Eurogamer

The Vive wireless adapter, which frees the headset from the cable tethering it to a PC, will launch here 24th September and oh my giddy aunt it's 300! And the Vive Pro wireless adapter is 364!

The adapters appear to be the same. They're relatively small and light (129 grams) black devices which look, to me, a bit like a bull's head and horns. Yes they do. The adapter sits on your head on a band which attaches to the Vive headset (you could pretend to be the bull!) and receives a wireless signal broadcast from your PC by a special PCI-e card accompanying the device (make sure you have space on your motherboard).

It looks like the battery, an HTC QC 3.0 PowerBank, sits on your waist - you can see it in the picture. Battery-life is up to two-and-a-half hours and you can swap other charged batteries in and out.

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Eurogamer

Supermassive is going multiplatform with a new set of horror games collectively called the Dark Pictures Anthology.

The Until Dawn developer is working with publisher Bandai Namco to bring the horror titles to PC via Steam, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Here's the official blurb, from Supermassive boss Pete Samuels:

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Eurogamer

Twitch has been roundly criticised for pulling ad-free viewing from Twitch Prime.

Twitch Prime, which costs 7.99 a month or 79 a year, offers a raft of benefits, including in-game loot, free games, monthly channel subs and exclusive content. But for many the main reason to subscribe was for an ad-free experience.

In a blog post, Twitch said universal ad-free viewing will no longer be a part of Twitch Prime for new members from 14th September. If you have a monthly subscription already, you'll continue to get ad-free viewing until 15th October.

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STORMDIVERS

Finnish arcade game specialist Housemarque (Nex Machina, Resogun, Super Stardust) has properly thrown the sheet off new PC game Stormdivers, having revealed the name and multiplayer intentions earlier in the year.

We now know for certain Stormdivers will be a battle royale game - a third-person science-fiction battle royale game, although today's announcement doesn't say for how many players. We know it will have character classes with different abilities, will have vehicles, and will have player-versus-environment cooperative content as well as player-versus-player battles.

Exactly which classes, abilities and PvE missions the game will have wasn't detailed, but we can see glimpses in today's new trailer. We can see what appears to be stealth as well as huge boosted jumps, dashes and deployable wall-like shields. There doesn't appear to be crafting, but the announcement mentions "exotic" loot so that element of the typical battle royale experience will be in, as will a storm, albeit a recurring storm of some kind. It sounds as though Stormdivers will entice you to dive in and out of the storm for the greatest rewards, hence the name, I suppose.

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Life is Strange 2

After numerous teases, a free tie-in game and what feels like a very long wait, we finally got an in-depth look at Life is Strange 2 last night at a pre-Gamescom showcase. Two early sequences from the game were shown, one of which will be playable on the show floor, giving us our first (proper) look at Life is Strange 2's main characters and teasing what the long road has in store for them. We're not in Arcadia Bay anymore, everything looks very different, and really, that's a very good thing indeed.

Life is Strange 2 focuses on the journey of two brothers, Sean and Daniel Diaz, who are on a dangerous road trip after a series of tragic events near the beginning of the game force them to go on the run from police under threat of separation and arrest. It's set three years after the events of Life is Strange 1 - so, 2016 - and begins a few nights before Halloween. Sean is the older brother and the playable character, a talented 16 year old would-be artist who hates parties, has a crush on a girl named Jenn much to the amusement of his best friend Layla, and likes chilling in his room while listening to The Streets. His younger brother Daniel is 9, loves Halloween, zombies and chocolate bars, and has a mini-crush on Layla, much to the amusement of Sean. They seem to have a fairly quiet life with their father in suburban Seattle until things unravel shockingly fast and they're forced to go on the run with nothing but the clothes on their back, stolen party supplies, and a small helping of pocket money.

The game charts the brothers and their journey along the west coast of America from Seattle to their father's former home, Puerto Lobos in Mexico. The road trip setting is quite a departure from the fixed location of Arcadia Bay in the first season, but developer Dontnod says it means the pair can meet a lot of colourful characters along the way. Were the studio worried about not having a single main location or town to anchor players and build a sense of time and place?

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Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Designer Koji Igarashi has announced that his long-awaited Castlevania spiritual successor, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, will now launch in 2019, and that the planned PlayStation Vita version is no more.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which successfully secured $5.5 million USD of Kickstarter funding in 2015, has never had a set launch date, but its release window has shifted more than once now. Initially, Bloodstained was expected to arrive in March 2017, but backers were informed of a first delay in 2016, when its launch was postponed to early 2018.

At the time of Bloodstained's initial delay, Igarashi noted that development changes were required, otherwise "the game may not end up meeting my quality standards". Now, in a new Kickstarter update, the developer has revealed similar reasons for postponing the game's release until 2019, noting that additional time is needed "to raise the quality level, especially after all the very valuable feedback from the Beta Backer Demo".

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Eurogamer

Rare has a few treats in store for Sea of Thieves fans watching Microsoft's Inside Xbox livestream tomorrow, August 21st - including the chance to get hold of a rather nifty Joanna-Dark-inspired figurehead to spice up their ship's bow.

The Joanna Dark figurehead, officially known in-game as the Huntress, is the second Sea of Thieves figurehead to be inspired by developer Rare's classic mascots. The first, themed around Banjo-Kazooie, was released in July to celebrate the pair's 20th anniversary.

The Huntress was originally given away to visitors at this year's San Diego Comic-Con, but will be made available to all Sea of Thieves players that tune into tomorrow's Inside Xbox Gamescom livestream on Mixer, which begins at 3.30pm BST, August 21st.

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A Hat in Time

Developer Gears for Breakfast's delightfully old-school 3D platformer A Hat in Time is heading to Switch, and there's new DLC coming to PC next month too.

In terms of the Switch release, there's admittedly not a lot to share right now: according to Gears for Breakfast's news-packed Gamescom announcement video, A Hat in Time is definitely on its way to Nintendo Switch and is simply "coming soon".

Moving onto more substantially divulged matters, however, A Hat in Time's new DLC, which was a stretch goal during the game's 2013 Kickstarter campaign, is called Seal the Deal, and offers a brand-new chapter's worth of exploratory platform action - this time aboard a luxurious cruise liner bound for the Arctic and staffed (inevitably) by seals.

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Life is Strange 2

Life is Strange 2 will swap the small town America setting of its original season and the powerful narrative of friendship between two teenage girls for something very different - a roadtrip tale set along the West coast of America starring two young brothers.

As 16-year-old Sean Diaz you must look after your younger sibling Daniel as you survive while on the run - after "a tragic event that changes their lives forever".

Tonight, on the eve of Gamescom 2018 in Cologne, co-directors Raoul Barbet and Michel Koch fully introduced the new setting and stars to an audience of invited media. Eurogamer was in attendance to see a chunk of the game - although you'll have to wait just a little longer for us to be able to publish our initial impressions.

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Eurogamer

DICE has announced that Battlefield 5's open beta will commence on September 4th, for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

More specifically, as revealed in a new blog post, the Battlefield 5 beta begins on September 4th in its "early access" guise, and will be accessible to anyone that's pre-ordered the game on any platform, as well as to Origin Access Premier, Origin Access Basic, and EA Access subscribers.

Then, from September 6th, the beta will be made available to all players on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, or PC (via Origin). DICE isn't yet saying how long the open beta will last, other than a vague "limited time", but does note that anyone planning to get involved can pre-load the beta client from 9am BST on September 3rd.

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