January 2021

Update: Sega has provided Game Informer with a comment on the departure of Roger Craig Smith. You can see the statement in its entirety below.

Original Story – 1/28/2021 @ 10:42 a.m. CT

Roger Craig Smith is far from the first voice actor to assume the role of Sonic the Hedgehog, but he very well may be the most iconic. Sure, Jaleel White will always have a special place in the hearts of '90s kids and Ben Schwartz recently assumed the role in the live-action theatrical film, but ever since 2010's Sonic Free Riders and Sonic Colors, Smith has delivered the iconic voice of the Blue Blur across myriad media. Now, the prolific voice actor has posted on social media that he is stepping away from the role.

Gamers have been modding Cyberpunk 2077 since the title launched late last year but now that there is official mod support from CD Projekt Red, fans are going wild with the possibilities. That being said, CDPR doesn't want players getting too wild. To jump ahead of the inevitable curve after one mod gained insurmountable popularity, the studio has banned mods that allow for V to have sex with Keanu Reeves' character Johnny Silverhand. 

As expected (rule 34, anyone?), the inevitable nude and romance mods have hit the world of Night City, including one that uses cut content to piece together a fully voiced Judy romance for a Male V. Another mod soon followed after, created by modder Catmino, that allowed for players to tweak the in-game textures with other models in order to have sex with virtually whoever they want. Included in that is Keanu Reeves' character, texturizing the rocker bad boy onto a sex robot named Joytoy. 

Jeanette Maus has donned many roles but most recently, she set the internet alight with her bloody charm in a new trailer for Resident Evil Village. It is with a somber heart that we report that Maus has passed away at the young age of 39.

Capcom broke the news to the gaming community, with an image of her character in Village and the following caption: 

"We here at Capcom R&D 1 are deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Jeanette Maus, the talented actress who helped bring several different characters, including our witches to the world in Resident Evil Village. Our hearts go out to her family and loved ones."

We here at Capcom R&D 1 are deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Jeanette Maus, the talented actress who helped bring several different characters, including our witches to the world in Resident Evil Village. Our hearts go out to her family and loved ones. pic.twitter.com/zG1K6BrkY0

— Capcom Dev 1 (@dev1_official) January 28, 2021

THR reports that Maus passed away due to an ongoing eight-month-long battle with colon cancer on Sunday night, January 24. 

Returnal, Housemarque’s time-looping third-person roguelike, needs a bit more time to come together. The developer announced this morning that the game will now launch April 30. Returnal was originally scheduled to arrive March 19. 

PlayStation UK tweeted the news, explaining the delay is simply an issue of allowing more time to polish Returnal. 
 

Update: Returnal has a new release date of April 30, 2021.

SIE and Housemarque have made the decision to move the release date in order to give the team extra time to continue to polish the game to the level of quality players expect from Housemarque. See you in April! pic.twitter.com/KaE0hL8S4E

— PlayStation UK (@PlayStationUK) January 28, 2021

Taking time to ensure a game performs well at launch is always welcomed news, especially given Returnal is among the first PlayStation 5 exclusive titles. There are a lot of PS5 owners eager for more experiences that take full advantage of the hardware, so there’s probably a bit of added pressure in making sure the game is up to snuff. 

As Pokémon Go celebrates each of the game's regions from week to week, trainers are tasked to round up a specific number of Pokémon from a specific region before time expires. If they succeed in their task, they earn an Elite Collector medal along with a variety of other rewards.

This week, as a part of the Johto Celebration event, trainers have six days to complete the Johto Collection Challenge by catching nine different Pokémon species. Along with all three Johto starter Pokémon, some of these critters are proving difficult to find. Here's where you can catch each one:

Chikorita
This Pokémon can be found in the wild, and also pops up in one-star raids. Chikorita also appears as a random catch opportunity in a couple of this week's field research tasks.

Some platforms did better than others

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Communities closing down, halted trades, and more

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Housemarque’s story-based third-person shooter gets a new release date

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Netflix revealed cast info for the long-awaited series

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Tiny Lands is simple and relaxing

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NPC in main story mission would call, but never talk to V

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Today Bandai Namco released a new trailer and a gallery of screenshots to celebrate the release on PS5 of Mobile Suit Gundam Battle Operation 2.

The free-to-play online battle game launched in the west in 2019 supports the haptic feedback of the DualSense controller and improved load times on PS5.

Bandai Namco and also added English voice-overs and a new map titled “Military Base.”

If you’re already playing the game, your progress will transfer from PS4 to PS5 seamlessly as long as you use the same PSN account.

Below you can check out the trailer and screenshots.

Epic Games has released its 2020 review article today highlighting impressive growth across the board, with its total user numbers exceeding 160 million and daily active users up 192%.

“Thanks to this community, the Epic Games Store saw historic growth in engagement across the board. There are now over 160 million Epic Games Store PC users. Daily active users are up 192% to 31.3 million daily active players, with a peak CCU 13 million concurrent players this year (up from 7M in 2019). Monthly active users in December rose from 32 million in 2019 to 56 million.”

This surge in player growth has also led to an increase in purchasing and play time! In 2020, PC customers on the Epic Games Store spent over $700M of which third party games represented 37% at $265M. Last year, the Epic Games Store community played 70% more hours with a total playtime of 5.70 billion hours in 2020 compared to 3.35 billion hours in 2019.”

As for the year’s most popular games, the top 10 (in no particular order) includes:

• Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
• Satisfactory (Early Access)
• Fortnite
• Snow Runner
• Godfall
• Borderlands 3
• Rocket League
• Rocket League
• Tony Hawks Pro Skater 1 + 2 Remake
• Grand Theft Auto V
• Rogue Company

The article concludes by looking forward to Epic’s 2021 plans as it is explained the team is focused on wanting to create “a smooth, seamless experience for developers looking to bring their titles to the Epic Games Store.”

Key features and improvements in development at the moment include:

The release date of Returnal, the upcoming PlayStation exclusive from Housemarque, has been pushed back to April 30.

It was initially supposed to release on March 19, so the delay is little over one month. In a Twitter post, PlayStation outlined the thinking behind the delay. They said:

“Update: Returnal has a new release date of April 30, 2021. SIE and Housemarque have made the decision to move the release date in order to give the team extra time to continue to polish the game to the level of quality players expect from Housemarque. See you in April!”

The studio, who’s best known for their arcade games such as Resogun and Nex Machina, revealed Returnal in June last year, during Sony’s PlayStation 5 reveal event.

It is a third-person shooter with supernatural and roguelike elements, so it’s quite a departure from the Helsinki based studio’s previous games, but it’s one of the new console’s most anticipated games of the start of 2021.

Unlike other upcoming games, such as Horizon Forbidden West, and the exclusive launch titles, Returnal will be exclusive to the PS5, taking advantage of the DualSense controller’s features. As of yet, a last gen version has not been revealed.

If any more news on the release date of Returnal is revealed, we’ll be sure to update you on it.

The post Returnal Release Date Pushed Back to April appeared first on Twinfinite.

Let’s cut right to the chase. Sunsetting in Destiny 2 isn’t going well. It’s being rolled out very poorly since the launch of Beyond Light, and fans are incredibly unhappy and have been for quite some time.

Popular streamers and YouTubers have expressed their frustration in recent days and weeks. Even players that had the wait and see approach, like myself, are starting to resign to the reality that this isn’t going the way that it should.

Popular weapons that aren’t even particularly problematic such as the ones released during Season of Dawn, like Breachlight and Patron of Lost Causes, are being removed from the game just because the sunsetting plan is in place and that’s the breaks.

If they were being replaced with a higher quantity of equally interesting and powerful weapons, then the sting would be lessened. But that’s not what’s happening.

Most players are still clinging to Warmind Cell weapons like the Ikelos group because of how powerful they are with the ability to support Warmind Cell builds. Bungie’s response to this has been lacking at best, and at worst, confusing and offensive.

Outside of the excellent Deep Stone Crypt weapons (which are only accessible to those capable of completing the raid, which is historically a small percentage of players), very few guns that were added in Beyond Light comes close to rivaling the Season of the Worthy weapons nor the Season of the Dawn weapons.

Blooper Team’s The Medium marks the arrival of Xbox Series X|S’s very first next-generation exclusive, and today’s launch trailer not only showcases its graphical beauty but the intrigue of its spooky story too.

Between the foggy forest, dramatic soundtrack, and the enigma of its mind-bending premise, there’s a distinctly Silent Hill vibe to the sequence that feels old-school in all the right ways. In fact, it’s something that Twinfinite’s Chris Jecks felt during his review when he explained

“While boldly venturing into new territory, The Medium does opt for an old-school horror staple. The game strips away the security of free camera movement, in favor of fixed camera angles throughout, clearly harking back to those iconic third-person horror titles of yesteryear.

While these did take a little bit of getting used to, Bloober Team has managed to utilize these perfectly to lend a bit of artistic and cinematic flair to Marianne’s story. Each fixed camera frames the action in such a way that it either looks visually incredible or almost helps to up the atmospheric ante.”

Sharp intake of breath: Slay the Spire finally arrives on Android next week. Wednesday, 3rd February to be precise.

It's been a bit of a wait, seeing as the game arrived on iOS last summer, but let's just put that down to Apple users being the guinea pigs, shall we? Oh I'm only joking! Or am I.

No price has been mentioned but Slay the Spire is £10 on iOS, so I'd expect it to be the same.

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Epic has released stats for the Epic Games Store - and they show impressive growth.

Monthly active users rose from 32 million in 2019 to 56 million in December 2020, Epic announced in a blog post.

That's a big jump, but the Epic Games Store still has some way to go before it catches up with market leader Steam. Earlier this month, Valve announced Steam had over 120 million monthly active users.

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It's one of the biggest Fallout: New Vegas mods of all time, but Fallout: The Frontier has had a seriously rocky launch since it released on 15th January. After crashing Nexus Mods on launch day and racking up 82k unique downloads, Fallout: The Frontier started to face accusations it was secretly a "fetish mod" - with critics highlighting a number of questionable moments from the mod as examples. Last night, things escalated rather dramatically, as one of the mod developers was ejected from the team for allegedly posting "animated paedophilic content". A few hours later, the entire mod was taken offline.

At 9:19pm, an announcement was made on the mod's Discord explaining that a member of the development team had shared "deeply disturbing" paedophilic content on their personal artist accounts. This individual was removed from the team, but the troubles didn't end there: as word got out about the controversy the mod's Discord was "raided" by 4Chan users, resulting in the shutdown of all chat channels as the dev team struggled to moderate the influx of new users.

Returnal is delayed to 30th April 2021, Sony has announced.

Housemarque's PlayStation 5-exclusive was due out 19th March.

In a tweet, Sony said the delay will give the developers more time to polish the game.

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Returnal, one of the first PS5 exclusives, won't be out in March 2021 as planned.

The post Returnal Release Date Delayed by a Month appeared first on Siliconera.

The Demon Slayer festival may have been postponed, but we're getting news on the PS4 game soon.

The post New Demon Slayer PS4 News Will Appear Next Month in Jump appeared first on Siliconera.

Sonic voice actor Roger Craig Smith posted a tweet with a broken heart and hedgehog emoji that mentioned, "10 years was an amazing run."

The post Sonic Voice Actor Roger Craig Smith May No Longer Be Sonic appeared first on Siliconera.

Now you can toss a coin to your Witcher, and only your Witcher, on the Nintendo Switch with a The Witcher 3 option that doesn't include DLC.

The post The Witcher 3 Switch Now Sold Without Its Expansions appeared first on Siliconera.

Three talented game designers will be discussing their GDC talks with you at GDC showcase. Find out more! ...

In this 2015 GDC talk, Michael Csurics breaks down the basics of dialogue editing for video game sound designers in the sound editing process. ...

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Immortals Fenyx Rising has been chilling for a little over a month now: which is like...five years in Ubisoft time! That means DLC is inevitably on the way: it already launched, in fact!

As stated by Ubisoft, you do not need to complete the gargantuan campaign to jump into A New God, which is slowly becoming the norm for a lot of these massive open world titles. In some instances, games will even give you the chance to create whole new auto-leveled-up characters to dive into the DLC with. It will have "story spoilers for the conclusion," however.

The add-on will focus on Vaults of Tartaros-esque challenges, but with a brighter aesthetic. Here's the rundown of what it entails: "new vaults, new types of puzzles, and godly new gear." If you want to see what the DLC is like, Ubisoft gave us a detailed and lengthy playthrough yesterday: you can watch the archived video below.

Outside of the new levels and boss in Fatal Falls, the DLC's flashiest addition has got to be Serenade – a talkative pet sword who hovers around, marking enemies for critical hits. It's the Brutality equivalent of the other two summons in Dead Cells: the Mushroom Boi (Survival) and Great Owl of War (Tactics).

I already ran down how to reach Fractured Shrines, Undying Shores, and Mausoleum in a separate guide, but it's also worth showing where you can find Serenade; it's super easy to overlook on your initial runs. To quickly get you up to speed, you'll want to head to the first Fatal Falls level, Fractured Shrines, which you can reach after either Black Bridge or The Nest – just take the elevator up.

Once you're in Fractured Shrines, lookout for a large room that splits off into four possible directions. One of the paths (in this case, the top-right path) will seemingly stop with a dead end. It's a trick.

_{This is the starting point for the secret path.}

If you look closely, you should notice rain landing on invisible platforms. Follow them to a secret area.

_{Vectorman prepared me for these invisible platforms.}

You'll eventually come to a room guarded by a giant enemy – beat it, and the door will pop open. There are a few big-door-guardian rooms in Fractured Shrines, but this particular one leads to Serenade.

While CD Projekt Red has its hands full with Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is still going strong.

It already dealt with its growing pains with a score of patches, and didn't piss off investors or the entire industry in the process. As such, it would behoove the publisher to keep rolling with that goodwill as they attempt to put out the fires they caused themselves with Cyberpunk. In the meantime, there's an interesting little option now for prospective Witcher 3 Switch players.

Originally, the game launched on Switch as a "Complete Edition" of sorts, and even came with the full version, DLC, included, on one physical game cart. But now there's an extra option available to just buy the base edition of the game, sans DLC, which is live in the UK now. If that's the sort of thing you're into, and feel like you can't get to the DLC at a later date (or not at all), it's something you can do now.

As Nintendo Life points out, all prior owners of the Complete Edition automatically own this other "lite" version, likely to weed out any potential mishaps and refunds. It's probably the least offensive way possible to roll something out like this! Better late than never.

The Witcher 3 [Nintendo via Nintendo Life]

I dig pinball. Do y'all know this? I don't know if y'all know this, but I do. And I also dig Pinball FX, which has kept digital fans flipping ever since its launch on Xbox 360 way back in 2007. So it's with no small amount of joy I bring you the news that Zen Studios is currently rebuilding its pinball simulator for launch on next-gen platforms in 2021.

The new version of Pinball FX will utilize the technology of platforms such as PS5 and Xbox Series X to deliver the flashiest and most visually arresting PFX experience to date. Not only that, but Zen is currently working on a whole host of new gameplay modes and additions, including "Pinball Royale" - a sort of "Last Ball Rolling" affair. A new career mode and score-attack challenges await, as do brand new online leagues, limited-time events, and even seasonal content.

How about that steering yoke, huh? Well, while everyone was getting riled up over that, Tesla did another weird thing, which is put a console-caliber gaming rig in some of its cars.

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