Month: November 2020

A year and a half after it debuted as an online companion to Red Dead Dead Redemption 2, Red Dead Online has managed to create a unique identity for itself in the competitive online gaming space as a gritty and realistic cowboy simulator that offers a more meditative experience.

While you can play Red Dead Online as an outlaw roaming the Wild West in pursuit of a high noon shootout, many of the game’s players prefer to eke out a living as naturalists and moonshiners, enjoying a more pacifistic approach to the old frontier that Rockstar created.

“With Red Dead Online, we’re trying to deliver every aspect of what it might be like to live in frontier America in the late 1800s, so it offers a huge variety of options for players to create the experience they want within that world,” Tarek Hamad, director of design production at Rockstar North, said to GamesRadar. “By designing it in this way, there’s room for players of all kinds.”

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Building relationships with the citizens of Night City plays a huge role in Cyberpunk 2077’s gameplay. Phil breaks down how it works, what sex is like in the game, and how you interact with Johnny Silverhand.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem launched earlier this year in a rough state, with numerous technical issues and some unbalanced gameplay souring a visually striking actionRPG. It’s been a while since developer Wolcen Studio provided an update on the game, but it turns out the studio has been working on the first part of a major gameplay and content update over the past few months.

Chronicle I: Bloodtrail is the first of these updates that will be entirely free for all Wolcen players, adding in new gameplay changes, economy updates, and content to the game. The update is said to be coming soon in the announcement on Steam, with specific details about the patch coming closer to release.

One change that Wolcen Studio did detail is the split this update will create moving forward. Any characters you currently have in Wolcen will be marked as “legacy”, while new ones will be tied to the new content. Since the entire economy is being reworked, Wolcen Studio will not allow players to trade between legacy and new characters, but will still support legacy play through a separate Legacy game mode that delivers the same experience pre-patch.

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February 2021 marks the 25th anniversary of Pokemon, and The Pokemon Company has teased an upcoming celebration to mark the event. During 2020’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the company revealed the anniversary celebration logo, hinting at news to come in 2021.

During the parade, a group of Pikachu danced to the original Pokemon theme song before Pokemon Trainers unfurled the 25th anniversary banner. The logo, which you can see below, features a silhouette of Pikachu’s head with its red cheeks replaced with the numbers 2 and 5. No other information was shared, but considering the anniversary is in February, it’s fair to expect news relatively early in 2021.

While this year marks the 20th year in a row that a giant Pikachu balloon has appeared in the parade, it has been 25 years since the release of Pokemon Red and Green in Japan in February 1996. The Western release of Pokemon Red and Blue followed nearly three years later, in September 1998; The Pokemon Company celebrates anniversaries based on the original Japanese release. The 20th anniversary celebration in 2016 included the announcement of Pokemon Sun and Moon, the release of Pokemon Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow on Nintendo 3DS, and a number of worldwide events.

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Microsoft has focused a lot of energy over the last few years into making Xbox more accessible, with the Xbox Adaptive Controller being a positive step towards addressing the unique needs of players. A product of the Xbox accessibility movement and a team of engineers in the Xbox gaming division, the controller went through numerous iterations when it was in development. Direct feedback from gaming and disabled communities helping to shape the final product into its current form.

“The Xbox Adaptive Controller looks absolutely nothing like the first prototype created,” Brannon Zahand, Microsoft’s senior gaming accessibility program manager, explained to Game Informer. “It changed many, many times over the course of development. The reason was that we built the device with the Gaming & Disability Community, not for them. As such, feedback constantly was rolling in that forced us to continually re-examine the design of the product during development.”

Microsoft focused primarily on people with limited mobility for the controller, prioritizing continuity and compatibility so that users could adapt quickly to the new physical language of this device. The Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S also feature accessibility functionality in their software, such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and a narrator, making the gaming experience more helpful for a wide variety of gamers.

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Black Friday has begun, and plenty of retailers are offering great deals on games. Square Enix is the latest storefront to get in on the Black Friday fun. Square Enix’s Red & Black Friday sale is live now featuring discounts up to 80% off on big-name franchises such as Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, and Deus Ex.

The excellent MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn and all of its major expansions can be purchased for $30 on PC and PS4, the creative Dragon Quest Builders 2 on PS4 will cost you $8, and if you’re feeling nostalgic you can grab Collection of Mana on Nintendo Switch for $20. Other notable discounts include Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for $8, Final Fantasy XV for $8, and Kingdom Hearts III for $10.

Marvel’s Avengers has also received a deep discount, with the standard version now down to $30 on PC, PS4, or Xbox One. The sale on physical games runs until November 30, while the digital game games will be discounted until December 1. Check out more of our picks from the sale below.

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