Halo Infinite is shaping up to be the ultimate, never-ending Halo, complete with tons of adventures, exploration, and discoveries. 343i gives more clues on what lays in wait for gamers in 2021.

Halo Infinite is basically an RPG that's more similar to Ubisoft games than linear campaigns. It has an online live campaign with co-op and a strong emphasis on replayability, complete with enemy skirmishes, missions, and tons of stuff to explore and unlock. Halo has always had little discoveries and secrets peppered throughout the campaigns, but Infinite will take things to a new level.

In a recent Halo Waypoint update, 343i teases Infinite's new playground and promises unique opportunities for discovery. Not everything will be on the ground; some things you'll have to fly to using vehicles like the Banshee.

Amazon reveals its Twitch Prime freebies for March 2021, and the offering includes one of the most visceral indie games ever made.

Prepare yourself for penitence! Blasphemous, the brutal platformer from The Game Kitchen, will be available free for all Amazon Prime subscribers on March 1. Just link your account to Twitch Prime to unlock this stylish, blood-soaked indie.

While you're at it, be sure to grab the huge SNK game pack while it's still free. The collection includes a ton of classic games from franchises like Metal Slug, Fatal Fury, King of Fighters, and Samurai Shodown. The SNK pack will be available free until March 31.

Sony plans to unlock the PlayStation 5's expandable SSD storage slot this summer, sources tell Bloomberg's Takashi Mochizuki.

The PlayStation 5's limited storage is a pain point that's caused headaches since the system launched. The PS5 console ships with a 825GB PCIe 4.0 SSD, but only 667GB of it is usable. That's not much considering games like Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War and Cyberpunk 2077 take up over 100GB a piece. Luckily, the console has an expansion slot that supports high-end PC-grade NVMe PC SSDs, but the M.2 port is currently inactive because only specialized premium drives will work with the console. The PS5 requires expansion SSDs that match or exceed the base 5.5GB/sec I/O speeds, which are made possible by the console's custom 10-channel memory controller. Sony cautions gamers not to buy NVMe SSDs for PS5 expansion until they formally announce compatibility lists.

"We will be supporting certain M.2 SSDs. These are internal drives you can get on the open market and install in a bay on the PlayStation 5. They connect to the custom I/O unit just like our SSD does so they can take full advantage of the decompression, I/O co-processors, and all the other features," PlayStation 5 architect Mark Cerny said in March 2020.

Destiny 2 will get cross-play this fall, allowing Xbox, PlayStation, and PC gamers to play together in PVE and Crucible.

Bungie just outlined a bunch of content and changes coming to Destiny 2 in Season 14 and Season 15. The major changes for Season 14, which kicks off in May, includes tweaks across subclasses, the return of the classic Vault of Glass raid, and a new lowered power cap raise by 10.

Season 15 is where things really start to heat up. Cross-play is finally coming to Destiny 2 to complement cross-saves, and this feature will usher in a new level of consistent engagement across the live game. Bungie didn't give an exact date when cross-play will be implemented, but Season 15 should start sometime around mid-August of this year.

A new report from Bloomberg outlines what exactly went wrong with Stadia, painting a grim picture of overreaching, overspending, and mismanagement.

Just a year after release, Google has pulled the plug on Stadia and closed all first-party studios. The service is now a storefront platform rather than the innovative new ecosystem that Google promised would go up against PlayStation, Xbox, and the Nintendo Switch. That plan failed for many reasons.

Sources tell Bloomberg's Jason Schreier that Stadia was rife with mismanagement. Google shelled out millions acquiring studios and setting up first-party games (which were later cancelled, with the studios defunded and closed) in a whirlwind of spending. Rather than starting small, Google rushed the market with a pocket full of cash, overpromises, content, and innovative features.

Eager to break farther into mobile gaming, Square Enix is making a Final Fantasy 7 battle royale game for iOS and Android. Yes, really.

With Final Fantasy 7 The First Soldier, Square Enix hopes to tap the billion-dollar market that PUBG Mobile (and soon, Apex Legends) has been enjoying. The game is a mix of first-person and third-person shooter, complete with action-based combat straight out of games like Final Fantasy XV and FF7 Remake.

Classic magical spells like firaga, thundaga, blizzaga, and barrier also show in combat, offering a unique mix of unorthodox gunplay and wizadry. There looks to be both PVP chaos and PVE boss battles lifted straight out of the most recent Final Fantasy releases.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake is coming to the PlayStation 5 as a next-gen re-release, but it won't be cheap.

Square Enix is bringing Final Fantasy 7 Remake over to the PS5 with high-end features like a 4K graphics mode, a 60FPS mode, overhauled texture, lighting, and weather effects, and ultra-fast loading via the system's 5.5GB/sec PCIe 4.0 SSD. Sadly, the publisher is also embracing the new $69.99 standard for next-gen games.

The company's storefront confirms the new $69.99 price tag, and we should expect new mainline Square Enix titles to adopt this pricing on next-gen hardware (although Outriders, the new game from People Can Fly, is $59.99 on PS5).

March 2021's free PlayStation Plus lineup was just revealed, and it's one of the best in the service's history with Square Enix's blockbuster Final Fantasy 7 Remake headlining the collection. There's just one small catch.

Starting Tuesday, March 2, PlayStation Plus owners can grab the massively popular Final Fantasy 7 Remake for free. This is the PS4 version, though, and won't include any upgrades. In fact, the free PS Plus version isn't eligible for FF7 Remake's free PS5 upgrade when it releases on June 10, 2021.

If you download FF7R on PS Plus, the only way you can play it on PS5 is if you re-buy the new next-gen Final Fantasy 7 Integrade re-release. It's a bit of a bummer but the upside is your PS4 saves can cross over to the PS5 version.

The popular Virtual Desktop app just got a surprise update today. After more than a year of refusing to allow wireless streaming of PC VR games on the Oculus Quest through Virtual Desktop, Facebook has approved the feature and enabled it on the official Oculus store.

Guy Godin's Virtual Desktop is one of the most popular VR applications. The software has been around since the earliest days of consumer VR and its had many iterations over the years. Virtual Desktop enables you to access your Windows desktop and all its features and applications in a virtual window within a virtual environment, including PC games and other applications.

When Oculus launched the Quest back in May 2019, Virtual Desktop launched on the standalone VR platform, and with it came a unique feature that Facebook was not fond of. The Quest version of Virtual Desktop would enable you to access SteamVR content and stream it wirelessly to your Quest headset, giving you a full untethered PC VR experience. Facebook allowed Virtual Desktop to remain on the Oculus Store, but it forced the developer to remove the streaming feature.

Valve released a significant update to the SteamVR platform on Wednesday. Steam VR version 1.16.8 now supports the OpenXR 1.0 API, giving developers an easy path for cross-platform game releases.

Khronos Group revealed the OpenXR 1.0 specifications more than a year and a half ago. It has taken a while, but VR companies are finally getting around to embracing Khronos Group's plans. The idea behind OpenXR is to remove barriers that prevent developers from supporting all VR platforms. With OpenXR, theoretically, you can build a game once and play it with any hardware through any platform.

OpenXR is an application interface layer that interprets instructions from any game engine or XR platforms, such as Unity or WebXR. The OpenXR layer translates the instructions to work with any hardware, including Oculus Quest, HTC Vive, Magic Leap, or HoloLens 2.