Those who are perhaps a little tired of playing Ticket to Ride or Settlers of Catan at Thanksgiving will have a new way to get mad at their extended family members starting next year. That's because Call of Duty: The Board Game is on the way. Pre-orders will start this fall on Kickstarter.

Activision teamed up with board game publisher Arcane Wonders, along with Genuine Entertainment and Evolution to make the game. Call of Duty: The Board Game is said to be a fast-paced blend of combat, strategy and tactical planning. However, an announcement video that brings to mind the Marvel Studios production logo doesn't shed more light on how the game actually works.

What we do know for now is that, as you may have guessed, you and your companions will take on the guise of soldiers. You'll battle your opponents with combat skills and a variety of weapons. Arcane Wonders says there are a number of scenarios and gameplay modes to choose from, while the action takes place across several maps from the Call of Duty games.

There’s no word yet on whether you’ll be able to set off a nuclear bomb in your living room if you reach a high enough kill streak to wipe out everyone and somehow still win the game. More Call of Duty: The Board Game details will be revealed in the coming months.

Ubisoft and developer Red Storm Entertainment have given us a closer look at The Division Heartland by releasing a cinematic trailer for the upcoming game at the publisher's Division Day event. The trailer introduces Silver Creek, the rural town that will serve as the backdrop for the free-to-play title, along with a new villain named Killian Tower who had disavowed the Division and killed his whole team. Players will assume control of an agent who tracks down Tower to rural America in a bid to find out why their former commander went rogue. 

The companies have yet to announce a launch date for the survival-action shooter, but fans can register at the game's official website for a chance to participate (and get five friend invites) for an upcoming closed beta. When the game does come out, it's expected to be available on consoles, PC and the cloud. 

Ubisoft has also revealed its roadmap for The Division 2 Year 5, which will start with the launch of Season One: Broken Wings wherein players have to rescue civilians taken hostage. Broken Wings will introduce a new free rogue-lite mode called Descent. Up to four people can play the mode together, though they'll have to start out without gear or any specialization available on the main game. While Season One of the online game isn't available yet, players can check out Descent mode on its Public Test Server starting today. 

Finally, Ubisoft has announced that the next test phase for The Division Resurgence mobile game will take place this summer. Fans can sign up for the chance to participate right now, and those who do will get access to a special Joint Task Force cosmetic outfit when Resurgence launches. 

Former Halo scribe Joseph Staten has joined Netflix’s burgeoning gaming division. On Monday, Staten tweeted that he will serve as the creative director on a new AAA game and original intellectual property from the streaming giant. “In my work life, there’s nothing I love more than collaborating with others to build worlds filled with iconic characters, deep mysteries, and endless adventures,” Staten wrote on Twitter. "So today, I'm thrilled to announce that I've joined Netflix Games as Creative Director for a brand-new AAA multiplatform game and original IP. Let's go!"

The announcement comes less than two weeks after Staten announced his departure from Microsoft. Before joining the tech giant in 2013, he worked as a writer and director of cinematics on Bungie’s first three Halo games. Staten later helped write and co-direct Destiny, but left the studio before the game’s release in 2014. Following his return to the Microsoft fold (Bungie was a Microsoft studio before it went independent in 2007), Staten worked as senior creative director on the Xbox Game Studios team for a number of years before moving to 343 Industries in 2020 to assist in the development of Halo Infinite. This past January, Microsoft reassigned Staten away from 343 at the same time it cut “at least” 95 jobs at the troubled developer.

On Monday, Staten said the game he’s working on at Netflix would be a “multiplatform” release. To date, the company’s gaming strategy has primarily centered around obtaining mobile publishing rights to respected indie titles like Into the Breach and Terra Nil. Funding the development of a multiplatform AAA game is significantly more ambitious.

It was after a particularly grueling session with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild that I started to wonder: When did developers stop putting cheats into their games to help the less talented among us get through the tricky bits? When I was a kid, a little bit of Up Down Left Right A and Start together, and a little older, a little /~noclip saved me no end of bother. These days, if you look for cheats for any modern game online, the best you’ll get is to be sassily told to “git gud.”

Sorry, a little context: I play games, but I’m not a Gamer, or a Nintendo Person, so in 2023 I resolved to remedy this. So many discussions at work fly past me because while I’ve heard of Cliff Bleszinski and Hironobu Sakaguchi, I couldn’t tell you their oeuvre without Googling. Part of my self-education was to watch every Zero Punctuation compilation to speedrun the last decade of games development. Another part was to seek out some classic games that I’d never played through ignorance, weakness, or my own stupid fault.

The first step on this journey only required me to go to the bookshelves in my living room, ironically. I bought my Pokémon Go-loving wife a Nintendo Switch at the start of 2020 so she could play Let’s Go Pikachu!. Not long after, a friend handed me their copy of Breath of the Wild and said I should give it a play. But it’s been sitting on my bookshelf for three years, as I subconsciously resisted the urge to give it a go. This, I’ll admit, is because I’ve always had the notion that Nintendo games are Hard Work.

And that was my belief up until a month ago, when I thought I’d better try Breath of the Wild before Tears of the Kingdom came out. I figured I’d give it half an hour, the smallest of toes dipped into the world, so that I could say I’d tried and that it wasn’t for me. And before you can say “I need to be up at seven in the morning for work,” it was long past midnight. Since then, Breath of the Wild has consumed my every waking moment. It is, without a doubt, one of the most engrossing and immersive games I have ever played, despite my frustrations.

Nintendo

It’s why I felt compelled to write this, because I want to spread the gospel to non-gamers who might feel similarly like they’ve missed the bus. Especially since we can hope that the older game might fall in price as people seek out its replacement. Or, given the current situation with Nintendo persistently keeping the prices of its older first-party games high, at least it won’t get any more expensive. But, to undermine my own argument, I’d say that if Tears of the Kingdom is half as good as Breath of the Wild, it’ll probably be the first game that’s worth the $70 fee Nintendo’s trying to push consumers into accepting.

Despite its age (it is from 2017, after all), Breath of the Wild feels cutting-edge, and part of that is how deep it is. When I started playing, I worried that it would be yet another soulless open-world grind-a-thon, a feeling not soothed by the presence of Far Cry-esque towers you need to conquer to open up areas of the map. But the one thing that this game has that sets it apart from its genre-mates is a level of curation that continues to surprise me.

It plays out on a sprawling map, but it never feels like you’re traversing through an empty void. The density of what’s available means that, despite spending a month or so covering just half of Hyrule (I’ve only recently reached Goron City), I never stop finding new stuff. And there are some assets that have been reused, like the standard template for enemy camps, but you never feel that they’ve been copy-pasted to pad out the space. This Hyrule feels hand-made, with every detail sweated beyond any player’s comprehension.

Even a philistine like me can appreciate the level of craft, not just in its layout, but how it has been built. Take the chemistry engine, which seems like such a simple idea you wonder why it hasn’t been a part of open worlds forever. By giving each material its own properties, you can take advantage of more than just weight physics to help you solve puzzles. Thanks to YouTube, once I understood how Shock Traps worked, I was able to start making real progress in the shrine quests that put you face to face with a particularly murderous killbot.

And the game’s critical path is left so completely wide open as to almost not matter at all, giving you total freedom. Rather than giving you a set series of missions, you unlock the main quest line after the first hour, and then can tackle it in any way you wish. I’ve seen more than a few Straight To Ganon speed runs where expert players take a bare-footed Link to defeat the title’s big bad within minutes of being able to leave the tutorial area. I love, too, how the landscape gently nudges you toward the safer areas where you can level up before you’re let loose on the harsher climates of, say, Death Mountain.

Nintendo

This works so well that when you’ve gotten a little way along you start picking up weapons that aren’t total garbage. Recently, I was cornered by a Guardian Stalker, very much a one-hit kill villain you can only ever hope of running out of view from. But, trapped in the North Lomei Labyrinth, I had no option but to try and fight without dying. And I managed to hack off its legs, one by one, until it flopped on its side, unable to shoot me with its laser. The feeling of exhilaration and satisfaction after so many deaths, was one for the ages. You don’t need to git gud in the grindy sense, you just need to spend enough time in the world to gently, naturally evolve how you play the game until things get easy.

And this is when I realized there was a good reason developers don’t put cheats into their games any more. Because a good title, like Breath of the Wild, rarely prescribes how you navigate and solve its world. If you’re not a fighter, you can devote your energies to stealthily circumnavigating your foes. When you grasp the game’s physics engine, you can use a well-placed remote bomb to send a venom-spitting Lizalfo hurtling down the side of a cliff. The only thing I can’t do yet is take on a Lynel – the game’s super-tough mini-boss – and not get rinsed, because I’m not sure I’ll ever learn the art of parrying.

Now, that may be deficiency enough that I never actually finish the game, since that’s rarely an impediment to getting to the fun bits. Take the shrine quests, which (mostly) offer the most enjoyable physics puzzles since Portal, give or take the aforementioned combat trials. Part of this is because the puzzles can be hard but are never unfairly-formatted, and there’s almost always a solution that’ll come to mind if you just walk around for long enough. The fact there’s no time limit or villain trying to force you to hurry up helps matters considerably.

I have gripes, but they’re all mostly nitpicks. The Switch’s hardware limitations means that the game’s draw distance can sometimes be a problem. If you’re looking for a spot out of sight of enemies to land your glider on, it can only be once you’re inches from the ground that it’ll finally render a camouflaged Lizalfo. And Nintendo’s policy of never being entirely open with the player to encourage experimentation means you’ll need to have some YouTube tutorial channels bookmarked to help you navigate some of the more baffling bits.

Simon Parkin’s essay about Breath of the Wild in The New Yorker quoted original series creator Shigeru Miyamoto, who described Hyrule as a “miniature garden you can put into a drawer and revisit any time you like.” And this speaks to something I’ve found about the game, that it’s less of a video game and more of a place that you can choose to visit. This vast, pastoral paradise, which you can roam around on foot, climbing mountains or on horseback. A land only spoiled by the regular appearance of a zombified enemy crawling up out of the ground to ruin your reverie.

In a way, as much as I enjoyed having No Man’s Sky as my lockdown game of 2020, I wish I’d been braver and tried Zelda back then. I’d have rather spent time inside Miyamoto’s miniature garden, now lovingly tended by Hidemaro Fujibayashi and Eiji Aonuma. And I think I’m going to have to try and get this finished as quickly as possible so that I’m ready to continue my journey in Tears of the Kingdom.

Sega is buying Rovio, the Finnish video-game company best known for creating Angry Birds, in a €706 million (~$776 million) deal. Though a slew of existing Sega games are available on iOS and Android, like Sonic the Hedgehog, the company is looking to "accelerate its expansion" into mobile gaming.   

Buying Rovio will give Sega access to Beacon, its "high-level experience" platform designed to improve and simplify game design, monetization and maintenance. Basically, its the accelerator Sega is looking for to bring it's current and future titles into the big leagues of mobile gaming. "I feel blessed to be able to announce such a transaction with Rovio, a company that owns Angry Birds, which is loved across the world, and home to many skilled employees that support the company’s industry leading mobile game development and operating capabilities," Haruki Satomi, President and CEO of Sega Sammy, said in a statement. 

Angry Birds truly was the definition of a "phenomenon." There was a time in the early 2010s when if you asked someone if they were playing Angry Birds, almost everyone said yes. In early 2014, Rovio said the Angry Birds series had surpassed two billion downloads, with 200 million playing the games each month.

Its popularity has certainly dipped in the years since, but that's not to say Angry Birds disappeared from the world's consciousness (Rovio has over five billion downloads). A 2015 movie inspired by the game grossed just under $347 million worldwide, though 2019's 'The Angry Birds Movie 2' dipped to $147.8 million, according to Box Office Mojo. Just last year, Angry Birds returned to the App Store for 99 cents as Rovio Classics: Angry Birds.

Rovio has yet to produce anything close to the success of Angry Birds but, with the deal expected to close "during the third quarter of 2023," it'll be interesting to see what comes next.

A studio full of video game veterans is about to release its first big project. Ascendant Studios and EA have confirmed they're releasing the magic first person shooter Immortals of Aveum on July 20th for PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Windows PCs. You play a new battlemage who's thrust into a never-ending war for control of the world's magic.

This isn't Call of Duty with spells, though, or even a revival of classic fantasy shooters like Heretic. Immortals revolves around a combination system that rewards mixing up different magic types to defeat enemies. You can also draw on magical abilities to create shields or turn the environment against your foes. Ascendant is also promising a narrative-focused experience with an extensive backstory, not to mention recognizable voices like Darren Barnet (Never Have I Ever) and Gina Torres (Firefly).

Ascendant is part of a wave of indie studios formed by departing leaders at major game developers. It's helmed by Bret Robbins, the creative director from the original Dead Space, who formed Ascendant in 2018 with Immortals in mind. The team also includes former Telltale Games workers as well as people behind well-known games like Spider-Man and Tomb Raider. Like other well-known exiles, Robbins and crew are effectively trying to regain creative control — even if they're still publishing through major brands.

This may be a good time to be a fan of Bethesda's game lineup. Sony has detailed the PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium game catalog additions for April, and more than a few of them come from Bethesda studios like id Software and Arkane. Most notably, you'll find Doom Eternal and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. These are no longer fresh games, but they're still some of the better-known first-person shooters in recent memory.

Other Bethesda titles bundled with the subscriptions include Wolfenstein: The Old Blood and the horror game The Evil Within. Not that you're stuck playing one publisher's games. The Pixar-like Kena: Bridge of Spirits is now available, as is the card battler/roguelike hybrid Slay the Spire and Ubisoft's extreme sports title Riders Republic. Sackboy: A Big Adventure is part of the package as well, although it's also available to Essential members.

PS Plus Premium members mostly get access to Bethesda classics. The first three Doom games and Doom 64 are included, as is Dishonored: Definitive Edition.

It's not all good news, unfortunately. Sony warns that Spider-Man, Resident Evil and NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 are some of the games departing the catalog by May 15th. As much as PS Plus' library of games has expanded since Extra and Premium became available, the additions aren't always permanent.

Respawn Entertainment and Electronic Arts have shared one final look at Star Wars Jedi: Survivor ahead of the game’s release later this month. Released on Sunday during Disney’s ongoing Star Wars Celebration event in London, the clip offers a mix of story and gameplay highlights. Specifically, you can see protagonist Cal Kestis use his new crossguard lightsaber in combat, and join forces with a few non-playable companions, including Merrin from Jedi: Fallen Order, to take out a KX-series security droid. I won’t spoil the best part of the trailer, but I will mention it involves a speeder bike. If you want to go into the game blind, note that the trailer points at a few story beats – though Respawn suggests “not all images appear in-game.”

I got a chance to preview Jedi: Survivor at the end of last month. The game feels like a better, more polished version of Jedi: Fallen Order, with more things for the player to do and discover. If you’re a fan of the first game, or Star Wars more generally, I suspect you’ll want to check the game out. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor arrives on April 28th on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.

Facebook just announced it is implementing multiplayer games into the video call feature within Messenger. This functionality allows you to converse with friends and family as you kick their booty in 14 currently-available titles. Trash talk is back, baby!

The video call gaming feature is available on Messenger for iOS, Android and the web, with no specialized installations required. The 14 games being showcased at launch include old favorites like Words With Friends and Mini Golf FRVR to newer titles like Card Wars and Exploding Kittens. Each game is designed to be played by as few as two people, though each title boasts differing maximum player numbers.

Each game is optimized for the service, with clearly-demarcated leader boards, and a user interface that leverages the Messenger experience. All you have to do is start a video call on Messenger, tap the group mode button, tap the “Play” icon, and then browse through the library of available games. The company has been experimenting with Messenger-enabled games for the past few years, but nothing has really stuck, so one hopes this new mode has some staying power.

The launch lineup here is relatively slim, at 14 titles, but Facebook Gaming says more free games are on the horizon later this year. To that end, the company is urging interested developers to contact their Partner Manager for details on how to add games to the platform. This news comes mere months after Meta shuttered the standalone Facebook Gaming app.

Sony just made it decidedly easier to find games that accommodate people with disabilities. As of this week, the company is rolling out accessibility tags on the PlayStation Store for PS5 users. Press the triangle button when looking at game's hub and you'll see whether a title has features to support those with visual, audio and motor needs. You'll know if a game has alternative colors, a screen reader or controller adjustments, for instance.

The tags will be generally available this week. Most of the initial support revolves around marquee games like Death Stranding Director's Cut, God of War Ragnarök and Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Sony says it's working with a "wide range of developers" to deploy tags going forward, so you can expect to see them from smaller studios.

The option comes roughly a year and a half after Microsoft unveiled similar tags for Xbox gamers. Not that PlayStation developers have been waiting for Sony to act. The Last of Us creator Naughty Dog has made a point of prioritizing accessibility in its games, such as a feature that plays dialogue through the PS5's DualSense controller as haptic feedback. In that regard, the store upgrade helps expose and promote these efforts.

Sony hasn't been standing still. The firm is developing an accessible PS5 controller that, like Microsoft's Xbox Adaptive Controller, helps people with limited motor control play games that might otherwise be unusable. The tags are just part of a broader strategy to make gaming viable for many more people — provided they can find a PS5 in the first place, of course.