According to Capcom’s 2013 financial report for the fiscal year ending March 31st 2013, there was a statement where the company talked about “moving forward with the development of new title ‘deep down’ for next-generation consoles, representing the culmination of Capcom technology and our next leap forward”.

It also stated that the company was “currently developing ‘deep down’, which integrates the latest state-of-the-art technology for next-generation non-portable consoles such as the soon-to-be-released PlayStation 4” and while when mentioning its new Panta Rhei engine, stated that, “The counterpart in collaboration for the ‘Panta Rhei’ game engine is the title ‘deep down’ for next-generation consoles. We are pushing ahead with development in tandem with the title development team.”

It doesn’t name the Xbox One explicitly but there’s no denying the significance of a line like “next generation consoles” over simply naming the PS4 alone. As of now, no release date has been announced for Deep Down.

Topics such as video games as art, the future of gaming, stereotypes within the industry and the debate about video games and violence dot the film, which is the result of a year of on-camera interview with celebrities, developers and various icons within the gaming industry.

This includes geek icons like Wil Wheaton, Chris Hardwick and Alison Haislip along with professionals such as founder of Atari Nolan Bushnell, Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford, Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski and more.

Director Jeremy Snead stated that, “We have spent the past year gathering footage, speaking with industry founders, influencers, and pundits to get their take on what we’ve collectively created as an industry and where we’re headed. We’ve amassed an amazing library of footage that we think will help bring the true story of the video game industry into clear focus.”

The Kickstarter target currently stands at $43,595 pledged of the $60,000 goal with 26 days to go.

“With graphics, the first bottleneck you’re likely to run into is memory bandwidth. Given that 10 or more textures per object will be standard in this generation, it’s very easy to run into that bottleneck. Quite a few phases of rendering become memory bound, and beyond shifting to lower bit-per-texel textures, there’s not a whole lot you can do.

“Our strategy has been simply to make sure that we were using GDDR5 for the system memory and therefore have a lot of bandwidth.”

And if memory isn’t the bottleneck? “If you’re not bottlenecked by memory, it’s very possible – if you have dense meshes in your objects – to be bottlenecked on vertices. And you can try to ask your artists to use larger triangles, but as a practical matter, it’s difficult to achieve that. It’s quite common to be displaying graphics where much of what you see on the screen is triangles that are just a single pixel in size. In which case, yes, vertex bottlenecks can be large.

“There are a broad variety of techniques we’ve come up with to reduce the vertex bottlenecks, in some cases they are enhancements to the hardware. The most interesting of those is that you can use compute as a frontend for your graphics.”

Cerny describes this as “a mix of hardware, firmware inside of the GPU, and compiler technology. What happens is you take your vertex shader, and you compile it twice, once as a compute shader, once as a vertex shader. The compute shader does a triangle sieve – it just does the position computations from the original vertex shader and sees if the triangle is backfaced, or the like.

“And it’s generating, on the fly, a reduced set of triangles for the vertex shader to use. This compute shader and the vertex shader are very, very tightly linked inside of the hardware. It’s also not a hard solution to implement.

“From a graphics programmer perspective, using this technique means setting some compiler flags and using a different mode of the graphics API. So this is the kind of thing where you can try it in an afternoon and see if it happens to bump up your performance,” he said in an interview with Gamasutra.

Everyone got all that? With the PlayStation 4 releasing this Holiday season, it seems pertinent to get all this out of the way early to avoid a PS3-style debacle. However, Cerny and his team are already hard at work to avoid said debacle. They’ve promised a PS4-optimized version of their performance analysis tool Razor and example code for devs.

Cerny also says that real world code will be distributed later. “If somebody has written something interesting and is willing to post the source for it, to make it available to the other PlayStation developers, then that has the highest value,” he says.

Sasko replied, “Geralt is a professional monster slayer, but not a sailor. He was never like this in the books and two previous games, so we don’t want to change it. We simply can’t imagine him chasing fish.

“However, sailing is an important activity of The Witcher 3 and it’s essential for exploring some regions. On the technical side, the boat is fully simulated, reacts to wind and simulation of ocean and waves. It’s a real pleasure to use it for exploration, but we are planning to do even more.

“Right now we are testing some gameplay opportunities on the working prototype connected to sailing, but I can’t reveal anything more.”

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is currently scheduled to release at the end of 2014 for PS4, PC and other next gen consoles.

“You don’t need a massive team to make a fantastic game. Journey. Perfect example, right? The Walking Dead. There are many, many games out there that are delivering triple-A content that are working with small, nimble teams – and that’s exciting.

“I don’t think you have to spend $200 million to have a game that players love and will continue to play for a long amount of time.”

Which is funny because some of the most played games are Call of Duty and Battlefield, both which have multi-million dollar budgets and large teams dedicated to them. But Price has a point, and hopefully the next generation will deliver stellar experiences like this one has.

In fact, EA has released the first screenshot for the game on Twitter. And this is apparently an in-game screenshot. So keep that in mind going forward.

The first screenshot of @eamaddennfl 25. BOOM! twitter.com/EA/status/3220…

— Electronic Arts (@EA) April 10, 2013

On one hand, it’s very impressive. On the other, EA is quite well known for releasing screenshots, which are assumed to be next-generation, and then showing us shots later that are anything but. Maybe Madden NFL 25 is the exception to the rule? Then again, maybe not.

You can bet that Madden NFL 25 will release for the current generation of consoles, with changes of cross-generation release. As of now, a release date is set for August 27th.

However, a recent discovery by Videogamer indicates that the game may indeed only be arriving on current gen consoles.

While poring through the source code for the teaser site, they discovered a line that said the following: “Find the latest news, videos, and trailers for Battlefield 4, EA and DICE’s award-winning first-person-shooter available for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.” You can view the accompany screenshot below (copyright of Videogamer).

Now keep in mind that this could be DICE exercising extra precaution. Given that Battlefield 4 uses Frostbite Engine 2.5 and will display some pretty wicked visuals, it’s a given to have it in some form on the next generation.

Nonetheless, we’ll wait till GDC 2013 on March 26th when the game is officially unveiled.

However, when Ripten decided to ask Square Enix for a response, they simply said “No comment”. The classic “don’t deny, don’t confirm” approach, sure, but consider the source – VGLeaks – and their outing of the Durango aka Xbox 720 SDK which was backed by Edge’s sources. So at least we know there might be some credibility to what the site has to offer.

And even if it’s not true, even if Versus XIII is still the same game (which seems unlikely given the changes that are said to have been implemented), that we could finally have some news on its release is all that really matters anymore.

As always, take this as a rumour.

DICE has revealed on the site that as more people log in, they’ll reveal new artwork for the upcoming first person shooter. As of now, a full gameplay reveal trailer is still to come on March 26th, just in time for GDC 2013. Judging from the impressions of those who have seen the game, which includes GameStop’s CEO, Battlefield 4 is quite the amazing experience.

Battlefield 4 is slated to be released for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, though releases on next generation consoles also seem to be on the cards. The game will run on the new Frostbite 2.5 engine and hopefully up the graphics ante significantly.

Source: BF4Central

A new ARG video for The Phantom Pain was uploaded and while it didn’t contain much aside from an odd laboratory with lots of beeping (which may have been Morse Code or something, who knows), you can spot this little screen if you pay attention.

This can be seen in the initial reveal trailer for Kojima Productions’ Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes. And that too, quite prominently.

A closer look at the still from the ARG video indicates that the Phantom Pain is a VR Program and that is for “treatment of neurological damage sustained in combat situations”, “treatment of combat related stress” and “enhancement of combat ability following impairment”.

Perhaps this has something to do with the boy seen in the initial trailer?