Author: Trafficblast

Blizzard has announced it’s making a few big changes to competitive Overwatch–specifically to the hero pools and map pools systems that it introduced over the last several months. Hero pools will undergo some major changes, while map pools will be going away entirely.

First, the hero pools for competitive play and Overwatch League will be unified into a single pool starting on April 13. Any heroes with a play rate above a certain amount in competitive matches will be eligible for removal, and the higher the play rate the more likely they are to be removed. Based on that data, the pools will remove one Tank, one Support, and two Damage characters. Regardless of the data, heroes won’t be removed two weeks in a row. New rotations will be announced at the end of Overwatch League matches on Sunday, or on Monday morning when OWL is out of season.

“We’ve… heard that some aspects of the [hero pool] system are confusing or unclear, including why certain heroes or roles are rotated each week, or why the exact number of heroes available is inconsistent from week to week,” Blizzard said in the announcement. “In addition, having separate Hero Pools for Competitive Play and the Overwatch League in the same week led to a confusing or disjointed experience for players who follow the League.”

In addition, starting on April 14, the game will no longer have rotating map pools. Competitive play will include all maps, with the exception of Paris and Horizon Lunar Colony, which are being temporarily counted out while Blizzard tweaks them. Blizzard said it originally introduced map pools to reduce the number of matches played on those two maps, and also to give the competitive seasons more unique flavor.

“However, we saw a lot of feedback asking for Map Pools to vary more often than every two months at the start of a competitive season,” Blizzard explained. “Some suggested one month, others two weeks, and some even one-week rotation periods. However, if the Map Pool were to rotate more frequently, it would stop providing the competitive season with the ‘identity’ we were going for. In addition, if we change the Map Pool faster, you might not even notice that maps were missing or back from one cycle to the next.”

The Overwatch team is currently at work on more Tank and Support heroes, just after introducing another Damage type, Echo. But we’ll also have to wait for more Tank and Support, because Echo is the last new hero until the launch of Overwatch 2.

A new event has begun in Pokemon Go. The game’s spring celebration is now live until April 16, and it introduces a couple of new springtime Pokemon to catch, as well as a new Shiny.

During the spring event, Pokemon like Exeggcute, Chansey, Mareep, Marill, and Torchic will appear in the wild more often than normal. You’ll also have a chance to find Shiny Exeggcute, as well as two special Pokemon: Buneary wearing a flower crown and Pikachu wearing a flower hat.

In addition to the increased wild spawns, you’re more likely to hatch Pichu, Togepi, Tyrogue, Chingling, Happiny, Munchlax, and Riolu from 2 km eggs. Any Pichu and Togepi that you hatch will likewise be wearing flower crowns. Niantic has also rolled out a special set of event Field Research tasks that lead to encounters with Alolan Exeggutor, Azumarill, and the rare Gen 5 Pokemon Audino.

Finally, you’ll be able to take advantage of a few bonuses during the spring event. First, you’ll receive twice the usual amount of Candy for hatching Pokemon. Any Lucky Eggs that you use will also remain active for an hour rather than their usual 30 minutes.

The Pokemon Go spring event runs until 10 PM local time on April 16. You can read more details about it on the official Pokemon website.

The spring event isn’t all that’s happening in Pokemon Go right now. The Legendary Landorus is appearing in Raids until April 21, and there’s a new batch of Field Research tasks for April. Each Research Breakthrough you achieve this month will lead to an encounter with Alolan Exeggutor. You can also claim some free items in Pokemon Go.

Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair is a good sequel to the original N64 throwback, with one central issue: its titular Impossible Lair. While its challenge isn’t insurmountable, it stands in stark contrast to the difficulty of the rest of the game, which is why developer Playtonic Games is introducing two new modes for it in the latest update, which goes live on April 14.

The Impossible Lair is now split in two. The “Not So Impossible Lair” is the new standard mode, offering you the ability to save your progress at checkpoints. Each of these checkpoints registers how many bees you have in your bee shield (effectively how many hits you can take before dying), letting you practice certain sections repeatedly without having to worry about reaching the same point consistently. Playtonic notes that you can ignore checkpoints entirely too if you want to replicate the experiences from launch.

The “Impossible Lair” variant is an even tougher challenge than originally presented, with no checkpoints and no bee shield to protect you during its grueling run. That means you have to make it through the lengthy stage without taking a single fault, which should please fans itching for a new challenge.

In addition to these difficulty changes, Playtonic is also adding a new chiptune, 8-bit soundtrack to all 2D stages in the game, which can be accessed from the in-game menu. The new tracks are also going to be available to stream on Apple Music and Spotify. It’ll be out on April 14, the same day as the update.

Although Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair builds positively on the original game, it still stumbles in some areas that keeps it from hitting those same highs as older classic platformers. In our 6/10 Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair review, we said, “The Impossible Lair is definitely a better attempt at capturing the magic of platformers than Yooka-Laylee’s first crack at it, but it’s still not remarkable. If you’re itching to return to a bygone era, then The Impossible Lair might scratch it. Just don’t expect much beyond that.”

Ubisoft has taken the decision to delay Year 4 Season 2 of For Honor due to the ongoing situation regarding COVID-19. The update has been pushed back and will now release on June 11 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

“First and foremost, we hope that everyone is doing well and is safe at home during these times,” the developer said in a statement. “On our side, the team is still hard at work to keep For Honor fully operational even though we are doing so from home.

“We are proud of how quickly everyone on the development team has adapted to the situation,” the statement continues. “However, even with all our efforts during these times, the disruption over the past weeks is having an impact on our ability to deliver our near term content updates. For this reason, we have taken the decision to delay the release of Year 4 Season 2 to June 11, 2020.”

Despite the disappointment, Ubisoft is planning to bring back some fan-favorite activities to compensate for the delay. These will be available in May, with more details set to be shared in For Honor’s upcoming May roadmap.

For Honor is just the latest game to be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The launch of The Last of Us Part II was recently delayed indefinitely by Sony, while Marvel’s Iron Man VR was hit with a similar delay. Other games, such as Dirt Rally 2.0 and Sniper Elite 4, have been combating the virus with in-game messages about staying at home. Meanwhile, Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red recently spoke about how the crisis could impact how people buy games.

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Final Fantasy 7 Remake is not the ‘full game’. That is to say, while it is a complete RPG in its own right, it does not cover the whole plot of the 1997 original. Instead, it is just the first in a multi-part series of games that will tell the full story. With that in mind, it’s understandable if the first question you thought of is ‘where does Final Fantasy 7 Remake end?’ especially if you’ve played the original PlayStation game. If answers are what you seek, then this is the place to find them.

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As Square Enix has stated several times before, Final Fantasy 7 Remake is just the Midgar section of the original game. That means the two Mako reactors, the slums, Wall Market, and the towering Shinra HQ building. Nothing beyond the borders of the steel city is shown at all, aside from in the odd flashback.

The very final scene of Remake sees Cloud, Tifa, Barret, Aerith, and Red XIII walking away from Midgar into the world of Gaia, with plans to stop Sephiroth from destroying the planet. It’s almost exactly as it was at the end of the Midgar section of the original game.

That means that you don’t get to see the town of Kalm or anywhere from the original game’s open world, but you do get to play through iconic moments like the fight with Rufus on top of the Shinra building, the escape down the highway on Cloud’s bike, and the big battle with the Motor Ball tank.

That’s not to say everything in the finale of Final Fantasy 7 Remake is the same as it was in the original, though. This is, after all, a reimagining and heavily expanded version of the story, and so there are new surprises to experience. If you want to see the finale with fresh eyes, then turn away now, because spoilers are coming.

Warning: more detailed spoilers follow for the finale of Final Fantasy 7 Remake.

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The final chapter of Final Fantasy 7 Remake is around an hour of entirely new story beats, involving two major boss battles and the introduction of a key new plot thread. The final boss is Sephiroth, which is understandable considering his status as the story’s big bad, but the boss preceding him directly ties into Remake’s new and expanded narrative. So while the final scene may be taken from the original game, almost everything else in the last chapter of Remake is brand new.

By concluding just after the party escapes Midgar, it leaves a sequel to pick up as they proceed to Kalm, Fort Condor, Junon Harbour, the glittering domes of the Gold Saucer, and beyond. Don’t expect that journey to be exactly as you remember it, though; Remake’s new narrative additions mean we’ll likely be seeing all of this in a brand new light.

So that’s where Final Fantasy 7 Remake ends, and it’ll take you anywhere between 30 and 40 hours to get there. That’s a far cry from the five or so hours it takes when playing the original game. If you’re looking for more Final Fantasy 7 Remake, then why not check out our review, or see why Final Fantasy is the biggest RPG of all time.

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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. You can follow him on Twitter. 

Even before the launch of CD Projekt Red’s next big game, Cyberpunk 2077, business is booming at the Polish studio. The company has released its latest earnings report, and it shows that the studio had the strongest fourth quarter of any year since the company was founded decades ago.

For 2019, CDPR posted revenue of 521 million PLN, which works out $125 million USD. That’s up a whopping 44 percent compared to the year prior. CDPR said the uptick in sales was primarily driven by the release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on Switch, which sold around 700,000 copies.

The launch of the free-to-play game Gwent for mobile devices also helped improve overall CDPR sales during the year, the company said. The game is free, but it makes money from microtransactions.

It’s not just revenue that increased at CDPR in 2019. Total profit reached 175 million PLN ($42 million USD). CDPR’s GOG.com division, meanwhile, brought in 162 million PLN ($39 million USD) in revenue, which was a record for the platform.

“The fourth quarter of 2019 was the best final period of the year in our history. We are extremely pleased with the unceasing popularity of The Witcher 3– especially given the fact that the game will be celebrating its 5th anniversary in just a couple of weeks,” CDPR CFO Piotr Nielubowicz said in a statement.

Cyberpunk 2077 is CDPR’s next big release, and it launches in September for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. A version of the game will also come to Xbox Series X, and the upgrade will be free for Xbox users.

CDPR’s annual earnings report also revealed massive new sales numbers for The Witcher 3 and some key details about diversity at the company.

Spoiler Warning: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has surprised fans of its campaign with its third multiplayer season with the reveal that Alex is still alive. The campaign protagonist, who seemingly sacrificed himself at the end of the game, apparently lived, although he lost a leg. Now, the game’s narrative director has responded to a fan worried that the game is wasting potential set-up for a sequel not to worry, as there’s plenty more for them to explore.

This article discusses some story details from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s campaign and contains spoilers for its ending.

Responding to a player who expressed that they wished that the series would “save some of the characters and story for the next game,” narrative director Taylor Kurosaki tweeted that they aren’t “stealing from whatever comes next,” and that there’s still plenty to be explored in any potential sequels.

Kurosaki is not confirming a sequel here, to be clear–the phrase “whatever is next” certainly hints at a sequel being likely, though, especially since Modern Warfare has sold incredibly well.

In the same thread, he confirmed that players will get to experience Farah’s reaction to Alex’s survival within Modern Warfare.

Here are the full patch notes for Season 3 of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, which is now live. Call of Duty fans are spoiled for choice at the moment–a standalone free-to-play Call of Duty battle royale, Call of Duty: Warzone, released recently, as did Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Remastered.