Take-Two, the parent company of 2K Games and Rockstar Games, is the latest company to speak about the impact of the COVID-19 (novel coronavirus). Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick started off by stressing that the health and safety of people around the world is far more important than the business of making video games.In terms of Take-Two's business, Zelnick said he is not concerned about a significant impact. Take-Two's Private Division has delayed the Switch version of The Outer Worlds due to the coronavirus, as the developers at port specialist studio Virtuos are based in China where their office was closed. However, Take-Two is not expecting a material impact beyond that, Zelnick said.The global financial market may take a "real hit" due to the coronavirus, Zelnick said, but he doesn't believe the games business will be meaningfully impacted.Continue Reading at GameSpotInfo from Gamespot.com

Ubisoft has released a full breakdown of what to expect in the upcoming Ghost Experience for Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. The update will go live on March 24, giving Breakpoint three different game modes to play--including the long-awaited Immersive Mode.With Ghost Experience, you'll have three different experiences to play: Regular, Immersive, and Custom. Regular is the default mode, where you play through Breakpoint with a gear score and tiered loot. Immersive offers a brand-new, tactical way to play Breakpoint with no level progression equipment, only partial health regen, limited resources, and a minimal interface. There's a full breakdown of the experience below. Finally, Custom allows you to set the rules for your adventure.Immersive Experience FeaturesNo Gear Level: Customize and keep the same weapon throughout your whole adventure. Quality tiers and item levels are disabled.Realistic Looting: Loot your enemies' weapon category and switch them realistically. Gear is found from missions, rewards, and crates.Primary Weapon Quantity: Choose to carry 1 or 2 primary weapons.Ammo Loss on Reload: Remaining ammunition is lost when you change magazines.Stamina Level: Adjust how much stamina you consume.Bandage Quantity: Limit the number of bandages your Ghost can carry.Risk of Injury: Choose the frequency of the injured status when wounded by enemy bullets.Health Regen: Choose to limit, remove or increase your health regeneration.New HUD Settings: Fine-tune your preferred HUD with new settings: Mini-Map Minimal: Smaller map with less information on it.Loot Notification Minimal: Smaller loot notification.3D Loot Minimal: Smaller 3D loot drop.Private Mode: Encounter only story characters and your direct co-op teammates in Erewhon.Access to Maria's Shop: Keep access to Maria's Shop in bivouacs or limit it to Erewhon only.According to a Ubisoft blog post, no matter which experience you pick, you'll be able to play with your friends. So you could have a squad where two of you are in Custom, one is in Immersive, and another in Regular. And you'll be able to change your experience on the fly.Continue Reading at GameSpotInfo from Gamespot.com

The COVID-19 (novel coronavirus) is impacting the world of video games, and this includes Bungie and the Destiny franchise. The studio is located in the Pacific Northwest--Seattle specifically--which is where a number of cases have been reported and deaths have occurred.Over the past few weeks, Bungie's management has been working on measures to keep their employees safe, and the company disclosed some of its strategies today--including working from home.Bungie has created a "remote work infrastructure" to support its ambition to keep Bungie's business operations moving smoothly. All of Bungie's employees around the world are now capable of working from home, and there should be no impact on Destiny 2's development.Continue Reading at GameSpotInfo from Gamespot.com

Each new season of Destiny 2 content includes an increase in the game's Power cap, pushing you to complete activities and gather new gear to make your characters as strong as they can be. The last few seasons have raised that cap by 10 points, but in the Season of the Worthy, the Power cap is leaping up 40 points, which will give players plenty to do over the next few months.Bungie detailed the Power rise in its latest This Week at Bungie blog, which explains some changes to the way you'll increase your characters' strength when the Season of the Worthy kicks off on March 10. "Power" in Destiny 2 is a measure of the total strength of your character, based on the stats of your weapons and armor. The current soft Power cap in Destiny 2 is 960, which players can reach by completing events that drop "Powerful" gear. After that, you can work up to 970 through activities that drop "Pinnacle" gear, like the Garden of Salvation raid or the Pit of Heresy dungeon. Since the release of Shadowkeep, each season also includes a seasonal artifact that allows you to keep increasing your Power by earning experience points, but those Power gains disappear at with the end of each season.In the Season of the Worthy, the soft Power cap goes up to 1,000. You'll need Powerful gear drops to go from 950 to 1,000, providing plenty of reasons to do weekly bounties, Strikes, and Crucible and Gambit matches. Once you hit 1,000, you'll be able to push your character's gear up to 1,010 using Pinnacle drops to hit the highest Power levels possible in the game. That'll be useful with the return of the Trials of Osiris next season--in normal Crucible matches, Power levels are automatically balanced, but you maintain your Power level in Trials, which can give you an advantage if you have stronger gear than your opponents.Continue Reading at GameSpotInfo from Gamespot.com

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is arriving on March 20, and as anticipation rises, fans of the series are already planning out what their island homes will look like. Now, thanks to some pre-release gameplay footage, we know about a great new feature that this game will introduce: animated, moving wallpapers.The news comes via a hands-on preview video from German Nintendo website Daily Nintendo, which was then combed over by Twitter page ACPocketNews.ANIMATED WALLPAPERS CONFIRMED IN ANIMAL CROSSING: NEW HORIZONS! pic.twitter.com/ze6jZ6ROFE — ACPocketNews (@ACPocketNews) March 5, 2020In the gif attached to this tweet, we can see the clouds moving across the wall--a feature that was not available in earlier entries to the series. It's subtle, but very pleasant. Hopefully this means that there will be others available in the final game, too.Continue Reading at GameSpotInfo from Gamespot.com

For more than 30 years, Sandman has loomed large in the annals of comic book history as one of the most famous Vertigo series of all time. Created by Neil Gaiman alongside artists Sam Kieth and Mark Dringenberg, Sandman introduced the Dreaming, a metaphysical realm populated by the Endless, the personifications of things like Death, Desire, and perhaps most importantly Dream--also known as Morpheus, who functioned as one of the series' central protagonists. Now, Audible will be bringing Dream and his adventures to an entirely new medium with an audio series produced and narrated by Gaiman himself. Take a listen to the trailer below. Continue Reading at GameSpotInfo from Gamespot.com

A big Destiny 2 patch is coming with the launch of the Season of the Worthy on March 10, and it'll extend beyond adding new content to the game. Bungie shared early details about what's coming with Update 2.8.0, which includes a bunch of changes to various Exotics and how they work in both PvE and PvP activities.You can check out the full list of changes in the update in Bungie's latest weekly blog post. If you've spent time in the Crucible in the last two seasons, either as a Warlock or playing against them, you'll be interested in the change to Contraverse Hold. The Warlock Exotic gives you a powered-up Handheld Supernova grenade, while also reducing incoming damage. The result in the Crucible has made Handheld Supernova a very powerful move that almost always guarantees a kill, while making Warlocks very tough to take down. Bungie is shifting the Exotic to reduce its damage reduction from 40% to 20%, which will make Warlocks easier to kill when using it--bad news for fans of the Exotic, but good news for everybody else.Another Exotic that gets heavy use in the Crucible is Titans' One-Eyed Mask, which allows you to track opponents who damage you and encourages you to chase them down and kill them. Bungie is changing that tracking so you won't be able to see enemies through walls anymore, and you won't get a damage boost when fighting your marked targets anymore. One-Eyed Mask also provides an overshield if you kill a marked enemy, but the update reduces its duration from eight seconds to six seconds.Continue Reading at GameSpotInfo from Gamespot.com

No Time To Die, the 25th James Bond movie, was recently delayed from its original April 2020 release date into November in response to lower global cinema attendance due to the coronavirus (COVID-19). With cinemas shut across China and other parts of the world encouraging citizens to stay indoors, delaying the film made sense for MGM, even though tickets had recently gone on sale.Sources have told The Hollywood Reporter that this delay will ultimately cost between $30-50 million, as so much has already been spent on promoting the film for an April release. However, releasing the film in April likely would have dropped the film's box office total by 30 percent.Considering the box office potential for the Bond franchise, the losses will, MGM hopes, be offset by higher attendance. The last time Daniel Craig returned to the series after a lengthy break between films with Skyfall, it made over $1.1 billion worldwide.As the report points out, MGM spent $4.5 million on a Superbowl spot, and the stars of the film have been on an extensive press tour. Furthermore, Billie Eilish's Bond theme is extremely popular right now--it remains to be seen if it will endure on the charts until November, however.Continue Reading at GameSpotInfo from Gamespot.com

Year three of the Overwatch League is underway and a large part of keeping this season new and exciting is the addition of Hero Pools. These Hero Pools are an alternative to how hero bans usually go down in tournaments, with players and coaches picking characters to ban at the start of each match. In Overwatch Competitive Season 21, four different heroes will be banned each week.The most important part of this update is that these heroes aren’t just banned in the Overwatch League, but across all competitive play. This includes Competitive Play mode, which is available to any player in Overwatch, regardless of platform. Game modes like Quick Play and Arcade are not affected by the bans.This week Hanzo, Mei, Orisa, and Baptiste are all banned. This follows the two DPS, one tank, and one support hero formula, which the Hero Pool system will stick to every week. Each week four heroes will be picked from those roles, with no hero being banned for more than two weeks in a row.Continue Reading at GameSpotInfo from Gamespot.com

Barack and Michelle Obama are working with Avengers directors Joe and Anthony Russo on a new Netflix movie featuring Star Wars actor Riz Ahmed.The movie is called Exit West, and it's going to be produced by the Russo brothers, with Yann Demange ('71, Top Boy) directing, according to reports today from Collider and The Hollywood Reporter.The Russo brothers acquired the rights to Moshin Hamid's book, Exit West, in 2017. The story focuses on the couple Saeed and Nadia who flee from their home in the Middle East after Saeed's mother is killed during a conflict between the local government and guerrilla soldiers.Continue Reading at GameSpotInfo from Gamespot.com

Releasing later this month, the next Total War: Three Kingdoms DLC--A World Betrayed--will focus on adding new factions, story events, missions, and units.The story kicks off following the assassination of Dong Zhou by Lu Bu, his own subordinate. Meanwhile Sun Ce is beginning his conquest of Jiangdong and Liu Bei has succeeded Tao Qian. Those who have played Total War: Three Kingdoms will understand just how much these changes can affect the story line, with the DLC intending to create all new friction between different characters and factions.Sun Ce’s faction will begin as a vassal like in the base game, but can be turned rebel during the story. Sun gains bonuses from ticking off his personal ambitions, which understandably includes avenging his late father. Both have new story events and unit types unique to their faction.Continue Reading at GameSpotInfo from Gamespot.com

When the original pair of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games were released in 2006, they were received as the ugly Duckletts of Pokemon spin-offs. Now, almost 15 years later, it is clear how wrong we were to write off Spike Chunsoft's ambitious take on the titanic series: Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX for Switch is wondrous to play and, in a way, boasts a substantially more resonant fable than most other recent Pokemon games.You wake up one morning and everything seems pretty ordinary, at least until you realize that you're not a human anymore. Instead, you've magically and mysteriously metamorphosed into a Pokemon--which exact species is determined by a fun little personality quiz you take at the beginning of the game. Before long you make a new best friend, who is also a Pokemon, and you decide to form a rescue team together. Why? To save foolish Pokemon who have ventured into dangerous dungeons stricken by environmental disasters, even though they're totally aware of said environmental disasters. Over the course of the game, you embark on arduous odysseys to the many dungeons scattered sporadically across the world of Pokemon, each of which contains several 'mons in desperate need of help and lots of others who are a bit aggravated by the daily earthquakes.What's important about Mystery Dungeon carving itself out a new home on Switch is that DX isn't just some sort of lazy rehash. Perhaps the most striking thing about this reworked spin-off, at least at first, is its revised color palette. It's pretty different to the old Mystery Dungeon games, sporting a warm painterly style to replace the originals' GBA-era pixel art. The revamped rescue base you get about halfway through the game is especially gorgeous, while the relentlessly upbeat soundtrack is capable of both intensifying the charming tone of the art and flipping even the tensest moments on their head. This is an essential part of the game's overall appeal, as it goes hand in hand with the fact that Mystery Dungeon is ultimately about overcoming adversity with a smile on your face. One second it seems as if you're on the verge of the inevitable apocalypse, the next you're bobbing along, beaming for no reason, ready to hurtle headlong into a procedurally generated dungeon to save some 'mons and make some money.Continue Reading at GameSpotInfo from Gamespot.com

Google is opening a second development studio in California that will be led by former SIE Santa Monica Studio head Shannon StudstillIn a blog post, Stadia games and entertainment boss Jade Raymond revealed that the team will be based in Playa Vista, with Studstill serving as studio director. Studstill previously worked at the Los Angeles-based Santa Monica Studio, the Sony PlayStation division responsible for 2018's God of War."The new Playa Vista studio will focus on delivering exclusive games, using new gameplay mechanics, creative ways to play together and unique interaction models that we're just starting to explore," Raymond wrote. "While we're not ready to share specific game plans yet, rest assured we are listening to what gamers want and adding our own Stadia twists to create new IP and experiences."Continue Reading at GameSpotInfo from Gamespot.com

Developer Media Molecule has released a new patch for its game-making toolkit, Dreams. Update v2.06 adds some new content along with a few tweaks, fixes, and improvements to the overall experience.The Welcome Garden Art Pack is the first new art pack to arrive since Dreams launched on February 14. It contains more than 40 sculptures that you can use to decorate your homespace, utilize in your own creations, or remix to create something new.The latest patch also adds Community Jam Collections, which highlights specific collections and should make it easier for those who want to enter one of Dreams' Community Jams but don't quite know where to begin. There's also a new online indicator to let you know when creators are online.Continue Reading at GameSpotInfo from Gamespot.com

Matt Reeves is the kind of movie director Batman fans need more of. After sharing camera test footage of Robert Pattinson in costume as the Caped Crusader in the new film The Batman, the director has now revealed the Dark Knight's ride in the movie.Using only a bat emoji and a race car emoji to describe what he's sharing, Reeves tweeted three photos of the new Batmobile on the movie's set and, honestly, it looks like something out of the Fast & Furious franchise more than it looks like a big-screen Batmobile. While it's unclear exactly what type of car Batman drives in the new film, it looks like a souped-up muscle car.🦇🏎 #TheBatman pic.twitter.com/qJFNprk1ut — Matt Reeves (@mattreevesLA) March 4, 2020What these photos also offer is the first official look at Pattinson's full Batman costume. While set photos were released online recently, they were not taken by the production. In these new images, Pattinson can be seen standing next to the car, looking menacing as he, one can only assume, challenges Dominic Toretto to a race through the streets of Gotham.Continue Reading at GameSpotInfo from Gamespot.com