That is the overall goal Mojang has in mind with this next combat update. They want Minecrafters to have fun and they want to have balance for PvE and PvP content alike. The changes we’ll see here will come in a future update to all official editions of Minecraft. This snapshot is based on the 1.15.2 pre-release and if you want to get a peek at what changes are coming to the combat system you better check it out. If you’d like to make a suggestion don’t be afraid to check out Mojang’s Feedback website or join in on the conversation on the official Reddit post.
Attack rates are generally faster
You are only able to attack when the attack timer has recharged
The attack timer only resets when attacking (compared to switching items)
You can keep pressing the attack button to continuously attack
Weapons deal less damage overall
Weapons now have different reach (tridents and hoes reach farther, axes reach less)
Natural healing from food has been rebalanced (no more saturation boost)
Projectiles are more accurate and don’t inherit the shooter’s momentum
Experimental enchantment called “Chopping” for axes
Many other smaller changes to tridents, snowballs, shields, and knockback mechanics
Read can read about all the changes over time in the Reddit posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 (this one)
In detail, weapons:
Stone tier lowered to +0 (same as wood, was +1)
Iron tier lowered to +1 (was +2)
Diamond tier lowered to +2 (was +3)
Swords lowered to +2 (was +3)
Axes lowered to +3 (was +4)
Trident lowered to 5 (was 6)
For example, a Diamond Sword now deals 2+2+2=6 points of damage. This was 2+3+3=8 in the previous test, and 1+3+3=7 in 1.9/1.8 (base damage is 2 now, same as on Bedrock).
In detail, food rebalance:
Saturation boost removed
Eating food is now slower (40 ticks, was 32 ticks)
Natural healing works longer (down to 6 food points, used to be down to 18)
Natural healing is faster (every 3 seconds, was 4)
New: Natural healing now always drains food points. Saturation is not used when healing damage and is only relevant as a “pause” until food drains (as originally intended)
Sprinting is no longer affected by the food value
Other changes:
Various block-hitting and air-swinging bug fixes
Made it possible to hit players with snowballs (TODO: game rule)
Reintroduced upwards knockback when hitting players in the air… Probably too strong right now, but can be balanced later
Changed the swing animation to emphasize the rhythm of the attacks
Added cooldown to egg
Bonus controversial edit…
Added a kind of “Coyote Time” that activates for a fraction of a second if you aim at something but attack outside its bounding box. The background to this change is that since you can’t attack between swings, it often gave the impression that your input was “lost”. It also made fighting small and fast targets (rabbits or baby zombies) unnecessarily frustrating
Relive the story of Goku and other Z Fighters in DRAGON BALL Z: KAKAROT! Beyond the epic battles, experience life in the DRAGON BALL Z world as you fight, fish, eat, and train with Goku, Gohan, Vegeta and others.
Mistress of Blade Coming to Black Desert on Xbox One
A small and hidden village of the Oeki Clan that resides alongside the banks of the Turina river gives birth to the newest class in Black Desert, Kunoichi. Trained at a very young age to master the use of a shortsword, kunais, and the hidden arts of Ninjutsu, Kunoichi has the ability to swiftly and silently dispose of her enemies.
Kunoichi’s skill set includes: Flash Slash (vanishes and reappears to inflict multiple hits on target); Kuno Stab (deadly stabs using her Kunai); Ninjutsu: Shadow Explosion (explosive frontal damage knocking back targets); Tragic Blade (counterattack).
Our veteran adventurers can now also utilize the scarecrow training dummy. This new feature allows for adventurers to train their classes through the use of training dummies within major towns to grow stronger within the world of Black Desert.
With new content available for both beginner and veteran adventurers, start your next Black Desertjourney with the Mistress of Blades, Kunoichi, now available on Xbox One.
Google expects 120 games to hit Stadia this year, including some exclusives
Google has shared a bit of a roadmap on what features will arrive on Stadia this year, including a ballpark estimate on how many games will launch for the cloud based game platform within the next 12 months.
At the current moment, Google says it has eyes on 120 games scheduled for a Stadia launch during 2020, with some exclusives among the bunch as well.
There’s currently only one Stadia exclusive—Gylt—out in the wild, but it will be joined at least 10 timed exclusives within the first half of the year, with more info on each due out soon.
The full post from Google highlights some of the features and improvements it’s brought to Stadia for its early waves of users, and notes that additions like 4K play on the web, additional Google Assistant functionality, support for non-Pixel phones, and wireless Stadia controller use on Web are all due to arrive on Stadia in the next three months.
All this comes around 2 months into Stadia’s launch, or the launch for those that purchased access through either the $129 Founder’s Edition or Primer Edition kits. Stadia’s more widespread launch has yet to occur, and news about when in 2020 the service plans to launch either its free Stadia Base tier or a non-bundled Stadia Pro tier to reach a wider audience is notably absent from Google’s New Years roadmap.
Tired Of Luigi’s Mansion 3’s Boss Fights? This Glitch Lets You Skip One
Halloween might have come and gone months ago, but it left behind a thrilling treat that we’ve been enjoying ever since. Luigi’s Mansion 3 was one of Switch’s very best games last year, and competition was certainly fierce. We very much enjoyed capturing each and every ghoul, but a new glitch has been discovered which enables you to skip one of the bosses entirely.
SPOILER ALERT if you’ve yet to play the game (we understand – that backlog, huh?!) and want the experience utterly preserved. Why you’d click on the article and start reading in the first place is a mystery, but here’s your last chance…
Still here? Great. A new glitch is sending speedrunners’ hearts a-flutter and enables the canny player to skip the Amadeus Wolfgeist boss entirely. Gaming Reinvented has looked into the glitch in detail, so check our their article if you fancy trying it yourself. The long and short of it is that the ghoulish pianist is guarding a Toad painting which is usually inaccessible until you beat the boss. However, by exiting through a door to the left of the stage at just the right time, you can then reload the game and it’ll think you’ve already given ol’ Wolfgang a rocking, leaving you free to rescue Toad and be on your way.
Here’s a video from reddit of the glitch in action:
The timing’s a little tricky, by all accounts, but the ability to skip a boss is big news for the speedrunning community. Of course, we recommend playing and enjoying every last minute of Luigi’s latest ghostbusting getaway, but it’s always fun to pull at loose threads now and again.
Have you run into any other glitches in Luigi’s Mansion 3? Reckon you could pull off this glitch? Share your ghoulish tales below.
Feature: So, Who’s Next For Super Smash Bros. Ultimate?
Since launch we’ve seen a steady drip feed of DLC fighters landing in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. The five brawlers of the Challenger Pack (plus Piranha Plant) have given the game a periodic injection of fresh blood, not to mention the excitement generated by the reveals. Byleth from Fire Emblem: Three Houses is the final fighter from the Challenger Pack to get one of those sealed invites – a boon for Fire Emblem fans, although with such a wealth of representation from that series already, non-aficionados could be forgiven for feeling a little underwhelmed.
That is until you remember that more fighters are incoming, of course! Yesterday Nintendo confirmed a further six fighters are planned in a second Challenger Pack, so the speculation won’t let up until this new round of DLC wraps up in December 2021. Blimey! The ones released so far have been brilliant additions to the roster and a source of rolling hype around the game. Even people who aren’t into Smash (yes, they exist) can get behind reveals featuring gaming legends like Terry Bogard, Banjo-Kazooie and Dragon Quest’s Hero.
So who’s next, then? Speculation about upcoming fighters has been rampant since the game launched, with any tiny innocuous detail taken as a clue to power the rumour mill. With six more positions to fill, we’ve rounded up the usual suspects as well as some outsiders to weigh them up and ponder the likelihood of their joining video gaming’s greatest crossover. At the bottom there’s also a poll where you can vote for your favourites or make suggestions in the comments.
For: High recognition factor; Unlike existing characters – potential for unique style; Could be a part of a Resident Evil echo fighter pair – with Claire, maybe?; Fabulous hair.
Against: With guns, knives, blood and creeping zombie flesh, Leon and the Resident Evil series is not exactly kid-friendly (Presidential daughters excepted). Counterpoint: the Metal Gear Solid series has featured genital-based explosives and Snake’s still in Smash.
Final Smash: Chainsaw Guy lurches onto the stage and everyone except Leon loses their heads.
For: Crazy style; Already an accomplished fighter who’d fit right in; Sexy Silvia would make a great shadow fighter.
Against: Hasn’t starred in a game in a while (not necessarily a problem – kids need an education!)
Final Smash: Joe slows time and proceeds to zip around delivering blow-after-blow until time resumes and the opponent bounces around and off the screen.
For: Cool fighting possibilities with the Celestial Brush; Plenty of combat experience; The sumi-e art style would be a unique addition (imagine the stage).
Against: … nope, can’t think of anything.
Final Smash: Chibiterasu leaps out with the Celestial Brush and plants bombs that blast the opponent into the stratosphere.
For: Incredibly recognisable to millions of people; Cartoon style would fit in well; Plenty of echo fighter skins to choose from; Fortnite = still so hot right now.
Against: Guns (kinda fundamental to Fortnite) might be problematic in Smash, although there’s enough scope for silly ACME-style weapons and llamas.
Final Smash: After thanking the bus driver three or four thousand times, he finally shows his appreciation of your appreciation by dropping his vehicle from the sky directly on top of your opponent.
For: Incredibly popular and family-friendly; Unique style compared to the existing roster; Microsoft and Nintendo are BBFs right now (seriously, Ubisoft are well jealous)
Against:Another sword fighter?
Final Smash: Night falls and creepers descend on your opponent, driving them off the stage.
For: A large repertoire of killer moves; Looks great on camera; Would make an excellent addition to the Smash soundtrack vault; Wubba dubba dub, is that true?
Against: Sometimes our desire for a fighter is based solely on who we want to see in amiibo form – this may be one of those times.
Final Smash: Take your pick! Maybe the paparazzi crowd into frame and you “Pose for the fans”, blasting everyone from the stage with your powerful pecs. Alternatively, The Chorus Kids arrive and shatter your opponent using their ultrasonic voices.
For: Could create interesting mechanics for a block-filled stage, We haven’t seen Mallo on Switch… yet.
Against: Lesser-known cute character would no-doubt invoke ‘fan’ ire in certain circles.
Final Smash: A wall of blocks appear behind your opponent and Mallo pushes a button. As he’s sake on top of the blocks, everyone else is smashed off the stage towards the screen, landing with a splat and sliding down.
For: Loads of potential in a Downwell stage; Gunboots offer cool offensive moves; Would make an unlikely but brilliant team with Bayonetta; Would go down… well.
Against: A bit one-note?
Final Smash: Downwell dude removes his gunboots and puts them on his opponent. Having no experience with such footwear, they are blasted off the stage to their doom.
Master Chief
Notable game(s):Halo: Combat Evolved, the Halo series
For: Iconic gaming character; Trained in evolved combat.
Against: We’ve already had a massively surprising Microsoft crossover with B-K, although Master Chief is very different.
Final Smash: A Warthog speeds onto the stage, the Chief jumps in while it’s still moving and ploughs over the opposition to finish the fight.
Super Smash Bros Ultimate Boss Asks Players Please Not To Request Fighters
The fifth and final DLC character included in Super Smash Bros Ultimate's Fighter Pass, Byleth, has been announced, and fans are already wondering who will come to the second Fighter Pass. During the Byleth announcement, Smash Bros director Masahiro Sakurai confirmed that six more fighters will join the game by December 2021. Sakurai, who receives a lot of requests, wanted to make something clear--the six fighters have already been chosen, and there's nothing to be gained from sending him requests.
"Of course, like last time, the contents will remain unknown for now," Sakurai said, and apologized for asking fans to buy the Fighter Pass without knowing who was coming to the game. Sakurai addressed the inevitable tweets he will receive about the next lot of fighters, asking for a reprieve.
"The new additions have already been decided," Sakurai said. "Even if I receive many requests regarding potential candidates on Twitter, I'm afraid it would be very hard to consider them. But I still hope you'll look forward to it."
With this in mind, we can start speculating over who the new fighters will be. Rayman? Crash Bandicoot? Steve from Minecraft? Master Chief?
Fighters Pass Volume 2 will be available to purchase on January 28, although we won't know the first new fighter it will add until later.
After watching the reveal of Alienware’s Concept UFO gadget at CES a couple of weeks back, we couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d seen the concept somewhere before. Obviously, it’s only natural that the best aspects of any tech will eventually get incorporated into rival companies’ products, but watching the Windows 10 device presented as if it were 2015 and the very idea was totally brand new felt a little laughable. How did they keep a straight face while presenting? With the tablet’s detachable controllers, kickstand and everything else about it, calling it ‘innovative’ felt remarkable cheeky.
Still, it seems that the machine itself has won over the people who have played it, with Trusted Reviews giving it one if their Best In Show awards. Alienware has since taken to Twitter quoting the website:
While the quote itself feels odd to anyone who’s been enjoying the deluge of software hitting Switch every week, the context of the article itself makes the “limited number of games” comment make more sense. The writer is speaking in relation to the tens of thousands of PC games available across dozens of portals. In comparison, Switch’s library of 3000-ish games obviously can’t compete. Still, if there’s one thing area where we’d say Switch definitively isn’t lacking, it’s the number of games to its name.
Alienware hasn’t announced a price for its device yet, although with an 8-inch 1080p screen and a 10th generation Intel Core running things, it’ll certainly cost more than Switch, assuming it makes it out of the prototype phase. It’s a smart little (or not so little) piece of kit, certainly – especially if you’ve got a big old Steam library – and it’ll be interesting to see how it fares against Nintendo’s take on full-fledged gaming on-the-go if it does ever make it to market.
How does the Concept UFO strike you? Innovative and the inevitable next step in portable gaming or cheeky co-opting of Switch’s design? How much would you be willing to pay to play your PC library on-the-go? Feel free to discuss below.
JetBrains, the makers of programmer tools such as IntelliJ, WebStorm, CLion and Rider, as well as the programming language Kotlin have been working on a font specifically designed for code. JetBrains Mono is an open source font family consisting of 8 fonts specifically designed with reading and writing code in mind.
For the most part of our day we, as developers, look at the code. And it is no wonder that we are always on the lookout for the best font to make looking at the text on the screen easier on our eyes. However, the logic in many popular fonts does not always take into account the difference between reading through code and reading a book. Our eyes move along code in a very different way, often having to move vertically as often as they do horizontally, which is opposed to reading a book where they slide along the text always in the same direction.
Therefore, while working on JetBrains Mono we focused, among other things, on the issues that can cause eye fatigue during long sessions of working with code. We have considered things like the size and shape of letters; the amount of space between them, a balance naturally engineered in monospace fonts; unnecessary details and unclear distinctions between symbols, such as I’s and l’s for example; and programming ligatures when developing our font.
Today, we proudly present JetBrains Mono – a new open-source typeface specifically made for developers. Check out what makes JetBrains Mono unique in the big family of monospaced fonts and try it in your favorite code editor. Have a look at JetBrains Mono, your eyes will thank you for it.
More details about Mono are available here. It is the default font on all 2020 JetBrains IDEs and is available as an option in version 2019.3 and beyond of all JetBrain products. If you use another IDE you can download the zip here. Learn more about JetBrains Mono, including how to install and configure in Visual Studio Code in the video below.
We’ve got a nice meaty update for you today. Couple of interesting new premium titles, as well as a few other other interesting movements in the free-to-play world. The industry is well and truly awake now, so expect more news, updates and releases coming down the pipeline over the coming weeks.
As we noted last week, Arnold Rauers and TinyTouchTales have a new game, which was released earlier this week. Maze Machina follows similar veins to past works like Card Crawl or Card Thief, but there doesn’t appear to be the same kind of progression mechanics. Michael’s review will be with us ASAP, so keep an eye out for that.
This game attempts to answer the question “What if we made Dark Souls for mobile?”. Gritty, difficult, action-RPG are just a few words you could use to describe it. Depending on how much it actually is like Dark Souls, I’m sure you could use more vulgar words as well. It’s a pretty reasonable price for a game of this visual fidelity, and early indications suggest it works quite well on iOS devices right now. We’ll add this to the review list and get back to you ASAP. Android users, don’t despair – a port is due later this year.
If you liked Call of Duty’s mobile incarnation, it might interest you to know that another popular FPS title has made the jump the mobile as well – Warface has never really been seen a ‘true’ competitor to COD and Battlefield, but it’s been doing the ‘F2P Shooter’ thing for while now (it was first released in 2013!) and still going strong. The mobile version is called Warface: Global Operations and is available on both iOS and Android, still Free-to-Play.
Last but not least, Space Grunts 2 is now out on Android, if any of you have been waiting for the Google Play version.
App Updates & News
What would you get if you decided to merge 100-Player Battle Royale and Auto Chess? Well, according to Ubisoft, you’d get Might & Magic: Chess Royale, which is a new game coming at the end of the month. I’m personally quite a fan of Auto Chess games, although I’m not a big Battle Royale player (Fortnite is fun enough if you’ve got someone to play it with).
I don’t really understand how this can be a thing, but the press blurb claim matches won’t take longer than 10 minutes, so that addresses my main concern. We’ll find out more on January 30th.
Narcos is a Netflix you may or may not have seen by now (not really my thing, but I know it’s fairly popular) following the family-friendly saga of the rise of the cocaine trade in Colombia in the late 80’s. It had a surprisingly decent (if tragically flawed) turn-based strategy spin-off game on PC and Console and now it’s getting a mobile spin-off in the form of… an Idle Clicker game. Yeah. Check out this bad boy.
You might also be excited to know that Playdek’s latest board game port, Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001 – ? will be entering early access on Steam at the end of February. No word on a mobile version yet but we know Playdek will want to bring it mobile eventually, so it’s good to see progress being made.
In terms of individual app updates, there’s a few:
Star Traders: Frontiers continues to be Best Traders.
Santorini got a minor update
Call of Duty: Mobile’s Third Season has started
DOTA Underlords got a new balance/tweak patch
Black Desert Mobile has got a new World Boss, as well as the Node War PvP mode we’ve spoken about before
App Sales
It appears to be another week where there’s nothing really to shout about in terms of sales, so I thought I’d take a moment to clarify how I go about populating this section.
Games go on sale all the time, but I tend to stick to the ones we’ve covered, or at least more obviously within our ball-park. Sometimes though you see the same games go on sale repeatedly, and they’re not always the best price. For example Klarus Victoria (Predynastic Egypt etc.) have all their games on sale again, but it’s the same price they always discount to.
Icewind Dale is also half price again, but that’s not the best price it’s been and there’s a couple others like this. We’ve covered all these games before and I do try to monitor whether a price is “good” price, as highly subjective as that concept it.
That being said, Beholder’s latest sale is the best price it’s ever been at $1.99, down from it’s previous typical sales price of $2.99. Maybe there are some of you who don’t own it yet who would like to, but again the older a game is the less relevant I feel it is at times in terms of discounts.
Seen anything else you like? Played any of the above? Let us know in the comments!
