Forza Horizon 5 is the biggest, most content-heavy racing game in the franchise. With that level of ambition undoubtedly comes a thorough development process with plenty of technical and scoping dilemmas. And yet, Playground Games is once again finishing strong. Yesterday, the studio announced that Forza Horizon 5 has officially gone gold. The game releases next month, but it's already taken the lead. 

A post on the Forza Motorsport website made the celebratory announcement and revealed Playground Games' extensive collaboration with Latin American music artists as well as a list of original songs that can be heard in-game on the various radio stations:

UPDATE 3.15pm UK: Oculus has now provided the following statement on changes to its Resident Evil 4 VR version:

"Oculus Studios, Armature, and Capcom partnered closely to remaster Resident Evil 4 from the ground up for VR," a Facebook spokesperson told Eurogamer today. "This includes immersive environments and high-resolution graphics. It also includes select changes to in-game dialogue and animations that we believe will update Resident Evil 4 for a modern audience."

Read more

Hello Games has announced a new Halloween event for No Man's Sky in the form of Expedition Four: Emergence. The seasonal event, which begins today, will feature a new narrative -- the first the game mode has had -- as well as several gameplay features and enhancements.

In Expedition Four: Emergence, players will find themselves stranded on a planet called Wasan, which has been “ravaged by dust storms” and “infested with Titan Worms”. Players are tasked with locating the Titan Worm impact sites, destroying Hungering Tendrils and collecting Vile Spawn that’s left behind. Cleansing the planets of “cursed dust” and sandworms will eventually unravel the dark narrative to the player and unlock exclusive rewards along the way.

Alongside the new Expedition, the update also brings with it an assortment of new gameplay features, including a varied collection of sandworms that players will encounter as well as revamped particle effects for meteors, muzzle flashes, explosion, burrowing fauna dust, billowing smoke, and laser impacts. Following on from the companions update that was released earlier this year, the game will also add the ability to tame and grow a sandworm companion to feed, pet, ride, and explore the universe with. They can also fly.

Today Hello Games launched the fourth Expedition event within No Man’s Sky, titled “Emergence.”

The expedition is designed to celebrate Halloween, but Hello Games has become well-known for going all out with pretty much everything they put in No Man’s Sky, so the event will have a full-fledged narrative and a lot of gameplay and rewards to enjoy.

“In Expedition Four: Emergence, travellers will find themselves stranded on planet Wasan, a barren world ravaged by dust storms and infested with Titan Worms. It is up to you to locate the Titan Worm impact sites, destroy the wretched Hungering Tendrils, and collect the Vile Spawn that lingers behind. The vessels of the many mouths must be purged!

As travellers cleanse planets of cursed dust and hunt the titanic sandworms, they will unravel the threads of a dark narrative. Complete the expedition route to reveal the history of a dark cult, and ultimately confront the Atlas with evidence of this indelible stain upon the universe.

The beast awakens in Expedition Four: Emergence, our first Expedition with a narrative throughout. There are also a bunch of improvements and new content to be enjoyed across the game.”

The developers also added in a few tweaks for the game as a whole, including more biological variation for sandworms across the universe and improved particles effects.

Of course, you can earn sandoworm-themed rewards starting from a casque all the way to a majestic sandworm mount.

You can check out the trailer below.

Dusk is a dark, pixelated, nightmarish boomer shooter - and it left a strong impact when it first shipped on PC back in 2018. In fact, it's one of my top ten games of that year, and it's still brilliant even today. On the surface, the game looks like it stepped right out of 1997, doing a remarkable job of capturing the Quake aesthetic, but beneath the hood, you may be surprised to learn that this is actually a Unity engine project. That's no problem for a modern PC, but what about Nintendo Switch? Dusk is coming soon to the console hybrid and I'm happy to report that the Switch conversion is excellent.

Now, in theory that shouldn't be too difficult, right? After all, Dusk is a retro-stylised shooter, built to approximate the look and feel of a mid-90s, software-rasterised polygonal first-person action game. Dusk does a commendable job of mimicking this very specific Quake-like look. Its hand-painted textures, designed to seamlessly tile across large planes, lack any sort of bilinear interpolation. These textures proudly flaunt raw, pixelated texels, boldly eschewing mip-maps as they're slathered across every map. The maps and the denizens populating them are made up of precious few polygons lending the game an abstract appearance - the silhouette of its jagged architecture and low colour assets strengthen the nightmarish aesthetic Dusk so beautifully delivers.

Read more

The physical card game will also feature all of the Nine Titans.

The post Attack on Titan Final Season Card Game Will Appear in Japan appeared first on Siliconera.

Yikes Scoob The move away from Activision was supposed to be a boon for Bungie, but it’s turned out to...

The post Bungie will charge standard edition Destiny 2 players for dungeons, on top of microtransactions and season passes appeared first on Destructoid.

The latest chapter in the ongoing Activision Blizzard controversy around the treatment of women in its workplace has unfolded. The Call of Duty and Warcraft publisher confirmed it has fired 20 people while it also is trying to pause California's lawsuit due to claims of ethics violations.

Activision Blizzard executive vice president for corporate affairs, Fran Townsend, sent an email to staffers this week addressing the latest developments, and this note was shared online. Townsend, who came under fire at the onset of the lawsuits for her initial reaction to the news and her social media presence, said Activision Blizzard's future "depends on fostering a company culture where all feel safe and heard." One part of this is that Activision Blizzard needs to prove to its employees that when they speak up about any issue, they are heard.

"I have been quietly listening over the last few months to your comments, concerns, and observations. I am grateful to everyone who shared their points of view--especially those who challenged us to do better," she said. "It's important to me that you know how seriously I take this, and how committed I am to the next steps we will take together. We are working tirelessly to ensure that, moving forward, this is a place where people are not only heard, but empowered."

Townsend said it has become clear that Activision Blizzard needs to do more and act faster to respond to the concerns of its employees. To that end, the company said it has grown in compliance team and is now putting a greater focus on "how we handle claims and communicate with the members of our team who are involved."

Amazon is now working on enabling New World region transfers after a vociferous player backlash.

Earlier this month, Amazon U-turned on letting New World players transfer their characters to a server in a different region.

Read more

The board game will be multilingual with rule books written in Japanese, English, German, and French.

The post Fullmetal Alchemist Board Game Will Appear in March 2022 appeared first on Siliconera.

Last month Sony finally upgraded the PlayStation 5 firmware with support for additional storage via NVMe M.2 solid-state drives (that is, the latest, fast models of SSDs). While not quite as simple as popping open the lid and slotting a chip, with the right hardware and a single small Phillips head screwdriver, the…

Read more...

Microsoft's The Initiative studio is working with Tomb Raider studio Crystal Dynamics on a new Perfect Dark game, and now a top Xbox boss has commented on the unusual partnership. Speaking to Kinda Funny, Xbox Studios boss Matt Booty acknowledged that this is not a "standard situation" because Crystal Dynamics is not usually known to be a co-development studio (and it's owned by Square Enix), but Microsoft found a way to make it work.

This happened thanks to personal relationships, and specifically Darrell Gallagher, the former Crystal Dynamics boss who now runs The Initiative. Gallagher's connections helped drive the deal, but it's also about how Crystal Dynamics is well-suited to help The Initiative on a project of a similar type to the new Perfect Dark.

Booty said Crystal Dynamics has a "great pedigree, good success, [and] just a lot of skill," and thanks to Gallagher's connections, the two sides came to an agreement.

"They've got a team with experience building the kind of thing that we're building, who's worked with some of the people that's now available. It was not a standard situation, because they are not usually billing themselves as a co-development studio like many places are, but we found a way to make it work," Booty said. "And I think it was through some of the personal connections we've got. So I'm excited about it in terms of what it adds on to the team that we've already got there at The Initiative. It's too precious of a resource in the industry right now to not jump on that."

Batman: Arkham City is now 10 years old, and looking back at the last decade of interactive entertainment, the history books show a game that built on its own substructure and gave fans a far more polished and confident dive into Bruce Wayne's world. While Batman: Arkham Asylum's arrival began a new era of superhero games, Arkham City is arguably the genre's foundation: a stunning exploration of the title character in a sandbox filled with Easter eggs and supervillains that became the go-to inspiration for games that followed in its wake.

Developer Rocksteady Studios had already set a high benchmark for itself with 2009's Arkham Asylum, an addictive cocktail of stealth, action, and detective work within the claustrophobic jail that housed Batman's rogues gallery, but Arkham City amplified everything memorable about that game and expanded on its story. With Arkham Asylum all but destroyed in the Joker's rampage, a large portion of Gotham City had been turned into a makeshift prison that even Snake Plissken would have trouble escaping from, filled to the brim with dangerous inmates, and used as a dumping ground for any opposition to Gotham's new political regime.

Spoilers for a game that's now a decade old below

Rocksteady kicked off the story with what felt like a one-two punch of Bruce Wayne being thrown into the suburban slammer while its warden--Hugo Strange--taunted him with knowledge of his alter-ego, and from there the story continued to escalate until it reached its cataclysmic conclusion. The Joker's death is as hard-hitting now as it was a decade ago, thanks to actors Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill delivering scene-stealing performances in the game.

Christopher Ayres, the voice actor behind the English dub of the iconic villain, Frieza, in Dragon Ball Z Kai and onward, has died. 

His partner, Krystal LaPorte, announced the news on Twitter on October 19, stating that Ayres died the night before. He was surrounded by LaPorte, his mother, and his brother when he died. He was 56 years old. 

pic.twitter.com/SvhMEeMWVk

— Krystal LaPorte (@WowSuchKrystal) October 19, 2021

"Chris loved you all," LaPorte wrote on Twitter. "How much he loved other people filled the vast majority of our conversations. To those of you who truly loved him back, thank you. To those of you who stayed in touch, checked on him, reminded him that he was so, so much more than his job, you were the fuel of his fight. You fed the dreams of a future that kept him going longer than any normal person could go." 

LaPorte said that for anyone asking if there's anything they can do at this moment, "please be more like Chris." A cause of death was not announced. 

I’ll bring the Pepsi MAX If you’re feeling the need for speed, then you might be in luck, as Ubisoft’s...

The post Riders Republic open trial kicks off tomorrow appeared first on Destructoid.

Voting is open to the general public.

The post Final Fantasy XIV Nominated for Two Golden Joysticks Awards appeared first on Siliconera.

Halloween-themed ‘Emergence’ is first expedition with a narrative

Continue reading…

This week sees the long-awaited arrival of Denis Villeneuve's Dune in UK cinemas, and, not to be outdone, No Man's Sky is getting in on the big, wormy sci-fi action too, giving its burrowing space sausages a terrifying makeover as part of its latest update.

This newest addition to Hello Games' ever-expanding exploratory space sim is described by the developer as an 'accidental' Halloween update, and primarily takes the form of a brand-new limited-time Expedition event, titled Emergence - the first to feature narrative elements.

Read more

The next PlayStation 5 firmware update is out now, but don't get too excited. The new update doesn't do much in terms of adding new features. Instead, it's focused on improving system performance.

Update 21.02-04.03.00 has a single line of patch notes: "This system software update improves system performance." This is the second system performance-focused update this month, following an earlier patch on October 7.

There is always the chance, too, that this new update secretly did more than the patch notes state, though there is no immediate evidence that this is the case.

The system performance updates in October followed a much bigger patch in September that added M.2 drive support, introduced 3D audio support for TV speakers, and made a series of other quality-of-life updates.

In other news, the PS5 is approaching its first birthday in November 2021. The console has sold more than 10 million units so far, despite the ongoing semiconductor shortage.

There's a new Lego Star Wars game coming out next month.

Lego Star Wars: Castaways is described as an "online social, action-adventure" game in which you get to build and customise your own in-game Lego minifigure character. It launches exclusively on the Apple Arcade subscription service on 19th November.

Read more

Chris Ayres, perhaps best known as Frieza’s English language voice actor, has passed away. Besides the iconic Dragon Ball character, Ayres also voiced Kei Kurono in Gantz, and Shingen Takeda in Sengoku Basara. He was 56 years old.

Read more...

Bungie has announced that Destiny 2: Witch Queen's new dungeons will only be available to those who buy the more expensive digital deluxe edition or pay for them separately.

Writing on Reddit, Bungie's Chris Shannon explained, "Hey everyone. We’ve seen some debate around the new dungeon content and wanted to clarify how it will be delivered next year."

Shannon shared that The Witch Queen's digital deluxe edition comes with all four seasons of content in 2022 and the two new dungeons. Players who buy the standard edition can pay for an upgrade to the deluxe edition or they can buy the dungeons separately.

"We will also be offering a separate way for you to purchase the Dungeons in the future, but they will not be included in the Season passes," Shannon said. "We will share more info on this closer to when this content is set to go live."

Pricing for the standalone dungeons access has not been announced yet.

The Reddit post where Shannon shared this information is flooded with negative comments, and people are similarly voicing their concerns on Twitter and other social media.

Destiny 2: The Witch Queen launches in February 2022, which is shaping up to be a very, very busy month for new releases, with Elden Ring joining the group that launching that month.

For lots more, check out GameSpot's roundup of everything we know about Destiny 2: The Witch Queen.

Amazon is giving New World players "The Stoic" in-game title and the "Waiting" emote for free to make up for the MMO's terrible launch server queues.

When New World launched last month it exploded in popularity, becoming the fifth most-popular game on Steam of all-time by concurrent players.

Read more

This includes a look at the game modes that will appear in Danganronap S Ultimate Summer Camp.

The post New Danganronpa Decadence Trailer Showcases Different Games appeared first on Siliconera.

Dead by Daylight is receiving criticism online following the news its Pinhead character model, introduced in its latest Hellraiser content, has been made available for NFTs.

The multiplayer title's developer Behaviour Interactive shared on Twitter that it worked with a company called Boss Protocol "over several months to adapt in-game models for use as NFTs".

Read more

Update, 10/20/21:

The official Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy Twitter account has revealed that the game's PC version has been further optimized and that, as a result, the final launch day download will be 80GB. This comes two days after Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy's Steam page said 150GB of space was needed to download the game. 

Hey everyone! We wanted to give you an update on the final size of the PC version of the game, which will not be 150 GB. The team is in the last stages of optimizing the final game and we can confirm the file size will be approximately 80 GB at launch.

— Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy (@GOTGTheGame) October 19, 2021

Original story follows...

Original Story, 10/18/21:

After a chance meeting with a Disney representative, it seemed possible to put Sora in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

The post Sakurai Says Putting Sora Into Smash Bros Happened by Chance appeared first on Siliconera.

Atlus is still far from done with its series of trailers showcasing the 200+ demons of its upcoming JRPG Shin Megami Tensei V one by one.

This time around we get to see the gameplay of Obaryon, a demon from Japanese folklore that debuted in the series with Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner in 1995.

You can watch it in action below.

Good news for your PC: Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy won't actually require 150 GB of free hard drive space. The developer is optimizing the final game for launch, and thanks to these efforts, the file size will be about 80 GB--about half of what was originally projected.

For more, check out the other Guardians of the Galaxy PC requirements.

The developer also clarified what fans can expect for a file size on console. Players will need about 50 GB of free space on PS4 and PS5. Presumably this is about the same on Xbox, which is already available for pre-load. Pre-loading on PlayStation begins 48 hours before the game releases, while there is no word yet on if pre-loading will be supported on Steam.

Want to know more about mangrove swamps in Minecraft? At Minecraft Live 2021, Mojang revealed that mangrove swamps - one of the options in the biome vote way back in 2019 - are finally coming to Minecraft. Many of the ideas mentioned back then, including mangrove trees and frogs, will be key features of the mangrove swamp biome.

This guide will explain everything that you need to know about mangrove swamps in Minecraft, including when mangrove swamps will be released, what you will find in the new biome, and how to grow your own mangrove trees with propagules.

Read more

Today Level-5 released a brand new trailer of its upcoming mecha action JRPG Megaton Musashi.

The trailer mixes gameplay with parts of the opening cutscene, and it’s rather epic. It also features the opening theme song “Metal Samurai” performed by Mana.

You can watch it below.

Megaton Musashi will release in Japan on November 11, 2021, for PS4 and Nintendo Switch, just in time to enjoy the visibility from the anime (which debuted a few weeks ago). It features a collaboration with Jump, so it includes plenty of tropes and a visual style that can appeal to Weekly Shonen Jump readers.

The game was supposed to come for PS5 as well, but the version for Sony’s new console simply disappeared without an explanation with a recent reveal. At the moment, at least to my knowledge, Level-5 has not commented on this and has simply gone ahead without mentioning the PS5 ever again.

A majority of these sales came from the PC release of the games.

The post Danganronpa Sales Surpass 5 Million Units Worldwide appeared first on Siliconera.

Mark Zuckerberg famously changed Facebook's name from The Facebook to just Facebook, but it appears an even bigger change-up is in store for the company.

According The Verge, Facebook will announce a new name to better reflect its "focus on building the metaverse." The name change could be announced at the Facebook Connect event on October 28, or it might happen sooner. Whatever the case, The Verge reports that Facebook might become an app within a wider ecosystem, not unlike how Google announced a parent company called Alphabet that now houses its various product divisions, including Google.

Some of Facebook's other popular brands include WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus, and more. A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment when approached by The Verge.

None of this is surprising, as Zuckerberg has said his ambition is for Facebook to transition from "people seeing us primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company." To that end, Facebook now has more than 10,000 people working on various hardware products, including augmented reality glasses, to help the metaverse come to life.

As for what the new name might be, The Verge said even senior leadership may be in the dark about it as Zuckerberg tries to keep it a secret. "A possible name could have something to do with Horizon, the name of the still-unreleased VR version of Facebook-meets-Roblox that the company has been developing for the past few years," the site reported.

If Facebook does do a rebrand, it would come not long after whistleblower Frances Haugen released sensitive company documents to The Wall Street Journal that detailed claims of Facebook acting as a harm to society.

EA Sports has outlined FIFA 22's next big patch.

The highlight here is the handful of changes made to gameplay, specifically nerfs to the AI.

Read more