Category: games

As promised, Nintendo’s Animal Crossing-focused Direct presentation today eschewed talk of any other console or game to focus completely on a new Animal Crossing game for mobile. Dubbed Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, the game will arrive sometime in late November. Nintendo followed up the presentation with some screenshots and a slew of press release information.

The game’s design, sound, and overall gameplay will be familiar to anyone’s who’s played the full-fledged entires in the series, and there’ll be an assortment of returning activities and mechanics. In addition to customizing your character and your living area (in this case, an RV camper), you’ll also lay out furniture and themed items across the game’s campground setting. There’ll be a real-time day/night cycle, and you’ll have the ability to visit shops run by the regular game cast to purchase new clothing and furniture to customize your personal space. And it wouldn’t be an Animal Crossing game without the ability to go into deep debt. Instead of Tom Nook, however, Pocket Camp has OK Motors, where you can purchase major upgrades that expand your RV’s interior and allow you to trick out your in-game camper.

But it’s not all familiar; Pocket Camp introduces a few changes as well. Completing requests from visitors will provide you with crafting material. Instead of just buying new items, you can craft new furniture by bringing the materials to series-regular Cyrus, who’ll take the raw materials and craft stylish new items.

Another change to the standard Animal Crossing flow are friendship levels for visiting animals. You can raise that level by bringing your friend items they like or fulfilling specific requests. From the press release, “If you level up your friendship or decorate your campsite with an animal’s favorite items, she or he might pay you a visit.” And it wouldn’t be a mobile game without some kind of new currency. Pocket Camp introduces Leaf Tickets, which can be “earned through regular gameplay or purchased using real-world money.” The items “can be used to shorten the time needed to craft items,more easily acquire materials or acquire unique camper exterior designs.”

You can also play with visit other players’ camps or trade items with real-life friends by sharing game IDs. “Random player avatars will also visit the campsite from time to time. Once someone visits, you can exchange your Bells for items saved in the Market Box.”

The game will launch for free across both iOS and Android. And regular content updates will roll out afterward–which you can assume will include some kind Christmas/holiday content. The press release states: “Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp will eventually offer seasonal events to keep the experience fresh and surprising, as well as limited-time furniture and outfit options through game updates. These events and updates will begin rolling out after launch.”

Be sure to visit IGN Tech for all the latest comprehensive hands-on reviews and best-of roundups. Note that if you click on one of these links to buy the product, IGN may get a share of the sale. For more, read our Terms of Use.

For some people, a keyboard ismore than just a slab to type out emails. It’s an investment in a particular lifestyle. It’s like buying a good couch or a comfy mattress – you’re going to spend a lot of time using it, so you might as well get something really nice. Besides, gamers usually keep their keyboards through multiple PC upgrade cycles, so it pays to get something with all the features you want instead of skimping on things because of budget constraints. If you do it right, it could even be the last keyboard you ever buy.

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Nintendo has dropped the details of its much anticipated Animal Crossing game for smartphones, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp.

In Nintendo’s Animal Crossing-dedicated direct today, we learned the details of its upcoming mobile entry, which will launch for free on iOS and Android mobile late November.

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp plays out like previous console entries, with a few tweaks. Rather than managing a town, Pocket Camp tasks players with managing a personalized campsite. If you gather materials around your world like cotton or wood you can craft furniture for your camp site by placing an order, but you can also make the process easier by earning – or buying with real world cash – LeafTickets, which can be used to shorten crafting time or more easily acquire materials, among other benefits.

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After teasing an imminent announcement, Konami has now confirmed the release date for Metal Gear Survive. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One spinoff will launch on February 20 in the US and February 22 in Europe. This was confirmed in a tweet today.

Everyone who pre-orders gets the Survival Pack. This comes with four gold-plated weapons (bat, sledgehammer, survival machete, and survival spear), two gestures (happy and thumbs-up), four survival scarves (green, blue, pink, and silver), and Kabuki face paint. Additionally, the Survival Pack includes the Mother Base nameplate and the Boxman [The Orange] accessory.

Metal Gear Survive is the first game in the franchise to be released since series creator Hideo Kojima parted ways with Konami. It’s a noticeably different sort of game, set in an alternate reality after the events of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes where you have to deal with what amount to zombies–something Kojima finds odd. It also features cooperative multiplayer as a key component, and is due out for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

Metal Gear Survive was originally due out in 2017. But at E3 this year, Konami announced a delay to early 2018, saying it needed more time to polish the game. For more on the game, check out all of GameSpot’s videos and written content here.

Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.

Kai’s cult started to collapse around him this week in “Winter of Our Discontent” – or did it?

He was either losing his grip on both his followers and reality or…everything’s going according to his crazy plan. Given the nature of this season, it’s hard to trust the genuiness of anything you’re watching when you’re watching it because there could be a scene a few minutes later, or a few episodes later, that just unravels it all. This element of Cult, the overuse of off-screen plotting, makes it hard to engage with and connect to.

Is Kai really making things up moment to moment now? Was his attempt to impregnate the Winter with a “messiah” a reflection of him going nuts with power or was it all a ruse to turn Winter against him? Could this be the reason he spared Beverly? Because he didn’t really believe Winter’s lie about Bev being the one who killed Colton Haynes’ “totally not gay” nazi cop Jack Samuels but he wanted her to think he did? The end of last week’s episode, when we saw Kai together with Bebe, fully suggested that everything going on with the marginalizing of the female followers was part of the bigger plan.

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Metal Gear Survive, Konami’s upcoming Metal Gear zombie survival spin-off, finally has a release date.

The game will come to the United States on February 20, 2018. The European release is scheduled two days after, on February 22, 2018.

No Australian/New Zealand release date has been announced as of writing. The release date announcement was made via the Metal Gear Official Twitter account, and also included details about pre-order bonuses available to Day One adopters of both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions. The Tweet does not mention the previously announced PC version of the game, but the Steam platform is listed on the game’s official site.

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“Animals don’t behave like men,” said Richard Adams in his rabbit-hero saga Watership Down. “They don’t sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures’ lives and hurting them.”

I’d love to know what Adams would have thought about the 3D action game Overgrowth, which centers on an anthropomorphic kung-fu rabbit that hops around the world dealing pain to the cats, dogs, wolves, and traitorous rabbits that would keep his people enslaved. Or maybe Orwell would have been more fascinated; hints abound that Overgrowth wants to be an Animal Farm-styled allegory tackling racism, classism, and a host of other -isms, and sometimes it comes close. But the whole game reminds me of the main character himself, who often falls short of reaching the distant ledges he jumps toward.

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Xbox boss Shannon Loftis, who heads up Xbox Publishing for first-party games, believes single-player-only games aren’t dead but they do have questions to face around their economic viability. Speaking to GameSpot today, Loftis said the demand by gamers for higher quality experiences comes with a price tag. While storytelling is still of paramount importance, the economics of single-player-only titles is “complicated” in today’s industry due to the dramatic and constant evolution of the game market.

“Game development in general is about a couple of things. It’s about delivering and experience and it’s about telling stories. Storytelling is as central to game development as it ever has been,” Loftis said.

There are of course strong examples of compelling single-player-only games that have performed well in the market, such as Bethesda’s Fallout 4, Sony’s Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Microsoft’s own Ori series, Loftis pointed out. But overall, Loftis said the call for higher-quality experiences can result in a big production budget. The suggestion is that some publishers might be understandably spooked putting so much money into a project when their return is not as much a sure-thing as it could be for a product with more potential revenue streams beyond the initial game sale.

“I don’t think that it’s dead per se,” Loftis said about the market for exclusively single-player games. “I do think the economics of taking a single-player game and telling a very high fidelity multi-hour story get a little more complicated. Gamers want higher fidelity and they want higher resolution graphics.”

Loftis said Microsoft’s Netflix-style Xbox Game Pass service for Xbox One, which costs $10/month for access to a library of more than 100 games, is one method by which Microsoft can help fund single-player-only games. Game Pass “gives us the opportunity to potentially fund games like that,” she said.

Retail game sales and subscription revenue–from Xbox Game Pass and other sources–“helps us put games like that in the market over time,” Loftis explained.

“I do think the economics of taking a single-player game and telling a very high fidelity multi-hour story get a little more complicated” — Loftis

These economic considerations may possibly explain or at least contribute to the discussion about microtransactions in AAA games. It is rare today for high-profile games to not have microtransaction systems in place.

One recent high-profile exclusively single-player game, Middle-earth: Shadow of War, has microtransactions in its single-player campaign. Everything can be earned through normal gameplay, but players can also choose to spend money to speed up their progress. Some called it out as odd that there would be speed-up microtransactions in a single-player game. Exactly why developer Monolith put this system into Shadow of War is not immediately clear, but it represents another revenue stream.

In Loftis’ estimation, single-player-only games will exist forever, though it’s possible they may become less prevalent. “I don’t think that there is ever going to be a time when there aren’t single-player, story-based games,” she said. “I do love the idea of building a community around the experience of these games.”

Loftis added that she wants to find a way to help find a way for the wider Xbox community to get together and enjoy the “shared experience of a single-player game” that affected them in some way. She pointed out the Red Wedding episode of Game of Thrones as a moment where fans were so affected by what happened that they came together to discuss and post videos of their reactions on YouTube.

We asked Loftis about the future of single-player games in the wake of EA’s unexpected and dramatic announcement that it was closing Visceral Games and re-tooling the studio’s much-anticipated Star Wars game. Announced as a story-based, linear adventure game, EA said it discovered in the production process that it wasn’t going to be a game that fans could “come back to and enjoy for a long time to come.” So the decision was made to “pivot” to something new. It remains to be seen what that will be, but the wording of EA’s statement suggests the team is looking at a more online, multiplayer-focused experience. Some took this news as a signal that video games in general are trending away from single-player-only experiences. That’s an understandably worrying thought. As Loftis said, it’s highly unlikely that exclusively single-player games cease to exist, though we could see fewer of them due to the realities of doing business.

What do you think about single-player games? Let us know in the comments below! This is just one of the many topics that came up in our interview with Loftis today. Check back soon for more on topics like the future of the Fable franchise, the Xbox One X, how she feels about Microsoft’s lineup of exclusives this year, and a lot more.

It’s a pretty good week if you’re a fan of Star Wars games. The classic RPG Knights of the Old Republic becomes backwards compatible on Xbox One tomorrow, and to celebrate, you can check out a couple of the expansions for the PC MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic for free.

Anyone with an active SWTOR account can play the Rise of the Hutt Cartel and Shadow of Revan expansions for free right now until November 6. All you have to do is go to this site and enter the code “Revanreturns” to get access.

The core game extends from level 1-50, Rise of the Hutt Cartel covers level 51-55, and Shadow of Revan is level 56-60. Since the main game is already free-to-play, this means that you can try out the game up to level 60 for no cost.

In addition, you can get a special Swoop Bike for use in The Old Republic that’s themed after KOTOR. You can redeem it using code “Kotorspeeder” at the same website; the code expires on November 6.

KOTOR is among the first original Xbox games to be made backwards compatible on Xbox One. You can buy it through the Xbox Store, or, if you still have a physical copy lying around somewhere, you can put it in your Xbox One to unlock it. You can read about the other original Xbox games that are backwards compatible here.

With all the buzz surrounding Switch versions of Wolfenstein 2 and Doom, it’s understandable if you forgot about another popular FPS coming to the console. Developer Overkill announced a Switch port of Payday 2 way back in April, and since then has been relatively silent about its progress. Today, however, it gave an update on the game, showing it running on Switch in portable mode.

The video also reveals a couple of new details about the port. First, the developer shows it running in both of Switch’s undocked modes, portable and tabletop. We also learn that the game will feature a new interface and touchscreen support on the platform. Finally, there’ll be a “special treat” for Switch players when the game launches. You can check out the video below.

The game was scheduled for launch this winter, although Overkill hasn’t specified any more than that. However, the studio did reiterate the winter release window in the video.

Payday 2 was originally released back in 2013 for PS3, Xbox 360, and PC. It made its way to PS4 and Xbox One in 2015. Overkill is also currently working on a VR version of the game, which is getting a beta test next month. You can check out its trippy 360-degree website here.