BioWare and Electronic Arts has announced that Dragon Age: Origins (PS3, PC, Xbox 360) has officially gone gold and is now currently in manufacturing ready for the November 3 launch date across North America.

Alex St. John, the CEO of online video game company WildTangent, has predicted at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle that consoles will be "extinct" by 2020. He said that "the PS3, the Wii and the X-box are the last generation of consoles that you either see or that anybody regards as successful in the market." Want to know what else he had to say? Well, the "read more" link is right below, use it.

Massive Development and Swordfish Studios' project of porting the PC real-time strategy game World in Conflict to both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 is looking really promising. It seems that the developers have figured out how to put in some Direct X 10 effects into the console versions of the game. To find out more, head on over to the full article.

Want more information on JoWood's upcoming title, Gothic 4? Well, you guys will be getting that and even more. We were able to catch the first details that were revealed by the German PC Games magazine for this RPG game. Find out the details after the jump!

One topic that this year's Nordic Game conference aims to discuss is regarding game development. To this end, Nordic's organizers have unveiled their initial line-up of professional programmers who will be giving talks at the event grounds. Details are available in the full article.

Ouch. Biggest news in the techies' Utopia is Epic Games' Mark Rein expounding his predictions that technology on PCs would be throttled, after a showcase of Unreal Engine 3 titles on consoles haven't even come close to pushing the DirectX 10 envelope.

 

After PC gaming (at least in the North American side) had drifted off to a steady decline, game companies have steered their focus into development for the next-generation platforms, such as the Xenon-powered Xbox 360 and the CELL-powered PlayStation 3. But with their physical limitations, consoles can only power so much in a game before plateauing at a certain performance level.

Epic Games' vice president Mark Rein told CVG that the game industry has to "dumb the games down for the consoles," so it's highly unlikely that gamers on PC will see anything pushing the graphical or technological envelope in the near future. In fact, Rein thinks that it most likely that no game would even tap DirectX 10 until the next iteration of consoles.

While Banzai Runners the world over could be "facepalming" in unison, this doesn't present more of a threat to "geeked up" gamers than to, say FutureMark or NVIDIA, whose businesses has been at the brunt of graphical technology advancement since the late 1990s. Sneaking around the Web's most reputable tech forums, we've found that majority of the reactions aren't even concerned with Rein's statements.

It is true that the opinion is worrisome to an extent (essentially, while unproven, it is potentially viable), but it appears that more concern has been emphasized toward creativity, variety and (gasp!) quality games for the PC, rather than always push the frontlines of graphics with first-person shooters, dungeon crawlers or real-time strategy games. Is a revolution at hand? If so, this blogger wants X-COM back (please?).

And as for PC gaming technology being throttled, however, some people believe that Germany, banded together with computer companies worldwide, may have something different to say altogether.

In a recent interview with Game Informer, id Software's John Carmack gave word that they will not be using DirectX 10 for the upcoming Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for the Xbox 360, PC, PS3, and Mac.

According to Carmack, so far there is no "massive pull" for him for DX10 and it all depends on how widely adopted Vista will become.

Microsoft's Director of Games for Windows Rich Wickham has responded to this and to the people who have been pointing out that Microsoft's DirectX 10 is not gaining as much acceptance among game developers.

"What I believe Mr. Carmack said was that he did not currently see a compelling reason to develop on DirectX 10...," said Wickham. "We obviously work with id, and a lot of id’s progeny." He also added that he would be "shocked and amazed if id doesn't build a DirectX 10 title some day" and that he suspects that it will be "sooner rather than later."

Those are pretty strong and confident words from Wickham regarding their product. Whether his predictions come true or not remain to be seen. Be sure to keep checking back here for more updates on the gaming scene.

The premise of The Club is not really new (*cough* Fight Club *cough*). A blood-sport financed by the insanely wealthy will pit eight highly skilled killers in a kill or be killed contest.

Bizarre Creations adds a new spin to the first person shooter genre, mixing it with beat 'em up and racing gameplay. So what more can we expect from the upcoming run and gun video game? The Club features five single player modes (Standard Mode, Time Attack, Survivor, Siege, and Run the Gauntlet) and nine multiplayer modes of up to 16 players online and four players (on split screen offline for Xbox 360 and PS3). The Club also sports eight real-world locations ranging from abandoned factories to steel mills.

It also has a motion blur system which makes for more dramatic gameplay plus the environments can be manipulated to the players' advantage. Players will earn points for efficiency and accuracy, and accumulated points can be used to unlock weapons, maps, and characters. The Club won't run out of toys to play with 17 customizable weapons to choose from: Automatic Weapons, Sniper Rifles, High Caliber Pistols, Sub Machine Guns, and Mounted Weapons. Story-wise, each of The Club's eight fighters has his own story and motives.

Here's the minimum system requirements for the PC version:

• CPU Speed: Intel Pentium 4 2.0Ghz / AMD
• Athlon XP 2000+ processor
• RAM: 512MB system RAM
• Video Card: 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible
• 64MB video card with latest manufacturer
• drivers (see supported chipsets below)
• Hard Drive: 2.2GB of uncompressed free hard
• drive space
• Operating System: Microsoft Windows 2000 or
• XP with latest service pack installed
• DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (included on disc)

   

The whole videogame industry is currently in the middle of the transition to high-definition next gen visuals with the introduction of DirectX 10, and to make the transition an easier process, here comes Nvidia with the "definitive" game development platform, Nvidia SDK 10.

The core of Nvidia's new platform is the new NVIDIA Developer Toolkit. It promises to "save developers time and money in creating games that deliver almost lifelike graphics and physics realism." The platform consists of Nvidia GeForce(R) 8 Series graphics cards, Nvidia nForce(R) 680 motherboards, and DirectX 10.

The new NVIDIA Developer Toolkit also includes instructive code samples, advanced shaders, performance tuning, and more, all in a bid to make the creation of Microsoft DirectX 10-compatible games easier.

The Nvidia Developer Toolkit also includes the following:

• SDK 10: all-new DirectX 10, OpenGL, and CUDA code samples for the latest GPUs
• Texture Tools: Powerful libraries and plug-ins for working with textures - now with DirectX 10 support and approximately 10x faster due to GPU acceleration via CUDA
• PerfKit 5: powerful tools for debugging and profiling GPU applications for Windows Vista and DirectX 10 -- now with shader edit-and-continue, render state modification, customizable graphs and counters, and more
• ShaderPerf 2: detailed shader performance information with support for new drivers
• FX Composer 2: a world-class development environment for cross-platform shader authoring; DirectX and OpenGL support with HLSL, Cg, and COLLADA FX
• Shader Library: the world's largest collection of GPU shaders featuring more than 100 different shader effects and support for external submissions

Nvidia is currently demonstrating the entire development platform and distributing some of its components free of charge at the Game Developers Conference (GDC).

Here are some new updates for Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, fresh from the concluded Games Convention in Leipzig:

• Soon, you can now play the PC version of the game using an Xbox 360 controller since it is easier to demo with a gamepad rather than playing with the mouse and keyboard as seen in the demo in GC 2006. Microsoft will be releasing a wireless receiver that should work with all the 360 accessories this fall.

• The game in the GC 2006 demo detailed the Operation Market Garden, which took place in Holland.

• The Xbox 360 and PS3 versions will look slightly better than the XP version, but that the Vista-based DirectX 10 version will look the best. Although there is no specific release date yet.

• The features of the PS3 version of the game is now complete and Gearbox's team is debating whether to include the PS3 controller's motion-sensing technology.

• Although the demo only previewed the single player mode of the game, the game's going to include a multiplayer mode where you can play co-op online. Also, you won't be able to play cross-platform between Xbox 360 and PC since Microsoft doesn't allow cross-platform gaming at this point.