In most MMOs, your job is to kill things and that’s pretty much the end of character development. In Carbine’s Wildstar, you can take alternate paths to glory as a scientist, settler or explorer in addition to your bog-standard soldier. That said, the hazards you’ll face along the way seem pretty similar, as the video below demonstrates. Losing is fun? I hope? If you’d like to know more, there’s also a developer diary which goes into greater detail on the differences between the paths.

Source: PCGamesN

The mysterious teaser trailer below makes mention of a man who “created a Bullfrog Masterpiece” in 1996, and who has plans to “redefine the genre”, before ending with a mention of a June Kickstarter.

According to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the game is Syndicate Wars and the man is Mike Diskett, so it seems perfectly reasonable to get very excited. There’s a countdown site, too; both video and site bear the name “Satellite Reign”.

Source: Blue’s News

Well done, everybody! In a surprise last-minute surge of pledges, Jagged Alliance: Flashback met its Kickstarter goal of $350,000, even managing to score a little bonus of $18,614 to put a cherry on it.

The reboot of the classic turn-based tactics title, which has players recruiting and kitting out squads of mercs, is being developed by Danish team Full Control, who made Space Hulk – as opposed to the crew behind last year’s less-than-stellar effort, Back In Action.

Flashback is expected in late 2014, but in the meantime, you may wish to check out Jagged Alliance Online, a free-to-play effort which is due to relaunch on Steam shortly.

Source: Kickstarter

Firaxis have revealed a new video for Civilization V‘s upcoming Brave New World expansion that discusses the new social policy trees of order, autocracy and freedom. Each one has its own unique wonder, and can apparently lead to tanks flattening people. Always good to know!

If you’d like to know more about Brave New World, why not check out our massive recent preview?

As the title of this article so laboriously explains, EA and DICE have released three more Battlefield 4 screenshots from the single-player campaign of the upcoming game (which hits our shores around the end of October). Only one of them is actually hi-res as EA have only been releasing them through Facebook and Twitter, but you’re welcome to enlarge ‘em anyway.

EA are promising we’ll learn more about the multiplayer side of things at E3, so stay tuned.

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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