Over the past few weeks, Monolith Soft has rolled out some software updates for Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and it seems the patch notes left out one minor change in Version 1.2.0. Warning: Spoilers ahead.
As spotted by some fans of the game on Twitter (via Noisy Pixel), this particular update – introducing the wave 2 DLC has made an adjustment in a cutscene shortly after Chapter 5’s narrative point.
In the cutscene featuring N and Z, a sword model has been changed to better fit the story. This was originally noticed by Twitter user @ui_frara, and then highlighted by @TheJeminiteLaw:
If you’ve already finished the main game, or have passed this point in the game, you likely wouldn’t have even noticed this change yet as it is such a minor adjustment.
Version 1.2.0 was followed by the release of Version 1.2.1 yesterday, which apparently “fixed some issues to make the game more enjoyable”. You can read more in our previous story:
Did you spot this cutscene change? Comment down below.
Years ago, a never-officially-released Warcraft point-and-click adventure game developed by Blizzard in the late ‘90s was leaked online. While the game was completely playable back then, its cutscenes were low-quality, highly compressed, not perfectly synced to the audio, and a few were even just straight up missing from the leak. Now, after years of working on it, someone has remastered all the cutscenes, fixed them up, and made it easier to experience this bit of video game history.
As spotted by Indie Retro News and PC Gamer, modder DerSilver83 recently released the finished 1.0 release of WACRP (Warcraft Adventures Cutscenes Remastered Project). The mod contains 20 completely remastered cutscenes, including two which didn’t actually exist in the initial leak but appeared later on via a different DVD leak.
You can see an example of what this mod and its improved cutscenes look like in the video below:
DerSilver83 / Blizzard
A lot of work went into this release, according to the modder and the project’s website. Apparently, DerSilver83 hand-removed all the compression artifacts from all of the cutscenes. The modder also used Photoshop to painstakingly redraw entire frames and assets, frame-by-frame. Continuity issues have also been fixed and some new transitional scenes have been created entirely from scratch. All audio was also synced and everything now runs at the correct 12fps.
All told, DerSilver83 says they have been working on this mod for about six years, and this latest 1.0 release represents the end of the project. They explained in a post on July 31 that they have done all they can in what they call a “reasonable timeframe” and are happy with the end results.
“I want to remember this project as something fun before it transforms into some kind of a burden,” said DerSilver83 on the project’s site. “So this is it. The final release of my Cutscenes Remaster Project and I hope everybody who uses it can enjoy it as much as I do. I always wanted to create a substantial mod for a game I love and I can finally say that I have achieved (or at least tried) that.”
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Logitech G502 Lightspeed Wireless Gaming Mouse
Gaming! Uses exclusive ultra-fast wireless tech to make sure your mouse is faster than you are, can be sued alongside special software for highly-customizable performance, and has 11 buttons to mess around with, a hyper-fast scroll wheel, and RGB lighting too.
To actually play this, you’ll need to do some searching around the internet to find the appropriate files needed to play the full game, as this mod only contains the remastered cutscenes and nothing else.
In the meantime, you can read more about Warcraft: Lord of The Clans via this great story from our own Luke Plunkett.
Yesterday, the studio behind the Nintendo Switch port of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lordsannounced that it’s finally fixed a game-breaking bug that had previously rendered the game impossible to finish.
Previously, those who bought the port of the Obsidian Star Wars RPG were forced to cheat their way past game-crashing cutscenes. This was resolved via an in-game cheat menu, but it was still a band-aid solution at best. Kotaku attempted to use this method to skip past a game-breaking cutscene at the end of a late game questline, but boarding the ship would just cause the game to crash again. But rejoice: the buggy cutscenes have finally been fixed. Sort of.
After updating the game, I was finally able to play the previously problematic cutscenes without being ejected to my Switch home screen. There’s one caveat though. KOTOR 2 has a special ability that increases your movement speed, and it’s indispensable for a game that forces you to traverse quite a bit of empty space. The trade off is that the game forces a blurry filter over your screen while the skill is active. The new patch may have fixed the cutscenes, but it makes it so that these blurry filters carry over to said cutscenes. So you get gross looking screenshots like this:
Screenshot: Aspyr / Obsidian / Kotaku
KOTOR 2 has a lot of cinematic scenes that automatically play when you cross an invisible boundary, so you can’t really turn off the filter manually when they start playing. The blurriness stops after the skill duration has elapsed, but it has arguably made my experience a little bit worse. But hey, at least I can get around to other planets now!
Did Aspyr knowingly release an unfinishable game? Yes. Am I annoyed? Also yes. But I recognize that the vanilla version of KOTOR 2 was also released in a broken and buggy state. Maybe it’s one of those games that’s always doomed to imperfection. In any case, I recommend keeping multiple save backups just in case more horrible bugs await you at the very end of the game.
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask as seen on Switch Online Expansion Pack (Image: Nintendo)
Nintendo yesterday added another game to its Switch Online Expansion Pack and updated the N64 library to Version 2.0.0.
There have been all sorts of improvements, but this latest update is even better than expected, it seems. According to “Zelda 64 researcher” and Twitter user Fig (as highlighted by Nintendo dataminer OatmealDome), the emulation of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask on the Switch Online service is actually “more accurate to N64” in one “situation” than it was on the Wii Virtual Console version.
Warning – Majora’s Mask spoilers in the video below:
OatmealDome: “Majora’s Mask – Here’s a situation where the Switch version is actually *better* than previous releases and more accurate to N64, thanks to a patch added by Nintendo. It fixes a cutscene running too fast, causing it to end too early.”
It’s quite impressive if this is the case – as the Wii Virtual Console N64 library is still considered by many as “the best” generation of Nintendo’s N64 emulation. You can read more about this in our previous post.
As OatmealDome further explains, the accuracy found in the Switch version of Majora’s Mask is good news for fans who have been asking for an experience more like the original Nintendo 64 release, but not so great for the speedrunning community, as it technically takes longer to complete runs.
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask as seen on Switch Online Expansion Pack (Image: Nintendo)
You can see the various other improvements in yesterday’s story. This is another example of the effort Nintendo is now seemingly putting into this paid service to not only improve it but in this case make it even better than past emulations of N64 games.
Would you be willing to give the Switch Online Expansion Pack service another look after the most recent update? Are you already a subscriber? Leave your thoughts down in the comments.
Screenshot: Me, trying to play through more post-launch woes.
I loved Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. So much so that, had I been given more time with it during the calendar year, it would have made a serious run for my Game Of 2020. But boy, at the same time, I have not been happy with the support the game has got after launch.
The game released, and continues to feature months later, a number of quest-breaking, and sometimes entirely game-breaking bugs. One of them had me stuck for over a week when a character essential to a main storyline quest refused to appear at her designated point in Ravensthorpe, another for a few days when a quest that was supposed to trigger new dialogue after I dropped a guy off my horse just never got around to it.
Those are two that plagued me; The Washington Post highlighted another last week that was giving many others serious headaches.
To be clear, the problem here isn’t that the game launched with bugs. Like some other wonky parts of Valhalla—low-quality sound effects in some areas, and cutscenes where character’s lips don’t move—there are concessions to be made for the fact a big AAA gamewas released in the middle of a global pandemic.
But also, there’s a point where we have to acknowledge that this game was released in November, and it’s now almost April, and many of these major bugs are still there, trapping and frustrating players months later. Which sucks!
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And while issues from November are still there, new ones keep piling up. The game’s latest round of free seasonal content, based around the Ostara festivities, has had a number of aspects removed after they started causing crashes.
That solution involved removing Ravensthorpe’s Ostara decorations, and its new quests won’t be able to be completed while Ubisoft works on a fix.
I’m trying to get excited for the game’s first proper update, which will shift Eivor’s adventures to Ireland, but when the game still has so many lingering issues, what’s to say an expansion won’t just add more to the pile?
