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It appears that CD Projekt Red plans on releasing a Game of the Year edition for its most recent game, Cyberpunk 2077. In an investor meeting reported on by Insider Gaming, CD Projekt Red CEO Adam Kicinski stated that the studio intends to release a Game of the Year edition after the launch of the game's upcoming DLC Phantom Liberty. The report states that Kicinski said the following about the upcoming rerelease of Cyberpunk 2077 next year: "It's the natural order of things--it was the same with The Witcher, which after both expansions was finally released as a Game of the Year Edition and has been on the market that way ever since. The same can be expected in this case." It was previously reported that Phantom Liberty would be the only DLC for Cyberpunk 2077. Following its release, CD Projekt Red will reportedly begin working on Project Orion (the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel's code name) in 2023. For more Cyberpunk 2077 news, check out these stories: Cyberpunk 2077 Helped CD Projekt Make More Money Than Ever Before In A Q3 Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty Expansion Won't Be Free DLC A Month Later, A Million Chooms Are Still Logging Into Cyberpunk 2077 Every Day View the full article

Gran Turismo 7 will be celebrating its 25th anniversary of the franchise by rewarding players with special in-game items, bonus rewards, and more. From now until December 5, players can increase their rewards for each race in Sports mode. This mode features a race similar to the one in the World Finals, but will allow players to earn up to five times the amount of credits upon completion. Players will also be able to earn additional credit through Online Time Trails, which task racers with completing tracks of the World Finals races in a limited amount of time. Those who tune into any Gran Turismo 7 live streams will be rewarded the Viewers Gift, and if they watch the World Finals and answer the Day 4 question, they'll receive the Ferrari Vision Gran Turismo. The last day to earn these rewards is December 4 at 7:59 AM PST / 3:59 PM GMT. Lastly, the special GT World Series World Finals liveries will be available until January 3 via the Recommended section in the Showcase pavilion. For more GameSpot news, check out these stories: The Callisto Protocol Review - I Don't Belong Here Margot Robbie's Pirates Of The Caribbean Movie Script May Not Be Dead Just Yet Ed Boon Says No Plans For Mortal Kombat Or Injustice Announcement At The Game Awards View the full article

After making a pair of surprise appearances earlier in the year, Tekken 8 has been confirmed for an appearance at The Game Awards next week. The official Tekken Twitter account posted simply "GET READY" along with a brief teaser video telling viewers to "save the D8" for the awards show. No other information was confirmed, and no other hints have been posted since the video went live. Tekken 8 was first teased at Evo 2022 in August, where a seconds-long teaser showed Tekken mainstay Kazuya Mishima's face--complete with glowing eye--and the franchise's iconic phrase "get ready for the next battle." Two months later, during the PlayStation State of Play in September, Tekken 8 was officially unveiled for the first time. The gameplay showed Kazuya and his son Jin Kazama battling during a heavy storm, with the video showcasing updated graphics and effects. No other info about the game has been revealed since the State of Play. Tekken 8 is the latest entry in the storied fighting game franchise, and the first since June 2017. It will launch on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. View the full article

Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon wants everyone to press pause on expecting an imminent announcement of a new entry in his fighting game franchises. Specifically, he says don't expect to see a new game from NetherRealm Studios to appear at The Game Awards next week. Boon possibly wanted to get out ahead of any predictions for Mortal Kombat 12 since his studio unveiled the 11th installment at The Game Awards in 2018. History won't repeat itself this time, the chief creative officer of NetherRealm made clear on Twitter. This reinforces what Boon said back in October. He explained that NetherRealm was focusing on celebrating Mortal Kombat's 30th anniversary before any new game announcement. That would come in due time. That said, a new mobile game called Mortal Kombat: Onslaught--developed by NetherRealm--was unveiled in October. It's an RPG in which players "build a team of fighters from a vast roster of characters--and unleash them in massive real-time group battles," according to Warner Bros. The game is planned to release next year. The most recent entry in the series, Mortal Kombat 11, has sold more than 12 million copies as of July 2021. View the full article

In addition to games like Starfield, The Elder Scrolls 6, and Fallout 5, Bethesda continues to push into the mobile games space. Bethesda's Todd Howard has now teased the company's next mobile game, which hasn't been announced yet. "We have a new mobile game that we're working on that we haven't announced yet that I'm in love with," Howard said on the Lex Fridman podcast recently, as transcribed by VGC. So far, some of Bethesda's mobile releases have included Fallout Shelter, The Elder Scrolls Legends, and The Elder Scrolls: Blades. Howard didn't have anything else to say about the new mobile game, but he observed that Fallout Shelter players enjoyed playing the game "for hours a day." "You know, if you look at kids these days, they can stare at their phone for hours, that's all they do; that's where they watch everything, so it's also like a demographic thing," he said. "The younger audience, they would rather sit and stare at their phone than play it on a big screen." In 2019, Bethesda parent company ZeniMax acquired Alpha Dog Games, the studio behind the mobile games Wraithborne and Mighty Doom, among others. ZeniMax's careers page lists multiple open positions at Alpha Dog for mobile games. Microsoft is trying to push further into the mobile games space, so having one of its premiere divisions, Bethesda, working on more mobile projects makes a lot of sense. View the full article

It's the start of a new weekend in Trials of Osiris, and if you've been battling to get your hands on the coveted Aisha's Embrace and Reed's Regret, this will be your last weekend to obtain one of those Adept weapons before they're cycled out of the loot pool. Here's where you'll play Trials of Osiris this weekend and what weapons you can earn. Map: To be confirmed Reputation Rank 4: Upgrade Module x 2 Reputation Rank 7: Enhancement Prism x 3 Reputation Rank 10: Trials Weapon (Changes for each rank reset) Reputation Rank 13: Upgrade Module x 2 Reputation Rank 16: Trials Weapon (Changes for each rank reset) Flawless Reward: Forgiveness (Adept) Trials weapons now carry the Alacrity Origin Trait. It gives you increased aim assist, reload speed, stability, and range on your Trials guns when you're the last living member of a fireteam or running solo. You can also choose to swap to the Crucible Origin trait, One Quiet Moment, which greatly enhances your gun's reload speed when you reload while out of combat. As always, Trials becomes available from Friday's daily reset at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET until the weekly reset at the same time the following Tuesday. During that time, you can also pay a visit to Xur to see what Exotics he's selling. Make sure to pay a visit to Saint-14 in the Tower to pick up a Trials card, which will dictate certain bonuses (such as whether you get bonus rewards at certain milestones or if a loss will be forgiven). Trials of Osiris is a weekend PvP mode that runs from the daily reset on Friday until the weekly reset on Tuesday, giving you four days to take part. Your goal in the Trials is for you and the other two players in your fireteam to achieve a "Flawless" run, in which you win seven matches without losing any. Go Flawless and you'll earn a trip to the Lighthouse and receive some special rewards, including the new Adept weapons. These have additional stat bonuses, making them among the most coveted items you can get your hands on. Thanks to a bunch of changes to Trials this year, though, the mode is a little easier to get into than it has been. The Trials of Osiris now features matchmaking, so you can jump into matches even if you don't have a full squad of three players to take it on. Your Trials Passage--the card you purchase from Saint-14 that grants you access to the mode and tracks your wins--now does not track your losses--so you can keep playing and earning rewards even if you lose out on a Flawless run. Bungie has also adjusted Trials so that you earn rewards based on the number of rounds, rather than matches, you've won during your session, and added a reputation system that's similar to the Crucible and Gambit, making it easier to earn some of the Trials of Osiris's unique loot. Finally, you'll earn Trials Engrams for participating in the mode, which you can cash in with Saint-14 during the weekend you receive them. You can tune those engrams to yield specific pieces of loot, or take your chances with random drops that will expand what's available in your loot pool. So even if you're just jumping into Trials alone, there are plenty of ways you can earn great new gear. View the full article

The U.S. Army planned to use Call of Duty streamers on Twitch as a means of gaining more Gen-Z recruits, according to military spending documents recently acquired by Vice. The Army has reportedly spent millions on the project--or planned to, anyway--with the hopes of winning over young adults and minorities who, historically, have plenty of interest in playing war games, but considerably less interest in enlisting in real life. Vice acquired the documents via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, and according to their report, the U.S. Army had millions earmarked for the project's 2021-2022 goals. Over the course of those years, the Army aimed to use esports tournaments and high-profile streamers as advertisement platforms, with the ultimate goal of reaching an audience that has evidently proven elusive in terms of recruitment. The documents openly state the desire for the ad campaign to target Gen-Z in particular, noting the preferred age range (18 to 24) in addition to other subgroups the Army hoped to reach via advertisement. "Focus on the growth of females, Blacks, and Hispanics," reads one section of the document. Much of the document focuses on proposed spending for events like Twitch's HBCU (Historically Black colleges and universities) Showdown, along with many others. One page in particular displays a tiered list of advertising prospects. "Twitch x HBCU Showdown" tops the chart, with a proposed budget of $1 million. Further down the list is Call of Duty League, with a note that such a move was pending a discussion with Activision Blizzard. The documents indicated that involvement with Activision Blizzard was being halted due to misconduct allegations and other legal troubles facing the publisher. According to Vice, an August 2021 email included in the documents states, "At this time, we intend to 'pause all activities' immediately with Activision due to serious allegations of sexual harassment at their workplace, and also recommended tha[t] the Marketing Engagement Brigade not send their eSports team to the tournament." The document obtained by Vice even mentioned individual Call of Duty streamers like Stonemountain64.The U.S. Army is no stranger to aiming ads at gamers online, including via video game publications such as GameSpot. It even has its own official esports team, which has been used as a recruitment tool at various gaming conventions and esports tournaments for several years. The team is made up of actual soldiers who must first finish basic training and can be deployed at any moment, just like any other member of the United States Armed Forces. But streamers aren't the only method the military has used in an attempt to reach what it may see as an untapped market of potential recruits. Per Vice, both the streaming service Paramount+ and the WWE were also approached as potential candidates for pro-enlistment advertisements. Additionally, $200,000 was allocated for a proposed sponsorship of Call of Duty Mobile. According to Vice, the documents indicate that there were once plans for the mobile game to reward players who watch U.S. Army ads with in-game currency. It's not clear exactly how much of the proposed $6.9 million budget was successfully spent on the projects outlined in the report. While some projects--like the aforementioned mobile game rewards for watching U.S. Army ads--obviously never happened, the success of other projects (like behind-the-scenes sponsorships) is more difficult to gauge. According to Vice, Activision Blizzard and Paramount+ declined a request for comment, while Twitch only stated that the company's ad services did not receive payment from the U.S. Army for individual streams or the HBCU Showdown in 2022. The U.S. Army, however, did have something to say. "Ad recall and favorability are important as they are both industry accepted measures of effectiveness of the advertising and sponsorships we purchase," read an emailed statement received by Vice. "Army Marketing’s goal for sponsorship is similar to all our advertising purchases which is to reach a specific market in support of Army recruiting." Though the U.S. military has frequently used games as a tool to drive recruitment (with varying degrees of success), some argue that the practice is immoral, potentially influencing young people to conflate in-game grenade-flinging with real-life combat. On the other hand, GoArmy.com advertisements have been slipped in between preview trailers at American cinemas for decades now, and concerns are rarely raised about this practice. Still, there is one significant difference there: Those cinema advertisements don't follow their young, impressionable audiences home the way ads in online games and popular streaming platforms do. "In Army marketing, we must meet the youth where they are," the Army's emailed statement to Vice concluded. "And that is online." (Disclosure: The U.S. Army has advertised on GameSpot in the past.) View the full article

Primitive is a new Stone Age survival shooter just announced for PC, and it aims to take full advantage of Unreal Engine 5 to deliver a photorealistic representation of what the world was like tens of thousands of years ago. Developer Games Box is the studio behind Primitive, and though it doesn't have a release date (or even a release window), the game is currently able to be wishlisted on Steam. The game's description states that players will need to climb the hierarchy of a group of hunters, learn to communicate, and craft various items that will aid in survival such as new weapons, shelter, methods of cooking, and clothing. Players will battle not only against rival Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens but massive wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. In a quote to IGN, Games Box CEO Tomasz Supel said the project is still early in development, but that other games like Ubisoft's Far Cry Primal will give players a good idea of what to expect. "Thinking of similar games, Primitive is close to such titles as Far Cry Primal, yet our concept focuses more strongly on showing the primal character of a real world from many thousands of years ago, where it all boiled down to raw power, as well as a fight for dominance and survival," Supel said. Visuals look to play a big part of what Primitive is going for. The game's Steam page promises "breathtaking views with photorealistic graphics using the potential of the latest graphics cards" and talks up the type of atmosphere and immersive visuals the team will be able to achieve thanks to Unreal Engine 5. Primitive, which is open world, will include an original story that takes players on a "journey through the primeval world of the origins of humanity," but will also include "random events and unforeseen twists" along the way. For more information, check out Primitive's Steam listing. View the full article

It's the final Season of Plunder weekend in Destiny 2, and while some big changes are coming, Xur remains a reassuring constant in the game. Back for a few more days to sell some of the finest Exotic weapons and armor, the Agent of the Nine will also have a few extra items with him to help flesh out your collection. Here's where you can find Xur and what Exotics he's selling this week. This week you can find Xur in The EDZ, in the Winding Cove. For his weapon, Xur is offering Cerberus +1. Hunters can pick up the Wormhusk Crown helmet, Titans can grab Peregrine Greaves boots; and for Warlocks, Xur has the Skull of Dire Ahamkara helmet. Xur Location Xur's location in the EDZ.Spawn in at the Winding Cove transmat zone, then hop on your sparrow and go north. Take the collapsed overpass on the left and look for a cave near the bend in the road. Follow the tunnel through the cliff face to reach a higher ridge where a Fallen dropship has crashed; you'll find Xur waiting there. Xur is present every weekend in Destiny 2, starting with the daily reset at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET on Friday. Bungie doesn't mark Xur's location on the in-game map, so it can be easy to miss him if you're not aware he exists. But he only comes to specific locations, of which now there are only three: the Tower Hangar area, on Nessus in Watcher's Grave, and in the Winding Cove area of the EDZ. View the full article

Deep Silver announced that all copies of Saints Row IV on PC will automatically be upgraded to the Re-Elected Edition for free on December 8. This also applies to the PC-exclusive Saints Row IV: Game of the Century Edition. With the Re-Elected Edition, players will have access to several additional DLC packs, such as the Enter the Dominatrix and How the Saints Save Christmas missions, as well as a bunch of outfits and weapons. Deep Silver also warned that all other versions of Saints Row IV and its separate DLC packs will be removed from PC storefronts on the same day. Cross-play on PC will also be added, which means that players across Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG can play together. Saints Row IV was first released in August 2013 for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360. It subsequently received PS4 and Xbox One ports in 2014 with the Saints Row IV: Re-Elected Edition. It was also released on Nintendo Switch in March 2020. In GameSpot's Saints Row IV review, we said, "Even if combat sometimes falls into a rut, there are more than enough surprises in the game's story missions to keep you entertained, and as in previous games, you can increase the mayhem by inviting a friend along to do missions and other activities." View the full article