Vibes: Slice-of-life journeys through heartache, music, and moving on Availability: 2023 Windows, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5
Set in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, Afterlove EP explores the life of Rama, whose romantic partner passes away. It’s definitely a heavy subject, but with the manga-inspired artstyle, and use of music in rhythm mini-games, Rama’s story looks like a slow, delicate tale of what it means to move on after losing someone.
Afterlove EP describes itself as a mashup of a narrative adventure, dating sim, and rhythm game, along with branching narratives and different endings.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced its decision to block Micorosft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard on Wednesday citing concerns it would hurt competition in the growing cloud gaming market where Microsoft dominates thanks to Game Pass. It’s a shocking turn of events for what seemed like a mega merger that was otherwise cruising toward regulatory approval.
Blade’s Book Club Is The Best Thing About Marvel’s Midnight Suns
“We have concluded that the merger would result in the most powerful operator in the fast-developing market for cloud gaming, with a current market share of 60-70%, acquiring a portfolio of world-leading games with the incentive to withhold those games from competitors and substantially weaken competition in this important growing market,” the CMA wrote in its final report. Both Microsoft and Activision Blizzard said they will appeal the decision.
One seemingly likely result of Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard would be that the latter’s hit games likeOverwatch 2, Diablo IV, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II would all get added to Game Pass. The CMA argues this would give Microsoft, already the market leader in cloud gaming, even more anti-competitive control. It also suggests that the company would then have an incentive to raise prices on cloud gaming subscription services like Game Pass, while potentially withholding certain releases from some rival platforms like Sony’s PlayStation Plus.
Microsoft tried to assuage these concerns in recent months by signing tons of deals with smaller cloud computing providers in the UK, promising to make Activision Blizzard’s games available through them alongside its own xCloud service. The CMA seemed unswayed by these overtures, however, calling Microsoft’s proposed remedies too limited in scope, implying they would leave out competing services like Sony’s and that enforcing the agreements would require too much ongoing regulatory oversight.
“We have already signed contracts to make Activision Blizzard’s popular games available on 150 million more devices, and we remain committed to reinforcing these agreements through regulatory remedies,” Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President at Microsoft, said in a statement. “We’re especially disappointed that after lengthy deliberations, this decision appears to reflect a flawed understanding of this market and the way the relevant cloud technology actually works.”
Activision’s response to the news was more harsh. “The CMA’s report contradicts the ambitions of the UK to become an attractive country to build technology businesses,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement. “We will work aggressively with Microsoft to reverse this on appeal. The report’s conclusions are a disservice to UK citizens, who face increasingly dire economic prospects. We will reassess our growth plans for the UK. Global innovators large and small will take note that— despite all its rhetoric—the UK is clearly closed for business.”
That language echoed Activision CEO Bobby Kotick’s previous claims that the UK would become “death valley” if it torpedoed the deal, which promises huge financial windfalls for him and other executives at the company. The merger is still being investigated by authorities in the European Union, who are expected to announce a decision in May, and the Federal Trade Commission is currently threatening the acquisition with an antitrust lawsuit. It’s unclear how the CMA’s initial surprise ruling could affect approval in the U.S. and EU as a result, since failure in any one of the regions could likely doom it.
Wartales is currently in Early Access on Steam. It’s being developed by Shiro Games, the French studio behind the Viking RTS Northgard. And it has been taking up a lot of my time this month.
Blade’s Book Club Is The Best Thing About Marvel’s Midnight Suns
There’s a lot going on in Wartales, a lot of influences getting thrown into a pot and swirling around each other, so the best (or at least most succinct) way I’ve seen it described is “Wartalesis a medieval open world role-playing game with turn-based combat in which the player leads a group of mercenaries.”
It’s mercenary management, basically. With some fighting. And a story. It’s like the management side of XCOM added the dietary and resting needs of a survival sim, then decided it wanted to go on a little RPG adventure. I have heard people say there’s some Mount and Blade here. Others say this is very close to Battle Brothers.
I could go on. But instead of continuing to confuse and bury you in references to existing video games, please just watch this release trailer instead:
Wartales – Official Release Trailer
I’ve been playing the game all week, and—this part is important—what I’ve played has been fantastic. The turn-based combat, while not exactly breaking new ground, works well enough. Your travels are full of story-driven quests full of morally ambiguous decisions, which as anyone who has played medieval-adjacent role-playing games will tell you, are the best types of decisions. The survival-style management of your party, which means everyone can die and you can hire replacements, has the same Fire Emblem, XCOM-y pull it always does when a game entrusts you with a (digital) person’s life.
Great for work or play This laptop boasts a 15.6-inch touchscreen, an Intel Core i3 processor, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, a webcam, and more. It also has a variety of ports for connectivity’s sake, making it versatile for use as a display or even a desktop replacement.
Fighting in Wartales is resolved through turn-based combat, in a way that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has ever played a turn-based tactics gameScreenshot: Wartales
Know why I’m loving the game, though? It’s that viewpoint. While the camera zooms in for battles and conversations, most of your time in Wartales is spent wandering around an isometric overworld, your party meandering their way through forests and mountain passes and lovely little rural laneways.
It’s well-established here that I am an enjoyer of good isometric video games, and this is one of the nicest I’ve ever seen. It’s a whole game based around those scenes in Fellowship of the Ring where you see everybody striding across mountains and grassy plains. It’s combination of lush landscapes, slow pace and wide horizons makes this game seem vast, like it’s a world so big and full of possibilities that you’re about to get lost in it, but that’s also so quaint and immediate with its concerns that you don’t mind simply walking around for ages taking in the sights.
It doesn’t feel like a stage, or a level, or a map. It feels like a world.
I emphasised “what I’ve played” earlier because, by a lot of people’s accounts who are a lot further into Wartales than I am, everything that makes the opening hours such a blast—the feeling of wide open spaces, the constant resting and eating to keep your soldiers happy and breathing, the overworld battles—starts to become a bit of a grind later on.
Maybe it does, and when this game gets out of Early Access and I get that far, I’ll see if that’s actually the case. But for now, around 15 hours in, the open-ended mission structure that lets you take on contracts at your own leisure means that, for all its potential as a day-waster, its actually perfectly suited to what’s become a pretty busy part of my life, as I can jump in, finish a contract or two, set up camp, save the game then revisit it the next time I get a chance.
The long-awaited, blood-soaked Dead Island 2 released today, and after almost a decade of waiting, I’m sure you have some questions. The game shares a peacefully embarrassing sense of humor with the first game, 2011’s Dead Island, repeatedly referring to your threatening surroundings as “Hell-A” while being gory enough to actually justify the zombified dad joke, but it’s also changed in important ways. Skill cards make their first appearance, and playing on modern consoles comes with its own idiosyncrasies.
This New Series Completes Studio MAPPA’s Dark Trilogy
The unknown is scary. But I’ll guide you through it, and tell you everything I wish someone told me before I started playing Dead Island 2.
How to unlock co-op
Dead Island 2, like the original, employs co-op, so that players can wield an array of unique playable characters—six, in this case—against a neverending onslaught of zombies with dislocated jaws.
To activate co-op in a new game, play through the first three missions of the main story. Co-op unlocks in the fourth, appropriately named “Call the Cavalry,” and you’ll be able to add, at most, two players to your game by choosing either “online options” or “social” when prompted.
Once co-op is enabled, as long as they’re at the same point in the game or earlier, you can accept a friend’s request to join their game, or you can select “Join” from the main menu for a random multiplayer pairing. Quest progress saves in co-op, so you’ll be able to play the entire game while alternating between single and multiplayer at your leisure.
Note that there’s no crossplay, though.
Even the apocalypse is better with friends.Image: Deep Silver Dambuster Studios
I know it’s annoying, but you should spam the “pick up” button
Like Amazon continues to turn our planet into a desolate Funko Pop landfill, Dead Island 2 environments are stuffed with stuff. You’ll find upgrade materials like adhesives, aerosols, and blades on top of tables, inside shut drawers, and raining down from felled like you burst a grisly piñata.
Forget your hand-wringing about storage management—in the zombie apocalypse, everyone’s a scavenger. Pick the stuff up. All of it. As long as you’re regularly upgrading weapons using the materials you’ve found, you’ll find that your Dead Island 2 inventory is impressively bottomless.
Keeping upgrade materials on hand saves you time when you’re at sporadic upgrade workbenches. Though these benches allow you to “track” materials you’re missing, they’re most helpful when you have your materials ready to go, and can repair broken weapons or make them even stronger immediately before your next fight.
To make space, scrap worthless weapons like wooden planks and sell real weapons to traders for lots of money. Upgrade materials let you create weapon mods, upgrades, and repairs, but money is necessary to actually buy them.
You’ll need to make trade offs between special mods and attack power
You’ll unlock and find motley weapon blueprints (often placed, conveniently, right on top of an undiscovered workbench) as you progress further into the game, allowing for wild mods that turn your weapon into two-punch electro-cutioners and cremators, as well as upgrades that bolster your weapon’s damage output.
While the constant influx of shiny toys is understandably tempting, you should be aware that extreme weapon modifications and upgrades aren’t always compatible. While some upgrades’ descriptions plainly indicate that they need certain mods to be equipped, general upgrades like Damaging, which increases a weapon’s damage dealt, will lose their overall potency when paired with a mod. Try to have a plan for the type of weapon you want to ultimately end up with before you irrevocably alter it at a workbench.
“Slaughter” is a perfect weapon upgrade
The game’s huge range of weapon customization options leaves a lot to consider, but I think you should especially prioritize the Slaughter upgrade.
It lets you hack limbs off with more efficiency, making it most compatible with gliding bladed weapons like katanas and hunting knives, but also lifts weapon durability.
Dead Island 2 weapons can break obnoxiously quickly, leaving you suddenly barefisted in the middle of an encounter.
Though you can keep track of weapon breakage by looking at the depleting meter in the bottom right corner of the screen, it’s best to avoid it by adding Slaughter. Don’t forget to repair your favorite weapons whenever you’re near a workbench, too.
You can’t bulldoze through combat—learn to dodge
Despite Dead Island 2’s quickly forming reputation as a brainless, mass bloodletting event, trying to aimlessly plow your way through fields of snarling zombies will get you killed quickly, and destroy your weapon stash even faster.
To protect both yourself and your arsenal, practice dodging, or tapping L1 in the split seconds before a zombie attacks—and I really do mean split seconds.
It took me a while to master the timing. I’d recommend you practice by singling out rogue zombies you come across while exploring environments, and not necessarily in the middle of a stressful main mission. When you nail a dodge (or, alternatively, block an incoming attack), you stun a zombie, opening them up for a health-melting counter attack.
Here come the fireworks.Image: Deep Silver Dambuster Studios
When a zombie mob is descending, use their own powers against them
Just as each playable slayer has their own innate advantages, every zombie you encounter will have its own violent quirk.
Most of them are thematic and obvious. Like, a frizzy zombie surrounded by blue sparks will eventually release a giant explosion of electricity, or a crispy zombie completely immersed in flames will, if it touches you, set you on fire.
Notice these quirks and use them to your advantage when you’re confronted by swarms of zombies that, at first glance, seem unmanageable. Throw a fuel can at a fire zombie to trigger a remote AoE eruption that will murder nearby zombies. Using an electric modded weapon to burst a hole into the water canisters some zombies carry on their backs, and turn the resulting puddle into a livewire trap.
And, once it becomes accessible to you in the game, don’t forget to use Fury Mode, which builds up as you slay zombies and imbues you with their destructive powers, for a brief period of time.
Make sure to level up, but it’s not necessarily as crucial as you might think
Once you hit a main story boss battle or reach a wild enemy with a skull over its head, meaning it’s higher level than you, you’ll feel the power disparity immediately.
To avoid getting overwhelmed by too-strong enemies, take a look at main story and side quests’ recommended levels and make sure your natural leveling up matches them before attempting them.
Though, you don’t have to be at a chapter or enemy’s recommended level to try it. Most of the time, especially in the rogue combat you’ll spend most of your time engaging with, leveling up makes a barely discernible difference in terms of damage output or defense. Most standard wild enemies also conform to your level, too, reflected by the number that appears next to the name over their heads.
If you get stuck on the main story, pivot to a side quest you can benefit from
In the case that you are not at the appropriate level to finish a main level chapter (without great difficulty, at least), don’t worry; you have 33 side quests to choose from.
You’ll unlock these without really trying—by exploring new environments, answering radio calls, or chatting with friendly NPCs.
But before you commit to a side quest, open up the Quests tab, glance at the rewards listed, and consider what your main story goals are. Do you want to level up ASAP? Pick a side quest with abundant XP gains. Do your weapons all suck, and you need something more excruciating? Take the side quest that gifts you a special weapon. Have fun while being practical. Slay responsibly.
Some NPCs are friendly. Others sort of look like Josh Groban.Image: Deep Silver Dambuster Studios
Don’t shy away from customizing your low-stakes skill deck
As you blaze through levels, the main story, and side quests, slots on your skill card deck will unlock. You acquire skill cards without truly trying, either grabbing them after you’ve spammed your “pick up” button, or by killing for them.
You can rearrange or cull your deck at any time, so try any skill card that intrigues you. Most skill benefits are nebulous enough—specializing the type of kick you do, or how you regenerate health—that choosing them never feels make-or-break. It’s more like deciding whether or not you want pickles on your burger.
Did you know there’s voice control?
Dead Island 2 has a unique voice-control system, which beguiled me at first as someone who knows how to use the computer, but just barely.
It lets you speak scripted commands to swap weapons, taunt zombies, and engage extra-powerful Fury Mode, among other things, by using a microphone and your Amazon account.
To activate it, plug your Amazon account information into the “Alexa Game Control” section of the Options menu, make sure Voice Commands is set to “enabled,” and select your preferred input audio device. Read through the available commands in the Voice Controls, found in the Tutorials section, and wonder, like me, if Jeff Bezos can hear you scream.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has partnered up with a bunch of Twitch streamers to encourage gamers to not commit war crimes in popular shooters like Call of Duty. The ICRC hopes that its event, “Play by the Rules,” will educate players on the statutes of actual war. The organization has even created its own Fortnite mode to help communicate what those rules are.
The Witcher 3 Meets Tense Roguelike PvE Card-Battling In Rogue Mage
“Every day, people play games set in conflict zones right from their couch. But right now, armed conflicts are more prevalent than ever,” the ICRC website said. “And to the people suffering from their effects, this conflict is not a game. It destroys lives and leaves communities devastated. Therefore, we’re challenging you to play FPS by the real Rules of War, to show everyone that even wars have rules—rules which protect humanity on battlefields IRL.”
As part of the event, on the ICRC’s official Twitch channel streamers have played a number of games while adhering (or attempting to adhere) to the Laws of Conflict, including PUBG Battlegrounds, Fortnite, Call of Duty: Warzone, Rainbow 6 Siege, and Escape From Tarkov. In addition to the Play by the Rules event, the ICRC created its own Fortnite mode that’s designed to convey the rules of war in the context of competitive play.
For those curious, the official rules of war for the ICRC’s Play by the Rules event (which have been streamlined to account for video game mechanics) are:
No thirsting (don’t shoot downed/unresponsive enemies)
No targeting non-violent NPCs
No targeting civilian buildings
Use med kits on everyone
ICRC
This isn’t the first time the ICRC has urged players to critically think about the rules of war. Back in 2017, the ICRC hosted a similar event in an Arma III DLC called Law of War. In Law of War, gamers put down their weapons and took on the role of humanitarian workers as they respond to people in crisis, deactivate mines, and speak with an investigative journalist. According to a blog post from Arma III developer Bohemia Interactive, the DLC raised a total of $176,667, which it donated to the ICRC.
Last week Capcom pushed an update out to the Steam versions of the remakes for Resident Evil 2 & 3. It was supposed to be a generic little update, but whatever Capcom did under the hood ended up breaking a couple of the game’s nicer features.
A Foe From The Next Team Ninja Game Is Giving Me Sekiro PTSD
Not long after the updates went live PC users began noticing that the option to enable ray-tracing within both game’s menu had disappeared. Also gone was the option to turn on 3D audio support. While some fans on Reddit initially believed this to have been intentional, Capcom later issued a statement confirming that the modes had been affected by the update, and that they “apologize for any inconvenience”.
To all Resident Evil 2 / Resident Evil 3 users on Steam
We’re aware of an ongoing issue with the raytracing option not appearing in the graphics menu and presets. We’ll have this addressed in a future update and apologize for any inconvenience!
Pick your processor, RAM, GPU, and more Whether you are in the market for a new laptop or desktop or if you a specifically looking to build something to game on, you can do so here and you’ll save up to 52% off.
Sucks that it’ll take another update to fix stuff that had already been in the game, but that’s game development and support, baby.
Weirdly, this isn’t the first time those two specific options have been the focus of botched updates. Back in 2022 the Resident Evil 2 remake, Resident Evil 3 remake and Resident Evil 7 were all forcibly updated on PC to include ray-tracing and 3D audio, a move which massively upset users who were (rightly) concerned that this would blow the required specs for the games—which they had already bought and played—out of the window.
After the updates did exactly that, and fans protested, Capcom quickly reverted:
“Due to overwhelming community response, we’ve reactivated the previous version that does not include ray tracing and enhanced 3D audio,” Capcom’s Resident Evil team wrote on Steam. “Both enhanced and previous versions will be made available going forward.”
First too many people had ray-tracing, now nobody has ray-tracing.
Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast was first released in 2002. It was, and remains to this day, one of the best Star Wars games ever made, a near-perfect blend of the original Dark Forces’ FPS combat with third-person lightsaber combat that even modern games could take notes from.
Suddenly, Everyone Wants To Remake Dead Space
If you went and played the game as nature intended in 2023, it would be great! But this standalone port/version, provided you’ve got the hardware, looks like a huge—and decidedly more modern—improvement. It takes the original Jedi Outcast and gives the player full VR support, along with the ability to wield your lightsaber via motion controls and use force powers via hand gestures.
I need to be clear when saying the original was a very good video game in every respect. But people’s lingering memories of it, especially in the wake of Fallen Order’s all-ages combat, was the way you could absolutely go to town on Stormtroopers with your lightsaber, something this trailer is very aware of:
JK-XR: Outcast – Jedi Knight II VR – Release Trailer
It’s called JK-XR, and was created by fans as a “standalone VR port” of the original, which means this is a complete reworking of Jedi Outcast’s engine with an all-new download (though you’ll still need a copy of the original for everything else). That explains why the team have been able to cater this so specifically to VR, down to the new weapon and force power menus.
Diablo IV is still a couple of months away, but Blizzard is already stomping down some of the game’s most popular classes ahead of its June 6 release date. The studio posted a new blog on its website reflecting on the game’s recent beta, and shared what’s basically a full set of patch notes it will implement ahead of Diablo IV’s launch. While there aren’t a lot of hard numbers to go off of, you can at least get a sense of where some of the game’s character classes will be by the time fans get to play them again.
8 Minutes Of Diablo IV’s Character Creator
What is Blizzard doing to my precious baby angel Necromancer?
At the end of March, Blizzard said Necromancers and Sorcerers were the most popular classes among beta players. This was especially significant for Necromancer, as the class was only available during one of the game’s two test periods, while the Sorcerer was available for both. Kotaku’s own Levi Winslow used Necromancer most, and said the class was “truly busted” thanks to its ability to revive dead skeletons to fight alongside them. While Blizzard’s new blog says these dead minions will die more often, there are no specific numbers or any mention of a smaller skeletal headcount being forced upon players. The developer notes the dead’s increased vulnerability will make raising them “a more active component” in playing the Necromancer, rather than something you can just set and forget.
The Sorcerer’s debuffs seem less all-encompassing, with Chain Lightning dealing less damage and specifically reduced effectiveness against boss characters. But beyond that, the class is getting some buffs with abilities like Charged Bolt and an increased Lucky Hit chance for Meteor Skill’s Enchantment bonus.
While players will be getting some changes in the final game, some enemies will, as well. The Butcher, an enemy who gave some players a tough time during the beta, may be getting some kind of rework before the game launches. The blog states that the team has “re-evaluated” the enemy for difficulty, and it will “present a greater challenge in World Tiers III and IV.” So it sounds like it might become easier on lower difficulties, but even harder on higher ones.
What’s happening in the Diablo IV pre-release patch notes?
Beyond balance changes, Blizzard is also tweaking Diablo IV’s dungeon layouts to avoid backtracking, which it says was a common complaint during the betas. Here is the full list of patch notes for those curious:
Dungeon Layouts
One of the most common pieces of feedback Blizzard received is that players felt they were doing a lot of backtracking within certain dungeons. The team has optimized multiple dungeons across all zones to minimize the need for backtracking. Here is a list of dungeons specifically in the Fractured Peaks zone which received layout updates:
Caldera Gate
Defiled Catacombs
Derelict Lodge
Forbidden City
Hoarfrost Demise
Immortal Emanation
Kor Dragan Barracks
Maulwood
Rimescar Caverns
Developer’s Note: Our primary goal with the Layout changes was to reduce certain kinds of backtracking which detract from a player’s experience. An example of this change is that players previously needed to enter side rooms to interact with Structure Objectives, causing them to retread the same path. Now, many of our Structure Objectives have been repositioned along main dungeon pathways, making them easier for players to reach and allowing them to readily explore the dungeon after defeating the Structure.
Dungeon Events
The chance for an Event to spawn inside of a dungeon has increased from 10% to 60%.
Dungeon Gameplay
To reduce the need to backtrack, small numbers of straggling monsters will seek out the player to help complete the Kill All Monsters objective.
When Animus is gathered, the player and nearby allies will:
Gain 10 Resource.
Reduce all active Cooldowns by 1 second.
Depositing Animus channel time was reduced from 3 to 0 seconds.
The time to Rescue was reduced from 3 to 1.5 seconds.
All Rescue objectives now drop a Health Potion upon completion.
While carrying the Ancient’s Statue, Bloodstone, Mechanical Box, or Stone Carving, you will receive a Momentum bonus granting a 25% move speed increase to you and nearby allies.
Pedestals have had their channel time reduced from 2 to 0 seconds.
Returning a Portable Object to its Pedestal now fully restores Health, Resource, Potions, and resets cooldowns for all nearby players.
All doors will now generate a minimap ping when they are opened.
All Structure Objectives in dungeons now have additional combat mechanics players must overcome.
Developer’s Note: While our dungeons offer a variety of Objectives to complete, player feedback stated that the action of completing each Objective felt tedious. We hope that providing bonuses, such as the increase to mobility while carrying certain Objective items, will streamline and vary the experience of completing Objectives. This adjustment is merely a starting point, and we intend to extend this philosophy to keys in a future update.
General
Effects like Stun and Freeze can be applied to Elite Monsters twice as long before they become Unstoppable.
Reviewed class skills to confirm that all classes have access to sufficient skills that remove control impairing effects.
Many Legendary Powers have had updates to their effectiveness.
Barbarian
A flat 10% passive damage reduction has been added for the Barbarian Class. Some Skill Tree passives had their damage reduction effects reduced to compensate.
The Whirlwind Skill now deals more damage and consumes more Fury.
The Double Swing Skill Enhancement refunds its full Fury cost when used on Stunned or Knocked Down enemies.
Druid
Companion Skills will now deal heavily increased damage.
All Ultimate Skills have had their cooldowns reduced.
Usability improvements have been made to Maul and Pulverize.
Using a non-Shapeshifting Skill will transform a Druid back into their human form.
Necromancer
Summoned Minions will die more often, requiring players to utilize Corpses more often.
Many bonuses in the Book of the Dead have had their stats increased.
The damage dealt by the Corpse Explosion skill has been reduced.
The brightness of the Skeletal Warriors and Mages has been reduced.
Rogue
Upgrades for Subterfuge Skills have had their bonuses increased.
Multiple passive Skills have had their bonuses increased.
All Imbuement Skills have had their cooldowns increased.
Sorcerer
Charged Bolt’s damage was increased and the Mana cost to cast has decreased.
Decreased the damage of Chain Lightning and reduced its effectiveness against Bosses.
Decreased the cooldown for the Incinerate Skill’s Enchantment bonus.
Firewalls will now spawn underneath enemies more frequently when using its Enchantment bonus.
Increased the Lucky Hit chance for the Meteor Skill’s Enchantment bonus.
Developer’s Note: Whenever we introduce changes to our Classes, it is with the goal of making both them and their Skills feel impactful and powerful—your feedback has helped us uphold this ideal. Some players have adeptly noticed that certain Skills were too powerful. One of our goals for Skills is to have them be interesting to wield and interactive in terms of itemization and combat feel. We’ve made some changes to help in this regard, with one example being the Necromancer’s Minions. We’ve made a change that makes them more vulnerable in combat, which will make raising the dead a more active component of the Necromancer’s gameplay. Launch is just the first step of our Class balance journey, and you can expect further updates that iterate on this pillar of Diablo IV.
UI
Fixed an issue where the built-in Screen Reader was not reading key prompts, game options details, and other UI text.
Fixed an issue where actions could not be bound to the mouse wheel.
Fixed an issue where Evade couldn’t be bound to the right Analog Stick on controller.
Chat will now display on the left side of the screen when using the centered action bar configuration.
A character’s stats will be displayed by default when players click the Materials & Stats button within their Inventory.
The Move and Interact inputs can now be mapped to one button while the Primary Attack input is mapped to a secondary button.
The sans serif font used in-game has been replaced with a new serif font.
Encounters
Fixed multiple issues that allowed bosses, like the Butcher, to become unresponsive.
The Butcher has been re-evaluated for difficulty and will present a greater challenge in World Tiers III and IV.
Bosses such as T’chort, Malnok, Vhenard, and others were reevaluated for melee character difficulty, resulting in changes to attacks and fight mechanics.
Fixed an issue where Vampire Brutes using the Shadow Enchant affix would chain-cast Impale.
Cellars
Increased the chance for a dungeon Event to occur in Cellars.
Cellars will now consistently reward a chest upon completion.
Fixed an issue where Cellars would prematurely be marked as complete.
Fixed an issue where the guaranteed elite monster would be absent from a Cellar.
General quality of life
Fixed an issue where players could increase attack speed by move-cancelling attacks early.
Fixed an issue where characters weren’t immune and untargetable after loading into an area.
The Reset Dungeon button has been disabled.
Fixed an issue that caused Gale Valley and Serac Rapture to have less monsters than intended until the campaign quests in those territories were completed.
Bungie is cracking down on Destiny 2 players using third-party peripherals to cheat in the game’s competitive and cooperative modes.
This Action Game Asks What If Ninja Gaiden Let Its Hair Down
The studio is following Call of Duty: Warzone’s example, which implemented a similar ban at the beginning of April, and is now monitoring when players use devices to get the leg up against others. Bungie outlines its policy in a blog post on its website, but stops short of naming any specific software or hardware because it “simply [doesn’t] want to offer a bigger spotlight than necessary.” But broadly, the post lists things like “programmable controllers, keyboard and mouse adapters, advanced macros, or automation via artificial intelligence” meant to let the user use inputs in a way that goes beyond what the game or player is typically capable of.
Bungie makes a distinction between things like external accessibility aids that make the game playable as intended for people with disabilities and third-party peripherals maliciously designed to give the user an advantage over others. Because Destiny 2’s PvE content also affects things like races to finish the game’s raids at launch, Bungie is extending these rules to cooperative modes, as well.
“Simply using an accessibility aide to play Destiny 2, where a player could not play otherwise, would not be a violation of this policy,” the post reads. “Using these tools to mitigate challenges all players face, such as reducing recoil or increasing aim assist, would be a violation.”
Moving forward, Bungie says it will be monitoring for violations, with plans to issue warnings, restrictions, or outright bans depending on the situation. Cheating in online games is as old as the medium, but what that means and how it’s detectable varies from game to game. Valve recently caught and banned over 40,000 cheaters from Dota 2and then publicized the move as a threat to would-be cheaters.
While third-party software and peripherals are one part of the conversation, some competitive communities are deciding for themselves what cheating looks like. The Super Smash Bros. Ultimate competitive scene has been dealing with an in-game strategy that was deemed unfair involving the character Steve. Since then, some tournament organizers have made the decision to ban the character outright, rather than having to vet suspect players at events.
The writer O. Henry is alleged to have said of New York City, “It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it.” I have a very similar feeling about Minecraft Legends. Its mix of real-time strategy and third-person action seems like it could be a splendid game, should Mojang ever get around to completing it.
Legends is an ambitious concept. As Minecraft Dungeons is to the action-RPG, Minecraft Legends is to the strategy game, another spin-off from the almighty franchise that attempts to make a complicated genre more immediately palatable to a family audience. However, where Dungeons is a roaring success, a delightful game to sit and blast through, Legends is a bemusing and messy creation that runs out of ideas before it runs out of tutorial.
How Minecraft Legends Becomes Strategic
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
It’s peculiar, reviewing something in the Minecraft milieu. It doesn’t matter a bit what I or anyone else has to say about it, because it’s predestined to be a phenomenon. My local department store is already filled with tie-in promotional products, from toys to t-shirts, a week before it’s even released. “Friends & Allies” reads one such kids’ shirt, showing the traditional Minecraft enemies stood alongside a heroic Steve-like, capturing the game’s USP: This time you fight alongside the Creepers, Zombies, Skeletons and so on, in a united front against a Piglin invasion of the Overworld.
In a large map (growing in size depending upon your difficulty level) that’s randomly arranged at the start of a single-player campaign, you are selected by three somewhat celestial beings, Knowledge, Action, and Foresight to repel the piggy invasion. These porcine pests are determined to take over the villages of the franchise’s erstwhile Villagers, building their own encampments, and despoiling the very ground beneath them. To fight against this, you play in third-person controlling your hero, accompanied by a team of golems that you create via spawners, who (are supposed to) follow you wherever you go, and follow your issued orders during on-the-fly battles.
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
It all begins pretty well. Knowledge, Action, and Foresight are all brilliant characters, excellently voiced and welcoming to new players. They are there to explain the basics of the game, as new concepts are introduced in the initial stages of play. You learn how to gather resources, starting off with wood and stone. Then how to build spawners, generate golems (and later Skeletons, Creepers, Zombies, etc), beginning with two types, a ranged arrow-firing block-like creature, and a melee rock-type, that furiously punches at enemies and enemy structures. Once this is established, Minecraft Legends lets you get into scraps with the Piglins, then you find a village, and get a rundown on the basics of protecting each location’s central well, done by building walls and defensive structures.
You roam the beautiful world on the back of one of four mount types (one’s a beetle that’s great at climbing, another’s a bird that can glide from heights without taking damage), all used to negotiate those familiar Minecraft biomes, mountains, and seas. But you can also build in this world by holding down the left trigger, then placing objects RTS-style around you, or drag-dropping lengths of wall into place on the ground near your character.
With all of these gameplay elements put in place, Minecraft Legends then just sets you free with almost none of the most important mechanics properly explained, while blathering new information at you while you’re trying to come to grips with what a complete mess the controls are. Devolving entirely into “tell, don’t show,” I was left struggling to work out how I was supposed to improve my tools, as it keeps demanding you should. Via trial and error, I eventually figured out it’s about building new structures at a central location, using materials it hasn’t told me how to get yet, and oh good Lord.
Why Minecraft Legends Is So Frustrating
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
Eventually, I figure all Minecraft Legends’ mechanics out. I get there. But it’s such aa frustrating experience, only to learn that one whole mess—of placing special towers that can variously improve the amounts of resources you can carry, the numbers of golems you can have in your army, the ability to have your alleys gather new resource types, and even the ability to gather other tower types—would have been far better as a skill tree in the menus. Then it would be clear, visibly understandable, and much better communicated to players.
But communication is Legends greatest failure. There’s just so much that’s so peculiarly missing here, not least when it comes to the game’s map. It allows you to fast travel between discovered villages, and also shows the location of different biomes, mount types, potential allies (the Skeletons, Creepers, etc), and the Piglin encampments. Hover over many of these and one of the characters will—after a weirdly long delay—tell you some information. Perhaps this Piglin camp is planning to create a new site tonight, or that this village is intended for attack by the Piglins and needs your help defending itself.
But what it absolutely doesn’t tell you, neither in the pop-up text nor the voice over, is whether a Piglin camp is possible to attack. To find that out, you have to run vast distances across the terrain to reach its borders, where either a (splendid) cutscene will play introducing that battle, or a text box will pop up saying you’re not yet ready to attack it. Again, get close enough and its difficulty level will appear on screen—1 to 4—giving you an idea of the challenge ahead. But that information isn’t on the map, either before or after you’ve learned it elsewhere. Why not? This is such basic stuff. The amount of time I wasted running toward battles I couldn’t play is galling, and could so easily have been prevented.
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
And when Minecraft Legends does give you valuable on-screen information, it’s often obfuscated and unexplained. I eventually work out which unlabeled number represents how many characters I currently have following me anywhere, and which represents how many of my total possible golems currently exist in the world. The two can’t usefully be matched up, because the former contains any random animals you might have picked up on your travels, given the only way to select units around you is to hit X, and grab the attention of anyone in a very small circle. Which means, yes, there’s literally no way to call your units to you when exploring or battling without going up to their immediate vicinity and hitting X. Instruct them to attack that structure over there, and they’ll rush off to do so, and then when it’s done, stand there. Forever. You have to run to them, and meticulously select them all, to issue another instruction. Which is bewildering.
It gets significantly worse because of the atrocious pathfinding. Most of the Piglin bases are on raised platforms, requiring you to build ramps for your troops to ascend between the rocky plateaus. But none of them can cope with the narrow paths and enemy structures that bounce them off the platform, meaning you constantly lose your units to the ground below. Down there, rather than make their way back to you, they’ll instead just stand there, uselessly, not even defending themselves from attacks. If you’re five platforms up, trying to fight an enormous Piglin elephant-thing, while attempting to destroy enemy towers that are raining fire on you, at the same time as thirty Piglins are fighting you from all sides, you are forced to jump all the way down, gather your stragglers, guide them all the way back up to the battle, and then watch them idiotically walk off the sides again. Over and over and over.
Lose your troops entirely, as you often will, and you need to run away from the battle site to the nearest spawners you’ve placed to generate some fighters. In a traditional RTS game, this would involve zooming out from your godlike view of the map, clicking on facilities that generate new units, then commanding them to head toward your fight. But in Legends, it involves riding your purple tiger away from the hundreds of enemies all attacking you, bounding across the terrain to your nearest spawners (only possible to place on non-enemy terrain, hence the journey), create new ones, then manically gather them to follow you because they’ll just stand there if you don’t get every single one within your tiny X-circle, then run with them all back to the battle, up all your ramps again, into the fray, likely to see half of them immediately killed by a massive fireball, and the other half throw themselves off the sides to get lost in the ground below.
How Minecraft Legends Buries Its Fun
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
I’ve described the above at such meticulous lengths, because that’s the majority of the experience of playing Minecraft Legends. It’s about painstakingly guiding these gormless troops via punishingly poor interaction into distant battles, over and over until you’ve finally whittled away at things enough to destroy the central portal. And all the time, you can see the fun you should be having, the solid family-friendly game that hides beneath all this clumsy crap, but you can never quite touch it.
Everything is so opaque. New structures are added with no fanfare, no notice, and are only discovered when you remember that there’s an in-game book-thing that lets you rearrange your UI. As the game progresses, you end up with the farcical issue of having about 15 different structures you want to have access to at any time, but a UI that only lets you select eight of them at a time. You’re supposed to endlessly juggle them about, which would be massively annoying if it weren’t for the next huge issue: you can’t sodding pause.
Because the game has been designed with co-op or combative multiplayer in mind, the single-player campaign that it presents as its main mode is forced to be an always-online experience. So when you hit pause to answer the front door, or deal with the kids, Minecraft Legends just carries on playing almost invisibly behind the apparent pause menu, killing your troops, and advancing time so the Piglin bases expand unchecked, villages are attacked, and allies lose faith in your support. The same is true when you’re opening the ‘book’ to try to rearrange your UI, so you can build the attacking structure you need to defend a village, but have your units wiped out while forced to fight with these menus. Idiotic.
An 8-Year-Old’s Review Of Minecraft Legends
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
All these frustrations aside, the game beneath them sadly all also falls short. Once you’ve defended a bunch of villages, and attacked a bunch of Piglin bases, it very quickly becomes apparent that you’ve seen all it has to offer. And unlike Dungeons, where replaying the same dungeons lets you make progress in your armor, equipment, etc, there’s nothing like that in Minecraft Legends. You get access to more golem types and more structures, but once they’re all in place there’s no carrot remaining to motivate continued play.
Of course, this is all based on the single-player game—my many hours with it were spent before release, and as such, before there was anyone else to cooperate or compete with. However, given the mad mess of awful unit controls, dreadful pathfinding and AI, and a lack of variety in what you get to do, I struggle to see how things could be dramatically improved by subjecting someone else. And it’s crucially important to note that unlike Dungeons, there’s no couch co-op here, and never will be, which is disastrous.
However, and this is a very significant however, I’m not the only one in my house who played Minecraft Legends. I was accompanied for much of my time by my 8-year-old son, currently on his school vacations, and he’s spent a good deal of time playing it for himself. His view is different. In fact, I commissioned him to write about them (paying him from my fee for this review, I stress). His view, from a much more relaxed approach to playing, just muddling about and not focused on attempting to make strong progress, was far more positive. Here’s Toby’s review:
I much prefer Minecraft Legends than normal Minecraft but Legends has bad things about it,too. Like for instance, I much prefer animals in normal Minecraft than in Legends though, I do quite like the Piglins so mixed feelings. I prefer mining in normal Minecraft and I prefer how you level up and beat the game in normal Minecraft. Minecraft Legends brings fights to another level. The Piglin bases are fun to fight, challenging and not too challenging. Also defending villages is super fun because of building defenses and attacking the mobs. I prefer building in normal Minecraft but that’s no big deal. So overall I think that Minecraft Legends is great and I really like it. THE END!!!
Screenshot: Mojang / Kotaku
So there you have it. As I said at the beginning, a 45-year-old games journalist’s views on Minecraft Legends are close to irrelevant. It’s going to be on Game Pass (along with the grimly inevitable in-app purchases for skins and cosmetic nonsense). It seamlessly transfers between your PC and your Xbox (we played the game on both, picking up downstairs where we left off upstairs), meaning it’ll be there on the couch or on your laptop. And perhaps most significantly, it’s going to be in every toy store, supermarket, and bus stop for the foreseeable future.
That it’s not a very good game, and one that desperately needed a lot more development before this seemingly premature release, will matter almost not at all. It’s stunningly pretty, it lets you make friends with the Creepers, and the cutscenes are brilliant. And it matches those new pyjamas. Should they ever finish Minecraft Legends, allowing you to instantly gather your spawned troops from anywhere, fixing the atrocious UI, giving your units some vestiges of pathfinding, and hugely increasing the mission variation, I think it could be a great place.
Normally I wouldn’t get too excited about a Resident Evil film, as both the live-action and CG entries haven’t been great. But a new trailer for the upcomingDeath Island looks too damn campy and fun to ignore. I mean, all your favorite Resident Evil heroes—like RE4’s Leon and RE3’s Jill—are back together to take on zombie sharks. How can I not get excited about this?
Grand Theft Auto 6 Comments: A Dramatic Reading
The CG-animated film Resident Evil: Death Island, first announced in February, takes place in 2015, putting it after the events of Resident Evil 6 but before those of Resident Evil 7 and Village. It’s a direct sequel to 2017’s CG movie Resident Evil: Vendetta. Check out the new trailer for the film, released on April 11 and featuring Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Rebecca Chambers, Claire Redfield, and Leon S. Kennedy:
Kadokawa / Capcom
Yes, this is basically Resident Evil’s spin on The Avengers, taking all the previous characters and events, tossing them into a blender, and then hitting the “Cool Shit” button. I’m not mad at all. The direct references to Resident Evil 5, Revelations 2, and other Resident Evil games had me smiling like a fanboy and the action looks silly and over-the-top. And I’ll admit it: Seeing that Avengers-like shot at the end with all of the heroes fighting one big foe made me pump my fist a bit.
What’s Death Island about, and when does it come out?
D.S.O. agent Leon S. Kennedy is on a mission to rescue Dr. Antonio Taylor from kidnappers, when a mysterious woman thwarts his pursuit. Meanwhile, B.S.A.A. agent Chris Redfield is investigating a zombie outbreak in San Francisco, where the cause of the infection cannot be identified. The only thing the victims have in common is that they all visited Alcatraz Island recently. Following that clue, Chris and his team head to the island, where a new horror awaits them.
As for when to expect the movie, so far Capcom’s only revealed a Japan release date: It will hit theaters over there on July 7, 2023. In the past, some of these CG Resident Evil movies have played in theaters in the UK and U.S. for a limited time before releasing digitally, so I expect something similar here. If Capcom follows a similar pattern as with past films, I’d expect a U.S. theatrical release around late July or early August, and a home release to follow shortly after.
Late last month the developers of venerable MMO Everquest II introduced a new kind of loot box to the game that was, basically, a pay-to-win situation. It did not go down well with the long-running community!
Nintendo Showcase Standout Gunbrella Has The Best New Video Game Name Of 2022
As MMOBombexplain, the loot boxes, called Libant Evernight Heritage Crates, “bypassed lockouts and provided the chance to buy more opportunities at raid gear through the cash shop”. Fans quickly called them “pay-to-raid” items, and took to the game’s forums—which look as old as the game itself—to complain.
Their pleas were loud and numerous enough for developers Daybreak to almost instantly backtrack on the decision, posting late last week:
After listening to your feedback and having lots of discussions, we have decided to pull the Libant Evernight Heritage Crate from the in-game Marketplace store. The crate and most of its current contents will no longer be for sale.
We heard you and understand that there were particular elements of the Libant Heritage Crate that run counter to our shared values. We will no longer be making any of these types of items available.
G/O Media may get a commission
As a result of the uproar, Daybreak have decided that “in the spirit of community feedback” they’ll now be opening a dedicated forum where players can weigh in on stuff like balance changes before they go live, not after:
I’d also like to announce that in the spirit of community feedback, we will be opening new Class Balance Forums for Everquest 2, look for these to arrive in the very near future. We want you, the community, the people who play these classes to help us decide what balance changes and bug fixes to prioritize with major updates. These forums will improve our communication with you and allow you to help us scope what changes happen. These forums will have a section for each class, and you will be able to propose changes, communicate with us, and vote on the fixes and balance changes you feel are necessary for your class. The goal here is to communicate with you the time and effort that these proposed changes will require, and openly discuss feasibility. We will make changes open for discussion as long as they remain within reason.
Sucks to be posting about it under these circumstances, but man, an EverQuest II story! In 2023!
Because Final Fantasy XIV has somehow evolved into one of the biggest video games on the planet, Square Enix has decided to grab some of its older content out of the back of the fridge, reheat it in the microwave for a bit and serve it up to a whole new audience of players who probably weren’t around when it was first released.
Hollow Knight: Silksong’s New Gameplay Trailer Is Living Rent-Free In Our Brains
I’m talking specifically here about the game’s second major expansion, Stormblood, which was released six years ago as a premium piece of downloadable content, but which for the next few weeks will be made available for free (provided you’ve already got a paid subscription, they’re not just giving it away to free/trial players).
As the game’s site points out (thanks, Eurogamer), the free offer runs until May 28. Importantly it’s not free-to-play, it’s free-to-download, so provided you grab it before that deadline you’ll be able to play it whenever you want.
It’s good for both the console and PC versions of the game, though as this official FAQ points out, you need to make double sure on PC that you’re downloading the correct edition, as only the Steam download will work if you bought the game on Steam, etc.
Incredible visuals This smart TV has access to a wide array of streaming services, all of which are easier to navigate, has 4K visuals for a stunning picture, and comes with an Alexa Voice Remote too.
Final Fantasy XIV is one of the best massively multiplayer online role-playing games going, one of the few able to maintain a monthly subscription model in a day when even an Elder Scrolls MMO has to go free-to-play. Stormblood’s epic narrative, gorgeous new locales, spectacular battles and some fresh gameplay mechanics make a great game even better.
I am never going to finish it and no one can make me.
It’s almost poetic that, in a genre built on many people fighting to stay alive until just a few remain, so many battle royale games have launched, flopped, and died over the last few years. Not every new battle royale can find the same success as Warzone or PUBG. In fact, most will be lucky to survive at all. And many haven’t, as this list shows.
While fan-made mods have added battle royale-like modes to games like Arma, the genre truly exploded with the release of Player Unknown’s Battleground and, shortly after, Fortnite’s take on the genre. These games exploded in popularity, with Fortnite alone jumping from 20 million users in 2017 to 125 million in 2018. Publishers took notice, and more studios began spitting out battle royales to cash in on the trend. And it makes sense. These games aren’t too tricky to make if you already have a shooter engine or existing IP that works within the genre and a talented team of devs. However, they need constant upkeep, fresh content, and a large player base to live. And that’s not easy to achieve.
So, as we wrap up our fantastic week focused on battle royale games, it seems like the perfect time to stop and acknowledge all the games that tried to survive and thrive, but in the end, for various reasons, didn’t make it. They all got sniped from afar and were left in a ditch, surrounded by digital corpses of other failed attempts to be the next Apex Legends or Fortnite.
No two battle royale matches are alike. Clever, spontaneous tactics springing from the generative collision of varying skill levels, map layout, and randomized items, weapons, and vehicles can lead to theatrical levels of epicness and hilarity—often both at the same time. So it’s only fitting during Kotaku’s week of Battle Royale that we celebrate some standout moments across the many games that have challenged our wits, accuracy, and luck, surprising us with moments no one saw coming.
It would be impossible to catalog every possible epic-tier moment, be it in Warzone, Fortnite, PUBG, or Apex Legends, so these are barely even the tip of the iceberg. But they are nonetheless some excellent examples of literal pro-gamer moves, crushing failures, and thrilling moments of victory. One of them is from one of Kotaku’s very own (but it ain’t me. I suck at these damn games).
For such a momentous period in human history, the First World War has been relatively under-served by video games. Mostly because the defining theatre of the conflict—the nightmarish trench warfare of the Western Front—is almost impossible to recreate in the medium.
Elden Ring’s Top Five Spells, According To FromSoftWare’s Stats
I mean, you can recreate it, loads of games have, but the problem is that—and I’m sorry for the ghastly reduction of the source material here, but we’re talking video games, so I have to do this—it’s boring. Most other forms of warfare, throughout the entirety of human history, have been turned into fantastic strategy games because there’s some degree of mobility to them. That’s what makes them games. You can flank, drive, encircle and withdraw. There are immediate and actionable tactics you can apply.
The Western Front, on the other hand, was a meat-grinder. Attacks involving thousands of men could result in gains of just a few yards. There was an enormous strategic effort under-pinning the war, from recruitment to manufacturing to global supply lines, but in a tactical sense there’s very little for the player to do, which is why nearly every game based on the conflict has been slow, bad or both.
Which brings us to The Great War: Western Front, a new strategy game from Petroglyph, the studio behind Star Wars: Empire at War and Universe at War: Earth Assault. It tries to tackle the subject matter from a slightly different approach, which I can best break down as “Total War meets Tower Defence”.
G/O Media may get a commission
The strategic aspect is where you amass your forces before descending into an RTS battleScreenshot: The Great War
The game is split into two sections. There’s a strategic aspect, where you move armies around a map in a turn-based system, and then when two forces meet the action zooms in to a real-time battle. This RTS element itself has two stages; there’s a planning and construction phase, where you get to design a network of trenches and firing positions, and a battle phase where you deploy units on the field and control them in real time.
The strategic stuff is fine. It works, it’s simple enough. It’s the RTS side of things that is most interesting, though, and it’s where the game both shines and ultimately falls down.
The design and construction stuff is, in the grimmest way imaginable, the highlight. Imagine a historical murder machine built the same way you’d put a LEGO set together. You’re given a map and can draw trench networks across it, picking the kind of trench, mapping out its supporting supply trenches, placing machine gun nests, agonising over the location of artillery batteries. If this was the game, and battles decided afterwards like some kind of flood management/tower defence title, I think it could have been the best First World War game ever made.
The RTS battles themselves are a disappointment (though it’s great to see a game with so much Australian representation, something loads of strategy games miss!)Screenshot: The Great War
Sadly, the moment a battle actually begins—perhaps as a nod to the actual conflict—everything falls apart. You control individual units, not entire lines of men, and a lot of the game involves moving them around the map, trying to time your devastating artillery support just right. The issue is that these units are weirdly sticky, having trouble entering or staying in trenches properly and making control of them a nightmare, while the AI’s own tactics are often somehow worse than those employed on the actual battlefields 100 years ago.
This sucks the life out of the whole thing, which is a shame! There are a lot of good ideas here, and the presentation is surprisingly earnest. There are loads of informative Company of Heroes-style 2D cutscenes, and the developers toe the line between respecting the horror of the conflict and expressing its brutality in the form of a video game as well as any other WW1 release I can remember.
The Great War: Western Front is out now on Steam and the Epic Games Store.
E3 is dead. Again. Probably for good this time, given the circumstances. A lot of people have a lot of feelings—a weird thing for regular folks to have, since this was an industry trade show—but one thing we should be remembering through all the tributes and dunks is that E3 didn’t mismanage its way into oblivion. Its demise is exactly what the world’s biggest video game companies wanted.
Nintendo Showcase Standout Gunbrella Has The Best New Video Game Name Of 2022
Yes, it had its problems that were its own doing, regardless of who was organising the show. Downtown LA sucks. The show’s industry-only focus gave it a sheen that was always a little too uncomfortable to be around. It could never reconcile whether it wanted to be a trade show for developers and retailers or an announcement fest for the world’s media. Downtown LA sucks.
What started killing the show, though, wasn’t any of those things. Those things were inconveniences for those attending, which those of you reading/watching from home could not have given half a shit about. E3 started dying when major companies like Nintendo and Sony began reducing their presence there, or pulling out entirely, and that had nothing to do with the limited dining options available around the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Those companies, from platform holders to major publishers, the real stars of the E3 experience, weren’t really presenters at a trade show. They were gladiators. At its peak—whenever you think that was across its various locations and decades—E3 ran for just a handful of days, but in that time hundreds of major announcements would be made, from new hardware to AAA reveals, and each of them would be vying for the public’s attention. If there was one thing that defined E3 beyond “press conferences”, it would be that every event, and every show, had its own list of “winners” and “losers”, drawn up by forum posters and international media alike. The “winners” could bask in the glory and leverage it for increased exposure and sales, while the “losers” might risk sinking into oblivion.
G/O Media may get a commission
Why on earth would any major company want to risk being a gladiator? Why would they look at a scenario where the success of their billion-dollar enterprise could be threatened by some kids deciding a game trailer or new hardware feature was “meh”? Why would they bother sitting down with games press to answer questions when they could just send out press releases?
It’s no surprise that major companies bailing on E3 killed it off. What’s surprising is that it didn’t happen a lot sooner! Like we’ve said before, there’s nothing major video games companies like more than being able to control the entire process of making a sale, from announcement to pre-order. Everything standing in the way of those sales is an obstacle to overcome, and so if E3 was presenting the risk of their games being overshadowed by their competitor’s, then of course they were going to walk away, and when enough companies walked away the show was never going to survive.
They don’t need to pay for big E3 press conferences anymore, they can just film their own presentations and show them on a day when there’s no competing news. They don’t need to walk journalists around for three days answering questions that may be occasionally uncomfortable when they can just get influencers to hype their games live on Twitch and YouTube. And every time they’re doing this, an incentive to pre-order their product—often from their own online store—isn’t far away. The feeding ramp is polished to a mirror sheen.
This Mini Sega Arcade Cabinet Packed With Retro Games Would Make A Great Gift
Which might explain why earlier today Kotick sent out an email to his entire company—and then posted it on the internet for the whole world to see—which does little but bang his head against the wall repeating the same arguments Microsoft, Activision (and now select US politicians) have been making for months: that the deal is fine, that everything is cool, that Microsoft has made “thoughtful, generous remedies to address regulators’ concerns”.
One thing stands out in this email, though, and it’s a section where Kotick has to juggle maintaining a business relationship with Sony while also wanting to throw them under the bus. Let’s see how he fared (emphasis mine):
The good news is, regulators who initially had concerns about console competition are starting to better understand our industry. The data and evidence Microsoft has been presenting are tilting the scale. You may have seen statements from Sony, including an argument that if this deal goes through, Microsoft could release deliberately “buggy” versions of our games on PlayStation. We all know our passionate players would be the first to hold Microsoft accountable for keeping its promises of content and quality parity. And, all of us who work so hard to deliver the best games in our industry care too deeply about our players to ever launch sub-par versions of our games. Sony has even admitted that they aren’t actually concerned about a Call of Duty agreement—they would just like to prevent our merger from happening. This is obviously disappointing behavior from a partner for almost thirty years, but we will not allow Sony’s behavior to affect our long term relationship. PlayStation players know we will continue to deliver the best games possible on Sony platforms as we have since the launch of PlayStation.
G/O Media may get a commission
In other words, “it’s not me, it’s you”. I don’t see any other way he could have put this, to be honest, but then this kind of tiptoeing is exactly why this proposed deal has been so important to the future of the console business: so many grenades have been lobbed by both sides that there’s going to be bad blood here for years regardless of the decision.
Microsoft’s $69 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard inched closer in a big way on Friday. UK regulators announced a provisional finding that the acquisition wouldn’t harm competition, despite previously suggesting the Xbox maker might need to spin-off the Call of Duty business to get the sale approved.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority was initially skeptical of Microsoft’s promises to keepthe military shooteravailable on PlayStation consoles for many years to come, arguing it could have a financial incentive to pull the blockbuster series from the platform in the future. The CMA now says that after receiving more detailed information about Call of Duty player spending, it’s clear that making the series exclusive to Xbox would lose Microsoft a ton of money.
“The CMA inquiry group has updated its provisional findings and reached the provisional conclusion that, overall, the transaction will not result in a substantial lessening of competition in relation to console gaming in the UK,” it wrote in a press release. The CMA continued:
While the CMA’s original analysis indicated that this strategy would be profitable under most scenarios, new data (which provides better insight into the actual purchasing behaviour of CoD gamers) indicates that this strategy would be significantly loss-making under any plausible scenario. On this basis, the updated analysis now shows that it would not be commercially beneficial to Microsoft to make CoD exclusive to Xbox following the deal, but that Microsoft will instead still have the incentive to continue to make the game available on PlayStation.
The CMA is still reviewing Game Pass
The regulatory agency is still investigating the cloud gaming side of the deal, with its final verdict/decision still not due out until 26 April. Call of Duty seemed to be the biggest sticking point in the CMA’s skepticism of the deal, however, and Microsoft seems to have now tentatively assuaged those fears. It’s also been busy shoring up its defense on the cloud gaming front by striking deals with several smaller competitors to guarantee its first-party games will be available on other services if the deal goes through.
One big question that remains is what a final deal between Microsoft and Sony will look like. An Activision spokesperson had previously claimed that Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan was unwilling to negotiate, stating his only objective was to permanently kill the acquisition. As that outcome becomes increasingly unlikely, the PS5 manufacturer will seemingly have no alternative but to hammer out the details of Microsoft’s 10-year Call of Duty proposal.
Save on smartphones, TVs, appliances, and more The spring Discover Samsung Event has sprung, and that means it’s a great time to save on Samsung Galaxy smartphones, 4K and 8K TVs, monitors, soundbars, home appliances, and more.
Determining the availability of Activision Blizzard games like Diablo IV and an upcoming Black Ops sequel on Game Pass competitor PS Plus will be a key part of that. In its latest argument to the CMA pushing back on Sony’s concerns, Microsoft went so far as to suggest that 10 years would be plenty of time for it to go make its own Call of Duty competitor if it was so concerned about losing it.
In the meantime, Microsoft still needs to get approval from European regulators and deal with an antitrust lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission. But investors seem more hyped for the deal than they’ve ever been. Activision Blizzard’s stock price shot up to $85 a share following the CMA’s latest announcement, more than at any point since the acquisition was announced.
The Sims 4’s Growing Together Expansion Pack DLC is exactly what fans have been waiting for. If you’re a discerning Sims 4 fan wading through the massive amounts of Expansion Packs, Game Packs, Stuff Packs, and now the extra bite-sized Kits, searching for only the most crucial offerings, you’ll want to add Growing Together to the list. It’s an instant must-have, up there with Seasons and Cats & Dogs.
Unsurprisingly, the pack that delivers is also the pack that has exactly what the people have been asking for. Growing Together is a spiritual successor to The Sims 3’s Generations Expansion Pack, which also built on family relationships when it was released more than 10 years ago.
The new San Sequoia world is nice but nothing new
As is common for expansion packs in The Sims 4, Growing Together offers a new world in San Sequoia, which is based on San Francisco and the Bay Area. It’s nice enough, but it’s not the only world based on California, and it’s a bit small for my liking—though the size of worlds that come with expansion packs has been a gripe of mine for quite a while. I long for the days of earlier expansion packs like Get Together’s Windenburg, City Living’s San Myshuno, and Cats & Dogs’ Brindleton Bay. Windenburg has 14 residential lots and 13 community lots, Brindleton Bay offers 11 residential spots and five community ones, and San Myshuno has an incredible 30 total lots, split between a number 21 apartment units, one full residential spot, two residential penthouses, and six community lots. The number of lots in later expansions has slowly dwindled: San Sequoia has a paltry nine residential lots and just the two community lots, and Copperdale (the world from the last expansion, High School Years) has seven residential lots and five community ones.
My favorite part of San Sequoia, however, is its starter home availability. There are empty lots where you can, of course, make the affordable starter house of your dreams. But not all of us are builders or want to spend all that time designing a house from scratch instead of jumping right in. There are two pre-built and furnished homes you can get upon starting a new game, one with two bedrooms (built by Sims content creator dzidziak86) and another four-beds-two-bath family home (built by Sims streamer lilsimsie). The latter is sparsely decorated and the rooms are small to keep it cost-effective, but the exterior design is quite nice. And it’s also easy to decorate and customize as your Sim family establishes itself.
San Sequoia also features a recreation center and library, both of which are bright, family-friendly areas. But beyond those two spots and a splash pad area that isn’t a full lot, there’s only a vacation rental and movie theater, which is the typical rabbit hole event your Sim disappears into rather than a location you can visit. It would have been nice to walk around a lobby where Sims can meet and maybe have a couple arcade games nearby.
The Sims 4 Growing Together – Five Minutes of Gameplay
Milestones are the surprise star of Growing Together
I cannot stress how much I love Milestones, which is far more praise than I thought I would give when I first learned about the new feature. Milestones are crucial to the expanded baby mechanics, as it serves as a guide to helping your new infant grow. You can see which milestones they’ve yet to unlock, which makes it easy to build upon your baby’s progression as you guide the little one in the world. While that part is great for the new infant gameplay, milestones are for all Sims.
Save on smartphones, TVs, appliances, and more The spring Discover Samsung Event has sprung, and that means it’s a great time to save on Samsung Galaxy smartphones, 4K and 8K TVs, monitors, soundbars, home appliances, and more.
Across all ages, Sims will experience milestones for a number of events. Many of them are no-brainers, like getting married, having a kid, or having your first kiss. That’s nice and all, but I quickly became fascinated with all the less obvious ones, especially those that work across DLC packs. You can unlock the “Crumplebottomed!” milestone after Agnes Crumplebottom, found in the Cottage Living Expansion Pack, hits you with her purse for the first time. Sure there’s a milestone for your first WooHoo, but you never forget your first Crumplebottoming. There are milestones for getting through living in a haunted house if you have the Paranormal Stuff Pack or from being possessed via the StrangerVille Game Pack. I love when the various packs work together rather than feeling like disparate elements. It’s not the first time The Sims 4 has done this, but I love it every time. And this detail is particularly delightful.
I wish there were even more milestones to discover, but I’ve already come to enjoy the satisfaction of achieving one after a big moment for my Sims.
Family Dynamics add drama and better autonomy
My biggest gripe when playing with families, especially ones with multiple siblings, is the juggling I inevitably have to do. I’ll have mom teach a toddler in one room, but wait, the infant has crawled off and CPS is about to be called because the dad is washing dishes in the bathroom sink again. To be clear, Growing Together doesn’t fix most of that. But it does give Sims a little more guidance on how to act with each other when I’m not watching them.
There’s an ease between a father and daughter who have the “Jokester” family dynamic, allowing me to focus on my mother Sim who is desperately trying to get her baby to learn how to move on his own. The Sims also tells you how this can impact relationships. For example, “Jokesters” can become close or distant, depending on how they move beyond those funny interactions—or don’t. A child interacting with a parent who’s strict with them will be more on their toes in automated interactions, as well.
The family dynamics options include close, distant, supportive, permissive, difficult, strict, and jokesters. These are also limited by family titles. So you can’t, for instance, have siblings who have a strict dynamic as that only works with parents and their children.
Relatedly, Sims can now set preferences for personalities and conversation topics, which further adds to better autonomy, though it still isn’t perfect, even when hanging out with non-familial Sims.
Screenshot: EA
The babies are free and now we must teach them
While a base game update added the infant life stage for all The Sims 4 players, Growing Together is where the babies really come to life. In the base game, they’re static. They can crawl around and play, but you won’t get to see them build up to crawling. And they won’t build up to much else, either. At least, not until they age up into toddlers. For some players, that’s likely fine, especially since the previous infant gameplay was nonexistent. But I found it a bit lackluster. In Growing Together, infants will have to be coaxed into lifting their heads on their own for the first time, learn to reach for things, roll over onto their tummies and backs alone, and eventually get to crawling.
The infant progression system works so well because it doesn’t feel like a chore. The next milestone is viewable, and the game tells you what to do to achieve it, either through parenting or self-exploration on the child’s part. The challenge isn’t figuring out what to do, but trying to make a literal baby do what you want. Sometimes your infant Sim will be more focused on when their next meal is coming or will be too tired to do whatever baby education they need to hit the next milestone. Other times, it just takes a couple sessions for your infant Sim to get the hang of things. De-mystifying progression and making the focus on actually doing the things you need to do to achieve these milestones makes the whole experience feel fun and like a normal part of how a virtual family would grow together.
Growing Together feels like a baby shopping simulator
As with all expansion packs, Growing Together comes with new Create-a-Sim items to dress, accessorize, or customize your Sim. There are also Build/Buy Mode items that bring new furniture, decoration, and structural items for homes. These are all…fine? Much of it is made up of mission design pieces, which to The Sims’ credit makes sense as the style’s origins come from San Francisco. Yet, nothing particularly wowed me. And while I didn’t expect a ton of new home things beyond baby and family items to really play around with in Build Mode, I would have liked some more fashionable pieces in the Create-a-Sim additions. It feels focused solely on adding infant and toddler items as well as their body details: We got lots of birthmarks and freckles (like, so many freckles), but the clothing items feel like they fit in too well with the options we already have, rather than offering a cohesive refresh.
In all, Growing Together already feels like an essential pack for anyone who enjoys the story-telling side of The Sims. Its biggest flaw may lie in being too essential as it feels like it gatekeeps key gameplay elements like infant progression and milestones behind a paywall rather than offering a taste of such details to base game players, which could then be expanded upon in the paid expansion pack.
Still, that’s not enough to dissuade me from recommending the Growing Together Expansion Pack, and it certainly doesn’t take away from its merits.
The Growing Together Expansion Pack is on sale now for $40.
