Update: The season starts today!
Update :
Here’s your reminder that Season 5 of Dragon Ball: The Breakers goes live today. This season also includes the addition of cross-play which will allow you to play with friends on PlayStation, Xbox and PC platforms.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
It’s been announced for Japan.
If you’ve already played Dave The Diver and were holding out for a physical release, you’re in luck…kind of. Arc System Works has today announced a physical Switch release, officially titled “Anniversary Edition” will be launching on 30th May 2024.
As part of this collab with Arc System Works, it will also include some content from the fighting game Guilty Gear Strive. This includes themed graphics for the boat, and customers who wear themed costumes. There’ll also be a rhythm game giving you access to the song “The Disaster of Passion”. It’s worth mentioning how this isn’t Dave’s first collab, he’s also teamed up with Godzilla and games like Dredge.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Celebrating the arrival of the Sora amiibo.
Sora from Kingdom Hearts has finally joined the amiibo line and to go out with a bang Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will be hosting a special amiibo event.
For five days, you’ll be able to participate in an in-game tournament and team up with your own trained amiibo. This event starts on 29th February in the US and will take place on 1st March in the UK and Japan. Here’s another look at the promotional artwork to go with this event:
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Some of the coolest bits in the Terminator series, and definitely the source of its best video games, are the future war parts. Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance is an RTS that tries to follow in those robotic footsteps, spinning off of the most recent movie to put you in the boots of a military officer facing down the killer machines in the months after the nukes fall. Unfortunately, trying to combine that future war fantasy with a gritty real-time tactics formula falls short here, largely because the way your units fight and the campaign built around them feel like they were designed for two entirely different games.
The meat of Defiance is a series of story-driven battles, with army management in between, set in the post-Judgment Day United States and Northern Mexico that has you fighting against Legion, the Dark Fate timeline’s equivalent of Skynet. The characters are mostly stereotypes with a few entertainingly hammy voices, while the story of your cut-off unit of military “Founders” attempting to fight alongside a local paramilitary resistance – hindered by local warlords and robotic collaborationists along the way – does the job well enough in that it (mostly) doesn’t get in the way of the cool RTS battles you’re really here for.
The battles themselves are realistic, detailed, and deadly. Soldiers can and do get picked off by stray bullets or explosions, or barely survive what should have killed them. It’s definitely modern warfare, so large numbers and logistics rule the battlefield. Every unit tracks and requires specific types of ammunition, as well as fuel and spare parts for vehicles, all of which is depleted as you fight and has to be rearmed by supply trucks. It’s the kind of realism that a good real-time tactics game is built on.
Battling the machines can be great, too. They fight like you expect: plodding, aggressive enemies that charge into danger with no heed for their own survival. But they’re tough, and numerous, so you have to deploy your units wisely and outmaneuver them to win. Most of Legion’s forces are low-grade homunculus soldiers or armored vehicles, but when proper Terminators show up it’s always pretty exciting as things quickly get hairy.
The infantry combat is neat, but it’s made odd because of one badly-balanced detail: Fighting in buildings is super cool, with units moving through the interiors to use windows and roofs as firing points, but cover outside of buildings is very hard to judge and finicky to use. Though you can manually pick when your troops go prone, you can’t tell them to take up positions behind walls or barricades other than by moving them close and hoping they automatically take the hint. There are no visual indicators for what kind of cover they are getting or what their line of sight is like, either, which is vital stuff in this kind of tactics game.
Leading infantry can still be amusing when you’re on up-close assaults of occupied structures at least, but armored combat doesn’t fare quite as well, sadly. Vehicles are admittedly fun to use, with chunky movement and minute interactions: They can be disabled in a variety of ways, from crew loss and armor degradation to destroyed weapons or mobility kills from losing tracks and wheels – they can even catch on fire, requiring the crew to bail out and then recover them later. That punishing detail could have been awesome in a game where the enemy is playing by the same rules as you, but Defiance’s battles aren’t actually built that way.
Even when I tested the lowest difficulty, the damage reduction it provided my troops wasn’t enough to let an RTS veteran like me win with ease. That’s because the battles aren’t strategic military exercises as much as they are trial and error puzzles, where everything has to go precisely your way in order to succeed. You rarely have enough troops to get the job done, and mid-mission replacements for your soldiers don’t exist: You lose a guy because you were anything less than perfectly attentive with your micromanagement? He’s gone, period.
That’s an interesting limitation to work around in the abstract, but the mission design just doesn’t support it. If that lost guy was the one rocket trooper you needed to destroy an enemy tank at the end of the level, well, I hope you quicksaved some time before he died. You have to hit those important few shots, you have to move in just the right way, and you have to go fast enough or you will run out of ammunition against the waves of bad guys coming at you, because those rules are only for you. The enemy has fresh guys – and therefore bullets – forever.
I think I would feel better about that if Legion were actually the ones deploying absurd amounts of troops and forcing you into grinding, brutal battles against overwhelming numbers – at least that would be on point thematically. Except it’s not Legion. The hardest and most frustrating missions are against other human factions, whose infantry are better at taking cover and therefore far harder to kill than the actual Terminators, and whose units come in the same seemingly-infinite stream.
Finishing Defiance on higher difficulties requires either silly luck or constant save scumming as you figure out the precise tricks and order of operations developer Slitherine intended you to do in its levels, which only seem open in their designs. Many of them have several routes through, but there are no strategic tradeoffs to decide between: One of those routes is always the optimal one.
I can understand, even enjoy, when an RTS mission is so hard I have to reload it a few times. But when the mission time is an hour and I’ve instead spent two or three because I’ve had to reload a save so many times thanks to pure random numbers? That’s no fun. Stuff like whether or not a unit decided to throw a grenade or bothered to get into cover shouldn’t be what the entire mission hinges on, and it’s vile to realize you lost 30 minutes ago without knowing because you wasted ammunition in what was apparently an unnecessary skirmish – let alone because you took losses from spawned-in traps that are impossible to see, or preprogrammed fights that teleport your units into an uncontrollable position because you moved one guy a little too close to an invisible trigger.
Defiance wants to be a real-time tactics wargame in the vein of Men of War or Ground Control, and at its best it absolutely did remind me of those series, but remind me is all it did. Remind me that, yes, this genre can be excellent and, no, this isn’t it. The moment to moment tactics here can and do feel fun sometimes – this is, for example, the only game I know of where you can obliterate a bunch of Terminators with a HIMARS strike. That’s just ruined when you have to reload and repeat it four or five times.
Between missions you can tweak, upgrade, replenish, and refit your units at the cost of a few different currencies. This would be a cool system if there were much more than the straightforward story missions on offer, such as procedural missions or side missions to let you bulk up and resupply between the main bouts. But there’s nothing like that, making it feel like it was meant for a structure more like XCOM’s, not a nearly-linear campaign that took me around 30 hours to complete.
In this context, army-building and management is a waste of your time full of false choices. I say that because not only are there obvious best units to use, but you also have to meet a certain supply requirement to move from mission to mission, which means that no matter how many cool new guys you recruit or vehicles you steal mid-mission you’ll end up disbanding most of them so that you have enough resources to make it to the next one. Not only that, when you do make it to a mission, you have a set number of deployment slots to put your units in. There’s no reason not to dump every resource you have into upgrading a smaller force because there’s no guarantee you could even bring a bigger one along if you somehow got it where you were going.
That’s not to mention that this campaign has hands-down one of the absolute worst, highly-scripted, extremely boxed-in “story-driven” missions I have ever played in an RTS campaign. Seriously. Screw Nuevo Tortuga: It literally contains a vital fight sequence where you’re not allowed to control your units.
Defiance also has multiplayer and single-player skirmishes, which are serviceable enough modes dedicated to point capture and hold. They use a nice little point-based system to call in your units that lets you customize your army as it gradually scales up over time, letting you bring in heavier and heavier units. It also rules that you can play as Legion, deploying plodding Terminators and hunter-killer machines that use very different tactics than the human factions. Unfortunately these skirmishes have a huge flaw: There are only four maps. RTS multiplayer lives or dies on map variety, and four just ain’t enough to keep me coming back.
The Switch dock isn’t very portable. It’s a little bulky and you’ll still need to bring along a wall charger. Fortunately, there’s a pretty awesome alternative. Right now Amazon is offering the Mirabox Portable Nintendo Switch Dock Charger for only $19.99 after you apply a 50% off coupon code “50Z2VU4B“. This compact gadget charges your Nintendo Switch (at its maximum charging rate) and has an HDMI port for you to connect your Switch to a TV. It has all the functionality of your dock but in a much smaller size.
The Mirabox dock charger looks unassumingly like a regular wall charger. You can pick Black, White, or the iconic Switch Red and Blue color scheme. It even comes with a matching USB Type-C cable. It has three ports: one USB Type-A 2.0 port, one USB Type-C port, and one HDMI port. The USB Type-C port supports Power Delivery up to 31W (plus another 5W for the USB Type-A port). That’s more than enough juice to charge the Switch at its maximum rate of 18W. You can charge your Switch even while you are playing it.
The HDMI port connects your Switch to any TV with an HDMI input. The Mirabox supports up to 1080p resolutions at 60Hz, which is good enough for the Nintendo Switch, since it doesn’t natively support 4K resolution or 120Hz refresh rate anyway.
The biggest advantage of the Mirabox is that it is 1/10th the size of the Switch dock. That makes it infinitely easier to stow this away in your bag without having to buy yet another larger Switch case. You also don’t need to carry another wall charger. As mentioned earlier, a USB Type-C cable is already included, and all you need to supply is your Nintendo Switch console and an HDMI cable. The fact that this deal drops the price by 50% is just icing on the cake.
If you’re looking for more Switch accessories, check out the best Switch deals of 2024.
Note that there’s a 65W model that is $25.99 after you apply the same code “50Z2VU4B“. This is overkill for the Nintendo Switch, however it’s the preferred model if you plan to use the charger dock with the ASUS ROG Ally, which accepts up to 65W, or the Steam Deck, which accepts up to 38W.
EA is shuttering Ridgeline Games, the studio co-founded by former Halo developer Marcus Lehto that was tasked with developing the narrative campaign in the next Battlefield. The closure follows word of Lehto’s departure earlier this week and coincides with a broader restructuring announced earlier today that will see EA lay off some 670 employees amid a shift away from future licensed IPs. The work that was begun on the Battlefield single-player campaign will continue.
In an internal note, EA Entertainment president Laura Miele said that Criterion producer Danny Isaac and studio head of creative Darren White will replace Lehto to continue work on the planned narrative campaign, with some members of Ridgeline Games joining Ripple Effect to continue working on Battlefield. DICE, Criterion and Ripple are all currently at work on the next Battlefield game, which has been confirmed but not fully revealed.
The closure is an abrupt end for Ridgeline Games, which was established in 2022 to work on the campaign led by Lehto. Lehto is a Bungie veteran whose portfolio includes serving as creative director on Halo: Reach. He joined EA in the wake of criticism over Battlefield 2042’s lack of a single-player narrative campaign.
Lehto recently departed EA on what he says was “my own accord,” with EA calling it a “personal decision.” In her note, Miele expressed confidence in the upcoming Battlefield game, calling it “ambitious and exciting” and saying that it is “making meaningful progress.” Miele praised the studios and leadership she says is “committed to building a Battlefield platform our fans will love.”
EA’s moves add to a period of turmoil for the games industry as Sony, Xbox, and other major publishers and platform holders cut jobs and close studios, with more than 6000 games industry workers are estimated to have lost their jobs in 2024 alone. CEO Andrew Wilson has said that EA’s “primary goal is to provide team members with opportunities to find new roles and paths to transition onto other projects.”
“I’ve been in the industry for 15 years and I’ve never seen things this bad,” said one developer who had been recently let go in our report on the ongoing layoffs. “Everyone is scared and waiting to see if their studio is going to be next. I am worried that this year is going to cause real, permanent damage and scarring to the game devs affected, and it’s not going to be good. The aftershocks of this are going to resonate for the foreseeable future. Games are ultimately a labor of love and creativity, and a demoralized workforce is not going to be at its best.”
Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
Electronic Arts has announced that it, too, is undergoing mass layoffs, with plans to let go 5% of its total global staff, or roughly 670 individuals.
In a note today sent to staff, CEO Andrew Wilson said that EA is reacting to “accelerating industry transformation where player needs and motivations and changed significantly.” Crucially, EA also said that it is “moving away from the development of future licensed IP.” EA currently has several confirmed Star Wars and Marvel games in development, including a third Jedi game, Black Panther, and Iron Man.
According to Wilson, EA will double down on owned IP, sports, and “massive online communities.” While Wilson did not provide details on which games would be sunset, EA already announced it would be shuttering two mobile games: F1 Mobile Racing and MLB Tap Sports.
“This greater focus allows us to drive creativity, accelerate innovation, and double down on our biggest opportunities — including our owned IP, sports, and massive online communities — to deliver the entertainment players want today and tomorrow. Lastly, we are streamlining our company operations to deliver deeper, more connected experiences for fans everywhere that build community, shape culture, and grow fandom,” Wilson wrote.
IGN understands that these layoffs will impact a number of teams across EA, largely affecting support teams. While some developers will also be impacted, EA largely hopes to move them off of canceled projects and onto other teams. Per Wilson, these changes are already being communicated, and will “largely” be completed by early next quarter.
“I understand this will create uncertainty and be challenging for many who have worked with such dedication and passion and have made important contributions to our company,” wrote Wilson. “While not every team will be impacted, this is the hardest part of these changes, and we have deeply considered every option to try and limit impacts to our teams. Our primary goal is to provide team members with opportunities to find new roles and paths to transition onto other projects. Where that’s not possible, we will support and work with each colleague with the utmost attention, care, and respect.”
This marks yet another major blow to the games industry coming off of a year and a half of ongoing mass layoffs at studios of all sizes. The cuts impacted roughly 10,000 developers in 2023, and are approaching 8,000 in just the first two months of 2024. Just earlier this week, PlayStation laid off 900 staff and closed its London studio, while Die Gut Fabrik shut down and Supermassive laid off 90.
While many have suggested this wave of mass cuts is occurring due to company overspending and overhiring during the COVID-19 pandemic, game developers have suggested a myriad of other reasons why this continue to happen. These include poor investment decisions from company leaders, struggles around the growing size, scope, and expense of making games, and a lack of long-term planning for the ebbs and flows of the games business.
Wilson’s full note can be found below.
Team,
We are entertaining, inspiring, and connecting more people with more content and deeper experiences than ever before. Over the last year, we have organized our company to further empower our creative leaders to deliver our strategic priorities of entertaining massive online communities, telling blockbuster stories, and harnessing the power of community in and around our games. These actions have positioned us to build bigger, bolder experiences for hundreds of millions of players and fans around the world.
We are also leading through an accelerating industry transformation where player needs and motivations have changed significantly. Fans are increasingly engaging with the largest IP, and looking to us for broader experiences where they can play, watch, create content, and forge deeper connections. Our industry exists at the cutting edge of entertainment, and in today’s dynamic environment, we are advancing the way we work and continuing to evolve our business.
As a company full of creators and storytellers, we believe in the value of teams innovating together, and continue to learn and adopt new ways of collaborating to grow and serve our global communities. Given how and where we are working, we are continuing to optimize our global real estate footprint to best support our business. We are also sunsetting games and moving away from development of future licensed IP that we do not believe will be successful in our changing industry. This greater focus allows us to drive creativity, accelerate innovation, and double down on our biggest opportunities — including our owned IP, sports, and massive online communities — to deliver the entertainment players want today and tomorrow. Lastly, we are streamlining our company operations to deliver deeper, more connected experiences for fans everywhere that build community, shape culture, and grow fandom.
In this time of change, we expect these decisions to impact approximately 5 percent of our workforce. I understand this will create uncertainty and be challenging for many who have worked with such dedication and passion and have made important contributions to our company. While not every team will be impacted, this is the hardest part of these changes, and we have deeply considered every option to try and limit impacts to our teams. Our primary goal is to provide team members with opportunities to find new roles and paths to transition onto other projects. Where that’s not possible, we will support and work with each colleague with the utmost attention, care, and respect. Communicating these impacts has already begun and will be largely completed by early next quarter.
I want to extend my appreciation to everyone who has helped contribute to EA’s ongoing story. We are a team that leans into our values to lead the future of entertainment, and I look forward to what we will create together. Thank you for all that you do.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Amazon is currently offering Amazon Prime members a Romoss 40,000mAh USB Type-C Power Bank with 18W of USB Power Delivery for only $23.99 after you clip a 50% off coupon on the product page. Non-Prime members can get it for $29.99. That’s an excellent price for a pretty massive 40,000mAh power bank that’s also equipped with a USB Type-C output with 18W of Power Delivery, which is the ideal wattage for charging your Nintendo Switch gaming handheld.
Amazon Prime members only ($29.99 for non-Prime members)
The Romoss 40,000mAh power bank has a larger capacity than most portable battery backups we’ve seen. The tradeoff is its size; it’s a pretty hefty device, measuring in at 6.7 x 3.2 x 1.7 inches and weighing in at 2 pounds. It’s important to note that the Romoss can’t be brought onto the plane as carry-on. The maximum cutoff is 27,000mAh and 100Wh, whereas this powerbank is 40,000mAh and 148Wh. A smaller 10K mAh power bank might be a better choice as a daily driver or airplane travel, however the extra battery capacity is useful for when you don’t have access to a power outlet for longer periods of time.
There are four total ports: one USB Type-A input, one USB Type-C input/output, and two USB Type-A outputs. The maximum amount of Power Delivery is 18W via USB Type-C, which also happens to be the max charging speed for the Nintendo Switch. The Steam Deck, on the other hand, supports a max of 38W and the ASUS ROG Ally even higher at 65W. If you want the most efficient charging for those gaming systems, there are better (and more expensive) options. If you’re not in a rush, though, this power bank can still charge up all three without a problem, it will just take a little onger.
It’s important to note that technically, the Romoss can’t be brought onto the plane as carry-on. The maximum cutoff is 27,000mAh and 100Wh, whereas this powerbank is 40,000mAh and 148Wh.
For more options, check out our picks for the best powerbanks of 2024.
Concessions stand.
While the demise of physical media has seemed like an inevitability for many years now, boutique publishers are helping to keep a passionate base of physical-only fans with a stocked game library. The scenario right now isn’t ideal, with eShop releases often only getting a physical version months later (once a publisher has gauged interest and calculated an approach that isn’t going to leave them lumbered with thousands of costly Switch carts in the storeroom) or with orders only open in a limited window.
Decade-old trends have suggested a movement away from physical from the big players — why create a secondhand market if you can limit resales and maximise your own profits? — although at present Nintendo seems content with the status quo. Microsoft is occupied with Game Pass and Sony’s number of first-party releases pales in comparison to Nintendo, quantity-wise, so right now it’s easy to imagine things just staying the same for the next generation — all the big games will still be available in physical form, if that’s how you want them.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Hey Xbox Insiders! We have a new Xbox Update Preview releasing to the Alpha ring today.
It’s important we note that some updates made to these preview OS builds include background improvements that ensure a quality and stable build for Xbox consoles. We will continue to post these release notes, even when the noticeable changes to the UI are minimal or behind the scenes, so you’re aware when updates are coming to your device.
Details can be found below!
Thanks to all the great feedback Xbox Insiders provide and the hard work of Xbox engineers, we are happy to announce the following fixes have been implemented with this build:
Accessibility
Backgrounds
System
While known issues may have been listed in previous Xbox Insider Release Notes, they are not being ignored! However, it may take Xbox engineers more time to find a solution. If you experience any of these issues, we ask that you please follow any guidance provided and file feedback with Report a Problem.
Audio
Networking
As always, be sure to use Report a problem to keep us informed of any issues you encounter. We may not be able to respond to everyone, but the data we’ll gather is crucial to finding a resolution.
If you’re an Xbox Insider looking for support, please visit the community subreddit. Official Xbox staff, moderators, and fellow Xbox Insiders are there to help with your concerns.
When posting to the subreddit, please look through the most recent posts to see if your issue has already been posted or addressed. We always recommend adding to existing threads with the same issue before posting a new one. This helps us support you the best we can! Also, don’t forget to use “Report a Problem” before posting – the information shared in both places helps us understand your issue better.
Thank you to every Xbox Insider in the subreddit today and welcome to the community if you’re just joining us! We love that it has become such a friendly and community-driven hub of conversation and support.
For more information regarding the Xbox Insider Program follow us on Twitter. Keep an eye on future Xbox Insider Release Notes for more information regarding your Xbox Update Preview ring!
The post Xbox Insider Release Notes – Alpha (2403.240227-0110) appeared first on Xbox Wire.
