Playground Games has announced that the first of Forza Horizon 4's two expansions is called Fortune Island and will be released on 13th December.
As you might gather from the title, Fortune Island will add a new off-shore area to Forza Horizon 4's map. The fictional island resides in "the remote northern reaches of the British Isles" - Shetland, then - and, like other Forza Horizon expansions before it, will focus on extreme weather conditions and demanding driving: "fierce lightning storms, perilous cliffside dirt roads, and sweeping paved mountain switchbacks under the mystical glow of the aurora borealis", it says here. Maybe not Shetland.
The press release also mentions a search for "hidden treasure": new Barn Find cars, perhaps?
Capcom has unveiled Devil May Cry 5's training mode, dubbed The Void.
During Microsoft's XO18 event, Capcom showed footage of The Void alongside Nero's Devil Breakers.
The Void is designed for newcomers to experiment with enemies, weapons, moves and combos, and for more proficient players to master the combat. There's a bit of a fighting game training mode about The Void, too, with a few settings options that let you tweak what the AI's doing, such as turning enemy damage off.
Rare has announced that its multiplayer pirate extravaganza, Sea of Thieves, will be getting a "fast-paced" standalone PvP mode called The Arena, and it's due to arrive early next year on PC and Xbox One.
The Arena, according to Sea of Thieves' executive producer Joe Neate, is essentially the game's main mode condensed right down in order to dramatically increase the frequency of competitive encounters. Pirates will be able test their combat mettle in quick-fire matches against rival crews, in what Rare calls "a fun, frenetic and action-packed race to find treasure".
Supposedly, treasure hunting will be the main goal in The Arena's first iteration, but the mode is designed to evolve over time. It will also apparently feature a new tavern area, as well as the new Sea Dogs Trading Company. The latter, says Rare, will offer new goals, rewards, and opportunities to progress to Pirate Legend.
After multiple delays Crackdown 3 has a firm release date of 15th February 2019 - and a new trailer that shows off destruction in multiplayer.
Over three years after Dave Jones, one of the chief creators of Lemmings, Grand Theft Auto and the first Crackdown game, took to the stage during Microsoft's 2015 Gamescom media briefing to present pre-alpha in-game footage of Crackdown 3 and promise a competitive multiplayer open-world experience with "100 per cent destructible environments" powered by the cloud, we finally see something of the end result.
Crackdown 3's multiplayer mode is called Wrecking Zone. In it, two teams of five agents battle it out in fully destructible arenas, the goal being to destroy the enemy tower. It's powered by Microsoft's cloud computing service Azure, creative director Joe Staten said during Microsoft's XO18 event.
The physical edition of Hollow Knight has been cancelled.
Developer Team Cherry had partnered with publisher Skybound Games to release Hollow Knight on discs, but both parties have walked away from the deal.
Skybound tweeted to say it was no longer working with Team Cherry on the physical edition of Hollow Knight.
Fallout 76 recently saw its final beta session, and players managed to set off a nuke just before it ended. But to get to that point is a surprisingly tricky process that involves hunting for codes, finding a keycard and decrypting letters and numbers.
A small group of players are claiming Fallout 76's "world first" nuke launch, although Bethesda has yet to confirm it. A streamer called FrenchTomahawk managed to call in a nuke late in the final beta session Thursday night after around four hours of sleuthing with the help of Twitch chat. The clip below shows the moment the bomb fell.
THERE MAY BE SPOILERS AHEAD.
PlayStation users in Chicago will soon have to pay a nine per cent "cloud tax".
Sony issued a warning to users in Chicago (thanks, USGamer), signalling Chicago's Amusement Tax begins on 14th November, and so will collect nine per cent more from PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now, among other PlayStation subscription services.
The Amusement Tax does not apply to sales of video games. So, if you're in Chicago and buy a game from the PlayStation Store, you don't have to pay extra. Rather, it applies only to rentals (considered streaming or temporary downloads), where the charges are subscription fees, per-event fees or otherwise, which is why Plus and Now are affected.
Nuketown arrives on the PlayStation 4 version of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 next week.
That's Tuesday, 13th November 2018 specifically. As per Activision's marketing deal with Sony for Call of Duty, Nuketown arrives on PC and Xbox One later.
There's a Russian flavour to Nuketown on Black Ops 4, which developer Treyarch has teased for a while now. The tweet below includes a short clip and contains the phrase "Welcome back" in Russian.
The next major Overwatch patch will force a full reinstallation of the game, Blizzard has warned.
In a post on the Blizzard forums, the company said the upcoming update for the multiplayer shooter will make fundamental changes to the game client across PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
"The number of back-end changes we're putting in is substantial enough that we can't just patch over the current content efficiently," Blizzard explained.