As the SIGGRAPH event is over for this year, there are some quite interesting things that have been revealed through it. Of course the new cooperation between Blizzard and AMD originally seemed to be of some interest at first glance, but IncGamers' StarCraft network site; StarCraftWire.net has let their tech guru loose on some of the papers that were published for the lectures by AMD, and has come to much more interesting conclusions.
The cooperation between AMD and Blizzard surely seems to be more than just a PR trick or getting free graphics cards for BlizzCon, as the documents Blizzard provided themselves hold new, exclusive information about StarCraft 2 system requirements. In this case "only" the requirements for graphics cards, but you will find out a lot more information from this with the help of PC hardware expertise and thorough analyse:
"This is in line with information provided by Xordiah in QA session 13 that the game required Pixel Shader 2.0 support. My article last month, StarCraft 2 System Requirements, contained my analysis in which it became clear that in terms of the GeForce series, the FX line was the bottom grade. This appears to be complete confirmation, the graphical situation was as I expected. I appear to have been near dead on regarding ATI Radeon cards as well."
Leading domestic game companies have entered into an unprecedented competition to win orders for Starcraft, Blizzard's representative IP (intellectual property).
Weird MS is letting go of a good IP. I don’t mind it but hopefully the best dev wins and I’m not sure who that is outbid those.
What they are bidding for are exclusive rights to develop the IP. Microsoft/blizzard is essentially licensing it out to the highest bidder, not selling the IP.
I wonder if we'll see Starcraft Ghost come out of this. And if we do, I wonder if it'll be a free-to-play gacha game.
Given the potential developers, looks inevitable there will be free to play gacha versions. But given south korea’s love for starcraft there would be one that is inline with starcraft 1&2.
Might want to expect some sort of backdoor cheat that only south koreans know of lol 🤣
This week, Blizzard Entertainment dropped both 'StarCraft: Remastered' and 'StarCraft II Campaign Collection' into PC Game Pass.
Hopefully these get released on Switch and Playstation, along with Age of Empires. There’s a severe lack of good RTS games on both those platforms.
Happy spooky season to those who celebrate! We have a collection of scary games for you to enjoy with Game Pass, while hiding under the blankets (or maybe that’s just how I play). And if you want to do something slightly less scary, we have a whole list of games for you to start pre-installing including more day one additions like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and more! Let’s get to the games.
• South Park: The Fractured but Whole (Cloud, Console, and PC) – October 16
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (Cloud, Console, and PC) – October 25
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (Cloud) – October 25
Game Pass Ultimate
• Call of Duty: Warzone (Cloud) – October 25
Game Pass Ultimate
• Ashen (Cloud, Console, and PC) – October 29
• Dead Island 2 (PC) – October 31
• StarCraft: Remastered (PC) – November 5
• StarCraft II: Campaign Collection (PC) – November 5
Let the COD on GamePass experiment begin!
I would think their quarterly revenue will take a hit compared to a year ago, but will maybe make up for it throughout the year as the monthly GP subs keep coming in
Was up with call of duty man?
I downloaded cod on gamepass and for some reason I cannot access the game.
just curious what version? There are some that you can pre-load, but they wont work until their release date later this month.
I have to redownload it again for the 3rd time to check.
I ended up just deleting it to make room for other games after the second time.
It was on Xbox game pass, I didn’t know there was other versions. I just downloaded everything, but sadly I couldn’t even access the game. Maybe 3rd time the charm. I’ll download it again.
On xbox there is the last gen/current gen versions pc though you could also get a xbox version.
When that new forza first came out for one day they had the xbox version on the pc store i was like ? what it was odd.
On xbox you can easily download the one version of a game instead of the series version so you run into issues on your series console.
Because a game won’t run after I download it??
Man your kids must hate your @ss if that’s how you think.
It's going to be very interesting to follow up on how the new entry of CoD will perform at the box office, player numbers and distribution of Xbox, PC and PS versions this year.
I got excited thinking they ported StarCraft to consoles but it's just the PC version. Also, I thought Starcraft 2 was already free to play.
I know the ATI 9800, but the Geforce FX series? I can't say I know where those stood in the whole lineup? Does anyone know which Geforce card preceded/followed these?
Was pretty hard to find that document, but the rewards were definantly there. Confirmation from Blizzard themselves on what graphics cards the game engine was designed in mind for, right from development. Hope it proves useful to someone!
Wonder why Blizzard didn't release this formally if it was just going to spill out when one person got smart and recognised it's value? Not that I don't mind cloak and dagger work, keeps me in work and all.
Great work! I'm really looking forward to SC2 and, since I will be building a new computer in the next few months, it's great to know what I will need ;)
While my initial reaction to the partnership was bad (I don't like ATI) it does seems that is has brought some benefits. The paper is surely to be quite technical, but it is a priviledge to have an insight into Blizzard's modus operandi
what about us intel integrated people?