Gaming News - Page 330

Free-to-play battle royale Hyper Scape is officially shutting down, Ubisoft Montreal today announced.

Ubisoft hit the ground running in 2020 with battle royale FPS Hyper Scape, an attempt to cash in on the billion-dollar Apex Legends and Warzone craze. Despite a fiery marketing campaign that recruited big-name streamers, the game fizzled out and lost steam over time. Now it's being shut down as Ubisoft Montreal moves to other projects.

"We have made the difficult decision to end development of Hyper Scape and shut the game down as of April 28th. We set out to create a vertical, close-quarters, and fast-paced shooter experience and we are extremely grateful to our community for joining us on our journey. We will be taking key learnings from this game into future products."

Sony's next big PlayStation console exclusive has been finalized.

Horizon Forbidden West has officially gone gold, and is now feature-complete and ready to ship. Guerrilla Games announced the news today with much fanfare, locking in the February 18, 2022 release date for Aloy's new adventure.

The sequel is one of the most ambitious games in the new PS5 generation, and Guerrilla's biggest title to date. Horizon Forbidden West introduces a significant amount of changes to gameplay, including fundamental shake-ups to verticality and exploration with free climbing and an arc glider. There's also a new outfit-based gear system that will buff skills and abilities.

AT&T's latest Q4 earnings report has no mention of video games and gives no updates on the current events at WB Games.

It's been a while since we've heard from WB Games, and parent company AT&T is no help. The company's Q4 brief didn't mention WB Games, video games, or any current game projects currently in the works. Execs mostly discussed the performance of WarnerMedia's HBO Max subscription (which has grown to 73.8 million subscribers). This isn't unusual for AT&T, who rarely mentions video games during its presentation.

The silence is made all the more loud by the looming acquisition. AT&T is about to merge WarnerMedia with Discovery in a $43 billion deal. All WarnerMedia subsidiaries including WB Games and its studios (Netherealm, Monolith, Rocksteady) will jump over to Discovery.

Today WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar re-iterated that WB Games will deliver a "full slate of highly anticipated games" in 2022.

It looks like WB Games' biggest games are coming this year after all--or at least that's the plan. WarnerMedia's Jason Kilar gave fans hope with a Twitter thread saying that 2022 will be a big year for games. The pictures included Gotham Knights, and Hogwarts Legacy. Rocksteady's new Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League game wasn't pictured but it was implicitly attached.

Some outlets report this means all three games will indeed release in 2022, or at least Gotham Knights and Hogwarts Legacy will. This isn't necessarily the case. All studios have been quiet outside of their initial launch announcements and if anything, Kilar is just reinforcing these existing plans.

Dying Light 2 will be supplied with new content until at least 2027.

Techland is going all out with Dying Light 2. Just like the first game, which had new content launching five years after release, the developers are prepared to support Dying Light 2 with new content for multiple years.

"It all starts on release, but it's just the beginning! We're planning to keep enhancing the game with DLCs, challenges, stories, events, and more for at least 5 years, and that's a minimum! You sure won't be bored!" Techland said on Twitter, revealing its new timeline roadmap for post-launch Dying Light 2 content.

Activision-Blizzard refuses to formally recognize the Game Workers Alliance, the proposed union of Raven Software's QA team, forcing a National Labor Relations Board election process.

Days ago, 34 people at Raven Software's QA team formally asked Activision-Blizzard to recognize their newly-formed union. The Game Workers Alliance, the QA testers became collectively known, would be the first video games union in the United States.

Raven's QA team ended their weeks-long work stoppage after the intent to unionize became known. The strike affected critical testing in Call of Duty Warzone, one of Activision-Blizzard's most lucrative video games.

Halo Infinite could get crossover content from the Halo TV show, possibly new weapons, vehicles, and cosmetic armor sets.

Today 343 Industries revealed a ton of new info about the upcoming Halo TV show, which is set to premiere on Paramount+ sometime soon. The post mentions a lot of interesting points like confirming the SPARTAN-II programs grisly, dark origins will be a part of the show, and also touches on the show's new divergent timeline.

The Halo TV show takes place in the "Silver" timeline, which is a separate and parallel timeline that exists outside of the base Halo canon. (Silver is also the name of the show's fireteam--Chief was part of Blue Team in the original canon). This gives 343i lots of room to bend and manipulate timelines and events to make things more show-friendly.

Valve's Steam Deck hasn't been delayed again, and will start shipping to buyers and the very end of February.

Today Valve announced Steam Deck reservations will start redemption on February 25. Users who pre-ordered a first wave Steam Deck will have 3 days to complete the purchase. If you don't pay for your reservation it will be passed down to the next person.

The first wave of Steam Deck handheld PCs will start shipping out on February 28, 2022 and open up a new dimension of PC gaming on-the-go experiences powered by a custom AMD Zen 2 + RDNA 2 SoC capable of serious handheld performance and compatibility with practically every Steam game on the market.

It's happening... it's finally happening -- Crytek is making a next-gen Crytek game, right in the middle of a pandemic-fueled GPU shortage.

Crytek announced Crysis 4 out of nowhere, saying: "It's something you have been asking us for a long time, so it's now finally time to confirm - yes, the next Crysis game is happening! We are so pleased and excited to bring this news to you, and we really can't wait to reveal more details about what lies ahead".

The developer continues: "Right now the game is in the early stages of development so it will be a while yet, but we wanted to bring you the news at this time as we are so hyped for the future, and to let you know that we will be listening to our community".

Halo Infinite has amassed a substantial 20 million players since launch, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella confirms, a somewhat foggy KPI given the game's conditions.

Xbox gaming just delivered its best quarter of all time with $5.4 billion in revenues. On top of that, more than 20 million people have played Halo Infinite since release. That's about 20 million users in 48 days. A pretty big milestone.

Nadella also touts that Infinite was the largest debut in the history of Halo, however this is to be expected considering Infinite is not only free-to-play, but included with Xbox Game Pass, which has 25 million active subscribers on consoles and PC. The point is that there's a lot of access points to Halo Infinite--that's no mistake, as Microsoft makes its games to drive services and subscriptions.