Capcom held a livestream from Japan today with a new trailer and additional info about the upcoming Monster Hunter World divulged.
The game is currently scheduled for launch on Jan. 26, and it's looking especially awesome. The new trailer shows off several of the Elder Dragons from the series, with some new additions and those included from earlier iterations of the series.
You can check out the flame king dragon Teostra with dangerous fires, steel dragon Kushala Daora with an entire body covered in metal plates, the rock-eating Dodogama, and several other dragons that can mess with your hunter if you're not careful. All are extremely formidable opponents.
There's also a final beta before release, which Monster Hunter fans on PlayStation 4 will be able to take part in from Jan. 19 to 22. It'll feature a battle with Nergigante, an enormous and fearsome creature featured in the game's marketing materials.
Capcom also discussed some additional details about Monster Hunter World's post-launch content, confirming that there will indeed be major, free updates to the game as well as regular content injections. There's a major title update planned for spring 2018, which will add the monster Deviljho as well.
If you're looking to sink your teeth into life as a monster hunter, there isn't much longer to wait. It looks like it's certainly going to be worth holding tight for.
God of War's upcoming reboot is poised to explore themes grounded in Norse mythology, but that doesn't mean future games will be rooted there, according to director Cory Barlog. In a new interview with Game Informer, Barlog stated that the team may end up actually exploring both the Egyptian era and the Mayan era, “and so on and so forth.”
It seems as though the God of War games may become somewhat cyclical in that it will eventually explore additional eras, following its original Greek exploration for the entirety of six whole games. It's interesting to ponder what a Mayan God of War game might look like, or an Egyptian version.
“What became apparent to me was that we were watching this franchise wane a bit,” Sony Santa Monica Head of Studio Shannon Studstill said in the interview. “It was getting old. The storyline with Kratos being the hardcore badass – I think people were starting to say, ‘What's next?’ I felt like, in order to reinvent, we really needed to turn a lot of things around.”
It was possible that the game we're seeing in the near future could just have easily have been given an Egyptian setting, though as it turns out with Assassin's Creed Origins taking the same route, perhaps it's a good thing that the project went another way.
Whatever route the series takes in the future, it'll be interesting to see a new direction for Kratos, especially if it means he'll be growing and evolving as a character.
Minecraft and Norse mythology may seem like two very different things, but the two are coming together with the new Norse Mythology Mash-Up Pack, a new DLC release that brings together some familiar pieces together with the blocky goodness of Minecraft.
The mash-up pack includes locations like Hel, the Great Hall, and Yggdrasil from throughout the annals of Norse mythology. You can even dress up as important figures from the stories themselves, like the very same ones you may remember reading about in one of your history classes (the parts you fell asleep during.)
For instance you can dress up as Thor and Odin, or even Heimdall and Sif. There are a few creatures up for grabs as well to complete the package. Enemies get several interesting skins as well, transforming familiar baddies into antagonists based in Norse mythology.
There are plenty of large, fanciful environments found in the expansion as well that really look as though they could transport you, even temporarily, to a faraway place and time. You can see it all in action in the official trailer, and you can download the DLC pack right now across all Minecraft platforms.
If you like reskinning Minecraft with lots of different looks, be on the lookout for a new Festive Mash-Up DLC pack, which is releasing later this week just in time for the holidays. It will transform your favorite world with candy canes, Santa hats, reindeer, and more!
Nearly six months ago, the first episode of Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two released. Jesse's story carried on from the first season as he/she met new friends, went on exciting new adventures and came face to face with strong, fearless enemies. It was all about to come to a head in this final episode, so just how would Jesse and friends defeat the Admin once and for all?
How exactly do you defeat the Admin?
We left Jesse and friends at the end of the last episode as they'd managed to make their way back to Beacontown. After sneaking into the town through some tunnels, we then get a real look at what has happened to Beacontown and see what it had been turned into by the Admin posing as Jesse. Even in block form, the town still manages to look run down and almost abandoned, a shell of what it used to be like. This is reflected in the especially dullen look of this episode, with the darkened skies, colours and streets.
Once inside Beacontown, your aim is to get to the primary terminal to enter the word of passage. In order to get there, you are given a number of different choices along the way that may help or hinder you depending on what you pick. The game offers you lots of chances to make decisions that, whilst they may not affect the ultimate outcome of the episode, will determine how the other characters in the game react to you. This gives you the choice of whether you can trust old and new friends with what you decide to do.
Aside from these smaller choices scattered about the episode, you also have some big decisions to make when it gets to the end of the episode too. No matter what you've done earlier in the episode or the season, these choices stand alone and can be made however you see fit. The ultimate last decision you make will decide how the episode ends, and either choice rounds things off nicely while still leaving the story open for potentially more episodes, as the first season ended up having.
No-one ever said it was going to be easy
This episode is another that is quite short compared to other episodes in the season, but it still ends up being largely focused on conversation. For the rest of the time, you have the expected bit of wandering about, combined with a bit of crafting and also a little bit of puzzle solving. A puzzle towards the end of the episode might cause you a little bit of a problem as you aren't really given much help, but this offers a nice change from the conversation filling the rest of the episode.
With this being the finale, you'd be expecting some kind of boss fight to occur and you'd be right. The boss fight does not disappoint for the large part, taking place across a number of different locations with the boss having a handful of different forms as well. It's an impressive boss fight and while the game does tease you for a little while that there may not be any fight at all, it is an enjoyable one that only has one outcome.
Another thing that this episode does well is to tie up some of the loose ends from previous episodes. Old friends that have made appearances in other episodes reappear and allow their stories to tie up, and people that you may have lost or left behind along the way also have their stories finished off. This is a nice touch and the episode perfectly brings everything together, which makes it feel like the ideal finale it is aiming to be.
Finally, the six achievements of the episode will unlock with natural progression through the story, offering the expected 200 gamerscore upon completion.
Summary
“Episode 5 – Above and Beyond” is an appropriate end to another good Telltale season. The episode does a brilliant job of bringing everything together and tying up a number of loose ends across the season. The episode is scattered with important choices and either choice at the end offers closure for the gamer. Aside from the episode feeling a little short, there's not a lot wrong here. It may not be non-stop action, or blow you completely away, but it is a solid end to an enjoyable season.
People can step back in time and experience what it would have been like to live in Roman Exeter thanks to virtual reality and the video game Minecraft.
The city’s rich history – and the treasures at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery – are now part of the hugely popular and addictive Minecraft game.
You will be able to experience Roman Exeter on Minecraft
A new map shows what Exeter’s Roman fortress could have looked like and is available to download for free while playing Minecraft. This joins another map, also inspired by RAMM’s collections , designed to represent 18th-century Exeter when the city walls still stood.
Minecraft is like a form of virtual Lego and has fans of all ages. Players build towns or cities together in virtual groups and complete buildings by selecting blocks with different textures and uses. They can also download existing buildings, or whole conurbations and change them and add to them.
This map is produced as part of the A Place in Time Project, a partnership between the universities of Exeter and Reading, Exeter City Council and Cotswold Archaeology. The Minecraft maps include recent discoveries and new interpretations of archaeological evidence found in the 1970s and 80s.
The Roman map shows the barracks and military buildings of the Roman settlement in what is now Exeter, and includes links to Roman objects excavated in Exeter. Players can use these to find out more about the objects in the game.
The Roman map shows the barracks and military buildings of the Roman settlement in what is now Exeter
RAMM worked with digital producer Adam Clarke AKA Wizard Keen and blockworks to produce the maps. The first is based on the Hedgeland model, which was constructed between 1817 and 1824 by Caleb Hedgeland and is one of the earliest surviving models of any town in Britain. The model is the only surviving record of many of the city’s buildings and streets. It is on permanent display in RAMM’s Making History gallery.
Sofia Romualdo, a researcher at the University of Exeter, who is working on the project, said: “The beauty of these new maps is they allow people to explore real places in different ways that are fun and educational.”
“I can’t help it!” I said. “I can’t figure out how to stand up straight.”
Sure enough, my character was tramping across the green block landscape slumped forward like a sulky teen who just broke up with her boyfriend.
We got an Xbox for Christmas, the goal, of course, being to insinuate ourselves into the lives of our children so that even their virtual reality is not safe from their parents’ antics.
“Just get in the house and stop wandering off!” advised my 10-year-old, who was teaching me how to play Minecraft. By “teaching,” I mean yelling at me continually as I stabbed at buttons.
But I didn’t go inside the house he had built for us. I was feeling rather full of myself, having just slaughtered a pig with a few swipes of my bare, block hands, earning my household pork chops. I was now off to chop down trees for an addition.
There was only one problem.
“I can’t figure out how to put this pork chop down,” I lamented.
My boy was too busy killing a spider with glowing red eyes to help me, so I just went with it.
I chopped down that tree with a pork chop. Who knew the other white meat could be so versatile?
“I got us more wood for the house!” I announced.
I only got a grunt. It was starting to get dark in our virtual world, and my son was killing another spider.
I moved across the screen, getting stuck in holes, stuck under tree branches, falling off cliffs.
The first-person vantage point of the game, like all modern offerings, messes with me. I grew up on a steady diet of old-school Nintendo, not this herky, jerky Blair Witch Project-meets-Luigi madness. Still, I wasn’t ready to give up. I wanted to make my boy proud, and that’s when I saw the llama. Eager to get the sort of accolades earned by my pig slaughter, I chased down the llama, and by “chased” I mean I stumbled and crouched across the screen until the llama was eventually cornered by some square blocks of earth. Then I began mowing down the animal with my pork chop.
The llama, however, was not going down without a fight. It kicked me and made angry llama noises. But I kept at it and eventually I killed that llama.
“I killed a llama!” I chirped. “What do I get for killing a llama?!”
“Ummm, you get nothing,” said my kid, giving me a look that said, “what kind of sicko kills a llama?”
“OK, now we have standards?” I said. “That’s the line we don’t cross? Llamas? It is not like it was a unicorn or something.”
I sulked back to the house to call it a night.
I jumped into bed and pushed a button, destroying the bed in one swipe.
“What did you do?” he yelled.
“I don’t know … I just pushed a button. I was trying to … ” I said, looking down at the controller that had, no lie, 11 buttons! Plus two joysticks and an up-down-side-to-side tossed in for good measure. “I am sorry … I …”
I stopped talking and walked to the corner with my pork chop.
“I am just going to crouch over here till morning.”
