THE BUZZ AROUND E3 2015

I simply had to do a post about the upcoming E3 in this year of 2015.

This is partly because there has been a great deal of talk and a mountain of rumours the likes of which I have never seen before.

There is so much talk about hardware that this alone is exciting what with virtual reality so close to being finalised as well as Microsoft and this Holo Lens gadget they have been working on that looks cool. Finally something similar to that seen in Iron Man films and The Minority Report.

Then there are the games rumours!

I have had trouble keeping track of everything and I seem to be finding out about something new every few days to a week.

I have stated before that I am excited over Star Citizen and that I have been around long enough in gaming, almost worked for Pivotal Games at one point, that I played the Wing Commander games and Freelancer.

I could honestly say that seeing Chris Roberts video about what he had been up to actually provoked me into building a new rig for the first time in quite awhile!

Frustrating that it is so far away from release.

I was also excited about Elite Dangerous but then started worrying about their announcement of no single player campaign and reviews by players static its galaxy wide and three inches deep, or something to that effect. Wanting to buy it to fill time until I go away over a humongous court case which will shock the nation I ended up buying Dying Light instead. Recommended by a brother who was always into consoles but made the jump to a PC.

As well as those two space sims there is also No Man's Sky which looks interesting but not too sure about. Now I find out about one more!

Starfighter Inc.

Here is the link to the Kickstarter page for StarFighter Inc. ...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/impellerstudios/starfighter-inc

It is another Kickstarter project but this one has huge kudos behind it because its largely made up of the team that worked on the X-Wing and Tie Fighter series. A couple of guys also that worked on Crysis, Homefront, FarCry and a few others.

About bloody time some space sims got made and as well as them being missing there has been no flight sims for years either, the latter being what made me get into computers in the first place because I was obsessed with fighter aircraft, wanted to be one when I was a kid and had a famous great grandfather who was a test pilot. He worked for Avro and the RAF and was testing an aircraft called the Avro Manchester which they tried several engines with but it crashed and he died. They added two more engines after this fatality and the Avro Lancaster was born.

But I like a great deal of games and was obsessed with 3D also and owned one of the early Voodoo cards. I went through two if I remember correctly.

There are many games I love and fond of, despite some driving me nuts at times and I wondered what the designers where thinking of ... or smoking in some areas.

Some seem to be almost perfect but missing vital things. Like when I played Dead Island Riptide, and now Dying Light. I will now always remember Kick Zombie ... sorry I mean Riptide because I did not understand the game, frustrated the hell out of me and I left it alone for months. Then one day I went back to it and realised it was not just a game where you pick up a slightly better gun every now and then and you had to make cash and build weapons. Weapons that were mostly hand to hand close range stuff in a melee fashion. This to me was kinda knew and once I realised how it worked the game was transformed into something bloody fun.

The not so large map, well I did play Elder Scrolls Skyrim before this, looked pretty good and it made me wonder about how the next generation version would look. However it did feel like it was missing something to make it feel like a living breathing place to roam around. Something you get in Skyrim and Fallout ... animals. Wildlife. Ooh I just remembered I did see fish in Dying Light, lol.

As well as being surprised and falling in love with Bethesda and their two biggest properties in Elder Scrolls and Fallout I also loved Deus Ex Human Revolution but another one I was confused how to play to begin with. I did also like The Witcher but this was the most frustrating of all the games with some pretty horrible boss fights along with regularly being confused about what to do next and where to go. Some things being seeming impossible to find.

I also liked Need For Speed Hot Pursuit and noted there was nothing really about. I was interested in Project Cars but wanted something more open world. I also liked Dishonoured but in all honesty and even though I bought the game of the year edition with all DLC I thought it was way, way too short and with very small maps.

After the free running of Dying Light I am not interested in the Mirror's Edge series, lol.

Here is a list of things I have heard are coming at E3 or otherwise ...

Fallout 4 (I am betting game play)
Elder Scrolls 6 (I am betting cinematic rumour behind closed doors)
Deus Ex Mankind Divided (oh man am I excited over this)
Homefront: The Revolution (looks and sounds cool)
Star Citizen (looks and sounds the coolest)
Starfighter Inc. (could be surprise hit and BE the coolest?)
Dishonoured 2 (large open world map and plenty side quests and could be great)
Mirror's Edge 2 (sounds cool)
Mass Effect 4 (whats this? Oh just my heart stopping!)
New Need For Speed (Good one would be super cool especially if open world maps)
Cyberpunk 2077 (sounds cool but Witcher drove me nuts)
New Splinter Cell (as above lol, have blacklist and its BAD in places but super cool the rest of the time!)

I have included the unlikely title of Elder Scrolls 6 because it might not be that unlikely. I would have imagined that after the success of the last two Fallouts and the Elder Scrolls that Bethesda may have been able to expand their capabilities. There team, so to speak. Or pulled in other software houses that they may have previously worked with?

Like music label companies the publishing houses would be dead keen to get up to date versions of both of the two biggest and most popular properties out of the door and onto the shelves. You can bet your sweet arse that they would have been pushing for this and to achieve that you would need a bigger team or working with another software house.

I am sure you wont see anything more than some screen shots or some artwork or title, if that. But it may not be so long after Fallout 4 that you see the next Elder Scrolls released. Just my guess.

You just need to look at BioWare. Dragon Age Inquisition is still a new game but we know that Mass Effect 4 is coming and will likely see at at the E3 event. I would imagine that Bethesda is a bigger team now than BioWare and with them doing the old one-two with their two properties it simply is not implausible that Bethesda will do the same.

They also have that little event they announced that takes place a couple of days before E3 itself starts and this intrigues me no end. Yes an announcement of a Fallout 4 would be pretty big news but this in itself warranting a standalone event? No. Also makes it more unlikely when you hear about the fact that they have invited a bunch of people to see some stuff behind closed doors.

Fallout 4, they say it is that they are showing and not in game footage. Hmm ... yes quite bizarre. No I wonder if the surprise might turn out to be that the showing behind closed doors of not in game footage may well be something else. I think Fallout 4 will take centre stage and not shown behind closed doors. It is its own standalone event after all.

So a cinematic piece for what then, I wonder? Maybe that little thing behind closed doors might just be an Elder Scrolls 6 peak? I think its possible, as apparently it has happened before I read somewhere, that Fallout 4 is more or less done and the release will be sooner than expected and at the same time announce that Elder Scrolls is well on its way too and not far behind?

Bah! Maybe its just wishful thinking? Lol.

I do like to try to deduce little puzzles and am normally quite good at it. However much of that energy has gone into dozens and dozens of other areas all of which I allowed no margin for error. This will become extremely clear on my corruption blog and oddly enough within the next couple of weeks!

It is also about time we saw a load of stuff in the next generation of graphics and are long overdue it in my opinion. So it seems both likely and quite exciting that a Tsunami of announcements is upon us.

My head is spinning looking at that list alone and all I keep thinking is that most of that is likely to appear and a few things that were unexpected too?

In just three weeks we will find out and oddly I have my own exciting things going on that may lead me to head out of town for ... well an unknown length of time that could be ... well long.

I will still post about things and still be keeping an eye on events at E3.

However if I hear of a new decent flight simulator or two based on F22's, F35's or EFA along with maybe Apaches or Comanches I may not be able to post due to heart failure?!

THE RESOLUTION GATE

Well I had to do a post about this after now reading about it enough times to know that is not just someone's mad rambling if bullshit!

It would appear that, as mentioned in my last post, Alien Isolation is reported by some to look good on what is now officially previous generation games consoles? Bizarre.

That paragraph had to be included because of the odd situation that has arisen regarding a couple of titles and one I am waiting for,  Dragon Age Inquisition, only being at a resolution of 900 pixels vertically on the Xerox One as opposed to 1080p on the PS4?!

This is odd. Sorry but very odd for a number of reasons...

1 Only vertical resolution is mentioned
2 It is being made a big thing of but...
3 It is only 180 pixels which would hardly be noticeable wick makes it...
4 Very odd that they had to do it as it is minimal as I said and...
5 Not checked but may be restricted to a particular game engine?
6 Why not just reduce about something else and bit resolution?!
7 Staggering that 1080p is an issue on next gen!
8 Kinect can't be helping matters?

Weird. It is all very bizarre. I cannot remember what the first title was I read about?

At the end of the day is only a few pixels in height. You would laugh at a mobile phone, cellphone of your American, that had 100x100 pixels. I dare say that throughout 2015 it probably won't occur anymore. Or a more efficient and prettier 3D engine would be created.

This is something that many posters on forums, especially fan boys committing themselves to a name calling spat, should remember. Is all code. Just because it looks pretty and plays well does not mean that it is programmed well! The same can be said the other way around. If a game is redheaded with a fault, yes it's a pain in the arse but does not mean the coding is crap. Like DriveClub, I think it's called. Online play falls down when there are a lot of cars on one track. Now I don't know what the numbers are but I thought what do you do if it's 50 players? What if it's going to take 100 players or 500?! How do you test for that? This must be hard to impossible so mistakes will occur.

Granted of its something stupid and it has not been corrected after the first month and especially if you pay a subscription this needs to be... dealt with. In the case of the aforementioned game they are and are apologetic.

However what I despise are the labels that act like God with some divine right and don't give a crap about players that I cannot stand.

I don't like it when companies, public services and others are quick to use the Internet to make more money but then decide to refuse to use completely free and immediate form of communication of emails.

Ooh good God man, do I hate that! Made worse if they want to direct you to idiots on forums who like to feel important but work for the company for free! Lol.

You have taken people's money, frustrated them, failed them or worse you can at least have something in place to answer their concerns?!

I have a list of names for those that are aloof in this way but I could not type that list here! There might be children present?! Lmao!

In the meantime there are a list of titles I am keen to read the reviews of and play...

Dragon Age Inquisition
Homefront The Revolution
Mass Effect 4
Star Citizen
Elite Dangerous... error...
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
The Order 1866
The Witcher 3
FarCry 4 (perhaps but read decent reviews first on Amazon/PC Gamer)
Project Cars and any other car games

Maybe by then you can add

Fallout 4 and Elder Scrolls VI to the list?!

Maybe a much longer lasting Dishonoured 2? Sorry but I did enjoy the first until it rather abruptly ended and the DLCs not up to much.

I also really must attach my Thrustmaster Ferrari GT Experience, sharp images of breath, and undertake the drivers and see if there is a problem with it?!

About the time I discovered my Windows 7 was not genuine the racing wheel developed a fault! Annoying as I hadn't used it from new and I don't exist that of Thrustmaster! But then it's PC World so probably refurbished like the dented Corsair K70 Vengeance Keyboard they sold me?!

Annoyingly add the price of the wheels rise the quality died not appear to get any better?! Well that is until you reach about 220 quid and lasso across to old favourite Logitech and their G27 wheel! But a bit expensive compared to 40 quid for current Thrustmaster but even at a tenner useless if it's not going to last five minutes!

Technically PC World owe me a bloody teaching wheel and it gets worse still! The Advent Tegra Note I am typing on right now has had another one of the three I bought returned fur refusing to charge?!

So to recap... bought three tablet pc's and...

Two of them have been returned TWICE and this one... once!

All but one which refused to read perfectly good SD CARD were all for failing batteries. This also reminds me...

PC Gamer which I have read on and off from issue one disappointed me in recent reviews of the new version of this Tablet the nVidia Shield as well as my AMD A10-7850K KAVERI APU.

The former used no mention of the issues on the previous model, favoring nVidia unfairly...

The latter they stated is not a gaming chip and not to be considered at all for a gaming PC?! For a bunch of people that look like computer nerds in their pictures they understand very little about computer hardware!

Not only was that statement way, WAY off base but once again unfairly favors nVidia to a degree and Intel a great deal.

This is even more surprising when you factor in that the architecture is used in the next gen consoles or that future games and software can utilise not just the four integer cores but also the eight GPU cores.

That last point is also odd when you consider that a big thing had been made of using GPU cores to general computing but now that something guard thinking and usable is here is run down and ignored?! Despite the fact that Adobe's Photoshop can utilise them ashtray madness it all the more bizarre.

Remember this is architecture that sits inside all the game consoles and they state that is not to be considered for gaming! So can we take it that both the next gen consoles cannot be considered for gaming either?!

There is no reason that I could add in a Radeon R9-280, or R9-380, and future titles use the APU's GPU cores due other things?!  I feel sure that this will be the way things will turn out which is why I decided to take a punt at this APU.

Of course the next APU could just drop in and have 6 CPU cores and 10 GPU cores? Perhaps and if I both wanted and needed to go that route?

Interested in the lithography drop to the 20nm node from the current 28nm. This is particularly interesting for both the GPU's, R9-380? As well as the APU's, Carrizo/Excavator, and possibly even the FX CPU's if they end up revisiting this avenue?