A few weeks back, CD Projekt RED announced the definitive edition of its most popular title, Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition. The game will be available from 05 December 2023, both digitally and physically, for Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC. While fans were already plenty excited about the announcement of Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition launch, CD Projekt Red teased the release of free update 2.1 for Cyberpunk 2077 and Phantom Liberty. The free update 2.1 will be released alongside the Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition.

CD Projekt Red has teased "new and hotly anticipated gameplay elements." CD Projekt Red will go live on their Twitch Channel for the REDstreams with Amelia Kołat and Alicja Kozera (Senior Community Managers), Paweł Sasko (Quest Director) and Monika Janowska (Producer), who will share more information about the update.

Also Read: Microsoft Is Setting Up Plans For Some Major Xbox Announcements For December's The Game Awards

Cyberpunk 2077 And Phantom Liberty To Receive Free Update 2.1 On 05 December 2023

Releasing on 05 December 2023, Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition will be available digitally and physically on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC. The Ultimate Edition will comprise the full story of V, a cyber-enhanced mercenary, combined with the base game Cyberpunk 2077 and its expansion, Phantom Liberty. The game will include all the updates, including free update 2.0. 

With the Update 2.0, CD Projekt Red overhauled the gameplay mechanics, including a revamped police system, the ability to engage in combat while driving vehicles, enhanced combat AI and new skills and perks. The update also significantly changes cyberware, weapons, and vehicles, introducing new features and refining existing ones. 

Regarding the upcoming 2.1 update, CD Projekt Red hasn't shared any details. According to their blog post on Update 2.1, Cyberpunk 2077 and its Phantom Liberty expansion will receive "new and hotly anticipated gameplay elements", suggesting adding new features and creating a better player experience. 

CD Projekt Red could add new in-game content, like a story expansion with new quests, locations, and characters, to provide players with fresh challenges. Since Cyberpunk 2077 is incorporating AI in the game, Update 2.1 might improve the AI aspect of the game to create a more immersive experience. CD Projekt Red suggested including "hotly anticipated gameplay elements," which could be the addition/refinement of the gameplay and combat mechanics. Players might see new cyberware implants, weapons, and mods in the game. 

CD Projekt Red will reveal more information regarding Update 2.1 on 01 December 2023 at 4 PM CET on their Twitch Channel. The REDstream will include Cyberpunk's community managers, quest director and producer. 

During the recent Xbox Partner Preview, 505 Games revealed the first extended look at Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, a Soulslike game that is already drawing comparisons to Black Myth: Wukong.

The story is set in China near the end of the Ming dynasty, but the visuals of the newly released trailer suggest that myth and magic will play a more crucial role in the game than actual history. The video also offers a glimpse of the powers that the players will have at their commands.

Also Read: Black Myth: Wukong Becomes An Instant Global Hit

When Will Wuchang: Fallen Feathers Hit Gaming Consoles

Wuchang is the game’s protagonist who appears to favor using a sword. However, the video also demonstrates that she can use her staff to fire projectile weapons and apparently some magic-based attacks. It’s difficult to get a read on Wuchang’s personality since the only spoken lines in the trailer belong to her unmanned enemy.

Against the backdrop of the battles between Wuchang and the god-like beings whom she takes on, the land of Shu has been stricken by a plague, which can cause mutations. But in Wuchang’s hands, these mutations can unlock powers or change her form into something more than human.

Wuchang comes across as formidable even without those abilities, but she will require them for boss fights that await her. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers will come to Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC. Microsoft and 505 Games have also announced that Wuchang: Fallen Feathers will be on Game Pass on day one of its launch.

Also Read: How Many Bosses in Black Myth: Wukong?

Black Myth: Wukong DLC To Reportedly Come Out In Early 2025

The instant global hit Black Myth: Wukong could be getting DLC or expansions in early 2025. According to analyst Daniel Camilo, DLC for Black Myth: Wukong is said to launch sometime around Chinese New Year. That would put it at, or around, the end of January. Announcements of the plans could be made anytime around December.

As far as what any DLC for the game would entail, that’s currently unknown. Camilo did say, however, that despite the game selling over 20 million copies, he expects the DLC to only be bought by 20% of the total player base. He says that’s due to a number of factors such as the game’s difficulty and having 70% of its sales in China where the “novelty and national pride” of the game has worn off by then.

Insider Gaming has yet to independently verify any information regarding the rumors. Until that happens or something official is announced, we recommend our readers take this information with a pinch of salt. 

After a US court ruling earlier this week that Google must open its Play Store to enable third-party app stores and alternative payment options, Microsoft is moving swiftly to slide into this slightly open door.

Sarah Bond, president of Xbox, posted on X that the ruling will give more choices and flexibility to users. "Our mission is to allow more players to play on more devices so we are thrilled to share that starting in November, players will be able to play and purchase Xbox games directly from the Xbox App on Android," Bond wrote.

Also Read: Discord On Xbox To Let Users Watch Their Friends’ Stream

Microsoft Aims To Offer Xbox Games Through Its App

Due to the court order requiring Google to stop forcing apps to use its own billing system and enable third-party app stores inside Google Play itself, Microsoft now aims to offer Xbox games directly through its app. Most games will likely not run directly on Android, but a revamped Xbox Android app could also directly stream bought or subscribed games to Android devices.

Until now, purchasing Xbox games on a mobile device has typically involved either navigating to a web-based store in a browser, or avoiding attempts by the phone to open a store’s official app.

The company has been quick to expand its Xbox brand’s availability outside its hardware. It made similar moves to capitalize on EU regulators’ attempts to disentangle Google’s and Apple’s app stores through its own planned app store in 2023.

Also Read: Xbox Could Soon Introduce Google Play Store Rival

Call Of Duty Coming To Xbox Cloud Gaming On Game Pass Ultimate

Players won’t need a gaming console to play Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 when it comes out later this month. Recently, Microsoft announced that it will bring the latest Call of Duty game, as well as Modern Warfare 3 and Warzone, to Xbox Cloud Gaming on October 25.

On the same day, Black Ops 6 will launch and land on Game Pass Ultimate.  "This opens up even more ways to play Ops 6 starting on day one at launch," said Ashley McKissick, corporate vice president of gaming experiences and platforms for Xbox.

Xbox Cloud Gaming is a feature included in a Game Pass Ultimate subscription, which will set back users by $20 a month. The feature is still in development, but it enables subscribers to access and play certain games from the Game Pass library on other devices without an Xbox console.

"Game Pass Ultimate members will be able to enjoy Call of Duty in more places than ever before, including on their consoles, PCs, mobile devices, select Samsung TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Meta Quest devices," McKissick said.

Activision claims to have “disabled a workaround to a detection system” in Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone which has led to legit players getting banned by Ricochet's anti-cheat system. The company says the problem “impacted a small number of legitimate player accounts,” and all accounts affected were restored.

However, zebleer, who runs the Phantom Overlay store selling cheats, claims the problem is much bigger than Activision’s post makes it seem. In a detailed post on X, they wrote when Ricochet scanned the memory of a player’s system to find known cheat software, one of the signatures it scanned for was a plaintext string reading: 54 72 69 67 67 65 72 20 42 6f 74 (Trigger Bot).

Also Read: Activision Wins $14.5 Million In Call Of Duty Cheating Lawsuit

How Many Players Were Affected By This Hack

Zebleer claims that “for quite some time,” it has been possible to get someone banned permanently just by sending them a friend request with a phrase or posting a message like “Nice Trigger Bot dude!” in the game’s chat since it would then show up in their memory and get recognized by Ricochet.

Despite Activision claiming that a “small number” of legit accounts were affected, zebleer claims that “several thousand random COD players were banned by this exploit” before anyone started targeting big streamers.

Zebleer points to BobbyPoff, a CoD streamer, as one of the players who got banned due to the person using the exploit since October 3 before his account was suddenly unbanned. Similar to other players and streamers caught up in the bans, there had been intense speculation and discussion over whether or not BobbyPoff was a cheater.

The Call of Duty Updates account suggested that the Ricochet team will share a blog post, though the account hasn’t specified if the post will discuss this exploit.

Also Read: Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Live Action Trailer Revealed

Activision Finally Trimming Call Of Duty’s Huge Downloads

Call of Duty is infamous for its huge file sizes, but ahead of the October 25th launch of Black Ops 6, Activision will finally be making some changes so that Call of Duty games don’t eat up a lot of space on users’ hard drives — including separating Warzone from the default download for the annual games.

The default separation of Warzone is going to happen soon: on August 21, along with the launch of Season 5 Reloaded. As part of that, when users download an annual Call of Duty game, users will be able to choose Warzone if they want. And if users just wish to download Warzone, that will still be an option.

Horizon: Zero Dawn, created by Guerrilla Games, will soon be getting a remaster. Recently, the remaster’s co-developer Nixxes stepped into the spotlight on the PlayStation blog to highlight a number of improvements players will see in the remaster, including the addition of lots of new NPCs.

The post talks about a number of updates coming to the game, perhaps the most notable of which is that Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered will "significantly boost the number of non-player characters." This doesn’t mean more quests or stories, but it does mean that villages and camps will be populated with more NPCs.

Also Read: Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered Is Coming to PS5 and PC

Remaster To Have More People Moving Around

Brian van Nunen, senior technical game designer at Nixxes, offered more details: “Building the game for PS5 allowed us to leverage the increased amount of memory available, enabling us to significantly boost the number of non-player characters," he said.

"We added many more places for NPCs to stand, sit, work, and fulfill their needs. We gave them more varied schedules to increase movement and liveliness in different areas. We also tried to make creative use of existing animations. For example, there is now a woman feeding geese at the well in Meridian, reusing an existing sowing animation. Additionally, on the bridge to Meridian, we’ve made significant strides in improving the atmosphere and sense of activity.”

This is not the only change coming to the game. The blog also talks about how the foliage is being overhauled to be more dense, realistic, and closer to the original concept art. Besides, the terrain is also being updated, including snow and sand that actually moves as it’s disturbed.

Also Read: Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition is Coming to PC; Release Date Confirmed by Sony

Horizon: Zero Dawn Remaster Gets Better Lighting

Apart from these improvements, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered benefits from 10 additional hours of motion capture data for various characters, which Nixxes says will make conversations seem livelier.

Mark Bazelmans, senior technical artist, said: “Horizon Zero Dawn has almost 300 conversations and well over 3100 dialog options, so we needed to find a way to easily integrate this huge number of updated animations into the conversations," he said. 

"We created a tool with Python to process the almost 2500 mocap files that Guerrilla provided to replace the original animation in the conversations, removing deprecated events and replacing those with the mocap and setup.”

The blog post also talks about how the lighting of the game has been improved, both world and cinematic, and how character models were updated to have more detail to hair, skin, and outfits.

IO Interactive, the studio that was behind the development of the popular Hitman series, hopes its upcoming James Bond origin story could start a trilogy. While speaking to IGN, IO boss Hakan Abrak said the team feels like it's had "20 plus years of training for the agent fantasy," courtesy of Hitman.

Indeed, Agent 47 is very Bond-like with his endless talents and ability to handle any weapon you can think of. "But obviously James Bond is a different IP. It's a huge IP. It's not our IP. It's actually the first IP that is not our original IP from the ground up," Abrak told the publication.

Also Read: PS5 Pro Announced: Launch Date, Price, Specs, Games, and More

IO Interactive To Bring James Bond’s Origin Story

"So it's not a gamification of a movie," Abrak continued. "It's completely beginning and becoming a story, hopefully for a big trilogy out there in the future. And equally important and exciting, it's a new Bond. It's a Bond we built from the ground up for gamers. It's extremely exciting with all the tradition and all the history there is... to work on this together with the family [and create] a Bond that the gamers can call their own and grow with."

"It's been, what, almost 15 years since the last game. So it's been a long time," Abrak added. "It definitely is something that is not overexposed in gaming. We actually see that as a strength... There are a lot of people out there who think about GoldenEye as the classic... I don't want to speak too big about it, but I just hope we'll do a thing that will define James Bond in gaming for years to come. And that is not only one game but that we create a universe for gamers to own for many years to come that we can grow with that next to the Bond on the movies."

Speaking of when fans will get to see the output of IO Interactive’s efforts, that’s still to be seen for now. It’s anyone's guess when the story of the decorated British spy will hit the consoles.

Also Read: Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Open Beta was the Biggest in Franchise History

James Bond Fans Will Have To Wait A Little Longer

"I don't have an update today, but believe me, it's itching here as well to be talking about it soon," Abrak admitted. "So we are following our plans. The production's going amazingly well and we will soon be talking more about it. I know it was a little teaser, not a lot of information, but there's a lot of cool stuff coming up."

IO first announced its James Bond title back in 2021. Very little has been given out about the game since, although some information has come out of the cracks.

But while fans will have to wait a little longer to hear anything more concrete on IO’s James Bond, the studio has also announced it’s taking on publishing duties for MindsEye, the expensive action adventure in development from former Rockstar executive Leslie Benzies.