It is a very big day for PlayStation VR, as Sony is reviving its “PSVR Spotlight” campaign to announce a total of six new VR games today, March 3. All the games are launching in 2021.
Sony will announce a new PSVR game every 30 minutes throughout the day, and Sony kicked things off with a new VR edition of a classic Bethesda game.
Doom 3 VR Edition
The first to be revealed is Doom 3 VR, which launches on March 29 for PS4 (and is backwards compatible on PS5). This game features the base Doom 3 and its expansions, Resurrection of Evil and The Lost Missions, updated for VR.
“Feel even closer to the terror with all-new VR enhancements that allow you to peer around corners, angling your shots with flashlight-mounted weapons using motion controls, 180-degree quick-turn functionality to catch demons sneaking up from behind and an immersive wrist-mounted display to track your health, armor, and ammo,” reads a line from the description.
We’ll add the other five games here in this post when they are announced.
Song In The Smoke
A new game from 17-Bit, Song in the Smoke challenges players to survive a dark and scary night. “The sun is setting, and the dense trees are casting long shadows across the forest. My fire is fading, too, its light flickering in the gloom. From the bushes, I hear a growl, low, and hungry. I have one question. How do I survive the night?” reads a line from its description.
In Song in the Smoke, players must survive in a harsh world by foraging for supplies and defending themselves from all manner of threats.
The third reveal was Fracked, a game that combines free running, skiing, and climbing.
You play as a hero who is stuck inside a mountain fracking facility and must fight against an army of enemies and “interdimensional maniacs” to escape with your life.
“We’re not going for subtlety here–it is bold, brash, and uncompromising in its vision,” Steve Watt of developer nDreams said in the game’s announcement on the PS Blog.
I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy and The Liar
Next up is I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy and The Liar. Coming four years after the original in 2016, the sequel was a “no-brainer,” according to project director Charlie Amis.
“Our PS VR Agents are an integral part of our community, and we can’t wait for players–both new and returning–to experience the new twists, turns, perils, and puzzles IEYTD2 has to offer,” Amis said on the PS Blog.
In the sequel, players are once again cast as a spy who must go “deep undercover” to stop an evil plan to take over the world.
“Take advantage of your telekinetic abilities in all-new environments and surroundings. Expose the diabolical plot and learn even more about Zoraxis. Risk your life for the greater good; because, remember: we expect you to die,” reads a line from the description.
Zenith
A JRPG-inspired VR MMO, Zenith is in development at the games studio Ramen VR. The game aims to blend a colorful open world with “adrenaline pumping action adventure gameplay.”
“Our game has beautiful, hand-crafted environments that you’ll spend hours getting lost in,” the developer said in a blog post. “From lush canopies in the Amarite Forest, to turquoise blue waters at the Radiant Coast, to the hyper futuristic city of Zenith itself, we’ve built a stylized fantasy world dripping with detail. Of course beautiful scenery is only one part of making Zenith feel like a living world, we’ve also invested lots of time on lore, infusing the setting with intricate details that bring it to life.”
PS Plus subscribers have had an added incentive to play GTA Online on PS4 or PS5 for a long time now, as each month has seen a deposit of a cool $1,000,000 of in-game cash placed directly into their Maze bank account every month. Usually, this cash would be made available if a player logged in but Rockstar Games has decided to change the process for landing that loyalty lump sum.
To claim your cash, you’ll now need to go into the PlayStation Store and grab the bonus as a free gift when the new system kicks in on April 1. Once claimed, the cash will still be instantly deposited into your game account, Rockstar explained in a blog post.
GTA Online has grown massively in the years since it was released, evolving across two generations of Xbox and PlayStation consoles with the regular addition of new vehicles, mission types, heists, and more. It’ll be getting ready to make a leap onto PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X later this year as a standalone release, similar to how Red Dead Online has been split off from Red Dead Redemption 2. Grand Theft Auto V won’t be left behind in last-gen though, as it’ll also be transitioning to new-gen consoles alongside it.
While a graphical upgrade is one of the new features coming to GTA Online when it arrives on new consoles, reduced loading times is also one of the more requested updates that fans have been asking for. One modder has figured out how to significantly reduce GTA Online’s long loading times on PC, and while the method is still just a proof of concept for now, the improvement makes for a noticeable difference.
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EA is offering a new size of DLC content for The Sims 4, called Kits. As opposed to the big Game Packs and the smaller Stuff Packs, Kits are “bite-size” bits of content that add some new items or features of their own. Three Kits are available so far, costing $5 apiece.
The three initial packs are the throwback fit kit, country kitchen kit, and bust the dust kit. Those include 1990s-style workout clothes, some nice kitchen cabinetry, and vaccuums to clean up actual, literal dust bunnies. You can check them out in the trailer below.
EA promises more kits will be coming, though they won’t be dropped in big batches like these three. This effectively adds a new tier to Sims 4 content, as Stuff Packs cost roughly $10 and the larger Game Packs are usually $20.
The Sims 4 was first released in 2014, but it’s become a long-term success for EA on the strength of its post-launch support. The game has added tons of DLC adding everything from paranormal events to Star Wars. The series as a whole recently celebrated its 21st anniversary by introducing player-created items.
March is Women’s History Month and 343 Industries is celebrating the occasion by giving all Halo: The Master Chief Collection players a special nameplate.
The nameplate depicts Spartan Kat, who was part of Noble Team during the events of Halo: Reach. “Wear it with pride, Spartans!” 343 said. All you have to do is log into The Master Chief Collection during March to get the nameplate.
Be sure to log into MCC at any time during the month of March in order to add the Women’s History Month Nameplate, featuring Spartan Kat, into your armory!
The Season 6 update is now available for Halo Insider members. Given that the content is now being tested by the public, it likely won’t be long until Season 6 arrives for everyone.
There has been a lot of Halo news lately; check out the stories linked below to catch up with the latest developments across the franchise.
GameOn, Amazon’s mobile gaming capture app, has come to iOS after dropping on Android last November, and Amazon is looking to make it big. As reported by TechCrunch, the app allows users to capture gameplay clips from mobile games, which can then be saved to a library and posted publicly on the GameOn sharing platform.
Despite also being owned by Amazon, GameOn is completely separate to Twitch, with different branding and seperate user accounts. With in-built capture, editing tools, and a public highlight feed, GameOn looks to be more like a gaming-specific take on TikTok than it is a mobile version of Twitch. Clips made within GameOn are also designed to be shared outside the app “via social media services or by sending direct links to friends.”
Amazon is hoping to build its userbase by partnering with streamers who will focus on mobile gaming content for the app. It’s also publicizing a series of “weekly challenges” for GameOn users, with the winners gaining more exposure on the app’s main feeds. An example challenge for PUBG Mobile reads: “Let’s see the most destruction with a vehicle in 1 minute!” You can check out GameOn’s highlight page here, without downloading the app.
Amazon says its app is integrated with over 1000 mobile games for screen capture, while users can also add an optional Facecam recording to their capture. GameOn is available now on both iOS and Android via Google Play or the Amazon Appstore.
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Twitch has released the first Transparency Report of what is set to be many, with the streaming company promising to release the reports twice a year. The report gives a top-down look at Twitch’s safety and moderation systems, before looking into more granular data about enforcement on Twitch.
The report breaks safety into multiple tiers, with the broadest level being Twitch’s community guidelines, followed by site-wide moderation, then channel-specific moderation, then the small suite of safety tools that are given to viewers.
The role of channel mods and creators is emphasized in the site’s overall plan, and Twitch brags that 95% of channels now have either human moderators or AutoMod enabled–up from 93% in the first half of last year. It also shows an increase in messages being deleted, with the number per 1000 messages up from 3.2 to 4.
Twitch attruibutes much of the increase to changes it’s made in the last year, including the rollout of the ModView dashboard in March 2020, and a change in the second half of last year that enabled AutoMod by default for new channels without a human moderator assigned.
While these changes have made life a little easier for creators and their mods, it’s the Twitch-side moderation that most of the site’s users have questions about. Twitch says it has increased its number of “content moderation professionals” by four times in the last year, though it still doesn’t say how many are currently employed by Twitch–or specify whether they are in fact Twitch employees or contracted from an outside company as other social media platforms are known to do.
Twitch says that these professionals “work across multiple locations, and support over 20 languages, in order to provide 24/7/365 capacity to review reports as they come in across the globe,” and also devotes a small part of the report to outlining some of the systems in place to reduce the harm on those workers of constantly viewing harmful content for moderation.
The report goes into granular detail on Twitch-side enforcements, including warnings issued, temporary suspensions, and permanent bans for infringements including hateful conduct, harassment, violent conduct, nudity, adult conduct, spam, and terrorist activity. Overall, it says enforcements have increased from 0.099 to 0.114 actions per thousand hours watched.
While the report gives a huge amount of data, it’s lacking the answers to a number of questions streamers and viewers most wanted answered. Replies to Twitch’s tweet of the report showed many users didn’t think it was enough. Streamers asked to know why Twitch’s Community Guidelines were often unevenly applied, with others asking for transparency about why high-profile streamer Dr Disrespect was banned–with even the streamer himself allegedly never being given a reason for the ban.
“This report is the first of its kind for Twitch so we will look closely at the feedback we receive to inform how we can refine these reports moving forward,” the blog post accompanying the report reads, directing users to UserVoice to submit their feedback. It looks like Twitch will get a lot of it on this report, so we’ll have to wait and see what changes are made in time for 2021’s half-year report.
Valheim‘s record-breaking success isn’t too surprising, even if you ignore outside elements like the current global pandemic and the game’s relatively low price point. There’s an obvious appetite for survival games on PC, as evidenced by the likes of Rust and Ark: Survival Evolved consistently butting heads on Steam’s most-played list. Yet Valheim also appeals to people like me, who aren’t particularly fond of the genre. There are a number of reasons for this, but chief among them is the fact that Valheim plays down all of the restrictive survival aspects that form the foundations of similar games.
The first structure my friends and I built in Valheim has now become known as our home base. In keeping with the game’s viking theme, it’s vaguely reminiscent of a Norse longhouse, complete with mead and a dining table. Colourful banners and trophies of the monsters we’ve slain adorn its wooden walls, and the outside courtyard features a smelter for refining precious ores and a kiln for producing the coal that powers it. Each person has their own bedroom with a place to sleep and chests to store their valuables, and there are also communal chests for everyone to contribute various resources like food, wood, and stone. Meanwhile, the house’s defenses consist of a spiked fence encircling the entire property and an improvised moat that’s proven surprisingly effective at keeping monsters at bay.
Can anyone argue that constructing our forever home would’ve been a better experience if we also had to worry about thirst and hunger meters while doing so? This has always been my main sticking point with most other survival games, and Valheim removes this prohibitive aspect completely. Food is still a factor, but you’re not going to keel over and die if you haven’t eaten for a few in-game hours. Instead, food provides you with health rather than acting as a ticking clock. You can eat up to three food items at any one time, and the combination of which will determine the size of your health bar and the speed at which it regenerates. My diet currently consists of cooked fish, sausages, and a slab of deer meat, but food sources are plentiful, with berries, mushrooms, and other meat-based treats all available to gather and consume.
Valheim removes many of the prohibitive aspects that dominate the survival game genre, allowing you to better focus on what you want to do.
If you’re simply building structures you don’t even need to engage with this system. Eating is something you do before exploring potentially dangerous areas, so in some ways the mechanic is more like Breath of the Wild than any other survival game. Speaking of which, weapon durability exists, too, but even this is largely hassle-free in Valheim. Tools and weapons will break through usage, but this is a non-issue unless you’re in the midst of a battle. As long as you have a workbench handy you can fix your equipment without using any resources. The same is true of your buildings as well. They can degrade over time, and enemies have a habit of hitting any structures they find, but as long as there’s a workbench in the vicinity you can simply repair walls and furniture so that they’re good as new.
You’re never required to gather crafting resources in order to fix what you’re already got, only to build brand-new equipment or upgrade what you currently have. This creates a satisfying loop where exploration often concludes with the option to expand your arsenal, whether that means crafting a new sword, piece of armor, or crafting station.
Eating, drinking, repairing structures, and fixing or replacing tools are little more than daily busywork in most other survival games. They’re often dull and tedious distractions as opposed to engaging mechanics, and Valheim doesn’t lose anything by disregarding them. It’s a better and more approachable game for it, where the emphasis and challenge come from embarking on risky expeditions and overcoming obstacles with friends, rather than ensuring you have enough sustenance to survive the day. Valheim focuses on the genre’s most attractive traits instead of trying to replicate a survival experience that only serves to add artificial difficulty and detract from your anecdote-worthy adventures into the unknown.
You only ever need crafting resources to build brand-new equipment or upgrade what you have.
This is where Valheim introduces some of its own strengths rather than simply removing the genre’s weaknesses. The frankly gargantuan map is currently made up of six varied biomes, each with its own aesthetic, resources, and enemy types. It’s all procedurally generated, too, so no two game worlds are exactly the same. You can venture into any of the biomes right from the game’s outset, but you’re probably going to need a boat to reach some of them. Doing so isn’t the wisest of decisions, however, since Valheim gates your progress by ramping up the enemy difficulty in each successive biome. To aid your advancement through its world, a general path has been laid out in the form of a boss run of sorts.
The first boss, Eikthyr, is a large stag that presides over the Meadows biome. Defeating it rewards you with its powerful antlers, which can then be used to craft the antler pickaxe. This is a key tool in the next biome, as the pickaxe allows you to gather the copper and tin located there. These are the ingredients you need to craft bronze, thereby allowing you to forge stronger armor, weapons, and other tools.
Valheim focuses on the genre’s most attractive traits instead of trying to replicate a survival experience that only serves to add artificial difficulty and detract from your anecdote-worthy adventures into the unknown.
Valheim’s core gameplay loop revolves around this routine, whereby defeating a boss will reward you with an item that aids your progression into the next biome. It’s slightly more involved than this, of course, especially when it comes to discovering where each boss is located and figuring out the best way to defeat them. The second boss, Elder, is pretty self-explanatory in this regard, being that it’s a giant tree and wood doesn’t mesh well with fire. Bonemass’ weaknesses, on the other hand, aren’t quite as intuitive and require some experimentation if you’re going to vanquish the third boss. Fortunately, the penalty for dying isn’t too harsh. You still lose everything in your inventory when you perish, but as long as you can return to where you died, you can retrieve it all. This becomes a larger issue when you’re miles and miles away from where you call home, but that’s what teleports are for. If you have the required materials to make one, teleports give you an easy way to traverse large swaths of the map in an instant.
Even as an Early Access title, Valheim is more fleshed-out than many finished games.
Preparing for a boss fight might actually be one of my favourite parts of Valheim. Upon discovering that Bonemass is weak to a specific damage type, we went to work gathering the iron needed to craft a weapon for everyone that would deal the requisite pain. This was an ordeal in itself as we had to venture into sunken crypts and fight through skeletons and draugrs in order to mine the amount of iron we required. While this was happening, we were also fermenting poison-resistant potions for everybody and gathering a lot of food to ensure everyone’s health was topped up. I was on fishing duty, while others hunted deer and used the cauldron to create unique meals. Once we felt suitably prepared, we tucked into bed for a good night’s sleep and then marched on the boss with Yggdrasil’s sacred branches looming above us.
Once you are face to face with an enemy, Valheim’s combat is decent if unspectacular. Weapons are diverse and attack differently depending on which type you’re using, and both parries and critical hits are met with an inherently satisfying sound cue that coincides with the enemy being sent staggering backwards. Stealth is an option as well, especially when combined with a bow, and Valheim adopts the Elder Scrolls method of leveling up, as different stats improve through use. If you’re using maces a lot, your skill with maces will improve, while the same rings true for physical activities like running, swimming, and chopping wood.
Valheim succeeds in enticing you to explore its vast open-world thanks in part to its surprisingly beautiful low-poly 3D visuals.
Beyond the boss fights and character progression, Valheim also succeeds in enticing you to explore its vast open world. This is partly due to its surprisingly beautiful visuals, as it adopts a deliberately lo-fi aesthetic that’s reminiscent of early 3D games. Pixelated and low-poly models are elevated by modern techniques such as realistic lighting, particle effects, and depth of field, and screenshots fail to adequately do it justice, especially when it comes to the ambience present in each forested hillside and snow-capped mountain top. This environmental variety is part of what makes exploring Valheim’s world such a joy, too. The procedural generation is particularly impressive, presenting cohesive and natural environments that feel like they were handmade.
The world of Valheim is already a wonderful one to inhabit, and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.
There are a few issues to speak of, including finicky building controls that arise when trying to connect pre-made building pieces in third-person. With that said, the pre-made pieces don’t stunt creativity at least, with plenty of examples of people constructing some frankly outlandish creations. The fact you can’t dismantle items is another inconvenience, since unwanted tools and weapons either end up polluting the landscape or filling up chests. The forging and fermenting process is also exceedingly slow, and there are a few instances where it can be overly grindy. Valheim’s grind isn’t bad in and of itself, but there are a few moments in the latter biomes where it can devolve into tedium. Crafting the Mountain biome’s unique helmet, for example, requires two Drake trophies to build. Drakes are fairly plentiful, but the drop rate for their trophies is only 15%, which means you’re likely to spend hours hunting the flying menaces in the hope two of them drop what you need. Normally you have a degree of control over Valheim’s grind, yet this is a stark example where you’re at the whim of the RNG.
Most of these are minor complaints in truth, and each one is an aspect that will hopefully be rectified and re-balanced in the coming weeks and months. Even as an Early Access title, Valheim is more fleshed-out than many finished games, and it’s going to be exciting to see how it evolves over the next year as systems are improved and more content is added. The world of Valheim is already a wonderful one to inhabit, and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.
Treyarch Studios has released the full patch notes for the latest update for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. The update is currently live–it’s primarily geared towards implementing bug fixes and objective tuning to Zombies.
The update focuses on Zombies’ new Outbreak mode, which is an open-world, co-op variation of Call of Duty’s traditional Zombies. Instead of fighting off hordes of zombies in a series of rounds, Outbreak tasks a team of players with accomplishing a series of objectives in any order they wish across a vast open space that’s filled with zombies.
Also in the patch notes, Treyarch details what players can expect in Rapid Fire Moshpit and Dead Ops Arcade: First Person, both of which are scheduled to go live in Black Ops Cold War on March 4. Rapid Fire Moshpit is a playlist composed of Team Deathmatch, Domination, Kill Confirmed, and Hardpoint but only on the game’s smallest maps. Dead Ops Arcade: First Person remakes Dead Ops Arcade 3–it’s just now played in first-person.
Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War March 2 Update Patch Notes
Multiplayer
Modes
Combined Arms
Adjusted Zone Capture time in Combined Arms Assault.
Zombies
Outbreak
Stability
Added various stability fixes for issues with Objectives, Jump Pads, Krasny Soldat, and the Dragon Relic.
Fixed a crash that could occur when killing a Megaton HVT during the Elimination Objective.
Gameplay
The Eliminate Objective no longer removes additional enemies between HVT jumps to better balance difficulty with other Outbreak Objectives.
Addressed an issue with zombies pausing or pathing incorrectly to the Holdout Objective.
Addressed an issue where the Krasny Soldat’s flamethrower attack would not deal damage under certain circumstances.
Addressed an issue where the flashlight would stay on after spectating during the Holdout Objective.
Perks
Addressed an issue where Tombstone Soda could cause the player to fall out of the gameplay space in Golova, Alpine, and Ruka.
Support
Addressed an issue where the Chopper Gunner could fly out of the gameplay space after multiple uses.
Weapons
Addressed an issue where Ray Gun splash damage could break all Armor if the player had Jugger-Nog Tiers III, IV, and V.
Field Upgrades
Addressed an issue where Healing Aura incorrectly gained the benefit of Quick Revive’s Tier IV ability.
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The heroes of any Dungeons & Dragons game are at a loss if they don’t have a villain to battle. Thankfully, the Dungeons & Dragons film has found a villain in British actor Hugh Grant, according to a report from Deadline.
Information about the Dungeons & Dragons film is scarce at the moment, aside from casting information. Along with Hugh Grant as the villain, actress Sophia Lillis (It) will join the previously-announced cast members, including Chris Pine (Star Trek franchise), Michelle Rodriguez (Fast & Furious franchise), Justice Smith (Paper Towns, Detective Pikachu), and Rege-Jean Page (Bridgerton).
Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley will direct and write the film. The duo directed Game Night and wrote Spider-Man: Homecoming, among other credits, and were briefly attached to the much-delayed The Flash moviet. Paramount and Hasbro are co-producing the film with eOne as distributor.
We’re most curious to see just what Paramount and Hasbro, the parent company of D&D maker Wizards of the Coast, imagine a Dungeons & Dragons movie to be. To the tens of millions of people playing the game, Dungeons & Dragons is a descriptor that has roughly as much meaning as “fantasy story setting.”
The official worlds of Dungeons & Dragons, including properties like Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, and Ravenloft, bring a rich history of characters and places, while the greater concept is used by Dungeon Masters and players to tell any manner of fantasy-themed story. Unless Goldstein and Francis Daley give us something that uses a specific Dungeons & Dragons world or plays with the concept of a roleplaying game in meaningful ways, we may be in for fairly generic fare. That’s despite the encouraging casting, which already has more going for it than the Dungeons & Dragons film starring Jeremy Irons and Marlon Wayans released in 2000.
The Dungeons & Dragons film does not yet have a release date, and definitely won’t make the 2021 release that was going around way back in 2017.
