May 2020

Riot Games is on a roll.

As we've talked about many times before, their host of new projects are finally coming to fruition. "Code names" no more, Valorant is poised to be released soon and make a splash in the esports scene, with Runeterra freshly launched, having already made an impact on the digital card game genre. So what's next? Well they have their fighter on the horizon, and Wild Rift: a mobile and console-ized version of League of Legends proper.

Thanks to a gameplay reveal this morning from the Summer Game Fest event, we now have a better idea of how Wild Rift will play. As a bit of background, Wild Rift was originally revealed last October, and is still slated for a "2020" release. The gist is to bring a more compact version of the MOBA to alternative platforms outside of PC, with "15-20 minute matches." That's down from the average length of a regular League match, which is roughly 30 minutes according to some data-gathering sites.

The main goal, Riot says, is to make Wild Rift accessible to everyone, to the point where folks get their friends to play it when they otherwise would have felt alienated by the original. It'll also be "free of cheats and cheaters and lag-free," feature a slightly smaller map and a pared-down (for now) "alpha roster" of characters with "lots more coming in the near future."

The cutie-pie farming adventure game Summer in Mara is coming to Nintendo Switch and PC on June 16, 2020. Better yet, developer Chibig has prepped a free Prologue demo for Summer in Mara that's available on Steam today and should arrive on the Switch eShop a little "closer to launch."

Playing as an 11-year-old named Koa, "you'll have to take care of your own island, harvest your crops, create new tools and buildings, and sail with your boat to discover new islands and secrets."

After soaking up all the Stardew Valley and Wind Waker vibes, I'm beyond stoked. My bags are packed.

Not only is there sailing – a huge hook in and of itself, especially in the context of a farming sim – there's a sense of progression. You can upgrade your ship to be "bigger, better, and faster." Along the way, Koa will make friends, trade resources, and become a thorn in a corporation's side. Yeah, I'm in.

Summer in Mara is also releasing on PS4 and Xbox One, but not until later this year.

With Final Fantasy VII Remake well into its post-launch honeymoon period, the time has come to chat with the development team and witness their reactions to all of our reactions.

While the recent Ultimania book gave us a ton of info on the actual design process, at this point Square Enix and company have had the chance to dwell on the game's impact; including this interview from VG247 with producer Yoshinori Kitase and co-director Noaki Hamaguchi.

Once again teasing a new entry that could be very far away, Kitase opens with this powder keg of a remark: "We've really enjoyed seeing these theories and guesses of what the ending means. We wanted the fans to keep the discussion going on social media and keep their excitement high as we head towards the next game." No spoilers here, but the ending is a huge point of contention for Remake players, and the single most polarizing part of the game (for the record, I didn't have a major problem with it: there's more to this story and there's no shame in waiting to see if they hit their mark).

Very little has changed to move the game to mobile

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10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki is an intimate look at Miyazaki’s process, and it’s free online

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Sony to unveil new games in hourlong presentation

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New games must work on both consoles

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It’s too hard to pick our favorite films, so we narrowed it down to moments

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Only a few days remain until Valorant launches in full on 2nd June, and now the two-month closed beta has wrapped up, Riot has published some statistics on how it went. The main takeaway: Valorant is pretty popular, surprise surprise.

According to stats from Riot, "an average of nearly 3 million players logged on each day to play Valorant", which is impressive considering you had to jump through several hoops to actually gain access. We'll have to wait until Valorant's full launch to see how its player numbers measure up to other big titles such as Fortnite and Minecraft. Or, dare I say it, CS:GO - which earlier this year kept breaking its own record for concurrent players, and even managed to tip over the 1m concurrents mark.

Something that does give us a better indication of interest in Valorant, however, are Twitch viewing figures. Riot says fans watched more than 470m hours of gameplay on Twitch during the closed beta, while Twitch stats website Twitch Metrics lists Valorant as the most-watched game for May (ignoring the just chatting category). Valorant also broke Twitch's record for the "single-day hours watched in a single game" category, with 34m hours watched on day one.

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UPDATED STORY 1/6/20: Sony has postponed Thursday's PlayStation 5 games reveal livestream to a later, currently undisclosed date.

Sharing the news on Twitter, the company wrote, "While we understand gamers worldwide are excited to see PS5 games, we do not feel that right now is a time for celebration and for now, we want to stand back and allow more important voices to be heard".

ORIGINAL STORY 29/5/20: Sony will reveal multiple PlayStation 5 games next week on Thursday, 4th June, via a stream on Twitch and YouTube.

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Life is Strange developer Dontnod has announced the opening of a new studio in Montreal.

This second branch will "complete" the original team in Paris and work on a "brand new project".

In a statement today regarding the new studio, Dontnod said this fresh North American office would allow the developer to be closer to the team's main audience.

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With another month in the bag and the weekend ahead of us, you might be looking for a new and exciting game to get stuck into.

I've got a handful of awesome game bargains for you right here, whether you call the PS4, Xbox One or Switch your home.

Let's start with Nier Automata, a game I can't help but forever shower with praise. It's a wondrous, imaginative and absorbing mix from the eccentric Yoko Taro and those masters of action Platinum Games. An RPG that demands your attention - even more so now it's at such an incredibly low price on PS4. The Game of the Yorha Edition includes some fittingly strange DLC, featuring additional costume packs and boss battles against heads at Square Enix and Platinum.

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Ghost of Tsushima is 100% Jin's story, so he'll be the only playable character. However, you get to pick his horse and the game's difficulty level.

The post Jin Is Ghost of Tsushima’s Only Playable Character appeared first on Siliconera.

You won't find out if it is "wrong to try to pick up girls in a dungeon" with Infinite Combate in English until later this summer.

The post Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Infinite Combate’s Delayed Until Later This Summer appeared first on Siliconera.

Attack on Titan is getting a fourth and final season of anime to conclude its story, and it'll be produced by Yuri!! on Ice studio MAPPA.

The post Attack on Titan Anime Gets a Trailer for Its Final Season appeared first on Siliconera.

Bandai Namco pulled all 2020 physical tournaments' official support for the Dragon Ball FighterZ, SoulCalibur, and Tekken World Tours.

The post Dragon Ball FighterZ, SoulCalibur, and Tekken World Tours’ 2020 Physical Tournaments Official Support Pulled appeared first on Siliconera.

The 20th Mega Man Battle Network anniversary is coming up, and Capcom is starting to prepare by looking for partners for products.

The post Capcom Seems to Be Preparing to Celebrate Mega Man Battle Network’s 20th Anniversary appeared first on Siliconera.

Cosmic Forces, Sony Pictures Consumer Products, and Scholastic are bringing R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC.

In Goosebumps Dead of Night you try to collect missing pages from Goosebumps stories that have been stolen, but it's not quite that easy - scary creatures like Lawn Gnomes, the Werewolf of Fever Swamp, and Murder the Clown. It's first-person survival horror, Goosebumps style. Along your journey through the macabre, you must hide, sneak, and solve puzzles to survive. 

While we don't have an exact release date, the title is expected to arrive this summer. Check out the trailer below!

Today is a surprisingly robust release day for Nintendo’s Switch. As announced a few months back, 2K just dropped several big game collections. The first is BioShock: The Collection, which features the remastered versions of all three BioShock games. The second is XCOM 2 Collection, which includes Firaxis' stellar strategy game and all four of its DLC packs. Finally, the Borderlands Legendary Collection includes the Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition, Borderlands 2, and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.

In addition to 2K’s offerings, the massive open-world RPG Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition also hits Switch today. This re-release of the 2012 Wii title features updated visuals, remastered music, and a new epilogue story sequence.

A lot of us probably have more free time at home than we know what to do with these days. If you’re an anime fan looking for some new shows to check out, look no further. Here are some of the best short anime that you should binge ASAP.

The Promised Neverland
(12 Episodes)

I’d love to give a proper synopsis of this show, but the less you know about it, the better. Trust me. The Promised Neverland is one of the best new short anime out right now.

The story focuses on the lives of a number of children in an orphanage in the year 2045. The orphanage is managed by a single woman who acts as a mother to the kids there.

Today Paradox Interactive released a brand new and sizable video featuring several aspects of its upcoming grand strategy game Crusader Kings III.

The video is quite long and spans several aspects of the game, including religion, different culture, the giant map that spans most of the medieval world all the way to Africa and Asia, and a deep dive into the art.

We also hear about how players can customize and influence general rules that dictate things like gender and sexuality within the game and their realm.

You can watch it below. 

Crusader Kings III releases on September 1, 2020, exclusively for PC.

Warframe’s next major update, The Deadlock Protocol, is fast approaching, and with it comes a new Warframe, a boatload of backstory, plenty more. But probably the flashiest addition is developer Digital Extremes’ continued efforts toward refreshing the look of some of its rough edges – and this time they are modernizing the oldest area in the game.

Part of The Deadlock Protocol will include a remaster of the Corpus tileset, an environment made of procedurally pieced together sections that are among the very first ever added to Warframe. That means adjusting the layouts, incorporating new backstory beats, and, of course, making all of it look shiny and new.

[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/05/29/warframe-corpus-reimagined-trailer"]

Watch the exclusive trailer above to see how much the Corpus tileset has changed.

“When you look at everything we’ve remastered so far,” Digital Extremes’ Rebecca Ford explains to me, “it’s actually a shock we haven’t done [the Corpus tileset] yet.” Previous remasters include tilesets for the Earth and Gas City environments, as well as Warframe’s first open world called the Plains of Eidolon, which was remastered less than two years after its introduction in late 2017.

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In contrast, the Corpus tileset was first added back in 2012. “It was literally our first environment in Warframe,” Ford says, explaining you can even go back and see it shown in all of the original marketing for Warframe, like this 2012 teaser trailer. “The main goal is to bring the quality and design up to 2020 Warframe standards.”

The fourth and final season for the popular anime Attack on Titan is coming this year and we finally have an action-packed trailer that will most definitely give you the “feels.”

If you didn’t know, Attack on Titan is set in a world where humanity lives in closed-off cities that are guarded by extremely tall stone walls that are meant to protect the citizens from the deadly, human-eating titans.

You can feast your eyes on the brand-new trailer down below and yes, that is Eren Yeager who is shirtless in the thumbnail:

And not only is the final season of Attack on Titan happening this year but there will be a new film called Attack on Titan: Chronicle that will recap the first three seasons of the anime series to prepare folks for the last season:

Ghost of Tsushima was one of 2020’s most anticipated games even before the excellent gameplay demonstration broadcasted during PlayStation’s State of Play last month. But now fans are really chomping at the bit, with even more questions about the game’s various mechanics and features.

To that end, Nate Fox and Jason Connell from developer Sucker Punch have joined PlayStation content communication manager Justin Massongill in a Q&A over on the PS Blog to answer the most burning of those questions.

Some of the key takeaways that stand out include the confirmation that there will be no karma system as there was in Sucker Punch’s acclaimed Infamous series. Regardless of how you play Jin –samurai or ghost–, his reputation amongst the locals will remain the same.

And for those who were disappointed with what they perceived as an over the top amount of knock-back when enemies were hit with arrows, fear not; the devs explain that there are two different arrow-shooting weapons and Jin was using the hard-hitting longbow here. He was also heavily upgraded in regards to his abilities. Not all arrow kills will send enemies flying in such fashion.

I encourage you to head over to the PS Blog and read the full interview, which details Ghost of Tsushima’s combat mechanics, side quest content, progression, difficulty, game-length and more.

If you missed it last week, Nate Fox and Jason Connell spoke during PlayStation’s BlogCast about Ghost of Tsushima’s minimalist HUD design, its photo-mode, and more.

Why did the truck cross the road? Because the bridge was out, obviously. Or at least it will be if you’re as bad at the wacko physics puzzle game Poly Bridge 2 as I likely would be. If you are, the second installment, like the first, lets you call in help from Twitch viewers. Poly Bridge 2 is out now with some new juice under the hood over its predecessor.

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Online multiplayer games aren’t usually designed to tell stories. For the most part, they’re built around their competitive nature, with titbits of lore to help establish a unique world for players to get invested in. However, the line between these online games and more story driven experiences is starting to blur, as games like Apex Legends begin to throw more narrative into the mix. Storytelling in a battle royale seems like a pretty tough balancing act, so I reached out to Respawn to find out about the challenges, and how it all fits into the future of Apex.

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It’s another big PC gaming deals bonanza this week, as we’ve not only got GOG’s Summer Sale going on, but Ubisoft’s Legendary Sale is still going strong, as is Epic’s month of mega deals. Let’s not forget about Humble’s Cities Skylines bundle, either, where you’re able to grab the full game plus 11 DLC packs for under twenty quid. And that’s before we’ve even got to all the other deals happening this week, where you’ll find loads of Devolver games on sale, 10% off Monster Train, plus half price Yakuza, Civilization VI and a nice chuck off Disco Elysium. So let’s not stand around gawping. There are a lot of deals to get through.

Small cars are the focus of the latest Grand Theft Auto Online event, and the community has reacted with jokes, anger, and a bit of confusion. For those who are upset, it seems you can blame a classic film from the 1960s for this week’s Mini Cooper themed festivities.

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Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition, out today for Nintendo Switch, re-re-introduces players to Shulk and his ragtag group of world-savers. It’s one meaty role-playing game, full of plenty to do and plenty to learn. For a quick introduction, watch the video above. Or read on for a deeper dive into the game’s…

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There’s a lot of music out there. To help you cut through all the noise, every week The A.V. Club is rounding up A-Sides, five recent releases we think are worth your time. You can listen to these and more on our Spotify playlist, and if you like what you hear, we encourage you to purchase featured artists’ music…

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In the past few days, an alarming headline has made the rounds: “Half of Fox News viewers think Bill Gates is using pandemic to microchip them, survey suggests.” This idea is nonsense, of course, but coronavirus conspiracy theories have spread almost like the virus itself across the meticulously calibrated algorithmic…

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Today on Highlight Reel we have bad AI guesses, Valorant plays, Apex Legends shots, Red Dead Online barfing, and much more!

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Brandon Sheffield of Necrosoft Games &  the Insert Credit podcast contributes some great, often retro & Japanese-focused picks for his favorite game culture links of all time. ...

Developers looking to ship PS4 games later this year should be prepared to make them compatible with the PlayStation 5, according to Sony documentation. ...

In this second part of my ongoing series, I will cover a key need that an open world map must meet: player progression. ...

EA, the NFL, and the NFL Player's Association have renewed their (contractual) vows to allow the game company to exclusively produce NFL simulation games through 2026. ...

Go Flawless this week to pick up one weapon and some armor

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