We finally have a release date for the last free content pack for the excellent indie Metroidvania, Hollow Knight, Gods & Glory will release on August 23rd on both Steam and the Nintendo E Shop.
Gods & Glory is a boss rush mode of sorts that pits the player against a series of enhanced bosses, returning from previous encounters found within the rest of the game. We’ve only seen a scant few encounters from Gods & Glory during Nintendo’s E3 treehouse live-stream but we do know that the Moss Charger enemy is being upgraded into a boss, for example. Gods & Glory will also add a brand new explorable area to the world map called God Home.
Also announced at the same time are a physical release of the second Hollow Knight soundtrack Gods & Nightmares on physical vinyl and digital streaming platforms. Fan Gamer will also be releasing a very huggable and cuddly talking Grub plushie that stands at 10 inches. I JUST WANT TO HUG IT!
Indie platforming darling Ori and The Blind Forest is getting a sequel, subtitled Willow of the Wisps, and it will launch in 2019 as revealed at the Microsoft E3 press conference. We got just under two minutes of gameplay footage from Willow of the Wisps and what was shown was very impressive. Featuring a bright. colorful and whimsical style that stays true to the 2D art style of the original it looks like OATBF: WOW is going to be a platforming title that many will be talking about before it comes out.
The original Ori and the Blind Forest was developed by Moon Studios and took over 4 years to complete. It was released for Windows and Xbox One in 2015 and was met with critical acclaim. Check out the trailer for Willow of the Wisps below, although a word of warning for those with Arachnophobia that there is at least one spider featured in this gameplay footage.
Fans of 2016’s Final Fantasy XV got confirmation at the Penny Arcade Expo that a season 2 of downloadable content is upcoming alongside the unexpected news that the multiplayer focused expansion, titled Comrades, will be receiving a major update this summer and a stand-alone release.
We’ve known for a while now – since the release and confirmation of March’s FFXV: Royal Edition – that brand new episodic DLC episodes could be a possibility.
Thanks to ResetERA User Reyes, who provided high quality copies of slides presented during the Final Fantasy XV: The Dawn of the Future panel that the next season of FFXV DLC will include:
Episode Ardyn: “The Conflict of the Sages”
Episode Aranea: “The Beginning of the End”
Episode Lunafreya: “The Choice of Freedom”
Episode Noctis: “The Final Strike”
All four of Season 2’s episodes will be directed by the same director as Season 1’s Episode: Ignis. An alternate ending to the game will be presented in Episode III: Notics – “The Final Strike”, Season 2 of DLC is set to begin at the end of this year and continue into the summer of 2019.
Comrades, an add-on expansion from Season 1 which allows players to create their custom avatar and take them during Chapter 13 of the story will receive multiple updates as well as a standalone version that can be played without the base game.
Here’s the full DLC schedule as presented at the panel:
I’m glad the rumoured (and honestly absurd) Final Fantasy XV: Versus episode ended up being nothing more than fan speculation. With almost two years of post-release content, now multiple Season Passes and a collection of free updates, FFXV has improved markedly from the initial release. I know fans wanted the development team to embrace Nomura’s original script and ideas – but I think expanding the characters and world of XV is a much better choice.
Spike Chunsoft has revealed their full 2018 slate of games coming out for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and Windows PC. New entries in the Fire Pro Wrestling franchise, Pixeljunk Monsters series and the acclaimed visual novel 428: Shibuya scramble are all coming soon.
First up is a new entry in the Pixel Junk Monsters series:
Pixeljunk Monsters 2 Platform PlayStation 4 Release Summer 2018
Features:
Local & Online Play – Maximize the fun by playing with your friends on the couch or online!
Close Encounters – Multiply the suspense by toggling your POV from top-down to an in-your-face view!
3D Stop Motion Graphics – Immerse yourself in Gati Gati Island like never before as the animation takes full advantage of the power of the PS4™!
428: Shibuya Scramble Platform PS4 | Windows PC Release 2008 (originally), Summer 2018 (N.A / Europe localization)
Originally released in 2008 this murder mystery is finally being localized for North America & Europe. Tasking players with investigating the lives of 5 unique protagonists during a 10 hour time-frame this intriguing title boasts over 5 different endings a weird mix of live-action video, text and still image narration.
Features
A Mosaic of Mediums – Unlike traditional visual novels, the narrative is presented with a palette of different mediums, combining text, live action stills, and video sequences.
Non-linear Storytelling – Five Protagonists. 10 Hours. Decisions made in one character’s story can affect the story of another character in unforeseen ways, culminating in a total of up to 50 different endings!
Famitsu Fresh – One of the very few titles to ever receive a perfect score (40/40) from Japanese video game magazine Famitsu Weekly!
Fire Pro Wrestling World Platform PlayStation 4 Release Summer 2018
Last on our tour of Spike Chunsoft’s 2018 line-up is another entry in the decades old Fire Pro Wrestling series of games. Fire Pro Wrestling World is set to feature a story mode that will allow players to customize every facet of their matches. Different sets of rules will also be available ranging from deathmatch, to steel cage matches to even a set based upon the popular MMA style of fighting.
Features:
Play Online – Organize exhibition matches, tournaments, leagues, championship bouts and battle royals with players from around the world.
Mix Up the Rules – Modes include Deathmatch (steel cage, barbed wire or landmines), MMA rules and no-holds barred Gruesome Fighting.
Unlimited Customization – Create your dream wrestler from over a thousand devastating moves and even more body parts to battle for custom championship belts. Personalize the ring, mat logos and even the referee!
Realistic Simulation – Give your creations personalities with a robust CPU logic system that defines their every action. Does your wrestler play to the crowd, or play dirty? You provide actors for the ringside drama.
Tekken 7 patch version 1.12 is now available on both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One as well as on Windows PC. General improvements to be found in this latest patch include better stability for online matches, across all platforms and automatic capture of Shadowplay highlights for Windows PC using Geforce graphics cards when certain conditions are met.
FFXV Noctis Lucis Caelum Pack includes the playable Noctis fighter, a fighting arena based upon the Hammerhead Station from Chapter 1, 5 unique costumes for Noctis to wear and the “Apocalypsis Noctis Remix” BGM track.
Check out a video of all of Noctis’ moves and combos which I’ve embedded below.
Plastic army infantry simulator and indie spiritual successor to the long dormant Army Men franchise, The Mean Greens will be receiving the much requested addition of online/offline bots in a future update. This news isn’t particularly new, the development of bots was originally revealed on Christmas Day but given that The Mean Greens is a smaller title with a very small player-base I thought it’d be a good reminder to our readers who maybe haven’t had a chance to play the game.
Supporting modes like free-for-all deathmatch and team death-match, The Mean Greens casts players as the tiny army soldiers that some of us may remember from childhood. Amusingly the arenas can range from lovingly crafted domestic settings like the inside of a bathroom, to toy castles constructed from wooden blocks to the inside of an aquarium.
I’ve enjoyed my time with The Mean Greens: Plastic Warfare, so much so that I even bought my own copy after playing it at a few conventions. Sadly with player counts sometimes dipping into the single digits it can be difficult to find a single server that is populated enough to start a match. Here’s hoping that the eventual addition of bots will make The Mean Greens a little less barren.
Today Bungie outlined exactly how they’ll be improving Destiny 2 over the next couple of months. In a brand new roadmap and feature breakdown the Destiny 2 outlined plans for update 1.1.3 (Feb), 1.1.4 (March) and 1.2.0 (May). Some additions are small but should have been present from the launch in my opinion – namely PC Public Chat, tweaks to the shader system and Heroic Strike Modifiers. Others like unique Nightfall Rewards, Quit penalties in the crucible and Iron Banner 6 v 6 will have a larger impact on Destiny 2’s playability.
Perhaps the largest of all of these planned changes (and the most complex from a player standpoint) is the “sandbox” changes. This might just sound like adjustments to the large open PVE sandbox that Bungie spent so many years creating but in reality it is a bunch of smaller adjustments to weapon damage, player movement, player health, respawn time and other factors that will provide players with more “hero moments”, especially in Crucible matches.
Their blog post does note that not all of these changes may make their way in to the final 1.1.4 Patch at the end of March but overall when combined these changes should make crucible and P.V.E a lot more interesting.
Some of the individual changes that compose the “Sandbox” adjustments include:
– Faster attack animations.
– Increased Super ability re-charge time.
– Higher overall maximum speed cap.
– Buffs to underutilized weapon types like Shotguns, Fusion Rifles, Hand Canons and Sniper Rifles.
– Major changes to the Arcstrider.
More of the changes involved in the Sandbox adjustments are available in the blog post. Alongside this three month roadmap Bungie also revealed that virtually no new P.V.E content will be making its way into the game until the new Raid tier drops with 1.2.0 at the end of May. Below you will find the full roadmap as posted on the Bungie blog.
Ubisoft’s year old open world third person shooter set in a post-federal government Manhatten, Tom Clancy’s The Division now has a free trial available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Windows PC via Uplay. After downloading the client brand new agents are able to play for free until level 8 or after eight hours have elapsed. In terms of the character level cap this is the exact same level cap that was used during the games’ alpha & beta tests.
Players on Xbox One have had access to the trial since the end of last week while those on Sony’s console will have to wait a few more days from now, as The Division’s trial will not go live on the PlayStation Network until March 9th.
If you haven’t checked out last year’s mega-hit (and subsequent abandoned ghost town) The Division then now might be the perfect time. When Ubisoft released patch 1.6 in January they did a lot to address player criticism when it came to The Dark Zone, which has been a massive haven for hackers & cheaters.
If you are intended to play on PC, make sure your rig meets the recommended specs below. Regardless of what your platform of choice is you are in for a massive download.
Recommended PC System Requirements:
OS: Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (64-bit versions only)
Processor: Intel Core i7-3770, AMD FX-8350, or better.
The streets of the desolated New York City in Tom Clancy’s The Division seemed barren for months until this falls 1.4 patch which saw thousands of agents descend into the chaos filled streets once more thanks to a number of positive changes to the game by Ubisoft & Massive Entertainment. Now the devs hope to not only retain players but provide lapsed agents with even more of a reason to come back to the game as they drop the next paid expansion – Last Stand.
Manhattan’s Dark Zone was supposed to be a bit of a WildWest with the possibility of rogue agents killing you and enhanced NPCs that safeguard some of the games’ most coveted loot. Unfortunately the experience never quite lived up to this promise – thanks in part of a number of folks using auto-aim and other hacks on PC and players trepidation in fighting each other, many simply felt that grouping up together would provide a better experience than facing off versus one another.
With 1.6 Dark Zone areas 7 through 9 will finally be available for agents who are the appropriate level / gear level. These brand new modes will function like the existing Dark Zones 1 –6 with new groups of roaming enemies, new landmarks and a challenging progression that increases in difficulty the further north your agent wanders in DZ 7 thru 9. Massive Entertainment will also finally allow us to fast travel between Dark Zone entry locations – rather than traveling to the closest safe house.
Here’s an interesting little quote from the official dev blog about how extraction has changed in the new Dark Zone areas:
“The new Landmarks can have multiple waves of enemies spawning after you’ve killed the initial NPC enemies.Clearing Landmarks will now award you with additional loot placed directly into your inventory, bypassing the need to extract it.“
Alongside these new Dark Zone areas are brand new contaminated areas where your built-in filter will not be able to completely protect you. Players will have to manage their health as well as their ammunition stocks if they’re going to be able to take out the unique Elite Cleaner NPCs that will spawn in the new contained zones before their health runs out. Elite Cleaners will be a world spawn that will occur in the new Dark Zones approximately every hour or so.
A new difficulty is also coming for those players who feel that they might have mastered all of the challenges and activities that the base game has to offer. The legendary difficulty is designed to be the hardest challenge on offer within Tom Clancy’s The Division and will challenge even those who have completed the Heroic Incursions. Legendary difficulty will be available on three specific missions initially: WarrenGate Power Plant, Napalm Production Site and Times Square.
Here is how Ubisoft described the new Heroic content which has been re-worked from the ground up to provide a challenging experience:
“You won’t be fighting the same enemies you usually fight in those missions, though. All the previous content has been taken out and replaced with new, powerful and much smarter LMB enemies that use more advanced tactics against you and your team.“
Head on to the Ubisoft Blog over for exhaustive details about Tom Clancy’s The Division V1.6 including more details about the Dark Zone enhancements, difficulty levels and Gear Set changes that will affect all characters regardless of level or expansion pass. The devs also went through a lot of detail surrounding the upcoming changes to skill power and how that will affect the healing meta currently used by the community, if you are a serious player it is certainly worth the read.
Warner Bros Interactive is assigning their veteran LEGO cop Chase McCain to another adventure through LEGO City with the current generation re-release of 2013’s previously Wii U exclusive LEGO City Undercover.
LEGO City Undercover is an open world city exploration titles that allows players to guide McCain through 20 unique districts filled with both minor crimes, collectables and story missions to keep the detective busy. Over 100 different vehicles roam the streets of LEGO City with a number of different categories including motorcycles, helicopters, sports cars, trucks and some truly exotic rides. LEGO City Undercover wouldn’t do the franchise justice without dozens of movie references and allusions to pop culture that allow the LEGO games to be enjoyed by gamers of all ages.
“It’s hard to find faults with this game. I loved it! For long time gamers or youth, there is content to be enjoyed here. From movie parodies, to just the comedy in general, the writing is fun, clever, and keeps you interested throughout the game. “
Make sure to check out the embedded trailer below for the cross platform version:
New gameplay footage from Bioware’s next space RPG adventure Mass Effect Andromeda will be shown at Nvidia’s Consumer Electronics Show keynote event on January 4th. The confirmation of a brand new gameplay trailer, which will reportedly focus on in-game environments, comes via the official Mass Effect Twitter account.
Here is the tweet that confirmed the brand new gameplay segment to be shown during CES:
Here is Nvidia’s official description of their upcoming keynote which will also be live-streamed:
“This January, NVIDIA will kick off CES and usher in a new year of technology innovation when co-founder and CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, takes the stage to give the preshow keynote address on January 4, 2017, 6:30 p.m. PST, of the industry’s most exciting tech unveilings in artificial intelligence (AI), self-driving cars, and gaming.”
We’ve known about the existence of Mass Effect: Andromeda for quite a while – with first word of the project coming over four years ago on “N7 Day” back in 2012. Since then EA & Bioware have been quite open about the development of the game, showcasing early engine technology and animation reels at E3 2014 before officially unveiling the game’s title at last year’s E3. More recently they released the first gameplay trailer from Andromeda, which you can watch below.
Mass Effect Andromeda is expected to be on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4 Pro, Xbox One and Windows PC Via Origin.
THQ Nordic has launched their cross-platform RPG title centered around the fantasy staple race The Dwarves on Xbox One, Windows PC and PlayStation 4 alongside a brand new music video by long-running German metal band Blind Guardian to celebrate the launch of the game.
Players take on the role of Dwarvan smith & scholar, the heroic Tungdill, as he builds a group of companions as he tries to save the land of Gridlegard and save the races of Men, Elves and Dwarves.
Players and their group of chosen companions are able to take on hundreds of foes with 15 playable heroes across a multi hour campaign. During these tactical challenges The Dwarves will fight against armies of other fantasy races like orcs, zombies, dark wizards, elves and hordes of the undead. Developer KING ART promises that these battles will rattle player’s brains – they’ll have to plan out their next moves in real-time in order to overcome their foes.
Here are the recommended specs for the Windows PC version:
Currently The Dwarves is available for 10% off on Steam for $44.99 CDN. The console editions retail for oddly specific price of $53.49 on the PlayStation Network and $33.99 CDN on Xbox One. For some reason the price of this title isn’t consistent at all across platforms.
Respawn Entertainment’s absolutely excellent first person mecha shooter Titanfall 2 will be getting a limited time multiplayer trial for PS4, Xbox One and Windows PC via the Origin Client. Players who subscribe to the Origin Access (PC) or EA Access (Xbox One) can start the multiplayer trial – which is the full multiplayer suite – on November 30th, with everyone else getting access to the trial on December 1st. This time limited multiplayer trial will run until the end of next weekend, December 4th.
A brand new map, Angel City, will also be available for Titanfall 2 on November 30th for pilots who pre-ordered the game, everyone else will get access to the new map before the end of the trial on December 3rd.The remainder of the December 3rd DLC drop will include the Wingman Elite Pistol, six new Titan kits and a new unlockable pilot execution. All of Titanfall 2’s DLC will be provided for free on all platforms.
It turns out that Respawn Entertainment posted an official blog post describing the multiplayer trial thusly:
“Titanfall 2 will host a free trial of the game’s full multiplayer offering. The trial* will begin for EA Access and Origin Access members on November 30th, and become available for all players starting December 2nd on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Origin for PC. This will feature a full offering including all maps, modes, weapons and more including brand new content from Angel City’s Most Wanted DLC on December 3rd. “
Also as the blog post points out, any progress made by trial users make will carry over to the full version should they choose to buy it:
“Progress from the trial carries over to the full game when you upgrade, so you can keep going right where you left off.”
Sony has brought their previously PlayStation device exclusive streaming service PlayStation Now to compatible Windows PC & devices the company has announced.
PlayStation Plus allows subscribers to access more than 400 PS3 games that can be streamed directly to either a PlayStation or Windows device as long as it meets the minimum requirements. If you’ve always wanted to sample previously PlayStation exclusives like Heavy Rain, Uncharted. Ratchet & Clank, The Last of Us and a wide variety of third party games and don’t own a PS4 this is pretty much your only option.
Windows PC owners (and presumably users of Surface devices that match the minimum specs) can start their streaming experience for as little as $19.99 USD a month. After installing the PS Now client you can hook up a Dual-shock 4 via Micro-USB cable to get started or wait until the wireless USB dongle is released on September 8th.
PC Minimum Specifications:
Windows 7 (SP 1), 8.1 or 10.
3.5 GHz Intel Core i3 or 3.8 GHz
AMD A10 or faster.
300 MB or more;
2 GB or more of RAM.
Sound card; USB port
Alongside today’s release of PlayStation Plus on Windows devices Sony also added six new titles to the PlayStation Now line-up including:
Mafia II
Tomb Raider Game of the Year Edition
Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch
Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution
Heavy Rain
Borderlands: Ultimate Edition
Castlevania will also be coming to PlayStation Plus just in time for October:
“Castlevania: Harmony of Despair — Dracula returns in Castlevania: Harmony of Despair. Featuring the classic fast paced 2D, side scrolling action the series is known for, fan favorite vampire hunters from across the series will join forces to return Dracula, the Lord of Darkness, to his eternal slumber.”
Image Credit: Sony Computer Entertainment America, (C) Sony – Reproduced for Fair Use Purposes
Last year’s Star Wars Battlefront reboot will receive its third add-on DLC in just a few weeks. We’ve known for a while that players would be taking to the lower orbit above the Death Star to fight alongside Luke or Vader and now we’ve got some more details about $14.99 DLC – which two new heroic units will be joining, two of the new vehicles and a brand new mechanics for the Death Star’s included maps.
Players will build up a separate experience level tied to the individual maps, based upon the level earned your objectives will change. In example: a player with low experience may fight above the Death Star while a more experienced pilot may take on the icon Trench Run from A New Hope.
New Vehicles
Darth Vader’s Advanced Tie Fighter
Luke’s Episode IV Red 5 X-Wing
New Map Mechanics
Dynamic map objectives based upon unique map-based experience
No specific launch date for the Death Star expansion has been confirmed yet, however it is expected to be launched either in late August or early September for Season’s Pass holders. It will be released two weeks later for everyone else on Xbox Live, PlayStation Network and EA Origin for Windows PC.
