Bellular

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[EARLY ACCESS] Who Are The First Ones?

The First Ones, the architects of the Shadowlands and all within it, are inexplicably linked with Azeroth.But who are they? How many teases have Blizz left for us in-game? Let's explore everything we know so far and who these mysterious figures could be.

Loot! January 2020

Phew, finally getting back on track! Be sure to check out recent post for December. We’ve got all of the January loot on hand & will be shipping out immediately after Patreon clears the month.

Daily Briefing: Thursday 28th January

AMD Supply Issues Until H2 2021AMD's CEO Lisa Su revealed in their Q4 earnings call that supply constraints in semiconductors are liable to continue until the second half of this year. This means supply issues with the PS5 and Xbox consoles will continue, and the same for PC hardware in general. The entire industry can't yet make enough to keep up with the ever-growing demand from consumers. This is sad to hear, and no doubt frustrating for customers, especially with the prevalence of scalpers. Hopefully, retailers can get their act tog...

Daily Briefing: Wednesday 27th January

EA Accused Of 'Stealing' Indie Character DesignIndie developer NOWWA have accused EA and Respawn of plagiarising their character design from upcoming title Bulletville. Their character 'Hunter' was shown to EA in early 2020 during publishing talks and in a playtest in October. Respawn's next Apex Legend, Fuse, shares a significant amount of design elements. There's almost no way to be certain, but NOWWA are mostly concerned their game will be labelled an Apex copycat. The similarities are many Hair, facial hair, jacket, ...

Daily Briefing: Tuesday 26th January

Warner Bros' Upcoming Titles Have A 'Heavy Focus' on Live ServiceAn advertisement for an intern opening at WB claims that their new projects have a heavy focus on live service. Hogwarts Legacy, Suicide Squad and Back 4 Blood are the likely candidates for a live service focus among their offerings, while Gotham Knights has been confirmed by developers to be designed not as a live service game. It's unsurprising to see a live service push from a publisher, but tying big-name IP like Hogwarts and Suicide Squad to live services is g...

Daily Briefing: Monday 25th January

New KOTOR In Development, But Not At EARumour has it that a new Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic game is well on the way but without EA's involvement. This comes with a little tease: According to the source, we'll 'never guess' who the studio is. Alongside KOTOR from this mysterious group, Star Wars also has a 'smaller' game coming from EA. One of the games under development is a bounty hunter game, but it could be either EA's smaller game or Ubisoft's open-world one - we'll have to wait and see. After ...

[EARLY ACCESS] What's Next For Shadowlands?

Shadowlands has been a smooth launch, although it did come after a major delay. What are Blizzard working on, and what should we expect next? Here's everything we know and what we think's coming up soon.

Daily Briefing: Friday 22nd January

Resident Evil Village Is Only $60 & Has A DemoIn Capcom's recent Resident Evil showcase, Village was given a release date of May 7th, a PS5-exclusive demo and pre-orders were opened - and the game is available for $60. Capcom also announced Re:Verse Resident Evil, a multiplayer shooter to celebrate the franchise's 25th Anniversary Console-exclusive demos are a bad thing to start, but the real story here is of a publisher opting not to move up to the $70 asking price yet. Perhaps a few publishers can resist the temptation of forcing cons...

[EARLY ACCESS] The History of Azeroth

The history of Azeroth is a rich one, but the vast majority of it has been war, eternal conflict for the soul of Azeroth herself. This video's a bit different - we've run through the history of Azeroth, primarily of Azeroth *the character*. She's been under siege for what could be hundreds of thousands of years from all sorts of cosmic forces, yet she still lives - and might be stronger for it.We may have a follow-up on this discussing *who* or *what* Azeroth is...

Daily Briefing: Thursday 21st January

Geo-Blocking Fine For Publishers & StorefrontsA whopping $9.5m is being taken from 5 publishers and Valve for breaching EU anti-trust laws. Specifically, for engaging in 'geo-blocking' in the EU. German users forced to pay German prices for games, as an example, goes against the principle of the EU Digital Single Market. Without getting too into it, the EU Digital Single Market can result in some vast differences in game prices compared to consumer spending power across EU countries, so it can get a bit awkward for some EU customers. It...

Daily Briefing: Wednesday, 20th January

Sony Santa Monica 'Confirm' A New GameThe studio is hiring an art director for an unannounced title - rumored to be Cory Barlog's sci-fi game. It may be a revival of Internal-7, an old sci-fi project that Santa Monica cancelled after encountering issues with the PS4's capabilities. This new generation would be a good excuse to bring it back. Given God of War is due 2021, this would line up for pre-production and early stages of development being finished in time for the God of War team to hop over. Sony's first-party will be...

Daily Briefing: Tuesday 19th January

Denuvo Anti-Cheat available via SteamworksDenuvo's Anti-Cheat, not to be confused with the Denuvo Anti-Tamper DRM, is now available to all Steamworks partners. Being included in Steamworks should mean it's free for use for effectively all games hosted on Steam. DAC had some controversy when it was added to Doom Eternal, but really, it's just another Anti-Cheat. Smaller devs having access to DAC for multiplayer games might open the door for competitive multiplayer indies. Let's just hope it isn't widely used in single-player ...

Daily Briefing, Monday 18th January 2021

Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of the Bellular Daily Briefing - industry news right at your fingertipsBayonetta 3 news possibly maybe hopefully coming sometime this yearAfter more than three years of silence, series designer Hideki Kamiya has stated that he hopes to be able to give an update on the much-anticipated sequel later this year, and asked fans to "please keep an eye on us." Kamiya said a few interesting things during the Arcade Archives stream, actually, like his claim that he will also be giving updates on &#3...

Hello 2021...

Hey everyone! We’ve had a slow start this year - entirely on me. I had a lot of knocks through 2020 in addition to the pandemic, and basically fell to pieces over the holidays. I’m beginning to become myself again, so there’ll be more posts etc this week, as well as the news channel plan that Matt, myself, Adam and Conall have been working on. I’d intended to hit the ground running for 2021, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve realised that doing so when you aren’t up to it is a recipe for disaster. Good shit to come! Stay safe everyone...

Daily Briefing, Friday 15th January

Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of the Bellular Daily Briefing - your stalwart companion in industry newsBattle.net just got a makeoverThe makeover's most significant changes will feel pretty familiar to anyone who has been running the Battle-net beta version recently - players can favourite and filter games however they want, and Battle.net's social and news tabs have also been expanded. Blizzard have called the update Battle.net's "biggest ever makeover" and, while the updates are currently only available to...

Daily Briefing, Thursday 14th January 2021

CD Projekt Red apologise for Cyberpunk 2077 launch...againStudio co-founder Marcin Iwiński this week released a video once again apologising for Cyberpunk 2077's launch state on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One - he also provided an updated roadmap for patches, DLC, and next-gen upgrades. Iwiński said that the intention was to build the game for high-end PC's and then adjust it to run on consoles, but the team underestimated the complexity of this task - and internal testing "did not show a big part" of the issues console players ex...

Daily Briefing: Wednesday 13th January 2021

MachineGames & Lucasfilm Games Reveal Indiana Jones ProjectThe newly reformed Lucasfilm Games will be working with the Wolfenstein devs on the game, which is an original adventure set at the height of Indy's career. Todd Howard is on the project as executive producer, so this is likely a huge project going forward. As the first project announced since Xbox's Bethesda purchase, it'll be interesting to see the scope and goal. The obvious comparison is Uncharted - is this an attack on Sony's adventure game dominance? Probably, but ...

Daily Briefing, Tuesday 12th January 2021

Hello and welcome to another edition of the Bellular Daily Briefing - industry news right at your fingertipsSony drop some PlayStation 5 release date updatesA Sony video presentation shown at CES 2021 on Monday concluded with a sizzle reel detailing release windows for several upcoming PS4 and PS5 titles - the big news is that Square Enix's Project Athia is coming in 2022, while Capcom's Pragmata has been pushed back to 2023. As for other PlayStation release dates - Returnal and Kena: Bridge of Spirits are both coming in March, Stray an...

Daily Briefing, Monday 11th January 2021

Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of the Bellular Daily Briefing - industry news right at your fingertipsThe Killzone website has officially been "retired"An official notice posted to the website informed fans that, going forward, the website will instead redirect visitors to the official PlayStation website. The notice also thanks fans for years of "enthusiasm and support" in a way that suggests we may never hear from Killzone again. Killzone used to be one of PlayStation's flagship franchises though, despite t...

Daily Briefing, Friday 8th January 2021

Hello and welcome to another issue of the Bellular Daily Briefing - your trusty industry news companionFormer EA Sports boss believes FIFA loot boxes are a "long way" from gamblingIn a new interview with GamesIndustry.biz Peter Moore, a former boss at EA Sports who oversaw the first iteration of FIFA Ultimate Team back in FIFA 09, likened FIFA loot boxes to collectible cigarette cards and blind bag toys. Moore also brought up the classic "surprise mechanics" terminology when discussing who EA view their loot boxes, and stated th...

Daily Briefing, Thursday 7th January 2021

Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of the Bellular Daily Briefing - industry news right at your fingertips.More Switch Pro rumours surfaceThis time courtesy of well-known dataminer SciresM, who has claimed that the Switch's most recent firmware upgrade references a new hardware - codenamed Aula. Aula reportedly uses the same chip as the Switch Lite and the updated 2019 Switch model, which SciresM suggests will be pushed to higher clock speeds. They also believe the firmware supports 4K resolution, possibly via an updated console...

Daily Briefing, Wednesday 6th January 2021

Hello and welcome to another edition of the Bellular Daily Briefing - gaming news sent straight to your digital doorstepMicrosoft are keeping an eye on Sony's DualSense controllerMicrosoft have issued a customer experience survey to Xbox Series X|S owners to ask whether they would like to see any PlayStation-centric features on Xbox consoles - particularly the functionalities in Sony's much lauded gamepad. Microsoft are having a few controller issues themselves, actually, as many players have reported connectivity issues between the new...

Daily Briefing, Tuesday 5th January 2021

Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of the Bellular Daily Briefing - industry news right at your fingertipsEpic Games to convert shopping mall into new global HQThe $95m deal was first reported by the Triangle Business Journal and will give Epic the enormous 980K square foot Cary Towne Center in North Carolina - around two miles from Epic's current Cary HQ. Epic hope to have converted the mall space into their new global HQ by 2024 and, thanks to the terms of the deal, construction can begin immediately. Epic had previously inten...

Daily Briefing, Monday 4th January 2021

New year, same news delivery service! Here's hoping this is the year you finally make good progress on your backlog.Bayonetta 3 is apparently still doing fineDespite hearing absolutely zero news for three years now, Hideki Kamiya has reassured fans that development of the Nintendo Switch-exclusive sequel is still "progressing smoothly." Kamiya told Famitsu that the team have seen success in verifying the various new systems at play for Bayonetta 3, and have asked fans to please not be worried by the extended period of silence. Kamiy...

December 2020 Loot & FAQ!

Here we go, the final loot of the year!As always, Patreon does not charge up-front. It charges for month A at the beginning of month B. So, November Patronage starts being charged on December 1st. It then takes Patreon a few days to get everyone charged & ping people if their cards decline. After that, Patreon gives us the final list of names and addresses. That's when we're able to pack, label & post everything. That usually takes 4-5 days.Official postage times are 2 business days for UK, 3-7 for EU and 5-7 for USA & worldwide. We hav...

Merry Christmas!

I hope you’re all doing well! We’ll be back on the saddle with content very soon - given how 2020 has been, I think we’ve all needed a few days off!We’ll be kicking the year off with a bunch of newish indicative - essentially codifying experiments we ran around the same time as Shadowlands & CDPR! This should increase our lead times, increase early access content, and decrease stress on the team. All important things, especially the latter!I’ll have a few posts here over the next few days, and we’ll be back to main channel content o...

[EARLY ACCESS] Embrace The Light - Paladin Class Review

The Paladin is one of the best classes in the game. Here's why. (It's actually got loads of weaknesses, but those hardly matter in its majesty. If you basically enjoy being more than DPS, Healer or Tank at once, this is it.

Daily Briefing, Tuesday 22nd December 2020

Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of the Bellular Daily Briefing - industry news right at your fingertipsRockstar eye more singleplayer GTA Online contentGTA Online's recent Cayo Perico Heist was a fresh approach to the game's heist design as it allowed players to complete it solo for the first time - and Rockstar say they'd like to do similar things in future. Rockstar North Design Director Scott Butchard told GQ that the studio are "keen to carry forward" these singleplayer elements, as a means to offer a more...

[EARLY ACCESS] It's Perfect For WoW - The Hunter Class Review

The Hunter! How is it in Shadowlands? After a lot of dungeons, too much PvP, and a few nights in Nathria, here's the verdict.

Daily Briefing, Thursday 17th December 2020

Hello and welcome back to the Bellular Daily Briefing - industry news straight to your digital doorstepVeteran BioWare devs return for Mass Effect 4Mass Effect 4's project supervisor, Mike Gamble, introduced several new team members on Twitter and there are a good few returning names. Parrish Ley, the cinematic director for the Mass Effect Trilogy, is back on board as creative director. Other names include Derek Watts, who was Mass Effect's original art director, and Brenon Holmes, a 20-year BioWare veteran currently working on the Mass...