The player character, Edward Pierce, is a former veteran and private eye in 1920’s Boston. The game’s narrative centers around Pierce’s investigation of the mysterious death of Sarah Hawkins and her family on Darkwater Island.  The trailer showcase both the island and the Hawkins Family Mansion, with a glimpse of how the tense environment causes Pierce to slowly lose his sanity.

While we don’t have much on the technical aspects of the game, Call of Cthulhu is slated for a 2017 launch on consoles and PC. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos is a criminally underutilized game setting, with 2005’s Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of The Earth still one of the scarier titles out there. Are you amped up for Call of Cthulhu? 

Just yesterday, Base listed The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Definitive Edition as launching on PS4 and Xbox One on November 23rd, seemingly confirming the rumoured remaster and giving it a release date to boot. This may lend credence to the possibility that Scalebound will indeed drop on March 31st.

Scalebound is an Unreal 4-based action RPG from PlatinumGames, developers of Madworld and Bayonetta among other titles. While the Xbox One comes up short on specs compared to the PS4, a strong lineup of exclusives is what allowed Microsoft’s console to remain a credible purchase, despite “Resolution-gate” and much backtracking on Kinect integration. As a new, exclusive Xbox IP, which PlatinumGames head Hideki Kamiya said is unlike anything Platinum has made before.

Are you amped for Scalebound? Let us know!

Microsoft is previewing its major anniversary software update for Xbox One. The  first patch for the upcoming update is releasing for people who’ve opted in for Xbox Early Access. The list of new features is quite extensive, but Cortana for Xbox One is the headliner. You’ll have to be an Early Access member to view the patch notes in the private thread here.

Xbox One’s current Kinect voice controls are functional, but rudimentary at best. Cortana will bring Siri-like natural language functionality, a big plus if you use voice controls regularly on the Xbox One. Cortana will work via a headset even if you don’t have Kinect, which is great if you purchased your Xbox One after Microsoft decoupled Kinect from the bundle.

Apart from Cortana, My Games, the Activity Feed, and the Store have also received overhauls. My Games receives several sorting and filtering options and lets you view detailed information about games while they’re being downloaded. The Activity Feed is now user customisable–you can pick what content you see there, and the Store’s received a major design overhaul,

Rumours indicate that Bioware will be pulling out all stops for its Mass Effect: Andromeda showcase at E3 2016. A Bioware contact of industry insider Shinobi602 said that the studio’s going to approach Andromeda’s E3 showcase “Fallout 4-style.”

Last year’s reveal of Mass Effect: Andromeda was decidedly low-key, and short on substance: all we got was  a two-minute announcement trailer with a bit of concept art thrown in and absolutely gameplay or narrative details whatsoever. Andromeda has been quite a leaky boat since, with everything from in-engine scenes to the game’s overarching narrative surfacing periodically.

Bioware’s expected to finally take the lid off Mass Effect: Andromeda at E3 2016, with rumours pointing to a Fallout 4-style smorgasbord of content. Last year’s Fallout 4 showcase left very little to the imagination, with Todd Howard walking the audience through a half-hour presentation that featured entire chunks of early area gameplay.

It’s certainly past time for Mass Effect: Andromeda to receive similar treatment–as far as narrative details go, all we know (officially), is that the game won’t star Commander Shepard (aww), and that it’ll take place in the Andromeda Galaxy (duh). In any case, we’re great fans of the original trilogy (we even hex-edited Mass Effect 3) to get the best ending. Whatever Andromeda content Bioware shows off at E3, we’re sure the game’s going to be amazing.

@G27Status They're approaching it Fallout 4 style, from who I've talked to.

— Shinobi602 (@shinobi602) January 28, 2016

Final Fantasy XV’s European box art has finally been revealed. The European box appears to feature a young Noctis cradled in the arms of his father, King Regis. Keen eyes over at NeoGAF spotted the  box art for the Special Edition in a listing on Amazon Spain.

The box art for the special edition is a departure from the usual Yoshitaka Amano-style minimalist white-backgrounded work we’ve gotten used to with previous Final Fantasy titles. The Amazon Spain listing also indicates that the Special Edition will come with a limited edition Steelbook case for the game disc, along with an additional DLC weapon, the Masanume.

Final Fantasy XV has certainly been a long time in the making. Initially announced in 2006 as Final Fantasy Versus XIII, a protracted time in development hell had people doubting whether or not Square Enix had shelved the project. It was only 7 years later, in 2013, that the game was announced as releasing on eighth-gen platforms, on the forwards-facing Luminous Engine. With remarkable visuals, a wide, open world, and a revamped combat system, Final Fantasy XV certainly seems worth the wait. What’s your take? What do you feel about the European cover art?

Volition, of Saint’s Row and Red Faction fame, will be announcing a new IP at E3 this year, going by the LinkedIn page of Jacques Hennequet, a former Creative Director with the studio. Per Hennequet’s LinkedIn, he’s “worked with a number of familiar faces, old friends really and some new ones, on an IP that will be announced at E3 2016.”

Earlier this year, publisher Deep Silver stated that that they had a major announcement to make at E3, which was initially taken to mean a possible new Saint’s Row outing. However, other resume filings citing work on a title called Agents of Mayhem, and a trademark filing for the same by Koch Media–Deep Silver’s owners–seem to lend credence to the idea that, rather than a new Saint’s Row entry, we may be looking at an entirely new Volition franchise come E3.

Of course, deep down, we’re hoping it’ll be a Red Faction announcement, but considering how badly Armageddon tanked, that’s just wishful thinking. Are you excited about Volition’s new franchise? What do you think? Let us know!

Dishonored 2 is set to launch this November! Bethesda announced this exciting tidbit yesterday. Details have started trickling in and, while we’ll have to wait until E3 2016 for more on actual gameplay, it appears that Dishonored 2 will feature an all-star team of sorts when it comes to voice-acting talent.

To start off with, Stephen Russel, best-known for his work as Garret in the Thief series, will be voicing Corvo Attano, Dishonored 2’s main protagonist. Russel also voiced various characters in Skyrim and Fallout 4. Pedro Pascal of Game of Thrones fame—he played Oberyn Martell for a while before his head was forcibly imploded—is set to voice “Paolo” in Dishonored 2.

Wilson D’Onofrio—Kingpin from Netflix’s Daredevil series—will voice the “Duke of Serkonos,” while actress Rosario Dawson will make an appearance as “Meagan Foster.” While a star voiceover lineup isn’t a guarantee quality—just listen to Peter Dinklage spout bored, phoned-in lines in Destiny—it does belie Dishonored 2’s high production values. We certainly hope the rest of the game will be as polished as the voiceovers are likely to be.

While Call of Infinity Warfare was indeed announced earlier during Call of Duty livestream, for many, the most interesting bit of news from last night was the announcement of the Modern Warfare remaster. Incredibly, it’s been nearly ten years since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare released, a watershed moment in the seventh-gen that redefined the shooter genre.

Whatever you have to say about the next decade’s worth of annualized Call of Duty rehashes, Call of Duty 4 was certainly a masterpiece, and completely deserves a remaster. Have a look at the screenshots below to see just how far Call of Duty has come visually from 2007.

The massively increased texture resolution is what struck us first, of course playing to the eighth-gen consoles biggest strength—lots and lots of video memory. Blurry wall textures are replaced wholesale, while the apparent use of parallax occlusion mapping lends “pop” to brick wall faces. We see significant upgrades to the core geometry as well, with blocky edges giving way to more organic surfaces, and additional incidental debris.

The lighting system has also overhauled with a physically based rendering pipeline, putting this remaster in the visual ballpark of recent main line Call of Duty releases. Take a look at the gallery below and let us know what you think about the remaster!

Thanks, Reddit.

Update: This leak has been proven to be fake.

Original Story:

A leak on Reddit indicates that Battlefield 5 will be set during World War II, and is set to release on December 6th. Furthermore, the leak suggests that the yet-to-be-announced game will be subtitled “Eastern Front,” implying that the focus this time will be on the Russian front, known for being the scene of some of the most brutal, tooth-and-nails fighting in the war.

WWII’s been an underutilized game setting of late (although if went back in time to circa 2005 you’d have found nothing but WWII shooters lining the store-shelves.) Over the course of the seventh gen, most AAA FPS franchises shifted to modern/futuristic settings (ironically, because WWII fatigue had set in by around 2007).

Call of Duty is taking the logical next step with Infinite Warfare’s alleged sci-fi setting, but there are many people—as this poll indicates—who really want a AAA WWII shooter throwback. What would a current-gen WWII Battlefield game look like? Most early WWII FPSs were corridor shooters, built around the memory limitations of sixth-gen platforms.

However, DICE’s Frostbite 3 engine is based on the premise of wide, open environments, and a bit of simple geography tells us that there’s a lot of countryside in Russia. We expect Eastern Front to trade burned-out cityscapes for environments that hearken back to the Bad Company era—lots of open countryside and a focus on emergent gameplay. Without further details, though, it’s all up in the air. So as usual take this report with a grain of salt.

This one’s a bit of downer: Bungie’s Community Manager, David Dague (AKA DeeJ), debunked rumours that redditor RezylAzzir was actually a Bungie employee. The Destiny community’s been abuzz with rumours and theories about new content underway on account of a series of cryptic posts on Destiny’s subreddit by an unknown person who went by the username RezylAzzir.

RezylAzzir discovered and promptly posted about a hidden in-game Dead Ghost just 17 minutes after the Prison of the Elders update went live. This incredibly fast turnover led many to believe RezylAzzir was part of Bungie’s team. The mysterious redditor did little to dissuade that line of thought and went ahead to post a series of cryptic statements (some in Latin), which, by a stretch, could be interpreted to mean that a major Destiny update is set to drop on September 9^th.

However all of this was debunked by DeeJ who stated: “Oh, and hey. Rezyl Azzir is not one of us. We cannot confirm nor can we decipher these riddles. It’s a mystery to us as well. Fun stuff, though. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, don’t worry about it. If you do, enjoy the speculation.”

Activision confirmed that Destiny’s sequel will only arrive in 2017, though major new content is promised to arrive some time later this year.