Weekly Retro: 12/17 – 12/21

PlayStation

• Media Molecule will finally release the first beta for Dreams, its upcoming create-your-own-game maker, to a select group of users starting tomorrow, Dec. 19. Subscribers to the studio’s newsletter will have first access to the demo, while the general public will be able to register to take part starting Jan. 8.

• Media Molecule announced that the oft forgotten title they’ve been working on for years now, Dreams, is about to enter beta. Here’s a small breakdown of the information

  • Dreams Creator Beta is a semi-open beta test that allows participants to go nuts with the creation tools, making anything from music to full game levels
  • The Dreams beta starts for some players on Wednesday 19th December 2018. Those who subscribed to Media Molecule’s newsletter before 7th December will be sent a code to gain access to the beta from this date.
    For everyone else, the developer will open sign-ups on 4th January 2019. Those who are accepted will be able to access the beta from 8th January 2019.
  • The end date for all Dreams Creator Beta participants is 21st January 2019.
  • PSVR support isn’t available in the Dreams beta, however, Media Molecule has said previously that the full game will support PSVR from the start.
  • Anything created will be available in the final game but player progress won’t carry over.
• Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: director Shawn Levy has reportedly left the Uncharted movie project, leaving it in limbo yet again. It seemed like the flick was finally going to go into production, with Spider-Man star Tom Holland purportedly on board to play a younger Nathan Drake. But alas, Levy ditched the project to work with Ryan Reynolds on a comedy called Free Guy.

Nintendo

• Nintendo revealed Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has managed to sell 3M copies in a little over 10 days, making it both the fastest selling Switch game as well as the fastest-selling Smash Bros. game.

• Also, since its launch in March 2017 through November 2018, Nintendo Switch has sold more than 8.7M units in the U.S. which is more than all other current-generation systems at the same point in their life cycles.

• During the Puyo Puyo Championship December 2018 Tournament, two new games were revealed for the SEGA Ages lineup on Switch. Puyo Puyo and Puyo Puyo Tsu from the arcades are both in the pipeline.

• InkyPen, the self-funded indie digital comic service, has launched on Switch and offers access to US comics, European comics, webcomics and even a little manga. The selection includes series such as Judge Dredd, Transformers, Robotech, X-O Manowar, Bloodshot, Metabarons, Pathfinder and Battlestar Galactica. Perhaps more fitting, InkyPen also includes comic adaptations of popular video game franchises such as Dark Souls, Dishonored, Tekken, and Assassin’s Creed. Classic strips such as Calvin and Hobbes are also available.

Xbox

• Microsoft’s 343 Industries has partnered with bionics non-profit Limbitless Solutions to create Halo-themed, 3D-printed prosthetic arms for children. The prosthetic is fully functional and capable of gripping objects through EMG sensors. The best part is that they’re donated free of charge to recipients.

• Microsoft’s Games with Gold for January have been announced:

  • Celeste – January 1 to 31
  • WRC 6 – January 16 to February 15
  • Lara Croft: Guardian of Light – January 1 to 15
  • Far Cry 2 – January 16 to 31 on Xbox One
• During a livestream Wednesday afternoon, Halo developer 343 Industries gave fans a tiny drip of information regarding Halo Infinite, including an early access period where fans can play the game and offer feedback to developers. Called a “flighting program”, it will start with just a handful of players and grow from there.
  

  Different layers of the community will be able to play the game at different stages of development
  343 community director Brian Jarrard said during the stream.
  The studio’s FPS head, Chris Lee, gave a little more detail on what this process would mean for the game.
  The flighting program isn’t like a beta, where it’s a moment in time on Halo 5 like we had for a couple weeks. We want to have a relationship, and we want to build that over time. We can have people coming giving us feedback and playing the experiences, and we can update it as we go.
  As for when we can try Halo Infinite, 343 industries was careful to note that there isn’t a date set for the flighting program just yet. However, the team says that players will be able to opt-in soon so that they might be selected when it officially begins.

Industry News

• This year has been an interesting time for cross-platform gaming. Xbox and Switch made waves with cross-platform support for Minecraft across PC, mobile, Xbox, and Switch. Then we had Sony looking like a bunch of dicks by refusing to support the effort and then locking Fortnite saves to PS4 accounts and then reversing this due to the swift media and consumer backlash. Now, users have discovered Xbox One network code references in the latest Steam beta possibly hinting at what’s to come.

• Starting January 1 2019, Steam will officially stop supporting macOS 10.10 Yosemite and lower. In order to continue running Steam and any games or other products purchased through Steam, users will need to update to a more recent version of macOS. The newest features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer functions on older versions of macOS. In addition, future versions of Steam will require macOS feature and security updates only present in macOS 10.11 (“El Capitan”) and above.

• Eric Barone, creator of Stardew Valley, said earlier this year that he’s working on a new game set in “the same universe as Stardew Valley”and that he won’t announce the title until “the concept is fully realized”. Well now he announced the game is “on the back-burner” because he can’t seem to keep himself away from Stardew Valley, noting that he continues to think of “new ideas for ways to improve and expand upon the game.” In fact, he “could probably work on Stardew for the rest of his life”. I know I’m excitedly waiting whatever new content he announces for the world of Stardew.

• A message from Kingdom Hearts III director Tetsuya Nomura has suggested the sequel’s epilogue and secret movie scenes will be patched in to the final product at launch. This comes after Square Enix was forced to release a statement due to copies of the long-awaited title leaking almost a month prior to launch.

• If you sign up for and participate in Project Stream — Google’s foray into a streaming video game service — you can get a free copy of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey to keep, on PC through an Ubisoft Uplay account.

• Alfonso Ribeiro, whose pretty much only known for his role as Carlton Banks in the The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, is suing Epic Games over claims along with rapper 2 Milly and Backpack Kid. All three are claiming that the company stole their dances and recreated them in Fortnite.

• Bethesda announced canvas bags will be making their way to collector’s edition players in the next 4-6 months. To make up for the wait, the company has also granted player accounts with an additional 500 atoms (the title’s in game currency).

• Rovio announced Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs which is being developed by Resolution Games, a Swedish studio that specializes in making VR titles for casual audiences. Angry Birds VR is set for a release in early 2019 and with no price to date and is expected to land on all major VR platforms—whatever that means.

• Ubisoft released a new free content pack for Starlink which includes new enemies, a new activity, and a _very_cool looking photo mode.

• Razer and Microsoft has announced the supposed “world’s first wireless keyboard and mouse designed for Xbox One and Windows PCs”—whatever the hell that means….It comes with with a built-in mouse mat which is neat. You can pre-order it now for a cool $250.

• The FBI announced it took action against 15 domains that allegedly helped take down other people’s websites, game servers and other online services through distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The seizures comes a week before Christmas, which, the FBI says, is “a period historically plagued by prolific DDoS attacks in the gaming world.”

• Blizzard announced plans to scale down Heroes of the Storm and move its developers to other games. This also means there won’t be a Heroes of the Storm Global Championship (HGC) esports league any more either. The news came as a shock to hundreds of Heroes of the Storm players and broadcasters, many of whom say they now find themselves out of income streams with no warning.

  We are troubled by the way the announcement was made; namely the impolitic choice to use social media to share such a message that effectively ended the careers of hundreds of players, content creators, casters, production crews overnight – and broke the hearts of countless fans
  wrote Darrie, the general manager of an esports team called Method, on Twitter this morning, echoing the thoughts of many other former Heroes of the Storm players and managers.