July 2023

The latest 1.2.0 patch for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has removed item duplication glitches previously discovered by the community.

The update, which became available yesterday, fixes issues relating to certain quests and various other bugs but unfortunately also prevents players from being able to make money quickly.

The methods previously reported on Eurogamer, one using thrown weapons and another using frozen meat, now do not work in version 1.2.0 of the game. I've tested this myself, and am grateful I already cashed in 40k before I updated my version.

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A Diablo 4 player has found what appeared to be - initially at least - a giant version of the game's terrifying Butcher enemy.

The Butcher, an infamous enemy from the first game, can randomly spawn in any dungeon, at any level, and is a particularly nasty foe to defeat.

Reddit user IronHeart_777 discovered a giant "beast of a Butcher" while running nightmare dungeons with friends, but don't worry - it's not actually a new version of the enemy.

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HoYoVerse released the pull art for Imbibitor Lunae, who will be a new 5-star character in Honkai: Star Rail. Since it usually reveals playable characters a version in advance, he will be likely one of the two new units to pull for from the gacha in Version 1.3. Imbibitor Lunae will be an Imaginary Destruction character.

According to the description for him, Imbibitor Lunae is the High Elder of the Luofu. He's also the one who carries on the Azure Dragon’s legacy. His job was to guard the Ambrosial Arbor. Lore that you can collect on the Luofu implies that he caused something terrible to happen and had to leave. This is why he's running from his kin and traveling on the Astral Express.

This is the 5-star version of Dan Heng, who’ll be a separate unit in-game, but the same character in the story. It’s a little similar to how the battlesuits worked in Honkai Impact 3rd. The Herrscher of Thunder and Herrscher of Origin are different characters with different kits in combat. However, they were both the same character: Raiden Mei.

DMM Games, Komoe Joy, and Sunrise announced that it will release an English version of Code Geass: Lost Stories some time in 2023. It will be available on iOS and Android devices. Pre-registrations are now open, granting awards such as Sakuradites and Knightmare Frame Enhancement Packs so that you can get a headstart when the game officially launches.

https://twitter.com/CodeGeassglobal/status/1674885524174041088

The story takes place seven years after Britannia turned Japan into Area Eleven. The protagonist that you play as attends Ashford Academy as a member of the Garfield family, and they are half-Japanese. They join the fight between the Japanese rebels and the Britannian armies as a Knightmare Frame pilot. You’ll be able to play as either a male or a female. All of the main characters from the show will appear as well. In fact, the final reward when 500,000 people have pre-registered is a version of Lelouch in his school uniform.

Yuma Uchida voices the male protagonist and Ayaka Oohashi voices the female one. Uchida has previously voiced Kaveh in Genshin Impact and Megumi in Jujutsu Kaisen. Oohashi’s previous roles include Ran in Aikatsu and Uzuki in The Idolmaster Cinderella Girls.

Ubisoft have started to dish out two-week suspensions to players in Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 over an XP exploit. Players were apparently joining the game’s roguelike Descent mode partway through matches via a loophole in Ubisoft Connect’s interface. The team says the bug yielded an “unfair amount of XP and SHD levels,” hence the penalties.

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Grand Theft Auto 5 headlines the next wave of games arriving on Xbox Game Pass this month.

The blockbuster game will be available on both console and cloud, with both Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S versions available. It's out today.

Exoprimal, Capcom's online dino shooter, is the other major release this month and will be available on day one from 14th July across cloud, console and PC.

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As Destiny hurtles towards the conclusion of its decade-long storyline, Bungie has discussed how it all might end - and addressed some recent criticism of how big story revelations have been handled.

Speaking out just a couple of weeks after the origins of Destiny's space golf ball The Traveller were finally revealed - to a somewhat mixed response - Bungie staff have defended Destiny's storytelling techniques, and said players should not expect to make allies with the game's villainous Hive.

"The Hive has still committed a lot of, you know, genocide," senior narrative designer Robert Brookes told Dexerto, pouring cold water on the Guardians and the Hive suddenly becoming besties.

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Last year, we saw a God of War rip-off turn up on Xbox. Now, we have another PlayStation rip-off turning up on another console. In this case, it is Naughty Dog's The Last of Us on Nintendo Switch.

Yes, that's right. If you head over to the eShop right now, you can get your hands on The Last Hope - Dead Zone Survival, an "intense storyline game set in an apocalyptic world overrun by hordes of ravenous zombies". Launched on 30th June, it normally costs £8.99 but is currently on sale for just 99p.

Having played The Last Hope myself, I would advise saving your pennies for something more worthwhile. Toothpicks, perhaps. You can see a trailer for The Last Hope below (and if you were still interested in playing the game afterwards, please note there are spoilers for The Last Hope below).

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It’s hard to overstate the impact, popularity and appeal of Dragon Ball Z. Across every manga chapter, every episode, every character trait, battle trope, etc., you’ll find something that has influenced the Shonen series that came after it, all the way up to modern day manga and anime. Dragon Ball Z is a cultural…

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Grand Theft Auto V is one again crashing the party on Xbox Game Pass just in time for the summer vacation. It headlines the subscription service’s slate of new games for July 2023, alongside some smaller indie releases and Capcom’s new dino-shooter, Exoprimal.

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Microsoft announced some of the July 2023 Xbox Game Pass titles, and GTA V and Exoprimal are among the new additions. Nine titles are coming to the subscription service in the first half of the month. Only Exoprimal and Techtonica “day one” drops.

Here's the full list of the new games joining Xbox Game Pass alongside Exoprimal and GTA V in its latest July 2023 update. As a note, Microsoft previously announced Arcade Paradise would appear on July 3, 2023.

• July 5, 2023: GTA V (cloud, console) and Sword and Fairy: Together Forever (cloud, console, PC)
• July 6, 2023: McPixel 3 (cloud, console, PC)
• July 11, 2023: Common’hood (cloud, console, PC) and Insurgency: Sandstorm (PC)
• July 14, 2023: Exoprimal (cloud, console, PC)
• July 18, 2023: Techtonica game preview (cloud, console, PC) and The Cave (cloud, console)

Only three games are about to leave Xbox Game Pass in July 2023, though. On July 15, 2023, Exo One, Paw Patrol the Movie: Adventure City Calls, and Spelunky 2 will be gone. All three were available on consoles, PCs, and via the cloud.

Square Enix announced that both Final Fantasy XIV Complete Edition and the Endwalker expansion are on sale again. However, this time there is a limit. The deals are only available on Steam as part of the retailer’s annual Summer Sale. The PlayStation Store and Square Enix Online Store are selling both the game and expansion for their normal prices.

These are standard 50% off discounts. This means the Final Fantasy XIV Complete Edition is on sale for $29.99 instead of $59.99. That gets someone the base game, Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker. You also get 30 free days to play the game.

As for Endwalker, there are two options for it during the sale. The standard version of the game is $19.99 instead of $39.99. You can also get the Collectors Edition of the expansion for $29.99 instead of $59.99. The latter includes the Arion mount, a Death Scythe weapon for the Reaper job, and a Wind-up Porom minion.

These sorts of sales on the MMORPG aren't uncommon. For example, the last time it went on sale was in March 2023.

Final Fantasy XIV and Endwalker are available for the PS4, PS5, and PC. The Steam Summer Sale discounts on the MMORPG and expansion are only in effect until July 13, 2023.

HoYoVerse shared a second character tease for Honkai: Star Rail, with Fu Xuan taking the stage this time. This involved the splash art for the five-star unit. It also confirmed that she will use Quantum attacks and follow the Preservation path, which means she’ll use defensive abilities. Her art appearing now means we will likely see her on a 1.3 banner in the game.

We already met Fu Xuan in the Honkai: Star Rail story. She comes up during the Xianzhou Luofu Trailblaze Missions. She is head of the Divination Commission and is capable of using the Luofu’s Matrix of Prescience to determine things that are going to happen. She features most prominently in the “Omniscient Inquiry of Arcana” mission. However, we don’t actually get to see her fight.

This is the second 1.3 character to be teased. We also saw Imbibitor Lunae. He'll also be a five-star unit. However, he is a Destruction path person who uses Imaginary damage to attack foes.

One recent Fallout: New Vegas mod adds a murderous psychic tumbleweed called Windy to your party, further cementing the game as the best in the series. ‘Wait a second, that doesn’t make any sense,’ you might be saying about a game where people don’t use bedsheets to sleep. But the mod is only accessible with the Wild Wasteland trait turned on, which allows all manner of silly and unrealistic things to happen in-game.

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From today, fans can now play as iconic actor Nicolas Cage in Dead by Daylight.

Cage is available in the Public Test Build (Steam only), with the full Nicolas Cage Chapter available to purchase from 25th July across all platforms.

Cage is a Survivor and plays himself, with an actor-like moveset meant to reflect that. Check out the new trailer below.

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Tencent has made an investment into Lighthouse Games, a new studio founded by Playground Games co-founder and studio director Gavin Raeburn.

Raeburn left Playground Games last year, where he worked on several titles in the Forza Horizon series.

In late 2022, Raeburn founded Lighthouse Games. The studio aims to create a "new, genre-defining franchise", it says on its official website.

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After hours of dodging orcs and ducking spiders, I found Shelob’s lair. I’m a slave in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, performing tasks like collecting tags and herding animals for maybe a bite of rotted bread. I was aching to escape. Meeting Shelob seemed like the first real attempt at bargaining for freedom. So, I…

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The most recent The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom patch seems to have done away with a few popular glitches, a Reddit post suggests. Nintendo issued update 1.2.0 on July 5 in order to “improve the gameplay experience,” it wrote in its patch notes, and to burn through your infinite money reserves, apparently.

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One of the first bosses I encountered in Diablo IV was the Butcher. I was doing reasonably well up until that point and thought “sure, I’ll just take this guy out real quick.” That didn’t work out for me, butI’m not alone—-The Butcher is as challenging as he is rare. And until now, there hasn’t been much indication of…

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The Pokémon Company has launched official forums on its website. While it seems only natural to have an official place for your community to gather, I am praying for the moderation team’s good health because they have their work cut out for them.

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Danmachi Battle Chronicle pre-registration is now available. This free-to-play action-RPG mobile game based on Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? is releasing on August 24, 2023, but players can register now ready for the launch.

There are also pre-registration rewards available depending on the number of players signed up. Currently, the first two tiers are unlocked. This means that all pre-registered users will receive an Assist Guaranteed Gacha Ticket and 1,000 Selas. A third tier, adding an additional 1,000 Selas, will be unlocked when 500,000 users register for the game.

Danmachi Battle Chronicle is based on the Danmachi anime and manga series, also known as Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?. It focuses on Bell Cranel, a rookie adventurer who travels into an underground labyrinth known as the Dungeon to defeat monsters. The game follows the story of the anime, although it will contain original scenes created for it. It will also feature a soundtrack from Hitoshi Sakamoto’s Basiscape production company, which also worked on Elden Ring and Dissidia Final Fantasy.

On July 4, 2023, Nintendo shared the The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom patch 1.2.0. It both adds a new feature and fixes some potential problems. People will be able to get free items via news stories seen on the console now. They’ll also find eight main story missions and sidequests are now fixed, following bugs that kept some players from finishing them.

With the free items, those are tied to the Switch News channel on the console for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Apparently, going forward Nintendo will occasionally give people items to use in-games via those news stories. Clicking the link in them to start the game can grant them. Those with the game should subscribe to ensure they see them.

As for the quest progression issues fixed in the The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom patch, the following ones now won’t abruptly keep people from completing them.

• “Dyeing to Find It”
• “Hateno Village Research Lab”
• The Incomplete Stable”
• “Lurelin Village Restoration Project”
• ”A Mystery in the Depths”
• “Secret of the Ring Ruins”
• “Seeking the Pirate Hideout”
• “Village Attacked by Pirates”

Here are the full 1.2.0 patch notes for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom:

Masahiro Sakurai brought up Kid Icarus: Uprising on his YouTube channel. A new episode appeared dedicated to the 3DS game. Much of it is dedicated to how he ended up working on a title for the new (at the time) handheld, design choices, and hardships faced during development. However, he also mentioned how he'd "love to play [it] on a bigger screen with smoother graphics." But he also mentioned the difficulty that would come from possibly making that happen.

Here’s Sakurai’s full quote about his thoughts on the title and a possible sequel.

It’s a shame that it’s only lived on 3DS, as I’d love to play on a bigger screen with smoother graphics, but without a team around to work on it, crafting a follow-up seems difficult.

This is the full "Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games" episode discussing the title. He talked about it how he'd "love" to see it on a "bigger screen" at the 12:17 mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-uwRfckTs4&ab_channel=MasahiroSakuraionCreatingGames

This isn't the first time Kid Icarus: Uprising came up during "Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games." He discussed it during a November 2022 episode too. In that one, he also mentioned how “it sure would be nice to play [the game] on a home console.” He also wondered if it would ever get a port.

The second Fighting Pass for Street Fighter 6 launched and brings with it several stickers, music tracks, and avatar gear all themed around Rashid. The character himself does not currently have a release date, but is scheduled to appear as DLC sometime in Summer 2023.

The Fighting Pass includes music tracks, clothing for player avatars, stickers, and access to the classic game Hyper Dyne Side Arms. The pass will have a limited free track available, but the premium track can be unlocked for 250 fighter coins ($4.99). It is available now and will end on July 23, 2023.

Here's a picture going over the Street Fighter 6 Fighting Pass additions.
[caption id="attachment_971473" align="aligncenter" width="1200"] Image via Capcom on Twitter[/caption]

Rashid was originally announced as a DLC character for Street Fighter 6 back in April 2023. We'll see him appear alongside AKI who is set to join the roster in Autumn 2023. Ed and Akuma will be arriving in early 2024. All 4 characters are available as part of the Year 1 Character Pass for $29.99. Rashid is an acrobatic fighter utilizing wind-based techniques and hailing from the Middle East, though an exact country has not been specified.

On the day of our interview, Exo Rally Championship programmer and composer Rhys Lindsay was preparing for a race on a hostile alien planet, and feeling pretty good about his chances. He spent a full three minutes surveying the pockmarked, potentially lethal landscape from above with a drone, marking the most dangerous terrain in advance and picking out a relatively safe route between the checkpoints. “Alright,” he thought. “I’m going to smash this stage.”

Of course, it’s just as they say: no plan survives contact with unroaded planets wracked by extreme temperatures, meteor showers and atmospheric pressure unlike anything ever experienced on Earth. On the corner of the first checkpoint, Lindsay flipped his rover, snagging the vehicle on a rock that immediately broke his scanning systems and left him driving blind. By the time of our chat, though, he’s laughing. Exo Rally Championship is a racer for those who like to roll with the punches, quite literally - an anecdote generator for players who adore the challenge of preparing for the worst, and then adapting to changing circumstances on the fly.

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Sweltering summer heats are alright and all, but subscription service Game Pass is still adding new games for those of us who would rather stay inside. Microsoft have announced the next batch of games coming to the service in July, headlined by the likes of dino-shooter Exoprimal and other-player-shooter Insurgency: Sandstorm.

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This Friday on July 7th, Frontier Development's Warhammer RTS Age Of Sigmar: Realms Of Ruin is holding its first open beta test for its 1v1 multiplayer mode. Players will be able to go head to head with two of the game's four factions - the golden fantasy knights of the Stormcast Eternals and the sneaky green stink lads of the Orruk Kruleboyz - giving us our first taste of how they'll handle in battle, and the kinds of powerplays we'll be making with their respective (and rather handsome) tabletop miniature recreations.

And having played four rounds of its 1v1 matches already at a press event last week, it's quite the thrill - and I say that as someone with no real attachment to Warhammer or Age Of Sigmar's specific lore legacy. The Stormcast Eternals and their flying hammer brutes are just as devastating as you'd imagine, while the lads lads lads and their Killaboss Kruleboyz are challenging late-game bloomers that will give even hardened strategy game veterans plenty to sink their teeth into. Both factions are great fun, and I'm very much looking forward to jumping back in this weekend.

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It's all change this year in the world of video game football, as EA - after some seriously big-money tussling - readies what will be its first major football game not to carry the FIFA branding in nearly 30 years. And now, thanks to a new leak, we've got a good idea of when EA Sports FC will likley be showing up - which, unsurprisingly, is pretty much slap bang in the same late-September slot FIFA has occupied for the last few years.

According to data miner billbil-kun - who has a amassed a pretty compelling back catalogue of accurate calls when it comes to video game leaks (Sony's monthly PlayStation Plus line-up being a particular specialty) - EA Sports FC will release on 29th September this year.

Given that FIFA 2023 and the series entry before it both launched on 27th September in their respective release years, it's hardly a huge surprise to learn EA's new FIFA-in-all-but-name game will follow suit, but it does give us an intriguing window to watch as we prepare to see how EA Sports FC will fair without its familiar branding.

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Assassin's Creed Mirage will include an interactive history feature available in the game at launch, allowing you to delve deeper into the real world version of the game's Baghdad setting.

This option appears to be an alternative to the more involved Discovery Tour mode that popped up some time post-launch in Assassin's Creed Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla. Perhaps befitting Mirage's more condensed nature, this option too sounds less involved.

Appropriately titled the "History of Baghdad", the option is described as being similar to the series' traditional Codex, and has been built in partnership with a series of museums and international historical institutions.

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