You’ve probably head by now that Redfall is a few virgins short of a vampy picnic, mainly by un-virtue of its undercooked co-operative cryptid blasting. But there are plenty of PC performance problems to contend with as well, despite it getting a helping hand from DLSS and FSR 2.1.
Pokémon Go developer Niantic has refuted claims that April saw the game accrue its worst monthly revenue total in five years as fans protest changes to the game’s raid system.
“We generally don’t comment on third-party estimates of our revenue as they are often incorrect, which is the case here,” said a Niantic spokesperson in an email to Eurogamer. “Our revenue so far in 2023 is up on last year.”
That response refutes a recent report from Mobilegamer.Biz, which claimed that Pokémon Go’s revenue had slumped from $42 million In March, down to just $34.7 million in the month of April, representing the app’s lowest monthly revenue since February 2018.
News of the alleged decline, and Niantic’s rebuttal, comes as Pokémon Go fans rail against changes made to the app’s raid system. Previously, the social distancing and lockdown procedures brought in to combat the COVID-19 pandemic pushed Niantic into creating remote play features for its game that allowed gamers to attend raids from the safety of their homes.
The feature was a boon to many in the community who lived in remote areas, or had disabilities that prevented easy travel. However, Niantic recently announced that from April 6, it was hiking its remote raid pass prices, and putting a cap on the number of the in-game events that players could attend each day.
The move, which was seemingly in an attempt to force players to return to pre-pandemic gameplay norms, angered many in the community, leading to a backlash.
“We don’t focus on month to month trends because they fluctuate based on major live events,” commented Niantic in relation to the effect that raid changes were having on gamer participation. “This year’s changes have already increased in-person Raiding and we’re excited to introduce exciting new features over the coming months.”
Regardless, recent events have shown that Niantic’s hit app still has the power to draw sizable crowds to its real world events, which represent another revenue steam for the developer.
Back in February a staggering 17,000 fans gatecrashed Niantic’s Las Vegas Pokémon Go tour, causing connectivity issues for those who had paid out $30 to attend the ticketed event. Operators went so far as to ask the unexpected guests to stay away from the public park in which the event was being held, “to ensure a smooth event for Sunday ticket holders”.
Anthony is a freelance contributor covering science and video gaming news for IGN. He has over eight years experience of covering breaking developments in multiple scientific fields and absolutely no time for your shenanigans. Follow him on Twitter @BeardConGamer
Digital festival LudoNarraCon is back for its fifth year, showcasing games that are all about story-telling and narrative. It kicks off today, May 4th, at 10am PT/6pm BST and runs until next Monday, May 8th. The event is being hosted on Steam where you can sample 36 demos, enjoy discounts on over 140 games, and watch 15 panels through a livestream. Highlights this year include three ‘fireside chats’ with Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame, the designer of the OPUS series Scott Chen, and Life Is Strange: True Color’s staff writer Felice Tzehuei, who’s sitting down to chat with our lovely reviews editor Rachel.
You sort the padawans from the poodoo.
It’s May 4th! Yes, May the fourth is with us (hmm, that doesn’t really work) and we’re republishing our ranked list of every Star Wars game on Nintendo consoles, but now with a twist! We’ve rejigged the ranked list below to be governed by each game’s User Rating in our database, meaning that the order is now dynamic and entirely reader-ranked — and subject to real-time change, even after publication.
In order to rate any of the games on the list below out of 10, logged-in Nintendo Life users can simply tap the ‘star’, assign it a personal rating, and refresh the page to see any changes reflected. With various of the games in the lower half of the list only having a handful of ratings at the time of writing, there’s plenty of potential for change in the coming days. It will be fascinating to see how the ranking shakes down as we move onto May 5th, May 6th, and other similarly un-Star Wars-y dates. Enjoy!
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, has addressed the significant negative response to Redfall, the co-op vampire slaying FPS that recently launched to a large number of negative reviews and player disappointment.
Talking to the Kinda Funny Xcast, Spencer said that he is “upset with myself” and that he’s “gonna take full responsibility for launching a game that needs to be great.” While he acknowledged the disappointment that comes from a $70 game arriving in the condition Redfall has, he also offered support for the game’s developers, Arkane Austin, noting that he will not “push against the creative aspirations of our teams.”
Phil Spencer gets honest about Redfall: pic.twitter.com/JUoqTrlLvU
— Kinda Funny (@KindaFunnyVids) May 4, 2023
When asked for his initial response to the launch of Redfall, which dropped as an Xbox console exclusive this week, Spencer said “There’s nothing that’s more difficult for me than disappointing the Xbox community, and just kind of watch the community lose confidence [and] be disappointed.
“I’m disappointed, I’m upset with myself. I kind of revisit our process. I think back to the announcement of 60 frames-per-second, then we weren’t shipping 60 frames-per-second, that was our punch in the chin – rightfully – a couple of weeks ago.”
While Spencer admitted that “the critical response was not what we wanted”, he maintained a somewhat defensive attitude for his team at Xbox Game Studios. “One thing I’ll fight is [the idea of] what went wrong,” he said. “There’s clearly quality and execution things we can do, but one thing I won’t do is push against [the] creative aspirations of our teams.”
“I’m a huge supporter of Arkane Austin,” he said. “Their track record is awesome, I love a lot of the great games they’ve built […] This is one where the team didn’t hit their own internal goals when it launched. I think it’s maybe a little simplistic to just say ‘Hey if you would have just delayed it three months the core creative of the game would have delivered on something that was different to what it was.’”
As for Redfall’s future, Spencer said that Xbox, Bethesda, and Arkane Austin intend to continue working on improving the game, starting with the promised 60FPS patch. “The team at Arkane is taking the near-term feedback, we’re still working on the 60FPS, we have a good timeline for that, we’re committed to getting that done,” said Spencer. “And we’re gonna continue to work the game. We’ve shown a commitment to games like Sea of Thieves and Grounded to continue and go and build games.
“But I also know these games are $70, and I’m gonna take full responsibility for launching a game that needs to be great,” he conceded.
Redfall launched earlier this week to a largely negative critical and player response, with the IGN review among the most critical with a score of 4/10. It’s a notable step down for the Austin-based studio, which co-developed the beloved Dishonored series and delivered the acclaimed Prey and Prey Mooncrash before starting work on Redfall. Arkane has notably been a single player-focused company, and Redfall marks not just the studio’s first step into co-op multiplayer, but also the first significant critical miss.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Features Editor.
We traveled to new galaxies, the land of the dead, and raced through magical kingdoms with a dash of time travel in between. Which game took us to the best places in the month of April?
How does it work? At the end of every month, PlayStation.Blog will open a poll where you can vote for the best new game released that month. Soon thereafter, we’ll close the polls, tally your votes, and announce the winner at PlayStation.Blog. PlayStation Store will also showcase some top Players’ Choice winners throughout the year.
What is the voting criteria? That’s up to you! If you were only able to recommend one new release to a friend that month, which would it be? In keeping with our long tradition in the Game of the Year Awards, remastered or re-released games won’t qualify. Ambitious, larger-scale rebuilds and remakes like Shadow of the Colossus and Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy will.
How are nominees decided? The PlayStation.Blog and PlayStation Store editorial teams will gather a list of that month’s most noteworthy releases and use it to seed the poll. Write-in votes will be accepted.
Star Wars is a biggie. Not only is it really good, but there’s also tons of it. Like tons and tons. What starts as a neat little trilogy, eventually leaks into a trilogy of film trilogies, spin-off movies, TV shows, and books. And these spawn comics, audio-dramas, short stories, and even more.
IGN has put together a definitive list of every piece of canon Star Wars content to help you keep track of it all. Whether you’re brand new to Star Wars and can’t wait to explore every inch of the galaxy far, far away, or you’re a seasoned traveler looking to tick off the final few elusive stories, this is the page for you.
Let’s also make clear what we mean by canon. When Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, they essentially reset the Star Wars universe. They turned almost everything outside of the core six films into something called Legends, which takes place in a universe where the Sequel Trilogy never happened.
Everything published afterwards is categorised as canon, and (more or less) sticks to one cohesive universe. No new Legends content will be published, whereas the canon Star Wars content will likely continue to grow for years and decades to come.
Below is a list of every piece of canon Star Wars content. It can be quite overwhelming, but that’s why we’ve collected everything for you, broken it down into different categories with explainers, and provided recommendations on the best places to start. We’ve also included definite upcoming content like the Ahsoka Disney+ series (these will be listed in italics), but not untitled projects like the new Rey Skywalker film. May the Force be with you…
Click through the index below to jump to any section of this page:
Let’s start simple. The famous film series was the main Star Wars media format to not get wiped and turned into Legends when Disney took over the franchise. This means that every Star Wars film is canon, from A New Hope in 1977 to The Rise of Skywalker in 2019.
We’ve included this as an entry because there are a few sneaky films sprinkled in though, including those released as part of Disney’s now scrapped “one film every year” approach. Finally, the easy to forget film The Clone Wars which began the beloved TV series is also a canon entry. As for where to start watching, checking out the mainline Episodes in release order is probably your best bet, while a chronological run-through might be more enjoyable for a second watch.
The first stop on any new Star Wars fan’s journey into the extended universe will likely be one of the several TV shows available on Disney+. Though there aren’t dozens of these to choose from yet, there is still plenty of content aimed at younger viewers, adults, those young at heart, and everywhere in between.
In fact, because even the shows aimed at younger viewers are packed full of important canon lore that feeds into other content, most of the offerings are enjoyable for all ages. The Clone Wars TV series introduces Ahsoka, for example, but she later appears in the Rebels show, in her own young adult novel, in The Mandalorian, and she’s even getting a Disney+ series all to herself.
As Ahsoka and The Clone Wars TV series were so beloved, they survived Disney’s Order 66 and made it into the canon universe despite being produced before the studio purchased Star Wars, but no other series released before 2014 is considered canon.
What better way to immerse yourself in Star Wars canon than by actually putting yourself into the galaxy far, far away by playing as one of its characters. Despite there being so many Star Wars games out there though, the canon list is surprisingly small.
Video games can take as long as films to make, if not longer, so the universe-resetting following the Disney takeover led to a slow restart for this side of things. Publisher EA also held an exclusive deal to make Star Wars games, and story-based, single player content seemingly wasn’t their priority.
The first canon game is therefore 2017’s Battlefront 2 (not to be confused with one from 2005 of the same name), because unlike its predecessor, it actually had a story campaign. There are also a couple of smaller virtual reality canon games, and space combat entry Squadrons, but it’s the Jedi series from Respawn Entertainment that provides the heftiest chunk of story content.
This is where Star Wars gets busy. Though the first canon novel was released less than 10 years ago, there are already dozens and dozens of books published, even ignoring the several adaptations and junior reader novels.
There are novels tied into the plots of films, deep backstories for characters only featured briefly in other content, and completely fresh ideas that have spawned their own multimedia sagas. If you really, really, want to get into the depths of Star Wars lore, the novels are for you.
These are published in several different categories. Adult novels are, well, novels aimed at adults, and are published with the most consistency. Then there are young adult novels, and while the writing here is slightly less complex, these are largely considered as interesting and enjoyable as the adult novels.
Finally, there are junior reader Star Wars novels. These are aimed at kids, though the ages can vary from book to book. Some are meant for middle school readers, meaning the stories can still be somewhat interesting to older readers, though adults will likely notice a significant difference between these and the adult and even young adult books.
They still contain canon lore, of course, so some readers may want to work through them to absorb every piece of Star Wars available. The reading level also allows them to be consumed in just a couple of hours, so it’s up to the individual whether they’re willing to spend the time and money.
Another brief explanation is needed for The High Republic, a novel-led saga of brand new Star Wars stories taking place around 200 years before The Phantom Menace. This is split into phases, and each phase is broken down into waves.
Each wave primarily contains one adult novel, one young adult novel, and one junior, with a few extras sprinkled in like comics, audio books, and more. The overall stories are contained within each format though, so the adult novels directly lead into each other and you don’t need to read the young adult novels to get the whole picture, for example.
Instead, the young adult novel stories just take place alongside the events of the adult novels, covering different characters in roughly the same time period. This means that if you only want to read the adult novels, that’s absolutely fine. And if this is all super confusing, just follow the publishing order of the High Republic saga.
Star Wars comics canon was easy to figure out when the universe was reset. Disney released a run simply titled Star Wars, and then blended it together with a Darth Vader run, and subsequently released smaller runs focused on single characters like Princess Leia, Lando, and so on.
Years on, however, and there are now dozens of different comic series and standalone graphic novels, featuring just about every established Star Wars character and a few new ones. Whether you want to read about the adventures of Han, Obi-Wan, Captain Phasma, Kylo Ren, Jabba, or any of your other favourite characters, there’s probably at least one comic run that allows that.
Our guide breaks all of these down, of course, but there are some useful things you should know to make the comic reading experience go a little bit smoother.
Some of the entries, such as the aforementioned Darth Vader run, will have years after them in brackets. This is because another Darth Vader run began after the first one wrapped, telling a new story separate from the original. We therefore say Darth Vader (2015) to indicate the run starting in 2015, and Darth Vader (2017) to indicate the run starting in 2017. You get it.
Annuals are also released for some of the longer series. These aren’t part of the regular, numbered issues but can still contribute to the run’s overall story. You can get away without reading these, but if you want to absorb absolutely every piece of the story, it’s worth checking when they fit into the main story.
Another thing non-comic readers might find confusing about delving into this side of Star Wars anon is crossover events. This is when readers are intended to read different comics from several runs to get the complete story. Don’t worry about missing out, however, as the comics tell you plainly when this is about to happen in the ‘next issue’ segment at the end of each chapter.
Finally, a single run from before the Disney reset is considered canon. A four-part comic called Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir was published by Dark Horse in 2014, but was based on content scrapped from The Clone Wars TV series and therefore fit with Star Wars canon. Disney made it official in 2017 when Marvel republished the book under its banner.
We’ve separated the below list to indicate comics aimed at younger readers (that would likely still be fun for adults), alongside smaller comic runs that appeared as part of other media, and another list exists for comic adpatations of the films and TV shows. What you’ll see first, however, is every mainline Star Wars comic that further expands the canon universe. The run name is followed by the number of issues (and number of annuals where applicable) followed by the date issue one was published.
Yes, Star Wars canon even includes audio dramas. There aren’t many though, as Disney only releases them every year or so. The scripts of these audio dramas can usually be purchased in a nicely packaged book too, and regular Star Wars novels can often be found in audio book format.
Finally, there are Star Wars short stories sprinkled throughout various other media. These are most commonly featured in the Star Wars Insider magazine, though have also appeared on websites as part of promotional campaigns, packaged in special editions of some novels, and so on.
There are some books made up entirely of short stories too, but we’ve listed these in the novels section for simplicity, and any short story appearing in one of these dedicated collections won’t appear in the below list.
And that’s it! As you can see there is a lot of Star Wars content to consume, and something for absolutely everyone whether you like TV, novels, comics, or whatever else. And within each section there’s probably a dozen choices of your favourite characters or storylines to get into.
Hopefully our guide will help you figure out where to start and act as a checklist for those looking to tick off every single canon release. It’s also just about 10 years into the canon universe, and we all know Star Wars is going nowhere, so you can imagine how much the galaxy will expand over the next few years and decades.
On that note, it’s also worth remembering that new content is released all the time, especially on the comics front. This list is therefore accurate as of May 4, 2023, and while we’ll continue to update it regularly, it will almost immediately be a tad out of date.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer and acting UK news editor. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
When Nintendo first released their level-building game Super Mario Maker, many fans hoped for a similar set of tools based on The Legend Of Zelda series. The Big N haven’t gotten around to it yet, but indie developers Rokaplay and Firechick have beaten them to the punch with Super Dungeon Maker, which just released out of early access. It’s what the name implies: a game where you can build your own classic Zelda-like dungeons, share them online, and then play through other people’s whacky creations.
The Pokéverse continues to spread onto the PC route this summer with an updated digital version of the trading card game. The free-to-play Pokémon TCG Live is set to leave open beta and launch fully on June 8th at 10am PT/6pm BST, The Pokémon Company have announced. TCG Live will be replacing the older version of the creature-card-collectathon Pokémon TCG Online, which was first released back in 2011.
Rapid retro.
Industry legend Takahashi Meijin, best known for his work with Hudson Soft and his ’16 shots per second’ trigger finger, is (suitably) one of the supervisors on Star Gagnant, an upcoming rapid-fire shmup that flies onto Switch on 25th May.
Published by Regista, the game employs a unique rapid-fire system which will have you selecting a fire rate for various different situations and keeping an eye on your special gauge to ensure that it works as well as it can. There are four different modes available (arcade, caravan, challenge and rapid fire), each of which provides a twist on the standard shmup format so that the game can be played however you’d like.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
