Falcom released more information on Hajimari no Kiseki that focuses on KeA, Alex, Mireille, Cao, Renne, and Erika.

The post The Legend of Heroes: Hajimari no Kiseki Brings Back KeA, Alex, Mireille, Cao, Renne, and Erika appeared first on Siliconera.

Looking at new releases including a Poly Bridge & Shantae sequel, Sludge Life, Robocop in Mortal Kombat, & lots more interesting links. ...

I’m so ready to just relax with my girlfriend, turn off the news for a few hours and play 51 games on our Switch.

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10% off Neck Gaiters | Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, and More

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Death Stranding director Hideo Kojima recently talked about how the game’s sales are doing and whether or not his next project is in development.

The post Hideo Kojima Described Death Stranding as a Sales ‘Success’ appeared first on Siliconera.

So far Minecraft Dungeons is off to a great start.

At $20 with local and online multiplayer it's a pretty easy sell, especially with the emphasis on random dungeons and loadouts. I've had a ton of fun with it so far at multiple player counts, but there's more coming for those of you who need it. As announced on the official blog, two big DLCs are coming.

The first is "Jungle Awakens," a pack due in July that will add three new missions to the game, as well as a host of items (weapons, armor, artifacts). Next up is Creeping Winter "later this year," which is merely mentioned, but will likely be in line with the "three levels, more items" concept. Then in a more tease-like fashion, the Dungeons team is promising "cool new free content," as well as cross-platform play. As a note, the two premium packs are included in the $30 "Hero Edition."

This is pretty much the perfect way to support the game: sprinkle in free and paid stuff as time goes on. Hopefully there's more planned past Creeping Winter, as the carefree nature of Dungeons will keep me going for a while when it comes to quick runs. Cross-play will make that even easier.

Minecraft Dungeons: On the Horizon [Minecraft.net]

EA Sports was scheduled to formally announce Madden NFL 21 on June 1, but the developer has changed plans in response to recent events in the world. Not only that, but Xbox, Bethesda, Riot Games, and Summerfall Studios have responded as well.

EA Sports said in a statement on Twitter, "We stand with our African American / Black community of friends, players, colleagues, and partners. Our immediate attention is on actions we can take to drive change against the unjust treatment and systemic bias that is plaguing the nation and our world."

The statement goes on: "We'll find another time to talk football with you. Because this is bigger than a game, bigger than sports, and needs all of us to stand together and commit to change."

Terra Battle, a 2014 mobile game from developer Mistwalker and producer Hironobu Sakaguchi--best known as the creator of Final Fantasy--will soon shut down all services. An upcoming termination of service has been announced, which will effectively end support for the game.

Service for the game will terminate on June 30, at midnight UTC. The in-game Energy currency has already been discontinued, so you cannot spend money on it in-game. On June 15, players will be unable to transfer or recover game data, and at the end of the month the game will end.

Sakaguchi wrote a note to fans alongside the announcement, expressing his "deep regret" that Mistwalker has to terminate services for the game. "I am so grateful for all the fans who played Terra Battle for nearly six years," his statement reads. "I personally learned a lot from this experience, and am constantly reminded that 'there are no paths that aren't worth taking.' I am very thankful to have had such an experience."

Mistwalker is currently working on Fantasian, a new game for Apple Arcade. They also previously released Terra Battle 2 in 2017, but it proved less successful than its predecessor, and was shutdown one year later.

This episode of New Releases is taking an overall look at June, and the new month is bookended by free-to-play games. Riot Games' Valorant is leaving beta for its full release as the month begins, and the cartoony Ninjala arrives as the month wraps up. June also brings us two major remasters: SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom - Rehydrated and the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection. Last but certainly not least, the long-anticipated Last of Us Part 2 is finally launching soon.

Valorant -- June 2

Available on: PC

The beta is over by the time you're reading this, but Valorant will be free-to-play for everyone soon. The team shooter pits attackers and defenders each other in a series of rounds, and each characters' unique abilities can totally turn the tide of battle. It's also important to note that ranks will reset for the full launch, so any beta progress you might have won't carry over.

The latest Sea of Thieves update, Lost Treasures, is live and offers brave pirates more bang for their booty-seeking buck. It dropped on May 27, boasting a host of changes to the story elements in the game as well as Daily Bounties to ensure that you're always flush with cash.

The official patch notes for the Lost Treasures update mention a host of quality-of-life improvements, but front and center is the improvement to the Tall Tales system: an optional set of narrative experiences that players can use to better explore the world of Sea of Thieves through challenges and more.

Most notably, Tall Tale adventures will now benefit from checkpoints, so that you're not pressured to complete entire adventures in one sitting if you're too busy.

According to a community update from Activision, Call of Duty Mobile will be expanding its battle royale map in the next update, bringing not only new areas for combat but also things like new vehicles. This update was scheduled to fall around June 4, roughly the same time that a Ranked Mode season would kick off, but it has been delayed in the wake of the George Floyd homicide. There is currently not a new release date set.

The upcoming update was announced on the official Call of Duty Mobile subreddit on May 29 by the Activision team. A Ranked Mode refresh and the new battle royale map are expected to be implemented in the game in early June.

The Outer Worlds is coming to Switch on June 5, and we're starting to get some idea of how Obsidian's RPG will run and play on Switch. Although we have not seen footage of the game running on Nintendo's console yet, we now know that it will target a frame rate of 30FPS, and a few other facts about the port.

Speaking to Nintendo Everything, the game's production director Eric DeMilt spoke about the changes being made for the Switch version. To aid accessibility and the ease of playing, the developers "tuned sensitivity, exposed some inputs to users in the settings menu, tweaked and iterated aim assist values, and added support for gyro aiming, and sticky targeting."

Gyro aiming has been featured in a few Switch FPS ports, including Doom, Wolfenstein II, and the recently released Borderlands games. DeMilt added that Obsidian is "very happy with how the game looks and plays".

Halo Infinite developer 343 Industries has posted its latest behind-the-scenes video that shows how the audio team captured sounds for the next-generation Halo game.

The team used the industrial explosives ANFO and TNT to capture sounds for the game. They planted the charges six feet underground inside of barrels that were blown to bits, leaving giant smoke plumes and pieces of the barrels launching high into the sky and crashing back down to Earth.

Halo 3 will be added to Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC soon, and now developer 343 Industries has shared some of the first images of the game running on PC.

Two of the images showcase the multiplayer map Snowbound, and it looks very crisp. Another image shows off the Avalanche map with a super-sized Elephant vehicle on it. The fourth image reveals what looks like the Foundry multiplayer map in the Forge map-making suite. You can check out all the images in the gallery below--click each image to see it in full-size.

New Stadia Pro games will become available on June 1 for subscribers of the service, with other titles to come later on in the month as well. It was announced on Twitter that five more free games would be added to the Stadia Pro service, bringing the total number of games on the service to 17.

What have been the most important changes in video games, video game technology, and in the wider video game industry over the last ten years?

Democratisation

The Last of Us Part II is finally almost upon us, with its June 19 release date inching ever closer. The game, which has faced delays and leaking plot details, is still tracking very well, according to Sony--and, in fact, could end up breaking sales records.

According to PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan, who spoke to GameSpot sister site CNET ahead of Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5 reveal, The Last Of Us Part II is likely to sell big numbers. In Europe, pre-orders are tracking ahead of Marvel's Spider-Man at the same comparative point before that game's release. That's significant, because that game broke records for Sony, selling 3.3 million copies within 3 days of release, and earning over 1 million pre-orders.

It's not clear what the split is here between physical and digital preorders, although digital sales are up across the board for games--especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

While Ryan only mentioned Europe, The Last of Us Part II seems set to do well in other regions too. "We hope this'll be a defining game for this generation," he told CNET. He also said that the game will run on PlayStation 5 at launch.

NHL superstar P.K. Subban of the New Jersey Devils is starting a new YouTube series focused on EA's NHL video game series. "P.K. Subban's NHL 20 Hockey Night" is a new show where two NHL players will go head-to-head in the video game, with Subban providing commentary.

In the first episode, Subban calls a game between Roman Josi of the Nashville Predators and Anthony Bitetto of the Winnipeg Jets. Subban provides some excellent commentary--he's both funny and informative, which is what makes a good broadcaster in sports.

Check out the full episode below.

When a new console generation is released, usually the changes are incremental--enough to be impressive, but never truly mind-blowing. That's why sometimes you have to compare a modern console to its retro counterpart to understand how much games have really grown--sometimes literally. The N64 used large game cartridges, but their data could all fit onto only one Nintendo Switch game card, according to a new report.

Redditor CorsairVI decided to run the math on this experiment, as picked up by Go Nintendo.

With the Nintendo 64's signature rounded cartridges holding a maximum of 64MB each, CorsairVI worked out absolute maximum size of the Nintendo 64's international library of 388 titles to be 24.83GB. However many games were much smaller than the cartridge's max limit, meaning the full library would have been even smaller.

The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are set to release this year, kicking off the next generation of consoles, and our first look at what the PS5 will be capable of came from a demonstration of Unreal Engine 5. But producing such highly detailed graphics will not come cheap, and could lead to an increase in the development cost of AAA games.

Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan has talked to gamesindustry.biz about the cost of creating a game that will look like the Unreal Engine 5 reveal video, "Lumen in the Land of Nanite" (see our breakdown below), will cost a lot.

"I think, to the extent that the technology enables the graphics side of it to become more interesting and life-like, [the games] will become slightly more human intensive and capital intensive to produce," Ryan told the site, noting that there will "probably will be an increase in development budgets." However, he doesn't expect these changes to be too extreme. "We don't see it as being a massive increase," he says.

People in Australia who bought Fallout 76 and felt misled by a refund policy can now request one from one of the largest retailers in the country.

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) has announced that EB Games--which is owned by American games retailer juggernaut GameStop--has begun to send out refunds to customers after admitting that the store "likely" misled consumers. Specifically, the ACCC's announcement states that EB Games acknowledged that it was "likely to have misled consumers about their consumer guarantee rights in relation to faults with the online video game Fallout 76."

The issue here is that EB Games reportedly told consumers who asked for a refund that they were not allowed one after they experienced bugs and other issues with the always-online RPG.

The first-ever PGA Tour 2K game, PGA Tour 2K21, releases this year, and developer HB Studios has now announced some new details about what to expect.

The developer answered fan questions on Reddit, and started off by confirming that there will not be cross-play support for multiplayer. However, the courses made with PGA Tour 2K21's level editor can be shared across all systems. The game is releasing on PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC, and Stadia.

Additionally, PGA Tour 2K21 will allow players to import their custom courses from The Golf Club 2019 to the new game and use its new tools and assets with the new game.

Level-5 released the first trailer of its upcoming JRPG Yo-Kai Academy Y: Wai Wai School Life, a spin-off of the Yo-Kai Watch series.

The trailer focuses on the school that serves as a setting for the game, including some of its characters and specific locations.

You’ll probably notice that this is a very different game compared to the usual Yo-Kai Watch title.

Instead of being loosely similar to Pokemon, this game involves protagonists that basically fuse with Yo-kai to become pretty much like superheroes. They don’t even keep it a secret, as popularity in the school is a relevant factor in gameplay.

Funnily, the video is pretty much a reproduction of infomercials that often try to convince parents to pick a certain school for their kids in Japan.

You can check it out below.

Yo-Kai Academy Y: Wai Wai School Life is coming to Japan this summer for PS4 and Nintendo Switch.

If you’d like to see more, you can enjoy the first screenshots and the original announcement, on top of another batch from a few weeks ago. 

Despite my grand plans to get more, right now I still only have one houseplant. But I do love it. I move it around to give it different amounts of light and carefully check the soil. Growing plants seems to have both a creative and a protective element to it. You can get a sense of that from Mutazione.

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