Another week of gaming is in the books, and we’ve hand-picked another few pieces of news to help keep you up to date with what’s going on in the industry! Keep an eye out for the Digest every Sunday night, and be sure to check the archive for news from weeks gone by!
Editor’s Note: Apologies for this Digest’s lateness, I’ve been caught out with the flu all week! Back on track this weekend.
We learned a bit more about Pokémon Scarlet and Violet:
Although Nintendo’s latest Pokémon Presents live stream focused on quite a lot more than just Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, it’s pretty fair to suggest that the new mainline titles were the big headline. Here’s everything we learned:
- The game’s setting is called Paldea.
- Your main “hub” — think Pokémon Legends: Arceus’s Jubilife Village — is a school, and you’ll take on the role of a student within it.
- There are three different story campaigns for you to follow once you’re sent off on your school’s “treasure hunt”. One of them is the typical Pokémon campaign — earn eight gym badges (in any order you want this time!), become the Pokémon Champion, yada yada — but the other two are yet to be revealed.
- The game’s Legendary Pokémon, Koraidon and Miraidon, are… look, they’re basically Transformers. They can transform into vehicles that replace the Ride Pokémon from Legends: Arceus.
- We met three new Pokémon: the Poison/Ground-type Paldean variant of Wooper, which the internet has affectionately nicknamed “Pooper”; Fidough, the Fairy-type dog made out of dough; and the 14’9”, 1,543.2lb Ice-type Terra Whale known as Cetitan.
- It’s got a new evolution gimmick called Terastallisation, which sees a Tera Jewel appear on top of their head, their bodies “[glisten] like a cut gemstone,” and their type change to one of the 18 available Tera Types. These Tera Types are not specific to the Pokémon, either: you might catch a Pikachu whose Tera Type is Grass, and then one whose Tera Type is Dark. This adds another layer to the “Same-Type Attack Bonus”, whereby the boost will be even larger if the Pokémon uses a move that matches both its Tera Type and one of its original types.
There’s plenty more information to come in the next few months, I’m sure, but for now, this looks like a fantastic continuation of the new direction Pokémon Legends: Arceus pushed the series in!
The upcoming League of Legends fighting game will be free to play:
Senior Director and Executive Producer Tom Cannon — who also started the EVO Championship Series with his brother, Tony — explained that Riot made the decision to go free-to-play in order to “remove as many barriers of entry as possible,” while also promising that any monetisation the studio implements will be “respectful of both your time and your wallet.” This will be Riot’s fourth free-to-play game within the League of Legends universe, following League itself, the 2019 auto-battler Teamfight Tactics, and the 2020 digital CCG Legends of Runeterra.
Alongside Cannon’s update, Riot also shared some information about another League of Legends champion who’s set to appear in Project L: “the Truth Bearer of Nagakabouros”, Illaoi. Game Designer Caroline Montano — a former Illaoi main on League of Legends — explained that she’s going to be a “big body”, with a “huge hurtbox, massive hits [and] slower movement,” and most of her damage will come from Illaoi herself, rather than from the aforementioned Nagakabouros.
Project L is looking pretty interesting based on the little we know so far, but Riot has yet to give it a release window.
Sony is worried that players will jump to Xbox if Microsoft owns Call of Duty:
Microsoft’s massive acquisition of Activision Blizzard might seem like old news, so some might be unaware that it still hasn’t gone ahead: it needs to be approved by competition regulators around the world before it can actually go through. One of those regulators, Brazil’s Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Econômica (CADE; Administrative Council for Economic Defense), published its findings online for all to see, and ResetEra user Idas took the time to translate various companies’ responses to the regulator’s questions.
While most of the companies CADE interviewed weren’t overly concerned about the transaction, rival platform holder Sony laid bare that it absolutely is. Predominantly, Sony is afraid that Call of Duty is popular enough to influence gamers’ choice of console, and that there are no competitors in the space that can come close to rivalling the series’ popularity — this in spite of other companies mentioning Apex Legends, Battlefield, Counter-Strike, Destiny, Rainbow Six and Valorant as competitors in the space.
It’s a truly fascinating read, if only to see how much importance Sony has placed on a specific IP while ignoring some of its own genuine system-sellers. It’s also funny when you consider that Microsoft itself told New Zealand’s Commerce Commission that “there is nothing unique about the video games developed and published by Activision Blizzard that is a ‘must have’ for rival PC and console video game distributors” (page 49, item 10.3(b))… and the fact that Microsoft has repeatedly promised that it will continue to publish Activision Blizzard titles on PlayStation and other platforms.
Quick Bites:
We got a look at FIFA 23’s Career Modes, which are set to get a bit of an overhaul with… Basically a gazillion extra cut-scenes to skip through. It will have actual, authentic managers, though, and the “playable highlights” in your Player Career will make it a little easier to play through all of those games.
Sony is discontinuing the PS5’s Accolades feature, because it “hasn’t seen the level of usage [it] anticipated.” That’s probably got a lot to do with the fact that it involves being nice to other gamers…
Multiversus Season 1 (and Morty Smith) has been delayed from its initial release date of August 9. Player First Games did not specify a new release date for the content, but promised that it’s “dedicated to delivering new and exciting content that delights players.”
YouTuber Jtisallbusiness spent more than $100,000 on Diablo Immortal… and spent a month and a half struggling to find competitors in the game’s PvP battlegrounds because of it. Blizzard has since fixed the issue, but that just means he’s now matching against people a lot weaker than he is.
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