Welcome to, The RoundUp! This is our news post summarizing the past month in PC gaming, PC tech and Thermaltake news. On today’s RoundUp for October, we discuss some exciting news for Death Stranding on PC, Halloween updates for multiple games, and Windows Defender is basically a god. All that and more, in this months RoundUp!
GAMES RELEASED
October was quite a busy month for PC games. First, came the latest in the Tom Clancy series of games, Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. Followed by both The Outer Worlds and the latest Call of Duty game, Modern Warfare on the 25th. A few days later, the studio that created Oxenfree, released a new side scrolling experience called Afterparty. Lastly, the racing game Grid was released, and finally, the latest installment in the WWE franchise, WWE 2K20.
MAJOR GAME UPDATES
This past month was very busy for game updates, specifically, with Halloween updates. Apex: Legends, Fortnite, Overwatch, TF2 and even Borderlands 3, held Halloween themed events. These events offered a variety of Halloween themed cosmetics and other items for a limited time.
In further Apex: Legends news, it was a busy month for the popular Respawn game. Not only did they launch Season 3 and a brand-new map[1], they also announced changes to the training mode. The new firing range allows players to either play alone or team up in the mode.[2] They also recently announced a limited time duos mode, starting on November 5.[3]
Fortnite also had a big month. First, they sucked their entire map into a black hole[4]. After a few days of downtime, they started off the new season by revealing an entirely new map. It sees the return of fan favourite locations Retail Row, Pleasant Park and Salty Springs, but everywhere else is completely new.[5]
GENERAL GAMES NEWS
There were a LOT of things happening in the gaming world this past October.
First, Sony finally announced their support of cross play. Historically, Sony was always very against it. But the recent trials with the new Call of Duty beta seem to have shifted their view. They have decided to leave, “the decision of whether or not to include crossplay up to developers.”[6]
Rocket League, one of the first games to remove loot boxes from their game, has unveiled their new loot system. Players will now be rewarded with Blueprints, which can be crafted with credits, which is their new premium currency. They can earn credits in game or buy them.[7]
Now onto some good news and some bad news.
Good news: Red Dead Redemption 2 is officially coming to PC! It will release on the Rockstar games launcher on November 5, 2019. It later releases on Steam in December, 2019. [8]
Now for the bad news.
The sequel to 2016’s Doom, has been delayed until 2020. The game was slated for release on November 22, however, has now been pushed back to March 2020. The devs stated this was done in order to, “live up to our standards of speed and polish”.[9]
The NPC’s update for Fallout 76 has been delayed.
The “Wastelanders” update was due to finally give the game a bit of life, adding NPCS, companions, and a new quests. Bethesda stated that the reason for the delay was to provide the, “best, most polished update”. There is no new set release date, however it’s expected by Q1 2020.[10]
After a number of leaks throughout October, the next Sims 4 pack was revealed. The 32nd Sims 4 add-on, The Sims 4: Discover University will release on November 15, 2019.[11]
There is a new Batman game on the way! A number of cryptic tweets by WB Games Montreal led many suspect a new game. Now a leak has seemingly confirmed it. The leak claims the game will be called, Batman: Arkham Legacy, and states that, “some or all of the Batman family will be playable”[12]
In streaming news, popular Twitch streamer Shroud announced he would be leaving Twitch for rival streaming platform Mixer. The move was very sudden and he is now the second big name streamer to move to Mixer after Ninja.[13]
Blizzcon was held November 1st and a number of rumours circulated throughout October leading up to it.
This included Overwatch 2, the PVE sequel to 2016’s Overwatch. Also Diablo 4 rumours circulated for a while, and it also ended up being announced this year. All of the run down from Blizzcon 2019 will be featured in next months November RoundUp.
Steam had a busy month as well. First the sales dates were leaked for the rest of the year, including the Halloween sale which ended November 1st.[14] In additional Steam news, they are implementing a feature which asks you to re-review a game after a certain period of hours played.[15] Finally, EA posted a cryptic video of an EA mug with steam wafting out of it. A few days later the EA/Steam crossover was confirmed, with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, planned to be the first official game to be launched on both Origin and Steam. More EA games are planning to trickle onto Steam in future, with games such as Apex: Legends set to appear next year.[16]
After months of speculation, the upcoming Hideo Kojima game Death Stranding, is coming to PC.
The PS4 release is still slotted for November 8, 2019, but the PC port is set for early summer 2020.[17]
A new AI chat banned around 20,000 toxic Counter Strike: Go players. The AI called “Minerva” examined chat messages in the game in late August, and within two months marked, “7,000,000 messages as toxic, issued 90,000 warnings, and banned 20,000 players”. After this time frame, the number of toxic messages the AI found decreased, with the number of overall toxic messages dropping by 8%.[18]
CONTROVERSIAL NEWS
The Writers Guild of America decided to scrap video game writing from their 2020 awards. They claim not enough games qualify their prerequisites, which requires, “a credited writer that’s applied for WGA membership”. Many publicly shamed them for this decision, including The Last of Us director and writer Neil Druckmann.[19]
A federal court decision in the U.S. upheld the repeal of net neutrality. However, this still leaves the door somewhat open for states to enact their own internet legislation themselves if they choose to.[20]
Fortnite found itself in some potential hot water, being sued by the parents of two children who are, “allegedly addicted to the battle royale”. The lawsuit claims that Epic, “knowingly put on the market a very, very addictive game which was also geared toward youth.”[21] There is no further news on how the lawsuit went, so potentially it was settled out of court.
Probably the biggest controversy of the past month, was the Blizzard censorship scandal.
The winner of a Hearthstone tournament, Chung ‘blitzchung’ Ng Wai, announced his support for his home country of Hong Kong during his victory speech. He was then promptly punished by Blizzard for it.[22] They stripped him of his title and prize money. This led to enormous backlash, with many accusing Blizzard of silencing him due to not wanting to upset the China market. Blizzard later retracted part of their punishment, stating that what blitzchung said wasn’t a factor in their ruling. They stated their goal had been to, “keep the focus on the game and on the tournament to the benefit of a global audience.”[23]
Once again, loot boxes, are back in the news.
A report published by the children’s commissioner for England, classified, “loot boxes as gambling and proposes a daily spending limit for children across all games that feature microtransactions.” Currently though, no official movement on the standing of loot boxes over in the UK has been made. This is despite multiple inquiries coming to the same conclusion as this latest one.[24]
Lastly, everybody’s favourite MMO attempt, Fallout 76, launched a nine thousand IQ move. They added a subscription service option. For $179AU a year, you can become a Fallout First member. This gives you access to private worlds for yourself and up to 7 friends, and an array of other in game items[25]. This was met with a lot of backlash due to the game’s often buggy state and the lack of game content. Also, the fact that the game itself isn’t free to play contributed to this backlash.
TECH NEWS
The tech world was a little quiet this past month, but there was still some noteworthy news.
On the AMD front, early October they released the Ryzen Pro 3000 series processors for businesses[26]. AMD also released their Radeon RX 5500 and 550M Navi graphics cards, built for 1080p gaming.[27]
Additionally in graphics cards, NVIDIA released their latest graphics cards too. The GeForce GTX 1660 Super graphics card has a similar performance to that of a 1660 Ti, but it’s cheaper. They also released a variety of models of differing prices, suiting multiple budgets.[28]
Moving onto Intel news. Earlier this month they lowered the price for their 9th Gen F and KF processors.[29] They also released their new Intel Core i9-9900KS edition CPU. Intel claims it is, “The best CPU for gaming”.[30]
The free Windows Defender for the second month in a row proves that spending money on anti-virus software is unnecessary. Its report showed that it blocked 99.96% of threats from a sample of 10,556.[31] Basically, Windows Defender is secretly a god tier anti-virus program.
THERMALTAKE NEWS
We released a few new cool things this past month.
Our new water cooled pre-built gaming systems range was released, LCGS! These are awesome pre-built water-cooled systems which are all made here in Australia. If you haven’t checked out our beautiful new systems, jump over to our site HERE! We also released a behind the scenes video on our YouTube. Check that out HERE!
We released a few cool new items on top of this as well. Such as the Level 20 RGB Mouse and Level 20 Extended RGB mousepad. For water-cooling enthusiasts, we also released the Pacific DP100-D5 Plus Distro-Plate with Pump.
PAX Australia was held in October and we had an awesome time! We hope those who came by our booth enjoyed everything we had to offer. A booth tour is up on our YouTube also, for those of you who couldn’t make it.
Here on the blog, we did some cool posts over August! This includes some spooky halloween posts, and a PC Build for under 1,500!
Lastly, in some exciting new content news, we have a podcast! Thermal Talk is the official Thermaltake Australia podcast. Go check it out on SoundCloud and follow it on Spotify and iTunes to ensue you never miss an episode! Check it out HERE!
And that’s The RoundUp for October! We’ll see you all for the next RoundUp!
SOURCES: [1] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/apex-legends-update/ [2] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/apex-legends-training-mode-is-getting-some-love-soon/ [3] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/apex-legends-is-getting-a-duos-mode-next-week/ [4] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/fortnite-season-x-event/ [5] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/fortnite-chapter-2-map-season-11-landmarks/ [6] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/crossplay-is-now-fully-supported-on-ps4-and-thats-good-for-pc/ [7] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/heres-what-will-replace-loot-boxes-in-rocket-league/ [8] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/red-dead-redemption-2-pc-announced/ [9] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/doom-eternal-has-been-delayed-until-2020/ [10] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/the-big-fallout-76-wastelanders-update-has-been-delayed-to-2020/ [11] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/the-sims-4-discover-university-release-date/ [12] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/batman-arkham-legacy-is-the-next-batman-game-according-to-prominent-leaker/ [13] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/shroud-moves-to-mixer/ [14] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/steam-sale-dates-have-leaked-again/ [15] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/steam-now-asks-players-if-they-want-to-revise-their-user-review-after-hours-of-play/ [16] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/ea-games-are-coming-to-steam-starting-with-star-wars-jedi-fallen-order/ [17] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/death-stranding-is-coming-to-pc-in-2020/ [18] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/20000-toxic-csgo-players-banned-in-six-weeks-by-faceit-and-googles-new-chat-ai/ [19] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/writers-guild-of-america-scraps-its-videogame-writing-award/ [20] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/court-rules-against-net-neutrality-but-leaves-room-for-states-to-push-their-own-rules/ [21] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/fortnite-is-compared-to-cocaine-in-a-potential-class-action-lawsuit/ [22] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/blizzards-dramatic-hearthstone-ban-is-the-latest-proof-that-china-is-too-lucrative-to-piss-off/ [23] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/our-relationships-in-china-had-no-influence-on-blitzchung-punishment-blizzard-says/ [24] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/childrens-commissioner-report-calls-for-loot-boxes-to-be-classified-as-gambling/ [25] https://www.pcgamer.com/fallout-76-now-has-a-premium-membership-for-dollar12-a-month/ [26] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/right-on-cue-amd-launches-a-lower-power-12-core-ryzen-9-pro-3900-cpu/ [27] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/amds-new-radeon-rx-5500-gpus-take-aim-at-1080p-gaming/ [28] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/here-are-the-geforce-gtx-1660-super-cards-you-can-buy-right-now/ [29] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/intel-issues-a-round-of-price-cuts-to-its-9th-generation-f-and-kf-processors/ [30] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/intels-core-i9-9900ks-special-edition-cpu-launches-october-30-for-dollar513/ [31] https://www.pcgamer.com/au/another-independent-antivirus-testing-lab-gives-windows-defender-high-marks/
