This week at Bungie, Osiris requests your assistance.
I’m currently writing this TWAB from the warmth of my home office. There’s been an abundance of snow in the greater Seattle area, so many of us with long commutes have been keeping up the pace through the miracle of the internet and conference calls. The show must go on.
There’s a mysterious new quest being offered by the wily Warlock who’s always messing about with time itself. The community’s already on the case and working together to explore the Corridors of Time. We don’t want to spoil anything, but do want to let everyone know that this one’s a marathon, not a sprint. We’ll keep an eye on things and so far we’re impressed with your progress!
Iron Banner
The Dawning has come to a close, and that clears up some room in the Tower for Lord Saladin to return and kick off the next Iron Banner.
Iron Banner and Valor Bonus
Start: 9 AM PST on January 21
End: 9 AM PST on January 28
Based on feedback collected during the first Iron Banner from this Season, we’ll be auto-completing everyone through the portion of the quest that requires Rocket Launcher defeats. We weren’t able to deploy a change to this step, but we can complete it for anyone who hasn’t already done so. This gives us time to consider changing or removing this step for next Season.
Guardians to the Rescue
Last week, we pledged to support Australia’s firefighting efforts and animal rescue and conservation efforts due to the ongoing bush fires devastating parts of the country. Today, we shared the full details on how you can support these efforts by purchasing a limited-edition “Guardians for Australia” T-shirt that also comes with a free “Star Light, Start Bright” emblem as a thank you for your donation.
The shirt is now available for pre-order on the Bungie Store, and here is a quick preview of what it looks like.
Patch Note Preview
When the 2.7.0.2 update slipped, we were reminded that sometimes our plans have to shift a bit. But we were able to release it today with only a 48-hour delay! So far, 2.7.1 is on schedule and here’s a small preview at a few of the changes coming in it.
Orbit/Director
Players can now shortcut directly to their Roster by selecting their empty fireteam slots, or by invoking the Roster shortcut on Director Map screens.
When an activity is selected, fireteam leaders can navigate left and right to get to Quests and Roster respectively, then back to their selected activity.
Weapons
Breakneck now has higher damage per second at Rampage x1 and x2, from 2170/2120 to 2190/2410.
The screen shake on Hard Light firing has been adjusted.
Armor
Several class item armor mods will now correctly provide diminishing returns when multiple copies of the mod are equipped. These mods include Perpetuation, Innervation, Invigoration, Insulation, and Absolution.
Grenade Launcher Scavenger will no longer award Special ammo for Grenade Launchers when the player picks up Primary ammo bricks.
SUPPORT RAPPORT
We launched Season of Dawn last month and we scrambled the fighters to shoot down some new bugs this week. Player Support has the details.
This is their report.
DESTINY 2 HOTFIX 2.7.0.2
Destiny 2 Hotfix 2.7.0.2 was released to the world today, January 16, and resolved several known issues, including:
The EDZ Obelisk could sometimes not be accessed.
The flashing notification icon for Eververse did not stop flashing above Tess’s head.
Banshee-44’s weekly bounty was disabled and displays “You have already completed this”.
Earlier this week, we identified an issue where the Solar Subclass Emotes were being sold for an incorrect price of 800 Silver on the Eververse Featured page. These Emotes were removed from the Featured page, but are still available for purchase at the correct price of 500 Silver on the Seasonal page.
We will follow up with affected players at a later date who purchased these emotes at the incorrect price.
TRACKING KNOWN ISSUES
Over the past few weeks, new issues have surfaced that our Player Support team has been tracking. Below is a list of the latest known issues that were reported in our #Help Forum:
Armor 2.0 Transcendent Blessing mods are not appearing in players’ inventories.
Transitioning between areas in the Pit of Heresy Dungeon may result in unintentional character death. This will not prevent players from completing flawless dungeon runs.
The Sundial Fractaline Extractor III obtained from the Nessus obelisk incorrectly states an increased chance to find Polarized Fractaline when completing strikes. The enhancement actually increases the chance to find Polarized Fractaline when completing the Sundial and the Menagerie.
As always, players encountering service issues should follow @BungieHelp on Twitter or monitor our support feed on help.bungie.net for the latest info. Players encountering other issues are encouraged to report them to the #Help forum.
Silence Your Phones
It’s time for Movie of the Week. This is our chance to seek out our favorite community-created videos and literally force you to watch them here. Ok, maybe you don’t have to watch them, but why wouldn’t you? They’re great!
These auteurs just won a cool emblem as evidence of their filmmaking prowess. Please allow a few days for them to arrive. Thanks for using our game to express your creativity! It’s just one of the reasons why we love this passionate community.
It’s a light TWAB week. This new year is taking its time to roar back to full speed and the weather isn’t helping at all. The current activity is hush-hush, so we’re going to step back and watch as you work together to solve it.
Sonic Movie Speeds Towards $65 Million In Its North American Opening Weekend
After nearly 30 years, Sega’s long-time mascot Sonic the Hedgehog has finally made his big-screen debut. The reviews are in, and while mainstream critics aren’t so fond of the film, the blue blur’s action-adventure outing starring Jim Carrey, Ben Schwartz, and James Marsden has received a lot of positive feedback from the fanbase so far.
So, how’s it gone for Paramount Pictures in terms of earnings? According to Deadline Hollywood, the $87 million production could potentially be in the running to become the best video game movie adaptation debut in North America of all-time. The latest industry estimates suggest it has banked around $53.99 million in three days and more than $64.3 million in its opening weekend.
If this is the case, it would be a new record for this type of film. The current record-holder is the Legendary/Warner Bros. production Detective Pikachu, starring Ryan Reynolds. It reportedly banked $54.3 million in three days. On a 4-day basis, Sonic is believed to have already surpassed the live-action Pokémon movie, which made $58 million during a non-holiday period last May.
The newest Warner Bros. release Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey simply couldn’t keep up with the blue blur, as illustrated in Box Office earnings below for the Valentine’s Day and President’s Day long weekend:
Have you seen Sonic the Hedgehog in cinemas yet? What did you think? Leave a comment down below.
Detroit: Become Human dev Quantic Dream will self-publish from here on out
Quantic Dream, the studio behind the likes of Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, plans to work independently of external publishers moving forward, noting in a blog post that the studio now considers itself fully independent and, after 23 years, is “now in a position to self-publish”.
Previous publishing arrangements, mostly with Sony Interactive Entertainment, saw Quantic Dream launch many of its heavy hitters as PlayStation exclusives (that, in some cases, later arrived on PC as well), but studio leadership has recently spoken of a desire to have a presence on all major platforms.
In this latest post, Quantic Dream reaffirms those ambitions moving into the next console generation, and says that self-publishing puts the studio in a better position decide the direction of its games and tech.
“This new venture will allow us to make decisions in total independence, and to address the technological and strategic opportunities of next-generation platforms,” reads the post from co-CEOs David Cage and Guillaume de Fondaumière.
The duo notes that stepping into self-publishing also puts Quantic Dream in the position to invest in and support other developers, saying that the studio wants “to support creators of original projects and help them, in turn, to achieve their vision and offer quality, ground-breaking experiences.“
“This is more than an evolution — it is a transformation. We are doing this to preserve our freedom and our independence, to continue working on innovative and even more ambitious projects, to address greater challenges, and to create the unexpected. Quantic Dream will never be just another studio. We want to face new horizons, to keep our passion alive, and keep trusting in the idea of making games that are different.”
After several years of changing business models and ownership changes, Corona Labs have decided to shut things down. Thankfully for Corona users they full open sourced the engine and tooling and changed to the MIT license.
Details of the closure process from the Corona Labs site (warning, it’s having trouble right now):
Some of the Corona Labs staff have expressed an interest in continuing to work with Corona as an as-available hobby project, so some engine development will continue. There is a possibility that engineers would seek funding through platforms like Patreon or Github Sponsors to continue work in larger capacity.
Appodeal will continue to fund infrastructure costs and work with the open source staff to keep the Appodeal plugin up to date.
The Corona open source license will change from its current dual license state (Commercial + GPLv3) to a single, much more permissive license: The MIT License will make building the open source version of Corona easier for you and lift distribution restrictions on your apps and games. If you are using the GPL version of Corona, you can continue doing so in your fork.
Corona Labs will remove Splash Screen restrictions and plugin license checks from Native and Simulator builds. All first-party plugins will be open sourced and be available on GitHub. Corona’s “daily” builds will be built using tools available for Open Source projects, and would be available on GitHub releases.
We will change the Corona Simulator to be an offline tool, building for all supported platforms using local storage as a source for plugins.
Marketplace sales will cease. Vendors will be paid what they are owed, and will have to distribute updates for their plugins themselves. Users will be able to download purchased plugins and assets before the store closure. Corona Labs will stop accepting new submissions to the Marketplace on February, 15. 2020. Self-hosted plugins will be turned on for everyone so community plugin developers can continue to provide plugins.
We will migrate the forums and coronalabs.com website content to another platform, since the current setup is tied to an expensive infrastructure. We may need several community members to volunteer to administer the new Forums. We are still working on what the coronalabs.com website access will become.
The community is welcome to spin up discussion forums. Possibilities include using GitHub’s Issues, Reddit’s /r/CoronaSDK page, a Facebook Group, etc. The community Slack will remain.
The Corona Labs maintained social media accounts will remain open, and we will turn them into sources of useful information for developers (i.e., industry news, development and monetization tips, etc.).
All these will not happen overnight. We are working on changes to the parts of the engine, and will release them gradually, moving the build process offline as well as migrating content to different platforms. We will post updates on the progress, as well as send out one more final email with all the details Feel free to follow Corona on Github or get involved in development. Progress will be reflected in this Github Project.
Learn more about the Corona Labs closure in the video below.
Now Playing: Terry Bogard, Syberia, Alien: Isolation, And More
We're back again to ask about and discuss the games we're currently playing right now. The GameSpot team is usually busy keeping up with the biggest releases, but other times we're catching up on games we missed, replaying old favorites, experiencing classics for the first time, or just dabbling in odds and ends for a spell. Below you can see a sampling of the games that we're playing, the reasons we're playing them, and what we love about them so far.
But don't just stop at reading our responses; we also want to hear from you too! Tell us all about what you're playing in the comments section and what you're diggin' about them.
So please, join us and ramble on about all the super cool video games you're playing! We know you need to get it off your chest as much as we do. And if you're playing the same games from previous weeks, that's fine too! You're more than welcome to talk about why you still love it!
The Epic MegaGrant program was first announced at GDC of 2019 and is a $100M fund by epic games to support game developers, open source projects and others. The Godot Engine project just joined past recipients such as the Blender foundation, receiving a cool 1/4 million USD in funding.
The story was broke by Gaming On Linux, but has been all but confirmed by Tim Sweeney, CEO at epic, in this Twitter exchange.
Some good news to share for the free and open source Godot Engine, as the lead developer Juan Linietsky announced during GodotCon that Epic Games have approved them for an Epic MegaGrant.
This was announced during Linietsky’s talk on porting Godot Engine over to the Vulkan API, which is coming with Godot Engine version 4.0 later this year. Epic Games have approved them for a sum of $250,000 USD which they’ve known for a little while, but they only just got the okay to announce it.
The GodotCon YouTube livestream video link is available here. You can learn more about the Epic MegaGrant program here or by watching the video below.
We really want a Fire Emblem Heroes premium subscription (said no one)
By Joe Robinson03 Feb 2020
Fire Emblem Heroes has, hands down, proven to be the other most popular Nintendo properties on mobile. Sensor Tower data from last week shows that, out of the $1 Billion+ revenue that Nintendo-published mobile games brought in in 2019, 61% of it came from FE Heroes.
It’s first place out of six with the No. 4 spot being held by Mario Kart Tour, which brought in only 8% and that’s with a $5 premium subscription offering. Clearly, Fire Emblem Heroes’ next step is to do something bold that meets the needs of their player base… like introducing a premium subscription offering? (Announcement at 11:40 below)
This rather strange move was announced on Saturday. Fire Emblem Heroes is a typical free-to-play strategy game in many ways (although it’s quite thematic), but it’s managed to convince a relatively small number of people to spend quite a lot of money. It may have brought in 61% of the revenue, but it only represents 4% of total downloads across the six games.
Out of all of the plans they could have considered, a $10 (!!?) premium subscription is not the one I would have chosen, or even guessed.
If you do choose to subscribe, you gain access to give key benefits:
Resplendent Heroes – new versions of existing heroes with new attire, voices and a +2 stat boosts. Two are on offer every month during set periods, and you can choose between attires if you manage to secure one. An option to purchase Resplendent versions separately is planned.
Special ‘FEH Pass Quests’ – available twice a month, offers unique rewards.
Expanded Summoner Support – you can bond with up to three heroes, instead of just one.
Re-Act – Essentially an ‘undo’ or ‘re-do’ button, you may go back to the start of the previous turn or the current turn, depending on what’s just happened. Unlimited uses, and works on the Game Over screen. Doesn’t work in Coliseum or Aether Raids.
Auto-Start – Essentially an ‘auto-battle’ feature, you can have the game automatically replay maps for as long as you have stamina remaining. When choosing a map you get to set how many times you want it to replay.
Fire Emblem: Heroes isn’t a game we’ve been keeping on top of, so it’s hard to expertly assess the impact of these features. The community has already expressed their concern over this new pass – the video itself is already at 11K dislikes vs. 6.3K likes.
The FEH Pass will be available to purchase after the 4.2 update, which is due later this week on February 5th.
First HomeKit Router firmware update coming very soon
By Mike Wuerthele Thursday, February 13, 2020, 07:21 pm PT (10:21 pm ET)
Linksys appears to be the first vendor to make available a HomeKit router, as the Velop line is scheduled for an imminent firmware update to enable the functionality.
Linksys MX10 Velop AX mesh router
After several false starts, firmware updates for routers to make them HomeKit Routers upgrades will start arriving soon. The first confirmed one, is for the Linksys Velop line.
“We’re rolling out a firmware update to your Velop system in the next several days. Once your system updates, the next time you open the Linksys app, it will invite you to link with Apple Home,” Linksys says in an update note. “All of your Velop nodes must be tri-band for this integration to work.”
“When your Velop system is linked with the Apple Home app, it can monitor HomeKit accessories and prevent them from communicating in ways that might be harmful in the event an external threat from the internet gets through,” Linksys added. “This can stop viruses and malware from spreading, or your data from being sent to the wrong places.”
The entire Velop line with not get the update. The update is limited to the following models.
A03
WHW0301 & WHW0301B
WHW0302 & WHW0302B
WHW0303 & WHW0303B
The update notification was first spotted by HomeKit News on Thursday evening.
AppleInsider reviewed the Velop router in December. At the time, we found that it delivered significant real-world speed on our iPhone 11 Pro Max because of Wi-Fi 6. Other devices show minor speed improvements as well because of the power of the router itself —but with the price still so high for Wi-Fi 6, it was hard to justify for the vast majority of people. HomeKit Router certification and compatibility may change that, however.
PlatinumGames Open To Wonderful 101 Sequel, As Long As Fans Show Their Support
In the same interview with Nintendo Everything, prior to the reveal of The Wonderful 101: Remastered, PlatinumGames head Atsushi Inaba said the developer was open to a follow-up, provided fans showed their support for the remaster.
In regards to a sequel or something, we can’t make one if there aren’t any fans for the series in the first place. So if fans support this and things go really well for The Wonderful 101, then I’d say it’s pretty natural that we’d want to make another game in the series!
The game’s director Hideki Kamiya added to this, stating how he had all these creative ideas flowing back when the original Wii U title was in development and hoped he could put them to use in the future:
I had ideas like, ‘Oh, what would it be like if we did a sequel where Wonder Blue was the leader?’ All of these creative and exciting ideas were flowing, and then the game released and I saw the numbers and was like, ‘Wait, what?!’ So, I hope I get to have those aspirations again in the future.
Last weekend, The Wonderful 101: Remastered surpassed its $1.5 million Kickstarter stretch goal, which unlocked “Luka’s First Mission” and two more stretch goals.
Would you like to see a sequel one day? Have you shown your support by backing the first game on Kickstarter? Leave a comment below.
