Fortnite Battle Royale is preparing to launch Season 10, and has been setting the stage for the changes to come. That will mean a new Battle Pass, changes to the map, and new gameplay mechanics. It’s a lot to keep up with all at once, so we’ve compiled everything we know so far.

When Will Fortnite Season 10 Start?

Typically a Fortnite season lasts 10 weeks, which would have put the start date for Season 10 within the week of July 15. This season is instead planned to last until August 1, which may be due to the timing of the Fortnite World Cup. Epic may have wanted to reserve any large map changes until after the competition had ended.

This will also allow the game to launch its Season 10 during or just after its planned Birthday Event, which will offer special rewards and challenges. Items like birthday cakes and presents will also be scattered around the map, offering health/shield regen and special loot drops.

How Much Will the Fortnite Season 10 Battle Pass Cost?

As usual, the Season 10 Battle Pass will most likely cost the usual price of 950 V-Bucks. You can buy a bundle of 1,000 V-Bucks for $10/£8, making that roughly the price point for a Battle Pass that will last over the next few months during Season 10. The Battle Pass entitles you to challenges and their associated cosmetic rewards.

What’s in the Fortnite Season 10 Battle Pass?

Season 9 is ongoing, and as usual a big world event has started to set the stage for things to come. This time it was a giant battle pitting a mechanized bear against a huge monster that took place on Saturday, July 20. The robot was apparently built to fend off the monster, and when it showed up the mech automatically activated. The mech powered up by breaking into the Loot Lake vault and taking a powerful orb, then drew a giant sword to defeat the monster and left the monster’s body and the sword behind.

What all this could mean for Season 10 is still mysterious, however. The themes for the seasonal changeovers are often surprising, so the next season could have nothing to do with mechs, monsters, or giant swords at all. Based on past seasonal events, this stage-setting probably created conditions for some unexpected consequences that will factor into the next big map change

from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/fortnite-season-10-expected-start-date-and-everyth/1100-6468661/

Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled has stormed back into first place in the UK all-format physical sales charts, according to sales monitor Chart-Track. The remastered kart racer gets a little help from Amazon’s Prime Day to beat Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, though it should be noted the latter is a Switch exclusive while the former is also available on PS4 and Xbox One, so has a larger potential install base.

As a result of those two games’ strong chart performance, last week’s No.1, Super Mario Maker 2, drops to No.3 for the week ending July 20. Elsewhere, Chart-Track says Prime Day helped 34 of the top 40 games register an increase in sales over last week, with FIFA 19 (No.4), Red Dead Redemption 2 (No.5), and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (No.7) the main beneficiaries.

The new Marvel game fared well in our review; critic Richard Wakeling awarded it an 8/10. “More so than its predecessors, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order excels because of its character diversity and the ways its disparate heroes work together,” he wrote. “For this reason alone it’s an ideal co-op game, whether you’re playing with another friend in the same room or with three friends online, but the AI more than holds its own if you’re playing alone, too. It falters in places, but there’s still nothing quite like the Ultimate Alliance series, and this long-awaited third entry makes it a triumphant return for a superhero brawler that feels more relevant than ever.” Read more in our full Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order review.

You can read the full top 10 sales chart for this week below, courtesy of UKIE and GfK Chart-Track. Note this table does not include digital sales data, and so should not be considered representative of all UK game sales.

1. Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled
2. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order
3. Super Mario Maker 2
4. FIFA 19
5. Red Dead Redemption 2
6. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
7. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4
8. F1 2019
9. Spider-Man
10. Mortal Kombat 11

from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/top-10-uk-games-chart-marvel-ultimate-alliance-3-c/1100-6468660/

EA Access, the subscription service from publishing giant Electronic Arts, launches today, July 24, for PlayStation 4. It’s been a long time coming, as the service premiered all the way back in 2014 on Xbox One. A countdown clock on EA’s website reveals exactly when EA Access go lives–5 PM PT on July 24.

Sony initially blocked EA from launching the service on PlayStation, but the company eventually came around (thought it never really explained its change of heart). A version of EA Access called Origin Access is available on PC, though it runs independently of the Xbox One and PS4 versions.

EA Access on PS4 will be available for $5 USD/month or $30 USD/year. Included with your membership is access to a growing catalog of games, known as the Vault. The library includes a number of big, popular, and well-received games such as Titanfall 2, Madden NFL 19, and Battlefield V, among many others.

Additionally, members get 10 percent off all digital EA games and content. For full-priced games, this brings the price down from $60 USD to $54 USD. Finally, members get access to the Play First trials, which normally provide 10 hours of early access to new EA titles prior to their official release.

EA Access launches for PS4 just in time for the Play First trial for Madden NFL 20, which releases on July 25.

Do you plan to subscribe to EA Access on PS4? Let us know in the comments below!

from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ea-access-finally-launches-for-ps4-very-soon/1100-6468657/

In May 2019, The Pokemon Company revealed a new Pokemon mobile game: Pokemon Masters. Developed by DeNA, which assisted on other Nintendo mobile games like Fire Emblem Heroes and Super Mario Run, Pokemon Masters is a lot more complex than you might expect. In some ways, it’s like many other gacha-style mobile games, tempting you to play more with the promise of (possibly) pulling your favorite characters. But Pokemon Masters limits microtransactions to a small corner of the game, leaving room for a surprisingly involved story mode to show through.

I recently played around 45 minutes of Pokemon Masters, and it’s not quite a pick-up-and-play kind of game. The actual narrative part of the story mode, like a lot of Pokemon games, is not particularly complex; you’re a trainer in a new region called Pasio, where Pokemon Trainers form a “Sync Pair” with one partner Pokemon, and your goal is to become the Champion. But each chapter is broken up into several activities centered around battles, from point-and-click exploration of the region to boss fights against a famous Trainer. A big focus of the game is co-op play–it currently doesn’t have a versus mode–but you have to go through a handful of story chapters to unlock the option of playing with others, because there’s just so much to learn.

It’s hard to come to grips with Masters’ 3v3 battles if you’re used to Pokemon’s traditional battle format. You control all three Trainers on your side of the battlefield, as well as their Pokemon–Trainers have support moves they can use just like a Pokemon’s moves. The type-matchup system is simplified in that each Pokemon only has one type and one weakness, and those weaknesses are displayed clearly in battle. The battles take place in real time, and moves are tied to a cooldown timer, so there’s a lot to manage all at once. Do you wait until your move meter fills to three sections so you can use a more powerful move–but possibly get hit a bunch while you wait–or do you forgo attacking entirely in favor of healing a Pokemon or boosting its stats?

In co-op mode, you contend with all the same things and add human communication on top of it. You can play with friends and strangers near and far. Even in person, co-op play isn’t easy; I was surprised at how close some of the battles ended up, even on the easier of the two difficulties available. There’s also a special “unity attack” you can unlock if you chain enough attacks as a team without taking damage, which takes a bit of coordination or luck to execute.

In short: 45 minutes was not enough to completely wrap my head around Pokemon Masters’ battles, and I spend quite a bit of my time thinking about Pokemon as it is.

The gacha part is much more straightforward. Masters features 65 Sync Pairs (a Trainer and their Pokemon) at launch, with a seemingly even distribution of characters from various points in Pokemon’s history to appeal to a wide range of fans. You can unlock some of them during the story mode, I was told, but to get your favorites, you’ll likely have to go “Sync Pair Scouting” and see what you get.

The only thing you can spend real money on is gems, a currency exclusively used for this gacha side of the game (you can also earn gems in-game, though we don’t yet know how much you’ll have to play to get enough for one Sync Pair pull). I spent around 20 fake dollars during the demo to buy enough gems for 10 pulls, so while the pricing may not be final, getting all 65 Sync Pair teams at launch could probably take a good amount of time and/or money. I did get Ruby and Sapphire‘s Flannery, though, which was my main goal.

Strangely, these microtransactions are sequestered in their own side menu, away from the story mode. They’re unobtrusive and largely seem optional if you just want to go through the story mode; you can buy any items you might need, for example, with a different in-game currency. The benefit of going Sync Pair Scouting is potentially unlocking a more powerful pair or powering up one you already have by pulling a duplicate, but the microtransaction system seems very quietly utilized. I’ll have to play more to know for sure, of course, but it has a certain “Pokemon is for everyone” air to it.

Pokemon Masters is coming soon; it’s set for a Summer 2019 launch on iOS and Android, though the exact date hasn’t yet been announced. Pre-registration for the game is now open on both Google Play and the App Store.

from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/pokemon-masters-is-light-on-microtransactions-heav/1100-6468650/