Microsoft and EA teamed up for special-edition Xbox One S consoles themed around DICE’s upcoming World War I shooter, Battlefield 1. With the game’s release coming up soon, Battlefield community manager Dan Mitre has now posted an unboxing video that shows off the system and what it comes with.
Note that what he’s showing off is the $350 1 TB military green model that comes with a matching controller and a digital copy of the Early Enlister Deluxe Edition of the game. Also on display in this video is an Xbox One Elite controller, but this does not come with the bundle.
The military green console also includes DLC in the form of the Hellfighter Pack, the Red Baron Pack, and the Lawrence of Arabia pack, as well as a “new visual appearance” of Behemoth vehicles. Additionally, it comes with five Battlepacks and a one-month EA Access subscription.
It goes on sale on October 18 in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which is the same day that the Early Enlister edition of the game (which can also be purchased separately for $80) goes live. This bundle comes to Europe on October 13. Since it comes with an EA Access membership, people in Europe can start playing the game that day, as that’s when the Play First Trial goes live on Xbox One.
The military green Battlefield 1 console is just one of the special systems Microsoft made to celebrate the launch of Battlefield 1. The others include a $300 bundle that comes with a white Xbox One S and a digital copy of the game for $300. Another 500 GB bundle, the “storm grey” variant,” also costs $300 but it doesn’t come out until November 1. It’s sold exclusively at Microsoft Store and Walmart.
Battlefield 1’s official release date is October 21, so the story grey model may not be the package you’re looking for if you want to play right away.
In other news about Battlefield 1, we recently got a good look at the game’s single-player campaign in a 12-minute gameplay video. Unlike past Battlefield games, Battlefield 1’s campaign features multiple playable characters, spread across five different “War Stories.” EA previously explained why it’s going with multiple protagonists, stating that, “We felt that to have one character hopping through those different settings wouldn’t be as immersive or totally respectful to the setting.”
With the release of Gears of War 4 coming up very soon (it’s out this week for some), you might be thinking about preordering the long-awaited Xbox One and PC game.
Now, Microsoft has revealed a special incentive for preordering the game with Paypal. Preorder a digital copy of the game from the Xbox Store using Paypal and you’ll receive a $10 credit for the Xbox Store to spend on whatever you want. If you were already thinking about preordering the game digitally and have a Paypal account, this sounds like quite a nice benefit.
This offer is good until 11:59 PM on October 6 and works on preorders for the standard edition and the $100 Ultimate Edition. Gears of War 4’s official release date isn’t until October 11, but the Ultimate Edition unlocks on October 7. The $10 Xbox Store codes will be sent to your Microsoft account within 30 days of making your preorder.
When it was announced earlier this year that character creation would be introduced for the first time ever in a Skylanders game with the upcoming Skylanders Imaginators, I don’t think I was alone in thinking that 3D printing of player-created characters was the obvious next step. It seems all of our hunches were right, with Activision today confirming that 3D printing will indeed be made available for Skylanders Imaginators, although supply will be limited.
While Activision did confirm that some players will be able to buy 3D prints of the Skylanders they make within Imaginators, they didn’t specify how many would be available outside saying numbers would be “limited.” How people will even get the opportunity to buy a 3D print is also unclear as of now, but Activision did say it would be running promotions and competitions during the game’s launch.
But it won’t just be 3D printing of player-created characters. Players will also be able to order a credit-card sized item that will have all of their characters’ details (and can be used on a portal in lieu of a real, 3D printed character), as well as t-shirts. I spoke with Toys for Bob co-founder Paul Reiche about why the Skylanders franchise finally went down the 3D printing route, and what challenges they faced in making this feature.
GameSpot: The idea of physical products based on the Skylanders people create in Imaginators must have obviously come very close to the start of production, is that right?
Paul Reiche: It did. It was one of the most aggressive parts of the plan. No one has ever done this where, from a console game you create a playable character, you bring a physical realization out of it, and then that’s playable back in the game. We’re making toys-to-life even more toys-to-life and life-to-toys because you get to think about something, create it virtually, and then generate a physical incarnation.
We’ve had to pioneer some technology and software here because a character in a 3D game has no physicality. If you want to make an infinitely thin wing, you can. If you want to have some armor floating on the surface, that works out fine in a video game. When you print it, it all falls apart. We don’t want to compromise how the characters look in-game, so there’s a translation process when they become printable.
In the same sense that people take Skylanders back to their bedroom and play with them, we wanted to give people other ways to show off their character design and their tagline and their name. t-shirts, I actually love them. I’m going to have a lot of them. They look good and they’re very unexpected. I think a lot of people will see these crazy characters with these funny taglines and wonder, “Where did those come from? Who is that character?” Then that the card is just a much more portable collectible. You can get as many as you want and I think it’s going to be practical for some families in ways that lots of 3D prints might not be.
The 3D print is very exciting. Were you ever at a stage where you weren’t going to go with 3D printing? Obviously t-shirts and the cards are a little bit easier to do, so did it ever get too difficult and you went, “We have to just leave this to the side for now”?
We knew we had to do it the whole time. Now there were certainly debates about it because, again, no one had ever done this before, but we knew it was essential. For us, that coming to reality is part of what it’s all about.
So obviously the fact that you had 3D printing in mind right from the start influenced how you build a character in the game, in terms of the different templates and shapes available, is that right?
I think, depending on who you talk to in our studio, we actually didn’t limit character creation on it. We consciously said, “Make cool characters in the game, and we’ll figure out how to make them printable.” Our poor guys who were responsible for that, they kept saying, “You know, if you would just limit how these things look it would make my life a lot easier.” And you’d say nope. The creating of the character in the game has to be on its own and we’ll just figure it out.
It was one of the things that, I think, kept us fired up. We knew we were doing something that hadn’t been done before. There’s a fire in your belly, a sort of tension and, “We have got to pull this off.” There are times when you need that passion and that moving into the unknown that’s a big part of what motivates us.
You’re using a pretty interesting technology to transfer people’s Skylanders data. How did that come about?
We have been working, pretty much the whole time, to figure out how it is that we can make a choice where a relatively young person on a console creates the character and has options about getting a 3D print, or getting a t-shirt, or getting a cool playable character card. The problem was, not all kids had network connections from their consoles, so we said, well, what can we do?
I said, okay, well, if we get them over to a mobile device, get their character there, there’s all kinds of things we can do. We looked around and we eventually found an audio trick that’s called chirping. It sort sounds like R2-D2. It’s this funny noise that goes on for a few seconds, and it actually transmits through sound, and then the phone’s microphone picks it up.
So it’s data, basically.
Just data. You don’t need any kind of connection from your console. It will do it purely through sound. It’s kind of funny and magical, too, which is important to us. Your character then appears in what we call the Skylanders Creator App. The Creator App’s free. You can download it, and actually it has the full creation system built into it. You can build your own characters there. Then you can also chirp from the console to the app. It saves the characters that you create there.
Something I forgot to mention is the character card that has a unique render of your character with your name and everything on it and a 3D print, those are playable. Those have all of the same electronics and are programmed so that when you put that on the portal, your character appears.
The world is not quite ready to do 3D printing in the millions
Paul Reiche, Toys For Bob
What are your expectations for take-up for this? It seems like a lot of folks who play Imaginators will probably want their own 3D printing.
The world is not quite ready to do 3D printing in the millions, which is what we would love to do. What we’re doing is making sure that we do it well and that we’re starting this process. I believe in 3D printing. I believe that having a reflection of what you like in your own imagination in Skylanders and in Imaginators and in other things is the way of the future. We’re the pioneers in this, in many ways. I believe that there’s great future to this and we want to make sure that we do it right in a limited sense first, get that sorted out, and then see where we go from here.
You can now add Steve Aoki’s name to the list of celebrity investors in professional gaming teams.
The EDM producer and DJ announced this weekend that he is now an investor in the Overwatch and Counter-Strike team Rogue. He made the announcement during his set at TwitchCon on Sunday.
According to ESPN, Aoki will work with Rogue in the areas of management and brand development. Rogue is a new team, having only formed back in May.
“As many of my fans know, I’ve been a gamer all my life and have been getting more and more involved in Esports,” he said. “I can finally take my love for gaming to the next level as an owner of Rogue, the professional esports team. As an avid player of Overwatch, their dominance caught my eye and after getting to know them, I realized that we shared the same goals and interests in team building and competition.”
Rogue CEO Frank Villarreal added that the team was growing quickly, so it was considering bringing on another financial partner. Aoki turned out to be a great fit. “His genuine passion for the Esports scene was exactly what we were looking for,” Villarreal said.
Aoki’s exact level of financial investment into Rogue was not disclosed.
A new PlayStation 4 update is now available, but don’t expect new features or any big changes.
The next time you turn on your PS4, you’ll notice PS4 v4.01 is available to download. It’s a relatively small install, coming in at 312.1 MB. The patch notes are one line long, explaining that the system software update “improves the quality of the system performance.” No specifics were provided.
The PS4’s stability is said to have been improved with this update. People on NeoGAF are capitalizing on the opportunity by releasing some pretty excellent “PS4 stability” gifs. Go have a look for yourself.
PS4 4.00, the console’s latest major update, came out in September. It introduced folders for managing games and apps, while some menus were also redesigned. PS4 4.00 also added HDR support for all PS4s.
The PS4 Slim came out in September, priced at $300 to start. Sony will launch its new, more powerful PS4 4 Pro in November. This console starts at $400 and you can learn more about it here.
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard’s VR mode will be exclusive to Sony’s PlayStation VR for 12 months, according to an advert spotted on Facebook. As noted in a Reddit post, the small print at the bottom of the advert indicates it could be released for other VR platforms after a year.
“Resident Evil 7 Biohazard coming in 2017 and exclusive to PlayStation VR for 12 months,” it reads.
As of yet, Capcom has not officially announced Resident Evil 7’s VR experience for any other platforms. GameSpot has contacted the company for a statement.
Capcom launched the VR-supported Beginning Hour demo for Resident Evil 7 during E3 2016. This section of the game is a standalone prologue to the main game and will not be featured in the final Resident Evil 7 experience.
Resident Evil 7 is set to release for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on January 24, 2017. A deluxe version of Resident Evil 7 will be available for $89.99 and includes the game and a season pass with three extra story chapters.
The first DLC will be made up of four short side stories, while the second adds another episode to the main game. It is unclear what the new DLC will provide as of yet. Resident Evil 7 is set to release for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on January 24, 2017.
For Europe, the standard edition of Resident Evil 7 is available to pre-order for €64.99/£49.99 and will have a custom theme for the console. A Day-1 Survival Edition, which will be available to pre-order at a special price of €69.99/£52.99 up until release, has the theme and and the Survival Pack: Recovery Set. This includes consumable healing items, an early unlock of the insanely difficult Madhouse mode, and a mysterious Lucky Coin in-game defense item.
The upcoming DC superhero team-up Justice League has been filming in London since April, but production there has now wrapped. Aquaman star Jason Momoa posted a new image on Instagram, congratulating the crew and apologising for having to miss the movie’s wrap party. Check it out below:
Momoa wrote: “There’s too many people to thank for all their hard work [on] JL. Tonight is our wrap party. I am so thankful for my cast and crew. I love you. I have never in my life missed a wrap party, as you all know I’m a huge fan of the food and merriment!
“Unfortunately I prepare for the north. For those that will be there, I WON’T let you down. See you Monday.”
Mamoa’s comments imply that production hasn’t entirely finished, and some location work will continue this week.
EA’s FIFA 17 debuts at No.1 on the UK sales chart for the week ending October 1. According to sales monitor Chart-Track, FIFA 17 has had the highest week one sales in the series’ history.
Microsoft and Playground Games’ Forza Horizon 3 arrives at No.2 in its launch week, ahead of Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens at No.3 and BioShock: The Collection at No.4.
The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions of XCOM 2 were also released during the week and reached No.5 in their first week on sale. Pro Evolution Soccer 2017 drops down to No.6 a week after its release, and is followed by Destiny: The Collection at No.7.
Rounding off the top ten are Rocket League at No.8, NBA 2K17 at No.9 and Grand Theft Auto V at No.10. Rockstar’s GTA V is in its 159th week on the UK sales chart.
You can see the full top 10 in the list below. This table does not include digital sales data, and thus should not be considered representative of all UK game sales.
This is Russian cosplayer Xenia Shelkovskaya, doing one hell of an impersonation of English actress Natalie Dormer/Westeros Deal Wheeler Margaery Tyrell.
