Somehow some people have managed to get hold of Just Cause 3 before its official release. People besides those reviewers and media outfits that get sent copies for working purposes that is. Square Enix have therefore released information about an upcoming pre-release patch to try and get people to maybe hold off until the actual release date.

The patch will be across all platforms and improves a number of things as well as righting a few bugs that were found. The full patch notes are below and some are suitably funny, although most are the usual plain language to avoid confusion I’d guess.

Fixes and Improvements

• The Medician Department of Nature Conservation has pored over every inch of our beautiful island for cracks and removed them
• The Medician Department of Motor Vehicles has taken measures to acquire poorly-tuned vehicles and burn them
• Di Ravello’s Militia has been given a refresher course in combat and spatial awareness as per the General’s recent mandate
• The Medician Department of Infrastructure has made some adjustments to certain roads to prevent traffic jams
• Various stability/crash fixes
• Various camera fixes
• Various Havok destruction optimisations
• Various localisation fixes and updates
• Various worldsim improvements

Missions, Challanges, Random Encounters

• Various minor mission bug fixes
• Various minor challenge bug fixes
• Fixed some various issues with Random Encounters

Graphics and Animation

• Various LoD optimisations
• Various lighting optimisations
• Various animation optimisations

Audio

• Various level and EQ adjustments
• Rebels riding along with Rico will now be less rude and not talk over each other
• Fixed a few rare audio distortion issues involving destructible objects with lots of moving parts

Especially fond of that ‘rude rebels’ one there.

Just Cause will be coming soon, on December 1st.

It seems that the mods over on /r/MassEffect have just received a leak of information from a source saying they have access to an early version copy of the new Mass Effect game – Mass Effect Andromeda.

Although they did get proof of the person’s identity the mods were asked not to share it publicly, so there is a chance that some of the information might not be real. On the other hand it could all be for real. We won’t know until closer to the time.

Included in the information was new of the character you supposedly play as as well as the mission the game is centred around. There were also details about some gameplay elements, including the reveal of two companions who can join you during gameplay and the fact that you can take two members of your squad on missions with you as the others stay behind on the ship.

The ship itself is said to be larger than the Normandy and there was also details provided on how you get from place to place. The enemy forces were also touched upon, with them apparently being dropped off in Cerberus ships.

Planet surfaces will be explorable and the combat will be greatly enhanced with the user of jetpacks to allow you to get to vantage points up high or across larger gaps and the omnitool now having a function to be used as a shield.

If you’re interested in reading more, or joining the discussion over on /r/MassEffect then navigate yourself to the thread over here.

Either way, we won’t get to know how legitimate any of this information will be until BioWare start releasing more official information next year.

In an interview with GameSpot, the head of From Software Hidetaka Miyazaki has revealed that it is his desire as well as that of others in the company for them to move onto new projects. And that Dark Souls 3 could be the last Dark Souls game they make.

“I don’t think it’d be the right choice to continue indefinitely creating Souls and Bloodborne games. I’m considering Dark Souls 3 to be the big closure on the series. That’s not just limited to me, but From Software and myself together want to aggressively make new things in the future.

“I believe that From Software has to create new things. There will be new types of games coming from us, and Dark Souls 3 is an important marker in the evolution of From Software.”

Whether the IP will be handed to another developer is unknown, but Miyazaki does have a point. From Software have released a lot of games in the last few years with the same style, so you can see why they might want to do something a little bit different. As he put it in the interview:

“I don’t care about what type of president I will be in the future or how I’ll be remembered, I just believe that [moving on] is necessary in order for players to continue enjoying our games. We have to keep creating quality games and be aggressive about doing new things.”

Fallout 4’s been out for a little bit now, not long enough for the shiny newness of its hype to wear off, but certainly long enough for the many players to encounter quite a few bugs. Hey, it is a big open-world Bethesda game after all, they’re kind of known for them.

Anyway, fear not for a patch is incoming soon to fix some of the more common game-breaking issues as well as some that aren’t game-breaking but just strange in that way that only a Bethesda game seems to achieve.

“It’s true that the freedom our games offer you can lead to unintentional consequences that are sometimes bad, when the game combines too many unexpected elements at once,” Bethesda wrote in a post. “Given the scale and complexity of the systems at work, especially when allowing you to build your own settlements, we’re happy that Fallout 4 is our most robust and solid release ever, and we’d like to thank our amazing QA staff who worked as hard as anyone to break the game so we could fix it during development.”

They then did go on to note that even hundreds of testers couldn’t possibly replicate all the bugs that the thousands playing might encounter, and so the patch will come along to fix those common ones that weren’t caught during the development stage.

The patch will release in a beta form sometime during the next week. A full release will be made available later on for all, and Bethesda have told players to expect more smaller updates that are frequent to fix bugs as they are squashed as opposed to fewer bigger updates that flatten many bugs at once. It also means that any issues caused by a previous update can be fixed quicker in the next small update.

The weekly UK chart of the most popular games has just been released and to few people’s surprises Bethesda’s new Fallout game is top of the chart.

Fallout 4 released to great fanfare after Bethesda made the gamers wait for years for any sign of its actual existence, and beat out the other new releases of the week to claim top spot. It even surpassed its predecessor New Vegas by having its launch sales at 213% more than the 2010 hit. It also beat out the record for concurrent players on Steam with 470,000 players logged as playing at once and over 1.2 million owners of a copy of the game on day one.

Although full figures of all sales haven’t yet been released, Bethesda did say they’d produced and shipped 12 million copies of the game in preparation for the launch. Let’s hope nowhere ran out of copies.