Month: November 2019

Black Friday is no longer confined to a single day. In 2019, Black Friday is a multi-day, multi-sale series of savings events. The price drops have already started and several retailers have dipped their toes into the lake of savings to test the waters.

Amazon remains one of the most dependable and easy-to-access retailers for Black Friday savings, but it lacks the doorbuster deals offered at retailers with physical locations like Walmart. That doesn’t mean it still doesn’t have drastic savings to entice you to spend your holiday money on the sort of items you’d expect to see for Black Friday.

There’s no flier or ad for Amazon Black Friday 2019, but we can do our best to predict some of the deals based on past deals and announcements from companies like Nintendo. Also, Amazon is notorious for price-matching competitors, so if you see a great deal at Walmart or Best Buy, expect it to show up on Amazon soon thereafter.

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Sony is continuing its leadership shakeup ahead of the PS5 launch as Shuhei Yoshida steps down from his Worldwide Studios presidency to helm a new indie-focused venture. Meanwhile, Guerrilla Games co-founder and managing director, Hermen Hulst, is the new head of Worldwide Studios effective immediately.

Yoshida’s switch in focus to independent developers is part of a wider push by Sony to bring in fresh talent. His initiative will nurture external indie studios that PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan called the “lifeblood of the industry.”

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Ryan said Yoshida “will ensure the entire SIE organization works together to better engage with independent developers through a culture of supporting and celebrating their contributions to PlayStation platforms.”

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The creator of the original Fallout and co-director of The Outer Worlds, Tim Cain, loves chocolate so much that developer Obsidian has a Slack channel dedicated to daily tasting sessions. To immortalise their boss’s adoration of cocoa, the dev team deliberately snuck a few Easter Eggs into The Outer Worlds – not literal chocolate eggs though. Sadly.

During development, The Outer Worlds staff had daily chocolate meetings arranged over Slack by Cain who would begin by sending out the details of that day’s confectionery. He explained the process to PC Gamer, how he’d write “if it’s single origin, what country it’s from, the cacao percentage, any flavoring agents. We all eat a piece and we talk about it and then I blog it, and so that way I have a list of everything chocolate I’ve eaten since 1993 and whether I liked it.”

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Actor Chris Evans has criticized the CGI casting of James Dean, who will be digitally resurrected for a secondary lead role in the Vietnam War film Finding Jack.

The Captain America star shared his reaction to the news on Twitter on Wednesday, as he retweeted the story from The Hollywood Reporter regarding Dean’s posthumous role in the upcoming action-drama and sarcastically remarked, “I’m sure he’d be thrilled.”

“This is awful,” he continued. “Maybe we can get a computer to paint us a new Picasso. Or write a couple new John Lennon tunes. The complete lack of understanding here is shameful.”

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Overwatch 2 was one of the major announcements of BlizzCon 2019, and the big surprise news was that all new characters, maps, and modes coming to the sequel would also be added to the first Overwatch. Series director Jeff Kaplan has said that this was a difficult decision to make and convince people on, but that it was ultimately the best choice for players. But it has also meant, in the short term, that the Overwatch experience has perhaps been less fresh than it could have been.

Speaking with Kotaku, Kaplan opened up about why the original game has seen fewer new seasonal events over time. “Overwatch 2 was 100 percent the reason,” Kaplan said, stating that the team was pained because it could not craft interesting new seasonal events. “Like, I sit right next to one of the designers of Junkenstein’s Revenge–this brilliant guy named Mike Heiberg–and he’s like, ‘I have all these ideas I want to do for Halloween this year.’ And I’m like, ‘I understand, Mike, but we’re focused on this other thing right now.'”

Kaplan says that, once Overwatch 2 is done (and it’s not clear when that will be), the original game will benefit too. “The fact that we can pick up again with that live service cadence, where we’re 100 per cent focused, is really exciting to me.”

Hopefully Overwatch 2 will be worth the wait. We’ve gone hands-on with the game’s new campaign at BlizzCon, and collected together all the details we know so far.

It’s going to be a big week for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Community manager Ashton Williams confirmed on Twitter that the military shooter’s next big update should release sometime before the week is out on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

This is the big update that developer Infinity Ward has been talking about for some time already. The update will include general stability improvements and bug fixes, as well as bigger-ticket items like weapon tuning and adjustments to footstep audio. There will also be changes to how claymores work “and more,” Williams said.

Modern Warfare’s co-director of multiplayer, Joe Cecot, added that there will be even more updates and improvements to the game in the upcoming update, though he did not offer any details on what they might be.

The update will be release “over the next few days,” Williams said in a tweet sent on November 6. That means it should be released any time now, though as Williams mentioned, specific release timing could change. Keep checking back with GameSpot for the latest.

Since launch, one of the biggest complaints players have put to Infinity Ward is that two weapons in particular–the M4 rifle and the 725 shotgun–are overpowered. Williams said in a follow-up tweet that the 725 should be among the weapons that gets addressed in the update. Players have also reported that claymores are generally over-used and too effective, so it will be interesting to see what changes are in store. There should also be fixes for the Spec Ops mode, Williams said in another tweet.

Modern Warfare launched on October 25, and it needed just three days to bring in more than $600 million in sales. Its sales over its first three days were better than every other Call of Duty released during this generation of consoles.

A Year of Rain, a new RTS that calls back memories of old-school RTS games like WarCraft 3, is now available on PC in early access.

A fantasy RTS with base building, cinematic cut-scenes, and a “strong focus” on hero units, A Year of Rain seems to be building on the elements that PC gamers of a certain age will fondly remember from WarCraft 3 and its expansion, The Frozen Throne. While other games such as StarCraft II and the Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War series have used these elements, this style of RTS seems to have been largely dormant for several years. As such, A Year of Rain feels a bit like a dose of nostalgia.

Alongside these old-school elements and the multi-faction campaign are more modern-day ideas such as a fully cooperative story and 2v2 multiplayer modes, including the upcoming asymmetric “Against All Odds” mode which pits two heroes against two entire armies.

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