and Viacom (MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central). At the moment, Disney properties like ABC and ESPN, as well as premium channels like HBO, are not listed. Vue will recommend programming based on your viewing habits and what’s trending on the service, and will have the past three days of programming available without requiring you to DVR it. You can store shows to the cloud and they’ll last for 28 days, though that might not be long enough for people with a large backlog.

As for pricing, Sony didn’t disclose any numbers, but did say that PlayStation Vue will be offered on a contract-free, month-to-month basis. If you don’t own a PS4 or PS3, PS Vue will be coming to the iPad not long after the console beta releases, and will eventually make its way to both Sony and non-Sony devices.

From the announcement, it doesn’t look like PlayStation Vue will help the PS4 or PS3 replace your cable subscription, but partnered with the other media apps and services available on the consoles, Sony is inching closer toward providing a cable-free media alternative on a single device.

If you’re not into betas, Sony plans to officially launch the service in the US sometime in early 2015.


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Over the last couple of days we’ve discussed Assassin’s Creed Unity’s poor reviews, bugginess, and the Xbox One’s surprising lead over the PS4. Now, it’s time to take a closer look at the PC version, and to see just how bad the performance situation is — and to try and work out why that’s the case.

One reason we’ve already heard is that the draw call count on the PC side is very high under certain circumstances — higher, in fact, then DX11 can reasonably support. We’ve rounded up a GTX 780, a GTX 980, and the Radeon R9 290X and put them through their respective paces to see how the game performs — and what users can do to boost frame rates. We’ll also be looking at what effect (if any) Unity’s use of GameWorks has on Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

GameWorks integration and graphics quality

Assassin’s Creed Unity uses GameWorks for ambient occlusion (HBAO+) and for Percentage Closer Softer Shadows (PCSS). It also supports the use of Cascaded Shadow Maps. All three of these technologies are designed to improve rendering by casting realistic and varied types of shadows — PCSS computes shadow penumbras based on the camera’s distance from the occluded object, for example.



High shadows on the left, PCSS shadows on the right

Nvidia’s GeForce.com website offers interactive sliders that you can position over an area of the image to examine the impact of specific features. PCSS is shown above; ambient occlusion below:



Graphically, Assassin’s Creed Unity is gorgeous, but there are two visual issues readers will want to be aware of. First, there’s the pop-in. Games often make subtle use of pop-in to quickly load area data, but Unity will pop people into a scene directly in front of you. Streets that looked empty suddenly have 5-7 people walking in them as you approach. Texture details also tend to pop noticeably as you approach objects.

The other poor aspect of Assassin’s Creed Unity’s graphics is that they’re a mass of crawling, jagged lines. The game makes heavy use of two materials that are prone to substandard jagged rendering — foliage and wrought-iron fencing. This doesn’t make the game unplayable, but it means that heavy levels of antialiasing are typically required to clean the image up.

Nvidia’s TXAA method of antialiasing tends to do a good job cleaning up both jagged lines and texture shimmer, but while TXAA is supported in ACU, it’s not good enough to fix the problem altogether. In my personal opinion, 8x MSAA does a better overall job — but the performance hit from enabling it is enormous.


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Earlier this year, Samsung announced a brand new virtual reality headset, by the*Gear VR. Made in partnership with the team at Oculus VR, this clever headset uses a Galaxy Note 4 to power the virtual reality experience, and a bluetooth controller to navigate. The “Innovator Edition” is currently up for pre-registration, and you’ll be able to buy your very own in early December.

First and foremost, you’re going to need a Galaxy Note 4 to use this device. That’s a $700 smartphone, and even with a 2-year contract, it still costs $300. It’s cheaper than buying a gaming PC, but not by much. Once you have the device, you’re still going to need to drop $200 on the Gear VR headset itself. Need a Bluetooth gamepad? That’ll be another $50. This isn’t a minor*endeavor, but that’s the price of being an early adopter. There’s no promise that this platform will ever take off, so you need to know right now that buying this hardware is a risky gamble.



If you’re still interested in buying one of these headsets for yourself, you’ll need to head over to Samsung’s site, and pre-register. You won’t be able to buy right away, but you’ll be the first to know about any specific release and purchasing details.

If you’re interested in making your own VR games and apps for the Gear VR, Oculus has finally pushed out its mobile SDK on its developer site. This initial release comes with baked-in features like asynchronous time warping, direct front buffer rendering, and GPU context priorities. The Gear VR probably isn’t a wise investment for your typical consumer, but it’s a superb way for developers to get their hands on some reasonably priced portable VR hardware and a powerful toolset.
The future is looking bright for VR, and this headset is just one of many stepping stones to perfection. The Oculus Rift and Sony’s Project Morpheus are quickly propelling the medium forward, and smaller developers are constantly iterating on the concepts.

This generation of virtual reality is growing ever-closer, and it’s only a matter of time before it breaks into the mainstream in a major way. The tech sphere has been hearing about the Oculus Rift for years now, but now major companies like Facebook, Sony, and Samsung are betting heavily on this tech. Everything is coming to a head, and it’s looking like 2015 might be the year that these devices finally hit store shelves. Are you getting in on the ground floor, or are you waiting to see if the VR fad passes? Sound off in the comment section below this post.


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We don’t experience music solely with our ears — we have the capacity to sense it all over our bodies. Feeling the bass thud in your chest at a concert or at a movie theater is a vital part of the experience, and we often miss that in the home environment. So, what if you could get that same sensation while playing a PS4 game, or listening to an album on Spotify? That’s exactly what the Woojer is designed to do, and this tiny box effectively adds another layer of immersion. In fact, it might just be the next piece in the virtual reality puzzle.

Plug in your audio device over a standard 3.5mm jack, and the Woojer will send out strong vibrations that match the bass notes perfectly. By placing this device against your chest or the small of your back, these strategically placed vibrations supposedly trick your brain into feeling that your entire body is being surrounded with vibrations.*ExtremeTech’s very own Sebastian Anthony has tried out this device, and the results seem surprisingly positive. If you want to feel your music without investing in an elaborate sound system, this seems like the perfect solution.

Of course, the Woojer has a lot more potential than simply helping you pump up the jams wherever you go. This device can be used by the hearing impaired to sense and enjoy something that they normally wouldn’t be able to perceive. It’s certainly no replacement for cochlear implants, but it can serve as an incredible tool for the deaf and hard of hearing. I know that if I lost my hearing, I would do anything within my means to try to recreate the experience of music. Considering that the Woojer is only $99, this could open the door to music appreciation for millions of people.

As with just about every gadget these days, minds drift towards virtual reality. Sight and sound are already being handled decently with existing technology, but the other senses have largely been ignored. Last month, we covered a powered exoskeleton that adds a sense of touch to virtual worlds, and the Woojer seems like the perfect companion device. Standing next to a crumbling building in Call of Duty? Now you’ll actually be able to feel it shake your whole body.

If you’d like to buy a Woojer of your very own, you can order one directly from the Woojer website. One device will cost you $99, the “Woojer Extreme” two-pack will run you $179, and the official store promises that orders will be shipping out this month. The Woojer isn’t going to completely revolutionize the world of music or virtual reality, but it will make for one hell of a stocking stuffer.

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Nvidia has released the Game Ready 334.75 WHQL graphics driver, with optimized support for World of Warcraft’s latest Warlords of Draenor expansion, Far Cry 4, Dragon Age Inquisition, and The Crew. Alongside those new titles comes support for a new capability that Nvidia touted when it launched the Maxwell family: MFAA, or Multi-Frame Anti-Aliasing.

What is MFAA?

The term antialiasing refers to a wide range of rendering techniques designed to reduce the appearance of jagged, crawling lines on a moving render surface. There are multiple techniques to reduce the appearance of these visual artifacts, from rendering the scene internally at 2-4x the current resolution (supersampling), to sampling line edges and geometry but avoiding the need to sample textures multiple times (multisampling), to performing edge detection and smoothing in software without the need for sub-pixel sampling (Fast Approximate Antialiasing, or FXAA).

Each of these technologies comes with a performance tradeoff, and both AMD and Nvidia have experimented with implementing various types of filters, temporal antialiasing, and in Nvidia’s case, TXAA. MFAA is different from TXAA, in that TXAA requires the game developer to specifically implement the rendering method in each title and uses sample information from previous frames to create smoother output. It was explicitly designed to give game developers the ability to implement a more cinematic feeling to a title and is designed to improve on MSAA’s rendering without the performance hit of supersampling.



MFAA is similar to TXAA in that it also uses temporal sampling in its algorithm, but it doesn’t implement the same pixel-shader filters or require the same degree of engine integration. Nvidia is still working to add support for more games, but MFAA is currently available in 20 titles, including Assassin’s Creed Unity, Battlefield 4, Civilization 5, Civilization: Beyond Earth, Crysis 3, and Titanfall. We’ll be examining the just-released Assassin’s Creed Unity to see if MFAA can alleviate some of the frame rate problems we saw in that title with antialiasing enabled.

The goal of MFAA is to offer equivalent antialiasing at higher frame rates. So 4xMFAA would, ideally, take a 2x MSAA performance hit but offer 4xMSAA quality, if not a little higher.

One other feature we want to mention is that Maxwell’s MFAA supports a much larger set of sampling patterns than any previous Nvidia GPU. Some of you may recall that 5-6 years ago, it was possible to force GeForce cards of a certain vintage to use ordered-grid supersampling (OGSSAA) in certain titles. This type of supersampling carried an enormous performance hit and blurred the final image, but it could nearly eradicate jagged lines. Normally, GPUs have a pre-programmed series of sampling methods baked into ROM and there’s nothing the end-user can do to change them — if the GPU performs OGSSAA with a square pattern, that’s what you get.



Maxwell-class hardware (currently the GTX 980, GTX 970, and GTX 980M) store patterns in RAM and can vary them from frame to frame depending on on-screen activity. The result of this should be better antialiasing overall, at every quality level.


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There was a lot of hype surrounding the impending launch of Valve’s Steam Machine platform, but much of the excitement dissipated when the first wave of machines were delayed until 2015. Now, Alienware is going in alone, and shipping its own consolized gaming PC with an Xbox 360 controller and a custom 10-foot interface. It’s certainly an interesting gambit from Dell, but this offering is pretty weak. It’s not as flexible as a normal gaming PC, and it’s not as cheap as a PS4. The Alienware Alpha just seems stuck in an uncomfortable no man’s land.

At the very bottom end, you can snag an Alpha with a dual-core Intel Core i3-4130T CPU, an Nvidia GeForce GTX GPU with 2GB of GDDR5, 4GB of DDR3L RAM, and a 500GB hard drive for $549. On the other hand, the top-of-the-line $899 configuration gets you a quad-core Intel Core i7-4765T CPU, an Nvidia GeForce GTX GPU with 2GB of GDDR5, 8GB of DDR3L RAM, and a 2TB hard drive. All versions come with Windows 8.1, but you can always install SteamOS if that’s your bag.

The price is decent for what you get out of the box, but the extremely small case is going to limit your upgrade options. If you want to invest in a high-end graphics card at a later date, it probably won’t be able to fit. Frankly, if you want the full PC gaming experience, just buy a full tower. You’ll thank me later.



Additionally, it’s worth noting that some new games aren’t going to work with the lower priced models. Some of this year’s major releases like Assassin’s Creed Unity and Dragon Age: Inquisition require quad-core CPUs, and the paltry 4GB of RAM will likely be an issue as well. At a minimum, you’re going to need to invest in the $799 configuration to play those games. At that point, you’re spending twice the price of a PS4, so the value proposition is pretty awful.

If you’re a diehard PC gamer, you’re better off building your own rig. If you’re more concerned with price and simplicity, buy an Xbox One or PS4. As for this frankenconsole? I’d recommend staying away. The mediocre hardware and limited ability to upgrade sour this product, and makes the comparatively high asking price seem like a joke.

So, does this spell doom for the future of similar devices? It certainly doesn’t fill me with confidence, but I’ll hold off on making blanket judgments until we see what Valve and its hardware partners can deliver next year. Until then, I plan on sticking to my PS4.


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In a rather chilling case of dystopian sci-fi made real, some Canadians have created a modified Xbox gamepad that draws blood from your arm every time your in-game character takes damage. According to the gamepad’s creators, the idea is to hold “blood donation gaming events” — to bolster blood bank reserves (which are always in short supply), and also to make gamers “think about more important issues while still doing what they love.” While this is ostensibly a rather noble effort, it’s hard not to see this as the first step towards extreme gaming and e-sports where losers actually die in real life.
The system, which is rather scarily called Blood Sport, is fairly simple in its design. Basically, the creators found an old blood collection machine, and then connected its pump to an Xbox 360 gamepad via an Arduino microcontroller.

Every time the gamepad rumbles/vibrates, the Arduino tells the machine to draw some blood. The creators say their system should work with any console/gamepad that has the rumble feature, but they’ve only modified a single Xbox controller so far. Apparently the Arduino keeps track of how much blood has been drawn, so that no one dies.



Blood Sport – connecting the blood collection machine to the gamepad’s rumble/vibration mechanism

The next step, obviously, as it isn’t much fun to lose blood to an NPC, is to modify another gamepad and acquire another blood collection machine so that you can play against other people. Thus, Blood Sport turned to Kickstarter for funding. At the time of publishing, however, the project had been suspended — with no word from Kickstarter or the project owners as to why. Presumably it’s because Kickstarter simply found the idea a little bit squeamish — though I’m sure the site has crowdfunded lots of other weird projects over the years.

Here’s the promotional video for Blood Sport. It’s not particularly graphic, but if you’re not a fan of blood you may want to skip it.

So, for now, Blood Sport has been put on ice — but, fortunately (unfortunately?) such novel and convoluted ideas don’t just vanish. Now, for better or worse, the world is thinking about combining video games and blood collection. At the very least, such a system could be employed by real clinics to improve the allure of blood collection — speaking for myself, I would be much more inclined to donate blood if it involved fragging some Halo noobs.

Obviously, though, I think we should be much more interested in the potential for extreme and dangerous uses of the technology. There is a very, very fine line between charitable gaming and an e-sports tournament to the death. Imagine if the Arduino bugs out, and keeps drawing blood past the safety threshold. Or imagine an extreme e-sports league, where there is no safety threshold — where dying in Counter-Strike or Dota 2 actually hits you in real life, diminishing your abilities and increasing the likelihood that you’ll lose more and more blood until… well, you get the idea. Amusingly enough, maybe this would encourage gamers to physically exercise more, or to take a leaf out of other competitive sports and start using steroids and blood doping. (Or who knows, maybe e-sports professionals are already doing that?)



The future of e-sports?

I’m starting to get ahead of myself — but I think we can all agree that such a scenario, as worrying as it sounds, doesn’t seem too far beyond the realms of reality. Whether it’s VR, brain implants, bionic retinas, brain-computer interfaces (or even brain-to-brain telepathy), we are clearly moving towards a world where the once-clear divide between humans and their tools is blurred. Today it’s the merging of fun and games and drawing blood — tomorrow, it’s a generation of humans that have had an augmented reality device attached to their head since shortly after birth.


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