We’re now one year into the life cycle for Microsoft’s Xbox One and while the company has hardly achieved its goal of global domination – at least compared to Sony which has sold more than 10 million PS4 units worldwide – it’s having a fairly good year all the same. One reason comes from the litany of updates for the consoles with at least one major update per month.

Major Nelson has pointed that as of November 22nd 2013, there have been hundreds of different features added to the console, highlighting some of the most popular features in a new blog post. These include updates to the Snap interface, a new Friends section that helps you keep up to date with friends’ activities, custom backgrounds and much more. You can also look back on the numerous other features the updates helped bring about. Be forewarned that it’s a large list.

What are your thoughts on the numerous updates for the Xbox One and which has been your favourite? Let us know in the comments.

Respawn Entertainment’s Titanfall has been a rather interesting case since launching this past March – the game has been praised for its gameplay and achieved a fair amount of financial success. However, there have been issues regarding dev-hosted servers, lack of an active community and matchmaking woes. While the developer has been doing its part to support the game, community manager Abbie Heppe told OXM at Gamescom that at some point, the studio will need to move on to other things.

“Alongside the paid DLC maps, we have been doing free content updates, with the next one being on I think the 6th? So we do have some plans to release some more free content, we’ve got some cool new modes on the way. But at a certain point, we are going to have to wind down so that we can move on and do other things.

“[S]o, yeah, at a certain point we’ve got to give some people a break and then think about where we go next.”

Support for Titanfall won’t disappear entirely. “Obviously, if there’s anything that totally breaks then yeah, we’ll absolutely fix that. But we’re going to have to wind down and then move on. But we still have some cool stuff in the works before that happens.”

Could that be Titanfall 2 or even a brand new project? That remains to be seen but the only thing to do is enjoy the ride while it lasts.

The Last of Us: Remastered (along with the PS3 edition) will receive two free multiplayer maps for the Factions Mode according to Naughty Dog. This was revealed by community strategist Arne Meyer who provided updates on the overall match-making and multiplayer experience of the game.

“We’ve been working hard to alleviate the long waits in Factions matchmaking some of our multiplayer community have been experiencing. We are working on resolving this issue for those in our community who are still affected. We know this can be frustrating and the team here at Naughty Dog wants everyone in our community to know that working on this issue continues to be our number one priority.

“Over the last two weeks, we’ve discovered that the most significant improvements may come from working with other teams at PlayStation to make updates to some of the existing matchmaking libraries. Since we are working with multiple groups inside and outside of the studio, we don’t yet have an exact date on when these updates will roll out. Our current estimate is on the short side of weeks, rather than months. We’ll be sure to keep you updated the moment we can provide more specific timing, or an actual date.”

These new maps have been provided as a means to thank the community for the presence. Meyer noted that “if you find yourself waiting to get into a match, the best thing you can do is exit matchmaking and select ‘Find Match’ again.” Have you still been experiencing issues with the match-making in either edition? Let us know in the comments.

Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Ghosts continues to roll on with multiplayer updates. After the recent Heavy Duty playlist, it seems the new update also tweaks the economy and Squad Points.

It works like this: Rather than a few Squad Points for each new level, your squad-mates now earn 5 Squad Points for each level. This applies for the first five levels they gain, and should help you unlock equipment, weapons, killstreak rewards and more all the faster. Since Squad Points pretty much determine what loadouts you can equip your squad-mates with, count it as a blessing that you’ll be able to pick up better equipment sooner now than before.

The update is currently live on the PC, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS3 and PS4 and comes with several other updates which you can read up on here. What are your thoughts on the same? Let us know below in the comments.

Speaking to NowGamer, Rubin stated that, “Basically the overall reasoning behind it all is we’re always updating the games, even whether the community knows it or not.

“We’re making changes that they don’t know about because we want to see the changes happen without [affecting] people’s sort of free perceptions on what they think has happened, so sometimes we stealth in changes to design and see how they react.”

This is done essentially for more honest feedback. “Without saying ‘hey we just did this, what do you think?’ and we’ll get responses ‘oh it’s tons better’ or ‘oh my god, it’s so much worse, you broke it’. A lot of times those answers aren’t as honest as they should be, so we stealth in updates to get more honest answers.

“In general our policy has been to continue to support the greatest game, trying to get the network connection specifically in player-to-player to get better from game to game. We’re constantly working on that and it’s probably one of the hardest that any of our programmers have to deal with, the internet.”

Call of Duty: Ghosts will be releasing on November 5th for current and next-gen consoles.

According to Eurogamer, several sources are reporting that Microsoft has stopped charging for updating and patching developers for updating and patching their games. Even more interestingly, this change happened with no official announcement from Microsoft.

It wouldn’t even have been confirmed as true or not if various developers hadn’t cited that there are no more charges happening for patching. Normally, a developer is afforded one free update for their games after certification is paid for. It doesn’t mean developers can patch the hell out of their games without having to pay any fees. But for those who do so only once in a while, it’s a major step forward.

This is especially so for indie developers who would rather leave their games as they are rather than paying thousands to update their games.

Of course some indie developers, such as Polytron which developed Fez, found patching to be especially hazardous since a bug occurred that corrupted save files and was a result of the very same patch. Fixing this would’ve required re-certification, which would require extra money to be paid – something Polytron wasn’t in the best mood to do.

Team Fortress 2 is Valve’s little baby and I don’t think the game will ever stop recieving updates as well as new additions.  The latest one is strangely enough no hats, along with other changes such as Coaching, Training, Voting, Dynamic Model (faster) Loading, Class Duels, Bot Improvements, Voice Chat Improvements, Server and Steam ID’s as well as a new map called ‘Badlands’ for King of the Hill.  Here is a link for more info on that and below is everything included in the update.

Trying to chat with a friend, random people, hell anyone on DC Universe Online was a damn nightmare and I never could get it to work when it is supposed to have an in game chat feature.  It would definitely make it easier when fighting bosses together, tell teammates when you are down to be revived among other things.

You can keep informed on fixes in progress and state any problems you are having with the game on the Official Forum–  right here.  A patch was supposed to fix issues in the game but obviously some people are still experiencing chat issues.

These chat issues prompted Community Manager, RadarX, to to let fans know that SOE is working on the problem stating “We are currently working on implementing some chat improvements. In the interim I’d like to see if there are some specific areas or types of chat not working more often than others. If it’s a server load issue, we will absolutely address it.”  The patch fixed the following:

General:
* Improved Client performance and stability.
* Addressed an issue that caused some PS3 players to hang or disconnect in the tutorial.
* Addressed an issue where other characters may appear to “warp” onscreen.
* The time it takes to get to Character Selection on launch has been reduced.

Audio:
* Audio should no longer drop after cutscenes if you have your Music volume set to 0.

Chat:
* The player’s Voice Chat Channel should now be selected according to the following priority, from highest to
o Alert
o Group
o Custom
o League

Player Appearance:
* Equipping a new weapon should no longer cause your weapon appearance to disappear.
* Swapping weapons with your weapon style locked should no longer cause the weapon appearance to change.

Movement:
* Player character animations should no longer have the chance of getting stuck when weaponizing objects.

Missions:
* Adjusted difficulty of content in the Venom Lab to level 7 to better match the surrounding content.
* No Joke quest is now available at level 18 instead of 19.
* A Crook’s Best Friend mission is now available at level 18 instead of 19.
* Something’s Fishy… quest is now available at level 22 instead of 23.
* Road to Hell quest is now available at level 22 instead of 23.
* Fateful Omen quest is now available at level 26 instead of 27.
* Hardcorps quest is now available at level 26 instead of 27.

UI:
* Pressing the “Accept” button on the Server Selection screen multiple times should no longer result in odd ssues with Character Creation movies and UI.

We recently reviewed DC Universe Online and liked it a lot. Read the review here.

Call of Duty: Black Ops has had some problems on the PC including serious lag issues.  Treyarch is hard at work trying to fix everything they can with the next patch fixing the following issues:

• GPU hitching on certain graphics cards.
• Incomplete server browser results.
• Improvements to Quickmatch joins (results with better ping and reduced lag).
• Zombies “The game session is no longer available” error.

Other fixes that have gone live are as follows:

11/10
• – GameServers.com has bumped sv_maxrate to 25000 across all servers to reduce lag.
• – GameServers.com continues to improve official server distribution in various worldwide regions.11/11
• – Friends fix for join in progress and Friends tab in server browser.
• – Performance improvement for dual and quad core.
• – Improved connectivity with Black Ops Rcon tool.

Source

• Improved matchmaking
• Improved match and host selection
• Additional improvements to party system
• Weekly and Monthly leaderboards stats reporting incorrectly for kills, deaths and assists

Playstation 3 players have some problems and with some already fixed here is the latest for info for the PS3 version:

LIVE FIXES

11/5
• – Villa: User can clip into rock at west edge of grid zone B2 and see through to the other side
• – Crisis: User can clip into LVT between grid zone A3 and B3 and see through to the other side
• – User can get an infinite number of ‘Sam Turret’, ‘Care Package’ and ‘Sentry Gun’ killstreaks (commonly referred to as the “care package glitch”)11/9
• – Radar sweep when there are only 2 players left in One in the Chamber will stop functioning if the 2 players have multiple lives when the sweep starts
• – Crash when viewing content (films, clips, etc) in the Community & Recent Games menu11/10
• – Users’ rank and stats can get wiped under very specific conditions11/11
• – Online number counts were not updating properly; these are now reporting exact online numbers
• – Parties getting disbanded when host did not find a match quickly

IN PROGRESS (for all platforms)

• – Improved matchmaking to find matches faster
• – Improved match and host selection; will result in much better networking conditions for all games (a.k.a., decreased lag)
• – Weekly and Monthly leaderboards stats reporting incorrectly for kills, deaths and assists (All Time leaderboard not affected by this)
• – Additional improvements to party system

For PC players some fixes that have already been taken care of (Steam will automatically update) including the massive lag issue are as follows:

• Friends fix for join in progress and Friends tab in server browser
• Performance improvement for dual and quad core systems