Video Game Chat

Ubisoft’s digital showcase Ubisoft Forward airs on September 10th and promises tons of new details on current and upcoming titles. A new trailer has been released that confirms updates on games like Skull and Bones and Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope. Check it out below. A special Assassin’s Creed showcase to reveal the "future of the franchise" is also promised. Assassin’s Creed Mirage, confirmed as the next game in the series after numerous leaks, will be present. It’s reportedly releasing in Spring and brings back the crowd density seen in Assassin’s Creed Unity. The gameplay also allegedly includes various stealth-focused mechanics like throwing knives, hiding spots on rooftops, and slow-mo assassinations. In addition to the main show is a pre-show with updates on new content coming to titles like Brawhalla, For Honor, Anno 1800 and The Crew 2.

After nearly 30 years of partnership, EA and Fifa are reportedly splitting up with the Football franchise being rebranded as ‘EA Sports Football Club’. This has been confirmed by Gaming Journalist Jeff Grubb on his podcast Grubnsnax who said that his sources have confirmed the change. “EA Sports Football Club, EA Sports FC, that’s the name of the game, I saw trademarks for it, I thought that could be just a feature like an online mode, I asked around about it and that’s it, that’s the name.” The reason for this split is allegedly due to the documented tension between Electronic Arts and Fifa. EA stated last year that they believed that their games would be of better quality without the Fifa branding. Notably, in the previous report, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said that Fifa impeded the developers from adding new features into the game and that the football organization wanted to double their license fees to 2.5 billion USD “over the next decade”. “Our players tell us they want more modes of play, different things beyond 11v11 and different types of gameplay. I would tell you, it’s been a fight to get FIFA to acknowledge the types of things that we want to create because they say our license only covers certain categories”. They even stated that they felt Fifa was just the name on the box and that they did not need those four letters for their games to succeed. “Our FIFA license has actually precluded us from doing a lot of this stuff. Again, FIFA is just the name on the box, but they’ve precluded our ability to be able to branch into the areas that players want.” EA’s current contract with Fifa will be expiring after the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Sources and other news sites indicate that EA will go ahead with the name Fifa 23 for this year, however, it may be the last. EA usually announces the latest Fifa sports game in June before realizing the game in the fall. We will likely see the name of the latest Fifa game around this time.

This is another game that seems to have got bad over time with the story line not really captivating these days.

RESTRICTIONS Teams With the Core of your mode established, and your Modifiers set – you can now determine which Eras of Battlefield will compete in your experience. If you’re looking to sustain variety, and have the factions change across your map rotations, you can select Map Defaults by clicking on the Battlefield Portal logo, left of the tile for Battlefield 2042. This means that if you’re playing on El Alamein, the faction will default to 1942, and then rotate to Battlefield 3 if the next map was Caspian Border. If you go for this option, it will prevent you from determining any restrictions to Characters, Weapons, Attachments, Vehicles, or Gadgets. So if you’re looking to fine tune things, make sure to lock in a dedicated era specific team for use across all maps. Characters Depending on what you chose in the previous section, you’ll then be able to deselect which classes (or 2042 Specialists) are playable. You’ll also have the options to denote which factions show up in-game. The UK, US, and German factions are available for 1942, with the game appropriate versions of the USA and Russia available for the rest. Weapons In total, there are over 75 Weapons available across the entire experience of Battlefield Portal at launch. Now that you’ve chosen your factions, you’ll have the ability to manage what weapons are available. If both teams are from the same era, you can also make use of our unlink teams function to customize exactly which weapons each team is gaining access to. To make things easy, there are filters you can use to refine what’s displayed, and global switches that enable quick deselection for each of the classes of Weapon. Disable all of the Weapons, and players will spawn with melee weapons instead.* *Many of Battlefield 2042’s weapons unlock as you progress in rank, with many experiences in Battlefield Portal able to reward you with XP that help you level up, even when you’re not using 2042 Factions. If a player hasn’t unlocked a certain weapon that you’ve selected for use in your mode, you’ll also be required to select at least one default weapon so that new players can spawn with a weapon. All Battlefield Portal Weapons, Gadgets, and Attachments from our classic Battlefield games are otherwise unlocked from the start. Attachments You’ve experienced a selection of Battlefield 2042’s attachments during our Open Beta and had an early glimpse of how many more there are to unlock through progression. If you’re keen to restrict any of those attachments, and keep to a specific style of weaponry, you can choose which attachments can be enabled in gameplay. We’ve also worked to include a huge range of attachments for the weapons that we’ve carried forward from Battlefield 3, Bad Company 2, and 1942. Depending on what you selected in previous menus, the Plus Menu will also be accessible, though if you prefer this to be kept to a strictly classic experience, you can unset this option and ensure that attachments can only be changed on the Deploy Screen, or from Battlefield Portals Collection menu. As with Weapons, we’ve ensured that you can deselect classifications of attachments en masse, and work through our filter system to get through to what you’re looking for, faster. You can also run asymmetric attachments in case you want to force one team to stick with Iron Sights, and have the other team dialed in at range with scopes. Vehicles Unless you’ve previously disabled Vehicles in a prior menu, you’ll now have the option to define which vehicles are restricted from the pre-selected Era’s chosen in the steps before, leveraging the same toolsets available when defining your Weapons, and Attachments. Gadgets Your final set of decisions now lie with deciding which Gadgets are equippable in your mode. Keen to keep it to launchers only? Fancy a Dynamite vs. Claymore face off? How about the David and Goliath setup of Launchers on Team 1, vs. Helicopters on Team 2? Here’s where those dreams come alive. If you want to read up on the rules editor, and other features (kicking players, etc.) you can do so, right here.

Xbox: BigPete7978 PSN: BigPete7978 Steam: BigPete7978 Battle.net: BigPete7978#1523 Discord: BigPete7978#7609 All I can think of right now.

Summer Game Fest will return this year on Thursday, June 10. Summer Game Fest 2021 will kick off that day at 11am PT, 2pm ET, 7pm UK. The show will start off with a performance by Weezer, which will be premiering a brand new video game soundtrack song. You can also expect day one to include a Day of the Devs indie showcase with iam8bit, and of course some world premiers and other gaming goodness. Partners this year include 2K Games, Activision, Bandai Namco, Blizzard, Capcom, Devolver Digital, EA, Epic Games, Gearbox, Hi-Rez, PlayStation, Riot, Sega, Square Enix, Steam, Ubisoft, Warner, Xbox, and plenty of other developers and publishers. Organizer Geoff Keighley said to expect this year’s event to be “more condensed” than its debut in 2020. The first Summer Game Fest debuted last year in May and was a four-month-long series of events featuring news and games. This year’s event will also see Valve return with its demo-laden event Steam Next Fest and there’s also the EA Play Live event in July. Head here to learn more about Summer Game Fest. The event will be livestreamed across all popular livestream platforms.

EA Play will return this year, but not in June. EA has today announced that EA Play Live, the online version of its summer showcase event, will return this year. Unlike previous iterations, however, this year’s show will take place in July. EA Play Live 2021 takes place July 22, which is a month later than its usual spot. Though EA has not been part of E3 for years, the publisher always held EA Play in close proximity to E3 – including last year’s digital event. This announcement comes on the heels of Battlefield’s official channels hinting that the game’s initial unveiling will take place in June, and not in May as everyone expected going off EA’s history. We still expect the game’s full reveal to be part of EA Play Live’s line-up in July, it just seems everything got moved back one month. Battlefield is, of course, EA’s biggest game this year. Outside of that, you can expect the usual line-up of sports games and EA Originals titles. Though they’re still early in development, we could also get another look at Dragon Age 4, Skate 4 and perhaps something form the recently-acquired Codemasters.

Evo, the premier fighting game tournament, has joined the PlayStation family. Sony Interactive Entertainment has acquired fighting game tournament Evo. PlayStation now co-owns Evo, along with a new esports venture called RTS. The 25-year-old tournament will return this year, as an online-only event. Evo co-founders Tom and Tony Cannon will remain involved with the tournament in “advisory roles.” As for this year’s event, it will take place entirely digitally on August 6 – 8 and again 13 – 15. The line-up so far includes Street Fighter 5: Champion Edition, Tekken 7, Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate, and Guilty Gear Strive. The tournament’s open format will be available to players from North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia, and qualifiers will be livestreamed. Entry will be free, and more details will be announced over the coming weeks. “For PlayStation, today’s announcement marks an exciting step in our journey to foster the growth of the fighting game community and esports, and support competitive gamers widely on our consoles,” Sony said in a statement. “Fighting games are hugely popular on PlayStation consoles, with gamers logging more than 1.1 billion gameplay hours in 2020 alone. We’re committed to breaking down the barriers for gamers to compete at all levels and providing a best-in-class, global platform for them to showcase their skills and passion.” For their part, EVO organisers said this won’t change what Evo is. Business development lead Mark Julio confirmed on Twitter that the tournament is still open to all platforms. “The teams at PlayStation and RTS are enabling us to continue working with our community to support fighting games,” said Julio. “In order to deliver on the trust you have all put in EVO, we realise that we need an experienced strategic partner who truly respects that spirit of the FGC [fighting game community],” said organisers Tom and Tony Cannon.

Japanese publisher Capcom has issued a warning about a scam claiming to offer folks early access to the upcoming Resident Evil Village. The firm said that it is not messaging people this way and this isn’t someone working on their behalf. Capcom warned people who received these emails to delete them straight away without downloading any files. “We’re sending this message as we’ve been made aware that there are currently emails circulating that pretend to contain ‘Early Access invitations’ to Resident Evil Village,” the company wrote. “The sender address is being displayed as “no-reply(at)capcom(dot)com. “We want to inform you that these messages are NOT from Capcom and appear to be phishing attempts by an unauthorized third party. If you have received such a message, please DO NOT download any files or reply, and delete the message immediately.” This isn’t a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination. Last month, Ubisoft had to issue a similar warning about an email scam doing the rounds claiming to offer access to a Far Cry 6 beta. Meanwhile, at the end of 2020 Polish games giant CD Projekt had to warn users about a similar scheme for its upcoming Cyberpunk 2077.

Here's an announcement we didn't expect to ever land in our email inbox. Six Days in Fallujah, the formerly cancelled tactical shooter that was the subject of controversy all the way back in 2009, has been resurrected by Highwire Games for a release at the end of this year. Development is headed up by a team of veteran industry members that includes the lead designer of Destiny and Halo: Combat Evolved Jaime Griesemer as well as composer Marty O'Donnell. Get a first look at what Six Days in Fallujah looks like a whole 12 years later in the announcement trailer below. This unexpected revival is an "all-new game" told from the first-person perspective, aiming to recreate the "true stories of Marines, soldiers, and Iraqi civilians who fought Al Qaeda during the toughest urban battle since 1968." You will take control of a squad faced with real-life combat encounters, which have been put together following more than 100 interviews with those who were present during the second battle of Fallujah. A press release reads: "The game gives these stories voice through gameplay and first-person accounts captured in original documentary interview footage. Six Days in Fallujah aims to be the most authentic military shooter to date and to tell these military and civilian stories with the integrity they deserve." Upon its cancellation back in 2009, Six Days in Fallujah was criticised for attempting to release in far too close proximity to the actual real-life events it was based on. In response, former Marine Sergeant Eddie Garcia, who was wounded during the battle for Fallujah, said: "Sometimes the only way to understand what’s true is to experience reality for yourself. War is filled with uncertainty and tough choices that can’t be understood by watching someone on a TV or movie screen make these choices for you. Video games can help all of us understand real-world events in ways other media can’t." Victura CEO Peter Tamte adds: "It’s hard to understand what combat is actually like through fake people doing fake things in fake places. This generation showed sacrifice and courage in Iraq as remarkable as any in history. And now they’re offering the rest of us a new way to understand one of the most important events of our century. It’s time to challenge outdated stereotypes about what video games can be." More information and footage of Six Days in Fallujah will be shared soon.

2021 will see the release of a brand-new Call Of Duty title to take the place of 2020's Black Ops Cold War. Rumours circulated last week that Sledgehammer Games, the studio behind Advanced Warfare and WWII would be developing the new title, while Infinity Ward (Modern Warfare) and Treyarch (Black Ops Cold War) continued with their own projects, including the constantly evolving battle royale Warzone. Now reliable leaker and Call Of Duty insider Tom Henderson, who first claimed that Sledgehammer was stepping up to develop Call Of Duty 2021, has dropped some hints about the upcoming game's title and setting. As you can see from the below tweet, Henderson is either claiming that Call Of Duty 2021 will be called Guerrilla Warfare, or Apes VS. Soldiers. I suspect the former, though I wish for the latter. Meanwhile, TheGamingRevolution, another well-known industry insider shared a cryptic tweet in response to Henderson that fans believe to be a reference to a potential 1950's setting. Interestingly enough, Reddit user NahuChurch also managed to spot a now-deleted tweet from a third reliable Call Of Duty source: ModernWarzone. They claimed that Call Of Duty 2021 will most likely be set in the 50s and feature guerrilla warfare, which would imply that the game's story will be focused around the Korean War. Activision doesn't tend to officially unveil its Call Of Duty games until around May, so take all of this with a pinch of salt for now.

I tend to focus primarily on one title but also casually dip into others at the same time - I play Forza Horizon 4 almost every night but just now my main focus is on completing Control.