Clearly, staying true to the spirit of an IP is hard… really hard. Some developers do manage, such as Firaxis’ excellent remake of XCOM. But most will fail miserably, like Aliens: Colonial Marines. It’s time then, to look at what actually ensures these remakes and IP games are actually true to the franchise.

Techland and Ubisoft have released Call of Juarez: Gunslinger into the wild west internet, and have also released the accompanying trailer. It’s a refreshingly honest trailer in a world of marketing spin, and point out that you can buy the game for quite a reasonable price ($17.95 on Steam) and then spend a good amount of time shooting in the faces of your enemies. Alright! Let’s do this, then.

EA’s Chief Technology Officer Rajat Teneja has used a post on LinkedIn to put forward what may prove to be a very unpopular opinion — that the next-gen consoles are already wiping the floor with PC gaming.

“These architectures are a generation ahead of the highest end PC on the market,” he claimed. “Our benchmarks on just the video and audio performance are 8-10 times superior to the current gen.”

Teneja went on to point out that these next-gen consoles allow them to focus the system resources in a more efficient manner.

“The compute capabilities of these platforms and the data transfer speeds we can now bank on, essentially removes any notion of rationing of systems resources for our game engines.”

While it’ll be several years before we see what the next-gen consoles are really capable of, by that time PC gaming will have advanced even further. At that point, perhaps, we can start making relevant comparisons.

Source: GamesIndustry (Thanks James)

Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the Internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of the wholesale price of the GTX 780, 3D printed food, and bomb-loving bees.

When Infinity Ward revealed their new engine for Call of Duty: Ghosts, it turns out that they’re actually running on an overhauled version of the previous Modern Warfare 3 engine.

Speaking with OPM, Infinity Ward’s animation lead Zach Volker clarified that “When we’re talking about a new engine we’re talking about upgrading significant systems within in that engine. We’re not talking about throwing it all away and saying we’re starting from the ground up”.

“It’s impossible to develop a new engine from the ground up in a two year cycle,” he continued. “You would need an army of 200 engineers. So what we do is we say ‘okay what are the things that are significant and that we would say that are encompassing of the engine or its visual quality? Are those being upgraded in a significant way? Alright then, I think that warrants (saying) that we’ve got a new engine on our hands.”

Check out a side-by-side comparison between the two engines below.

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Dying Light is a new survival horror game on the way from Techland (the developers behind Dead Island) and Warner Bros. Just announced today, the key concept of the title is a “portentous day-night cycle set in a vast open world”.

During the day, players will be required to run around scavenging and gathering supplies, as well as exploring and crafting weapons. At night, however, the population of “infected” (which look a lot like zombies, but we’ll see) leave their hidey-holes and come out to fight, joined by “vicious predators”.

Techland are touting it as a breakthrough only possible thanks to next-gen technology in consoles, but it’s also announced for the PC so I guess that next-gen technology was there all along? Who knew! We’re also promised an innovative free-running system, which sounds delightful. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one — in the meantime, you can cast an eye over the screens below.

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Ah, that Brazilian Ratings Board — that leaker of all things confidential and upcoming. A listing has now been spotted for something called FarCry HD, leading many to believe that Ubisoft may be working on a HD re-release of the game.

The listing is only for Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles, so it’s unknown whether or not such a remake would be coming to PC. Fingers crossed, however — Far Cry‘s recent successes with number three and Blood Dragon could be inspiring Ubisoft to push the franchise even harder.

Source: VG247

Although war is generally agreed to be “pretty awful” by everybody who has ever been through it, many video games gloss over that fact –especially when there are bad guys that need killing. Well, Company of Heroes 2 is keen to remind you of the horror of war, even if you’re somewhat detached from it when you’re ordering dozens of tiny little soldier-men to their deaths on a whim.

Enjoy! Or, perhaps, don’t. Company of Heroes 2 lands in Australia on June 26.

No real big surprise here for anybody who has been gaming on a Windows PC for more than a few years, but it’s interesting to hear it said aloud: Microsoft’s Matt Booty has confirmed that the company’s strategy is now to focus on Xbox One games and games that connect across Microsoft’s various multiple platforms.

Microsoft announced at the Xbox One reveal event (get the details here) that the console would have 15 exclusive titles in its first year. However, PC gamers are unlikely to see any of those games. Indeed, Booty described Microsoft’s Windows 8 gaming strategy by saying “we have got everything from very, very casual games, like our very much improved and reimagined Solitaire, all the way to graphically complicated games like The Harvest.”

“When I think about more connected experiences across those platforms, it’s things that show up within that family of devices where we’ve got Xbox Live, like Windows Phone and Windows 8,” said Booty.”Not what you might consider a more traditional desktop PC game.”

It’s important to note that this refers only to Microsoft’s first-party strategy — that is, they’re happy to let other developers continue making games for Windows, but they’ll continue to focus their own efforts on consoles and smartphones.

Source: Shacknews

Even though PlanetSide 2 is an unstoppable free-to-play colossus, for some reason Sony are still charging a subscription fee on the now ten-year-old original game.

All that is set to change however, with Sony’s John Smedley revealing via Twitter that the original game will be moving F2P.

“We did a mass grant of anyone who has ever played PS1 or PS2 with free time in PS1. We weren’t ready to announce it yet because the database grant is still ongoing and won’t be done till tomorrow morning,” he said.

“So please if you didn’t get flagged chill. We are trying to do something cool for everyone, and we were going to tell people when it’s done. But people saw it and others broadcast the info.”

“This also gives us more time to make it F2P. So enjoy starting tomorrow late morning.”

Source: 1,2,3,4,5,6

If you’ve not heard of War for the Overworld then you at least must have heard of Dungeon Keeper — its inspiration, mentor and father figure. Well, War for the Overworld has wrapped up a successful Kickstarter, and is now proudly announcing its entry into the beta testing phase.

Backers of the project on Kickstarter should look out for an email explaining the details soon (if you haven’t already got it). If you didn’t back the project, you can pay $22 to jump in on Steam instantly.

Source: Rock Paper Shotgun

Battlefield 4 has been dated for a European release of November 1st. While this isn’t the official Australian date (we’ll update this story if we hear more), Australian dates are generally identical to those of Europe and the UK.

If you live in the USA of course, you get the game first — it launches there on October 29 so that our American cousins can have three extra days of play time.

There’s no word yet on when any early access or beta periods will be, but you can be sure we’ll let you know (and have our servers up and ready to go).

Source: PC Gamer