That’s the Angel City Chorale bringing down the house on America’s Got Talent. They are indeed talented, but their choice of song obviously helped showcase their amazing sound. Christopher Tin’s Baba Yetu, originally written as Civilization IV’s theme song, remains a powerful, beautiful piece of music. The Lord’s Prayer in Swahili seems to transcend language. It deservedly won a Grammy in 2011. You can check out the version used in-game here, or the re-release from Tin’s album, Calling All Dawns.
Turn 10 is removing prize crates from Forza Motorsport 7. The prize crates, Forza’s version of random loot boxes, will take at least until winter to be fully excised due to their ties with other elements of the game, but the developer has already removed cars as prizes from the crates. Turn 10 has also unlocked 100 previously locked exclusive cars to all players. While the prize crates were never available directly for real money, they now offer nothing but cosmetic doodads and will stay that way until they leave entirely. Additionally, the tokens which you could buy with real money in previous Forza games will never be coming to Forza Motorsport 7, and Turn 10 promises that they will not appear in Forza Horizon 4.
“The overwhelming feedback has been that this system feels out of place in the game.”
While the tide may not be fully turning against the loot crate model, recent high-profile reversals from games like Star Wars Battlefront 2 and Middle-earth: Shadow of War show that publishers are paying attention. The additional revenue crate gambling brings in may not make up for the loss of some players that refuse to engage with the model, and the hit to the brand’s reputation. Recent legal developments in other countries are undoubtedly taking a toll on the scheme as well.
That’s me on my third No Man’s Sky starting planet in a row that tried to kill me. Those are the breaks in the infamous survival crafting game from Sean Murray and Hello Games. I was trying to check out all the changes in the much-anticipated NEXT update that was just released. True multiplayer, a third-person view, more junk to craft, a better guided beginning, and loads of other stuff came in the free update. Some of it works better than others. For example, the guided beginning works a lot better if the random number gods put you on an hospitable starting planet. The ones that burn you with constant acid rain or the fiery heat of a too-close sun make for a less great first impression. Overall, NEXT is a lot of greatness. It doesn’t fundamentally change the nature of the game, but it does fulfill a lot of the promise people thought the game was supposed to have originally.
Psyonix has published the drop rates for the loot in their Rocket League crates. According to the developer, the published figures have been true since the system went into effect in September 2016. Like most loot crate schemes, the rarer unlocks require a significant amount of luck to get. For example, the current Black Market tier of unlocks start with a 1% base roll to be present in the crate, and then each particular item in that tier has an equal chance of appearing. The good news is that you’ll probably unlock that common double-lightning decal pretty quickly.
Ghost Recon Wildlands’ Special Operation 2 is launching on July 24th. More Ghost War versus multiplayer characters, new maps to fight in, more cosmetic loot to purchase. All fairly standard stuff for multiplayer content. What is notable is the new Ghost Mode coming to the single player and co-op campaign. The new feature enables permadeath, restricts you to one main weapon and one sidearm, disables inventory management unless you’re at a gear station, reloading early loses unspent ammo, and (this is the big one) turns off the AI team. Finally, an end to the garbage squad chatter! Goodbye faux stealth NPC.
The free update addresses a lot of the criticisms we had with the game in its original launch state. Say what you will about Ubisoft’s open world game design, but they’ve shown a willingness to listen to players and support their games for a good stretch of time.
That’s hunky star Nathan Fillion playing Nathan Drake in an Uncharted short film. While it’s an unofficial fan production, this is something fans of the Naughty Dog action game series have wanted to see for a long time. Thankfully, director Allan Ungar did too. Between ABC’s The Rookie going from pilot to series, Fillion was able to squeeze in some time for the passion project.
“This is what we set up to make, what we set out to do when we sat down for vegan Thai food. It’s a fifteen-minute short film. It’s our tribute to the character. For right now, we’re very happy with this just this being what it is.”
Nathan Drake is famously voiced by Nolan North in the games, so it’s a bit coincidental that at about the same time the Uncharted short was hitting the web, Nathan Fillion confirmed that he does not voice Cayde-6 in Destiny 2’s upcoming Forsaken expansion despite voicing the character previously.
“I wasn’t available for this last instalment – it’s not me doing the voice for Cayde-6. In a wonderful, amazing turn of events – it’s actually Nolan North!”
When a door closes, a window opens. Something like that.
Duncan Jones is developing a movie based on the Rogue Trooper property. Rogue Trooper is a British comic character that first appeared in 1981 in the pages of 2000 AD. There’s a videogame relationship in the form of a 1986 Commodore 64 game, a 1990 Amiga game, and a 2006 game from Rebellion which was given the HD teatment with a 2017 Redux Edition. Jones even linked to the Rebellion game’s site in his announcement.
The next big update for Creative Assembly’s Total War: Rome II is a doozy. The Ancestral Update (currently in beta testing) features a host of long-requested additions and tweaks to the almost five year old game. One of the most anticipated changes is the return of family trees. This was a large part of the strategic gameplay in the first Rome, so its absence in the sequel was always puzzling. It’s finally coming! Players will be able to track family fortunes, marry into and out of power and wealth, and piss off sullen teenagers with bad career decisions. War never changes.
I don’t know what’s going on with the mimics wearing Uncle Sam top hats and Asian bamboo hats in this free update for Prey: Mooncrash, but I love it. Bethesda promises more free updates in the future, including one that features the “Typhon Hunter” multiplayer revealed during E3. How long must we wait for the inevitable skins that turn mimics into mudcrabs?
Prey: Mooncrash is one of Tom’s picks for the best games of 2018 (so far)! You can watch him fumble around in the DLC for a couple of hours here.
Remember Desperados: Wanted Dead Or Alive? It was 2001 squad tactics game in the vein of Commandos, except set in the rootin’ tootin’ Old West. It’s now compatible with modern PC systems thanks to THQ Nordic. The publisher has updated the game to work with Windows 7, 8, 10 and Macs and Linux! Yeehaw partners! They’ve even restored a “long lost” demo mission to the game.
“A challenging level from back in the old days when some games still had rather difficult demos.”
That’s called shade cowboy, and it’s being thrown in your lily-livered face! Desperados: Wanted Dead Or Alive is available on Steam and GOG.
Warframe’s next content update has hoverboards. Honest-to-gosh trick flip, Back to the Future 2 style decks that float. The Fortuna expansion takes players to Venus and gives them the opportunity to skim over the surface of the planet and even do tricks on a customizable board. Auto-inflating Nike sneakers not included.
Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence research arm has created bots that have learned to play Quake 3: Arena capture-the-flag. Unlike the gaming bots we’re familiar with which are programmed for specific games and get hidden cheats, DeepMind’s creations learned to play using visual input like humans do and received no information that would not be available to a person. They were actually playing the game and getting better with practice. A mere half-million practice games later, and the bots could beat “strong” human teams 74 percent of the time. Make the bots teabag opponents, scream profanities, and disconnect to avoid losing and we might have something.
SCS Software presents Oregon! The Beaver State! The Pacific Northwest is a decidedly different landscape from what players are used to in American Truck Simulator’s current build. According to the devs, the upcoming expansion goes all in on the forest industry that makes up a large part of Oregon’s economy. Despite the prevalence of big rigs loaded with lumber, players won’t be able to recreate the crash from Final Destination 2, but I’m sure you’ll all try anyway.
Some players of Grand Theft Auto V’s online mode have been seeing the above message flash on their screens the past couple of days. It may look official, but it’s not. Rockstar confirmed that the message is a hoax perpetrated by one or more players that have hacked the system to show custom messages to online players. Sanity check! As much as you may want this to be true, Rockstar’s focus through 2019 is going to be on Red Dead Redemption 2.
In related news, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told GamesIndustry that Red Dead Redemption 2 matching Grand Theft Auto V’s 100 million total unit sales is not a realistic goal.
“It’s hard to expect anything to perform as well as the most profitable entertainment product of all time.”
We’ll get a real Grand Theft Auto 6 announcement someday. It likely won’t come in the form of a text message for in-game players.
That’s Wrecking Ball, the newest playable character coming to Overwatch. The design inspiration is clear. He’s your childhood pet hamster in the plastic exercise ball you rolled around on the floor. In Blizzard’s game the hamster is super-intelligent and bloodthirsty, and his plastic ball is now a combat mech. It makes sense.
The hamster’s name is Hammond and according to the lore he escaped from the same Secret of NIMH type laboratory as Winston before becoming an Overwatch hero. You know what that means! Erotic gorilla-on-hamster fan art coming soon!
