Author: Kyle Orland

SAN FRANCISCO—The rise of engines like Unity has been great for making game development more accessible to the masses. Unity now says the 1.1 million monthly users of Unity Personal Edition outnumber "all the employees at every public game company in the world." That vast popularity has a negative side effect, though: the rise of an identifiably generic "Unity look" among many games made using the engine.

That "Unity look" is the result of so many new developers using the same Unity Engine default materials, assets, lighting effects, and shaders in their games. Dedicated artists and coders can add their own stamp to a Unity project, of course, by coding their own custom assets and shaders to give their project a more unique aesthetic. But a lot of smaller developers can't or won't bother putting in the work to really get their game past the "generic" look that can characterize Unity projects.

As Unity has progressed from version 5.0 to the newly released version 5.4 beta in the last year, they've put a lot of work into this problem. You can see a lot of those changes in the above video, which shows some pretty generic-looking Unity 5.0 demos getting quite a bit more character by simply implementing some of the graphical effects introduced in the intervening 12 months.

With this year's Game Developer's Conference barely started, Microsoft has already rolled out a major announcement that has the potential to significantly change the console gaming landscape. By allowing for cross-network play on Xbox Live, Microsoft has signaled it's willing to open the doors to one of gaming's most frustrating walled gardens and help restore the platform-agnostic promise of the early Internet.

The question is, why now? Microsoft has been running Xbox Live since 2002, and it's been nearly a decade since the similar PlayStation Network launched on Sony's PlayStation 3 (not to mention PC-based networks like Steam). Why hasn't Microsoft made public overtures to connect these disparate networks before now?

Part of it might be technical, on all sides. After all, it's easier to develop a new, private gaming network with tens of millions of users if you are in total control of all the hardware that will be connecting together. The Xbox 360 and PS3's vastly different system architectures may have made true online agnosticism difficult on console developers in the last generation as well.

The growing virtual reality platform wars got a little more complex this morning. That's because graphics chip maker AMD has thrown in with Toronto-based startup Sulon Technologies to unveil the Sulon Q headset, which aims to provide a PC-based, fully tracked virtual reality experience without the need to tether yourself to a computer tower.

According to the announcement, that "wear and play" untethered design makes the Sulon Q quite different from competition like the Oculus Rift or SteamVR-powered HTC Vive, which both need a relatively high-end PC to actually generate the images on the headset. With the Sulon Q, the Windows 10 PC hardware is built into the unit, including an expected four-core AMD FX-8800P processor with a Radeon R7 graphics card.

Add in a built-in 256GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, and a 2560×1440 OLED display with a 110° field of view, and it's a bit like wearing a lower-end (but still apparently VR-capable) PC on your head. AMD isn't specifically discussing the mass of the "lightweight" headset, but it seems likely to be much heavier than tethered headsets where the heavy processing is done externally (or even mobile headsets like the Samsung Gear VR, which are powered by much-more-compact smartphones)

These days, you're lucky if some titles from certain big publishers get a year or two of post-launch online support for their games before they're unceremoniously dropped. And then there's Diablo II. Blizzard issued a new version 1.14 patch for the nearly 16-year-old game Thursday, five years after the game was last officially updated (not to mention, four years since the game's sequel launched with its own attendant post-release problems and patches)

The new Diablo II patch doesn't add any new gameplay features, balance tweaks, or anything like that. Instead, Blizzard has added compatibility with modern operating systems like Windows 10 and OS X. But Blizzard says it's working on improvements to the game's "cheat-detection and hack-prevention capabilities" and hints at more improvements to come.

"There is still a large Diablo II community around the world, and we thank you for continuing to play and slay with us," Blizzard writes. "This journey starts by making Diablo II run on modern platforms, but it does not end there. See you in Sanctuary, adventurers."

The world of NES emulation hasn't been all that exciting since the late '90s, when NESticle provided "good enough" emulation accuracy and stability for any NES game out there (though there has been a lot of subsequent work to get that final bit of true emulation accuracy). So it was a bit of a surprise this week to stumble across a new NES emulator that provides a genuinely new perspective on decades-old games by rendering them in three dimensions.

The 3DNES project, as the name implies, extends the 2D sprites of the NES into the Z axis, letting players rotate the camera around to see the sides and back of the formerly flat sprites. This isn't just a conversion of every pixel into a uniform voxel, either. In a game like Super Mario Bros., for instance, 3DNES converts pipes to into cylindrical 3D models, with bulging piranha plants embedded in the center. In Mega Man, ladders remain in the background while wall-hugging enemies are accurately placed on the sides of thick blocks.

The emulator's developer, who goes by the handle "geod" online, has been posting videos of the work-in-progress emulator for months. This week, he finally took his work public, posting a playable beta version that runs through the Unity Web player and can load arbitrary (and definitely legally obtained) ROMs from the cloud.

Nearly five years after the PlayStation Network was subject to a massive breach that exposed the personal data of tens of millions of users, Sony is finally sending downloadable game codes for PS3 and PSP games to those affected, as required by an earlier out-of-court settlement.

Game Informer's Mike Futter reports that his promised reward as part of the Sony Gaming Networks and Customer Data Security Breach Litigation Settlement was finally processed and e-mailed to him last week. That settlement offer gave most PSN subscribers access to one or two downloadable games from a small selection of PS3 and PSP titles.

This final resolution of the hacking case comes over a year after Sony began accepting claims as part of a $17.75 million class-action settlement, which it officially agreed to in 2014. That settlement only came after over three years of litigation, thanks in part to a 2012 District Court ruling that threw out many of the initial class action claims.

In a surprising blog post Monday morning, Microsoft announced that Lionhead Studios, known in recent years for the Fable franchise, is being shut down. Development is being halted on the long-planned cross-platform multiplayer title Fable Legends. Danish studio Press Play, which was behind Max: The Curse of Brotherhood, is being closed as well.

"These have been tough decisions and we have not made them lightly, nor are they a reflection on these development teams—we are incredibly fortunate to have the talent, creativity and commitment of the people at these studios," Microsoft Studios Europe General Manager Hanno Lemke wrote. "We have nothing but heart-felt thanks for the members of Lionhead and Press Play for their contributions to Xbox and gaming. We are committed to working closely with those affected by today’s news to find them new opportunities at Xbox, or partnering with the broader development community to help place them in jobs elsewhere in the games industry should they desire."

Lionhead was founded in 1996 by Peter Molyneux—at the time well-known for PC classics like Populous and Magic Carpet—along with Games Workshop's Steve Jackson and veterans from Molyneux's former Bullfrog Studios. After making a name for itself with the ambitious Black & White series of god games and original Xbox RPG Fable, Lionhead was scooped up by Microsoft in 2006. A series of Fable follow-ups followed (including an ill-fated Kinect-powered spin-off), before Molyneux left the studio in 2012 to start 22cans (which has been mired in some controversy of late).

For about a year now, we've been absolutely wowed by short, controlled demos of the virtual reality tech in the SteamVR-powered HTC Vive. But enjoying a slick demo in a curated show floor booth is one thing. Having a Vive in your house to play with at your leisure is another.

Ahead of its upcoming consumer launch, Valve has sent us loaner units of its near-final HTC Vive Pre to test in the Ars Orbiting HQ. I've spent a large portion of the past few days immersed in Valve's room-scale vision of virtual reality, whiling away hours blind to the real world around me and trying not to kill myself walking around my office (which has never been cleaner, to make sure there are no tripping hazards about).

We'll have fuller reviews of the hardware and the most interesting VR experiences as we get closer to the Vive's early April 9 release. For now, here are some scattered impressions of what it's like having room-scale virtual reality in your very own room.

The annual orgy of game marketing and hype that is the Electronic Entertainment Expo will be a little less hype-filled this year, as some of gaming's biggest publishers have decided not to buy space on the Los Angeles Convention Center show floor.

VentureBeat reports today that Disney Interactive and Wargaming won't have booths at E3 2016. The two major publishers join Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts, which announced in recent weeks that they are also opting out of the show (though EA will have a press event and "hands-on" demos at an off-site location in the days before the show starts).

Wargaming, which has maintained a large E3 booth since 2011, summarized the reasons for its departure in an e-mail to Venturebeat. "From a strictly business perspective, E3 just doesn’t fit our current direction," a company spokesperson said. "It’s a show that is very centralized on retail product, and as a free-to-play digital download gaming company, we’ve realized that while the show may be a good fit for lots of other publishers and developers, it’s currently not a great fit for us."

It's been almost a year now since Oculus announced that the consumer version of the Rift virtual reality headset would only support Windows PCs at launch—a turnaround from development kits that worked fine on Mac and Linux boxes. Now, according to Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, it "is up to Apple" to change that state of affairs. Specifically, "if they ever release a good computer, we will do it," he told Shacknews recently.

Basically, Luckey continued, even the highest-end Mac you can buy would not provide an enjoyable experience on the final Rift hardware, which is significantly more powerful than early development kits. "It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn’t prioritize high-end GPUs," he said. "You can buy a $6,000 Mac Pro with the top-of-the-line AMD FirePro D700, and it still doesn’t match our recommended specs."

"So if they prioritize higher-end GPUs like they used to for a while back in the day, we’d love to support Mac. But right now, there’s just not a single machine out there that supports it," he added. "Even if we can support on the software side, there's just no audience that could run the vast majority of software on it."