Today Intel demonstrated a lineup of new games and technology, and revealed several new initiatives, including partnerships with ESL, Oculus and Ready At Dawn Studios that will take PC gaming to the next level. With more than 1.3 billion PC gamers worldwide, the PC platform continues to be the top choice for the best gaming experiences.

The company also announced timing for the new Intel Core X-series processor family. The 4- to 10-core processors will be available for pre-order beginning on June 19 and will start shipping to consumers the following week. Availability for the rest of the family will soon follow, with the 12-core Intel Core i9-7920X X-series processor expected to start shipping in August, and the Intel Core i9-7940X X-series processor, Intel Core i9-7960X X-series processor and 18-core Intel Core i9-7980X Extreme Edition processor, expected to start shipping in October.

“Intel’s heritage in gaming has been built around technical innovation that brings to life amazing experiences – and it’s also an area where we want to keeping pushing the limits of what’s possible with our technology,” said Gregory Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group at Intel Corporation. “From giving the world its first look at our upcoming Intel Core i9 Extreme Edition processor to accelerating esports and the future of VR esports, we’re excited to be part of one of the strongest PC gaming showcases at E3 in recent years.”

The Intel Core X-series line up is Intel’s most powerful, scalable and accessible high-end desktop processor family ever. With a wide range of options and price points to match, the X-series opens the door for a whole new level of experiences and capability for gamers and content creators of all levels and interests. At the top of the stack is the new Intel Core i9 Extreme Edition processor, the first consumer desktop CPU with 18 cores and 36 threads of power to handle all the megatasking demands of gaming, VR, content creation and more.

ESL, the world’s largest esports company, and Intel announced today that they are expanding their 15-year partnership to further advance the worldwide growth and development of esports. As ESL’s official technology partner, Intel will help grow all of ESL’s esports events around the globe and deliver a world-class experience for competitors and viewers. Intel’s technology will make up the backbone of ESL’s esports events, studios and broadcasting operations, with all amateur and pro tournament PCs running the latest Intel Core i7 processors and all of ESL’s production hardware running on a combination of Intel Core and Intel Xeon processors.

The two companies also revealed the Intel Grand Slam for “Counter Strike: Global Offensive” (“CS:GO”) that will offer a $1 million prize, awarded to the first team that wins four “CS:GO” competitions by ESL and DreamHack in a 12-month period. Qualifying events include the Intel Extreme Masters, ESL One, ESL Pro League and DreamHack Masters series.

In addition, Intel announced several partnerships and investments to accelerate pro-competitive VR gaming (VR esports) and to help accelerate the global growth of esports, including premier events like the Intel Extreme Masters. This includes a partnership with Ready At Dawn Studios to release “Echo Arena” as a free download for all Oculus Rift owners for three months starting on July 20th, 2017. In “Echo Arena” – the fast-paced competitive multiplayer mode for “Lone Echo” – teams of up to five players face off against the competition in a zero gravity clash of robotic glory as competitors glide, boost and punch their way to scoring goals in a breathtaking virtual arena.

A collaboration with ESL and Oculus to launch the VR Challenger League. The competitive VR gaming series begins in July and features both “The Unspoken” from Insomniac Games and “Echo Arena” from Ready At Dawn Studios. The VR esports competition will take place online and at key events with players from around the world, with the finals taking place at the Intel Extreme Masters World Championship in Katowice, Poland, in 2018.

Demonstrating other innovations in VR, Linkin Park joined Intel to announce a brand new addition to their ongoing partnership. Linkin Park Destination powered by Spatialand and Intel will help the band extend its social media engagement with fans via a curated experience in VR – from the studio to on tour to anywhere in between. Available in July, fans can enter into the VR destination via the Spatialand app to access Linkin Park’s music, interact with the band, sign up for contests, buy merchandise, and even unlock secret fan experiences and events created by the band.

The post Intel Showcases Extraordinary PC Gaming and VR Experiences at E3! appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Over the last two years the publisher has been drip-feeding scant details about their cinematic third-person shooter set in a steampunk reimagining of Victorian London.

In the run up to the game’s launch Sony’s hype machine was working on overdrive. So much so that when word of a five hour campaign length, excessive quick-time-events and a couple of hours of cut scenes broke, the internet went wild and skinned the game alive.

The Order: 1886 became less about an intriguing alternative take on colonial Britain at the turn of the century and more about bite-sized gameplay and button mashing.

And it’s a shame because, whilst it does have its faults, overall The Order: 1886 is a rather special affair.

I’m not going to dwell too much on the pre-launch hysteria about the game’s length, the quick-time-events and the rest. You can read about all that elsewhere. I want to look at The Order: 1886 for what it is; a cinematic interactive experience, if that means a game to you, call it that, if it doesn’t then call it something else.

Set in a steampunk version of Victorian England, players take on the role of Sir Galahad, one of the Queen’s Order of Knights. He is joined by his fellow Knights: Sir Percival, Lady Igraine and the knight-in-training, The Marquis de Lafayette. The Order follows a tradition going back to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table from whom they take their aliases.

By drinking Blackwater, fluid from the chalice known in legend as the Holy Grail, the knights of The Order can extend their lives for centuries and heal their wounds. They are not, however, immortal. They can be killed and when they die another knight takes on their alias.

It’s an interesting idea, indeed. Throw in Lycanthropes, the threat of rebellion and the plan of the nefarious United India Company and nothing is quite what it seems.

The game’s plot is sound, but seems to only be a small part of a bigger story.

By the end of the game, even though I enjoyed the tale, I felt it was left hanging a bit too much. For much of the game I had the feeling that the, developer, Ready at Dawn, had bitten off rather more than they could chew.

The Order: 1886, walks a very fine line between being a third-person shooter in the traditional sense and being a very high quality interactive CGI movie. As such it’s an amazing visual feast and, quite simply, the best-looking game I’ve ever played. I’m sure we will see better, but right now this is the best you are going to get.

Victorian London has never been portrayed it such incredible detail. The action takes players from the dank alleyways of Whitechapel to the eerie Westminster catacombs. There’s also plenty of London’s iconic tube system to explore. There’s even a sequence on-board a huge fancifully designed airship, The Agamemnon, that wouldn’t look out of place in a Final Fantasy game.

The characters, as well, are beautifully realised and without a doubt on par with a modern CGI movie, except, incredibly, the PS4 is rendering them in real time.

The game’s attention to detail isn’t just reserved for the spectacle. Tiny details like the different sheen of the ink on documents that you pick up and the dirt on the “camera” lens suggest that this has been a labour of love for the development team.

The graphics absolutely are jaw-dropping. But, these amazing visuals come at a cost, a cost that could arguably be in keeping with the game’s overall cinematic aspirations.

The game runs with an aspect ratio of 2.40:1, similar to a Blu-Ray movie,this means that when playing the game on your HDTV there are black bars at the top and bottom. It’s common for Blu-Ray movies, but not for games, and takes a bit of getting used to. It’s still in “full” HD, it’s just the visible picture between the bars is only 1920×800 and not 1080.

The framerate is a chugging thirty frames per second, close to the 24fps we have no problem with when watching a movie, but a far cry from that video gaming sweet spot of 60fps.

Until you get used to it, the action in The Order feels very juddery compared to, say, the rip roaring frame rate of the PS4’s, almost as beautiful game, The Last of Us Remastered.

The game is, for the most part, an over-the-shoulder third-person cover-based shooter. There’s a bit of stealth and some climbing but nothing in a way of real puzzles or anything like that. It’s also a pretty linear affair, with the rather obvious path set out ahead of you.

The developers have really used their imagination to produce a range of fantastic weapons that seem oddly believable for the time.

In the game, the brilliant real-life Serbian genius, Nikola Tesla is on hand as The Order’s Q-like gadget-man, supplying all sorts of interesting stuff. An assortment of pistols, rifles, shotguns and proto-machine-guns are joined by more exotic items such as the incendiary M86 Thermite Rifle and the lightening in a bottle that is the TS-21 Arc Induction Lance.

The action is interspersed with plenty of cut-scenes. Some players may find the way that the game takes control away from them a bit annoying, but this isn’t Call of Duty.

The Order is first and foremost telling a story, and it’s a good story. To give a bit of interaction back to the player, the game uses quick-time-events. These Simon-says button mashing sequences are the scourge of modern gaming and a design fad that I thought we had seen the back of.

Admittedly, the QTEs in The Order are more in context than most, but the resultant insta-death due to a poorly-timed button-press can still be annoying.

Still, overall, I found the gameplay fun even though I think some other games have done it better.

As I played the game I started drawing some parallels with Crytek’s Xbox One launch title, Ryse: Son of Rome.

Both games are visually impressive. Both games are more about the story than necessarily about the gameplay. Whilst The Order has a better premise, it’s is Ryse, though, that seems to come out on top in putting its narrative setting to better use.

Even though both games slightly overuse QTEs, The Order offers marginally better gameplay, whilst Ryse may provide slightly better replay value.

Both Ryse and The Order make for excellent launch day graphical showcases, though, unfortunately The Order: 1886 has arrived over a year too late.

The Order:1886 is the definition of flawed genius. A fantastic setting and glorious graphics are almost enough to get it by. Unfortunately, the solid but uninspired gameplay isn’t quite enough to propel the game into excellence.

Whilst the story is good and the gameplay polished, it does lack a bit of substance, sometimes feeling like an extended tutorial that doesn’t quite take off.

It’s a shame, as it is still an astounding effort by Ready at Dawn; a developer that should be lauded for trying something different and pushing the medium in this way.

The Order ticks more boxes than most games around at the moment.

Whilst doesn’t quite live up to the hype, it’s still a good effort. As a piece of interactive entertainment, the developers have almost nailed it with a great premise, good story and some very accessible gameplay.

Whilst I can understand that it might not be for everyone, despite its flaws I really enjoyed it. In any case, I’m sure that the inevitable sequel will seek to iron out some of its predecessor’s wrinkles.

The Order: 1886 is out now on PlayStation 4 and I’d recommend it to players that enjoy stunning graphics and a good yarn in their games.

The post The Order: 1886 – Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

The following day we had some one on one time with the developers at PlayStation HQ, in Auckland, New Zealand.

Sitting down in the media room, I began a chat with Garret Foster, the Technology Director at Ready at Dawn.

Garrett Foster: Technology Director – The Order 1886

Shane: Hey Garret, welcome to New Zealand! Let’s start with a brief overview of your role and how this fits into the development of The Order: 1886.

Garret: Yeah sure, so I’m the Technology Director at Ready at Dawn, what that means is that I oversee all of the different technology groups. So it’s kinda an elusive thing to alot of people, and a bit hard to explain, but what we do is make sure that all of the people who are creative types have the necessary tools in order to do their jobs.

So that’s the more tech side, and then there’s the gameplay side, where we have gameplay engineers who work and they are kind of half designer and half engineer and they work with the design team to build all of the game mechanics.

It covers both of those efforts.

Shane: Ready at Dawn has produced the portable versions (PSP), and The Order: 1886 has apparently been in development since 2011, so, was there a Kratos influence, or did the studio aim for something totally different than what they had been doing previously?

Garret: Whenever you’re doing something, whether it’s artistic you are building off past experiences in some form and it’s impossible to ignore that past experience. So, there’s God of War in there, but also Daxter too, that’s an older throw back to everything that we used to do.

There might not be tangible, direct copies of things there but you are influenced by everything so it’s impossible to not have that carryover.

For us, you know, I think it was the story telling elements, that we tried to push into Ghost of Sparta [but] with The Oder, we really took it to a new level. Really defining in the characters, make it a little more complicated, because nothing is really black and white. Nothing is really good and bad ever, there’s a;ways a grey area, there’s motives for why people are bad and there’s motives for why people are good, so it was [for us] trying to understand the human element of it all.

Alot of that came from God of War too but it’s not necessarily a direct rip off but you can kinda see the seeds of it there and [we] obviously took it to a different level. When we play this game it doesn’t feel like God of War but it was also impossible not to be influenced by it.

Shane: Had The Order: 1886 always been slated for PS4 / ‘Next Gen’?

Garret: Yes, it was always a PS4 title. We started development before we knew what the PS4 was. So that was kind of a challenge developing the engine for the game, we had an idea of what it was going to be like, we had an ear to the ground but Sony’s pretty tight lipped when it comes to things that are still in development, so it’s not like we were privy to any information or anything.

You can take a look at technology trends and see where things are headed. And you do your best to see over the next 10 years this is where hardware is going and so we just kind of aligned ourselves with that. For us on the tech side, we are always working on the long game, like, 10 years out [from now] and try and plan, like, where’s the engine going to go over the next 10 years. Things are so big and complicated now that you just cannot not do that.

Luckily we were pretty much spot on, just a little shy, there were some things that were a little different here and there [on the PS4 hardware] but it was pretty much what we predicted so that was good.

We got lucky.

Shane: The Order: 1886 is the story of man vs. Half breeds and centuries of war between the two factions, set within the Victorian industrial revolution era. Where did the inspiration come from for the story?

Garret: I wasn’t involved in the story creation but how I understand is that we knew we wanted something in Victorian London and we knew that we didn’t want it to be real, but plausibly real and so that’s what we are kinda calling it ‘Neo-Victorian’, like if at some point because of the war with the half breeds, technology advances at an exponential rate during the wars so it causes a split, and what would happen, if that split occurred.

And so there was this catalyst of a human divergence, what would the war be like and what would humanity do to ensure that they can fight against that and protect themselves. There was also, during this point that we wanted it within the Industrial Revolution, where everything was booming at the same time. So you had this really interesting mix of social problems, cities were starting to become a staple, you have a technology influx and a whole sense of enlightenment there.

It was a really interesting time period that was kind of the catalyst for that and we knew that everything could grow from out of that.

Shane: The Order: 1886 is built on the ‘RAD Engine’. An internally developed game engine from studio Ready at Dawn. What was the reason for using a home grown game engine for the game as opposed to an out of the box one?

Garret: For us, when you use something from out of the box… well, we already had an engine to begin with, so we were used to working a certain way. So that was the biggest motivator to keep developing our own technology. There was also alot of things that we saw that no one else was able to do or has done before, so like our lighting and material model no one else does that right now.

How we construct the materials, with a relatively small team, you know we are not a thousand person team like you see with other publishers, we are just over hundred people at Ready at Dawn and so we have to pick and choose our battles.

Where we can help out, say, the Art team with technology, we do and so we could have taken something from out of the box and crafted it, but for us we had an engine, we had a way that we liked to work so we said, lets develop off that and keep going.

It’s not like the other engines are bad, or anything like that, it just suited us at the time and still suits us now.

Shane: I realise it is early days, the game does not release until the 20th of this month, however is this the first chapter in a series? Can we expect more – and, what do you want PS gamers to take from The Order: 1886?

Garret: I hope it is. I don’t have an answer to that, but I do hope it is because I really really enjoyed this game. You know, you’re working on a game and sometimes you get lost, like the expression ‘seeing the forest in the trees’ and so for us we were always so close to it, our faces so close to our computer screens, it wasn’t until I finally got a step back from it and saw it all I was so happy with what we were able to achieve.

So pumped by it. Really happy how the story came together and it’s such a rich Universe that it would almost be a shame to not do something else with it.

There’s nothing really planned right now, but I would love to work on it further.

For me personally, I got into making video games because I loved video games. As a programmer I could’ve gone in a number of different directions, I could’ve gone into banking software and had a very good life and gamed all the same and all of that. But for me, I love video games, so I just hope that everyone can just sit down and get lost in a world and have fun, lose themselves for the duration of the story and enjoy the game. Just take it for what it is; a great story driven video game.

If I was to hear from someone, that they sat down they played the game, they forgot what time it is, I lost myself, then we did our job.

Shane: Bonus question! What was your favourite toy as a kid?

Garrett: Favourite toy… oh my goodness. I had a little Transformer but it wasn’t actually a Transformer, it was a knock off Transformer that turned into a jet. And I was so obsessed with jets as a kid because of Top Gun (movie). And so, I don’t remember the name of it, I tried to look it up recently…

Shane: I actually had something similar, I think they were called ‘Machine Men’ a rip off of Transformers. They released at around the same time.

Garret: Yeah possibly. They were totally a knock off and totally my parents style; ‘yeah that’s cheaper’ we will get one of those. But for me it was the greatest thing. It’s a robot and then it’s a freaking jet, it can fly it can do everything! I’ve always been a huge fan of like, mechs and robots.

Shane: Well, thank you Garret for talking to us here at Shane the Gamer. Really appreciate it.

The Order: 1886, developed by Ready at Dawn Studio, is there first major console release and is out on 20th of February, 2015 in Australia and New Zealand.

The post Interview with Garret Foster: The Order 1886 – Feature appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Firstly, it must be said that the presentation is incredibly striking.

There is certainly a distinct feel of polish and meticulous detail attributed to the visuals. Textures are sharp and surfaces react in a realistic way to light, creating a very moody and atmospheric sense.

The visual epicness has received a ‘cinematic’ treatment by way of a subtle film grain and, more noticeably, narrower aspect ratio resulting in letterbox format black bars top and bottom.

This never distracted from the gameplay though, which had a few issues of its own to contend with. More on that later.

The preview demo kicks off at Chapter 5, (sorry; Chapter V), entitled “Agamemnon” which just so happens to be the name of the zeppelin in which the demo is set within.

You take control of one of the knights of the Order “Galahad” and are required to rappel down the side of the zeppelin to breach.

It’s right here the first issue is revealed. It’s not apparently obvious that the player has control once the cutscene ends (a testament to the impeccable visuals) but also an arbitrary and banal exercise which could’ve easily been handled in an extended cutscene.

You can almost hear a Ready at Dawn PR spokesperson whispering from the cosmos, “See, these are in game graphics” like we were all skeptics…

This aside, the first real section of the playable demo is stealth focused and has Galahad skulking through the belly of the beast plucking off unsuspecting guards one by one. All very “paint by numbers”, but still enjoyable.

I’m sure many will draw ire from the “fail-QTE-insta-death” upon being spotted, but for me, I was happy being encouraged to take a more cautious approach.

It is however a bit jarring to be so close to an enemy, second nature dictating a melee stealth kill, only to fail the button prompt and subsequently receive a bullet to the temple at point blank…

There is a QTE (Quick Time Event) brawl that occurs a little later, again which I didn’t mind as long as it doesn’t constitute the lions-share of the game and is handled only at appropriate moments (such as frenzied close quarters combat).

A couple of lock-picking and electrics-shorting mini games find their way in also. Not terribly exciting, but certainly not unwelcome.

Second major issue has the player attempt to identify and mark ‘fake guards’ through the scope of a rifle by recognising those without the proper uniform insignia.

All fine and good, however the game holds the players hand like an infant throughout this entire sequence,  telling you exactly when and where to “hit the button” and then only allowing you to shoot at a very specific moment, removing any judgment the player might otherwise be required to make. It creates a minimal effort, minimal payoff situation which is detrimental to gameplay enjoyment.

The rest of this demo is effectively an action cover based shootout, mostly through corridors but is actually quite enjoyable.

The AI is smart enough to be challenging, and there is enough feedback and resistance in the controls to feel brutal and threatening. Gameplay definitely picked up at this point.

Yes, nothing particularly revolutionary gameplay wise (akin to any number of cover-based shooters) but the slick visuals provide added definition to an already well-trodden landscape.

It will be interesting to see how all of this incorporates the supernatural elements demonstrated elsewhere and how that effects the pacing and dynamism of gameplay but that’s for another time.

The official verdict is still out, as this was one chapter within the throws of an entire and impending story driven action title, but what is certain is that The Order 1886 is set to be the new visual benchmark for the PlayStation 4 and will no doubt generate some excitement amongst gamers as to what to expect from future titles.

The post The Order: 1886 – Preview appeared first on Shane the Gamer.