NBA 2K20 is getting players from the NBA 2020 draft class far earlier than normal. Players from the 2020 draft, like LaMelo Ball and Onyeka Okongwu, are coming to the MyTeam mode as part of the Next collection of card packs and boxes.

Normally, NBA rookies wouldn't be available until the next game in the series is released after the draft, which in this case would be NBA 2K21. The NBA 2020 draft is currently scheduled to take place on October 16 after being delayed from June due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

NBA 2K20's New 2020-21 Rookies

• LaMelo Ball
• James Wiseman
• Anthony Edwards
• R.J. Hampton
• Cole Anthony
• Onyeka Okongwu

The collection is available through July 3 and players can earn a Galaxy Opal Zion Williamson card for completing the collection. Williamson was the number one draft pick in 2019. NBA 2K also announced that it would be announcing three NBA 2K21 cover athletes on TikTok next week.

If you’re sick of notE3 taunting you with games you can see but not play, surprise! Here come Valve with a huge sale on so very, very many video games for you to play today. The 2020 Steam Summer Sale just launched and… many, many games are discounted until July 9th. Steam has has also opened a Points Shops, where points you earn by buying regular Steam stuff can be swapped for emoticons, profile backgrounds, animated stickers, avatar frames, and other vanity bits. And as is Steam sale tradition, the servers are now stumbling.

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Kick back and remember how much fun you had journeying with Ryu and Nina, thanks to newly added Breath of Fire soundtracks on Steam.

The post Breath of Fire Soundtracks Showing Up on Steam (Update) appeared first on Siliconera.

Blizzard is taking a slow and steady approach to talking about Diablo IV, and the longer this potentially-years-away game simmers, the better it sounds to me. The development team's quarterly update for June 2020 covers a big internal playtest, the open world, multiplayer, items, and other facets.

I won't recap everything – it's worth hearing this status update in Diablo IV director Luis Barriga's own words – but I'll highlight a few spots. Recently, the team "focused on blocking in all the elements in a region known as the Dry Steppes, complete with campaign content, open-world elements, itemization, a PvP subzone, dungeons, and a cinematic to cap the completion of the region's narrative."

On average, in this pre-alpha state, "team members took several hours to complete the campaign content for the [Dry Steppes] region, but those who focused only on the story finished the arc in less than half the average time (and were, of course able to do side content after that)."

Apart from PvP bouts and side-quests, camps – overrun locations that can be turned into outposts with NPCs – proved popular during the session. "For example, one of the camps in the zone was a town afflicted by a curse that turned villagers into piles of salt. Another was a crypt, haunted by a spirit that possesses the bodies of various undead – jumping from skeleton to skeleton until you defeat him."

_{A camp in Dry Steppes.}

Cyberpunk 2077 has a deep level of customization that allows you to craft your ideal V and assortment of skills. And although CD Projekt Red's upcoming RPG is not an immersive sim, the nature of its world allows you to take advantage of the many levels of customization to interact with it in unique ways.

"It especially blew my mind to see playtesters use offensive combat abilities to solve stealth situations," Cyberpunk 2077 senior level designer Miles Tost said. "Previously, I had thought of our reflex-enhancing cyberware, like Kerenzikov, or its more advanced form, Sandevistan, as purely useful in combat situations, since it allows your character to temporarily enter a bullet time-like state, making you move at superhuman speeds. But I was very surprised to see when our playtesters were using bullet time to bypass security cameras and enemy patrols, pulling off complex stealth maneuvers…or to simply catch a green traffic light at a pedestrian crossing."

When it comes to unlocking new abilities, there are several different ways. At the start of the game, you'll be able to allocate a number of skill points into Body, Reflex, Intelligence, Technical Ability, and Cool to give your V a starting baseline of abilities to specialize in. As you play, you'll level up and unlock perk points to further develop these baseline abilities. However, you'll also unlock special skills by how you play--for example, kill lots of enemies with guns and you'll naturally increase your proficiency as a Gunslinger, which makes you even more deadly with a firearm.

Hello, all you electric love swarms, and welcome to Ask Dr. NerdLove, the only advice column that helps eliminate the need for crunch time to help your love life go gold.

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Starting today, Steam users can pick and choose from a bevy of discounted games during the Steam Summer Sale. For the next eleven days (until July 9), you can save up to 75% off on over 2000 PC, Mac, and Linux titles. There will also be daily deals that users can check out to save even more moolah.

While there are just too many video games on sale to list in one place, you can check out the sale for yourself right here. We’ve listed some highlights of the sale down below that we recommend you pick up, if you’re interested at all that is:

• Terraria – $4.99
• Project Winter – $13.39
• Jackbox Party Pack 6 – $20.99
• Mordhau – $23.99
• A Plague Tale – $15.29
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain – $5.99
• Planet Coaster – $11.24
• Dragon Quest Builders 2 – $35.99
• Cities Skylines – $7.49
• Total War: Three Kingdoms – $44.99
• The Walking Dead: The Final Season – $9.99
• Dead by Daylight – $7.99
• Skyrim – $15.99
• Dark Souls 3 – $14.99
• ESO Online – $7.99
• The Sims 4 – $19.99
• Grand Theft Auto V – $14.99
• Mass Effect 3 – $14.99
• Ni No Kuni II – $17.99
• Tekken 7 – $9.99
• Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 – $9.99
• Rainbow Six Siege – $7.99

The Steam Summer Sale will come to an end on July 9 at 10 AM PT, so make sure to grab these deals while you can.

Developer id Software has announced that Update 2 for Doom Eternal is now live on PC, PlayStation 4, Stadia, and Xbox One. The lengthy patch notes show a bevy of additions and changes made to Doom Eternal.

The most notable is the brand-new Battle Mode map, Torrent. Once occupied by UAC and now home to eternal prisoners, Torrent is a marsh-covered location that features long hallways and various platforms.

In addition to the new map, Battle Mode has been given some quality-of-life improvements to enhance stability. This includes latency adjustments to ensure smoother matches, adding keybinding support for each individual demon, fixing various other issues like missing audio, and more.

The first episode of Cyberpunk 2077‘s Night City Wire just wrapped, broadcasting more deets from CD Projekt’s long-awaited open-world hackathon. Almost a year since we last hit the streets of Night City, we’ve hacked into the 25-minute livestream to dig up some of Cyberpunk’s mind-invading “braindance” investigations, hands-on gameplay, and an explosive new trailer pieced together from the game’s brutal opening hours.

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Here's an early look at what GDC Summer attendees can expect to find when you log in on the first day and start looking for opportunities to meet interesting people in game development. ...

Epic Games Store? More like Epic Free Games Store. Another Thursday, another round of freebies courtesy of Epic.

The title with the most brand-name recognition behind it is Stranger Things 3: The Game. This one is a co-op beat-em-up that follows the events of the show's third season. It's a decent enough game -- maybe a bit dull and unnecessary -- and the boss fights are supposed to be clever. It might be worth it just to see The Mind Flayer stylized for a retro game.

The other Epic freebie is AER Memories of Old. AER has you soaring across abstract skies, freely exploring ancient ruins to find the end of this shattered world. It's supposed to be a meditative experience similar to Rime or Journey.

(If the Epic Games Store really ain't your thing, both these games are a part of the Steam Summer Sale. Stranger Things is $5 and AER is $3.)

Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't feature an established protagonist like developer CD Projekt Red's The Witcher series--instead, you build main character V from the ground up by choosing their appearance and shaping their personality. This agency extends to V's backstory, of which there are three to choose from.

"We wanted to give the players freedom of creating their own character, but at the same time establish some kind of connection with V on a narrative level," Cyberpunk 2077 lead story writer Tomasz Marchewka said. "The three origin stories share a common motivation, but give the character different roots which will have consequences throughout the whole game."

Much like BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins, the backstory you choose will have significant ramifications on your story (though it will likely hit hardest in the side missions instead of the campaign), starting with the opening prologue. Your prologue will take place in different locations and see you encounter different people depending on which backstory you choose, ultimately shaping how your V perceives the world and other people for the rest of the game.

Cyberpunk 2077, the upcoming first-person RPG from CD Projekt Red is currently in the spotlight after their recent Night City Wire broadcast revealing some new information about the game, as well as a bunch of previews cropping up after the studio allowed select media to play a hands-on demo of the game.

At GameSpot, three of us were fortunate enough to experience what it's like to play the opening hours of Cyberpunk 2077--we've got a video feature that details our three different experiences. This allowed us to see each of the three different prologue sequences of the game that introduce the protagonist V, and portray V's growing relationship with her partner Jackie in different ways. The three different scenes corresponding to the three "Life Paths" that game allows you to choose: Street Kid, Nomad, and Corporate. We've got an article describing what happens in each prologue if you'd like to know more.

I was the one who chose to play the Corporate path, where V begins the game as a counter-intelligence operative for the Japanese firm Arasaka. V is given a treasonous order by her conniving, garbage boss (who weirdly uses the c-word twice in the space of 30 seconds so you know he's bad), and you're introduced the cutthroat world of corporate espionage that helps to define a lot of cyberpunk fiction. It's all very exciting, so naturally, the first thing I set off to do was to poke around the corners of the Arasaka office to look at trashcans, vending machines, and the workspaces of employees.

Dark deck-building adventure Black Book, which draws inspiration from Slavic mythology, has been given another intriguing airing by developer Morteshka.

Black Book is Morteshka's second game - following on from the similarly striking, Finno-Ugric-inspired The Mooseman - and charts the tribulations of Vasilisa, a young witch with the ability to control demons, still reeling from the death of her betrothed.

Described as a "fusion of card-based RPGs and adventure games", it sees Vasilisa on a journey across the game's bleakly beautiful rendition of 19th century rural Eastern Europe as she searches for the titular Black Book, said to grant one wish to those that locate its seven seals.

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There’s going to be plenty of fun new things to do in Animal Crossing: New Horizons this summer. This morning, we got an update video outlining the new summer events we can look forward to doing in the game in July.

Swimming and diving, which were the main new features shown in “Wave 1” of the update, look like a lot of fun. These were beloved features from New Leaf that were sorely missed when New Horizons released on Switch.

At the end of the summer events trailer, a “Wave 2” was teased, letting us know that the second half of the update would be revealed in early August. There was no other information given, except one tiny hint…

Ashraf Ismail has stepped down from the Valhalla team following allegations of infidelity and, reportedly, inappropriate advances toward Assassin's Creed fans significantly younger than himself. ...

A new Studio Trigger project has been announced: Cyberpunk Edgerunners. It's an anime series set in Cyberpunk 2077's world.

The post Cyberpunk Edgerunners Is Studio Trigger’s Cyberpunk 2077-Related Anime appeared first on Siliconera.

Bethesda and id Software have set the dates for this year's QuakeCon online event - which replaces the live show cancelled earlier this year as a result of the coronavirus pandemic - with the whole thing scheduled to get underway in early August.

This year's QuakeCon marks the 25th anniversary of the event, and when Bethesda made the decision to cancel the live show earlier this year, it told fans,"We hope to work with you to come up with other ways to celebrate the spirit of QuakeCon this August, and we look forward to the return of this amazing event next year".

It seems those alternative plans are now firmly in place, and a special online QuakeCon - appropriately titled QuakeCon at Home - is now scheduled to fill the same calendar slot as its cancelled predecessor, running from 7th-9th August this year.

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On this week's episode of The Game Informer Show, we take our closest look yet at Cyberpunk 2077 and discuss what we thought of our time actually playing CD Projekt Red's long-awaited RPG. Later, we give our impressions of what we saw from both Pokémon Unite and Marvel's Avengers and wrap it all up with another round of community emails. So please join me, Kim Wallace, Matt Miller, Dan "The Jacket" Tack, Brian Shea, and Alex Stadnik for another wild and entertaining episode! 

We continue to do this show from our homes as we hunker down in quarantine, so please forgive us for any audio or video hiccups as we deliver content outside the studio.

Thanks for listening! Please make sure to leave feedback below, share the episode if you enjoyed it, and follow me @therealandymc to let me know what you think. 

During today’s Night City Wire stream, CD Projekt Red announced Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, an anime series spun off from Cyberpunk 2077. Coming to Netflix in 2022, it’s being made by Trigger, the Japanese animation studio known for Kill La Kill and Little Witch Academia. Given the success of Netflix’s The Witcher, yeah, I’m not surprised.

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Get a better look at a Cyberpunk 2077 trailer that sends V, our protagonist, after some incredibly desirable prototype biochip.

The post Cyberpunk 2077 ‘The Gig’ Trailer Sends V After a Biochip appeared first on Siliconera.

Delays be damned, this is it: the official Cyberpunk 2077 countdown has begun with the inaugural episode of Night City Wire, a video series all about Cyberpunk 2077’s intriguing dystopian world. As promised, CD Projekt Red delivered a brand new trailer featuring new gameplay footage, as well as offering insight from key members of the development team on a mechanic called braindance.

Braindance, it is explained, was originally a therapeutic device in the world of Cyberpunk 2077 but has since permeated to the entertainment industry, as well as more nefarious surveillance purposes.

For players, braindancing is a feature that allows them to inside the mind of other characters throughout Night City and see what they’ve been up to. It’s is described as offering players a keyhole into the lives of other NPC’s in Night City. More than that, Braindancing allows you to literally get inside their skin — to feel what they feel, to relive the experience.

In today’s gameplay trailer we get a flavor of both how the system looks and how it works, using the braindance editor to spy on a conversation and seek out useful items and clues registered in the peripheral vision of whoever you’re investigating.

In practice, it all looks incredibly William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer and the father of the cyberpunk genre whose work served as inspiration for Cyberpunk 2020 creator Mike Pondsmith and developer CD Projekt Red.

You can check out the full stream below, which also includes a brand new story trailer and the announcement of an anime series called Edgerunner.

Is it that time already? It sure is. The 2020 Steam Summer Sale is here until July 9 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific with countless game deals, a "save five bucks if you spend $30" offer, and loads of animated stickers.

No, really – check these things out. They've got Geralt soaking in a tub. They've got an oh-so-squeezable chibi Arachnotron. They even have Kim from Disco Elysium showing off with a little dance.

_{The G-Man is tired of our shit.}

Aside from free daily stickers for just showing up throughout the sale, Steam is giving out points – 100 for every $1 spent – that can be exchanged at the Points Shop, which is "now open all year round."

"Emoticons and Backgrounds that were previously associated with trading cards can now [also] be directly acquired by using Steam Points," and "Items from the Points Shop are not marketable or tradeable." Players can tip points to other users for their reviews, Workshop mods, guides, and screens.

Steam will eventually "expand the set of things you can use your points on in the future."

It should come as no surprise that the team behind The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is making another rich and detailed world, but there's a huge difference between watching blades of grass dance in the wind as the warm glow of the sun emerges over distant trees, and being in the middle of a city bathed in blinding neon lights that's also screaming thumping bass and ear-piercing guitar riffs at you at every turn. In Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red trades natural serenity for the overwhelming, furious progression of technology. We're not in Kansas anymore: This is Tokyo turned up to 20.

For the sake of transparency it must be noted that my hands-on with the game was conducted remotely. I was playing over the cloud and, although latency was not discernable, visual fidelity was not the same as what it would be on a machine running the game locally.

Nevertheless, Night City was impressive to behold. It has a raw, grimy kind of majesty, and the sensory overload hits the moment you walk out into its bustling streets. It's a cacophony of chattering citizens, a barrage of lights, a constant hum of music, invasive advertising, distant sounds of gunfire, strange cars whizzing by, unsavory characters just looking for a reason to start trouble, and helpless people calling out for aid. It's a place that makes you feel completely out of sorts and instills an odd sense of discomfort, but also beckons you to unlock the potential it holds. From the very outset, as an up-and-coming merc named V, you're told that it's a city of dreams where legends are born, and that's exactly what you hope to become.

It's frustrating that the first chance to play Cyberpunk 2077 is not in the flesh but remotely, streamed from somebody else's PC. But there's a pandemic so a press event can't happen, and this is what we've got. And you know what? The tech's not bad. The video image is compressed but it's still a stunning game, and while there's a bit of input lag, it's negligible. It's surprisingly playable, and so I play for four hours from the very beginning of the game.

You've seen some of what I play in the gameplay video already released, but I also do things and meet characters you haven't seen. More importantly, I get a chance to just be in the world and feel what it's like to be there. I nose around, talking to people. I look through my inventory and pore over my character development screens, fantasising about the kind of Cyberpunk hero I'll be. I get a sense of what it's going to be like spending hours and hours here.

And I tell you this: there's a lot more going on in Cyberpunk 2077 than The Witcher 3. Night City is an overwhelming place. There are no quaint little villages like White Orchard with gentle rolling hills on the horizon to ease you in. There's one big city stuffed with huge buildings, and the labyrinthine alleyways and the dirty streets beneath them.

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Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t quite click with me until I met Certo.

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If you're sitting at home twiddling your thumbs and basking in the whir of your PlayStation 4 fans, why not try rooting around for some bugs - as finding a critical vulnerability could now land you $50k.

As announced via the PlayStation blog, the new "Bug Bounty Program" is being run in collaboration with HackerOne, the security company also working with Riot on a bug-hunting program for Valorant. The rewards for spotting an exploit reach up to $100k for kernel driver exploits on that one, mind you.

HackerOne lists the potential rewards for finding different PlayStation bugs on its website, with the very lowest reward (for low-level threats to PlayStation Network) earning bug-hunters $100 (£80.60), while finding critical vulnerabilities could earn you $50k (£40.2k). Sony's own blog post states that $50k is the starting point, however, so it's possible you could earn more for finding something really bad.

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It's not just The Witcher getting a Netflix glow-up. Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red has just announced an anime series also headed to the streaming service.

Named Cyberpunk Edgerunners, the series is being created by Trigger Studio, the team behind Kill la Kill, Little Witch Academia and many other anime shows, while Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka will handle its score.

Edgerunners will not tell the same story as the upcoming game, but it will share the same location of Night City and it is being worked on in close collaboration with CD Projekt.

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Today, during a livestream dedicated to Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red showcased a new trailer of the game and made an interesting announcement.

The trailer showcased new gameplay, cutscenes, and characters. It focuses on the prologue of the game and provides a look at one of the gangs that we’ll encounter in the game, the Mox.

On top of the trailer, we also get news about a Cyberpunk anime series coming in 2022 title Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. It will be created by the popular Studio Trigger that you may know for Kill la Kill, Little Witch Academia, and more.

“CYBERPUNK: EDGERUNNERS tells a standalone, 10-episode story about a street kid trying to survive in a technology and body modification-obsessed city of the future. Having everything to lose, he chooses to stay alive by becoming an edgerunner—a mercenary outlaw also known as a cyberpunk.”

You can check out both videos below.

New Cyberpunk 2077 Trailer From Night City Wire

What Is Braindance in Cyberpunk 2077

• Braindance is a recording of somebody else's experience and lets you live through their memories.
• Their sights, smell, sounds, everything will be experienced by you through Braindance.
• In an extended gameplay preview, the V was shown living through the memory of someone else's robbery on a grocery store.
• In an analysis mode, V was able to explore the same scene but this time as an observer.

During CD Projekt Red's Night City Wire livestream, the developer announced that a Cyberpunk 2077 tie-in anime will hit Netflix in 2022. Titled Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, it will be produced by Studio Trigger, the animation company known for hits like Kill la Kill, Little Witch Academia, BNA: Brand New Animal, and others.

You can check out the announcement trailer below.

Edgerunners is a "standalone, 10-episode story" that features original characters disconnected from Cyberpunk 2077. While it is an original story, Edgerunners will take place in the same universe, with Night City being a prominent location in the show.

Get a fresh look at Night City and V’s cyberpunk adventure

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The Pokemon GO fourth anniversary events have been revealed, and Flying Pikachu will be floating into Raids to help celebrate the event.

The post Pokemon GO Flying Pikachu Raid Being Added for Its 4th Anniversary appeared first on Siliconera.