Elden Ring, The Witch Queen, and plenty of Pokemon Scarlet & Violet.
There was a surprising amount of interesting stuff in the news today. The majority of this unsurprisingly had to do with what might just be the two biggest games of the year. I’m of course talking about Elden Ring and Destiny 2: The Witch Queen. When it comes to the former, we found out that people playing on Steam have been encountering problems backing up their save files and that modders have just made a photo mode for the game. As for the latter, we heard that Clan Elysium won the World First raid for the second year in a row. The day also had some news about a long-lost game for Nintendo 64 and the catching mechanics in the upcoming Pokemon Scarlet & Violet.
Elden Ring has been dominating the news ever since it was released last week. The game has also been dominating my time, but that’s another story. In any case, players on Steam have been facing problems when it comes to backing up their save files. "We are currently aware of an issue in the PC version of Elden Ring where save data is not being saved correctly to the Steam Cloud under certain conditions," Bandai Namco announced. "If this happens, you will see an error message at game launch stating that your local save files conflict with the ones stored in the Steam Cloud." In other words, don’t rage-quit and delete the game for a bit.
The game world in Elden Ring is absolutely gorgeous. As a person who takes a ton of screenshots, I’ve really been wondering why it didn’t ship with a photo mode at launch. Well, someone has gone and solved this little problem. The modder known as Otis_Imf recently released a photo mode for Elden Ring, so now you can snap away to your heart’s content. The only hiccup is that you have to play offline. "Using the anti-cheat workaround, you play offline, so there's no way to get banned,” Otis_Imf pointed out. “You can't use it online as the anti-cheat has to be active for that which immediately makes it impossible to use the tools.” Keep an eye out on my Twitter timeline for Elden Ring screenshots.
The people who played Pokemon Legends: Arceus have really gotten used to the new catching mechanics. Many of them in fact seem to think that Pokemon Scarlet & Violet should stick to the new system. Referring to a short description of the game on the official website, players have pointed out that Pokemon Scarlet & Violet might just be going back to the ways things used to be. This of course wound up sparking a huge debate. "I'm not complaining, but if the battles are done in the exact place you're standing instead of some sub-dimension of whatever, then I'll be very happy,” one person said on Reddit. “But I like being the one hiding in the tall grass for once,” another replied.
Clan Elysium has managed to win the World First raid for the second year in a row. The team pulled this off in seven hours and 14 minutes, beating the second place winner, Datto, by just three minutes. This even despite the ongoing server issues that have been hindering many players. Bungie announced the winners last night, saying that “after verification, we’re proud to congratulate our Destiny 2 Vow of the Disciple World First winners, Clan Elysium! BACK-TO-BACK CHAMPIONS!” The company went on to praise Cruz, Kyros, Moople, Quazz, Saltagreppo, and Slap for their performance.
The group of game preservationists called Forest of Illusions recently rediscovered and released a long-lost Nintendo 64 game known as Carnivalé: Cenzo’s Adventure. “Today, we have quite a special one,” the organizatio said. “We've released Carnivalé: Cenzo's Adventure, a canceled Nintendo 64 title developed by Terraglyph Interactive Studios! It was based on the animated film by the same name and was first shown off to the public at E3 1999 in an unfinished state.” Carnivalé: Cenzo’s Adventure follows a group of children as they make their way around a magical amusement park. The mechanics apparently consist of “grinding silver (and the rarer gold) coins to play various carnival games such as duck shooting, high striker, and racing.” The game files can be downloaded on their website.
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Justin is an archaeologist specializing in architecture, urbanism and spatial theory. He also happens to be a pilot. But you probably know him as a columnist at Unwinnable and an editor at TheGamer where he writes articles and publishes news about games. You can find some of his work in EGM, Vice, Heterotopias and more.