What do players want from the next NBA 2K game? Is it visual fidelity? Sick dunks and rock-dropping? Major blocks? Realistic plays? Nah. If the trailer For NBA 2K20 is anything to go by, the players just want more casino in their basketball. Pachinko! Prize wheels! Loot packs! Slots! Slots! Slots! It’s all in the new MyTeam experience. Why bother with fantasy sports, when you can bank on straight-up gambling for your fix?
Wreckfest, Bugbear’s triumphant return to demolition racing, is coming to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Alongside that platform launch, the PC version is getting a bunch of free content to bring it up to the consoles. Four new tracks, five more vehicles, (including motorhomes and a motorised couch) additional career events, and a new dirt devil arena are coming today.
I want to stress the important point here. There is a couch with an engine rigged up to it, and you ride it while slamming into other drivers on motorised couches.
There is also a season pass being offered that will give you twenty more vehicles over the course of eight DLC packs coming soon. Will anything in the DLC be as good as a souped-up demolition derby couch? Is there anything that good in real life?
Dennis Brännvall, design director of Electronic Arts’ and DICE’s Star Wars Battlefront II, has a mea culpa for the fans. He knows they screwed up the 2017 launch and had a hard road to winning back players. The major issue was, of course, the loot boxes. It was a mistake that cost the company dearly, and the well-publicized backlash continues to impact the industry.
“Not a week goes by without us thinking, ‘Imagine if we hadn’t launched with loot boxes the way we did.'”
Things are looking up for Battlefront II. The furor is largely behind them, and the developers have steadily worked on improvements and adding content to the game. The recently announced roadmap includes clone commandos, more offline single player content, and The Rise of Skywalker stuff to coincide with the next movie. The cynical gamer in you can chalk it all up to EA not wanting the game poisoning the well for the rest of their license, but either way, the players benefit.
People were monitoring Kinect. Recently, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook had to admit that real live people sometimes listened in on the companys’ digital assistants. During that news cycle, Microsoft also admitted that they hired folks to monitor Skype and Cortana conversations, but Motherboard reports that contractors also listened to Kinect interactions. Their sources, ex-employees of the contracted company, say that while their monitoring was limited to audio only, children were frequently the subjects.
“The Xbox stuff was actually a bit of a welcome respite, honestly. It was frequently the same games. Same DLCs. Same types of commands.”
If you were one of the people that objected to Kinect because it was “creepy” and maybe invasive, well, congratulations! Being paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not listening. Microsoft has updated their general privacy policy to note that they use both “automated and manual (human)” methods of processing data.
If you’re a fan of the 1993 Groundhog Day movie starring Bill Murray as a weatherman caught in a time loop, you’ve probably always wondered what shenanigans his son would go through in an official sequel. No? Well, Sony and Tequila Works will show you anyway with the VR game on September 17th. Phil Connors Jr. goes to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, and the player gets to guide him through VR time puzzles and “wacky” dialogue.
Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son will launch on PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, and Vive. If you preorder, you’ll get a digital copy of the movie, presumably to see what a good story looks like.
Once upon a time, there was a Prey 2. It looked like this and it was being developed by Human Head Studios as a sequel to the original 2006 Prey. It was officially cancelled in 2014 by Bethesda Softworks, although there are numerous reports of Human Head and Bethesda parting ways as early as 2011. The franchise would eventually be rebooted with Arkane Studios’ Prey in 2017.
The new Prey is great, and the Mooncrash expansion added a terrific rogue-like experience to the game. But the ghost of Prey 2 remains. Andrew Borman of the Museum of Play has dug up some audio logs from that cancelled game. In them, the game’s protagonist, bounty hunter and displaced human Killian Samuels, muses on his encounters with Tommy Towadi, the hero of the first game. Even though Tommy was not seen in any of the released footage, it sounds like he had unfinished business with his alien kidnappers. Don’t fear the reaper, Tommy! At least you didn’t end up stuck on the Talos space station.
The gates are open! Rush now to your Battle.net client and reserve your character name in World of Warcraft Classic. The throwback version of the Blizzard MMO goes live on August 27th, but you can grab your name now. Hurry, before someone else takes your precious DodgersFan_Ganja or ThisIsMyWizardHat. It really is the true 2004 experience.
Bungie has released more details of Destiny 2’s planned move from Activision Blizzard’s Battle.net service to Steam. Beginning August 20th, PC players will need to go to this site and follow the instructions to migrate their accounts. That move will transfer the player’s expansions, loot, characters, and stats to the new service permanently, and allow them to continue playing the game. After October 1st, Destiny 2 not be available on Battle.net, and you’ll have to start over on Steam with a new account if you haven’t completed the move.
On August 21st, platform cross-saves come to Destiny 2. Players can designate an active account to play on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, or Google Stadia as they wish. Play for a few minutes in the morning on PC as you wait for your oatmeal to cook, hit up the break room Xbox One at work during lunch, then come home and unwind on your living room PlayStation 4. Cross-play won’t be supported, but logging in and playing from any valid platform is a convenience.
The Destiny 2: Shadowkeep expansion launches on October 1st.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the soft reboot of the series, will feature an in-game “tamagunchi” that feeds on kills. According to Infinity Ward, the sick little digital pet started as an effort to get a working wristwatch onto player characters. Just like the tamagotchi fad you’re probably more familiar with, you feed it or it dies. In this case, it eats delicious murder.
“This little thing on your wrist, every time you get a string of kills, it goes, ‘Ya-ta!’ and it makes a little noise, then you look at it, and it evolved out of an egg.”
The tamagunchi is optional in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, so if you don’t want some digital pet chirping at you for more kills, you don’t need to use it. Despite this, I imagine tamagunchi variants will be a hot commodity in the game’s loot shop, along with the normal cosmetic gun skins and animated name tags.
This lighthearted news comes as the United States deals with the latest horror of two mass shootings within hours of each other. While there have been no credible studies linking real-world shootings to video game violence, political commentary has once again raised the debate further fueling the controversy.
The big industry news last week wasn’t a new game reveal or a beloved studio closing down. It was popular Fortnite streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins moving from Twitch to Microsoft’s competing Mixer service. Ninja made the announcement and said he was excited to get back to his “streaming roots” perhaps in a nod to his origins as a big Halo player. Whatever the deal entailed, Microsoft obviously hopes some portion of Ninja’s 14.7 million Twitch followers will do exactly that. And if enough of them come over to Mixer, perhaps other popular streamers will follow suit? It’s a gamble for both participants, since Twitch partner streamers cannot also play on competitor’s services, but some dress code rules are proving to be an hindrance in some cases.
Apple and Google are exploring subscription passes for all-you-can-play mobile game services. Both will offer rotating selections of mobile games with no time limits and all in-app rigaramole covered by the membership fee.
Apple Arcade “coming this fall” will offer over 100 games at launch. Apple announced the service in March, but has yet to divulge pricing or issue public invitations for testing. It will boast some exclusive game titles, over those just native to Apple’s regular app store, and promises to disable tracking, ads, and in-app purchases.
Google Play Pass, although not yet officially announced, was confirmed by Google to Android Police after they obtained images of the service. The $4.99 monthly subscription will give players access to curated games and some productivity apps, also with ads and in-app purchases turned off.
The challenge for both services is that mobile game players in general are notoriously cheap. Apple gamers generate more revenue than Android users, but both rely on rare whales to fund their overwhelmingly more popular free-to-play markets. A less discussed, but possibly more immediate concern, is the probability that some games will turn out to be much less addictive when you turn off their free-to-play timer business model.
Diablo, the seminal hack and slash action roleplaying game from Blizzard is now playable in a regular browser. Go here and you can check out the work of RivSoft, the makers of other open-source projects like a Diablo III character planner and a Path of Exile passive skill tree planner. If you don’t have your original Diablo files, you can play the old shareware version. If you own Diablo, let’s say through GOG, then you can drop the main DIABDAT.MPQ file into the browser and play the whole darned game in it. there’s probably no practical use for this, but it’s cool to stay awhile and see Tristram living in your Internet Explorer or Chrome window.
The folks behind Roll20, The Orr Group, have published their annual stats for usage. Roll20 is one of the most popular ways to play pen and paper roleplaying games over the internet with over 4 million regular users, so while the report isn’t a comprehensive look at the industry, it’s an interesting snapshot of a large part of the community.
The summary is that an overwhelming majority of the Roll20 players party up in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition games. In both campaign and account participation quantity, it’s over 50% to D&D5E, with everyone else making up the rest. Pathfinder, the system that for many years captured the hearts of older school D&D players, gets less than 10% in either category. Most surprisingly, Call of Cthulhu (any edition) tracked high on both measurements, even surpassing Pathfinder in the number of campaigns played. Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!
That image is what you’ll see if you try to play the recently released Nintendo Switch port of Doom or Doom II without an internet connection. It’s also the dead end you’ll get if you don’t have a Bethesda.net account. Bethesda says it’s a mistake and the login requirement should actually be optional. They’re working on a fix.
The moose with the gun is called Big Khan. He breathes fire somehow, which is really not that odd in the world of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden. The guy wearing the motorcycle helmet is not in the game. The Seed of Evil expansion will launch at the end of this month.
