Anthem, BioWare's ambitious multiplayer role-playing game, will now launch the other side of this Christmas.
That's according to a report published by Kotaku last night. Eurogamer sources have heard similar.
The report suggests we'll see the game in the spring of 2019. Officially, Anthem holds a vague "2018" placeholder date.
A note from the editor: Jelly Deals is a deals site launched by our parent company, Gamer Network, with a mission to find the best bargains out there. Look out for the Jelly Deals roundup of reduced-price games and kit every Saturday on Eurogamer.
By now, it's likely that the Monthly offerings from Humble Bundle need little to no introduction. That said, for the uninitiated, let's go over it one more time.
The Humble Monthly is a subscription service from the folks at Humble Bundle that allows people to pay $12 / 10 a month to get a stack of Steam keys, usually worth over $150 in total. Previous Monthlies have featured games like Dawn of War 3, Quake Champions, Shadow Tactics, Quantum Break and more. Each month, you'll get instant access to a couple of titles up front before getting the rest of the batch after the month finishes.
The good news is EA DICE has bitten the bullet and is reworking the Star Wars Battlefront 2 progression system, having turned microtransactions off amid a storm of controversy in November. The bad news is we don't know how and we won't know more until March.
"Your feedback has been essential here, and we are preparing significant changes to progression that will address many of the things we've seen players asking for. We'll be sharing more details about these changes in March," EA DICE said in a Star Wars Battlefront 2 update.
"Significant changes" sound promising, and if they're taking this long, perhaps it really is a complete refit. Maybe Star Card abilities will no longer have anything to do with loot boxes. Nevertheless, by the time March rolls around, Star Wars Battlefront 2, already slipping from the public eye, will be four months old - and there's no guarantee the changes will actually be ready. But at least something is being done.
At the end of the first day of her attempt to climb Celeste mountain, Madeline sits down and lights a campfire. Flames crackling and sparks rising against the darkness, it's a moment of respite in a world defined by relentless, delirious challenge. We've been here before, of course, but, even if the nod to Dark Souls isn't intentional, it's entirely appropriate. Celeste offers ingenious delights and gruelling punishment. To master it, even partially, is to feel like you're really achieving something.
If the game's beautiful pixel art characters and landscape don't necessarily prepare you for the rigour that lies ahead, the lineage should. Celeste is from the creators of Towerfall, but while that game puts glorious platforming at the service of the single-screen party battler, creating a world where precision can look very similar to chaos (and vice versa), Celeste spins it out into a grand single-player adventure perfect for speedrunners. Madeline, battling demons that will probably be entirely familiar to many players, wants to climb a mysterious mountain. Between her and the summit lie ruined cities, ghostly hotels, jungles of glinting poisonous glass, mirror shrines, valleys beset by stormwinds and much more. She has no ropes or pitons or ice hammers, merely a decent jump, the ability to climb most surfaces, and a multi-directional air dash. That first level - the one that leads to that campfire - twists these elements together in exhausting, exhilarating ways. The game's remaining levels - and there are more of them than you might expect - subvert all expectations.
Even when Celeste is playing things straight it's a wonderfully challenging proposition. A platform will start to move when you jump onto it. Moments later, a gap will seem uncrossable until you realise that you can hurl yourself further if you use the moving platform's momentum to provide an extra shove. Carefully placed gems allow you to refresh your air dash without first hitting the ground. Pretty soon you are chaining moves together so confidently - or with the wild abandon encouraged by the fact that the game saves your progress at the start of each screen and offers endless restarts - that someone peering over your shoulder might think Celeste is a game about flying between platforms rather than jumping.
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is making changes to its delightfully chaotic pre-match meet-ups in an effort to improve performance and reduce the strain on its servers.
Battlegrounds is somewhat known for its wonky performance issues, and developer Bluehole has pledged to do everything it can to improve the situation. As part of its latest update efforts, players will no longer spawn together at the same starting location before a match. Instead, according to the developer's most recent Steam Community post, multiple pre-match gathering areas have now been introduced on both maps to spread out players.
It doesn't stop there though; Bluehole has also removed weapons on the starting island before a match - all of which means that there'll likely be considerably less of Battlegrounds' wonderfully/obnoxiously ridiculous pre-game chaos (as briefly immortalised in the video above) before the serious business of frantically killing everyone gets underway.
Developer Stoic Games has announced that The Banner Saga 3 will launch this summer, considerably earlier than its originally anticipated December 2018 release date.
The Banner Saga 3 is the third and final entry in Stoic's critically acclaimed Viking series, which blends narrative-heavy role-playing and turn-based strategy. It was successfully Kickstarted in February last year, securing more than twice its $200,000 target.
At the time, Stoic anticipated that the game would launch in December 2018, but it appears that the studio is well ahead of schedule, and is now preparing for a summer release.
A note from the editor: Jelly Deals is a deals site launched by our parent company, Gamer Network, with a mission to find the best bargains out there. Look out for the Jelly Deals roundup of reduced-price games and kit every Saturday on Eurogamer.
In a returning offer from last year, for one day only, Amazon UK is offering 10 off a 50 spend when using a code.
The one-day promotion, which Amazon has launched as a 'thank you' for its customers having ranked Amazon.co.uk as number one in the 2018 UK Customer Satisfaction Index, is set to begin at 00:01 am on Thursday 25th and finish at 23:59 pm the same day.
Tomorrow Corporation, the developer behind World of Goo and Little Inferno, has announced 7 Billion Humans, a new game for PC and Switch.
7 Billions Humans is described as a "thrilling follow-up" to the developer's 2015 puzzler Human Resource Machine, and demonstrates Tomorrow Corporation's usual flair for the poignantly satirical. This latest endeavour unfolds in a world where humans now serve their robot overlords - after complaining that workforce automation had left them with nothing to do. Here's that sentence again, in longer trailer form:
Like its predecessor, 7 Billion Humans features a series of programming-themed challenges. However, while Human Resource Machine asked players to use Assembly-based programming commands to automate a single human office worker and solve problems, 7 Billion Humans features 60+ puzzles based on a new language, enabling you to control many, many office workers at the same time. It looks considerably more complicated.
Ubisoft has announced that its popular tactical open-world shooter Ghost Recon Wildlands will be getting loot crates in its next update, due to arrive before the end of January.
Clearly anticipating some resistance to the announcement - given the furore surrounding the controversial microtransaction systems seen in Destiny 2 and Star Wars Battlefront 2 - Ubisoft has posted an exhaustive FAQ detailing exactly what its loot crates will contain.
Wildlands' loot crates - known as Battle Crates - are, says Ubisoft, designed to offer "an additional and accessible way to complete your cosmetic customization experience, for both the Campaign and Ghost War modes". The publisher insists that the new system "is fair in terms of the items given to players, while also ensuring that they have zero impact on gameplay and player's progression".
Ubisoft has announced a new addition to Ubisoft Club, its somewhat nebulous layer of cross-game friction. The new addition is called Sam, and it's a personal gaming assistant.
Sam has two elements, by the looks of it. It provides personalised tips for you based on your profile - on loading up a game it might point you towards things you haven't yet tried in it - and it also exists as a chatbot, accessed via your smartphone.
The video below shows someone using the bot to find out how much time they've put into a game, and then spy on their friend. Their friend is playing Steep, so they're my kind of people, frankly.