Another week, another set of exciting and not-so-exciting vidya game news. Look, it’s Saturday night and I’d rather use this precious hour to finish off some of our upcoming reviews. That means you’re saved from my usual rant and blabber on this one. If I had all the time in the world…
#1 Cyberpunk 2077 But Multiplayer
Yes, yes there are too many media houses kissing Cyberpunk’s 2077’s neon-bathed butt to fill up their daily news section these days, but that just goes to show how far the once-minuscule Polish studio has come since the release of the first Witcher. CD Projekt Red has announced that CP 2077 will be getting a multiplayer mode. Rest assured, they aren’t sacrificing the single-player campaign to shoe-horn in a half-arsed multiplayer mode. The plan is to release the base game first, follow it up with a couple of free and paid DLC and when everything is said and done, release some sort of multiplayer mode. It is unknown at the moment what the multiplayer mode will look like.
#2 Ghost Recon: Breakpoint Closed Beta Underway
The closed beta for Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s The Division 2.5…I mean Ghost Recon: Breakpoint is now underway. Even after getting into the beta and downloading it, I couldn’t manage to spare some time for the Ghosts. So I hope fans will forgive me for the blatant generalization back there. It looks cool and all but looks like Ubisoft is pulling the ‘bringing all our titles under one big gameplay trope’ once again. I’d loved to be proven wrong when the game launches next month, but eh, I’m still happy with Advanced Warfighter. Ghost Recon Breakpoint Beta is available till 9th September 2019 at 12 pm CEST
#3 Gears 5- Xbox One Gets One Exclusive Right
Gears of War, the third-person shooter series where the good boys never skip a leg day launched its latest iteration, Gears 5, and boy did it deliver. It does everything you expect a Gears game to do well and then some. Great combat, amazing visuals, tightly knit campaign and spectacular set-pieces – it’s all there in its full glory. We’re finally glad to say that the Xbox One has received an exclusive (technically it’s also out on PC but whatever) worthy of its legacy in a while. Also, it has Dave ‘The Animal’ Bautista in it.
#4 Path of Exile Receives Yet Another Expansion
Can someone please give an award to Grinding Gear Games? Path of Exile, one of the two pinnacles of ‘how to do f2p right’ (the other being Warframe of course) has received yet another expansion which further reduces your social life by another 200 hours. Titled Blight, the free expansion combines the exciting action combat of PoE with the strategy of classic tower defense games. As with all Path of Exile expansions, Blight introduces a wide selection of new skills, items and balance changes. Moreover, there will be significant revamps to a few key character archtypes; the Necromancer, the Poison Assassin and the Mine Saboteur.
#5 New Box Art for PS4 Exclusives
While Sony is hitting homerun with each AAA exclusive being released, the company might have thought it’d be a good idea to go back and give the box art of some of its most prestigious games a makeover (why are the vanilla art so tasteless?). If you’re in the UK, then you can get Bloodborne, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition, The Last Guardian, The Last of Us Remastered, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Ratchet and Clank, Shadow of the Colossus, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, and Wipeout: Omega Collection in new sexy minimalist covers. Sony is also looking into making these available as printable JPEGs for the rest of the world.