Blizzards Tells Us Which Overwatch Heroes Had Highest Win Rate!

Posted on November 29, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

It appears that last weekend’s Overwatch Stress Test Weekend was quick the success as Blizzard has revealed some statistics from the recent test on their twitter account. Between all of the players invited for the stress test weekend over 350,000 matches were played with an average match length of 8 minutes and 8 seconds.

If you’re wondering which heroes had the highest win rate among the 21 currently available:

Assault: Soldier 76
Tank: D.va
Defense: Torbjörn
Support: Symmetra

I’m not surprised to see Torbjörn at the top of the defense bracket – with his ability to build & maintain turrets on top of his Armor Pack ability allowing him to drop armor for teammates, I saw quite a bit during my playtime with the game. Soldier 76 leading the pack in terms of assault is  the opposite of my experience – I found his quick healing field and sprint to be useful but his low health pool to be quite the drawback. Lastly the fact that D.va won the most matches with her (literal) nuclear ulti is a sign that maybe they need to NERF THIS! D.va was actually my favorite hero during last weekend’s stress test.

Which hero do you enjoy the most? Did any of these statistics surprise you?

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Broken Deals: A Bunch of Idea Factory International Games Are On Sale!

Posted on November 29, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Idea Factory International’s titles like the Hyperdimension Neptunia series as well as the various Visual Novel and Japanese roleplaying games that they tend to localize for the west.

We’ve covered some of these games extensively and now Retroism has the all three Hyperdimension Neptunia Rebirth (remake) titles on sale for a ridiculously low price for the next 24 hrs.

Hyperdimension Neptunia Rebirth 1:

Base game for $5.99 USD
Rebirth 1 DLC Pack for $1.18 USD

Hyperdimension Neptunia Rebirth 2:

Base game for $5.99 USD
Rebirth 2 DLC Pack for $0.99

Hyperdimension Neptunia Rebirth 3:

Base game for $11.99 USD
Rebirth 3 DLC for $0.39 USD

Amnesia Memories:
Base game – $2.99

All of these games are redeemable on Steam and playable on Windows. If you are into visual novels or self-referential JRPG titles I highly recommend you give these games a try! At 6 bucks they are well worth the asking price – especially that price on Amnesia, considering the game was released just a couple of months ago.

Broken Deals is a regular series of posts where Broken Joysticks editors feature deals from around the web for our readers. This post was in no way sponsored by the game’s developer, the site selling the software or the game’s publisher.

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AMD Crimson Bug May Cause Cards To Overheat

Posted on November 29, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

Editor’s Note:

After the publication of this story it has come to our attention that AMD has issued a tweet that outlines their plans for a hot fix for this particular bug due out on Monday, original story follows:

AMD’s recent release of the Crimson driver suite – designed to replace the aging AMD Catalyst Control Centre and speed up gaming performance by up to 20% – might have a critical bug linked to the software’s control of graphic card fans.

Several users on different sub-reddits are reporting that the AMD Crimson software is not correctly adjusting their Radeon Card’s fan to properly manage the increased heat that comes with running games.Read More

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Rocket League X Portal? Yup That’s a Thing!

Posted on November 29, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

Valve, the owners of Steam and the developers of the PC classic Portal, have partnered with Rocket League developer Psyonix to provide the Rocket League PC community with some pretty sweet free DLC.

Want to deck out your car with a sweet cake sticker? By playing a full match of Rocket League after December 1st you’ll get a chance to earn one of the following Portal themed items:

Cake (Topper)

Conversion Gel (Rocket Trail)

Propulsion Gel (Rocket Trail)

Repulsion Gel (Rocket Trail)

Aperture Laboratories (Antenna)

Cake Sticker (Antenna)

Companion Cube (Antenna)

Personality Core (Antenna)

PotatOS (Antenna)

Honestly I think my favorite of all of these is probably the Gels being used as Rocket Trails. Just imagine if they had the same effects as they did in Portal 2? Cars would be bouncing around all over the place… even more so!

Rocket_League2

Kudos to Valve for allowing Psyonix to use some of their most iconic imagery and giving them the ability to provide players with awesome free DLC. Perhaps they could do the same for PS4 players?

[source]

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Rainbow Six Siege Launch Trailer Is GO GO GO

Posted on November 28, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

Rainbow Six Siege

Ubisoft has given the GO command on both the Rainbow Six Siege open beta and the game’s launch trailer.  Titled ‘the breach’ this brand new one minute trailer – narrated by a British special forces member – outlining some of the emotions members of the Rainbow team might feel when participating in one of the game’s multiplayer-centric matches.

Rainbow Siege’s open multiplayer beta went live this weekend – featuring 14 different operators and three different maps – on all major platforms (Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Windows PC).  The open beta was delayed by two hours on Friday and is scheduled to close tomorrow night before the final game becomes available via retail and digital distribution on December 1st.

For more Rainbow Siege coverage check out our full coverage of the game’s closed beta from earlier this fall.

[youtube id=”RPY3TQSolm4″]

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The Director & Cast of Uncharted 4 Headline PSX Panel Moderated By Greg Miller

Posted on November 28, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

The cast of Sony’s long running Uncharted franchise as well as the creative director of developer Naughty Dog, Neil Druckman, will be headlining a panel at next weekend’s PlayStation Experience (PSX) in San Francisco.

Nolan North the voice of series protagonist Nathan Drake, Laura Bailey – whom has a secret as of yet unknown voice part in the game as well as other returning series stars.   This whole deal will feature behind the scenes clips, brand new gameplay footage and will be moderated by long time PlayStation fan / former IGN PlayStation editor Gregg Miller.

Here’s most of the pertinent details from the PlayStation Blog:

What: Uncharted 4: Stories from the Performance Capture Set
Where: San Francisco, CA — Moscone West Hall, 3rd Floor
When: Saturday, December 5th. 3:00PM Pacific
Who:

  • Greg Miller, moderator
  • Neil Druckmann, Creative Director at Naughty Dog
  • Nolan North, actor
  • Richard McGonagle, actor
  • Troy Baker, actor
  • Laura Bailey, actor

[Source]

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In-Engine Total War: Warhammer Trailer Released

Posted on November 26, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

SEGA and Creative Assembly have teamed up to give us the first in-engine look at the upcoming Total War: Warhammer which launches in April 2016. Thirst glimpse of the campaign gives us a look at some of the goblin encampments as they plan to wage war all the way from the Badlands to the Chaos Wastes.

Total War: Warhammer will feature similar gameplay to other titles in the Total War franchise – minus the historical accuracy. Basically replace the roman empire with Orks, The Empire (humans), Dwarves and Vampire Counts.  Also unlike other games factions in this game may also have access to flying units – something that the time periods and real world settings of the other Total War franchise don’t allow for.

Check out the trailer below.

[youtube id=”DbvY_fij9E8″]

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Here Are The PlayStation Plus Games For December

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

Playstation Plus

Sony has revealed the December games for PlayStation Plus subscribers ahead of next weekend’s PlayStation Experience. PlayStation Vita owners are in for a real treat with the JRPG hit from last year – Freedom Wars. PlayStation 4 owners can experience the 2014 reboot of the arcade classic Gauntlet free of charge and finally PlayStation 3 owners will be receiving EA’s 2012 reboot of the SSX franchise and Ubisoft’s Far Cry: Blood Dragon!

Here’s the full line-up:

  • Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, PS3
  • Freedom Wars, PS Vita
  • Gauntlet: Slayer Edition, PS4
  • King’s Quest — Chapter 1: A Knight to Remember, PS4
  • Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken, PS Vita
  • SSX, PS3

Do any of these games excite you? I’ll probably try Gauntlet at least for a little bit and it’ll be nice to have a digital copy of Freedom Wars in my library despite the fact that I already own the game on a physical cartridge.

All of these games are expected to go live next Tueday, December 1st, when the PlayStation Store updates.

[Source]

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December 2015 Games With Gold Unveiled – Extra Games For The Holidays

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

Microsoft has taken the wraps off of the games that Xbox Live gold subscribers will be receiving for free over the holidays (heh heh .. it’s a pun!). Sneaking into the shadows is Thief for Xbox One, exploring ancient dungeons are The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing for Xbox One and Sacred 3 for Xbox 360. Bringing up the rear is Flashpoint: Dragon Rising for Xbox 360.

Here’s the full line-up with dates and MSRPs

December 1 – 31st

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing – Xbox One – $14.99
Dirt 3

December 1 – 15th

Castlestorm – Xbox 360 – $9.99

December 16 – 31st

Sacred 3 – Xbox 360 – $19.99
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising – Xbox 360 – $9.99
Thief – Xbox One – $29.99 (free until Jan 15th)

Remember that all Xbox Games with gold are guaranteed backwards compatible on Xbox One! What do you think of Microsoft’s free holiday offerings? Let us know in the comments.

[Source]

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Does AMD’s Crimson Driver Suite Really Increase Performance By 20%?

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

As we reported earlier this week AMD has released an elaborate overhaul of both it’s Windows 10 / 8 / 7 drivers for AMD Radeon Cards that support the Graphics Card Next (GCN) architecture. In the interest of performance, I’ve decided to test the performance of the last AMD Catalyst Software / Driver versus the newly released AMD Crimson. Check out my testing methodology, suite of games and results after the jump!Read More

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Huge Black Friday Sale Hits Heroes of the Storm

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

If you’re staying in this holiday weekend perhaps you might want to look into playing a few rounds of Blizzard’s addicting MOBA Heroes of the Storm. This weekend all of the mounts, skins and heroes in the Nexus are reduced by 50% (off of their cash purchase price, in game gold prices remain unaffected).

Blizzard has also released a limited time Second Chance bundle which allows you to gain access to some of the timed exclusive mounts from the game’s past. These mounts include the Lunar Tiger, Red Carpet mount and the Reindeer mount!

If you’re a really dedicated player within the Nexus then this is your only chance to grab the 365 day stim pack which grants you additional gold & experience for an entire year. Normally the stim packs are sold in 7 and 30 day allotments for $3.99 and $9.99 respectively. The 365 day stim pack is currently priced at $59.99 USD and will not be available after this weekend’s sale.

Personally I picked up the Ranger-General Sylvanas Skin for $3.99 – I just couldn’t resist the idea of having a living elf Sylvanas now that I’ve got her to a high level!

  • All Heroes, Mounts, and Skins will be on sale at a 50% real money discount
  • A new 360 Day Stimpack will be available at a deeply discounted price.
    • Please note: The 360 Day Stimpack is a limited-time item that will ONLY be available during the Black Friday Sale. 
  • A new Second Chance Bundle will be available with the following items:
    • Winter Veil Jaina Skin
    • Greatfather Winter Rehgar Skin
    • Reigndeer Mount
    • Nazeebra Mount
    • Lunar Tiger Mount
    • Magic Carpet Mount

[Source]

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Holiday Weekend Sales Give Us All A Reason To Stay In-Doors & Game

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

All of our American editors are enjoying their time with family over the holiday weekends. As countless people are traveling across the continent to see family members and love ones that they may not have shared physical space together in many months. If you’re like me a long 8 hour flight with multiple lay-overs can be a great time to catch up on games that I might have ignored for quite some time.

I am of course not American – I’m Canadian – so I won’t be traveling anywhere this weekend. This doesn’t mean that some of the jaw dropping deals that large worldwide corporations have cooked up to coincide with a holiday steeped in colonialism. Some of these deals are USA only, most of them are open to everyone in USA & Canada and at least one is Canadian only.

PlayStation Store Co-Op Sale

Check All PlayStation Deals Here

PS4

  • Battlefield Hardline Hardline Edition – $19.99
  • Super Street Fighter IV Ultra – $14.99
  • Far Cry 4 – $23.10 (such an odd price)
  • Payday 2: Crime Wave Edition $20.00
  • Evolve – $18.80
  • Rayman Legends – $10.80

PS Vita

  • Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z – $6
  • Resident Evil Revelations 2 – $17.99
  • Rayman Legends – $10.80

Origin Black Friday Deals

All Prices in USD

Check out all of the Origin PC deals

  • Sims 4 – $24.99
  • Battlefield 4 Premium Edition – $19.99
  • Dragon Age: Inquisitions – $14.99
  • Battlefield Hardline Standard Edition – $11.99
  • Sim City Standard Edition (2013) – $9.99

Humble Codemasters Bundle

All Prices In USD

Check Out All of Humble’s Deals Here

Donate at least $1 for access to:

  • Grid 2 + Drift Pack DLC
  • DIRT Showdown
  • Overlord
  • Operation Flashpoint Complete + Dragon Rising + Red River
  • Hospital Tycoon

Beat the average (currently $4.69 USD)

  • Grid Autosport + Road & Track Car Pack
  • Overlord II
  • Overlord Raising Hell Expansion
  • Grid 2 Track Pack

Donate $15 for all of the above plus

  • Grid Auto Sport Season Pass
  • DIRT 3 Complete Edition
  • All released GRID 2 DLC

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AMD Crimson Driver & Software Suite Rumored For Imminent Release

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

Owners of AMD cards have been seeing some inferior benchmarks when compared against comparable Nvidia hardware with recent titles like Batman: Arkham Asylum and The Witcher III. Many tech journalists and enthusiasts users have speculated that this disparity may have to do with these titles utilization of Nvidia’s proprietary GameWorks technologies. Rain effects in Batman, Lighting in Fallout 4 and hair in The Witcher III all utilize Nvidia exclusive technologies that AMD owners have had to tone down or disable entirely in order to achieve the same framerates as GeForce owners.

It looks like AMD might finally have an answer with the (rumored) impending release of AMD Radeon Crimson – a brand new driver and software suite that according to leaked marketing material will provide a number of benefits to owners of existing and future hardware.

On the r/PCGaming sub-reddit a user by the handle of BehindaCorpFirewall posted a link to over a dozen presentation slides that outline the AMD Crimson software. Here are a few of the more interesting points, at least to me:

Higher Frames Per Second

  • Asynchronous Shaders allow for breaking serial workloads into parallel tasks
  • Idle GPU resources used for this task instead of queuing
  • Improved multi-threading performance

Low Frame Rate Compensation Technology

  • Smooths out gameplay when application frame rate falls below monitor refresh rate
  • Algorithms adjust GPU output and refresh-rate to prevent game stuttering
  • No additional hardware or configuration required for this feature.

Custom Resolutions Support & Better Up-Scaling

  • Allows users to create custom resolutions.
  • Control over pixel density & refresh rate.
  • Improved 2k (1080P) à 4K (UHD) scaling

What do you think of some of these rumored changes that the Crimson driver & software may bring? If these leaked material are even close to accurate we could see the rollout of this new software package in the coming days. If you head-on over to the AMD website you can already watch a preview video outlining some of the work that has gone into Crimson.

Right now all of this should be considered a rumor, as an AMD owner I’ll be sure to take some bench marks in some of the games I regularly play and report back after the rollout.

[source]

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New Fallout 4 Dynamic Shadows Mods Greatly Improves Average FPS

Posted on November 21, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

Are you still wandering through the wastes of Boston weeks after release? Are you playing the Windows PC version on mid-range hardware? If you answered yes to both questions, then I might have the right mod for you! Don’t worry Vault-tech isn’t involved in any way!

“FPS dynamic shadows” mod by creator Shadow Beast adds the ability for the game engine to dynamically shadow draw distance and level of detail based upon your desired frame rate. The mods creator offers the following description of it:

Many of you may have noticed that in some locations of Fallout 4 fps gets low even with a good hardware, like in the City, mostly it happens in theareas with lots of objects. Since the game isn’t properly optimized, almost everything that it does with objects which it renders takes more time thanit actually should. One of the most time consuming operations in Fallout 4 is shadow rendering and because the game has only predefined shadow drawdistance, which applies everywhere in every location just the same, we have a choise either we set it to high value with having a good picture but eventually facing fps drops in locations with lots of object or we lower the value to make fps more stable in general. And this is exactly the pointwhere this plugin comes handy!

With this mod installed I saw my frame rate increase in diamond city from 35 FPS on average to a respectable 55. Outdoor areas like the commons faired even better never dipping below my target of 60 frames per second even during intense battles. Before installing the mod I was ranging between 40 – 50 during intense firefights with super mutants. I don’t know all the technical ins and outs of this mod but it seems to work wonders.

If you’re wondering what kind of rig and graphical settings I am running to achieve these results – I’ve got everything except Godrays set to ultra with maximum draw distance enabled. My system specs just meet those recommended by Bethesda with probably my graphics card being the weakest component.

My system:

4.0 GHZ 8-Core AMD Processor
16GB DDR3
Radeon R7 270 2GB Overclocked
Fallout 4 installed on a mechanical hard drive

Installation of the dynamic shadows mod is really easy as well. If you’ve installed mods for Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas you might be familiar with having to use tools like the nexus mods manager or even the built-in plugin loader to ensure everything worked without a hitch. To install the dynamic shadows mod you just drag the files into your games directory and you’re good to go!

Users on Reddit are reporting similar findings to mine in terms of performance on cards as high as the Geforce 970. Interesting posters on the Reddit thread are also comparing the capability of this mod to 2011’s RAGE which featured a dynamic graphics performance system designed to optimize the user’s experience on lower end hardware.

We’ll keep you posted on any other interesting Fallout 4 mods as they continue to emerge.

[Source]

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The Overwatch Stress Test Changed My Opinion Of The Game

Posted on November 20, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

I’ve known about Blizzard’s colorful and vibrant first person shooter, Overwatch, for a while now. I remember everyone getting totally amped up about the game last November when the game was unveiled but I wasn’t as taken in my the initial gameplay trailers and character reveals as some fans where. After spending several hours with this weekends Beta Stress Test my opinion on the game has radically changed. Here’s a rundown of what I played and why I enjoyed it so much!Read More

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