Borderlands Mask of Mayhem logo from the official teaser trailer showing old and new Borderlands characters

Welcome back to patch notes where I selectively chat about random bits of gaming news from the past week or so. This time there’s a lot of Sony stuff, plus Borderlands looks like its making a comeback.

The big game announcement, or rather tease, of the week came from Gearbox who put out a short teaser trailer for some Borderlands related announcement coming March 28th. The trailer shows a lot of the franchise’s history which ties in with rumours of a Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition, but there’s also plenty of interesting new things which indicate this could be a true Borderlands 3. Let’s hope so BECAUSE I AM SO READY FOR MORE BORDERLANDS!

Some random Sony news came in the form of them announcing that they will no longer be providing full game download codes to physical retailers. I’ve got mixed feelings here because while very few shops actually sold these little plastic cards it was still nice to have the option in case you wanted to gift a game to a friend or perhaps simply didn’t want to enter your payment details into your console. You could also occasionally snag special deals on the cards, and now Sony have removed that option. With that said, it’s hard to imagine that many people actually bought and used the cards anyway, so it does make sense for Sony to stop producing them.

Sony also held their first State of Play livestream during the past week, and while I didn’t watch it personally the rest of the Internet seems to think it was a complete train wreck. And who am I to argue with the Internet? But a bunch of PS VR news came out of said train wreck, so it’s all good.

One of the things Sony mentioned during their stream was that the PS VR has now shipped 4.2-million units. It’s also currently outselling the Oculus Rift and the Vive, which is hardly surprising since the PS VR is cheaper and is guaranteed to work with your PS4 whereas the Oculus and Vive are much more expensive and require a beefy PC to use.

During the stream they announced Iron Man VR which looks…well, not good. Coming to the PS VR sometime later this year the trailer doesn’t do much to tickle the senses. What we see and hear is some rather flat Tony Start voicework and cinematics with only a brief snippet of actual gameplay. Said gameplay just seems to be an on-rails shooter that didn’t do the fantasy of being Iron Man justice. Anthem wasn’t a great game, but it did pull off the Iron Man dream pretty well in its flying mechanics. I’m not holding my breath for this one, but maybe it’ll turn out better than it looks in the trailer. Still, I can’t help but think it’s a cash grab.

Much more interesting was Blood & Truth, due for release for PS VR in May. This is coming from the same guys who did London Heist, a short experience included in the PS VR demo disc that comes packaged with the headset. London Heist was a superb little game, so I’m excited to see what London Studio can do with a bigger budget. The trailer features plenty of Cockney accents and fun looking set pieces. We play as Ryan Marks, a soldier who has returned home and somehow ended up involved in something pretty shady by the looks of things.

Another VR announcement came in the form of No Man’s Sky, which apparently will be getting PS VR and PC support, although exactly what VR headsets can be used on PC wasn’t announced. Best of all the developers confirmed that the entire game will be in VR, not just a small piece of it. While No Man’s Sky had a rough launch surrounded by bad PR it has since continued to grow through free updates. I’ve not jumped back in myself, but I’ve been told by many friends that it’s a massively improved experience now, and the idea of exploring planets and hurtling through space in VR sounds freaking awesome. VR will be part of the huge Beyond update to No Man’s Sky sometime this summer.

Speaking of updates to existing games, Star Wars: Battlefront 2 (the new one, not the old one) is getting a brand new mode called Capital Supremacy on March 26th at the cost of absolutely bugger all. This new mode lets players fight it out on the ground before the attacking team attempts to board two transport ships which will then take them up to a capital ship which they must try to destroy from the inside before making an escape. It sounds pretty awesome, even if it’s still not the dream of being able to hop in a ship on the ground and fly straight up into space, get into a dogfight then board a large vessel. A new map will be getting added as well, so it sounds like a solid reason to fire the game back up. I mean, I had a lot of problems with Star Wars: Battlefront 2, but I still enjoyed a lot of it, too.

Finally, I wanted to mention that there’s a new Wolfenstein game arriving in July. This one is focusing on co-op gameplay with players taking on the role of BJ Blazkowicz and Anya’s twin daughters as they hunt down Nazis. It’s not a fully-fleshed sequel, rather a £25 smaller title that looks like it could be quite fun.

Take care, everyone!

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