First-Person Shooters

Source: Blue’s News

The Rainbow Six website announces Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege is now available, offering the chance to siege the day with the latest installment in the tactical shooter series. The GeForce website offers a Graphics & Performance Guide on how to get the best visuals for the game on their hardware. The game is available on Steam and Steam announces that if you buy the game there before December 14th you get a free copy of Rainbow Six Vegas 1. This offering is being applied retroactively to all who preordered the game as well. Here’s the description of the game:

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege invites players to master the art of destruction. Intense close quarters confrontations, high lethality, tactics, team play, and explosive action are at the center of the experience. The gameplay sets a new bar for intense firefights and expert strategy in the rich legacy of past Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six games.

Key Features
THE SIEGE GAMEPLAY
For the first time in Rainbow Six, players will engage in sieges, a brand-new style of assault. Enemies now have the means to transform their environments into strongholds: they can trap, fortify, and create defensive systems to prevent breach by Rainbow teams.

To face this challenge, players have a level of freedom unrivaled by any previous Rainbow Six game. Combining tactical maps, observation drones, and a new rappel system, Rainbow teams have more options than ever before to plan, attack, and diffuse these situations.

Square Enix and Avalanche Studios are proud and excited to announce that Just Cause 3 is out now!

The Mediterranean republic of Medici is suffering under the brutal control of General Di Ravello, a dictator with an insatiable appetite for power. Enter Rico Rodriguez, a man on a mission to destroy the General’s hold on power by any means necessary. With over 400 square miles of complete freedom from sky to seabed and a huge arsenal of weaponry, gadgets and vehicles, Just Cause 3 allows you to unleash chaos in the most creative and explosive ways imaginable.

Check out the game in action in the Just Cause 3 “Kasabian” trailer here.

The Just Cause 3 launch trailer can be viewed here.

More game information available at the Just Cause 3 website.

The final video in the Just Cause 3 Developer Diary series takes a look at the technology behind the game: the Avalanche Engine. Talking about the combination of mechanics the engine allows for, procedural destruction models and enemy AI behaviors, the final video is a fantastic insight into how the Avalanche Studios team has brought Just Cause 3 to life.

Square Enix and Avalanche Studios are excited to broadcast the first hour of gameplay from Just Cause 3. With a game world as vast, varied and as open as Medici – with its 400 square miles of beautiful beaches, towering mountain peaks and Mediterranean inspired towns – your first hour of play might be wildly different to ours. That said, we thought we’d focus on some of the early missions and content to whet your appetite ahead of next week’s launch.

More game information available at the Just Cause 3 website.

Source: UbiBlog

Rainbow Six: Siege is almost here, but before it launches, the developers want to give everyone one more chance to try it out. That’s why they will be running an Open Beta on all platforms from November 25 through November 29. This is your opportunity to hop in, play with the operators, check out a few of the maps and modes on offer, and help the developers run one last stress test before the game officially launches on December 1 on PC, PS4 and Xbox One.

Because of the Open Beta, all players will be able to pre-load the game on November 23, and those who participated in the Closed Beta in September will be able to jump into the Open Beta a day early (on November 24). During the Open Beta, you’ll have access to 14 operators (out of the 20 that will be available at launch), including 3 of the Russian Spetsnaz operators you may have seen during the Closed Beta – Glaz, Tachanka and Kapkan.

Read on…

Avalanche Studios have been busy squeezing every last drop of power out of their proprietary engine for the upcoming release of Just Cause 3 on December 1st. The game can be seen firing on all cylinders, with all settings turned to overkill in this video running at a 4K resolution.

More game information available at the Just Cause 3 website.

Source: Blue’s News

EA’s Battlelog has details on Battlefield 4: Legacy Operations, a free DLC pack coming soon to Battlefield 4 for Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. At the center of the release is Dragon Valley 2015, an updated version of the Dragon Valley map from Battlefield 2, saying this “opens up for vehicular mayhem on land, air, and sea, with a massive number of flags, and destructible and repairable bridges.” This trailer shows off some play testing of the map, and here’s a bit on how the original had to be changed:

If you played Battlefield 2, you likely remember the map – it was huge, with a massive number of flags, and destructible and repairable bridges. Our goal for this map is to make a great, large vehicle map for Battlefield 4 but at the same time modernize the original where appropriate.

Some things had to change when reimagining the map. Battlefield 2 featured a poor draw distance (how far you can see in the game world) by today’s standards, and the original map was built around those limitations. We tackled this in several ways: first we increased the terrain verticality to closer mimic a real life Chinese river valley – and to give us more terrain occlusion for long distances, especially on the central island. We also added a dynamic cloud layer, which not only adds a welcomed air-to-ground separation in terms of gameplay, but also helps shroud far distances at ground level. This has the added bonus effect of allowing you to have intense aerial firefights above the cloud level, which looks really, really cool in Battlefield 4.

By Alex Osborn, IGN 

Call of Duty: Black Ops III released today across an array of different platforms, and it looks like PC gamers are getting the short end of the stick.

Many who picked up the game for Windows are having major issues with Treyarch’s new shooter, citing unacceptably low frame rates and in some instances an inability to play the game entirely.

Polygon notes that users have taken to the official Call of Duty forums as well as Steam’s Community forums to level their complaints, with several claiming the “game doesn’t even start.”

Treyarch is aware of the issues and has suggested players edit one of the game’s INI files. “There have been reports of certain i5 CPUs having performance issues causing very low frame rates – We are still working on the final solution for this issue, but we have had reports that changing WorkerThreads = 4 to WorkerThreads = 2 in your config.ini file can help.”

The wait is over: Black Ops is back! After months of anticipation, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 is available now around the world. With an all-new campaign that can be played solo or in four-player co-op, the 1940s film noir zombies experience, Shadows of Evil, and massive new multiplayer features, like a new momentum-based, chained movement system and the introduction of Specialists—Black Ops 3 is the biggest, most ambitious Blacks Ops game to-date.

Of course, in true Black Ops fashion, there’s so much more for fans to discover and experience—whether it’s exploring the data vaults of the Safe House in campaign, uncovering the heavily-rumored Nightmares mode, or gaining access to the new Dead Ops arcade*. Those that pre-ordered Black Ops 3 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC also get instant access to the reimagined fan-favorite multiplayer map, Nuk3town, as a bonus map. And for zombies fans, there’s The Giant, the next chapter in the classic Black Ops zombies story that’s included with Black Ops 3 Collector’s Editions and for Season Pass owners.

But there’s even more to come—Black Ops 3 will help usher in a new era of Call of Duty eSports with the inaugural season of the Call of Duty World League, which kicks off this January.

More game info available at the Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 official website.

Full review coming within 48 hours of launch.

By Brian Albert, IGN

With alternate histories and crazy weapons, Treyarch’s Black Ops games have always been Call of Duty’s oddballs. After killing mind-wolves with a swarm of nano-bees in the new campaign, I’m happy to say Black Ops 3 not only continues that trend, but smartly embraces its sci-fi oddities more than ever before.

Read on…

All Profits from Limited Edition Merchandise Will Support the Call of Duty Endowment’s Work to Connect Veterans with Quality Employment

Activision Blizzard have announced merchandising partnerships with Costco Wholesale Corporation and GameStop Corp. to support the Call of Duty Endowment’s nationwide work to help veterans find high-quality careers after military service. Costco will sell exclusive, limited edition dog tags packaged with the highly-anticipated Call of Duty: Black Ops III in its U.S. stores, and GameStop will offer an exclusive limited edition Call of Duty: Black Ops III challenge coin—sold separately from the game—in its stores. These unique items will be available on November 6, 2015, in conjunction with the Call of Duty: Black Ops III launch. All profits from sales of the dog tags and challenge coins will go towards the Call of Duty Endowment‘s support for organizations that prepare veterans to reenter the job market.

This Smart News Release features images of the dog tags and challenge coin. View the full release here.