E3 2019: Battlefield 5 Added To EA Access Free Game Vault

EA Access subscribers now have another big game to play for no extra cost, EA has announced. Battlefield V, DICE’s hit shooter that only launched in November, is now part of the EA Access Vault on Xbox One.

In addition, the game will be free on EA Access for PS4 when that launches in July. The news comes shortly after Battlefield V was added to the Origin Access game collection. Origin Access is a very similar service to EA Access, except exclusive to PC.

EA Access costs $30 / £20 / AU $40 for year or $5 / £4 / AU $40 per month. A subscription grants you access to a vault of free EA titles, such as Titanfall 2, Star Wars: Battlefront II, and FIFA 18. Subscribers also get a 10% discount on all digital EA games, as well as their respective expansions and in-game purchases. Members can also take advantage of EA Access’ Play First Trials, which typically give you 10 hours of early access to new EA titles prior to their official release.

EA Play, the publisher’s pre-E3 conference, also brought news of new Battlefield V maps. The first map shown is called Marita, based on the village where the Battle of Greece began. It features a sloping mountain ridge and tight streets, with lots of hills and multi-story buildings for verticality. Allies are in control of the town, while the Axis tries to break their stronghold. Marita launches in July.

The second new map shown, Al Sundan, is the next one to arrive: It launches on June 27. It takes place in an African desert and is a large, wide map leaving plenty of room for air battles, and the Axis has established an air base. When you play in Conquest Mode it will have six flags, and campaign players will recognize the map from the mission Under No Flag. It’s coming as part of Tides of War Chapter 4, which will also see two new close-quarters maps added.

Finally, the third map is Operation Underground, an underground battlefield similar to Metro from previous Battlefield games but entirely reimagined. That one is coming in October, between Chapters 4 and 5.

Beyond this, EA also further confirmed that Battlefield V is adding the Pacific Theater. This will include the Iwo Jima map and M1 Garand weapon, among other things still to be confirmed.

We Saw An Extended Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order Gameplay Demo | E3 2019

EA Play started with the showstopper, as Titanfall and Apex Legends developer Respawn Entertainment showed off Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order, its upcoming third-person action game. We got to see 15-minutes of the game during the stream, getting a look at the some of the combat and traversal skills that protagonist Cal Kestis has.

However, shortly after the stream aired, we got the opportunity to see a 30-minute demo, which showcased a set-piece moment from the game. This involved Cal climbing an AT-AT and wreaking havoc from inside the cockpit, and provided a very different flavor of the game than what we saw on stream. In the video above, Randolph Ramsay and Tamoor Hussain recount what they saw behind-closed-doors and also talk about the broader impressions of the game.

For more on the title, read our interview with Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order director Stig Asmussen, who discusses the game’s inspiration, how combat works, and more.

The Sims 4 Will Add LGBTQ+ Pride Items In Partnership With It Gets Better Project

June is Pride Month, and there are many LGBTQ+ celebrations that take place around the world. During the EA Play event ahead of E3 2019, the company announced that The Sims 4 will be getting a suite of new pride-themed items to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community. The new items come as a partnership with the It Gets Better project, a nonprofit that works on uplifting LGBTQ+ people; additions include clothing as well as a gender-neutral bathroom door, which is currently unavailable in the game.

PC players will get access to the new pride items beginning June 18th, while console players will get them in July. The content is also coming to The Sims Freeplay and The Sims Mobile in June. The announcement did not specify, however, whether the items will be available for purchase or if they’re simply free additions.

The Sims series has a long history of being inclusive of different sexualities and identities. Beginning in the original game, Sims could form romantic relationships with anyone regardless of gender or their dating history. In The Sims 4, there are now options for transgender Sims, and while binary, they are much more than most character creators currently offer. The upcoming gender-neutral bathroom door seems like a step in a more nonbinary-inclusive direction for the game.

In other Sims news, The Sims 4’s seventh expansion, Island Living, was announced. The expansion adds a new world called Sulani, which is largely based in Polynesian culture, and includes new features like mermaids. Island Living launches on PC on June 21 and then on consoles on July 16.

All The E3 2019 PC Games Releasing In 2019: Gears 5, Doom Eternal, Borderlands 3, And More

E3 2019: Nintendo Switch’s Splatoon 2 Getting Final Splatfest, 5.0 Update Next Month

Nintendo closed out its pre-E3 Splatoon 2 World Championship with a big announcement: the theme of the game’s final Splatfest. Ahead of Nintendo’s E3 Direct on Tuesday, Splatoon 2 producer Hisashi Nogami took the stage and announced the Final Fest, which will take place over a 72-hour period from July 18-21. Fittingly for the final Splatfest, the competition will carry an apocalyptic theme: chaos vs. order.

Just as in previous Splatfests, a new Shifty Station will be featured during the Final Fest. Not only that, but all 23 Shifty Station stages from previous Splatfests will return for the event as well. The previous Shifty Stations will rotate out for the first 48 hours of the Final Fest, while the new design will be featured for the final 24 hours.

Nintendo also announced four new pieces of headgear to coincide with the Final Fest. The gear will be distributed through the Squid Research Lab channel from the Switch News app closer toward the event. You can take a look at it below.

No Caption ProvidedGallery image 1Gallery image 2Gallery image 3

That wasn’t the only Splatoon 2 announcement. Nogami also revealed that the game’s 5.0 update will arrive in late July, following the Final Fest. The update will add a “Turf War (Splatfest)” option to private battles, which will allow players to play on any of the 24 Shifty Station maps. The Splatfest option will also transform the other stages into their nighttime versions, just as they appeared during actual Splatfests.

Nintendo has more announcements in store on June 11, which it airs its E3 Direct presentation. That will focus on Switch games coming in 2019, including Luigi’s Mansion 3, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. You can find out when and how to watch Nintendo’s E3 Direct here.

E3 2019: After EA Play, Three New EA Originals Games Announced

While they were not featured in E3 2019‘s EA Play livestream, three new indie games were announced during the studio event just after the stream. In a press release, EA announced partnerships with three indie studios to create several new games: Zoink Games (Fe and Flipping Death), Glowmade, and Hazelight Studios (A Way Out). The games that each are working on will be EA Originals.

“We continue to connect innovative and creatively distinct new games from the best and boldest independent game makers to a global audience of players.” EA executive vice president of strategic growth Matt Bilbey said in the press release. “We want to offer our players the broadest, highest quality content possible, with the best access possible.”

Zoink Games is creating Lost in Random, a game that mixes together both action and strategy within a dark fantasy world. Glowmade is developing a co-op RPG called RustHeart, which sees a young hero and their robot sidekick explore an alien multiverse. Hazelight Studios’ game remains unannounced, but EA’s press release describes the title as “a fresh take on the challenges of working together.”

This year, EA Play focused on the publisher’s larger, more mainstream titles. The livestream began with a gameplay reveal of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which saw Cal Kestis cut through Storm and Purge Troopers with his lightsaber in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice-looking, tactical combat and also pull off supernatural feats with his array of Force powers. We were also treated to a familiar face and provided additional hints that Fallen Order takes place a few years before Rogue One.

The rest of EA Play showcased what to expect in Season 2 of Apex Legends (including start date, a new Legend named Wattson, a Titanfall 2 fan-favorite LMG, and a dragon), revealed where BioWare stands on Anthem, announced changes coming to the new FIFA and Madden games, and highlighted a bunch of new content for The Sims 4.

Outer Wilds Review – Extraterrestrial Investigation

For a game about interplanetary exploration, Outer Wilds can often feel incredibly small. Flying from one planet to the next takes a matter of seconds, making it easy to ping pong around the game’s singular solar system. The brevity of traveling through this handcrafted collection of areas to explore might seem strange at first–especially when the opening minutes of Outer Wilds place such a heavy emphasis on the importance of your mission to document the unknown. However, it doesn’t take long for your expectations of Outer Wilds to be completely flipped on their head, giving way to captivating mysteries to solve and difficult questions surrounding mortality to confront. These questions lead you on unforgettable adventures in which each piece of the story you unearth feels as rewarding as the last.

You play as a citizen of a race of four-eyed, jolly-looking aliens, and you have been selected as the next of your kin to take to the stars. Nestled in the cozy forests of a small planet called Timber Hearth, you and your brethren contemplate the same questions that you’ve likely thought of before. Just where did we come from? Have there been others before us? And if so, where are they now? These questions drive you to explore the solar system you’re in, risking your life in search of answers. Armed with nothing more than a spacesuit, a nifty language translator, and tools for surveying anything from distress signals to harmful invisible gases, you’re left to take flight in your crudely constructed spaceship and venture off in any direction.

Gallery image 1Gallery image 2Gallery image 3Gallery image 4Gallery image 5Gallery image 6Gallery image 7Gallery image 8Gallery image 9Gallery image 10

With suggestions that other life existed in this solar system before you, you’re tasked with finding evidence to support that claim. Dilapidated architecture from a forgotten age can be found on most planet surfaces, with translatable foreign texts allowing you to piece together the mystery of where these civilizations are today. Your exploration is restricted by a celestial ticking time bomb: The sun at the center of the solar system implodes after 22 minutes and sends you back to the same dreamy campsite on your home planet to start this Groundhog Day loop again. With each new run you can collect more pieces of Outer Wilds’ narrative puzzle, slowly piecing together what might be causing the rapid decline of your neighborhood star, before embracing each inevitable death.

Death isn’t detrimental in a traditional sense in Outer Wilds. In a way, it’s beautiful. The somber tune that plays moments before the light disappears from the solar system signals your death, but it’s also an indicator of how much you might have discovered in that one life. It’s satisfying to have a productive run that unlocks multiple new threads for you to follow up on in your next attempt, pushing you to new planets to explore and narrative puzzles to solve. Other times it’s just as poignant to accept an uneventful run and just embrace the gorgeous scenery around you. Sitting on top of a peak and watching the sun die out is oddly soothing after uneventful expeditions, letting you reflect on your misguided choices and realign yourself for the next journey.

Exploration and the knowledge you obtain with it is the only way to progress through Outer Wilds. As you come across clues and discoveries, they’re recorded in a useful log aboard your ship. These clues are stitched together and color-coded to help guide you along the various dangling threads of the story. The game’s open-ended structure lets you tackle whichever parts of the mystery you want to, in any order, before they inevitably start linking together to bring the bigger picture into focus. These links aren’t clear directions towards the next piece of the puzzle, but instead are suggestive nudges that help you determine when it’s safe to move on from one discovery to another. This helps make each of these discoveries feel earned while also avoiding potentially frustrating barriers to your progress.

Strong writing brings you into Outer Wilds’ world, and unearthing even the smallest bits of this larger story is a rewarding undertaking. Its myriad of uncoverable dialogue records are charming while always maintaining a purpose, giving you small nuggets of information to ponder even in the most seemingly throwaway conversations. The preserved exchanges between children might describe a game they created to pass the time in dark and gloomy catacombs beneath a planet’s surface, which contains a helpful clue for how to get to a hidden area. By contrast, you can also stumble upon the bleak distress signals that never reached their intended saviors or complex plans for alien contraptions that drove past civilizations to make alarmingly dangerous decisions. You grow attached to the recurring names in conversations and become invested in their stories, even when you know many of them don’t have happy endings.

Without an explicit guide to point you in the direction of your next great find, each new discovery feels like a hard-earned reward. You’ll slowly be able to piece together events taking place on other ends of the solar system, slowly letting your own theories make way for a clearer understanding of events that truly transpired before presenting even more questions. This loop of discovery drives you towards exploring every inch of every planet you can, each of which holds its own delightful little puzzles to solve.

No Caption ProvidedGallery image 1Gallery image 2Gallery image 3Gallery image 4

Outer Wilds features just a handful of planets and other celestial objects that you’re able to explore on foot, but no two are exactly alike. They each feature unique characteristics that present different challenges you need to overcome to simply explore them. The Hourglass Twins, for example, closely orbit the sun but stay dangerously close to one another, with the gravitational pull of one absorbing the sandy surface of the other and slowly unearthing new areas for you to explore over time. A fast-traveling comet known as the Interloper has an icy exterior that hides a labyrinth of caves underneath its crust, which can only be explored once it travels close enough to the sun for entrances to be melted open. An orbiting moon littered with erupting volcanoes that project volatile balls of lava into space makes simple surface exploration of Brittle Hollow treacherous. You have to uncover a way underneath the Hollow’s crust to safely traverse it, discovering previous civilizations that grappled with the same dangers seemingly eons ago.

Figuring out how to safely traverse each planet is an engaging puzzle to solve, especially when it requires an understanding of their positions within the solar system and at what times they’re best to tackle. Stumbling upon entrances to new areas by accident or observing mysterious behaviors when exploring a planet make each of these spaces more detailed and expansive than their small physical sizes suggest, and it’s even more surprising when many of them contain large cities hidden underneath their crusts waiting to be picked apart. The mechanical and visual variety of each of these planets makes exploring each new one a tantalizing treat.

It’s disappointing then that the rules governing simple movement and space flight in Outer Wilds are counter-intuitive to this curious poking and prodding of its world. Space flight in your ship and planetary surface exploration with your jetpack is strictly bound to the rules of physics. You need to wrestle with different gravitational magnitudes and directions as you navigate using thrusters that fire off in six directions, adding or subtracting to your motion in each associated direction.

The somber tune that plays moments before the light disappears from the solar system signals your death, but it’s also an indicator of how much you might have discovered in that one life.

It takes time to learn when to start applying reverse thrust on an approach to a planet or how to delicately jet upwards on a planet’s surface without accidentally breaking through the atmosphere and into space, but no matter how much you practice, these actions never feel completely natural. Small errors are punished with untimely, frustrating deaths. You can spend minutes waiting for the right time to navigate to a certain area, only to waste all of it over a mistake brought on by Outer Wilds’ unintuitive control scheme. It’s at odds with the rest of the game.

Outer Wilds’ deeply captivating narrative and plentiful mysteries push you further into exploring its richly varied and stunning solar system. The time loop you’re trapped in lets you craft bite-sized expeditions that all end up telling their own stories, irrespective of whether you make a monumental discovery or simply encounter a playful interaction. Having a tool to neatly document your discoveries helps you slowly piece together a tale filled with charming writing, and one that presents its own open-ended questions that add emotional heft to the numerous exchanges you parse through during your travels. By letting you chart your own course and piece together its mystery at your own pace, Outer Wilds makes each of its expeditions feel incredibly personal and absolutely unmissable.

Microsoft Teases Next-Gen Xbox Scarlet Reveal in Hidden Codes

Microsoft has been teasing a reveal for its next-gen systems in its E3 promos, with three separate videos hiding codes that, when put together, create the RGB code for Scarlet, the codename for Microsoft’s next Xbox consoles.

Via The Verge, Twitter user @Cr8Beyond was one of the first to piece together this hidden message. Xbox even sent the user a 1-month code for Xbox Game Pass, saying “Here’s a little something form

Continue reading…