Happy Monday you rotten bunch I hope yours sucks as hard as mine does!! Anyway lets get to the news and it’s a slow news day once again so I’ll be picking at a few bones left laying in the dirt.
First up is news that iD software the power house developers behind DOOM are targeting 1080p at 60FPS for consoles and PC’s. Having played the closed Alpha a few weeks ago on PC it’s quite a boast and I have to say necessary to have a quality DOOM experience. Halo 5 of course reached that benchmark and whilst the DOOM environments I’ve played are nowhere near the epic scale of some Halo maps the level of detail and eye candy on show should simply melt our woefully underpowered consoles. Quite how they are managing such a feat is beyond my simple brain but if they pull it off with anywhere near the level of graphical fidelity that has been shown on the PC version I will be amazed.
Billy Khan, Doom’s Lead Project Programmer had this to say on the games targeted resolution and frame rate.
“We want players to wonder how DOOM and idTech 6 games can be so visually stunning at 60 frames-per-second at 1080p on all platforms, when other titles cannot even achieve a similar look at 30 frames-per-second,” said Khan. “Our goal is to be the best-looking game at 1080p at 60fps.
“idTech 6 allows the artists and designers to quickly decorate the world with fine details. idTech 6’s physically based renderer and dynamic lighting system allows our artists to make our characters and environments more realistic and stunning than ever before.”
Visuals aside I really enjoyed the few hours I was able to spend with DOOM it really feels like there is a space for a super fast paced, brutal shooter like this and boy was it a messy blast from the past. It didn’t feel old or stuck in the past at all it was brilliant fun and there really is no other game out there quite like DOOM.
Elsewhere in the crazy world of Xbox Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella confirmed that Windows 10 universal Apps will indeed be coming to Xbox. Speaking at a .net conference Nadella was unable to give any indication of a due date for the first Universal Apps or even confirm which Apps we can look forward to. I would expect popular social networking platforms, with the likes of VLC and PLEX to be making their APPS available to the XBOX crowd and maybe even Office with keyboard\mouse support. Not much to go on at this stage but hopefully more at E3 just be prepared for the morons to start complaining about MS showing off something other than games…
In more disappointing news it seems the best game of 2015 Rise of the Tomb Raider really did quite poorly on the Xbox One. The PC release however was far more successful seeing more than 3 times the copies shifted in the first few weeks. The Xbox one version struggled over the 1 million copies mark something the PC smashed through with relative ease despite the console having a lengthy exclusivity period. It should be mentioned that ROTR launched alongside the juggernaut that is the latest Fallout game but still for a timed console exclusive to go down that hard it really must be worrying Microsoft. There is a general sense of growing apathy towards the console and these negative stories are becoming more and more frequent something has to be done to address this slide into irrelevance the Xbox is currently on. I can see ROTR doing extremely well on the PS4 another nail in the coffin of the Xbox One perhaps?
I’ll leave it there for today but hopefully I can get my Hardline review done and posted for tomorrow oh and if you haven’t played ROTR go buy a copy and enjoy the best game of 2015. Seriously I never like anything but I loved this it’s brilliant.
