Gaming - Page 377

The wait is finally over--Nintendo and PlatinumGames have officially confirmed Bayonetta's release date for 2022 on the Nintendo Switch.

Today Nintendo dropped a new Bayonetta 3 trailer that confirmed the game's release date for October 28, 2022, and also revealed some story elements and over-the-top chaos. The trailer showcased a new playable witch-in-training character called Viola, who has some distinct rebellious DmC Nero vibes and uses a unique blend of witchcraft and samurai swords.

Bayonetta and Viola travel through different areas, tackling hulking demon monstrosities along the way. There's mention of the Alphaverse which could indicate time or dimension-traveling, too.

Much to the delight of fans, Konami has confirmed plans to re-list old de-listed Metal Gear Solid games.

Metal Gear Solid turns 35 years old tomorrow, and to celebrate Konami has said it will bring back Metal Gear games onto storefronts. "The Metal Gear series released on July 13, 1987 celebrated its 35th anniversary today. We are preparing to resume sales of titles that have been temporarily suspended," Konami said on Twitter.

There's no word on which Metal Gear games will be returning and we don't know for what platforms they'll arrive on. Fans are clamoring for the HD collection to be re-released, as well as original releases of the classic PS1, PS2, and PS3-era games. We may get Steam re-releases, or possibly even ports on Nintendo Switch. At the time of writing, only a handful of Metal Gear Solid games are available on Steam and PlayStation, but Xbox has the HD collection and Metal Gear Solid V.

Danish media giant Nordisk Film (owned by parent company Egmont) has purchased Supermassive Games, the studio behind campy horror games like The Quarry and Until Dawn.

Today Nordisk and Supermassive Games announced a landmark deal that will propel a new age of horror games. Nordisk Film has purchased the remaining outstanding shares of Supermassive Games and folded the studio in its stable of wholly-owned game developers. Nordisk also owns Avalanche Studios, the devs that helped with RAGE 2, worked on various Just Cause games, and the 2015 Mad Max game.

"After taking a 30.7% stake in 2021, Nordisk Games acquires 100% ownership of UK studio Supermassive, making it the third wholly-owned studio in its portfolio," reads the press release.

Bandai Namco has reportedly been hit by hacking collective ALPHV who is allegedly holding the publisher's data for ransom.

"ALPHV ransomware group (alternatively referred to as BlackCat ransomware group) claims to have ransomed Bandai Namco," malware watchdog vx-underground said on Twitter. The group is known for stealing corporate data and selling or disseminating it out onto the internet if their demands aren't met.

Bandai Namco has yet to confirm or deny the hack, and purported leaks of new games have started rolling out. The leaks, which include likely sequels as Tekken 8, Dragonball Xenoverse 3, and a new Armored Core game, have been proven fake. The Tekken 8 logo, for example, was used in a fan video (see below) days before the leaks came out, and appeared on r/LeaksandRumors 5 months ago.

Cuphead's new Delicious Last Course DLC is one of the most popular expansions of all time.

Today Studio MDHR, the studio behind the beloved 1930's animated classic platformer Cuphead, announced that the game's new Delicious Last Course DLC has achieved over 1 million sales to date. These kinds of numbers make the post-launch content a fantastic contender among full game indie sales, and an instant best-seller in the DLC category.

It's worth mentioning that the Delicious Last Course is being sold separately at $7.99 or included in a $26.99 bundle that offers the base game + DLC. The platform availability also widens the access points for consumers, but it's still quite impressive to hit 1 million sales in less than two weeks--especially for DLC for an indie game.

GameStop, who recently fired a number of employees including content creators at Game Informer and store workers, just launched its NFT marketplace.

GameStop's NFT marketplace is now live, and as you'd expect, the online storefront has massively varying sale prices for its digital non-fungible tokens. The GameStop NFT store is in beta phases but already has over 53,000 NFTs with significantly varying buyout costs, with some commanding what can only be seen as joke prices.

Some NFTs have been listed for multiple millions of dollars--and one NFT, MetaBoy #4522, is marked up to 2 million ETH or roughly $2 billion (which has to be a troll price). When arranged by most expensive pricing, the first five pages of GameStop's NFT marketplace have million-dollar NFTs. In fact, no NFT in the first five pages is listed at less than $1,000,000.

Far Cry 6, one of the best games released in 2021, is just $12.99 on Amazon right now (check the buy link below).

Amazon Prime Day (July 12-13) has a bunch of good deals on video games, but one discount stood out to me: Far Cry 6 has been marked down to an extremely affordable $13 for Prime subscribers.

All versions have been discounted, including the PS4, Xbox One, and newer-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X/S SKUs. It's worth noting that Far Cry 6 has a free PS4 -> PS5 upgrade, and supports Smart Delivery on Xbox One/Series X which will automatically deliver the best version of the game depending on which system you own.

The new Last of Us Part I remake was apparently developed and finished without any crunch at Naughty Dog, a studio that is infamous for grueling work weeks driven by perfectionism.

Naughty Dog might have finished the first modern game that the studio didn't have to use crunch in order to complete. The studio is notorious for its brutal crunch culture which has seen employees hospitalized for stress-related breakdowns and overwork (other studios like BioWare have likewise been accused of the same). It appears things are turning around for Naughty Dog.

According to Anthony Vaccaro, a principal environment artist for Naughty Dog, the new Last of Us remake was the first major project that he didn't have to crunch in order to finish.

To celebrate Prime Day, Amazon is giving away a bunch of PC games for Prime subscribers.

If you're an Amazon Prime member, don't forget to take advantage of the new Freeloading promo that offers a ton of PC games for the low cost of free-99. The Prime Day Freeloading offer lists a ton of smaller-scale indies and a handful of memorable games including the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which is a fully-fledged remastering of the original ME trilogy with a bunch of QoL adjustments and big visual overhauls.

Other noteworthy free games include Need For Speed Heat and Grid Legends, both of which require EA Origin account linking to unlock. There's also a handful of Star Wars games like Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, and Star Wars Republic Commando (oddly enough, Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight isn't included, but that game seldom is for some reason).

A new Terminator survival game is happening, and it will chronicle the grim and brutal times before John Connor's resistance when humans were mercilessly hunted down and executive.

Nacon Milan's new Terminator game sounds pretty exciting; the game is described principally as open-world survival, but we're betting it'll have some distinct horror elements too. The project, which doesn't have a name yet, owes most of its mystique and promise to its theme and setting.

According to the devs, the Terminator survival game will have a brand new storyline that's set in a specific period. Players will take on the roles of nuclear survivors in a period after Judgement Day but before the resistance was formed by John Connor. This time frame isn't explored all that much in video games and give Nacon Milan a lot of creative liberties.

Respawn Entertainment is currently hiring multiple roles to work on a new singleplayer-driven Apex Legends first-person shooter.

New job listings confirm that Respawn is currently assembling an incubation team to start plotting out a new Apex Legends FPS game. There are five listings for the "Apex Universe FPS Incubation team" that say the game will be singleplayer-driven, which is a big departure from the F2P battle royale sensation that has made over $2 billion so far. What's also interesting is the Apex universe is technically the Titanfall universe; in the past, Respawn has teased that more Titanfall games are coming.

"This new singleplayer title is a developer's dream playground with a freedom to innovate made possible by the unique universe it inhabits," a senior environment artist job listing reads.

Rockstar Games may have cancelled its plans to release a next-gen PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S version of Red Dead Redemption 2.

Rockstar just announced that it will be paring back Red Dead Online content so it can exclusively focus on GTA Online and development of GTA 6. Rockstar confirmed that Red Dead Online content expansions have been halted, and sources say this wasn't the only project that was put on hold in favor of GTA 6.

Sources have told Rockstar insider Tez2 (and Kotaku) that remasters of Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto IV have also been put on hold, and possibly even cancelled. There's two main reasons for this: 1) Rockstar is all hands-on deck for GTA 6 right now, and 2) Rockstar wants to avoid another disastrous GTA Trilogy Remaster Definitive Edition controversy. To avoid that controversy it would need to double-down on making sure these remasters were quality products, and that would require pulling people off of the GTA 6 teams.

Sony's new INZONE brand of enthusiast game peripherals is made specifically for PC gaming, not necessarily PlayStation users.

Like Xbox did before it, PlayStation is evolving to include PC gaming. Sony has released a number of first-party PS4 exclusives onto PC and more are set to follow. In fact, Sony expects to make $300 million in revenues from PC game sales this year. Now Sony is making special high-end gaming peripherals to complement its PC gaming push.

Enter the INZONE brand, a new lineup of enthusiast-grade displays, headsets, and soon controllers. INZONE currently has two monitors (INZONE M9, a 27-inch 4K 144Hz display, and the INZONE M3, a 27-inch 1080p 240Hz display) and three headsets, the H3, H7, and H9. Although the peripherals are compatible with the PlayStation 5, they are targeting PC gamers first.

Former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was recently assassinated during a political rally. Internet jokesters created memes on how the actual assassin Tetsuya Yagami looked similar to Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima. The memes circulated and French reporter Damien Rieu caught wind of it, re-shared the images on Twitter, and a Greek newscast ran the story as a video while another Iranian newspaper used the image on their print media.

Now Hideo Kojima says he is prepared to take legal action. In a post on the Kojima Productions Twitter page, the dev said this: "Kojima Productions strongly condemns the spread of fake news and rumors that convey false information. We do not tolerate such libel and will consider taking legal action in some cases."

All erroneous reports have apparently been corrected. The Greek news reports have been edited, mention of Kojima as the assassin have been scrubbed from Twitter, and images portraying him as the assassin have likewise been removed from social media as per service regulations. But the case of mistaken identity for such a high-profile crime could have lasting effects on Kojima's reputation for those that aren't in the know about video games, or for those that haven't seen the clarification reports.

Ubisoft has delisted two games from sale on Steam, and plans to revoke access to all current owners--in short, Ubisoft is taking your digital games away.

Today Ubisoft inadvertently kicked off a new controversy surrounding digital media ownership rights (e.g., when you buy a game on Xbox LIVE, PS Store, or Steam, you don't own the game--you own the rights to access the game). Steam listings confirm that Ubisoft has plans to remove ownership access to two particular games, Assassin's Creed Liberation HD and Silent Hunter 5.

Both games have now been delisted from Steam and cannot be purchased on the platform, but not before the wide Steam Summer Sale discounted both products (Google searches show that Liberation HD and Silent Hunter 5 were sold for 75% off). It's also worth noting that Assassin's Creed III, which will also be shut down on September 2022, has been delisted too. Current owners will have a two-month grace period to play the games. After September 1, 2022, the games will be unplayable and revoked from your digital library.

Sony's first-party PlayStation game dev Haven Studios is looking to use machine learning for its upcoming live games.

Today Sony completed its acquisition of Haven Studios, a new startup dev team created by Assassin's Creed and Mirror's Edge alum Jade Raymond. Haven is currently helping lead the charge in Sony's big new live service game plan which will see 12 first-party PlayStation live games released onto the market by 2025.

What's interesting is that Haven Studios wants to use the PlayStation 5's machine learning (ML) capabilities to help power its live games. Back in late June, Logan Olson, who's part of Haven's Creative ML team, announced he was building a group of engineers to help build ML solutions.

The new Robocop Rogue City first-person shooter game will use the same grid targeting system that was seen in the 1980s hero classic.

Teyon, the studio that made Terminator: Resistance, is making a new Robocop FPS game called Rogue City. The project will apparently stay quite true to the original film, complete with new performances from original Robocop actor Peter Weller and many throwbacks to the 80's satirical dystopian film.

Robocop's arsenal is an authentic recreation with the signature Auto-9 pistol and the original grid-based target lock aiming seen from the film. The game looks to use the exact same simple-yet-futuristic targeting system lifted directly out of the retro sci-fi classic, and will auto-lock onto enemies and specific targets in what appears to be a potentially scripted or QTE moment where you have to pull the trigger during the right time.

NVIDIA can't let its competitor have all the upscaling technology fun, with the company coming out swinging and announcing its DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology is now used in over 200 games and applications.

NVIDIA has taken the time to announce that DLSS is now powering 200+ games and applications, with DLSS available for every major game engine, and that "adoption has accelerated rapidly, and we have even more DLSS games to announce today".

The new games getting NVIDIA DLSS support include Loopmancer, and Hell Pie, while during the recent Nacon Connect streaming event wee found out that The Lord of the Rings: Gollum and Stellrising will be launching in September with both NVIDIA DLSS and ray tracing. Not only that, but NVIDIA has confirmed that both Warhammer 40,000: Darktide and A Plague Tale: Requiem will support NVIDIA DLSS at launch.

Robocop Rogue City, a new first-person shooter set in the film's satirical futuristic dystopian vision of America, is coming soon.

Yesterday publisher Nacon announced Robocop Rogue City, a new FPS that explores the dark and gritty tech-city of Detroit. Gamers will take to the streets as the titular cyborg cop and gun down ne'er-do-wells and criminals while unraveling the deep webwork of corruption in the city. In short: You're going to blast a lot of people with Robocop's huge and massive arsenal of upgrades (will the jetpack show up?).

Robocop Rogue City is being developed by Teyon, the same devs who brought us the middling Terminator Salvation game, and will have multiple-choice dialog, too.

Brandon Sanderson is interested in creating a whole new world for a video game, similar to how George R. R. Martin helped shape the lore of Elden Ring.

Mistborn and Stormlight Archive writer Brandon Sanderson is apparently working on a video game, but if he had his way he would be building a brand new IP or series from the ground up. In a recent Reddit AMA, Sanderson said he'd ideally like to create something brand new for the game and not have it based on his books.

"[If it were 100% up to me I would prefer] a separate story set in the same world as one of my books, or a completely new story in a new place. I think I'd like a new story in a new place the most, as I could design something for a game really well, I think. A world that lends itself to that kind of storytelling. I think B is more likely, though, as people would prefer a publicity boost from the IP associated," Sanderson said in the AmA in a paraphrased quote.