Today Star Wars Squadrons delivered a lovely free content update. It's not often that an update such as this appears for a major game - but here it is. The two ships you'll gain access to in the update are some of the strangest vehicles in the Star Wars universe: the TIE Defender and the B-Wing.
New console hardware almost always means more power. That power, however, is lost if the software, that is, games, don't take advantage of it. That naturally requires releasing new titles and updating old ones that exploit all that new processing muscle, which is what EA is doing for Star Wars Squadrons running on next-gen, actually now current-gen, hardware. But just as these new consoles aren't exactly equal, neither are these next-gen improvements that could leave some feeling a bit jealous.
Xbox Series X and Series S are coming and Microsoft isn't taking any chances that you might not want to sign up to Xbox Game Pass, with a huge bundle deal that is set to include EA Play. The two new consoles - both of which will go up for preorder on September 22, Microsoft confirmed today - will get to take advantage of a new $15 per month Ultimate subscription deal.
Advertisements have been around since the earliest days of mass media and they have reviled just as long. While some ads can be tasteful, ingenious, and even entertaining, most are just "in your face" attempts to grab consumers' attention. While those have more or less been accepted facts of life in some media, like print and the Web, other channels actually have ways to make consumers' voices be heard, something that EA Games learned the hard way in its latest attempt to put full-on commercials in the middle of a video game.
The soccer (football) game FIFA 21 will not allow players to meet across console generations, console to console, or console to... anything else, really. EA noted this week that users will be able to carry over their progression from an older console generation to a newer generation, but no cross-play will be available for anyone, at all, ever. This might well be the first major example of the dropping off point between generations of consoles released at the tail end of 2020.
Valve has always been accused of trying to monopolize the PC games distribution market, especially after Epic Games' colorful statements last year. Warranted or not, it may have helped push the company to change a few things and open its doors to more of its competitors. Considering it was a long time coming, it may have been presumed that EA will never make good on its promise to bring its subscription service to Steam. That is finally happening this month but there's a bit of a catch.
Despite how the Internet has connected us and made us closer, gaming is still pretty much like walled gardens separated according to platform boundaries. Even those games that are actually available across platforms mostly let you play only with others on the same platform. There is, however, a growing desire among gamers to be able to play with friends on other platforms. At its EA Play Live event, EA Games is promising to give Apex Legends players that and more this coming Fall, expanding the battle royale's reach across more platforms.
There are often two or three things that Star Wars fans would probably like to be in a game adaption of the space opera franchise. One is to be a Jedi Knight or even a Sith, something that most Star Wars games have already delivered on repeatedly. The other is a space fighter pilot, either for the Empire or the Rebel Alliance, a fantasy that EA Games will soon try to fulfill in Star Wars: Squadrons coming later this year.
One of the biggest hallmarks of PC gaming and something that consoles still have difficulty allowing is modding. Sometimes, modders have to bend over backward to apply some custom changes to a game, often coming at odds with the game's developers or publishers, but there are many games that support modding right of the bat. EA Games, however, is going above and beyond what most major publishers do and will even release the open source code for Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun and Red Alert when their remastered versions launch next month.
We're at the point in gaming history when iconic titles are being celebrated with both nostalgia and remastered versions. The newest to join that ranks is Command & Conquer from EA, back when it was still actually called Electronic Arts. Now that the genre-defining franchise is a quarter of a century old, the publisher is giving gamers a chance to relive those good old days, this time with support for modern hardware, including 4K displays.
A man decided to play a video game on a monitor at an airport in Portland yesterday, January 16, 2020. This was not a particularly forward-thinking idea, given the forever-volatile nature of airports in general here in the USA for the past couple of decades. But he did it anyway. He decided that his best course of action for staving off boredom at the airport at 4:40 AM was to "hijack" an official airport TV screen.
Star Wars Battlefront 2 is not the same game that released in 2017 to thunderous outrage. EA’s road to redemption has seen game-changing updates this month, including the Battlefront 2 Celebration Edition and The Rise of Skywalker update. Most importantly, they all come free.