Author: Trafficblast

Street Fighter EX developer Arika has shared more details on its upcoming PS4 fighting game, Fighting EX Layer. While the developer didn’t pin down a precise release date for the title just yet, it did reveal how much it will cost and when players could expect to get their hands on it.

During a livestream on Twitch (via Gematsu), Arika announced that Fighting EX Layer will launch digitally on PS4 around the world by the end of June. The standard edition of the game will run for $60 and comes with 15 Gougi decks and 12 characters. Players will also have the option to purchase a “light” version, which includes five Gougi decks and 10 characters, for $40.

Arika hasn’t revealed which characters will be excluded from the light version, but 10 have been announced for the fighting game thus far, among them Skullomania and the latest addition to the roster, Shadowgeist, who was also revealed during the livestream. The latter last appeared in Street Fighter EX3 back in 2000. Two more playable characters have yet to be revealed for Fighting EX Layer.

In addition to those details, Arika revealed that Fighting EX Layer will not feature a story mode, although the game will have some kind of as-yet unspecified single-player mode. Arika also revealed that it will offer “Type-A” and “Type-Gold” character color variations as DLC.

Fighting EX Layer is currently only slated to release digitally for PS4; however, Arika has said that the game could potentially come to PC via Steam as well. In addition to that, Arika says Fighting EX Layer may also receive a physical release in the future.

Rocket League has received numerous tie-ins with other entertainment over the past couple of years, and recently developer Psyonix announced the newest crossover. WWE-themed items are coming to the game this spring.

Psyonix announced today that it’s extended its partnership with WWE for 2018. As a part of this, Psyonix will be adding WWE items to the game, so players can expect customization options like wrestling-themed decals, flags, and possibly cars. The developer hasn’t provided specific details yet, however; in a blog post, it stated that it’ll reveal the items in April.

On the wrestling side, meanwhile, viewers will see more Rocket League-related sponsorships and content. The studio stated that the game will frequently be played on the WWE’s gaming channel on YouTube, and there’ll be a Rocket League booth at WrestleMania 34 taking place in April.

This isn’t the only cross-media tie-in in the works, either. Psyonix also recently announced a DC Comics DLC pack that adds two Batmobiles and a bunch of other superhero-themed cosmetics. It’ll launch next Monday, March 5, and will cost $4.

A new Nvidia Game Ready driver is now out for download (version 391.01), and users of GeForce graphics cards get optimizations for the PC port of Final Fantasy XV, one of 2016’s biggest RPGs. In addition, Nvidia users should expect better performance for the incredibly popular battle royale game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The upcoming first-person action game Warhammer: Vermintide 2 and the multiplayer phenomenon World Of Tanks 1.0 both get support for better optimization.

Final Fantasy XV will be one of the best-looking PC games to date, when it launches on March 6, thanks to the slew of Nvidia GameWorks graphics technologies: Flow, HairWorks, ShadowWorks, Turf Effects, and Voxel-based Ambient Occlusion (VXAO). There is also native support for resolutions up to 8K as well as HDR10 for much better brightness and colors. The GeForce Experience application provides support for Ansel, which allows for customizable in-game screenshots. Ansel lets players change the camera angle on the fly, add image filters, and even capture 360-degree screenshots that can be viewed in VR. The ShadowPlay Highlights feature is also integrated, which can automatically record gameplay footage for specific circumstances in the game such as certain summons, special achievements, and defeating powerful enemies.

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds continues to get optimizations; the new driver can give users of GTX 10-series cards up to a 7% boost in framerate. Nvidia conducted benchmarks with every card between the GTX 1050 and GTX 1080 Ti using a system equipped with an Intel Core i7-7820X CPU clocked at 3.6GHz and 32GB of DDR4 RAM at 2666MHz. The following chart outlines the performance improvements with driver 391.01 compared to the previous version:

The new driver gets ahead of the March 8 release of Warhammer: Vermintide 2 to make sure the game runs as smoothly as possible at launch. Wargaming’s long-standing game World Of Tanks also gets technical updates and optimizations on top of the upcoming 1.0 overhaul that’s currently in beta.

As with every driver update comes a handful of smaller fixes. Here are a few of the issues ironed out in version 391.01:

• BeamNG: Dynamic reflections flicker in the game.
• Call of Duty WWII: Flickering shadows occur in the game.
• NvfbcPluginWindow prevents Windows from shutting down.
• Booting from a cold boot results in black screen on a multi-monitor system.
• 3DVision: System shutdown time increases when Stereoscopic 3D is enabled.
• Nvidia Control Panel: The Display->Adjust desktop color settings->Content type setting is reset to “Auto-selected” after rebooting the system.
• GTX 980/1080 Ti: OpenGL program may crash when trying to map a buffer object.
• GTX 965M: Drop in GPU performance occurs.

There are some known issues still present, and Nvidia points out that the following problems still exist:

• Titan V: G-Sync displays may go blank when switching between different overclocked memory clocks multiple times.
• GTX 780 Ti in SLI: There is no display output when connecting the DisplayPort and two DVI monitors.
• GeForce Titan (Kepler-based): The OS fails after installing the graphics card on a Threadripper-enabled motherboard.
• Pascal GPUs and Gears of War 4: Blue-screen crash may occur while playing the game.
• GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and Doom: The game crashes due to the driver reverting to OpenGL 1.1 when HDR is enabled.

For more on Nvidia graphics cards, you can check out our GTX 1080 Ti review or GTX 1070 Ti review, two of the company’s latest cards. Now might be a bad time to buy a video card, however; read up on how cryptocurrency mining has affected video card prices. If you’re still on the fence about jumping into either of the games mentioned above, be sure to read our Final Fantasy XV review or PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds review.

Legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk has weighed in the possibility of Pro Skater remasters–and the news isn’t exactly great for people hoping to see the franchise return. Posting on Twitter, Hawk pointed out that Activision owns the license to the Tony Hawk Pro Skater franchise, adding that he is no longer involved in discussions with the publisher.

Hawk, 49, went on to say that he “would be happy” to take on the challenge of creating new Pro Skater games “for newer systems.” But unfortunately for fans, Hawk acknowledged that he lacks the skills or authority (due to Activision calling the shots) to do so.

The Birdman also said he has no power to revive the servers for older Pro Skater games, including potentially Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5. People reported online that the game’s online servers were reportedly switched off sometime in the last year. Without the online functionality, the skateboarding title lacks core features on what was already a very hard-to-recommend experience.

In 2012, Activision released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD, which features levels from earlier entries in the series. No other high-definition remakes have come since. As a company, Activision has said it is open to making more remasters after Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy performed so well, though whether or not a new Tony Hawk remaster is among these remains to be seen.

2015’s Pro Skater 5 is the latest entry in the long-running series that debuted in 1999, and no new titles have been announced. The news that Hawk is no longer involved with the franchise is probably not what fans want to hear, though as always, things could change. We have contacted Activision in an attempt to get more details on what the company’s plans for the franchise going forward may be.

In January last year, Hawk teased that he was working on a new skateboarding game without Activision.

Blizzard continues to share tidbits related to Overwatch. Speculation surrounding the first of these teases pointed to all of this leading to the reveal of the game’s next hero; if that’s the case, the newest teaser image may give us a glimpse at the tools he or she will have at their disposal.

On the official Overwatch Twitter account, the quote “I’ll knock some sense into you!” was published–complete with quotations marks–along with the image below. It shows the schematics for some kind of tool named Slaga v3.0. It looks as if it may be some kind of pickaxe that converts into a hammer not unlike Reinhardt’s.

There are various other details hidden in there, like some (possibly Swedish) text about different materials on a tablet-like device in the bottom right, that fans will undoubtedly attempt to dig into. Perhaps more notably, the bottom of the image shows a mouse toy and what looks like a cat’s paw swiping at it from just out of frame. It could be nothing or just a small glimpse of a backstory where someone (perhaps Tobjorn or his daughter, Brigitte) owns a cat, but it’s hard not to think of the so-called Jetpack Cat, a character Blizzard recently considered for inclusion in the game but ultimately decided was too extreme.

This tease follows one that consisted of an “after-action” report for something called Operation White Dome. It describes an incident involving Torbjörn, Reinhardt, and someone named Private First Class Emre Sariogulu. Subsequently, we got to see a letter Torbjörn wrote to his wife. How this latest piece of the puzzle fits together with those remains to be seen, but it presumably won’t be the last, assuming this is all leading to some kind of announcement. As shared on Reddit, some fans believe the aforementioned Brigitte is the new character.

Blizzard previously stated that it is already playtesting a new Overwatch hero, though it has shared no details about it. Game director Jeff Kaplan did, however, say that the character is “very needed.”