Episode 33 – PAX East Boston News

recorded on 3/29/2019

Headliners

PAX EAst is happening up in Boston right now and yesterday Gearbox had its own panel showing off stuff

• BulletStorm:  Duke of Switch Edition available this Summer
• Borderlands The Handsome Collection remastered with 4-player co-op launches April 3
  • This is free to owners of Borderlands on Steam
• Borderlands 3 announced with a reveal trailer that looked really cool and was received well

Little Bits

Sony’s first ever State of Play, similar to a Nintendo Direct lot of smaller and PSVR titles (Sony, GameSpot)

• Headliner:  Days Gone and Mortal Kombat 11
• VR Titles:  Iron Man, No Man’s Sky, Blood and Truth, Five Nights at Freddy’s
• Other smaller titles were Crash Team Racing: Nitro Refuelded, ReadySet Heroes, Concrete Genie

ID @ Inside Xbox took place on Tuesday showing off Indie games coming to Game Pass (Polygon)

• This was Microsoft’s first ever Indie game focused Inside Xbox
• Killer Queen Black, Outer Wilds, and Blazing Chrome

EA lays off 350 employees and rampos down operations in Russia and Japan (The Verge)

• No game devs were affected but marketing and publishing was hit the hardest
• EA has closed down its offices in Japan and Russia entirely
• Affected employees have been expecting this since October of last year
• All affected employees have received severance packages and future job help

Apple unveils Apple Arcade their new game subscription service (The Verge)

• No word on the price but the goal is for this to take off like Apple Music
• This is not a streaming service rather a download service that is rumored to cost $10

Fallout 76, Doom Eternal, Rage 2, Wolfenstein: YoungBlood and CyberPilot coming to Steam (Bethesda)

• Basically Bethesda is not confident that people will use their launcher…..cuz its bad

Another backwards compatibility (BC) patent been filed by Sony further reinforcing BC for PS5 (Forbes)

Another new Legend is coming to Apex Legends sometime in the next 12 weeks (PCGamesN)

Twitch adds new Squad Stream feature allowing up to 4 streams to go live at the same time (TheVerge)

The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind is free this week for The Elder Scrolls series 25th birthday (ScreenRant)

PSVR has sold over 4.2 million units….nice, this is good as Sony is committed to VR (Ars Technica)

Luminous Production (FFXV studio) is working on a brand new IP (Playstation Lifestyle)

Director of Xenoblade: Chronicles is hiring for a new legend of Zelda game

• Sounds like good news maybe more RPG elements in this possible next game

Minecraft removes creator’s name from the lastest build of the game (Polygon)

Upcoming Releases and Deals

Playstation Plus games for April are The Surge and Conan Exiles….nice, good selection (Sony)

Xbox Games w/ Gold are: The Technomancer (4/1-4/30) and Outcast Second Contact (4/16-5/16) (Xbox)

• OG Star Wars Battlefront II

Wolfenstien Young Blood launches on July 26 featuring co-op and a buddy pass with the deluxe edition

Twitch Prime members can claim 3 months of Switch Online, after 60 days can claim again for 9 months

Rumor Mill

UPDATE:  Nintendo to release 2 new Switch models: 1 more portable and 1 more powerful (Kotaku, WSJ)

• The more portable option is aimed to replace Nintendo’s 3DS and more likely for kids, ~$200
  • This version will cut certain features like rumble for example to lower the price
• The more powerful option geared to “avid video gamers” with more performance ability, ~$400
• Nintendo will likely show these new versions during E3 with one of them launching soon after

PS5 and Xbox Anaconda are aiming to outpower Google Stadia’s 10.7 TFLOPS (Jason Schreier)

• Referencing WayPoint, the power outputs for the current console generation are below:
  
  
• PS$ TFLOPS = 1.8
• Xbox One TFLOPS = 1.3
• PS4 Pro TFLOPS = 4.7
• Xbox One X TFLOPS = 6
  
  
• This means the rumor that PS5 will be 2-3x more powerful than PS4 Pro could be true

From Software and George R.R. Martin apparently are teaming up to tcreate a medieval open world RPG

• Martin would be a writer and From would handle the dev game side

Resident Evil 3 Remake in the works, may launch by January 2020, dev team not same as RE2 Remake