Since its full unveiling back at E3 2019, Crystal Dynamics has promised a beta for the upcoming Marvel’s Avengers, and now finally, we know when that beta will take place.
As part of IGN’s continuing IGN First coverage of Marvel’s Avengers, we can confirm the beta dates for Marvel’s Avengers:
August 7 – PlayStation preorder beta access begins
August 14 – Xbox and PC Preorder beta access begins, PlayStation open beta also begins
August 21 – Open beta across all platforms begins
Marvel’s Avengers Beta Dates
Crystal Dynamics will be hosting a second War Table presentation on July 29 at 10 a.m. PT to detail what players can expect out of the beta. While we’ll have to wait a few weeks for full details, Creative Director Shaun Escayg did tease that the beta will include a little bit of everything – campaign content, co-op missions, hero progression, and exploration in War Zone and Drop Zones, the latter of which is a new kind of mission to be detailed in the War Table.
“We built the beta in such a way that you can experience most of things that you’ll be doing in the full game,” Escayg said in a statement accompanying the announcement. “That means playing a piece of the original single-player Avengers story campaign, fighting through co-op missions, experiencing hero and world progression, and exploring War Zones and DROP ZONES, a new kind of mission we’ll talk about in the upcoming War Table on July 29. This beta is meaty, but it’s only a small part of the finished game.”
DC Comics has just announced Rorschach, a new sequel to Watchmen set 35 years after the events of the original comic.
Rorschach will be published as a 12-issue limited series under the DC Black Label imprint. The series is written by Tom King (Batman, Mister Miracle) and drawn by Jorge Fornés (Batman, Daredevil), with colors by Dave Stewart (Hellboy) and letters by Clayton Cowles (Batman).
Check out the slideshow gallery below for a look at the cover and several pages of unlettered art from Rorschach #1:
Unlike the 2012 prequel series Before Watchmen: Rorschach, the new comic won’t be focusing on original Rorschach Walter Kovacs. Nor does it appear to feature his successor Reggie Long, who was a major protagonist in DC’s previous Watchmen sequel Doomsday Clock. The new series isn’t even about Rorschach the man so much as the dark legacy he left behind after his death. Similar to HBO’s Watchmen series, Rorschach has become a cultural icon in 2020, with many in this alternate universe seeking to follow his violent example.
“Like the HBO Watchmen show and very much like the original ‘86 Watchmen, this is a very political work.” said King in DC’s press release. “It’s an angry work. We’re so angry all the time now. We have to do something with that anger. It’s called Rorschach not because of the character Rorschach, but because what you see in these characters tells you more about yourself than about them.”
According to DC’s press release, the series opens with a mysterious new Rorschach and his partner attempting to assassinate a political challenger to President Robert Redford. Though they fail (and appear to be killed in the process), the series follows a detective’s quest to retrace the assassins’ steps, uncover their identities and learn the truth behind their mission. In that sense, Rorschach may play with time every bit as much as the original Watchmen and the HBO series.
The finale of Doomsday Clock laid the seeds for another sequel, though it’s unclear how directly Rorschach will reference the events of that story, or if any of the surviving Minutemen will appear. Interestingly, depending how Rorschach is structured it could theoretically act as a continuation to both Doomsday Clock and the HBO series without contradicting either one.
Rorschach #1 is priced at $4.99 and will release on October 13. No doubt DC will reveal more about the new series at upcoming digital conventions like Comic-Con@Home or DC FanDome.
Over many years and many iterations of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, the iconic assassin’s outfit slowly became more ostentatious and less useful for, say, hiding among a group of white-robed monks. The next game in the series, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, is bringing hoods, hidden blades, and social stealth back.
“We do bring social stealth back in a lot of our quests and a lot of parts in our world,” said assistant level design director Laurence Letalien in an interview with GameSpot’s Jordan Ramée. “We do have this mechanic of disguise where you can put your hood on and in different locations where you want to blend in more get less detected, you can put it on and it’s a mechanic you can use to social stealth between crowds. We are also bringing back the social stealth of the monks walking around you can blend with them.”
The new-old mechanic was shown off in the Valhalla section of the Ubisoft Forward presentation, showing protagonist Eivor pulling up the hood of their cloak to blend with a crowd of people. While this mechanic was used extensively in the first three Assassin’s Creed games, it fell out of favor as the games took on more of a focus on combat and RPG elements. Now, it’s coming back to make Valhalla feel more like a classic Assassin’s Creed game.
Of course if stealth isn’t your jam, the option to fight your way into and out of any situation is still available.
“Stealth was a super important part for us to bring back and focus on,” Letalien said. “And we do have both approaches… the demo was a bit more action-y but you could, before the raid, before calling your crew, go alone and take out enemies stealthily before calling your crew to the battle.”
Valhalla will release on November 17 for PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Stadia. It’ll also be available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X when the consoles release, with players who buy the game on current-gen getting an upgrade to the next-gen edition for free.
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MLB The Show 20 released in March, just as social distancing was starting to happen amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and the standard 162 game baseball season still looked like a possibility. Now, with a new match schedule in place for a reduced season, the PS4 exclusive game is updating one of its modes to reflect this.
The Show Nation has provided an update on how the 2020 season will play out in-game, now that the MLB season is starting. The big change is that Play Now Live will mirror the real-life 60-game schedule, so you’ll be able to play along with the real season.
There has not been enough time for the team at San Diego Studio to implement similar changes across the entire game, though, so in other modes details like season length, rules, and schedule will remain in-line with a 162 game season. The size of crowds in the game will also not be affected. It’ll still be realistic, but it won’t resemble the 2020 season–and really, any escape from 2020 is welcome.
Live content will continue to update in line with the real world in the lead up to the World Series, too.
Here are the other changes noted, directly from the developer:
Roster updates are back! But to be more in line with the shorter more action packed season, roster attribute updates will now be weekly, compared to our usual bi-weekly updates.
Topps Now moments return! Relive the best plays, comebacks and walk-offs of the week to unlock Topps Now player rewards to use on your Diamond Dynasty squad.
Monthly Awards will crown the best performances from around the league each month in new Programs. Jump into missions and moments to earn the Lightning player of the month.
MLB The Show 20 earned an 8/10 in GameSpot’s review. Reviewer Richard Wakeling wrote that the latest iteration in the series “doesn’t make any large strides forward, choosing instead to focus on refining areas that needed improvement from last year.”
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“The electronics giant has informed assembly partners and suppliers it’s radically increasing orders for its next-generation console, though logistics may yet pose a challenge to delivering all those machines on time for the holiday shopping season, the people said, asking to remain anonymous,” Bloomberg reported.
Nikkei’s sources mentioned that order numbers could change in either direction based on market demand, so the 9-10 million figure is likely not set in stone.
Neither report had any details on the breakdown of production orders for the PS5 by SKU. In addition to the standard PS5, Sony is producing a disc-free PS5 edition. On top of these two consoles, Sony will continue to manufacture the PS4 and the PS4 Pro.
Karn Chauhan, a senior analyst with Counterpoint, told Nikkei Asian Review it makes sense that Sony would seek to increase its production pipeline for the PS5 due to the pandemic and how it’s led to a surge in gaming. “During the pandemic, the gaming industry witnessed a record number of online player additions as more consumers are considering gaming as entertainment at home,” Chauhan said.
The same Nikkei Asian Review report said Facebook is looking to increase the production of Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets to 2 million units.
Recently, a pre-order page for the PS5 went live on Amazon, prompting some people to speculate that Sony might announce a release date and price soon. As of yet, that hasn’t happened, but the console is confirmed to release this holiday season.
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Viewers in at least half of the United States will miss out on seeing the 30 Rock reunion on Thursday, the first new episode of the show in over seven years. More than half of the country’s NBC affiliates won’t show the one-hour reunion special, including station groups Gray Television, Hearst, Nexstar, Tegna, and Sinclair Broadcast Group, The Wrap reports.
The issue, according to a Vulture report, is that the new special focuses too much on promoting Peacock, the streaming service NBC is launching on Wednesday July 15. The station groups who are boycotting the special consider Peacock to be a competitor.
Featuring bits from original cast members Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin, Tracy Morgan, Jane Krakowski, and Jack McBrayer filmed remotely during the coronavirus pandemic, the 30 Rock special will also serve to promote NBC’s upcoming slate of programming. The special was produced by NBCUniversal’s marketing department.
The special is still set to air in major markets such as New York City and Los Angeles where NBC owns its own stations, as well as other markets comprising of around 40% of the country. A rebroadcast on Friday will also see the special aired on the USA Network, Bravo, E!, Oxygen, SYFY, and CNBC–and yes, it will be available to stream on Peacock.
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Steam’s own publicly available data shows that The Master Chief Collection reached a peak concurrent player base of 54,761 people on launch day, July 14. With numbers that big, MCC moved inside of the Top 10 list for the most-played games on Steam’s entire platform.
Halo 3 and MCC are also available to buy on PC directly from Microsoft’s Store, while Xbox Game Pass members on PC can get the games, too. As such, the total player count for Halo 3 and MCC overall is surely much higher.
MCC and Halo 3 are also tracking well on the Top-Sellers charts for Steam, with MCC and Halo 3 ranking as the No. 2 and No. 3 best-sellers on Steam right now, only behind another new release, Death Stranding.
Halo 3 is available to buy as an individual game for $10 USD or through MCC for $40 USD. MCC on PC currently includes Halo: Reach, Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, and Halo 3. ODST and Halo 4 will follow later on to complete the package.
One of the new features of the Xbox Series X is called “Xbox Velocity Architecture,” and it’s a new piece of technology that Microsoft says will help the console make games look and run better.
In a blog post, Xbox’s Jason Ronald mentioned that, with current-generation games, designers oftentimes need to create things like elevators and hallways to hide things in the background as the game loads certain in-game elements. “This challenge would continue to increase exponentially and further constrain the ambition for truly transformative games,” Ronald said. “This feedback influenced the design and development of the Xbox Velocity Architecture.”
To understand what Xbox Velocity Architecture is, Ronald said you can think of it as “the soul” with the Series X’s new custom processor as the heart. “Through a deep integration of hardware and software innovation, the Xbox Velocity Architecture will power next-gen gaming experiences unlike anything you have seen before,” Ronald said.
The four major components of the Xbox Velocity Architecture include the Series X’s NVM SSD, hardware-accelerated decompression blocks, a new DirectorStorage API layer, and a Sampler Feedback Streaming.
Ronald provided an overview of each of these components, and you can see his comments further down the page. His comments get deep into the specifics, but in short, Xbox Velocity Architecture is a new system that will allow developers to access capabilities “beyond the raw specifications of the hardware itself.”
“The Xbox Velocity Architecture fundamentally rethinks how a developer can take advantage of the hardware provided by the Xbox Series X,” Ronald said. “From entirely new rendering techniques to the virtual elimination of loading times, to larger, more dynamic living worlds where, as a gamer, you can choose how you want to explore, we can’t be more excited by the early results we are already seeing. In addition, the Xbox Velocity Architecture has opened even more opportunities and enabled new innovations at the platform level, such as Quick Resume which enables you to instantly resume where you left off across multiple games, improving the overall gaming experience for all gamers on Xbox Series X.”
The Xbox Series X is due to release this year, with Halo Infinite as a launch title. Microsoft will show off more of Halo Infinite during an event on July 23, so keep checking back with GameSpot for more very soon.
Xbox Velocity Architecture:
Custom NVME SSD: The foundation of the Xbox Velocity Architecture is our custom, 1TB NVME SSD, delivering 2.4 GB/s of raw I/O throughput, more than 40x the throughput of Xbox One. Traditional SSDs used in PCs often reduce performance as thermals increase or while performing drive maintenance. The custom NVME SSD in Xbox Series X is designed for consistent, sustained performance as opposed to peak performance. Developers have a guaranteed level of I/O performance at all times and they can reliably design and optimize their games removing the barriers and constraints they have to work around today. This same level of consistent, sustained performance also applies to the Seagate Expandable Storage Card ensuring you have the exact same gameplay experience regardless of where the game resides.
Hardware Accelerated Decompression: Game packages and assets are compressed to minimize download times and the amount of storage required for each individual game. With hardware accelerated support for both the industry standard LZ decompressor as well as a brand new, proprietary algorithm specifically designed for texture data named BCPack, Xbox Series X provides the best of both worlds for developers to achieve massive savings with no loss in quality or performance. As texture data comprises a significant portion of the total overall size of a game, having a purpose built algorithm optimized for texture data in addition to the general purpose LZ decompressor, both can be used in parallel to reduce the overall size of a game package. Assuming a 2:1 compression ratio, Xbox Series X delivers an effective 4.8 GB/s in I/O performance to the title, approximately 100x the I/O performance in current generation consoles. To deliver similar levels of decompression performance in software would require more than 4 Zen 2 CPU cores.
New DirectStorage API: Standard File I/O APIs were developed more than 30 years ago and are virtually unchanged while storage technology has made significant advancements since then. As we analyzed game data access patterns as well as the latest hardware advancements with SSD technology, we knew we needed to advance the state of the art to put more control in the hands of developers. We added a brand new DirectStorage API to the DirectX family, providing developers with fine grain control of their I/O operations empowering them to establish multiple I/O queues, prioritization and minimizing I/O latency. These direct, low level access APIs ensure developers will be able to take full advantage of the raw I/O performance afforded by the hardware, resulting in virtually eliminating load times or fast travel systems that are just that . . . fast.
Sampler Feedback Streaming (SFS): Sampler Feedback Streaming is a brand-new innovation built on top of all the other advancements of the Xbox Velocity Architecture. Game textures are optimized at differing levels of detail and resolution, called mipmaps, and can be used during rendering based on how close or far away an object is from the player. As an object moves closer to the player, the resolution of the texture must increase to provide the crisp detail and visuals that gamers expect. However, these larger mipmaps require a significant amount of memory compared to the lower resolution mips that can be used if the object is further away in the scene. Today, developers must load an entire mip level in memory even in cases where they may only sample a very small portion of the overall texture. Through specialized hardware added to the Xbox One X, we were able to analyze texture memory usage by the GPU and we discovered that the GPU often accesses less than 1/3 of the texture data required to be loaded in memory. A single scene often includes thousands of different textures resulting in a significant loss in effective memory and I/O bandwidth utilization due to inefficient usage. With this insight, we were able to create and add new capabilities to the Xbox Series X GPU which enables it to only load the sub portions of a mip level into memory, on demand, just in time for when the GPU requires the data. This innovation results in approximately 2.5x the effective I/O throughput and memory usage above and beyond the raw hardware capabilities on average. SFS provides an effective multiplier on available system memory and I/O bandwidth, resulting in significantly more memory and I/O throughput available to make your game richer and more immersive.
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Sony is reportedly increasing its PlayStation 5 production to 10 million units in 2020 as it “sees the prolonged effects of the COVID-19 pandemic boosting demand for gaming.”
Sony is said to have begun PS5 mass production in June and “under the latest plan, expects to assemble 5 million units by the end of September and another 5 million between October and December.”
Not all 10 million may make it to store shelves in 2020, however, as logistical delays may delay a percentage of the PlayStation 5 consoles to 2021.
A big factor in the potential delay for some of the stock is due to shipping constraints, as “a large proportion of Sony’s consoles are made in China and sent out via sea around the world.”
Alongside the news about PlayStation 5, Nikkei reports that Facebook is also increasing production on its Oculus headsets by at least 50% to 2 million units.
Christopher Nolan’s new movie, Tenet, will reportedly be on the long side, but it won’t be the Dark Knight director’s longest film. The Korean ratings board (via The Telegraph) has revealed that Tenet clocks in at 149 minutes, which works out to about 2 hours and 29 minutes.
It’s 20 minutes shy of Nolan’s longest film, which is Interstellar (2 hours and 49 minutes). Nolan’s shortest movie, meanwhile, is his 1998 debut feature film, Following (1 hour and 9 minutes).
Tenet will be 1 minute longer than Inception (2 hours and 28 minutes) and 3 minutes shorter than Nolan’s Batman movie The Dark Knight (2 hours and 32 minutes). You can see a full rundown of the runtimes for Nolan’s 11 movies here at Collider.
Tenet was initially planned for release in theatres this Friday, July 17. Warner Bros. pushed the date to July 31, before shifting it again to its current date of August 12. That date might be optimistic, too, as COVID-19 cases in the US are still on the rise, with more than 100,000 new cases reported this week alone.
Tenet–which is written and directed by Nolan–stars Robert Pattinson, John David Washington, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Martin Donovan, Kenneth Branagh, and Elizabeth Debicki, in addition to Michael Caine who played Alfred in Nolan’s Batman movies.
