In Bloodline: Heroes of Lithas, players establish a legacy in a fantasy world where your progeny inherit the abilities that came before them. The player’s goal in the game is to become the leader of the City of Light, the High Guardian, in the world of Lithas. This is done by expanding your influence over various parts of the city with the help of your children and your champions’ children.
Lithas is filled with unique creatures and races all of whom you can influence to be your champions and allies as they marry and grow through the generations. Developer and publisher Goat Games has revealed there will be Dragonborn, Dark Elves, and Lycans, but it seems there will be other races, as well, like your standard human. You can take an exclusive look at Bloodline’s cinematic trailer below.
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How gameplay works is currently unclear, but it’s described as a card-based RPG. There will be opportunities to resolve conflicts diplomatically, but you will often have to fight, which is where your collected champions come in. Your most powerful champions can get married to create children that share their parents’ abilities. This is how you will acquire your most powerful champions, as opposed to collecting them from a loot crate.
Bloodline: Heroes of Lithas is published by Chinese publisher Goat Games, which created the successful mobile game War and Magic. Bloodline will be available as a free-to-play mobile title on June 23 for iOS and Android, but you can pre-register for the game here.
This won’t be the only experience this year with gameplay based around abilities being passed between generations. You can read GameSpot’s Rogue Legacy II review by following the link.
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Amazon Prime Day will officially run from July 12 through July 13, but the weeks leading up to Prime Day will also be of interest to Prime members. Amazon has unveiled a new promotion that will reward Prime members with a bunch of free games. The promotion, dubbed Start Freeloading, kicks off on June 21 and runs through July 13. More than 30 free games will be given away during Start Freeloading.
Start Freeloading is by far the biggest free games giveaway that Amazon has ever hosted. Each month, Amazon gives away a handful of free games to Prime members, so the retailer is practically hosting six months of giveaways within a three-week stretch.
The free games that will be featured during Prime Day are the most noteworthy. Mass Effect: Legendary Edition leads the pack of freebies that will be up for grabs July 12-13. Members will also be able to claim Grid Legends, Need for Speed Heat, Star Wars Jedi Academy, and other unannounced games during Prime Day.
Prior to the main giveaways, though, you’ll get a chance to secure more than 25 indie and classic games without spending a dime. It’s worth noting that some of these games have been offered to Prime members in the past, but others are new to the program. Here’s the list that has been revealed so far:
Death SquaredFatal Fury SpecialGiana Sisters: Twisted DreamsGone ViralHueMetal Slug 2Pumped BMX ProSamurai Shodown 2The Darkside DetectiveThe King of Fighters 2002
If you’re not already an Amazon Prime member, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial to take advantage of the giveaways as well as the sales event itself. We’re within the 30-day window of Prime Day, so even if you sign up today you’ll be able to shop during Prime Day.
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Recently, Ark: Survival Evolved has experienced a surge in popularity like it never has before. The open-world survival game surpassed its all-time concurrent player count on Steam thanks to a free period following the Xbox Games Showcase. As the game is attracting a horde of new players, there’s going to be a plethora of adventurers with questions about how Ark works. Set in a world where dinosaurs run rampant and there’s danger at every turn, newcomers don’t have much time to learn the game’s mechanics and intricacies.
With this in mind, we thought it would be prudent to go over a few beginner tips that can help players during their first few hours in Ark: Survival Evolved. These tips won’t be too useful outside of the beginning of the game but they will serve as a basis for the more advanced mechanics players will learn the more time they spend in-game. Below, see all 10 tips we compiled for players just starting out in Ark: Survival Evolved.
1. Stay away from the water
Once you begin your journey in Ark, you will likely be spawned near some water or on the beach itself. The beach is one of the safest spots in the early game and it’s where you should stay for the majority of your first few hours (more on that later). However, even though it might be tempting, we advise every new player to avoid going into the water at all costs. While it looks inviting, the water is extremely dangerous. It’s filled with fish and other predators that would love nothing more than to snack on you during your first few minutes on the island.
2. Build a bed or two
While you’re going to be crafting a flurry of different tools and other useful things to help you survive, we recommend building a bed as quickly as possible. Like in other survival games, a bed serves as a spawn point for you if you end up dying out in the world. Once you sleep in a bed, you’re given the chance to spawn there after dying. If you don’t have a bed, then you’ll leave your spawn point up to chance. You can also build additional beds along your travel routes so you can spawn closer to where you died.
3. Spawn in the right spot
If you don’t have a bed or just forget to craft one after destroying a bed, then you aren’t necessarily out of luck. You will have the choice of respawning in different areas across the map. Most of these areas are dangerous and not meant for a newcomer. However, there are safe zones across the map that you can spawn in to remain safe after you come back to life. Choosing the safe zone closest to where you last died or near your base is preferred.
4. Craft a Pickaxe
As you begin to pick up resources and other items, Ark: Survival Evolved will recommend you craft various tools and recipes. While you’ll have your choice among some starter items, you want to craft a Pickaxe above all else. The Pickaxe is a versatile tool that can mine for stone, flint, and metal while also gathering wood and thatch as well. The Stone Pick in Ark should be your first tool followed by the Hatchet.
5. Stay near the beach
As we said earlier, the beach is one of the safest and best spots you can be during your first few hours of playtime. It has few threats, except in the water, and is close to enough resources that you can get started with a simple base and tools to be able to survive in other areas. You’ll want to stay on the beach until you’ve leveled up a few times at the very least. Going past the beach can be a dangerous endeavor, especially if you’re alone. The dinosaurs you’ll run into on the beach aren’t carnivorous and you’ll be able to get the hang of things in no time at all.
6. Avoid glowing dinos at all costs
They’re positively glowing.
If you do decide to venture beyond the beach, you might run into a glowing dinosaur. This glow will be orange and surround the dinosaur’s middle section. If you see this, run in the complete opposite direction as quickly as possible. An orange glow on a creature means that they’re an “alpha,” and they won’t stop to say hello. You can’t tame these creatures and they’re extremely difficult to kill. If you’re just starting out, though, they’re basically impossible to deal with. All you can do is run if you see one out in the wild.
7. Tame a Dodo
Speaking of taming creatures, you’ll be introduced to this feature relatively early. However, at a starting level, you won’t be able to tame many creatures. The one animal you can and should tame is the Dodo. These flightless birds are common in the starting areas of Ark: Survival Evolved and aren’t too difficult to tame. All they’ll do is deal slight damage to you until you knock them out with your fists. Once they’re out, feed them some berries and they’ll become your best friend when they wake up next. You can also tame a lystrosaurus if you come across rare flowers, fresh barley, fresh wheat, etc. This dinosaur can be hand-fed, so it’s much easier to tame them than even the Dodo.
8. Build a modest base
Home is where the dinosaurs aren’t.
After you’ve gathered enough resources, you will be tasked with building a base. This helps immensely with fending off any wandering creatures and gives you a place to put your bed and any valuable resources you might have acquired. Your first base shouldn’t be anything extravagant, though. You want to preserve as many resources as possible since it’s likely the location you build your first base won’t be a permanent spot. Make it big enough to walk around in and store a bed and other items.
9. Watch out for pickpockets
As you continue to gather resources, you’ll actually become a target for certain creatures in Ark: Survival Evolved. Even in the beginning areas of the game, there are a couple of dinosaurs you need to watch out for. The pegomastax is a small little dino that has a furry back and yellow mouth. It runs on the ground, jumps at you, and can actually take items out of your inventory. You need to watch out for these little annoyances and chase after them if they manage to get the jump on you. Alternatively, you also need to watch the skies. The icthyornus is a flying dinosaur that can swoop down and steal items from your inventory as well. Additionally, the icthyornus will eat whatever they take, so you won’t be able to get whatever they stole back.
10. Begin unlocking Engrams
As the game will point out fairly early on, Engrams are a key piece of your progression in Ark: Survival Evolved. Essentially, they are ways to upgrade your character, base, armor, weapons, and other tools. The more Engrams you unlock, the stronger you will become. There are different Engrams for all of the game’s items, so you’ll need to prioritize what you’re unlocking. If you want a stronger base, then focus on the Engrams that improve your base and give you additional items to build. However, if you want to improve your armor, then you can unlock better pieces to craft and equip. We recommend focusing on unlocking Engrams for tools and weapons to start, as these will allow you to gather more resources that you can use to craft additional items.
Those are our 10 beginner tips for new players in Ark: Survival Evolved. We hope that your first few hours are enjoyable and not full of deaths.
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Finding the right cadence of endgame activities is key for a game like Outriders, which straddles the line between RPG and loot-shooter sensibilities. While Outriders is mostly a story-based game about wrecking enemies with ridiculous weapons and physics-manipulating powers, it also borrows a lot from live games–including the need to keep players engaged long-term with activities that kick off once the main campaign is done. Outriders’ upcoming expansion, Worldslayer, is bringing a big new endgame activity to the game, one that looks like it’s taking smart ideas from other games.
People Can Fly gave GameSpot another look at Worldslayer during Summer Game Fest 2022. In addition to more hands-on time with Worldslayer’s new story campaign, which included a little more content than what we played back in April, the developer provided a deeper, hands-off dive into Worldslayer’s endgame and answered questions about what players can expect from it.
That endgame activity is a replayable dungeon called the Trial of Tarya Gratar, which will throw challenges at players that you won’t find anywhere else in the game. The dungeon looks to be built in a similar way to other locations and missions in Outriders, where you run up against a series of battles as you progress through a space. Unlike other spaces in Outriders, though, you’ll run through Tarya Gratar repeatedly for additional loot–and according to People Can Fly, you can even farm certain encounters to tune the kind of loot you receive.
The dungeon is also split up into specific locations that you’ll want to pay attention to as you hit them. As you move through an area, you’ll reach “crossroads,” which sound like they serve as something of a checkpoint on your run. From a crossroads, you can find side paths that often lead to “troves,” which are special encounters, and boss arenas, which you’ll have to clear to advance deeper into the dungeon.
The trove locations are the ones you’ll probably want to pay attention to the most. These are side encounters that lead to a big loot chest, but to reach them, you’ll have to fight through a tough group of enemies. The upshot, however, is that in addition to getting a bunch of loot for winning those fights, you’ll also get specific kinds of loot from troves. Knowing which trove drops what gear, like gloves or chest pieces, allows you to seek out the particular kind of gear you want or need by playing those troves over and over.
In fact, Tarya Gratar sounds like it’ll be imminently replayable. A complete run through the dungeon will take around two to three hours, People Can Fly said, with runs ending when you finish Tarya Gratar, die too many times along the way, or quit a run and return to the base camp location where you start. If you leave the dungeon, however, you can head back in and run it again–and get more loot on the next haul.
Expect to spend a lot of time in Tarya Gratar, taking on its challenges and farming the loot you need.
Tarya Gratar will have its own challenges, though, too. The dungeon is home to special enemies and bosses you won’t find elsewhere in the game. These include the Shadowbeast, a creature that can cloak itself and has the ability to silence players, briefly shutting down their special abilities and forcing them to rely on their guns. Shadowbeasts are augmented by new elite enemies called Beastmasters, who can control the cloaked monsters and use them to hunt you.
During our play session, People Can Fly developers mentioned that one of the pieces of feedback they’d received from players was a desire for more involved boss mechanics, like those seen in other loot shooters such as Destiny 2. Worldslayer is an answer to that request, and it sounds like you’ll find challenging bosses that require more tactics, planning, and coordination to take down, especially if you’re with a group of other players.
We saw a little of that in our hands-on time with Worldslayer, which constituted about an hour of the story campaign. The early portion of the story sends the player’s Outrider to try to infiltrate a place called Black Gulch, where they’re hoping to meet with a scientist who might know something about the deadly, intensifying storms plaguing the game’s world of Enoch. The trouble is, the scientist is part of the enemy Insurgency faction, and Black Gulch is deep behind enemy lines.
In the portion we played, we twice faced off against mini-boss characters, including the Night Fisherman from April’s preview, and a new enemy called an Executioner. While perhaps not true full-on boss fights, both enemies presented new attacks gimmicks. The Fisherman could fling a pair of blades out, snagging you and drawing you toward him for a big attack, while the Executioner likes to leap across the battlefield and land hard with an area-of-effect attack. In both cases, the enemies require a new slate of tactics to deal with them effectively. That’s opposed to Outriders’ other major human enemies, who tend to wander the battlefield as armored bullet sponges, forcing you to use the same strategy of relocating and chipping away at their health over and over again.
It sounds like you can expect Worldslayer bosses to engage your brain as well as your trigger finger.
Though we’ve only seen a few glimpses of it so far, Worldslayer seems set to greatly improve on what Outriders offered at launch. New content and story mean players will have lots of new stuff to engage with, while the experience has been improved via quality-of-life adjustments, like how loot and leveling work, how you can change the difficulty, and how you can chase gear over the long term. From the looks of things, Outriders players should be getting what they want with the Worldslayer expansion, but we’ll have to see how all the additions come together with the base game when Worldslayer launches on June 30.
Read MoreGameSpot – Game News
Anyone who has played Elden Ring knows that it’s a massive game. The Lands Between is a sprawling open world filled with dastardly foes and a plethora of secrets. So it’s not too surprising that Elden Ring’s official strategy guide clocks in over 1,000 pages and is spread across two volumes. Officially titled Elden Ring Books of Knowledge, each volume is available to preorder individually at Amazon, and the retailer just dropped the price of each book to $30. When we first wrote about these guides last week, they were being sold at retail price ($50). Volume 1 releases July 29, while Volume 2 arrives September 30.
The strategy guide is published by Future Press. The hardcover books feature unique cover art, and Amazon’s listings note that each book comes in at 512 pages. If you already ordered the strategy guides last week, don’t worry: You’ll get both books for the lowest prices offered between the time you ordered and release. So, as of now, your total has dropped to $60 plus tax as opposed to $100 plus tax.
If you don’t want to shell out the cash for the strategy guides but still need help with Elden Ring, we have a massive collection of Elden Ring guides that covers practically everything you could want to know about the game.
Editor’s Note: Article updated on June 15, 2022
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Lollipop Chainsaw is coming back, and this time it’s going to be handled by Dragami Games. CEO Yoshimi Yasuda announced this on Twitter.
Yoshida simply says, “Lollipop Chainsaw is back by Dragami Games. Please look forward to it.” What he means by this is unclear. It could potentially be a remaster on newer consoles, or it could be a sequel to the first game.
Lollipop Chainsaw はドラガミゲームスで復活させます。楽しみに待っていてください…!!!
Lollipop Chainsaw is back by Dragami Games. Please look forward to it.#ロリポップチェーンソー
#DragamiGames pic.twitter.com/RlcLrxMkKK
— 安田善巳 (@yasudaD5) June 14, 2022
According to VGC, Yoshida was previously the CEO of Kadokawa Games where he worked for 14 years. Kadokawa Games also published Lollipop Chainsaw, which was developed by Grasshopper Manufacture. Last month, Yoshida left Kadokawa and started Dragami Games.
Earlier this week, Lollipop Chainsaw co-writer James Gunn celebrated the game’s 10th anniversary but also mentioned that he has not been privy to conversations regarding any sort of remastering for the game.
Lollipop Chainsaw was released back in June 2012 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. If the game is indeed coming back, hopefully, it’ll see a PC release too.
The game follows a young girl named Juliet Starling as she fights off a zombie infestation while on her way to meet her boyfriend, Nick. In our Lollipop Chainsaw review, we said, “Lollipop Chainsaw is cheery and obscene, but it doesn’t hit its marks consistently enough to be more than a passing amusement.”
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Kingdom Hearts IV’s reveal trailer made a big splash with its more realistic art style, modern-day setting, and focus on new characters. However, in a new interview, director Tetsuya Nomura assured fans the upcoming sequel is still very much the same franchise so many fans have come to obsess over, even as he said it may feel “slightly different” compared to past titles.
In an interview with Game Informer, Nomura made clear that despite the game’s new, more photo-realistic art style, Kingdom Hearts IV will still include Disney worlds. While it may look more realistic, the game is still Kingdom Hearts.
“It might feel slightly different from previous Kingdom Hearts titles, but once players have had a chance to play the game, I’m sure they’ll be relieved to find that it is definitely a Kingdom Hearts title,” Nomura said. “It’s the game series that they’ve come to know and love.”
However, due to there being “so much more we can do in terms of graphics,” the number of worlds that will appear in the game may be more limited, Nomura said.
As for the game’s story, it will center on Sora’s disappearance and a group of new enemies (teased during the end of Kingdom Hearts III). Nomura said Sora is the “only real candidate” for the game’s main character when asked if the series would ever focus on a new protagonist. He then added if Sora no longer was the main character that the series would stop with its core, numbered entries, and described Sora as just “that important to the series.”
According to Nomura, a “pretty good amount of time” of Kingdom Hearts IV will take place in Quadratum, the Tokyo-esque city glimpsed in the game’s teaser trailer. Nomura described Quadratum as the game’s base, and players will spend time there between venturing to other worlds. While there, players will be able to see more of Sora’s “day-to-day routines,” such as spending time in Sora’s room.
For fans hoping to see more Final Fantasy characters in Kingdom Hearts IV after an almost complete lack of them in Kingdom Hearts III, don’t get your hopes up. Nomura confirms in the interview that with the sheer number of original characters now in the series, it makes it difficult to fit in more Final Fantasy characters.
Kingdom Hearts IV does not currently have a release date, but was announced alongside the mobile game Kingdom Hearts Missing-Link for the franchise’s 20th anniversary. Fans have been furiously theorizing which Disney worlds will be included in the upcoming sequel, with many convinced the Kingdom Hearts IV teaser trailer shows a Star Wars world is finally coming to the series.
Read MoreGameSpot – Game News
It’s never too early to get children interested in technology, and this discounted app from CodeSpark makes it easy to both entertain and inspire the programmers of tomorrow. Discounted to just $10 (or $18 for two accounts ), CodeSpark Academy helps kids between the ages of four and nine learn the basics of coding by walking them through a series of logic puzzles disguised as colorful games.
While your preschooler won’t be developing the next Stardew Valley with CodeSpark Academy, they will get exposure to many of the underlying concepts that are vital in the world of programming. For example, the app offers a variety of games and puzzles that discuss sequencing, looping, conditional statements, and Boolean logic.
Each account comes with unlimited, three-month access to all its content. If you need a second account, you can bundle two together for the discounted price of $18. CodeSpark Academy can run on iOS, Android, FireOS, and PC. New content is released every month, so there’s bound to be something interesting that catches your child’s eye over the course of this three-month subscription.
If you are more interested in programming than your kids, be sure to check out this new deal from ZENVA, which bundles 15 hours of coursework into a single package for $30. Included in the bundle you’ll find classes that cover game development with Godot, Unreal, and Unity–and unlike CodeSpark Academy, this bundle offers lifetime access to its content.
Read MoreGameSpot – Game News
Activision has revealed major changes coming to Warzone‘s Caldera map for Call of Duty Season 4. Additional looting opportunities, visibility improvements, and more are set to arrive with the Mercenaries of Fortune update on June 22.
The Call of Duty Twitter account tweeted an updated version of the Caldera map, showcasing that the seasonal update will remove 50% of the island’s vegetation to improve visibility on the map.
Battle Royale players – we got you 🤝
A few of next season’s updates to the Caldera include:
📍 New micro-POIs and more looting
💰 Secret underground Mercenary Vaults
🌴 50% less vegetation & better visibility
🤔 Plenty more surprises in-store pic.twitter.com/Ux3kR69RX3
— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) June 15, 2022
The tweet also reveals that players can expect to have more looting opportunities on Caldera with the upcoming additions of secret underground mercenary vaults and new micro-POIs for Season 4. Additionally, Activision teases “plenty more surprises in-store” for the battle royale.
A new secondary map has also been announced for Warzone’s Season 4: Mercenaries of Fortune update. Fortune’s Keep is a brand-new Resurgence map, which will be much like Rebirth Island’s close-quarters and respawning action, but now with a new castle island setting. Players can get a look at the upcoming island map’s major points of interest in the recent Fortune’s Keep trailer.
For more on what to expect for the Mercenaries of Fortune update, check out everything we know about Call of Duty: Warzone and Vanguard Season 4. Activision has also revealed Warzone 2.0 releases later this year, following “soon” after the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
Read MoreGameSpot – Game News
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