Gamer's Outpost Press (archived)

by Matthew Humphries via Geek

From launch day, the Xbox One has been carrying a performance deficit when compared to the PlayStation 4. Hardware choices made during the design stage by Microsoft meant a games console that can’t quite match Sony’s offering. Much has been done in the last two years by Microsoft’s engineers to try and close the gap, but it looks as though Sony is about to unlock more performance and pull further ahead.

Both the Xbox One and PS4 use an 8-core AMD processor, but initially two of those cores were reserved in either console for background operations and the operating system to function. In order to close the performance gap Microsoft unlocked more GPU bandwidth and the 7th core on the Xbox One late last year. While this did give developers more performance to use, it meant losing a few features including voice commands and disabling Kinect functionality.

Since then, the Xbox One performance has been closer to PS4, but still can’t match it in most games and games run at a lower resolution. The bad news for Microsoft is that Sony has quietly rolled out a new Software Development Kit (SDK) to developers and it does the same thing: unlocks that 7th processor core.

The impact of this change won’t be seen immediately, but games in development for Sony’s console right now should be able to take advantage of the extra performance this will offer. The end result seems inevitable: the PS4 will increase the performance gap to its rival.

The performance comparisons between the two machines won’t stop any time soon, and will happen every time a multi-platform release hits the shelves. There’s very little else Microsoft can do to close that gap, so it probably won’t be a major focus for them. Instead it’s the games that count, and in particular exclusive games. Not timed exclusives such as Tomb Raider, but Xbox-only releases if they can be secured.

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by Paul Tassi via Forbes

A long while back, fans speculated that Hideo Kojima had buried a secret inside Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain that was going to be almost impossible to trigger. Now, Konami has confirmed that all the fan theories were true, and the grand “nuclear disarmament” community event is actually for real.

What Kojima wants players to do is work together to disarm the entire Metal Gear Solid 5 multiplayer world from any and all nuclear devices. Nukes are powerful weapons in the game’s FOB mode, so sacrificing them gives up a lot of security for your base. The goal of the secret “event” is to get the number of nukes on each regional server to zero, either through convincing players to voluntarily scrap their own, or sneaking into rival bases and destroying the nukes for players who refuse to give them up.

And yes, it is really, really hard to ensure every single player in the game gives up the one of the game’s best weapons, so much so that it might actually be impossible. But Konami really, really wants players to complete it, hence why they’ve gone public with the secret, and now are posting daily updates about how many nukes are in the wild.

The overall trend shows that the numbers of nukes in the wild are dropping dramatically, especially over the past month:

* By November 1st

– PlayStation 4: 2761

– PlayStation 3: 1685

– Xbox One: 525

– Xbox 360: 1011

– PC(Steam): 36552

* By November 25th

– PlayStation 4: 352

– PlayStation 3: 250

– Xbox One: 96

– Xbox 360: 85

– PC(Steam): 15691

Big drops, right? Unfortunately, I believe that this is happening less because players are suddenly trying to give peace a chance, and more because they’re probably moving on from Metal Gear Solid’s (honestly not great) FOB mode to one of the zillion other huge games that came out in November. As such, it becomes a little easier for active players to invade bases and wipe out nukes when they’re not actually be defended or replenished anymore.

However, Konami has started publishing the totals for nukes every day now, and those numbers have been fluctuating a lot more now that Konami has revealed the secret is for real. Some platforms are down the past few days, while others are now up. Naturally, when something like this is confirmed, you will have die-hards trying to complete it, but you will also have players that don’t care in the least or purposefully try and ruin everyone’s fun by cranking out as many nukes as possible. World Peace trolling, if you will.

The problem with this event, other than the fact that it might be impossible, is that what it unlocks has probably already been discovered for months now. An eight minute-long cutscene that celebrates the end of all nukes has already been extracted from the game via datamining, and you’re free to watch it on YouTube below:

Players think that nothing else will be unlocked besides this cutscene. The hopeful think that somehow an entirely new chapter of the game is hidden away, which could hopefully clear up the game’s ridiculously abrupt ending, but it would seem insane to hide something that important behind a close to impossible task. But this is Hideo Kojima, so who knows.

Kojima clearly is trying to make a point about the nuclear arms race, but it’s not clear on if he’s saying it is possible to all lay down our WMDs, or by making this event so hard to trigger, he’s showing how impossible the idea is.

I think this is a pretty cool secret, but one I’m not sure if the community will ever unlock unless the entire fanbase loses interest in the game entirely and the last few remaining players sneak around to eliminate nukes. Otherwise, some hearts and minds will never be changed, and there will always be one more nuke left to ruin things. But if all it unlocks is a cutscene everyone has been able to watch for months, I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. There’s only one way to find out, though.

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Games retailer scolds Star Wars: Battlefront sales, then abruptly changes tone.

by Chris Morris via Fortune

Earnings conference calls don’t typically have a lot of drama. There might be a surprise or two in sales forecasts or maybe news of an unannounced product will slip out of an executive’s mouth, but real drama? It’s rare.

But GameStop GME 0.80% turned heads Monday, as it seemingly took issue with its partner Electronic Arts EA -2.78% , then quickly reversed course before the call ended. And analysts are still trying to figure out what it all means.

Third-quarter results for the video game retailer were lower than expected, as both software and hardware sales slowed down and new store openings were delayed. But GameStop officials specifically pointed to EA’s Star Wars Battlefront as one of the chief sources of weakness.

“We’re not going to quantify it in actual number, [but] we had high expectations that diminished somewhat as it got closer, and then it failed to hit those lowered expectations,” said Tony Bartel, chief operating officer of GameStop. The company went on to say it did not think digital downloads of the game were the reason for the lower than expected sales.

By the end of the call, though, Robert Lloyd, GameStop’s CFO, was singing the game’s praises, saying “We expectStar Wars to be one of the strongest titles for the holiday season.”

Analysts say it’s unusual to see a company make such a drastic shift in tone during a call—and aren’t sure what prompted it.

“It was really quite strange to hear GameStop management change tone over the course of less than one hour during its conference call,” says Ben Schachter of Macquarie Capital. “Management seemed to tone down the negative talk onStar Wars as the call progressed. Perhaps EA management reached out during the call with some comments of their own to GameStop, or perhaps GameStop wanted to remind EA that GameStop commentary to the market does matter and that EA and others should remember that as they talk about digital in their own commentary.”

(EA shares fell more than 7.5% after the GameStop conference call, rebounding slightly before trading ended Monday.)

GameStop officials, however, did note that Battlefront‘s underwhelming sales could be tied to the leak of its ownBlack Friday ad. (The company will offer $30 off select EA games with the purchase of Battlefront.)

And analysts Fortune spoke with say they have not adjusted their quarterly sales expectations for the game.

“It’s hard to gauge the potential of a mass market game like this in the first week or two,” says John Taylor, managing director of Arcadia Investment. Corp. “This is the number one candidate for gift purchases in December.”

Benchmark analyst Mike Hickey agreed, saying he remains “confident in EA’s ability to appropriately forecast sales performance, and believe[s] the upcoming movie and related digital content should drive sales of the game.”

GameStop has always had a curious relationship with its publishing partners, though. The company’s sale of used games has always rubbed game makers the wrong way, since they see no financial benefits from the practice. EA led the fight to monetize used game sales in 2010 with “Project Ten Dollar,” which required second-hand players to pay a $10 premium to the publisher to re-activate a game. Other publishers emulated this model, but all (including EA) have since abandoned it.

Today, many of those same publishers are promoting their own digital download services, luring people to bypass physical software—and the stores that sell it. And Monday’s call might have been GameStop’s way to begin fighting back.

“There is no question there is some friction between GameStop and publishers—particularly over publisher’s efforts to build direct to consumer businesses,” says Taylor. “Everybody is trying to do it. EA’s EA Access program probably is as visible as anybody. It wouldn’t surprise me if there weren’t some discussions going on behind the scenes and some of that spilled over [during the call].”

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by David Murphy via PC Mag

One of the Xbox One’s best new features is the ability to hook up a controller to your Windows 10-based PC and stream your Xbox One’s screen to that PC. Use that controller to play games that look just as good as if you were sitting in front of your living room TV, an especially useful feature if you have roommates who tend to hog your primary TV.

Sadly, Sony’s PlayStation 4 doesn’t have a feature like this. However, a third-party developer plans to launch a workaround on Wednesday, which will make it a reality. Remote Play PC will be a native Windows application that lets you play PS4 games from a different room than your console.

“I’ve been working on this project mostly part time for over a year when the Android version was first released in October 2014. I’ve lost count the amount of hours I’ve put in over this time but I’ve enjoyed every moment working on this project which leads me onto my main point. I’d like to work on this project full time, adding features, getting it stable and porting it to other platforms which I know a lot of you want,” writes the app’s developer, Twisted.

“The only way to support this is to charge for the app, all my previous projects have been free and I don’t want to have to but sadly its [sic] the only way to support my living costs. On the plus side this means I have more time to work on the project and provide support to its users, something which I’ve been limited on in the past.”

It remains to be seen how long Remote Play PC will be live before Sony shuts it down or disables it (Sony doesn’t love tinkerers). Call us skeptical, but we can’t see Sony being too thrilled about the development—especially if the company is working on similar functionality, or wants to restrict its use to PlayStation Plus users as a way to entice gamers to sign up for the service.

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by Owen S. Good via Polygon

More people are playing Star Wars Battlefront on PlayStation 4 than on Windows PC and Xbox One combined, according to a third-party site that tracks server figures for noteworthy Electronic Arts games.

Over the past 24 hours, Star Wars Battlefront has seen a peak of 188,171 players concurrently online on PS4, says Player Stats Network, compared to 113,696 for Xbox One and 48,292 for Windows PC. The latter two figures combined are still more than 25,000 users short of the PS4 total.

The figures themselves could be attributable to any number of factors other than sales, but with publishers increasingly reluctant to disclose sales figures for anything other than obvious mega hits, it gives at least a partial picture of the relative sizes of a big-name shooter’s constituencies.

Electronic Arts senior executives have, over the past year, targeted 10 million and then 13 million units sold as makeable goals to investors. Those totals are over the lifespan of the release; Star Wars Battlefront launched on Tuesday, Nov. 17.

Player Stats Network says it pulls the statistics from EA’s servers themselves. “We don’t calculate anything ourselves; these are direct numbers for every platform,” it said to NeoGAF. The site has monitored traffic figures for games in the Battlefield and Need For Speed series in the past.

Our review of Star Wars Battlefront is here; we scored it an 8.0 and called it “a game of surprising complexity and anachronistic constraints.” But more than 300,000 players all online in the same hour is its own measure of acclaim, too.

by Zulai Serrano via iDigital Times

The ongoing Xbox One vs PS4 debate spilled into the Star Wars: Battlefront beta this week after a performance analysis for revealed the PS4 version’s resolution is better than the Xbox One version.

Digital Foundry (via Eurogamer) tested Star Wars: Battlefront beta on Xbox One and PS4. Turns out the Star Wars: Battlefront beta on the Xbox One is running at 720p while the PS4 is at 900p.

“Battlefront on Xbox One is fixed at 720p, meaning that it runs at 64 per cent of the PS4’s overall pixel count,” Digital Foundry wrote. “From an image quality perspective, the compromises are just as you’d expect; we see more aliased edges, and a higher level of shimmering on fine distant detail – particularly on Tatooine’s flag-lines. Added to that, there’s a softening to the picture as a whole – a result of a more drastic upscale, combined with a similar grade of post-process anti-aliasing to PS4.”

The lower resolution might put off Xbox One users who were thinking of purchasing the game, but that seems to be the only difference between Xbox One vs PS4 and PC versions. Digital Foundry reports the content for the Xbox One is “identical” to the PS4 and comparable to PC graphics. The game textures and overall quality looks the same for both consoles. Digital Foundry also touched on the fps performance for the PS4 and Xbox One.

“As a baseline we’re looking at a 60fps playback on Xbox One overall, but it’s fair to say drops are more intrusive and protracted than PS4’s once the engine is stressed,” Digital Foundry wrote. “Fortunately, smaller maps run a lot smoother, and we get a near perfect 60fps for Sullust’s 16-player games, and the Tatooine survival mode. Barring a few dropped frames here and there, Xbox One’s level of performance isn’t a distraction on these two at all.”

It’s important to note the tests were done on Star Wars: Battlefront beta. EA still has time to work on the resolution and frame rate issues before the game’s official release. Read more about Digital Foundry’s tests on the Star Wars: Battlefront beta here. Star Wars: Battlefront is slated to hit the PS4, Xbox One and PC on Nov. 17.