Get used to it, Gramps. The kids love Fortnite and it’s the hub of their entertainment world. Back in the good old days, the youngsters would watch videos on YouTube, but that’s long gone. Fortnite is the place to go if you want to capture the youth market. A pre-movie event for Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker was only available in Fortnite. Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Tenet trailer debuted in Fortnite. Celebrities play Fortnite to show how hip and cool they are.
Now, Fortnite will stream three movies in its Party Royale island. Depending on where you live, you’ll get one of three Christopher Nolan films streamed in your region on June 26th. The movies are The Prestige, Batman Begins, and Inception. Unfortunately, US residents get Inception, while Canada gets the superior The Prestige. The event will mark the first time a full movie is played in Fortnite. Attend so you can tell your grandchildren you were there too.
Wizards of the Coast is revamping the way races are depicted in Dungeons & Dragons. Take orcs, for example. An evil homogeneous race of humanoid green-skinned barbarians no more, according to the blog post. Orcs have feelings and motivations. In fact, they are as complex and diverse as humans. It’s all part of a strategy to be more racially and culturally sensitive throughout the game system.
“We will continue that approach in future books, portraying all the peoples of D&D in relatable ways and making it clear that they are as free as humans to decide who they are and what they do.”
Wizards of the Coast is dedicated to more diverse hiring, and they’re working with consultants to vet their products and make sure they’re not inadvertently perpetuating harmful stereotypes. The studio is committing to correcting past misdeeds by updating long-time favorite publications.
The studio acknowledged that the Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation adventures contained unfortunate depictions of people that have been corrected in upcoming reprints. Kobolds, of course, are still dog-faced little twerps.
Microsoft is closing down Mixer. Beginning today, Microsoft will transition the hundreds of Mixer accounts left to Facebook Gaming, with the absolute switch occurring on July 22nd. It’s a radical move meant to support Microsoft’s Project xCloud system which is integral to the Xbox Series X and Xbox Game Pass strategies moving into the next generation.
Microsoft acquired Mixer in 2016, and integrated it into the Xbox ecosystem shortly afterwards. Despite a concerted marketing push, people just weren’t into Mixer. The big money exclusivity deals Microsoft cut with top tier streamers like Ninja and Shroud just last year ended up as nice paydays for those talents, but the audience did not come with them from competing sites. While the Twitch and Facebook Gaming streaming services saw audience numbers and hours viewed rise significantly during the COVID-19 crisis, Mixer has remained relatively flat.
I’m a sucker for tchotchkes in cockpits. The idea of customizing the console of my long-haul truck or P-51 Mustang with stickers, fuzzy dice, or pictures makes me warm all over. The king of useless dashboard toys is the bobblehead, and I love slapping one down in a high-performance vehicle. Put one in a No Man’s Sky spaceship? Sure. Put one in an Incom T-65B X-Wing Space Superiority Fighter? Oh, it’s on.
Electronic Arts’ Star Wars: Squadrons may end up being a boondoggle with a subpar single player campaign and it might launch stuffed to the brim with microtransactions, but look at the cockpit customization! I can forgive almost anything with a good bobblehead.
December 17th, 1995 was the air date for Marge Be Not Proud, the 11th episode of The Simpsons’ 7th season. In it, a clueless Marge buys Bart a copy of Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge, and she expectantly looks on as he hides his disappointment at not getting the infinitely more awesome sounding Bonestorm game. (To drive the point home, the episode’s end credits play over a clip of the snooze-worthy golf game.) Decades later, the internet would use the pivotal scene as the basis for a million memes.
Someone finally made Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge. You won’t have to shoplift it either. Aaron Demeter has thankfully uploaded his creation for free. You can play it here in your browser. Former Simpsons writer Bill Oakley has even given the game his seal of approval.
Wizards of the Coast has banned seven cards with racist imagery, names, or details and removed them fully from the official online database. In the announcement, the publisher apologized for insensitivity and not being aware of the problematic parts of the cards. The seven card being excised are Invoke Prejudice, Cleanse, Stone-Throwing Devils, Pradesh Gypsies, Jihad, Imprison, and Crusade.
“The events of the past weeks and the ongoing conversation about how we can better support people of color have caused us to examine ourselves, our actions, and our inactions. We appreciate everyone helping us to recognize when we fall short. We should have been better, we can be better, and we will be better.”
Banning cards from competitive play is done all the time, but the removal of the cards from the database is unusual and speaks to the seriousness of the action. As an example, one of the banned cards, Invoke Prejudice, wasn’t just banned and removed, the card ID number has been changed from its original 1488, due to that number’s association with white supremacist iconography.
Remember the Disney Vault? That was the Walt Disney Studios’ strategy of rotating VHS home movie releases by having limited availability windows for older films. If you wanted Bambi, you couldn’t just go to a store to buy it unless it was the right time. If you missed it, the movie could “go into the vault” (taken off shelves) for years. People hated it, but Disney apparently saw value in creating some sales urgency with each title. Destiny 2’s activities are moving to a similar plan.
First, Bungie has plans for the game through the next three years. The new saga begins today with Season of Arrivals, then Beyond Light in September, and continuing in The Witch Queen and ending with Lightfall sometime in 2022. It’s a longer term plan than rumors of an impending Destiny 3 announcement indicated, but with new consoles on the horizon it makes sense to have a crossover period. In fact, Bungie specifically addressed the question of what’s going on with the next game.
Instead of building a Destiny 3 and leaving D2 behind, each year, we are going to cycle older, less actively played content out of the live game and into what we’re calling the Destiny Content Vault (DCV).
With all this new content, Destiny 2 is just too packed with stuff. It’s 115GB of data that’s pushing consoles to the edge of their storage capacities and a lot of it is seldom played, according to the studio’s metrics. The Destiny Content Vault is Bungie’s solution. Whole planets with their missions and destinations will cycle into and out of the vault as part of the live service schedule. The first places to go in when Beyond Light launches are Mars, Io, Titan, Mercury, and Leviathan. You’ll want to do the story missions on each as soon as possible if you want to catch them before they go away for a long time. In their place will be some new stuff and a returning favorite, the Vault of Glass, from the first game. The story is about to get even more incomprehensible.
This is the splash screen that will greet you in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare if you fire up the game today. After years of denying that Call of Duty was a game with a political message, (even with mountainsofevidence to the contrary) it seems like Activision Blizzard is finally ready to say something political with their platform. Hurrah! Unfortunately, it may sound a little hypocritical to some.
DICE and EA have published the last major content update for Battlefield V. It may be the final hurrah for the game, and it may not have lived up to fan expectations, but the Summer Update is a substantial one. Although there is a caveat, even here. There are nine new weapons and five new gadgets for the soldiers on their feet as well as six new vehicles. The update comes with a bevy of balance changes and map tweaks to go with the new kit. Finally, the bit with the caveat is that there are two new-ish maps.
The Al Marj Encampment is another North Africa map featuring a spice market and a German headquarters to fight in. The Provence map was released back in June of last year, but as an infantry-only map. This “expanded” version gives players a bigger battle space and allows vehicles to actually do the stuff Battlefield players expect.
All in all, it’s not a bad update, but it leaves something to be desired as a finale. The game’s rocky reception and dwindling player numbers speak to unrest in the community. Can DICE recapture that “only in Battlefield” magic that drew so many to previous games?
Elite Dangerous already had spaceships, rovers, and even aliens, but the next DLC expansion is adding the most important way to travel. Look! It’s legs! Elite Dangerous: Odyssey is adding the ability to get out of your vehicle and walk around the way we’ve been doing it for decades. Not only that, but Frontier is adding first-person infantry combat to the game, so you can shoot other people just the way we’ve been doing it for decades.
Developer Ion Lands has added new views to Cloudpunk. You can use a snazzy first-person view or a new zoomed-in third-person view along with the original zoomed-out perspective. They’re optional and free. The feature feels a little bit like it’s held together with gum and persistence, but it works. Check out the gorgeously voxelated neon world and feel like a Nexus-6. There’s no C-Beams or attack ships off the shoulder of Orion, but blocky heads and rain abound.
Minecraft Dungeons is a mostly okay take on the ARPG formula. It’s maybe a tad simplified, but it’s got the Minecraft branding all over it so the kids will like it. But wait! There’s a little something for us old-timers tucked away in there too. In what can only be a nod to Diablo II, Minecraft Dungeons has a secret cow level. As first reported by Lords of Gaming, you need to beat the game at least once, then do a bunch of silly things (I won’t spoil it here) and you’ll get access to this homage to Blizzard’s game. Moo!
Gearbox has announced Bounty of Blood: A Fistful of Redemption. It is the next chunk of season pass DLC for Borderlands 3. In it, players will travel to the planet Gehenna and Man With No Name it up in a town beset by bandits. Borderlands is no stranger to classic Western movie tropes, but Bounty of Blood looks to push the homage even further with overt imagery and characters. of course, it’s still Borderlands, so there’s bound to be toilet humor and clumsy robots besides the oat opera.
Bounty of Blood launches on June 25th. It will be the third of four planned season pass DLC installments.
Also announced today, Takedown at the Guardian Breach, a new endgame mission for high-level groups, will be released on June 4th. It will be a free permanent update for all owners of the game.
According to multipleindependentsources, the next Call of Duty will be a return to the Black Ops timeline. It is rumored that Cold War would essentially be a reboot of the first Black Ops game, taking players back to the post-Vietnam War era. Like the current Modern Warfare game, it wouldn’t be a straight up remake, but more of a do-over that recontextualizes the old game’s elements in the more modern style.
Lending credence to the rumors, the bunker locations in Modern Warfare’s battle royale Warzone map recently became accessible, and they are filled with Cold War details like a U-2 spy plane. The next season of the battle pass will feature bunker-related missions and the timing of the next season’s start would match the release of past Call of Duty annual game announcements.
Expect conspiracy theories and battle pass seasons to meld and say hello to The Numbers again!
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 collection is the inevitable high resolution remaster of the classic skating games, but the lineup has something the old games didn’t. Middle age. The titular star is 52 years old and he appears in the game with his modern look thanks to developer Vicarious Visions’ decision to update the in-game models to match his real age. He looks damn good for 52! That goes for all the other skaters, too. You’ll get Bucky Lasek at 47, Steve Caballero at 55, and Bob Burnquist at 43. Even Elissa Steamer is depicted as the 44 year old she is now. (You can see the new models at around the 38 second mark of the trailer.) It’s a nice change of pace for an industry that usually panders to a younger audience.
