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Rumor: Titan might be a time-traveling, earthbound MMO
The folks over at Project Titan claim to have a huge leak on Blizzard's upcoming Titan project from a reliable (and unnamed) source. While we are certainly wary of rumors, particularly on this scale, the author says he is "extremely confident" about the leak in particular. So what is Titan, according to this post? Several bullet points sketch a picture of an MMO that is based on Earth, is big into historical mythology (including Greek, Roman, and Viking myths), and involves "a lot" of time travel. The leaks says that Titan will play from a third-person view, has a new game engine, could also be headed to consoles, and has a strong e-sports emphasis. The leak purports that over 150 developers are working on Titan, including Jay Wilson. Apparently we'll be seeing a teaser of Titan at BlizzCon before it goes into friends and family testing in early 2014. So what do you think? Is this too elaborate to be a hoax, too vague to be the real thing, or a possible advance insight into what Titan is? Sound off in the comments! [Thanks to Mynsc for the tip!]
Know Your Lore: The best of Tin-Foil Hats
The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft. A funny thing happened this week. For the past two weeks, I've been working on Tinfoil Hat Editions of KYL -- fun, speculative posts that attempt to predict just what the heck is going on with the Warcraft universe. I was, in fact, working up to a super big reveal of an a-ha moment I'd had a couple of weeks ago regarding the nature of the mists surrounding Pandaria and what exactly happened to Emperor Shaohao. Except that I was preempted, for want of a better word. The PTR hit for patch 5.3, and in all of the datamining of the sound files, that pet theory I'd been working with was addressed directly. On the one hand, it was nice to see that I'd been dead on and correct with what I was assuming. On the other, it meant I had half of an article written that I couldn't really publish. ... oops? So Adam Holisky suggested in his infinite wisdom that this week, I look back on some old TFH editions of Know Your Lore -- a best-of recap of some of the wilder things I've pointed out. It seems as good a time as any!
EVE Evolved: The Battle for Caldari Prime
The empires of EVE Online have long and bloody histories that, until now, have been played out largely through fictional chronicles and in-character news posts. This week saw conflict erupt in-game between two NPC empires in the Battle for Caldari Prime live event. The neutral CONCORD faction has managed to maintain order between the four main empires of New Eden for decades, but that doesn't stop the Gallente and Caldari factions occasionally violating the peace. The Caldari were originally part of the Gallente Federation but gained independence in a war lasting almost a hundred years. Following an attack on a Gallente city, a right-wing faction in the Gallente government seized power and ordered the bombing of the Caldari homeworld. Millions of Caldari citizens were evacuated from the homeworld, a planet that has been under dispute ever since. Caldari Prime resides in the Luminaire system and is officially inside Gallente territory, but recent events have seen the tables turn. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at the story behind the recent Battle for Caldari Prime, accusations that the event was staged and scripted, and what the future may hold for live events in EVE.
Two more Titan-powered PCs emerge, from Digital Storm and Origin
Both Digital Storm and Origin are getting NVIDIA's latest GPU, the GTX Titan, the two boutique PC makers announced this morning. Per Digital Storm's adorable little Bolt PC, a single Titan GPU is replacing the GTX 680 as the most powerful GPU offered, while Origin is offering a variety of setups featuring the Titan (all the way up to four Titans working together in an SLI configuration). Of course, at $1,000 for the Titan video card, you're looking at a ridiculously hefty price tag for that four-way setup (akin to what we saw this morning from Maingear), not to mention the custom liquid cooling Origin's throwing in. Interestingly, Digital Storm's Titan-enabled Bolt and Origin's top of the line setup offer two very different real world examples of how NVIDIA's latest GPU can be put to work. While it scales to the ultraniche, superrich PC gamer, Titan also caters to the more casual PC gamer (albeit one who's still willing to shell out a good amount of cash). Both are set to launch alongside the Titan itself on February 25th.
Maingear fits 3-way GTX Titan graphics into (un-priced) gaming PC
If you're a high-end gaming PC manufacturer, why not just time your desktop launches for when the latest pixel-blasting GPUs come out? That's exactly how Maingear rolls, so it's just announced three new machines based on NVIDIA's freshly launched GeForce GTX Titan. The new flagship graphics card borrows its name (and some of its tech) from the Kepler-based Titan supercomputer and packs 2,688 CUDA cores and 7.1 billion transistors, along with 6GB of GDDR5 RAM and a 384-bit interface. That lends it 4,500 Gigaflops of horsepower, displacing the company's GTX 690 model at the top while letting modders overclock and overvolt the cards with "higher limits than ever," according to NVIDIA. Maingear will ship three units armed with the Titan: the SHIFT, which will be available in dual or three-way GTX Titan configurations, the F131 with one or two cards and the single-card only Potenza. All feature a 90 degree rotated motherboard design to vent hot air out the top for better cooling, along with with AMD or Intel processors up to the Core i7-3960X six-core model, SATA 6G, USB 3.0 and up to 64GB of RAM. You'll also get 4K max resolution on four simultaneous displays, thanks to two dual-link DVI, HDMI and Display Port 1.2 connectors. There's no word yet on pricing, but for a three-way SLI SHIFT PC? Think big.
NVIDIA unveils the GTX Titan, an enormous graphics card that costs $1,000 (eyes-on)
NVIDIA's GTX Titan is rumor no more, as the American computer hardware company unveiled the superpowerful graphics card this morning. With 2,688 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR5 RAM, and 7.1 billion transistors packed into the 10.5-inch frame, Titan's capable of pushing 4,500 Gigaflops of raw power -- NVIDIA's pitching Titan as the means to "power the world's first gaming supercomputers." The company even showed off the Titan in its mightiest form, bootstrapped to two others running together (three-way SLI), which powers graphics showcase Crysis 3 running at its highest settings: a whopping 5760x1080 resolution across three monitors. Of course, a setup like that would cost you quite a pretty penny; just one GTX Titan costs $1,000, not to mention three (nor all the other hardware required to support it). Should you prefer your gaming PCs to not be of the neon-lit, triple GPU, above-$10,000 variety, NVIDIA was also showing off the Titan in a Falcon Northwest boutique PC. The company's working with a variety of boutique PC makers to incorporate the Titan (see: Maingear), making NVIDIA's top of the line a teensy bit more accessible to your average joe. GTX Titan is the new top of the line for NVIDIA, effectively pushing aside the GTX 690 and setting a new benchmark for performance. Of course, with a $1,000 price tag and freedom -- nay, encouragement -- to tweak its nitty gritty settings, the Titan isn't really meant for your average anyone. The PC game-playing early adopters, however? Here's your next GPU. Hopefully you've got a big, empty space in your rig, as you'll need it. The GTX Titan arrives on February 25th for $999.
EVE Evolved: Is EVE becoming a spectator sport?
This week saw another landmark event in EVE Online grab the gaming community's attention as over 3,000 players from dozens of alliances battled it out in the lowsec system of Asakai on the Caldari border. The battle reached 2,800 concurrent players at peak, falling just short of 2011's record-breaking siege of LXQ2-T which hit 3,110 simultaneous combatants at its peak. There were livestreams, tons of after-action reports, and the story of this immense battle started by one man clicking the wrong button really captured our imaginations. EVE is one of those rare cases in which a lot of people find the media that surrounds the game more fun than the game itself. News of big in-game events like scams, heists, and huge battles spreads across the internet like wildfire, even among people who hate the game or have never tried it. When news of the Asakai battle emerged, someone on Reddit suggested that people should play EVE for only a few months to get some background and then quit and just read the stories. I've seen a lot of similar comments over the years saying that EVE is more fun to watch and read about than play, and it makes me wonder if the game is becoming a bit of a spectator sport. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at why stories like the Battle of Asakai are so pervasive and explain why I think EVE should embrace its role as a spectator sport.
Colossal 3000-man battle rocks EVE Online
What started out as a few EVE Online alliances forming up PvP fleets last night rapidly evolved into one of the largest PvP battles in the game's history. Reports indicate that a total of over 3,000 players may have been involved in the colossal battle in the lowsec system of Asakai in the early hours of this morning, with hundreds of corporations taking sides in the conflict. The battle officially centred around a Liandri Covenant staging starbase in the Caldari faction warfare system of Asakai, but things rapidly got out of control as practically every major alliance with a capital fleet threw its own forces into the mix for a bit of fun and the chance to kill a titan or two. The system peaked at around 2,800 players fighting simultaneously, just 300 short of beating 2010's world record battle in LXQ2-T. Lag set in with around 700 players in the system, but EVE's Time Dilation feature kept the server running amicably up into the thousands of players. At the peak of the battle, the system was running at just 10% normal speed and people were experiencing several-minute delays on module activations. Dozens of valuable capital ships and supercapitals were destroyed, in addition to several titans worth several thousand dollars each. A few players filmed parts of the action and have shared footage of the slow-motion battle on YouTube. [Thanks to BobFromMarketing for the tip!]
Last week in MMO news: The best of Massively
Sometimes, you'd like to know that there are other MMOs out there, right? It's not all WoW, all the time! Our sister site Massively can provide you with everything you need to know about all of the other MMOs around -- past, present and future. Rumor: Blizzard's Titan is not a new IP and could be heading to consoles What is Project Titan? All we know about it right now for sure is that it's being developed by Blizzard, and we've been told on occasion that the game is not a new installment of one of Blizzard's existing franchises. But that may not be the case. According to rumors collected by fans, Titan may indeed be a spinoff of an existing IP and might even be aimed at the console market. New MMOs to watch in 2013 The year that was 2012 turned out to be a mixed bag for the MMO industry. For every piece of good news, there was a piece of bad news. Now that it's 2013, it's time to look forward, and Massively examines what the top ten most promising titles of 2013 may be. A video retrospective on 38 Studios discusses 'star-struck legislators' The sun has set on 38 Studios, but there's still a lot of people eager to analyze and dissect the company's rise and sharp decline. As a whole, it's been looked at and analyzed extensively from the gaming side, but the other factors that went into the studio's enormous state loan and subsequent burnout are examined more closely in a new video. Massively's week in review Don't let WoW Insider do all of the talking when it comes to Massively's best content of the week. The Massively staff themselves have picked out what they think is the best content their site has to offer in their own weekly roundup.
Rumor: Blizzard's Titan is not a new IP and could be heading to consoles
What is Titan? All we know about it right now for sure is that it's being developed by Blizzard, and we've been told on occasion that the game is not a new installment of one of Blizzard's existing franchises. But that may not be the case. According to rumors collected by the fans over at Titan Focus, Titan may indeed be a spinoff of an existing IP and might even be aimed at the console market. The hints have been coming from a fan known in the community for being fairly reliable in his rumors, lending this some credibility, but it's still just a rumor at this point. If it's true, then we can expect the game to be tied to one of the existing Blizzard franchises, albeit not as a direct sequel. Considering how quiet the studio has been on the project for some time, we can only hope that the surfacing rumors are a sign we're getting closer to some hard information.
MediaPortal 1.3 hits beta, scores new Titan UI, preliminary Windows 8 support
After simmering in its second alpha stage for roughly two weeks, MediaPortal 1.3 has hit the beta phase with a trio of newly-minted looks. The Titan skin spruces up the open source media player's interface with fresh visuals designed for folks with 1080p 16:9 displays. If you're worried about the new look harshing your plugin mellow, the Titan Extended option already plays nice with a handful of add-ons: OnlineVideos, MovingPictures, MP-TvSeries, My Films, Fanart Handler, Latest Media Handler, Trakt, InfoService and the Extensions plugin. Those who'd rather not make the leap to the brand-spanking-new skin can take advantage of refreshed Default and DefaultWide themes instead. In addition to the new coat of paint, the Beta adds preliminary support for Windows 8, which is scheduled to mature in the final version. Thanks to Last.fm's about face on free API access, the music service's plugin has been nixed, but it might return for Last.fm subscribers. For the full changelog and instructions on migrating to the latest test release, hit the bordering source link.
Alt-week 12.15.12: rivers on Titan, electric handcuffs and crashing into the moon
Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days. Space, it's the final frontier, where no-one can hear you scream in frustration at not knowing who the villain of Star Trek: Into Darkness is, as well as where 50 percent of our stories take place this week. NASA's planning to crash satellites into the moon, someone's patented an electo-shock handcuff and there's a river on Titan that you wouldn't want to canoe-down. This is alt-week.
Blizzard snags Project Blackstone domain name
Titan, is that you? We can't say whether or not Blizzard is getting close to revealing its top-secret game project, but the studio did secure an interesting domain name this week. On November 26th, Blizzard Entertainment registered ProjectBlackstone.com and opened the door to all kinds of speculation of what it may be. If it is Blizzard's next MMO or franchise, the name alone is one of the most solid pieces of news that we've seen in years. The studio is notorious for its tight security and has let little slip about Titan or any of its other projects. Earlier this year, Blizzard confirmed that development on Titan was proceeding and that the company had shuffled around some of its staff to share between World of Warcraft and the upcoming "casual" MMO. The name "Blackstone" is also somewhat similar to Blackthorne, an early Blizzard game from 1994. While the website for Project Blackstone is currently defunct, rest assured we'll be keeping our eye on it to see what happens when or if Blizzard turns on the lights.
Blizzard registers Project Blackstone domain, no clue what it is
An interesting little bit of domain activity has been detected from Blizzard the last few days. Recently they have registered the projectblackstone.com domain -- which sounds like a great name for a new game. They've also registered warcraftbattles.com and heroesofwarcraft.com. While it's a bit much to say anything definitive about domain registering activity, it does raise an eyebrow. We know that there is a large team, filled with some amazing people, working hard on Titan. Could Project Blackstone be Titan? Speculation is interesting here; although we really have no idea. What we do know is that we'll be keeping a close eye out on these domains, and you should too... Something might pop up suddenly one day that we all will want to know a whole lot more about. We've reached out to Blizzard to see if they have any comment on these domains, but we're not expecting anything noteworthy.
Titan supercomputer leads latest Top 500 list, newly-available Xeon Phi chip cracks top ten
The supercomputer formerly known as Jaguar recently got an upgrade that was significant enough to earn it a new moniker, and it turns out that was also enough for it to claim the top spot on the latest Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Now known as Titan, the Cray-developed supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory edged out the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia supercomputer for the number one position, reaching 17.59 Petaflops per second with the aid of 18,688 NVIDIA K20 GPUs and an equal number of AMD Opteron processors. As EE Times notes, however, the other big story with this list is the strong showing for Intel's new Xeon Phi co-processors, which have just starting shipping to customers and have already found their way into seven of the supercomputers on the list, including one in the top ten (the Stampede at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas). You can see how your favorite supercomputer did at the link below.
Cray's Jaguar supercomputer upgraded with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, renamed Titan
Cray's Jaguar (or XK7) supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been loaded up with the first shipping NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPUs and renamed Titan. Loaded with 18,688 of the Kepler-based K20s, Titan's peak performance is more than 20 petaflops. Sure, the machine has an equal number of 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processors as it does GPUs, but the Tesla hardware packs 90 percent of the entire processing punch. Titan is roughly ten times faster and five times more energy efficient than it was before the name change, yet it fits into the same 200 cabinets as its predecessor. Now that it's complete, the rig will analyze data and create simulations for scientific projects ranging from topics including climate change to nuclear energy. The hardware behind Titan isn't meant to power your gaming sessions, but the NVIDIA says lessons learned from supercomputer GPU development trickle back down to consumer-grade cards. For the full lowdown on the beefed-up supercomputer, hit the jump for a pair of press releases.
EVE Evolved: Top ten ganks, scams, heists and events
It's been called "boring," "confusing," and "the world's biggest spreadsheet," but every now and then a story emerges from sci-fi MMO EVE Online and grabs the gaming world's attention. Tales of massive thefts, colossal battles, high-value kills, record-breaking scams, political dirty deals, and controversial player-run events never fail to grip us. Perhaps it's the fact that these events have such huge impacts in the EVE sandbox that captures our imaginations, or maybe we just want to watch with morbid curiosity as a virtual society self-destructs. Whether it's innocent interest in quirky stories or a secret sense of schadenfreude that keeps us glued to EVE's most illicit events, the game continues to deliver them with startling regularity. Most scams, thefts, and high-profile battles will never make the news, instead becoming another forgotten part of EVE's history or just a story for a few friends to reminisce about. But those stories that do reach the news always draw in a huge audience that wouldn't play EVE in a million years but can't get enough of its engrossing stories. In this week's EVE Evolved, I run down a list of ten incredible EVE kills, scams, heists, and sandbox events that have made it into the news over the years.
Know Your Lore, TFH Edition: The dark secrets of the mogu
The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft. They were once rulers of an empire that rivaled the Zandalar in size and scope, but they possessed powers far greater than the trolls could ever dream of. They used their power to shape the grummels and saurok from the lesser races of Pandaria. They enslaved the pandaren race as a whole, using them to build structures and gather supplies all under threat of their iron fists. Their great empires trace back to thousands of years ago, before even the War of the Ancients, and possibly before the rise of the kaldorei race. The mogu are one of the clear villains of this expansion, and our arrival denotes the sudden uprising of this strange, curious, violent race. While the mogu may have been relatively quiet for centuries, they are certainly far from it now. And as we make our way through Pandaria we see more and more evidence that these violent beings are on the move -- something that disturbs the gentle pandaren greatly. The mogu hide secrets, and over the course of raiding, we uncover a few. But their greatest secret may just be something so unfathomable, so bizarre, that it shakes the roots of everything we currently know and believe. Today's Know Your Lore is a Tinfoil Hat edition, meaning the following is a look into what has gone before with pure speculation on why and what is to come as a result. These speculations are merely theories and shouldn't be taken as fact or official lore. Please note: This post contains some content spoilers from Mists of Pandaria.
Refresh Roundup: week of September 17th, 2012
Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging for an update. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it's easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make sure they don't escape without notice, we've gathered every possible update, hack, and other miscellaneous tomfoolery we could find during the last week and crammed them into one convenient roundup. If you find something available for your device, please give us a shout at tips at engadget dawt com and let us know. Enjoy!
Senior Artist for Blizzard's next MMO sure likes dieselpunk
It's always a good thing to know the sort of hands in which the art of an upcoming MMO rests. One of Blizzard's senior artists, Nick Carver, has got quite the excellent collection of personal works. As a senior artist, Carver is busy with Blizzard's tremendously mysterious Project Titan, the company's MMO-in-the-making. While personal works may not be indicative of which way an MMO's art team is leaning, these are still well-worth an appreciative gander.There are occasional speed paintings and one-offs, but many of the pieces belong to the world of the dieselpunk or Decopunk city of Dustrum, Carver's personal project. Head over to Kotaku to check out a fine sampling of Carver's work, or hit up his blog to wade hip-deep in the original source.
