The world of Assassin's Creed collides with For Honor from today.
The For the Creed in-game event runs from 20th December to 10th January on all platforms.
It includes a variation of the four versus four Dominion mode called Assassini e Templari in which you capture zones to spawn Ezio Auditore da Firenze and Cesare Borgia out to battle.
Ever heard of a game called Geneshift? No of course you haven't. It was barely a speck on the gaming radar until yesterday when, out of nowhere, it became one of the most played games on Steam ever.
Geneshift recorded a concurrent player count of 213,183 players, according to Steam Charts, an increase of 9000 per cent. It's a number that would place Geneshift fourth on Steam right now, behind colossi PUBG, Dota 2 and CS: Go.
In the all-time rankings it puts Geneshift 10th - 10th in how many hundreds of thousands of games I wonder? Yet there it stands among giants like Grand Theft Auto 5, Monster Hunter World and Fallout 4. And it's only made by one guy.
"No one knew what was happening; there was no warning. When we got the news, people cried, hugged, or stared blankly ahead. In the aftermath, people wondered what they would do without health insurance, what would happen with their work visas, what to tell their families. For me, it was a day of mind-numbing shock. The full weight of what had happened and what it meant going forward - not being in that office, not working with my team, not being on a project I'd spent over a year on - took weeks to sink in."
That's Mary Kenney, a video game writer who worked at Telltale before its closure earlier this year. Her retelling of the events of 21st September 2018 depicts a studio of people in mourning for their work, shocked at the situation that was pushed upon them and worried about their future. Telltale was dead and all of a sudden 250 people had lost their jobs.
It would later come to light that the abrupt departure of a major financial backer was the smoking gun. But what did the passionate creators within Telltale experience during its final year? What was the human cost of Telltale's final act? To find out, I talked to several ex-Telltale employees, some of whom wished to remain anonymous in order to protect their careers, about their experience at Telltale, and the highs and lows of working there in its final months.
Destiny has always had a love / hate relationship with story, but following the launch of the Destiny 2 expansion Forsaken, lore fans are finding a lot to sink their teeth into - and this week a new story revelation certainly set the cat among the pigeons.
THERE MAY BE SPOILERS AHEAD.
First, some background. Forsaken antagonist Uldren Sov was killed at the end of the expansion's story, a troubling revenge act for the death of wise-cracking hunter Cayde-6.
I love Blackout in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, but it's clear the developers at Treyarch are having trouble working out a sweet spot for perhaps its most troublesome feature: armour.
Armour has been tweaked this way and that ever since Black Ops 4 came out back in October as Treyarch has tried to settle it down in a place that makes for a good experience.
For those who don't know, armour is a pick-up that comes in three levels, the third being the most durable. It's a powerful item for all the obvious reasons: it mitigates damage, thus increasing "time to kill". In a firefight, armour can be the difference between life and death.
Fallout 76 will get a new mode designed to let people play with and against each other without PvP restrictions.
The unnamed new mode will launch at some point during the first quarter of 2019, Bethesda said in a blog post.
From the sounds of things, this new mode involves co-op and PvP. The note about it working without PvP restrictions is important, as Fallout 76's current PvP is a mess. As I wrote in our Fallout 76 review:
Street Fighter 5 got a surprise new character earlier this week - and combo masters are already doing incredible things with him.
Kage, a twist on the Evil Ryu character from previous Street Fighter games, is a flashy, high-damage, combo-heavy character who has some unique abilities that make for particularly cool-looking strings.
Street Fighter combo master Desk has already put together a couple of awesome Kage combo videos - and they do not disappoint. In the videos below we see combos that involve air dashes (Kage's V-Trigger 2 gives him a ground teleport that, in the air, is an air dash) to extend juggle combos beyond what we're used to seeing in Street Fighter 5. There are also cool-looking combos that involve teleporting this way and that while Kage's opponent is in the air. And I like all the wall bounce combos!
Across several reviews, I've praised Playground Games' wonderful Forza Horizon series of open-world racing games for their free-spirited generosity. But this is getting ridiculous now.
Forza Horizon 4's first expansion, Fortune Island, was released last week. As a package it is satisfying, but you wouldn't call it lavish. Its new map consists of a small island in the far reaches of the North Sea, where a tiny fishing village clings to the edge of of a mass of barren moorland and marshland topped by jagged rocky peaks and liberally scattered with ruined viking longboats and druidic stone circles. The skies are either riven with lightning storms or pulsing with beautiful aurorae. It's not the most lush or varied environment Playground's artists have come up with, but personally I appreciate its stark Nordic atmosphere and mildly fantastic stylings - and the driving is exciting.
You also get 10 new cars exclusive to the expansion, including the new Lamborghini Urus SUV and a wood-panelled 1950s Morris Minor, and a wealth of new campaign content. There's a series of drifting challenges, a pair of long-distance race layouts, a new form of PR stunt called the Trailblazer - a timed point-to-point dash across open terrain with no checkpoints - and a new campaign structure based around treasure hunting. Seasonal championship enthusiasts like myself will be delighted that the expansion doubles the number of these available in each weekly update.
Yesterday Carlton from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, today the Backpack Kid from, um, Instagram - another day, another legal case against Fortnite because of dances in the game.
Who's the Backpack Kid? Only the teenager who created the Floss*, the most famous dance in Fortnite (and maybe the western world in 2018). His real name is Russell Horning and he's 17 years old. His mother is reportedly filing suit on his behalf, wrote TMZ.
The similarities to Carlton actor Alfonso Ribeiro's lawsuit, and rapper 2 Milly's, are no coincidence, as it's the same law firm representing all three people: Pierce Bainbridge Beck Price & Hecht.
Treyarch has nerfed Zero, the new specialist added to Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 just last week.
Zero hit the PlayStation 4 version of the game first, as per Sony's marketing deal with Activision, and was met with an immediate backlash from players who considered her perhaps the most overpowered specialist ever seen in Call of Duty.
Yesterday, Zero hit the PC and Xbox One versions of the game in nerfed form (she's also now nerfed on PS4). The problem had to do with Zero's hacking ability, the Ice Pick. It lets Zero hack into any enemy scorestreak and take control of it, which no other character can do or counter. It means a player who has earned no streaks can take control of, for example, the devastating attack chopper.