Month: February 2018

It’s a new week which means Microsoft has rolled out a fresh set of deals on Xbox Live. There are sold solid deals to be had across Xbox One and Xbox 360, including quite a few offers on numerous Ubisoft titles.

On Xbox One, Assassin’s Creed Origins, the newest entry in the series and one that is enhanced on Xbox One X, is marked down to $40. Also on sale this week are Ubisoft games such as Steep ($20), Ghost Recon: Wildlands ($24), Rainbow Six Siege ($25), The Division ($15), and Watch Dogs 2 ($18). Outside of the Ubisoft deals, Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 ($24) and The Sims 4 ($30) are discounted this week.

A scene from Assassin’s Creed Origins

Some of the notable Xbox 360 deals include Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag ($8), Beyond Good & Evil HD ($3.30), and Rayman Origins ($4.50). Some of these deals and the Xbox 360 offers require an Xbox Live Gold membership to save the most.

All offers are good through February 12. Go to Major Nelson’s blog to see a full rundown of the deals, including local pricing for where you live.

In other Xbox news, the first of February 2018’s free Games With Gold titles for subscribers are now available. These include the shooter Shadow Warrior on Xbox One and the backwards-compatible racing game Split/Second for Xbox 360.

Friday the 13th launched last year, and although it sold well, it had frequent stability, performance, and server issues. In response to these issues and player feedback, developer IllFonic and publisher Gun Media announced in October that they would be upgrading the game to a newer version of Unreal Engine. Today, they provided an update on their progress toward this goal, saying that the engine upgrade is a couple of months out–and it’ll set the stage for dedicated servers on PS4 and Xbox One.

In a post on Friday the 13th’s forum, community lead Daniel Nixon explained the improvements that the engine upgrade will hopefully bring. Among other things, it’ll likely improve physics, increase performance on all platforms, and fix “long-standing issues that will be automatically resolved by moving to the new engine version.”

The highlight of the engine upgrade is making it possible to roll out dedicated servers to console players. These servers are designed to provide much better multiplayer stability. There’s still no release timeframe for the dedicated servers, however. “Our focus has to be on the [engine] update first,” Nixon wrote. “So we’ll need to wait until that’s wrapping up to start estimating the work remaining to get to dedicated servers, and provide you with that information.”

However, in order to successfully achieve the engine upgrade, the developer is halting regular game updates. According to Nixon, the studio is transitioning the full team to this task, which will preclude it from developing other patches. IllFonic is targeting an April release for the upgrade.

PUBG developer PUBG Corp. planned to release a PC update focused on new anti-cheat measures today, February 5, but that update has now been delayed. The studio said it discovered an “unexpected issue” during compatibility testing, and has thus made the decision to push the release to sometime later.

As announced earlier, this update is expected to add a new anti-cheat feature that will “block different helper programs that alter the graphics or aid in gameplay in some way.” One popular piece of software that will be blocked with this update is ReShade. You won’t face a band if ReShade is detected on your system, but if you won’t be able to play PUBG so long as it’s installed. You have to uninstall ReShade, along with any other prohibited program, before getting back rights to play PUBG.

In its earlier blog post, PUBG Corp. also said some players may need to reinstall PUBG to get back online. Additionally, some software like Nvidia ShadowPlay and video/audio capture programs might be blocked, temporarily, as PUBG Corp. works out some teething issues with its new anti-cheat measures.

“We will be dealing with these cases as soon as possible. If a harmless program is blocked, please report it in this form. Thank you for your support and understanding,” PUBG Corp. said.

According to anti-cheat software provider BattlEye, it banned more than 1 million PUBG players for cheating in January alone, as instances of cheating continue to grow. Incredibly and unfortunately, this adds on to the 1.5 million that BattlEye banned already.

PUBG is one of the biggest games on the planet. It had more than 2.8 million peak concurrent players today on Steam. Cheating in PUBG and basically every game is a problem that may never be fixed (where there is a will, there is a way) but it’s good to see games like PUBG taking enforcement seriously.

With its significantly larger player base, PUBG’s PC edition is understandably the focus of PUBG Corp.’s efforts on the anti-cheat front. Here’s to hoping that PUBG Corp. and Microsoft also take steps to stamp out cheating for the Xbox One edition.