News
14 CommentsFire Emblem Heroes is changing in big ways next month
Nintendo’s shaking up mobile role-playing game Fire Emblem Heroes in a ton of ways starting next month with the introduction of new battle features, rule sets and hardcore events to come.
The most exciting update coming in April is two new ways to battle. Defense — which requires clearing the map in a set number of turns — and additional enemy reinforcements will both become clear conditions starting next month. That should up the difficulty for Fire Emblem Heroes, making its level of challenge more in line with its console and handheld counterparts.
Fire Emblem Heroes will also add permadeath as part of a new in-game event. In classic Fire Emblem games, players can’t revive fallen allies, but it’s a feature that’s since been made optional with recent entries.
In Heroes, all allies are...
News
3 CommentsFire Emblem Heroes popularity contest names its rightful victor
Fire Emblem Heroes’ recent Voting Gauntlet event was a veiled popularity contest, asking players to throw support behind one of six beloved men and women from the series in a worldwide test of strength. The results of the weeklong campaign are now in, and Fire Emblem: Awakening’s Lucina has emerged victorious.
The winner of the first #FEHeroes Voting Gauntlet is… Lucina! Thanks to all who participated! Your prizes are now available in-game. pic.twitter.com/sdr1Dz3W3R— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) March 13, 2017
What makes this achievement notable is that the Voting Gauntlet wasn’t just a simple “vote for your favorites”-type event, like the one Nintendo had pre-launch. Instead, Fire Emblem Heroes players actually had to fight in their chosen hero’s honor, winning...
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Issue
26
February 27, 2017
What the game industry thinks of Nintendo’s Switch
We talk with third-party developers and industry executives about what to expect.
Read morePenny Arcade Expo
8 CommentsDungeons & Dragons is finally getting a proper digital app (update)
Dungeons & Dragons is building a modern digital toolset. Called Dungeons & Dragons Beyond, it will feature a mobile companion app for Dungeon Masters and players alike. Scheduled to enter beta release this summer, the tools will be designed and maintained in partnership with Curse, the community-focused communications platform that was purchased by Twitch in August.
In a brief press release issued during last weekend’s PAX East, publisher Wizards of the Coast provided few details. The app will reportedly work on any device, and will be specifically designed for fifth edition rules. It will include a “rules compendium, character builder, digital character sheets, and more.” The ultimate goal of the app is to “make game management easier for both players and Dungeon Masters.”
So, we...
News
32 CommentsHearthstone players lash out as Blizzard raises pack prices in many regions
A major change to card pack pricing has many Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft players calling foul on Blizzard Entertainment. After the developer announced that it would hike up the cost of cards in many African, European and Middle Eastern countries, fans worldwide fired back to voice their disappointment and concern with where the game’s going.
A Blizzard community manager announced the price changes on the Hearthstone Battle.net forum.
“We regularly look at our pricing around the world, and from time to time we make changes such as these to align with local and regional market conditions,” the post reads as an explanation.
These prices will go into effect starting March 22. For some regions, the new cost reflects an up to 30 percent increase across Android, Mac and Windows PC. There...
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News
7 CommentsHarmonix’s next project is a mix of DJ Hero and ... Yu-Gi-Oh (update)
Harmonix, makers of the Rock Band, Dance Central and Amplitude games, has a new rhythm game in the works. Called Dropmix, it’s a game that’s all about mixing up new beats, and it’s due out in September for mobile platforms.
Just like its predecessors, Dropmix requires the use of a unique peripheral. But experience with plastic guitars and Kinect-mediated booty shaking doesn’t apply here. Instead, players who grew up with Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokémon cards will find themselves at home with the Dropmix game board and accompanying app.
That’s because Dropmix isn’t just a mobile version of the rhythm games that made Harmonix famous. Instead, the company is working with Hasbro to create what it called in a press release “the next evolution of musical play.” What that looks like, apparently, is the...
News
2 CommentsUncharted 4, Inside, Firewatch lead 2017 BAFTA Games Awards nominees
Some of the best video games of 2016 were Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Inside and Firewatch, according to the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), which today announced the nominations for the 2017 British Academy Games Awards.
Those three games garnered eight, seven and six nods, respectively, and they’re all up for Best Game. The other three titles vying for the top honor are Overwatch, Stardew Valley and Titanfall 2. Four titles — Overcooked, Overwatch, The Witness and The Last Guardian — each picked up four nominations. BAFTA’s criteria state that in order to be eligible to be nominated for the 2017 awards, a game had to be released in the U.K. during the 2016 calendar year.
Since these are the British Academy Games Awards, they contain the unique category of British...
News
9 CommentsEven Niantic thinks Pokémon Go’s gyms need work
Pokémon Go’s gym feature is desperately in need of improvement, according to several top members of Niantic, the game’s developer. While that’s been widely apparent to players of the game, staff behind-the-scenes recently spoke to Polygon and other outlets about how the game’s competitive component currently misses the mark.
“The gym portion [of Pokémon Go] needs a lot more work, and we are trying to improve it and make a bigger change to how the system works,” senior product manager Tatsuo Nomura told Polygon during Game Developers Conference 2017. “Overall, I think we need a little bit more time to think through how we do it.”
Now that the game’s been out for nearly a year, Niantic has had plenty of time to reconsider how gym battles work in Pokémon Go. Issuing a revamped version of...
News
7 CommentsTelltale’s Guardians of the Galaxy game debuts this spring
Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series, the latest episodic adventure game from Telltale Games, will premiere this spring with an original story, the studio announced today.
It does not appear that the five-episode adventure game will relate to Marvel Studios’ Guardians films in any way; instead, Telltale is likely drawing on the Guardians of the Galaxy comics. Therefore, the actors who play those characters on the silver screen will not reprise their roles in Telltale’s game. The company announced a voice cast today of veteran screen and video game actors:
Scott Porter (Friday Night Lights, The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series) as Star-Lord
Emily O’Brien (The Young and the Restless, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor) as Gamora
Nolan North (the Uncharted series, Pretty Little Liars)...
News
1 CommentOrphan Black tie-in game will explore important stories from the show
Orphan Black isn’t the first TV show to receive a mobile game adaptation, but it is one of the first to be developed by the same television studio that produces the show.
The idea for the game, which is simply called Orphan Black: The Game, started floating around in 2014. Players will take control of different clones and have to solve a variety of puzzles and riddles to solve a variety of crimes they come across.
When the producers on the show figured out the angle they wanted to go with, Boat Rocker started putting together a team of in-house designers, artists and developers to start working on the game. James M. Woods, chief technology officer at Boat Rocker, told told Polygon that development began about two years after Boat Rocker came up with the concept.
When asked why Boat...
News
7 CommentsLegendary Pokémon head to Pokémon Go by the year’s end
Rare Pokémon, like Mew and Mewtwo, are set to appear in Pokémon Go by 2017’s end. That’s according to John Hanke, CEO of developer Niantic.
In an interview with the German edition of Wired, Hanke explained that making legendary Pokémon available to catch in the mobile take on the franchise is a priority for the team this year.
“I can say with certainty that we will see it more this year,” Hanke said when asked about when legendary Pokémon are due to arrive.
Players shouldn’t expect every rare Pokémon from the first and second generations to appear just yet, though. Wired specifically called out just five of them: Mew, Mewtwo and the three legendary birds. Articuno, Zapdos and Moltres are already included in Pokémon Go in an indirect fashion: They’re the mascots for the game’s three...
News
4 CommentsFire Emblem Heroes update spotlights what makes the game so good
A new Fire Emblem Heroes event kicked off today, and it’s focused on what’s most endearing about the game: its characters, and especially the most popular ones. For the next week, a voting gauntlet is live in the mobile game, encouraging players to throw their support behind some of the best known Fire Emblem heroes.
The campaign runs until March 13, with special attention paid toward some of Fire Emblem’s most memorable princes and princesses. In the new voting gauntlet feature of Heroes, players can choose a male and female hero to rally behind as they make their way across a bracket.
It’s a popularity battle, essentially, and it seems likely that familiar faces like Chrom and Lucina will take down original characters Sharena and Alfonse with ease. Although the winners may already be...
GDC 2017
6 CommentsPokémon Go was over capacity less than two hours after it launched
Remember how much of a pain it was to play Pokémon Go at launch? We finally know why: The game was over capacity less than two hours after it launched.
In a presentation at the Game Developers Conference, Ed Wu, director of software engineering at Niantic and the man who leads the engineering team for Pokémon Go, revealed some of the internal numbers behind the game’s meteoric rise. Before launch, he and his team sat down to look at the player base and the growth curve for other, popular mobile games. Then they came up with an estimate of the kind of network traffic they expected, along with a “ludicrous” estimate of five times that number.
Wu personally handed those figures over to Google, their hosting provider, in order to prepare them for the launch. Then, the team pushed the...
GDC 2017
10 CommentsPokémon Go trading won’t solve rural players’ biggest problem
Long-requested features for Pokémon Go are in the works, and chief among them is trading Pokémon. But players stuck in smaller towns who are eager to fill out their Pokédex will likely remain out of luck, senior product manager Tatsuo Nomura told Polygon at this week’s Game Developers Conference.
“[Trading] won’t be through the internet,” he said of the mechanic, which remains in development and heavily under wraps. “You shouldn’t be able to exchange your Pokémon with someone who is 100 miles away from you. ... The person needs to be in your proximity.”
Players interacting in real life remains the utmost priority for Niantic, even if that comes at the expense of more isolated players’ Pokédexes. Even as the core mechanics continue to change and expand, Pokémon Go is still about getting...
Culture
3 CommentsHere’s a video of Hearthstone’s game director rapping and I am sorry
Throughout its history, Hearthstone has built up a tradition of announcing new content with songs. The Whispers of the Old Gods reveal, for example, featured a creepy tune, while One Night in Karazhan had a showy, disco-inspired track.
But when the latest expansion, Journey to Un’Goro, was announced earlier this week, some fans noticed that its cinematic trailer did not feature a song. Reddit poster shadowthiefo was so bothered that they started a petition on the Hearthstone subreddit demanding a Journey to Un’Goro song.
Hearthstone game director Ben Brode is never one to turn down the demands of the community. And so today he responded with the video above: a three minute hip-hop song seemingly recorded in his house with earbuds in.
It’s ... it’s something.
Polygon has reached out to...
GDC 2017
1 CommentWhy Pokémon Go’s trainers don’t look like the ones you remember
Pokémon Go’s art style noticeably differs from that of the main games in the series, but that wasn’t always the case. Early builds of the mega-hit Pokémon game featured far more familiar-looking trainers, as director of interaction and visual design showed off during Game Developers Conference 2017.
Niantic’s Dennis Hwang, who gave a talk on designing the augmented reality game, showed off several previously unseen looks at Pokémon Go’s design elements. These ranged from different versions of the overworld map and a variety of takes on the appearance of the battle screen, but it was the development studio’s original iteration of the trainer avatar that was most striking.
Allegra Frank/Polygon
Look familiar? The bust on-screen, used as the avatar in a very early...
News
8 CommentsMinecraft sales hit 122M copies
Minecraft continues to sell at a mind-boggling pace: Developer Mojang has now sold 122 million copies of the sandbox exploration game across all platforms, the Microsoft-owned Swedish studio announced today.
Microsoft’s previous milestone was 100 million copies, which Minecraft reached in early June 2016. That means that a whopping 22 million people bought a copy of the game in the last nine months. Asked by Polygon, a Microsoft representative clarified that although the company has been allowing owners of the original Java-based PC/Mac version of Minecraft to get a free copy of Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition, Microsoft does not include those redemptions in its sales calculation.
“The 122M units is paid units to players only,” the spokesperson told Polygon.
Mojang also announced today...
News
7 CommentsPokémon Go hits 650 million downloads
Pokémon Go has been downloaded more than 650 million times, developer Niantic Labs announced today during Google Developer Day at the 2017 Game Developers Conference.
That figure suggests the Pokémon Go craze has subsided somewhat, as you may have expected. Niantic said back in early September — less than two months after the game’s debut — that it had racked up more than 500 million downloads. So if the number of downloads has increased by 150 million in the period following that announcement, which is just under six months long, the pace has slowed a lot since those heady days.
Speaking at Google Developer Day today, Niantic chief technology officer Phil Keslin said the company plans to keep Pokémon Go fresh with regular content updates. Earlier this month, Niantic added...
GDC 2017
1 CommentEpic Games unveils new cross-platform mobile, PC game Battle Breakers
Epic Games today announced Battle Breakers, a new Unreal Engine 4-powered role-playing game that features cross-platform play on Android, iOS and PC.
While the game has been testing in a limited soft launch on iOS in the Philippines, it was officially unveiled today during Google’s GDC Developer Day.
No worldwide release date has yet been announced, with Epic only saying that the game is coming out later this year. Android players can pre-register starting today and receive an exclusive in-game hero by visiting here.
“The team at Epic had this crazy idea that if we combined our passion for zany 80’s Saturday morning cartoons with our obsession for tactical turn-based RPGs, we might just create something awesome and unique,” Donald Mustard, worldwide creative director at Epic Games, said...
News
6 CommentsMore huge Hearthstone changes incoming with Arena mode tweaks
It’s been a big month of long-anticipated announcements for Hearthstone, including card nerfs, changes to the ranked mode ladder format and some cards shifting out of standard as the game enters the Year of the Mammoth. Blizzard isn’t done with the news, however, as it hits players with another big announcement today.
This time the changes are focused around Arena mode. In this mode, which has existed mostly unchanged since before Hearthstone’s full launch in 2014, players must pay either 150 gold or $1.99 to buy in to a run. Once you’re in, you choose one card from a set of three over and over until you have a full deck of 30 cards. Then you play against others who put together their deck the same way until you lose three times or manage to get the maximum of 12 wins. A reward is doled...
Pokémon Go
4 CommentsEvolving gen two Pokémon in Pokémon Go
Pokémon Go’s latest update added a wrench into the evolution process. In order to get many of the new, second-gen Pokémon now available in the game, players will have to amass not just the appropriate types of candy, but certain evolutionary items as well.
This may seem like a confusing addition to something that takes some time to understand in the first place. It may be especially confusing to know that these Pokémon that need an item to evolve are the powered-up forms of some popular first-generation Pokémon, giving some monsters already in players’ parties a major power boost.
Luckily, anyone who’s played the second generation of Pokémon games will be familiar with this change. But even if they haven’t, we’ve compiled all the items they should be on the lookout for if they want to...
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