Plus a new Tomb Raider game is on the way and Amazon announces a God of War TV show
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SIFTER is produced by Kyle Pauletto, Fiona Bartholomaeus, Daniel Ang & Adam Christou. Mitch Loh is Senior Producer and Gianni Di Giovanni is our Executive Producer. Thanks to Omny Studio for their support of SIFTER.
KYLE: Hi I'm Kyle Pauletto
FIONA: and I’m Fiona Bartholemaus
KYLE: Welcome to Walkthrough, SIFTER’s weekly recap on the biggest news in video games.
FIONA: This week players get rare mounts in World of Warcraft thanks to a new bug, Amazon announces a God of War TV series, plus new developments in the Microsoft Activision acquisition drama.
Here is the news for Sunday 18th of December. Let’s go
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KYLE: Some really lucky world of warcraft players were able to discover an insane exploit in the brand new player class that let them win super rare mounts easily, breaking a ten year old loot system for 28 hours.
Sit with me here because it’s a little complex.
Dragonflight which launched last month, introduced a very brief window where some of the rarest mount drops in the game were made almost default drops for the brand new Evoker class.
The insanely rare dragon mount the Heavenly Onyx Cloud Serpent is only supposed to drop when a world boss is killed around 0.01% of the time, or around 1 mount for every 7500 kills.
Most players in the last decade since Mist of Pandaria released have never even seen this mount let alone own it, as the odds were so so low… but because evokers are brand new and Blizzard forgot to give them a specific pool of loot for this 10 year old expansion their odds were massively improved.
Instead of basically zero chance they had about a 40% chance to secure the mount, and once collected it could be used on any character.
Because you can only create one evoker per server, and loot the boss once a week it created a mad dash where people were creating new evokers, fighting through the starting area, killing the boss to try their luck and deleting them if they only got gold.
The door was quickly closed, but not before a stack of players secured one of the rarest drops in the game, and quickly worked through other super rare mount drops too, also massively buffed.
Blizzard to their credit once they closed this exploit went and changed the odds, pushing the chances up to around 1% which is the default rarity for most super rare mounts. Tricky, but not impossible.
FIONA: It’s stories like this that make MMOs so much fun to hear about…people love a good bug and it’s almost part of the game to try find them and beat the system, good on those clever players!
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FIONA: There is officially a new Tomb Raider game on the way, and developers Crystal Dynamics will partner with Amazon to publish it
We had an idea that a new tomb raider game was on the way, a follow up to 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider that’d be built in Unreal Engine 5.
It’s rumoured that this new game will tie the prequel slash reboot series with the original games continuity.
KYLE: This is good to hear, I really enjoyed the reboot series so I’m always happy to have more of a good thing.
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KYLE: Speaking of Amazon, the company has officially announced plans to develop a new TV show based on the God of War series.
The creators and executive producers from The Expanse and The Wheel of Time are reported to lead the project with input from Sony and Playstation.
Games are looking like a bit of goldmine for these companies, with Sony pursuing adaptations of nearly all their major first party franchises, Uncharted, The Last of Us, God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn.
FIONA: It does seem a little pointless given the rebooted series basically play like fantastic TV shows already, but hey, good luck to them. Gamers love this franchise, so god help Amazon if this turns out poorly.
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FIONA: Good news for Call of Duty players, Microsoft really wants to buy Activision so much it’s willing to let all the new games appear on PlayStation Plus not just Xbox Game Pass according to Leah Nylan and Dina Bass at Bloomberg.
The cynic in me says this is a move that’s come from some serious arm twisting, with Microsoft really feeling the pressure from regulatory bodies over the massive acquisition.
But that also means no more paying $100 a year for the latest COD.
Sony is yet to accept the offer, but we’ll keep you posted as this story develops.
KYLE: This seems like a big concession for Microsoft, I’m sure they would have loved to keep these games on Game Pass only but money is money
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FIONA: Hogwarts Legacy which is due to arrive on the 10th of February next year will only launch on PS5 and Xbox Series X and PC, at least at first.
Playstation 4 and Xbox One players will need to wait until at least the 4th of April and Switch players even longer, they won’t be slinging spells until the 25th of July.
There is a new 30 minute gameplay demo to watch, and we’ve stuck a link to that in the show notes while you wait.
KYLE: This kind of announcement really just drives home that it could be time to cut off the old gen, and give the dev teams a little break from having to design games for consoles that are nearly a decade old at this point. But all that aside, I cannot wait to get my hands on this game, so fingers crossed there’s no more delays.
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FIONA: That’s it for news, here are the games releasing this coming week.
KYLE: We’ve pretty much reached the end of the big releases before they kick off again in January but still on the cards is Sports Story from Brisbane based Sidebar Games, the retro styled RPG is the follow up to Switch exclusive Golf Story, packed with even more sports and classic australian humour. It’s due this month with no fixed release date yet, but do yourself a favour and keep an eye out.
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KYLE: This has been Walkthrough by Sifter, my name is Kyle Pauletto
FIONA: And my name is Fiona Bartholomaeus This is the last episode of Walkthrough for 2022 thanks so much for joining us this year we’ve loved sharing the news with you.
KYLE: We’ll be back in early 2023, but I recommend checking out SIFTER’s other podcasts Mainstream where we’ve recapped our Games of the Year and Lightmap where we’ll speak to games composer and music radio show host Meena Shamaly who will pick his favourite soundtracks of 2022.
FIONA: We know you love listening to SIFTER so why not show your support by backing us on Ko-Fi. Your help lets us keep making our shows so head to sifter.com.au/support that address again is sifter.com.au/support
KYLE: SIFTER is produced by Kyle Pauletto, Fiona Bartholomaeus (Bar-tholo-may-US), Daniel Ang & Adam Christou (CHRIS-TOO). Mitch Loh is Senior Producer and Gianni Di Giovanni is our Executive Producer.
FIONA: Thanks to Brian Fairbanks from Salty Dog Sounds for composing the Walkthrough theme tune.
Thanks to both Audio Technica Australia and Omny Studio for their support of SIFTER’s three podcasts.
KYLE: Thanks again for listening, we’ll be back with more news in 2023.
