Gaming - Page 786

Fallout 76 does indeed have big glaring issues, and an ex-Obsidian developer shares his thoughts about Bethesda's new online-only survival sim.

Hearing what other developers think about big new games is always fascinating, especially since they're familiar with the rigors of game creation. Thanks to Fallout: New Vegas, this goes double for Obsidian Entertainment devs, and one such creator expressed their opinions about Bethesda's new experimental online Fallout game. Ex-Obsidian dev David Lockwood says Fallout 76 has lots of problems, but it also has lots of potential--a sentiment I echoed in my Fallout 76 impressions.

"I am completely in love with this game, despite's its flaws. It has many, many flaws but I can see and already feel the potential," Lockwood said in a lengthy Reddit review post.

Fallout 76's future may be as bleak as its NPC-less Appalachia wasteland.

Fallout 76 is a brave experiment at its core, and it took lots of courage for Bethesda to release an online game with so many problems. There's lots and lots of risk involved here, much of which Bethesda has already suffered from: alienating core fans, terrible reviews, public disdain on social media and damning PR, and ultimately underlining the belief that the studio only releases broken, buggy games. All of these things and more could mean Fallout 76 doesn't grow very much from its failures and may not evolve into the experience it really should be.

Although Bethesda and its live service teams undoubtedly have a vision of what Fallout 76 can become, the game's continued development depends on many factors. Gaming is a business, after all, and these companies are in the biz to make money. Sales figures are hugely important to corporate execs at Bethesda's parent ZeniMax Media. All of the negative reviews, press, and player sentiment is likely damaging Fallout 76's potential sales (and current sales thanks to refunds), thus dramatically shrinking the gateway the point of sale represents for live games.

We are only a couple of weeks out from the official launch of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and it appears some very lucky pre-ordering fans have already received their copies.

It appears that some retailers have released a few copies of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate prematurely and they have arrived in some players' hands. Before I continue reporting on this, I would advise anyone who doesn't want spoilers for the game to stop reading now and avoid as much Smash news as possible. The fact that a user has already received their copy of Ultimate could suggest that other people have as well, meaning that spoilers will no doubt be posted online ahead of the games official launch.

The images that I have provided come from a Twitter post of the user revealing that he/she has already received their copy of Smash Ultimate. The images quickly were saved by users who saw the post, but now as writing this the Twitter post has been removed. We can see from the images that the user received the Nintendo Switch cartridge and is using the game as intended. I would assume that no one would be present on the online service as the majority of masses still haven't received their pre-order copies. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will be releasing exclusively on the Nintendo Switch on December 7th.

Bandai Namco have announced today that they will be bringing JUMP FORCE fans a Premium Edition to purchase. The Premium Edition will be arriving with a bunch of goodies but will set you back a pretty penny.

According to the announcement on the Bandai website, the Premium Edition will include the full game with additional 9 characters, a steelbook, 3 art boards and a set of postcards that give buyers a "unique souvenir of each places visited in the game and get a nice view of all the battle stages."

This Premium Edition will be for players that want everything they can get with the coming JUMP FORCE and don't mind paying the extra money. According the Amazon listing, the Premium Edition will be coming in at a price of $260, view the listing here. JUMP FORCE is planned for release on February 26th for the PC, Xbox One and PS4. In other news about JUMP FORCE, Cell, Piccolo, Kenshin and Shishio have been announced for JUMP FORCE's roster, check that story out here.

One of the most well known games published by Square Enix is undoubtedly Yoko Taro's NieR: Automata, now news has surfaced regarding a special edition for the title which is planned for PS4 and PC.

Before an official announcement could be made, the Entertainment Software Rating Board has revealed that the a special edition titled 'NieR: Automata Game of the YoRHa Edition' will be coming to the PC and PS4. Unfortunately, this means that there would be no new content coming with the re-release, but more so this edition will be similar to that of the Xbox One's Nier: Automata - Become as Gods Edition.

The Become as Gods Edition arrived on the Xbox One with the DLC "3C3C1D119440927" which blessed the game with the Xbox One X's 4K display capabilities. It is unclear whether the Game of the YoRHa Edition will be bringing visual and performance enhancements to the PS4 or the PC but it is entirely possible. We should hear some official announcement regarding the coming special edition release sometime soon. For more information, visit the official NieR: Automata website here.

When I first put Zelda: Breath of the Wild into my Nintendo Switch I was immediately shocked at how I was just thrown into this vast world with barely any direction. The game wants you to make your own story and encourages you to do so, this is why Breath of the Wild isn't linked to other Zelda games lore wise.

Despite Breath of the Wild adapting aspects and having similarities from previous Zelda titles, when looked at it from a lore standpoint there is no relation. This news was confirmed by the Lead Producer of Breathe of the Wild and long time Producer of the Zelda franchise, Eiji Aonuma. Aonuma said "In books like the recently released The Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia, we revealed where each Zelda game fell on a timeline and how their stories related, but we didn't do that for Breath of the Wild."

Aonuma continues "There is a reason for that. With this game, we saw just how many players were playing in their own way and had those reactions I just mentioned. We realized that people were enjoying imagining the story that emerged from the fragmental imagery we were providing. If we defined a restricted timeline, then there would be a definitive story, and it would eliminate the room for imagination, which wouldn't be as fun." Aonuma further explains that Nintendo noticed that many players were already throughly enjoying the world that they were immersed in, and for this reason "We want players to be able to continue having fun imagining this world even after they are finished with the game, so, this time, we decided that we would avoid making clarifications. I hope that everyone can find their own answer, in their own way."

After the reveal of Piranha Plant in the latest Super Smash Bros dedicated Direct, many fans of the series were disappointed with the development choice Smash Director Masahiro Sakurai made, here is why Sakurai chose Piranha Plant.

If you have been following the Smash Bros. series and have been reading up on what Sakurai is like when developing these games you probably already know that he loves to keep his fan base guessing. Sakurai drops hints for coming characters, never confirming their inclusion or even acknowledging the developing conspiracies surrounding a supposed hint. In other words he loves to mess with the Smash fan base and throw us off at any chance he can get, the Piranha Plant reveal was one of those chances.

As I reported yesterday, Sakurai sat down with Gameinformer to discuss development details of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and throughout that interview the question was raised about why he choose to include Piranha Plant in the games final roster. Despite "too much focus on the surprise element when we introduce a new fighter" as "The surprise element quickly fades once the announcement has been made." The choice of including Piranha Plant was made due to Sakurai believing "it's important to have a good balance as a game. In the past titles in the series, Mr. Game & Watch, R.O.B. and Duck Hunt Dog were some of the examples we offered outside of people's typical expectations."

Blizzard is working on plenty of new games but the mobile-based Diablo Immortal and the developer was absolutely slammed by criticism, but today is a new day and now we have rumors that Warcraft is going to be turned into a Pokemon GO-inspired mobile game.

According to a new interview with Blizzard from Kotaku, a new Warcraft game is in development for the mobile world. According to sources, Kotaku said "a Warcraft version of Pokemon GO" is in development. Cory Stockton, Lead Designer on the game and had worked on World of Warcraft previously, is a huge Pokemon fan. He said that plenty of Blizzard employees play Pokemon GO competitively at the Blizzard HQ everyday.

The new Warcraft game is similar, but not identical to Pokemon GO with Stockton saying Blizzard's new game has "a lot more to it" than Pokemon GO, and will have a single player element.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is being updated with developer Nixxes and publisher Eidos Montreal announcing the new update improves multi-GPU stability, voice chat functionality for co-op multiplayer, and much more.

The new update also includes fixes for problems with things like stereoscopic 3D being enabled under DX12, which would normally crash Shadow of the Tomb Raider on specific rigs, which should now be fixed. Nixxes has also tweaked the game data to drop HDD space use with smaller downloads of Shadow of the Tomb Raider for new gamers, but this new patch is just 5GB.

Here's the full PC Patch #7 notes for Shadow of the Tomb Raider:

Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most hyped games of all time and now that we've had a proper look at what to expect from CD Projekt RED's most ambitious game ever, small nuggets of what to expect from the game are coming from weird places... like the official Facebook page for the game.

A representative of CDPR answered a fan question over Messenger, with the person asking how big the game world will be compared to The Witcher 3. The rep replied with: "Night City holds 6 districts, but I can't give you an exact number on square meters, because no one counted this yet. Also, this is tricky for an urban environment - Night City has lots of buildings and these buildings have floors".

CDPR adds: "You can have 120 square meters of space technically taking up 60m2 of space. In a tall building, and we will have many of them explorable, each flood can house a lot of activities. Floors stack. The Witcher 3 was, in a way, much flatter - the activities were scattered. Here, the world can be huge, but it can be huge upwards, or downwards".

United Kingdom regulators find no causation between lootboxes purchased by young gamers and problem gambling behaviors.

In its new Young People and Gambling 2018 report the U.K. Gambling Commission reveals some interesting statistics.

The study, which questioned 2,865 young people about between the ages of 11 and 16 about all forms of gambling (electronic, card-based gaming, personal bets), found that 31% or 888 people in the group had either spent money on lootboxes. The awareness rate for lootboxes is quite high, too; 54% of the group, or 1,547 people, knew they could spend money on in-game items but only 888 of them actually did. This means the majority of the sample who knew about lootboxes, or roughly 57%, bought them.

The Nintendo Switch's latest 6.2.0 firmware may have closed off homebrewing, emulation, and piracy on the handheld-console hybrid.

For quite some time Switch hackers and modders have been one step ahead in the cat-and-mouse game they play with Nintendo. Thanks to a recovery mode exploit, hackers have been able to boot up a customized OS to run illegally downloaded games, play homebrew games made by amateur devs, emulate old-school retro games, and even enable external hard drive support for the Switch. As Motherboard reports, the world of Switch hacking is quite expansive and tumultuous.

But Nintendo has now delivered a striking blow to the hacking scene...or at the very least created a large speed bump. The Switch's latest 6.2.0 firmware patch secures the console's boot-up functionality and apparently fixes the Tegra X1 exploit. Furthermore, all Switch owners are now required to immediately download and install the update in order to connect to the eShop. Hackers typically pirate games directly from the eShop by tricking the servers in specific ways, and while this may not do anything about the existing offline-only games already installed on pre-6.2.0 devices, it temporarily prevents hackers from getting any new ones.

Red Dead Redemption II's monumental success has stock firms eyeing CD Projekt RED's new Cyberpunk 2077 in a different light.

Polish brokerage firm Vestor DM believes Cyberpunk 2077 has potential to be a sales monster along the lines of Red Dead Redemption II, which sold-in 17 million copies and made $725 million in just three days. In fact, the brokers estimate Cyberpunk 2077 could sell as much as 19 million copies thanks to its multi-platform release. This would outstrip RDRII's numbers and be closer to The Witcher's entire trilogy sales of 25 million. We're not sure if those are launch weekend or quarterly estimates, however.

Strong sales potential sees the firm elevate CD Projekt RED to buy status, especially after CDPR's recent affirmations that Cyberpunk 2077 will be as polished as Red Dead Redemption II when it ships. But when will it release? CDPR is coy about an official release date, saying Cyberpunk 2077 will release by 2021, but Vestor DM expects a Q4 2019 launch (possibly to coincide with next-gen consoles).

Capcom is quite serious about the Resident Evil 2 Remake and conscripts a massive 800-strong development team to work on the project.

The Resident Evil 2 Remake isn't just a remake of an older game: it's more of a re-imagining. It'll have the same storyline and old-school themes and settings, but the project is much more ambitious than its 1998 forebear; Capcom's powerful new proprietary REngine will ensure high-def lighting, visuals, and physics sequences to breathe new life into the beloved survival horror classic. Everything we've seen so far shows an impressive attention to detail (gore and blood, facial animations, sound, photorealism, lighting, motion-capture effects, etc). But all of this effort comes at a cost, and Capcom has been making serious investments into the REmake.

At a recent NHK showcase, attendee Alex Aniel notes that Capcom has 800 developers working on the Resident Evil 2 Remake. To put this number in perspective, Ubisoft typically has 1,000 or so global devs taking on massive open-world Assassin's Creed games, and about 600 developers apparently worked on Resident Evil 6.

As analysts predicted, the Switch's new Pokemon games are selling amazingly well right out of the gate.

The new Pokemon Let's Go: Pikachu and Eevee duo have sold-through more than 3 million copies worldwide in one week, the Pokemon Company today announced. This makes combo the top-selling Switch games in first-week sales in the system's history.

Pokemon's monumental success was to be expected for the holidays and undoubtedly propelled Switch sales with a new system bundle. This helps Nintendo get closer to its current 20 million console sales target for FY2018 (Nintendo needs to sell 14.9 million more Switches to hit this goal).

Heading into Black Friday and the Cyber deals Nintendo has slashed the prices of 47 different games in their eShop. This could be the time to get that Nintendo Swith game you were considering.

Nintendo has never brought the prices down over a range of this many games before, so I'd say this would be as good as time as any to pick up any of the following titles if you were considering them before. We have in no particular order; Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze: $42 (30%), Celeste: $16 (20%), Dragon Ball FighterZ: $42 (30%), Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection: $26 (35%), Skyrim, Doom, Wolfenstein II: $30 (50%).

That is just to name a few as well, other titles include the recently release from Ubisoft, Starlink: Battle for Atlas, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D, NBA 2K19, Dead Cells, Undertale, Hyrule Warriors Legends and many more fantastic titles. Nintendo will only be having this sale for a limited amount of time, with the beginning of it being today and then original prices resuming on November 28th. For the full list of discounted games, visit the official Nintendo Cyber Deals website listing here.

Months after the release of Dragon Ball FighterZ on the Nintendo Switch, Bandai Namco has released a new feature trailer educating fans in how to correctly brawl it out with eachother.

Firstly, those that own a Nintendo Switch and don't mind a fighting game every now and again should really look towards Bandai's Dragon Ball FighterZ. FighterZ allows for players to create a team that coincides with their personal fighting preference. Fights can be enjoyed by those with very basic skill in combos as well as those players that want to take it to the higher echelons of skill.

The above trailer showcases to players that are familiar with FighterZ the basic controls of the game and also the range of different ways players can interact with eachother. For fans that are already familiar with the Dragon Ball universe, FighterZ also comes jam packed with 3 story arcs to relive. Dragon Ball FighterZ for the Nintendo Switch is currently available, for more information visit the official eShop listing here.

Will players be drawn back to Star Wars Battlefront II with the coming Battle of Geonosis update that will be featuring Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi and General Grievous?

DICE might be expecting quite a lot of players to return to their game after the studio released the above visually pleasing trailer. In the trailer we can see that the Clone Wars have begun and Geonosis will soon be a hectic battlefield. According to Level Designer, Peter Vesti Frendrup, "It should rather feel like you're being part of the largest battle yet, and you're in it together with your team members on the frontlines."

Not only will players feel as if they are in the midst of battle while playing the Geonosis map, but they will also now have the option of stepping into the shoes of good or evil. Players can now enjoy the likes of dominating the map as legendary Jedi Obi-Wan or General Grievous. DICE will be rolling out this update on November 28th and will be coming completely free of charge. For more information regarding Star Wars Battlefront II, visit the official website here. Want to know more about Obi-Wan, check out another article on him here.

Valve has updated their Steam client for all users and made live their annual Steam Autumn sale, bringing massive discounts on across numerous genres.

The Steam sales are here, every gamer that uses the Steam service (basically every PC gamer) has their wallet crying out to resist spending the owners weekly pay on these awesome sales. Not only has the sales gone live, but Valve has also made the nominations for the Steam Awards available, Steam users can nomination their favorite games in a range of different categories.

Some of the categories that will give awards and are available to nominate game titles in are; Game of the Year, VR Game of the Year, Labor of Love, Best Developer, Best Environment, Best Alternate History and Most Fun with a Machine. Moving onto sales now, there is a ridiculous range of popular titles on sale, we have; Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Frostpunk, Sid Meier's Civilization VI Gold Edition, NieR: Automata, Monster Hunter World and many more. Sales are ranging from 30% off to a whopping 90% off, with most titles falling in the 30% to 50% discount range. To view the sales for yourself, click here. To nominate game titles, click here.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Director, Masahiro Sakurai has sat down in an interview with Gameinformer to shed some light on the development process of Ultimate.

Sakurai has answered many questiosns regarding his thought process when developing Smash Ultimate. Some of the question were based around why he choose to include so much content within this game in particular, his answer to that was "I worked with the same company and same team that worked on Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS titles. And in those titles, we were able to include quite a few fighters. So I thought, if we work a bit harder, we can make the dream of including all fighters come true, so we went for it."

When asked about the process that he as a director takes when choosing the specific new fighters, Sakurai said "It is a project after all, so we take into consideration things like labor, man-hours, the time in which the title will be sold. We decide on the fighters from the very early planning stage, and from there, we calculate and begin production. We don't add or remove any characters during the project." Sakurai also mentions that he makes sure that there is a "difference in the types of fighters" and that the "results of the Smash ballot" are also taken into consideration.