Hey, remember that time a little while ago when it was asked if the Division would have microtransactions and we discovered that Ubisoft’s definition of the word DLC was probably a little different to our own? Well, during the beta of The Division some players uncovered something that could hint at The Division actually having microtransactions – or at least an in-game currency.

One of the main things that people said about The Division’s beta was that it was ridiculously easy to game the system and cheat, so no wonder this was uncovered. In case you weren’t aware, The Division already had another currency available called Dark Zone Funds which gave you a reason to venture into the PvP part of the game. So this other currency, called Phoenix Credits could be something that Ubisoft are aiming to charge real money for. However, a community manager for Ubisoft denies this is the case.

When asked, Natchai Stappers said that the company would “communicate on it later, but don’t worry,” following that up with: “There will be no microtransactions, and definitely no P2W.” However, as we determined before Ubisoft’s definition of DLC was being applied to some planned content that seemed more like the sort of thing most would call a microtransaction – cosmetic accessories.

However, to see what the true purpose of a Phoenix Credit is, we’ve no choice but to wait for the full game’s release.

With the announcement of the first Fallout 4 DLCs we can expect to see in the near future last week, a number of people were asking – “where’s the game’s Creation Kit”? Not that modders haven’t already been doing a great job without it.

Now details of the modkit have emerged, and it’s due to be releasing in between the first two DLCs – Automatron and Wasteland Workshop. At least, if you own the PC version it will. not that the console players won’t be getting it, it’ll just take a month more for Xbox owners and two more months for owners of the PS4 version. Owch.

In an interview with Game Informer Todd Howard said: “Our goal [for full mod support] is between the first two DLCs. It’ll go up at that time on PC. In April. All of that stuff will go up on PC. People are beta testing it.”

The new Survival mode was also talked about. From what we know, it’ll only save when you sleep; will not contain fast travel; will have diseases and the combat is probably going to be overhauled as well to remove a little of the bullet-sponginess on both side of the equation. Needless to say, it’ll probably go through a beta stage so that Bethesda can be sure they’ve gotten the balance right.

Are you excited for the advent of even greater Fallout 4 mods? Let us know in the comments!

It seems that nowadays any big game beta seems to have some problems, and they usually include a problem with the framerates. It seems that the latest Hitman game’s no exception to this rule.

The people at Gaming Bolt have been putting the beta of the assassin game through its paces in the last few days before they lose access to it (the access being a bonus of pre-ordering the game) and the results are… well, not great.

Running the game on a Radeon R9290 4GB GPU along with an AMD FX 8350, they’re reporting that during the opening training mission the game is failing to maintain even a steady 30FPS. Other tests done seem to confirm this, with an hour spent on the training mission ship using two 980 TIs it’s hard to get a steady 60FPS. Admittedly the beta isn’t configured for dual GPU set-ups, but even on a single 980 the framerates drop. And this is on quite good hardware too, so you can imagine the issues more affordable hardware could have with it.

Unsurprisingly, it’s the NPC crowds that do it. Less populated areas run faster as there’s a lot less on screen to process and keep track of. Since this is a game about murdering targets that are generally located in very populated areas though, you have to hope that IO Interactive is planning some further tightening of the game’s optimization before the full release.

Mind you, there’s a good track record because Hitman:Absolution was apparently well received on its PC port. So there is hope that IO will have it sorted by launch. We’ll just have to wait and see.

For their new game, Ubisoft constructed a game engine they called Snowdrop. It’s supposed to help support its lobby-free multiplayer functions along with the open-world, dynamic weathers and so on. Now we could see it being used for some of Ubi’s other IPs in the future.

Head of IP at Ubisoft Massive, Martin Hultberg, was interviewed and revealed that Snowdrop could be seen in other franchises in future.

“Internally we try to share as much technology as possible between the studios. It’s just more efficient that way. In our case we developed the Snowdrop Engine from the ground-up because we needed middleware that could run on the new consoles and PC, while doing everything we wanted to do with the open world, the weather, time of day and such features. Now we’ve made that engine available to other studios, and not just the Clancy teams. Any Ubisoft team can use Snowdrop now.”

Also, the Division’s ‘Dark Zone’ could see the functionality traveling across to other teams under Ubisoft’s umbrella as well in future. “I think that feature could definitely be incorporated into other Ubisoft games like Assassin’s Creed. It’s a really immersive feature that I think fits with pretty much all Ubisoft’s IPs.”

Ubisoft have recently announced their intention not to make a new Assassin’s Creed game in 2016, so I wonder if a desire to build their next game in that series upon this game engine is a part of that? It’ll be interesting to see if that theory holds water when the next one is announced.

XCOM 2’s release was quite good as far as the launches of big-name games has gone in recent years. No big issues, although some have reported performance issues that affected their gameplay by tkaing framerates down below what they should have been. And in a game that is all about getting things done in as few turns as possible… it sort of ruins the immersion, you know?

Last week publisher 2K Games acknowledged the issues, saying that they were “gathering more information from users” and today Lead Designer Jake Solomon said that the developer Firaxis was “working very furiously” to get XCOM 2 running smoothly.

He also said that the issues hadn’t been caught before launch purely because it doesn’t seem to effect every computer and every build. Where as some less powerful computers have reported no problems, so high-end expensive custom rigs have been seeing issues left, right and centre.

“We didn’t catch this stuff in compatibility testing. We’re fully, fully accountable for the product in people’s hands, so we certainly take responsibility.”

He admits that some of the camera pauses after events take far too long, and that all the issues with the stuttering and framerates annoy the developers as much as the players.  While he couldn’t say when the fixes would be coming he was adamant that Firaxis was working hard on them and that there would be “fixes coming soon.”