News | New Assassin's Creed Valhalla patch fixes several bugs
Ubisoft released a new patch for Assassin's Creed Valhalla yesterday.
Patch 1.10 fixes several bugs in the game. There were a number of bugs that prevented quests from being completed, for example, because an NPC did not go where it should go.
Furthermore, the balance of the game has also been adjusted. The strength of enemies can now be up to 51 points below that of the player, and when one is stronger than bosses in the game, the power of bosses is adjusted to the level of the player. Finally, the patch already adds support for the upcoming Settlement expansion and an upcoming limited Christmas event called Yule Season. Details on these elements have yet to be announced. Ubisoft has summarized the content of the patch on its website.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is set in the ninth century and features Norway and England as playable locations. Valhalla introduces new features, including the ability to build your own settlements and gain power and influence. Also, players can now use a different weapon in each hand. It is also possible to play as a female character, just like in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. The game is out now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. A free upgrade for Xbox Series X, Series S and PlayStation 5 is also available.
News | Watch Dogs Legion trailers show the story and additional content
Ubisoft has released two new trailers of the upcoming Watch Dogs Legion, which focus on the story and additional content.
Watch Dogs Legion is set in a future version of London, in which society is closely watched by the government. Players can be attacked by drones, but also deploy drones themselves, for example to spy or to fly around. Unique to the game is that players can in principle recruit all characters around the game world for their resistance group. These characters can then be controlled at any time.
Another trailer provides more information about both free and paid content coming to the game. For example, on December 3, a free online multiplayer is coming to the game. Players can roam freely through the game world with the four of them and do various cooperative missions. A PvP mode called Spiderbot Arena will also appear on that day, in which spider-like robots compete against each other in a deathmatch. New missions, new characters and a New Game Plus mode will also appear in 2021.
Paid content is also coming to Watch Dogs Legion through the Season Pass. For example, Bloodline, a new story about Aiden Pearce – the main character from the first Watch Dogs, appears. Additional DedSec missions and new characters will also be available.
Watch Dogs Legion will be released on October 29 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Epic Games Store, Uplay and Google Stadia. The game will also be available on Xbox Series X / S on November 10 and on PlayStation 5 on November 19. People who purchase the game on the current generation of consoles can upgrade it on the next-gen consoles at no cost.
News | Dogs are coming to Sea of Thieves
An upcoming update to Sea of Thieves will add dogs to the game.
The update is due for release in September and will allow players to take dogs as pets. Like previous pets such as cats, parrots and monkeys, players can give attention to dogs by, for example, petting them.
Sea of Thieves is from Rare, the makers of games like Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie and Kinect Sports and has been available for several years. In the game, players form a pirate crew together with friends or strangers. You have to work together to pilot a pirate ship, search islands for treasure and fend off other pirates and monsters.
š¶ Woof woof! Just announced at #gamescom2020, good boys and girls of various breeds will be able to join you on the Sea of Thieves for scritches and hugs with our next content update! Please act surprised. pic.twitter.com/ZGOhBRkYBh
— Sea of Thieves (@SeaOfThieves) August 28, 2020
Sea of Thieves is available on Xbox One and PC.
Column | Exclusive deals on consoles makes perfect sense
Exclusive content in multiplatform games is in serious controversy this week. The superhero Spider-Man is only coming to the PS4 and PS5 versions of Marvel's Avengers. Companies try to attract consumers with these kinds of deals, but it backfires for fanatic gamers. Well, at first glance.
In addition to the fact that players will be able to hang around with Spider-Man sometime after the release of Marvel’s Avengers only on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, there is apparently other exclusive content for the game coming to those systems. For example, exclusive challenges will come to the PlayStation versions of the game, as well as all kinds of cosmetic items. Although PC, Xbox and PlayStation gamers pay the same amount of money for the game, the latter will soon be able to get more value from their purchase.
Marvelās Avengers is now under attack, many gamers are screaming murder and fire but of course it’s by no means the only game where this is happening. Each generation, Activision chooses a platform holder who will receive exclusive marketing rights for Call of Duty. That platform will also receive beta and downloadable content for the games much earlier. This generation draws the longest straw from Sony, the previous generation was Microsoft. Exclusive content for Warzone on PlayStation 4 was also announced this week, but there was significantly less fuss about it.
If you think that only Sony is guilty of this, then you are very wrong. Microsoft is just as involved, even though they have been carefully trying to build a reputation as a consumer-friendly company in recent years. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and The Medium, for example, are temporarily exclusively coming to Xbox Series X. You can bet that these games would also have appeared on PlayStation 5 if Microsoft hadn’t thrown a bag of buck on the table. More similar to the Spider-Man debacle is the upcoming multiplayer update for Tetris Effect, which should not be released on Sony’s consoles until next year. Microsoft does not wash its hands in innocence.
And it is not crazy either: bringing temporarily exclusive content to your platform is a proven way to make your system more attractive to the consumer. Is your favorite series Call of Duty? Chances are you played the series on the PlayStation 4 this generation. Love Marvel and Spider-Man in particular? Then you want to buy Marvel’s Avengers on a Sony console. If the PC-like shooters and horror games that initially only appear on Xbox Series X appeal to you, it will be tempting to buy Microsoft’s new system.
These exclusive deals are also a nice extra for developers of games. The gaming industry is a killer and it remains to be seen how well or badly your game sells. If a company like Microsoft or Sony already pays out part of the development costs in advance in order to arrange temporary exclusivity, the chances are that your studio will continue to exist in the coming years. That means making a new game and – more importantly – making money so you can feed your family and pay off your mortgage. It will be a shock to those developers that a small group of gamers complain about it on a forum – getting a living is more important!
As mentioned, we can scream murder and fire on the internet, but apparently we don’t mind too much. We really talk with our money. If those exclusive deals hadn’t worked, or even hurt the sale of a game, they’d long since died out. But it works, so they persist. It’s not rocket science.
Is there a solution, a way to get rid of those annoying exclusive deals? Not really. We could all agree globally to penalize publishers for this type of practice and stop buying the games where this happens. However, not only is it extremely unlikely that we will get anyone to boycott a game, we also punish many developers who have nothing to do with the closed deal and who have poured blood, sweat and tears into a game for years.
So we have to learn to live with it. If possible, you have all the platforms in house, but otherwise I hope the game you are looking forward to will appear completely on your system of your choice. In a perfect world, console farmers like Sony and Microsoft would stop making these kinds of deals on their own. They would realize that the market is big enough for both of them, that the quality of the various games, including of course their internally developed exclusive titles, is such that they no longer need exclusive deals. The company that dares to do this is the really tough one.