Remember that only those on Xbox One / Windows 10 / and Android may participate in the Beta builds.  You will not be able to join Realms or non-beta players worlds and you will not be able to open worlds opened in the Beta in earlier/current stable builds of Bedrock.

Performance and Stability

• Fixed crash that could occur when playing an emote and suspending the game (MCPE-73235)

General

• Tweaked arm animation for Brutes, Piglins, and Vindicators that have their weapons removed (MCPE-83581)
• Emotes can no longer be equipped before unlocking them (MCPE-84810)
• Custom skins now work properly on multiplayer (MCPE-48207)

Achievement Screen

• New achievements screen design and added a new achievement details screen (available after gradual roll-out). We would love to hear your feedback on it here in this post!

General

• Custom names now modify boss’s bars (MCPE-43473)
• Fixed bug where system language setting for Simplified and Traditional Chinese was not honored by the game
• Nintendo Switch can now upload worlds to Realms again (REALMS-474) 
  
  • NB – this fix is still in beta so won’t be available for Realms or non-beta platforms yet, but we wanted to give you a heads up this fix is on its way!
• Game no longer crashes if a player opens a Shulker Box they’re standing on after rejoining a multiplayer session
• Fixed issue where some walls were not correctly connected on world load
• Fishing Rod will now correctly cast when close to a Mob (MCPE-65249)
• Fixed an issue that meant the block highlight/selection box was extending above blocks
• Fixed an issue with missing animation when damaging bamboo
• Added Noto Sans font license button and pop-up dialog to Settings screen (in the Profile section)

Graphical

• Fixed a graphical issue with glass blocks in City Living world, that affected some devices on Windows 10
• Fixed an issue with the skybox background graphics not rendering correctly on some devices

Actors

• The “minecraft:behavior.controlled_by_player” goal is now data-driven
• Physics Component’s has_gravity is now used to decide whether a mob should apply water gravity, if the mob does not have a Navigation Component
• Ender Crystals can no longer be pushed
• The Squid’s rendering is now data-driven
• Minecarts are now data-driven. This converted minecart rideable, minecarts with chest, with hopper, with command block, and with TNT to be data-driven

Display Name Component

• Items can now override their display name with a localized ‘value’. If a value is not supplied the component will stay with its default name. If the value supplied is not in the localization file the display name will be the value string

Item Parsing

• Example 1
  
  • any_tag functionality added to several actor components. In addition to representing items as item names in json they can now be represented as a set of tags
  • “item”: {“any_tag”: “food”}
  • “item”: {“any_tag”: [“food”, “wood”]}
  • “bribe_items”: [“emerald”, {“any_tag”: “stone”}]
  • minecraft:ageable feed_items can now use any_tag functionality
  • minecraft:breedable breed_items can now use any_tag functionality
  • minecraft:bribeable bribe_items can now use any_tag functionality
  • minecraft:giveable items can now use any_tag functionality
  • minecraft:healable items can now use any_tag functionality
  • minecraft:tamemount feed_items and auto_reject_items can now use any_tag functionality
  • minecraft:equippable accepted_items can now use any_tag functionality
• Example 2
  
  • looks for “apple” key in the vanilla localization for a string to use as the display text, which it will NOT find a value so the display name will just be “apple”
  • “minecraft:display_name”: {
    “value”: “apple”
    }
• Example 3
  
  • looks for “item.apple.name” key in the vanilla localization for a string to use as the display text, which it will find a value as “Apple”. Note “minecraft:” namespace not required.
  • “minecraft:display_name”: {
    “value”: “item.apple.name”
    }
• Example 4
  
  • looks for a custom string supplied in the resource pack, if not found the display name will be “item.my_namespace:My_Awesome_Item.name”.
  • “minecraft:display_name”: {
    “value”: “item.my_namespace:My_Awesome_Item.name”
    }

To ensure that we can devote our resources to the platforms where most Crafters are playing, we are ending support for certain older devices and platforms where Minecraft is available. Effective in October 2020, Minecraft will no longer be updated or supported on Gear VR, Windows 10 Mobile, Android devices with 768MB of RAM or less, iOS devices running iOS 10 or below, or video cards that only support DirectX 10.1 or below.

If your device is affected, a prompt will appear in-game to let you know if it will no longer receive updates. Please see the article on Minecraft.net for more information.

Despite having the word “games” in its title, Riot Games spent the better part of the 2010’s building off of the release of a single game: League of Legends. Late last year, that all began to change with the release of Teamfight Tactics, an autobattler in the vein of Auto Chess, a mod that grew popular in the DOTA 2 community before multiple gamemakers began to develop full titles inspired by it.

At GDC Summer, Teamfight Tactics design lead David Abecassis finally got to deliver a design-oriented talk that covered why Teamfight Tactics has been such a huge hit: in particular, why it’s been so successful with League of Legends players who may have drifted away from the original game.

Abecassis explained that Riot employees became obsessed with Auto Chess at the start of 2019, loving how it embodied some of the high moments of MOBA games, but compacting them into a more relaxed, non-confrontational experience. If you’re wondering how a game can embody the MOBA genre, but still be “non-confrontational,” Abecassis credits the game’s free-for-all/Battle Royale-type experience, which mathematically lowers the player chances of winning. “It’s quite different from 50-50 PvP games, where if you’re not winning, you’re losing,” he pointed out.

(This is technically true of the autobattler genre as well, but when you have 7 opponents enter and 1 leave, that’s a different experience than the tense team-based combat of League of Legends.)

Since Riot happened to also have a globally popular MOBA lying around, they realized they could build something similar to capture that experience. To that end, Abecassis said it was important for Riot to identify who’d even want to play “League of Legends Auto Chess” anyway. He described the ideal Teamfight Tactics player as someone who still enjoys the competition and mastery found in League of Legends, but who isn’t interested in testing pushing the physical capabilities that the MOBA demands, in favor of a more relaxed experience.

These players do exist (especially on the older side), and may be an audience orbiting multiple game franchises.

That characterization informed design decisions on Teamfight Tactics, such as how players acquire units during the game’s planning phase. An earlier build of Teamfight Tactics required players to quickly click around during a 30-second timer to manage their units, in a process called “juggling,” that let them purchase more units than they could store on the bench in order to find the most strategically viable advantage. It was a mechanic that fits the game’s balance, and rewarded high skill, but punished players who couldn’t process information or click quickly.

The solution was to keep the timer, but limit the total units a player could purchase, and deny them the ability to purchase more units than they could field. This raised some feedback from playtesters, who objected that the juggling mechanic helped the best players rise to the top. But by shifting the team’s design goals, the notion of what determined the “best” players had to be adjusted to fit the game’s new direction.

Obviously not every developer has the resources to muster a whole other development team to capture a portion of their audience that may be exhausted on their primary game, but if you’re trying to retain a fanbase, it’s an interesting development exercise–even over the span of a year, your players’ tastes and motivations may change, leading them to drift away from high-level play on your live game.

When this happens, the Teamfight Tactics development story may be a way to help them stick around and still be part of your community.

This week Blackbird Interactive’s Rory McGuire and Elliot Hudson delivered an interesting GDC Summer talk all about how the studio wound up creating space salvage sim Hardspace: Shipbreaker.

Launched onto Steam’s Early Access platform in June, Shipbreaker has already earned critical acclaim and a significant fan following. To help fellow devs better understand that success, McGuire and Hudson walked through how the studio came up with the novel concept and, after multiple huge pivots and changes, turned it into a fun game.

Hudson began by outlining Blackbird’s goal to, like Psyonix, Gearbox, and Digital Extremes, build up its internal tech and talent by working on projects for others while trying to succeed with its own original games. After Blackbird shipped Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak at the start of 2016, the studio held an internal game jam to give everyone some room to decompress while keeping busy between projects.

Five teams of seven or eight people got to work, and when the studio gathered together afterwards to evaluate the results, one project stood out: a game prototype called Hello, Collector that put the player inside the helmet of an astronaut climbing through a debris field adrift in space, a la the film “Gravity” or ADR1FT.

“The sense in the room was electric, that we had to make Hello, Collector into a game,” said McGuire.”Everyone produced awesome games for the game jam, but I probably had ten people come up to me afterwards that weren’t on the team talking about, are we gonna make this game.”

It was popular enough that McGuire says “it literally took about two days before we had a full green light” to start development; work began within a month. He said the studio was careful not to set specific sales or profitability goals on the project, to avoid influencing the team’s decisions.

“It’s a very human thing that when you set a goal in front of someone, they try to solve it,” said McGuire. To keep the team from being too risk-averse, Blackbird set three general goals for the Shipbreaker team: “We want you to ship…we want you to make an original game that is unusual, and…we want it to be an original IP that is ours.”

Development began with expanding upon everything folks liked about Hello, Collector, starting with the debris field. The team built out a whole space station that was in the middle of collapsing, refined core mechanics, and began honing the tone of the game’s narrative elements.

“We found out we aren’t above gates and milestones”

Work steadily progressed and since it was an internal project, the studio initially decided to enjoy not having to meet any milestones. But within six months or so, the team switched over to a milestone-based production system because it offered convenient, regular opportunities to have people at Blackbird play the game and discuss it together.

“When we first began development…we felt that milestones and gates were…part of the social contract, that business contract, that you get with publishers,” said McGuire. “We realized, actually gates and milestones…let us take a moment to evaluate the game.”

By the end of 2016, the team hit a milestone “confidence check” and the feedback the team got was that Hello, Collector had developed a sort of “cosmic horror” tone with a “dark, slow plodding pace” that didn’t fit with the games Blackbird was making.

So the studio took a month or two to retool it, and by the start of 2017 Hello, Collector began to evolve into Falling Skies, which Hudson simplified as “Fruit Ninja in space” — an exciting, action-heavy game about grappling between warships falling towards Earth and cutting them apart.

But it proved to be too dramatic a shift.

“We were really excited about this concept of cutting, but overall we weren’t happy with where we ended up tonally,” said McGuire. The team had over-corrected, and some felt Falling Skies became too generic by leaning so heavily into an arcade action game with a super-capable space-grappling, ship-slicing protagonist.

“In trying to address the concerns with Hello, Collector being too slow and too plodding, they felt we had gone and done an over-pivot,” said Hudson. “That we’d lost…that sense of relatability, and this personal touch the game had. It didn’t feel unique anymore.”

The development team agreed, and told Blackbird creative leadership they didn’t want to do the project; to move it forward, they collectively came up with four possible directions the game could go. Whether sabotaging space warships, slicing up starships or battling interstellar leviathans, all were first-person, zero-g games about grappling and cutting into things.

“There was one idea that stood head and shoulders above the rest,” said McGuire. “This concept of tearing apart derelict starships in search of value.”

The team decided to pivot again and try to hone in on this concept of slicing up space hulks, pulling the tone of the narrative back from the heavy action of Falling Skies towards a more blue-collar tone with a working-class hero. By 2017 the game, now Shipbreaker, had three core pillars: a blue-collar fantasy, of tactical ship disassembly, and providing a vehicle fantasy from a human perspective (which turned out to be a bad, confusing pillar carried over from Deserts of Kharak that was changed down the line).

A slide showcasing how the game’s core pillars evolved over the course of its four-year development

Since pillars are by now common argot in the industry, McGuire clarified that Blackbird has a system of building “game pillars” for each project which influence all aspects of production.

“We kinda inherited this process [from Relic Entertainment],” said McGuire, explaining that Blackbird tries to follow four rules when instituting pillars of a game project. The pillar should reflect an authentic goal rather than a strategic one, it should be specific (no one-word pillars), it should repeat across the game, and it should be refined throughout.

The benefit, according to Hudson, is that when you collaborate with your team on defining these pillars you can often count on individual members to remember those pillar concepts and implement them more often in their daily work.

With pillars in place, by 2018 the team had progressed to the point where they could create a vertical slice of what would become Hardspace: Shipbreaker. The game was given the green light internally to go into full production, but there was a problem: the team was creating all the ships you break in Shipbreaker by hand, and they didn’t think they could make more than a handful of cool ships in a reasonable amount of time.

That was a problem because it meant the game could only be 5-10 hours long, and the team didn’t feel it had the narrative elements in place to make a game of that length feel impactful. The team also wanted to release the game on Early Access, and that didn’t seem like a great place for a short, narrative-heavy game.

So instead, they leaned into systemic game design and tried a “systems as content” approach. They revamped Shipbreaker’s design so that it relied on modular, “pseudo-procedurally generated” ships that players have to carefully disassemble while dealing with elemental effects like electricity and radiation (“heavily inspired by Breath of the Wild’s element system,” Hudson added), as well as health and equipment maintenance.

This proved to be the ideal mix, and by this summer the team had finished enough of the game to launch it into Early Access. Throughout it all, McGuire said the team walked away with some key learnings:

They learned the value of keeping the team size small (never larger than 10-15 people) until the game entered full production, because the smaller team could be more agile about creating prototypes and mechanics.

However, they also learned that it helps to never move people off the team or pause the team’s work, since it takes so much more effort to get the team back on track.

They also recommend that devs consider “timeboxing” things by giving a team a discrete time period, say one week, to evaluate a hard choice or challenge and examine whether they can accomplish it. Often, with time, team members will come up with new approaches to seemingly impossible asks or startling changes in direction.

“It’s really easy as a studio, or from a business perspective, to get panicked about change,” said Hudson. “Changing the game, pivoting, and refining it is super healthy.”

Finally, ask for help! McGuire says Blackbird would have had a much harder time building Hardspace: Shipbreaker without guidance from fellow devs and studios; there’s no shame in asking your colleagues for advice.

Yet another week has been and gone, this time bringing with it the announcement of Pikmin 3 Deluxe for Switch, a surprise Smash Bros. Ultimate update, and a much-needed Switch menu icon change, but now it’s time to sit back and discuss our weekend gaming plans.

Members of Nintendo Life have done just that below, and we’d love for you to join in via our poll and comment sections. Enjoy!

Ryan Craddock, news editor

I’m still spending my time flicking between Paper Mario: The Origami King and FIFA 20 at the moment, which actually makes for a strangely nice contrast. I’m really enjoying Paper Mario and its fantastic writing in particular, and despite all the negativity surrounding it, I’ve even found myself liking the battle system. I’m not one to get caught up in the internet’s anger towards games – I loved Pokémon Sword and Shield, for example – but it was still a nice surprise to see that the new system hasn’t put me off.

As for FIFA, I only ever play the Career Mode and have just entered into my second season as the mighty Leicester City. We’ve just made it through the group stage of the Europa League and are currently sitting just outside the top four – which is fantastic, but will make no sense to any of you who don’t like football. Next!

Austin Voigt, contributing writer

This weekend, I’ve got plans to hunker down with Animal Crossing‘s latest updates, the new Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town, and a lot of Paper Mario: The Origami King. A lot of fairly relaxing gameplay for me, as things have been a bit chaotic recently. Looking forward to just enjoying some time in some beautiful digital worlds!

Gavin Lane, features editor

I’ll be dipping into the backlog this weekend and I’ve got dozens to choose from, although DOOM (the original one), Deadly Premonition Origins and Cuphead are the main games vying for attention on my Switch home screen. I’ll also be trying to catch the last few beetles I need for my Animal Crossing: New Horizons Critterpedia, two or three of which I haven’t even seen yet. It’d be nice to get those ticked off the list and avoid a mad dash at the end of the month.

I also picked up the 3DS game Puzzle & Dragons Z + Puzzle & Dragons: Super Mario Bros. Edition for next to nothing earlier in the week. It’s been a while since I fired up the 3DS, but I’m very much in the mood for a mindless match-three. 2020, eh? Blimey Charlie!

As always, thanks for reading! Make sure to leave a vote in the poll above and a comment below with your gaming choices over the next few days…

Target locked - #DCFanDome - August 22. #suicidesquadgame pic.twitter.com/HrXZNKwo0f

— Rocksteady Studios (@RocksteadyGames) August 7, 2020

The embattled short-form video app TikTok may launch its legal fight against an executive order banning the app in the United States on Tuesday, under grounds the ban is unconstitutional.

DOOM Eternal might not even be out on the Nintendo Switch yet, but that hasn’t stopped id Software and Bethesda Softworks from teasing the game’s first campaign expansion, The Ancient Gods, Part One.

This reveal was made by Marty Stratton and Hugo Martin in the opening presentation of QuakeCon 2020, and the full trailer for it will be revealed on 27th August at Gamescom Opening Night Live. Here’s a bit about it (spoiler alert):

Your victory over the hordes of Hell spared Earth from a perilous, demon-infested fate, but saving humanity has upset the delicate balance of power in the heavens. Become the DOOM Slayer once again and set things right in DOOM Eternal’s first single-player expansion, The Ancient Gods, Part One.

Travel to previously uncharted realms of the DOOM universe and confront a new challenge head-on when The Ancient Gods, Part One releases for DOOM Eternal later this year.

This DLC expansion is part of the Year One Pass, included in the DOOM Eternal Deluxe Edition and available for purchase digitally. We have more to share soon on this exciting new chapter

Earlier this week Bethesda also confirmed that DOOM Eternal would be released on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 – with Xbox One and PlayStation 4 owners able to upgrade for free.

This brings us to the Switch version. The last official update we got was in July when Stratton said the plan was to lock in a release date “pretty soon” for the Switch, and with this year’s QuakeCon now underway, we’re hoping to hear more soon.

Have you been holding out for the Nintendo version of this game? What do you think of the new teaser? Tell us below.