Wireless Xbox One controller adapter for Windows ships today

You won’t have to wait much longer to use your Xbox One gamepad wirelessly with your PC. Microsoft announced today that its handy peripheral, revealed earlier this year, is now shipping to “most” retail stores around the world. If you’re in the US, though, it looks like the Xbox Wireless Adapter for Windows will be available starting today for $25. There’s also a bundle kitted with an Xbox One controller, which is $55 extra — or $80 total, to be specific. The USB-powered add-on is going to be useful for Windows 10 users who want to use it to play PC games, as well as with Xbox One titles being streamed to a nearby desktop, laptop or hybrid tablet.

Source: Xbox

‘Minecraft’ with a story isn’t as weird as you’d think

A story-driven game about Minecraft, the block-building phenomenon adored by children and adults alike, might sound a tad contradictory. By design, Minecraft has little in the way of plot or characters — the world is randomly generated and the best “stories” occur naturally based on what you decide to build and explore. The game’s open nature is what makes it special, and it’s also the reason why Minecraft: Story Mode, a spin-off title with a carefully crafted plot, has been met with so much skepticism. Minecraft works because it doesn’t have a story — is it possible, or right, for another developer to give it one?

Telltale Games is best known for adventure game adaptations of popular franchises such as The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones and Fables. Unlike Minecraft, these properties come with established stories, characters and mythology that the team can work with. Using its own game engine and a comic book art style, Telltale typically offers a game “season” comprised of five episodes. These are broken down into cutscenes, branching conversations, quick-time events and puzzles. Occasionally, you’ll get the chance to walk through an environment, but there’s little in the way of exploration or creativity. You want freeform building and crafting, like that found in Minecraft? Better look elsewhere.

Despite these enormous differences, Minecraft: Story Mode works. It’s a charming celebration of the game that made Markus “Notch” Persson a billionaire, and its narrative and characters feel like they fit the world — despite them never being mentioned in the original game. In episode one, you take on the role of Jesse, and unlike most Telltale games you can choose between a boy or a girl, as well as one of three different races. It’s a nice touch and immediately gave me some sense of attachment to the character, voiced by either Patton Oswalt (best known for his roles in Ratatouille and The King of Queens) or Catherine Taber (you might recognize her voice from Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Final Fantasy XII or Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker). With a small group of friends, you set out to win a building tournament at a Minecon-style convention called Endercon.

You won’t find any reference to Jesse’s treehouse, his or her pet pig Reuben or the Endercon competition in the original Minecraft game. Which could have been a problem, but Telltale quickly won me over in a few different ways. For one, Story Mode doesn’t claim to be the definitive storyline for Minecraft. It’s a different take on the blocky franchise and is set in its own, separate version of the Minecraft world. That gives the writers room to experiment, while also protecting the source material. Story Mode also weaves in countless elements that will be familiar to fans of the original game. Creepers, beacons and portals all appear in episode one, and are easily recognizable. When Telltale does introduce a new idea — for instance, a colorful amulet used to locate important characters — it doesn’t feel out of place in the Minecraft universe. Story Mode is respectful to the original game by expanding, but never abusing Minecraft‘s established items and mechanics.

The pacing is a little slow to begin with, but once the Endercon building competition ends, the plot kicks into a much higher gear. At the very beginning, Telltale introduces a group of heroes called the Order of the Stone, which once defeated the Ender Dragon and subsequently faded into legend. The peril the world now faces is linked to these members, and it’s here the developer sets up a few of the overarching mysteries for the five-part season. It’s nothing exceptional, but I’m intrigued enough to play the remaining episodes.

Story Mode is supposed to be family-friendly, so there are some limitations regarding the writing and where Telltale can take its cheery characters. Other properties that it’s adapted in the past, such as The Walking Dead and Fables (The Wolf Among Us), have given the team more opportunities to create darker and more unpredictable personalities with devious plans. These provoke stronger reactions in the player, trickier decisions and more complex relationships with the characters you choose to side with. Most of Story Mode‘s cast is likeable (aside from Jesse’s friend Axel, who tends to be impulsive and self-centered), so I spent most of my playthrough just trying to be best friends with everyone.

That said, the characters are distinctive and have quirky, energetic personalities. All of them have clear motivations and desires, which makes it easier to predict the consequences of each dialogue decision. Previous Telltale games have suffered from occasionally stiff scripts and inconsistent pacing — an inevitability, perhaps, with branching storylines — but they’ve always made me care about the characters. The same holds true in Story Mode, which is a testament to the quality of the writing. Jesse’s friends might be a little shallow, but they’re also easy to root for. I really want my “Nether Maniacs” (early on, you get to choose your team name for the building competition) to survive and stay together, so I’m interested to see how the game tries to pull them apart in later episodes.

Even if you’ve never played Minecraft before, there’s a lot to like in Story Mode‘s first chapter. It’s a charming, if simple tale with interesting characters and a few memorable set pieces. In terms of game design, it couldn’t be further from Minecraft, but somehow Telltale has managed to make it work. I’m putting that down to the quality of the writing and the way it cleverly integrates classic items, monsters and gameplay mechanics. Story Mode raids everything in Minecraft‘s toolbox to support its own storytelling, and ultimately it works to great effect. The game could have been a lazy and awkward cash-in, but instead it’s a smart, respectful spin-off that celebrates Minecraft‘s special brand of creativity.

Microsoft built Halo 5’s weapons ‘from scratch’ for Xbox One

Halo 5: Guardians‘ soundtrack isn’t the only aspect of the game’s audio that got an overhaul — the developers at 343 Industries had to reimagine what the Xbox One exclusive’s weapons sound like, too. Because of the sheer amount of sounds happening at once during firefights, 343 had to figure out some creative ways to keep the aural calamity in check. It’s quite a bit different in scale from 343’s last outing, 2012’s Halo 4, where there was had a handful of characters on screen simultaneously, as opposed to 40 or 50 in the forthcoming sequel. “We have many more sounds and the mixing is a very challenging situation,” 343 Industries audio director Sotaro Tojima said in a recent interview. “We’re establishing pretty much all the weapon sounds from scratch again for Xbox One.”

He said that besides keeping the sounds of 20 different weapons firing and their 20 different bullet impacts during a firefight, the team also has to prevent the ambient sounds and the game’s score from being drowned out. Making sure everything stayed crisp and clear throughout wasn’t easy. “We tried to make [the weapon sounds] more solid and shorter, but still have enough detail,” he said of keeping the weapons audible. “It’s a totally different kind of mixing approach.”

Has it paid off? Not exactly. Based on my time with the game, they sound much less powerful and aggressive — especially compared to their Halo 4 counterparts. It’s something that the fans noticed after last fall’s multiplayer beta, and I’m sad to report that the beloved assault rifle, and rocket launcher sound like peashooters here. They stick out from the rest of the audio, but aren’t very distinctive at all, sounding more like generic weapons from any other game than firearms from the Halo universe.

For more on Halo 5‘s music and a chance to hear the game’s soundtrack before October 27th, check out the full interview with Tojima and Halo 5‘s audio team.

The ‘Halo 5: Guardians’ soundtrack gives fans what they want

When Microsoft’s in-house Halo studio 343 Industries took the franchise over from creator Bungie, it made a bold statement by abandoning longtime composer Marty O’Donnell’s iconic score for one mostly written by Neil Davidge of the English trip-hop group Massive Attack. Think of it like Disney replacing John Williams’ iconic Star Wars score with something by Randy Newman and you’re about halfway there. His changes were drastic, eschewing established musical tropes for something simultaneously foreign and familiar, leaving no sacred cows behind. It was a ballsy move, and at the time 343’s freshman bravado made a statement about how it would handle the franchise moving forward. But something happened in the three-year gap between then and now: 343 released Halo: The Master Chief Collection to disastrous technical results. How broken that game was (and in some cases still is) had an effect on the development team, and likely killed some of its confidence.

I recently had the chance to speak to 343’s in-house composer Kazuma Jinnouchi as well as audio director Sotaro Tojima and lead audio producer Mary Olson. Our conversation covers everything from fan reactions to Halo 4‘s soundtrack to using music composition as a means of differentiating returning hero Master Chief from new protagonist Jameson Locke. Previously, Jinnouchi’s worked on a number of Metal Gear Solid games, so we talked about the differences between writing music for a first-person versus third-person game as well. To hear how fan-centric the approach to the score was for yourself, you can stream the game’s entire soundtrack as you read the interview below.

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https3A//api.soundcloud.com/playlists/152119772&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true

I’ve been listening to the soundtrack quite a bit and I’m curious what the approach was for the game and how it differed from Halo 4.

Jinnouchi: The major difference was me being the main composer. And me being in-house at 343 Industries from the very start of the project. When the story was only five pages long, I was there. Having that insight helped me understand the game a lot more than how I was involved in Halo 4. Because I joined the team a year before the game shipped, I pretty much jumped in in the middle of the production that was already happening between the studio and Neil Davidge. We were working remotely with Neil so there were a lot of challenges on our end. Communication was very … it wasn’t the easiest project for us. Getting to know people and then being told to make the biggest game was quite a challenge. Going through that experience and moving forward to Halo 5 was a lot easier.

When I listened to the soundtrack, I noticed that there were a lot of familiar themes, musically. The monks are back, for example. Why go back to what was in the original games?

Tojima: Neil Davidge did a great job on Halo 4. We felt that we were missing one piece from the Neil Davidge library: strong music pieces which the Halo fans really love. This is the reason I took Kazuma and said I really need one piece of really strong music which has a strong Halo classic aesthetic for Halo 4. “This is clearly your biggest goal.” So we worked together and he composed “117.” It was one of the users’ favorite pieces, eventually.

Outsourcing a strong composer has a benefit because they have a bunch of experience working for film, TV or music. To me, especially for Halo fans, the most important thing is that the main music composer keeps thinking about Halo fans and the franchise a whole year, every day, with strong communications with the audio director, creative director or the whole studio.

Halo 5‘s score was recorded at the legendary Abbey Road studio

What was the fan reaction to the Halo 4 soundtrack? It sounded different than you’d expect a Halo game to sound and was really experimental. I think that’s what I liked most about it. Halo 5‘s sounds like a traditional score for the series.

Tojima: Actually, the music feedback was a combination of negative and positive. On the positive side, the many Halo fans said that the music itself is really cool, but some people complained about it having not enough of a classic Halo aesthetic; it was too different. “I can’t hear what I listened to for 10 years.” That kind of thing. Negative feedback was that each piece is great, but for some reason it didn’t feel so memorable in-game.

This is kind of my bad rather than Neil Davidge’s. The mixing or music and music direction; everything is not sophisticated enough. For example, Neil did compose a bunch of thematic, melodic pieces. Great pieces, but we couldn’t use his great music most effectively. We should’ve used some specific music more repeatedly or arranged it more thematically. But like Kazuma was saying, we had a communication challenge. He’s a great guy, easy to work with; we had a couple of Skype meetings per week. Compared to the daily communication with an in-house music composer, though, it’s a challenge.

We should always talk about what Halo fans want. We’re checking the user feedback pretty much every day and adjusting details, the direction.

What was it like working under fan expectations?

[Interrupts] Olson: Sorry to cut you off, but to be clear about this vision and what they set out to do was really more to combine. It wasn’t to just go back to Marty’s pieces and hang out there and give up. It wasn’t just to go back and give the fans total classic Halo. It was more like a leaping point. There’s absolutely the intent of establishing a new direction and taking a new direction, but taking a nod and showing the respect for that classic and bringing that into Halo 5 and incorporating it.

Jinnouchi: My process was to take all the musical elements from Halo 1, 2, 3 and 4 and say, “Okay, we have this theme for this type of moment, this theme for that character.” We have a lot of that for our legacy. So moving forward, I have to take them and make sense against what we see and what we experience in Halo 5. I rearranged a lot of them in a way that the tone is still Halo 5, but you do pay homage to the previous titles.

Given your background and how differently Japanese culture views first-person shooters, did that play a role in how you approached the music?

Jinnouchi: My approach was very different from the previous games I worked on. Working on a Halo game felt like you need a lot more subtlety. You arrange differently because of that and write differently. Previously, I’d mostly worked on third-person games. When you work on a first person game, you’re not looking at the character; you are the character. The music shouldn’t be in the way of what you do or your thinking process. When I say I felt like I needed more subtlety, it’s driven by that aspect; there’s a lot of room for thinking as a user from that perspective.

With first-person shooter games, my approach is to have music not explain what’s really going on on the screen because you are the character and you are fighting through the intense moment. You know it’s an intense moment. The music doesn’t have to be there to explain that. Well … sometimes it needs to be there to drive that intention even more. In general, there’s a different role for the music. What’s the story behind [what’s happening on-screen]? Why’s it creepy? The music doesn’t necessarily explain what kind of situation you’re in from a gameplay perspective; it should explain why it’s happening. It’s not just third-person versus first-person; it’s more about how modern gaming music should be.

Was there a specific reason Davidge wasn’t brought back?

Olson: [16-second pause] I think that it touches on all the things that Kazuma and Tojima have said in terms of the advantages of having an in-house composer. At that point, because Kazuma came in in the last year of Halo 4, he was here and [having him compose] was an option that was available, whereas it wasn’t on Halo 4. And again, like Tojima mentioned, he’d written “117.” He’d taken some time to creatively prove himself.

“117” is a great track; I love the Halo 4 soundtrack and listen to it pretty regularly. When Halo 5 was announced, my first question was if Davidge was coming back.

Olson: It’s fun to talk to somebody who did love it.

So this wasn’t anything to do with appeasing fans that weren’t happy with Halo 4 and just go back to classic?

Jinnouchi: No, it was more about creatively how we should move forward.

Tojima: Not just on the audio team, but I think all of 343 has a very challenging question: Where is a great spot between something totally new and epic, or a classic Halo aesthetic? So some fans really want to keep that similarity. As a new team, the creators, we try to hit something new creatively. That’s why I think we are struggling between a classic Halo aesthetic, but something new.

We also tried to hit that sweet spot in Halo 4 with Neil Davidge. We arranged a couple of [existing] pieces in Halo 4. But we didn’t use the iconic Halo choir on the title screen, but we didn’t arrange one of the most thematic, iconic pieces. We arranged the more iconic pieces [from the past] this time because we feel these pieces should be the core of the experience for Halo fans. This is part of their gaming history, so we should really respect the melody.

You’re introducing a brand-new character, Spartan Locke. What are the things you did differently musically to differentiate him from Master Chief?

Jinnouchi: Two things. One is choice of instruments. Another big factor is chord progression and melody. I used a different scale for Locke’s theme as opposed to Master Chief. It’s got little major/minor scale things that consist of two different chord progressions. It doesn’t just stay within the minor or the major. It has this ambiguity to it.

Initially, I wanted to create the feel of, “Is this a good guy or a bad guy?” I wanted the music to make you ask, “Who is this?”

[Image credits: 343 Industries]

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Here’s how ‘Halo 5: Guardians’ multiplayer rankings work

Halo 5: Guardians is almost upon us, and once the campaign credits roll (or the game itself finishes installing on your Xbox One, depending on your style) you might be curious how multiplayer ranking works. Wonder no more because it’s similar to League of Legends according to a post on Halo Waypoint. Your starting placement in matchmade Arena games is determined by how you fare in your first ten games. That “Competitive Skill Rating” breaks down into seven categories: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Onyx and Champion. The post stresses that the only way to increase your rank after those initial ten matches are set is by winning.

“Whether you drop 30 kills in a game of Slayer or single-handedly capture every flag in a CTF match, wins are the only way to improve your CSR,” it says. “If you are skilled enough to continue winning at tier 6 [the highest per rank], you will advance to the next rank.”

And doing the opposite? It’ll cause your progress to drop, but not at the expense of your current rank. League of Legends isn’t quite so kind in that regard. So, say you have a bad night and you’re losing matches left and right in the Diamond rank. That won’t drop you back to Gold. In theory, this’ll help you keep in that sweet spot of consistently grouping with folks of your skill level regardless of a nasty cold streak.

Oh, and in ranked Arena matches you don’t have to worry about joining a game that’s already in progress and getting dumped onto the losing team, hurting your CSR. How’s that? Every match starts from the beginning and there isn’t such a thing as joining one halfway through. That feature still lives in Warzone and Custom Games, though. You’ll be penalized for dropping out of matches too. What’s more, Arena plays out in “seasons” now. They’ll debut sometime later this year and from the sounds of it, only live within specific playlists. Seasons last a month each, and your CSR resets with each successive season. Should you earn some of those points in the playlist, you’ll be rewarded with cosmetic items like an in-game banner for your Gamertag.

Sounds good, yeah? Well, I don’t know about you folks, but I’m pretty sure that I’m gonna be stuck in Bronze for quite awhile come October 27th — no eSports stardom for this guy.

Source: Halo Waypoint