Rainbow Six Quarantine officially renamed Extraction, full reveal coming on Saturday
Rainbow Six Quarantine was a fairly safe, conventional title for a videogame in 2019, until an actual pandemic gripped the globe and suddenly the whole thing seemed a lot less cool than it did in early planning sessions. Earlier this year, Ubisoft acknowledged that a new title might be in order, but denied a subsequent report that it would be rechristend as Rainbow Six Parasite. (We continued to call it that, though, because we had to call it something, right?)Today, it finally made a new handle official: Rainbow Six Quarantine will be called Rainbow Six Extraction. "You'll be facing an always evolving alien threat," creative director Patrick Methé says in the video. "You'll have plenty of different challenges to overcome, but will always have one goal in mind: Making sure no one gets left behind. It will be up to your and your squad to decide when to push forward, or when to extract. As you will soon discover, Extraction is truly the name of the game."Clever wordplay there, but there's a literal bent to it too, as the full reveal of Rainbow Six Extraction will take place at the upcoming Ubisoft Forward online event, which begins at 12 pm PT/3 pm ET on June 12. If alien infestations are more up your alley than competitive shooters, there's also a dedicated Twitter account you can follow along with at R6Extraction.We already have a pretty good idea of what to expect from Extraction. Leaks in March and April revealed that teams of Rainbow Six operators will progress through a Left 4 Dead-like series of sub-missions, broken up by airlocks, while gathering intel on an alien menace known as archaeans. Each new area will be tougher (and presumably more rewarding) than the ones before, leading to increasingly difficult calls about when to proceed and when to bail out. It's also apparently possible for players who miss the extraction to be rescued, although it's not clear how that will work at this point. I guess that's what the Ubisoft Forward reveal is for!For the full rundown of everything that's happening during this very busy month of June, which will include E3, the Summer Game Fest, the return of the PC Gaming Show, and even more, keep an eye on our full E3 2021 schedule.
www.pcgamer.comCD Projekt has confirmed that a new Witcher game is in development, "kicking off a new saga for the franchise."The new game will be built using Unreal Engine 5 rather than CD Projekt's REDengine, which the studio said will begin "a multi-year strategic partnership with Epic Games.""It covers not only licensing, but technical development of Unreal Engine 5, as well as potential future versions of Unreal Engine, where relevant," CD Projekt said. "We'll closely collaborate with Epic Games’ developers with the primary goal being to help tailor the engine for open-world experiences."CD Projekt said that the change to the new engine was made to help streamline the development process.  "From the outset, we did not consider a typical licensing arrangement; both we and Epic see this as a long-term, fulfilling tech partnership," CD Projekt Red CTO Paweł Zawodny said. "It is vital for CD Projekt Red to have the technical direction of our next game decided from the earliest possible phase as in the past, we spent a lot of resources and energy to evolve and adapt REDengine with every subsequent game release. "This cooperation is so exciting, because it will elevate development predictability and efficiency, while simultaneously granting us access to cutting-edge game development tools. I can’t wait for the great games we’re going to create using Unreal Engine 5!"  The studio also confirmed that despite the shift to a new engine, the new Witcher game is not planned as an Epic Games Store exclusive.
www.pcgamer.comMicrosoft to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion 👀
League of Legends looking at long lockouts for AFK laggards
Developers over at Riot Games are broadening their strategies when it comes to countering behavior they don't like, and are going to trial new penalties for players who leave or engage in AFK behavior during matches. According to Riot, about 9% of players worldwide engage in consistent AFK behavior.Riot defines AFK as two behaviors that waste time for others: people who idle during matches and people who just up sticks and leave the match entirely. Right now, the worst those players can get is a queue delay: "Queue Delays are a speed bump on an offending player’s way to their next few games: Upon clicking the play button, the queue blocks them behind a short timer. The purpose of this is to change behavior," says Riot.Now, however, players can get escalating penalties of between 1 day and 14 days of a queue lockout. That means no playing at all: They're removed from the player population entirely. "We're removing the player from the population for a while so they can't continue to AFK in games," says Riot.For now, the new punishments are being trialed in specific regions, as Riot is concerned about certain region-specific connectivity problems. (The SEA region, at least in other MOBAs, is infamous for connectivity issues that players can't control.) Players who would be immediately subject to the new punishments have been reset to a lower tier, so they have a change to change their ways before the new punishments are levied.You can read the whole developer log, with stats, on the League of Legends site.Nice spot, Eurogamer.
www.pcgamer.comBattlefield 2042 delayed by a month
Battlefield 2042, which was slated to release on October 22, has been delayed. Electronic Arts announced today that because of "unforeseen challenges" created by the Covid-19 pandemic, it has elected to push the game to November 19."Building the next generation of Battlefield during a global pandemic has created unforeseen challenges for our development teams," DICE studio general manager Oskar Gabrielson said in a statement. "Given the scale and scope of the game, we had hoped our teams would be back in our studios together as we move towards launch. With the ongoing conditions not allowing that to happen safely, and with all the hard work the teams are doing from home, we feel it is important to take the extra time to deliver on the vision of Battlefield 2042 for our players."
www.pcgamer.comOverwatch Reveals New Deathmatch Map Malevento
Amazon’s New World MMO is getting an open beta on September 9th
New Supercell Beta Launch! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY_VluvV54M