Author: Trafficblast

In the latest update for the Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord beta, even more bug fixes have been rolled out, along with some alterations to units for balancing purposes. Patch e1.4.0 also marks the move from the current beta branch to the main Steam branch, syncing the two versions.

As with all games in beta, there are a myriad of bugs that need fixing, with the majority of patches so far focusing on erasing these issues. The developers have been patching the game almost daily since the beta launched, working hard to make the game playable despite still being in beta. This update patches the following known bugs in-game:

Latest Bug Changes

• Fixed a problem where it was not possible to select newly changed perks in older save files.
• Pila, Jagged Throwing Spear and Triangular Throwing Spear are throwable again
• Fixed a crash that occurred when trying to purchase a workshop.
• Fixed a bug that causes duplicate dialogue options to appear in some dialogues.
• Fixed the bonus for the castle “castellan’s office” settlement project.
• Some lords which have a risk of going below critical money limits will stop paying wages and suffer the morale penalty only. This way they will at least keep enough money to buy food and avoid starvation. Their troops will still desert eventually if their morale drops too low.
• In some cases, siege map events were stopping in the middle and the besieger party was returning to owned settlements to buy food. They will now continue the map event.
• In some minor cases, armies were going to faraway towns when they ran out of food. This was fixed. The distance will be the most important factor in such cases.
• Fixed a bug that prevented excessive settlement militia from decreasing.
• Fixed a crash that occurred sometimes when trying to complete Gang Leader Needs Weapons quest through dialogue.
• Fixed a Save & Load crash related to one-handed perks.
• Fixed a crash due to an empty .dll name appearing on call stack frame.
• Fixed a crash due to missing frame info when capturing a call stack.
• Fixed a crash that occurred sometimes when trying to load a game when quests were active.
• Fixed a crash that occurred when selecting some troops for a custom battle.

This update also fixed the annoying bug where the player’s besieger party would stop storming a fort or village during an event to go purchase food. These troops will now finish the fight regardless of how hungry they are.

A number of changes to units have been added as well to balance out the battles. The following troops have been altered:

Latest Balance Changes

• Aserai
  • Beduin
    • Troop count increased by 1 (10)
  • Skirmisher
    • Troop count increased by 1 (17)
• Battania
  • Clan Warrior
    • Troop count increased by 1 (22)
  • Wildling
    • Troop count increased by 1 (18)
  • Ranger
    • Replaced Bastard Sword with Highland Two-Handed Sword
    • Mounter Warrior
    • Troop count increased by 1 (11)
• Empire
  • Menavlion Infantry
    • Troop count decreased by 1 (16)
    • Hit Points reduced by 5 (100)
  • Courser
    • Replaced Menavlion with Cavalry Menavlion
      • Swing Speed 83 to 73
      • Damage 129 to 118
• Khuzait
  • Rabble
    • Mace length got increased
      • Length 58 to 67
      • Swing Speed 95 to 91
      • Damage 37 to 39
  • Nomad
    • Troop count increased by 1 (11)
  • Mounted Archer
    • Cost reduced by 10 (150)
    • Spear Perk replaced by Stronger Arrows Perk
• Sturgia
  • Berserker
    • Troop count decreased by 1 (16)
  • Varyag
    • Movement Speed decreased by 1 (77)
    • Armor decreased by 1 (39)
    • Large Round Shield is now the Default Shield
    • Replaced Stronger Shield Perk with Lighter Shield Perk which equips the Light Round Shield
    • Large Round Shield weight increased to 4
    • Troop count decreased by 1 (15)
  • Hunter
    • Replaced LongSword perk with Strong Arrows Perk
    • Swapped Strong Arrows Perk and Shield Perk
• Vlandia
  • Peasant Levy
    • Troop count reduced by 2 (23)
    • Pitchfork can not be used One-Handed any more.

Some art assets, localization text files, and the UI system have also been updated. For the full list of updates in patch e1.4.0 check out the developer blog on the official website.

Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord is currently available in beta on PC.

There’s a new Harry Potter game coming to mobile, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be quite as exciting as Wizards Unite. The game, which has received its first trailer ahead of release, is called Harry Potter: Puzzles and Spells, and it’s a match-3 puzzle game.

You can watch the trailer in the tweet below, although it doesn’t show off any gameplay.

The game is being released under the Portkeys label, and is developed by Zynga (Words with Friends, Farmville). It seems to be set early in Harry’s time at Hogwarts, based on how young the characters are in the key art. If you’re in Australia, the game has already soft-launched on both the App Store and Google Play–but other regions will have to wait a little longer. No release date has been announced.

The game features many locations from the series, including various parts of Hogwarts and Diagon Alley.

Fans of the series can always pretend that this is an adaptation of the unpublished manuscript for Harry Potter and the Three Green Stones That Disappeared When They Touched Each Other, but there are also other ways to continue enjoying J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world. For instance, there’s this excellent Harry Potter RPG created inside Minecraft, or you could watch Daniel Radcliffe read the Harry Potter books.

If you’re waiting for a new AAA Harry Potter game, it might still be happening–plans for an open-world leaked back in 2018. Nothing has been announced, however.

Ubisoft’s latest financial report included new details on microtransaction spending for Rainbow Six Siege and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. In short, both are performing very well in regards to microtransansactions.

Ubisoft categorizes microtransactions as Player Recurring Spending (PRI), which covers digital items, DLC, season passes, subscriptions, and advertising. The team-based tactical shooter Rainbow Six Siege enjoyed “record engagement” in the months of January, February, and March 2020, with PRI spending jumping by 26 percent.

That’s an incredible achievement for a game that was released in 2015. Ubisoft will be supporting Siege for a long time to come, as the company is releasing the game as a launch title for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X later this year. GameSpot recently re-reviewed Siege, and we awarded it a 10/10.

Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, meanwhile, is pacing ahead of Assassin’s Creed Origins on a number of metrics. Microtransaction spending in Odyssey is up by a whopping 170 percent compared to Origins, while daily engagement and the number of copies sold over its previous 12 months are up by 90 percent each compared to Origins.

Odyssey featured a boatload of microtransaction offerings, but one of the most notable one was a permanent double XP boost for $10 that makes the grind easier to get through.

In total, spending on PRI for Ubisoft’s latest fiscal year ended March 31 reached €702.4 million ($759.8 million USD). That’s a huge number, but it’s nowhere close to the $3.36 billion USD that Activision Blizzard generated from microtransactions during its latest year.

Given Ubisoft’s solid performance on microtransactions in the latest period, you can expect the company to continue to make use of the business practice going forward for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and the company’s other upcoming games. For the upcoming quarter, Ubisoft said it expects microtransaction revenue to continue to grow in the coming year.

In other news, Ubisoft recently confirmed that it had 11 games across six franchises that have sold more than 10 million copies during the current console generation–you can see the full list here.

Nioh 2 has received a free update, and it has brought new playable content and a photo mode to Team Ninja’s punishing action game. Update 1.09, announced over at PlayStation Blog, will let you capture images of some of the game’s stunning vistas and horrifying enemies.

The camera mode will feature plenty of options for fine-tuning, such as exposure, gradation, and lighting and tint adjustments. There are also numerous filters, letting you pretty up your photos of the game’s various grotesque beasts, as well as options to tilt your photos or display watermarks. You can see it in action in the screenshots below.

Nine new missions have also been added, and they’re divided between sub-missions and one Twilight missions. Here’s the complete list, as well as how far you’ll need to be to unlock them, according to Nioh 2 Wiki:

• The Chinese Bellflower Dagger (Clear Shadow chapter)
• The Child Prodigy’s Invitation (Clear The Golden Nation side-mission)
• Farewell to the Past (Clear Twilight chapter)
• A Strong Bond (Clear Twilight chapter)
• Winds of Ruin (Clear Afterglow chapter)
• The Trustworthy (Clear Afterglow chapter)
• Wave of Terror (Clear Afterglow chapter)
• Calamity’s Pulse (Clear Afterglow chapter)
• Mountain of the Dark Lord (Twilight Mission) (Clear Dawn chapter)

1.09 also adds the Guardian Spirit Mizuchi to the game, although we’re not clear on how they are unlocked yet.

Nioh 2 will expand further later this year with a trio of expansions, the first of which arrives in July. These are unlikely to be free, however. The PS4 exclusive received an 8/10 in GameSpot’s review, and reviewer Mike Epstein wrote that “though it sometimes feels like a curse as you play, it is a testament that Nioh 2 successfully grabs and holds your complete attention so close for so long.”

International Museum Day is apparently a real annual event that takes place on May 18, and not being one to shy away from obscure holidays and seasonal events, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is treating the day as an in-game event. It’s called the Stamp Rally, and it runs from May 18 until May 31. Like the May Day event that took place at the beginning of the month, the Stamp Rally gives you a week to visit your island’s museum in order to collect stamps and give you an excuse to spend some time fully appreciating Blathers’ beautiful building of bugs, bones, and bass (among other fish).

How To Participate In Stamp Rally

Taking part in the Stamp Rally couldn’t be simpler. Head into your island’s museum and speak to Blathers, who will explain the event and invite you to visit three different wings of the building–the fish, bug, and fossil wings. The art wing, if you have access to it, isn’t a part of this Stamp Rally event.

How Stamp Rally Works

Your goal is to simply find all the Stamp Rally stations located within each of the three participating museum wings and interact with them to get a stamp on your card. The wings will have three stations each, for a total of nine stations. Once you collect all the stamps on a card, speak to Blathers again to get a completion stamp, as well as your reward.

How To Complete Stamp Rally

Finding the Stamp Rally stations is a simple affair–they’re bright yellow and red booths that you can find located in front of certain exhibits in the participating museum wings. The catch is that the locations of the stamp booths will be randomised each day, but thankfully the wings are small enough that it shouldn’t take too much of your time to run around and find them.

What Do You Get For Stamp Rally?

Completing the Stamp Rally by handing in your completed stamp cards to Blathers will reward you with golden plaques of a fish, butterfly, and fossil, not unlike the ones you see mounted in the museum’s lobby. You can hang these on the wall of your home, which is handy in case you felt like creating your own competing museum to run Blathers out of business.

You can continue to visit the museum and complete the Stamp Rally on subsequent days. The location of the stamp stations will likely change, but the rewards you receive for completing your stamp card will not.

And that’s about all there is to know about this simple event. The next event for Animal Crossing: New Horizons is Wedding Season, a photography-focussed event which will take place for the entire month of June.

Bohemia Interactive’s survival shooter DayZ is enjoying a newfound level of success on Xbox One after the game was recently added to the Xbox Game Pass catalog. The publisher said in a news release that “hundreds of thousands” of new players jumped into DayZ following its introduction into the subscription program on May 7.

The game is “flourishing now more than ever, and has become one of the Most Played games on Xbox,” Bohemia said in its press release (via Eurogamer).

Publishing director Vojtěch Ješátko added: “Xbox Game Pass is a great opportunity for us to open the game to a different audience, and to let a massive number of new players experience DayZ in all its crude harshness and beauty, together with the veterans.”

Launching into a subscription program like Xbox Game Pass carries some risk, of course, but for DayZ at least, it seems to be working out. Not every developer is thrilled with subscription services. A recent GDC survey found that about a quarter of respondents worried that subscription programs may lead to the further de-valuation of games. Additionally, Devolver Digital told GameSpot that subscription services, overall, are a worry to the company.

All of Microsoft’s first-party games, including Halo Infinite later this year, will be available for subscribers at launch through Xbox Game Pass (for Xbox and PC). Some third-party games have launched into subscription catalog too, including the whimsical ’80s game Moving Out.

Xbox Game Pass is set to grow in a big way later this year when Microsoft’s game-streaming service, xCloud, gets folded into it. Currently, you must download and install Xbox Game Pass titles, which can take a long time, but xCloud integration will allow you to stream games with minimal waiting.

In other news about Xbox Game Pass, Rockstar’s celebrated open-world western, Red Dead Redemption 2, is now available in the catalog.

Minecraft developer Mojang is moving into the new decade with a new name, or at least a revised name. The company is now known as Mojang Studios, and it has a new logo to go along with it.

Inspired by the developer’s expansion into multiple offices around the world, Mojang Studios’ new name represents its scale and how it has expanded far beyond a small team working only on Minecraft.

The new logo is made up of little gadgets called “Mojangs,” appropriately enough, and in the trailer they are turned and twisted around to spell out the studio’s name. It sounds like it won’t be the last time we hear about the somewhat sentient gizmos, and they should pop up again as we learn about future Mojang Studios projects.

“They test and tinker, endlessly explore, and help us discover new corners of the Minecraft universe,” Mojang Studios’ head of creative communications said in the announcement post.

Speaking of new content, the developer has several things cooking. Aside from Minecraft and the spinoff game Minecraft Dungeons, Mojang Studios is also creating a feature film, experimenting with new game ideas, and producing a live show. Of course, none of this is stopping its continued work updating Minecraft with new features and content.

Most recently, the Minecraft RTX beta got even more worlds for players to check out. They make use of ray tracing technology to make the game look absolutely gorgeous. Minecraft Dungeons releases May 26 for Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PS4, and PC.

Fans who’ve watched the new Scooby gang movie, Scoob!, will surely have noticed that, for the first time in a long while, Matthew Lillard is not voicing Shaggy. The Scream actor has been providing the voice for Scooby-Boo’s best pal, Shaggy Rogers, in animated projects for the better part of two decades, ever since he played the role in the first live-action Scooby movie in 2002.

In a huge change up, Will Forte plays Shaggy in Scoob! and recently Entertainment Tonight spoke with Lillard about this shocking changing of the guard.

“Yeah, about Scoob! I don’t have a lot of good things to say,” Lillard lamented. “I wish them all well. I hope the movie does really well.”

“It was a drag and I was surprised that it happened,” he added. “You know, Hollywood’s an interesting place and I’ve been around for a long time. Some of them are easier than others, when you don’t get a job, but that was a bummer. I like playing the part. I like sort of having a legacy in a career that’s been 30 years.”

You can watch the video interview here…

Matthew Lillard not being in Scoob is a crime pic.twitter.com/hIxjyn4XnN

— Ash Crossan (@AshCrossan) May 15, 2020

Lillard also, upon the movie’s release to VOD, offered up this supportive tweet…

Dear SCOOB.

I hope you’re everything the world needs in this time of crisis. Have a great opening. #zoinks. .

— matthew lillard (@MatthewLillard) May 15, 2020

You can check out IGN’s review of Scoob! here, which calls it a “pleasant enough diversion during these trying times,” and also watch the cast of Scoob! respond to IGN comments…

[ignvideo url=”https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/05/16/scoob-cast-respond-to-ign-comments”]

[poilib element=”accentDivider”]

Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.

New game releases have slowed to a crawl as of late, but you can enjoy some of the best retro games for a great price on the Sega Genesis Mini. The plug-and-play system is currently being sold for just $50 on Amazon, and it comes with 40 of the most popular games for the Genesis across several different genres.

Typically sold for $80, the Sega Genesis Mini comes loaded with 40 games from the original Genesis library as well as two bonus games: Darius and an unreleased Genesis version of Tetris. Its design features impressive attention to detail, including a non-functional volume switch, cartridge slot, and expansion port. The console comes with two controllers by default, as well, so you can start playing competitive fighting games and other multiplayer titles right out of the box.

Most of the biggest Genesis games are included on the Genesis Mini, such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Earthworm Jim, Contra: Hard Corps, Castlevania: Bloodlines, Golden Axe, and Ecco the Dolphin. There is plenty of genre variety, as well, with a few great shoot-em-up games such as Thunder Force 3 and Gunstar Heroes.

The Sega Genesis Mini’s software was developed by M2, the same company responsible for the software on the TurboGrafx-16 Mini. The latter system was delayed in North America but is now scheduled to arrive on May 22. It includes a mix of TurboGrafx-16 games and PC Engine games, and it’s the perfect companion to the Sega Genesis Mini.