Sony’s next-gen console will arrive with a completely new controller, retiring the DualShock branding for the more advanced DualSense input device. Not just a bigger controller with a new ergonomic design that will come with the PlayStation 5, the DualSense’s haptic feedback and adaptive triggers have also become big talking points.
YouTuber TronicsFix got his hands on one of the controllers and pried it open to see not just how much technology Sony had managed to fit inside of it. He said he wanted to gauge how easily a broken DualSense would be to repair, but he also took a closer look at the variable triggers.
Compared to the DualShock 4, the DualSense is a far more advanced controller and the triggers alone showcase a design that uses more sophisticated technology to deliver haptic feedback. A spiral gear is used to change the resistance on the adaptive trigger, allowing for games such as Deathloop to simulate a gun being jammed or the feeling of drawing a bow to shoot an arrow. The entire assembly makes use of a modular design, allowing for parts to be more easily replaced should they be broken.
In comparison, the DualShock 4 relied on more basic rumble features embedded in its body to send force feedback into your hands. You can see the results of TronicsFix’s teardown just after the nine-minute mark in the video below:
While the DualSense does have advanced rumble features, TronicsFix did note that the analog sticks were nearly identical and could also be prone to drift issues that the DualShock 4 occasionally suffered from.
The controller also has a beefier 1560mA battery to handle all the new haptic features, which YouTuber Austin Evans discovered in his own teardown that resulted in him accidentally breaking part of it.
While Halo Infinite has been delayed to 2021, the game’s various marketing promotions are rolling out this year. The latest of these comes from the candy bar Butterfinger.
Now through February, people in the US who purchase two Butterfingers can get player emblems for Halo Infinite when it releases in 2021. You’re not limited to Butterfingers, as the promo also applies to Baby Ruth, Crunch, and 100 Grand bars, all of which are made by the same company.
Butterfinger has also partnered with Microsoft to give away Xbox Series X consoles through a special campaign–you can get all the details on both promotions here on the Butterfinger website.
“Learning about some big new customization changes coming to Halo Infinite by seeing some marketing materials and reading a few paragraphs isn’t ideal, but with programs already in motion and our date shifting, here we are,” 343 said.
With Apex Legends Season 7: Ascension starting on November 4, Respawn let us go hands-on with the new map Olympus and legend Horizon. We were able to test out Horizon’s tactical ability on the latest map, checking out how the new legend interacts with the abilities of the other Apex Legends characters.
In the video above, Max Blumenthal and Erick Tay play around with Horizon’s Gravity Lift, a plantable rift that launches squad members–and, surprisingly, items–high into the sky.
Players can even toss the abilities of other legends into Horizon’s Gravity Lift. Mirage’s holographic decoy Psyche Out can get a lift if sent through the ability. And most legends that have a throwable, like Bloodhound and Lifeline, will see their abilities blast off if thrown directly into Gravity Lift as well.
Not all abilities interact with Gravity Lift, though. This is the case with Wraith’s Into the Void tactical ability. When activated, Wraith simply sprints through Gravity Lift–which makes sense since she enters a different dimension. The same happens with Pathfinder’s Grappling Hook tactical ability.
In September, Blizzard announced Blizzcon Online for 2021, following the cancellation of this year’s usual convention due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, in a new fireside chat, company president J. Allen Brack has revealed that the online version of Blizzcon will be totally free.
PC Gamer reports that the Virtual Ticket system used for previous years will not be in place–instead, everyone who wants to access Blizzcon can do so for free from their homes. The event, which runs from February 19-20, 2021, will not cost you a cent.
This might mean, of course, that some of the rewards usually tied to Blizzcon tickets–like unique character skins–might end up costing some money. We’ll have to wait and see what happens.
Brack also revealed that 95% of Blizzard’s employees are currently working from home. BlizzCon 2021 will likely look very different from the events of previous years.
Dragon Quest XI: Definitive Edition is coming to PS4, PC, and Xbox One (through Xbox Game Pass) on December 4, and if you’re keen to try the massive JRPG in advance, you can do so now. A huge new demo is available on Steam, and each console’s store.
This demo is the same as the one that released on Switch ahead of the RPG arriving on Nintendo’s hybrid console, and is said to contain about ten hours worth of content. Considering that Dragon Quest XI can take about 90 hours to finish, there’s still plenty of game left after the demo–and thankfully, your progress carries over into the final game.
If you’re on PS4 or PC, and you’ve played the earlier release of Dragon Quest XI, you might want to test out the Definitive Edition’s 2D retro mode, and decide whether you want to double dip. Unfortunately, this is not an option in the demo–it seems you’re only able to experience the modernized version of the game.
The Definitive Edition of Dragon Quest XI scored a 9/10 in GameSpot’s review. Reviewer Heidi Kemps praised the game’s 2D mode: “2D mode offers a fantastic way to explore, grind, and farm efficiently–or just experience a fresh perspective on the game as a whole if you’ve played it before.”
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Blizzard’s very popular MMO World of Warcraft celebrates its 16th anniversary this month, and the developer is throwing a party to mark the occasion.
The event was supposed to start later, but Blizzard moved it up due to the release date changed for the Shadowlands expansion. Available now through November 22, the anniversary event adds special rewards, including an Anniversary Gift Package that comes with items that increase reputation and experience gains by 16% to reflect the game’s 16th anniversary. The gift bundle also comes with a special invitation to initiate a quest in Orgrimmar or Stormwind, depending on which faction you’re aligned with.
There is also a new vendor in the world who sells items from previous anniversary events, as well as a new Crafted Clock of War you can buy to use for transmogrification. The Korrak’s Revenge PvP event also come to WoW with the anniversary event, and it allows you to earn new mounts.
Finally, some legacy bosses return to WoW with the anniversary event, including Lord Kazzak and Azuregos. You can visit Icy Veins to see a full rundown of what’s new in the 16th anniversary event.
The Xbox Series X has been sent out to many press and streamers, and videos of various Xbox One games running much faster are emerging. With the Xbox Series X launch line-up looking pretty thin, much of the appeal for new console owners will come from revisiting older titles and seeing how the new system’s features enhances them.
Now, thanks to one streamer’s video of The Witcher 3 running on a Series X, we can check out the advantages of super-boosted loading times. YouTuber rubhen925 has shared nearly two hours of footage, showing the game running on the new system. While the full video is worth a watch, the most exciting part, funnily enough, comes when fast travel is used.
The GIF from the video below happens just past the 1 hour 14 minute mark in the video, and it shows what happens when you fast travel. There’s no loading screen now–in fact, the environment loads in so fast that it kind of looks like a glitch.
It’s a bit uglier than a loading screen, perhaps, but it’s much more convenient.
The Witcher 3 is coming to Xbox Series X and PS5 with an improved next-gen edition. It’ll feature ray tracing for the first time.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a bit of a mess, and for now, that’s okay. Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t done yet. As with developer Larian Studios’ previous release, the acclaimed 2017 RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2, Baldur’s Gate 3 has been released into Early Access on Steam. It contains the first act of the game: a chunk of content encompassing around 25 hours of adventuring for players determined to seek out every last treasure chest or minor side quest.
As a setup it shows promise, introducing you to a cast of half a dozen characters who hint at the potential to become interesting traveling companions. Already on the brink of civil war and now facing a terrifying alien threat, the world itself seems to offer rich pickings for these characters to indulge. And by building on the template forged by the Original Sin series, BG3 already has the foundation of a well-engineered RPG that rewards players willing to engage with its systemic creativity.
Yet such promise is muted by notes of caution. Baldur’s Gate 3 is rough and messy and often feels like it is just barely hanging together. Occasionally it falls apart, collapsing under the weight of scripting bugs and graphical glitches, and even gives up completely with numerous hard crashes to desktop. Technical issues are not unusual in any game, let alone one still in Early Access, and so it is neither a surprise nor much of a criticism to encounter them here.
You can pet the dog in Baldur’s Gate 3.
Many such problems are trivial–a wonky death animation here, a missing bit of text there–and can be excused by the game’s Early Access state. The real price to be paid by the many bugs and glitches is a tariff on the dramatic weight of the conversations and cinematic scenes during which they arise. Tense confrontations are diminished when characters cycle through clearly unfinished animations or the placeholder camera position fails to focus on what’s actually happening. Key scenes are undermined when the faltering choreography makes it hard to discern what’s at stake. As a result, it’s tough to really invest yourself in story development or character dynamics when they’re being constantly tripped up by a presentation that is so obviously a work in progress.
Technical issues are not unusual in any game, let alone one still in Early Access, and so it is neither a surprise nor much of a criticism to encounter them here.
But that’s okay. Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t done yet. Without trying to second-guess Larian’s development process, these technical problems don’t seem fundamental; the reasonable expectation is that they will be fixed, and there is plenty of time for that to happen. Improvements have already been noted in the transition from pre-release to Early Access launch, as well as in the subsequent patches, and there’s no reason to think that trend won’t continue.
Beyond technical frailty though, there are other–perhaps more intractable–reasons to suggest it may be premature to embark on your Baldur’s Gate 3 adventure.
I found the tone of much of the writing to be a turn-off. The premise has your starting character escape from a Mind Flayer experiment, but only after a gross psychic maggot crawled into your character’s eyeball and bedded down in their brain. Meeting up with a handful of other such victims, with whom you share the realisation you can now influence the thoughts of others, you decide to band together and find a way to remove the maggots. These party members are at first understandably wary of you and of each other–you’ve all endured a traumatic experience and you don’t like anyone who can go digging through your mind. I totally get it. But everyone feels cut from the same cloth. Everyone shares the same slightly petulant personality. Treating you with a certain degree of suspicion makes sense, but it’s tiring to travel with companions who all affect an air of mystery, teasing you with allusions to there being much more to their stories while at the same time clamming up and even scolding you for daring to probe further.
It seems likely the writers are shooting for a gradual building of trust. During conversations you’ll receive feedback that your fellow party members approve or disapprove of the things you’ve said and the choices you’ve made. At times they’ll even voice support or concern during the exchange. You can also have one of your party members (rather than your primary character) initiate conversations with an NPC and potentially reveal different lines of dialogue as a result. On a mechanical level, it feels good, as if your choices matter, particularly when you realize a situation would likely have played out differently if you had left one party member at base camp and brought along someone else.
Yet the dialogue itself feels off to the extent that I’m not convinced anyone wants to be there. There’s a snideness and aloofness to each party member that doesn’t align with their willingness to, you know, be a party member. It could be that it’s too early to judge, and I am all for a good long arc of character development, but the impression these characters have so far left on me is that I don’t particularly want to hang around with any one of them.
It probably doesn’t help that the primary character available in the Early Access build is a generic roll-your-own variety. The most interesting way to play Divinity: Original Sin 2 was by picking one of the pre-made characters who came equipped with their own background, a distinct personality, and an established relationship with the wider world, while the pre-made characters you didn’t select initially would later be recruited to your party. Rolling your own character at the start did let you customize their skills and appearance, but it meant you had to forgo the extra flavor that came with choosing a fleshed-out, pre-written character. It felt like you were missing out.
It could be that it’s too early to judge, but the impression these characters have so far left on me is that I don’t particularly want to hang around with any one of them.
Baldur’s Gate 3 works in much the same way. You can roll your own character, selecting from a variety of races, classes, genders, skills and so forth, along with a fairly impressive suite of sliders and presets that allow you to tailor physical appearance. Or you can pick one of the pre-rolled options and properly role-play an existing character. The exception is that the latter is not yet available in the Early Access build. It’s visible as an option in the character creation menu, but it’s greyed out.
What this means is you’re currently left with a fairly boring main character. I played through the first act with three different primary characters, switching up their race, gender and class, and I struggled to find many ways to make the experience feel fresh each time. That your primary character remains silent during conversations, while everyone else is fully voiced, only exacerbates the problem, heightening the sensation you’re playing as an interchangeable mannequin. When the option to pick one of the pre-made characters becomes available in a future update, this issue should disappear. For now, though, it’s another reason to wait.
There are also reservations to be had on a more mechanical level. Combat works very much like it does in Divinity: Original Sin 2, and for the most part that is an asset. The turn-based encounters revolve around making use of the immediate environment, whether that’s securing high ground and the advantage it affords ranged attacks or deploying spells and items to leverage elemental hazards, such as turning pools of water into slippery ice traps. Creative solutions are not merely encouraged but rewarded, and the many fights in Baldur’s Gate 3 are best enjoyed when you’re able to exploit options beyond once again swinging your longsword.
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Where it comes undone is in failing to tell you about any of the more interesting ways to approach combat. Tutorials for anything beyond basic melee and ranged attacks are non-existent at this stage, and I suspect anyone who hasn’t played Original Sin 2 will find that much of the complexity passes them by. Worsening the confusion is an inventory system that does a poor job of highlighting anything useful, while the quick select bar at the bottom of the screen is a jumble of indecipherable icons, sorted seemingly in the most chaotic and unhelpful order possible.
The difficulty of encounters is similarly all over the place. I found some very early fights completely impossible while later ones proved a breeze. This led to a great deal of careful quicksaving and quickloading when exploring. I’d take a wrong turn and find myself in a pitched battle I quickly realized I had no hope of winning, so I’d reload and explore in the opposite direction. This would be fine if it felt like I was braving more dangerous territory, but instead it simply felt random and thus frustrating.
Related to the difficulty, percentage chances to hit in combat often feels very low. From frustratingly low to-hit chances to frequent steep skill checks, you will spend a lot of time in Baldur’s Gate 3 failing at various actions–failing to stab someone, failing to hit them with a spell, failing to intimidate or persuade or pick a lock. There’s a sense that you are, despite your “chosen one” status, not actually a particularly accomplished adventurer.
It’s probably best to wait and see how these things fall in the final, or at least story-complete, release.
Currently there is no adjustable difficulty setting–the pre-game setup describes the difficulty as “Normal”–and it’s impossible to know if this sort of unevenness is intentional or will be tweaked in future balance updates. Either way, it’s another example of the virtue of patience. It’s probably best to wait and see how these things fall in the final, or at least story-complete, release.
Reviewing Baldur’s Gate 3 at this point in time is a delicate proposition. It shows a good deal of promise, yet there are plenty of warning signs it may not fulfill its potential. But predicting the future is not really the task of an Early Access review. To some extent, it is fascinating to play Baldur’s Gate 3 today with the knowledge you will be able to follow its progress over the coming months–and possibly years–with a kind of academic interest in how AAA RPGs are built. You’ll be able to witness first-hand how rough cuts are beaten into shape and finally polished. And for some small section of the audience, that alone will be worth the price of admission. For the rest of us, however, there’s no rush. Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t done yet. It’s okay to wait until it is.
In Half-Life 2: Episode Two, players can encounter a garden gnome near the game’s opening. If they manage to carry it all the way to the end and place it in the rocket ship before it takes off, players can unlock the Little Rocket Man achievement–an infamously complicated but very fun challenge for Half-Life fans. Now, Valve founder Gabe Newell is recreating this achievement in real life for charity.
Polygon is reporting that Newell is looking to launch a garden gnome into space as part of a Rocket Lab initiative in New Zealand, where he’s currently staying. The gnome, called Gnome Chompski (as it is in several Valve games), will be sent into space during a livestream, and viewers will need to donate to watch.
Money raised from the stream will be sent to the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit at Starship, an Auckland-based children’s hospital.
This version of Gnome Chompski is not a regular garden gnome–Weta Workshop, the studio behind the effects in the Lord of the Rings movie series, has 3D-printed a titanium gnome that can withstand the heat and pressure of the launch.
The exact date of the launch isn’t yet clear, but it will likely happen within a two-week window starting on November 15.
The latest Half-Life game, the VR shooter Half-Life: Alyx, also contained a gnome that could be carried through the whole game for a Steam achievement.
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