Tag: news

NME

Riot Games has addressed issues surrounding toxicity within Valorant and its chat systems, outlining what it’s already done and what’s still to come.

• READ MORE: ‘Lost Ark’ review: a steady grind

In a blog shared today, Riot Games has shared its thoughts on abuse and toxicity within Valorant.

“While we can never remove the bad conduct itself from individuals, we can work to deter behavior such as insults, threats, harassment, or offensive language through our game systems,” explained the blog, whilst adding that there’s also room to “encourage “pro-social” behaviour”.

Outlining what the studio already does to combat toxicity, the blog states that Riot currently uses player feedback to identify when some individuals are deemed particularly toxic, so it can punish them faster. It also touches on the game’s recently-added muted words list, which aims to let players choose which words and phrases they do not want to see or hear in the game.

On the topic of punishments, Riot says it has issued 400,000 voice chat and text bans and 40,000 bans in January alone.

Looking ahead, Riot shared its plans to expand its efforts to tackle toxicity in voice chat, on which it said the following:

When a player experiences toxicity, especially in voice comms, we know how incredibly frustrating it is and how helpless it makes us feel both during the game, as well as post game. Not only does it undermine all the good in Valorant, it can have lasting damage to our players and community overall. Deterring and punishing toxic behaviour in voice is a combined effort that includes Riot as a whole, and we are very much invested on making this a more enjoyable experience for everyone.”

One of the improvements Riot has outlined include “generally harsher punishments for existing systems” such as imposing tougher penalties on players who have been flagged via Valorant‘s automated systems. On the same topic, Riot also hopes to implement faster punishments for certain “zero tolerance” words, and aims to have these administered immediately after they are used.

In regards to voice chat moderation, Riot admits that “voice chat abuse is significantly harder to detect compared to text (and often involves a more manual process),” though adds that it’s making gradual improvements to the way this is handled.

Finally, Riot is also trialling “reporting line with player support agents – who will oversee incoming reports strictly dedicated to player behaviour – and take action based on established guidelines”. If the ongoing beta shows promise, Riot has said that it will consider expanding this to more regions.

In other news, Chrono Cross is finally coming to Europe – here’s everything else that was announced during last night’s Nintendo Direct.

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Nintendo has announced the Portal: Companion Collection will be released for the Switch this year.

• READ MORE: ‘Elden Ring’ preview: this could be FromSoftware’s best game yet

During yesterday’s (February 9) Nintendo Direct, it was announced that Portal and Portal 2 will both be coming to the Nintendo Switch in 2022 in the form of a collection, although no specific date was given.

Nintendo also shared the news on Twitter, saying, “No lie, the Portal: Companion Collection – featuring the award-winning games Portal and Portal 2 – is warping onto NintendoSwitch this year!”

Portal is a physics-based puzzle-platformer released by Valve in 2007 and uses a portal gun to allow players to link two locations together. Players have to solve puzzles in various test chambers to escape from Aperture Science Laboratories and its sarcastic ai, GLaDOS.

Portal 2 expanded the original with new types of obstacles and also introduced a two-player co-operative mode. The upcoming Nintendo Switch version will feature split-screen and online multiplayer. Players can now wishlist the collection on the Nintendo eShop.

Valve announced that Nvidia Lightspeed Studios collaborated on the port, saying in a tweet, “Portal: Companion Collection, developed for Switch in collaboration with Nvidia Lightspeed Studios, includes the single-player experiences of Portal and Portal 2, as well as Portal 2’s full co-operative game mode, which is playable via split-screen, local and online multiplayer.”

Portal 2 recently became the first officially verified title for Valve’s Steam Deck. The handheld gaming device has strict criteria that must be met for a game to be certified for the system, and so far, several titles have been announced as fully compatible.

In other news, a new trailer for The Wolf Among Us 2 shows the return of Bigby Wolf. Adam Harrington and Erin Yvette will reprise their roles as Bigby and Snow White when the game launches in 2023. The game will be spread out across five episodes, but no release date has been confirmed.

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NME

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 has been announced with confirmation the game will launch in September for Nintendo Switch.

• READ MORE: Koji Kondo’s ‘Ocarina of Time’ soundtrack is a hip-hop album

During the latest Nintendo Direct, and saving the announcement for last, Nintendo announced the latest game in the Monolith Soft RPG series with a 2-minute story trailer.

The trailer debuted the game’s main cast, several open-world environments, and third-person action that is so familiar to the RPG series. It will apparently tie together the futures of the worlds depicted in Xenoblade Chronicles and Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

You can check out the official trailer below:

Additionally, following the game’s reveal, Xenoblade Chronicles 3‘s executive director Tetsuya Takahashi also shared a message on the new title, detailing further information that will interest fans of the series.

“We are currently making final adjustments to ensure we create the best game possible based on everything we’ve learned from the past entries in the series,” Takahashi said.

“The key visual features a broken great sword of Mechonis and the body of the Urayan Titan with a gaping wound,” the director continued. “I imagine everyone who saw the trailer was quite surprised by the final scene. What is this visual hinting at? I can’t reveal that just yet.

“What I can tell you is that this visual was conceived quite some time ago. More precisely speaking, we came up with it sometime between the end of development of Xenoblade Chronicles and the beginning of development of Xenoblade Chronicles 2. So, it’s not something we recently added to the series.”

Takahashi went on to confirm that the characters depicted in the trailer were designed by Masatsugu Saito, who also designed the characters for Xenoblade Chronicles 2, while Koichi Mugitani created some of the game’s key artwork – which has yet to be revealed- and the music was composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, Manami Kiyota, ACE (TOMOri Kudo, CHiCO), Kenji Hiramatsu and Mariam Abounnasr.

Elsewhere, Telltale Games has revealed the trailer for The Wolf Among Us 2.

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NME

Miles Kane has hinted that The Last Shadow Puppets could return in the future.

• READ MORE: Miles Kane – ‘Change The Show’ review: indie king plays it safe

Kane formed the group with Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner in 2008. They released two albums, 2008’s ‘The Age Of The Understatement’ and 2016’s ‘Everything You’ve Come To Expect.’

Speaking to Music Week, Kane said they while had no plans to reunite soon, he hasn’t ruled out another album for the group.

He said: “We won’t be doing anything in the near future, but I think it’d be rude not to do a trilogy.

“The trilogy would be the icing, wouldn’t it?”

Previously, Miles said in 2018 that he would “never say never” when it came to the group returning on day. “The Last Shadow Puppets was good, I had great fun with that. Bring them back? Who knows, yeah! Never say never.”

Last month, Kane has revealed that he and Lana Del Rey have an album’s worth of unreleased material that they recorded together.

Speaking in a new interview, Kane – who released his fourth solo album, ‘Change The Show’ on January 21 – discussed his creative partnership with Del Rey, who co-wrote his 2018 track, ‘Loaded’, and he returned the favour on last year’s ‘Dealer’, which he also added vocals to.

He told told Far Out that both songs came from the same recording session, and that there’s a lot more music they did together that hasn’t been released yet.

“We did so many songs,” Kane revealed. “I think I was sorting flirting about putting it on an album, then she was, and then I got a call a few months back where she said she wanted to stick [‘Dealer’] out.”

Kane continued: “That was the one song from the demo’s we did that had something really special, and it’s so real. The way she comes in and soars on her vocal is something that I think nobody has ever heard before. I like that she’s just kept it as the original demo we did when we wrote it.”

In a three-star review of Kane’s new album ‘Change The Show’, NME‘s Sophie Williams wrote that “the Wirral singer-songwriter searches for comfort in new beginnings on his fourth album.”

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NME

The team behind Dolly Parton’s theme park Dollywood has announced they will cover 100 per cent of tuition for employees who wish to pursue higher education.

• READ MORE: Dolly Parton: “I take care of business”

The initiative, which also covers costs like textbooks, will start February 24 and all full-time, part-time and seasonal Dollywood employees will be able to enroll in the education benefits package. From that date on, all new hires will be eligible from their first day of employment.

“One of The Dollywood Foundation’s key tenets is to ‘learn more,’” Dollywood Company President Eugene Naughton said in a statement. “This program is created with that very tenet in mind. We want our hosts to develop themselves through advanced learning to fulfill the foundation’s other tenets: care more, dream more, and be more.”

“When our hosts strive to grow themselves, it makes our business and our community a truly better place. We care about our hosts’ development and we want their future to grow because of love — not loans,” Naughton continued.

This isn’t Dolly Parton’s first foray into charitable acts though. She used the royalties from Whitney Houston‘s cover of ‘I Will Always Love You’ to invest in a historically Black neighbourhood in Nashville. It was estimated that Parton earned $10million (£7.2 million) from the song, which was re-recorded by Houston for The Bodyguard.

In 2020, it was revealed that Parton donated $1million (£716,000) to the team behind the Moderna coronavirus vaccine. “I’m a very proud girl today to know that I had anything at all to do with something that’s gonna help us through this crazy pandemic,” she said.

Next month, Parton will release her 48th studio album ‘Run, Rose, Run‘.

The record acts as a companion piece to a novel of the same name. The book was co-written by Parton and with US fiction writer James Patterson, who described the project as “a new thriller about a young singer/songwriter [Rose] on the rise and on the run…and determined to do whatever it takes to survive!”.

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