Despite coming out in 2018, Among Us soared in popularity this fall to become one of the most popular games in the world. It saw particular success in YouTube videos, with view counts increasing dramatically in September to top 4 billion.
According to YouTube, Among Us videos have a global appeal, with just under 19% of viewers located in the United States. Mexico and South Korea are the second- and third-biggest countries for viewership and Indonesia makes up more than 5% of views. The game doesn’t have an in-game chat option yet, but players often use programs like Discord to communicate.
Players aren’t just uploading gameplay videos, either. More than 6% of views related to Among Us used the word “animation,” according to YouTube’s statistics. It doesn’t necessarily mean that percentage of videos are animations, but it does suggest people are interested in watching “expanded universe” material for the game. Smaller creators have seen their channels grow since uploading Among Us videos, as well, including animations.
It’s no wonder developer Innersloth opted to cancel Among Us 2, instead focusing on keeping the community together and adding more content to the base game. A major beta update added ways for changing voting and added colorblind accessibility options.
Though not available on consoles, Among Us is currently available on PC, Android, and iOS. The game supports cross-play, so you can enjoy it with your friends regardless of system.
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Pokemon Sword and Shield mark the eighth generation of Pokemon games. It’s a great time to jump in if you haven’t already, since the games’ second DLC, The Crown Tundra, is just around the corner.
There are plenty of great deals to find during Prime Day 2020. You can check out our full roundup of the best gaming deals, which we continue to update throughout the event, to see what’s available. We also have a roundup of all the best Nintendo Switch deals with more discounts on other Switch games–and if you’re particularly in the market for more Switch games, be sure to check out our Nintendo Switch gift guide, too. Finally, you can head to our Amazon Prime Day 2020 hub to see all the deals we’ve found so far.
$59.99on Walmart
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According to both the PlayStation Network service status page and DownDetector, PSN is currently experiencing connection issues on PlayStation 4, specifically with its social features and online gaming. PS4 users are unable to access their party list, friends list, and can’t play games online. Some are even reporting freezes and crashes.
“You may have some difficulty launching games, applications, or online features. Our engineers are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, and we thank you for your patience,” reports the official PSN service status tracker.
The issues began to arise following the release of firmware update 8.00. It’s not clear if the two are related, but some users were encountering a “cannot load” prompt when attempting to open their friends list, along with error code WS-44369-6, after installing the patch.
We’re aware users are experiencing difficulties accessing specific functions of PlayStation Network at this time. We’re currently investigating. Thank you for your patience.
PlayStation’s official support account on Twitter has acknowledged the issue, which is currently being investigated. We will continue to monitor the situation and update once things are up and running again.
If you were looking to check out the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare patch that went live earlier this morning, you’ll have to wait a bit longer. The Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War beta also launches tomorrow following a PS4-exclusive alpha weekend—hopefully the PSN issues will be resolved before then.
Among Us has a pretty simple ruleset, so it’s not difficult to replicate it in other games. One Animal Crossing: New Horizons created a way to have their own murder mysteries play out in Nintendo’s small-town simulator.
Redditor micmartperez posted an image with their preferred ruleset. Crewmates must complete their tasks (collecting every type of fruit and returning to base) before Impostors kill them by hitting them with a tool. Here are a few other important rules:
Killed players must wear red shirts to show that they are no longer participating.
Emergency meetings can be called by returning to base and sending a message that says “EM.”
A single area must be set up as the meeting area before you start to play.
No communicating during the game except while in a meeting.
Dress Appropriately While Playing Among Us in Animal Crossing
The fun part of Among Us is communicating, not the tasks or other gameplay mechanics. This New Horizons ruleset is a little janky, but it’ll get the job done in replicating how it feels to play InnerSloth’s surprise hit.
This is another game that players have made within Animal Crossing to give them more to do while playing together. Other players found a way to play soccer while one person turned their entire island into a Mario Party game board.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla‘s Eivor shares similarities with Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag‘s Edward; both are people who are historically known for pillaging and raiding–not something that’s typical for a hero. I asked narrative director Darby McDevitt how Ubisoft hopes to handle a story where you play as the conqueror, not the protector.
“People don’t have a full picture of the Viking thing,” McDevitt said. “That being said, they did aggress. But we tried to pick a point in history where they did have a grander reason for their aggression. And that is to go out and settle, to make a life for themselves.”
He continued: “We’re trying to depict this with as even a hand as we can. There is a little bit of ‘everyone’s the hero of their own story,’ but we also try to tell this story with as even a hand as possible. I think you’ll find that–and I hope that you saw this in the story arc you played–that nobody comes across as purely evil or purely good.”
In my six-hour hands-on with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Eivor met up with the Sons of Ragnar and aided them in their quest to create an alliance with a neighboring kingdom by disposing of their king and queen and implementing a puppet ruler. And to McDevitt’s point, both sides had people that I hoped I’d have the chance to kill, as well as individuals that I came to respect over the course of the saga.
Not every threat you meet in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will be human.
It’s again, a little like Black Flag in that regard, which featured several allies turned enemies and enemies turned allies. In this way, Black Flag managed to avoid delving into the implication that you were a pirate responsible for a lot of suffering by painting all sides of the conflict, not just Edward, in shades of grey. It’s harder to notice Edward’s failings when almost everyone around him is as deeply flawed as he is. Valhalla seems to handle Eivor and their story in a similar way.
“There’s a bit of–what we say in literature or film–that depiction is not endorsement,” McDevitt added. “It’s a bit harder to make that argument with a video game, when you’re actually participating in it, but we’ve tried to be very even handed about it.”
He concluded: “And I hope that when you play this game, as you move through it, you’ll see that we start to pull off the gas a little bit with the invasion aspect. And the territories that you see in the back half of the game, the reasons for meeting these people are actually much more diverse. [Valhalla] does start with, ‘Let’s go in and knock some pots and pans over heads and take over some forts so that the people know that we’re here to stay.’ But in the back half of the game, we go deeper into more human stories and more interesting and diverse stories.”
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Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is the first game in the franchise to tell its story in more of a loop, where you’re returning to your settlement after every mission in order to pick the next one. As a result, its story is divided into individual two- to three-hour chunks. Valhalla isn’t one long adventure like the previous games, it’s individual stories that ultimately add up to one final conclusion.
“This inspiration came from the Viking sagas themselves–the sagas of the Icelanders,” Assassin’s Creed Valhalla narrative director Darby McDevitt told me. “The sagas are not told like the typical hero’s journey that you get in most Western literature–a three-act structure, a rise and fall, the call to action, and then the refusal of the call. The sagas are actually more episodic moments in a character’s history. And you follow them through a long period of their life. It typically follows them from birth to death, but it’s not about having a single driving plot. They feel more like life. How life really is, which is just a series of character building incidences that orbit some themes.”
I’ve actually seen this first-hand. I played through one of Valhalla’s more combat-focused sagas back in July, and then a completely different one in a recent six-hour hands-on. Neither one made reference to the other. They were each self-contained stories that had their own beginning, middle, and end. The only commonality is protagonist Eivor, and I did notice that how I played the character (in regards to dialogue options) in that first saga informed my decisions in the second. So my Eivor was evolving, but the two different sagas could have easily been played in any order and it wouldn’t have drastically altered my understanding of either one.
“[Valhalla] has a thin through line–there’s definitely an emotional through line,” McDevitt said. “But what we’re more interested in is saying, ‘Here’s a little two-hour experience and here’s another little two-hour experience,’ and they’re all self-contained. And then they’re going to stack on top of each other so that the themes that we’re slowly building have more resonance, more and more. And I think actually, for a player of video games, having these two- or three-hour bite sized chunks is actually cool because you’re not going to be 40 hours into this game thinking, ‘Hey, I want the story to wrap up. It’s been a long time.'”
McDevitt added that he hopes that by dividing Valhalla’s story into these self-contained segments, it makes it easier to finish the whole game. As Assassin’s Creed fans will tell you, the most recent games have been getting fairly long–the last game, 2018’s Odyssey, clocked in at 50 hours (and that’s just the campaign; that’s not even counting the extremely lengthy six follow-up DLC expansions). With Valhalla, the idea seems to be the hope that players will find dozens of two-hour stories to be easier to ultimately finish than one giant story.
“Like I said, we’re playing a longer game here–there is an undercurrent,” McDevitt added. “But we’re hoping that these more bite-sized things carry you forward in a unique way.”
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Become Eivor, a mighty Viking raider and lead your clan from the harsh shores of Norway to a new home amid the lush farmlands of ninth-century England. Explore a beautiful, mysterious open world where you’ll face brutal enemies, raid fortresses, build your clan’s new settlement, and forge alliances to win glory and earn a place in Valhalla.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will be launching very soon, and ahead of its release, Jordan got to spend six more hours with the game, taking control of Viking raider Eivor and swan-diving into Ye Olde England to build a new settlement for their clan.
In this video, Jordan and Lucy discuss how the Assassin’s Creed franchise has evolved, from being firmly rooted in social stealth, to embracing more action-focused gameplay. Now, with Valhalla, it seems to have found a sweet spot somewhere in the middle. As Eivor is an outsider–an invader, no less–stealth plays a crucial role in Valhalla, as most people will attack them on sight.
Jordan also explains how constantly upgrading Eivor’s settlement plays a huge role in Valhalla, making its gameplay loop feel more cyclical, and more akin to RPGs like Mass Effect’s, or Dragon Age Inquisition’s. But those who loved Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s long, winding side missions may be disappointed, as Valhalla offers much quicker, bite-sized side missions.
For Jordan’s full impressions, be sure to watch the video. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla launches on November 10 on Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 4, Stadia, and PC, before coming to PlayStation 5 on November 12.
I get the sense that Assassin’s Creed is in the midst of some sort of metamorphosis. After getting hands-on with the game for six hours, I walked away from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla with the general sense that I had been playing something that felt altogether different from 2017’s Origins and 2018’s Odyssey. However, Valhalla feels like it could be remembered as a game that acted as a transition for the franchise.
The Assassin’s Creed franchise has always walked the tightrope between moments of stealth and sequences of action, with most entries leaning a bit more towards the former. This changed with Origins and Odyssey, both of which provided protagonists Bayek and Kassandra/Alexios with a more traditional open-world RPG set of combat mechanics and skill trees, and additional opportunities to fight bosses with large health bars.
Both games primarily take place outside of cities as well, removing the need for social stealth in most instances. And, of course, you’re not an outsider in either one. Bayek is basically a cop who can get away with murder and Kassandra/Alexios is an educated mercenary–it’s reasonable to see them work with the elite in one moment and then interact with the downtrodden in the next. Kassandra/Alexios isn’t even forbidden from running free in Athens after they’re seen aiding Sparta in numerous conflicts–it’s all chalked up to just being a part of their job.
In contrast, Valhalla protagonist Eivor is a Viking and thus not welcome in England. So social stealth returns. Outside of cities, Eivor may travel as they wish but once they enter more civilized pockets of the world, they have to wear a disguise. Standing too close to others may draw curious glances, and guards are suspicious of you as soon as they lay eyes on you. For the first time in years, a new Assassin’s Creed game encourages you to take to the rooftops, duck into crowds, or cause a commotion to distract wandering eyes. You either get good at blending in or you risk getting into a fight every single time you walk into town.
Eivor’s journey will see them confront Fenrir, a monstrous wolf who, according to Norse mythology, is a child of Loki.
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It’s my favorite aspect of what I got to play. Walking into an area where you know you’re not wanted can be tense. Every corner could be hiding a new patrol of guards you have to figure out how to avoid, and you know you won’t be able to reliably stock up on items or weapons because no one will sell to you. You are unwelcome. It reminds me a lot of Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, the game in the series that best handled social stealth by tying it to both race and gender and allowing protagonist Aveline de Grandpré (a half-African, half-French woman born into wealth in 18th century New Orleans) to change her clothes in order to appear as either a lady, a slave, or an Assassin, and thus adjust others’ perception of her. Valhalla feels like the mainline Assassin’s Creed games finally taking a stab at that formula, even if it’s not nearly as robust as Liberation.
But it’s not ideal. Eivor moves like Bayek and Kassandra/Alexios do, lacking the grace of protagonists like Aveline, Connor, and Arno, among others–all of whom possess parkour and stealth mechanics designed for cities. Eivor certainly has more climbing and stealth skills than your traditional RPG protagonist like, say, Shepard or Geralt, but only just. So even though the stealth sections are delightfully tense, Eivor’s clunky and awkward movements can prevent these sequences from playing out in a satisfying way.
Which brings me back to my earlier point: Valhalla feels like it’s caught between two different worlds. Like I said a few months back, Valhalla’s combat is enjoyably frantic–encouraging you to respond to overwhelming numbers by becoming a whirlwind of motion on the battlefield. But I was disappointed to see my six-hour hands-on only reaffirm my fear that assassinating targets with a hidden blade and bow is so easy that you rarely have to rely on combat outside of scripted sequences. And yes, unlike Origins and Odyssey, Valhalla brings back the franchise’s tradition of putting you into the role of an outsider who must occasionally rely on stealth, not combat, to accomplish certain tasks. But the combat-geared controls don’t allow you to achieve the careful, calculated movements that make stealth segments in games so fun. Both aspects of Valhalla are good, but they seem to be actively undermining the other.
At the very least, I’m just glad that social stealth is back in Assassin’s Creed after being mostly absent in the last two mainline entries–when Ubisoft was presumably focused on improving the series’ traditionally lackluster combat mechanics. The RPG elements that Origins and Odyssey introduced into the franchise also continue to evolve in intriguing ways in Valhalla; most notably, there’s some very interesting stuff being done with the settlement. And it is worth repeating: I only played six hours of what assumedly is a much longer game. Who knows how the whole experience will shake out? Perhaps Valhalla will see stealth and combat more seamlessly complement one another later in its campaign with brand-new mechanics and features that we’ve yet to see. What I played occurs pretty soon after Valhalla’s prologue, so it’s fairly early on.
Briefly seen in a recent story trailer for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the Hidden Ones haven’t been mentioned very often ahead of the game’s release. The group was founded in Assassin’s Creed Origins, acting as the precursors to the Assassin Brotherhood. I caught up with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla game director Eric Baptizat and narrative director Darby McDevitt to ask how the group ties into Eivor’s quest.
“[The Hidden Ones] actually sail with you to England and they set up a Bureau with your permission in the settlement because they tell you they’ve got this big task ahead of themselves,” McDevitt said. The Hidden Ones are trying to get the Order of Ancients (the precursors to the Templar Order) out of England, and since the Order is causing problems for Eivor, the Hidden Ones and Eivor’s Viking clan decide to team up to take them out.
“Rest assured, there’s actually quite a large list of targets to take down,” McDevitt said. Baptizat added that killing these targets allows you to loot their medallions, which when taken back to the Hidden Ones Bureau, allows you to unlock new Assassin-based skills and tidbits of lore.
However, even if you don’t want to fully commit to rooting the Order out of England, the Hidden Ones still fulfill a rather important purpose in Valhalla: catching new players up to speed. Even if it takes place prior to most of the games, Valhalla is still the twelfth mainline title in a decade-long franchise. There’s a lot of lore to catch up on going into Valhalla, specifically all the ground that both Assassin’s Creed Origins and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey have covered. “Thankfully, the Bureau is there to actually provide some of that backstory,” McDevitt said.
The Hidden Ones Bureau in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Artist credit: Gilles Beloeil
In this regard, expect to hear some familiar names in Valhalla. McDevitt mentioned that the Hidden One Bureau will talk about notable Assassins, such as Bayek and Aya. It’s not just names from the past either. As I saw in my six-hour hands-on with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Rebecca Crane–an ally of the original present-day protagonist, Desmond Miles, who hasn’t been featured in Assassin’s Creed since Syndicate–shows up to help the current present-day protagonist, Layla Hassan. Baptizat teased that there would be more, but wouldn’t confirm names. But if Rebecca is around, there’s a good chance that Shaun Hastings isn’t too far behind.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is scheduled to launch for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS4, PC, and Google Stadia on November 10. It will also be released for PS5 on November 12.
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