As expected, Epic Games Store has prepared a big hit for the first day of Christmas.
The game was developed by the Kojima Productions studio and published by 505 Games.
In a break from family gatherings, PC players will have an opportunity to play as courier in the post-apocalyptic world for free. From December 25 to December 26, each Epic Games Store account holder can assign and download Death Stranding.
The giveaway appears just as Kojima Productions announced the next installment in the series with a working title “Death Stranding 2”. What should be noted however is that the version that is currently available for free is not the Director’s Cut that was released this year, but the original version from 2020.
Death Stranding, Source: Epic Games Store
System recommended specs list GeForce GTX 1060 6GB or Radeon RX 590 GPUs for good 1080p experience at 60 FPS. However, this game already supports NVIDIA DLSS2, so the performance may vary depending on support for this technology. Meanwhile, AMD FSR 2 and Intel XeSS are only available in Director’s Cut edition, which is not part of this promotion.
Death Stranding PC requirements, Source: Epic Games Store
One of the major problems that worked against from the jump was the fact that Google didn’t secure blockbuster exclusives for the cloud gaming service, which it will . Sure, people were able to play the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2,Cyberpunk 2077and Destiny 2on the platform, but those are all available elsewhere. As it turns out, Google may have spurned the chance to have an exclusive title from one of the biggest names in gaming.
According to at one point Hideo Kojima was working on a Stadia-only follow-up to , which debuted on PlayStation in 2019 and later arrived on PC. Death Stranding has some asynchronous multiplayer elements. Other players might be able to use ladders, roads and other items that you place in the world, for instance. However, the planned follow-up was said to be a fully single-player game, which might have been the reason why Google canceled the project.
According to the report, Google canned the game, which was described as an episodic horror title, after seeing the first mockups in 2020. Stadia vice-president and general manager Phil Harrison is said to have made the final decision to kill the project. For what it’s worth, , Kojima claimed one of his projects had recently been canceled.
Stephen Lam / reuters
Google reportedly abandoned the project in the belief that there wasn’t a market for single-player games anymore. Of note, CD Projekt Red that Cyberpunk 2077 (which, again, was released on Stadia) has now sold 20 million copies, less than two years after its . By mid-2021, Death Stranding itself had sold more than 5 million copies.
The lack of big exclusives is far from the only issue that led to Stadia’s downfall. A questionable business model and a didn’t help, and nor did Google’s for ruthlessly killing off its own products. Even though Stadia has excellent game streaming tech and some passionate fans, it never took off as Google hoped. The company will and issue refunds for all hardware and software purchases (except for Pro subscriptions). Ubisoft is to give people who bought its games on Stadia access to PC versions.
The news of Stadia’s demise developers, from giants like Destiny 2 studio Bungie to indie studios whose titles were supposed to hit the now-closed Stadia store in the coming weeks. As notes, it isn’t clear whether Google has a broad plan to reimburse studios for costs they after launching their games on Stadia. There are concerns about what Stadia’s closure means for game preservation too. While Google didn’t secure AAA exclusives, that aren’t available elsewhere.
Future Publishing via Getty Images
Meanwhile, some are to unlock the Stadia Controller’s Bluetooth functions. The argument is that, if people can more easily use the controller on other platforms, it’s less likely that the gamepad will become . The controller connects directly to WiFi for Stadia games in order to minimize lag. You can also hook it up to devices with a USB-C cable.
As for Kojima, , according to the game’s star, Norman Reedus. that Kojima has teamed up with Xbox Game Studios for his next title. That game will be powered by Microsoft’s cloud technology.
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Before Google closed down the division in 2021, Stadia Games and Entertainment turned down the opportunity to have an exclusive follow-up to Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding.
When Stadia was first announced in 2019, Google did so with aplomb, showcasing a grand vision for what cloud streaming technology could enable, with ideas like Stream Connect to instantly view your teammates’ gameplay. Rather than relying on third-party companies to see the merits of these ideas, Google formed Stadia Games & Entertainment — headed up by industry veteran Jade Raymond — to create experiences that could only be possible on Stadia.
A little over a year into Stadia’s existence, however, with the service reportedly missing user targets by “hundreds of thousands,” Google began winding down the Stadia Games and Entertainment division. Before that shutdown, Google was working with quite a few well known developers in the gaming industry to craft Stadia exclusive titles.
Some companies like Harmonix had been publicly confirmed to be working on Stadia titles while names like Yu Suzuki and Hideo Kojima were reported after the fact. These efforts were presumed to result in second-party titles published by Stadia Games & Entertainment, as opposed to the in-house games being developed by Shannon Studstill’s team and Google’s Star Labs.
A source has told 9to5Google that the game Kojima was working on was meant to be a Stadia-exclusive follow-up to Death Stranding, a game which initially launched as a PlayStation exclusive in 2019. Where the original Death Stranding was an asynchronous multiplayer game — where actions taken in your world can have an effect on other players, such as building signs to help others find their way — the proposed game would be strictly a single-player experience.
In fact, our source says it was that single-player nature of the game that led Google to cancel Stadia’s collaboration with Kojima, with the company believing there was no longer a market for solo experiences. Reportedly, the game had gotten initial approval from Google and had begun the early stages of development. However, shortly after the first mockups were shown in mid 2020, Google scrapped the project entirely.
Previous reporting on Kojima Productions’ intended Stadia efforts claimed it would be an “episodic horror game,” and that Kojima himself excited to work with the potential of the cloud. Ultimately, it was said to be Stadia’s General Manager, Phil Harrison, who made the final call to cancel the Death Stranding follow-up.
Since that cancelation, with its more recent PC re-releases, Death Stranding has grown to be a well-regarded game with a full sequel now said to be in the works. Beyond that, the enduring popularity of games like God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and Control shows that single-player games continue to be a core market, especially for platform exclusives.
Even with the benefit of hindsight, it’s impossible to know whether an exclusive game from Hideo Kojima would have made the difference for Stadia’s future as a platform. According to Kojima’s own timeline, the original Death Stranding entered development in 2015 and didn’t launch until 2019. If the follow-up required a similar timescale, it wouldn’t have even seen release before Google pulled the plug on Stadia.
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Around 200 whales have died and just 35 remain alive following a mass stranding in Australia this week, rescue teams say.
The pilot whales were found Wednesday stranded on an exposed beach along the coast of Tasmania.
Rescue efforts are ongoing to save the remaining whales.
“We are primarily focused this morning on really getting into that rescue operation and getting [the whales] released,” Brendon Clark of the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service told the Australia Broadcasting Corporation on Thursday.
“We are conscious that some of them may re-beach themselves and so we’ll be monitoring that.”
Rescuers had previously estimated that about half of the whales were still alive.
This is the second mass stranding of whales to have taken place in Tasmania this week after more than a dozen sperm whales, mostly young males and believed to be part of the same bachelor pod, were found dead on another beach.
Cases of whale strandings have baffled marine scientists for decades.
Tasmania’s largest stranding was in 2020 when more than 450 pilot whales were found.
Xbox’s official PC Game Pass Twitter account may be teasing the arrival of Death Stranding on PC Game Pass.
Earlier today, the account changed its profile picture to a foggy landscape featuring grassy hills and rocks. After changing the photo, the account posted, saying, “sometimes we just like a good landscape picture #NewProfilePic”.
sometimes we just like a good landscape picture #NewProfilePic
— PC Game Pass (@XboxGamePassPC) August 16, 2022
This afternoon, some eagle-eyed fans believe they’ve already uncovered the location within Death Stranding that the new profile picture was taken from, with user @naven0m posting the area in a reply… along with an image from the game of Sam Bridges urinating.
Found it pic.twitter.com/xlHwrqz0qD
— NV (@naven0m) August 16, 2022
Most seem to agree that this is the correct location featured in the profile picture, meaning PC Game Pass is likely teasing a Death Stranding release on the service.
After originally launching exclusively on the PlayStation 4 in 2019, both the original Death Stranding and the Director’s Cut have already come to PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. Sony Interactive Entertainment did publish the PS4 version, but the PC version was handled by 505 Games. Inclusion on PC Game Pass would mark the game’s first appearance under the Xbox umbrella.
Death Stranding is the first project from Kojima Productions following Hideo Kojima’s breakup with Konami. The game stars Norman Reedus’ Sam Porter Bridges, who trudges across a post-apocalyptic America delivering packages. Reedus seemingly leaked the existence of Death Stranding 2 earlier this year, although it hasn’t been officially announced yet.
While the true meaning behind Xbox’s tease isn’t officially confirmed, we do know that Kojima and Xbox are working together for a project separate from Death Stranding. Earlier this year, Kojima announced a partnership with Xbox to create “a game I have always wanted to make.” We don’t know much about the game yet, other than that it will include Microsoft’s “cutting-edge technology”.
Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN. You can find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.
Death Valley National Park was closed Saturday after exceptional amounts of rain drenched the park on Friday, triggering flash floods that left about 1,000 visitors and park staff stranded.
The park received 1.46 inches of rainfall at the Furnace Creek area — just shy of the previous calendar day record of 1.47 inches, set on April 15, 1988. This amounts to about three-quarters of what the area typically receives in an average year, 1.94 inches, and is the greatest amount ever recorded in August, The lowest, driest and hottest location in the United States, Death Valley averages just 0.11 inches of rain in August.
As of Saturday morning, “everything is going well,” said Nikki Jones, a server assistant at a restaurant in the park’s Ranch Inn, who also lives there and posted a video of the flooding from her colleague on Twitter. Jones told The Washington Post that the floodwaters receded Friday afternoon, but light debris remain on the roads.
“CalTrans has done an amazing job to get it cleaned up as soon as possible,” she told The Post in a Twitter message. “I drove on the roads today.”
Jones said some people are stranded at the Inn at the Oasis because of trapped cars, “but people are able to get out of the park today.”
“The floodwaters pushed dumpster containers into parked cars, which caused cars to collide into one another,” the National Park Service said in a statement Friday. “Additionally, many facilities are flooded including hotel rooms and business offices.
The NPS did not immediately respond to The Washington Post’s request for an update Saturday morning.
The torrent was triggered by the Southwest monsoon, which develops each summer as prevailing winds shift from out of the west to out of the south, drawing a surge of humidity northward. This moisture can fuel vigorous downpours that douse the parched desert landscape. Because there is little soil to soak up the rains, any measurable rains can cause flooding in low-lying areas, and heavier rains can collect into normally dry creeks, triggering flash floods.
This year’s Southwest monsoon has been particularly intense — which has helped relieve drought conditions in the region but also resulted in many significant flood events. Serious flooding has recently affected areas around Las Vegas and Phoenix.
Las Vegas flooding sends water gushing through casinos
The Death Valley flood also comes amid a series of extreme rain events over the Lower 48 states. Over the week spanning the end of July and beginning of August, three 1-in-1,000 year rain events occurred — inundating St. Louis, eastern Kentucky, and southeast Illinois. Earlier this summer, Yellowstone National Park also flooded.
How two 1-in-1,000 year rain events hit the U.S. in two days
Death Valley holds the record for the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth, as well as several runners-up. Officially, Death Valley reached 134 degrees on July 10, 1913, but some climatologists have questioned the legitimacy of that reading. The next highest temperature on record, 131 degrees from Kebili, Tunisia, set July 7, 1931, is also controversial. Last summer and the summer before, Death Valley hit 130 degrees, which may be the highest pair of reliably measured temperatures on Earth if the 1931 Tunisia and 1913 Death Valley readings are disregarded.
Death Valley soars to 130 degrees, matching Earth’s highest temperature in at least 90 years
The rainfall inundated the park, trapping vehicles in debris, according to a video tweeted by John Sirlin, an Arizona-based stormchaser. He wrote that roads were blocked by boulders and palm trees that had fallen, and that visitors struggled for six hours to leave the park.
Major flash flooding in Death Valley National Park this morning. Approximately two dozen vehicles trapped in mud and rock debris at the Inn at Death Valley. Took nearly 6 hours to get out. #cawx #stormhour pic.twitter.com/3rDFUgY7ws
— John Sirlin (@SirlinJohn) August 5, 2022
Earlier this week, flash floods hit parts of western Nevada, forcing the closure of some roads leading to the park from Las Vegas. Flash floods also hit parts of northern Arizona.
Flash floods close roads into Death Valley National Park
Sirlin told the Associated Press that Friday’s rain started around 2 a.m. and was “more extreme than anything I’ve seen there.”
“There were at least two dozen cars that got smashed and stuck in there,” he said, adding that he saw washes flowing several feet deep although he did not see anyone injured, and the NPS reported no injuries as of Friday.
Last July, rare summer rains also soaked Death Valley, bringing 0.74 inches in a day at Furnace Creek approximately two weeks after the park set the world record for the hottest daily average temperature, at 118.1 degrees Fahrenheit.
Desert downpours: Rare summer rains soaked Death Valley and parts of California on Monday
Scientists say human-caused warming of the climate is intensifying extreme precipitation events. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found some evidence that rainfall from the Southwest monsoon has increased since the 1970s.
A Coral Princess cruise ship with more than 2,000 passengers onboard is stranded at sea.
Strong winds and 20-foot waves are preventing the ship from safely docking in Australia, per reports.
This isn’t the ship’s only challenge in recent days. Last week, it reported 120 cases of COVID-19 onboard.
Passengers on the Coral Princess cruise ship, now stuck off Australia’s coast, can’t seem to catch a break.
Last week, the ship reported 120 cases of COVID-19. Now, its 2,000-plus passengers are stranded at sea.
Strong winds and 20-foot waves are preventing the vessel from safely docking, according to news reports from The Daily Mail and Sky News Australia. The ship was supposed to dock in Brisbane at 7am local time Friday, the last day of its weeklong voyage, with stops along the Queensland and New South Wales coasts, but bad weather has made that impossible.
It’s unclear when the ship will be able to dock.
“The Port of Brisbane is closed … ” a Princess Cruises spokesman told The Daily Mail Australia, citing “adverse weather conditions associated with the East Coast Low off Queensland.”
The ship’s arrival and reopening of the port will depend on when conditions improve, the spokesman said.
The ship has been hit with waves measuring roughly 20 feet, according to passenger footage cited by The Daily Mail. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology issued a warning for winds with gusts up to roughly 55 miles per hour, for parts of the southern Queensland coast Friday.
Princess Cruises did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hideo Kojima seems to have subtly addressed yesterday’s Death Stranding 2 leak by Norman Reedus.
In a tweet early this morning, the developer shared three photos of himself and Reedus. It’s not clear exactly when or where the photos were taken, and a reverse image search on Google doesn’t turn up any results, but the pair appear to be in a location associated with The Walking Dead TV series, on which Reedus is a recurring cast member.
“Go to your private room,my friend“👍😍 pic.twitter.com/jBTDqhQSLIMay 21, 2022
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The caption to those images reads “Go to your private room, my friend,” referring to the spaces across Death Stranding in which Reedus’ character, Sam Bridges, could rest between jobs. Kojima also used thumbs up and heart-eyes emojis, with the positive message seeming to be a tacit confirmation of Reedus’ recent claim that Death Stranding 2 development was underway.
Discussing the original game in an interview, Reedus said that he had “just started the second one,” also referring to whatever the new project might be as “part two.” It’s not the first time we’ve heard about a potential Death Stranding sequel, but back in August 2021 the title was said to be “in negotiations.” This time out, we appear to have had confirmation that work is underway directly from one of the game’s primary figures, backed up by Kojima himself.
Unfortunately, it may be a long time until we get any more concrete information about the project. Reedus’ suggestion is that work has only just begun on the project, and the subtle nature of the reveal implies that we’re unlikely to learn much more over the E3 2022 schedule.
Kojima Productions is reportedly working on two games: one big, one small, with the latter apparently launching a new IP.
More than 100 riders were stuck on the San Diego Zoo’s “Skyfari Aerial Tram” gondola ride Saturday in what authorities said was a case of suspected vandalism.
Four men, between ages 20 and 24, were later arrested in connection with the case, FOX 5 of San Diego reported. They were charged with suspicion of vandalism, the report said.
The suspects allegedly were “rocking back and forth” in their gondola, knocking their gondola out of alignment with the support cable and causing the entire ride to shut down for more than an hour, a witness claimed, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
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None of the suspects were immediately named.
The San Diego Zoo entrance is seen June 11, 2020. (Associated Press)
Details about possible damage to the ride were not immediately known.
San Diego fire and rescue personnel were called to the scene, but about 160 riders eventually returned to the ground after zoo employees got the ride working again, the Union-Tribune reported.
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Everyone was safely on the ground by 4:34 p.m., the fire-rescue department said. No injuries were reported.
The ride lifts passengers about 40 feet from the ground, the newspaper reported.
President Biden was heckled for stranding Americans in Afghanistan while he surveyed the damage from Hurricane Ida in New Jersey on Tuesday.
Biden was visiting a neighborhood in Manville and speaking to police when onlookers erupted over the president’s handling of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
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“My country is going to s— and you’re allowing it!” one woman yelled off camera, according to C-SPAN’s footage of the encounter. “And I’m an immigrant and I’m proud of this country! I’d give my life for this country. You guys should be ashamed of yourselves.”
“All this for a f— photo-op?” one man scoffed off camera. “You ain’t gonna do s—!”
“My best friend died in 2011 in Afghanistan for what?” a man asked angrily. “For this guy to pull this s—? You leave them in ruins and leave Americans behind!”
“He will leave you behind – you guys protecting him,” he said to the police officers assisting Biden.
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“Leave no American behind!” the first woman screamed.
Biden appeared to pay no attention to the hecklers.
The president has repeatedly defended his handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal despite breaking his promise to keep troops in the now-Taliban-led country until every American was out. The State Department now estimates there are roughly 100 Americans still trying to flee.
