October 2020

As part of its latest earning report, released earlier today, Ubisoft has announced delays for Far Cry 6 and Rainbow 6 Quarantine, as well as offering a brief update on its attempts at "culture transformation", following a number of damning reports this summer.

Starting with the delays, Far Cry 6, which is set to shift the series' first-person open-world formula to the Caribbean, was originally set to launch on 18th February next year, while Rainbow 6 Quarantine had only ever been given a vague "2020" release window.

However, as outlined in Ubisoft's first-half 2020-21 earnings statement, the company has made the decision to postpone the launch of both titles in order to "to leverage their full potential in the context of production challenges caused by COVID-19". As a result, Far Cry 6 and Rainbow Six Quarantine will now release in the publisher's next financial year, meaning a new launch window somewhere between April 2021 and the end of March 2022.

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In this week's episode of The Game Informer Show, we discuss a handful of the games we've been playing recently, including: Watch Dogs: Legion, The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope, and Ghostrunner. Then, we close the show with another fantastic round of community emails. It may sound simple, but it's one great show! So please join Kim Wallace, Marcus Stewart, Blake Hester, Alex Stadnik, Alex Van Aken, and myself for another wild and ever-entertaining episode!

What’s scarier than monsters, ghosts, and things that go bump in the night? We’ve all seen bots in games by now. I don’t mean players setting up systems to run to farm crafting materials in predictable routes or to play cards in a set order; I’m talking about bots designed by developers. Now, you might be saying to yourself, “What’s wrong with bots?” Bots can fill lobbies to make sure games can launch, they can make matchmaking take a lot less time, and hey, it's always fun shooting down an automated opponent and getting a free kill in a field with dozens of human opponents running around. But there’s a lot more to these innocuous A.I. additions, and they have implications for all kinds of multiplayer experiences. With the trends we’re seeing in data acquisition, user privacy, and monetization models, bots are headed for dangerous implementation.

The Ghost In The Machine

On the surface, pairing up players with bots seems like a good thing. No one wants to wait more than a few seconds to find a match, whether it’s in an online shooter lobby or a mobile card battler. Beating up on bots might not seem like an issue, even if it’s changing your rating, ranking, or other parameters over time. Depending on the game, you may not even be aware your opponent is a bot. Maybe a bot is your sole opponent, or perhaps the game can field many bots, but the takeaway is that the developer can tweak the challenge (or lack thereof) directly by bot prescience. While adjusting the difficulty in this fashion may seem harmless, it becomes a sketchy proposition as we dive in.

Gears POP! was a surprise reveal blending the worlds of Funko POPS and Gears of War into a tactical mobile game that was announced right at the same time as Microsoft's Gears Tactics. A more playful experience with some of our favorite Gears characters, the name alone was not enough to keep this train chugging. Unfortunately, the studio behind the title, Mediatonic, has announced that servers will be shutting down permanently early next year. 

The studio took to the Gears POP! blog to share the latest update. "Thank you Gears," begins the farewell. "Together we have taken on countless waves of Horde and vanquished foes on the Versus battlefield but sadly Gears Pop! is closing on April 26, 2021. Until that time, we’re bringing back some of our most popular events, increasing Bounty rewards, and upping the drop rates for Legendary Pins. Effective immediately, in-app purchasing has also been disabled. Thank you for your understanding and support."

The servers will remain active, with pins still usable, until April 26, 2021. Refunds will be automatically issued for anything purchased within 90 days of October 28, 2020. Anything bought between July 30 - October 28 is eligible, according to the site, though refunds themselves might take a few weeks to process. 

It's time for the weekly Epic Games Store freebies, and, as we told you last week, the new crop is all about those Halloween vibes. 

On the docket this week is the divisive Blair Witch from Bloober Team and the well-regarded Ghostbusters game. Ghostbusters is a remaster of the 2009 game that was fan-servicey as all hell. You should definitely check it out.

Next week is Red Dragon but not the Hannibal movie I wish it was. (Seriously, I just watched Red Dragon on Netflix two weeks ago. That shit is still excellent.) It's Wargame: Red Dragon, an RTS where western troops take on the Communist forces in the Pacific theater. Only one next-week game has been announced thus far, but you know Epic's gonna come swinging in with another.

For now, two movie-based games and one more that should be movie-based. Hannibal would probably call us rubes for playing video games.

Blair Witch, Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered [Epic Games Store]

For the three years Xbox Game Pass has been around, plenty of people have wondered how Microsoft can balance the books on this type of service. There's always a stupidly low-cost introductory offer and then it's a reasonable month price. Xbox Game Pass is on par with Netflix or Hulu or any of the other million entertainment subscription services that exist.

The armchair logic has always sort of been that Microsoft is eating the cost of getting stuff on Xbox Game Pass while building a robust user base. Getting people committed to the Xbox ecosystem is a valid reason for a loss leader. Down the road a bit is when you can jack up the price.

Xbox head Phil Spencer went on the Dropped Frames podcast this week (as reported by VGC) and said that Microsoft has no plans to increase the price of Xbox Game Pass anytime soon. "We like the value that Game Pass is today," Spencer commented. "From a business model, it's completely sustainable the way it is, and I mean that."

Spencer goes on to emphasize how Xbox Game Pass allows more types of video games to get published. There's a lot of things that wouldn't work from a business standpoint under the traditional retail model. However, Game Pass gives those more creative games a new home, as millions of players have the option to check them out at no risk. It ends up providing value for the consumer, the developer, and for Game Pass as a service.

How much longer can Annapurna Interactive's hot streak last? The publisher has one of my favorite lineups in recent years, and now it's building up an in-house development studio based out of Los Angeles. The team needs a game director, senior producer, and other staff for an unannounced title.

It's one thing to pick out promising, thoughtful, creative upcoming titles for your label and help make sure they're a success, but creating your own in-house? I'm curious to see Annapurna branch out.

"We've had the immense honor of working with some of the most talented independent game creators in the world," president Nathan Gary said in a press release. "Many of us came from an internal development background and are excited to make this a part of Annapurna Interactive moving forward."

I wonder what type of game they'll set out to make that (presumably) doesn't exist elsewhere.

After What Remains of Edith Finch, Gorogoa, Outer Wilds, and Sayonara Wild Hearts, they deserve the benefit of the doubt. They've already impressed me in so many genres. Next on my list: 12 Minutes.

A lot is made, and rightly so, of the plight of retro video games once they succumb to the passage of time. But while we focus on preserving the games themselves, what happens to the instruction manuals that used to come with them?

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Watch Dogs Legion is out today, and, while the game does a solid job of introducing you to the tech-dystopian world of future London, there are plenty of systems and details that are under-explained. So these tips should help you hack, shoot, drive, and resist like a pro hacker instead of an amateur script kiddie.

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Call of Duty big now. Real big. 250 GB on PC big.

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If an artist writes enough music, they’re going to eventually touch on a lot of subjects repeatedly. But it seems that for John Darnielle, songwriter, singer and creator of the Mountain Goats, that cars and driving are a constant thread through his work. Darnielle is incredibly prolific. He started recording under the…

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A few weeks ago, Gearbox announced a second wave of Borderlands 3 downloadable content. Among the offerings will be a new mode called Arms Race, which Gearbox chief Randy Pitchford said is “not a battle royale,” despite it exisiting on an isolated map and granting players progressively powerful gear over the course of…

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Players will be able to use weapons from Modern Warfare or Black Ops Cold War in battle royale

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Celine Song adapted Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull on The Sims 4

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Keeping track of Disney Plus’ often weird release schedule

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Oh dang, they’re really giving this Anthem comeback a proper shot aren’t they? 3 months after we last checked in with BioWare’s beleaguered loot ’em up, the studio has returned with a fresh look at the game’s revamped UI, along with a new approach towards character skills and robot-suit loadouts aimed at fixing the base game’s seemingly-limited build options.

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London’s a weird place. As a Scot, I’ve always found my trips to the giant English sprawl to be bewildering affairs, as suited blokes ferry themselves from one Pret A Manger to another packed anchovie-like in screaming metal cans. Thank goodness then, that Watch Dogs Legion‘s condensed capital is an equally strange place – and it couldn’t possibly just be launch-week weirdness, right?

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Today Microsoft and Asobo Studios released a brand new trailer of Microsoft Flight Simulator and a new update.

The trailer is the latest of the “Around the World Tour” series, this time around bringing us to several locations of South America, Central American, and the Caribbean.

On top of that, we also got a new update that brought several tweaks and fixes. You can find the full patch notes at the bottom of the post. Incidentally, the patch also introduced a Halloween-themed landing challenge that you can watch here.

Halloween is coming and Microsoft and Asobo Studio are celebrating with a brand new landing challenge in Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Appropriately, the challenge is set in Transylvania, placing the player at the controls of a small Cessna 152 inbound to land at the Aerodromul Piatra Craiului among the Carpathian mountains.

While some special effects and pumpkins help convey the atmosphere of the season, the real protagonist is the absolutely spectacular and fiery stormy sky.

In the end, the challenge is certainly more beautiful than scary.

You can check it out in the video below (unless you want to discover it for yourself in the simulator).

Those asking why the name and website was changed - we made the move to respect trademark and copyright claims.

Xbox Games with Gold soldiers onward in November with four new offerings, this time in the form of Aragami, Swimsanity, Full Spectrum Warrior, and Lego Indiana Jones.

First up is developer Lince Works' stylish supernatural stealth game Aragami, which follows the titular undead assassin, armed with the ability to manipulate shadows, as he attempts to thwart the Army of Light. Aragami comes to Games with Gold in its Shadow Edition guise - which bundles up the Xbox One base game and its Nightfall expansion - and is available to download between 1st November and 30th November.

Pandemics Studios' acclaimed 2004 action-strategy effort Full Spectrum Warrior is this month's original Xbox offering, and can be downloaded from 1st November to 15th November, and that's followed by the Xbox 360 version of Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures.

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In today's contest you can win Monster Prom XXL on Switch from Super Rare Games!

It's almost Halloween! It's by far my favorite holiday, and definitely my favorite time of the year, weather-wise (well, not anymore now that I live in Phoenix, but still...). Ghosts, zombies, mutants, and freaks roam the streets searching for souls. But what do they all have in common? They're monsters!

Today's theme is monsters: Super Rare Games just put out the highly anticipated Monster Prom XXL on Switch, and we've got a copy of the standard edition to give out! Happy Halloween, y'all!

Activision shared the PC requirements for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War today, and – no surprise here after the way Modern Warfare ballooned – the game needs 50GB for multiplayer alone "at launch."

If you're installing "all game modes," Cold War will need 175GB, and if you're going extreme with top-of-the-line Ultra RTX specs with a GeForce RTX 3080, you're looking at a 250GB storage requirement.

Seeing this news, thinking about future content updates to Cold War (Season 1 and Warzone are expected to launch in December), and considering the comparatively quaint storage available by default in the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X... yep, we're gonna be juggling game installs for a long time.

It'll be important for developers to give us choices – and try not to go overboard with huge updates.

Check out what players have been up to in the first 10 days with these Ghost of Tsushima Legends stats. How have you contributed?

The post Ghost of Tsushima Legends Stats Show People Summoned Over 22 Million Dogs appeared first on Siliconera.

By day, Brenden McCormack is a developer at Wargaming, working on World of Tanks. In his spare time, though, he’s built (along with his wife Laura) one of the most impressive pieces of Nintendo cosplay I have ever seen.

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If you’re a fan of Capcom, Clover, horror, or just good video games in general, please set aside part of your week to enjoy this hour-long documentary by Archipel on Shinji Mikami, the legendary director of everything from Resident Evil to God Hand to Vanquish.

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Part Time UFO, the HAL Laboratory mobile game ported to Switch today, is a charming little project about an alien helping the people of Earth tidy up with its spaceship’s arcade-like claw. It also has a very good dog.

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We now know more details about how Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War will integrate with Warzone.

During Activision Blizzard Q3 earnings call, Activision Publishing president Rob Kostich mentioned that Black Ops Cold War “really start to work together in cool and fun ways” with Warzone in December when the first season for Cold War launches.

There was no specific date revealed in the call for Cold War’s season one launch.

That being said, we hear that players will be able to bring their Black Ops Cold War weaponry & operators to Warzone.

“Core Black Ops progression will build upon the success and will work similarly to how it did in Modern Warefare,” Kostich said in the earnings call.

According to Kostich, weapons that players unlock between level 1-55 in Black Ops Cold War will be usable in both Cold War and in Warzone.

Activision also announced that Black Ops Cold War will continue to follow Modern Warfare’s monetization system as Cold War will have an all-new Battle pass.

Black Ops Cold War battle pass content and store content will also work across Black Ops and Warzone with Kostich adding that players will be able to choose between their Modern Warfare loadouts and Cold War loadouts once the game is integrated.

“This is just one example of how Warzone is going to expand and evolve over time,” Kostich said.

More information of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s first season will be announced in the “next week or two.”

The Epic Games Store is offering another two free PC games for a limited time this week, both part of two movie franchises: Ghostbusters and Blair Witch series.

The first free title is Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered, which tells an original story about the four guys who bust ghosts for a living set two years after the events of Ghostbusters II.

The game originally launched on the PC, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo Wii, and Xbox 360 in 2009. The remastered version launched last year for the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch to coincide with the game’s 10th anniversary and the franchise’s 35th anniversary.

The other free game is Blair Witch, which has an original story and takes place two years after the events of the first film, The Blair Witch Project, and initially launched last year for PC and Xbox One.

Both games can be claimed for free from the Epic Games Store starting today until Thursday, Nov. 5 at 11 a.m. ET. The store is also holding a Halloween sale with 144 discounted titles until the same day.

Epic Games also announced that next week’s free game will be Wargame: Red Dragon, a real-time strategy game featuring militaries from 17 nations.

Like the harsh and snowy climate it's set in, the final DLC for Pokémon Sword and Shield’s season pass is an add-on designed with the most hardcore Pokémon players in mind. The Crown Tundra puts open-world exploration and legendary Pokémon front and center, taking full advantage of the base game's best innovation: wild areas. But while it succeeds in being another entertaining addition to Sword and Shield like The Isle of Armor before it, its weak story is similarly short-lived – and its exciting legendary hunts end with classic, grindy encounters that will have you praying to lady luck.

The second part of the Pokémon Sword and Shield expansion pass takes you to the Crown Tundra, an icy mountain region filled to the brim with powerful pocket monsters and frostbitten senior citizens. Like The Isle of Armor DLC, The Crown Tundra is one giant wild area where you’re given 360 degrees of control over the camera and Pokémon roam freely. Unlike wild areas before it though, The Crown Tundra actually makes much better use of the open-world sandbox by cramming it full of legendary Pokémon to track down and secrets to discover. You might find yourself solving a series of riddles to track down some legendary giants or cooking curry to lure out a reclusive unicorn. Though there’s only a few hours of legendary-hunting to be had in total, it’s definitely some of the best content in all of Pokémon Sword and Shield.

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands New Release Date Read More »

Was Marnie your favorite Pokemon rival? Well, Good Smile Company is working on a ¥13,000 (~$125) Marnie and Morpeko figure.

The post The New Marnie and Morpeko Figure Looks Ready to Fight appeared first on Siliconera.

Folks, 2020 has hurt in a lot of ways to a lot of people. Financially, emotionally, physically, temporally: it's been no bueno. But you know who has been hurting the most? THE CHILDREN, and I'm here to tell you how you can help them out (with a sizable cash donation).

Just call me Sally Struthers/
because if I had my druthers/
we would all care more for others/
especially the kids at the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital for whom we are raising funds this year!

That's it; that's the rap. The official rap of Extra Life 2020.

Today Atlus revealed a new commercial of the upcoming Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD Remaster.

The video is quite special since it’s basically a remake of a popular commercial from 2003.

You can check it out below.

Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD Remaster will be released in spring 2021 in North America and Europe. Japanese gamers will be able to enjoy the game earlier, on Oct. 29, for both PS4 and Nintendo Switch.

The remaster will add voices to event cutscenes and improve the graphics and will also add a difficulty level on top of the original “normal” and “hard.” You can choose a “Merciful” level that will be available as free DLC to let you enjoy the story without sweating the details of the gameplay too much.

Today Square Enix revealed that its mobile JRPG Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent achieved a new downloads milestone.

The game was downloaded three million times, which is really impressive considering that it was released only two days ago.

Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent was already well on its way to success after a day, since yesterday it had two million downloads.

You can check out the announcement below.