Following it is FIFA 16 at No.2, Overwatch at No.3, and last week’s top performer, Doom, at No.4.
Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness enters the top ten at No.6 in its first week on sale, while survival horror game 7 Days to Die debuts at No.9.
Take a look at the full top ten in the list below. This table does not include digital sales data, and thus should not be considered representative of all UK game sales.
999 is currently only available on the Nintendo DS and iOS, while Virtues Last Reward was released for PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS. Both games have a small but passionate following. They have received acclaim for storytelling.
The point-and-click adventure games follow a group of people that have been kidnapped by a mysterious figure. In order to escape they must solve a series of puzzles. Both 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward shift in perspective over the course of the game, showing events across branching timelines.
A third game in the series, called Zero Time Dilemma, was recently released.
“Like a great page-turner, Nine Hours is very tough to put down once you start,” said reviewer Carolyn Petit.
“The engrossing puzzles work hand in hand with the terrific storytelling to pull you into the gut-wrenching situation Junpei and his companions find themselves in, and the tension progressively ratchets up to keep you glued to the game and biting your nails as you seek an escape from this terrifying dilemma.
She continued: “For those who enjoy point-and-click adventure games and don’t mind the gruesome possibility of having someone explode all over them, Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is a delightfully chilling treat.”
“Among the many games released each year, there aren’t many that leave you contemplating and debating their story and worldviews long after the final set of credits has rolled,” said Heidi Kemps.
“Virtue’s Last Reward takes its place proudly among this crop of games. As fun and challenging as the brainteasers in the room escapes are, they’re merely dressing for the fantastic writing, memorable characters, and stunning plot twists that could only be presented successfully in a game format.”
Capcom has announced that Resident Evil 7 Teaser: Beginning Hour has set the record as the most downloaded single-player PS4 demo in the first week of its release for North America. The demo has hit 2 million downloads globally, despite it only being available to PlayStation Plus subscribers.
Kawata confirmed that the game represents a “return to horror” for the series, although combat and gun-play will also be present. The game will be playable from start to finish using PlayStation VR. As for the story, we know that the game is set after the events of Resident Evil 6, and takes place in a modern day setting. The story centres on a “foreboding, derelict plantation mansion in rural America. Players must explore and survive the horrors within the mysterious, sprawling estate.
Bandai Namco has revealed a new trailer for its upcoming action game Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, and the video reveals a long-requested feature for players: Super Saiyan 3 transformations for custom made characters. In addition, the trailer shows the player character using the move Final Kamehameha; an attack hitherto only used by Vegito and Gogeta.
Final Kamehameha is a fusion of both Vegeta’s Final Flash and Goku’s Kamehameha–hence why it is typically only used by Vegito or Gogeta. This will mark the first time another character is able to execute Final Kamehameha.
After it was reported that Blizzard Entertainment was hiring a new game director for a Diablo project, it was unknown what that meant for Diablo III‘s current director, Josh Mosqueira. Now, Blizzard has confirmed that Mosqueira has left the company altogether.
“With Diablo III in a good place at this point, Josh felt that now was a good time to pursue other opportunities with minimal impact to the team,” Blizzard told Polygon. “We’ll be filling the director role either from within Blizzard or externally.”
Thanks to an amazing team and community! Forever #diablo
Wilson and Mosqueira aren’t the only recent high-profile departures from Blizzard. The lead designer on Diablo III, Leonard Boyarsky, left the developer earlier this year.
Concerning the job listing, it remains to be seen if it’s for a sequel to Diablo III, a new expansion, or something else. The position is located at Blizzard’s headquarters in Irvine, California, and the job ad was published this week, according to BlizzPro. The listing calls for someone with “outstanding communications skills, proven experience in creative direction, strong ability in system design, and a stellar track record of shipping AAA games.”
A successful candidate will “lead the Diablo series into the future.”
If you’ve been looking forward to the upcoming space exploration game No Man’s Sky, chances are that you’ve heard about its absurdly big procedurally generated universe. But just like when talking about the actual universe, the size of the playable area of No Man’s Sky dwarfs our normal conceptions of the world so completely that it’s difficult to actually comprehend.
When developer Hello Games talks about the number of planets that you can visit in the game, it’s challenging to wrap your head around it. 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 really doesn’t mean much when written on a page, even when spelled out as eighteen quintillion planets. It’s just an absurdly large number that doesn’t have any immediate analogue.
But even though 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 is so huge that it’s silly, No Man’s Sky’s universe still has limits. It’s not infinite. You can hit the edge of the game’s galaxy, or reach the center. So to make that number–18 quintillion–a little more understandable, and to better contextualize No Man’s Sky, let’s take a look at how this compares to other video games, the Earth, and our real universe.
These calculations are based on my own speculation and the handful of details that Hello Games has shared. We’ll have to wait for the official release in August to confirm that the universe is as unbelievably large as the studio says it is.
Eighteen Quintillion
There’ve been other big space exploration games before No Man’s Sky that claim to have galaxy-sized worlds. To be sure, some of them are massive:
Stellaris–1000 star systems, with 10-15 planets each
Even if you estimate Elite’s star systems as containing a handful of planets–let’s say 10, for ease of calculations–that would amount to a paltry 4 trillion planets. You’d need 4.5 million copies of Elite’s galaxy to equate to No Man’s Sky’s.
In the real world, you probably hear huge numbers being discussed most frequently in the context of the economy. National economies work with massive amounts of money, and so we are used to hearing about sums in the billions or even trillions. The gross world product–essentially the monetary worth of all the work done per year–is about $107 trillion. If each No Man’s Sky planet was worth a dollar, the total value of the game’s planets would be 172,000 times the amount that the world produces every year.
It also helps to compare the planets of No Man’s Sky to incredibly small things, such as grains of sand or gallons of water–both measured in quadrillions and quintillions. Back in 2012, researchers at the University of Hawaii estimated that there are 7 quintillion 500 quadrillion grains of sand on the Earth’s surface. No Man’s Sky’s planets beat that by about two and a half times.
But No Man’s Sky finally meets its match when compared to the gallons of water in the world’s oceans. At around 350 quintillion gallons, the volume of water in the oceans exceeds the number of planets in the game.
Here are some other real-world comparisons:
Books published–130 million
People on Earth–7.4 billion
Cells in a human body–37 trillion
Highest-denomination banknote of Hungarian currency printed–1 sextillion (one thousand quintillion)
Atoms in a .1 mL drop of water–10 sextillion
No Man’s Sky planets–18 quintillion
Of course, a single instance of each of these is dwarfed by one planet-sized planet in the game. If you start considering the amount of planet surface explorable in No Man’s Sky, the numbers get even more ridiculous.
How Many Earths Can You Fit in One Game?
Hello Games has claimed in the past that the planets you’ll visit will be actually planet-sized–meaning that it’ll take you hours or days to circumnavigate. However, the studio’s been unclear on exactly how big the planets are, so I’ll use the very conservative estimate based on pre-release demos in my attempt to contextualize the size of the game.
As helpfully explained by Reddit user Rossmancer, the E3 2015 demo of the game can be used to calculate the diameter of the planet visited. Since this is an E3 demo, the planet is heavily modified. This also means that it would be quite a bit bigger in the final release. With that being said, Rossmancer figured out that the diameter of the planet would be about 5 miles across.
Knowing this, we can find the total surface area of one of these planets. Using the demo planet’s radius of 2.5 miles, its surface area would be 78.5 square miles. This is minuscule compared to the Earth, which has a surface area of 197 million square miles. But it makes more sense when compared to other games:
It’s also comparable to a small city, like Boston, which has a land area of 90 square miles.
But, once again, there’s that eighteen quintillion number. If you take just one planet in No Man’s Sky, it’s easy to contextualize. But take the whole game, and the explorable surface area becomes nonsensical, even when using the conservative estimate of planet size. If we assume that every planet is the same size, then the game would have over 1 sextillion (that’s a 1 with 21 zeroes) square miles of planet surface area. Now we’re getting to even more absurdly large numbers. So let’s try to make this a little bit more comprehensible.
Considering that the Earth’s surface is 200 million square miles, No Man’s Sky has the equivalent of 7 trillion Earth surfaces. If you added up the surface area of every planet and the Sun in our Solar System, you’d need 400 billion Solar Systems to match No Man’s Sky.
In other words, this is truly a galaxy. Recently, NASA’s Kepler Observatory has discovered dozens of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system). As a result of these findings, scientists have estimated the number of terrestrial (read: not gas giants with solid surfaces you can stand on) planets in our galaxy at 40 billion. No Man’s Sky’s total number of planets obviously exceeds this, but it does give a bit of helpful context for understanding its scope.
The Creatures You’ll Discover
This game would be pretty boring if all those 18 quintillion planets were uninhabited and uninteresting, but luckily Hello Games is designing them to be both diverse in landscape and in life. Don’t expect to find life on every planet, or even most of them, though: Hello Games has confirmed that there’ll be simple life (plants, maybe small animals) on about 10 percent of the planets. Complex life will show up less frequently, on about 1 percent of the planets. But very complex life–civilizations, perhaps–will only appear on roughly 1 in 100 million planets.
Even this extremely rare chance of finding incredibly complex life, though, means that there is still a massive amount of those kinds of lifeforms out there in the galaxy. 100 million sounds big, but it’s really tiny relative to the entire game: if that probability is accurate, then there’s roughly 180 billion planets out there with complex life. Unfortunately, chances are high that you’ll never find one of these planets. 1 in 100 million is like winning the lottery. To provide a very morbid comparison, you’re about ten times more likely to die in a plane crash than find a species of super interesting creatures on any one planet you visit.
Speaking of extremely unlikely possibilities…
Finding Other People
No Man’s Sky has a shared universe, and Hello Games has said that it has a matchmaking style similar to Journey’s. You can stumble across someone else working their way through the galaxy, or happen upon a planet already discovered by another explorer. But Hello Games makes it clear that you almost certainly will not find another person during the entire time you play the game. It’s not even entirely clear how multiplayer will work at all, or even if there’ll be multiplayer in the traditional sense.
But since this is a shared universe, there’s a chance that two people might be on the same planet at the same time, even if they don’t see each other. This can be estimated using the same formula as the birthday problem. If we assume that 1 million people will be playing the game at the same time–which would be a pretty impressive number of concurrent players–and all of them are on some planet, then the chance that at least two of them are on the same planet is extremely small: .00000271%. For there to be a 1% chance that at any moment two or more people are on the same planet, about 600 million people would have to be playing simultaneously.
The goal of the game is to get to the center of the universe, so as everyone journeys closer to the middle, the chances of meeting someone else will undoubtedly go up. This is probably your best bet for running into another player: a more limited space, with much fewer planets, means that it’s likely that you’ll see another explorer out there–or at least, you’ll see the planets they’ve already discovered. In the Milky Way, for instance, scientists have tracked a group of 28 stars closest to the galaxy’s center, which allowed them to discover signs of the supermassive black hole holding the galaxy together. If No Man’s Sky follows this model, then it’s a good bet that you’ll see signs of other players when you finally reach the middle.
The insane number of planets is only one element of the game, and it’s unclear yet how No Man’s Sky will tie it all together into a cohesive, engaging experience. It will have several other mechanics besides exploration to keep players interested, such as crafting, trading, combat, and deciphering alien languages. But ultimately we’ll have to wait for its release on August 9 for PS4 and PC to determine whether or not we’ll want to explore more than just a handful of planets in No Man’s Sky’s massive galaxy.
Microsoft’s new Play Anywhere feature, which was announced at E3 last month, will go live on September 13, the company confirmed to Polygon.
The feature lets you buy a game (digitally) on Xbox One and get the PC version free or vice versa, while game saves and achievements are also available across devices.
Play Anywhere requires Windows 10’s new Anniversary update, which lands on August 2. Additionally, Xbox One users will need the new summer update, which is coming soon.
The first Play Anywhere game will be ReCore, which launches on September 13. Other supported games will include Forza Horizon 3, Gears of War 4, and Halo Wars 2. You can check out this post to see a rundown of all the Play Anywhere games announced so far.
“I always hesitate to be drawn into discussions of someone else’s strategy,” PlayStation president Andrew House recently said. “I’m more than happy to talk about our own strategy. Yes, there was a big emphasis from the folks at Microsoft on Xbox and PC cross-play. It remains to be seen whether there is latent large consumer demand for that.”
Do you plan to make use of Play Anywhere? Let us know in the comments below!
A new mod for Valve’s Left 4 Dead 2 replaces most of the in-game graffiti with quotes from Jaden Smith such as “School is the tool to brainwash the youth” and my personal favorite, “How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren’t real?”
These quotes, which Smith himself tweeted, are often philosophical and motivational in nature. “Prepare to be enlightened by his juvenile genius!” the mod’s creator, Molkifier, said on the game’s Steam Workshop page, as discovered by PC Gamer.
People seem to be loving the mod, as the comments are quite positive. One person wrote, “Thank you. I didn’t knew it [sic], but I needed this.” Another said, “This is beautiful; thank you for this blessing.”
In other news about Jaden Smith and video games, when you die in No Man’s Sky, sometimes you will see one of his motivational quotes. Sean Murray of developer Hello Games said only featuring quotes from scientists and scholars might have led people to perceive the game as being too pretentious.
After five years, Nintendo marketing executive Scott Moffitt is leaving the company. The executive, who formerly held marketing positions at PepsiCo and Henkel, will work at Nintendo through the end of July, before moving on, the company said in a statement to IGN.
“Scott Moffitt, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, has decided to leave Nintendo of America. In order to ensure a smooth transition, Scott will continue to work through the end of July,” Nintendo explained.
“Nintendo has a strong group of seasoned leaders in place who will step in to assume the full responsibilities of the role on a permanent basis, with the objective of driving more collaboration and greater efficiencies across these groups and among the respective leaders. We thank Scott for his years of service and wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors.”
IGN reported that Nintendo was intending to permanently do away with Moffitt’s position, executive VP of sales and marketing, with those tasks moved to existing staff. From the wording in Nintendo’s statement, it sounds like this is indeed happening.
Moffitt joined Nintendo in 2011.
His departure comes less than a year before Nintendo is due to release a new console, the NX (codename), which is slated to arrive in March 2017.
Now, Kojima has shown off the prop he used to film the scene, and even gave the baby a name, Lu#2. Another baby, Lu#1, is also referenced. These names may contain clues, but Kojima didn’t give anything else away. Here are the tweets and images:
1/2 The baby Norman was holding in DS(DeathStranding) teaser was this one on the left, called Lu#2, pic.twitter.com/H7XEwGUP4l
Kojima also confirmed that he recently filmed a new episode of his HideoTube series. It will presumably air soon, though it’s not immediately clear what the subject will be. Perhaps more details will be shared about Death Stranding during the event. Whatever the case, we’ll bring you the news as it’s announced.
A release date for Death Stranding has not yet been announced, but don’t expect it soon. Recently, Kojima said, “Our game is still far from being released.”
