In the northern hemisphere, winter is currently in full swing, and what better way to welcome these chilly months than by adding a touch of winter to one of 2020's most popular games? The team behind Microsoft Flight Simulator at Asobo Studio has given us a look at the game's new real-time snow feature, which will blanket some maps with fresh powder as you fly over them.
Week-long speedrunning marathon Awesome Games Done Quick 2021 kicked off yesterday, and though it looks a bit different from AGDQ 2020, it will still be hosting dozens of speedruns and raising money for charity. Usually a live event, Games Done Quick has moved entirely online for the time being thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, but even without a live audience watching runs or commentators sitting on the fabled couch behind each speedrunner, AGDQ 2021 still has a ton of great runs on tap.
While there was no lack of great games to play in 2020, there were many things about the games industry that were lacking throughout the year. Obviously, some of the issues we'll cover here were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic - particularly the launches of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X - but there were some important issues that came to light this year too. There were also some epic fumbles, and one in particular isn't likely to be forgotten anytime soon.
As with many large, open world games, modders have wasted little time in creating mods for Cyberpunk 2077. One of the more high-profile mods dropped over the weekend, giving players the opportunity to play the game in third-person mode. While the mod is still a work in progress, this could be a good mod to install if you'd like to actually look at your character every once in a while.
2020 was a bad year in a lot of regards, but thankfully, it wasn’t all bad in the gaming industry. We had a lot of really good games to see us through the pandemic, and while the games were really the only good thing to come out of the gaming industry in 2020, there were a lot of high points on the release schedule. We’ll get to the bad parts of the gaming industry in 2020 with a separate article, but for now, let’s recap the year in gaming by running down some of the solid titles we saw release in the past 12 months.
If you're a Stadia Pro subscriber, you can now grab the four free games released for January 2021, all of them available as long the player remains a subscriber. The lineup is decent, though not quite as exciting as some of the games gamers got through similar subscriptions with Sony and Microsoft.
Respawn and EA plan to kick off the new year with a Fight Night Collection event in Apex Legends. This will be the first Collection event in the game's Season 7, according to the studio, which recently detailed Fight Night in a couple of videos. The key point of this event? You're going to ditch the weapons for hand-to-hand combat.
As the world turns the page into 2021, Apple has removed a huge number of apps from the iOS App Store in China. In all, the company removed 46,000 apps from its Chinese storefront, the vast majority of which were games. The apps that were removed come from publishers who didn't provide Apple with a license to sell in-app purchases in their games or apps, with Apple implementing a December 31st deadline to provide those licenses earlier in the year.
It's that time of the year for making resolutions, writing retrospectives, and grabbing free stuff. Of course, the holiday shopping season has yet to end and game stores are still pushing out free titles for people to grab, regardless of whether they'll be able to play those immediately or not. While Steam's holiday sale is still ongoing, Epic Games is wrapping up its own daily free offers while GOG, formerly Good Old Games, is making one title free for a very limited time only.
CD Projekt Red has already committed to shipping a number of patches to fix Cyberpunk 2077, but separately from that, we'll also see an assortment of DLC for the game. While some of that DLC will need to be purchased, other DLC will be free to everyone who owns the game. While CD Projekt Red hasn't detailed what we should expect from that free DLC yet, the company did say that the first free DLC should be landing relatively soon.
January is right around the corner, and that means we're about the get the first batch of PlayStation Plus games for 2021. PlayStation Plus subscribers are getting three games for the month of January, with two on the way for PlayStation 4 and one that's exclusive to PlayStation 5 users. If you're one of the few PlayStation 5 owners out there at the moment, you should be able to claim and play all three games next month.
2020 was a pretty good year for indie games all things considered, and now Nintendo is recapping the year's best-selling indie titles on the Nintendo Switch. There are a obviously a lot of fan favorites featured in Nintendo's recap - obviously, otherwise they wouldn't be the platform's best-selling indie games - but there's always a chance you could be introduced a new game by checking it out.