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4 CommentsDestiny's Iron Banner is back right now
Destiny's on-again-off-again multiplayer event, the Iron Banner, is now live with Control as the game type, developer Bungie announced today.
Bungie had put the Iron Banner, as well as the Trials of Osiris, on hold last week after players discovered an exploit that allowed them to generate unlimited ammunition for some of Destiny's most powerful weapons.
"We're pleased to report that our work on that front is done, and [that Lord Saladin] has been granted clearance to set up shop at his usual haunt in the Tower," said Bungie in a blog post.
This week's Iron Banner will run until the next weekly reset, which will occur at 5 a.m ET on Tuesday, May 31. Iron Banner combatants will be able to earn gauntlets (including PlayStation-exclusive ones), chest pieces, sidearms and fusion rifles....
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0 Comments7 Days to Die comes to consoles on June 28
7 Days to Die, the survival horror crafting game from The Fun Pimps, will be released June 28 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, publisher Telltale Games announced today.
The Fun Pimps launched 7 Days to Die on Linux, Mac and Windows PC via Steam Early Access in December 2013, while Telltale's publishing arm is bringing the game to consoles. The PS4 and Xbox One versions of 7 Days to Die will include a new mode: split-screen local multiplayer.
7 Days to Die will be released both digitally and at retail in North America on June 28. In Europe, only the digital version will launch on June 28; the game will be available July 1 at retail. It will cost $29.99. PS4 and Xbox One pre-order customers will receive a set of five skins based on characters from Telltale franchises, including Lee...
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19
May 25, 2016
Designing Mirror’s Edge: The making of a franchise
Go behind the scenes with DICE on the creation of Mirror’s Edge and Mirror’s Edge Catalyst.
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1 CommentHitman's next episode heads for Morocco next week
Hitman's next mission takes place in Africa, a first for the series, Square Enix and developer Io Interactive announced this morning. The episode launches on May 31.
In this episode, Agent 47 is in the ancient Moroccan city of Marrakesh, tracking a rogue general who is plotting a coup, and a private financier holed up in the Swedish embassy. In all of his world travels over the 16-year history of the Hitman franchise, this marks 47's first trip to Africa.
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Hitman Review
According to an Io spokesperson, the new episode will focus on "diversity and contrasts" as 47 scopes out bustling marketplaces and a more minimalist foreign embassy. New tools and weapons are also promised, with which players can plan various paths to successful assassinations.
The...
Opinion
28 CommentsOverwatch's most interesting trait can be its hardest to get used to
Overwatch is, in broad terms, a hero-based first-person shooter. You pick your hero, you play the round and you attempt to use each character's abilities to their fullest. But Overwatch's most interesting wrinkle is also the hardest to get used to: You can switch characters at any time.
This is part of the reason the game isn't free-to-play, according to Blizzard. "We really made the decision on the business model based on what we thought was right for the gameplay," game director Jeff Kaplan told Polygon at Blizzcon last year. "If you've played a lot of Overwatch, you know that hero-switching [mid-match] is a core part of it — it's a really fun dynamic part. The difference maker between ... Overwatch and other games is the fluidity in the team compositions and matching what the other...
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36 CommentsThe Division's latest update is kind of a disaster
Tom Clancy's The Division launched its second high-profile update just yesterday, unleashing a plague of game breaking bugs across multiple platforms. Some users are even reporting missing characters.
The big release — called update 1.2 or Conflict — contains new player-versus-player and player-versus-environment content, as well as a second centerpiece raid called Clear Sky. Many users, including Polygon staff, are experiencing persistent issues with stability and matchmaking in multiple game modes.
One of the PvE systems, called High Value Targets, relies on a new currency called Intel. But when some players turn in their hard-won Intel, HVT missions refuse to unlock. When they do unlock, named bosses often fail to materialize, leaving players empty-handed. The only solution seems...
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45 CommentsBattleborn cuts price and rolls out a new character as Overwatch launches
Battleborn introduced a new character and cut its price by $20, perhaps not coincidentally on the same day rival Overwatch launched.
Both are colorful first-person shooters with several distinctive characters; Battleborn is the one that launched three weeks before Overwatch. The latest member of Battleborn's roster is Alani, described as a "water-bending warrior monk." Her introductory video is below.
The character is available for everyone who played in the PlayStation 4 open beta or bought Battleborn's season pass or digital deluxe edition.
As for that, every version of Battleborn has been trimmed by $20 from now through Saturday. That means the digital deluxe version, which includes all the future downloadable content, costs $54.99 and the standard version is $39.99. The deal is...
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22 CommentsMirror's Edge Catalyst has a launch trailer, and it's boring in a great way
The launch trailer for EA's upcoming Mirror's Edge Catalyst is a bit on the boring side, but I don't think that's a problem.
Mirror's Edge has such a distinct visual language and color palette that it's impossible to mistake the game for anything else. That's already a nice advantage over the majority of first-person titles, which often seem to bleed together. There's also the pleasant sensation that the trailer is showing me everything I wanted to see — those lovely colors and the convincing sense of speed and height — and completely avoids the one thing I feared to see: Faith holding a gun.
I wonder if people who haven't played the original game feel differently about the trailer, but I found it reassuring more than I found it exciting. It's a game I want to play, not watch. The...
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8 CommentsValkyria Chronicles successor getting overhaul after demo complaints
Following a recent demo, the team behind Valkyria: Azure Revolution, the upcoming Valkyria Chronicles game on PlayStation 4, will be making several major changes to its battle system and other features. That's because, according to an interview in Famitsu, Japanese players who tried out the game's first demo weren't shy about offering their criticisms.
Players offered feedback on the Valkyria: Azure Revolution battle demo — three times more than director Takeshi Ozawa expected, he told the publication. Many of their comments focused on the action-focused battle system, which Ozawa said will become "more RPG-ish."
The number of members in the player's party will be also increased from three to four, and field encounters will no longer be in the game. These changes will be seen when the...
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13 CommentsPlayStation Store sale discounts games up to 80 percent this week
Following last weekend's flash sale, the PlayStation Store is extending the deals. From now until 11 a.m. ET on May 30, PlayStation owners can check out the Extended Play Sale, which offers price cuts of up to 80 percent on recent and popular releases like Star Wars Battlefront, Life is Strange and Grand Theft Auto 5.
Also included with certain discounted titles are season passes or downloadable content, adding to the savings. Check out our round-up below, and note prices for PlayStation Plus subscribers are in parentheses.
Battlefield Hardline — Ultimate Edition (PS4): $34.99 ($27.99)
Dragon Quest Heroes — Digital Slime Edition (PS4): $38.99 ($32.49)
Grand Theft Auto 5 — Great White Shark Cash Card bundle (PS4): $53.19 ($45.59)
Life is Strange — Complete Season (PS3/PS4): $11.99...
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9 CommentsSony expects to sell 20 million more PS4s by April 2017
Sony is banking on a big year for the PlayStation 4 — the company is anticipating PS4 sales of 20 million units worldwide in its current fiscal year, according to the corporate forecast that Sony released today.
Sony's 2016 fiscal year runs from April 1, 2016, through March 31, 2017. The company said today that it sold 17.7 million PS4 consoles in its 2015 fiscal year, so the forecast represents a 13 percent year-over-year increase. Last year's figure came in 19.6 percent above the 14.8 million PS4 systems that Sony sold during its 2014 fiscal year, the first full year of the console's life cycle.
Earlier this year, Sony announced that global PS4 sales had reached 35.9 million units by the beginning of January. That means that if Sony hits its target, the company will likely be...
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28 CommentsI Am Setsuna looks like a wintry, nostalgic fantasy in new trailer
Square Enix has premiered a new gameplay trailer for I Am Setsuna, the upcoming role-playing game that harkens back to the publisher's '90s roots. Although Square Enix is calling the video above the game's E3 2016 trailer, you can watch it now, ahead of the June event.
Inspired by Chrono Trigger and other classic Squaresoft role-playing games, I Am Setsuna is developed by new studio Tokyo RPG Factory. The winter-set RPG features a battle system similar to older Final Fantasy games, several dungeons to explore and tons of villagers to befriend.
I Am Setsuna is set to launch July 19 on PlayStation 4 and Windows PC for $39.99. The game is already out in Japan, where players can choose between PS4 and PlayStation Vita versions.
Check out our gallery of screenshots below for another look...
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16 CommentsVampyr's protagonist definitely has a thirst for blood in first screens
Focus Home Interactive has debuted the first in-game look at the star of Vampyr, the upcoming role-playing game from Dontnod Entertainment. In a trio of screens, Dr. Jonathan Reid is shown to have a mighty bloodlust.
Focus Home explained the dilemma at the heart of Vampyr in a blog post: "Players take control of Dr. Jonathan Reid, a newly formed vampire who is torn between the Hippocratic Oath he swore as a doctor, and the bloodthirsty need to kill due to the monster within," the publisher wrote. As Reid, however, players will decide on whom Reid will feed, not whether to give into his killer impulses at all.
First detailed back in December, the game's focus is on making tough decisions on how to sate your vampiric tendencies and watching the consequences play out. The choice-based...
News
6 CommentsWinter sports game Snow gets big snowboarding update ahead of PS4 debut
Snow, the open-world winter sports title from Swedish indie studio Poppermost Productions, is getting its biggest addition yet: snowboarding, the game's first sport beyond skiing. With the long-awaited debut today of snowboarding, along with snowmobiles, Poppermost is looking to set Snow apart from everything else in the extreme sports genre — including another indie competitor, HB Studios' upcoming Mark McMorris Infinite Air.
Poppermost originally launched Snow on Windows PC and Linux via Steam Early Access in October 2013, and more than 500,000 registered users have tried the game since then. The studio counts 100,000 monthly active users on the platform. And of the 4,400-plus reviews Snow has received on Steam, 73 percent are positive, illustrating the strong connection that...
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9 CommentsOverwatch's first big update will bring back Competitive Play mode
Blizzard Entertainment is currently at work on Overwatch's Competitive Play mode, which it hopes to bring back in the game's first major update. In a developer Q&A on Facebook today, seen above, director Jeff Kaplan explained that reworking the mode, which recently went back into development after time in a closed beta, is the team's current focus.
Competitive Play mode wasn't available in the recent open beta, and won't be offered upon Overwatch's full launch tomorrow. Instead, Kaplan teased that Blizzard hoped to reintroduce it into the game within the next month.
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Overwatch: How Blizzard turned its biggest failure into its next great hope
"I don't want to promise an exact date," Kaplan said. "My rough commitment — or not commitment — would be...
Culture
5 CommentsLive-action Uncharted 4 took two drone pilots, was done in one shot and looks amazing
This video takes a bit of explaining.
The video above by Freakin Rad isn't just a live-action take on Uncharted 4 — since that would just be a movie using the same characters and settings — but an attempt to replicate the visual language of the game in real life. Which is a much more ambitious undertaking than it may seem at first.
The entire thing was filmed in a single take using a Dji Inspire 1 drone, with one person flying the device and another person controlling the camera. That smooth camera motion where the angle changes while the view stays locked on the character required a steady hand on not one, but two sets of controls.
You can watch the behind-the-scenes video to see how it was all done, but this is a really neat piece of filmmaking, and required an intense amount of...
News
122 CommentsUncharted 4's women characters angered a 'sexist focus tester,' Naughty Dog says
Uncharted 4: A Thief's End features a renewed focus on female characters, according to director Neil Druckmann. In an interview with Glixel, he described how, in Nathan Drake's final chapter, the team at Naughty Dog actively considered adding women to the cast, occasionally meeting some resistance.
(Warning: This story contains spoilers for the ending of Uncharted 4.)
"When I'm introducing and describing a new character to our lead character concept artist, constantly she will ask, 'What if it was a girl?'" Druckmann said, when asked how his interest in the work of Feminist Frequency affected the recent PlayStation 4 game. "And I'm like, Oh, I didn't think about that. Let me think, does that affect or change anything? No? Cool, that's different. Yeah, let's do it."
One character whom...
Opinion
67 CommentsHow Blizzard turned me into a salesperson for Overwatch
Let me be clear about something up front: I don't really care if you buy Overwatch. This story isn't about using my influence to try to get a large number of people to purchase the game. I love that you're here, but in terms of your decision to buy or not buy Overwatch? I don't give a shit.
My friends are another story.
I, like many people, assumed that Overwatch would be a free-to-play game. I play with the same core group of five or six people on most nights, and getting them to try games when there is no money to risk is pretty easy. They'll try anything once, even if time being at a premium means that one of us has to step up to champion the game to get people interested. If that doesn't happen? The evening is spent with Diablo 3, or maybe Rocket League. Heroes of the Storm is...
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2 CommentsPac-Man 256 chasing down console, Steam release next month
Pac-Man 256 is launching on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One next month, according to Bandai Namco Entertainment's European branch. Planned for a June 21 release, the port of the mobile game will add local co-op multiplayer, as seen in the trailer up top.
In the console and Steam versions, up to four players can race around the endless maze together as they outrun both ghosts and that game-breaking bug. The game will also add social sharing features and additional themes, and costs $4.99 at launch, according to the publisher.
Created by Crossy Road developer Hipster Whale and 3 Sprockets, Pac-Man 256 found success after its release on iOS and Android last year. The game is based on the infamous 256th level of the original Pac-Man arcade game, which players are prevented from...
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