January 2021

As part of Halo Infinite developer 343's huge news blowout, the studio shared a series of brand-new weapon renders and pieces of artwork from the anticipated next-gen sci-fi shooter.

The in-engine weapon renders showcase a variety of popular and familiar weaponry, including the Assault Rifle and Battle Rifle, both of which have received some tweaks based on their appearance in previous games. Other weapons on display include the Hydra, the Needler, the VK78 Commando, and the brand-new Bulldog shotgun that 343 created to shake things up in a big way.

Also on display is some artwork, including new renders of the Drop Wall equipment that can be used in campaign and multiplayer to protect yourself from incoming fire. A render of Master Chief's grappling hook is also available, while 343 separately shared new details on how it works and how you may be able to use it to bring the fight to your enemy.

The Human Rights Campaign has released the results of its 2021 Corporate Equality Index that shines a light on the US-based companies that are doing the best in regards to practices and policies related to LGBTQ workplace equality, and several gaming companies made the list.

The 2021 index includes 767 companies that received a top score for LGBTQ-inclusive policies, which is a record for the index. Included on the list with a perfect score are gaming giants like Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, and Sony Interactive Entertainment, as well as the retailer GameStop. Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon also made the list this year.

"The Corporate Equality Index comes out after a year the nation has faced a global pandemic, legitimate racial injustice and national unrest," the organization said. "Within this climate, companies have continued to advance vital workplace protections for LGBTQ employees around the world, as acknowledged in this report."

The next update for Obsidian's adventure-survival game Grounded has arrived, and it adds flying insects to the Xbox and PC title for the first time.

Mosquitos, fireflies, and bees are now invading the world of Grounded, adding on to the ground-dwelling bugs such as ants and spiders. In a blog post, Obsidian said flying insects had been a top-requested feature from the community since launch.

In addition to the insects themselves, the new update adds more craftable items themed around the new winged creatures. These new items include Beer armor, a Firefly head lamp, and the Mosquito Needle. You need to kill the critters themselves first before you can craft the items.

Halo Infinite developer 343 Industries has elaborated slightly on some of the tools that the anticipated sequel will give you to play around with, teasing that players haven't yet seen the full capabilities of ones such as the Grappleshot.

Master Chief's new grappling hook was one of the standout features of an otherwise highly criticized gameplay demo last year, allowing you to zip along through the open-world that Infinite takes place in. Speaking in a new development update, Tim Temmerman, lead designer on tools for the sandbox team, says that there's more offensive-focused gameplay that the team wants to show off soon.

"We have some really exciting equipment we haven't shown yet, but the Grappleshot is probably my favorite of the bunch that we have shown," Temmerman said. "Not only does it just feel fun to use, but there's additional functionality that hasn’t been revealed yet that adds some more… offense-focused gameplay that I'm super excited to show off."

Developer Dark Lord and publisher Daedalic Entertainment's latest project was revealed this week, an action game by the name of Glitchpunk that mixes trans-humanist themes with crime sprees as you explore four different cities in a dark future. What makes Glitchpunk different from many other sandbox games that are clearly inspired by the brand of mayhem found in modern Grand Theft Auto games, is that it found inspiration in the older GTA games from the 1990s.

Like those titles, Glitchpunk is a top-down action game where you have to survive in cities filled with corrupt police officers and homicidal gang members. Aside from shooting your way out of an explosive situation with the game's massive arsenal of weapons, you can also engage in high-speed getaways using cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles, tanks, and trains.

One of the more controversial elements of Halo Infinite is its new rapid-firing Bulldog shotgun, which replaces the standard shotgun we've seen in the series since the very beginning. 343 Industries has detailed the new weapon, as well as its reasoning for making such a big change, and what it really comes down to is giving players a viable option to fit their playstyle.

Speaking in an interview on Halo Waypoint, lead sandbox designer Quinn DelHoyo said that, particularly for multiplayer in past Halo games, players just didn't choose the shotgun very often. The team wanted to give close-quarters specialists a good option, and it began developing the Bulldog with that in mind. The weapon's individual shots aren't as powerful as the old shotgun, but it fires and reloads much more quickly to make up for that.

"The Bulldog is a versatile weapon that provides the player with the role of a shotgun and up-close playstyle more frequently in multiplayer than previous Halo titles as it is lower on the lethality scale of weapons and thus more prevalent," lead weapons designer David Price added.

Halo Infinite marks a big shift for the franchise, as the sci-fi shooter's multiplayer will be free-to-play. Developer 343 Industries has now spoken further about this change to a "true service" model and why feedback from fans will be critical in shaping the future direction of the game.

In a blog post, 343 said it will do its best to respect the 20-year history of Halo and try to please as many players as possible who have difference preferences for the Halo experience. With Halo Infinite multiplayer now going free-to-play, responding to fan feedback and delivering ongoing updates will be more important than ever, the studio said.

"As our free-to-play multiplayer shifts to a true service, it's more critical than ever that we drive continued feedback loops to ensure we are prioritizing the right work and continually improving the experience," the studio said. "Player feedback--via community input and additional vectors like user research studies--serves as our 'north star' that we'll evaluate alongside game telemetry data and our team's instincts to inform a specific outcome."

As part of a wide-ranging and in-depth blog post, Halo Infinite developer 343 Industries revealed that the sci-fi shooter's controls will be fully remappable.

The studio said it's doing this because Halo is best "when the controls feel frictionless, natural, and responsive" such that the actual input fades away and players get immersed in the combat.

"Everything should feel intuitive and we don't want the player to have to 'fight' the game in order to have fun," the studio said. "It's because of this principle, and the fact that Halo Infinite will be on PC, that led us to rebuild the control scheme system to allow players to fully rebind and remap their controls, regardless of platform.

Here’s some good news on a Friday. Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, Ustwo’s wonderful game about conservation, has helped do some real-life good. Thanks to a campaign by the studio to plant one tree for every download of the game, the result has been over 450,000 new trees planted.

The campaign is a partnership between Ustwo and Ecologi, a website focused on tackling climate change by planting trees, which helps reduce greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Paid members sign up to have Ecologi plant a number of trees based on their subscription tier, thus having their own forest. Ustwo created Alba’s Forest, which currently has 465,060 trees planted in forests across Madagascar, Mozambique, and Nicaragua. Besides offering a nice barometer for how the game is performing sales wise, it’s always cool to see a purchase have a positive side effect. 

The R-Type Final 2 international release date is here. It will fly onto consoles and computers in April, with digital and physical options available.

The post R-Type Final 2 Will Take Flight Internationally in April appeared first on Siliconera.

The last season of Fruits Basket has a release window. Fruits Basket the Final will appear in Japan in April.

The post Fruits Basket the Final Will Air in Japan in April 2021 appeared first on Siliconera.

One store said that people who place a New Pokemon Snap pre-order will also get a picture frame to... presumably display Pokemon photos.

The post New Pokemon Snap Picture Frame Pre-order Bonus Is Ready for Your Photos appeared first on Siliconera.

Following last week's news of a slight delay for Flight Simulator's third World Update - which is set to give the UK and Ireland a very welcome makeover - developer Asobo has narrowed down its launch window to the second week of February.

Flight Simulator's incoming third World Update continues the impressive work seen in previous overhauls for the United States and Japan, and will, as previously announced, include new aerials, improved elevation data, new landing challenges, new points of interest, five new hand-crafted airports, and five brand-new photogrammetry cities.

Building on those earlier details in its latest development blog, Asobo has now confirmed World Update 3's new airports as Barra, Land's End, Liverpool, Manchester-Barton, and Out Skerries, while the cities getting the photogrammetry treatment will be Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford, and London - the latter of which gets an airing in the screens below.

Read more

In this 2015 GDC session, Kongregate co-founder Emily Greer examines the game industry practice of building financial models based on large-spending users. ...

Hisense 55" 4K TV | $480 | Amazon

Read more...

Console gaming is at a crossroads, finding itself in the center of that transitory phase between console generations. Many games are landing on both last-gen and next-gen hardware. And given that getting your hands on a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series whatever remains damn near impossible, this is a boon all around.

Read more...

You may know it as the Everything Store. But there’s one chunk of “everything” Amazon has failed to crack: video games. A new report from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier and Priya Anand sheds light on why Amazon Game Studios, backed by one of the planet’s biggest companies, can’t seem to make a successful video game.

Read more...

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend? 

Read more...

Free 30-Day Trial | Twitch Prime

Read more...

Today Creative Assembly revealed an intriguing teaser trailer for its Total War: Warhammer series.

The teaser is set at the Celestial College in Altdorf, within the dome of the Grand Astrolabe used to predict the future of the Empire.

While no official word has been shared, this seems like an obvious tease of an imminent reveal of Total War: Warhammer III, which we already know is coming as the third element of the trilogy.

You can watch the trailer below.

The Total War: Warhammer series is one of the most popular in Creative Assembly’s lineup, launched in 2016 to fan and critical acclaim and then renewed in 2017 with Total War: Warhammer II.

The series has always been officially described as a trilogy, and after a long series of DLC, it’s certainly time for the third game to come.

Total War: Warhammer and its sequel certainly have an interesting setup, because they combine in a mega-campaign including factions from both games. It’ll be interesting to see if the third game will do the same.

Finish mobile gaming company Supercell has dominated the platform for years ever since Clash of Clans burst onto the scene in 2012. Since then, its produced spin-off Clash Royale, and farming simulator Hay Day, which have impressed in equal measure. Now, a fourth marquee title has exceeded the $1 billion revenue milestone in Brawl Stars.

That’s according to Sensor Tower Intelligence’s estimates, which highlights that Brawl Stars has been Supercell’s fastest-growing title by revenue, with player spending increasing by 27.5 percent year-over-year. Much of its success is owed to the game’s successful 2020 launch in China where it has already accumulated $100 million.

Biomutant looked like one of Gamescom’s hot prospects way back in 2017, but it’s taken much longer to come together than developer Experimental 101 imagined. Today, in an interview with IGN, studio head Stefan Ljungqvist lifted the curtain on exactly what the hold has been over the past few years.

“It’s a big game, a big bite for 20 people to chew off,” he says before later explaining that bug-fixing such a huge open-world game with a small QA team has been immensely time-consuming.

“It’s been a huge amount of work for QA because it’s not easy in an open-world game to find them,” said Ljungqvist. “And then once they’ve been found, we have to fix them, and that’s put some additional challenge on us, being a small team.”

Other factors contributing to the snail pace of its development include the enormous 250,000-word script, which has actually grown from an already sizeable 85,000 back in late 2019.

Refreshingly, publisher THQ Nordic hasn’t piled on the pressure to release the game, allowing the studio plenty of breathing room to take their time and make sure it delivers a quality product.

Ljungqvist told IGN:

“I mean, the studio, we are 20 people and we can’t afford to have [staff] leave the studio, or be destroyed during development. That would be devastating.”

“For certain pushes, you might do it in a limited form. But the most important thing is you get paid, which is not common in our industry, crazily enough. And also you get ‘recap time’, because you have to have rest. If you’re just doing this constantly for 12-14 hours a day, you will eventually have to pay for it.”

Scott Adkins weighs in on virtual fisticuffs

Continue reading…

And we know a thing or two about polygons here

Continue reading…

Why don’t we see this more often?

Continue reading…

Pick up two weapons and two armor pieces

Continue reading…

Destiny 2’s 13th season is almost here

Continue reading…

Theater chain gets unexpected lifeline when private equity trades a corporate IOU for stock

Continue reading…