The Witcher 3 is still getting patches and updates and its latest one – Patch 1.10 – is pretty hefty as far as updates go.

With a 13-page PDF of patch notes and around 600 changes, CD Projekt have clearly been busy. The main thing to note, as well as the foxes for a load of quests, is that a whole bunch of new conversation options have been added into the dialogue options for many major characters giving you the change to “enhance your relationships with them as well as the story as a whole”. The other big change is that the way items in your inventory are ordered has been completely overhauled.

The patch itself will be somewhere between 6 to 15 GB in size, which makes sense really with so many changes. There’s bound to be something in there too that will tie into the Hearts of Stone expansion that due out on Tuesday so make sure you’ve already updated if you’re planning to get it to expand your Witcher 3 experience beyond the core game’s offerings.

Shovel Knight caught our attention from the first time we saw it on a Nintendo Treehouse at a big gaming event. The game has been popular enough on Nintendo consoles that Yacht Club Games decided to release retail versions of the game.

Now however they’ve just announced that not only will the retail edition coming to PlayStation 4, Wii U, Nintendo 3DS and PC (in Europe only) be delayed until October 30th in Europe and November 3rd in North America; the retail copy for the Xbox One had been cancelled altogether.

Explaining the situation on their website Yacht Club Games wrote: “The final few steps of the Plague of Shadows content took a little longer than expected, but it was important to us that this update to be on the disc/cart right out of the box. Unfortunately that meant we had to push back the date just a little a bit.” They then explained that the Xbox retail edition had been cancelled for now owing to “publishing policies on that platform that are totally beyond our control.” The digital version is still available though.

The price of the physical copy has also been raised a little, but people who pre-ordered at the original price should have their retailers honouring that original price. The decision to bump up the price was down to limited space to display wares and down to the location of where certain priced merchandise was to be displayed meaning that Shovel Knight might not have been displayed where Yacht Club Games would have liked it to have been. “We didn’t want our ‘bargain priced’ game to go straight to the bargain bin.”

Each physical version will now come with a free soundtrack download to make up for the delay and price increases, and Yacht Club Games have said that updates on the retail Vita version and the Shovel Knight Amiibo are coming soon.

With the game coming out soon, EA has opened up a small slice of Star Wars: Battlefront for beta testing. I’ve taken it for a spin and collected my thoughts for you in a handy video. Check it out below:

IO Interactive show us the latest installment of their hit assassination’em up, Hitman!

The developer session kicked off showing us some pretty standard gameplay for a Hitman game, however there are options, lots and lots of options. It seems that as per the words of Travis and Sven, the two employees of IO Interactive who took us all through the Showstopper Level of Hitman,

“You will experience a rich and detailed sandbox, every person has a name”

It certainly looks like they’re correct at least on the rich sandbox part of that statement, the level is very densely populated, the crowds move, mill and mingle around as one would expect a large crowd of posh twats to and the level itself is pretty bloody expansive, including a large manor house with two floors, large garden grounds, numerous balconies (with vantage points of course) and plenty of staff members and civilians with nicely tailored clothes to steal.

Keeping with the whole options angle I mentioned earlier it doesn’t stop there. We’ve been given numerous types of poison, the ability to have weapons and equipment dropped into the level before the player begins and even ways to smuggle weapons and equipment past security checkpoints. Which is something I look forward to utilising, even Metal Gear Solid doesn’t have a feature like that and that’s pretty much the franchise that wrote the book on stealth. We’ll undoubtedly have the usual staples of the series however, I’d hate to see 47 without his Silverballers and Garrotte wire.

But there is a ton to see and do in this level, it isn’t just kill one target, in this Showstopper level we have two. One is the man behind the fashion show and the other is his accomplice who is holding a secret auction to sell off “deadly secrets” to some very unscrupulous people and of course all these options can come into play. Maybe you’ll drop one of your Silverballers that’ll get picked up by a security guard, taken past a checkpoint which you will then bypass and retrieve your gun afterwards which you will then utilise in a trigger pulling fashion to silently kill someone…maybe. There’s even more than one escape option, a chopper or a speedboat though you will have to find the keys. You may decide to get a Sniper Rifle smuggled in, camp out on a vantage point and shoot your way out afterwards or my personal favourite, attempt to bypass everything in a disguise and get discovered almost instantly. Almost mind you.

So allow me to summarise. Options. You need to take out the target, pick a path and get to it.

You can watch the full developer session below, Enjoy!

This year’s EGX featured games of all genres and titles, and I was lucky enough to be assigned Hellblade. Presented by Ninja Theory’s Dominic Mathews, this developer session was as much about the process of creating a game as it was about the game itself. For their latest game release, Ninja Theory are taking the novel approach of allowing the audience to follow the production of Hellblade from concept to animation and story-building to completion. Whilst they realise this can leave the small team of 15 staff open to a lot of criticism, it also provides people outside of the games production industry a unique insight to how our beloved games come to be realised.

Another unique aim of the team who created ‘Devil May Cry’, is the type of title they want to release. Dominic detailed the main draw-backs of triple A titles being a set budget, spiralling costs and a loss of creative ownership in order to deliver a product expected from customers of triple A titles. Instead, the team are aiming for a title hallway between triple A and Indie, lovingly named “independent Triple A”. This will allow the developers to take creative risks and ensure an immersive storyline and gamer experience, without limited their production values.

The game Hellblade, follows the fantasy adventures of Celtic warrior “Senua”; a female protagonist plagued by psychosis and visual and auditory hallucinations. The thing that impressed me most about tackling such a controversial subject is the amount of research the team conducted to portraying the reality of mental illness in everyday life. Not only did the team interview people who deal with psychosis on a daily basis, but they worked with prominent psychiatrist Professor Paul Fletcher to create a truthful representation of psychosis. In this author’s opinion, mental illness is a subject that is only just receiving the attention it requires in wider media. The developers of Hellblade are striving to disband the usual stereotypes and to really help those with no experience, understand what sufferers all over the world have to cope with.

Continuing with the open development style, we were shown a ‘vertical slice’ of the game. This is a small cut scene created to demonstrate the sound, graphics and storyline standards the game will eventually be made to. To stay true to the Independent Triple A title, the team have created an in-house performance capture studio using materials obtained from Amazon and Ikea to keep costs down. Using Vicon 30 technology, not only have the actors portraying in-game characters been captured, but also rocks and trees in the real world have been scanned. The single environment artist on the team will be using these objects to create the background to Senua’s adventures, allowing a realistic environment for the player to experience.

The journey of Hellblade has already begun, and you can follow them at www.hellblade.com. Here you can catch up on developer’s diary videos, weekly blogging and Q and A sessions. All in all, Hellblade promises to be an immersive, creative experience, which I can’t wait to play.

To watch the entire developer session for yourself, click below: