Welcome back, Agents!

Last month, we gave you Crackdown 3’s Keys to the City, providing a deep menu of Campaign tools and cheats to unleash unprecedented havoc, alongside a new vanity progression system for Wrecking Zone. Today, we’re excited to announce the free Flying High Campaign update, available with Xbox Game Pass and on Xbox One and Windows 10 PC.

With Flying High you have new gadgets to collect, new Achievements to earn—and a whole new way to explore the expansive, vertical world of New Providence.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s you soaring above the city with the Agency Wingsuit! Reach new heights, attack enemies from above, and test your flying skills in one of seven Wingsuit races.

Eager to bring even more boom? Try the Clusterduck grenade and its chain-reaction explosions. If that doesn’t fit the duckbill, make it rain with the Hellstorm Flare to call in air-strikes from the Island Defense Turrets or deploy the Agency Peacekeeper Beacon to summon Civilian Militia backup.

But that’s not all! Unearth the Elemental Forge gadget to summon four over-the-top melee weapons, each with its own unique environmental damage effects. Light up your foes with the Flaming Sword, give them a shocking send-off with the Electric Hammer, keep it cool with the Ice Mace, or be the toxin of the town with the Chimera Axe. Swing, smash and throw each weapon to unleash chaotic fun.

We can’t thank you enough for your continued support of Crackdown 3. With a total of 14 new Achievements and 500 Gamerscore, the free Flying High update is yours for the taking, so get to it Agents!

Crackdown 3 is available now with Xbox Game Pass and on Xbox One and Windows 10 PC. For the latest on Crackdown 3 and all things Xbox stay tuned to Xbox Wire.

For the 2017 company-wide Hackathon, Chirag Gupta and Gaurav Kapila saw an opportunity to bring visibility to and alignment behind an improved and more in-depth analysis of resource allocation for large enterprise customers on Azure. At the time, the two were working on log analytics and Azure Governance for their day jobs. They were gathering evidence on what were the gaps for enterprise adoption of Azure, and what could help the experience for customers with Azure subscriptions at scale. With their 2017 Hackathon project, Cloud Map, Chirag and Gaurav recruited a team to create a solution that provided Azure Resource exploration through a graphical interface as well as advanced query language for searching across Azure resource properties. When showing their hack project to various groups in the company, they found that everyone was dealing with one problem – helping large-scale, enterprise customers better understand their own Azure environments by bringing better visibility to existing issues or potential problems.

“Hackathon helped us really get these internal teams together. Our project has a lot of dependencies and partners inside Microsoft.” Gaurav explained. “We needed to get these teams in the same room and ask, ‘would something like Cloud Map be helpful to you? Does this solve your problems?’” Chirag added.

Their project resonated with teams and especially Group Manager of Azure portal, Leon Welicki, who not only joined their project but became the sponsor, key in guiding the project towards public preview and general availability as Azure Resource Graph. Alex Zakonov, who was the Director of Application Insights in 2017, also sponsored the project with engineers from his team contributing to the project early on. The amount of validation the project received was so powerful that the portal team adopted Azure Resource Graph completely, with the top search bar in Azure portal pulling data solely from Azure Resource Graph.

“We coded like crazy in 3-4 days during Hackathon, we were elbow to elbow, sitting together, so we developed a really close relationship. Fantastic full stack collaboration between everybody involved, which set a very solid foundation of two teams that worked like one.” Leon recalled his team working side by side with the Graph team during the Hackathon and how each member of the hack project worked across disciplines to achieve a compelling demo that showed their vision for the project. “We continue to have a fantastic partnership going on driving two parts of the product – front-end and back-end.”

In 2018, Chirag again participated in the Hackathon to experiment with what their team had built. Their 2018 Hackathon project, Microsoft Graph for Azure, investigated ways Azure Resource Graph’s reach could be extended by integrating Microsoft Graph to allow exploration using Microsoft Graph API’s.

In September of 2018 at Microsoft Ignite, Azure Resource Graph was officially released as part of Azure Governance, a set of services for customers that help build and scale applications quickly while making sure their environments are secure, compliant, and cost effective. Customers are able to access Azure Resource Graph by directly searching in the Azure portal search bar, querying and filtering on multiple resource properties, and seeing an in-depth and even visual representation of their resources across Azure subscriptions. All to ensure customers have a clearer picture of their activity and environments across Azure for smarter and more efficient management to save time and money.

At Build 2019, the team released the Azure Resource Graph explorer view in Azure portal. In addition to allowing customers to create custom queries, they could now also create dashboards based on the Graph. The experience was also made available on the Azure mobile application, expanding Azure Resource Graph’s footprint.

Even after public preview and general availability release, expect the team to continue improving and extending Azure Resource Graph. The team is collaborating closely with Azure portal to provide robust data visualizations and build improved Azure management experiences that are critical for IT admins, cloud admins, DevOps, and enterprise businesses everywhere.

Following on from the news about the ‘best of E3’ nominees, we’ve now got the full list of winners selected by 64 global media and influencer outlets. In the end, the Nintendo and Next Level Switch title Luigi’s Mansion 3 won the award for best family/social game.

This was the only first-party Nintendo title to win an award and Final Fantasy VII Remake won best of the show. Apart from this, the recently released Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled won the best racing game, Doom Eternal won best action game and the Xbox Elite Wireless Controller beat the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis Mini to win the best hardware/peripheral award.

Best of Show
Final Fantasy VII Remake
(Square Enix for PS4)

Best Original Game
The Outer Worlds
(Obsidian/Private Division for PC, PS4, Xbox)

Best Console
Final Fantasy VII Remake
(Square Enix for PS4)

Best VR/AR Game
Phantom: Covert Ops
(nDreams/Oculus Studios for Oculus Quest, PC)

Best PC Game
Doom Eternal
(id Software/Bethesda for PC, PS4, Stadia, Switch, Xbox)

Best Hardware/Peripheral
Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2
(Microsoft)

Best Action Game
Doom Eternal
(id Software/Bethesda for PC, PS4, Stadia, Switch, Xbox)

Best Action/Adventure
Watch Dogs: Legion
(Ubisoft Toronto/Ubisoft for PC, PS4, Stadia, Xbox)

Best RPG
Final Fantasy VII Remake
(Square Enix for PS4)

Best Racing Game
Crash Team Racing
(Beenox/Activision for PS4, Xbox)

Best Sports Game
EFootball Pro Evolution Soccer 2020
(Konami for PS4, Xbox)

Best Strategy Game
John Wick Hex
(Bithell Games/Good Sheperd for Mac, PC)

Best Family/Social Game
Luigi’s Mansion 3
(Next Level Games/Nintendo for Switch)

Best Online Multiplayer
Call of Duty Modern Warfare
(Infinity Ward/Activision for PC, PS4, Xbox)

Best Independent Game
12 Minutes
(Luis Antonio/Annapurna for PC, Xbox)

Best Ongoing Game
Destiny 2
(Bungie for PC, PS4, Stadia, Xbox)

Special Commendations for Graphics
Cyberpunk 2077
(CD PROJEKT RED for PC, PS4, Xbox)

If you would like to see what other games were nominated, check out our previous post.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) expects the number of drones in our airspace to increase as much as threefold by 2023, as commercial drone operations become more common. But with more drones in the air, mishaps become more likely. In 2017, the FAA reported an average of 250 safety incidents per month, in some cases halting operations at major international airports.

Israeli startup Vorpal specializes in tracking and, ideally, preventing those near misses. Their drone detection and tracking solution, VigilAir, uses a geographically distributed network of sensors that scan relevant frequencies to identify drone transmissions, allowing them to identify and track drones and their operators in near-real time.

Each of Vorpal’s sensors is equipped with computing hardware that processes their location-tracking software. The more drones in the sky, the more compute power needed to handle all that data. To ensure that VigilAir can seamlessly maintain those capabilities, Vorpal is looking to the cloud, working with AT&T and Microsoft to test how edge computing could allow them to track thousands of drones at any given time.

The AT&T Foundry, a network of innovation spaces dedicated to rapid prototyping, is testing how to bring network edge compute (NEC) capabilities into AT&T’s network with Microsoft’s intelligent edge offerings, including Azure’s IoT and AI services, and Azure Stack hybrid technology. By deploying Microsoft’s advanced cloud services closer to the edge of the network, NEC could allow businesses to access low-latency network compute at a fraction of the cost of traditional, embedded processing.

Learn more about the proof-of-concept solution Vorpal is developing with AT&T and Microsoft.

Black Squad is Now Available on Steam!

Black Squad is a free-to-play military first-person-shooter. Players can master their skills and show off their strategies with a wide range of game maps, modes, and weapons to choose from. Join thousands of FPS players worldwide in one of the most played games on Steam!

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Responsibilities:

• Create, edit and publish content for the company’s blog and all other official social media channels.
• Manage and engage social media community as it exists across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch and other networks.
• Maintain a consistent presence and friendly environment across all communication channels, engaging fans via social media channels, events, chats, direct email, and other NWI fan discussion outlets.
• Create and present regular reporting to internal teams on community engagement and social media metrics. Track content consumption, traffic growth, user registration among other things.
• Create and present regular community feedback reports to aid our production and development teams in adding new features and identifying issues in our live products.
• Help develop community campaign strategies in line with marketing/brand/PR objectives.
• Build and maintain direct relationships with key community and social influencers.
• Conceptualize and manage execution of new social media engagement initiatives such as events, contests, and promotions.
• Work with internal teams to create and produce content, including video assets.
• Compile daily monitoring reports on fan discussion and be responsible for tracking down answers to fan questions.
• Manage, reward and energize fan communities of NWI game franchises.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Previous experience in social media and community management.
• Experience with video and audio streaming and recording equipment.
• Knowledge and passion for online community creation and social media.
• Knowledge and passion for video games, especially FPS.
• Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills, both written and verbal.
• Highly self-motivated and proactive with ability to work both with minimal supervision and as part of a team environment.
• Strong planning and project management skills and good analytical skills.
• Ability to work swiftly and efficiently in a fast-paced environment.
• Excellent organizational skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Working knowledge of HTML, BB Code, Sony Vegas or Premiere Pro and Photoshop.
• Multiple languages (especially Russian and/or Chinese)

Applications MUST include:

• Resume
• Cover Letter telling us why you are passionate about working at NWI.

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

Waiting… waiting never changes. After a burst of new information about the upcoming Summer Release, there’s been next to no news from our side. Indeed, we prepared a handful of minor updates – including the addition of Random Duos – yet there was nothing major on the horizon.

Right now, we are working hard to create the best possible experience for when the game fully releases as a free-to-play title in Summer 2019. Indeed, we know you would like to take a closer look and give it a try as soon as possible – and that’s one of the reasons we prepared one last major update before the actual release. So, without further ado, let’s see what’s in Update 0.9: Aid that is coming in July.

We listen to the feedback of the community. Sometimes, it may not seem so at first glance, but we really do. Our developers have managed to go through each and every report of wobbly shooting to improve the gunplay – we found some gnomes in the machine, and sent them packing. That means shooting should be much more reliable now, and all the weapons got some more configuration love as well. You should be able to enjoy the gunplay more than ever, and the same goes for the animations and interactions.

Many of you proposed we should focus on customizations and a possibility to acquire them for Crowns. This is actually something we have already been working on in the background, and Update 0.9 should finally see the Outlander’s shop in the game. Speaking of customizations… what if no one gets to see you in the Encounter? Well, we decided to add an option for you to learn from your mistakes and return to the Encounter as a spectator once you are killed. Learn from the best – see how they play and check out their attire.

Do you still remember the first time you saw Vigor? It was a rough experience, waking up in dark tunnel without any leads for what to do. This should change with a new tutorial that’s going to bring you up to speed. We went through various focus tests and decided to change the structure. You are now going to get a helping hand – yet, it will still be up to you to decide who you going to trust in the outlands.

As you can imagine, Update 0.9 is going to be a big one. In the meantime, we plan to showcase some more content that is currently being prepared for you. Stay tuned!

That’s all for now! As always, keep sending us your feedback on Twitter and Facebook.

See you in post-war Norway, Outlanders.

Vigor is available now as an Game Preview title for Xbox One via the Microsoft Store. Click here for details.

Ring of Elysium has graduated from Early Access and v1.0 is now available on Steam, including the new Ashen Eye update!

Trapped in an area assaulted by natural disasters, the only way out is a rescue flight which can only save up to four people. Survivors must stay ahead of the approaching danger while eliminating competition.

This week at Bungie, we’re about to hit the road.

Heroic Menagerie went live this week. Calus is testing you in new ways and sending those who fail to impress him back to orbit. You must gather your own fireteam to tackle this challenge, but new Triumphs and rewards await those of you who are up for it.

Next week, the Lumina quest becomes available to all Annual Pass owners. We are excited to see Guardians wielding this weapon to support each other in combat. We don’t want to spoil too much, but you should expect to start your hunt for this weapon in the EDZ.

Page Turner

Thanks to your dedication to the stories the Destiny universe has to offer, you made our first volume of the Grimoire Anthology a hit, and we’ve seen many of you asking when Volume 2 would be coming out. Starting next week, on July 2, you can start pre-ordering the Destiny Grimoire Anthology, Vol. 2: Fallen Kingdoms from the Bungie Store. The book will ship in October.

We will also be offering a new “Consult the Archives” emote in the Eververse store for all of you lore lovers out there. If you choose to purchase this emote in game and are signed up for Bungie Rewards, you can receive a 20% discount offer for the Destiny Grimoire Anthology, Vol. 2 Fallen Kingdoms. You just need to visit bungie.net/rewards and redeem your discount starting on July 2 at 10AM PDT. You will have until 11:59 PM on July 9 to redeem this limited time offer.

Chest Runs

When Season of Opulence began, we watched as players quickly discovered a bug in how the Menagerie’s final chest granted rewards. Players began to race out of the area and then back to the chest as fast as they could to get as many rewards as possible before sent back to orbit. It felt reminiscent of when players were farming treasure keys from chests on their Sparrows leading up to House of Wolves.

Consider this an error in your favor. We haven’t rushed to fix it, but when we patch on July 9, this loophole will officially close, allowing only one opening of the chest per completion. Until then, we invite you take advantage of this all you like. Grow fat with strength.

Charitable Endeavors

Last week, we had the honor in participating in the annual GuardianCon charity marathon. We were overwhelmed by the generosity from players showing up in huge numbers to support a great cause. In our 4-hour block, you raised $406,000 for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and the grand total for the week was $3.7 million! Thank you so much to everyone who participated and donated—it was truly amazing seeing gamers come together to help others. We have given out the Bungie Bounty emblems and are currently working on giving out all the other emblems and prizes from the charity stream.

We’re not done yet. We have another opportunity coming up for you to help more little lights and grab an emblem as a thank-you from us for your continued support. Here is Sr. Foundation Manager Christine Edwards with the details.

Christine: Bungie Day is right around the corner on July 7! As we head into this day of celebration, I can’t help but smile in gratitude for what truly sets our community apart—the level of care you have for one another and the world around us. Time and time again, you have all stepped up to the plate to support incredible charitable causes from natural disaster relief to families experiencing medical crises, and everything in between.

I am excited to announce today that for the very first time, we are inviting you to support the Bungie Foundation in our own work to make the world a better place through the iPads for Kids program.

Between now and July 14, we are asking you to help us raise $77,000 by making a donation. By contributing, you will play a direct role in providing hospitalized children with age-appropriate and therapeutic entertainment for distraction, play, and a sense of normalcy while they’re facing some tough and scary illnesses.

Donors who contribute $50 or more between now and July 14 at 11:59 PM PDT will receive a unique redeemable code for the “System of Peace” emblem! Exact distribution date will be announced to all donors after the fundraising event ends.

Together we can bring joy, laughter, and smiles to so many incredible kids! Thank you for your support

P.S.—Look out for some exciting additions to the Bungie Store next week, complete with exclusive Bungie Foundation merchandise!

Support Crew

The DPS team is always working diligently behind the scenes. They make sure you have the info you need for the best Destiny 2 experience.

This is their report.

Destiny Service Maintenance

Today, in preparation for the launch of Cross Save this Fall, we temporarily brought Destiny services offline for maintenance.

At this time, all Destiny services should be back online, across Destiny 1, Destiny 2, Bungie.net, and Destiny API services, however maintenance is ongoing. Players should follow @BungieHelp on Twitter or monitor our support feed in help.bungie.net for live updates.

Destiny 2 Season of Opulence Known Issues

Listed below are the latest player-impacting issues discovered in Season of Opulence:

Peregrine GREEEEEEEEEEEEAVES!

Welcome to another movie of the week. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the popcorn. This is a few of our favorite videos from the week. All of their creators will be rewarded with a special emblem. If you are one of the said creators, make sure you have your player name in the description of the video. Our creations page is the best place to submit your videos, but any that we come across on the internet are fair game. Here are this week’s winners.

Movie of the Week: Peregrine GREEEEEEEEEEEEAVES! (Bad Language warning)

Thank you for your generosity, enthusiasm, and for continuing to surprise us after all of these years. Destiny first launched in 2014, but it feels nearly 5 years later like we’re just getting started.

<3 Cozmo