Author: Trafficblast

Fallout 76‘s first big patch of the New Year is coming sooner than expected. Bethesda announced today that the previously announced patch will begin its rollout tomorrow, January 10, instead of January 14 as announced previously.

The patch will launch be released on January 10 at 9 AM ET for PC. It’ll come to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One “early next week,” Bethesda said in a tweet.

The Fallout 76 patch will feature “150 fixes,” Bethesda said, and the patch notes will be released on January 10 alongside its release for PC.

On a high level, Bethesda said the update will “address many issues raised by the community as well as continue focus on improving performance and stability.”

Specifically, the update will address problems with Challenges and quests. It will also contain fixes for perks and weapons; it’ll also clear out some exploits that have been brought to Bethesda’s attention.

Launching the update first on PC gives Bethesda the opportunity to “make further adjustments as needed before releasing the patch on consoles,” Bethesda said.

A second patch is coming to Fallout 76 later in January; here’s more information about it.

In other news, Bethesda announced a nice thank-you gift to Fallout fans. Everyone who logged into the full version of Fallout 76 on any platform in 2018 is getting a free copy of the Fallout Classic Collection for PC. Full instructions on how to grab the game can be found here.

More details have come to light about the new Marvel show featuring Scarlet Witch and Vision. According to The Hollywood Reporter, one of the writers of the upcoming Captain Marvel movie, Jac Schaeffer, has been hired to write the new show for Disney.

Schaeffer will also serve as the showrunner for the program, which will air on Disney’s new streaming network, Disney+. As rumoured, the actors who play Vision and Scarlet Witch in the Avengers movies, Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olson, are expected to reprise their roles for the new streaming show.

Schaeffer also wrote the screenplay for the Black Widow movie starring Scarlet Johansson. Her ties to Disney and Marvel run deeper still, as she also co-wrote the script for the Frozen short Olaf’s Frozen Adventure.

Marvel is also working on new shows for Loki, and Tom Hiddleston is expect to come back for that one. Another show will be a joint adventure featuring Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan).

The next big Marvel movie is Captain Marvel, which stars Brie Larson; it’s due out in March. It’ll be followed by the hugely anticipated Avengers: Endgame in April.

While a lot of the talk in gaming, including mobile gaming, today is focused understandably on Fortnite, it is not the biggest money-maker out there, it seems.

Sensor Tower reports that the Candy Crush series of mobile games collectively made more than $1.5 billion in revenue from microtransactions in 2018 across iOS and Android. That works out to a staggering $4.2 million USD spent per day on average.

Candy Crush Saga, the 2012 original game, made $945 million by itself, which is very impressive for a game that is more than six years old. Its $945 million accounted for 63 percent of the total $1.5 billion that people spent on Candy Crush mobile games in 2018.

Twenty-nine percent of spending, or around $443 million, came from Candy Crush Soda Saga. Candy Crush Jelly Saga brought in around $90 million in 2018, which was good for 6 percent of total franchise revenue during the year. The newest Candy Crush game, Candy Crush Friends Saga, made $3 million in 2018 following its October release.

The Candy Crush games collectively added more than 230 million new players in 2018, though a total download figure was not made available.

For comparison, Pokemon Go made around $800 million from its microtransactions in 2018 across iOS and Android, so Candy Crush Saga ($945 million) beats it. Fortnite’s mobile edition made $455 million on iOS alone in 2018, but importantly, this figure only covers iOS; what’s more, Fortnite’s mobile edition only launched in March 2018.

Candy Crush is an Activision franchise, following the Call of Duty company’s acquisition of developer King back in 2015 for a staggering $5.9 billion.

Blizzard has added a tribute to the late comics legend Stan Lee in World of Warcraft. A new NPC can be found wandering around sporting Lee’s iconic mustache and aviator lenses, as long as you know where to look.

WowHead reports that the 8.1.5 patch in the Public Test Realm adds “Stanley,” a thin man with grey-white hair and sunglasses, and saying “Excelsior!” So far he’s only been spotted in Stormwind, sporting the colors and armor of the Alliance. But a little digging into the update pulled up two other Stanley character models: one in neutral colors without armor, and another wearing Horde gear.

This isn’t the first time World of Warcraft has paid tribute to a celebrity. Blizzard similarly memorialized Robin Williams, himself an avid WoW player, after his death.

Stan Lee was an affable pitch man and the public face of Marvel comic books for years, known especially for his series of cameos in movies based on Marvel properties. He created or co-created many of Marvel’s most well-known superheroes, including the Fantastic Four, X-Men, Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, and Spider-Man, among many others. He’s widely credited for helping to give superheroes realistic problems atop their super-powered antics.

He passed away in November 2018, leading to lovely tributes from celebrities and his comic book competition alike. True to his larger-than-life personality, he had also sold the rights to his life story to Fox. But rather than a standard biopic, the plan is reportedly to adapt it into a wild period action film in the style of Kingsman: The Secret Service.

The Xbox Game Pass catalog has added two more games, while four are leaving “soon.”

Titles added the library today include the fighting game Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and the open-world action game Just Cause 3. Xbox Game Pass subscribers can download and play these games forever so long as their membership stays active.

As for the games that are leaving, the “Leaving Soon” dashboard on the Xbox Game Pass app shows that The Division is heading out, as well as Letter Quest Remastered, Riptide GP: Renegade, and The Escapists: The Walking Dead.

It’s not immediately clear precisely when these games will leave Xbox Game Pass apart from “soon.” So if you’re interested, you should download them now while you still can.

Some of the other games added to Xbox Game Pass in January included Life is Strange 2: Episode 1 (January 3), Ark: Survival Evolved (January 3), Farming Simulator 17 (January 3), and Absolver (January 7). The new 3v3 shooter Aftercharge launches on January 10.

You can sign up for Xbox Game Pass for for $1 for the first month and pay $10 for each additional month. The program is currently only available for Xbox One, but Xbox boss Phil Spencer has big plans for the future and wants to see it come to “every device.”

The Xbox Game Pass library contains more than 100 Xbox One and Xbox 360 titles. More titles are added on a regular basis, and, sometimes, some games are removed.

In other news, Microsoft just announced that you can earn Microsoft Rewards by playing Xbox Game Pass titles.

During AMD’s CES 2019 keynote, Xbox boss Phil Spencer went on stage to talk about the continued partnership between the two companies. Most notable is his mention of “future platforms” which teases AMD’s technology will be used in the CPU for Microsoft’s next console, much like Xbox One.

“As a company, we look at the opportunity in gaming and one of the things I want to say is when we think who our partners are, we think about great companies that do great work, but also do it in the right way,” Spencer said. “As we look forward to future platforms that we’re building and work that we’re doing, the partnership and the innovations that we’ve seen in the past have led to what we’ve been able to do today, I think they’re going to be critically important to our future endeavors. I’m really looking forward to showing those to people more in the future.”

In December 2018, Microsoft insider Brad Sams reported that the next Xbox would release in 2020 and use AMD’s next-generation GPU and a Zen 2 processor. Spencer’s speech at CES is the closest we’ve come to a confirmation that any of that information is true.

Spencer has been dropping hints about the next Xbox since E3 2018, which many have taken as a sign that an announcement is coming soon. The Xbox boss has already confirmed that multiple consoles are in development, but there hasn’t been an announcement detailing whether they’re all for next-generation or if one is a final upgrade for Xbox One–like the One S and One X consoles. Even when they weren’t expressly about new consoles, Xbox made moves in 2018 that hinted towards a promising future for the next generation, such as acquiring seven game developers.

Other announcements for AMD’s new technology came out during the CES keynote, which can be found in the coverage done by GameSpot’s sister site CNET. Most notable are AMD’s new Radeon VII, which is the world’s first 7nm gaming GPU and company’s most powerful one to date, and third generation Ryzen CPU, which can outperform an Intel i9-9900K on a Cinebench multicore test.