This was a fun week for gamers, mostly due to the plethora of April Fool’s Day jokes. Dying Light gave players super strength, Destiny provided Guardians a colorful dance party, and Google transformed areas of Google Maps into playable Pacman levels. We even played our own April Fool’s Day joke. Beyond the festivities of April 1st, there were some other major happenings during the week.
After two months of teasing and confirming fighters for the upcoming Mortal Kombat X, NetherRealm Studios provided the full roster of fighters for the combat game. There are 29 confirmed fighters, with a few more still rumored to be joining in DLCs or add-ons. With less than two weeks left till the game releases, we’re confident NetherRealm’s marketing strategy will pay off.
Also this week, Microsoft added another game to the growing list of release delays when it announced their Xbox One exclusive, Quantum Break, won’t be available until 2016. Unlike those games that have been postponed due to bugs and unfinished features, Microsoft announced they were pushing Quantum Break back due to the already congested fall release schedule.
Here are a few more items from the week that are worthy of mentioning.
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How Long Does 'Witcher 3' Take to Beat?
Senior Game Designer for The Witcher 3: The Hunt, Damien Monnier, shared on Twitter that Witcher 3 will take players over 200 hours to fully complete. He was sure to mention that includes doing everything, so it won’t necessarily take players that long to complete the game’s primary campaign. However, we’re sure the campaign will still take a decent amount of time to beat. In fact, if the stats from sites like howlongtobeat.com are any good reference, our guess is that The Witcher 3: The Hunt’s campaign will take somewhere between 30 and 50 hours to complete.
In a time when players lament short games (see the worries that The Order: 1886 was barely five hours long), it’s nice to see a developer provide an expansive experience. However, that means the game will be quite large to house on devices. According to an interview with IGN, the folks at Witcher developer CD Projekt RED said they wanted to create an “open-world where there were no boundaries.” To accomplish that, it sounds like the download will be 50 GB on PS4. It could be even larger on Xbox One.
The Witcher 3: The Hunt is set to release on May 19 for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.
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Spotify Launches on PS3 and PS4
Earlier this week, Spotify, the music streaming app, launched on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. Within 24 hours, 1.5 million people had installed the app to their PlayStation device.
Spotify on PlayStation goes beyond just offering a music streaming service to console owners, but also allows players to create their own soundtracks in their games. This is a service many games from both PlayStation and Xbox have been requesting for some time. While game soundtracks can provide great music, sometimes it’s nice to listen to your own tunes while playing games. Hopefully Xbox One will soon receive a similar capability.
Source: Twitter
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Nintendo Mobile Games Could Make $25 Million Per Month
Nintendo made many fans very happy when they recently announced some of their well-known, classic games will officially be making their way to mobile devices. While many mobile users have played Nintendo’s games on their mobile devices in the past thanks to emulators, it’s still exciting to know the gaming giant is finally releasing approved version of their games on mobile.
This week, Nintendo’s mobile partner, DeNA, revealed that they expect to make over 3 billion yen (about $25 million USD) each month from the mobile games. They mentioned this won’t come from one single game, but rather the culminating sales from all the games they plan to release. They didn’t discuss whether this will be just from sales, or if they also plan to incorporate microtransactions, but whichever way they go, it’s still an impressive expectation. Our only question is: what took so long?
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Nintendo Update Speeds Up Enemy Turns in 'Code Name STEAM'
Nintendo has long been known for releasing successful turn-based games. One of their most recent releases, Code Name STEAM, will be getting an update that allows players to speed up enemy turns by twice the speed.
This is something that would be nice to have for most turn-based games. While it’s fun at first to watch enemies in Final Fantasy and Pokemon take their turns, it's easy for patience to run thin further into the game. Hopefully the success of this feature in Code Name STEAM will encourage Nintendo to incorporate it into other games as well
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