Igarashi released a video thanking players and fans around the world who have played the new IP, as well as all the people who have contributed to its development and publishing. The producer says this sales milestone was the overall goal set internally, letting development on additional free updates and DLC continue without the worry of having to break even.
Ritual of the Night will be receiving more free updates throughout the year, with some arriving over the next few weeks. In a blog post on the official website, a timeline lays out free updates scheduled for the rest of the year, including new game modes, playable characters, and more. You can read the full list of upcoming updates below.
In addition to free content updates, the post also mentions that Bloodstained will be getting paid DLC in the future, too. Developers ArtPlay and WayForward aren’t detailing yet what this might entail, but Igarashi says this sales milestone allows development to move into a second chapter, suggesting support for Ritual of the Night will continue for some time.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Free DLC Roadmap
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was received well by critics, especially as a spiritual successor to one of the most revered Castlevania games ever made. In GameSpot’s Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night review, critic Steve Watts scored the game an 8/10, saying, “With more flexible combat and level design that always beckons to check just one more room, Bloodstained shows that a modern Metroidvania can stand alongside its predecessors as an equal.”
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Free DLC Update Plans
Q2 2020
Boss Revenge Mode
Take control of one of four in-game bosses and use them to battle the heroes of Bloodstained!
Chroma Wheel
The salon is back in business with more options than ever for character customization, including hair, clothing, and skin color. Switch up your look with a true color selector and eliminating pre-set options previously available.
Boss Revenge and Chroma Wheel will launch on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on Tuesday, June 23rd, and Nintendo Switch in July
Q3 2020
VS Mode (Local/Online)
A tense survival mode where players compete by indirectly attacking each another.
Chaos Mode (Local/Online)
A specialized boss rush for 1 or 2 players. The mode includes randomized drops and special sub goals that will grant more equipment when completed. Collect the best, drop the rest as you build power to defeat all the bosses!
Classic Mode
It’s Bloodstained 80s-style as Miriam faces off against a series of sub-bosses laid out across five harrowing stages and three difficulty levels.
Q4 2020
Playable Character
Bloodstained’s 3rd playable character after Miriam and Zangetsu (It’s not Dominique).
If you’re a Switch owners who’s been pining for a deal, you’ll want to check this out. Nintendo is running a Summer Game Sale on digital games at various retailers. This includes first-party titles like New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, as well as third-party titles like Dragon Quest XI, and more. The deals end on June 16, so get ’em while they’re here. Take a look at the deals below.
Game Pass is already a fantastic value in gaming, but beginning tomorrow, it gets some truly massive additions by way of No Man’s Sky, Kingdom Hearts, and more, and right now Amazon and Best Buy are offering 3-month Game Pass Unlimited subscriptions for $22.99.
Right now, Microsoft is running its Xbox Deals Unlocked sale, with huge discounts on tons of games and even consoles. The best deal in the sale, in my opinion, is for 3-months of Game Pass Ultimate. If you buy it today, you can be playing No Man’s Sky tomorrow and for three months after that.
At the metal heart of Disintegration’s multiplayer is an interesting idea: a first-person shooter that blends aerial vehicle combat with real-time strategy tactics. It’s a great pitch, but after jumping into the fray during a handful of pre-release multiplayer sessions, that concept doesn’t seem to live up to its exciting potential. Disintegration is undoubtedly different from any other competitive FPS out there, but the novelty of zipping through the sky on a hoverbike eventually gives way to its relatively shallow strategic core.
Each player in this 5v5 squad shooter pilots their own levitating gravcycle while also commanding a small team of AI robotic troops to fight from the ground and directly interact with objectives. But with guns bolted to your ride, you’ll act as both soldier and general, having to simultaneously engage in firefights while directing your team to support you, adding an extra layer of decisions to make during each encounter.
The first-person floating and shooting can be jarring to even the staunchest FPS player, but the controls are straightforward enough that it only took me a couple of rounds to get a hang of sky surfing. That said, it’s made more complex when you consider that there are nine different types of cycles to choose from, all with their own set of generally familiar weapons and maneuverability quirks to learn. Shotguns, for example, have that recognizable boom, but lack the recoil and devastating bite featured in most contemporary shooters – presumably because it’s mounted to a flying metal death machine and shooting other armored death machines.
I’ve come to really like zooming around the three mode-specific maps. They feature plenty of tall structures to weave between and low overhangs to dip under and over when you’re trying to lose a pursuer. Faster gravcycles feel especially fun to blaze around in, as the speed really ramps up the pressure during some tougher chases. Oddly, though, the selection of slower, tankier gravcycles don’t always feel more durable, and in my limited time with them often felt more like a liability than a force to be reckoned with.
While you’re chasing enemy hovercraft and dancing around oncoming fire, you’ll also need to issue commands to your ground units. This team features three or four robotic companions who range between balanced, assault rifle-wielding Warriors to heavy-duty Tanks that run headlong into the fight for melee attacks. Disintegration’s one-button contextual pinging system does an adequate job of intuitively issuing orders at a moment’s notice, but your tactical options are also extremely limited when compared to something like a traditional real-time tactics game. Telling all of them to focus on an enemy, move to a designated spot, or interact with an objective is pretty much the extent of your control outside of a few activatable abilities.
In the most hectic of matches, it can become overwhelming to trade fire in the sky while also giving effective directions to my ground squad. Keeping them safe rarely felt possible, as I was often too busy sparring directly with enemy pilots to get them behind cover. Their unique abilities, like tossing disorienting stun grenades or doing big damage in a large area with a mighty ground slam, are very useful against enemy crews, but they largely won’t affect their pilots. And since killing a pilot also kills their henchmen, it has so far felt like aiming for anything that isn’t the floaty, shooty thing in front of me is a waste of time and resources.
Before each match, you select a “crew” that dictates the stats and weapons of your cycle, the abilities of your squad, and your snazzy dress code. Gravcycle loadouts from crew to crew are satisfyingly diverse: putting on the pink and black leather of the Neon Dreams means you’ll be cruising through the arena with vehicle handling as sharp as your outfits, and its dual light machine guns and single-shot stun gun really spoke to me, as well. By contrast, the blue and orange King’s Guard are literal armored knights whose gravcycle features a charged bolt that is slow to fire but does big damage and slows enemies unfortunate enough to be hit by it.
I wish the aesthetics went beyond just color schemes and costumes, though. When you get into the action, all of the voice lines and sound effects are the same generic one-liners no matter who you’ve picked. Looking at The Sideshows, a crew full of killer clowns a la Twisted Metal’s Sweet Tooth, you would expect some fringe, Joker-fied quips to match, or maybe circus music to accompany their rapid-fire sticky grenades. Disintegration does the rest of a crew’s aesthetic so well that it’s disappointing and a bit jarring to see this part missing.
Of its three competitive game modes, I’ve thus far had the most fun with Retrieval. One team of attackers must grab explosive cores and take them to designated goals while defenders work to prevent that from happening. It’s the only time online where I felt incentivised to use my squad as more than just a ball of guns, as only they can carry the cores from point to point. Escorting them to the goal is properly tense, and the white-knuckle skirmishes that break out around core carriers is always engaging. Retrieval is similar in design to modes from several other online shooters, but the combination of first-person shooting and light RTS tactics really make it feel fresh here. This is the only mode that seems to fully embrace what makes Disintegration so unique.
In contrast, the other two modes, Zone Control and Collector, are your standard FPS fare. In Zone Control, ground teams must occupy a zone without enemy interference to contest it, but there’s no nuanced way to have your troops go in and secure those areas. Without being able to individually set certain troops in defensive positions based on their supposed strengths – for example, splitting more fragile units up behind different cover points to keep eyes on every approach angle – things often devolve into pinging your gang into a central killing zone and letting the AI figure it out while pilots hover in a circle shooting at each other. There could be deeper strategy still to learn here, but it doesn’t feel like I have the tools to enable anything more than an all-out brawl when fighting for a control point.
In Collector, there seems to be even less strategy, as killing enemies drops “Brain Cans” that need to be physically picked up by your squad to score points. More often than not, Collector games devolve into teams lining up, Revolutionary War-style, and firing into each other until one side breaks and runs. There’s almost no incentive to get creative outside attempting basic flanking maneuvers. I’m sure some of this brutishness is due to the community being young – time and experience often lead to techniques and play styles that will come to define a game. But so far Disintegration’s multiplayer doesn’t demand much of you outside of pulling the trigger.
Review in Progress Verdict
It may be too early to tell what kinds of clever tricks and strategies get teased out of Disintegration once it’s in the hands of a larger playerbase. But in its current form, this genre hybrid comes off as little more than a very interesting idea stuck in a very run-of-the-mill shooter. The mix of FPS and RTS never gels in a way where the inclusion of one fully justifies or elevates the other. Hovering gravcycles are fun to fly and shoot, but don’t spice up Disintegration’s otherwise uninspired game modes in any meaningful way. I still need to spend some time playing on its live, post-launch servers before I’m ready for a final decision, but right now Disintegration’s multiplayer isn’t much more than an amusing but thin curiosity.
No Man’s Sky will enable cross-play across every one of its available platforms from tomorrow, June 11. Tomorrow will also see the game join the Xbox Game Pass programme on Xbox One and Windows 10.
Announced in a press release, players playing the game through VR, PC, PS4, Xbox, Windows 10 or GoG will be able to connect online. The update is timed to coincide with the game being added to Game Pass, “to allow everyone in the community to benefit from the influx of new players that Game Pass brings.”
The Hello Games team has been working on the addition of cross-play for six months. According to head of publishing Tim Woodley, the developers have been “quietly reworking the networking back-end of the game to get all versions of the game onto one single multiplayer base.”
Aside from the benefit of being able to connect with previously unavailable friends on other platforms, this change means that the likes of huge planetary bases built on high-end PCs will now be available to visit for those on consoles.
This update will also add general improvements to the game, including speech-to-text, improved lobbies and fireteams, and a set of other tweaks to multiplayer, VR and the game as a whole.
Hello Games is teasing an “eventful summer” for No Man’s Sky, so it seems this isn’t the last update we’ll see in the near future. All of this is yet another step on the journey No Man’s Sky’s taken since launch, becoming one of the most notable gaming comeback stories of recent years.
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Robots blasting and bashing each other to bits is a concept near and dear to my heart, and on that level Disintegration’s single-player campaign delivers. Its creative approach to first-person shooting is also intriguing, since it has you floating above the action and calling the shots for a team of bots on the ground while firing away. But it’s not as smart as it looks, and what seemed like it could get interesting and tactical never really did.
Disintegration’s 15-hour campaign doesn’t do a great job of setting up the conflict between the evil, red-eyed robots and the good, blue-eyed rebels, but a lot of that history eventually comes out in between-mission dialogue with your cohorts. Most of them have been “integrated,” which is the technology of transferring a human consciousness into a robot body. As former celebrity pilot Romer Shoal, you lead your team in a series of missions to take down the enemy’s massive flying fortress. The voice acting does lend those bots some good diverse personalities, and that gives the story’s events a little bit of weight, at least.
There are a few “Wha?” moments from the opening minutes I have to call out: first, Romer knocks an evil robot unconscious by whacking him in the back of the head with a wrench. I… don’t think that’s how robots work? A short time later, 12-foot-tall robot hulk Doyle backs down from attempting to intimidate a human who points out Doyle’s gun isn’t loaded, as though Doyle couldn’t literally squish this guy between his robo-toes like jam. It settles down after that but these eyebrow-raising moments set a strange tone for the rest of the story.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Your%20guns%20will%20tear%20apart%20the%20environment%20in%20a%20pretty%20dramatic%20fashion.”]Disintegration is respectable but not the prettiest of games – its robots are well-animated but the textures, lighting, and effects are largely middle-of-the-road – but it does have some good diversity to its settings. Visually at least, no two are alike: you’ll start out in forests and move to canyons and junkyards and urban areas and more. Mission design, on the other hand, almost universally leans heavily on throwing wave after wave of the same handful of enemy types at you as you move through a linear gauntlet. It’s not without variety in objectives, since you’ll often have to destroy a target or have your squad deactivate a jamming device so that you can use your gravcycle’s weapons again, but the process of fighting from point A to point B doesn’t shake up too much because of limited enemy diversity, especially in the first half.
To Disintegration’s credit, blasting enemy robots like Star Wars’ battle droids is a fair amount of fun for a while. Not because their AI is especially good or anything, but because rather than literally disintegrating when you kill them they explode into chunks in a satisfying way, sending pieces flying. That’s one thing Disintegration does better than most games: your guns will tear apart the environment in a pretty dramatic fashion, reducing wood to splinters and even shattering concrete barriers that enemies were using as cover. It’s not Red Faction or anything, since most of the environment is invulnerable, but this level of destructibility definitely makes the weapons and explosions feel powerful and look cool.
And yet, combat gets stale pretty quickly because even though this is a squad-based game where you get a bird’s eye view of the battlefield, Disintegration isn’t tactical at all. Where something like Mass Effect allows you to tell each unit where to go and what abilities to use when they get there, this is more like directing a mob. You can’t tell your Iron Giant-style hulk buddy to play Rock’em Sock’em Robots with the big guys while the more agile soldiers take on the fodder because there’s only one “everybody attack this target” or “open that box” button and they all act as one. It’s very simple and one-note.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=There%E2%80%99s%20only%20one%20%E2%80%9Ceverybody%20attack%20this%20target%E2%80%9D%20button%20%E2%80%93%20they%20all%20act%20as%20one.”]You do get to direct your squad members’ to individually use their special abilities, like grenades and ground-pounds, and they can be used as combos for extra damage. Missions’ side objectives will reward you, for example, if you can use the time-slowing bubble to hold enemies in place while Doyle bombards them with rockets. But these abilities aren’t really interesting to use because the positioning of your squad doesn’t matter much – there’s no setup required – so it’s just a matter of waiting for the cooldowns and then casting them again.
You have to keep your team alive to use them, though, and also so they can absorb all the enemy fire that your fragile flying gravcycle can’t. Depending on what gear you’re given for a mission, that can be tricky to do – for instance, if you don’t have any healing abilities and have to rely on pickups from certain enemy types or healing stations your crew can activate for you. But of course, if one of your bots goes down, all you have to do is retrieve their head and they’ll rocket back onto the field a few seconds later in a shiny new body, so you don’t need to sweat it much if they explode. It’s important to keep them on the field to give the bad guys something else to shoot at, and there’s a 30-second timer that will end the mission if you don’t retrieve a head, but the stakes are largely pretty low.
Then there are the boss battles, which look and sound great but are usually pretty weak. They boil down to shooting the giant four-legged Thunderhead walker (while dodging its slow-moving projectiles) until it goes down, then getting right up in its armpit – and I mean all the way up in its armpit – and hovering there while you hold down the fire button until each of four weak points explodes. It only got a little challenging when I had to deal with two at once, but the vast majority of these fights after the first one were painfully dull.
What’s especially frustrating about Disintegration’s campaign is that even though there’s a whole area you walk around between missions where you can talk to your crew, you have zero control over your squad composition or your vehicle’s loadout. Every mission dictates all of that to you, and all you get to do is pump in a few upgrade points for boring but necessary stat boosts to weapons, cooldown reductions, and things like that. I get that I’m being walked through different roles I’ll need to know for multiplayer, like the healer and the sniper, but it’s a bit annoying to have things like how you heal yourself change from level to level and not being able to pick a favorite gun or robot and develop it. That lack of continuity made levels feel like a string of unrelated battles, and practically kills replayability because I can’t return to a mission and play it with a different style of gravcycle and squad. Having no customization seems like a really poor design choice.
The writer behind Dead Space has revealed that a game he has worked on will feature during Thursday’s PS5 event.
Antony Johnston, who wrote the script for Dead Space and has credits on Shadow of Morder and Binary Domain, tweeted that he’s been “working on a big videogame for almost 2 years now,” and suggested that those interested should “watch the PS5 launch event on Thursday.”
As some of you know, I’ve been working on a big videogame for almost 2 years now.
In totally unrelated news, you should all watch the PS5 launch event on Thursday.
Johnston added in the subsequent replies that the game has you “play a character having a really bad time” which is… not a lot to go off, honestly, but we’ll take it! In another quoted retweet suggesting the game will be a horror, Johnston noted that it was “weird how everyone automatically assumes it’ll be a horror game.”
Whether it is something in the same vein as Dead Space or something completely different remains to be seen. Johnston’s pedigree is reason enough to be interested however – not least because we consider Dead Space one of the scariest games ever made.
The PlayStation 5 reveal event is right around the corner now, as it’s set to take place on June 11. Sony has kept a tight lid on what will be shown off during the video, but one writer has shared a cryptic tweet that indicates that a secret game they’re working on will be revealed.
Antony Johnson, who wrote much of Dead Space and worked on the writing of the nemesis system and dialog in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, tweeted that he’s been working on a big game for the past two years. He also said that, in “totally unrelated news,” he believes that people should watch the upcoming PlayStation 5 reveal.
As some of you know, I’ve been working on a big videogame for almost 2 years now.
In totally unrelated news, you should all watch the PS5 launch event on Thursday.
Johnston didn’t (and likely couldn’t) elaborate further, but we won’t have to wait much longer to find out what the game is. Johnson also wrote The Coldest City, the graphic novel that the movie Atomic Blonde is adapted from. His latest book is The Tempus Project.
Whatever the game is, we wouldn’t bet on it being Dead Space 4. Dead Space developer Visceral Games is no more, and much of the team that worked on it is scattered. Another Dead Space vet, Glen Schofield, is working on a narrative-centric game set in the PUBG universe.
The PlayStation 5 will release before the end of 2020. Sony has said that the COVID-19 pandemic has not impacted their ability to produce consoles.
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If you got the chance to play Valorant during its closed beta period, you may have gotten some time in with an early version of its ranked system and Competitive mode. Loading up the newly launched Valorant to see that Competitive mode missing was probably a bit of a surprise–the only modes available to play at the moment are its default Unrated mode and the newly added Spike Rush. So when is ranked Valorant coming out? And why did Riot remove it in the first place?
Does Valorant Have A Ranked Release Date?
Riot doesn’t offer an official Valorant ranked release date, but you can expect its ranked system and Competitive mode to return in “a few patches” after launch, according to Riot’s official blog. We don’t know how long that will take, but Riot has been releasing patches at a fairly steady pace. We will keep you updated.
Why Is Ranked Competitive Disabled In Valorant?
Riot removed Competitive mode and ranks from Valorant at launch to further improve on the system, but also to give players who didn’t get into the beta a chance to learn the basics.
“Similar to our closed beta launch, our initial focus is making sure our service is stable before activating competitive matchmaking. This is also a way to give new players the same courtesy that closed beta players had to learn the game ahead of turning on Competitive. We’ll also make some adjustments to Competitive based on remaining closed beta player feedback. Our plan is to turn on Competitive a few patches into our launch.”
How Will Ranked Competitive Mode Work In Valorant?
If you’re curious about how Valorant’s ranked system will work in Valorant, we have a ranked system and Competitive Mode guide that breaks down how it worked during its brief early access period in the Valorant closed beta. This information is subject to change, but may provide a good look into Riot’s initial approach. We also list all the competitive ranks and tiers, but are still waiting to learn what Valorant’s new best rank (formerly “Valorant”) will be renamed.
For more on Valorant, check out the recent news, announcements, and guides below.
“This is an action game in which players follow the story of Ellie and Joel on their continued struggle for survival in post-pandemic Wyoming. From a third-person perspective, players traverse through small towns, wilderness, and ruin environments, using a variety of weapons (e.g., rifles, pistols, explosives, blades) to kill infected mutants and human survivors in frenetic combat.”
“Some sequences enable players to use stealth attacks against enemies–approaching from behind, slitting their throats. Players can also use explosives to set enemies on fire or blow enemies apart into limbs/bloody chunks of flesh. Cutscenes depict further instances of violence: a human captive bound and hung from a noose before being disemboweled; assailants beating a restrained woman’s arm with a hammer; characters shot in the head with arrows; a man repeatedly pistol-whipped.”
The game contains some sexual content: a couple disrobing and briefly engaging in a sexual act; the couple is heard grunting/moaning as the screen turns black (depicted from the waist up with female toplessness). Some zombie creatures are depicted with exposed breasts and genitalia. One sequence depicts two characters smoking a marijuana joint in a room full of marijuana plants. The words ‘f**k’ and ‘sh*t,’ appear in the dialogue.”
