Picking up a new physical game isn’t as easy as it was just a couple of months ago. Shipping delays and low stock have emphasized the importance and convenience of digital games. Luckily, most games are available digitally on PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC. We’ve put together a list of the best digital game deals this week, and there are a lot of good titles up for grabs at discounted prices, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Outer Wilds, and Dishonored 2.
You can check out all of the best digital game deals–separated by platform–below. Also, don’t miss out on games you can snag free of charge; we’re keeping a running list of every free game available now. In addition to games, you can save right now on PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live Gold subscriptions.
Best Switch game deals
Best PS4 game deals
Best Xbox One game deals
*denotes deal only available for Xbox Live Gold subscribers
Ubisoft has released a new video on the state of The Division 2. The video, below, sees the team discussing the upcoming Title Update 9.1 patch, connectivity issues, warhound convoy, and more.
First and foremost, Ubisoft has nothing to say about The Division 2’s upcoming raid. “We don’t have any information about the raid yet,” community developer Chris Gansler said. “My goal is to give you at least two weeks of a heads up so you’ll have plenty of time to look at getting ready for the raid and all that stuff.” Gansler went on to say that the raid should come packaged in Title Update 10, but there’s currently no word on when this drops for PC, PlayStation 4, Stadia, and Xbox One.
Ubisoft is continuing its investigation into The Division 2’s connectivity issues. Gansler said the Delta/Foxtrot errors should occur less frequently following a recent backend update. However, the Delta errors persist in general and the team is “currently struggling to figure out what the underlying causes [are].” There’s no word on when these connectivity problems will be fully resolved, but they are the team’s “highest priority.”
Title Update 9.1 is slated to drop in May, though Gansler said that “it might be mid-May, it might be a little bit later, depending on how tests are going.” Next week’s State of The Division 2 should feature a definitive release date, where the team will also talk about all of 9.1’s changes. Gansler said the patch will look at “NPC aggressiveness, NPC target accuracy, grenades flying around and hitting you all the time. So accuracy there as well.” The update will also include bug fixes and adjustments from player feedback.
Ubisoft is aware of the warhound convoy XP bug in The Division 2 but doesn’t consider the problem an “exploit.” Gansler said the activity, in which you’re tasked with taking down highly armed guards transporting a secured weapons cache, is “tuned too generously at this point.” The team is considering how it will change when Title Update 9.1 arrives sometime this May.
The team also talked about The Division 2 League, free gifts you can receive just by logging in before May 5, the manhunt targets, and more.
Ubisoft recently dropped Title Update 9 for The Division 2 across all platforms. The 10 GB update makes a number of changes to the looter-shooter, such as adjusting Named Items and Talents, implementing a new Exotic reconfigure feature, addressing a variety of bugs, and more.
Since its launch in late 2018, Fallout 76 has lacked one element crucial to the series’ identity. The series’ best moments predominantly involved stories of its survivors, the poor souls unfortunate enough to have been exposed to nuclear war and the horrors of its fallout. Fallout 76’s latest free expansion, Wastelanders, attempts to inject some of that humanity into the game by introducing human NPCs and their stories to the auburn hills of Appalachia, while also expanding upon available role-playing options. Taken as a separate part, Wastelanders represents some of the best Fallout content since New Vegas, but Fallout 76’s flawed structure and mechanics prevent it from shining.
It’s been more than a year since I played Fallout 76, and it’s likely that I’m not the only one returning from a prolonged absence now that Wastelanders has launched. This made me decide to start a new character in a bid to see just how much Fallout 76 has changed since then. Wastelanders’ changes are apparent from the start. After the tutorial, you emerge from Vault 76 to something new: Two human travelers, marking the prominent return of human life to West Virginia wasteland, greet you at the entrance to the vault. They mention a treasure rumored to be buried in the hills of Appalachia, which quickly leads you to a newly established bar under the management of Duchess and her party of ragtag brains and brawn. This alternative start to Fallout 76 is more gripping than the previous audio logs that initially introduced you to its world and serves to illustrate how Wastelanders’ content affects the rest of the game.
Initial tutorial quests take you through the broad strokes of Fallout 76’s survival elements and base-building, interspersed with contextual dialogue for each action delivered by a character you can actually interact with. The disembodied audio logs and impersonal robots of the original tutorial are still there if you choose a different route, but running through the same lessons while advancing a more captivating story in Wastelanders make Fallout 76’s opening hours more akin to a traditional Fallout adventure. It can be easy for brand-new players to miss this pair of human NPCs entirely, but for returning players their mere existence will quickly draw you to their new introduction.
The most welcome change is the addition of Fallout’s traditional nuanced dialogue and the associated decision trees. Using points that you pour into your SPECIAL stats (the range of role-playing traits including strength, charisma, perception, and more) you can instigate certain dialogue options that help you resolve situations in different ways. An early example featured an altercation between Duchess and a local gang of raiders. Instead of breaking up the hostile intrusion into her bar, I was able to use my character’s Perception skill to spot and call out backup hiding behind the enemies, letting them resolve the imminent conflict without having to pull the trigger. If you’ve played Fallout 3 or New Vegas in the past, you’ll be familiar with the system that Wastelanders uses here. Despite not iterating on a system that’s over a decade old, it adds much-needed personality and space for role-playing in contrast to the rest of Fallout 76’s quests.
It’s disappointing then that after its initial handful of quests, Wastelanders forces you to reach level 20 before you’re able to continue its story. This requires you to plunge back into Fallout 76’s original main questline, which is also required to contextualize the rest of the expansion’s story. The issue isn’t so much the ham-fisted timeline trickery that you have to ignore for the story’s events to make sense, but rather the older quest structures that you have to return to for an extended period. Wastelanders’ opening teases you with the kind of structure and storytelling that made previous Fallout games so captivating, but you have to see yourself through at least 10 hours of tedious pre-Wastelanders quests just to get back to it.
The whiplash of this switch is jarring. Going back to quests primarily relayed through audio logs is deflating, and the diminished sense of role-playing is prevalent. If Fallout 76’s original quests have been altered since launch, the effect isn’t significant. Many quests are straightforward: Move to a waypoint, kill enemies, pick up a quest item, and repeat. The lack of dialogue and decision-making in between makes the repetition even more noticeable, and it quickly reminded me why I was bored with Fallout 76 to begin with. At its worst, it’s incredibly frustrating. When robotic quest-givers attempt to poke fun at how you had to travel so far across the map just to end up having to make the return trip, it isn’t funny; it just reminds you that Fallout 76 understands its shortcomings and makes you deal with them anyway.
Once you reach the required level, however, the most promising parts of Wastelanders are ahead of you. You’ll form relationships with two factions as you decide on a way forward, giving you even more space to tackle dialogue with choices that have lasting ramifications. The two factions–a returning band of raiders and a docile settlement of engineers–work towards the same goals with different approaches. Siding with the Raiders, I was surprised to see a different take on the predominantly violent archetype from past Fallout stories. Meg, the group’s leader, expressed a clear understanding of how past Raider behavior was counterintuitive to sustainability, but still retained the tough-as-nails attitude required to cut it in the dangerous wasteland. This depth of character extended to my favorite pair in the Raider crew: a brash and energetic girl named Ra-Ra and her best friend Gail, a tall and powerful Super Mutant. Listening in on their friendly conversations or their comical teardowns of other raiders made small pauses in their camp between missions worth it, making me look forward to each next interaction with the pair.
This characterization that Fallout 76 initially lacked wasn’t just a hindrance to its overall world-building, but to its quests too. The later questlines in Wastelanders are fantastic, eschewing the reliance on combat and giving space to more variation. Whether it’s deciding how to infiltrate a brutal underground fighting ring, tricking security systems using a mutant, or navigating deadly traps left by a ghoul in his misguided attempts to rid himself from Appalachia, Wastelanders’ quests are consistently engaging, in spite of Fallout 76’s enduring issues with its gameplay mechanics.
Wastelanders’ quests are consistently engaging, in spite of Fallout 76’s enduring issues with its gameplay mechanics
But for an online-only game, Fallout 76 still makes playing with friends one of its biggest hurdles to work around. When you’re exploring the wasteland and taking on side quests, rotating public events, or just hunting for loot, playing with a party does make the monotony more enjoyable, but anything to do with main quests is still problematic. This is highlighted in Wastelanders’ new narrative spaces–areas where Fallout 76 intends for you to make lasting story decisions. These can range from small indoor areas, like Duchess’ bar, to larger dungeon-like encounters where major story missions take place. In a party, you’re given two choices: Either each player completes them alone or follows whoever the party leader is, forfeiting all of the meaningful decisions to them. However, Fallout 76 doesn’t make sharing these moments with your friends worth it, as progress is only awarded to the party leader. You’ll either have to complete each mission multiple times for each player’s story to progress or not play together all.
Playing Fallout 76, and by extension its Wastelanders content, alone is entirely possible, and it’s how I spent most of my time. But it’s also the most tedious way to play, as Fallout 76’s many survival elements require considerable amounts of time and effort away from its more engaging aspects. Hunger and thirst meters drain rapidly and negatively impact both your action points and health, while weapon condition meters will routinely run their course and leave you without your favorite rifle in combat. You can sustain yourself with raw food and dirty water in large quantities (if you have the medicine to cure any diseases and radiation poisoning), but for the most part you have to cook food and boil water at a cooking station. Similarly, you have to spend a lot of time looking for junk to break down into pieces to repair weapons and armor.
Fallout 76 still has some eye-catching settlements and dilapidated factories to explore, but for the most part I was too fixated on hunting down junk to truly appreciate the stories they tell. A lot of my time in Fallout 76 revolved around its convoluted in-game menus, shuffling around from one tab to the next to administer healing items or diving into separate menus entirely to repair my gear. The upkeep is a frequent bother. Without any meaningful tension or satisfying challenge to overcome, being forced to consistently engage with these mechanics feels like little more than unnecessary roadblocks. You can purchase repair and salvage kits with real money from Fallout 76’s store (I only found two in-game in 30 hours), and it does alleviate the tedium to an extent. But it’s hard not to wonder, then, how much of the survival frustrations are designed intentionally to push you in the direction of spending even more money on microtransactions.
Fallout 76 retains a heavy emphasis on combat, and it’s another facet that hasn’t changed all too much since launch. Weapons still feel cumbersome to use, especially if you go the route of specializing in melee combat. VATS, the tactical body-part aiming mechanic from past Fallout games, still feels out of place since the world around you still can’t be paused, serving more as an aim-assist that loses all semblance of its strategic roots. And the balance of combat is still incredibly confusing, with main quests presenting you with trivial encounters only to then thrust you into a scenario where enemies are almost immediately killing you. For such a large part of the overall gameplay loop, combat still remains one of Fallout 76’s weakest elements.
For an online-only game, Fallout 76 still makes playing with friends one of its biggest hurdles to work around.
There are still numerous bugs and technical issues in Fallout 76, affecting not only new Wastelanders content but older questlines equally. Some are small and inconsequential enough to ignore, like clipping character models and floating supply crates. Others are more difficult to ignore. I encountered numerous quest bugs that brought my progress to a halt, forcing me to reboot the game and start the entire quest again. On Wastelanders’ final quest, this happened three times at different points, which made what was meant to be a climatic heist into a frustrating exercise of hoping I’d reach the end of it. On top of that, Fallout 76 would routinely freeze and crash, as well as suffer severe frame rate issues and technical oddities like invincible enemies or freezing dialogue.
In many ways, it’s Fallout 76’s initial foundation that so severely holds it back from its most engaging content to date. Wastelanders is a clear return to more traditional and captivating Fallout stories, with characters and quests that give you room to role-play in a way the original quests lacked. But they still require you to dedicate a lot of time to survival mechanics that don’t reward your effort, and its frequent combat remains monotonous and uninteresting. Wastelanders introduces some of the best Fallout sequences in recent years, but you’ll have to dig through a lot of Fallout 76’s enduring issues to experience them.
Since launch, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has been steadily growing in size thanks to its frequent, large updates. Following this week’s latest patch and additional content DLC owners of the game, Modern Warfare no occupies close to 200GB on any given platform.
Modern Warfare on PC currently takes about just over 180GB of hard-drive space, while ringing in at just over 185GB on PS4 and Xbox One. This follows two patches that went live on April 28. On PC these were combined into a single 32GB download, while it was split into a 12GB title update and additional 18GB DLC download on consoles. Warzone players on console could skip the latter of the two, reducing their overall download requirement and file size.
Downloading big updates has become normal for Modern Warfare players, so much so that developer Infinity Ward addressed it specifically in February. During the lead up to Season 2, Infinity Ward stressed that the large update size at the time (in excess of 50GB) would help reduce update sizes in the future, while also improving the game’s overall footprint on your hard drive. While 32GB is smaller, the game’s growing size is concerning, especially as it inches closer towards 50% of the total internal capacity of both the PS4 and Xbox One S.
Prior to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare launching, Infinity Ward shared the PC requirements for the shooter, which included a recommended hard drive partition of 175GB. At the time Infinity Ward explained that this was to ensure future content updates had space to exist, but that estimate has already been exceeded following this week’s patch.
It’s leading to a lot of frustration from players, especially when Infinity Ward isn’t being clear as to why the game requires more and more space on consoles and PC alike. But if you plan on continuing you play online, there’s no other option. We’ve reached out to Activision for comment on Modern Warfare’s on-going update situation.
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Animal Crossing: New Horizons isn’t an “edutainment” game, but your submissions to Blathers’ museum do carry a lot of real educational value. Both in the owl curator’s explanation and the museum placards, you can learn a lot of interesting details on the donated fish, bugs, and dinosaur fossils. But science can be tricky, and a new dinosaur discovery has rendered one of the Animal Crossing fossils outdated.
As reported by Science News, archeologists recently found the most complete tail bone of a spinosaurus ever recovered. And it shows that the spinosaurus tail was actually much wider than previously believed, making the dinosaur an excellent swimmer comparable to a crocodile.
Amused Animal Crossing fans quickly noticed this doesn’t match up with the spinosaurus fossil found in the game, with its distinctly un-paddle-like tail.
A Spinosaurus fossil in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
It’s hard to blame Nintendo. After all, science is a moving target, especially when it comes to piecing together pieces of the historical record through fossils. Our perceptions of plenty of dinosaurs have changed over the years, perhaps most famously when we learned that the brontosaurus didn’t even exist. Still, it’s surprising for one of the depictions to become inaccurate after only a month.
Aside from the fossils, bugs, and fish, the museum recently added a new wing in its latest update: fine art. That wing opens up after you donate your first piece of artwork procured from Jolly Redd, a shady fox who visits your town in his rickety old boat. A big part of finding art is telling the real masterpieces from the forgeries. Like other artifacts you can give to Blathers’ museum, donating legit pieces will treat you to some interesting facts about the piece.
The Last of Us Part 2 has several special editions for PS4, but none of them have been as coveted as the $230 Ellie Edition, the most prestigious version. The Ellie Edition has been sold out since it was first announced, with one restock back in February that quickly ran out again. If you’ve been wanting to get your hands on the edition, you have another chance, as GameStop just opened pre-orders for the Ellie Edition again. We expect they’ll sell out again quickly, so take advantage of this restock while it’s available.
The Ellie Edition comes with a slew of physical and digital goodies along with a copy of the base game, including a full-sized recreation of Ellie’s backpack, a 7-inch vinyl record, a 12-inch Ellie statue, a replica of her bracelet, a collectible steelbook, and more. You’ll also get the in-game pre-order bonuses: an ammo capacity upgrade and crafting training manual.
Here’s everything the Ellie Edition comes with:
Base game and any applicable pre-order bonuses
Full-sized recreation of Ellie’s backpack
Embroidered patch
7″ vinyl record with original music
12″ Ellie statue
Life-sized replica of Ellie’s bracelet
Collectible steelbook
48-page mini art book from Dark Horse
Set of six enamel pins
Lithograph art print
Set of five stickers
PSN Dynamic Theme
Six PSN avatars
Digital soundtrack
Digital version of the mini art book
The Last of Us Part 2 will now release on June 19 for PS4, PlayStation announced this week. This comes after an announcement in early April that the game was delayed indefinitely due to logistical issues stemming from COVID-19. The new June release date is possible due to “an ease in the global distribution environment,” according to a PlayStation blog post.
Developer Psyonix has announced that some of Rocket League‘s more-recent limited-time modes, such as Beach Ball and Heatseeker, will return in a month-long event on all platforms starting this May.
The car soccer game will hold a Modes of May event, a special month-long showcase that kicks off on Friday, May 1 with Dropshot Rumble. The LTE, which runs from May 1-4, combines “the action of Dropshot enhanced by the zany power-ups from Rumble.” Modes of May will swap the modes each weekend in the month.
Beach Ball, an LTE where two teams of two contend with a ball that curves and floats around the field, comes back on May 7. May 14 will see Boomer Ball return, though Psyonix said “more [information] on that [mode]” will be revealed as we get closer to the date. Finally, wrapping up Modes of May is Heatseeker on May 21, a fast-paced 3v3 mode where the ball functions as a homing missile and gains speed after every touch.
Each LTE begins at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET / 4 PM GMT on their respective start dates and concludes at the same time on their end date. Check below for Modes of May’s full schedule.
Ubisoft has kicked off a stream that will reveal the setting of the next Assassin’s Creed game. Interestingly, the setting will be revealed via a unique piece of artwork produced by BossLogic, an acclaimed artist known for his awesome Street Fighter pieces and, more recently, his collaborations with Marvel and DC.
BossLogic will be streaming his progress and, by the end of the showcase, we’ll know where the new Assassin’s Creed will take place. Those who watch the official stream on Twitch have a chance to earn a drop for a future Assassin’s Creed skin. However, the event can also be seen on Mixer, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.
We’re currently a few hours into the stream and the setting hasn’t been fully revealed, but the artwork shows a few notable points. On one side of a silhouetted figure is an icy sea and some ships, while on the other is a land-based battle scene with a castle in the background. This may be indicating the rumored Viking setting, but we’ll have to wait for the stream to finish to know for sure.
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The Assassin’s Creed franchise underwent a drastic evolution with Assassin’s Creed Origins. The game, which was set in ancient Egypt, took on more role-playing design elements. Most notably, it introduced a large number of quests that players could choose to undertake. Its follow up, 2018’s Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, built on this with more intricate systems, a vast open-world, and multiple protagonists, among many other additions. Ubisoft then skipped releasing a new mainline entry in 2019.
Given Ubisoft’s investment in the technology powering this new iteration of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, it’s likely this new game will bear some similarities to Origins and Odyssey, with some fresh twists of its own. It’s unclear the extent of this reveal, and if we’ll get a glimpse at gameplay or some sort of story tease, but we’ll keep you updated with more information as it becomes available.
