Daily Briefing: Thursday 11th November

New World is getting a PTR

Amazon confirmed this week that the MMO will soon be getting a suite of rather substantial updates. The first of these is a new Public Test Realm, which will allow participating players early access to upcoming features. The upcoming Into the Void update will be the first thing thrown into the testing arena, which is set to bring new quests, a new weapon class, and a stack of quality-of-life changes to the game. The New World PTR is available to everyone who owns New World, though they will have to download it as a standalone application from their Steam Library.

• New World wasn't without its problems at launch but Amazon have honestly done a pretty solid job at kicking the content rolling out. Into the Void looks like it'll add a lot of stuff to the game and it's a good idea having players test everything out ahead of time to prevent the main game from breaking on update day. Anyone who has been near a Blizzard game in the past few years will be well acquainted with the idea of a PTR, and New World getting one seems like Amazon being happy to give fans what they're expecting. There are also mad weapons up for testing.

The Grand Theft Auto Definitive Edition Trilogy unlocked early so Sony had to pull it

The PS4 edition of the upcoming Grand Theft Auto definitive trilogy compilation has been temporarily removed from sale on the PlayStation Store after it unlocked real early for some players. The game was supposed to unlock on all platforms today at 7am PST / 10am ET / 3pm GMT, but players who preordered the digital edition of the game via the PlayStation Store found that it unlocked at midnight local time. Which is a big yikes.

• This means that players in territories like Australia, New Zealand, and the UK were allowed into the game a full 24 hours earlier than intended. Sony have pulled the game in response, though it will presumably reappear in and around the various relevant regional unlock times. What's interesting is that the Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S versions of the game didn't return the same early unlocking problem, so this appears to be an issue with the PlayStation Store, specifically.

The Game Awards 2021 will feature 40-50 titles

We're fast coming up on Game Awards time yet again and Geoff Keighley, the founder and host of what has become one of the biggest events in the games industry calendar, has confirmed that this year's show will feature its "biggest lineup yet of world premieres and announcements." It sounds like quite the spectacle, too, returning to an in-person event and featuring an on-stage orchestra, celebrity guests, game reveals, and, almost begrudgingly at this point, the actual awards themselves.

• Speaking on the Epic Games website, Keighley emphasised that, despite all the pomp and ceremony, the show is about the games when you get down to it. He also said “what we really learned last year was at the end of the day, it really is the games and the trailers that drive the show.” As such, Keighley expects 40-50 games to be on display in one shape or another, and the number of new games announced could crack double digits. He did not say that there will be 40-50 new games announced during the show, IGN got burned on Twitter for that one.