Posted by: xSicKxBot - 01-09-2020, 05:14 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Fantasy Flight Interactive to close after company-wide layoffs
News is spreading that Fantasy Flight Interactive, the branch of Fantasy Flight Games in charge of the tabletop game company’s digital games, will close in February after an unspecified number of employees were laid off.
This is a notable failure for Fantasy Flight Interactive, which opened its doors in 2017 with a mission to both adapt Fantasy Flight’s physical games for digital platforms and develop its own original games based on the company’s library of franchises.
But in a LinkedIn post published yesterday, studio head Tim Gerritsen (formerly of Human Head) wrote that “the decision has been made to close Fantasy Flight Interactive next month.”
“I’m going to do my best to get my team placed in new positions. I have programmers, designers, artists, QA staff and a producer to get placed in new roles and will do my best to do so quickly,” he added. “Additionally, I’m now open to new opportunities myself since I will also be out of a job.”
Gamasutra has reached out to company representatives for further details and comment on the layoffs. If you or someone you know has been affected, you can email Gamasutra to share your story confidentially.
Update: A source close to the situation estimates that over 10 people have been let go from Fantasy Flight Games, and that the customer service department and tabletop RPG department are also expected to shutter as a result.
Rumour: The Pokémon Direct Will Share “New Details” About Sword And Shield
As you’ve probably already heard by now, later this week a Pokémon Direct is airing. It will apparently feature “roughly 20 minutes” of new Pokémon information in a live stream presentation. This is definitely odd timing, considering Pokémon Sword and Shield were only released last November, so what exactly is this upcoming broadcast focused on?
If you were hoping for details about future remakes of the older Pokémon RPG, try not to get your hopes up. According to Twitter user @Ruki185, the German press release “specifically states” the presentation will be sharing “new details” about Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield. This information was allegedly spotted on the German press release, which was retrieved from the German NoE press server.
As the Twitter user who shared this information seems to be in question, we’ll tag this as a rumour for now. In saying this, we would be surprised if we didn’t get at least some new information linked to S&S or new details about Pokémon Home – a storage solution designed to connect with the modern Pokémon titles.
The Pokémon Direct will be streamed live at 6:30am PT on 9th January (so that’s 9:30am ET / 2:30pm GMT / 3:30pm CET), will you be tuning in? Leave a comment down below.
Super Smash Bros Ultimate's 6.1.1 Patch Introduces One Tiny Change
Super Smash Bros Ultimate has received a minor new update today, and it's natural to wonder when you see the game update what has just been added. Update 6.1.1 for the hit Switch fighter is such a small change, though, that most players will not notice it. Don't worry about tier changes or balance shifts that will affect how you play--this update is just for amiibo support.
Update 6.1.1 implements support for the Dark Samus and Richter amiibo, both of which release on January 17. The update will allow you to use both amiibo in-game, leveling them up and fighting against them as you would with any other amiibo fighter.
The majority of Super Smash Bros Ultimate fighters have now received amiibo, except for the characters available in the Season Pass--Joker, Hero, Banjo-Kazooie, Terry, and an unannounced fifth fighter, and whoever else Nintendo will release in the future.
This update is necessary to play the game online. Local wireless play is not compatible with earlier versions, and replay compatibility is available for replays saved on ver. 6.1.0, but not 6.0.0 or earlier.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 01-08-2020, 03:50 PM - Forum: Windows
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Sea of Thieves passes 10M player mark
We’re
excited and humbled to share that Sea of Thieves has now been played by
more than ten million players, reinforcing its status as the most successful
new IP from Xbox this generation.
It’s
mind-blowing to think of that many people setting sail on the Sea of Thieves,
and it’s all been made possible by the support and passion of our fantastic
community.
For
everyone at Rare, the Sea of Thieves community represents the very best
of what gaming can be. It’s home to players from more than eighty different
countries, bringing together gamers on Xbox Game Pass, Xbox One and Windows 10 PC
and creating countless stories and moments that people can treasure. Seeing
these stories shared through social media or other community spaces is
something that inspires the team every day. To every person who’s played Sea
of Thieves, thank you.
Our community will be at the centre of our January update – ‘Legends of the Seas’ – which will be available to all players for free from Wednesday January 15. Not only will this update celebrate our community and its stories, it will also feature two limited-edition gifts to mark our 10 million player milestone. Log-in to the game between January 15 and 22 and claim a free custom sail and a special new emote.
Once again, on behalf of everyone at Rare I’d like to say thank you to everyone who’s been on this journey with us so far. The best news is that we’re just getting started and have big plans for the coming year. See you on the seas!
Feature: Game Of The Decade Staff Picks – Fire Emblem: Awakening
Following on from our reader-voted Top 50 Games of the Decade, Nintendo Life staff members will be picking their personal favourite Nintendo games between the years 2010-2019. Today, Gavin looks back nearly seven years and tries to remember the name of his kid…
Picking one’s favourite game from a decade’s worth is a tough proposition. It involves quantifying something intangible. What does ‘favourite’ mean exactly? The games I’ve had most fun with were invariably tied up with people, places and periods of my life where the game itself was just a single element, one part of the puzzle. They’re tied up inextricably with memory and these days I have trouble remembering what I did at the weekend. You might suggest looking at solid metrics like Most Played Game to help arrive at a decision, but is StreetPass Mii Plaza really my Game of the Decade?
My introduction to the Fire Emblem series was through Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones. Having got in early with the 3DS (and paid top dollar before the price cut), I was eligible for the Ambassador Programme and the 20 Virtual Console games it gifted. I played through several of the exclusive GBA offerings for the very first time and Sacred Stones was one of them. I’d tried Advance Wars back in the day but somehow bounced off it (I should really go back and try again at some point), but Fire Emblem’s mix of story and strategy hooked me immediately and I devoured Sacred Stones on my commute over a month in 2012.
Being a listener of the 8-4 Play podcast (check it out if you’re a fan of Japan, games or Japanese games), hearing that they were behind the translation of the upcoming 3DS entry encouraged me to dive in early, and digitally – a novelty for me at the time. I remember weighing up whether I wanted to wait until morning just to have a box or start playing that very night (a couple of days after the EU launch on Sunday 21st April 2013 according to my 3DS Activity Log – how I miss these stats on Switch). Impatience got the better of me, so I got it on the eShop and dived right in.
I don’t remember why, but for some reason I went straight in on Hard difficulty. Perhaps I’d heard that was the best way to play (it certainly is for the latest entry on Switch). Whatever the reason, it was the right choice; the pitch-perfect level of challenge that expertly walked the line between frustration and compulsion and had be hard resetting many, many times. Permadeath is a fundamental part of the series, but I wasn’t about to let any of my team go gently (or not so gently) into that good night – not on my watch! In fact, I doubled my playtime through resets as I restarted battles again and again to make certain my entire team survived.
Where normally such a rigmarole would sour me on a game immediately, Awakening was brilliant enough to make hard resets essential. I simply had to go back, rethink, restrategise, and redeploy my team to attain victory. I was invested in all aspects of the game – the positioning, the strategy of terrain, character and weapon type, and the stories behind the characters themselves. Every component dovetailed to make Awakening one of the most challenging and satisfying games I’ve ever played.
Much of its appeal comes down to the writing. The web of interactions between all characters is complex and relationships are forged and strengthened in a system which puts friendships at the heart of the game, on and off the battlefield. Fighting alongside one another strengthens a pair’s bond and you find yourself playing social engineer as well as coordinating offensives on enemy forts. The spunky Sully quickly stole my heart and we ended up marrying and fighting back-to-back on many occasions. We had a kid, too, although I’m hazy on the details. I told you I can’t remember what I had for breakfast – you expect me to remember my kid’s name? Sully, though! She sure sticks in the memory…
In addition to the synergy between narrative and gameplay, it’s one of the games that used the 3DS’ namesake function really well. The battlefield UI and map was well-designed and easy enough to parse without it, but the 3D effect separated each layer and made it a breeze to understand what was going on at a glance. A thrilling soundtrack and beautiful presentation rounded out what has to be one of the 3DS’ most perfect packages: it would seem you lot agree, too. The game was so good that you really didn’t notice the absence of feet for the entire cast.
You’d think that having enjoyed Awakening so much I’d have gone on to devour Fates and Shadows of Valentia, but other games got in the way. The latter, in particular, is one I’d like to return to at some point, but I’ve had Fire Emblem: Three Houses sitting on my Switch for months and have barely scratched the surface thanks to about thirty other games waiting to be played. This is what I do now – buy and collect brilliant games and never play the damn things. Maybe that’s another factor in how fondly I look back on Awakening. Back then I had the time to pump 100+ hours into an SRPG and get totally lost in it, hard resetting over and over with no care for the clock.
So, there we are – I went with Fire Emblem: Awakening. Shout-outs to Super Mario Galaxy 2, Kirby’s Epic Yarn, Dark Souls II, Breath of the Wild, Overcooked and about forty others, but Awakening was particularly special for me. Is it categorically my ‘favourite’ game of the last decade? Pah, I’m not sure what that even means anymore. All I know is that it’s a phenomenal game that’s worth hunting down a 3DS to play.
Get 3 Months Of Xbox One Game Pass Ultimate For $15--Here's How
For Xbox One owners, there's no better deal than Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft's monthly membership that grants access to a huge library of games, with new games added on a regular basis. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is the next step up, combining Game Pass for both console and PC with Xbox Live Gold, which gets you free monthly Xbox One games and exclusive game discounts. The premium membership normally costs $15 a month, but you can pick up three months for the same price thanks to a deal at Amazon right now.
When you buy a one-month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription from Amazon, you'll get an additional month of the service free as part of a limited-time promotion. This is available to both new and existing subscribers. To get one more month free, make sure auto-renew is disabled before you take advantage of this deal. When redeeming the first code, you'll be asked to turn on auto-renew to get an additional one month free.
Unfortunately, you'll only get the three free months, not four. According to Twitter user @oketz1, who took advantage of this deal, the bonus code doesn't seem to trigger the additional free month.
The open source 2D game engine GDevelop just released beta 84 of their 5.0.0 branch. Major features of b84 are BBCode formatting support, dozens of new layer effects, improvements to the integrated pixel graphics editor and more.
Thanks @Bouh and @blurymind for porting, trying and setting up these new effects for GDevelop: Black and White, Noise, CRT, Godray, Tilt shift, Advanced bloom, Kawase blur, Zoom blur, Displacement, Color Map, Pixelate, Reflection.
DOTA Underlords has gone from 200K to 18K Peak Players in six months
By Joe Robinson07 Jan 2020
It seems y’all have stopped playing DOTA Underlords. A reddit thread on r/Games has pointed out the Steam Charts listing for Valve’s own Auto Chess take, which shows the game as lost over 80% of its player base since launching mid 2019.
In June peak players were just over 200K, where-as of the last 30 days that’s dropped to around 18,000. It’s worth bearing in mind though that Underlords went from 200K to 100K peak players in the first thirty days, with the decline getting more gradual in the months that followed. The average number of players is around 11K for the last 30 days, which while nothing to sniff at still indicates not as many people are playing as there used to be.
I’m not 100% sure if Steam tracks people who access the game via mobile… I want to say yes, because every-time I bring it up on my phone it then appears in my ‘Most Recent’ played games list within the Steam client, even though I don’t have it installed on my PC. I’d be interested in knowing how many of Underlords’ active players play primarily on their phones or tablets.
Reading the thread in full, you can get some interesting insights as to what core players think of Underlords’ journey since it launched into Beta. Many respect Valve for the experimentation and the better handling of the game versus Artifact, although some haven’t been impressed with the specifics of the updates that have come since. The inclusion of the titular ‘Underlords’ hasn’t really hit home, and the Jailbreak system led to so much confusion that the devs simply dropped it as part of of the December 18th update. Instead they’ve gone for a more direct rotation system, with 14 heroes currently removed from the game.
Some argue that the development team at Valve don’t really know what they want to do with Underlords. You can look at what Drodo is going with the OG Auto Chess game as one route for evolution, but I think Hearthstone Battlegrounds has shown that Auto Chess games can be much more than what we’ve got currently. Underlords was offering its own ‘quick-play’ format called Knockout, and it seems they’ve incorporated the lessons learned from that mode into the Standard and Duo format as well, making all games shorter by default. This will serve as a decent enough short-term solution to help with retention, but I feel like Underlords really needs to step up their thinking.
The ‘Auto Chess Wars’ in general haven’t been as heated as I thought they would be – we had an initial rush of knock-offs and me-toos, but nothing major in the latter half of 2019 apart from Blizzard’s‘ own “Hearthstone but Auto Chess’ experiment. TeamFight Tactics seems to be doing the best out of the ‘big’ auto battler games, and so far no other big-name western publisher has tried to get in on the action.
It will be interesting to see where this new ‘hot’ genre goes in 2020 – I hope it doesn’t die off completely, but a lack of real innovation may lead to stagnation.
Containing all five episodes of the point-and-click adventure, the TV Edition was dependant on the completion of the fifth and final act. While it seems to have taken a little longer than anticipated, the wait is finally over and we’ll soon have the chance to play the entire game through on Switch (and other consoles).
The console version includes all five Acts, plus the Interludes that developer Cardboard Computer released in between the main instalments. Combining elements of magical realism with striking visuals and writing, the game follows the journey of truck driver Conway was he travels Route Zero making a delivery and meeting strange folk along the way. The first two episodes released in relatively quick succession back in 2013, followed by another in 2014 and the fourth in 2016.
With Act V apparently concluding Conroy’s adventure, it’s been a long journey for fans who were there at the beginning, but the plaudits the game has collected along the way suggest the wait will be worth it on console. We’ll be reviewing the game when it’s finally ready, so keep an eye out for our verdict at the end of the month.
Have you played Kentucky Route Zero on PC at any point over the past 7 years? Let us know what we can look forward to and if you’re planning on picking up the Switch version below.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 01-08-2020, 08:02 AM - Forum: Lounge
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Peacock Is Getting A New Original Show About A Real-Life Murderous Doctor
The upcoming Dr. Death series has found a home on the upcoming streaming service Peacock, as revealed in an interview with one of the stars of the show, Alec Baldwin.
During Tuesday morning's episode of the Howard Stern Show, Baldwin briefly discussed the previously-greenlit series. It was revealed the show would be landing on NBC's upcoming streaming service Peacock, which launches this April.
The story of Dr. Christopher Duntsch garnered national attention in 2018 with the Dr. Death podcast, hosted by Laura Beil--who will produce the new show. The series explored the life of Christopher Duntsch, a doctor who was nicknamed Dr. Death for the death of one patient and maiming of 33 others during his time when he was a practicing surgeon beginning in 2010.
Baldwin is one of the stars of the series, playing spinal surgeon Dr. Robert Henderson, who worked with Duntsch. Dr. Death himself will be played by Jamie Dornan, who is mostly known for his work in the Fifty Shades movies playing Christian Gray.
At this time, there is no release date for the upcoming series, and according to Baldwin, he's not allowed to say much about the show. Peacock has a few other series coming soon, including a Saved By The Bell revival, a Battlestar Galactica reboot, and possibly more from the world of The Office.
Peacock combines the properties of NBC, USA Network, Universal Pictures, Dreamworks, Telemundo, and more, so there will be a wide collection of TV shows, movies, and original content.
