Lucasfilm today released a new TV trailer for Star Wars: Rogue One. Titled “Hope,” the video showcases main character Jyn Erso and her quest to lead the effort to steal the plans to the Death Star. As the trailer alludes to, this won’t be easy–Darth Vader shows up in the video, too. Take a look:
The film also stars Ben Mendelsohn, Diego Luna, Riz Ahmed, Donnie Yen, Forest Whitaker, and Mads Mikkelsen. The Gareth Edwards-directed movie arrives in theaters on December 16, 2016.
DICE is releasing a Rogue One-themed expansion for Star Wars Battlefront called Rogue One: Scarif. The DLC comes out in December and a launch near Rogue One‘s theatrical debut seems likely.
Black Friday is coming up soon. Now, retailer Toys R Us has announced its deals for the annual shopping bonanza–and among them are some solid gaming offers.
As posted by BFAds.net, Toy R Us will offer many of the same hardware deals as other stores. You’ll be able to get the Uncharted 4PS4 Slim or the Xbox One SBattlefield 1 or Minecraft bundles for $250 each. Both offers are for 500 GB systems, if that matters to you. Toys R Us will also sell the Black Friday New Nintendo 3DS for only $100.
DualShock 4 controllers for PS4 are marked down to $40, though it doesn’t look like there are any offers available for Xbox One controllers.
Go to BFAds to see all the deals; the video game offers are on pages 24 and 25.
Toys R Us opens its physical stores at 5 PM on Thanksgiving Day, while some deals will become available earlier. Hit the links below to see the Black Friday game deals other stores will have.
Yet another store’s Black Friday ad has been uncovered, and this time it’s GameStop’s offerings that we’ve gotten a look at.
The 12-page ad has been published online by BFAds. On the console side, you can get the PS4‘s 500 GB Uncharted 4 bundle for $250–and for Friday only, you’ll receive a free copy of either The Last of Us Remastered or Ratchet & Clank. $50 is also being taken off all Xbox One systems, letting you pick up, for example, the 500 GB Gears of War 4 Xbox One S blue bundle for $250. The store will also be among those where you can get a $100 New 3DS.
PS4 controllers are marked down to $45, while Xbox One controllers will go for $50. The stylish Gears of War 4 special edition JD Xbox One controller is also down to $55.
Not all of these deals are as good as the prices you’ll find elsewhere: PS4 and Xbox One controllers will be $39 at Walmart, for example. Luckily, we’re getting these ads far enough in advance for you to plan out what you’d like to pick up–though actually getting your hands on them will be an entirely different matter.
You can check out the full GameStop ad at BFAds. Hit the links below to see the Black Friday game deals other stores will have.
Update 2: Amazon’s availability has come and gone in what was seemingly the blink of an eye. Numerous people are reporting the site crashed for them or otherwise prevented them from adding the system to their cart, though it was still possible to successfully place an order. There’s no word yet on when more systems will be in-stock. We’ll report back when that changes.
Update: Amazon says it will have “very limited quantities” available for sale today, November 11, at 2 PM PST (5 PM EST). That may be your best chance to order one today, though the retailer notes, “Demand is expected to be very high, and there’s no guarantee that it will remain in stock for long. We will announce when additional inventory becomes available.” It also says it “will be receiving additional quantities over the coming weeks.”
For its part, Nintendo tells GameSpot that it’s “working hard to keep up with consumer demand.” It also states, “There will be a steady flow of additional systems through the holiday shopping season and into the new year.”
We don’t know just how soon those systems will come in or how many will be available. Certainly, Christmas being right around the corner won’t make it any easier to buy one. There is the eBay route, but as of this writing, that will cost you far more than the $60 retail price of the Classic Edition.
There aren’t any special versions of the Classic Edition available–it’s just the $60 system, which comes with one controller. (Extra controllers go for $10 and are also sold out, though Wii Classic Controlers are supported.) All of the major retailers are sold out currently. Even if you were able to place an order today through places that seemed to have them in stock, such as Toys R Us, it looks as if there might be a longer-than-expected wait.
You can find listings for the Classic Edition through the retailer links below. Again, there’s no telling exactly when more will be available or if advance notice will be given, as was sometimes the case with Amiibo figures that also faced supply shortages. If that does prove to be the case, we’ll report back with all the details.
For Uncharted 4, the single-player campaign has been upgraded from 1080p to 1440p, while its multiplayer portion is up to 1080p from its original 900p. Single-player will remain 30 FPS, however.
The whole of The Last of Us Remastered, meanwhile, can be played at 30 FPS in 2160p or a smoother 60 FPS in 1800p.
Players of either game without a 4K TV also benefit from the higher resolution rendering, just downscaled to 1080p. Those lucky enough to own an HDR set can enjoy expanded colour and brightness ranges in both games.
We loved both Naughty Dog’s PS4 games here at GameSpot, scoring the Joel and Ellie’s apocalyptic journey an 8, and Nathan Drake’s globe-trotting caper a 10. Check out our full Last of Us Remastered review, or our Uncharted 4 review.
2K Games and Gearbox Software have released new story DLC for Battleborn. The add-on is called “Toby’s Friendship Raid” and tasks players with recovering Toby’s stolen “death-dealing mech suit.”
“This all-new story operation let’s players fight their way through LLC manufacturing facilities’ deadly traps and enemies to earn new skins, taunts, and chances to unlock Faction Commander Packs while pursuing their mission to restore Toby’s mech suit to its rightful owner,” reads a press release.
Toby’s Friendship Raid is available today for Season Pass owners. The story expansion can be purchased separately for 700 Platinum through the in-game marketplace when it becomes publicly available.
Along with the DLC release, Gearbox revealed Beatrix, a new playable character that will be available “in the next couple of months.”
“A former scientist, Beatrix has a fondness, if not obsession with hygiene, precision and manipulating living creatures by injecting them with lethal debuffs and disease from her prosthetic syringe-arm.”
Beatrix will be available in-game for 47,500 credits or can be unlocked using a hero key, which is included in the season pass. Looking ahead, Gearbox said it plans the “content to keep rolling in over the coming month.” The next story mode is called “Oscar Mike Vs. Battle School,” but no further details or release window were specified.
Beyond that, three more story DLCs will be released, in addition to a free competitive multiplayer mode.
On October 13, Battleborn received a big influx of new content, including its first story operation, Attikus and the Thrall Rebellion, and a new competitive mode called Face-Off. You can read about them, and other recent content additions, here.
Pokemon Go developer Niantic Labs has spoken about the “painful” summer it faced after the game’s July launch, as well as its plans for future content.
In an interview with Eurogamer, the company’s chief marketing officer Mike Quigley said, “We were overwhelmed by how [Pokémon Go] took off. The success of the product caught us out of position in a couple of areas. The summer was quite painful–no one slept much.”
Niantic faced heavy criticism earlier this year when it blocked the use of third party apps–used to find rare monsters–and disabled major features such as the ability to track Pokemon. Quigley defended the decisions, saying the company was forced to cut content just to keep the game running. “[The apps] were just crushing us on the server side,” he says. “You’ve got to keep fans happy but you also have to keep the core product accessible.
Quigley also remembers Niantic worrying about how Pokemon Go’s teething problems would affect Nintendo and The Pokemon Company. “It’s not a good signal for their brand,” he said. “That’s why we had to make some of those hard decisions like blocking third-party sites. It’s difficult but ultimately it’s the right thing to do for the life of the product.”
Quigley went on to compare the mobile hit to long-running MMO World of Warcraft: “I think our lifespan and curve may be quite different from a free-to-play mobile game–it may be more in a Warcraft vein.
“We are more an MMO than anything else. Every two weeks there’s new content or bug fixes going in the game. There’s key content releases we’re planning.”
The UK’s largest dedicated video game retailer, Game, is opening a “small” number of concession stands inside WHSmith stores.
According to GamesIndustry.biz, Game said the in-store partnerships are part of an ongoing trial across the UK, as the retailer attempts to improve disappointing recent financial results–its profits were down 81% this year.
The move will see WHSmith selling video games for the first time since 2010. Before that, the newsagent chain had stocked games for nearly 30 years.
Nick Griffiths is disappointed with Pokemon GO. Niantic’s followup to Ingress took advantage of Nintendo’s hugely popular franchise, marrying its characters and concepts with the company’s experience with location-based software. But for Nick, GO didn’t quite hit the mark.
“The depth in GO is obviously a problem. I’m a massive Nintendo fan and therefore a massive Pokemon fan as well, and I was inherently disappointed with a lot of things it provided. It’s selling this big dream of real-world Pokemon catching, and in the beginning everyone is enamored with the AR, and then you end up turning it off and figuring out the grind is horrible. It didn’t feel at all like a Nintendo game, which is always inherently fun to play!”
Coincidentally, for the past three years, Griffiths has also been working on a real-world game which utilises location data. The game is a giant, real-world version of Monopoly called Buy Somewhere. In Buy Somewhere, players acquire collectibles on their travels and compete for ownership of real-world buildings: homes, bars, offices, iconic landmarks, and more. Griffiths and his team officially revealed the game at PAX Australia 2016.
“Five years ago I was working on a maps-based project with Google called Build with Chrome. It was a partnership with LEGO where you could choose a plot of land and build structures on it, and immediately I was like, “ping”! I never really thought of what you could do with the Google Maps API to that kind of capacity, so my gears started spinning.”
Griffiths and his initial partners met on the location-based project, and now he and a team of 16 artists, programmers, and producers are working on Buy Somewhere in Sydney. “Even though this is a game created with data, we wanted it to feel like a level designer had gone through and placed everything individually. With Google’s API you get things all over the shop, and for it to feel like a game world you actually have to do all this kind of stuff on the back end. So, we had to build our own layout engine that has all these different rules that basically creates these beautifully curated environments. It’s taken us 3 years to just build the engine, but now 99.9 percent of everything in-game is curated automatically”.
“We wanted the feeling of different kinds of areas to come along in the actual scale of what you saw. So if you’re in a residential zone, it’d be clear and easy to digest everything around you, little green houses laid out across grid roads and stuff. When you’re in the city you really feel like you’re in this concrete jungle, as opposed to a world that feels the same wherever you are. And we’ve taken that logic to places like beaches as well. There’s topography we’ve built into the game, so paths are actually raised off the ground whereas waterbeds and beaches slant into the water, so the environment is quite diverse, and it’s all automatically generated.”
At a glance, the game’s early screenshots show a map populated with swaths of physical, three-dimensional models of residential and commercial buildings, visually reminiscent of both a city-building game as well as pieces from Monopoly, the game Buy Somewhere takes heavy cues from. The map also features uniquely-modeled landmarks to represent a scale version of their real-world counterparts, like the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House.
“I think that when you get in there and you see locations that you recognize, the environment becomes quite fun in itself”, Griffiths explains. “You can’t see the Harbour Bridge in Pokemon GO, and everything is the same color. If you took the map away in GO it would be the same game. You could still see the direction your trainer is facing and walk towards a Pokestop. The map itself is really useless.”
Griffiths believes this is Buy Somewhere’s key difference and fundamental hook. “When we show people the game the first thing they do is look for locations they know. There’s my house! Who owns it? The concept of owning representations of real world property resonated with everybody we talked to. There’s an element of exploration to the map itself, this recreation of the real world that I don’t think anybody has ever really seen before. Something that Ingress doesn’t have, that Pokemon GO doesn’t have.”
Griffiths also seems to feel grateful to have witnessed Ingress and Pokemon GO pave the way for real-world games, as it enabled his team to immediately identify and address some of the major pitfalls of this young genre. “One of my biggest qualms when I first started playing Ingress was that portals were few and far between. So, one of the things we considered a lot very early on was the venues that people would play.” Griffiths spoke at length about the experience of playing real-world games in rural areas and on transport: “When you’re building a game that truly represents where things are in real life, you have to consider what it’s going to be like when the player is in one location for a really long period of time, or when they’re going on a road trip and if they’re sitting in the passenger seat–that they can be doing something that is entertaining and also contributes to the game’s overall goal.”
Because of the game’s representations of real-world buildings, a number of in-game property assets already exist in small towns, cities, and suburbs, of which people are encouraged to acquire as much as they feasibly can, thanks to Buy Somewhere’s Monopoly-style game loop. Griffith believes this will assist in giving people something to do when they’re not travelling: “When you have a base property collection in Buy Somewhere there’s a game to be had in the managing of those properties. So you can sit at home at the end of the day after having gone out and bought and traded properties, come back, and manage your portfolio–buff your properties, collect rent. It’s basically a resource management game at that point.”
Following on from his remark regarding Pokemon GO not feeling like a Nintendo game. Griffiths cited strong Nintendo influences with Buy Somewhere in both its character design, attention to detail, and philosophy in creating something fun.
“A lot of it is about how we approached game balancing, from a luck, skill, persistence perspective. There’s a lot of satisfying collection that goes on in the game to collect resources that are then used on your properties, and not everything 100% depends on the skill or strategy that the player applies. So if you’re not a min-maxer, there are opportunities to roll good numbers and have great results as well. Think about how the guy coming 8th in Mario Kart gets better items, so that it’s fun for everybody. We’re looking to apply that thinking to the style of play that we end up settling on.”
Buy Somewhere is still in development, but the team reported to have a large amount of interest at PAX Australia 2016, where they ran a real-life version of the game on the show floor. Buy Somewhere is currently accepting sign-ups for their upcoming beta.
This weekend is offering a couple of free games to play, and now there’s another one. Tactical first-person shooter Squad is available to play for free on Steam until Sunday, November 13, at 1 PM PT.
If you want to keep playing past its free promotion, Squad is discounted to $20, while the soundtrack is $3 down from $6. Additionally, both can be purchased in a bundle for $22. It’s also worth noting that Squad is currently in Early Access. You can install and start playing it here.
Squad
Other games available for free this weekend include Rainbow Six Siege and Dirt 3. Siege is free until Sunday at 1 PM PT, and if you want to keep playing past that, it’s discounted to $25. Dirt 3, on the other hand, is part of a giveaway on the Humble Store until November 12 at 10 AM PT, but once you claim your free Steam code, you’ll get to keep it forever.
As for other discounts, Steam has the grotesque stealth-strategy game Party Hard on sale for $6.45. All of the discounts mentioned in this article are good until Monday, November 14, at 10 AM PT.
