As soon as you complete Far Cry 5's tutorial, you can play the open-world shooter co-op online with a friend, Ubisoft has said.
You can play through the entire campaign in co-op. Your Friend for Hire appears as a custom player character and can fight alongside you throughout the game, dropping in and out with full voice-chat support.
You can share ammo and health packs, and can even turn on friendly fire if you fancy living dangerously.
Activision has put out a video of multiplayer map Carentan in Call of Duty: WW2.
Carentan is one of the most fondly remembered Call of Duty maps, and it turns up in Sledgehammer's Call of Duty: WW2 as day one DLC for season pass and digital deluxe edition owners of the game. The expectation is Activision will release the map to all players at some point after Call of Duty: WW2 comes out.
Carentan sees players fight through destroyed buildings and fortified streets in a war-torn French town. It made its debut in Infinity Ward's Call of Duty, then popped up again in Call of Duty 2.
Did you catch it? In amongst the blather and breaking bones of PlayStation's Paris Games Week press splurge? The moment between a father and daughter that wasn't grim, predictable and clumsy? The moment that was simple, gentle, and beautifully observed? The moment that occurred in the Spelunky 2 trailer when an old hero passes his hat on to the next generation and then...?
Let's just think about that for a second: Spelunky 2. It feels so strange to see that logo. It's exciting, of course, because Spelunky is exciting. But it's also completely unexpected, because Spelunky is one of those rare games that is sort of perfect.
And Spelunky is already its own sequel, of course. It's an endless mirror-hall of sequels, a procedural platformer in which, each time you die, the game rebuilds itself around a set of inviolate rules that nonetheless manage to generate surprises, shocks, and set-pieces that seem to challenge you in new ways. It belongs to a small group of games that you suspect would resist sequels, games that seem to say everything that they need to the first time out. I loved Crackdown 2, for example, but even I can admit with the passage of time that it didn't add anything meaningful. Equally I can't imagine a Stranglehold 2 that conjures more excitement than the original, as much as I would love another outing for Inspector Tequila.
Developer Infinite Fall's celebrated narrative adventure Night in the Woods - a game of cute animals and crippling existential dread - is getting a "director's cut" on December 13th.
Known as the Weird Autumn Edition, the new version features (in the words of its creators) "a whole bunch of new content". The announcement trailer is marginally more illuminating, revealing that it will feature "new weird, new crimes, and old tales". Weird Autumn will be made available as a free update for existing PC and PS4 players on release day.
December 13th also marks Night in the Woods' Xbox One debut, where it will arrive in its new Weird Autumn guise. As a bonus, Xbox One and PC players will receive Longest Night and Lost Constellation, the two previously released supplemental games, on launch day. PS4 players, meanwhile, will get them a smidgeon later, in January 2018.
Eve Online developer CCP has pulled out of virtual reality development, a move that affects some 100 or so staff.
The Icelandic company had invested heavily in VR games, with Eve Online spin-off Valkyrie, Gunjack and PSVR exclusive Sparc betting big on the tech. But CCP has now decided to halt VR production to concentrate on Eve Online.
Icelandic business publication mbl.is reports 100 of CCP's 370 staff are affected by the move. The Atlanta office, which worked on Sparc, is closed. The Newcastle office, which worked on Eve Valkyrie, is up for sale.
In Football Manager 2018, players can come out as gay.
Only newly generated, fictional players will be able to come out, to avoid legal issues with real-world players. If and when players do come out you will receive a news item in your inbox informing you. Your club will even receive a slight boost in revenue due to new attention from the LGBTQ community.
"It's not a message that everyone is going to see in their game," Football Manager director Miles Jacobson told BBC Sport. "It is quite rare, but we want it to be seen as a positive thing."
A month after launch, FIFA 18 is in an interesting spot.
When EA's gargantuan football sequel came out I, and from what I can tell most people, enjoyed the game. Gameplay changes made for a fun, fast-passing and high-scoring game of virtual football, and some cool new modes meant FIFA 18 felt fully-featured. (For more, check out our FIFA 18 review.)
A month later, and with a couple of patches under its belt, FIFA 18 now has a mixed reputation among its rabid community. I've stuck with the game, pumping tens of hours into this year's FIFA Ultimate Team mode, and I've played what feels like hundreds of online and offline matches so far. So, I thought it would be useful to run through the good, bad and ugly of FIFA 18 one month in - and to offer my thoughts on what happens next.
The next big thing in the Star Citizen pipeline are cities the size of planets.
Chris Roberts and his Cloud Imperium team demonstrated them on Friday night during the CitizenCon 2947 livestream broadcast from Frankfurt, Germany.
What we see in the footage is the transformed ArcCorp planet and Area 18 hub Star Citizen players have seen in the social module before. But it's drastically different. The cityscape stretches as far as the eye can see, above and below, with towers spewing flame, and orange canyons steaming and glowing. People mill around, giving the city a sense of life and activity, and advertising boards and projections blink and beam. It is, as Chris Roberts honestly remarked, "very Blade Runner esque".
"Legends are almost always beautiful. The reality often leaves a lot to be desired."
The witcher's remark is aimed at the Elves, who have strained out the grit of life, love and loss before writing down their history, leaving only romantic, idealistic odes to the past. But it could just as easily be applied to the role-playing game: video game memories that sit warm and pretty in the heart, the reality of their original awkwardness so often lost to time and nostalgia.
So we remember the vainglory of slaying the dragon atop a mountain in Skyrim, not the 20 minutes of tacking zig-zigs on horseback that it took to reach its summit. So we remember Aerith's hands clasped on her still chest in Final Fantasy 7, not the machinegun volley of random battles that prevented us from reaching her in time to save her life. So we remember the silhouette of Fable's sheepdog fighting faithful by our side, not those times he caught upon a sticky polygon, or lost his mind to AI Alzheimer's and tore off to greet the distance. Legends are almost always beautiful. The reality often leaves a lot to be desired.
The witcher's game - his second, a Polish blockbuster exquisitely rebuilt stone by stone for Xbox 360 from the 2011 PC original - has been designed to ensure that, wherever possible, the legend and the reality match.
It's in the interface, which allows you to hack, slash, parry and throw spells with the touch of a button, stylishly slowing time to a crawl as you select a different brand of magic from a radial menu before winding it back to full speed once selected with decidedly un-RPG-like flair. It's in the cut-scenes, which press interactivity into the player's palms at every opportunity while maintaining their Game of Thrones-style directorial drama.
It's in the story itself, which is written at a geographical, architectural level just as much as it is written in the words of its characters. It's in the trade-post town of Flotsam where you spend the first few hours of your adventure, a riverside settlement where racial tension, poverty and hopelessness are scrawled into its dirt and structural layout as much as the dialogue boxes of its inhabitants. It's in the whorehouses, gambling dens and fighting rings where you can fritter away your hard-earned pennies on womanly comfort or manly jeopardy - downtime that might not make it to the history books, but which adds spice and grit to the true tale behind the telling. If The Witcher 2 is the stuff of legend, it's a legend rolled from s**t and blood, semen and mud; a plausible legend.
It's in the voice acting, which brings to vivid life dialogue that has the capacity to move in one moment and arrest the next. It's in the races and dialects, the social pecking order that reveals itself in every conversation with a beggar, a king and everyone in between. It's in the way in which the scriptwriters weave this cultural detail into your missions, over the short term and the long. The witcher's working to clear his name for the assassination of a king, but never too busy to ignore a cry for help from a pauper.
It's in the systemic counterpoint to the talking: combat, a taut, impressive affair which pits Geralt against groups of enemies demanding that you earn your wins through quick wits, nicking at foes with sword swipes before driving them back with ranged spells and dagger throws. Even the most seemingly straightforward skirmish is hard won, while battles against the true monsters lurking beneath the game's shallows require mastery before they relent.
It's in the character development tree, the freedom to extend the witcher's talents into magic or combat or alchemy, crafting a character of your own making rather than merely chiselling away at the predestined potential set out for him by a game designer. It's in the witcher, Geralt of Rivia, himself. Dry, collected, believable, mature, equal parts endearing and vicious, he is a lead character born for legend, the reality of whom rarely fails to live up to the legacy he leaves after the closing credits.
Curiously for a PC game hanging from a branch of Tolkien's family tree, The Witcher 2 is as much Rockstar as it is Bethesda. While this may not be an open-world game, the way that linear story and non-linear play link arms is reminiscent of Red Dead Redemption. Cut-scenes trigger when you approach key characters or areas, while the way missions are received, juggled and delivered is very Grand Theft Auto.
Where CD Projekt's game surpasses this influence is in the branching story: choices that halt you in your tracks as you realise the full weight of their repercussions, not only to those around you in the game, but also to your story, your legend. John Marston was tethered to Rockstar's tale, but you define the both the fine detail and grand sweep of Geralt's, deciding one moment whether to save the women from the burning building or topple the corrupt commander before he flees, before choosing which key character you will chase for the next 10 hours, altering the game experience dramatically.
Inevitably, perhaps, a few elements leave something to be desired. CD Projekt's first console release has textures that pop in and the occasional game-halting crash (although no bugs so persistent or crippling as those seen in the console versions of Skyrim). The interface occasionally requires one finger more than a console player owns (switching spells mid-battle on the Xbox controller forces thumbs and fingers into tortured positions) and there's just a little too much reliance on quick-time-event button-presses, which more feel out of place than ever here. An all-new tutorial smooths over some of the clumsiness of the PC game's opening hours, but the game demands just enough of its player before it begins to pay out its greatest rewards to ensure that some will walk away disappointed.
There are areas where the console players arriving late to The Witcher 2 benefit, however. For one, all downloadable content released for the game thus far is included in the package, these extra missions slotting seamlessly alongside the main quest so you can't see the stitching. The quality of these missions is universally high and creative: one asks you to wean a troll off vodka, another - exclusive to this version of the game - has you quietly escorting a lady-in-waiting from the city as she seeks to evade the eye and ire of her mage hunters.
The Witcher 2's timing is prescient. As Game of Thrones dominates the television ratings, just as Skyrim has dominated the game charts in recent months, the cultural appetite for fantasy is as high as it's ever been. Despite the competition, however, The Witcher 2 has an air of unique wonder about it. There's a weight and detail to the mythology that is beguiling, but CD Projekt's skill has been in making this relevant and meaningful to the player.
Where endless talk of mythical factions, rivalries and loyalty can drag even the best fantasy fiction down, in The Witcher 2, the backstory is as compelling as the plot that darts through it. And the weave of systems and story ensures that here is a legend as beautiful in the reality as it is in the telling.
9
/
10
Nintendo of America has snapped up the domain SuperMario4.com.
The web address currently acts as a redirect: try to access SuperMario4.com in a browser and you'll be warp-piped to the official Nintendo US website.
Nintendo has already announced a new side-scrolling Mario game for release on 3DS by the end of the financial year - April 2013.
A return to Mario's numbered roots fits a move back to the series' origins. A fourth numbered Super Mario title would follow NES classic Super Mario 3, launched way back in 1988.
The upcoming 3DS side-scroller will mark a change of pace from the last major Mario title to launch. Mega-selling Super Mario 3D Land, a cross between classic Mario games and the more recent Galaxy sub-series, has sold over five million copies since its launch late last year.
But Super Mario 4 may be a confusing moniker in Japan. In 1990, Super Famicom classic Super Mario World was released with "Super Mario 4" as a subtitle.