January 2021

Shooter/RPG Outriders has been delayed to April 1, nearly two months after its February 2 release date. Developer People Can Fly tempered the bad news by announcing that a free demo will be available on February 25 to give eager players a big taste of what’s in store. 

In a message posted on the game’s Twitter account, People Can Fly explains it plans to spend the extra development time “fine tuning the game and focusing on delivering a fantastic play experience at launch.” 

For those bummed out about the wait, the February demo gives players the chance to play Outriders’ opening hours and all four classes (Trickster, Pyromancer, Technomancer, and Devastator) will be available. The demo can be experienced solo or with up to three players in co-op, and your progress and character can be transferred to the full release; the chef’s kiss of any demo. As People Can Fly puts it: 

Animal Crossing: New Horizons players are always creating impressive feats in-game, whether it be recreations of other popular franchises or unique islands all their own. The latest tribute has one Animal Crossing player faithfully recreating a Pokemon Center on their island and it's a pretty neat way to fan out about the beloved pocket monster series. 

Instagram user 'ACNH.Pokeland' shared quite a few images of their creation alongside a code for this particular homage. A Dream Address is also on the way, though not available quite yet: 

        View this post on Instagram                      

A post shared by 𝗢𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗲 💕 (@acnh.pokeland)

The usual Tuesday update is now live for Destiny 2: Beyond Light players and while it was mostly good, there is a bug concerning the Coup De Grace mission which makes it seemingly impossible to finish. Bungie is working on a fix, but in the meantime, the studio did offer some advice for Guardians that find themselves frustrated with the glitch. Basically, Bungie is telling players to "slow down." 

Taking to the Bungie Help Twitter, the studio told players who are running into issues with this particular mission to "slow down with damaging the High Celebrant. Players should also wait a few seconds before shooting the black blight orb." 

Players who are experiencing issues in the Coup De Grâce mission are advised to slow down when damaging the High Celebrant. Players should also wait a few seconds before shooting the black blight orb.

— Bungie Help (@BungieHelp) January 6, 2021

For those that haven't attempted this mission yet, it tasks players with hunting the High Celebrant of Xivu Arath and includes a multi-damage phase boss fight. The downside is that the current state of this mission means that taking out the boss too quickly (not even just cheesing it) can cause it to break and unable to complete. 

It turns out when Microsoft started work on the original Xbox, it approached Nintendo, Square Enix, EA and Midway about buying each of them.

The post Microsoft Tried to Acquire Nintendo and Square appeared first on Siliconera.

Square Enix and People Can Fly's Outriders will be delayed, but at least people will be able to try it before buying it.

The post Square Enix’s Outriders Delayed by 2 Months appeared first on Siliconera.

You won't be able to use Netflix on two platforms later in 2021. Support is ending for both the 3DS and Wii U versions.

The post Netflix 3DS and Wii U Support Will End in June appeared first on Siliconera.

Developer CD Projet Red has dismissed a lengthy allegation posted on the GameFAQs board last week by an individual claiming to be an employee of the company.

The thread, which has since made its way onto Reddit, makes some very bold claims about the various strategic decision’s made by the studio’s upper management ahead of Cyberpunk 2077’s launch:

“CDPR hurt themselves to keep investors safe and sound. Now devs are hearing plans of a “No Man’s Sky” style comeback due to late June. The first two patches should come out mid-March, despite what’s been said by top execs.

There will be major departures from the studio in the coming months. Dev morale is on an all time down and Sony is roasting our asses due to the gigantic volume of refund requests. There will be a meeting today with Sony execs to figure out a way to compensate players threatening with legal action. Sony Japan is especially furious.”

It goes on to suggest that large areas of the game were cut during development, too, in addition to rambling about other features of the game supposedly missing from the final product.

In all honesty, it reads more like a giant rant from a disgruntled fan as opposed to anything to be taken at all seriously. Still, the thread has gained traction to such an extent that CDPR issued the following response on Twitter:

Today, developer People Can Fly shared the news that its upcoming third-person looter shooter Outriders would be delayed a couple of months from its Feb. 2 release date to April 1. And before you ask, no, it already confirmed that this was no April fools!

The good news for fans is that they won’t have to wait too much longer to get their hands on at least a small slither of Outriders for themselves. As part of the delay announcement, the developer announced that a free demo would be released on Feb. 25. It offers the chance to “play the first few hours of the game with all four classes — in both single-player and co-op — along with seamless migration of your character and progress to the full game.”

Later today (or tomorrow, depending on where you live), SNK was supposed to reveal The King of Fighters XV with the first trailer.

That reveal has been delayed, as announced on Twitter.

The developer apologized to the fans who were looking forward to the announcement, and promise to announce a new time frame as soon as it’s finalized.

You can find the announcement below.

The reveal also included a look at the first two characters of the next season pass for the popular fighting game Samurai Shodown. That has also been delayed.

A long time has passed since the reveal of the season pass of Samurai Shodown in July, and even more time has gone by since we saw the initial tease of The King of Fighters XV in the summer of 2019, but the Coronavirus pandemic has likely hindered development.

Today’s issue of Weekly Famitsu included a lot of interesting information about the Akihabara-based developer Acquire.

First of all, we get the confirmation of the Switch version of Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound and Debriefed, which was leaked yesterday by a Japanese retailer on top of PS4 and PC.

Incidentally, president Takuma Endo mentioned that the Akiba’s Trip series sold about 800,000 units in total, with the second game increasing its success outside of Japan due to the growing worldwide popularity of Akihabara.

Secondly, we see the reveal of Labyrinth of Zangetsu for PS4, PC, and Nintendo Switch, coming to Japan in summer 2021.

The game is a 3D dungeon-crawling JRPG that aims to pay homage to the origin of hack and slash game.

The setting is medieval Japan with the addition of magic and monsters. The visual style is monochromatic, reproducing Japanese ink paintings, and the soundtrack is inspired by traditional music genres like Gagaku and Noh.

You can see what it looks like in the gallery below.

When AMD unveiled their pair of next-gen Big Navi graphics cards at the end of 2020, there was hope that they’d bring some much needed competition to Nvidia’s latest crop of RTX 30 GPUs. Leading the pack was AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 XT, a £600 / $650 graphics card that aimed to take on Nvidia’s more expensive GeForce RTX 3080. Alas, the 6800 XT fell short when it came to matching the RTX 3080’s raw performance speeds, and AMD’s continued lack of any kind of frame rate-boosting DLSS competitor technology meant its ray tracing performance was also a bit underwhelming.

As with oh so many games originally planned for 2020, Bulletstorm devs People Can Fly’s shooter Outriders has slipped into 2021. They’ve announced a new date now, a bit later than the February mark they’d previously mentioned. The good news is that they’ll be putting a free demo in players’ hands in February instead and launch will happen not too long after in April.

(more…)

So, this past year kind of sucked!

But it didn't suck for games. Let's escape for a minute down 2020 memory lane together.

MegaCrit's tower-climbing indie hit Slay the Spire is being converted into a board game. As revealed by Contention Games, the team behind card game Imperium, Slay the Spire will translate the fantasy roguelike into a co-operative table-topper for 1-4 players.

"Slay the Spire is a co-operative deck-building adventure," reads a brief blurb from Contention Games. "Craft a unique deck, encounter bizarre creatures, discover relics of immense power, and finally become strong enough to Slay the Spire!"

Slay the Spire, which officially launched on PC a little over a year ago before coming to consoles, has players battle through a procedurally generated tower of doom, hacking through hordes of enemies while gathering loot, relics, and magic abilities. The video game itself utilizes a card-based system for its character building and its combat, and thus the title should translate very well to the tabletop environment.

An official Kickstarter for the Slay the Spire: The Board Game is set to launch this spring, with details regarding targets and stretch goals still to be revealed. We will be sure to keep you informed when said crowdfunding campaign is open for business.

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Hitman 3 is bringing a new shortcut feature to the third-person stealth shooter. "Persistent shortcuts" will reward players for exploring the sequel's various maps by unlocking permanent shortcuts that give players new ways to approach their assassinations.

These shortcuts are only available by searching for hidden secrets in levels--players will find things like unlockable ladders that'll open up new pathways they'll be able to use in future playthroughs. Each shortcut can only be unlocked from one side, so it'll take some investigative work to find out how to access them.

Game Informer showcased one of these shortcuts from the Dubai level of Hitman 3 in a short video.

Developer and publisher SNK has announced that the reveal of King of Fighters XV and Samurai Shodown's Season Pass 3 has been postponed, though a reason hasn't been confirmed.

SNK had planned to officially unveil King of Fighter XV this week. The reveal of the latest entry in the King of Fighters series was to be followed by an announcement of the new characters coming to Samurai Shodown as part of the game's Season Pass 3 bundle. However, the company said it will "inform our fans as soon as the new date and time has been confirmed."

King of Fighters XV was teased in December, with SNK calling it the "most ambitious KOF yet." The studio shared no gameplay at the time. King of Fighters creative director Eisuke Ogura revealed King of Fighters XIV newcomer Shun'ei is the franchise's latest protagonist. As such, Shun'ei has a new outfit (shown off in some concept art), as well as an overhauled moveset.

Ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show next week, Samsung has revealed its new line of 4K and 8K TVs set to launch later in 2021.

All the models announced today make use of brand new QLED technology that Samsung is branding "Neo QLED." The biggest benefit is that Samsung has managed to reduce the size of the LEDs that act as the backlight in its display, allowing for drastically more dimming zones and the reduction of blooming. Traditional LED displays require backlighting for brightness, but the size of the LEDs has often led to distracting light bleed in scenes where only small portions of the image are overly bright or dark. This is one of the biggest benefits of OLEDs, which are self-emissive.

According to The Verge, Samsung is promising up to "up to almost 30,000 tiny LEDs" and "up to 2,500 dimming zones," which will make backlighting in this year's models noticeably better than those from 2020. Samsung announced to 8K models (the QN900A and QN800A) as well as numerous 4K models (QN95A, QN90A, and the QN85A). The number of dimming zones does decrease with less expensive models, but Samsung hasn't detailed each individually yet.

2020 was a rough year for many of us, but there was another crisis going on that you probably weren't even aware of: a time crisis. Unfortunately, no light guns will save us here. According to TimeAndDate.com, the Earth spun faster than in 2020 than in any other time in the past 50 years, with the 28 shortest days since 1960.

As reported in the Telegraph, experts and astronomers warn that timekeepers may need to introduce a negative leap second in order to stay accurate. Leap seconds--which are used to accommodate differences between atomic time and less-precise solar time--have previously been used to solve such issues. However, a leap second in 2012 wreaked havoc across the Internet, with Reddit, Yelp, Mozilla, and others reporting Y2K-esque crashes due to the shift.

Some experts have called for an end to leap seconds entirely, opining that they are a relic of a past age, since much of the world relies on atomic time today. The World Radiocommuncation Conference may end up abolishing the practice in 2023, though it's unclear how likely this is to happen. Earth's rotational speed varies considerably due to the motion of tides, the atmosphere, and the planet's core, as well as other factors, such as snowfall on mountains.

Nintendo is holding a new Spirit Board event in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate this week. The event kicks off tomorrow, January 7, and it introduces a handful of new Spirits based on the recent Zelda spin-off, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity.

Three new Age of Calamity Spirits are making their debut as part of the event: Age of Calamity Impa, Master Kohga, and the Diminutive Guardian. All three will be appearing randomly throughout the event, and defeating them will net you extra gold as well as unlocking them for your own use.

The Age of Calamity Spirit event begins at 10 PM PT on January 7 and runs until the same time on January 12.

Bulletstorm developer People Can Fly's new game, Outriders, has been delayed again. The Square Enix-published shooter will no longer release in February, and is now scheduled for release on April 1. That is not a joke.

"We will spend this extra time fine tuning the game and focusing on delivering a fantastic experience at launch. Thanks for hanging tight a little longer. We appreciate your patience!" the developer said in its message posted on Twitter.

While Outriders will no longer release in February, the developers are releasing a free demo for the game on February 25 that showcases its first few hours. All four character classes will be available in the demo for both single-player and co-op. Additionally, progress from the demo will carry forward to the full game, People Can Fly said.

If you have been playing Monster Hunter World: Iceborne lately and have been running into issues with a bugged delivery quest, we have good news for you! Iceborne version 15.11's patch update is now live and will squash those bugs.

In the previous version of Iceborne, 15.10, delivery quests would disappear from the list at the Resource Center when playing on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles in offline mode. This bug made it impossible to complete these quests, which was a pretty significant drag on the Monster Hunter experience. If you play in online mode, those quests should reappear anyway, but with the 15.11 update, even players who want to remain offline will no longer see delivery quests up and vanish on them.

The bug was originally discovered by Twitter user JalBagel, a Monster Hunter speedrunner, during a charity stream back in early December. He noticed that while playing with an offline mod on Steam, the delivery quests were disappearing. This was noticeably strange since JalBagel knew that prior to the game's Movie Event Quest update, delivery quests were not going missing.

Activision has followed through on its promise to nerf the DMR, which was causing some issues and headaches in the battle royale game Call of Duty: Warzone.

The newest patch is now live, and it reduces the headshot damage of the DMR 14 while also increasing recoil to deliver an overall nerf to the weapon. The Type 63 has also been nerfed with the same adjustments through the patch notes.

The Mac-10, meanwhile, sees its headshot multiplier decreased, while players using dual pistols will discover more hip fire spread and a decreased damage range. All of these nerfs and adjustments are specific to Warzone, not Black Ops Cold War.

You'll have two fewer options to watch Netflix starting later this year. The company has announced plans to stop supporting the Nintendo Wii U and 3DS starting on June 30, 2021. And if you didn't already have the app on those devices, now it's too late.

In a statement, Nintendo gave word that Netflix removed its app from the Wii U and 3DS eShops on December 31, 2020. If you downloaded it in the past, you can re-download the applications and use them until support is discontinued on June 30.

Netflix functionality is mostly ubiquitous, so you should have no trouble finding other devices with which to watch the service. But the pending absence of it on Nintendo devices is a reminder that years into the Nintendo Switch lifecycle, Netflix still hasn't come to the console. The console/handheld hybrid does support some other video streaming apps, such as Netflix competitor Hulu.

If you're old enough to remember the early 2000s, you probably have fond memories of playing Flash games to while away the hours at your job or at school. As many longtime Flash fans know well by this point, Adobe officially halted support for the longtime multimedia platform back on December 31, citing security flaws and the existence of better tech. However, one prolific Flash developer took an unusual step to preserve their work: porting it to the original Game Boy.

That game is Anthony Lavelle's IndestructoTank, and you might have hazy memories of it from your youth, as I do. It's a grounded shoot 'em up similar to Defender or Moon Patrol, only your tank is completely invincible, and your goal is to bounce onto your enemies' heads continuously so you don't run out of fuel. The Game Boy port obviously limits the game's color palette, and the on-screen action is a little bit tighter, but it plays just as I remember.

Though the ROM will work on a real Game Boy, for the rest of us, Lavelle has provided an emulator that works in your web browser on his Itch.io page. As a whole, Lavelle exhibits a sense of humor about the demise of Flash in a recent AMA, but it's clear that he still has a lot of love for the platform. Arguably best-known for the puzzle game Shift, he says that Flash is the reason that he got into making games, and there will never be a tool quite like it.

Amazon has revealed which video games were its top-sellers in 2020, and in a year that saw no shortage of excellent titles on offer, Nintendo proved to be a dominant force.

Out of the top 10, Nintendo claimed eight spots on the list which saw Animal Crossing: New Horizons take first place. In a year where many people were forced to stay at home during the coronavirus pandemic, the relaxing island getaway game proved to be a winner in not one but two slots.

Animal Crossing's physical edition was joined by demand for digital downloads sold through Amazon, with that version of the game also ending up in fourth place. Super Mario 3D All-Stars came in second place, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe took the third spot, and Smash Bros. Ultimate claimed the fifth position on the list.

If the ongoing supply issues and resurgence in cryptocurrency mining isn't enough to make grabbing a new graphics card challenging, prices for them might soon be increasing in the US to make stock even harder to come by.

The price increase might soon affect numerous GPU manufacturers, as waivers that kept trade tariffs at bay have now expired. President Trump instigated a trade war with China in 2018, which would've increased GPU prices had companies not applied for waivers to prevent it. Those waivers expired, however, this month, meaning tariffs between 7.5% to 25% can now be applied to all PC hardware.

ASUS is the only company that has acknowledged this right now, writing to customers to explain why they might encounter higher than expected prices on products.

It's one of the longest running jokes for Madden fans. A CPU team with a veteran quarterback steps up to the mic during the first round of the draft and picks another QB. The team is filled with holes and they choose not to fill any of them.

Madden CPU AI has always been flawed and Madden 21 is no different--but EA hopes to change that. A new update is bringing improved QB draft logic alongside other changes to the only licensed football game.

"We have added new logic checks that CPU teams will use to guide whether they should even be interested in drafting a QB when they’re on the clock in Round 1," EA said in a statement sent to GameSpot. "Now, teams will evaluate their roster and previous draft picks of the last two years to keep teams from replacing players too soon."

2021 marks the 20th anniversary of the Xbox, and to celebrate the occasion, Bloomberg spoke with more than 20 people involved with the creation of the console. It's a fascinating read that is stuffed with interesting insight, one part of which was that Microsoft wanted to collaborate with Nintendo, and potentially even buy the Japanese company.

Former head of business development at Microsoft, Bob McBreen, said Microsoft reached out to a number of companies to discuss an acquisition many years ago, the first of which was Electronic Arts. They said "no thanks," according to McBreen. Nintendo also declined to get acquired, and the meeting apparently did not go so well.

Former Xbox executive Kevin Bachus said then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told senior staff they needed to travel to Japan to speak to Nintendo about a potential sale.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla players spotted several new abilities within the game's Bear, Raven, and Wolf skill trees a few weeks ago, which then quickly disappeared. The first node allowed for players to "let the fates guide your path" and automatically allocate skill points into any empty slots.

The other nodes revealed new abilities that players could acquire: The Raven tree added the Assassin Carry ability, a skill that lets you automatically pick up a body after performing an assassination.

The Bear tree added Fight Ready, which guarantees a full adrenaline slot at the start of a fight and the Wolf tree's new Arrow looter skill increases your chances of finding extra arrow ammo on the bodies of dead enemy archers. None of these new abilities were mentioned in the December update patch notes, and some players reported seeing them for an instant before they vanished.

What are you up to, TNT

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