This Week on JungleDrums:
Your JungleDrums host, AcuteJungle66, is joined by SergeantJay to delve into this week’s gaming and tech news! EA shuts down Visceral Games, prestige raid in Destiny 2 defeated in 2 hours, Activision holds a controversial patent, and more!
- EA is shutting down Visceral Games, the studio behind games like Battlefield Hardline and Dead Space. The Star Wars game in development at Visceral will be revamped and moved to a different studio, EA says, although it will now be something completely different. EA was not clear about the status of longtime Uncharted director Amy Hennig, who joined Visceral to direct this Star Wars game after she left Naughty Dog in early 2014.
- After having delayed the launch of the Leviathan Prestige Raid over an exploit, then deciding to set it live on the new date, despite the exploit not being resolved, the Prestige Raid officially went live in Destiny 2. Within two hours of the Prestige Raid having launched it was beaten by Clan Redeem. The clan had a total of a four-minute margin before the next fireteam beat it. It is unclear if an exploit was used, however Bungie did say they would be checking for it.
- A couple of weeks ago we discussed the impending launch of the GTX 1070 Ti, and I did say I would be ‘keeping an eye out’ for any benchmarks. Well, a few days ago the AotS score of the 1070 Ti graphics card from NVIDIA leaked out and it is clear that there are cards undergoing testing right now. Unlike Ashes of the Singularity however, 3DMark’s benchmarks are much more reliable for comparison purposes and WCCFTech have both the Fire Strike Extreme and Time Spy scores.
- Elysium, the private/pirate vanilla World of Warcraft server that took over from Nostalrius, has imploded amid allegations the people in charge were pocketing donations and creating gold and characters to sell to players for real money. It was alleged that the project’s former leader “has taken at least roughly 2000 Euros or more for personal financial reasons,” and that another senior project member was running a gold and character selling business on the side.
- Microtransaction systems are a much-discussed and controversial topic in gaming. They make publishers a lot of money, in part because the margins are so high, so you can expect them to stick around. Now, it’s been revealed that gaming giant Activision holds a patent for a system that “drives microtransactions in multiplayer video games.” US Patent No. 9,789,406 was filed in 2015 but only granted to Activision this week, according to public records spotted by Rolling Stone.
- As with previous major updates, the Fall Creators Update is being rolled out gradually to users, rather than pushed out to every PC at once. You may or may not see it available through Windows Update. If you don’t see it but are anxious to jump on board, head here and click the Update now button. Gaming is not as big of a focus this time around, though Microsoft did make improvements to Mixer and Windows 10’s Game Mode, the latter of which you can now switch to inside a game.
About JungleDrums:
JungleDrums is a weekly news show run by Scholarly Gamers’ Content Coordinator, AcuteJungle66. Topics discussed in the show focus heavily on gaming, highlights, streams, and tech, but will typically hover around hot-button topics of the week. Joining AcuteJungle66 are a rotating selection of guests, ranging from friends and those interested in the topic at hand, fellow Scholarly Gamers, or members of raiding parties from gaming staples of his such as Destiny 2, The Division, or Rainbow Six Siege.
