Join Alexis Pinturault and experience the thrill of the competition with Steep: Road to the Olympics available now!

Source: XBOX YouTube
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Join Bode Miller and experience the thrill of the competition with Steep: Road to the Olympics available now!

Source: XBOX YouTube
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For the first time ever, the stand-alone version of South Park: The Stick of Truth is on Xbox One! Play this South Park classic now. From the perilous battlefields of the fourth-grade playground, a young hero will rise, destined to be South Park’s savior. From the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, comes an epic quest to become… cool.

Source: XBOX YouTube
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With the Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang officially underway, Steep is giving you the perfect opportunity to ignite your competitive flame with Road to the Olympics, available now on the Microsoft Store.

This expansion introduces a sprawling new powder-filled mountain set in Japan as well as a bevy of new events set on South Korean slopes. These new challenges are specially tuned to capture the speed and challenge of Olympic competition, and they include Giant Slalom, Slalom, Super-G, Downhill, Parallel Giant Slalom, Halfpipe, Snowboard Cross, Slopestyle, Big Air, Ski Halfpipe, Ski Cross, and Ski Slopestyle.

To help get the look and feel of these events exactly right, the Steep team consulted with Olympic athletes during the development process — and to help you succeed in your quest for gold, those same Olympic athletes recorded some tips and advice to inspire you in the new Become a Legend mode.

In Become a Legend, you’ll embark on a quest to hone your freestyle skills and rise through the competitive ranks en route to Olympic glory. Along the way, you’ll hear from 10 Olympics legends and rising stars who share their training tips, insights on track designs, and perspective on what it means to be an Olympic athlete, all to help spur you onward and upward to the awards podium (and ever higher on the Xbox Live leaderboards). Read on to meet some of the athletes whose words of wisdom await you in-game, and get a look at Road to the Olympics in action.

Lindsey Vonn won gold and bronze medals in Downhill and Super-G, respectively, at the Olympic Winter Games Vancouver 2010, and is one of the winningest alpine skiers in history on the World Cup circuit.

Gus Kenworthy is a freestyle skier who won a silver medal in his Olympic debut in Ski Slopestyle in Sochi, Russia, and has gone on to win two World Cup championships in Men’s Halfpipe.

Ayumu Hirano was the youngest medalist in X Games history, winning the silver in superpipe at the age of 14, and the next year he won the silver medal in Halfpipe at the Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Bode Miller is the most decorated male American alpine skier of all time, having won six Olympic medals (including gold in Super Combined) and numerous World Cup titles across multiple disciplines.

Alexis Pinturault is a French alpine ski racer who found success on the World Cup circuit, and won a bronze medal in the Giant Slalom in the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014.

Julia Marino is an American snowboarder who won big during her rookie year at the X Games, winning gold in Slopestyle and bronze in Big Air.

To get your taste of Olympic glory, you can download the Road to the Olympics expansion from the Microsoft Store now, provided you already own Steep. If you don’t, then the Steep Winter Games Edition is for you, as it includes the original base game and the Road to the Olympics expansion. And if you go for the Steep Winter Games Gold Edition, you’ll get the base game, the expansion, and the Season Pass, which gives you access to a bunch of previously released add-ons, including new challenges, new outfits, and additional sports like sledding and rocket wingsuiting. Yes, that’s wingsuiting with a rocket strapped to your back, and yes, it’s awesome.

See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire

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Source: Xbox Blog
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Deep Rock Galactic is the bearded brainchild of a team of video games industry veterans who hail from leading studios such as, IO Interactive, Ubisoft, Havok, Deadline Games and Press Play. In 2016, we suddenly found ourselves with the opportunity to start our own game company, and thus Ghost Ship Games was born. As a studio, our goal is to create co-op first experiences in weird and wonderful settings that unite players and will keep them engaged for years to come.

Deep Rock Galactic is our first title and encapsulates the game we’ve always dreamt of making – a co-op first space mining FPS, with dwarves! To make our lives even more difficult, we decided to go with procedurally generated, fully destructible caves to make every mission a gleefully chaotic surprise. We’ve had a blast developing the game so far, and can’t wait to hear more from the Xbox community when we launch on Xbox Game Preview later this month.

Our journey took us on the road with Deep Rock Galactic to showcase our badass space dwarves at various shows across the globe, where we met our brothers in arms for the project – Coffee Stain Studios. The lovely unhinged Swedes behind Sanctum and Goat Simulator really understood what we were trying to create with Deep Rock, and saw the potential in our team and vision. It was a matter of weeks before an investment and publishing deal between us was finalized. There is still no goat to be found in the caves of Hoxxes, but who knows what the future will bring?

Right from the beginning, Microsoft had shown interest in Deep Rock Galactic and after partnering with Coffee Stain, we closed a deal for the Xbox Game Preview launch alongside our Steam Early Access release. As a result, Deep Rock Galactic was showcased at the Microsoft Conference at E3. This was huge for us — our greatest exposure to date and it really put Deep Rock Galactic on the map.

Since we first entered Closed Alpha in 2016, the game has gone through an extensive amount of changes and improvements with the help and feedback from our awesome community. We’ve introduced new mission types, massively improved systems for generating caves, an upgraded biome system and completely new and remodeled enemies. We’ve also introduced the Space Rig, new minerals to hunt for, and a full system for upgrades and vanity items to spend those minerals on – and that’s not even mentioning the tons of ideas we still have for stuff to implement and improve.

The next step in Deep Rock Galactic’s Xbox evolution was Paris Games Week in November, where we showcased the game on the Xbox One X for the first time. This was a huge step for us and taught us three things: 1) the Xbox community is epic, 2) you guys really love dwarves, and 3) dwarf in French is ‘nain’. The show was a success and confirmed to us that bringing Deep Rock to Xbox is a game changer.

Finally, this brings us to today, on the verge of launching on Xbox Game Preview on February 28. This launch dwarfs anything we’ve done before (pun intended)! We’ve enhanced the game for the Xbox One X with improved resolution and HDR and we also support Xbox Play Anywhere, featuring cross-save, cross-play and buy once, play anywhere across Xbox One and Windows 10.

We can’t wait to work with the community to see how much further we can take the game. In all seriousness, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with any and all feedback, it’s all of your efforts that can help us make Deep Rock Galactic the best co-op shooter in the galaxy for our full commercial launch in 2019!

See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire

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Source: Xbox Blog
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Play Rainbow Six Siege for FREE this weekend! Grab a friend and level up your operators.

Source: XBOX YouTube
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Many of gaming’s most compelling stories come from those who’ve helped to create our favorite Xbox One games. In our Inside Xbox One X Enhanced series, these creators will share the behind-the-scenes accounts of the work involved in enhancing these epic games for Xbox One X, how they’ve helped chart the course of the world’s most powerful console, and what that means for the future of gaming. Today, we’ll be chatting with the development team The Astronauts about enhancing The Vanishing of Ethan Carter for Xbox One X.

What specifically is your development team doing to enhance The Vanishing of Ethan Carter for Xbox One X (textures, draw, framerate, resolution)?

The resolution is the number one thing, we offer up to true 4K. We’d say “up to” because you can also choose a non-standard resolution that’s between 1080p and 2160p/4K. So, it’s up to the player if they want respectable framerate with the crispiest possible image (4K) or ultra-smooth 60 frames per second in 1080p or 1440p. You can change the resolution and see its effect on the framerate at any moment in the game.

How do these enhancements impact the gaming experience (visuals, performance)?

For Xbox One and Xbox One X we have redone quite a lot of the game – more than we expected, actually – to merge the code with the latest version of Unreal Engine 4. So, all the code and graphics enhancements come from that merge – thanks, Epic Games! – and then also directly from the power of X. In result, we got, for example, a better handling of high resolution textures, meaning pop-ups are rarely noticeable and streaming in the new areas is without any hitches.

Why did your development team choose to focus on these enhancement areas?

Ethan Carter is what we’d call a “no compromise” game. We did not sacrifice the gameplay on the altar of visuals or vice versa. In our case, we fell like literally everything is crucial to the experience – gameplay, writing, visuals, music, sounds – and high-res graphics and better handling of those graphics help achieve that goal. The reason is that the sense of presence our visuals offer is an important element… of the gameplay. It’s hard to explain without spoilers, but let’s just say it’s a game where the players need to feel they’re really there. We already have a great source material (high resolution textures and models produced with the use of the photogrammetry tech), it’s nice to be able to display it all in its original glory.

How do you expect fans of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter will respond to seeing/playing it on Xbox One X with these enhancements?

We’re already getting very encouraging messages from players. “The best-looking game” and so on. While they’re nice and it’s lovely to see those screenshots flooding our Twitter feed, it’s even better that these messages also include stuff like “I was in tears,” or “Unforgettable experience.” Because all those high-resolution visuals are not for show but merely a tool to let the players live and believe a certain story.

What/how has the process been to get the game up and running on Xbox One X?

Getting the code merged with the latest UE4 took us some time, but then it was basically very simple to get the game running. Of course, some extra work was needed to handle some Xbox-specific things – but everything went smoothly. From that point of view, the development was a breeze.

What enhancement were/are you most excited about to explore leveraging for The Vanishing of Ethan Carter on Xbox One X?

There’s one very special non-technical feature we have added to Xbox: the Free Roam mode. Many players just wanted to explore the Red Creek Valley without all the evil and murder in it, so we went for it. It was a surprising amount of work, to clean all that blood and hide the corpses! But the effort was worth it: if you turn down the music and just walk around this beautiful place listening to nothing but the wind and the water and the trees… It’s a very immersive experience.

What does 4K and HDR mean for your game, games in the future and development at your studio?

Seems like 4K is slowly becoming the expected standard, and we get why — 4K is more visible in-game than, say, in movies. We could do the HDR for our game but ultimately, we chose not to. It was a conscious decision, and the reason behind it is that although the game is nearly photo-realistic, it’s also paintery and oneiric in a way. Meaning we don’t use a lot of contrasts in our visuals. So, we decided to leave the game the way we developed it, to make sure it’s still 100% the way we imagined it. But that’s specifically for Ethan. We have little doubt we will be using HDR in any future game. It’s just too cool!

Thanks to The Astronauts for taking the time to chat with us about Xbox One X Enhanced. We’ll be bringing you more interviews with more developers in the future, so stay tuned to Xbox Wire!

See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire

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Source: Xbox Blog
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