No Man’s Sky will enable cross-play across every one of its available platforms from tomorrow, June 11. Tomorrow will also see the game join the Xbox Game Pass programme on Xbox One and Windows 10.
Announced in a press release, players playing the game through VR, PC, PS4, Xbox, Windows 10 or GoG will be able to connect online. The update is timed to coincide with the game being added to Game Pass, “to allow everyone in the community to benefit from the influx of new players that Game Pass brings.”
The Hello Games team has been working on the addition of cross-play for six months. According to head of publishing Tim Woodley, the developers have been “quietly reworking the networking back-end of the game to get all versions of the game onto one single multiplayer base.”
Aside from the benefit of being able to connect with previously unavailable friends on other platforms, this change means that the likes of huge planetary bases built on high-end PCs will now be available to visit for those on consoles.
This update will also add general improvements to the game, including speech-to-text, improved lobbies and fireteams, and a set of other tweaks to multiplayer, VR and the game as a whole.
Hello Games is teasing an “eventful summer” for No Man’s Sky, so it seems this isn’t the last update we’ll see in the near future. All of this is yet another step on the journey No Man’s Sky’s taken since launch, becoming one of the most notable gaming comeback stories of recent years.
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Robots blasting and bashing each other to bits is a concept near and dear to my heart, and on that level Disintegration’s single-player campaign delivers. Its creative approach to first-person shooting is also intriguing, since it has you floating above the action and calling the shots for a team of bots on the ground while firing away. But it’s not as smart as it looks, and what seemed like it could get interesting and tactical never really did.
Disintegration’s 15-hour campaign doesn’t do a great job of setting up the conflict between the evil, red-eyed robots and the good, blue-eyed rebels, but a lot of that history eventually comes out in between-mission dialogue with your cohorts. Most of them have been “integrated,” which is the technology of transferring a human consciousness into a robot body. As former celebrity pilot Romer Shoal, you lead your team in a series of missions to take down the enemy’s massive flying fortress. The voice acting does lend those bots some good diverse personalities, and that gives the story’s events a little bit of weight, at least.
There are a few “Wha?” moments from the opening minutes I have to call out: first, Romer knocks an evil robot unconscious by whacking him in the back of the head with a wrench. I… don’t think that’s how robots work? A short time later, 12-foot-tall robot hulk Doyle backs down from attempting to intimidate a human who points out Doyle’s gun isn’t loaded, as though Doyle couldn’t literally squish this guy between his robo-toes like jam. It settles down after that but these eyebrow-raising moments set a strange tone for the rest of the story.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Your%20guns%20will%20tear%20apart%20the%20environment%20in%20a%20pretty%20dramatic%20fashion.”]Disintegration is respectable but not the prettiest of games – its robots are well-animated but the textures, lighting, and effects are largely middle-of-the-road – but it does have some good diversity to its settings. Visually at least, no two are alike: you’ll start out in forests and move to canyons and junkyards and urban areas and more. Mission design, on the other hand, almost universally leans heavily on throwing wave after wave of the same handful of enemy types at you as you move through a linear gauntlet. It’s not without variety in objectives, since you’ll often have to destroy a target or have your squad deactivate a jamming device so that you can use your gravcycle’s weapons again, but the process of fighting from point A to point B doesn’t shake up too much because of limited enemy diversity, especially in the first half.
To Disintegration’s credit, blasting enemy robots like Star Wars’ battle droids is a fair amount of fun for a while. Not because their AI is especially good or anything, but because rather than literally disintegrating when you kill them they explode into chunks in a satisfying way, sending pieces flying. That’s one thing Disintegration does better than most games: your guns will tear apart the environment in a pretty dramatic fashion, reducing wood to splinters and even shattering concrete barriers that enemies were using as cover. It’s not Red Faction or anything, since most of the environment is invulnerable, but this level of destructibility definitely makes the weapons and explosions feel powerful and look cool.
And yet, combat gets stale pretty quickly because even though this is a squad-based game where you get a bird’s eye view of the battlefield, Disintegration isn’t tactical at all. Where something like Mass Effect allows you to tell each unit where to go and what abilities to use when they get there, this is more like directing a mob. You can’t tell your Iron Giant-style hulk buddy to play Rock’em Sock’em Robots with the big guys while the more agile soldiers take on the fodder because there’s only one “everybody attack this target” or “open that box” button and they all act as one. It’s very simple and one-note.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=There%E2%80%99s%20only%20one%20%E2%80%9Ceverybody%20attack%20this%20target%E2%80%9D%20button%20%E2%80%93%20they%20all%20act%20as%20one.”]You do get to direct your squad members’ to individually use their special abilities, like grenades and ground-pounds, and they can be used as combos for extra damage. Missions’ side objectives will reward you, for example, if you can use the time-slowing bubble to hold enemies in place while Doyle bombards them with rockets. But these abilities aren’t really interesting to use because the positioning of your squad doesn’t matter much – there’s no setup required – so it’s just a matter of waiting for the cooldowns and then casting them again.
You have to keep your team alive to use them, though, and also so they can absorb all the enemy fire that your fragile flying gravcycle can’t. Depending on what gear you’re given for a mission, that can be tricky to do – for instance, if you don’t have any healing abilities and have to rely on pickups from certain enemy types or healing stations your crew can activate for you. But of course, if one of your bots goes down, all you have to do is retrieve their head and they’ll rocket back onto the field a few seconds later in a shiny new body, so you don’t need to sweat it much if they explode. It’s important to keep them on the field to give the bad guys something else to shoot at, and there’s a 30-second timer that will end the mission if you don’t retrieve a head, but the stakes are largely pretty low.
Then there are the boss battles, which look and sound great but are usually pretty weak. They boil down to shooting the giant four-legged Thunderhead walker (while dodging its slow-moving projectiles) until it goes down, then getting right up in its armpit – and I mean all the way up in its armpit – and hovering there while you hold down the fire button until each of four weak points explodes. It only got a little challenging when I had to deal with two at once, but the vast majority of these fights after the first one were painfully dull.
What’s especially frustrating about Disintegration’s campaign is that even though there’s a whole area you walk around between missions where you can talk to your crew, you have zero control over your squad composition or your vehicle’s loadout. Every mission dictates all of that to you, and all you get to do is pump in a few upgrade points for boring but necessary stat boosts to weapons, cooldown reductions, and things like that. I get that I’m being walked through different roles I’ll need to know for multiplayer, like the healer and the sniper, but it’s a bit annoying to have things like how you heal yourself change from level to level and not being able to pick a favorite gun or robot and develop it. That lack of continuity made levels feel like a string of unrelated battles, and practically kills replayability because I can’t return to a mission and play it with a different style of gravcycle and squad. Having no customization seems like a really poor design choice.
The writer behind Dead Space has revealed that a game he has worked on will feature during Thursday’s PS5 event.
Antony Johnston, who wrote the script for Dead Space and has credits on Shadow of Morder and Binary Domain, tweeted that he’s been “working on a big videogame for almost 2 years now,” and suggested that those interested should “watch the PS5 launch event on Thursday.”
As some of you know, I’ve been working on a big videogame for almost 2 years now.
In totally unrelated news, you should all watch the PS5 launch event on Thursday.
Johnston added in the subsequent replies that the game has you “play a character having a really bad time” which is… not a lot to go off, honestly, but we’ll take it! In another quoted retweet suggesting the game will be a horror, Johnston noted that it was “weird how everyone automatically assumes it’ll be a horror game.”
Whether it is something in the same vein as Dead Space or something completely different remains to be seen. Johnston’s pedigree is reason enough to be interested however – not least because we consider Dead Space one of the scariest games ever made.
The PlayStation 5 reveal event is right around the corner now, as it’s set to take place on June 11. Sony has kept a tight lid on what will be shown off during the video, but one writer has shared a cryptic tweet that indicates that a secret game they’re working on will be revealed.
Antony Johnson, who wrote much of Dead Space and worked on the writing of the nemesis system and dialog in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, tweeted that he’s been working on a big game for the past two years. He also said that, in “totally unrelated news,” he believes that people should watch the upcoming PlayStation 5 reveal.
As some of you know, I’ve been working on a big videogame for almost 2 years now.
In totally unrelated news, you should all watch the PS5 launch event on Thursday.
Johnston didn’t (and likely couldn’t) elaborate further, but we won’t have to wait much longer to find out what the game is. Johnson also wrote The Coldest City, the graphic novel that the movie Atomic Blonde is adapted from. His latest book is The Tempus Project.
Whatever the game is, we wouldn’t bet on it being Dead Space 4. Dead Space developer Visceral Games is no more, and much of the team that worked on it is scattered. Another Dead Space vet, Glen Schofield, is working on a narrative-centric game set in the PUBG universe.
The PlayStation 5 will release before the end of 2020. Sony has said that the COVID-19 pandemic has not impacted their ability to produce consoles.
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“This is an action game in which players follow the story of Ellie and Joel on their continued struggle for survival in post-pandemic Wyoming. From a third-person perspective, players traverse through small towns, wilderness, and ruin environments, using a variety of weapons (e.g., rifles, pistols, explosives, blades) to kill infected mutants and human survivors in frenetic combat.”
“Some sequences enable players to use stealth attacks against enemies–approaching from behind, slitting their throats. Players can also use explosives to set enemies on fire or blow enemies apart into limbs/bloody chunks of flesh. Cutscenes depict further instances of violence: a human captive bound and hung from a noose before being disemboweled; assailants beating a restrained woman’s arm with a hammer; characters shot in the head with arrows; a man repeatedly pistol-whipped.”
The game contains some sexual content: a couple disrobing and briefly engaging in a sexual act; the couple is heard grunting/moaning as the screen turns black (depicted from the waist up with female toplessness). Some zombie creatures are depicted with exposed breasts and genitalia. One sequence depicts two characters smoking a marijuana joint in a room full of marijuana plants. The words ‘f**k’ and ‘sh*t,’ appear in the dialogue.”
If you got the chance to play Valorant during its closed beta period, you may have gotten some time in with an early version of its ranked system and Competitive mode. Loading up the newly launched Valorant to see that Competitive mode missing was probably a bit of a surprise–the only modes available to play at the moment are its default Unrated mode and the newly added Spike Rush. So when is ranked Valorant coming out? And why did Riot remove it in the first place?
Does Valorant Have A Ranked Release Date?
Riot doesn’t offer an official Valorant ranked release date, but you can expect its ranked system and Competitive mode to return in “a few patches” after launch, according to Riot’s official blog. We don’t know how long that will take, but Riot has been releasing patches at a fairly steady pace. We will keep you updated.
Why Is Ranked Competitive Disabled In Valorant?
Riot removed Competitive mode and ranks from Valorant at launch to further improve on the system, but also to give players who didn’t get into the beta a chance to learn the basics.
“Similar to our closed beta launch, our initial focus is making sure our service is stable before activating competitive matchmaking. This is also a way to give new players the same courtesy that closed beta players had to learn the game ahead of turning on Competitive. We’ll also make some adjustments to Competitive based on remaining closed beta player feedback. Our plan is to turn on Competitive a few patches into our launch.”
How Will Ranked Competitive Mode Work In Valorant?
If you’re curious about how Valorant’s ranked system will work in Valorant, we have a ranked system and Competitive Mode guide that breaks down how it worked during its brief early access period in the Valorant closed beta. This information is subject to change, but may provide a good look into Riot’s initial approach. We also list all the competitive ranks and tiers, but are still waiting to learn what Valorant’s new best rank (formerly “Valorant”) will be renamed.
For more on Valorant, check out the recent news, announcements, and guides below.
The recent Last of Us Part II trailer featured a cover of New Order’s “True Faith” that was inspired by Lotte Kestner’s own over of the song. Naughty Dog didn’t credit Kestner, and this led to some controversy.
Writer-director Neil Druckmann has now apologized for the oversight. “Ellie’s rendition of ‘True Faith’ was inspired by Lotte Kestner’s haunting cover of the song,” he said on Twitter. “Due to an oversight on our end, she wasn’t credited as intended. Our deep apologies–we are rectifying this ASAP. We lope Lotte Kestner receives the recognition she deserves.”
Ellie’s rendition of “True Faith” was inspired by Lotte Kestner’s haunting cover of the song. Due to an oversight on our end, she wasn’t credited as intended. Our deep apologies — we are rectifying this ASAP. We hope that @lottekestner receives the recognition she deserves.
In a now-deleted tweet, Kestner said called out Druckmann and the team at Naughty Dog for this oversight. “Hey, are you aware the that the True Faith cover you put in your Last of Us 2 trailer is a replica of my cover that came out 10 years ago?” she said. “I wrote original parts not in the original song that are copied exactly by whoever covered it. I am heartbroken.”
Kestner and Naughty Dog have now seemingly made up. Kestner said on Twitter, “So proud this music has found a home in such an amazing project. Thanks to Neil, Naughty Dog, and everyone at Sony.”
So proud this music has found a home in such an amazing project. Thanks to Neil, Naughty Dog and everyone at Sony. https://t.co/FJ2r5Xgbgs
You’re hunkered down behind a beaten-up truck, bleeding from a chest wound. You can hear the labored breathing of one of your squadmates over the comms. Nightmare, as the team knows her, is unconscious at your feet, but you can’t think about that right now as a horde of zombies comes skittering around the corner. You take aim, the first of your targets weaving erratically in your field of vision before you blow its brains out. You repeat this twice more and as the horde advances yet again, you hear a shot ring out and a bullet zips past your ear, splintering the helmet of an ADVENT soldier who had a flamethrower at the ready.
The sniper, Rat King, holds up five fingers–minutes until evac arrives. Another member of your squad, Outrider, drops cloaking and picks Nightmare up to take her to safety as the sounds of more Lost ring out in the distance. It takes seconds, in the end. With the Commander’s voice in your ear, you pull the pin on the frag grenade and chuck it, close enough to clip the rampaging horde but also to light up the truck that you’re taking cover behind. This resulting explosion will finish you, but allow everyone else to make it to safety. After all the hard choices the Commander has had to make, your last thought is the hope that this has been easy in comparison.
XCOM 2 Collection on the Switch is an ambitious port, full of those excruciating choices and richer for it. Firaxis Games’ alien-massacring hit has become a bit of a household name when it comes to strategy games. Even though it’s infamous for its Russian roulette-style approach to combat probability, the impact that XCOM 2 has had on the genre as a whole is widely accepted, making this one of the more highly-anticipated ports of legacy franchises to Nintendo’s flagship console. Unfortunately, the full experience is too performance-intensive for the Switch to let the title’s tactical magic truly shine through in this latest iteration.
For those who are new to the XCOM series, the extensive lore can be a bit to wrap your head around. However, you’ll be relieved to note that you don’t need to be an expert in alien-human diplomatic relations to connect with XCOM 2’s characters and central premise. Think of every space opera that you’ve watched, but now imagine that your starting point is that the aliens have won. Humanity is under the thumb of interstellar rulers, and you’re part of a resistance force to overthrow the bad guys.
How does one overthrow the bad guys? Well, you’re going to want to defeat them in the marketplace of tactical troop deployment. Your job is leading loyal members of the Resistance (read: people the game really wants you to care about) against the intergalactic prowess of an alien empire, and it’s a classic case of rooting for the underdog if you’ve ever seen one.
Luckily, XCOM 2 has always pulled this off with aplomb, and it’s even more apparent if the version of the game that you’re jumping into is War of the Chosen. War of the Chosen is an optional expansion which, put simply, makes the human cost of the conflict that you pursue in XCOM 2 much more apparent. One of the ways it does this is by introducing a system that Fire Emblem fans are already familiar with: bonds between soldiers.
These bonds have the primary purpose of allowing your soldiers to gain new abilities and perks based on how close they are to those fighting alongside them against the alien scourge. The benefits seem entirely tactical at first until you think about the cruelly high stakes that XCOM 2 has always subjected players to. Soldiers aren’t only strengthened by their teammates, they’re also weakened by their fears–fall to an enemy type enough in battle and you’ll have to watch your squad crumble the next time you encounter that foe in the wild.
The difficulty curve of the game has been lamented by fans in the past, but not because of the addition of those debuffs or particularly tricky level mechanics–tactical cover, using party-wide skills, line of sight, and other combat concepts are easy to pick up. No, the most frequent complaint from veterans is the fact that you can’t trust your ability to hit a headshot even though the game might argue that you had a 98% chance to do so. There’s very little more agonizing than watching your squad member whiff a shot like that, only to be critically struck by an enemy’s laser while ostensibly behind majority cover.
Nothing rackets up the tension to unbearable levels quite like the game’s story missions. Part of engaging with those missions is also making careful strategic decisions about base management: what alien technologies to research and what facilities to build to empower your soldiers, because prioritizing the wrong thing can set your efforts back by miles. It’s not about mindlessly churning out anything that might buff your squad–building takes days, and reaping the right rewards is crucial to your campaign’s overall success.
When you’re not busy scanning locations on the globe map for resources or trying to pick up comms links to resistance forces, you’re thrust often into time-sensitive missions where your inaction means that people die. Not just civilians, but potentially friends that have been taken hostage.
This is where War of the Chosen accomplishes what the base XCOM 2 game could not. The expansion’s enemies bring a new flair to the already solid narrative by creating new opportunities for tension. We’re talking enemies that can make copies of XCOM soldiers, zombie hordes frothing at the mouth, and the mythical Chosen themselves–souped-up enemies who can kidnap your soldiers and grind the resistance’s progress to a halt if they’re not dealt with. To deal with these Chosen, you’ll be able to engage allies in covert operations for extra resources and also push through special orders that give you anything from extra firepower to the ability to get strategic resources.
XCOM 2 sets you up with a fair amount of ways to even the odds against your more powerful alien counterparts, and making full use of all of those is key to success. Whether it’s utilizing the special hero class soldiers that War of the Chosen gives you, or trying to turn randomized combat effects to your advantage, the arena where you’ll earn your necessary victories remains the same–a tactical grid of the battlefield.
It’s here on this battlefield that the lionized series starts to stumble. This would be a death knell if not for how compelling the narrative is, or how involved the out-of-combat management aspects are. To be clear, it was a given that the port of a rather intensive PC game would always take a hit in quality on Nintendo Switch. However, it’s a rather significant dip.
Visual pop-in and frame stuttering are immediately evident across the combat levels, especially so when you’re cracking through War of the Chosen. These don’t affect the quality of your player experience overly given that you’re not needing to execute any frame-perfect actions. However, menus being obscured by black squares meant to denote the tactical grid do affect your ability to command your troops effectively. It’s larger graphical issues like that which can make necessary actions like directing your troops excruciating when all you want to do is chase the excitement of chaining headshots onto Lost enemies while the flawless score thrums along in the background.
There’s also the matter of the action camera: slow-motion close-ups on your squad when they’re performing certain tasks. It’s all well and good when they activate as you’re scoring a critical on an enemy, but more often than not you’re getting a camera zoom on someone just running behind cover, and the cinematic nature of the tracking shot is yet another wrench thrown wholesale at your frame rate. There were instances where the game would freeze entirely for about 10 seconds at a time before everything clicked back into place, with squad members rubberbanding across the screen before arriving at approximately where you had indicated they should go before.
These things make dealing with the visually dense UI quite difficult. Everything about XCOM 2 Collection was shrunk down to fit on the Switch, including the menus. There’s a fair amount of reading to be done before you start to intuit what all of your skills do, and each soldier comes with an action menu laid out across the bottom of the screen that has their possible actions displayed in tiny little squares with accompanying text.
Here is where it gets tricky to read. The symbols look quite different, but it’s not actually obvious as to what each of them pertains to. Sure, the one that looks like an aiming reticle is easy enough; so is the one shaped like an eye or a grenade. But what about symbols that look similar, but are differentiated by tooltip text that tells you one is a combat ability and another is an assist ability? Everything has been visually crunched down to fit on the Switch’s screen, and the limited real estate compared to a PC monitor is a size difference that’s keenly felt.
Font size and accessibility have been perennial problems for Switch ports of PC games, and XCOM 2 Collection is no different. Over a time, you get used to the shortcuts that are available for specific player actions like shooting, going into Overwatch mode (reactive fire), and calling for help, but it takes time. When levels drag on for longer than they should because of lagging, crashes, or the fact that you have to account for being hindered by visual bugs, that time can feel like it’s in short supply.
You might risk losing patience with the title entirely because of these technical issues and how taxing it is on your console’s battery life, but to write off XCOM 2 Collection would be a shame. It’s a strategy game with an unusual amount of heart, not only because of its ability to make nameless cannon fodder NPCs feel like real people to you.
Soldiers chatter in their own languages, can be given nicknames, and even adopt traits that affect how they behave. If you want to make sure that you approach every situation with kid gloves and a knot of dread in your stomach, then feel free to create a squad of alien-fighting quasi-Marines who look and sound just like your friends. Every single percent towards nailing a shot will feel like it counts then, and every action you take will carry even more weight than the amount already imbued by XCOM 2’s narrative, as well as the story that you inevitably weave as the player through attachments to your troops.
Those tense moments are where XCOM 2 is most compelling. It’s when you’re gripping your Joy-Cons in sweaty hands, praying that the lumbering flesh golem doesn’t eviscerate a soldier who carries the name of one of your childhood friends. It’s landing successive headshots when the game tells you that your hit chance is less than 50% each time, only to muscle your way out of a previously impossible situation. It’s making it to an evac zone with exactly one turn to spare, only to have your heart sink because someone you’ve been trying all level to save has been kidnapped by the Chosen and there’s nothing you can do about it.
XCOM 2 Collection forces you to strategize on a tactical battlefield skewed in favor of your opponents, and that handicap is what makes it so enjoyable. However, the performance limitations on the Switch add an artificial challenge to your encounters that frustrates in a different, unwelcome way. It’s lovely to be able to play one of the strategy genre’s highlights on the go, but it’s going to take a fair bit more work for this port to be as great as its legacy deserves.
Kao the Kangaroo, a PS2-era mascot platformer series, is making a comeback. The series, which has been dormant since 2005’s Kao: Mystery of Volcano, is returning for a new adventure. The games, which were 3D platformers released in the early 2000s, might not be the most fondly-remembered titles of the time, but with 3D platformers being much less common these days there’s perhaps reason for people to be nostalgic for Kao.
The game has been announced on Steam, and while details are thin, this confirms that the game will come to PC. “This time Kao will take on a completely new journey,” the announcement reads. “New story, challenges, enemies, visuals, and a whole lot more! We will keep you posted and soon you will be able to see a first glance of the game.”
Kao is not the only Australian animal to have worked as a platformer star on the PS2 before being revived–Ty the Tasmanian Tiger HD released for the Switch earlier this year. While Tate Interactive is a Polish company, Ty was developed by Krome Studios, based in Australia.
Hopefully we’ll have more news about what the new Kao will look like soon, and whether it’ll be aimed at older fans or new young players.
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PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has dominated the mobile game scene, with a report from Sensor Tower stating that the PUBG Mobile raked in over $200 million last month, which represented 41 percent growth from May 2019. Tencent scooped both first and second place on this report when it came to overall revenue earned, with PUBG Mobile and Honor of Kings pocketing an estimated total of $450.5 million combined.
PUBG Mobile saw most of that revenue come from its Chinese share of the market–China made up 53 percent of the game’s earnings last month–with the United States in second place at 10.2 percent of the share. Outside of PUBG Mobile and Honor of Kings, Roblox took third place when accounting for overall revenue earned in May 2020, beating out the likes of Pokemon GO and Fate/Grand Order.
While Pokemon GO experienced an impressive surge in revenue since May last year, it still wasn’t enough to dethrone PUBG Mobile. Even Fortnite, who has made over $1 billion from microtransactions, didn’t even compare to the earners on Sensor Tower’s top ten list. The battle royale shooter’s Season 13 Royale Pass launched last month, adding a number of in-game unlockables and allowing players who paid for the Elite pass to earn exclusive rank rewards. There’s also the matter of the Fire Ranger and Ice Ranger skins that players can now access as part of Season 13, in keeping with the content’s toy-like theme.
PUBG Mobile has seen a number of quality of life changes since first hitting the market, with the most recent being an update to the notification season to make tracking one’s in-game progress easier. With Season 14 poised to hit around July, it’ll be exciting to see what other changes are in store and if PUBG Mobile can keep its place on the throne for this month’s revenue projections.
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