Added: 18.05.2015 13:00 | 14 views | 0 comments

Video games have offered us some compelling visions of the future of human habitation. Some seem idyllic, like the glistening arcologies of . Where the cost of policies and the fact that only a few policy trees were mutually exclusive often discouraged switching them mid-game, traits are meant to be managed more actively. Like policies, they will come with unique perks and benefits for your civilization, but they will also fuel different kinds of diplomatic interactions. The development team wants to extend your diplomatic dealing beyond war, peace, and trade agreements, and having complementary traits will be a big factor in determining your options with a given leader. What these traits might be, how you manage them, what kind of benefits you'll see, and how they will interact with each other all remain to be seen.

The Rising Tide will also herald the arrival of four new factions; the only leader announced thus far is Arshia Kishk, head of the Al Falah (pictured at right). As Beyond Earth's story tells it, the Middle East was mostly depopulated after The Great Mistake. In the years that followed, a tenacious group of resilient survivors held on and refused to desert their homeland. When they finally managed to fund a spaceship send forth colonists, it wasn't the cryogenic variety that most other civilizations sent. It was a generation ship, meaning that those who boarded it knew they would never see their destination, and those who touch down at the end of the journey have never set foot on a planet before. The three other factions will apparently have similarly fraught origin stories, and each one of them will bring disruptive new strategies into play.

There are a few other changes that The Rising Tide is bringing to Beyond Earth, though details on them are fairly scant at this point. In order to further enrich and incentivize the exploration processes, you will now be able to find artifacts through resource pods, expeditions, and other means. Whether it's alien in origin or a relic from Old Earth, each artifact will have its own story and its own possibilities. You could keep it as is or combine it into a set, provided you find the others needed, and the rewards might include new perks or new buildings.

Along with the new units developed to accomodate aquatic and amphibious gameplay will be new hybrid units that require a blend of different affinity levels to unlock. Spreading your affinity points around may keep you from unlocking the highest level perks and units until very late in the game, but if these new hybrids are powerful in the mid-game, perhaps it'll be a more viable strategy to play the field. And finally, two new biomes are on their way, including the primordial world pictured above. With so much volcanic activity, I asked McDonough if the environment was going to pose a threat beyond that of native aliens and miasma clouds. He said only that they are "in the process of making each biome more unique, and will share more soon."

There are certainly more questions to be resolved, but even what's been shared so far seems to portend a serious shift in the Beyond Earth landscape. In a panel during the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco this year, McDonough and the other Co-Lead Designer, Will Miller, lamented that they hadn't been bolder in their divergence from the core Civilization formula. The oceanic gameplay of The Rising Tide holds the promise of radically changing the way Beyond Earth plays when it is released in fall of this year, and hopefully we'll get a clearer sense of how it all works in a few weeks at E3.

Added: 14.05.2015 19:08 | 17 views | 0 comments


Have you ever wanted to play video games against a celebrity? On April 16th, PlayStation Heroes winner and San Francisco Giants fan, Josh Dirk did just that. He laid claim to a gaming opportunity of a lifetime -- a one-on-one, high-stakes battle of MLB 15 The Show against Los Angeles Dodger, Yasiel Puig.

Added: 01.05.2015 22:17 | 22 views | 0 comments


Microsofts Build conference in San Francisco is coming to an end today, but theres more on the horizon. The house of Windows and Xbox will hold another big event named de:code at the Prince Park Tower Hotel in Tokyo on May 26th and 27th.

Added: 01.05.2015 11:28 | 26 views | 0 comments

Direct X 12, the next graphics API for Windows devices, has been demonstrated rendering real-time graphics with "six to twelve" times more polygons than its predecessor.

Speaking at the Build 2015 conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Microsoft technical fellow John Shewchuk talked through a strikingly detailed Final Fantasy PC demo that was running from a quad-SLI Digital Storm rig.

The video demonstration, which graphics card giant Nvidia says "points a way through the uncanny valley", can be found below:

"The thing that's really incredible about what you're seeing is just the density of data that's involved in this," Shewchuk said.

In a bid to show that the demo was not pre-rendered CG, Shewchuk opened the free camera to look around the scene in real-time, as well as make various changes to the lighting.

Shewchuk claimed that each scene renders about 63 million polygons. "That's about six to 12 times more than we could do with DX11," he said.

He went on to claim that the textures were 8K by 8K, and that "every piece of hair is being rendered as a polygon - this isn't surface map stuff. I think it's an incredible example of just how far people are pushing big data."

Nvidia said the demo was "running on four of our flagship GeForce Titan X GPUs," and described it as a "stunning example" of what can be done with Microsoft's next graphics API.

Direct X 12 is due to arrive with Windows 10, which is rumoured will release in July, though no official date has been set.

“Microsoft .

Added: 01.05.2015 11:28 | 14 views | 0 comments

Direct X 12, the next graphics API for Windows devices, has been demonstrated rendering real-time graphics with "six to twelve" times more polygons than its predecessor.

Speaking at the Build 2015 conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Microsoft technical fellow John Shewchuk talked through a strikingly detailed Final Fantasy PC demo that was running from a quad-SLI Digital Storm rig.

The video demonstration, which graphics card giant Nvidia says "points a way through the uncanny valley", can be found below:

"The thing that's really incredible about what you're seeing is just the density of data that's involved in this," Shewchuk said.

In a bid to show that the demo was not pre-rendered CG, Shewchuk opened the free camera to look around the scene in real-time, as well as make various changes to the lighting.

Shewchuk claimed that each scene renders about 63 million polygons. "That's about six to 12 times more than we could do with DX11," he said.

He went on to claim that the textures were 8K by 8K, and that "every piece of hair is being rendered as a polygon - this isn't surface map stuff. I think it's an incredible example of just how far people are pushing big data."

Nvidia said the demo was "running on four of our flagship GeForce Titan X GPUs," and described it as a "stunning example" of what can be done with Microsoft's next graphics API.

Direct X 12 is due to arrive with Windows 10, which is rumoured will release in July, though no official date has been set.

“Microsoft .