An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat: CD Projekt Red showed off a new demo of Cyberpunk 2077 at Microsoft's Xbox press event at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the big game trade show in Los Angeles. And actor Keanu Reeves surprised everyone by coming out on stage to say that he would be in it. The trailer reveals one of the key characters of Cyberpunk 2077, Johnny Silverhand. The legendary rockerboy is played by Reeves (The Matrix trilogy, John Wick series, Johnny Mnemonic). In addition to his appearance and voice, Reeves is also providing full-body motion capture for the character. The game debuts on April 16, 2020...

We all know that CD Projekt Red has a hell of a game in Cyberpunk 2077, which the company revealed in a 48-minute gameplay video last year. The video showed an amazingly detailed open world, as the narrator said the ambition was to create "the most believable city in any open world to date." I interpreted that as a shot across the bow of Rockstar Games and the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption teams, as Cyberpunk 2077 was as incredibly hyper detailed as any Rockstar game I've ever seen. It's the only game I've seen with such density of interaction and the realism integrity of Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2....

Last year's demo of the upcoming game promised deeper the details of the open world, with fascinating futuristic touches such as cranial chip implants, robotic body modifications, hyperfast video communications, and surveillance drones. The dystopic city seemed like a living thing, and the choices for getting things done seemed like they had no limits. You could be as peaceful or violent as you wished... It's a mature game, aimed at adults who can deal with subjects like nudity, drugs, and murder.

The world has immensely changed since 1999, when a company in Southern California launched an online game called EverQuest that would go on to serve as the model for many more titles to come in the massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) space. And unlike many games that sought to replace it over the years, this one is still going strong. ArsTechnica has a long-form piece on the old game, its journey and what it has evolved into now. An excerpt from the story: This sword-and-sorcery-based game was developed by a small company, 989 Studios, but it eventually reached its pinnacle under Sony Online Entertainment after SOE acquired that studio roughly a year after the game's launch. Today, EQ marches on with a dedicated player base and another developer, Daybreak Games, at the helm. I've been a dedicated player since the early days, and others like me would likely acknowledge the game peaked early. A variety of factors have whittled down the once-mighty player base since: many just simply walked away, either busy with life or quit because it took up too much time. The impact of World of Warcraft over time is also undeniable.

But while it's no longer a leading game in the MMO space by any stretch (WoW does hold that title), today's EQ retains a small but dedicated fanbase whose members complain as much as they praise it. And in an era where most games have a shelf life of four to six months, EQ has officially spanned four presidential administrations largely off that kind of support. [...] The game still has a trickle of new players, according to Longdale, but it's understandably hard to attract a whole new generation of young players to a DirectX 9 game with 15-year-old player models and a broken Z-axis (that's correct, you can't go straight up and down in EQ like in WoW) where solo play is darn near impossible.

Players will have to pay $129.99 up front and $9.99 a month, on top of individual game purchase costs, when Google's previously announced Stadia game-streaming service launches in November. From a report: A free tier will be available some time in 2020, as will a paid subscription tier that doesn't require the upfront purchase. The Stadia Founder's Edition and its contingent Stadia Pro subscription will be the only way to get access to the Stadia service when it launches, Google announced today. That $129.99 package, available for pre-order on the Google Store right now, will include: A Stadia controller in "limited-edition night blue", a Chromecast Ultra, a three months of Stadia Pro service and a three-month "buddy pass" to give to a friend, and first dibs on claiming a "Stadia Name".

After the first three months, Stadia Pro users will have to pay $9.99 a month to maintain their membership. For that price, they will get access to Google's highest-quality streams, at up to 4K/60fps with high-dynamic range (HDR) and 5.1 surround sound. In 2019, users will not be able to sign up for Stadia Pro without investing in the Founder's Edition hardware package, and Founder's Edition packages will only be available "in limited quantities and for a limited time."

PC gaming platform BlueStacks has launched BlueStacks Inside that enables mobile game developers to publish their games on Steam with no porting to the PC required. From a report: BlueStacks inside has a one-step software development kit (SDK) that lets developers take existing mobile games to Steam and Discord. The initial launch will include several high-profile developers like KOG, Funplus, Fabled Game Studio, and many others whose games will be available directly on Steam. Mobile developers have started allocating large budgets to game development, and that means mobile games can be competitive on Steam without a ton of modification.

With games like Lineage 2: Revolution and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, graphics and gameplay push the limits of what a mobile device can do. On the other hand, gamers are caught in a struggle to maintain devices that can keep up with demanding games. BlueStacks Inside gives developers an opportunity to reach a much wider and valuable PC-based audience without the need to hire a separate PC development team. Players can use their PCs to do the heavy lifting for games their phones would otherwise not be able to run well.

Apple CEO Tim Cook today announced that the company is expanding Apple TV controller support to include "two of the best and most popular game controllers available, Xbox One S and PlayStation DualShock 4" with the next tvOS update. Unfortunately, as Ars Technica notes, this "does not include original Xbox One control pads that shipped with the 2013 version of the system -- only the Bluetooth-enabled controller update that premiered alongside Microsoft's One S update in 2016 will work with Apple TV." From the report: The announcement, which drew large and sustained applause in the presentation hall, comes nearly four years after Apple's second-generation Apple TV became the company's first foray into TV-based gaming since the ill-fated Pippin. At launch, Apple TV games were required to support the hardware's touchpad-focused, tilt-sensitive remote, and those games could optionally support any number of MFi controllers already designed for mobile iOS hardware. While Apple reversed that decision in mid-2016 to allow for MFi-exclusive games, Apple TV game developers continue to complain about the fragmented control landscape on Apple's set-top box.

John Romero has finally released Sigil, his unofficial fifth episode of Doom with nine new single-player levels and nine deathmatch levels. It's available for free on Romero's web site (though you'll also need the original Doom to play it). Hot Hardware reports: If you want to know what Sigil is about, Romero explains it best. He wrote, "After killing the Spiderdemon at the end of E4M8 (Unto the Cruel), your next stop is Earth -- you must save it from hellspawn that is causing unimaginable carnage. But Baphomet glitched the final teleporter with his hidden Sigil whose eldritch power brings you to even darker shores of Hell. You fight through this stygian pocket of evil to confront the ultimate harbingers of Satan, then finally return to become Earth's savior. In summary, rip and tear!"
Kotaku calls it "some of the most punishing and devious Doom I've ever played... I've been playing it all day, and it owns..." What makes Romero's designs work so well is how unabashedly excited he seems to be about them. Levels are teeming with enemies, including many tougher ones such as the beefy, energy hurling Barons of Hell. Each new maze is punctuated with fights that mix and match Doom's precisely-designed enemies... There's a real giddiness here, a sense that a master is excitedly returning to his favourite tools... The default difficulty is tricky; higher levels feel like borderline trolling. Screw it, let's just toss a few cyberdemons at the start of this level. You know how to dodge, right?

In the old days, we used to call all first-person shooters "Doom clones". But there's nothing else like Doom. There's a particular, nearly impossible to describe playfulness that even the 2016 reboot sometimes misses. A single run through Romero's new levels feels positively joyous, a chance to see fantastic level design in action and observe a master at play.

"A team of programmers at a British artificial intelligence company has designed automated 'agents' that taught themselves how to play the seminal first-person shooter Quake III Arena, and became so good they consistently beat human beings," reports AFP: The work of the researchers from DeepMind, which is owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, was described in a paper published in Science on Thursday and marks the first time the feat has ever been accomplished... "Even after 12 hours of practice, the human game testers were only able to win 25% of games against the agent team," the team wrote. The agents' win-loss ratio remained superior even when their reaction times were artificially slowed down to human levels and when their aiming ability was similarly reduced....

The team did not comment, however, on the AI's potential for future use in military settings. DeepMind has publicly stated in the past that it is committed to never working on any military or surveillance projects, and the word "shoot" does not appear even once in the paper (shooting is instead described as tagging opponents by pointing a laser gadget at them). Moving forward, Jaderberg said his team would like to explore having the agents play in the full version of Quake III Arena and find ways his AI could work on problems outside of computer games. "We use games, like Capture the Flag, as challenging environments to explore general concepts such as planning, strategy and memory, which we believe are essential to the development of algorithms that can be used to help solve real-world problems," he said.
DeepMind's agents "individually played around 450,000 games of capture the flag, the equivalent of roughly four years of experience," reports VentureBeat. But that was enough to make them consistently better than human players, according to Ars Technica. "The only time humans beat a pair of bots was when they were part of a human-bot team, and even then, they typically won only five percent of their matches..."

"Humans' visual abilities made them better snipers. But at close range, [DeepMind's team FTW] excelled in combat, in part because its reaction time was half that of a human's, and in part because its accuracy was 80 percent compared to the humans' 50 percent."

dryriver writes: If you had asked someone doing 3D graphics seriously back in 2000 what 3D technology will look like two decades away in 2019, they might have said: "Most internet websites will have realtime 3D content embedded or will be completely in 3D. 3D Games will look as good as movies or reality. Everyone will have a cheap handheld 3D scanner to capture 3D models with. High-end VR headsets, gloves, bodysuits and haptics devices will be sold in electronics stores. Still and video cameras will be able to capture true holographic 3D images and video of the real world. TVs and broadcast TV content will be in holographic 3D. 3D stuff you create on a PC will be realtime -- no more waiting for images to slowly render thanks to really advanced new 3D hardware. 3D content creation software will be incredibly advanced and fast to work with in 2019. Many new types of 3D input devices will be available that make working in 3D a snap."

Except of course that that in the real 2019, none of this has come true at all, and the entire 3D field has been stagnating very, very badly since around 2010. It almost seems like a small army of 3D technology geniuses pushed and pushed 3D software and hardware hard during the 80s, 90s, 2000s, then retired or dropped off the face of the earth completely around 10 years ago. Why is this? Are consumers only interested in Facebook, YouTube, cartoony PlayStation graphics and smartphones anymore? Are we never going to see another major 3D technology innovation push again?

Microsoft says it's committed to supporting competing PC game stores and it's announcing today that it will distribute more Xbox Game Studios titles through Valve's Steam marketplace. From a report: Typically, Microsoft has distributed its games through only Xbox Live on its game console platform and through its own Windows storefront on PC. Now, Microsoft says it wants to better support player choice and let customers buy games in more than one destination on PC. "Our intent is to make our Xbox Game Studios PC games available in multiple stores, including our own Microsoft Store on Windows, at their launch. We believe you should have choice in where you buy your PC games," writes Xbox chief Phil Spencer in a blog post announcing the shift in strategy. The move follows Microsoft's decision earlier this year to publish its upcoming PC port of Halo: The Master Chief Collection on Steam.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: YouTube Gaming is more or less shutting down this week. Google launched the standalone YouTube gaming vertical almost four years ago as a response to Amazon's purchase of Twitch, and on May 30, Google will shut down the standalone YouTube Gaming app and the standalone gaming.youtube.com website. The plan to shut down the gaming portal was announced in September, with a report from The Verge saying the site was dying because it simply wasn't popular. YouTube serves more than 50 billion hours of gaming content a year, but people just aren't viewing those hours through the gaming-specific site and apps. "A support page does detail some of the changes users will have to deal with, like the merging of YouTube Gaming and normal YouTube subscriptions," the report adds. "Users will also lose their list of followed games, which isn't supported on YouTube."

"Google is directing former YouTube Gaming users to a gaming sub-page on YouTube.com, which has some of the YouTube Gaming features intact, like the top live games list. On the Web, the gaming section is at YouTube.com/gaming, and you can find it in the regular YouTube app by tapping on 'trending' and then 'gaming.' Just like the standalone site, though, a normal person would be hard-pressed to discover these special interfaces."

Saturday the World Health Organization officially adopted the latest update to its International Classification of Diseases (ICD) -- and added "gaming disorder" to its list of modern diseases.

It's in a list of harmful behaviors which also includes too much use of "the internet, computers, smartphones." Despite opposition from trade groups, which reportedly pointed to contradictory research on the subject and touted some of the virtues of video games, the latest ICD was officially approved at the 72nd World Health Assembly.... It's described as "a pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behavior, which may be online or offline, manifested by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other life interests and daily activities and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences."

The issue of gaming addiction isn't new: The American Psychiatric Association still has it listed as up for discussion (PDF) in the latest version of its diagnostic bible, the DSM-5.

Microsoft today shared more details about its Project xCloud game streaming service, revealing that developers won't have to make any modifications to their games for their titles to be supported by xCloud. From a report: That means that technically, Project xCloud supports the over 3,500 games that are playable on the Xbox One, even including the Backward Compatibility list. That means that Xbox and Xbox 360 games will work as well. Moreover, Microsoft said that there are over 1,900 games in development for the Xbox One, so that brings the total to well over 5,000 games. And when a game is updated on the Xbox Store, it's automatically updated for xCloud. Of course, the key words to pay attention to in the blog post are "technical capability." Just because a game is technically able to stream doesn't mean that it will. Presumably, this will be left up to the developer.

Democratic and Republican senators can hardly agree on what to order for lunch, but as of Thursday they seem to agree that the video game industry requires additional government oversight. From a report: Proposed legislation could ban loot boxes and other kinds of microtransactions, and its co-sponsors include members from both major parties. The devil is in the details, of course, and the bill itself could have far reaching implications for the game industry. The full text of the proposed bill is available online. Its intention is to "regulate certain pay-to-win microtransactions and sales of loot boxes." In order to do so, it first has to define what those things are.

The bill says, "an add-on transaction to a interactive digital entertainment product that [...] eases a user's progression through content otherwise available within the game without the purchase of such transaction; assists a user in accomplishing an achievement within the game that can otherwise be accomplished without the purchase of such transaction; assists a user in receiving an award associated with the game that is otherwise available in association with the game without the purchase of such transaction; or permits a user to continue to access content of the game that had previously been accessible to the user but has been made inaccessible after the expiration of a timer or a number of gameplay attempts; or with respect to an interactive digital entertainment product that, from the perspective of a reasonable user of the product, is a game featuring competition with other users, provides a user with a competitive advantage with respect to the game's competitive aspects over users who do not make such a transaction."

The only exclusions listed in the bill are additional difficulty modes, cosmetic items, and downloadable expansions. So, if a company wanted to charge for a new game plus mode, they could do that. Also, the sale of skins in Fortnite and new content expansions for The Elder Scrolls Online would be perfectly acceptable. But, these guidelines as written leave a lot open to interpretation. Would it call into question selling experience point boosters in games like Anthem, Destiny 2, and World of Tanks? What about the practice of selling access to characters in Mortal Kombat 11 and Apex Legends, and even new Champions in League of Legends? Do we get to the point where, somewhere in the future, senators are arguing whether or not a particular weapon or perk is overpowered and should not be for sale?

Veteran software developer firm Panic, which has made its name through high-end Mac software as well as titles such as Firewatch, is expanding its work in games and moving in a very unexpected direction. This week, Panic unveiled Playdate, a tiny, yellow Game Boy-like device with a black-and-white screen, a few chunky buttons, and... a hand crank for controlling quirky games. From a report: Playdate is adorable and exciting and fun and technically impressive. They're making their own hardware (in conjunction with Swedish device makers Teenage Engineering). They wrote their own OS (there's no Linux). It has a high resolution 400 x 240 black and white display with no backlighting. It has a crank. It's going to cost only $149 -- $149! -- and that includes a "season" of 12 games from an amazing roster of beloved video game creators, delivered every Monday for 12 weeks. The idea of a new upstart, a company the size of Panic -- with only software experience at that -- jumping into the hardware game with a brand new platform harkens back to the '80s and '90s. But even back then, a company like, say, General Magic or Palm, was VC-backed and aspired to be a titan. To be the next Atari or Commodore or Apple.

In today's world all the new computing devices and platforms come from huge companies. Apple of course. All the well-known Android handset makers building off an OS provided by Google. Sony. Nintendo. Panic is almost cheating in a way because they're tiny. The Playdate platform isn't competing with the state of the art. It's not a retro platform, per se, but while it has an obviously nostalgic charm it is competing only on its own terms. Its only goal is to be fun. And aspects of Playdate are utterly modern: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, apps and software updates delivered over-the-air. They're taking advantage of an aspect of today's world that is brand new -- the Asian supply chain, the cheapness of Asian manufacturing, the cheapness of CPU and GPU cycles that allows things like Raspberry Pi to cost just $35.

Millions of golfer records from the Game Golf app, including GPS details from courses played, usernames and passwords, and even Facebook login data, were all exposed for anyone with an internet browser to see -- a veritable hole-in-one for a cyberattacker looking to build profiles for potential victims, to be used in follow-on social-engineering attacks. Threatpost reports: Security Discovery researcher Bob Diachenko recently ran across an Elastic database that was not password-protected and thus visible in any browser. Further inspection showed that it belongs to Game Golf, which is a family of apps developed by San Francisco-based Game Your Game Inc. Game Golf comes as a free app, as a paid pro version with coaching tools and also bundled with a wearable. It's a straightforward analyzer for those that like to hit the links -- tracking courses played, GPS data for specific shots, various player stats and so on -- plus there's a messaging and community function, and an optional "caddy" feature. It's popular, too: It has 50,000+ installs on Google Play.

Unfortunately, Game Golf landed its users in a sand trap of privacy concerns by not securing the database: Security Discovery senior security researcher Jeremiah Fowler said that the bucket included all of the aforementioned analyzer information, plus profile data like usernames and hashed passwords, emails, gender, and Facebook IDs and authorization tokens. In all, the exposure consisted of millions of records, including details on "134 million rounds of golf, 4.9 million user notifications and 19.2 million records in a folder called 'activity feed,'" Fowler said. The database also contained network information for the company: IP addresses, ports, pathways and storage info that "cybercriminals could exploit to access deeper into the network," according to Fowler, writing in a post on Tuesday. No word on whether malicious players took a swing at the data, as it were, but the sheer breadth of the information that the app gathers is concerning, Fowler noted.

Razer, the gaming hardware manufacturing company that purchased Ouya's software assets in mid-2015, announced today that the crowdfunded Android console will cease functioning on June 25th. "That date will mark the unremarkable end of what began as a runaway Kickstarter success story: the inexpensive Ouya mini-console was powered by Android and introduced games such as TowerFall," reports The Verge. "But despite being positioned as the indie console, Ouya never quite took off after its $8.5 million crowdfunding campaign. The goal was to move Android's indie gaming scene to TV screens -- with exclusive Ouya-only titles mixed in -- but the execution didn't pan out." From the report: The hardware has been discontinued ever since Razer acquired Ouya's software assets in 2015. So it's somewhat surprising that the platform has continued to plod along for nearly four additional years. But that all ends next month. Accounts will be deactivated on June 25th. After that, Razer says "access to the Discover section will no longer be available. Games downloaded that appear in Play may still function if they do not require a purchase validation upon launch." But by and large, games on the Ouya platform will stop working after the cutoff date.

Razer notes that some developers might choose to help their Ouya customers by activating the same game on some other platform (i.e., Google Play) where available following the shutdown. Razer's own Forge TV device will continue functioning as an Android TV set-top box, but the Forge TV games store is also going offline come the 25th. Part of Razer's thinking behind the Ouya acquisition was to propel its long-term Android TV gaming ambitions. The company has clearly shifted its priorities over the last few years, as indicated by the decision to finally shut down Ouya once and for all.

As Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social platforms come under fire for enabling hateful speech, Microsoft is stepping up to thwart toxic comments among its 63 million Xbox live users. From a report: Microsoft needs to make sure Xbox players don't hear or see content that might turn off users, or scare younger players away. Microsoft is making these moves after the ascent of the Gamergate controversy, which led to people harassing and making threats against women. The changes follow Microsoft's recent update to its Xbox "community standards" for gameplay, which pointed out several practices that aren't acceptable. Now it's taking that a step further with moderation tools.

"This summer, we are empowering our official Club community managers with proactive content moderation features that will help create safe spaces for fans to discuss their favorite games," Microsoft's executive vice president of gaming, Phil Spencer, said Monday. "We plan to roll out new content moderation experiences to everyone on Xbox Live by the end of 2019." Xbox Live has 63 million monthly active users, and the service includes groups where people can post content and submit comments, along with chat rooms. "Our industry must now answer the fierce urgency to play with our fierce urgency for safety," he added.

Taking a page from the Marvel playbook, Sony Interactive Entertainment is reportedly launching its own studio to take its video games to the movie and TV screen. From a report: PlayStation Productions is a new division of Sony Interactive Entertainment with the task of adapting PlayStation games into films and TV shows, The Hollywood Reporter reported Monday. Heading up the new studio will be Asad Qizilbash, who was vice president of marketing for Sony Interactive Entertainment of America, according to the report. Overseeing the studio will be Shawn Layden, chairman of SIE Worldwide Studios, The Hollywood Reporter said. [...] The new PlayStation Productions will reportedly work with Sony Pictures for distribution of the new batch of movies and TV shows.

When Sony unveiled a cloud gaming pact with archrival Microsoft, it surprised the industry. From a report: Perhaps no one was more shocked than employees of Sony's PlayStation division, who have spent almost two decades fighting the U.S. software giant in the $38 billion video game console market. Last week, the companies announced a strategic partnership to co-develop game streaming technology and host some of PlayStation's online services on the Redmond-based company's Azure cloud platform. It comes after PlayStation spent seven years developing its own cloud gaming offering, with limited success. Negotiations with Microsoft began last year and were handled directly by Sony's senior management in Tokyo, largely without the involvement of the PlayStation unit, according to people familiar with the matter. Staff at the gaming division were caught off-guard by the news. Managers had to calm workers and assure them that plans for the company's next-generation console weren't affected, said the people, asking not to be identified discussing private matters.

dryriver explains the new buzz around "Dreams" for PS4 (now in open access). Created by the studio that made PS4's Big Little World, Dreams "is not a game. It is more of an end to end, create-your-own-3D-game toolkit that happens to run on PS4 rather than a PC... essentially an easy to use game-engine a la Unity or UnrealEngine." Dreams lets you 3D model/sculpt, texture, animate and create game logic, allowing complete 3D games to be authored from scratch. Here is a Youtube video showing someone 3D modeling a fairly sophisticated game character and environment in Dreams. Everything from platformers to FPS games to puzzle, RPG and Minecraft type games can be created.

What is interesting about Dreams is that everything anybody creates with it becomes available and downloadable in the DreamVerse and playable by other Dreams users -- so Dreams is also a distribution tool like Steam, in that you can share your creations with others.

While PC users have long had access to 3D modeling and game authoring tools, Dreams has for the first time opened up creating console games from scratch to PS4 owners, and appears to have made the processs quicker, easier and more intuitive than, say, learning 3D Studio Max and Unity on a PC. Dreams comes with hours of tutorial walkthroughs for beginners, so in a sense it is a game engine that also teaches how to make games in the first place.
Back in January Push Square gushed that "There's simply nothing like this that's ever been done before... This is one of the most innovative, extraordinary pieces of software that we've seen on a console in quite some time..."

"And it can be browsed for hours and hours and hours. It's like when you fall into a YouTube hole, and you're clicking from recommended video to recommended video -- except here, you're jumping from minigames involving llamas to models of crustaceans to covers of The King of Wishful Thinking..."

"It's an astounding technical achievement with unprecedented ambition."