Today at BlizzCon 2015, Blizzard confirmed thatOverwatch will not support cross-platform play. PCplayers will only play with other PC players; while players on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will only play against people on those same consoles. Blizzard senior designer Jeremy Craig shared the news in an interview today, explaining that part of the reason for the decision came down to keeping the game fair and balanced.

"It's really difficult," he said about why Overwatch won't support cross-platform play. "From a gameplay standpoint, mouse and keyboard has a little bit of an advantage in terms of being able to spin really quickly. And our game is pretty fast-paced. It just felt like there was a little bit too much of an advtange.

"It just seems like the console crowd is going to love playing against the console people; the PC people will love playing against PC people."

Also in our interview, Craig said there are basically no differences between the PC and console versions of Overwatch. They are "pretty much 1:1," he said.

One major game that does support cross-platform play between PC and console is Street Fighter V, which will allow PC players to fight against PS4 users. The game's beta tests, however, have not gone so well.

Craig also told GameSpot that Overwatch's business model was not locked in from the onset of development. Some thought it would be a free-to-play game like Team Fortress 2. "For me as a developer, it's awesome, because at Blizzard, we have the freedom to make these games what we want them to be and sort of trust that we'll figure out the best way to deliver it to the players," he said.

During a BlizzCon presentation tonight, game director Jeff Kaplan shared even more details about Overwatch. He said the game was planned from day one for consoles. He also said there won't be a Mac version, at least not right away, because doing that is "too challenging." In addition, Kaplan explained that Blizzard hopes to one day add per-hero key-binding for all 21 characters.

On top of that, Kaplan said Blizzard hopes to introduce modding support for Overwatch down the line. This probably won't be in place for launch, but he stressed that, "We absolutely believe in modding." He added that local "split-screen co-op would be awesome," though there are no plans at this moment.

What's more, Kaplan confirmed that the new Overwatch characters announced at BlizzCon earlier today will be released in the beta next week.

Overwatch launches in spring 2016 for PC, Xbox One, and PS4. The game comes to consoles through the Origins Edition, which you can see more of in the video embedded above.

1. The Tough Tandi Choices
Early in the original Fallout, you’re given a quest to find Tandi, the daughter of the leader of the Shady Sands. She’s a sweet young woman, who’s earnestly helped you before (and who goes on to found the New California Republic). She’s been kidnapped by raiders, who have a heavily fortified camp, with a dozen defenders, all ready to go after your measly Vault Dweller. Show up with a high enough Luck stat, though, and the opposition just melts away, believing you to be the ghost of their old leader.
Or you can sneak in, pick some locks, and bust Tandi out. Or you can talk your way through the raiders, and buy her freedom. Or you can try to do it guns blazing, realize that Fallout isn’t about that, and come back when you’re more powerful. The options don’t end at regaining Tandi either – sure you can take her back to her dad, but if she follows you in a meeting with a local villain, and he offers money to take her into slavery...well, in the world of Fallout, that’s an option too.
In 1998, almost no video role-playing games offered these kinds of options on a consistent basis. Fallout didn’t just offer them every now and then: every single quest had multiple methods for resolution. For many players, rescuing Tandi was when that gameplay variety sunk in.
2. The SMG Salsa
While you’re in Shady Sands, you may want to take a moment to meet Ian. Along with Tandi and her dad, he’s about the only interesting person there. Ian, in fact, will join you, as your first companion in the Wasteland, for enough money. And if you ask Ian, he’ll tell you he’s a fan of submachine guns.
Don’t give an SMG to Ian.
If you do give a semi-automatic weapon to Ian, he’ll likely help you learn something cool about Fallout. That cool thing is that mass damage or critical hits can make characters die in hilariously/awfully gruesome fashion. In fact, the most likely result is that Ian sprays a ton of bullets in whatever direction he so chooses, and those bullets are as or more likely to shred you in your pathetic leather jacket as they are an enemy. Watch your Vault Dweller’s entire side just split off, flying through the air, as Ian cackles wildly, unable to control his burst-fire urges.
The entire Fallout series has a strange relationship with hyperviolence (see entry #4). Good ol’ Ian is most players’ introduction to that, in the worst (best?) possible way.
3. Meet The Master
Fallout - Meeting the Master in Fallout
As you progress through Fallout, you slowly pick up information about the Super Mutant menace and their leader, known only as “The Master.” While the Super Mutants are certainly a threat, The Master ends up looking like a more sympathetic figure – he was a good man who fell into the wrong experimental vat, mutated, and lost his grasp on reality.
But the depths of his mutation and loss of reason only become apparent when you step into his church and meet him. He is body horror incarnate, an unholy hybrid of organic matter and computers, spread across a full building. It’s hard not to treat him as a monster and fight, but if you can talk to him as a human, and have the information to convince him his plan is doomed...he’ll listen to you. Or you can sneak around his building, never meet him, and detonate a nuclear bomb. That’s Fallout.
4. The Kiss
Fallout 2 - Full Fallout 2 Intro
Aesthetically, Fallout has always been built on the tension between insipid and hilarious faux-Cold War nostalgia and the brutal necessities of life in a post-apocalyptic world. Across all of its games, this was never better than the intro to Fallout 2. Here’s Louis Armstrong’s 1951 version of “A Kiss to Build a Dream On”,  combined with pure Vault Boy kitch about the joys of stepping outside the Vault.
And then there’s a man in massive power armor, bigger and badder than everything else we’ve seen before. The Vault dwellers wave hesitantly at him. He opens fire with a minigun.
This is Fallout. This is the combination of horrific violence and cute pragmatism.
5. Geckos Chirping
Every Fallout has had potentially violent death animations. Ian blasts half your torso out with a submachine gun. A super mutant melts under attack from a plasma rifle, flesh first, then skeleton. In later Fallouts, the brutal skull explosion from a critical hit to the brain.
But the most shocking violence in Fallout may be one of the least graphic. In the early sections of Fallout 2, the main animal enemy you run into is the gecko. It stands, it walks, and it kills. But when you shoot it...it winces. And squeaks. And when you kill it just keels over. Over and over and over, as you’re encouraged to kill gecko after gecko after Golden Gecko. It is an example of how occasional bursts of subtlety can be as or more effective than over-the-top cartoonishness.
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6. Going Shopping
Early in Fallout 3, your character is given a quest to go to a local bombed-out Super Duper Mart, pick up some medicine, and head back to town. Simple enough. But the grocery store is huge, and filled with raiders. At your early levels, you can probably handle a couple at a time, and that’s enough to get into the back of the store to get your medicine. But once you get in the back a new set of raiders appear, making you all lost in the supermarket, with no easy way out.
What happens is perhaps the best argument for Bethesda’s style of Fallout systems around. With your weak set of early skills, you have to traverse the massive Super Duper Mart with your skin intact. Combat? Stealth? Science? Some, all, or none of these things can be used, as all of the game’s systems collide in fascinating ways in the aisles of the market. Whatever moment was the point that got you out of the grocery – that was likely one of the craziest and most resonant in the entirety of Fallout 3.
7. Boom
Fallout 3 - Nuking Megaton
Every Fallout – almost every RPG – has an intro town. Here’s where you learn what your role is, how to level up, how to interact with people, how to understand your role in the game world. Fallout 3 is no exception: it has Megaton, with multiple quests from friendly townspeople that help you learn how the Wasteland works and you within it.
Once you’ve gotten that, though, Megaton is much less useful. In fact, it’s so much less useful that you’re given the opportunity to take a quest to engage fully with its name: to take the nuclear bomb at the heart of Megaton and activate it.
There goes the happy, confident tutorial town. There goes every single person who helped you start your life in the Wasteland. For a new generation of Fallout players, this was the the moment when it became incredibly clear that this was not an RPG that let you mess around. Fallout played for keeps.
8. Happy Hotel
The first Fallout helped invent the “moral choice” ideal of role-playing games, which they stuck with ever since. Try to be a good person, and you’ll get largely good result. Be a jerk, and the world is jerkier. It’s simple, effective, and largely unsurprising once you’re used to it.
Enter Tenpenny Tower in Fallout 3. It’s got a relatively straightforward problem: this luxury hotel has rich humans oppressing the ghouls who want in. You can join either side, sure, but as every RPG player knows, there’s an ideal compromise solution: convince the ghouls to be less violent, convince the humans to be less bigoted, and there you go! Instant RPG success, both sides happy!
Then you go back and the ghouls have slaughtered all of the human residents. Okay, the humans deserved this. But did you? After all your hard work get the ideal RPG quest solution, is the game crazy to make that solution actually worse than not having done anything at all? It’s a shocking, and intelligent subversion of expectations – one that games like The Witcher and Dragon Age 2 would go on to do themselves.
9. The Think Tank
Fallout: New Vegas is a very good game on its own, but it, more than most any other recent role-playing game, is tremendously improved by its expansions. Each of the four examines a different aspect of Fallout: Honest Hearts is about post-apocalyptic community-building; Dead Money is survival horror; and Lonesome Road examines the mythology of the wandering hero. But the weirdest and funniest is Old World Blues, the DLC that dives gleefully into the silly 1950s sci-fi B-movie inspiration.
And boy does it land its first impression: your Courier awakens in a science lab, explores a bit, and meets The Think Tank, an orb with a brain inside, filled with different personalities, all filling some kind of “mad scientist” archetype, and best of all, all responding to you and your presence as if you’re incapable of understanding – always comic gold. Then you try to convince them of your intelligence by waving your hands and fingers at them, they start ranting about your “erect hand-penises,” and Old World Blues is off like a rocket.
10. The End of the Quest
Fallout: New Vegas's Horrifying Intro
“Do as many quests as you can” is a core tenet of the modern role-playing game – in fact, Fallout helped popularize this model. Fallout: New Vegas has the densest collection of quests in the whole series, combining the large open world of Fallout 3 with the narrative strengths of the first two Fallout games. The quests themselves could also be more complex than normal RPGs, particularly when you arrive in New Vegas itself, and are recruited by multiple factions.
In most RPGs, the goal here would be to do as many quests with as many factions as possible, get the experience and loot, and then maybe make a final decision at the end. But not in New Vegas, which warns you that the different factions are all spying on you, and, as soon as you hit a point of no return helping one faction – which occurs much earlier than you might expect – suddenly the other all turn on you, and there’s a cascading series of “Quest Failed” notifications.
For many players this seemed like a bug – understandable given New Vegas’ unstable launch. It’s certainly shocking and frustrating given conventional RPG tropes. But it’s also the best example of New Vegas’ approach to narrative complexity, the main thing that set it apart from Fallout 3. You can’t do everything for everyone, be all things to all people.

Punk and co-writer Cullen Bunn take a very movie-inspired approach to Drax here. He's written as a very literal-minded bruiser at a loss for how to conduct himself when the time for destroying has ended. I don't mind the series leaning so heavily on the film except where the issue of Drax's vendetta against Thanos is concerned. That's not really the character's defining purpose in life in this post-Annihilation era, and dredging it up again seems like a cheap and easy way to get the conflict rolling. But as this is clearly one of those books where the journey is far more important than the destination, this isn't a huge concern in the end. The writers take a very lighthearted approach to Drax's world (despite the allusions to his dead family) and craft a book very much at home alongside the recent Rocket Raccoon and Groot comics.

The real MVP of this series right now is artist Scott Hepburn. Hepburn brings a very kinetic quality to his pages. Drax is rendered as a man brimming over with muscle and propelled by a relentless need to smash, stab and otherwise maim everything in his path. In addition to the strong sense of energy in his storytelling, Hepburn's line-work boasts an impressive level of detail. This is one of those rare cases where the cover shows you exactly what to expect inside.
The straightforward, no-nonsense approach to this issue helps the book in a lot of ways. There's no tiresome exposition and only a minimum of setup before Drax is sent on his merry way. But it would be nice if the book had a bit more on its mind. So far the story doesn't seem to be building towards more ambitious than "Drax vs. Cosmic Villain of the Month." Whether the focus is on Drax's lingering hatred of Thanos or his perpetual loneliness, there is pathos to explore here.
THE VERDICT
If all you want from Marvel's new Drax comic is a fun, lighthearted adventure full of violence and space tomfoolery, this debut issue delivers the goods. The execution is made that much better by Scott Hepburn's amazingly dynamic art. However, the book doesn't show much ambition when it comes to dramatic storytelling. There's potential in exploring the darker aspects of Drax's life and personality, and hopefully we'll see this series delve into those areas.

We Own the Night
It is immediately extremely pretty, though. There are dark and gritty instances where it feels a little like the whole thing has been shot on Michael Mann’s iPhone, but racing at speed through the soaked streets here (particularly in bumper cam) is really something else. The cars glisten with beaded water droplets and the streets gleam, a shiny tapestry of mirror-like asphalt reflecting artificial light from all angles. Need for Speed also sounds nearly as good as it looks; the throaty burble of performance-tuned engines is well-realised and the crackle of exhaust overrun and the ker-chunk of slamming gears is similarly respectable. However, the sudden, jarring transitions from the dead of night, to pre-dawn, and then back to night again are horribly ill-conceived. These transitions seem to be baked into parts of the environment so they can actually happen multiple times over the course of a single race.
The cars glisten with beaded water droplets and the streets gleam, a shiny tapestry of mirror-like asphalt.
The eclectic roster of cars is only a fraction of what’s on offer in, say, Forza Horizon 2, but it has a little something for most gearheads. Garage spots are limited to five but the focus here isn’t collecting; it’s perfecting. I completed most of Need for Speed in a single car, constantly cramming upgrades into it to keep it ahead of the competition.
Performance customisation is the basic kind (bolt in everything you’re eligible to purchase and your car will go faster) but there’s a little more to visual customisation. You can sweep around your car, swap external panels, add flair to fenders, install canards, adjust stance, and more. There’s also a freeform livery editor, which definitely beats having to make do with simple, pre-set designs and wraps. You can’t modify everything, though; after I completed the story mode I splurged on a classic Ferrari F40 but was disappointed to discover I could barely do anything to it. I couldn’t even change the rims. It seems at odds with the game’s philosophy.
Need for Speed - Cars and Customisation Trailer
It’s still good to have customisation of any sort back in Need for Speed, and with it comes several basic tuning options you can use to alter your car’s driving characteristics. The main slider adjusts all settings, nudging your car towards a drift setup or a grip setup, but you can dive deeper and massage certain steering, tyre pressure, and braking power settings individually to fine tune your ride. I much preferred the drift setup for all race types because I found it far easier to get around corners by poising my Focus in a slide via a bootful of throttle and liberal use of opposite lock, rather than navigate the bends with a grip tune. The latter feels too twitchy at low speeds and too prone to understeer at higher ones, and I found myself getting frustrated trying to find the balance. Odd is the fact that, while Need for Speed has brought back tuning in a big way, the option for a manual transmission hasn’t made an appearance.
First-person Fist Bumping
Need for Speed’s light narrative plays out in a series of short, live-action cut-scenes, brimming with slang I don’t understand, excessive energy drink consumption, overuse of the word “hashtag”, and a slightly comical amount of first-person fist-bumping.
There are five main characters who, when they aren’t speaking to each other like living, breathing internet memes, each represent a different one of Need for Speed’s five themed racing threads. All of these threads lead to an encounter with a real-life automotive icon; an idea which I genuinely like.
The lack of any drag racing in Need for Speed seems like a misguided omission.
The best thread is ‘Outlaw’, which is really just a mix of all the game’s race types with the cops on your tail. The cop action is scaled back from Hot Pursuit and Rivals but I certainly appreciate how the police AI seems a lot more fair and bound by the in-game physics than it ever did in Ubisoft’s The Crew. Considering it was the standout mode in the old Underground games, the lack of any drag racing in Need for Speed seems like a misguided omission.
It’s not an especially long story, though. There are 79 main events, but I blasted through them in just two days. The often shameless rubber band AI screwed me out of a few wins here and there but, for the most part, there were only a handful of races I needed to repeat. This modest length might be less of a problem if the multiplayer was more robust, but it isn’t.
Need for Speed - Official Launch Trailer
Like The Crew, Need for Speed requires a constant internet connection to play – even if you want to play solo. Unlike The Crew, you can’t just simply opt into multiplayer and rely on the game to take care of matchmaking and enlist you into a series of events. This really didn’t need to be an always online game, and because it is, you can’t even pause the game, which I found extraordinarily annoying. Plus, without decent PvP, the only thing left after the brief campaign is hunting down Need for Speed’s frankly boring collectables. Exactly why are we collecting photographs of plain, dimly-lit parking lots and anonymous warehouses?
THE VERDICT
Need for Speed looks the part, sounds the part, and is surprisingly reverent to real-world car culture. I like the direction Ghost has taken here, and I think it’s the right one, but beneath its flashy exterior it's not quite firing on all cylinders.

On November 2nd, Lost World will be available digitally for $25. The digital version includes Steam achievements, controller support, and the game's Nightmare DLC.
Originally released for the Wii U in 2013, Sonic Lost World's story focuses on an unlikely alliance between Sonic the Hedgehog and Dr. Robotnik to take down a mutual enemy.

Developers Yukes and Visual Concepts were on the right track last year when they added a stamina system and a chain wrestling system to create a greater sense of pace, and they’ve built on those successes beautifully.
Educated Feet
At the center is the reworked reversal system, which makes reversals a limited, slowly regenerating resource. Managing it correctly means you’ve got the ace in the hole you need to escape scary late-match situations, where a less frugal opponent might find themselves forced to absorb a beating. Not only does this create a welcome layer of decision-making previously absent from the series, it adds an extremely meaningful differentiation between characters, as some have more reversal stocks than others.
WWE 2K16 - Raise Some Hell Gameplay Trailer
Working in tandem with the excellent reversal system are the new Working Holds. Wrestling smarks know these are holds that performers use to catch their breath mid-match, and WWE 2K16 smartly incorporates them in a competitive context here. Successful working holds restore your stamina while sapping your opponent’s - effectively allowing you to stall out their offense until you can get some reversal stocks back. That’s just one possible tactic you might employ. The pressure to stall or scrape by until you have the resources you need, and the incentive to force your opponent to waste theirs opens the fighting up tremendously.
The net result is matches that have a greater sense of variety and ring psychology.
Options I used to never care about, like escape-rolling out of the ring, or having a manager distract my opponent suddenly become totally valid choices, since it buys me time to catch my breath. I’ll lay on the ground and let my opponent land a few kicks if I see them getting close to having a finisher, since that’s the bullet that needs dodging. I even started learning which moves, when reversed, give me a big enough window of opportunity to get an attack in, letting those that don’t slide. The net result is matches that have a greater sense of variety and ring psychology; blurring  the line between playing to win and putting on a show.
Holes in the Show
Most wrestling fans agree that showmanship is at least as important as technical, in-ring ability, and WWE 2K16 doesn’t quite nail all its big spots in this regard. Technically, it’s kind of all over the place: there are no load times between ring entrances, lending a seamless, TV-broadcast feel to match openings, but the loads between other modes, and even just to preview a costume piece in create-a-wrestler can be painful. Sometimes the AI behaves uncannily like the wrestler you know and love, like when Seth Rollins tries to DQ himself to retain the belt, and other times, they quizzically zone out and sort of stare off into space.
WWE 2K16 - Seth Rollins' Full Ring Entrance
This same inconsistency spills over into other areas. Visually, some character models and effects look terrific, like during Randy Orton’s ring entrance, while guys like Chris Jerico seem to be holdovers from the last-gen days. 
WWE 2K16 doesn’t quite nail all its big spots
Finally, the commentary has improved greatly, with far fewer repeated phrases, and more specific insight into many wrestlers’ fighting style and history, but it’s not all the way there yet. There are still a few too many general move callouts, making the play-by-play a bit flat at times. No one issue is big enough to ruin the fun, but together they can periodically undercut the tension and excitement the in-ring action builds so effectively.
Feed. Me. More.
The biggest criticism leveled at last year’s game was the anemic roster, and the overall lack of modes and features compared to prior years. WWE 2K16 largely rectifies this, but its bag of tricks hasn’t quite gotten back to the point of overflowing yet. The one exception is in the roster which is, quite frankly, nuts. In terms of separate individual wrestlers, you’re looking at over 120, including many NXT-born stars, who fans were clamoring for last year. Not only are they a joy to play in their own right, but they add some much-needed diversity to the roster.
Finn Balor vs Kevin Owens Gameplay
In terms of match types, much of what we lost last year is back. There are exceptions: no backstage brawl, no 2 out of 3 falls, no inferno etc. Honestly, very little that I cared about hasn’t returned, but it would be nice to see these modes come back in future iterations. Still this represents a huge improvement over last year’s sparse match offerings.
The roster is, quite frankly, nuts.
Core modes like create-a-wrestler and MyCareer have been expanded considerably, with the latter spanning multiple years instead of ending with a single Wrestlemania appearance. Diva, belt, and arena creation are thankfully restored. Universe has even more ways to customize your WWE sandbox, including detailed personality sliders that affect in ring behavior.As has become expected, 2K Showcase is back, and is still a great mix of history and fantasy recreation. I miss create-a-story and create-a-move, but even without them, there’s still plenty you can do with this toolset.

According to a translation by The Wall Street Journal, Miitomo "will be free to play, with attractive add-ons that people can pay for," while other smartphone games "will be pay-to-download," according to new Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima.
(UPDATE: Following the presentation, Nintendo said in a statement that Miitomo is "a free-to-start communication application that helps friends share fun personal facts and interests. Consumers create and use their own Mii characters to engage friends in a welcoming social environment, answering questions and sharing information to discover more about each other and what they have in common. Miitomo is designed to appeal to a wide range of global smart device users and introduce them to uniquely Nintendo experiences beginning with Miitomo and carried through future applications.")

 
 
 
Nintendo confirmed that its mobile titles won't launch until March 2016, rather than the end of this year as previously expected. Mr. Kimishima said the delay is due to "the need for more lead time to fully promote and explain Miitomo." Nintendo is focused on its 3DS and Wii U titles at the moment and will start promoting Miitomo after the holiday season.
The title Miitomo and the screenshots shown above could suggest a link to Tomodachi Life, which came to Nintendo 3DS in Japan in April 2013, with Western versions following in June 2014.
3 Predictions for Nintendo's First Smartphone Game
Nintendo’s partnership with DeNA was first announced in March. At the time, Nintendo said development would be handled “mainly by Nintendo,” while DeNA would be “primarily responsible for the service-oriented operations.” The partnership promises five new titles by March 2017, though some analysts predict the “bigger” franchises won’t be revealed until next year.
This isn’t the first Nintendo-connected title to appear on mobile, as separate from the DeNA partnership, The Pokemon Company revealed Pokemon Go earlier this year, in addition to releasing Pokemon Shuffle for iOS and Android, and Pokemon Trading Card Game Online for iPad.