Month: March 2018

Update: Rainbow Six Siege server maintenance is happening right now, meaning servers are either down as you read this or they soon will be. Check out the exact maintenance times below. Original story follows.

Rainbow Six Siege’s big Operation Chimera update goes live in just a few hours. The patch introduces a bunch of changes, but this unfortunately means servers will be down for a little while, Ubisoft has confirmed.

On Twitter, Ubisoft stated that each version of the game will go down for an hour as the company launches the update. It’ll arrive first on PC, which will be down from 6-7 AM PT / 9-10 AM ET / 2-3 PM GMT. Next, the PS4 version will go down for maintenance and deployment from 7-8 AM PT / 10-11 AM ET / 3-4 PM GMT. Finally, Ubisoft will deploy the update to Xbox One from 8-9 AM PT / 11 AM-12 PM ET / 4-5 PM GMT.

The highlights of Operation Chimera are two new Operators–Lion and Finka–as well as the Outbreak event. Outbreak is a three-player cooperative mode that tasks you and your teammates with fighting back against infected enemies.

The update also tweaks a bunch of Operators. Ela’s gun is getting nerfed, while Kapkan’s loadout is changing. In addition, Blitz will now be a 2 speed / 2 armor Operator, having previously been 1 speed / 3 armor. For more, check out the Operation Chimera patch notes.

Also starting today, Rainbow Six Siege’s 20 base Operators are being given away for free, along with all past and future weapon attachments. Looking further ahead, Ubisoft has revealed a new Siege game mode called Pick & Ban that’s coming later this year, reaffirmed its aim to eventually reach 100 Rainbow Six Siege Operators, and stated it does not currently plan on making a sequel.

Far Cry 5’s March 27 release date is drawing ever nearer, and now publisher Ubisoft has revealed a new mode for the upcoming game. Arcade Mode is a versatile level editor that lets you build huge, complex arenas, and it even includes assets from other Ubisoft titles.

You can use items from games such as Assassin’s Creed Unity, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Watch Dogs, Far Cry 4, and Far Cry Primal, as well as Far Cry 5 itself of course. At a recent preview event we got to try out a couple of levels made by Ubisoft itself: one is a weird, mind-bending mission in which you must escape some sort of prison or maze, while the other is a stealth-based find-and-kill level that contains a nod to James Bond. Arcade Mode also contains a multiplayer segment, although we weren’t permitted to capture footage of that mode; you can, however, watch us play the single-player levels above.

Far Cry 5’s campaign continues the series’ recent trend of attempting to balance silliness with discussions of serious topics. This game’s American setting made us feel like an outsider in a powerful way, but it also contains a murderous grizzly bear named Cheeseburger. For more, read the game’s lead writer discuss how he attempted to balance these two aspects of the story.

For more on the upcoming open-world game, watch us test the limits of Far Cry 5’s co-op multiplayer gameplay. Alternatively, check out Far Cry 5’s minimum and recommended PC specs.

This past weekend marked the first anniversary of the Nintendo Switch, but the celebration was dampened for many Switch owners when they discovered the system had begun seemingly resetting their play times. Fortunately, the issue appears to be temporary, and Nintendo has announced an update is on the way to resolve it.

“Some Nintendo Switch owners’ play activity info is displaying incorrectly, but play activity is still being recorded accurately in the background,” Nintendo said on Twitter. “A future system update will resolve this issue [and] ensure play time data is correctly displayed. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

The play time glitch was first reported just prior to the console’s first birthday. Many early adopters had discovered that any titles they had started playing on the system’s launch day, such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, now displayed that they were first played “0 days ago” in their Switch profile, leading many to fear that the system was only keeping track of users’ play activity for one year.

Fan publication NF Magazine later reported on Twitter that play times aren’t reset permanently, but rather disappear for 10 days–the same amount of time it normally takes for your play activity to show up in your Switch profile. After day 11, your play time would begin displaying again normally. This is certainly good news for players who enjoy having a record of how long they’ve spent playing each of their Switch games.

Switch celebrated its first anniversary on March 3, enjoying one of the best debut years of any console. You can relive the system’s early successes (and a few areas where it can still be improved) in our look back on Switch’s great first year. As successful as the console has been so far, Nintendo reportedly doesn’t have plans yet to release a new version of the console yet this year.

Star Wars Rebels may be over, but if the series finale makes anything clear, it’s that there is so much more story to tell. While the final episode of the Disney XD series left most of its characters in a way that they could be easily revisited, it’s Sabine’s (Tiya Sircar) story that is worthy of an entirely new series.

With the city of Lothal safe from the threat of the Empire, Sabine reveals that she and Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein) are embarking on a new adventure to find Ezra (Tyler Gray). In the climax of the finale, Ezra uses the Purrgil–essentially space whales capable of warp speed–to rid Lothal of Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) and the Empire’s remaining ships. However, in doing so, he was also blasted into space, leaving his friends behind.

While his location is unknown, Sabine and Ahsoka finding him and continuing their adventures through the galaxy could make for an exciting new series. At least, that’s what Scrubs star and superfan Donald Faison told co-creator and executive producer Dave Filoni during a fan screening of the series finale.

“Obviously, it’s intriguing. It would probably make a good story. It’s a good idea. So I don’t know. We’ll have to see,” Filoni responded. “There’s so many stories to tell, Donald. I’ve been so busy and I’ve been too busy finishing this story to think of another one.”

However, Filoni is adamant that if these characters are revisited, it can’t just be about the search for Ezra. “It’s going to be more than that,” he says. After all, Star Wars Rebels is a story about a family coming together to fight off its evil oppressors. A new series can’t just be about a single mission.

As for any sort of time frame on a new series, chances are fans are going to have to wait a while, if the story does indeed continue. “I have this crazy thing. I have to know what the story’s about before I tell it,” Filioni told fans. “We’ll see. You never know. Time marches on.”

Still, while he’s being vague about possibly continuing the Rebels storyline, we’d bet good money this isn’t the last fans have seen of Sabine, Ezra, Chopper, and the rest of the crew. The series ended on such a high note with so many possibilities to explore that chances are Filoni’s already spinning a few ideas in his head.

After all, Disney is launching its own streaming service in 2019 and already has multiple Star Wars TV series in development. While it’s believed at least one of the Star Wars shows in the works is live-action, there’s plenty of room on the studio’s new service for another animated extension of the franchise.

Composer John Williams has been an integral part of the Star Wars series since the first movie back in 1977. Williams has scored every film in the ongoing Saga since then, including last year’s The Last Jedi. However, the 86-year-old movie music legend has now confirmed that he will stop with next year’s Episode IX.

In a recent interview with Californian radio station KUSC, Williams explained that his ninth Star Wars score would also be his last. “We know JJ Abrams is preparing one [Star Wars movie] now that I will hopefully do next year for him,” he said. “I look forward it. It will round out a series of nine, that will be quite enough for me.”

Williams provided the iconic music for the original trilogy, the much-maligned prequel trilogy, and both The Last Jedi and 2015’s The Force Awakens. In 2016, Alexandre Desplat became the first new composer to tackle a Star Wars movie, when he was hired to score the spin-off Rogue One. Bourne Identity composer John Powell will score the upcoming Solo: A Star Wars Story, although Williams is still set to provide the movie’s main theme.

Solo: A Star Wars Story hits theaters on May 25, and the first trailer was released last month. It stars Alden Ehrenreich as Han, Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca, and Donald Glover as Lando, plus Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton, Paul Bettany, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

In related news, it was also announced last month that Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss will write and produce a new series of Star Wars movies. Disney confirmed that these films will be separate from the current Skywalker saga and the trilogy of movies that Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson is working on.

Last week, Diablo fans got excited when the game’s publisher, Blizzard, appeared to hint that a version of the game would be coming to Nintendo Switch. The company later quashed the rumors by saying, “We can assure you we’re not that clever.” Now, a new report claims the long-running action-RPG series is coming to Nintendo’s hybrid console after all.

Eurogamer says its sources have informed the site that yes, Diablo is coming to Switch–specifically, it will be a port of Diablo III that makes its way to the device. The report does not state whether Diablo III’s Reaper of Souls and Rise of the Necromancer expansions would be included in the port and does not mention a release date. An official announcement is still months away, the site says.

The news comes as something of a surprise after Blizzard said last week that the tweet–which showed a Diablo-themed light being switched on and off–was “meant to be a fun community engagement piece” and that the company has “nothing to announce” regarding the series coming to Switch.

Diablo III originally launched for PC in 2012. It was later released for PS3 and Xbox 360, before being ported to PS4 and Xbox One in 2014. However, Blizzard hasn’t released any games for a Nintendo platform since it brought Starcraft to the Nintendo 64 in 2000. People also want to see Blizzard’s Overwatch come to Switch, but game director Jeff Kaplan says that’s unlikely (although not impossible).

The Witcher protagonist Geralt of Rivia could cameo in another game being released in 2018, according to a tease from CD Projekt RED community lead Marcin Momot, who hinted at the possibility on Twitter.

He asked: “What if Geralt was going to step out of [The Witcher] for the very first time to make an appearance in one of the upcoming games later this year?” Of course, this isn’t confirmation, but it’d be quite the bait for him to mention it only for it not to happen.

There are some interesting possibilities for where Geralt could appear, but one that immediately sticks out is Bandai Namco’s SoulCalibur VI, which is expected to launch later this year. Bandai Namco has a working relationship with CD Projekt Red, having distributed The Witcher 3 in Europe and The Witcher 2 in Australia.

The SoulCalibur series has previously included guest characters from a wide-range of franchises, including Star Wars and The Legend of Zelda, so Geralt wouldn’t exactly feel out of place in the arena-based fighting game. There are other games that he’s well suited to, most notably Monster Hunter: World or the PC release of Final Fantasy XV.

Following the huge success of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, CD Projekt Red has moved on to working on its next title, CyberPunk 2077. There’s been very little news about the title since it was originally announced in 2012, but CD Projekt Red has confirmed it will be attending E3 2018, sparking speculation that the game will be shown there.

Although platforms for Cyberpunk 2077 have not yet been announced, the studio has said it will “probably” come to Xbox One, PS4, and PC. While you wait for news about Cyberpunk 2077, you can check out GameSpot’s feature on “Why Cyberpunk 2077 Is So Important To The Genre And Modern Society.”