Month: January 2021

YouTube has announced it’s rolling out a new feature: The ability to create short clips from a longer video. The announcement was made under the banner of its Live & Gaming departments, suggesting the company looks at this as a way to enhance its gameplay streaming and VOD community.

The feature is just in a limited alpha testing phase right now, among a small group of channels with access to the feature. Those tools are also only available on desktop and Android devices for the time being, and iOS devices are said to be coming soon. Content creators are not able to request access to this for their channels during the testing phase.

With clips, you can create a 5-60 second segment of anyone’s content, and then share that clip. Content creators who have been given the ability to create clips will see a clip icon underneath a video, and once clipped it will play from the original video on loop. YouTube created a sample video to show off the feature in action, and it’s inviting feedback via the replies or the standard report feedback form.

For game streamers in particular, the clips feature will allow creators or fans to quickly show off standout gameplay moments in longer videos. The functionality is similar to the current ability to mark a timestamp, though making it a clip and letting it loop differentiates it.

This also makes the functionality seem very similar to Twitch’s own clips feature, which is YouTube’s major competitor for game streaming.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

Pokemon Go developer Niantic has outlined a variety of events happening in the game in February. In addition to February’s Community Day and Kanto Tour, the studio will be hosting a Lunar New Year event, new Pokemon Spotlight Hours, and more next month. You can see all the biggest events happening in Pokemon Go in February 2021 below.

February Research Breakthrough Encounter: Snorlax

Niantic is rolling out a new batch of Field Research tasks and rewards starting February 1. In addition, a new Research Breakthrough encounter will be available. Each time you achieve a Research Breakthrough in February, you’ll earn a chance to catch the Sleeping Pokemon Snorlax.

Legendary And Mega Raid Bosses

A variety of Legendary Pokemon are returning to five-star Raid Battles in February. You can see the full Legendary Raid schedule below:

• January 31 – February 4: Raikou
• February 4 – 9: Suicune
• February 9 – 20: Latios and Latias
• February 20 – March 1: Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres, and Mewtwo

On top of that, Niantic is featuring different Mega-Evolved Pokemon in Mega Raid Battles throughout the month:

• January 19 – February 9: Mega Venusaur, Mega Ampharos, Mega Houndoom
• February 9 – 20: Mega Pidgeot, Mega Ampharos, and a “surprise Mega-Evolved Pokemon”
• February 20 – March 1: Mega Venusaur, Mega Charizard X and Y, and Mega Blastoise

Team Go Rocket Celebration

Following the Johto Celebration event, Niantic is holding a Team Go Rocket Celebration from February 2-7. During that time, the following Pokemon will be appearing in the wild much more often than usual:

• Golbat
• Koffing
• Ariados
• Qwilfish
• Sneasel
• Houndour
• Nuzleaf
• Stunky
• Skorupi
• Venipede

Additionally, new Pokemon will be hatching from strange eggs during and after the event, and Team Go Rocket grunts you encounter will have new teams of Shadow Pokemon. Some new monsters will also be available in Shadow form for the first time, including Swinub, Nosepass, Aron, Spheal, Lileep, and Anorith. You’ll also receive a new Team Go Rocket gift sticker for defeating one of the team leaders during the event, and there will be new event-exclusive Field Research and Timed Research tasks to complete.

Pokemon Spotlight Hours

Every Tuesday evening in February, Niantic will spotlight one specific Pokemon and bonus for one hour. These spotlight events will all run from 6-7 PM local time. You can see the full schedule below:

Date	Spotlight Pokemon	Special Bonus
February 2	Ekans	2x evolution XP
February 9	Miltank	2x catch Stardust
February 16	Luvdisc	2x catch XP
February 23	Pikachu	2x catch Candy

February Community Day

February’s Community Day takes place on Saturday, February 6. The featured Pokemon this time is Roselia. The Grass/Poison type will be appearing in the wild much more frequently than normal throughout the event, and you’ll have an increased chance of finding a Shiny Roselia. On top of that, any Roselia that you evolve into Roserade up to two hours after the Community Day ends will know two special event moves: the Fast Attack Bullet Seed and the Charged Attack Weather Ball.

Lunar New Year Event

Pokemon Go’s Lunar New Year event returns from February 9-14. Throughout the event, red Pokemon will be appearing more frequently than usual, and Niantic teases that a “special Mega-Evolved Pokemon” will make its debut in Mega Raids. Additional details about the Lunar New Year event will be announced later.

Valentine’s Day Event

Following the Lunar New Year event, Niantic is holding a Valentine’s Day celebration from February 14-19. Details are scant at the moment, but Niantic teases that some new Pokemon will be debuting as part of the event, and there will be exclusive avatar items.

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“Okay, so that’s the Crow, and he’s the guy who killed Cayde-6, and it’s a really big deal that he’s back and that we’re working with him–because we murdered him,” I explained, somewhat breathless, over the Discord voice chat filled with four of my oldest friends. “You really should play Forsaken before this.”

Nobody said anything for a few long moments as I thought about what other story elements of Destiny 2 might be relevant to the mission we were about to run. As I thought about it, two things dawned on me. First, that anything I could tell them about Destiny would be relevant because their introduction to the story and the world was so thin. Second, that they probably didn’t care.

When Bungie released Beyond Light, the latest expansion to Destiny 2, it added new content to the game while removing a whole lot of old content. Several major in-game destinations were “vaulted,” ostensibly because Destiny 2’s install size was getting too big and because those areas of the game were getting too little attention, both from the developers and from players. But because of that, tons of old missions are now gone from Destiny 2–like the vanilla campaign that introduces you to the world and its characters.

That includes Cayde-6, Destiny 2’s biggest personality, who was murdered as part of the story in the Forsaken expansion. Without some time spent with Cayde, his murder means a lot less–as does the current story in the Season of the Hunt, about how Cayde’s killer has returned as a Guardian, with no memory of his past crimes (or the fact that we, the players, hunted him down to exact revenge on him).

So for my four friends, who are brand-new to Destiny 2, a huge part of the game’s context is just gone. The earliest they can start with Destiny 2’s story is Forsaken, which builds on a huge amount of story that came before it. Central to Forsaken is Cayde-6, with whom previous Destiny 2 players had spent a full year interacting with (and for Destiny 1 players, even more time). Just beyond that is the story of the Dreaming City, which suffers a curse that repeats time every three weeks. That’s the work of Savathun, an enemy Destiny 2 has been building up since its very first day, and all of that context is related to The Taken King expansion to Destiny 1. Without the old content, how are new players supposed to know any of this stuff?

It’s true that Destiny has historically not been great about delivering story–but it’s been getting better. Bungie continues to evolve the way it works the vast, fascinating lore behind Destiny 2 into its more immediate events, and that’s culminated in Beyond Light. If you’re jumping into the game through New Light, the free-to-play option, you miss that story, though, because you have to pay in. Not that you’d understand any of it anyway, since Beyond Light is predicated on all the story beats of the last year, plus things that happened all the way back in Destiny 1’s campaign.

What’s frustrating about all this is that I have come to really like Destiny 2’s story. Yes, it’s hard to parse–most of the critical, fun, interesting, and meaningful backstory is segmented and hidden away on lore messages attached to weapons and armor, and that’s to say nothing of the online-only Grimoire Cards that held all the lore in Destiny 1. But Bungie is getting better and better at weaving together weird narrative threads and incentivizing digging into the lore while bringing those beats to the forefront. Slowly, Destiny has gotten deeper than just shooting a random new huge alien thing every couple of months. It’s developed a real sense of foreboding over the last year, with seeds planted years ago beginning to sprout in really interesting ways.

I’m glad that my friends have jumped into Destiny 2 but I don’t think they’ll ever really come to appreciate the storytelling undercurrent of the game. How could they, without any setup of who their characters are, who they’re fighting, why they’re fighting, and what they’re fighting for? And that means their interest in Destiny will stay fairly shallow, reliant on its solid gameplay but with no investment in the larger world.

And that probably means that their stay in Destiny 2 will ultimately be short-lived. They might find it fun and exciting now, with the full breadth of available content laid out before them, and having never before experienced the game’s best ideas, like its super-intricate raids–I took them through their first, Deep Stone Crypt, only a few days ago. But as soon as they’ve played the content through a few times, gotten over chasing some of the better guns, or hit a lull in new things to experience, they’re probably going to fall off. Destiny 2 just isn’t doing anything to capture their long-term interest–in its current state, it’s almost impossible to get them invested in the game world. Why would they care about seeing the ultimate plans of Savathun or Xivu Arath, or whether Eris Morn and the Exo Stranger can resist the Darkness, or what will happen when the Crow finally learns who it was that killed him before his Guardian resurrection? They barely know who any of these characters are.

I’m mostly pretty understanding of the adjustments Bungie has made to Destiny 2 and the reasons it has put forward about why it has needed to make them. And it’s worth noting that the New Light experience that was added with Beyond Light is a lot better than the missions that were bringing new players into Destiny 2. What’s available in the Cosmodrome does a lot to explain how the game works, introduce some of the characters, and bring players into the role of a solar system-defending Guardian.

But right now, it sure seems like it sucks to be new to Destiny 2. Bungie has built a huge, intricate game world, and it’s largely indecipherable for new players. It feels like such a waste to have so much deep, fascinating, weird storytelling in the game, and have it continue to be so difficult to reach. There are players who, like me, might eventually find that they’re enamored of the strange sci-fi fantasy world Bungie has created–but Destiny 2 has to stop making it so difficult for them to learn and care about that world. Otherwise, it will probably lose them.

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The Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe SSD features a read speed of 3,500MBps, making it an excellent drive for those with PCIe NVMe Gen3 motherboards. While its size is small, it would be perfect for a boot drive, making a huge difference in your start-up speed and general use.

Tesla has revealed a refresh to its Model S electric sports car that features an on-board GPU that rivals both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.

The Models S is getting the first refresh the line has seen since its inception in 2012, which mostly includes improvements to things you’d expect to find in a car: updated interior and exterior designs, a better powertrain, and greater mileage. What is both very new and very out of place is the Tesla Arcade, which now features 10 teraflops of processing performance for gaming.

Games have been included with Tesla models in the past, most notably Cuphead, but this is in another ballpark. The promotional images show off a carousel that features games like The Witcher 3, Stardew Valley, and more. Tesla founder Elon Musk also tweeted saying that the new Model S will support Cyberpunk 2077. CD Projekt Red also benefitted from Musk’s tweets recently, seeing a massive share price hike.

This puts the Model S hot on the hells of both Sony and Microsoft’s latest consoles offerings. The PS5 features 10.28 teraflops of computing power, while the Xbox Series X sits at 12 teraflops. There’s a lot more to a gaming experience than just that metric, but the fact that a car even comes close is surprising. That said, it is an $80,000 investment, so maybe don’t think about replacing your console just yet.

The updated Tesla Model S launches later in March this year, which leaves enough time for the company to explain just how gaming will work in its new car.

Open Roads is the third game from Fullbright, the developer that’s made a name for itself with its narrative-focused exploration games Gone Home and Tacoma. For its third game, the studio is changing things up by introducing a partner for you to travel with–in this case, protagonist Tess’ mother, Opal. This conceit opens Fullbright to implementing interactivity into the act of dialogue itself instead of the player being a passive observer to conversations.

“I think that the games that we look at as points of reference are pretty familiar in how they’re branching, dialogue-based games,” Fullbright co-founder and Open Roads director Steve Gaynor told me. “Firewatch is definitely a point of reference, games like Mass Effect are relevant in the sense of there’s this flow in the game where you’re exploring, you might find something of interest, and then you interact with it.”

Even though you’re following both Tess and Opal, Open Roads is entirely from Tess’ perspective. It’s up to you to draw your mother into the journey to discover the truth behind the mysterious past of Tess’ grandmother. Your mom may be the literal driver on this road trip, but you must figuratively push the journey forward by opening up a dialogue. In this way, Gaynor compares Open Roads most heavily to a game like Firewatch, where the outcomes of a conversation are dependent not only on what you say but how you say it.

“Most of the dialogue in the game is based on finding something,” Gaynor said. “So it’s sort of like the walkie-talkie in Firewatch–you find something, you pick it up, you look at it and then you have the ability to say, ‘I want to talk to mom about this.’ So, in a lot of ways, finding more [clues] gives you access to all sorts of conversations that you just never would’ve had otherwise. And then there may be cases where, in more central dialogue, there are actually additional options that open up, like “Hey, remember that thing we found before.” But if you didn’t find it, you don’t have that option.”

He continued: “We want to lean into that ‘Opal will remember that,’ so you make choices in dialogue throughout the game that may affect how Opal reacts to you later. Not in the sense that it will send you off on this whole alternate version of the game, but you can react to things in a certain way that later down the road–depending on what you’ve chosen earlier–you might choose a dialogue option where [Opal] is just going to not be having it because of how you reacted earlier.”

How dialogue connects to what you find allows the developers at Fullbright to maintain a focus on exploring a space when telling a story. Dialogue may be the primary way that determines how Tess and Opal’s relationship evolves over the course of the game, but the items you choose to interact with will affect the overall campaign as well. Finding something on one leg of your road trip may inform how Tess reacts to something else found later in the game, or create a correlation that Opal is able to draw a conclusion from.

This does mean that, yes, you can miss out on things while playing through Open Roads. The intent isn’t to make players think that they may run the risk of missing out on something crucial and getting an incomplete story. If you play through the game, you’ll get the same ending that everyone else does–you can’t miss the major story elements. But you can find additional information that provides further context to the story. Gaynor compares it to the story of Gone Home. Everyone who completes that game finds out what happened to your sister, but you can find additional clues in your family house that provide further context to the overall story, such as why your parents aren’t around.

“Hopefully, if you look for more [clues], and you find more, and you piece more together, it enhances and supports that central narrative,” Gaynor said. “We want to ensure that someone playing through Open Roads can get a satisfying resolution to that central mystery by following a certain breadcrumb trail of clues that will lead to the resolution, but if you play [the game] like a detective and try to find everything that you can and go into those discussions with Opal, it will give you more context for what you’re finding.”

He continued: “There isn’t a checklist. We always want the game to be led by the player’s interest and the player’s attention. So we hope that we can make these places that are full of interesting stuff. And everything that you’ve found is because you wanted to dig deeper and you wanted to find everything that you could. You don’t necessarily know what you’ve left behind, but your experience of the place is the one that you had.”

Gaynor teased that adding another character to Fullbright’s formula of storytelling is game changer, in fact a new member of the team told Gaynor that he “can’t imagine going back to a Fullbright game where there isn’t another character to talk to.” We’ll have to wait a little bit longer to see just how transformative the addition of a partner is to Fullbright’s formula–Open Roads is currently slated to release for PC and consoles later this year.

Listen, we’ve seen some pretty cool Nintendo merch collaborations in recent years. There’s the recent ColourPop x Animal Crossing collaboration, and last year’s Mario 35th-anniversary celebrations brought all kinds of product collabs, from basketball shoes to a new version of Jenga. But nothing has evoked quite the same reaction from us as the latest product collab with Nintendo, an apparel line releasing as part of Pokemon’s 25th-anniversary celebrations this year. But we’re not talking about new Uniqlo graphic tees this time–no, we’re talking about Levi’s x Pokemon, “coming soon” in 2021.

Apparel brand Levi’s announced the collaboration via social media on Wednesday, teasing the upcoming clothing line with a close-up shot of a denim jacket. Except this isn’t your average denim jacket–instead of standard Levi’s blue, the jacket has a green-and-brown forest background with flowers along with various Pokemon lurking in its leaves, including Ekans, Oddish, Bulbasaur, Psyduck, and more.

Maybe we’ll feel differently when we see the full jacket, but at first glance, this piece of clothing is a lot to take in. The green forest-y background feels at odds with the bright red and yellow flowers peeking through. There’s not even a consistent theme with the Pokemon included–sure, it makes sense to have grass-type Pokemon like Bulbasaur and Oddish here, but why are Mewtwo and Squirtle hanging out in the forest as well?

And then we come to the pants. Twitter account PokeJungle shared photos of two pairs of pants that appear to be from the Levi’s x Pokemon collection, taken from early listings (one of which can still be seen at Urban Outfitters). The first pair of denim pants is identical to the jacket design, meaning you’ll be able to rock a full green denim Pokemon look from head to toe. The other pair of jeans is a standard light blue denim design–except for the massive Pikachu on the right thigh. These will sell for $148 USD each, according to PokeJungle.

And don’t worry about having to carry around a purse or bag that doesn’t match your ‘fit–the collection will include a drawstring bag with the same forest design as the jacket and jeans. Convenient!

This might be one of the stranger Nintendo collaborations we’ve ever seen–but at the same time, we kind of love it. And all we know for sure is that we need to see more photos of the Levi’s x Pokemon collection ASAP. There’s no word yet on a release date for the collection, but we can expect to see more Pokemon collabs like this throughout the year–Nintendo has teased new products with Build-A-Bear, General Mills, McDonald’s, and more.