Month: October 2019

Blizzard has outlined this year’s BlizzCon Virtual Ticket, which will grant you access to in-game bonus items, extra panels including musical acts, and the closing ceremonies. It’s on sale now through the official site for $50 / £35.

As always, the main attraction for those watching from home may be the exclusive goodies for Virtual Ticket holders. Some are already available for those who jump onto the ticket, while others will be hitting closer to the event.

Starting today, World of Warcraft gets faction leaders Finduin and Gillvanas, and a Wendigo Woolies transmog outfit. Heroes of the Storm players can claim a commemorative spray and portrait and a Celestial Deepcrawler mount. StarCraft 2 gets three new Brood War unit skins and portraits.

Coming closer to the event, Overwatch will get in on the WoW homage action for the first time, with an Illidan Genji and Tyrande Symmetra skin. Hearthstone players will be able to claim an exclusive card back as usual, but this year you can also get a Golden Legendary card that will be revealed at the show. Blizzard also says commemorative wings are coming for Diablo 3, but didn’t outline when to expect them.

This comes alongside the round of panels, musical acts, Community Night, and esports tournaments. You’ll also get access to the musical performances during the closing ceremony.

“This year’s BlizzCon is shaping up to be our best yet, and we want to make sure everyone in the Blizzard community can experience it together, whether they’re joining us in person, from home, or hanging out in-game,” said new company president J. Allen Brack, in the announcement. “We’re looking forward to delivering an epic experience for those watching our free broadcasts–which we’ll have more of than ever before–and for everyone tuning in for all of the extras provided with the Virtual Ticket.”

BlizzCon 2019 will begin on Friday, November 1. If you’re not a Virtual Ticket member, you can still watch many of the opening ceremonies as well as the esports tournaments for free.

Destiny 2‘s new DLC expansion, Shadowkeep, and free-to-play New Light version are out now. If you pre-ordered the expansion, you’re entitled to some freebies, but they won’t automatically appear in your inventory when you log in for the first time since patch 2.6.0.1 released. Instead, you’ll need to progress a short way into Shadowkeep’s campaign and then claim them. Here’s what to do.

You’ll need to complete the first mission of Shadowkeep’s new campaign in order to claim the bonuses. You can do that by bringing up the Director and selecting the new moon location. That will launch you directly into the mission. Play through it and you’ll unlock the moon as a new destination you can freely visit like any other location. That will also unlock a vendor and quest giver: Eris Morn.

Your next quest step is to visit Eris. Accept the next leg of your journey, and you’ll see she has bounties for the moon (though you’ll need to advance further in the story before you can claim them). In a separate row of her inventory, provided you qualified for the pre-order bonuses, you’ll see your rewards: the Exotic rocket launcher Two-Tailed Fox (which was originally added in Forsaken) and a weapon ornament called Chasing Kitsune that gives the weapon a new look.

To equip the ornament, you’ll need to inspect the rocket launcher in your inventory and then press Down to view the new Appearance window. From here, you can freely equip and unequip the ornament.

While Two-Tailed Fox isn’t new, it is a fun gun to use. As the name suggests, it fires two rockets: one is void (and suppresses enemies, preventing the use of abilities) and the other is solar (causing damage over time). If you’re looking for new items, be sure to check out our look at all of the weapons, armor, and Exotics you can earn in the new Season of the Undying battle pass.

In an unsurprising result, FIFA 20 is top of the UK all-format physical sales chart in its debut week. EA’s sports behemoth was the highest-selling boxed game for the week ending September 28, meaning The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening slips to No.2.

Other new games didn’t fare quite so well as FIFA. The Nintendo Switch version of Dragon Quest IX: Echoes of an Elusive Age enters at No.11, while Code Vein debuts at No.13 and The Surge 2 manages a No.35 finish. However, FIFA’s launch sent ripples across much of the chart; an Xbox One FIFA 20 bundle that included Gears 5, for example, caused the Xbox-exclusive shooter’s sales to soar by 70%.

We enjoyed EA’s latest football game here at GameSpot, awarding it an 8/10 in our FIFA 20 review. “Flawed and iterative, but comforting, complete, and compelling, FIFA 20 is as frustrating and as essential as ever,” we said. “The Journey and FIFA Street will continue to be missed, but Volta offers a genuinely different option for those who want to dip in and out across FIFA’s smorgasboard of game types, while Ultimate Team continues its route to world domination. It’s just a shame Career Mode continues to stagnate–even if EA has finally remembered it exists.”

You can read the full top 10 sales chart for this week below, courtesy of UKIE and GfK Chart-Track. Note this table does not include digital sales data, and so should not be considered representative of all UK game sales.

1. FIFA 20
2. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
3. Borderlands 3
4. Gears 5
5. Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled
6. The Division 2
7. Sea of Thieves
8. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
9. Minecraft: Xbox Edition
10. Forza Horizon 3

Video games can be serious business–people’s lives and livelihoods can depend on them, and they can harm or help people to a huge extent. It’s the latter effect that Ubisoft is most interested in with two of its newly announced projects. The Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, and Far Cry publisher has revealed two new games–one titled Rabbids Coding and the other temporarily known as Project Oikos–focused on educating children.

The first is a Rabbids game that aims to teach kids how to code. You’re faced with puzzles based around moving in the right direction and in the right order. You might, for example, need to pick up a Rabbid on one side of the level and drop it off on the other, requiring the correctly ordered instructions for your robot player-character to make the journey. The PC game is simple, but it quickly gets more complex, all the while teaching the basics of coding syntax in a more welcoming way than simply bombarding you with lines of code. Best of all, it’s free, with a release date being announced “soon.”

Project Oikos, meanwhile, is a prototype that’s only been in development for around six months. It’s a two-player co-op title in which each player controls an animal of one of four species: a lilypad, a fish, a worm, or a bird. Together, you need to maintain the populations of each species by reproducing and eating the other species. As well as the obvious themes of ecosystems and food chains, Oikos is also a useful tool to demonstrate how working together and communicating helps make complex problems much easier to solve. Ubisoft said it’s too early to say what form Oikos will take if and when it eventually comes out, but I hope it sees a similar free release as Rabbids Coding, as it could prove to be a great learning tool.

Finally, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey‘s Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece mode is out now, allowing you to take an educational tour around–you guessed it–Ancient Greece. The mode allows you to wander around the game’s locations without fear of interruption from the main game’s enemies, as well as supplying actual in-game guided tours. The mode is available now as a free update on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, and is also available to buy separately on PC.

This week in Red Dead Online, pick up the bounty for the Owlhoot Family, participate in the Condor Egg Role Free Roam Event, or simply log on to get RDO$200.

The long-awaited sequel to Kerbal Space Program was the surprise announcement at Gamescom 2019! If you don’t know what Kerbal Space Program is, well… it’s part astrophysics simulator, part aerospace engineering crash course – with a heavy emphasis on the crash – and part trial-and-error rocket science that all boils down to you trying to build a space vessel that can shuttle these lil’ green cuties called Kerbals into space before bringing them home safely.

Now that Kerbal Space Program 2 has crested over the proverbial horizon, creative director at Star Theory, Nate Simpson, shared with us some of the secrets, hints, and teases baked into this cinematic announcement trailer, to give you a better idea of what to expect in the sequel. You can watch us unpack everything Simpson shared with us in the video at the top of the page!

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New York City Comic Con 2019 kicks off this Thursday, October 3, and the announcements and reveals are already ramping up.

Hasbro has a new set of Transformers to show off by way of the Transformers Generations: War for Cybertron Earthrise figures. Check out Optimus Prime and more in the slideshow below:

Each figure comes with “a piece of the Transformers Universe Map,” and collecting the figures allows you to complete the map in its entirety.

The line-up reveal only has Autobots at the moment, so it’s probably a safe bet we’ll see some new Decepticons joining the next chapter of the Transformers saga.

Transformers Generations: War for Cybertron Earthrise figures can be preordered beginning October 3 at 5 pm ET directly from Hasbro Pulse. While you visit the Hasbro Pulse website, you can also put in a preorder for the massive Transformers Unicron figure, which is close to meeting its crowd-funding goal and will enter into production if it reaches 8,000 backers.

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