Two weeks ago, Niantic released the gym update for Pokemon GO. The update was supposed to fix and balance gyms and make gamers feel as though they were battling a gym leader in the main Pokemon games. I would like to say Niantic succeeded, but I can’t, because thanks to server problems, the gyms are completely borked. Please note that this article is based on my personal experience, so maybe (or, I hope) it does not apply to everyone playing Pokemon GO. Still, there is a huge problem.
On the surface, the gyms work as intended. Trainers can only leave six unique Pokemon at gyms (i.e., no more than one Blissey, no more than one Dragonite, etc.); the photo disc that gives players free items works well, and the new motivation system is fully functional. Catching and leveling up Pokemon also work well, but once you get into gym battles, the game self-destructs faster than a Voltorb/Electrode.
When I played, at first everything seemed to be ok; Pokemon GO displayed the defending Pokemon I was going to battle and what Pokemon I would use. However, the game constantly thought I wandered away from the gyms while I customized my team. Sure, I could simply exit out of the gym screen and reenter it to fix the problem, but then I would have to customize the lineup again. And then the game thought I wandered away again, which forced me to exit the gym screen again and start all over. Again. I usually had to repeat this process four to five times, but that’s still four to five times too many. And then there were the battles. Oh, the battles, the laggy, unresponsive battles. When the patch first landed, health bars fluctuated wildly, which made it impossible to know which Pokemon would faint first, but then the lag got worse; way worse. Usually, the defending Pokemon didn’t faint for a good twenty seconds until after its health was depleted, but for the past several days, almost all of my matches ended with the time running out after I won the match, which counted as a loss. Each time, the game took half a minute before it told me I lost (despite my obvious win). Oh, and the game stopped responding to my commands in the middle of the battle at least twice. While the timer still counted down. Sure, sometimes I got lucky and the game said I won a match that I clearly won, but usually the servers cheated me out of my hard-earned victories. And raid battles weren’t much better; they suffered from the same lag issues as normal gym battles. In fact, raid battles might be even have been worse, as the last raid battle I participated in didn’t end until two to three minutes after the timer reached zero.
Niantic, buddy, you really have to fix these server problems. Gym battles are a major draw for many people in the game, but right now battling in gyms is next to impossible. Sure, sometimes I got lucky if the planets aligned during a blue moon and the gym battles functioned as intended, but usually gyms were beyond broken. Or maybe the game has become sentient and decided to target me and only me. I don’t know. Is it wrong for me to hope that I’m not alone in this, because otherwise I come off as shallow complaining about a problem nobody else has.
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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