One modder has shown off a new angle to Elden Ring, quite literally.

YouTuber Kevin “Flurdeh” Hensen reimagined the game with an isometric viewpoint and tweaked frame rates to tilt-shift Elden Ring so that it looked like an old-school RPG. Similar to Diablo’s isometric viewpoint, Hensen’s work–made possible by software created by photo mode modder Frans Bouma–moves the camera up high to provide a new perspective.

“Most of the effect’s illusion comes from the angle and depth of view so I experimented with that a lot until I got the right look,” Hensen said to Kotaku. “Then I sped up the footage and removed certain frames from the videos to make the whole thing look like toys in a stop-motion animation.”

The end result is a deceptively adorable take on From Software’s grimdark world, and bears more than a passing resemblance to retro games like Fallout. Hensen has also applied these techniques to Days Gone and Red Dead Redemption 2, in case you want to see what those titles would like with a tilt-shifted design.

Elsewhere in the Lands Between, a recently discovered network test build unearthed some fascinating content that was cut from the final release. Elden Ring has been a blockbuster success story so far, and after a number of weeks at the top of the Steam charts it has finally been dethroned by Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga.

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Last month, Motive Studios held a developer stream for its upcoming Dead Space remake, focusing on the audio design for the updated version of the game. Fans had some issues with the sound effects on some of Isaac Clarke’s most iconic weapons–specifically the plasma cutter and pulse rifle–and now Motive has taken note and made changes.

The newly tweaked sound design was shared on Dead Space’s social pages, showing a comparison between the original DS weapons, the ones showcased in March’s audio livestream, and the weapon sound effects as they stand now.

Things you did:
Shared feedback on our Plasma Cutter and Pulse Rifle
Things we did:
Listened and made modifications 💥 pic.twitter.com/HIMJ9kHRE4

— Dead Space (@deadspace) April 13, 2022

Posting to Reddit about the changes, Motive community manager Caden House shared some extra details about the tweaks that had been made. House also stressed that everything shown in the video is still a work-in-progress, and that the focus for this update is on the audio experience, rather than “visuals, animations, textures, or models.”

“The sense of power from weapons comes with the full experience, as it’s not only the core sounds you’ll hear, but also the impact on surfaces, and the effects on the environments,” House explained. “You’ll notice the Plasma Cutter frequency range has been rebalanced to focus more on the kick, as well as the lower end. Overall, this better aligns to that ‘feel’ that so many of you mentioned with the original. With the Pulse Rifle, you can hear now that the rhythm is a bit more chaotic and not as tight as the previous version. There’s a bit more volume from the environmental reaction, as well as more feedback from surface impacts.”

The remake is being developed in EA’s Frostbite engine, and is focusing on walking the fine line between improving and modernizing Dead Space for modern platforms, while also retaining the feeling of the original title.

It’s admirable for the development team to have taken on the fan feeback from the livestream, and implemented it into the game with such a short turnaround. While the game ended up having its release window pushed back into 2023, it looks like the team at Motive is taking the time to do this remake properly. Internal reports have suggested the goal is to deliver a remake that stands up to the level of Capcom’s lauded Resident Evil remakes.

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Impostors and crewmates are bound for Troi as Krafton Inc. has announced a partnership with Innersloth that will see the worlds of Among Us and PUBG: New State collide for a limited time.

The limited-time event kicks off in PUBG: New State April 21 and runs until May 19. The biggest addition to the game during that time will be a new Among Us-style minigame, one that squads of four can play on the starting island while waiting for a match on the Troi map. One of the four squadmates will be designated as the Impostor, and the other three must avoid getting killed before the actual PUBG match begins.

The game will also feature a special set of missions, completion of which will allow players to earn Among Us-themed icons, titles, and frames. Players can also purchase special crates containing clothing and other items based on the hit social deduction game from the in-game store.

A few areas of the map, specifically the Starting Island, Chester, and Anchorville, will be adorned in Among Us decorations and props, though these items cannot be used as weapons during a match.

PUBG: New State is a unique and futuristic take on PUBG, with unique maps, locales, weaponry, and more. It is available to download now on iOS and Android devices.

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Halo: The Master Chief Collection has recently added Floodfight, a new firefight mode for Halo 3: ODST that plays like traditional Firefight but with a hint of Call of Duty Zombies. At first glance, the mode may seem a bit intimidating, but this guide will teach you everything you’ll need to know about playing Floodfight in Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Here are some essential tips to help keep you alive during Floodfight.

How to play Floodfight

There are two different ways to play this mode. You can either play with friends in a custom lobby. Or you can join up with others in Matchmaking. To play a private match with friends, you’ll need to select Firefight on the main menu, then Halo 3: ODST Custom Firefight. After that, head to the second tab closest to the map and select Floodfight.

If you want to play with others in Matchmaking. You’ll need to select Firefight on the main menu, click on Matchmaking, have Halo 3: ODST selected, and choose Spore Attack in the game categories.

Essential tips for surviving the Flood

You should keep in mind that if it’s the Flood, don’t shoot it. In this mode, you’ll have a few AI allies with you, and depending on the map, it could either be USMC Marines or Elites. It’s also important to mention that you won’t have any AI help in specific maps. You shouldn’t worry too much about protecting them because it’s only a matter of time before they get taken over by the Flood. Think of them as a meat shield. They’re there to help buy you time.

While playing Floodfight don’t worry about protecting the AI

Next, you’ll need to learn where all the medkits are. Since in ODST, the only way to refill your health bar is by using one, knowing where all of them are located is essential to surviving late in-game. Like any round-based mode, the longer you play, the harder it gets. With that being said, be mindful every time you use one because you don’t want to run through them fast.

You’ll need to learn where all the weapons spawn. Luckily you won’t need to look too far because most of the weapons will spawn next to you. Usually, they’re near health packs or bunched together in the main hub of the map.

Don’t get attached to one gun, either. This could cost you a life or, worse, the game. The Flood loves to run at you in numbers. So it’s only natural that you’ll run out of ammo fast. It doesn’t matter if it’s your favorite gun. If you run out of bullets, don’t hold onto hope that the Flood will drop some ammo for your weapon. Pick up another weapon and continue fighting. To piggyback off of the last tip. Make your shots count because you’ll go through ammo at a fast phase. Don’t be afraid to melee the Flood if the situation calls for it. Just don’t do it when you’re near a large crowd. Try to aim for the head because it’ll do the most damage.

Always be on the lookout for vehicles. If you’re playing on a map with driveable vehicles such as Warthogs or Ghosts, enter them quickly. Vehicles are an excellent method of getting across the map safely, as you can also run over the Flood or shoot them safely from a distance. Sometimes, if you get lucky, the AI will enter a Warthog or a Ghost and help you kill the Flood. It’s also important to mention that the Flood can drive vehicles. They’re known to spawn in Wraiths, Warthogs, and Ghosts. They can quickly become a problem if they’re not dealt with right away.

At the start of every round, the Flood will always spawn on the edges of the map. So you never have to worry about them appearing in front of you if you’re somewhere in the middle. Unless you’re in a vehicle, do your best to avoid the corners of the map because when the round starts, you’ll be swarmed right away.

When the Sentinels spawn in, lure them to the Flood. When you see the Sentinels spawn, they usually spawn in small packs, so don’t engage them head-on because all of them will lock onto you and kill you within a few seconds with their beam. Instead, lure the Flood towards them, have them fight it out, and kill whoever survived the fight.

The Flood can take control of any dead body in-game. They can even control your dead body or a friend’s body if they want to. So if you’re holding your ground around a dead friend, keep an eye out for the flood that can control bodies because if you’re not paying attention, they’ll take control of the corpse and start attacking you.

As for the last tip, don’t stay in one spot for too long. It may seem like a good idea at first to hold your ground in one location, but this could quickly backfire on you. As mentioned, the Flood travels in hordes, so the odds of killing them all before they get to you are slim to none. Try to find a path you can easily navigate to lure them into a good kill zone. And try not to back yourself into a corner while moving around. For more Halo tips, check out our Halo Infinite equipment guide and our Halo Infinite Season 2 primer.

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Both Sony and Nintendo have updated their subscription services to include auto-renewal protections for users.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), based in the UK, announced today that it finished its investigation into both companies. The organization was concerned about PlayStation Plus and Nintendo Switch Online’s auto-renewal mechanisms, where users may be stuck paying for services that they no longer want to use.

As such, Sony has agreed to contact customers about how to cancel their PlayStation Plus memberships should they lapse and haven’t used the service in a while. Additionally, if users continue to not use their memberships, Sony will also stop processing future payments. Nintendo has also agreed to change the Switch Online service so that the subscription’s auto-renewal setting is no longer the default option for customers.

“Today’s announcement, therefore, concludes our investigations into the online video gaming sector,” says Michael Grenfell, executive director of enforcement at the CMA in a press release. “Companies in other sectors which offer subscriptions that auto-renew should review their practices to ensure they comply with consumer protection law.”

Back in January, the CMA conducted a similar investigation with Microsoft and Xbox. As a result, Microsoft now has to contact Xbox Live Gold and Game Pass customers who haven’t used the services in at least one year about how to cancel their subscriptions. If they aren’t used for another year, then they will automatically cancel.

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Activision released the first Call of Duty Season 3 teaser on April 13, with a cinematic trailer to introduce new operators and the “Classified Arms” seasonal theme for Vanguard and Warzone. The trailer ended with the ferocious roar of an unknown creature, and the Call of Duty Twitter account has since added a mysterious sound clip that continues to point towards a season of monsters.

“We’ve uncovered a device broadcasting a mysterious frequency from the cache. Further spectral analysis is needed to decipher the signal,” tweeted the Call of Duty Twitter account. “Can any soldiers help?”

Just listening to the sound clip doesn’t provide an actual clue, but YouTuber PrestigeIsKey has discovered a hidden message by running the sound clip through a spectrogram, which provides a visual voiceprint hidden in the audio. The spectrogram revealed Season 3’s hidden message: “Monsters are real.”

When you run the audio through a spectrogram… https://t.co/7Xf06mYsb5 pic.twitter.com/qaq6D3cYbd

— Ryan B. (@PrestigeIsKey) April 13, 2022

Having monsters arrive to Warzone might seem a little outlandish, but leakers previously claimed Activision had planned for a major event with Hollywood monsters such as Godzilla and King Kong. Twitter user BeePlayingGames even replied to PrestigeIsKey’s tweet with an audio clip, adding that the sound seems to be a match for Orca from 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

Call of Duty’s monstrous Season 3 is scheduled to start on April 27, and here is everything we know so far about the big update. Season 2 is currently wrapping up Warzone’s Rebirth Reinforced event, as the limited-time event is set to conclude on April 14.

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It looks like something real big is coming to Apex Legends. Specifically, Storm Point looks like it’s about to be hit by a large object or lifeform–perhaps something tied to the Storm Point Season 13 map change teaser from last week.

Developer Respawn has tweeted a GIF of a computer monitor in Apex Legends. The computer showcases a satellite view of Storm Point, revealing that an unknown anomaly is heading toward the map.

Remain calm . . . pic.twitter.com/gPYE2nOTJt

— Apex Legends (@PlayApex) April 13, 2022

Notably, the sensor is also picking up the two massive leviathans that are chilling just off Storm Point’s coastline. So we can clearly see that the unknown anomaly is somehow bigger than the two towering beasts, teasing that something truly gigantic is moving towards Storm Point.

Given the anomaly is depicted as a pulsing red dot like the leviathans, it’s likely that whatever is approaching is alive. If Apex Legends’ universe is anything like ours, then sea life has the potential to be quite large.

So along with the supposed flood coming to Storm Point–theorized based on a giant Apex Legends leak–maybe a sea creature is about to absolutely wreck the northwestern shore of the map? Or, if Respawn sticks to Storm Point’s theme of being the map that features PvE via aggressive wildlife, perhaps the map is about to get a brand-new kind of environmental danger? That would be really cool!

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The Walking Dead: Last Mile is not a game in the traditional sense. I was reminded of this several times during the course of my exclusive preview session with the team behind the upcoming hybrid series. Part Facebook Gaming event, part Facebook Watch streaming series, I came away thinking that Last Mile is, more than anything, an intriguing social experiment that comfortably pairs ahead-of-its-time technology with one of the most beloved comic book series in the world.

When The Walking Dead: Last Mile debuts later this year on Facebook, you won’t need a controller, console, PC, or even a copy of the game to engage with it. To better understand what sort of experience it will be, you need only understand the play on words in its title. The Walking Dead: Last Mile is itself a MILE, or massively interactive live event.

MILEs have been on Facebook before, such as the Survivor-like Rival Peak. In-season, a MILE is like a 24/7 stream, with major and minor moments unfolding at different hours of the day for months at a time, and where AI-assisted characters live out their days whether you’re there to influence them or not.

To interact, players simply need a browser that lets them access Facebook. There, they decide how involved they want to be with the season-long story, whether that means simply watching things unfold like it’s an ant farm, participating in the interactive elements like a morning routine–a new Wordle, perhaps–or even making it their new favorite dedicated series, like watching a Twitch streamer for a few hours every day. If players miss a period of Last Mile, they can keep up with the drama via a wrap-up show that will air regularly and give them something like a “previously on” segment.

Here you can compare concept art and in-game visuals side by side.

Rival Peak has been developer Genvid Technologies’ most successful MILE to date, but Jacob Navok, CEO and co-founder of the company, told me the team is using what it learned from that experience to make The Walking Dead: Last Mile even better, so that all players can feel satisfied no matter their own level of interaction, and maybe more importantly, no matter the time zone in which they live. “If you choose to lean back and watch, it will progress. You do not need to do a thing. The reason you participate in the activities is because you want to have more agency over the outcome.”

Though some interactive elements, such as the mechanics behind communal decision-making, are still being finalized, Shawn Kittlesen of Skybound gleefully stressed that Last Mile is being handled like a proper new entry in The Walking Dead comic universe–and all of the narrative prestige that comes with it. He also teased that though the undead are often slower or even frozen stiff in the Alaskan setting, other new threats will be revealed for the first time in the franchise.

Its story arc, most excitingly, is not set in stone. Players will have a lot of influence in the way the story goes, writing new The Walking Dead canon that can’t be reloaded, rehashed, or rewritten to better suit the lives of its characters or the preferences of its players. As with anything in The Walking Dead, the stakes are life-or-death, and Facebook users will collectively help decide who lives and who dies.

Think of it like Twitch Plays The Walking Dead, except where all alternate narrative branches are instantly chopped off the moment a decision has been made. Those tangential universes simply cease to exist. Rather than compare endings–“What happened to Kenny in your story?”–players will act as a fractured community trying to come together and help characters make it out alive, all while telling a singular story that will be cemented as canon and referenced in future Walking Dead media.

Concept art for the leader of a group central to Last Mile’s drama.

That element of it is meant to entice TWD fans, but Last Mile’s strongest suit has a broader appeal: putting a massive player community in a struggle for survival and asking them not to go at each other’s throats over ideology. I saw glimpses of several of Last Mile’s characters–the fates of whom are in the hands of the potentially millions of players who will take part in its saga. These characters will be fully voiced and animated, and often come from different factions, so players will come to know them, choose favorites, and perhaps even align themselves with certain individuals, which can influence their decisions even more than what they might consider “right” or “wrong.”

Will the characters go to war? Steal from each other? Work to mend bonds both figurative and literal? Much of the story can’t be spoken to yet, because it’s the players who will determine its path over the course of the months-long season. “Do you mean to tell me that people won’t always work together amid a pandemic?” I joked. The irony that such an experience will unfold on Facebook of all places is not lost on me.

Though this isn’t the sort of experience where players will freely control a character in first- or third-person, everyone will have their own character who accompanies them via an overlay. Engage with Last Mile enough and you’ll earn a sort of in-game currency that can be used to bid on different rewards, including a walk-on role in the cinematics of the series. As a zombie genre nerd, the thought of my character appearing in The Walking Dead canon is admittedly tantalizing, but what was even more fascinating to me was learning that one’s player character can die.

“In the world of The Walking Dead, we kind of have the opposite of plot armor,” Kittlesen told me. “We have, like, plot magnets.” It’s likely that players will have to make new characters more than once over the course of the long season, like resetting a post-apocalyptic Tamagotchi. This player character doesn’t seem to be more than a UI addition, but it may help heighten the drama for players wishing to survive the season with a single character. More importantly, it’s a way to give each player their own face and voice in the drama, even as not everyone will be among the diehards who end up in the series itself.

This line of thought opened up a whole new avenue of possibilities for me as a fan. What would I have done if someone like Negan or The Governor came knocking at my community’s door? Would I bow down? Fight back? Run into the woods and leave it all behind? Having a character who can die at any moment means players will have to determine not just what the best course may be for everyone, but what the best course will be for themselves. Whether driven by selfishness, charity, pragmatism, or another vice or virtue, crunching those numbers on a scale akin to Rival Peak’s many millions of viewers feels right at home in The Walking Dead, a series that loves to chew on sociopolitical brain food through the lens of… well, actual brains as food.

The Walking Dead: Last Mile is set to debut exclusively on Facebook in 2022.

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While the rest of us are out here trying to beat From Software’s latest game, Elden Ring, YouTuber Ymfah is beating other Souls games with self-imposed challenges. The content creator is known for his runs, all of which are outlandishly difficult, including a recent run of Dark Souls 3 in which he didn’t take a single step.

The 55-minute long run is a miracle to watch, filled with glitches and exploits that make the final Dark Souls game look simple. Of course, the first problem Ymfah encounters in the run is simply making it out of the starting area. Instead of moving around with a joystick, he slowly nudges himself forward by attacking with melee weapons. As for turning his character, the creator has to aim with a bow or lock-on to enemies.

If that sounds like a painful process, it is, though it gets worse. Eventually, there are ladders that players have to go up to access Dark Souls 3’s late-game areas, and climbing up or down a ladder would break the run’s rules. So instead of climbing the ladder–you know, like a chump–Ymfah executes a number of glitches that let him walk on air and through the game’s invisible walls. Using this, he’s able to bypass what is arguably the biggest roadblock in his run.

Outside of beating Dark Souls 3 without walking, Ymfah has done the same in Skyrim and even beaten Bloodborne with guns only. Aside from past From Software games, players are also doing some incredible things in Elden Ring. Recently, a speedrunner beat the game in under 13 minutes, a record that has since been crushed by speedrunner Distortion2 with a sub-seven-minute run.

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