PCGamesN Saturday, October 1, 2022 1:21 PM  Medieval city builder Manor Lords combines the peaceful industry of settlement management with large-scale battles in the style of Total War. The gorgeous strategy game created by solo developer Slavic Magic is being published by strategy and city building game specialists Hooded Horse, and you can get your hands on a demo of the city building side of things during Steam Next Fest in early October. RELATED LINKS: Best city builders, Best PC strategy games |
PCGamesN Saturday, October 1, 2022 12:10 PM  The Terraria 1.4.4 update Labor of Love is here, and one of the most fun new items introduced in the latest patch for one of the best crafting games is a fully pilotable drone. The Kwad Racer Drone is a fast, flighty thing that can really zoom around the map - if you can wrap your head around its sensitive controls. Of course, someone who's had a bit more time to practise is Re-Logic artist Jim 'Jaxrud' Kjexrud, and he's been showcasing his skills to fans. RELATED LINKS: The best Terraria mods, Terraria happiness guide, Terraria bosses guide |
Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed Saturday, October 1, 2022 6:32 PM  What would be the most fitting end for Shenmue's anime adaptation? To be cancelled with its story incomplete, of course. And so it is: Shenmue The Animation isn't getting a season two. |
Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed Saturday, October 1, 2022 5:54 PM  I've no idea how many Steam Decks Valve have sold, but cor: it sure seems to be a success in terms of the diversity of games people are enjoying on it. Yesterday, the official Steam Deck Twitter account shared a list of the most played games on the handheld PC gaming machine in September. The list includes Vampire Survivors, Elden Ring, Stardew Valley, Cyberpunk 2077, Hades and No Man's Sky. |
Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed Saturday, October 1, 2022 5:04 PM  Skyrim has been released and re-released several times and is available for almost anything that plays games at this point. As of two days ago, it's even now available DRM-free from digital retailer GOG.com. The GOG release is "entirely playable offline" and includes all the Anniversary Edition content "without the need for Creation Club access." |
Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed Saturday, October 1, 2022 4:22 PM  Tomorrow, October 2nd, is the last full day during which the Overwatch 1 severs will be online. Blizzard's first-person shooter will switch off at 8am PT on the 3rd (4pm BST) ahead of the release of the free-to-play Overwatch 2 on October 4th. How do we feel about that? |
Twinfinite Saturday, October 1, 2022 12:44 PM A reddit user discovered how much it would cost for new players to purchase all Overwatch 1 cosmetics! |
Twinfinite Saturday, October 1, 2022 12:25 PM Fond out more about what the Quirk Singularity Doomsday Theory is in My Hero Academia. |
Siliconera Saturday, October 1, 2022 4:00 PM
It's still the early days of Bandai Namco's new team shooter Gundam Evolution - the game came out for PC about ten days ago as of this writing - but things are already looking up. The time it spent in testing wasn't wasted, either: Already quite refined, the play experience is smooth almost to the point of feeling frictionless. Bandai Namco has learned, and learned well from the example of Overwatch and its many copycats, and landed the essentials with aplomb. For those uninitiated, Gundam Evolution is Bandai Namco's attempt to adapt one of the most iconic anime franchises of all time to the rigors of a free-to-play, team-based "hero shooter". Rather than secret agents, superheroes, or elite soldiers, Evolution plumbs the decades of Gundam history for inspiration. As of launch, 17 mobile suit mecha from a wide range of Gundam series form the playable roster. Twelve are playable from the beginning, with five more unlockable by various means (more on that later).
Every Mobile Suit (MS) is unique, with bespoke weapons, abilities, and tactics. Rather than Overwatch's role-based system, Gundam Evolution embraces a more freeform approach to team-building. There can't be more than one of any given MS on a team, but there's enough overlap in style that you'll find something reasonably similar if you find your favorite suit taken. Even then, every unit is unique, and learning how to play as them and play against them is key to mastery. Of course, each Mobile Suit does fall into a certain preferred style defined by its loadout and stats. Absolute units like Sazabi and the Unicorn Gundam love to mix it up in team fights, with Sazabi out front absorbing damage with its shield and closing in to use its beam shotgun. Unicorn suppresses enemies with its rapid-fire beam gatling, while helping its team just by being there through a passive heal and armor boost ability. Yet both are quite different. Sazabi can immediately jet to its thrown axe or a teammate, giving it surprising mobility and the ability to get right in an enemy's face. Unicorn's size and lack of a shield make it far more vulnerable in a stand-up fight, so it's reliant on keeping in a crowd of friendlies and using its Shield Bits to tag faraway snipers lining up a bead. One of the new unlockable suits, the Mahiroo, is the only one in the game with a grenade launcher, and is quite valuable for its ability to spam areas with indirect fire.
Gundam Evolution is also surprisingly fast and deadly for the alleged size of its giant robot cast. Every unit has one or more boosts to quickly dodge out of the way, and many units have access to precision "hitscan" weapons that reward accurate aim (the GM Sniper II can outright down the more fragile suits in a single headshot). In other words, the time-to-kill can be brutally short. There are some mitigating measures in place to account for skill and coordination. Getting "killed" leaves your MS disabled for a few seconds, allowing a teammate a brief window to revive you (support suits like the Methus and GM Sniper can even do this from a distance). And swapping suits can change a strategy entirely, potentially letting you turn an oppressive situation around with bold offense. There are, however, some balance concerns to be found. Though the relative dominance of the melee Mobile Suits (Barbatos in particular) has been toned down somewhat, the three have an extremely high skill ceiling and, in the hands of capable players, can utterly oppress an enemy team with few direct counterstrategies. Exia in particular seems a little too capable of jetting its way out of consequences when its pilot makes a mistake. The new melee suit, Zaku II (Melee), has nearly medium-range reach on the shockwaves from its axe, and even has a move that makes it invincible (if immobile). In a game with many sources of precision damage, melee suits need to feel high-risk; at the moment, they feel a bit too safe.
More concerning than any transient balance issue, though, is the way the Gundam Evolution executes its monetization model. The game is free-to-play, but those 12 initial suits are all a new player gets access to for a considerable period of time if they don't want to pay up. Bandai Namco's added the triple-threat of monetization methods to the game: A battle pass (with premium and free tiers), an item shop selling bundles of cosmetics and suit unlocks, and a gacha/loot box system that lets players roll the dice for cosmetics. The game's premium currency is Evo Coins, paid for with real money and earned in small amounts via the Battle Pass. Evo Coins can be used to buy things off the item store and roll the gacha. Freebies are few and relatively far between. Players can unlock a new suit by paying "Capital" (a.k.a. blue points), which is earned from completing Beginner's Challenges and Battle Pass levels. But the current Battle Pass and Beginner Challenge slates only reward enough Capital to unlock two suits at the end of the grind. There are five unlockable suits. Worse still, ranked play is outright unavailable to players on the free tier without a considerable grind to get their player level up. Those who upgrade their Battle Pass to "Premium" unlock ranked play immediately. It's a move in poor taste that also warps the landscape of available players for ranked mode because even at the bottom-tier bronze ranks you'll have a mix of completely new players who chose to upgrade their Battle Passes and players that have tons of experience but couldn't unlock Ranked Mode until they'd done their time in the casual playlist mines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xll1G4pW4tU Even now, after some adjustments to the system, it can take quite a while to get into ranked matches above the first ranking tier. All in all, if you just downloaded Gundam Evolution and want to jump straight into ranked play with all the available suits, you're looking at an outlay of about $60 USD (about $50 in Evo Coins to purchase the "Deluxe Pack" that unlocks the 5 locked suits, and $10 to upgrade to a premium Battle Pass). I personally don't think it's unreasonable to pay something to a free-to-play game. At the moment, though, it feels like Gundam Evolution's potential is being hamstrung by its monetization. New players might be turned away by the notion they're getting a second-class experience if they don't pay up, and players who do pay don't reap the benefits of the large audience a free-to-play game can attract. With luck, Bandai Namco will rethink some of these moves and focus on Gundam Evolution as more of a long-term concern. The moment-to-moment play experience is simply too much fun to deserve to be weighed down by the gravity of business. The post Gundam Evolution's Team Shooter Soul is Weighed Down by Monetization's Gravity appeared first on Siliconera. |
Siliconera Saturday, October 1, 2022 3:00 PM
Ed Sheeran's "Celestial" will appear in Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet. You can watch the entire music video and listen to the full version of the song on services such as YouTube. The music video is interspersed with stylized cartoons of Pokemon. As he goes about his day, they appear to either help him or wreak havoc. You can watch "Celestial" with Japanese subtitles from Ed Sheeran's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23g5HBOg3Ic It is unknown in what context this song will play in Scarlet and Violet. It is also unclear if the full song will be available in game. As of the time of writing, "Celestial" is #7 on YouTube's trending list for music. It has already accumulated over 2.1 million views on September 30, 2022, though the video came out on September 29. Aside from stylized cartoony version of the Pokemon (courtesy of artist Yu Nagaba) appearing in the music video, there is also a sequence that references Pokemon: The First Movie. Ed, instead of Ash, leaps between Mew and Mewtwo's fight while Pokemon from the first generation cheer him on. The starters from the Galar region also make cameo appearances as Ed's Pokemon. Ed Sheeran, the singer behind hit singles such as "Shape of You" and "Perfect," will be joining Toby Fox as a music collaborator for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. Fox, who is famous for Undertale, revealed in June 2022 that he helped to compose some of the music for the game. Pokemon Scarlet and Violet will come out on the Nintendo Switch on November 18, 2022. The post Ed Sheeran Song Will Appear in Pokemon Scarlet, Violet appeared first on Siliconera. |
Siliconera Saturday, October 1, 2022 1:00 PM
Good news to the players who played the now-defunct Immortals: Muv-Luv Alternative – the game will re-launch in Spring 2023. It originally came out in March 2022 before shutting down almost immediately due to bugs that made the game unplayable. The re-launched version of the game will be one that improves on the base of the original. [Thanks, KaroshiMyriad!] According to the announcement on the Immortals: Muv-Luv Alternative website, the development team will work with NextNinja to publish the title. NextNinja has worked on mobile titles such as Grand Summoners, Touhou LostWord, and and Warau Arsnotoria. As the new game will essentially be an upgraded version of the original, it'll count as a new release. When the title originally came out, it was only available for a short period of time before critical issues forced the developers to shut down the game. Originally, the shutdown was only supposed to last for about a month. aNCHOR did not officially specify the exact nature of the issues, nor explain the decision to extend the shutdown. Commentary from the time suggests that one issue may have been related to an exploit that allowed players to earn unlimited amounts of premium currency. Immortals: Muv-Luv Alternative will come out on iOS and Android mobile devices. It will be an action RPG with characters from the Muv-Luv series making an appearance. The post Immortals: Muv-Luv Alternative Will Re-Launch in Spring 2023 appeared first on Siliconera. |
Gamer Empire Saturday, October 1, 2022 5:40 PM The death mechanic in Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord is one of the most entertaining features added to the sequel. It allows the player, after […] |
Latest Games on Play iDev Games Saturday, October 1, 2022 2:37 PM Jump on platforms and avoid dangerous objects to attain a goal of 1000 carrots... |