UPDATE 11.45pm: Following Sony's announcement that it will no longer be attending PAX East, the company has confirmed it will also be pulling out of this year's Game Developers Conference as a result of "increasing concerns related to [coronavirus]".

In a statement obtained by GamesIndustry.biz, Sony Interactive Entertainment explained, "We felt this was the best option as the situation related to the virus and global travel restrictions are changing daily. We are disappointed to cancel our participation, but the health and safety of our global workforce is our highest concern.

"We look forward to participating in GDC in the future."

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2020 is a big year for Halo, as Microsoft is releasing Halo Infinite as a launch title for Xbox Series X. While the company is yet to show any proper gameplay footage, some of the first merchandise around the game has been revealed. Hasbro announced new Nerf blasters earlier this week, and now another company has followed with its own announcement.

Mega Construx, the new toy brand from Mega Bloks, has announced it will be releasing new sets based on Halo Infinite. The company revealed these in a tweet today through a series of shadow-y images. From the looks of it, you can expect new Halo Infinite Mega Construx toys for the Warthog, Pelican, and Mongoose.

Every now and then an Xbox Game Pass game will drop without any previous fanfare or announcement, which is always a nice surprise. The Early Access version of World of Horror has just joined the service, bringing a low-fi black-and-white scares to users worldwide.

World of Horror is an RPG with roguelike elements, set in a Japanese fishing village that is being reclaimed by the Old Gods. There are five characters to choose from in this Early Access version, and you can solve 10 mysteries through a text adventure-style interface.

If you're familiar with the comics of Junji Ito (particularly Uzumaki, his masterpiece about a town infected by spirals), elements of World of Horror will look familiar. The game is also inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

Developer Keen Software House's construction-focussed sandbox game Space Engineers is finally making its way to Xbox One on 15th April.

Space Engineers, which Keen describes as a "sandbox game about engineering, construction, exploration and survival in space and on planets", launched in its version 1.0 guise last February on PC, having been in Steam early access for almost five and a half years.

It's an absurdly ambitious game, enabling players (either working solo, co-operatively, or competitively in survival or creative modes) to build everything from planet-bound outposts to space stations and ships, piloting the latter among the stars to explore ever-further.

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Today on Highlight Reel we have decapitating VR lightsabers, leg spawns, sudden combustion, fantastic creations in Dreams and much more!

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It seems unlikely that Media Molecule will return to the Little Big Planet franchise, at least not anytime soon or with a direct sequel. Studio director Siobhan Reddy said in a new interview that the studio is "all-in" on its recently launched game-creation game, Dreams, leaving no bandwidth for more LittleBigPlanet games from the team.

"We're all-in all Dreams," Reddy said. "That's what we're all doing right now. We've got so many plans, and we are a really small team. It's going to take every one of us, working on it together to get through all those plans that we have."

As Reddy mentioned, Media Molecule is a relatively small studio by AAA standards, with around 50 people on staff. The company has an extensive roadmap of ongoing support and content for Dreams, which is taking up the studio's time currently.

Nintendo showed off its latest first-party title, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, this morning, and the reception was mostly good. However, gameindustry.biz noted that there’s at least one big problem with the yet-to-be-released game: You’re pretty screwed if you lose your save.

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Today Bandai Namco Entertainment released a brand new trailer of the popular fighting game Dragon Ball FighterZ, focusing on the upcoming DLC.

The video focuses on Kefla, the fusion of Caulifla and Kale that will be added as the first DLC of the upcoming season 3.

Funnily, the trailer shows a normal match, so it also includes plenty of gameplay in which Kefla isn’t featured at all, but that’s pretty much the nature of Dragon Ball FighterZ as a team-based fighting game.

You can watch it below. Incidentally, we already know that the second DLC of the season will be Goku Ultra Instinct coming later in the spring.

Dragon Ball FighterZ is currently available for PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC. Kefla will be released on all the platforms mentioned above on February 28.

If you want to know why it’s so well-loved by the fans, you can check out our review.

This should be someone who'll lead the Level Design team in the operation of designing, developing, and polishing game levels including level geometry, enemy encounters, puzzles, and unique gameplay. ...

Once every month or two, I have this dream. I’m standing in a cavernous entryway to what my brain tells me is absolutely a World of Warcraft raid dungeon. Its walls are streaked with throbbing orange and purple veins, akin to the armor sets dropped in Molten Core, an actual WoW raid dungeon. It is dark. It is…

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Season 2 of Fortnite Chapter 2 is now underway on all platforms. Along with a host of gameplay tweaks and map changes, the new season brings along a new batch of challenges to complete. The first weekly set is called Brutus's Briefing, and it's related to one of the new character skins you can unlock through the Season 2 Battle Pass.

Tying into the season's spy theme, one of Week 1's challenges asks you to disguise yourself in a Phone Booth in different matches. If you're not sure where those can be found, we've put together the map and guide below to help you out.

Where Are The Phone Booth Locations?

There are several Phone Booths scattered about the island, many in the new areas that were added as part of Season 2. You only need to disguise yourself in three of them to complete this challenge, however, so we've marked down the locations of three of the Phone Booths on the map below:

Annual game developer gathering affected by COVID-19 fears

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Two major online games announced new features for cross-console play this week, continuing console games†™ slow march toward a more cross compatible future. ...

You need the world’s most badass curved monitor, for starters

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The gaming headset market is absolutely packed nowadays, which makes finding the best gaming headset to keep you comfortable while gaming a difficult task. Each pair of headphones boasts all kinds of key features, and it's hard to know which ones actually matter. Are there downsides to buying wireless over-ear headphones? How universal is compatibility among headsets? How important are sound quality and surround sound audio? Can I tell from images whether a headset will be a comfortable fit? Should I get memory foam or something with fabric? What are planar magnetic drivers, and should I care? Are LED lights cool?

The most important thing to keep in mind when looking for the best gaming headset isn't necessarily high-end audio latency--that is, the delay between the action happening on screen and the time it takes for the audio associated with that action to reach your ears. Naturally, when playing video games, especially action games that require quick reactions, you want the lowest possible latency. Depending on what your situation, you might also be looking for a good microphone to go along with good audio and low latency.

Bluetooth wireless headphones are generally good enough but will, in most cases, usually suffer from some latency, but unless you're looking for a truly professional gaming headset, that might not matter. Wireless gaming headsets, like the ones we've featured, will usually have their own proprietary dongle that uses a short-range wireless signal, which minimises the latency greatly. If you're a massive stickler for best absolute best possible audio quality and latency however, you might want to stick to a purely wired solution.

You will have to speak Japanese, though

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In Democratic Socialism Simulator, the goal is simple: loads of cute American animals are going to either ask questions about, or give advice related to, government policy. And you, as “the first socialist president of the United States”, have to decide what to do.

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Nexon recently hosted its financial conference for investors and analysts and provided some interesting information about its upcoming games and business, including a snippet about the upcoming mobile Final Fantasy XI reboot code-named Final Fantasy XI R.

First of all, for those who have been wondering, Final Fantasy XI R is still in the works, as showcased in the publisher’s pipeline, but it doesn’t appear among the games that will be released in 2020.

You can see the future pipeline below, and the games planned for 2020 in the second slide. Incidentally, it also confirms that Final Fantasy XI R should be coming west.

In 2015, development of Resident Evil 2: Reborn, the fan-made remake of the classic survival-horror game, came crashing to a halt when the young development team in small-town Italy received a call from Capcom politely asking them to stop. Before long, Resident Evil 7 and later RE2: Remake were officially announced. Meanwhile, in Italy, Invader Studios rose from the ashes of the cancelled fan project, delivering their own title Daymare: 1998 on Steam in 2019.

As Daymare: 1998 heads to consoles in April, IGN Japan and IGN Italy visited the Invader Studios team in the small mountainside town of Olevano Romano, 45 km east of Rome, where they told us about the fallout of that fateful call from Capcom.

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When the group of friends who were working on their fan remake – built from the ground up in Unreal Engine as an over-the-shoulder third-person action game – they knew the IP was not theirs to use. Rather than intending to monetize the project, they saw it as a way to hone their skills as game developers and maybe, just maybe, garner them some attention.

Which it did – after hundreds of thousands of YouTube plays, the team received a call from Capcom’s European marketing office. And that was the end of the project.

Showing Respect in the Industry

The team was invited to visit Capcom’s Osaka office, where they were shown top-secret early builds of the as-yet-unannounced Resident Evil 7 and – yep – Capcom’s own over-the-shoulder third-person action game remake of Resident Evil 2.

Half-Life: Alyx is just over a month away, and those looking to step into the heady world of VR gaming have a new range of options to consider courtesy of HTC, which has just unveiled three new iterations of its Vive Cosmos headset.

The original Vive Cosmos launched at the tail-end of last year, offering a high-end PC-based VR experience that, in terms of price at least, occupied the middle ground between Oculus' £399 Rift S and Valve's maxed-out £919 Index, coming in at £699.

Vive Cosmos' three new variations - the Elite, XR, and Play - all have the same 90Hz 2,880 x 1,700 LCD display as the original model, but each utilises its own (removable) faceplate, providing support for a range of different features.

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Just a day after canceling its attendance at Pax East 2020, Sony has announced it’s also removing itself from the Game Developers Conference (GDC) next month, too, citing fears over the spread of the Coronavirus COVID-19. Facebook has followed suit, opting instead to deliver its Oculus keynote online.

The news comes by way of Gamesindustry.biz — the outlet was issued statements by spokespeople from both companies.

A statement from Sony Interactive Entertainment read:

“We have made the difficult decision to cancel our participation in Game Developers Conference due to increasing concerns related to COVID-19 (also known as coronavirus). We felt this was the best option as the situation related to the virus and global travel restrictions are changing daily. We are disappointed to cancel our participation, but the health and safety of our global workforce is our highest concern. We look forward to participating in GDC in the future.”

While Facebook explained:

“Out of concern for the health and safety of our employees, our dev partners, and the GDC community, Facebook will not be attending this year’s Game Developer Conference due to the evolving public health risks related to COVID-19.

We still plan to share the exciting announcements we had planned for the show through videos, online Q&As, and more, and will plan to host GDC partner meetings remotely in the coming weeks.

We continue to collaborate with UBM, GDC’s parent company, and our partners, and thank them for their efforts.”

CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 will arrive on GeForce Now the same day as it launches on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Google's competing cloud gaming service Stadia, Nvidia announced in a blog post.

GeForce Now members can play their Steam copy of Cyberpunk 2077 when it releases on September 17. Founders subscribers will get access to RTX On, a higher-fidelity resolution using ray tracing technology. Nvidia said the higher resolution will be "fully optimized and instantly available, even on your Mac laptop."

Much like Stadia and Sony's PlayStation Now, Nvidia's GeForce Now is a cloud gaming service that allows you to stream your favorite PC games directly to your Mac, PC, Nvidia Shield TV, or Android-based devices. The company officially launched GeForce Now earlier this month with two tiers.

The GDC team is following developments around the Novel Coronavirus closely as we take the health and safety of our game development community very seriously.

Borderlands is coming to a movie theater near you, and it has some big names attached to it. The upcoming film, which Lionsgate teased five years ago, will be directed by Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel). It's based on a script from Craig Mazin, the writer behind The Hangover Part II and HBO's Chernobyl miniseries.

Gearbox president Randy Pitchford, who is also an executive producer on the project, revealed Roth's involvement in a tweet, in which he also said more info was coming in a week at PAX.

“I’m so excited to dive into the world of Borderlands and I could not be doing it with a better script, producing team, and studio,” Roth said in a statement. “I have a long, successful history with Lionsgate — I feel like we have grown up together and that everything in my directing career has led to a project of this scale and ambition. I look forward to bringing my own energy, ideas, and vision to the wild, fun, and endlessly creative world of the game. Randy Pitchford and everyone at Gearbox have been incredibly supportive of my ideas — it really feels like a perfect storm of creators coming together. We are out to make a new classic, one which the fans of the game will love, but also one which will find new audiences globally."

Hot on the heels of news on Outward’s first premium DLC expansion earlier this week, Deep Silver and Nine Dots Studio have announced a new sales milestone for the game today. Outward, the open-world adventure RPG set in the fantasy world of Aurai, has now sold 600,000 units since its release on March 26, 2019.

CEO of Nine Dots Studio Guillaume Boucher-Vidal celebrated Outward as an “outstanding success” and spoke of looking forward to revealing the studio’s future plans for the game moving forward in a press release today.

To mark the occasion, the developer has also released the game’s wonderfully atmospheric OST. Boucher-Vidal praised composer Jean-François Racine for his efforts on the score, which was his debut as a video game composer:

“We are the first studio that hired for an entire game soundtrack and are thrilled with the result. Jean-François is still a newcomer, but he has a great career ahead of him. His music helped our game to build a very special atmosphere that the players will surely remember for a long time. We are therefore looking forward to his next works.”

You can download the soundtrack here.

As mentioned earlier, Outward’s first premium DLC, Soroboreans, is set to launch later this spring, adding new mechanics and features, and seemingly locations to the already robust experience.

Before that, a major free update released in October of last year added a hardcore mode for those wanting an even more harrowing survival experience.

If you thought that the Animal Crossing Nintendo Direct that aired earlier today already had a lot of new information, think again! A few hours after the 25-minute-long presentation, Nintendo has dropped yet another piece of Animal Crossing: New Horizons footage in the form of a short trailer.

The Nintendo Direct pretty much showed us everything we need to know about the upcoming Switch exclusive, but just in case you wanted to see some more footage, here’s the trailer for you all to gawk at. It’s only 30 seconds but it’s a perfect 30 seconds:

You can check out the Animal Crossing Nintendo Direct right here and if you want even more AC goodness, make sure to check out this feature all about the tiny details that you might have missed from the presentation.

There were also some really good memes that came out of the direct earlier today, and you check out some of those here that I compiled earlier.

Cursed! is a game of competitive magic potion making, with players battling for the spellbook and cauldron in order to cure themselves of some nasty afflictions. ...

A host of small changes with big potential effects are coming to Destiny 2 when its next content season kicks off in March. They're mostly small tweaks that lessen the damage dealt by a variety of guns, and taken together, they seem likely to result in some changes to which guns players favor in the Crucible PvP arena, and which weapons are seen as essential to high-level content like raids.

Bungie detailed the changes in its This Week at Bungie blog post, which largely seem like they're aimed at keeping any given type of weapon from becoming a default choice in either PvP or PvE. Bungie is switching around one of the perks of Izanagi's Burden, an Exotic sniper rifle that has become a mainstay of loadouts for players taking on high-level enemies, which will make it reload a little slower but a little more reliable when you're under fire.

Two other weapons, which have become dominant in the Crucible, are also getting downgrades: Lord of Wolves and The Last Word. Lord of Wolves, in particular, has seen a major uptick in use; the shotgun carries an alternate fire mode that sprays a ton of ammo in a short period that makes it ridiculously deadly at close ranges. Bungie is tweaking the gun to reduce the accuracy of that alternate fire mode, making it effective only at very close range--and that should encourage Lord of Wolves users to try its normal firing mode when they're fighting at a little more distance.

PlayStation has announced it will not be attending GDC this year amidst concerns surrounding the Coronavirus (COVID19). Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, a Sony Interactive Entertainment representative said skipping the show was its best option and the safest decision when keeping in mind the welfare of its employees.

"We have made the difficult decision to cancel our participation in Game Developers Conference due to increasing concerns related to COVID-19 (also known as coronavirus)," the company confirmed. "We felt this was the best option as the situation related to the virus and global travel restrictions are changing daily. We are disappointed to cancel our participation, but the health and safety of our global workforce is our highest concern. We look forward to participating in GDC in the future."

GDC 2020 is set to begin on March 16 and run through March 20 in San Francisco. In addition to PlayStation, Facebook Gaming/Oculus is also opting to not attend the show, though it will still make announcements via a digital presence.

GDC is happening next month in San Francisco, and today organizers want to quickly update you on what enhanced on-site measures are being taken to ensure everyone has a safe and successful event! ...

Did you grow up with Tiger LCD handheld games? Well, Sonic 3 and three others are coming back in 2020.

The post Tiger Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Three Other LCD Handhelds Coming Back in Fall 2020 appeared first on Siliconera.

There’s a sinking feeling I get every time my team in Darksburg gets surrounded by purple-tinted goth zombies. Waves of them break against us, driven back by our attacks, only to reform and come at us again. Surely this is the last one, I think, only to find our party of four overwhelmed once again a few moments later.

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In this 2018 GDC talk, Square Enix's Youichiro Miyake offers up a behind-the-scenes look at the design and development of Final Fantasy XV's three primary AI systems! ...

Animal Crossing: New Horizons appears to follow in its predecessors' footsteps of being an utterly chill game. You catch some bugs, shake some trees, catch some fish, and so on. This time it all takes place on your own private, deserted island. What could be more relaxing?

Oh, also someone died.

At least, that's what appears to have happened, thanks to a brief glimpse in the latest Animal Crossing-themed Nintendo Direct. During the section detailing the game's terraforming features, the plucky island-dweller passed by the unmistakable image of a tombstone, caught by eagle-eyed fans.

This year's nominees include a handful of recent video game releases alongside nominations for novels, tabletop systems, and short stories. ...

The original map is back

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If you haven't already gotten yourself a big external hard drive for your PS4, Xbox One, or PC, then now is a good time to do so. There are a lot of games coming out this year, and most of them are going to have huge file sizes--and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's patches are gigantic. That's why these two recent deals on external hard drives from Amazon are so enticing. You can get two excellent drives for under $100 each.

The WD 5TB external hard drive costs $98.10, while the Seagate 6TB external hard drive is $90--both hard drives normally sell for $130 each. Both drives are available with free Prime two-day shipping and will give you plenty of space for a lot of games. I currently use a 4GB external hard drive, and I keep the vast majority of my Xbox One library on it and the console's own storage space.

WD 5TB Elements portable external hard drive

$98.10 ($130)