Not only did Skramblez recreate the epic-looking magical castle, the THPS fan also created custom skaters resembling some of the characters from the book and film series–though the antics in the video seem more like something the Weasley twins would pull.
While the custom parks in THPS1+2 are limited in the amount of detail or scope that can be included, the Hogwarts park still includes a couple of epic towers, a few of the castle’s courtyards and, of course, the Great Hall, complete with the four house banners on the wall.
This isn’t Skramblez first nerdy custom map–the Redditor has also done Peach’s Castle from Super Mario 64, City Escape from Sonic Adventure 2, as well as the Hyrule Castle Smash Bros map we featured here last month.
Players who have THPS1+2 on PC can try out Skramblez’ custom maps for themselves, though sadly the custom levels are platform-locked, meaning console players will have to make their own levels if they want to skate through Hogwarts.
GameSpot’s review of the 2020 Tony Hawk reboot praised the potential of the now-sharable custom parks in THPS1+2, saying “because you can share your maps, it’s a far more enjoyable mode than it ever was in its early days.”
Halo 4 is the sixth and final game coming to PC through Halo: The Master Chief Collection. It’s available now for testers, but the public release is still a little ways off. While we wait for that, developer 343 Industries has now shared gorgeous new images from Halo 4 on PC and informed fans a little bit more on what to expect when it arrives.
Starting with the images, the screenshots show off a few locations from Halo 4’s campaign. The images had to be downscaled for publishing, but 343 tells fans, “trust me, it’s glorious in 4K 60.”
Halo 4’s official release on PC will also serve as the introduction of new graphics settings. Design director Max Szlagor said these will include the ability to adjust UI gamma and detail independently of game gamma and detail, along with new options for things like graphics quality, shadow quality, effects quality, details quality, and anisotropic filtering.
Additionally, there will be expanded customization. For Halo 4 specifically, players will be able to customize individual armor pieces, and you can see a preview of this in the image below. Finally, Halo 4 will introduce the Champions Bundle weapon skins that originally appeared in Halo 4 years ago. In MCC, these can be earned by completing objectives in the Season 4 refresh.
Halo 4 is the sixth and final Halo game coming to PC through The Master Chief Collection, following Halo: Reach, Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo 3: ODST. These games can be purchased individually or through a bundle.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare continues to break sales records. Activision Blizzard has announced that the game’s first-year sales are the highest in Call of Duty’s history. However, the company did not provide an exact sales number.
That is a notable achievement given that the figure only covers up to September 30, so the game–which released in October 2019–didn’t even need a full year to break the single-year sales record for the franchise. It’s not immediately clear which title was previously the record-setter for first-year sales.
Activision also announced that two-thirds of Modern Warfare’s lifetime sales were digital. That’s good for Activision, as the company makes more money from digital game sales than boxed copies.
The battle royale game Warzone helped improve sales of Modern Warfare, Activision said. The company said it saw “substantial growth” in game sales for Modern Warfare that came from people who upgraded from Warzone, which is free, to the paid game Modern Warfare.
What’s more, Activision said that total hours played in the “Modern Warfare universe,” which covers Modern Warfare and Warzone, were about seven times higher compared to Black Ops 4.
In total, Modern Warfare and Warzone saw more than three times as many monthly active users than Black Ops 4 did during the same period last year. Console monthly active users “grew strongly,” Activision said, while monthly active users on PC grew “over ten-fold” compared to last year.
Monster Hunter Rise is coming to Switch on March 26, and fans of the series are wondering how it will differ from past entries–including the huge Monster Hunter World. Now, in a new video, developer Capcom has shown off an example of combat using the game’s Great Sword–and how some of this entry’s new mechanics will work.
This video details your palamute companions, rideable dogs who will fight alongside you. While riding your palamute, you can sharpen weapons, boost stamina, or use potions, meaning that you can move towards your target while also preparing for battle. The video also shows off more of your Wirebug, which is used to gain height and traverse through the environment–but which can also be used in combat.
The video below shows the first two stages of a battle between a hunter and Aknosom, a bird/wyvern hybrid. The fight shows how the Palamute dogs will jump into the battle and fight alongside you, and how the Wirebug can be used in combat to attack from above and escape danger.
The Great Sword has numerous charge attacks, so using it properly requires good timing, picking your moments to unleash some of its bigger moves. Getting above your enemy also allows you to unleash some big multi-hit attacks.
Monster Hunter Rise promises some deep exploration throughout the game world. The game has a preorder bonus and multiple different editions: check out GameSpot’s preorder guide for more information.
Activision Blizzard has reported new financial numbers for the July-September period, and it was a gigantic quarter for the gaming publisher. One section of the company’s business that did particularly well was microtransactions. For the three-month period, Activision Blizzard made $1.2 billion from microtransactions, which are called “in-game net bookings.”
This is a dramatic 69 percent improvement over the same period last year, when Activision Blizzard made $709 million from in-game net bookings.
Microtransactions are very big business for Activision Blizzard. For the latest reporting period, Activision Blizzard made $1.95 billion in revenue from all of its business combined, so the $1.2 billion figure from microtransactions represents more than half of the company’s total revenue.
Activision’s Call of Duty franchise was a bright spot for microtransactions. Microtransaction sales from Modern Warfare and the battle royale game Warzone were four times higher than the same period last year. Growth was always expected, with far more players jumping into Call of Duty than usual this year
Additionally, Activision reported that Modern Warfare’s first-year sales are the highest in Call of Duty history, and two-thirds of sales came digitally.
Activision Blizzard also owns King, the makers of Candy Crush. Microtransaction revenue from King’s games grew year-over-year, but a specific number was not divulged.
Windbound will expand with a trio of free major updates over the next few months. The first of three major patches is out now, and it contains some new stat-boosting skins, a photo mode, and and new endless mode for the survival game.
The new Witch Skins are made up of three items–the Witch’s Hat, Witch’s Outfit, and Witch’s Staff–which give you a healthy stat boost when equipped. The hat makes potions last longer, the outfit gives you easier, closer respawns, and the staff is an unbreakable weapon that fires out enemy-seeking orbs after each melee attack.
Photo Mode, meanwhile, lets you pause the game and line up a photo, changing how Kara’s posed and adding filters. It lets you change your position, camera orientation, and mess with field of view, exposure, and time, just as in most photo modes. You can also equip Kara with a variety of different hats and accessories, getting some nice shots of your adventures.
The new endless mode, meanwhile, is called Eternal Voyage, and it allows the game to continue on past Chapter 5. The game will continue to get bigger and more difficult as you go–while it won’t expand indefinitely, you can expect challenges beyond what the base game offered.
All of these new features are offered for free, which will also be the case with the next two updates. The next one, which will arrive before the end of the year, will come with more Kara skins, a free sailing mode, and improvements to the Nautilus tower system. New towers, with fresh challenges, will be added.
The next update, coming in early 2021, will introduce more changes to the Nautilus experience, along with new enemies and attacks. A “corruption” system will be added, too, although it’s not clear what this will involve yet.
Kara’s Ancestral gear, which was available as a preorder bonus, is now available for purchase, too. This includes the Ancestral Attire, Oar, and Knife.
Windbound received a 5/10 in GameSpot’s review. “Windbound has its moments,” wrote reviewer Andrew King. “Much of the time, it was relaxing enough to zone out and search for crafting materials. But the game is built around finding towers, and that process becomes significantly less fun after the first level. There are only so many times you can search for a tower, no matter how winsome the presentation.”
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Twitch has had ongoing issues with DMCA this year, with its most recent wave of takedowns seeing the streaming platform sending a one-size-fits-all warning to streamers who had hosted infringing content. Twitch has since returned to sending out regular copyright notices, though they still aren’t helpful for streamers who want a long-term solution.
The issue has been illustrated by streamer Jake’n’Bake, who received a copyright notice over a snippet of a Kanye song appearing in a video from an IRL stream from 2018. As he points out, he never played the song himself, but likely walked past a business or person playing it.
Just to be clear… This is a 30sec clip from two and a half years ago. It was from an outdoor IRL stream. I probably passed by a shop or was in a place that was playing the song in the background. I’m now in danger of losing everything. How is this even realistic?! 😔 pic.twitter.com/zqYxfrshR0
The fact that this song snippet had been picked up illustrates streamers’ problems with the current DMCA situation–even when they go to lengths to avoid copyrighted content, it often still crops up when its least expected.
To make things even more difficult, streamers have almost no option to legally play music if they want to. The process of licensing music isn’t accessible to the average streamer, and as Jake’n’Bake points outs, copyright holders aren’t interested in replying to or communicating with streamers who have, or want to, use their music.
Last week, Twitch Partner Herman Li was banned from the platform, with some alleging that it was due to copyright issues over him playing music from his own band, DragonForce. Neither Li nor Twitch ever officially confirmed why the ban occurred, however, and Li’s account has now been reinstated.
While Facebook has struck a deal with a number of major music companies to license their music for its streamers, so far Twitch hasn’t announced anything similar beyond Twitch Soundtrack, which provides music streamers can play in the background of live streams (but not saved videos). It’s also been facing criticism from the music industry, which is putting increased pressure on the streaming giant.
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Far Cry 6 and Rainbow Six Quarantine aren’t the only Ubisoft games that have been delayed. The French publisher confirmed in its latest report that its new Avatar game based on the James Cameron film franchise has been pushed to a new date further in the future.
This new Avatar game, which is in development at The Division studio Massive Entertainment, will now release during Ubisoft’s financial year that begins in April 2022. The first Avatar movie sequel, Avatar 2, is scheduled for release in December 2022 after its own delay. It would make sense that the game will release around that time to capitalize on the hype, but no firm date has been announced yet.
The new delay for the Avatar game was made in response to the delay of the movie, Ubisoft management said on an earnings call.
Ubisoft’s first Avatar game came out in December 2009 alongside Cameron’s blockbuster that would go on to become the highest-grossing movie of all time until it was dethroned by Avengers: Endgame in 2019.
Almost nothing is known about Ubisoft’s new Avatar game, apart from the fact that it is set on Pandora and will come to PC and consoles. No date has been set and no gameplay has been shown. Given the timeline, it’s expected the game will release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.
In addition to Massive Entertainment, the new Ubisoft studio Ubisoft Stockholm is contributing to this game. Ubisoft announced that it hired Battlefield veteran Patrick Bach to lead the team, which is on a hiring spree.
As for Far Cry 6 and Rainbow Six Siege, they are now scheduled to release in Ubisoft’s fiscal year 2021-2022, which means they will arrive between April 2021 and March 2022. During an earnings call, CFO Frédérick Duguet narrowed that timeline slightly, saying the company expects both to hit in the first half of the fiscal year.
One of Microsoft’s secret weapons for next-gen is Xbox Game Pass, the company’s subscription service that already has 15 million members. It could be a big deal in the future, as the subscription model shakes things up in terms of the business of how people consume games.
He told GI.biz that Game Pass has the potential to help games succeed where they might not have otherwise.
“Game Pass and things like it allow titles to be successful where the economics of the business, and having to sell things at retail to sell X amount of copies… That works against some games. Just like in other avenues–let’s take television or movies. Certain types of comedies or big budget dramas went away,” Howard said. “TV went to the cheapest thing they could make for a long time, reality television, which I could equate to a free-to-play match-three game. What brings eyeballs? What’s cheap? Right, let’s get it out.”
When subscription services in the film/TV industries came onto the scene, there was a renewed investment from the companies in quality content, and Howard said the same could happen in gaming.
“Subscriptions came along and now you see the quality and investment in dramas or historical fiction series,” he said. “That’s where creators are able to go and create these things people want and it makes sense for everybody: the people paying the bills, the people creating it and the people consuming it. That’s what we see happening with games with things like Game Pass.”
As an example, Howard said the classic adventure game genre could see a resurgence in popularity through platforms like Game Pass. “Those are games that really don’t make a lot of economic sense at $60, or maybe even at $30 if someone’s going to play it for five or six hours, but in a system like that it makes complete sense,” Howard said. “It drives a lot of people saying ‘Hey, I got to experience that and I wouldn’t have any other way,’ and the creators got to make it without the burden of ‘Will this be successful? Will we get to make another one?'”
Overall, Howard said he feels “extremely optimistic” about the potential for Game Pass. “Not just to people playing it but to creators being unbridled in terms of what they can create,” he said.
