Role-playing video games – Gloomberg News

30Sep

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Gaming

Square Enix Is Drowning 2022 With RPGs, And We’re Here For It

Image: Square Enix / Kotaku2022 is a great year to be an RPG fan, particularly of Japanese games. The holiday season is usually crowded with new game releases, but this year Square Enix appears to be releasing games like it’s Christmas all year round. With so many out already, and so many more to come, are SE’s profligate ways good or bad for RPG lovers?Back in March 2022, Square Enix had a string of big releases all throughout the month: Babylon’s Fall, a live-service action game; Triangle Strategy, a strategy RPG game; Chocobo GP, a racing game spin-off of the Final Fantasy series; and Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy, an action RPG game in collaboration with Koei Tecmo.Square Enix has always had a habit of releasing handfuls of games in a rush, mixing big names from reliable IPs with...

5Sep

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Gaming

Pokémon Has Taken Over My Life, From Games To Cards To Toys

Image: The Pokemon CompanyIn my mid-40s, my life is so latterly being taken over by Pokémon. After falling down the Pokémon GO hole in 2020, and then chronicling its slow takeover of my spare time, I have since found myself the primary Pokémon GO correspondent for Kotaku. And now, as if that weren’t enough, I’ve finally discovered the TCG. RIP my bank balance. Today feels like a good day to have an amiable chat with you about the whole experience.I was exactly the wrong age for Pokémon. In 1997, I had just failed the exams we Brits take to get into university, and was miserably retaking the same subjects I couldn’t comprehend. In 1998, I started a far less ambitious (and ultimately awful) university course. I was a student, just starting my writing career, kissing girls, and playing pool i...

16Aug

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Gaming

Stadia Fans Still Clocking Thousands Of Hours On ‘Dead’ Service

Image: Google / Kotaku / Zoa.Arts (Shutterstock)Google Stadia hasn’t really been in the mainstream spotlight since its high-profile launch in 2019. And outside of bad news and poor reviews, it mainly disappeared from most gaming sites and YouTube channels. But the players who’ve invested hundreds or even thousands of hours into Google’s video game streaming service don’t seem to care what others think. To them, Google Stadia is the perfect solution to a hobby that they feel has become too expensive, complicated, and restrictive. For most of you reading this, Google Stadia is that cloud-based streaming video game service Google launched a few years ago which may or may not be around still. It’s likely not something you engage with beyond reading occasional stories on Kotaku and other sites ...

13Aug

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Gaming

Bungie Throwing Shit At Wall In Court

Image: Bungie / KotakuLast year, Bungie filed a lawsuit against alleged Destiny 2 cheat maker AimJunkies claiming copyright infringement. Then, earlier this year, a judge dismissed most of that case, forcing Bungie to refile its lawsuit. Now, AimJunkies is fighting back, claiming in a press release that the former Halo dev is wrong in its claims that AimJunkies’ software caused any harm. What’s more, the company suggests that Bungie is throwing “shit” at “the wall” in court in an effort to see what sticks.As reported by TorrentFreak, AimJunkies is firing back at Bungie via press release following its earlier victory in court against the studio behind Destiny. That victory happened back in April of this year, when a federal judge dismissed most of Bungie’s lawsuit against the cheat maker, s...

9Aug

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Gaming

Elden Ring Just Got A Huge Update That Nerfs Bloodhound Step

Screenshot: FromSoftwareIt’s been a while since Elden Ring saw any love, but patch 1.06 is here. There’s not much in the way of new additions, though notably the update means you can now do co-op or invasions in multiple places at once in addition to having larger invasion area. There’s also a new mysterious NPC who is supposed to help you advance Varre’s questline without wading into multiplayer at all, though in typical FromSoftware fashion no word on where to find this useful fellow. Still, the update is an enormous one, at least when it comes to gameplay tweaks.The much-reviled Bloodhound Step, an Ash of War which allows you to dodge attacks at high speeds while becoming invisible, has been tuned down so that the more you use it, the less effective it is. Bloodhound Step does also go f...

2Aug

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Gaming

Pokémon Tournaments Allow Mythical Pokémon For Ranked Matches

Image: NintendoCompetitive Pokémon trainers are both excited and terrified at the recent rule changes in the video game championships (VGC), where players compete against one another via Pokémon Sword and Shield in an array of leagues. Mythical Pokémon are now allowed for official tournament play for the first time. This means that nobody is safe from heavy-hitters like Megearna or Victini, and the community is scrambling to find counters. Some of the most truly diabolic players have already started to add broken Pokémon to their own teams. The rules for the latest Series 13 ranked matches, starting September 1, were posted yesterday for Pokémon Sword and Shield, this series focused on the Galar region, The rules mainly remained the same from the last series, except for an extended eligibl...

1Aug

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Gaming

Xenoblade 3 Is Already Winning Me Over

Screenshot: NintendoI’ve been looking forward to Monolith Soft’s next game since the last one ended in 2017, though not without my fair share of reservations. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was a meandering JRPG with a hodgepodge of systems and extremely uneven storytelling. As much as I love the series, I was worried Xenoblade Chronicles 3 would be the same. So far, it’s not. It’s a first-party Nintendo Switch blockbuster that can hang with the rest of the library.Five hours in, it feels like the most lush and balanced game in the series. The environments are sprawling but filled. Combat has plenty of layers to experiment with but none of them seem overly obtuse or overbearing. Your party’s roster is stocked with classic archetypes that stop short of cliché. And the music, responsible for sustain...

27Jul

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Gaming

A Half-Million Dollar Pokémon Card Heist Just Happened

Photo: Kotaku / Toby WalkerWe’re an odd species, what with our predilection for scarcity, even if that scarce item is a piece of cardboard with a cartoon drawn on it. So it is that 62-year-old South Carolina resident Christopher Polydorou is alleged to have had his home broken into, and his $500,000 Pokémon card collection stolen.Polydorou isn’t just someone who dug out a gem mint collection of cards from his attic and got lucky. The insurance broker, as reported by The Smoking Gun, is a collector of many types of cards, and stores his collections in a temperature-controlled room within his 6,800-square-foot home on the waterfront. The Pokémon cards sat alongside more traditional cardboard compilations, like baseball, football and basketball cards, occupying a dedicated room in the seven-b...

12Jul

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Gaming

Skyrim Co-Op Mod Released For PC, Can Support Over 30 Players

Screenshot: Skyrim Reborn TogetherI know there have been a lot of attempts at releasing multiplayer mods for Skyrim over the years, but none of those have been as ambitious as the co-op mod Skyrim Together Reborn, which aims to get between 2-8 players running around in the same game, completing the same quests and fighting the same monsters.The mod, which has been years in the making, was released last week. And while it’s not without its teething problems—you can read some of those here—for the most part it works, allowing players to jump into the same world and have all their actions and progress sync up. To see what this is like in action, here’s a video the development team released earlier in the year, showing five players completing a few story missions:Skyrim Together Reborn quest s...

5Jul

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Gaming

Diablo Immortal Earns $1 Million A Day, Data Shows

Image: BlizzardIn its first month of release Blizzard’s controversial new mobile game, Diablo Immortal, has racked up nearly $50 million in reported revenue across 10 million downloads. Even as debates and criticism swirled around the free-to-play RPG, data shows that the game has made at least $1 million a day since launch. As first reported by Mobilegamer.biz, data from AppMagic seems to indicate that Blizzard’s Diablo spin-off is raking in the cash. According to the data, in the game’s first week it was downloaded 6.85 million times. By July 3, that number increased to 10.35 million downloads. And while not all of these players likely stuck around or spent money, enough players did that on June 11 Immortal racked up $2.4 million in revenue, its best day so far. 30 days after release, Im...