Gamer's Outpost Press (Archived)

by Anthony McCartney

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani will defend Activision in court against a lawsuit filed by disgraced Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega over the “Call of Duty” franchise, the video game maker said Thursday.

Giuliani joined the legal team fighting Noriega’s lawsuit last month but had not been expected to argue the video game giant’s case at an Oct. 16 hearing.

Noriega sued Activision Blizzard Inc. in July over his inclusion in 2012’s “Call of Duty: Black Ops II.” The former military dictator did not authorize the use of his likeness in the game, but Activision contends its usage is protected by the First Amendment.

The ex-dictator sued, claiming the game maker depicted him as a killer and enemy of the state. The game features a story line in which players capture Noriega, who in turn helps the game’s villain.

Activision contends that Noriega plays a minor role in the game and his case should be dismissed.

“If successful, this case would obliterate the entire genre of historical fiction,” Giuliani wrote in a statement. “I couldn’t be more excited at the prospect of being back in court to defend the makers of Call of Duty against this convicted murderer who wants to make a mockery of the U.S. legal system and attack our right to free speech.”

Previous “Call of Duty” games have featured historical figures such as President John F. Kennedy and Fidel Castro.

In a sworn declaration, Noriega wrote that he learned his likeness had been used in the game after his grandchildren played it and asked why one of the missions focused on captured the ex-dictator.

Noriega’s lawyers argue that the First Amendment defense doesn’t apply because Activision copied the ex-dictator’s likeness without consent and did not transform his video game character into something different from his actual persona.

“Here, Activision painstakingly created a character in its ‘Black Ops II’ game that was nothing more than a conventional, high-tech recreation of General Manuel Noriega,” Noriega’s lawyers wrote in a filing earlier this month.

Noriega was toppled in 1989 by a U.S. invasion and served a 17-year drug trafficking sentence in the United States. He later was convicted in France of money laundering, and that country repatriated him to Panama in December 2011. Noriega, 80, is serving a 60-year sentence for murder, embezzlement and corruption.

He has had health issues in recent months and has been treated for high blood pressure, flu and bronchitis. His family also has said he has a benign brain tumor and heart trouble.

Giuliani, who led New York City’s government for two terms — including during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — is also a former U.S. attorney and sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. In private practice, Giuliani worked as a free speech lawyer, representing major news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the financial magazine Barron’s.

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by Paul Tassi

Despite the struggles of the Wii U, it’s hard to find anyone, fans or critics alike, who isn’t excited for this November’s Super Smash Bros. installment for Nintendo’s latest console. We’ve been hearing about the game for literally years at this point, and now that Nintendo has finally set a premiere date for it (November 21st), everyone can breathe easy about further delays (we hope).

But naturally, fans aren’t pleased with every bit of information that’s come out regarding the game. One frequent topic of conversation has been the usual addition of clones. In Smash Bros. for Wii U’s case, that includes Lucina, Dark Pit and Doctor Mario, who aren’t really new characters, but just alternate models for existing characters in the game with a few minor tweaks. Think Mario vs. Luigi in the original Super Smash 64. In fact, every Smash Bros. game has a few of these types of clones, but some fans are upset that more work wasn’t put in into making them fully-fledged characters.

Smash Bros. director Mashiro Sakurai explained a bit about why and how clones exist when speaking to Famitsu with translation from Nintendo Everything:

“There are 3 fighters [Lucina, Dark Pit, and Doctor Mario] that are alternate models (clones) in the game. Each was originally a color variation, but during development, they were given balanced characteristics. Since their functionality had differences, forms were separated from each other. However, it was vital that this didn’t increase the required man-hours. Some relative tuning was sufficient as it wasn’t necessary to create balancing from scratch.”

Seems logical, but Sakurai goes on to appear downright offended at the implication that fans “deserve” more from him and his team in terms of making these clones into more involved characters.

“This is like a free dessert after a luxurious meal that was prepared free of charge. In a restaurant with this type of service, I don’t think there’s anybody who would say, “Change this to a meat dish!!” Yet, I’m told [to do that] about Smash Bros. But, I guess since a lot of them are children, it cannot be helped.”

Ouch. Perhaps this is one of those times where translation makes a statement sound more blunt than it is, but those are some pretty harsh words for his critics. I’m not sure if he genuinely believes that children are the ones complaining about these kinds of things, but I think most of us in the gaming space know that grown adults throw plenty of tantrums about their favorite games, depending on the topic at hand. I have to imagine that’s the case here as well, in addition to any actual children who may be complaining.

While I understand why fans may want more unique characters in the game, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is hardly lacking for fighters, and boasts a beefy roster, whether you include the clones or not. Here, Sakurai is essentially saying “You get clones or nothing” with these characters, and I can’t say that’s an incorrect stance to take. Would you want Smash delayed to 2015 so these three clones can become a bit more fleshed out? Because I certainly wouldn’t.

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by Emily Gera

Actress Lindsay Lohan continues her lawsuit against Grand Theft Auto 5 makers Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games with a new 67-page complaint against the companies for allegedly using her likeness in the open-world video game, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The new complaint features 45 pages of pictorial evidence, including one of the game discs that features the image of a blonde, bikini-laden woman. According to the text, the suit emphasizes a “common interest among all celebrities, actors, singers, and athletes … to protect their likeness and personas from misappropriation by unscrupulous merchandisers.”

The filing also alleges that Take-Two Interactive used this female character on merchandise and advertising: “The Defendants were in the business of selling games as opposed to artists displaying artwork in galleries for profit where unauthorized images or portraits of individuals were reproduced in limited editions as opposed to the mass production for commercial promotion and financial gain.”

The Associated Press reported earlier this year that Lohan’s legal team filed a lawsuit in a Manhattan court that alleges Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games based GTA 5 character Lacey Jonas on the actress, who has starred in Herbie Fully Loaded and The Canyons.

The developer “incorporated her image, likeness, clothing, outfits, [Lohan’s] clothing line products, ensemble in the form of hats, hair style, sunglasses” and the jean shorts worn by Lohan without her permission, according to the complaint.

The suit also alleges that the in-game hotel Gentry Manor, based on West Hollywood hotel Chateau Marmont, is associated with Lohan, as she formerly resided there.

In Grand Theft Auto 5, players can encounter Lacey Jonas in a mission in which they must escort her to escape the paparazzi. Her in-game dialogue portrays her as a famous Vinewood actress with an eating disorder. You can see what she looks like in the image at the top of the page.

Lawyers for Take Two had previously claimed the lawsuit filed by Lohan was done “for publicity purposes.”

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by ‘James’

Ubisoft has issued a response to the recent concerns surrounding the “parity” the studio has made for their upcoming game, Assassin’s Creed Unity.

Vincent Pontbriand, the mind who started this whole commotion by stating they shot for parity between the two consoles to avoid any “debates and stuff” was the first to issue a response. Pontbriand stated that they would “absolutely not” lower the resolution for the PS4 version, something they’ve been working on for four years.

Like before, Pontbriand cites Unity’s massive crowds and the detail Ubisoft has put into Paris as the reasons both versions are 900p/30fps:

“We realize we had also pushed for 1080p in some of our previous games, including AC4. But we made the right decision to focus our resources on delivering the best gameplay experience, and resolution is just one factor. There is a real cost to all those NPCs, to all the details in the city, to all the systems working together, and to the seamless co-op gameplay. We wanted to be absolutely uncompromising when it comes to the overall gameplay experience. Those additional pixels could only come at a cost to the gameplay.”

Assassin’s Creed Unity will be available on the PS4 and Xbox One on November 11th.

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by Giuseppe Nelva

Microsoft’s Xbox Division head honcho Phil Spencer was interviewed by the good folks at The Inner Circle podcast, and he had a lot to say about the future of Xbox One, starting with the promise that he’s listening to feedback on Backwards Compatibility:

“Back compat is always a hot topic at the turn of a generation, and I get why, especially on 360 so many people bought so much digital content and it means that a lot of us are holding on to our 360s. I get the question. I totally respect the question. There’s nothing I can say now, but I’ll just say “I hear you.” I definitely hear you and I’ll continue to try to work to build something that can help people out.”

He then moved on to talk about the cloud, explaining what we can expect from the technology as it gets gradually adopted by developers and admitting that communicating it better with gamers may be a good idea:

“On cloud, and I don’t know, people always make fun of me when I say cloud, I need to come up with another word (laughs). Just like with dedicated servers and people playing multiplayer, but people don’t think of that as cloud because everybody does it, and I get that, but I think I looked at a stat the other day, and I bet it’s gonna be 34 to 40% of the games live this holidays are gonna be using the cloud technology that we put out in some way.”

“When you look at something like crackdown, you’re picking up something that’s trying to jump a leap ahead and do some things that people haven’t done before. Titanfall did some of this with the AI stuff that they did. […] Halo 5 is gonna be something that’s obviously making use of the technology.”

“In any kind of these technologies, you kind of do a little on the technology platform side, then you get some studio to try to use the tech, they tell you what’s working and what’s not working, the platform makes more progress, and you kinda iterate over time. […] Definitely from first party and third party we’re seeing more and more people look at the technology that we’re putting out there and use it. Maybe we should think about how to talk about it with consumers better.”

Finally, he gave a very straightforward answer on DirectX 12, that some touted as some miracle tech that somehow doubled the power of the Xbox One’s GPU, a view that Spencer doesn’t hesitate to curb with refreshing honesty:

“On the DX12 question, I was asked early on by people if DX12 is gonna dramatically change the graphics capabilities of Xbox One and I said it wouldn’t. I’m not trying to rain on anybody’s parade, but the CPU, GPU and memory that are on Xbox One don’t change when you go to DX12. DX12 makes it easier to do some of the things that Xbox One’s good at, which will be nice and you’ll see improvement in games that use DX12, but people ask me if it’s gonna be dramatic and I think I answered no at the time and I’ll say the same thing.”

Yet, Spencer explained that it’ll ease development especially for those working on both PC and Xbox One, since the API will make using the hardware on both platforms easier. He also mentioned that developers will get better at using DirectX 12 over time, and we’ll see a continuous increase in the fidelity of the games like it happened with Xbox 360.

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by Chris Reed

It’s a rare game these days that offers a high level of challenge. Most popular games are carefully play-tested and tweaked to offer a gentle difficulty curve. It makes sense: if you spent years making a game, wouldn’t you want as many people as possible to experience the entire thing from start to finish?

That said, when a game comes along that uses exceptional difficulty in a smart way, it can give players a truly rewarding experience. To beat these games, you must pay attention, learn and adapt, and you can’t give up. But when you succeed? Oh man, it feels good. It feels like you’ve accomplished something — because you have.

Below is a list of some of the best challenging games that are worth the effort. These are games that pull no punches and give no quarter. They’re also games that give you a feeling of deep satisfaction when you finally do beat them.

Dark Souls (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC)

The Souls series — which encompasses Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls 2, with Bloodborne coming next year — is far and away the highest profile set of games that fit the bill of being super challenging, but worth the effort. Just the fact that these games keep coming out is proof that a substantial number of gamers crave the kind of challenge they deliver.

For my money, the original Dark Souls is the best game in the series. It’s better balanced and easier to wrap your head around than Demon’s Souls. It’s also a little better designed than its sequel. If you’re not sure if you’re up to the task, feel free to use the guides and hints you can find online. There’s no shame in that, and they’re likely to save you a lot of time and frustration as you acclimate to the series. If you find that you enjoy the game, try playing another entry in the series without assistance.

Super Meat Boy (Xbox 360, PC)

Once you get past the fact that the main character is a squishy hunk of raw meat, you’ll find Super Meat Boy to be a surprisingly fresh take on the platforming genre. There’s no real gimmick to the gameplay here, so you’ll spend all your time running and jumping to get from point A to point B. The only problem is that deadly obstacles are everywhere. Depending on what level you’re in, these may come in the form of saw blades, enemies, or piles of salt — all of which kill you in a single hit.

This might be frustrating if not for the game’s brilliant design. Meat Boy has the perfect amount of inertia, making the controls incredibly tight. When you die (and you will die a lot), you respawn instantly at the beginning of the level, ready to try again. There’s very little punishment for your failure, which makes you always want to give the tough parts another shot.

1001 Spikes (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Wii U, PS Vita, Nintendo 3DS, PC)

Another game that’s designed to kill you at every turn is 1001 Spikes, a side-scrolling platformer with a very different feel from Suer Meat Boy. While all of the games on this list demand technical proficiency, 1001 Spikes requires you to play each level again and again, sussing out exactly where the danger will come from. Platforms crumble beneath your feet, spikes pop up in the most unlikely of places, and rocks plummet from the sky without any warning whatsoever.

There’s really no way to complete these levels without a lot of trial and error. That may put some people off, but if you don’t mind throwing yourself at a problem again and again, crossing the finish line can give you an exhilarating rush. No matter how good you are, there’s no way you can know where death lurks until you die.

Splunky (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PS Vita, PC)

Before we talk about Spelunky, we have to talk about roguelikes. A roguelike is a game with randomly generated levels and something called “perma-death.” That means when you die, you lose all the progress you’ve made, and start back at the very beginning. The name “roguelike” comes from Rogue, the 1980 computer game that’s credited with kicking the genre off.

Spelunky is a roguelike. It’s a side-scrolling platformer made up of randomly generated levels, which means no two play-throughs will be exactly the same. The thing is, it’s a long game that takes several hours to complete, so when you die and have to restart from the beginning, it can be a little disheartening (to put it mildly). But for all you lose, you also learn a lot with every play-through. Most people who see Spelunky through to the end spend weeks or months playing before they have a chance to fight the final boss. But by the time you do, no one can say you haven’t earned it.

Hotline Miami (PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 3, PC)

Some games have brutal difficulty, while others have brutal violence. Hotline Miami has both. This game is retro in just about every sense of the word. It has an 8-bit aesthetic (in fact, it’s kind of ugly), and a difficulty level that may make you throw your controller across the room. Thankfully, it also has a forgiving checkpoint system, so you never lose too much progress when you get one-hit killed.

In Hotline Miami you play as a hitman who receives mysterious phone calls, telling you where to go and who to kill. When you get to the location, without fail, it’s a building that’s crawling with bad guys. You can scope out the level, plan your attack, and then attempt your killing spree. It almost never works out the first time you try (or the first 12 times), but once you start, this is a game you’ll want to see through to the end.

Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze (Wii U)

It’s weird to think of a Donkey Kong game as being challenging. He’s so cute and lovable! He’s a cartoon gorilla, for crying out loud! Those things are true, but it’s also true that the levels in this game are designed to kill you. Despite its kid-friendly looks, this is no kiddie game.

The levels in this game are incredibly dynamic, with all kinds of moving parts that can snuff out your life in the blink of an eye. Misjudge a jump or a cannon shot, or simply bump into a deviously placed enemy, and it’s game over. But for all its difficulty, this really is a brilliantly designed game. Each level introduces new ideas that are a blast to experience — even if you die so many times you end up experiencing them over and over.

VVVVVV (PC, Nintendo 3DS, iOS)

Another retro-style platformer is VVVVVV (that’s six Vs, for those counting at home). In this game, you can move left and right as usual, but when it comes to jumping, things get a little wonky. Instead of being able to do normal jumps, in this game you actually flip gravity, so your feet will leave the ground and you’ll go sailing toward the ceiling, where you can run around until you flip gravity again to come back down.

It’s a great idea, and the controls respond as quickly as you can push the buttons. However, flipping gravity doesn’t come natural to us humans, so expect to strain your brain as you try to navigate between fast-moving enemies and avoid spikes at the same time. (Spikes are everywhere in this game.) Again: a forgiving checkpoint system is in place to save you too much trouble when you die. But this is a game of reflexes, and you’ll be surprised by how quickly you can pass through environments you would have thought impossible just a few minutes ago.

Cloudberry Kingdom (Wii U, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC)

This tough-as-nails game is also a side-scrolling platformer. (Are we seeing a pattern here? Yes we are.) The levels are randomly generated, but they’re always beatable in the sense that it’s technically possible to beat them. Whether you’re able to do so or not is a matter of skill and luck.

The game doesn’t start out so hard, but as you progress more and more, swinging maces and rotating fire rods populate the levels. Then come the lasers, spike pistons, collapsing platforms, and lava columns. By the end, the majority of the screen is taken up by traps and enemies, and it’s all you can do to survive a few seconds at a time. Thankfully, the game has infinite continues and quick respawns.

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by William Usher

Back in June, it was originally confirmed by Insomniac Studios that Sunset Overdrive was going to be 900p at 30 frames per second. Some gamers thought that since the game was in beta and still had a few months to go before release that maybe Insomniac Games would boost up the resolution or frame-rate before release. Well, that’s not going to happen.

In an interview with IGN at the EGX convention, Insomniac Games president Ted Price basically whipped out the news that even with Microsoft giving back 10% of system performance to developers with the option to disable Kinect 2.0’s skeletal tracking, Sunset Overdrive won’t be running above 900p or 30 frames per second.

Price stated that…

“What happened for developers not using the Kinect is that there was a slight boost in CPU power that we got to take advantage of. This game really does push the limits when it comes to the number of enemies on screen, so it was useful for us to have more CPU juice to help with physics, navigation and AI. We’re running at 900p and 30 fps native. This is a game with a lot on the screen and we made the choice to be at 900 because we wanted to push the level of detail, action, the size of the city and the views you can experience as move around. What’s great about Sunset Overdrive is if you can see it, you can go there.”

Anyone who had hoped that optimizations would boost up the resolution or frame-rate within the last few months leading up to Sunset Overdrive’s release at the end of October must feel sorely disappointed.

The reality is that the Xbox One seems to show a bit of its peaking with some titles early on as far as resolution and frame-rate go. I know some people were hoping for more following the XDK update in June, but as director of development of Xbox software engineering, Kareem Choudhry, mentioned in an article on Winsupersite, the optimization for the removal of Kinect’s skeletal tracking was only going to have minimal effects on most titles, saying…

“Previously, 10 percent of the GPU was reserved for system level processing which included Kinect-related skeletal tracking data,” …. “With this change, titles that are not using skeletal tracking with Kinect can choose to use that portion of the system reserve for other purposes.”

In the case of Sunset Overdrive the June XDK update only afforded Insomniac Games an upgrade in the way the game’s core systems performed, as opposed to opening up leeway to expand the specifications of the title.

The likelihood of the Xbox One’s lifespan is that it will nestle in at 900p for most larger titles, and it will hit 1080p for linear or less resource-heavy games. As for the frame-rate… I think stability in frame refresh is more important than resolution in the long run, and hopefully there will be a moderate compromise insofar that we won’t be seeing games drop below 30fps as often as we did during the PS3 and Xbox 360 era, where 20fps was a common occurrence for a lot of triple-A titles such as Sleeping Dogs and Grand Theft Auto V.

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by Alex Co

Possibly one of the biggest PlayStation 4-exclusive games to come early next year is Bloodborne, and with good reason; given From Software’s excellent work on the Dark Souls franchise.

Speaking to PlayStation LifeStyle in an interview at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, we asked Bloodborne Director Hidetaka Miyazaki why the action RPG is a PS4-exclusive and here’s what he said:

I always wanted to make a game set in the Victorian era, but to make it look good — with all the clothing and the architecture and things — required a console more powerful than the ones that were around. the arrival of the PS4 finally gave us that. Bloodborne isn’t a game that could have been cross-generation, it was only possible on PS4.

Bloodborne will be out on February 6, 2015 exclusively for the PS4.

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by Ben Kuchera

Blizzard has canceled one of the largest, most ambitious games it ever tried to create. At least, it might have been. No one knew that much about it. And now it’s dead.

The quotes from the company about the decision are hard to read. The work and the budget that went into Titan have now been sunk, although it’s likely some of the ideas and technology behind the game will aid Blizzard in some way. It’s rare that these things are a total loss, although this means that there are likely people who have put the better part of a decade into a game that will never see the light of day.

But this move signals a new direction for the company, and the industry is bound to pay attention.

“I wouldn’t say no to ever doing an MMO again,” Blizzard co-founder and CEO Mike Morhaime told Polygon. “But I can say that right now, that’s not where we want to be spending our time.”

Why would anyone?

The changing of the guard

World of Warcraft has long been one of the most popular, and profitable, games in the business, but things are changing. It’s not just that it’s going to become harder to hang onto players. The fact is that there has yet to be an MMO that has remained profitable, or has kept its subscription fee, in quite some time.

It’s a space filled with battered wrecks of games that have been forced to move to a free-to-play model, and it’s unlikely that any of these titles will ever come close to World of Warcraft now from a business perspective, much less the numbers the game enjoyed at its height. Taking another run at that hill would require a huge investment, and a very special product. And Blizzard didn’t feel Titan would have been that game.

“We took a step back and realized that it had some cool hooks. It definitely had some merit as a big, broad idea, but it didn’t come together. It did not distill,” Chris Metzen, Blizzard’s senior vice president of story and franchise development, told Polygon. “The music did not flow. For all our good intentions and our experience and the pure craftsmanship that we brought together, we had to make that call.”

Blizzard didn’t feel Titan would have been that game

Being able to make that call at all is one of the most telling examples of Blizzard’s power in the video game world. In nearly every other situation, with this much time and money riding on the seven years the game had been in development, the publisher would likely have forced some kind of product to be released.

Blizzard was given the privilege of taking its own dog behind the shed to put it down, which is an odd way for a company to show its muscle. But make no mistake that this is a company flexing its ability to react to the market and only release the games it’s completely sure of.

It’s unlikely that we’ll see another company create the kind of MMO we’re used to seeing from companies like Blizzard, and instead the sort of “always-online but please don’t call it an MMO” class of games like Titanfall and Destiny are bound to take over. Blizzard is moving into other areas with the upcoming Heroes of the Storm, a clear shot at the monstrous MOBA market, and Hearthstone, a trading card game that has become a massive success.

The puck had disappeared

This is how Blizzard works: They follow the crowd, but the company is talented and clever enough that it has always been able to make the definitive version of the game they’re trying to emulate.

“Let’s take a game that we all love playing, do what we want to do to make it ours, just like we’ve done with every single game from the past. Vikings was Lemmings. Rock and Roll Racing, name any of those car games out there. Warcraft came from Dune, so it’s the same thing with Heroes of the Storm,” Sam Didier, a senior art director at Blizzard told me when discussing Heroes of the Storm.

“It’s like, we take a game that we like and then we make our version of it. If we like it, it turns out that people like it as well.”

During the course of Titan, it sounds like Blizzard lost that path, and even worse they were no longer skating towards where the puck would be in a few years. The puck had disappeared. Blizzard was chasing its own tail, and may have been inspired by its own success with a previous product rather than anything that ignited the company’s imagination.

Killing the game now, and still having two of the most promising titles in active development in Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm, not to mention the still-popular World of Warcraft, shows the power and might of Blizzard, and it may be a situation where a failed project makes them one of the more admired developers in the business.

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by William Usher

The resolution disparity continues on as the Xbox One and PS4 face off over the latest high-end eighth generation exclusive, Lords of the Fallen. The game is a Dark Souls-style hack-and-slash, action-adventure that focuses a lot on the strategy and skill of combat rather than just relying on rapid button mashing. It’s been revealed, however, that Lords of the Fallen won’t be running at native 1080p on the Xbox One.

Videogamer managed to get in word with Lords of the Fallen creative director Tomasz Gop, who talked to them about the spec performance of the upcoming game for the eighth generation home consoles.

According to Gop…

[They’re] “pretty much similar,” [but] “probably the resolution [on Xbox One] is like 900p instead of 1080p on PlayStation 4. But apart from that there’s nothing different I would say.”

Lords of the Fallen hasn’t been spread across the gaming news-wire quite in the same way as other titles, but it’s one of the few games coming out this fall that I’m thoroughly excited for.

Even though the game is still within the Dark Souls-clone arena, it manages to separate itself by focusing heavily on how combat plays out. For instance, enemies using shields require weapons that hook around or deflect the shield in order to get an attack in on the body of the enemy. Additionally, weapon weight and swing/strike/slash attacks alter how the player-character or enemies react to said attacks, opening them up for more devastating blows, combos or counter-hits. It’s an extremely tactical game that slows the combat down so players will have to think about how they engage rather than just engaging for the sake of it. Hit-spam combos from games like Dynasty Warriors are no where to be found in Lords of the Fallen.

As for the resolution disparity… it’s to be expected and it’s an expectation that we’ll likely see grow as the generation wears on. Software optimization can’t fix hardware limitations.

It’s been brought up many times previously that the Xbox One had problems hitting 1080p, and unless a game is specifically designed around certain architectural designs of Microsoft’s console, it’s likely to continue to running into problems rendering games above 900p.

However, this doesn’t mean that gamers can’t have fun with the game. If you don’t mind a slightly lower resolution then you might be find with paying the same amount for a game that renders 633,000 pixels less than the competition.

Of course, let be known that even some games on PC have a tough time maintaining native 1920 x 1080 full HD resolutions with the graphics maxed out, as evidenced in the performance analysis of the Asus ROG GL551JM. You sometimes have to give and take with these things.

As for Lords of the Fallen… the game is scheduled to release soon, and Gop mentioned that the title has already been certified and they’re just brushing up some bug fixes and glitches before release…

“It’s really, really close [to completion],” … “Pretty much the only thing that we’re doing is last minute fixes, but we’ve already been certified. We’re already past the US certification for PlayStation.”

The game is due to drop on October 31st for Xbox One, PS4 and PC.

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