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Fallout 76 Repair Kits Come Tomorrow, Can Be Earned Or Bought With Real Money
Bethesda has announced that the new repair kits coming to Fallout 76 can be earned in-game or bought with real world money. The kits are designed to repair weapons and armor without needing to waste resources.
“Repair Kits are new utility items that will help you spend more time looting and shooting, and less time toiling away at a workbench fixing your gear,” Bethesda wrote in the latest Inside the Vault blog post. “We’ve received lots of requests for Repair Kits, and we’re excited to add them in the weeks following Patch 8.” Patch 8 is scheduled for tomorrow, April 9.
Patch 8 adds two types of repair kits: basic and improved. Basic kits are single-use and repairs any one item to 100% condition. You’ll be able to unlock them in the in-game Atomic Shop with microtransactions or earn them by completing challenges in Fallout 76. Improved kits are also single-use, but they repair a single item to 150% condition, allowing them to last much longer than they normally would. The improved repair kits can only be earned for completing in-game content, such as defeating the Scorchbeast Queen.
Following Patch 8, more of Fallout 76’s Wild Appalachia expansion will release on April 16. A new dungeon, called The Burrows, will be unlocked for you to explore with a squad of other players. Bethesda plans on releasing further details about the The Burrows during next week’s Inside the Vault, but promises the dungeon will be a “daunting new subterranean battleground.” Next week’s Inside the Vault will reveal more details about Fallout 76’s upcoming in-game camera and memory book features too, which brings a new quest and challenges on April 16.
Player vending, which allows you to set up your own store to sell items to others, has been delayed. No longer coming in Patch 8, player vending is now scheduled for Patch 9, which is currently expected to release sometime in May.
Wild Appalachia is the first of three large content drops scheduled for Fallout 76 in 2019. Nuclear Winter, coming this summer, brings a new game mode and features to Fallout 76, along with a new prestige system and two challenging raids. This fall, Wastelanders adds a story expansions that includes a new main questline, factions, events, and features.
Fallout 76 is available on Xbox One, PS4, and PC.
from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/fallout-76-repair-kits-come-tomorrow-can-be-earned/1100-6466106/
Pokemon Go: Latios Returning For Special Raid Event Next Week
Niantic is bringing another Legendary Pokemon back to Pokemon Go for a limited time. Beginning Monday, April 15, the Eon Pokemon Latios will make an encore appearance in the hit mobile game as part of a special Raid event, giving players their first opportunity to capture it in nearly a year.
Latios is scheduled to appear in Raid Battles for a full week, leaving the game again on April 22. As before, you’ll first need to team up with other players in real life and battle the Legendary Pokemon before being able to catch it. Niantic teases that you’ll also have a chance of coming across a Shiny Latios during the Raid event.
Latios first appeared in Pokemon Go alongside its twin, Latias, last May. The other Eon Pokemon returned for its own special Raid event back in February. Both Latios and Latias are dual Dragon/Psychic-types, which makes them vulnerable to Ghost and Dark Pokemon like Gengar and Tyranitar. Other Dragons like Salamence and Pokemon Go’s current Legendary, Giratina, will also be effective against it.
Ahead of the Latios Raid event, Niantic is holding another Legendary Lunch Hour this week, on April 10, from 12-1 PM local time. During that hour, there will be an increase in five-star Raids featuring Giratina in its Origin Forme, which has more attack-oriented stats than its standard Altered Forme.
Following the Legendary Lunch Hour, Niantic will host the next Pokemon Go Community Day this Saturday, April 13. That event will run from 3-6 PM local time and will feature increased spawns of the rare Dragon Pokemon Bagon. Niantic also announced a series of Pokemon Go Fest events for Chicago, Germany, and Asia later this summer.
from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/pokemon-go-latios-returning-for-special-raid-event/1100-6466105/
AI: The Somnium Files, A Trippy Detective Adventure With Zero Escape’s Spirit
Investigations, interrogations, serial murders, and a whole lot of plot twists–it’s all here in the upcoming puzzle-adventure mystery AI: The Somnium Files, the latest game from Zero Escape director Kotaro Uchikoshi and the team at Spike Chunsoft. It’s not much of a surprise that AI borders on bizarre and grotesque, as you can see in the latest trailer (see below). Having seen it in action briefly and getting a taste of its early gameplay, it appears to be in the same vein of Uchikoshi’s past work, but with it’s own unique flair.
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (colloquially known as 999), Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward, and Zero Time Dilemma formed a trilogy of mind-bending narrative experiences built around puzzle-solving. But Uchikoshi has traded the twisted escape room premises of those games for putting you in the shoes of a detective. With Uchikoshi and assistant director Akira Okada on-hand during my demo time, I asked about their approach in creating something new and thematically different that still had the spirit of past games.
“What I had in mind is that I wanted to make this for adventure game fans around the world, including investigations into a separate dream world,” Uchikoshi said. “I can’t go into details right now, but as an adventure game, you want to expand as much as you can so everybody can have fun. Everyone knows what an adventure game is like, but in 2019 I wanted to make that a little more fresh.”
People who haven’t played adventure games: first go home, try to drink a gallon of tequila, make sure your mind’s loose, and then just accept what it is. Then you’ll get used to the game, and it’ll just suck you in. – Kotaro Uchikoshi
There is a thematic twist that’s new for Uchikoshi, which shares a few similarities to aspects of Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain or even Suda51’s The Silver Case. Okada even points to games such as The Walking Dead and Life Is Strange as influences. However, a lot of AI: The Somnium Files’ DNA can be traced to Zero Escape, since you’re still trying to investigate and unravel mysteries from a first-person perspective, at least when you’re taking the role of the main protagonist Kaname Date.
As Date, you talk to folks around the crime scene and examine your surroundings, but that’s only half the work. His cybernetic eyeball named Aiba (pun intended)–and partner in crime-solving–can enter an alternate dimension to unlock deeper secrets, new pieces of evidence, and more abstract thoughts of the specific characters involved. It almost reminds me of Persona 5’s Phantom Thieves entering the Metaverse to uncover the true nature of others, and ultimately affect those people’s reality. Aiba gets a moe anthropomorphization in these sequences, where you roam around a deformed version of the crime scene from a third-person point of view. The catch is you have a limited amount of time to investigate this dimension, and interacting with story-critical objects will consume time depending on the action you take. Thus, AI offers branching narrative paths dictated by your decisions and actions.
I got a sense of pressure in these moments and asked Okada how they approach balancing difficulty for a narrative-based adventure game.
“In general you would play more and more of the game, doing puzzles, and that was the challenging part, for me as well, playing a ton of puzzles and trying to balance the levels together,” Okada responded. But in general, playing the game multiple times will help the player out, help understand the puzzles.” It seems that players have to live with the result they earn in AI, at least for chunks of the game, and that’s how branching paths are constructed–something like 428: Shibuya Scramble came to mind. Okada continued, “We think a lot about accessibility, options for difficulty, options for games that aren’t entirely story based. So I think that’s still a big concern.”
A heavy narrative is the driving force in AI: The Somnium Files, and in that department, there’s been a bit of an unconventional lead-up to this game. If you haven’t been following, I’ll catch you up a bit. Uchikoshi first revealed AI as his next game at Anime Expo 2018, and held a panel covering some of the design philosophies. Promotion for the game then pivoted to shining the spotlight on one important character: Iris Sagan, an in-universe influencer and pop star under the stage name A-set. She spilled into the real world with songs, music videos, and interactions with fans through Twitter and YouTube–hell, I even ‘interviewed’ her and Uchikoshi at the start of all this. We learned a lot about her, like her favorite Hatsune Miku song and opinion on the best boy/best girl of the Danganronpa series.
However, it was pretty clear where things were going once Iris’ own YouTube videos were corrupted with creepy subliminal messages. A few horrifying videos went up a couple weeks ago, one of which was just camera footage of her apartment left running without a trace of her presence, and another showing a bi-pedal polar bear about to chop her in half with a saw blade. Since then, her channel has had two hilarious video in promotion of the game featuring her commentary on Uchikoshi himself and different parts of the game’s lore. In the game itself, we’ve seen her crying for Date’s help and on the verge of getting killed Saw-style in the latest trailer. It’s wild.
There’s been a heavy focus on Iris, but what about the other characters? We don’t know much about Date yet, other than the fact that he works for the Tokyo MPD and lost his memory six years prior. So I asked about how they approach creating characters and what we could expect from the game’s cast, to which Uchikoshi responded, “First of all, the care and balance of personalities is very important to me. So the character types don’t double up. If we have a sad person, we don’t want another sad person. And the game is based on a murder mystery, so we kind of want you to try to figure out who these characters are, while everyone’s working together.”
Admittedly, I couldn’t get much out the rest of the game’s cast, but character design appears to be a major appeal. Having employed the talent of Yusuke Kozaki (known for his work on No More Heroes, Fire Emblem, and Pokemon Go), it’s an important aspect. Okada agreed, saying, “I think since the illustration and art is visually attractive, during the whole game, while you’re playing, it’ll draw you to the story also. Looking at the characters, that’s how I started getting hooked. The visuals would get you first, then the mysteries will get you to keep on playing.”
AI seems to be really going for it with its outlandish pretense, and I wouldn’t expect anything less from Uchikoshi. I think his continued response to my questions about why people should keep an eye on his new game says a lot. “So, for the people who already played adventure games, I understand they’ll really like this one,” Uchikoshi said. “But people who haven’t played adventure games: first go home, try to drink a gallon of tequila, make sure your mind’s loose, and then just accept what it is. Then you’ll get used to the game, and it’ll just suck you in.” Please don’t try this at home, or anywhere, really.
You can take up the role of detective and adorable eyeball sidekick in AI: The Somnium Files when it launches for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC on July 25, 2019.
Editor’s Note: Translations for the interview portions with Kotaro Uchikoshi and Akira Okada were done by Spike Chunsoft.
from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ai-the-somnium-files-a-trippy-detective-adventure-/1100-6466076/
