Eador. Masters of the Broken World – Valve

Many of gaming’s most compelling stories come from those who’ve helped to create our favorite Xbox One games. In our Inside Xbox One X Enhanced series, these creators will share the behind-the-scenes accounts of the work involved in enhancing these epic games for Xbox One X, how they’ve helped chart the course of the world’s most powerful console, and what that means for the future of gaming. Today, we’ll be chatting with Ninja Theory’s Dominic Matthews, Commercial Director on the epic adventure game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.

What specifically is your development team doing to enhance Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice for Xbox One X?

We’ve put a lot of work and care into making the Hellblade really sing on the console. We’ve given players the choice of three enhanced modes to choose from: Enhanced Visuals mode, High Framerate mode and High-Resolution mode.

How do these enhancements impact the gaming experience, and why did your development team choose to focus on these enhancement areas?

We wanted to give players the option to enhance Hellblade in the way that they want. Different players care about different things. Enriched Visuals mode offers increased visual richness throughout the experience, such as additional fog, foliage density, shadow quality, and higher resolution textures. High Framerate mode runs the game at a silky smooth 60fps. This is for players who choose smoothness of the action over higher resolution. High Resolution mode runs the game with dynamic resolutions that scale throughout the game up to 4K. This is for players who are happy with 30fps and want to see just what their Xbox One X can do when partnered with a 4K TV.

How do you expect fans of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice will respond to playing it on Xbox One X with these enhancements?

Xbox One X players are looking for an experience that gives them an opportunity to showcase what the console can do. Hellblade’s Xbox One X enhancements, combined with HDR support, will give them just that.

What enhancement were you most excited about to explore leveraging for Hellblade: Senua’s on Xbox One X?

We always like to see where we can push resolution and framerate, but for Xbox One X being able to add additional richness in the Enriched Visuals mode was particularly exciting. Hellblade is a very cinematic experience and the additional touches of quality help to immerse you in the game even deeper.

What does 4K and HDR mean for your game, games in the future and development at your studio?

We see 4K and HDR as being important steps in improving the cinematic experience that games can offer. In the case of Hellblade, we took the Xbox One X release as an opportunity to great our first 4K HDR trailer, which can be seen at the top of this post.

Thanks to Dominic for taking the time to chat with us about Xbox One X Enhanced. We’ll bring you more interviews with more developers in the future, so stay tuned to Xbox Wire!

Splatoon 2’s upcoming Octo Expansion DLC is getting its own soundtrack album in Japan, it has been revealed.

The album – which launches on July 18th in Japan – will come with two CDs. One will contains tracks from Octo Expansion, in addition to new songs which have been added to the core game via software updates. The second CD showcases the Inkopolive live concert performance that was held at Game Party Japan 2018. It will cost 3,200 Yen.

To top it all, there will also be a special first-print edition of the soundtrack that comes with a video recording of the Game Party Japan performance on a Blu-Ray disc. This enhanced edition will be 4,800 Yen.

The track listing for the Blu-Ray is:

• Color Pulse (Off the Hook)
• Acid Hues (Off the Hook)
• Muck Warfare (Off the Hook)
• Ebb & Flow (Off the Hook)
• Fresh Start (Squid Sisters)
• Spicy Calamari Inkantation (Squid Sisters)
• Now or Never! (Off the Hook + Squid Sisters)

Splatoon 2’s previous soundtrack album as a massive success in Japan; we can’t see this being any different. Let us know you’ll be importing this one by posting a comment.

It’s Thursday again, so that means the Nintendo Switch, 3DS and Wii U eShops have just been updated with all manner of new goodies. And this week’s haul is a diverse one, too – we’ve got your usual Neo Geo offerings from HAMSTER, a revamped throwback from Natsume, some indie darlings and plenty of new and exciting titles that may have previously flown under your radar. As always, be sure to drop a vote in the below below and leave a comment with your potential digital picks. Enjoy!

Switch eShop

South Park: The Fractured But Whole – Standard Edition (Ubisoft) – Players will once again assume the role of the New Kid. As the newest member of Coon and Friends, you must create your own superhero, build up your notoriety and use your superpowers to save South Park. Only then will Coon and Friends take their rightful place as the greatest team of superheroes ever assembled – and get the movie deal they so richly deserve. The game launches on 24th April.

Death Road to Canada (Ukiyo Publishing, $11.99) – Death Road is built for replay value. Everything is randomized: locations, events, survivor appearances and personalities. There’s a different story every time you play, set in a world that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Available April 25.

Football Manager Touch 2018 (SEGA, $39.99) – FOOTBALL MANAGER TOUCH 2018 on Nintendo Switch is the most immersive football simulation ever created for Nintendo players. Feature packed with a huge choice of clubs, TOUCH gets you through the seasons quickly without compromising on detail or control.

Firefighters – The Simulation (United Independent Entertainment, $39.99) – Buildings ablaze, people screaming and flames shooting several feet high! Welcome to the professional fire brigade. You and your team will experience the exciting work of the professional fire brigade, surviving realistic missions where you extinguish house fires, salvage and neutralize extremely toxic and hazardous substances, and accomplish many other fascinating tasks. Available April 24.

Firefighters: Airport Fire Department (United Independent Entertainment, $39.99) – Fire can be a friend, but also a merciless foe. Nowhere else is the danger greater than at a modern airport with thousands of travellers and highly flammable kerosene. Available April 24.

Gal*Gun 2 (Pqube, $59.99) – Japan’s most infamous shooter makes its long-awaited Nintendo Switch debut! Available April 24. Read our review.

Manticore: Galaxy on Fire (Deep Silver Fishlabs, $19.99) – Write your legacy in gunfire and smoke as you take down the galaxy’s most wanted criminals in action-packed dogfights! Rise to become the hero of the Neox Sector – a deadly fringe world terrorized by ruthless crime lords and their no-good underlings!

Ninja Striker! (Flyhigh Works) – Ninja Striker takes visuals and music inspired by the 8-bit era and fires them up with modern touches. Heavily stylised around Japanese themes, your goal is to advance forward with as much speed, flair and combo power as possible.

7.13b:
==

* Strength heroes base movement speed reduced by 5
* Strength heroes base armor reduced by 1 (except Doom, Io, Lycan, Phoenix, Timbersaw, Tiny)
* Intelligence heroes base strength increased by 2 (Except OD, Tinker and Bane)
* Strength gain for the following heroes increased by 0.3: Dark Seer, Death Prophet, Ember Spirit, Leshrac, Nature’s Prophet, Necrophos, Pugna, Queen of Pain, Ursa and Visage

We’re very close to feature complete, and have now started focusing more on bug fixing & polishing!

A full changelog for the Snapshot can be found on Minecraft.net.

• New custom world type: Buffet
• Coral fans now generate naturally
• Drowned can sometimes be found inside ruins
• Turtle helmet will no longer give you particle effects
• Turtle helmet will no longer make you absolutely completely 100% invulnerable
• Blue ice is now ever-so-slightly less slippery than before. Still pretty slippery!
• When water spreads and would later turn into a source block, it now immediately just places a source block
• We changed how we calculate the temperature of ocean biomes, which should result in nicer transitions between oceans
• Mining coral blocks now requires silk touch
• Changed particle effect from the Conduit
• Optimized spawn position finding code
• Technical: there’s now a distinction between scheduled “liquid ticks” and “block ticks”
• Technical: there’s new block & item tags for coral
• Lots of bug fixes!

BUFFET WORLDS

All you can pick!

• As a popular request, we readded a way to play with single biome worlds
• You can check it out when creating a new world by selecting Buffet World as a world type
• As a side bonus, we also threw in another way to generate chunks in there
• Keep an eye on this screen, there might be more things on their way!
• (it’s pretty crazy)

FIXED BUGS IN 18W16A

• MC-18903 – Villagers’/ Witchs’ right arm doesn’t have the texture flipped. (Like zombies/giants/players/zombie pigmen/zombie villagers/Illagers’ does.)
• MC-83064 – Accumulated fall damage is not reset when levitation starts
• [               ] – x25 more bugs fixed

To get snapshots, open your launcher and go to the “launch options” tab. Check the box saying “Enable snapshots” and save. To switch between the snapshot and normal version, you can find a new dropdown menu next to the “Play” button. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (In the “launch options” page).

Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com.

Snapshots can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds. 1.13 will have a lot of experimental snapshots that may break everything and smell funny. This may be one of those snapshots. This is what happens when Mojang are changing all the things! 

Share your thoughts on how 1.13 is shaping up in the comments below!

Sega is getting in on the micro-console act with the Mega Drive Mini, a bite-sized reimagining of its classic 16-bit home console not too dissimilar from Nintendo’s shrunk down SNES and NES Classics. 

As reported by Siliconera, the device is still in development, and is expected to launch at some point this year. 

Much like it’s micro-console cousins, the system will serve up a smattering of retro games when connected to a TV, allowing owners to rediscover the classics of yesteryear. 

Other details are thin on the ground, but a couple of posts over on Sega’s Japanese Twitter account give us a clear look at the console, and as you’d expect, it looks exactly like a Mega Drive that’s been through the dryer one too many times.

「メガドライブ」誕生30周年記念！
『メガドライブ ミニ』（仮称）2018年発売決定！

思い出の名作ゲームの数々が、これ1台で楽しめます！#セガフェス #メガドライブ #メガドライブ30周年https://t.co/HWj6NFL96y pic.twitter.com/0C9QH1l5Mr

— セガ公式アカウント (@SEGA_OFFICIAL) April 14, 2018

Terraria: Otherworld has been canned by developer Re-Logic after the studio realized the title wasn’t going to reach its potential in “any sort of reasonable time or fashion.”

Announced back in February 2015, Otherworld was pitched as a Terraria spin-off that would utilize RPG and strategy elements to explore “what might have been” had the original game taken a different path. 

Fast-forward three years and it seems Re-Logic has struggled to realize that vision, and while progress has been made since the spin-off was unveiled, the project remains well behind schedule. 

“Our team has a clear vision for this game, and, in spite of all of our efforts, the current state of the game remains equal parts far from that vision and beyond behind schedule from our initial planning when we shared Otherworld with all of you three years ago,” wrote the studio on the Terraria forums. 

“Progress has absolutely been made during that time — but unfortunately, a very thorough status review of the game versus its intended design showed […] that things were quite a bit further away from the finish line than we had imagined. 

“Taking the massive amount of work that would be remaining to complete along with the extensive time it would take to get that done, and how that would greatly interfere with the pursuit of other projects on behalf of Re-Logic — it becomes clear that this leaves things in a very undesirable state.”

While that means Otherworld will never see the light of day, Re-Logic has promised to learn from the process, and has already highlighted some key mistakes. 

For starters, the studio claims it should never have spoken publicly about the game at such an early stage, suggesting that “error in judgment” created an emotional rollercoaster for fans. It also believes outsourcing development of such a “critical title” was a mistake, and now intends to bring the core development of its more high-profile projects in-house. 

The company will continue to work on the original Terraria while it regroups, and has hinted it could implement some of Otherworld’s more promising features in future titles.

Starting at 2 p.m. PDT today, members of the Xbox One Preview Update Preview Rings (Beta, Delta and Omega) will begin receiving the latest Xbox One system update (1804.180407-1335). Read on for more about fixes and known issues in the latest system update and to learn about another opportunity to notify Team Xbox about potential audio issues.

Fixes:

Activity Feed

• Fixed an issue in which users would receive a “Something went wrong” error message when sharing game clips and captures through Twitter.

App Stability

• Fixed an issue in which a user would be using an app such as Netflix or Hulu would logout then unable to launch the app again until they power cycled.

Audio

• Fixed an issue in which some users would experience loss of system sounds on Home.

 Game Hub

• Fixed an issue in which users some users with High Contrast enabled could not see active Club counts and Looking For Group (LFG) post counts.

 Game Installation

• Resolved an issue which prevented some users from installing certain Games (Minecraft and Fallout Shelter), and received no notifications of the installation failure.

 Loss of Home Navigation playing Guitar Hero

• Fixed an issue in which users some users playing Guitar Hero with a Guitar Hero controller would return to Home and be unable to perform any navigation with their controller.

Mixer Crowd Control

• Fixed an issue when a user used the co-pilot for extended sessions the feature would stop working.

 My Games and Apps Collection

• You should no longer encounter an issue with My Games and Apps appearing empty or non-functional when launched.

 Settings – Privacy

• Fixed an issue in which some users could not view or change Privacy Settings.

 System Reliability

• Resolved a system stability issue that could result in apps crashing when multiple games or apps are running.

Video Playback

• Fixed issues with the UHD version of Disney’s latest BD-disc “Thor:Ragnarok” disc in which playback would hang towards the end of the movie.

Known Issues:

Pi-hole

• Pi-hole users may encounter issues signing in, creating, or recovering accounts upon downloading the 1804 update. This is due to a new configuration file which is downloaded from a URL Pi-hole blocks by default.
• Workaround: Add clientconfig.passport.net to the Pi-hole allowed IP address list.

Profile Color

• Sometimes users may encounter an incorrect Profile color when powering on the console.

Audio

• Hulu app volume is lower than expected—the Hulu team is working on an app update.

Audio Issues Help Needed

• We need your help if you are experiencing any audio issues on the console!
• If you experience any loss of audio on Home or in games and apps please use Report a problem and provide as much detail as possible please including:
  
  • TV make and model
  • Audio receiver or headset make and model
  • Duration and frequency of the issue (How long did the issue occur? How often?)
  • A video of the issue including audio if possible – please post a link to the video in your bug or we can direct message you for it.