Outriders Animated Trailer Explores the Origins of Enoch's Humans
People Can Fly's Outriders is one of the major new releases of next month and we've heard quite a bit about the story. Humanity travels to Enoch and after a mysterious storm, select members of the expedition gain super powers. But what are the origins of the expedition? A new animated trailer provides some answers.
As "No Turning Back" reveals, the expedition isn't humanity's best and brightest but the so-called rejects. The storm has turned them into something else entirely though as they fight for survival. In-game, you'll start in the Last City and venture to the wilderness in search of a strange signal, perhaps figuring out humanity's future along the way.
Make no mistake though – Outriders is a looter shooter with an emphasis on third person gunplay and abilities. Along with a meaty campaign, it will also have a post-game where players can earn better loot by taking on tough Expedition missions. It's out on April 1st for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, PC and Google Stadia.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge Announced – 4 Player Beat 'Em Up "Coming Soon"
Tribute Games and Dotemu have announced a new beat 'em up title, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge. Utilizing pixel art, it sees the Turtles returning in an action title reminiscent of 2007's TMNT on the Game Boy Advance. Check out the announcement trailer below, complete with sweet old-school animation.
The story sees Bebop and Rocksteady stealing tech for the next nefarious plan by Shredder and Krang. Naturally, the Turtles must stop them and will fight all kinds of foes, from the Foot Clan to Triceraton Warriors. Stages include Manhattan's rooftops, the sewers and even Dimension X. Each Turtle has their own unique play-style and abilities, and have been lovingly rendered in pixel art.
Up to four players can battle it out together (though the story can be played solo) and there will also be different vehicle sections. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge is in development for consoles and PC, though no release window was given beyond "Coming Soon." Stay tuned for more details in the coming months.
Wasteland 3 – Permadeath, Difficult Skill Checks, and More Now Live
Wasteland 3's patch 1.3.3, "Death and Taxes", is now available and introduces the highly requested Permadeath mode. Available in single-player only, it sees your party members dying if they're down for too long. No reviving or any of those shenanigans. Difficult Skill Checks are also available to encourage specializing different squad members.
It essentially allows for increasing checks to Skills, Attributes and Perception by +2 up to +10. Along with dialogue choices, it also applies to equipment so you'll need to be very careful about each squad-mates role. Fortunately, it's now possible to respec different party members as well. Just head to the Ranger HQ, go to Manage Squad and choose "Retrain." Of course, any Quirks, Cyborg Tech or Tarjan Machine perks can't be changed.
Retraining does come with a cost, which is also shared with recruiting new Rangers. While the first two are free, you'll need to spend $200 for subsequent recruits and respecs, which increases by 1.75x up to $3000. Other features of the patch include new customization options for characters like makeup, tattoos, masks, helmets and so on. Check out the full patch notes here for more details.
Additional Crash and Performance Fixes
- We've been continually working to improve stability on systems with low amounts of memory (older consoles, primarily) and this update resolves one of our most impactful issues. For those of you experiencing crashes after longer play sessions, we'd love for you to give this update a try and let us know if it resolved your issue. If not, we'd also like to hear from you on the inXile forums so we can continue to make improvements.
- We've taken a pass at textures across the game to either reduce or increase texture sizes to create a more consistent memory footprint. This should result in slightly more even performance.
- Additional misc. changes and fixes that should result in overall improved stability.
[PC] Added voice chat options to enable Push to Talk, show microphone input source, manage volume, or disable it entirely. The Push to Talk key can be customized in keyboard bindings.
Gameplay
- Game options now have descriptive text in case our very intelligently named options weren't clear enough.
- Fixed the Poindexter quirk for Rangers recruited from HQ. They'll now correctly receive their bonus skill points as intended… NERDS.
- Resolved an issue with the bonus Hit Chance from Leadership not increasing correctly as it's leveled up.
- We just made the Hoon Homestead always available from the world map regardless of choices and progression. So that better fix it.
- We screwed up the intercom before Vic and now we have unscrewed it.
- Resolved a softlock that could occur while arresting Vic.
- Fixed an issue where you sometimes couldn't save the game after a combat where you hacked a robot or tamed an animal. How does that even happen? Who knows. Well, someone does, just not me. Making games sounds hard.
Fortnite's New Season Will Begin With First Single Player Experience
Epic Games' Fornite has continued on with an incredible amount of cultural clout for years now. The game has become a melting pot for various pop culture and popular licenses. It's changed itself, sometimes radically, year to year, and it shows no signs of slowing down whatsoever. Now it's trying something else new, something that you probably don't expect: single player.
As detailed by Epic, the beginning of Chapter 2 Season 6 will see the finale of Zero Crisis and the conclusion of the mission of Agent Jones. Over the past few months, you've had to tune in at specific time periods to see cinematics detailing the story of Zero Crisis, but here there will be an actual playable experience, one that will be solo, that you can play whenever you log into the season. Alternatively, you'll also be able to watch the event online at a later date.
Fortnite is available now on all major platforms with the exception of Apple iOS. Season 6 will begin on March 16th with their solo Agent Jones adventure.
Tell My Why Chapter 1 is Now Free for Everyone
Dontnod Entertainment released Tell Me Why late last year for Xbox and PC, and as you'd expect from the people who made Life is Strange, it was a great game that told an emotionally charged story. Like most Dontnod games, it was also an episodic release, and if you've been on the fence about whether or not to give the game a go, now is the perfect time to do so. The developer has announced that the first chapter of the three chapter-long game is now free for everyone across both PC and Xbox.
Meanwhile, Chapters 2 and 3 of Tell Me Why are also currently being sold at discounted prices. Ordinarily sold for $20, they can now be purchased together for half off, at $10. It seems that unlike the first chapter being free, chapters 2 and 3 will be sold at a discounted rate only for two days- so if you should enjoy the first chapter and want to jump in on the rest of the game for a cheaper entry point, you'll only have the next couple of days to do so.
Tell Me Why is currently available on Xbox One and PC. Published as it was by Xbox Game Studios, it is, of course, also available via Xbox Game Pass across both platforms. You can read our review of the game through here.
Overwatch PachiMarchi Challenge Adds New Roadhog Skin, Available Till March 22nd
Along with an update that added 1440p/120 FPS support to Xbox Series X/S (but not PS5), Overwatch also has a new challenge live. It's the PachiMarchi Challenge, based on the somewhat-cute in-game mascot Pachimari. Available till March 22nd, it offers cosmetics, including a new PachiMarchi Roadhog skin, for those who rack up the wins.
At three wins, players receive a new player icon. Interestingly, six wins nets a new emote for Junkrat instead of just a generic spray. Nine wins nets the new Epic skin. Aside from Custom Games, wins in any of the game modes from Quick Play and Arcade to Competitive will apply so go wild.
Check out the trailer below to see the new skin in action (along with other oddities). Blizzard Entertainment hasn't commented on the lack of graphical options for the PS5 version. This could be akin to Activision's Call of Duty: Warzone which received enhancements on the Xbox Series X/S but not on PS5. We'll see if the situation changes for both titles in the coming months so stay tuned.
The Medium – Latest Update Adds Ultrawide and Super Ultrawide Support
Bloober Team's psychological horror game The Medium has been out for a few weeks now, but the Polish developer has continued to release fixes and updates for the game in the time since then. Most recently, patch 1.2 for the game went live across Xbox Series X/S and PC, and it brings about several changes and fixes.
Most of these are pretty ordinary (and not that major), including minor gameplay bug fixes, performance and accessibility improvements, and some other minor issues here and there. Most noticeably though, support for Ultrawide resolution (21:9) and Super Ultrawide resolution (32:9) has now also been added to the game. Bloober Team says that though it was hard to implement owing to the game's fixed cameras, they're happy to have been able to acquiesce to demands from fans and players.
"Due to the design of The Medium (fixed cameras), implementation was complicated – but we're pretty thrilled that we could get this done for you," the developer writes.
The Medium is currently available on Xbox Series X/S and PC. You can read our review of the game through here.
The Medium has been a financial success for Bloober Team right out the gate, and the developer is also already at work on their next big game. The project has apparently been in the works for over a year, and is being made with "a very famous publisher."
UPDATE NOTES:
- Minor gameplay bugfixes
- Minor performance improvements
- Accessibility improvements
- Fixed issues with fullscreen resolution changes in multimonitor scenarios
- Fixed issues with audio device changes
- UltraWide (21: 9) and SuperUltraWide (32: 9) support has been added.
Samurai Shodown Shows Off Cham Cham's Special Attacks With New Trailer
Samurai Shodown saw its grand revival in 2019, and the game is still going strong almost two years later. It's had a hefty post-launch amount of support. Not only is it getting a third season of characters, which you can read about through here, the game even now has a native next gen version. Now we get a quick look at one of the season 3 characters and all their special attacks.
The third season of characters was revealed at the beginning of this year, and one of the characters is Cham Cham. She serves as a sort of companion piece to another character, Tam Tam, who was in the base game's initial roster and is his younger sister. Cham Cham is a swift character, and the trailer below shows how quick that is, and uses a boomerang as a weapon, which can grow to massive proportions. Check it out below.
Samurai Shodown is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PC and Stadia. Cham Cham will be the first character of the third season, but as of now, there's no date for when to expect its release.
Nioh 2 – Team Ninja Looking Into PC Crash Issue
Update 1.27 went live recently for Team Ninja's Nioh 2, fixing issues with using the Burst Counter on 120 FPS mode. However, it seems that it also reintroduced a crash issue for PC players. When asked about the same on Twitter, the developer said it was "looking into" the cause of the issue.
Nioh 2 – The Complete Edition launched for PS4 and PC on February 5th while PS5 players received Nioh 2 Remastered – The Complete Edition. Though it ran fairly well on consoles, the PC version was beset with numerous issues like frame rate drops when Effect Quality was set to "High." Past updates have remedied the same, despite the issue not being completely eliminated, and update 1.27 added keyboard and mouse icons for the controls.
Team Ninja has committed to improving PC performance and other issues in future patches so we'll see how much longer it supports the title. After Nioh 2, the series has reached its "resting point" with a sequel not planned at the moment. As for what's next, stay tuned for more details.
Currently looking into what is causing this issue to some players.
— Team NINJA (@TeamNINJAStudio) March 9, 2021
Curved Space Will Run at 4K/120 FPS on Xbox Series X and PS5, 1440p/60 FPS on Xbox Series S
With the Xbox Series X/S and PS5 offering significantly more powerful hardware than their predecessors, it goes without saying that developers across the industry are going to leverage that additional power to improve their games in various ways. The most obvious improvements we're going to see (and have already begun seeing) will be to resolution and frame rates, and another upcoming game that will boast such enhancements is Only by Midnight's upcoming twin stick shooter Curved Space.
Speaking to GamingBolt in a recent interview, Curved Space lead designer and Only by Midnight president Andrew Czarnietzki confirmed that on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, the game will run at 4K and 120 FPS, while on Xbox Series S, the game will run at 1440p and 60 FPS. Meanwhile, on the PS4 and Xbox One, the game will target 1080p and 60 FPS.
Czarnietzki also explained that Curved Space will have two major graphical modes that will determine "how much we are leveraging the GPU for our force-field-based physics and energy particles."
"This lets us also have an action-based game on Nintendo Switch, while scaling up the detail for PS5 and Xbox Series X," Czarnietzki explained. "This also applies to PC: you're going to have a great experience on anything from a moderate computer getting pretty long in the tooth to the most cutting-edge build."
Curved Space is due out later this year for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Our full interview with Czarnietzki will be going live soon, so stay tuned for that.