Month: March 2019

Google took its first steps into being a major competitor in video games with the announcement of Stadia, its cloud-based game streaming platform. The presentation showed off lots of ways the company is leveraging the game tech against its other products like YouTube and Google Assistant, but one particular point showed how games on Stadia could be a major boon for split-screen gaming.

The moment came when lead research and development designer Erin Hoffman-John walked through various features, including multiplayer features. One tech demo showed Stream Connect, a purportedly easy way for developers to feed different views to each player. Since every player is being fed their own video stream of a play session, Stream Connect can combine these and feed one video inside of another player’s stream.

“Each of these screens is powered by a separate Stadia instance,” Hoffman-John explained. “But what would happen to squad-based games if developers could allow players to call up the views of their teammates on demand? Or utilize any polygonal surface as a receiver for another player’s video stream? Stream Connect makes this possible with extremely little effort on the part of the developer, bringing dynamic squad-based gaming into easy reach even for very small teams. We’ve shown you three views but we can keep going. We can keep adding streams and shape how they’re shown to the player.”

In the demo, this was used for each player in an asymmetrical game to see each other’s viewpoint alongside their own. The stream was also shown adding more and more views, and adding a hypothetical third player with their own “command center” view to direct other players.

Split-screen multiplayer has become less prevalent in recent years, in part because of the advent of online multiplayer, but also because it’s a strain on computing power. When a single PC or console has to render two separate player perspectives, developers usually have to drop the fidelity on both views to make it work. With a streaming solution and all the computing power being handled remotely, this would no longer be a problem.

For more on Google Stadia, catch up with everything we know and read our hands-on impressions. Or for more on cloud gaming as an emerging trend, read our primer on cloud streaming and which big companies are investing in the tech.

If you’re not a fan of loot boxes in Apex Legends, changing your Origin account region to Belgium removes them from the game. Instead, leveling up will unlock crafting metals bundles, which allows you to make the cosmetic items you want.

In Belgium, there are laws against loot boxes in video games. As Reddit user UnicornPL pointed out, this results in Belgium Apex Legends players earning crafting metals instead of Apex Packs when they level up. Rock Paper Shotgun went one step further to discover changing your region to Belgium allows you to take advantage of this as well, but adds on that it’s possible EA will block this trick soon.

Season 1: Wild Frontier has started in Apex Legends, and it’s added a battle pass and brand-new playable character, named Octane, to the game. The standard battle pass costs 950 Apex Coins. If you sign up for a one-month subscription to EA Access on Xbox One or Origin Basic Access on PC, you can effectively grab the battle pass for half off. There’s currently no cheaper option on PS4. For 2,800 Apex Coins, you can purchase a bundle that includes the pass and also unlocks 25 of its 100 levels of rewards. Like Fortnite, Apex Legends Season 1 battle pass lets you unlock enough Apex Coins to purchase next season’s pass. However, unlike Epic’s game, Apex Legend’s first battle pass does not include challenges.

Octane is the ninth Legend to join Respawn’s battle royale game, and he’s specifically designed for players looking for a little bit more speed. Like Mirage and Wraith–who have new battle pass skins–Octane is an offense-focused character. Octane’s tactical ability gives him a six-second boost of speed at the cost of his own health. His passive counteracts this, allowing the speed demon to regenerate his health while he’s out of combat. Finally, Octane’s ultimate ability allows him to throw out a launch pad that he, his allies, and enemies can use to launch into the air.

Apex Legends is available on Xbox One, PS4, and PC. In our Apex Legends review, Phil Hornshaw gave the game a 9/10, writing, “Apex Legends is a mix of smart shooter ideas that makes for a competitive, team-based game that gets at all the best parts of battle royale while addressing a lot of the weaknesses. Respawn’s intense focus on team play makes Apex more than just a worthy addition to the genre; it’s an indicator of where battle royale should go in the future.”

Nintendo showed off a ton of games during its annual Nindies Spring Showcase on Wednesday. The nearly 30-minute-long broadcast was packed with reveals and announcements, giving us our first look at more than a dozen indie titles coming to Switch this year–including a few that are available now.

Nintendo bookended the showcase with two big announcements. First, the company revealed that Microsoft’s acclaimed platformer Cuphead will arrive on Switch on April 18, and it’ll add Xbox Live integration down the line, allowing players to unlock Achievements even when they play on the hybrid console. Nintendo later closed out the presentation with the first trailer for Cadence of Hyrule, a Zelda-themed Crypt of the NecroDancer crossover coming to Switch this spring.

There were plenty of other announcements in between, from the retro-style Stranger Things 3 game to Blaster Master Zero 2, and nearly every title featured during the showcase was accompanied by a new trailer. If you missed the presentation, you can watch all of the new trailers from it below. You can also catch a replay of the entire broadcast here, and if it inspires you to pick up some indie games, Nintendo is holding a big sale right now in the Eshop.

Cuphead

Cadence of Hyrule – Crypt Of The NecroDancer Ft. The Legend Of Zelda

Blaster Master Zero 2

Katana Zero

Rad

The Red Lantern

Stranger Things 3: The Game

My Friend Pedro

Nuclear Throne

Super Crate Box

Creature In The Well

Pine

Bloodroots

Overland

Neo Cab

Swimsanity

In case you haven’t heard: The Epic Games Store is giving away a free PC game every two weeks this year to celebrate its first 12 months in business, and all you have to do is create a free Epic account to claim it. For the past two weeks, Epic members have enjoyed free access to Slime Rancher, a charming game about collecting slimes and running a farm–but starting tomorrow, Slime Rancher will be replaced by Oxenfree, a supernatural mystery game from Night School Studio. Oxenfree will be available for free from March 21 to April 4–and once you claim the game during that time period, it’s yours to keep forever. You don’t even have to install it.

Oxenfree is a story-driven adventure where you play as a teenage girl named Alex on a weekend trip with her friends to an island. After they accidentally trigger the release of a supernatural force, Alex and her friends must find a way to set things right and escape with their lives. Alex has free rein to explore the whole island, and the main gameplay centers around dialogue bubbles that appear above her head as she talks–at any given time, you have multiple dialogue choices to pick from, or you can choose to say nothing at all. Player choices have a significant impact and multiple endings are possible.

“The rabbit hole of influence goes deep in Oxenfree–from playing matchmaker among Alex’s friends to destroying or strengthening her own relationships with them–and it’s entertaining to repeat it all in an effort to learn what could be,” wrote Alexa Ray Corriea in GameSpot’s Oxenfree review. The game received an 8/10 for its amazing dialogue, unpredictable story, fantastic soundtrack, and deep influence of player choice.

Oxenfree generally sells for $20 on PC, so don’t miss this chance to pick it up for 100% off. And if you fall in love with its style and story, keep an eye out for the next game from Night School Studio, Afterparty, which is set to release this year.

Get Oxenfree for free in the Epic Games Store »

OPINION: If the reality of what Google is promising with Stadia is accurate, then we’re looking at the future of video games.

Yes, that could read a little hyperbolic given that outside of the Project Stream beta last year (successful as it was), we’re not exactly sure just how well Stadia will cope with fluctuating latency in widespread, real-world conditions. And no, we’re not saying that Google and specifically Stadia is the one and only future for games. But Stadia’s promise–a hardware agnostic world for consumers that can deliver the best gaming has to offer on whatever device you happen to have in front of you (as long as you have a decent internet connection)–feels like where we’re all headed. And while we’ve had other companies try to deliver on this, Google seems uniquely positioned to actually make it work.

That promise is certainly intoxicating. A new gaming platform, delivered completely online and with all the processing handled in the cloud, is revolutionary for consumers in a few ways. It removes a lot of the friction we normally associate with playing games: having to spend hundreds of dollars on console or speccing up a PC to run the latest and greatest; having to buy physical discs or download gigabyte upon gigabyte of data to local drives; or being surprised by hefty patches or updates when all you want to do is play.

Will Doom Eternal’s performance on Stadia be on par with consoles and PCS?

And of course, there’s the convenience. You can watch Netflix on your TV or PC at home, and then continue watching on your phone on your way to work. You can do the same with music on Spotify, switching from device to device seamlessly. If you want to play The Division 2, however, you’re stuck to the screen your console or PC is tethered to. Even the most convenient gaming console ever–the Nintendo Switch–is “locked” to one device. A service like Stadia makes playing games more accessible than ever.

It will also seemingly have a major impact on how games are made. Google made a big song and dance at its GDC reveal event about all the ways Stadia could help developers create games, the biggest of which is the added power that a cloud-based development platform can offer. Google is saying game development no longer needs to be tied to finite processing and hardware specs, or that only one “instance” of Stadia infrastructure is what design should be pegged to. Imagine a scenario where the world’s best game makers weren’t constrained by the processing power of one unchanging piece of hardware? How will that impact the types of games we’ll all be playing in the future? “As a developer, you’re used to being forced to tone down your creative ambitions that are limited by the hardware, but our vision with Stadia is the processing resources available will scale up to match your imagination. In this new generation, the data center is your platform,” Stadia’s head of engineering Maj Baker said during the Stadia briefing.

Of course, all of this dazzling potential could be undone if Stadia doesn’t provide a smooth, seamless gaming experience when it launches later this year. The bane of online game streaming–high latency leading to lag–is a problem Google claims to have answered thanks to a combination of its geographically widespread data centers and other infrastructure solutions, but just how well it has solved this won’t be known for sure until the service is released. Will this only be a viable alternative to a PC or console if you live somewhere like San Francisco or New York? What if you’re in a remote location? And location isn’t the only thing standing in the way of Stadia’s widespread success. If you’re one of the millions on fixed data caps every month, is this service viable for you (especially with the 8K video Google is saying is coming down the line)? And of course, there will always be those who prefer a physical device to game on, either because of the visual fidelity, the want to fully control one’s gaming environment, and the fact that owning a game on a disc you can hold in your hand is simply more… tangible.

But even if you’re someone who thinks a platform like Stadia isn’t for you, what is undeniable is the promise of a purely online, hardware agnostic platform is a massive disruption to not only the way we play games, but to the video games industry as a whole. If Stadia works as well as advertised, then the future of games is no longer tied to hardware. It’s all about connectivity.