Whenever a new military shooter like Battlefield or Call of Duty comes out, there are always voices lamenting that game makers need to explore other settings. Why not cover the Civil War? Why not make a game about trench warfare? Outside of novelty titles like Darkest of Days, static line engagements haven’t really been featured in many shooters. You can kind of see why. Sitting in a trench or crouched behind earthworks for hours, then running over no man’s land to be gunned down in a blast of enemy machinegun fire, may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Good news then that Blackmill Games and M2H have released Verdun just for fans of the First World War. It’s a hardcore multiplayer shooter like Red Orchestra, but set in the muddy slog between 1914 and 1918. Maxim guns! Bayonet charges! Mustard gas! Why die for glory when you can die horribly for futile exchanges of worthless ground?
The Imperial AT-AT and Stormtroopers in Arma III just because. Unfortunately, mod author “McRuppertle” says this is part of an old project that he abandoned, but we can hope that the renewed interest will spur him to complete it.
Explosions! The Just Cause series always seemed like something Michael Bay would turn into a movie, and this gameplay trailer for Just Cause 3 sticks to what works. Planes blow up. Buildings explode. Trains derail while on fire. Cars crash and fly apart. Kaboom! The plot even reads like a treatment for a Bay-approved script.
The Mediterranean republic of Medici is suffering under the brutal control of General Di Ravello, a dictator with an insatiable appetite for power. Enter Rico Rodriguez, a man on a mission to destroy the General’s hold on power by any means necessary.
With extreme prejudice! And dynamite! Just Cause 3 is scheduled to launch on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Windows PC later this year.
Kerbal Space Program is now feature-complete and out of early access. The sandbox space agency sim by Squad now has and actual game to go with its physics playground and the developer feels confident that the game has reached a point worthy of being called a 1.0 release. In recent Reddit discussions with fans, Squad confirmed that they will continue updating the game for free for as long as they can, and that they would not sell DLC unless it was “something huge that adds a lot of gameplay” like a more traditional expansion. Among the features of the 1.0 launch are a female crewmember, an overhauled flight model, a new heat sim, fairings for rocket construction, and resource mining.
Kerbal Space Program 1.0 is what we envisioned when development of the game started four years ago: we set out to make a game in which the player is given ultimate control over the exploration of space: from designing their rockets to launching and flying them to their destinations, in a universe that was modeled to be as realistic as possible while remaining fun to play in.
Kerbal Space Program has been endorsed by NASA, Elon Musk of SpaceX, and the European Space Agency. The game is available on Steam, GOG, and the official KSP site.
Silent Hills is dead. The horror game teased at the end of last year’s P.T. demo on PlayStation 4 will no longer be developed. Rumors had been swirling for weeks that the relationship between publisher Konami and developer Hideo Kojima had deteriorated and that they had stopped communicating. When Konami removed Kojima’s name from the Metal Gear Solid website, it was obvious that the situation between the two parties had hit a breaking point.
Actor Norman Reedus and director Guillermo del Toro, who were both going to be involved in the Silent Hills production, separately made apologies over the weekend lamenting the death of the project. Their statements caught Konami off-guard forcing the company to make a terse announcement this morning regarding the cancellation.
Konami is committed to new Silent Hill titles, however the embryonic ‘Silent Hills’ project developed with Guillermo del Toro and featuring the likeness of Norman Reedus will not be continued.
In terms of Kojima and Del Toro being involved, discussions on future Silent Hill projects are currently underway, and please stay tuned for further announcements.
Horror fans should note that the P.T. demo that many horror fans lauded as the best example of the genre from last year, will be removed from the PlayStation store on April 29th.
Yup. That’s the next Call of Duty game. It’s being handled by Treyarch, so it’s back to giant mechs, augmented-movement parkour, and robots. Wait a minute! Are we sure this is Call of Duty: Black Ops III and not Titanfall 2?
Valve is allowing mod creators to charge money for their work. Valve, working with Bethesda, has opened up creator pricing in the Steam Workshop for Skyrim. According to the announcement, content creators can set their own pricing (including free) in the Workshop, split revenue with partners, and even fight each other with DMCA Takedown notices. Congrats modders! You’ve hit the big time! Enjoy protecting your content and wrestling for rights.
On the consumer protection side, Valve has also instituted a 24-hour refund policy for mod buyers if they aren’t satisfied with what they paid for. Not enough nudity in that Bubblegum Crisis mod for your taste? Get a refund and buy the mod that lets you marry a horse.
Factions are coming to Elite: Dangerous. Frontier Developments outlined the upcoming Powerplay initiative in the latest newsletter to players. The feature will add factions to the game that players can join. Each faction, or power, will have goals that they wish to attain and territory to defend. Each week, powers will pay out credits, influence, perks, and other rewards to players in their faction based on performance. The missions and rewards for participating players will reflect the character of their chosen power.
For example, if a major economic Power sends in their traders for a financial takeover against a military powerhouse, the other side may be tasked with piracy missions to destroy or loot their cargo. You can always be a trader or a miner or a pirate for your own ends, but by joining a Power you’ll be afforded special rights and be rewarded for playing the way you already like to play.
The downside of joining a faction? Well, it will be open season on you if you come across a wing of ships on an opposing power. Also, powers don’t take kindly to players that shift loyalty. Leaving a faction may incur penalties like having a bounty set on you from your former group. Powerplay will be included in a free update to Elite: Dangerous.
That’s one of the ships a player has built in the current beta of Galactic Civilizations III. People created some impressive stuff in Galactic Civilizations II, but just from looking through the screenshots in Steam, it’s obvious that folks will be going nuts in the newest game’s more robust ship creator. Star Trek vs. Star Wars vs. Babylon 5 vs. Battlestar Galactica vs. Flash Gordon vs. The Last Starfighter? It’s like everything in our own starship week crammed into a cage match.
Now, Galactic Civilizations III has an official launch date. Stardock announced that the third installment of their space 4X franchise will release on May 14th. In early access, it’s grown from bare bones turn-based space expansion game to an almost full-fledged star-spanning exercise in crushing puny humans. Bah, humans! With better ship creation, custom factions, strategic hex maps, 4-player online multiplayer, and an ideology mechanic, Galactic Civilizations III promises to have a modified YT-1300 light freighter’s cargo hold of improvements from previous games.
How do you make a movie about Grand Theft Auto? The games themselves ape cinematic crime stories, so filming a gangster epic and tacking the Grand Theft Auto name to it would be covering old ground. The BBC has a better idea. Make a movie based on the conflict between those that wanted to ban violent video games and the people that made their living from creating games. Game Changer, based on David Kushner’s book Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto, will cover the battle between moral activists and Rockstar, the studio that turned lap dances, hookers, and shooting sprees into games. Daniel Radcliffe will play Rockstar co-founder Sam Houser. Bill Paxton will take on the role of Jack Thompson who, before his fall from grace in 2008, led the media fight against what he called “murder simulators” and video games.
Game Changer’s script was written by James Wood (Rev, Ambassadors) and will be directed by Owen Harris (Black Mirror, Misfits). No air date has been announced yet.
Mad Catz is co-publishing Rock Band 4 with Harmonix. They’re not just manufacturing the new plastic instruments you’ll be jamming on, they’ll be in charge of global retail sales, promotions, and distribution for the game itself. Harmonix will still be responsible for digital sales of the game as well as track DLC. When Rock Band 4 was announced in early March, Harmonix said they were working closely with the platform manufacturers to make the old instruments work with Rock Band 4, but that the new instruments would offer many improvements. Mad Catz reiterated that sentiment.
As a hard-core Rock Band fan, I can honestly say this is shaping up to be one of the biggest games of the year, and music fans are just going to go nuts for what Harmonix is creating! Not only that, but I truly believe that we’ll be delivering the very best music game controllers you’ve ever played with. We’re working so hard to improve all the controllers in so many ways, we think you’ll notice the difference immediately and love what we deliver!
Rock Band 4 will face competition from the recently announced Guitar Hero Live. They are both scheduled to launch later this year for Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but Guitar Hero Live will also be available for mobile platforms.
We all know another Mass Effect game is coming. The only question is what will the game be like? Will it be a futuristic elevator simulator? An off-road planetary exploration adventure? A third-person cover shooter with lots of sexy cleavage and derrieres? According to leaked marketing survey details from BioWare and Electronic Arts, we can expect the game to resemble Dragon Age: Inquisition quite a bit, except there will be a lot more collecting. And derrieres.
The next Mass Effect game takes place in the Helius Cluster (a cluster of 100s of solar systems in the Andromeda Galaxy), far removed by time and space from Commander Shepard’s heroic acts and the final events of the Mass Effect trilogy.
As a Pathfinder, who is totally not Commander Shepard, the player will gather resources and allies to combat The Remnant, who are totally not The Precursors, before their technology destroys the galaxy. Details of some features included the return of the all-terrain Mako, establishing settlements to spread influence, and high-level raid style gameplay. Multiplayer appears to be an iteration of the current style found in Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect 3.
Previous survey leaks revealed accurate information about Assassin’s Creed: Unity and Dragon Age: Inquisition prior to their official announcements.
Desktop Dungeons, the fiendishly clever anti-roguelike that got five stars from a certain hard-assed reviewer, is about to find its way to iOS and Android devices, where it’ll freely sync itself with your PC version.
But in the course of making it for mobile platforms, the folks at QCF Design came up with some new stuff they didn’t want to leave out of the PC version. So today’s Enhanced Edition is available as a free update. I’ll leave it to QCF to explain the new features in their own words:
* Secretly despise friends for already beating you on the Daily Dungeon leaderboards.
* Unlock a terrifying new building for your Kingdom.
* Discover the Rat Monarch and Chemist classes… and their reasons for visiting the Kingdom.
* Click through new quests and ignore exposition as it streams past you.
* Gleefully and accurately sling spells from the player-requested drag-to-cast and radial menus.
* Pages and pages of optimizations and bug fixes that are awesome but don’t sound cool when we put them in lists like this one.
The mobile versions will be out “by the end of May”.
There’s already an iconic moment for Star Wars fans in the new teaser trailer for The Force Awakens. It’s that part at the end where space pirate Commander Riker is standing next to Dr. Zaius and he says “We’re home.” That’s what the announcement of Star Wars: Battlefront feels like. We’ve known about Electronic Arts and DICE taking on big multiplayer in the Star Wars playground since a few weeks after Disney bought the whole lot from George Lucas, but it’s nice to finally tear away the tarp and see what they’ve been working on. It’s a Battlefield game!
It’s the Frostbite engine and explosions and next-gen super graphics with a jillion polys and plenty of pew-pew. Teams will square off against each other with Star Wars equipment and vehicles in familiar places like the forest moon of Endor or the snowdrifts of Hoth. EA will even offer a free map download just before The Force Awakens premieres that depicts a battle on Jakku, the desert planet shown in the latest movie trailer. And since Star Wars is all about pulp heroes and villains, players will be able to embody their favorite cosplay subjects like Darth Vader and Rebel Trooper #12. Basically, it’s all the fan-service you could want outside of a remake of Wrath of Khan starring Smaug.
Star Wars: Battlefront is scheduled to launch on November 17th for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC. UPDATE: Here’s the trailer.
2011’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution presented players with the classic stealth or brute-force options during gameplay, except during the boss fights. Shoot or die was the only choice, and players that invested heavily in the stealth part of the game found those bits painful. Eidos Montreal outsourced those sections of the game to another developer, and it showed. This criticism dogged Human Revolution even after the “director’s cut” reworked the boss encounters to give less trigger happy players a leg up. While many players appreciated the work Eidos Montreal put into updating the Deus Ex universe, that one negative point really stuck in a lot of players’ minds.
With Square-Enix’s announcement of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, the all-important question was asked. Would boss battles suck as much as they did in Human Revolution? Short answer: No. Game director Jean-Francois Dugas confirmed on Twitter that a true stealth solution would be possible throughout the game. Cybernetically enhanced protagonist Adam Jensen will be able to use his sneaky skills to deal with even the most heavily-armed bosses. Good news for players that want to tiptoe past the bad guys.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided will be coming to the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Windows PC later this year.
