Category: Game Releases

New game releases.

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Black Desert Mobile update reveals the new Dimensional Crystal class

Acclaimed MMO Black Desert Mobile is ramping up its content to see out 2020 on a high note. After the trashfire of a year we’ve had, games are the perfect form of escapism, and updates just keep us away from the real world for as long as possible.

Black Desert Mobile is introducing a brand new crystal class for players. The Dimensional Crystal – aside from just sounding more epic than a journey to Mordor – grants new buffs to your attack points, defense points, and Black Spirit stat points. For those of you currently using the Abyssal-grade crystal, the effects of the Dimensional Crystal vastly exceed the highest potential of your current class.

Publisher Pearl Abyss also announced the return of the Field of Valor, which sees players form uneasy alliances with each other to fight hordes of enemies. The mode is here for two weeks (until December 8), so find four other players and take down as many monsters as you can in the 30-minute survival mode. A word of warning, however: you’ll need to spend Tokens of Valor in order to enter. So slay some monsters in the Black Desert world to gain access to the Field of Valor.

The full patch notes and information for the Dimensional Crystal can be found below:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hW6B_TvvdU?modestbranding=1&rel=0&feature=oembed]
  • Added Dimensional Crystal
    • Dimensional Crystals can contain power for the Aal, Labreve, Serrett, and Ahib branches
    • Dimensional Crystal extraction is only possible for gear lower than Primal grade, and cannot be done otherwise
  • Added a separate category on the craft menu for crafting Dimensional Crystals
    • You can craft Dimensional Crystals in the Alchemy Lab or Craft menu, under the Crystal category
  • Added new items that are required to craft Dimensional Crystals
    • Obtain Dimensional Fragments from feeding Abyssal-grade items to the Black Spirit and from Field of Valor
  • Dimensional Fragments cannot be obtained by feeding the Delphad Main Weapon and Sub-Weapon event rewards to the Black Spirit
    • Use Dark Coins to purchase Empty Crystals from Gervaise’s Shop

There is also – as with everything – a Black Friday sale in the Pearl Shop. Ornaments, outfits, and pets all have discounts, some of which reach 90% off. Pearl Abyss also says there will be special item bundles available, although we don’t know exactly what these include at this point.

Check out our picks for the best Black Friday deals on all things mobile and Switch gaming, or take a look at our roundup of the best mobile MMORPGs for more like Black Desert Mobile.

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Quixel Mixer 2020.1.6 Released

Hot on the heels of the Quixel Bridge release, today Quixel released version 2020.1.6 of Quixel Mixer. Quixel Mixer is a texture generation tool that is completely free for everybody and includes MegaScans integration for Unreal Engine users. The 2020.1.6 release adds the ability to export masks, as well as 65 new free smart materials.

Details of the release from the Quixel blog:

Following the support of 3D Texturing and Smart Materials, this Quixel Mixer 2020.1.6 adds 65 new scan-based Smart Materials along with a powerful new feature: advanced mask export. This highly requested feature enables you to combine, channel pack and export advanced masks, leveraging Mixer’s versatile mask stack and material blending engine.

The ability to utilize these masks in other applications allows you to easily create high-quality variations of your materials directly inside the app of your choice.

Mixer is available for everyone, for free, forever, including its enormous base library of hundreds of free scans and Smart Materials. What’s more — Unreal Engine users have access to the entire Megascans library for free, right within Mixer. 

Quixel is available for download here for Windows and Mac OS. You can learn more about the 2020.1.6 release in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtRcoxqOfaM?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Blender 2.91 Released

Blender 2.91 was released today another step forward in the rapidly improving open source 3D application. As with other recent releases this one includes several sculpting improvements, especially on the cloth brushes including the ability to collide with other objects in your scene. Other sculpting improvements include several new gesture tools, support for sculpting on the base mesh of a multi-res mesh and the addition of boundary brushes to control the edges of sculpted meshes.

Sculpting Cloth In Blender
Blender 2.91 Cloth Sculpting

Another major feature includes improved Boolean support including a new exact solver as well as the ability to perform boolean operations on collections of objects. The new exact solver is much more accurate but at the cost of running slower. This improvement is a welcome one, as the boolean functionality in Blender 2.8x was one of the few areas where it was worse than the previous releases.

In addition to the improving volumetric support in the form of openVDB support, Blender 2.91 also has the ability to generate volumes from meshes, as well as apply displacements to those volumes. There are a number of other improvements in Blender 2.91 from EEVEE to Grease Pencil. Learn more about the release in the release notes.

You can learn more about the Blender release, including several new features demonstrated in the video below. The 2.91 splash screen is the work of Robin Tran, a concept artist at UbiSoft Massive, you can see more shots here. Blender is available on all major platforms as a free download here, assuming of course their servers are currently on fire due to demand! If you are interested at looking even further into the future of Blender, Blender 2.92 is currently available here in alpha( soon to be beta) form.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bs5ujDz_9M?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Unigine 2.13 Released

The Unigine engine just released version 2.13. The new release includes an all new GPU based lightmapping tool, a new terrain generation tool, improved clouds, better lighting and a whole lot more. Since Unigine 2.11 there is a free community version available making Unigine a lot more viable for indie game developers.

Highlights of the release include:

  • GPU Lightmapper tool
  • Introducing SRAA (Subpixel Reconstruction Anti-Aliasing)
  • Upgraded 3D volumetric clouds
  • Performance optimizations for vast forest rendering
  • New iteration of the terrain generation tool with online GIS sources support (experimental)
  • Adaptive hardware tessellation for the mesh_base material
  • Project Build tool: extended functionality and a standalone console-based version
  • New samples (LiDAR sensor, night city lights, helicopter winch)
  • Introducing 3D scans library

For further information on the release be sure to check the much more in-depth release notes or watch the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmPl2B-pyQ4?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Nintendo announces huge Cyber Deals sale including Link’s Awakening, Hades, and more

If you’ve had your Switch for a while, you’ll know that a decent sale is hard to come by. That’s what makes Nintendo’s latest Cyber Deals sale so damn good. The sale covers first-party IPs like the Legend of Zelda through to third party games like Hades as well as ports and remasters like Burnout Paradise, all for a significant chunk off.

The Cyber Deals sale runs from right now, November 24, until December 2 at 23:00 PST (December 3, 07:59 GMT). While the actual percentage point varies between 20 and 75% off full price, most of the games included in the sale sit between a third and half off their regular price.

However, it’s worth noting that at this point in time, the sale is only available on the US eShop. We don’t know whether the UK will receive a similar Cyber Deals sale to coincide with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but we’ll keep you updated either way. For now, US players can enjoy a fat stack of games on sale.

The full list of games available is as follows, with the percentage savings in brackets:

  • MARVEL ULTIMATE ALLIANCE 3: The Black Order (20%)
  • Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition (40%)
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (33%)
  • Cuphead (25%)
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (33%)
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 2 – Torna the Golden Country (33%)
  • Hades (20%)
  • Super Mario Party (33%)
  • Just Dance 2021 (40%)
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (50%)
  • Diablo III: Eternal Collection (50%)
  • Dark Souls: Remastered (50%)
  • Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 (50%)
  • DOOM (50%)
  • Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate (60%)
  • Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers (50%)
  • The Jackbox Party Pack 7 (20%)
  • Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (50%)
  • The Outer Worlds (50%)
  • DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS (50%)
  • Two Point Hospital (50%)
  • Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore (33%)
  • The Last Campfire (30%)
  • DAEMON X MACHINA (33%)
  • Catherine: Full Body (40%)
  • LAYTON’S MYSTERY JOURNEY: Katrielle and the Millionaires’ Conspiracy – Deluxe Edition (40%)
  • Burnout Paradise Remastered (40%)
  • New Super Lucky’s Tale (30%)
  • CARRION (25%)
  • SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy (40%)
  • Knights and Bikes (25%)
  • Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido (50%)
  • The Long Dark (33%)
  • Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes (50%)
  • SEGA AGES Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (25%)
  • SNACK WORLD: THE DUNGEON CRAWL – GOLD (40%)
  • RUINER (50%)
  • The Wonderful 101: Remastered (32%)
  • Castle Crashers Remastered (40%)
  • Terraria (50%)
  • WHAT THE GOLF? (30%)
  • Slay the Spire (40%)
  • Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (70%)
  • Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse (50%)
  • Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled (49%)
  • Mortal Kombat 11 (70%)
  • Divinity: Original Sin 2 – Definitive Edition (30%)
  • Fe (75%)
  • Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove (50%)
  • Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 (35%)
  • Katana ZERO (40%)
  • Coffee Talk (25%)
  • Superliminal (30%)
  • SUPERHOT (40%)

As you can see, that is a long old list of games. So, take your pick and get playing! If you need any help deciding what to pick up, check out any of our guides to the best Switch RPGs, Switch strategy games, or the finest Switch multiplayer games to hit up with your friends. You can also find all of the best Black Friday deals right here on Pocket Tactics.

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Quixel Release Quixel Bridge 2020.4

Quixel have just released Quixel Bridge 2020.4 with a heavy focus on making the tool easier to use. Quixel Bridge is a cross platform (Linux, Windows and Mac), free tool for organizing your textures, as well as acting as a communication tool between your data and your game engine or DCC tool of choice. Quixel Bridge also acts as a handy interface to Megascans massive texture and 3D object library, a library that is completely free for Unreal Engine users!

Highlights of the 2020.4 release from the Quixel blog:

At the beginning of this year, we overhauled the Bridge browsing experience to help you discover new, relevant content faster than ever before. As part of this ongoing effort to simplify the creative experience for artists, this latest update comes packed with enhancements to the Asset Preview Panel, the download and export settings, and other improvements that make Bridge even easier to use.

Key new features include:

  • Redesigned Asset Preview Panel
  • Simplified download and export settings
  • Managing Plugins made easier
  • Simpler initial set up
  • Deeper categorization

Quixel Bridge is available as a free download here and you can learn more about the 2020.4 release in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5-tqhkIZU8?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Beepbox Easy Online Music Sketching Application

Beepbox is a free online tool for quickly generating music via sketching. It’s written in a combination of JavaScript and TypeScript with the source code available on GitHub under the very permissive MIT license. Getting started with Beepbox is as simple as going to the website and starting to lay down some notes. There are a variety of instruments available and you can layer multiple tracks of sounds to easily create music.

Perhaps coolest of all, as you create your song, the song’s data is encoded into the URL. You can simply share your songs URL and others can either open it in the player or they can open it in the editor and make changes. You can also download your song in .mid or .json formats for later updating, or you can export out into WAV format for use in your game engine of choice. In addition to BeepBox is there a modified more complex version called ModBox you can check out here. It is forked from the same source code but offers additional tools and levels of control at the cost of complexity.

You can learn more about BeepBox and see it in action in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hxb53xL35s?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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City Generator Hands-On

City Generator is a free and open-source procedural generation tool for creating American-style grid based cities. The source code is available on GitHub under the GPL 3 license, composed almost entirely of TypeScript code.

Features of City Generator include:

  • .png download
  • .png heightmap download
  • .svg download
  • .stl download
  • Several colour themes including Google Maps, Apple Maps, and hand-drawn styles
  • Pseudo-3D buildings
  • Open source

City Generator can export STL files that can then be imported into a 3D tool of choice for creating 3D levels. We should this process in Blender as well as the process of generating a city in City Generator in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ligKs9aXKsA?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Nintendo has added cosy AR cabins to Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

Nintendo has announced that it is adding AR features to its long-standing AC mobile game, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. These two new modes – called AR Camera and AR Cabin – let players spend some quality time with their favourite villagers. The first, AR Camera, lets you set up a space for your pal, adding furniture to the scene, and taking a snapshot. AR Cabin, on the other hand, is a little more comprehensive, and lets you enter the same space as the characters.

You can turn this AR Cabin into a cosy hideaway, and overlay the door anywhere in the real world, allowing you to enter whenever you want. Once in your cabin, you can invite up to eight of your favourite villagers to hang out in the space. In celebration of this new mode, Nintendo are also giving away a free month of the Furniture and Fashion plan, which is a great way to get some new clothes and home decorations.

For those unfamiliar, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp first launched three years ago, and is Nintendo’s free-to-start mobile game. In Pocket Camp you build a campsite and invite friends to come stay. You can also visit different locations, catch bugs, fish, and pick fruit. It isn’t as comprehensive as New Horizons, but it’s still a fun on-the-go experience for any AC fan.

If you want to know more about the AR features, check out the release trailer below:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTr21GedotM?modestbranding=1&rel=0&feature=oembed]

AR Cabin and AR Camera launched on November 19, and are available in-game now.

If you want to play Pocket Camp for yourself, you can find it on Google Play and the App Store. For more relaxing recommendations, why not see our list of the best mobile idle games?

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Unity Closing Unity Connect

Unity Connect was first launched back in 2016 as a sort of social hub for Unity developers. Due to declining interest Unity have announced Unity connect will be closing by February 4th, 2021. Users were sent the following email announcing the closure:

Hi User,

Today we’re announcing that on February 4, 2021, Unity Connect, our dedicated talent and sharing marketplace, will shut down. We’re proud of the community that rallied around Connect and we are inspired by the great sharing and discovery that came from it.

We want to make this transition as smooth as possible for everyone who uses Connect. If you are an active user on the platform, click here to learn more about the alternatives that will be provided for some Connect features. If you would like to download any part of your profile, please feel free to do so before we delete your information on February 4, 2021.

If you head on over to the Unity Connect website you will see a notice of the upcoming closure with the following details:

We launched Unity Connect almost four years ago in an effort to provide a free community tool for all users, of all experience levels, to connect with each other. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on February 4, 2021, we will retire Unity Connect. Some features, e.g. posting new content, creating job posts, will be locked prior to this date.

We understand that these changes might cause inconvenience, therefore, we have made sure to provide alternatives for some of the most popular Connect features, please read on to learn more.

You can learn more about the Unity Connect closure and the alternative services available for Unity Connect users in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gXx4_7IKEQ?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]