AlexanderTheGreat

Grab your sword and shield as we dive into another Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Livestream on November 19th at 9am PT. Knowing that we have a little more time to dig into the title before it launches, the team is looking to update fans on more information about the game launching in 2025. If you can’t wait that long to get into battle, this stream is for you.

You can grab right now ahead of release.

You might consider the biggest Xbox releases this week to be Stalker 2 and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, but don't forget the other massive one - free-to-play sensation Genshin Impact arrives on Wednesday, November 20th.

If you want to be ready to go on Wednesday, you can actually preload Genshin Impact on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S right now, and you might be surprised to learn that it's over 100GB! Here's what some Xbox fans have been saying...

The big day is almost here!

After a bunch of delays, Stalker 2 is turning out to be one of the most anticipated Xbox Game Pass titles for the end of 2024 - and the good news is that its release date is right around the corner!

So, ahead of that launch, we're going to tell you everything you need to know about Stalker 2 and its Xbox Game Pass release. This is going to be a huge experience on Xbox and PC, so it's probably worth clearing your calendar — and a big chunk of SSD space — before getting stuck in.

I've been having some trouble unlocking achievements in 360 games, and having achievements say they are unlocked already if I haven't played the game. But the achievements don't actually count towards my gamerscore or achievements unlocked. I talked to Xbox support chat and this is what they told me. Anyone else having this issue? It's been going on about a year now for me.

Oftentimes, video games are delayed because the project hasn't fully come together, riddled with performance issues or game-breaking bugs. But that's not the case with Avowed, according to Xbox head honcho Phil Spencer. He pushed back Obsidian's upcoming RPG because this holiday season was too crowded for the company.

Speaking with Game File (via VGC), Spencer discussed Avowed's delay to February, noting Xbox currently has the benefit of a packed holiday season with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Diablo 4: Vessel of Hate, and next month's Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (not to mention Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024). This allowed Xbox to space out releases and give Avowed its own time to shine next year.

"We didn't move it because Obsidian needed the time," Spencer said. "They'll use the time."

Ahead of the holiday season, and presumably to help drive sign-ups to Game Pass, Microsoft has rolled out a new ad campaign called "This Is An Xbox." The basic takeaway is that, as Microsoft has been saying for years, you don't have to buy an Xbox to play Xbox. That's because Xbox games are available across a variety of devices these days as part of Microsoft's new strategy to gain marketshare. Microsoft is, of course, is in third place against PlayStation and Nintendo.

Microsoft is going big for this ad campaign, with visuals set to appear in places like San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, London, New York, and Berlin. Microsoft also commissioned a live-action trailer featuring the song "The Choice Is Yours" by Black Sheep, which is rather fitting.

Additionally, Microsoft partnered with companies like Samsung, Crocs, Porsche, and The Happy Egg for branding takeovers. The ads first display a product, say, a pair of Crocs, with the message "This is a pair of Crocs," and the next page shows an Xbox and says, "This is an Xbox."

Staff who are members of ZeniMax Workers United-CWA are on a one-day strike to call out Microsoft for an alleged lack of progress at the bargaining table over remote work and for allegedly unilaterally outsourcing quality assurance work without bargaining with the union.

In January 2023, ZeniMax Workers United-CWA formed the first video game studio union at Microsoft, representing over 300 quality assurance workers in Maryland and Texas. Today's strike takes place at four ZeniMax locations across Maryland and Texas, with workers set to return to their desks tomorrow, November 14.

A Microsoft spokesperson told IGN, "We respect our employees’ rights to express their point of view as they have done today. We will continue to listen and address their concerns at the bargaining table."

ZeniMax is the umbrella organization that includes The Elder Scrolls and Fallout maker Bethesda and Doom developer id Software, among other studios. It also owns Indiana Jones and the Great Circle developer MachineGames and Marvel's Blade developer Arkane Lyon.

Last month, Communications Workers of America Union (CWA) filed an unfair labor practice charge against ZeniMax for contracting out work without notification. ZeniMax Workers United-CWA members have raised concerns that ZeniMax’s recent unilateral decision to outsource quality assurance work threatens job security amid record layoffs across the video game industry.

The strike comes hot on the heels of Microsoft gaming boss Phil Spencer's insistence that “the Xbox business has never been more healthy.”

After splashing out $69 billion on Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard last year, Microsoft has cut more than 2,500 jobs from its gaming business and closed three ZeniMax studios. Sales of Xbox Series X and S continue to plummet, and Game Pass subscriber numbers are flat, although Microsoft said it enjoyed a record bump from the recent day one launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Spencer said 2025 is looking brighter for Microsoft’s gaming effort. “The Xbox business has never been more healthy,” he said, citing growth in cloud and PC gaming as well as console usage. “The business is performing right now, and I think that means a more healthy future for hardware and the games we build.”

Spencer is even optimistic about the growth of mobile games, despite cutting staff from the teams behind the underperforming Call of Duty Warzone Mobile and Warcraft Rumble. “I feel pretty good about where this industry is going,’’ he said. “To reach new players, we need to be creative and adaptive of new business models, new devices, new ways of access. We’re not going to grow the market with $1,000 consoles.”

Spencer is of course under pressure to deliver following the Activision Blizzard acquisition, and is in the middle of a big multiplatform push that may end up seeing Halo launch on PlayStation.

“We run a business,” Spencer said in August. “It’s definitely true inside of Microsoft the bar is high for us in terms of the delivery we have to give back to the company. Because we get a level of support from the company that’s just amazing and what we’re able to go do.

“So I look at this, how can we make our games as strong as possible? Our platform continues to grow, on console, on PC, and on cloud. It’s just going to be a strategy that works for us.”

Update: This story has been updated with a statement from Microsoft.

Baldur’s Gate 3’s romance system is one of the game’s most famous and popular features, and while Avowed’s choice not to have a romance system of its own may raise a few eyebrows, director Carrie Patel expressed her confidence during an interview at EGX that the game is better off without one.

The latest RPG from the storied Obsidian Entertainment, taking place in the same universe as its Pillars of Eternity series, Avowed is currently on course to release early next year. While excitement for the game is high, comparisons are already being drawn between it and Larian Studios' triumphant 2023 hit, Avowed is set to follow its own path, focusing on only four well-written companions, with the lack of romance being key to how players will experience their stories.

“It’s a ton of work”, Patel notes, on romance systems. “You want to make sure you do it right. And part of that is also you want to make sure that a player who opts not to romance but still wants to have a very deep relationship with those companions gets to have just as thorough and meaningful an experience on a friendship or ally path as [if] they went on a romance path. And so we felt that we could best tell our companions' stories and our players' relationships with them without the romance option”

For the Avowed team, ensuring that all of their companions are equally fleshed out, and their stories can be experienced equally by all players is key to the game’s story, and by extension, key to players’ experiences. “With the four companions we wanted them to all have key roles in the story, different party roles, different personalities, and ways that they compliment each other and let them tell the story of the Living Lands to the player”, Patel explains.

The lack of a romance system is particularly important with regards to one companion, who Patel explains is in a relationship, something which is key to their development over the course of the game. “[It] isn't a story that I think you often get to see in a lot of games with a party member who's travelling with you”, she begins “and so one thing players will really get to explore with here is kind of how she navigates having her heart in one place, while knowing that she really needs to be here”.

At the end of the day, Avowed and Baldur’s Gate 3 are, of course, different games, and while Patel accepts that romance “works very well in some games”, that is not necessarily the case with Avowed. Though comparisons between the RPGs are unlikely to go away anytime soon, Patel remains confident that Avowed’s quality will inevitably do the talking. “Players will always respond well to a really good character.”

Pocketpair, the developers of the popular game Palworld have revealed the details behind the recent lawsuit filed against them by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. The lawsuit alleges that Palworld infringes on multiple patents owned by both Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. Pals!

Palworld rose to prominence following it’s release on Steam and Xbox Game Pass in game preview at the start of this year. It was immediately compared to the popular Pokémon games, with a focus on catching ‘pals’ and taming them for the player to enslave, do battle with and more.

Following the lawsuit that was filed back in X, Pocketpair have now revealed via a press release that it focuses on three patents that were filed only this year by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company, listed as “Patent No. 7545191, Patent No. 7493117 and Patent No. 7528390” but that they sit under an existing ‘parent’ patent, which was actually filed back in 2021. Palworld reveals the details.

The ‘parent’ patent in this instance is focused on the capture of creatures by throwing an item, and that once captured, would be owned by the player.

Nintendo and The Pokémon Company are seeking an injunction against Palworld, in addition to fines and late payment damages.

Pocketpair have once again asserted that they will fight – stating that “We will continue to assert our position in this case through future legal proceedings“.

Do you think Pocketpair have a case? Are Nintendo being big ol’ jerks? Let us know in the comments.

Smoking barrels.

As we spoke about yesterday, Stalker 2 is now less than two weeks away from releasing on Xbox Game Pass - and the team has just gone into detail on the game's arsenal of weaponry ahead of its launch.

As showcased above in the game's new 'Smoking Barrels' trailer, developer GSC Game World has detailed exactly what gear you can get yours hands on in the wastelands of Stalker 2 this month. Since its announcement, this game's gunplay has looked impressive - and we're even more excited to properly go hands on with it after this new trailer.

Read the full article on purexbox.com

A new report claims that Amazon is officially developing a TV show based on Bioware’s hit sci-fi franchise, Mass Effect. This follows previous reports indicating that Amazon wanted to make a Mass Effect show. Seems the retail giant is finally doing it.

Not sure how I feel about this.