Apex Legends has been teasing something big coming to the game, and now it appears to have arrived. Players have reported hearing and seeing dragons roaming about the map, potentially laying the groundwork for a world event to come with Season 2.
The flying beasts can be spotted in the game or on screens posted to the Apex Legends subreddit. The community has taken to calling them “Flyers” and if you bring one down you can get some loot. In a potentially related development, the Leviathan that wanders in the waters outside the map has moved significantly as well.
The trailer for Season 2 that debuted at EA Play, just before E3 2019, showed a giant lizard-like eyeball as a teaser at the very end. These creatures are significantly smaller than the one that implied, so they could be harbingers of some larger event to come.
Apex Legends’ battle royale competition Fortnite has become known for big world-changing events that accompany each season, and so far Apex hasn’t followed suit. Respawn has suggested that it is comfortable with a slower pace for its content drops so as to not burn out the team, but that was as compared to weekly and monthly updates. A new season could still bring big changes, so we’ll have to see if a giant dragon is among them.
Now that the frenzy of E3 2019 is over, all those great game deals are no longer available, but while the big Xbox One game and console sale has ended, the Xbox Store is back on its regular schedule of offering new weekly game deals. The newest batch of Xbox One deals is available now, including a Sonic anniversary sale, discounted indie games, $10 off Xbox wireless controllers, and more.
The spotlight is on everyone’s favorite speedy hedgehog this week, as Sonic the Hedgehog debuted on the Sega Genesis in North America 28 years ago this month. To celebrate, Sonic’s recent games on the Xbox One are marked down along with a collection of Xbox 360 games, many of which are backward-compatible with Xbox One. For the next week, you can get the newly released competitive racer Team Sonic Racing for $30, the gorgeous, retro-style Sonic Mania for $12, and 3D platformer Sonic Forces for $15. If you feel like taking a trip down memory lane, you can also save on classics like Sonic Adventure 2 for $5 and the original Sonic the Hedgehog for $2.49, both of which can be played on Xbox One.
The Xbox Store is also highlighting discounts on games from independent developers, who can self-publish digital games on Xbox One and PC with the ID@Xbox program. Some of the best indie games to grab on sale this week include My Time At Portia for $24, The Witness for $20, Observer for $9, and The Gardens Between for $12.
Sony’s annual Days of Play sale, which ran during E3 2019 with steep discounts on games and consoles, is finally over. But a new week means new deals, and luckily, the PlayStation Store has some eye-catching bargains available now.
Most notably, quite a few Persona games and DLC are currently scattered throughout the PSN deals section, including Persona 5, which is on sale for $16 (and only $14 if you have PS Plus). With well over 100 hours of content, this is a phenomenal deal on one of the console’s best games. If you already own Persona 5, there’s also a DLC bundle on sale with added Personas, which each bring unique battle skills to your team. That bundle is available for $14 ($12 with PS Plus). You can also get Persona 4 Golden on Vita for only $12 ($10 with PS Plus) and the Persona Dancing: Endless Night Collection for $70 ($60 with PS Plus).
With Shenmue III scheduled to release this August, fans of the classic, open-world adventure series might be interested in grabbing Shenmue I & II at a discount. You can get the bundle together for only $21 ($18 with PS Plus). Monster Hunter World is also still on sale for $20, and with the Iceborne expansion beta launching this weekend for PS Plus members, there’s no better time to pick up the base game.
After it was announced in April that the showrunners for FX’s adaptation of the Y: The Last Man comic book series were leaving the project, it wasn’t clear if the series would be delayed or was even moving forward at all. It’s alive and well, though, with a new showrunner at the helm.
In a press release, FX announced that The Killing and Animal Kingdom alum Eliza Clark would take over the duties on the show as showrunner, writer, and executive producer. “Eliza Clark is an enormously talented writer and producer whose ambitious vision for Y will only enhance the mystique and allure of this powerful story,” one of the network’s presidents of original programming, Nick Grad, said in a statement. She will partner with fellow executive producers Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, Brian K. Vaughan, and Melina Matsoukas to bring the series to life.
In a statement of her own, Clark said, “A decade ago I devoured the complete Y: The Last Man series cover to cover, imagining how it might take shape on screen. It introduced me to the amazing work of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra and the complex, fascinating world of Y. I’m thrilled to tell this story and to be working with this immensely talented cast.”
Y, as the TV adaptation has been titled, is set in a world where all men–save for one guy and his pet monkey Ampersand–are dead. According to FX, the series revolves around a “new world order of women” that “will explore gender, race, class, and survival.”
Diane Lane will star on the series as Senator Jennifer Brown, with a supporting cast that includes Imogen Poots, Lashana Lynch, Juliana Canfield, Marin Ireland, and Amber Tamblyn. Barry Keoghan plays Yorick Brown, the last living man on the planet.
A release date has not been announced yet but Y is expected to debut on FX in 2020.
With E3 2019 behind us, Twitter has revealed its top trending moments and game announcements from the annual event.
The Hollywood Reporter reports that the biggest moment overall was Nintendo’s annual Direct presentation on Tuesday morning, which encompassed all of its games lineup including a surprise peek at The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2. Keanu Reeves’ appearance at the Xbox conference came in second place, and Square’s dual showings of the Final Fantasy VII Remake and Marvel’s Avengers during its press conference came in third.
Nintendo was also the most tweeted-about of any publisher, which makes sense given that its press conference was also the most tweeted moment. It was followed by Xbox, Sony, Square Enix, and Bethesda. Every publisher that held a press event, including Electronic Arts’ EA Play presentation on Saturday, gained the top spot on Twitter’s trending topics.
The top new games this year were FF7, Cyberpunk 2077, Breath of the Wild 2, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and Avengers. Overall, the top games and franchises were Pokemon (due to Sword and Shield), Fortnite, Splatoon and Super Smash Bros Ultimate due to their tournaments, and Apex Legends.
It took longer than usual for some of Take-Two Interactive’s most recent successes–Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2–to hit the market. While the publisher is likely pleased with the results of such ambitious games, CEO Strauss Zelnick is convinced the development gap between releases will shorten thanks in part to post-launch content.
In a GamesIndustry.Biz interview during E3 2019, Zelnick envisions the trend of extensive time between game releases coming to an end. “I don’t see it expanding further. In fact, I would expect in many instances it may compress,” Zelnick said. “We find that intersection between the time it takes our creators to do the best work in the industry on the one hand, and what the consumer wants, recognizing that building anticipation is a good thing.” Zelnick cements his argument by saying “eight years is probably too long,” likely referring to the development time between Red Dead Redemption and its direct sequel.
Post-launch content might be the force that causes the pendulum to swing, according to Zelnick. “It’s possible that the ability to deliver content on an ongoing basis for a long time after an initial release,” he said. “Would mean that perhaps that initial release wouldn’t be as long in terms of [the] number of hours of gameplay as previously had been demanded in a world where that was all you were getting.”
He suggests the development could shorten because teams would be primarily focused on finishing a product first and delivering further content once the game is released. While Zelnick doesn’t predict a change in the way AAA publishers shoot for less ambitious titles, he does find the idea of post-launch content shortening development to be “a fewer, bigger, better strategy.”
Take-Two is the parent company of developers like 2K–and its properties 2K Play, 2K Games, and 2K Sports–and Rockstar Games. The big-name publisher has some games launching throughout the rest of the year. Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is set to launch on August 27 for PC and sometime in December for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Borderlands 3 will launch on September 13 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, and November 14 for Google Stadia. The Outer Worlds is scheduled to release on October 25 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
The appearance of the next game from Ninja Theory, Bleeding Edge, was something of a surprise during Microsoft’s press conference at E3 2019. It’s a competitive game in the vein of something like Overwatch or Apex Legends, pitting teams of four players against each other as they try to capture objectives while wailing on each other. That’s pretty far removed from the studio’s past games–third-person narrative action titles such as Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and DmC: Devil May Cry.
Bleeding Edge is looking to marry online competitive games with the kind of combat experiences you might expect from Ninja Theory. It’s principally a sort of competitive brawler–the majority of the characters specialize in melee combat. Think Overwatch, but fewer guns and more combos.
That’s the kind of game creative director Rahni Tucker wanted to play, so that’s the one she and her team made, she told GameSpot at E3.
“For me, combat is my interest, that’s what I love to make,” Tucker said. “At home, I play competitive team multiplayer games. So, it just seemed like a natural synergy. Like, an ‘Ah!’ moment. I was like, ‘Where’s third-person action combat meets competitive team multiplayer? I feel like this game doesn’t exist and I would play it, so why don’t we make that? It’s just the game that I love basically, my passion project.”
Close-Range Combat
In Bleeding Edge, most characters are melee fighters, although there are different roles among the cast. Some are support class fighters with ranged attacks, meant to stay out of the fray to heal or buff teammates, while others are tank-like and designed to get in close and wreck people. All 10 characters have a variety of abilities, which we tried out in a match we played at the Microsoft Showcase. Melee DPS fighter Daemon, for instance, carries a samurai sword, can briefly turn himself invisible, and uses a dash move to close gaps and land quick hits. The witchy Maeve can cage opponents in place and siphon life from them, while saw-wielding tank Buttercup has a Roadhog-style chain move that can pull enemies to her. All those abilities have cooldown timers, and every character also has an ultimate move that charges up over time; Daemon’s ultimate turned him into a fast-slashing killing machine against anyone who stumbled into a certain radius around him. Each character has two ultimates for you to pick from at the start of a match.
I was like, ‘Where’s third-person action combat meets competitive team multiplayer?'”
The round we played took place on an industrial map with a train track running through the center–and happening to cross over its three control points. Capturing those spots earns your team points (as does landing kills), but the trains that occasionally run through the map are a hazard to be either avoided or used against the other team. The map also had jump pads that made it possible to reach higher levels, adding some verticality, and health drops scattered around that were key to keeping alive.
It’s all the sort of thing you’d expect from other character-based competitive games. Bleeding Edge stands out with its combat, though; it all feels much more MOBA-like as two teams converge and start wailing away at each other. As soon as you get into a fight, the action-adventure pedigree of the Ninja Theory team asserts itself. Hitting an enemy with a series of melee strikes can stun them, and linking regular attacks with your special abilities can extend a combo and let you hammer away opponents. You’ve also got a dodge move that helps you break free of a combo executed by someone else, but it has limited charges, requiring you to think about how best to use your moves to control the fight and avoid getting locked down.
“The main thing, I think, is the design sensibilities that go into making the combat feel right because the game, to play, is very different, as you know,” Tucker said. “Single-player hack-and-slash games, you can run in versus 50 guys and own them all in the face, and do a 50-hit combo where they don’t get to do anything. But playing against that is not very fun. [Bleeding Edge] is definitely a team game and that was a big thing that I wanted it to be, because I like playing support and you can’t play support if it’s not a team game. That was important to me as well. I think that’s one of the things people struggle a little bit when they see third-person action, is they go, ‘Oh, cool, I’m just gonna run in and kill everything!’ And it’s like, well, yeah, but so are they. You can’t run in versus four people and just kill everything because they’re as powerful as you are.
“The thing that I’m bringing, I think, from DmC into this is the design sensibility. So making the combat feel good, making the hits feel like they’re connecting, the animation slick, it feels right in your hand, got good response control.”
It might not feel exactly like DmC, but Bleeding Edge does capture that responsive, strategic feeling of fighting–while amping it up with the frantic unpredictability inherent in taking on other players.
Modding Your Heroes
Bleeding Edge also separates itself in the ways you can customize your characters. The premise of the title, as Tucker explained, is a friendly competition between cyborgs set some 50 or so years in the future. The characters are all at the “bleeding edge” of cybernetic body modification, using technology to do all sorts of weird things to themselves, and beating and blowing each other up are how they try out their latest enhancements.
Customization is part of the underlying premise, so in addition to picking different characters with a variety of abilities (and switching between them mid-match to adjust your strategy), you can also unlock “mods” to install on your characters, which change the way their abilities work. Each character gets three mod slots, and you can unlock more character-specific mods over time as you play (there are about 20 for each), which allow to you build different loadouts of each character that fit your playstyle and the strategies of a match.
The thing that I’m bringing, I think, from DmC into this is the design sensibility.”
“Using Daemon as an example, his default mod set is base attack/damage, a bit of extra health and more range for his shooting but if you wanted to you could go fully into, say, stealth and you can have a mod that makes stealth last forever, you have a mod that makes him move faster under stealth and there’s a mod, say, that does extra damage coming out of stealth. You can equip those three into a build and call it the Stealth Build, and then if you’re playing on a team where you don’t really need to care about survivability and you just want to get around the back and kill [support character] Zero Cool time and time again, then you might take that build.”
It all sounds like a potent recipe for a competitive game, and Bleeding Edge created some fun, chaotic moments as all eight players wailed on each other in an attempt to take control points in our match. It’s tough to gauge after just one battle, of course, but there’s a depth to Bleeding Edge’s melee combat that should entice fans of MOBAs and other competitive games, with a bright, easygoing art style and accessibility that make it easy to pick up. The question is whether Bleeding Edge can make a dent in a crowded competitive game market–but at the very least, it has the potential to scratch a combat itch no other games of this type are addressing.
Though there’s no price point or release date for Bleeding Edge yet, Tucker said Ninja Theory intends to support the game after launch with additional characters (there are 10 at launch and Ninja Theory is already teasing two more) and maps (beyond the three that’ll be available at release). Tucker also said she wants to work on a more robust spectator mode for the game as well. Microsoft and Ninja Theory are also running a technical alpha on June 27, which you can sign up for on the Bleeding Edge website.
On Sunday, June 23, the next WWE event, Stomping Grounds, is coming to PPV and the WWE Network. It’s a bit of a summer-lull right now, coming out of a Saudi Arabia show, and the event formerly known as Backlash got a name change–probably because WWE didn’t want a PPV named “Backlash” after all of the backlash they got for the Saudi show.
The next WWE show takes place at the Tacoma Dome in Tacoma, Washington. If you’re in the Seattle/Tacoma area, there are still plenty of tickets available, even ringside, for as cheap as a little more than $100. Even more interesting is that Stomping Grounds is offering “two for one” tickets to the event, so you and a friend can go to the show for the price of one ticket.
Date & Times
As previously mentioned, Stomping Grounds takes place on Sunday, June 23. Depending on where you live on this planet, the time will be different. Check out the times for Stomping Grounds below. Keep in mind, that the Kickoff Show starts one prior to the main card.
4 PM PT
6 PM C
7 PM ET
12 AM BST (June 24)
9 AM AET (June 24)
How To Watch
If you’re planning to watch the event, there are a couple different ways to see it. You can get it through your cable or satellite provider, but that comes at a price. However, you can watch it on the WWE Network for $10 a month, and the first month is free if you’re a new subscriber. You’re under no obligation to continue your subscription, so you could cancel right after your trial is over.
Stomping Grounds Match Card
As of this writing, there are only seven matches on the card, but there is still an episode of Smackdown to air tonight, and more than likely, more matches will be added. There are five title matches on this card, and one of them is a steel cage match. Check out the full match card below, and we’ll be updating it as more is added.
Seth Rollins (c) vs. Baron Corbin (Universal Championship)
Kofi Kingston (c) vs. Dolph Ziggler (Steel Cage Match for the WWE Championship)
Becky Lynch (c) vs. Lacey Evans (Raw Women’s Championship)
Bayley (c) vs. Alexa Bliss (Smackdown Women’s Championship)
Roman Reigns vs. Drew McIntyre
Samoa Joe (c) vs. Ricochet (United States Championship)
Big E & Xavier Woods vs. Kevin Owens & Sami Zayn
Make sure to come back to GameSpot on Sunday, June 23 for live coverage and a review of the show.
While most mainline Pokemon games to date have allowed you to carry your monsters over from previous titles, we learned at E3 2019 that the upcoming Pokemon Sword and Shield for Switch will be bucking this trend. During a Treehouse Live segment, producer Junichi Masuda revealed that players can’t transfer every old Pokemon to the games–only those that already appear in the Galar Pokedex. And it seems Sword and Shield may not be the last Pokemon titles with this restriction.
In an interview with Famitsu (via Eurogamer), Masuda reiterates that the reason behind this controversial limitation is due to the amount of time it would take to balance every Pokemon and improve them visually thanks to the sheer size of the series’ Pokedex, which now encompasses more than 1,000 Pokemon including alternate forms. “As a result, it has become extremely difficult to make Pokemon with a new personality play an active part and to balance their compatibility,” Masuda said. “That is the reason for this decision, and we have decided that it is difficult to make all Pokemon appear in future works.”
Masuda’s response suggests that future Pokemon games may likewise not include every monster in the series, although it doesn’t necessarily rule out the possibility that more could be added in to the titles down the line. Famitsu asked if that would be the case with Sword and Shield, but Masuda said that was still “undecided” at this point.
To transfer previous monsters over to Sword and Shield, you’ll first need to bring them over to Pokemon Home, a new Pokemon Bank-like cloud service launching for Nintendo Switch and smartphones in early 2020. Pokemon Home allows you to store any monster from Pokemon Bank on 3DS, as well as Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee, Sword and Shield, and Pokemon Go, then bring those into Sword and Shield (provided they’re in the Galar Pokedex). Unlike Pokemon Bank, you can also trade Pokemon with other players directly from Pokemon Home. The Pokemon Company hasn’t shared any pricing details for the service yet, but Pokemon Bank requires players to have a subscription, which cost $5 per year.
Pokemon Sword and Shield launch for Switch on November 15. Nintendo revealed a ton of new details about the games during a special Pokemon Direct ahead of E3. Among other things, we learned about the games’ new Dynamax battle mechanic, which allows Pokemon to temporarily grow into the size of a building during battle. We also got a look at the open-world Wild Area that stretches between towns in the Galar region, as well as the multiplayer Max Raid Battles. You can read more about the games in our Pokemon Sword and Shield pre-order guide.
Update 06/18/2019: Google’s Patrick Seybold has told IGN that Stadia users will indeed be able to change their username at any time, but will only offer that change for free once.
Seybold also clarified that name-changing, and the one-time free change, is not a Stadia Pro-exclusive feature. However, he did not not speak to what the name change service would cost. We’ll update you on that as we find out more.
Stadia, Google’s foray into the home console/streaming market, will allow users to change their names at any time they want, according to a Google spokesperson.
