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Overwatch reaches more than 20 million players.

Blizzard has announced a new milestone that Overwatch reached, more than 20 million players have registered accounts for the hero-based shooter. Earlier in the year the open beta alone racked up nearly 10 million players, when the game launched on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One in May, Blizzard touted some 7 million players had played the game’s retail release in its first week. This milestone was achieved in just 5 months and surprisingly Overwatch has some catching up to do compared to other Blizzard games. Hearthstone has reached 50 million players, so Overwatch isn’t far behind and is on a pretty good pace. 7 months from now who knows what the numbers could be.  

Cuphead has been delayed to 2017

Studio MDHR’s game Cuphead, has been confirmed to be delayed until mid 2017. The studio made a blog post earlier today saying this: “Throughout this year we discussed reducing the scope to make a 2016 release, but we made the difficult decision to delay the launch in order to ship with our vision intact. We are happy to announce that Cuphead will be coming to Xbox One, Windows 10 and Steam in Mid-2017.” The game was originally announced during E3 in 2014, which helped me believe that the game was close to being done being developed, but I guess these things happen. We don’t know exactly why the developers have delayed the “Xbox/PC” exclusive but if they think the game is not ready to launch then I think its a good idea that they release the game with the best of their ability. Source

Single Player vs. Multiplayer: Why Single Player is Superior

Election season has arrived in the United States, and with it the overwhelming darkness at the prospect of choosing between the lesser of two evils. That’s why at Rectify Gaming, we’re proud to take people’s minds off the horrors of the coming November and cover the far superior world of video games. Like politics, gaming is largely split into two camps – the multiplayers and the single players. And while no one loses when choosing between the two, one is undoubtedly better than the other. Of the two, single player games have far more to offer players than their multiplayer counterparts. From the storylines, to how available they are to gamers, to how they are played, right down to the nuts and bolts of the games, single player games are the original and current king of the video game world. The single player world is filled with thousands of stories, set on intricately created and beautifully rendered worlds, rife with all kinds of conflict and heroism. Whether you’re trying to save the galaxy in Mass Effect, escape from the Nazis in Castle Wolfenstein, survive and fulfill a contract in The Last of Us, escape the diabolical AI GLaDOS in Portal, protect the innocent young girl Clementine in The Walking Dead, understand the meaning of free will in the chaos of Rapture in Bioshock or in the offices of The Stanley Parable, or simply understand what it means to be alive in Thomas Was Alone, the narratives found in single player gaming rival the best found in any other medium. The nature of the single player experience allows for a significantly greater range and depth of emotion than can be found in the multiplayer arena. Multiplayer games simply cannot create the same feelings of hope and hopelessness, horror and anxiety, awe and wonder, determination and companionship and despair and triumph and loss and all the other myriad of emotions that make up life that cannot be captured by starting another match of capture the flag. While multiplayer allows for higher degrees of competitiveness and the thrill of victory, its overall emotional reach is found wanting to that which single player can achieve. With the restrictions that multiplayer labors under, it cannot provide a fraction of the wonderful cast of characters found in single player games. Even recent story co-op games such as Destiny or The Division have not produced characters with same level of depth, personality, or backstory that invoke the level of emotional attachment that many single player games have introduced over the years. No multiplayer game has created characters with the complexity of Spec Ops: The Line’s Colonel John Conrad, the rage and terror of F.E.A.R.’s Alma, the loyalty of Mass Effect’s Garrus Vakarian, the genuineness of Half-Life 2’s Alex Vance, the intrepid spirit of Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft, the loneliness and heartbreak of Shadow of the Colossus’ Wander, or the desperation and madness of Portal’s unseen Ratman. And while the absence of such characters in multiplayer is meant to be filled by the friends and strangers you play with, the character void is not satisfied. Single player games are also given the opportunity to better appreciate the graphical artwork and music that goes into a single player experience. Speed is the name of most multiplayer games, with stopping to smell the roses quickly followed by a teabagging. Single player games, however, are filled with structured narrative events that allow the player to take in the sights and musical scores that drive up the emotion of a given scene. Multiplayer games rarely get little more than background music. The sum total of narrative, emotion, characters, and artistic elements give single player games an advantage multiplayer games may never achieve: something I can only refer to as literary significance. Video games still struggle to find legitimacy as a serious narrative medium among the general public, but single player games have, especially in recent years, addressed serious political, sociological, and psychological topics, much like modern literature, television, and movies do. It may not be long before single player games are held up as important eye-opening experiences the way other media are. To emphasize the single in single player, playing a game on your own lends other advantages. I’ve recently taken to playing online co-op games with a few friends. In each case that I did, I found my character on a different level than my friend’s characters. That meant that while they were able to mow down waves of the enemy, I struggled with taking on even one or two myself. Even a slight difference in characters resulted in one of my friends racking up over twice as many kills as I did. Playing alongside but hardly participating took away from what should have been a fun experience, and instead made co-op an exercise in spectating. There are other drawbacks to multiplayer that gaming that single player games do not experience. Single player games (properly managed ones without draconian DRM) do not require a fast internet connection to play, meaning they are always accessible. They do not become rendered unplayable over the years as other people lose interest, so even today I can fire up and enjoy 1993’s Wing Commander III the same as the day it was released, while 2003’s Star Wars: Galaxies is altogether useless to everyone who purchased it. There are no squeaky-voiced 13-year-olds to mute. No aim-bots to rage at. No chance of being banned over a misunderstanding. No subscriptions to maintain. No getting kicked out of games by groups who decided that you’re just not good enough to play with them 12 seconds into your first match. No getting sniped three times in a row halfway across an unfamiliar map by XxXxXxUrMoMsUcKsXxXxX. No finding yourself on a server that is apparently run and solely occupied by professional players. And, perhaps most importantly, you can actually PAUSE a single player game when you absolutely need to. I’ve had plenty of fun playing multiplayer games, and there

Gears of War 4 officially launches today along with multiplayer credit update

Gears of War 4 is officially out for the general public today, and with it comes a new multiplayer update. Credits were being earned slower than expected, and the elite gear pack cost a lot in respect to how long it took you to earn it. As a result, The Coalition announced on its official blog that the Elite gear pack will now cost 3500 credits (down from 4000). The amount of credits we earn has also been increased whether you win or lose, but winning the match will see you earn more of course. It’s great to see The Coalition doing everything they can to optimize the game. What do you think of Gears of War 4? .

Nintendo still plans to reveal the NX this year.

For a long time now Nintendo fans have been impatiently waiting for Nintendo themselves to make an announcement when the reveal of the NX is coming. Nintendo of Europe representative Ulysse Richert-Botté reiterated that Nintendo will publicly share more information about the NX within the year. He also added that development tools will be made available to smaller developers at a later time. There was another rumor recently that the NX will have 4 launch titles, the console will cost $299.99. A bundle option will also be available for $399.99. The NX is expected to launch sometime in March 2017 so the reveal has to be before 2016 ends. Are you excited for the NX?

Hello Games Is Working On The Next No Man's Sky Update.

It has been a few weeks since an update was release for No Man’s Sky and, according to Audio Chief Paul Weir, the team is busy on the next patch. Paul did not specify what this patch may include such as fixes or adding new content. Sean is fine and we're all busy on the next patch. — ᴘᴀᴜʟ ᴡᴇɪʀ ♫ (@earcom) October 9, 2016 You may have noticed both the Twitter accounts of No Man’s Sky and Hello Games have not been active as well as their website.   I'm afraid I have nothing useful to say. It's entirely up to Hello or Sean as to when they want to talk publicly. — ᴘᴀᴜʟ ᴡᴇɪʀ ♫ (@earcom) October 9, 2016

Microsoft studio developers will work together more often says Phil Spencer

During an interview with Stevivor last month in Australia, Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer stated that Microsoft Game Studios development houses will work together on certain projects, but not at the scale of Ubisoft and EA. Some fans have noticed the water in Forza Horizon 3 looks very similar to Sea of Thieves style and thought that Playground and Rare teamed up on that, but Phil declined to comment. With Forza Horizon III I think the great example we do have is the Turn 10 Team, which is in Redmond, Washington, and the Playground Team, which is in Leamington Spa in the UK. Turn 10 works on Forza Motorsport and Playground works on Forza Horizon, but they use a shared engine and pipeline. The technology advances that they make together, iteratively, as they launch each one of the franchises leads to a better product for both. It’s fantastic, because the technology advances faster. Somebody’s doing multiplayer, somebody’s doing single-player, somebody else might be doing co-op. Big triple-A games are now massive budgets. They’re on the scale of a blockbuster movie. First-party, we’re shipping on fewer platforms. For us, we’re shipping on Xbox and Windows. “The idea that we would engage a thousand developers to go work on a first party game is probably not where we are. We probably choose things that we think are more linked to the platform work that we do. We want to make them big. Gears of War will be a huge game. Halo is a huge game. We’re doing really well with Forza Horizon. The idea that we’d have multiple studios pivot, I think, is probably more of a third-party thing just given the scale and the surface area that they ship into.” This is a great idea for Microsoft to do this because every title has something unique about it and why not spread it around. What are your thoughts?