Image: Game Freak/The Pokémon Company
The Rogue Monkey Pokémon arrives on ‘Pokémon Day’
While the skill tree in Wolcen is nowhere near as big as some other action RPGs, it is one of the more interesting to navigate. It allows you to customise your character into the type of character you want them to be. You could be a dedicated warrior that specialises in tanking damage and cleaving through enemy ranks, or a mixture of an assassin class with a bit of poison magic.
After a string of slightly disappointing 1440p gaming monitors last year, the last couple of screens that have crossed my desk have really knocked it out of the park. AOC’s Agon AG273QX currently stands at the top of the pile with its superb picture quality and hassle-free FreeSync 2 HDR support (wot AMD are now calling FreeSync Premium Pro, in case you’ve forgotten), and now there’s MSI’s Optix MAG272CQR, another 27in, 2560×1440, 165Hz gaming screen that comes in at a very similar price to its AOC rival. Does it have what it takes to knock it off its best gaming monitor perch? Here’s wot I think.
Temtem can’t get enough of their Pokémon inspired features – it shouldn’t be a surprise really, it’s a Pokémon-inspired MMO after all. Crema have released yet another roadmap through early access and beyond, this time telling us about some of the lovely new things we can expect to start arriving in the game from this winter, including a good old fashioned Nuzlocke game mode. They’ve also provided some details on an upcoming battle pass-style system, as well as something called Dojo Wars.
Wolcen’s final boss was for the longest time more than a bit broken. It was impossible to beat him if damaged him while he was transforming in the second or third phase. Now the game has been patched, he is able to be killed with ease, well, if you have the right build of course. (more…)
Click here to watch embedded media To celebrate Pokémon Day, a new Mythical Pokémon is being introduced into Pokémon Sword and Shield – Zarude. This Dark- and Grass-type Pokémon is known as the Rogue Monkey, and it uses vines grown from its body to get around, attack, and even heal itself.
The new trailer for Zarude gives players just a glimpse of the creature's vine abilities, and developer Game Freak says more info on the Pokémon is coming in the future.
In other news, the company has announced limited-time Max Raid battles. Starting today at 4 p.m. Pacific until Sunday, March 1 at 3:59 p.m. Pacific, Dynamax Mewtwo may appear in Max Raid Battles. It can't be caught, but if you beat it you'll get rare items like Ability Capsules.
You can also encounter Dynamax Bulbasaur, Charmander, Squirtle, and others in Max Raid Battles, but unlike Mewtwo, these can be caught.
All of these limited-time Pokémon will put up a challenging fight, so it's suggested you bring along some friends.
Star Wars Battlefront II has quietly transformed into a success story, moving from the microtransaction-heavy bowels of the sarlaac pit to the comfy seat of a soaring X-Wing carrying a payload of free content. The game's latest update, dubbed The Age of Rebellion, is impressive in size. With the focus on the original trilogy, players can now play cooperatively on the classic locations of Mos Eisley, Yavin IV, Hoth, Jabba's Palace, Endor, the Kessel mines, and the Death Star II. As an added bonus, DICE is making co-op play available on the prequel-era capital ships, the Venator and Dreadnaught.
This update also introduces the Ewok hunter, an infiltrator unit with a bow and arrow, and the ISB agent, a dual-wielding infiltrator. The ISB Agent's final ability regenerates nearby allies' base health, and the Ewok hunter can single out weakened foes.
Players can also bring new weapons into the fray, such as a new blasters like the E-11D and DL-18, as well as the T-21 heavy blaster, and the Cycler Rifle. Heroes vs. Villains skirts the classic trilogy to add playable maps set on the MC85 Star Cruiser and the Resurgent-class Star Destroyer.
The update brings a number of tweaks and fixes, such as modifications to Leia's E11 blaster and Chewbacca's bowcaster. You can find out more at DICE's official Battlefront II forum.
The six main Trials of Mana characters are being turned into small figures you can display.
The post Trials of Mana Figures Bring the Game’s Six Heroes Into Your Home appeared first on Siliconera.
Kemono Heroes is NIS America's latest game, and will reveal two more games in March 2020.
The post NIS America Releases Kemono Heroes and Promises Two More Announcements appeared first on Siliconera.
Square Enix kicked off a new behind-the-scenes video series for Final Fantasy XIV, going over the creation of the Shadowbringers expansion.
The post Final Fantasy XIV Behind-the-Scenes Developer Diary Series Goes Over the Creation of Shadowbringers appeared first on Siliconera.
The whole "free-to-play" concept has really thrown me for a loop whenever a game goes temporarily free. I mean it is free to play, but not "free-to-play," dig? The hyphens used to let you know a game wasn't swimming in microtransactions, before premium games started to abuse microtransactions.
Anyway, The Division 2, a premium game that's currently on sale for $3 for four more days at the time of publication, is free to play this weekend. That means you can download it on PC, PS4 and Xbox One and lay it from February 27 through March 2. The catch, of course, is that you can't partake in any of the upcoming Warlords of New York expansion bits, as that DLC drops on March 3.
If you do partake, and you should, because Division 2 is still pretty fun, you'll get a free mask for logging in and progress will carry over to the retail edition. That includes anyone who buys it at the sale price, as Ubisoft points out in their announcement blog for the event.
As a reminder, The Division 2 is going full swing with the "seasonal" concept that so many other shooters of its ilk are using, which will be the framework for the game going forward, to propel it past the Warlords of New York story campaign. Season 1 kicks off on March 10, and you can find all of the relevant info regarding them below. Have fun this weekend if you boot it up!
The Division 2 – State of the Game Recap [Ubisoft]
Video game convention PAX East gets underway in Boston today, and publisher THQ Nordic has revealed some of the titles that it plans to showcase for the public, some of which will be playable for the first time on U.S. soil.
First up is SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated. This remake of the 2003 adventure will be making its U.S. playable debut at PAX East, giving fans new and old the opportunity to see how developer Purple Lamp Studios has reinvigorated the classic 3D platformer for a whole new audience.
Another remake playable at PAX is Destroy All Humans! taking another 3D adventure from the mid-'00s and sprucing it up for a fresh audience. Take a trip to the wild times of the 1950s, as Crypro-137 lays waste to Americana on a mission to rescue his captured brethren - gladly bringing about armageddon en route.
Mimimi Games will also be in attendance at the THQ Nordic booth, showing off old west sequel Desperados III. Coming a long 14 years after the previous entry, Desperados III already looks poised to capture the intense and highly methodical stealth-strategy action that is the series' trademark.
Yes, we all loved the Carmen Sandiego show as kids, but the master thief’s true edutainment legacy lied in the computer video game series that kicked it all off in the first place. Now Netflix’s latest animated iteration of the heroine is leaning a little into that gamified history with a new special that puts you…
Game designer Elizabeth Hargrave helped jumpstart a tabletop revolution with Wingspan, an environmental board game about creating habitats for birds. Her upcoming release, Mariposas, has players guiding monarch butterflies on their migration. But there’s something unsettling lurking beneath the table.
Earlier this month, The Pokemon Company and Google collaborated to let fans vote on their favorite monster in the "Pokemon of the Year" competition. The vote counted up players' picks from all eight regions, and to celebrate Pokemon Day, we have a winner: Greninja.
The amphibious ninja Pokemon took home the top prize, likely for its strange appearance and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate prowess as much as its usefulness in the Pokemon games themselves. We aren't sure why Totodile was disrespected like this, but we're thinking our own votes may have been thrown out due to some technicality.
The Pokemon YouTube channel also revealed the other top contenders for the prize, and it's a mix of classic and newer Pokemon.
Continue Reading at GameSpotDragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age is one of the best Japanese role-playing games on Nintendo Switch. It also happens to be one of the third-party Switch games that really holds its price. Dragon Quest XI released last September for Switch, and we've never seen it for less than $50, and even a $10 discount has been rare. If you've been holding out for a better price, DQXI is discounted to $37.49 at Target right now.
There is a catch here, though. The discount is only good for in-store pickup online orders, so if you don't live near a Target store, you won't easily be able to take advantage of this excellent deal.
The Switch version, which received a 9/10 in GameSpot's Dragon Quest X1 review, is the "Definitive Edition" for good reason. It features two totally different graphical styles: modern 3D visuals and a top-down 2D render modeled after the old SNES games. The Switch version also adds bonus content found in the original 3DS version that was exclusive to Japan. The soundtrack is also fully orchestrated, replacing the maligned music found in the PS4 and PC versions of its US release.
Continue Reading at GameSpot
Plague Inc., the real-time strategy sim about pandemics, has been abruptly removed from the Chinese App Store - and it's still unclear as to why.
In a blog post, developer Ndemic Creations said it had been informed that Plague Inc. "includes content that is illegal in China as determined by the Cyberspace Administration of China", although no further explanation was given to say exactly what was considered illegal.
"This situation is completely out of our control," Ndemic Creations wrote. "It's not clear to us if this removal is linked to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak that China is facing. However, Plague Inc.'s educational importance has been repeatedly recognised by organisations like the CDC and we are currently working with major global health organisations to determine how we can best support their efforts to contain and control COVID-19."
Hideo Kojima will pick up a prestigious BAFTA Fellowship award this year, and follow in the footsteps of past recipients such as Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright and Gabe Newell.
Creator of Boktai and voice actor in Control, Kojima is also known for his work on the Metal Gear series, and for the PlayStation 4/PC game Death Stranding.
Kojima will pick up his prize at the 2020 BAFTA Games Awards, due to take place on 2nd April at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London.
It's rare that we review graphics card variants at Digital Foundry but in the case of the RTX 2060 KO from EVGA, we're going to make an exception. Nvidia's entry-level, feature-complete Turing card sat at a $349 price-point for quite some time - a touch pricey perhaps when the significantly superior RTX 2060 Super turned up costing just $50 more. However, with this new EVGA KO model clocking in at $299, it's time to re-assess the product and specifically, just how capable the card is in handling games using hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
Primarily, it's the RTX aspect of the 2060 that sets it apart from its nearest AMD competitor, the RX 5600 XT. Its ability to tap into the DXR API and by extension access the full range of visual options available in supported games is obviously a nice feature to have - and with ray tracing confirmed for the next-gen consoles, the broader adoption of RT is a case of not if but when. On top of that, the inclusion of Turing's tensor cores allows for the 2060 to access hardware-accelerated machine learning features with the AI-powered DLSS upscaling pretty much the only application for this technology in the here and now. This is all in addition to standard graphics power that's generally in excess of the RX 5600 XT - to the point that AMD had to deliver an 11th hour BIOS upgrade to bring its latest Navi release back into contention.
Image: PUBG Corp.
‘Experimental DDoS solutions’ made connectivity and performance worse
A legally-distinct series of races which are definitely not Formula One featuring no official F1 vehicles arrived in GTA Online, and it’s as messy as you’d expect from an open-world murder simulator. Up to 16 murderers can compete in the new Open Wheel Races, whipping around at tight tracks at 120mph while fighting their honed instincts which scream to ram and kill everyone. At least, that’s what I imagine other players are experiencing when I see six cars pile up at the first corner. While you can buy an F1 car for keepsies, the races will provide one so all are welcome. Ish. Welcome-ish. Unless you get in my way.
Congratulations, if you’re reading this, you’ve beaten the main campaign of Wolcen. From now on, it’s up to you to rebuild the city of Stormfall. It’s going to take a lot of money and a lot of primordial affinity to construct all of the facilities on offer. I warn you now, this is going to take a long time to complete, so get ready for the long haul. (more…)
Perhaps understandably, given that it’s my job to attempt to stay up to date with PC games these days, I don’t get to play all my favourites with quite the same regularity. Usually, that’s fine – Civilization VI, for example, is always gonna be Civilization VI. Sometimes, it’s even a bit of a boon – I’ll return to something like Rimworld after a few months away, only to find it’s sprouted a game-changing update. But there are some games where even a couple of weeks away can make you feel like you’ve missed out on years, and Hearthstone is really giving me a hard time on that front right now.
GOG.com have gone and updated their refund policy, and it’s a doozy. This week, the DRM-free storefront announced that their 30-day refund window is expanding, no longer limited to games that have sat unplayed and undownloaded in your library. Now, you can spend a whole month plugging in the hours, working out whether you want to keep your new toy before the clock runs down. It’s a generous move – twice as long as comparable policies, with none of the playtime restrictions. But it’s one places a lot of faith in their customers not to take advantage of that generosity.
Respawn’s battle royale seems like it’s been dropping new events nonstop for a while. Now, the System Override Collection event is on its way, and it’ll be adding new cosmetics, new shields, a new Octane heirloom, and more to Apex Legends.
Apex Legends Season 4 has been full of surprises so far. The Valentine’s Day Rendezvous event and the short return to Kings Canyon have both come to an end, so the System Override Collection event is coming up next. It’ll be live for two weeks, from Mar. 3 to Mar. 17.
If you ever find yourself upset about the lack of good loot after dropping, you’ll be glad to know that System Override will feature a Deja Loot mode. The mode makes loot locations permanent, so you’ll start to remember where to go to get exactly what you want.
The second week will return to the Kings Canyon map once again, so you won’t have to mourn its absence for too much longer.
Last, but not least, both cosmetic and gameplay-altering loot will be added to Apex Legends, including an Evo Shield and Octane’s Heirloom. The Evo Shield gets stronger as you deal more damage, and you’ll need to complete new challenges to obtain 24 exclusive new items as well as the Heirloom.
You can see most of the new additions in-game in the new System Override trailer below:
Following the announcement of the PC version of Granblue Fantasy Versus, Xseed Games followed up with more information via press release.
We learn that the Steam version of the game will include graphical customization options and support for multiple languages.
Keyboard and mouse, as well as gamepads, will be supported.
Voice-overs will be both in Japanese and English, while subtitles will be in English, Japanese, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, with Traditional and Simplified Chinese and Korean to be added at a later date.
The PC version will have two editions, the standard edition will sell for $59.99.
The “Character Pass Set” including the character Color Pack DLC, the Character Pass (with 5 additional characters), and the Lobby Avatar “Nice-abs Vyrn” will be priced at $79.99.
Unfortunately, buying the PC version will not grant the in-game bonuses for the original Granblue Fantasy mobile game.
Granblue Fantasy Versus launched on February 6 in Japan and Asia for PS4, while western players are still waiting for the North American release on March 3, 2020 and for the European one on March 27. The PC version will launch worldwide on March 13.
Square Enix has released a few new assets for its upcoming Final Fantasy VII Remake.
We get a bunch of wallpapers that you can use on your PC, console, or mobile, portraying iconic villain Sephiroth.
You can check them out below, and download additional sizes on the official site.
The Dark Pictures anthology is building steam, as on Twitter today they released a video that paid tribute to the let’s players who muscled through the game online, and teased the upcoming entry in the anthology, Little Hope.
You can check out the official Twitter video here:
Today Paradox Interactive announced a release date for the latest expansion of its grand strategy game Stellaris, titled Federations.
The expansion will launch on March 17 and is available for pre-order now on PC. At the moment there is no information about a release for the console versions of the game.
The pricing is $19.99 / €19.99 / £15.49 depending on where you live.
You can check out a new (and rather ominous) story trailer below.
Below you can check out a series of bullet points describing the expansion’s features:
Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection released today in Japan, and lots of new content has been released to commemorate the occasion.
The post Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection Gets Launch Artwork and a Soundtrack Box appeared first on Siliconera.
The Tifa dynamic theme from the Butterfinger promotion is based on recreated Final Fantasy VII artwork.
The post Here’s What the Final Fantasy VII Remake Butterfinger Tifa Dynamic Theme Looks Like appeared first on Siliconera.
While each dungeon has its own identity, the Rune Factory 4 Obsidian Mansion is one of the more detailed and environmentally interesting places.
The post Rune Factory 4’s Obsidian Mansion Is Still Its Coolest Dungeon appeared first on Siliconera.
The Cyberspace Administration of China says Plague Inc. has "illegal" content.
The post Plague Inc. Is No Longer in the Chinese App Store Due to ‘Illegal’ Content appeared first on Siliconera.
Sometimes, a game is pitched that - on paper - looks positively ridiculous. And odds are, it is positively ridiculous – but that isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes, a game's development hits some bumps in the road, causing delays or restructuring - but that doesn't always spell doom for a project.
Here are 25 games that, whether because of their nontraditional concepts or troubled development, many found themselves skeptical of - or even expected to be downright terrible - but they still won the hearts of players everywhere.
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Click through the gallery above, or scroll down for the full list!It may just be football with cars - the fever dream of a seven-year-old boy - but Rocket League continues to drain countless hours from even the most discerning of players. Blending hyper-competitiveness with streamlined gameplay, it’s also become the perfect fodder for eSports and YouTube channels alike. The original game, Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, didn’t receive much acclaim when it launched on the PS3, but Rocket League learned from the shortcomings of its predecessor and included more elaborate mechanics and modes - such as the game-changing Mutators and Rumble mode - to become a staple multiplayer title in most gaming libraries.
Hypnospace Outlaw looked like a mix between a vaporwave music video and an archived Geocities page - and could have easily focused too much energy on it’s attractive a e s t h e t i c, and not enough on actual substance. In reality, it was a branching, compelling, endless romp through an alternate timeline - giving the player countless opportunities to abuse (or respect) their already unbalanced judicial power.
EA Vancouver/EA Sports
Image: Disney Plus