Game Tech News

Warcraft 3: Reforged hasn’t gotten any more popular in the days since its release. The clamor has gotten bad enough that Blizzard has reportedly begun giving instant refunds to players who want them.
That’s the word from Reddit user krOnicLTD, who received a refund within a minute after applying for one and posted the information (and a handy link) to the Blizzard site. If you’ve been unhappy with the game, you can ask for your money back, no questions asked. Frustration with the title has been high for a number of reasons, ranging from Blizzard’s aggressive copyright position on fan mods to the fact that the version of Warcraft 3: Reforged that the company ultimately shipped bears little resemblance to the game it promised it was making. Because both Reforged and Warcraft 3 Classic now share a mandatory front-end client, you can’t play WC3:C with its original set of capabilities as a separate title at all.

Blizzard has posted an update to its forums, giving fans an idea where the game is headed. There’s a bug currently causing colors and shading to look different than intended, which will be fixed in the coming days. Portrait animations and UI fixes will also be implemented. The lack of leaderboards and clans will be fixed in a future update. Features like the Reign of Chaos ruleset and tournaments will not be returning after having been removed in mid-2019.

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After years of struggling to make its game streaming service a reality, Nvidia finally launched GeForce Now earlier this month. One of Nvidia’s main selling points was that players would be able to bring the games they already owned to the service. However, there’s already a wrinkle in that plan. Nvidia announced via its GeForce Now forums that players are losing access to all Activision Blizzard games.

At launch, the Activision Blizzard was one of the game companies Nvidia called out by name with popular titles like Overwatch and Modern Warfare. Some gamers even purchased those titles from Activision Blizzard specifically to play on GeForce Now. It would appear Nvidia didn’t build any sort of guaranteed access into the deals it signed with game publishers, which could come back to bite it. At the same time, Blizzard has removed Warcraft 3: Reforged from AMD’s Raise the Game Radeon GPU Bundle. We don’t know if these moves are related, but the timing is suspect.

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Ever since Final Fantasy VII Remake was announced, fan enthusiasm and interest have run high. We’ve seen teasers and leaks for the game — impressive trailers and an entire suite of leaked demo music — but there’s always been the question of how well the game would actually play. It isn’t that hard to piece together good gameplay bits or CGI sequences, particularly when a remake has as much cultural cachet and nostalgia value as this game does. Now there’s a new demo available for the PS4 — and simultaneously, a number of publications have gotten hands-on time with the game and reported back with their own experiences.
The demo is available to anyone with a PS4, which means you can play through the opening chapter of the game and “the events of the iconic Make Reactor 1 bombing mission.” I’d be curious to know if this is a straight demo of the game or if it follows the convention of the actual demo Sony shipped for FF7 back in the day. For those of you who didn’t play it, the demo version of Final Fantasy VII that shipped on at least some discs gave you access to monster summons and abilities that you didn’t actually have at that point in the title when you played the game normally. The demo listing is here (no word on any PC version thus far, though we’ve gotten hints that there might be a PC version of FF7R on the way).

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Doom Eternal has taken a bit longer to materialize than we’d hoped it would, but developer id says the new game engine is a major leap forward. The new shooter will have more effects and crisper textures, and you’ll be able to render a lot more frames. Lead engine programmer Billy Kahn claims that Doom Eternal’s engine will support up to 1,000 frames per second. That’s more of a theoretical ceiling, though.

Doom Eternal picks up where the 2016 rebooted Doom leaves off. You are the iconic Doom Slayer, battling the forces of hell with all manner of awesome sci-fi weaponry. There will be more demon types in the new game, along with enhanced character upgrade mechanics. That’s all well and good, but Doom is about fast-paced hacking and blasting, and this game will be fast indeed.

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Electronic Arts has done plenty of things to draw the ire of gamers over the years, but remastering the original 1990s Command & Conquer games hopefully won’t be one of them. Some of the original developers got together in 2018 to announce a remastered Command & Conquer project, and EA has followed through. The Command & Conquer Remastered Collection launches on June 5 with numerous tweaks and enhancements for the modern age.

The Command & Conquer Remastered Collection focuses on the two iconic 90s titles: Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn (originally just known as Command & Conquer) and Command & Conquer: Red Alert. These games stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Warcraft and StarCraft to define the real-time strategy genre. While Blizzard’s franchises continued to grow in the 2000s and beyond, Command & Conquer was never the same after EA acquired the original developer (Westwood Studios) in 1998.

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The E3 game show — formally expected to be held from June 9-11, 2020 — has been canceled. The show drew some 66,000 thousand people to LA last year, including yours truly, but the show’s future had been on the chopping block since prominent sponsors started pulling out.

The announcement is at least well-timed, given that the WHO has now awarded pandemic status to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the illness known as Covid-19. According to StatMeds, there are basically two paths the virus could take.

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The continued spread of coronavirus has prompted many people to spend more time indoors, and what can one do while locked away from the world? If you said “play video games,” a lot of people agree with you. Steam reports this past weekend broke the record for active users at just a bit over 20 million.

Steam regularly breaks its own player records — every few months or once a year the service’s peak usage will inch upward just a bit more. Although, there’s usually something happening in the gaming world to precipitate the new milestone like a new game or one of Steam’s major sale events. This time, nothing like that was happening on Steam’s end.

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We were expecting to get more details about Microsoft’s next game console at the E3 show this spring, but organizers canceled the show as coronavirus continues to spread. Microsoft has decided to make its big announcement without a trade show backdrop. We now have the full, official specs for Microsoft’s Xbox Series X. Yes, it’s a beast, designed to target 4K resolution at 60fps, but it will be ready for a future of 8K and 120fps gameplay.

At the core of this new gaming machine is a custom AMD Zen2 CPU with eight cores, each clocked at 3.8GHz. The CPU uses a 7nm manufacturing process, and has a total of 16 logical threads. The 3.8GHz max speed is only available with SMT (hyperthreading in Intel lingo) disabled. Developers can choose to run with SMT at 3.6GHz on all cores. These clocks are locked and won’t vary based on thermal conditions. No surprise, there’s also an AMD GPU in the mix. The RDNA 2 GPU has 52 compute units, each clocked at 1.825GHz. That works out to 12 teraflops of graphical prowess. That’s just a bit more than the Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti, a powerful last-gen desktop graphics card that still holds its own. The RDNA 2 GPU also supports ray tracing for more realistic lighting. A 130mm fan at the top of the tower-like console keeps everything cool.

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Somehow our family became auto racing junkies. Watching F1 became a bonding experience, following a relative of ours who drives in IndyCar became a hobby, and the action of NASCAR wormed its way into our hearts. Even Formula E has grown on us. So when we were first encouraged to stay-at-home as much as possible we looked forward to watching racing as a way to break the monotony. At the time, it looked like racing might continue, minus local fans.

Except, of course, since then, actual auto racing has come to a complete standstill. In its place, its otherwise-second-class sibling of eSports has come to the rescue. Each of the major series has begun to ramp up its virtual racing efforts. We watched a number of the big-name versions over the weekend and found a wide variety of approaches and effectiveness.

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Once upon a time, Microsoft promised a truly impressive 4K overhaul for Minecraft and then canceled it. Shortly thereafter, Nvidia announced that it would create an RTX-powered version of Minecraft, delivering ray-traced visuals to Nvidia owners who own the Windows 10 version of the game and want to play it in this mode. Nvidia has just published some updated visuals for the game, along with asset packs intended to be used by modders and content creators to hit the ground running.
First, let’s look at some maps created by community members, as showcased by Nvidia. All captions by Nvidia.



Temples and Totems RTX. By: Razzleberries – An adventure world focusing players on exploring and completing challenges in mysterious temples. Each temple showcases per-pixel emissivity and real-time shadows, and leverages global illumination to create an immersive experience for players. (Caption: Nvidia)

Cristal Palace RTX. By: GeminiTay. A survival map with a whimsical fantasy theme, that features a masterfully built castle. Ray-traced shadows and beautiful atmospherics create realism in this world built on a 1:1 scale. (Caption: Nvidia)

Imagination Island RTX. By: BlockWorks. A fully explorable theme park, filled with easter eggs, that hosts four distinct lands, each dedicated to an element of real-time ray tracing. In this scene we see the visitor center of the park, highlighted by god rays cast in real-time through the windows, shining down onto the floor. (Caption: Nvidia)

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