News for "2K"

Quite possibly one of the most anticipated games of 2009, BioShock 2 has finally been given a set date from publishers 2K Games. Set for a simultaneous release on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC on October 30th 2009 internationally, while North America will have to wait another few days for their release on the 3rd November.

Source: The Cult of Rapture

In an interview with Godfrey Cheng, Director of Technical Marketing in AMD's Graphics Products Group, Bit-Tech.net has quoted him saying that standards such as PhysX would die due to their proprietary and closed nature. Says Mr. Cheng:

---

"There is no plan for closed and proprietary standards like PhysX," said Cheng. "As we have emphasised with our support for OpenCL and DX11, closed and proprietary standards will die."

---

Bit-Tech.net interviewed the AMD person to get the company's take on EA and 2K's decision to adopt NVIDIA PhysX across all of their worldwide studios, earlier this week. Interestingly, when asked about how the major publishers such as EA adopting PhysX across all of their studios would impact the propagation of the API, Cheng responded with saying that monetary incentives provided to publishing houses alone won't help a great deal in propagating the API, and that the product (PhysX) must be competitive, and that AMD viewed Havoc and its physics simulation technologies as leaders. "Games developers share this view. We will also invest in technologies and partnerships beyond Havok that enhances gameplay." he added. PhysX is a proprietary physics simulation API created by Ageia technologies, which was acquired and developed by NVIDIA. You can read the full Bit-Tech.net interview with Godfrey Cheng here.

Bit-tech reports that a new 2K Games studio is being founded specifically for the development of BioShock 2. The new studio, 2K Marin, will consist of the remnants from the 2K Boston developer team of the first BioShock. Apparently, not many of the original staff wanted to work with Ken Levine ever again after the first BioShock. 2K Games understood the sentiment and allowed the staff to set up a new studio so they can work on BioShock 2 while leaving Ken in 2K Boston with Project X which has been confirmed as being a new X-Com game.

Source: Bit-tech

It appears that players are having problems after reinstalling BioShock a few times. BioShock is using Sony's anti-piracy SecuROM which contacts them with your hardware specifications. SecuROM's website states "Only legitimate customers who have purchased the product are able to unlock the program which is bound to the hardware after activation. This ensures that once activated, it cannot be transferred to another PC and therefore not being mass pirated." Players are reporting after installing the game more than two times will stop the installation process. So not only is it being bounded to your current hardware. It will also lock you out after too many installs.

Source: 2K

2K Games announces it will publish Borderlands, an upcoming sci-fi first person shooter from award winning developer Gearbox. The game features a revolutionary content generation system allowing for near endless missions, environments, enemies, weapons, item drops and character customizations. Christoph Hartmann, President of 2K says "Borderlands represents an important evolutionary leap in game design and technology. By utilizing revolutionary new technology to create thousands of unique, randomly generated missions, weapons and situations, Borderlands will raise the bar for next gen action games." Borderlands is set to release Christmas 2008.

Source: gearbox software