Month: November 2017

Our picks for the best gaming monitors under $500 — you don’t need to spend a fortune for a high-quality display.

BlizzCon 2017 saw the reveal of the next Hearthstone expansion called Kobolds and Catacombs, so we sat down with Hearthstone Game Director Ben Brode and Producer Eric Del Priore to get some answers to our biggest questions about this new content, as well as a few big-picture questions about a tenth class and that missing Druid Hero.

If you already haven’t, check out the trailer for Kobolds and Catacombs.

As you can see, the expansion is themed around battling monsters and finding wondrous treasures and epic loot to equip yourself with, just like you would in a classic fantasy dungeon crawl. If you didn’t catch it, Kobolds and Catacombs is a play on Dungeons and Dragons, which was a huge influence on this expansion.

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Microsoft is launching a new console, the Xbox One X, this week. One comment that gets repeated in some circles online is that Xbox overall has too few exclusives to encourage people to pick up an Xbox One S or Xbox One X this year. Now, Xbox executive Shannon Loftis, who heads up Publishing for first-party games, has responded. As she’s said before, Loftis said she is confident in the lineup for 2017 and next year, though she acknowledged it would be good to have more exclusives, too.

“I think our offering is good and it is solid. I definitely hear that gamers want more. Would we love to have two-dozen more super-strong, absolutely exclusives? You bet,”
Loftis said. “We do have more coming; more that are in the works that we’re not talking about now. But I feel good about what we have to offer for the launch [of Xbox One X].”

Some of Microsoft’s exclusives for this year include recently released titles like Forza Motorsport 7, Super Lucky’s Tale, and Cuphead, while PUBG is headed to Xbox One on December 12 as a “console launch exclusive.” People often point out that many of these games are also available on PC through the Xbox Play Anywhere system, so are they truly console exclusives? They may not be, but Loftis wonders if that’s such a bad thing.

“Regarding [Xbox Play Anywhere] and games being available on PC, I may be out in left field but I do not see how offering games on more platforms to more gamers is a bad thing necessarily, particularly in a multiplayer scenario,” she said.

Loftis pointed out that having Killer Instinct be available on both Xbox One and PC (via Windows 10 and Steam) is great for the fighting game because it expands the multiplayer pool. She added that Microsoft does not see a lot of overlap between people playing Xbox Play Anywhere titles on Xbox One and PC. She indicated that it is more often the case that

Still, Loftis said she is aware of the way Xbox fans feel about exclusives. “I don’t want to disregard the feelings of the people that care deeply about exclusives for Xbox …” she said.

Microsoft originally going to have another exclusive out this year, Crackdown 3, but the game was delayed to 2018. Additionally, Microsoft canceled Scalebound and Fable Legends, two of its other exclusives.

The Xbox One X launches on November 7, priced at $500 in the US. More than 130 games are getting or have already been patched to take advantage of the console’s horsepower; it is 40 percent more powerful than the PS4 Pro. Some of the enhanced titles include Halo 5 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt–you can see them all here. With its premium price tag, Microsoft is not targeting the mass market with the Xbox One X, as the Xbox One S is expected to continue to be Microsoft’s best-seller this holiday and beyond.

How do you feel about the discussion around exclusives for Xbox? Let us know in the comments below!

UFC star Ronda Rousey loves World of Warcraft. Last weekend was BlizzCon, the annual celebration of all things Blizzard. So what did Rousey do? She and her UFC fighter husband Travis Browne dressed up in WoW outfits and hit the show floor.

They went as Death Knights, and their cosplay is pretty excellent. They also got to be among the first in the world outside of Blizzard to go hands-on with the just-announced WoW expansion Battle For Azeroth.

Rousey caught up with Uproxx at BlizzCon and said she is really excited to try the new races in Battle for Azeroth. But she sounds even more excited about new mounts. “I’m a mount collector; mount or die,” she said. Rousey once spent $1,300 on WoW cards for the chance to get a rare mount, but unfortunately for her, it didn’t work out.

Last year, Rousey spoke about how she played WoW with Vin Diesel to unwind during the filming of Furious 7. Rousey is not the first celebrity to cosplay at BlizzCon; in 2015, Halloween and Freaky Friday star Jamie Lee Curtis walked the show floor as an undead Forsaken character.

Battle For Azeroth was announced at BlizzCon this weekend. It raises the level cap to 120, adds new areas to explore, while there are also new dungeons and raids. There are new Allied Races for the Alliance and Horde, while a three-player co-op system called Island Expeditions is also included in the expansion. For lots more on Battle For Azeroth, check out GameSpot’s interview with production director John Hight.

In other WoW news, Blizzard also announced World of Warcraft Classic, a version of the game that lets you play a version of the game before it received countless updates and expansions. Fans really wanted this and now it’s finally happening.

For more on BlizzCon cosplay, you can check out GameSpot’s gallery of 50 images here of some of the best cosplay we saw at the show.

Sony is rolling out a new PlayStation rewards program that will pay you a small amount of money for unlocking PlayStation Trophies. Before you get too carried away, it’s not much. Kotaku noticed a page on the Sony Rewards Passes website that mentions you can earn points by unlocking silver, gold, and platinum trophies in the games you play.

Here’s what you can earn in the new rewards scheme:

• 1 point per silver trophy
• 10 points per gold trophy
• 100 points per platinum trophy

Collect 1,000 points and you can claim a $10 PSN voucher. While that may not sound like a lot, it’s not nothing. But remember you need to sign up for the Sony Rewards program and link it to your Playstation account to have it count.

The PSN user with the highest trophy count–Roughdaw4–has 15,511 silver, 6,903 gold, and 1,359 platinum trophies. If this person redeemed them all at the rate mentioned above, that would earn them $1,583. This is obviously the most extreme example, but if you’re committed and have lots of trophies, this is a nice little perk.

Another thing to keep in mind is that this program appears to be exclusive to the United States, at least for now. PlayStation gamers in Australia have a chance at winning an actual, real-life PlayStation Trophy, so they aren’t left out completely.

Not one to publicly bad-mouth the competition, Xbox boss Phil Spencer wrote on Twitter that he likes the sound of this new rewards scheme. He praised Sony for putting out and pointed out that competition is good. “Sounds like a cool feature, I’m going to give it a try. Competition is a good thing,” he said. “Keeps us all working hard.”

Full spoilers follow for this episode. Click here if you want to learn how to watch Star Trek: Discovery.

The stage is set for next week’s mid-season cliffhanger of Discovery with “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum” — translation: “If you want peace, prepare for war” — as Burnham, Saru and Tyler find themselves on a very old school sort of Trek mission, even while the bigger concerns of the war effort become increasingly dire.

Things kick off with Lorca and the Discovery crew attempting to rescue the USS Gagarin from a Klingon attack, only to find themselves up against the dilemma that is the enemy’s “invisibility screens.” This scene is a variation on the training sequence we saw Lorca putting his crew through earlier this season, with the captain again barking orders and the Discovery crew ultimately unable to complete their mission as the Gagarin is lost. War is hell… but it’s an exciting sequence nonetheless.

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Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.

“Monsters” was the most problematic slice o’ war this season, so far, as it continued Jesus’ ridiculous wrong place/wrong time mercy crusade, gave us a totally unsatisfying non-payoff to the big Morales reveal from last week, and lingered far too long on a dying character who, after several years, we still didn’t fully know or care about.

I mostly care about Aaron, since we’ve spent a few quality moments with him here and there, so I’ve inherently come to care about what he cares about, but Eric’s fatal wound/death here, and how much time we spent with it, smacked of a series that’s delusional about itself. To presume that we care about any characters outside of the major core characters (and even those have their particular rival fan camps) is a stretch. The Walking Dead has the largest ensemble on TV but it’s done very little to make us care about anyone introduced after Season 4.

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Call of Duty: World War II launched on Friday, and, as expected, it saw a huge amount of interest. The game was so popular that the servers ran into issues due to the “extremely high demand,” developer Sledgehammer Games said in a blog post today.

All platforms were impacted. Some couldn’t find multiplayer matches. Others had a poor experience with the game’s online features in general. In general, people experienced “mixed online connectivity,” Sledgehammer said.

As a result, Sledgehammer made back-end changes, one of which was the enabling of “higher capacity load balancers,” which the studio said improved the connectivity issues. Perhaps the bigger change, however, is that Sledgehammer changed the Headquarters social space to make it solo. Normally, it’s populated with lots and lots of people, like Destiny’s Tower. But to help with the issues, Sledgehammer is making it a “solo experience” for now, though you can expect it to return to normal “shortly.” In the meantime, you can manually invite friends to join you in the HQ.

Additionally, Sledgehammer temporarily deactivated leaderboard updates, and you can rest assured that your stats are being recorded so when the service comes back online, all of your progress should be reflected. These changes have already paid off, Sledgehammer said, noting that connectivity is already improved. As always, your mileage may vary; if you’re encountering issues, you can reach out to Activision at this Twitter account @ATVIAssist.

Sledgehammer also acknowledged a problem where players lost their multiplayer progression. The studio isolated the bug and fixed it. For most players, they lost 5 or fewer levels. That’s a bummer, for sure, and if it happened to you, you can contact Activision on Twitter to see what can be done. Sledgehammer said, “We realize losing progression is very frustrating. We are committed to making it up to the affected players. If you were affected, please reach out to @ATVIAssist for help.”

Finally, Sledgehammer thanked fans for their patience and understanding during Call of Duty: WWII’s launch weekend. “We’re extremely grateful for all of the enthusiasm, and couldn’t be more excited to have launch weekend here,” the studio explained.

GameSpot’s Call of Duty: WWII review scored it a 9/10. Reviewer Miguel Concepcion said, “As one of the most comprehensive and filler-free Call of Dutys in recent memory, Call of Duty: WWII successfully capitalizes on the series’ strengths.”