Madden 19 Release Date / Pre-Order Guide (PS4/Xbox One) For The US
It may not be a surprise, but it's official: Madden NFL 19 is coming to PS4 and Xbox One on August 10. This year's installment features improvements to the graphics and animation, thanks to Real Player Motion Technology. Players will also have better tools for building their roster and new ways to train and develop the players. You can find more details here.
Whether you buy the new edition each year or you're looking to get into the franchise for the first time in 2018, you might be wondering what editions are available, how much they cost, and where to pre-order Madden NFL 19. We have you covered below.
Madden NFL 19 Standard Edition
Suggested retail price: $60
This is the standard version of the game. Pre-ordering it from Best Buy gets you a $10 reward certificate, but Newegg has it for $10 off. The cover athlete hasn't been revealed at the time of this writing.
Where to buy the Standard Edition:
Best Buy - PS4 / Xbox One: $60 ($10 reward certificate with pre-order)
The Hall of Fame Edition has 2018 Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee, wide receiver, Terrell Owens on the cover. It costs $20 more than the standard edition, but it gets you the core game, plus a number of extras. It also lets you choose between Owens or four other NFL legends (Brian Urlacher, Rod Woodson, Dan Marino, and Terrell Davis) to add to your team. Additionally, you get 12 Gold Team Fantasy Packs, one Elite Madden 19 cover athlete (TBA), and two All-Madden Uniforms.
As above, pre-ordering from Best Buy gets you a $10 reward certificate redeemable at Best Buy, but Newegg gives you $10 off the price from the start. And if you pre-order it anywhere, you get access to the game three days early (August 7).
Where to buy the Hall of Fame Edition:
Best Buy - PS4 / Xbox One - $80 ($10 reward certificate with pre-order)
A side-scrolling shooter with a monster hunting gameplay, you must search and hunt down dreadful sea monsters and explore the post-apocalyptic underwater world of Earth Atlantis. Unlock multiple ships with special weapons and abilities for your journey and become a legendary hunter.
Blog: Making a tabletop-style party game for consoles
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
Awkward is a brand new party game from Snap Finger Click. The aim of the game is to answer divisive, uncomfortable and sometimes controversial questions while another player tries to guess what you think. The questions start out gently, asking if you prefer hot dogs or hamburgers, or if you spend your weekends staying in or going out. But as you progress, the questions get increasingly more difficult:
“Would you have a night of passion with your best friend for $1m?”
“What outrages you the most, sexism or ageism?”
“Do you think you’re the smartest of all your friends?”
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Snap Finger Click is mostly made up of former developers of the now defunct Relentless Software who made the BAFTA-award winning Buzz! quiz series. Prior to Awkward, we released two party games: Act it Out!, and It’s Quiz Time. Making games that people can play together is our passion, but with Awkward, we also wanted to try something new, something not done on console before, and something that appeals to a big audience.
Act it Out! and It’s Quiz Time are both E-rated games, suitable for all ages. It was hard work securing those ratings as the smallest reference can push the rating up. Most party games tend to be T-rated and we noticed a problem with this: a game suitable for teenagers excludes families with younger kids, but also can be a turn-off to older adult groups looking for something more risqué. This can make it hard to find an audience as it floats between two age groups. And finding an audience is already a challenge for an indie studio! So having already made games for the family-friendly market, we spotted another gap at the other end of the spectrum: party games made for adults. While there are many successful adult tabletop party games such as Cards Against Humanity and Secret Hitler, no such games existed on console. Our goal with Awkward was to make an M-rated title, standing out against other party games as being for a solely grown-up audience.
In all our years making party games, there are a few things we’ve learned along the way. Two of the biggest constraints you have to consider are the number of controllers and the number of players required. With console, the only guarantee is that there’s one controller. Relying on players having multiple controllers narrows the potential audience you can reach. Similarly, the more players you require to start a game, the less chance there’ll be enough people in the household to play. Every party game we’ve ever worked on has always shown the 2-player game to be the most popular way to play, even if it was designed to work with more players in its main mode. From the beginning, we decided that Awkward had to be playable with just one controller and it had to work well as a 2-player game. To achieve this, we designed the core gameplay starting from a group of two players, and built outwards from there. We found posing a question to two people at a time with a simple button press input worked well, and we were easily able to add extra players by dividing players up into teams of two. Since the game is designed to cause debate, we found even large groups are happy to wait their turn as they can join the conversation with each question asked.
Something that sets party games apart from other genres is the need to be evergreen – the game must be replayable in short bursts to keep players coming back time and again. It was vital to make Awkward enjoyable in bite-sized chunks with an addictive quality. Each game of Awkward is fairly short at around 10-15 minutes, depending on how long players spend debating between questions. We played around with this quite a bit, but ultimately decided this was a great length for a game since it’s easy to get into, but gives the players a ‘just one more go’ mentality. When were testing it, we found ourselves playing for hours because we just wanted one more game. Had we made the games last longer, it could be off-putting to play again. Awkward comes with 5,000 handwritten questions which is far more than most players will be able to get through. Even if they did, the wonderful thing about Awkward is that it changes with every play according to the group playing it. If you play enough to see the same question, it may be posed to someone else this time, prompting a different experience and a different debate. As well as learning more about your friends and family, Awkward lets you compare yourself to the rest of the world with every question revealing how other players have answered. It’s really fascinating to see how your views measure up worldwide and often produces some surprising results.
A staple of all Snap Finger Click games is the Live Show feature. We think it’s important to cater for broadcasters, and party games lend themselves particularly well to interactive streaming features. Our focus is specifically on supporting Twitch, YouTube and Mixer. We introduced Live Show with our first title – Act it Out! – where the host acts out secret phrases on camera while the viewers type their guess into the chat. The game is able to read the text and detects when someone has typed the right answer. We also included Live Show in It’s Quiz Time, letting the viewers take on the host with a series of multiple choice questions, again detecting viewers’ answers from the text in the chat. The Live Show mode in Awkward is our best yet, perfectly suited to the social nature of broadcasting. The host answers the questions while the viewers try to guess what the host has said. The game maintains a leaderboard of the best-performing players, highlighting the viewers that know the host the best. It’s a great way for a broadcaster to get to know their followers better and we believe it’s a truly awesome and innovative features that makes Awkward stand apart from its rivals in the party genre.
It’s been just over two weeks since Awkward released, and seeing people having fun with the game has been a real joy. Every play of Awkward is delightfully unique, and we love to hear the personal stories behind the answers people choose. With the addition of Live Show, we get to experience games a lot more than usual, and we’ve seen everything from smaller, intimate streams, to 30,000 people playing with Sodapoppin on Twitch. We’ve also had so many people contacting us with their suggestions to spice up the game with their own house rules such as Strip Awkward, or Awkward: The Drinking Game. One of the most magical things about making party titles is that half the game is something you can’t control – how the players interact with each other in the living room – and that’s different for every group and every play. Awkward was certainly a risk for us in a departure from our previously family-friendly titles, but it’s a risk that’s paid off. At Snap Finger Click, we continue to innovate in the party genre and we’re looking forward to sharing our next game with the world!
Key Takeaways:
• Look for a gap in the market within the genre of games you’re making.
• Take inspiration from successful titles in other similar industries, such as board and card games.
• When making a multiplayer game, the more controllers you require, the smaller your potential audience.
• Groups of two are the most popular way to play multiplayer games.
• Embrace streaming – it’s a great way to promote your game to a wider audience.
At XRDC, learn how (and why) to effectively simulate stress in VR!
Back in 2016, longtime BioWare dev Jonathan Perry (who, as cinematics director, worked on the interactive cinematics of games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age) started his own VR studio Ractive.
This October, he’s coming to XRDC in San Francisco to share what he’s learned about simulating affecting, stressful situations in VR.
His presentation, appropriately titled “Performance Under Pressure: Simulating Stress in VR Training,” is a promising part of XRDC’s cutting-edge Education & Training track of talks.
You’ll want to make time for this if you’re at all curious about the power of VR experiences to transport people into new places and scenarios, as the Ractive CEO will showcase how VR training is being used to train folks for complex and dangerous tasks in a safe space.
According to Perry, by simulating stressful environments and distractions, VR training can help inoculate users against the effects stress and adrenaline have on performance and decision making when performing under pressure in the real world. His XRDC talk will explore cutting-edge research on stress in training and dig into a variety of techniques for adding stress to simulated VR scenarios as a way to improve skill retention and performance. Don’t skip it!
XRDC is happening October 29th and 30th in San Francisco at the Westin St. Francis Hotel. Now that registration is open, you’ll want to look over XRDC passes and prices and register early to get the best deal!
For more information about XRDC, which is produced by organizers of the Game Developers Conference, check out the official XRDC website. You can also subscribe to regular XRDC updates via email, Twitter and Facebook.
Gamasutra, XRDC, and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas
Build Your Own Jurassic Park in Jurassic World Evolution on Xbox One
Jurassic World Evolution launched this week for Xbox One and in this post I’d like to give you a helping hand taking care of your dinosaurs.
Back in “Jurassic Park,” way back in 1993, Ray Arnold said that Jurassic Park had all the complications of a theme park and a zoo, and that’s the challenge you face when you first start developing your islands. Of course, Jurassic World is no ordinary zoo, and the creatures you’ll bioengineer and (try to) contain on the Las Cinco Muertes islands are deadlier and more challenging than any modern animal.
The first task is to keep the dinosaurs healthy, and top of the list is their hunger and thirst. If you don’t satisfy those basic needs then the dinosaur will eventually lose consciousness and die. Luckily these two needs are relatively easy to meet by making sure that the dinosaur can access suitable feeders and pools of water. It’s a good idea to drop a feeder in an area your guests can see so they’ll have a better chance to see your amazing dinosaurs up close.
Diseases can also affect health, and each island introduces new diseases that can spread like wildfire among your dino population. Different dinosaur species are susceptible or immune to different diseases, and cures for each disease need to be researched before your ranger teams can medicate any sick dinosaurs. Dead dinosaurs can be a potent source of disease, so clearing their bodies is essential for the health and wellbeing of your living creatures. Dinosaurs can also be poisoned through acts of sabotage, and antidotes must be researched. Get a head start on this job in case a disgruntled employee sabotages your park.
Beyond basic health, the comfort of the dinosaur is a more complicated challenge that balances various requirements in their environmental or social needs. Each species has differing environmental concerns. Some prefer open grassland while others prefer the cover of forest to keep them safe. As well as the composition of the environment, how much space is available (either grassland or forest) is an important factor; remember very large dinosaurs like our sauropods – including the fearsome T. rex – require large expanses of land to be comfortable.
Tailoring an enclosure for a single species is relatively straightforward while mixing species becomes harder but can be rewarding, allowing you to get ‘more bang for your buck’ and give your guests access to lots of dinosaurs in a single paddock. Some dinosaurs – especially herbivores like the Parasaurolophus – prefer to live in large herds and tolerate mixing well. As well as others of their own kind, many dinosaurs require the company of other species.
But dinosaurs that do not live near their ideal social group numbers will soon become agitated and may fight or attempt to escape. Of course, some dinosaurs are loners or prefer small social groups. It’s up to you to experiment with paddock composition, but I recommend keeping the carnivores away from the herbivores.
Oh, and remember – dinosaurs hate storms.
Maintaining the dinosaurs comfort is key to building a successful park. Jurassic World Evolution is a complex but accessible systemic game with dinosaurs that think, feel and react to the world you build around them. Nature can’t be contained indefinitely, and as Dr. Ian Malcolm says: ‘life finds a way’.
I hope you’ll find your own way to tame the chaos of Jurassic World, and maybe achieve something we’ve never seen in the “Jurassic Park” movies – a park that works!
Video: Go Postal With 11 Minutes Of Air Mail Gameplay On Switch
When it comes to games about planes and flight simulation, Nintendo Switch is fast becoming the most populous airspace in video games, and the platform is getting another aerial adventure in the form of the upcoming Air Mail.
Placing you in the shoes of Scoop, the youngest pilot to join the Domeekan Island Fliers, your postal delivery duties get thrown to the wind like flimsy letters when the Kingdom of Domeeka erupts into conflict. With 25 missions to complete and all manner of locations to explore in your plane, this award-winning little odyssey looks right up Switch’s alley. Check out some footage of it in action below.
Let us know what you make of Air Mail in the comments below…
With Nintendo Switch fast accumulating all manner of new multiplayer experiences – including the global phenomenon that is Fortnite – it seems fitting the plucky hybrid machine would add another competitive string to its bow. Enter Paladins, a hero shooter that does an impressive of job of bringing the full experience to a new platform with a surprisingly small number of concessions.
At first glance/play, Paladins does look and feel an awful lot like Overwatch. Both games launched four months apart in 2016 and on paper the two do share plenty of DNA: both feature a roster of ‘heroes’ with unique weapons and abilities, both feature objective-based matches and both place a heavy emphasis on teamwork. But that’s where most of the similarities end, with Paladins adding a little more strategy to the mix to help set itself apart from the pack, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
There are 36 Champions to choose from, which are divided into four specific classes – Damage (those with mid-range health pools but large damage output), Flank (low health, but high mobility and high damage potential), Frontline (high health with a focus on shielding and brute strength) and Support (low damage output but essential for healing teammates). While they all fall into the familiar sniper, assault, tank and healer templates, there’s still plenty of crossover that makes many of its roster considerably more dynamic in battle.
The mech-toting goblin that is Ruckus is considered a Frontline with his heavy reserves of health and on-board shielding, but his double Gatling guns and rockets make him just as effective as a Damage character (especially when using his dash ability). Then there’s Grover, the axe-wielding tree from Smite (developer Hi-Rez Studios’ MOBA). He’s a Support by trade, but his axe has surprisingly low damage drop-off at range, making him an ideal Flank if needs be. Not every Champion is so dynamic in their application, but there’s a generous amount of scope for those looking to ‘main’ a specific character.
To complement your chosen warrior, and to mix things up further, Paladins also uses a card-based loadout system. Each Champion comes with a default loadout consisting of five normal cards and one talent card, with each one providing a specific buff or enhancement in battle. You can build your own loadouts as well, applying a set number of points to increase the potency of each effect. For instance, the blunderbuss-toting dwarf Barik (a Frontline beast by day) is built around the use of turrets, so you can use cards that heal his turrets when Barik is near, or reduce the cooldown between each deployment.
Talent cards are chosen at the start of each match and are periodically unlocked as you level up each Champion. These are geared towards a particular playstyle and give you glimpse into just how versatile some of them can be. Androxus, for instance, can use his Flank-based abilities in a multitude of ways. You could use the Godslayer card to increase his damage against enemies with 40% health or lower, or instead opt to increase the output of his Reversal ability when absorbing and redistributing enemy fire back at its source. It’s here you start to realise this is way beyond the simple point and shoot mechanics of Call of Duty and the like.
There are also items you can purchase before the start of each match to further buff your abilities. These only last for one match at a time, but add an extra dimension to play once you start actively learning what each one does. It’s a lot to take in for new players, so you can easily turn on auto-purchase which will select an extra buff based on your character and loadout. These are purchased with in-game credits, so you won’t have to worry about being penalised for not pumping in real-world cash. There is a premium Battle Pass you can buy, but this just drops cosmetic items such as profile avatars and skins and won’t affect how you play (unless fashion is your number one priority).
Game modes are pretty slim, but then again this is the same for Overwatch, so it’s not really a criticism. TDM (Team Deathmatch) is the best way to try out Champions for the first time, with its simple first to 40 kills setup offering a quick and clean way to see where your skills and persuasion lies. Onslaught adds more of an objective-based spin, tasking you with battling for control over a central area. The longer you spend in the area, the more you score, with kills also adding to your team’s total. It’s a great place to step up from TDM and start applying your abilities as a team rather than a lone wolf.
If TDM is Paladins’ hors-d’oeuvre and Onslaught its starter, Siege is the main course and dessert piled onto the same delicious plate. Two teams of five race to the middle of a large map, with the aim of controlling a central point then moving a payload towards their enemy’s base. These larger maps also offer some of the best level design, with shortcuts that favour the ambush potential of Flank characters and elevated positions perfect for Damage Champions looking to cut through a poorly grouped enemy team.
So here comes the big one – just how well does it run? Those aforementioned ‘concessions’ are certainly present and will stand out to most to those that have played Paladins on PC or other consoles, but even then they’re hardly game-breaking. There’s the occasional bit of slowdown during a match, but it’s a rarity, with the promised 60fps holding true for the most part. There’s a slight delay moving between screens when you’re navigating menus, with the online store suffering the worst – just trying to move between tabs can be a real chore.
Matchmaking for the most part is pretty stable, although frustration does arise when the game automatically kicks you from a lobby if one or more players fail to select a Champion before the pre-game timer runs out. Swapping them out for another player (or automatically assigning them a Champion) would be a far more productive process, and one that wouldn’t penalise those who are simply waiting to join a new match.
Again, it can’t be overstated just how well Paladins runs on Switch. Whether you’re a twitchy Damage player looking to snipe an objective from afar or a Support trying to heal multiple teammates during an unfolding battle, everything from hit detection to AOE all work just as well as they do on consoles and PC. It’s a really impressive feat from Hi-Rez Studios and proof that Nintendo Switch is far more powerful and versatile than we give it credit for. And with cross-platform play due to be patched in by the end of June, Switch’s Paladins community won’t be an isolated one either.
The lack of voice chat support is a problem, though, and one that can only be remedied by joining a Discord channel (such as the official Paladins one) and jumping into a party. Considering all other versions of the game support such a feature, as well as the fact Epic Games proved such a component can function on Switch without the need for the official companion app, there’s no excuse for its absence. We’re really hoping Hi-Rez is working on patching it in ASAP.
As it stands, you can only access Paladins via the £25 Founders Pack. It’s a big asking price when you consider the game will be free-to-play later in the summer, so those of you looking to avoid spending big might want to wait. However, considering it unlocks all 36 Champions as well as additional skins and a special mount, it’s an attractive early way in for those wanting to play ranked (where you need to have at least 14 Champions unlocked and have a level 15 account, with the former taking a lot longer to grind than the latter).
Conclusion
While locking the game behind a £25 Founders Pack might be a little cheeky for a game that’s actually free-to-play, the game itself is an easy sell. As exciting, tense and rewarding as Overwatch, Paladins: Champions of the Realm brings the cross-platform hero shooter to a new platform without sacrificing the moreish gameplay tenants that’s made it such a hit with both gamers and pros. There’s a definitive learning curve for those looking to play competitively, but it’s nonetheless one of the console’s best new multiplayer additions.
