Yesterday at Gamescom, Sqaure Enix revealed that the story arc that began with 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot and continues with this year’s Rise of the Tomb Raider will carry on with a third game as part of a trilogy. The quote came from Square Enix Americas and Europe CEO Phil Rogers, and it appears to have come too early, as a follow-up to Rise of the Tomb Raider had not been previously announced.
Now, Square Enix has weighed in on the matter with a new statement sent to GameSpot.
“We’re always thinking about the future of the franchise, but right now we’re focused on the upcoming release of Rise of the Tomb Raider,” the company said.
A follow-up to Rise of the Tomb Raider wouldn’t be altogether surprising, however. Back in 2012, before the release of the Tomb Raider reboot, then-global brand director Karl Stewart said Crystal Dynamics would need multiple games to tell Lara Croft’s new story.
“You have to look at the future, you have to look at where…It’s not just one game,” Stewart said at the time. “I have to be careful because I know exactly where she’s going.”
By comparison, it took the original Angry Birds more than nine months to reach 20 million downloads. However, it’s important to note that the original Angry Birds had paid and free versions, while Angry Birds 2 is exclusively offered as a free-to-play game.
The Finnish developer also notes that Angry Birds 2 is the “number one” iPhone and iPad game in more than 100 countries. It’s also the most downloaded game on both iOS and Android “virtually worldwide.”
Some other notable Angry Birds 2 statistics for the first week include:
1.4 billion slingshots fired
300 million levels beaten
350 million instances of maxing out the Destruct-O-Meter
Rovio’s Alex Lambeek said he’s encouraged by the response to Angry Birds 2 so far in the Americas and Europe. One area of major potential growth is China, where Angry Birds 2 is available through a partnership with Kunlun China Games.
“A new generation of Chinese gamers are getting to know the angry feathered flock, and we see a bright future together with Kunlun,” he said.
In Angry Birds 2, your arsenal of birds takes the form of cards. When you use them up, you lose a life. After this, you can either wait for those lives to refill after using them up, or spend in-game currency to buy a few more chances. Another change for Angry Birds 2 is the environments, which now have a multi-area layout.
It’s a big day for Blizzard Entertainment’s genre-defining PC MMO World of Warcraft, as the developer on Thursday will announce the game’s sixth expansion during a livestream broadcast from Gamescom.
The streaming event kicks off at 9 AM PDT / 12 Noon EDT / 6 PM BST. You can watch the entire event through the Twitch embed below, and we’ll be sure to break out all the big news as it happens.
2K Games and Gearbox Software on Thursday announced a release date for the Borderlands developer’s brand-new first-person shooter Battleborn. The MOBA-like game will launch for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on February 9, 2016.
The companies also confirmed that an open beta for the shooter will be held prior to launch, with more details about this pre-release play period to be announced later.
Gearbox also announced fur new characters for Battleborn today: Ambra, Melka, Reyna, and Benedict. Take a look below the video here to see official, Gearbox-written descriptions for each character.
Battleborn is set in the “distant future” and has 25 total playable heroes. The game’s story mode can be played totally alone, and also supports split-screen and online co-op. It also has a competitive multiplayer mode where teams of five can go head-to-head. The experience and items you earn in gameplay carry with you, regardless of which mode you’re playing.
New Battleborn Characters:
Ambra: Born into an ancient order of priestesses responsible for discovering a way to prolong life indefinitely, Ambra was betrayed by her leader and her faction, the Jennerit Empire, and now fights alongside the Battleborn. She is a specialist hero, dealing damage up close through her melee attacks and powerful abilities, while healing her allies in the process.
Mellka: A stealthy assassin, Mellka lost her parents at a young age before eventually earning her place among the Eldrid’s black op’s and intelligence bureau. Her life has been defined by a series of staggering losses, but her response to these losses was never despair–it was fury. She strikes quickly, disorienting foes with her nerve gas machine pistol and bio-glaive melee attacks.
Reyna: Known by her followers as “The Valkyrie,” Reyna was born aboard the Rogue faction’s ailing junk heap of a flagship and is a native to the last star system. Reyna has fought tirelessly for the freedom of her space pirate comrades, finding her calling as their inspirational leader. She dishes damage with her laser pistol and uses her command glove to support her teammates.
Benedict: August Benedict Jr. is one of several surviving races of bird-like “Aviant” refugees. He swore allegiance to the Peacekeepers where he’s gained considerable notoriety for being a self-centered jerk that’s capable of astounding destruction with his rocket launcher. Double jumping, rocket jumping, and flying–Benedict’s good at all of them and he lets his teammates know it.
Final Fantasy XV Director, Hajime Tabata, has confirmed to GameSpot that fans can expect to play the game before 2017, indicating the game will be released in 2016.
Asked about when Square Enix release plans to reveal the release date, Tabata replied: “At the very least, I can tell you that it isn’t going to be released this year. I think we’ll be able to tell you when we’re making the announcement around PAX Prime, at the end of this month.”
Pressed on how Tabata and his team plan to reassure fans struggling to remain excited after such a long development process, especially given the lackluster announcements coming from Gamescom, Tabata admitted the showing may have left fans wanting, and offered his sympathy.
“I understand why people are feeling that way after coming to Cologne and speaking to a lot of the media,” he said. “We really do get the feeling that people are a bit worried. Certainly, one thing I would like to say to them to reassure them, is that we’ve set down the release date, we know when it is, and we’ve got a complete road map lined up, right up to launch, and we’re proceeding along that as planned.”
Then, Tabata dropped the best indication of the Final Fantasy XV release date yet: “We can certainly say to people: it’s not going to be 2017. It’s going to be before that.”
Before Gamescom 2015, Square Enix teased an upcoming reveal which, given that Final Fantasy XV was not at E3, led many to speculate a release date would be officially revealed.
Square Enix also said it was going to show off “new, never-before-seen” gameplay footage during the event, but this did not materialise. Instead, it released a story trailer depicting events set prior to the main game.
If you haven’t played it, you’d be forgiven for not understanding why Mirror’s Edge, a game that fell short critically and commercially when released back in 2008, is still considered important.
The elevator pitch for its sequel, announced six years later, is hardly as self-explanatory as, say, Red Dead Redemption 2 or Half-Life 3 would be. And yet, while this would have been considered ludicrous just a few years ago, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst has emerged at Gamescom 2015 as one of the most promising games of the show.
All it takes are a few seconds of play to remember exactly why its predecessor carried so much potential. Vaulting across the rooftops of the sharp and ultramodern fictional city of Glass is as quietly empowering and exhilarating as ever. As you clamber up drainpipes, hurdle railings, slide into ventilation shafts and make death-defying leaps across the skyline–often in one beautiful flowing motion–it feels as though you are pushing the human body to the peak of its physical possibilities. No studio other than DICE has managed to capture this solitary Zen of first-person urban parkour so wonderfully.
Crucially, its heroine Faith remains as easy to control as Mario. Two buttons and two analogue sticks are usually all you need to dash and spring across the city. The Xbox One Controller’s Left Bumper (PS4: L1) is the ‘up’ button, which ordinarily results in a jump, but is also used to climb upwards in certain contexts. Meanwhile, the Left Trigger (L2) is ‘down’, which can mean crouch, or slide, or dropping from ledges, etcetera. In a game that hinges so much on how it flows, simplicity is king.
As a concept, fluid and foolproof first-person platforming has always seemed like a bridge too far. But the thought that DICE has put into Catalyst means that players will have a comprehensive understanding of the basics in a matter of minutes. Your doctorate in parkour begins from that moment onwards.
This is perhaps best demonstrated in the time-trial segment of the Gamescom demo, which is the first challenge that most players encounter. The goal: Jump across various rooftop real estate and reach the end point in the fastest time possible. On my first attempt I crossed the line in about 45 seconds, and yet when returning to the challenge some 10 minutes later, all the advanced free-running tricks and ideas I had learned meant I was able to shave off an additional 15 seconds.
Click on the thumbnails below to view in full-screen
It’s the purity I love. I didn’t acquire speed boosts or jump perks; I unlocked my own ideas. So, instead of thinking about how I could clamber across a mesh of ventilation tunnels and pipeworks as fast as possible, I began to realise I could instead leap across the whole obstacle entirely if I wall-dashed across a building that overlooked it.
Combat, meanwhile, is built to take advantage of the momentum you build. Press X (Square) in the middle of a dash, or at the crest of a jump, and Faith will launch herself towards a nearby enemy. Approach speed is key here; pressing X whilst running at full-pelt will result in a haymaker roundhouse kick, and doing the same mid-jump will trigger a pounce maneuver where Faith uses an unwitting enemy as her landing cushion. Attacks, like every other main command, are context-sensitive, so even when sliding across the floor, pressing X will make Faith hurtle towards an enemy’s knee-caps.
Conversely, a lack of momentum is punished. When standing toe-to-toe against Catalyst’s armed soldiers, fights become more evenly balanced, at the cost of your health. Unless you approach at speed, the grunts will get their jabs in.
The Gamescom build was described as “pre-alpha”, but Catalyst’s gameplay fundamentals already show a wonderful elegance and fluidity. Yet fans of the series would be quite right to point out that, actually, everything positive written so far could actually be said of its predecessor.
So what, exactly, is new in Catalyst? That’s a harder question to answer, and there are a couple of great ideas. The first; Catalyst’s map is open world, meaning that a choice of missions and side-quests will be presented to the player at any given time. Placing a waypoint on the map results in a red breadcrumb trail dotted across the game world. Imagine a parkour satnav system and you’re close (but don’t worry, the red trail tends to be artfully and unobtrusively placed along the geometry–it’s not as though a giant red paint-roller has been let loose across the city.)
The second notable addition are the new puzzle elements found within the beautiful neo-IKEA building interiors. With level design seemingly inspired by Portal 2, some rooms present exit points that are simply too far out of reach for Faith. Players need to scan their surroundings and mentally build an idea of the best way out.
Aside from these two welcome additions, the developer hasn’t revealed much of anything new that wasn’t in the original formula. But to an extent, this is fine. The first Mirror’s Edge was just a few leaps short of becoming a masterpiece precisely because of the poor thinking that was stirred in. For all its blissful first-person free-running and thrilling getaways, there was a maddening checkpoint placement, a weak story throughout, and eventually a rather spineless resort to handing the player a machine gun. Will Catalyst make the same missteps? No signs of them yet.
The Attack on Titan anime series has been extremely popular, and now there’s a video game adaptation in development. Koei Tecmo, developer of the Dynasty Warriors series, announced the game today.
The project was revealed in a short cinematic teaser trailer. There’s very little known about the game at the moment. However, we do know it’s a collaborative effort: Koei Tecmo is working with developer Omega Force to create the game.
What’s most interesting about the trailer is how it focuses on the characters in massive armies fighting against the gigantic Titans. In a sense, it’s a reverse of the Dynasty Warriors formula, in which players fight through hordes of weak soldiers.
There is not an official title for the game, yet. But on Facebook, Koei Tecmo President Hisashi Koinuma wrote a little about the project. “Having evolved from a manga/anime series to an internationally recognized brand, we were enchanted by the opportunity to create our own take on humanity’s last stand against these overwhelmingly powerful beings, the Titans,” he explained. “Our studios are already pouring all of their passion and excitement into it and we hope to reveal more information soon!”
The Attack on Titan game will launch on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, and Vita. What do you think of Attack on Titan getting a video game adaptation? Let us know in the comments below.
Blizzard has unveiled a new character for its upcoming class-based shooter, Overwatch. His name is Lucio, and he’s is a rhythm-themed character whose attacks are related to music.
Although the developer didn’t share many details about the character, it’s still possible to gather some details from the screenshots and video showing him off. He carries a weapon shaped like a speaker called the Sonic Amplifier, which shoots bursts of energy at enemies. It has two firing modes; the first is a four-round burst, and the second is a massive knock-back round. He also skates around on rollerblades, letting him jump and move on walls.
Lucio can also perform an area-of-effect attack, during which he yells “Let’s drop the bass.” It gives teammates a shield to greatly increase their survivability. Lucio can also heal and increase speed for his teammates.
You can see the character’s trailer and a gallery of images below.
Lucio was first teased last week, when Blizzard published a blog post advertising for a new musical artist. In the post, Lucio poses as an electronic music producer who is revealing the first two songs from his upcoming album, called Synaesthesia Auditiva. You can listen to those tracks here.
Blizzard also announced two new maps, Volskaya Industries and Numbani. Volskaya Industries is a large building featuring offices and a giant mech factory. Static defenses such as turrets can be put on moving platforms around the map.
Numbani, on the other hand, is more urban, featuring open streets, small interior spaces, and futuristic skylines. Its first objective involves capturing a certain payload of items. If you succeed in capturing it, you’ll have to then escort the cache through the map. These two maps were also teased recently in Blizzard’s Twitter posts.
You can see the video and galleries of the maps below.
Volskaya Industries:
Numbani:
It’s still unknown when Overwatch is coming out, but it will have a beta test this fall. It’s being made for the PC, and it’s the first new Blizzard IP in 17 years. Keep an eye on GameSpot for more news coming out of Gamescom this week, and for more about Overwatch in the coming months.
You would expect that a game with “Mafia” in the title would focus on the Italian mob, but Mafia III is taking the series in a direction few could have predicted could have predicted. Set in New Orleans in the 1960’s, Mafia III stars Lincoln Clay, a black Vietnam veteran who began life as an orphan. Without a family to keep him on the straight and narrow, young Lincoln sought companionship in gangs, the church, and the army, all to no avail. After his stint in Vietnam, Lincoln headed to New Orleans and joined up with the black mob. Though it once had ties to the Mafia, there was a falling out, and the closest thing Lincoln ever had to a family was violently wrenched away from him. Rather than run, Lincoln decides to fight back, and he teams up with a small crew to dismantle the Italian mob in New Orleans and build a new family to call his own.
That’s a lot to digest, but Mafia III’s premise is simple if you break it down. It’s a game that’s set in an era when racial tension was high in America, specifically in 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. At the same time, anti-war sentiment was growing; the public wanted an end to the struggle in Vietnam. Lincoln, who is both black and a veteran of the war, is a character that must face the harsh realities of both conflicts while he searches for a place to call home.
The evidence of these issues was readily apparent in Mafia III’s version of New Orleans. “Wage Peace” could be seen spray painted on walls. On a street corner in a busy neighborhood, a white police officer accosted an anxious black man, seemingly without cause, while his girlfriend looked on in terror. On more than one occasion, locals used racial epithets, and as if it was normal, pro-segregation chatter filled the airwaves of a local radio broadcast.
It’s far too early to tell if the topic of race will be handled with care, rather than flaunted for the sake of controversy. We were told that Lincoln could have intervened and stopped the racist cop on the corner, but that doing so would cause other cops to surround the area, jeopardizing the mission at hand.
Instead, Lincoln proceeded to a local jazz club that served as a front for a Mafia drug dealer. Immediately, a black bass player on stage commanded your attention, as a spotlight isolated him in the room. More than the neon signs, period racism and fashion on the streets, this moment gave credence to the harsh inequalities of Mafia III’s world. If you’ve ever been on stage, you know what it’s like to feel alone despite the fact that you’re standing in front of a crowd. The same light that makes you visible also blinds you from the outside world, and for the bass player in this scene, it looked like this isolation gave him solace from New Orleans’ inescapable plight, if only for a moment. Perhaps I saw what I wanted to see, but in that ray of hope, where music was an equalizer and the only thing that mattered to the bassist, he seemed at peace as he detached himself from the darkness that surrounded him.
A young Lincoln sulks outside of an orphanage.
Lincoln was on a mission, so he proceeded to the back of the club towards a staircase, but was unceremoniously turned away by a fedora-wearing mobster. Again, we were told that Lincoln could have taken matters into his own hands, but he left the club and searched for a back entrance instead. He found it, along with an inattentive guard. Here we saw the first glimpse of combat, but it was short lived as Lincoln quickly and quietly dispatched the guard with a stealth kill. Proceeding downstairs, Lincoln found himself in a subterranean club. As he searched for his target, he came across a dock that was connected to an underground canal–another possible entry point.
After wandering through a smoke-filled, secret club, Lincoln spotted his target. A quick shot to the head was all it took, but then Lincoln needed to fight his way out. Cover proved to be his greatest asset, and the defining characteristic of Mafia III’s gunplay. He was rarely out in the open, which was good for him, but as it was the only tactic on display, I couldn’t help think that the constant reliance on cover might feel limiting over time.
With his target down and the club under control, Lincoln called in one of his lieutenants to set up shop. His small crew includes a black woman, Cassandra, an Irish thug named Burke, and none other than Vito from Mafia II. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to directly control anyone other than Lincoln, and we learned very little about what they’re capable of beyond controlling areas of New Orleans in Lincoln’s place.
Mafia III’s unconventional family: Burke, Lincon, Cassandra, and Vito
With the club now under his control, Lincoln left, but as he drove away, more mobsters confronted him and a car chase ensued. Here, we saw Mafia III’s new, physics-based driving engine. While driving, Lincoln was able to shoot out tires with a semi-auto targeting system. This looked like a great mechanic, but when every car that had its tire shot out flipped over and exploded, things felt off. Similarly, every car that you ram faces the same fate. This aspect of the game, like the emphasis on cover, felt like too much of a good thing.
After the demo concluded, I walked away with mixed feelings. I was sold on the setting and subject matter. I bought into this version of New Orleans, and the struggles it was facing. I wanted to know more about Lincoln, and ultimately, how he dealt with a seemingly never-ending stream of adversity. What had me concerned was whether or not Mafia III will ultimately deliver an experience that feels cohesive, where the story and gameplay co-exist in a way that makes sense. Where the story was fascinating and new, the gameplay was almost too familiar and explosive. Given the option to explore the nuanced problems facing black communities in the 1960’s or diving deep into the mechanics of shootouts, I know which one I would choose.
