With the PS4 version of The Talos Principle launching next week, developer Croteam has released four introductory behind-the-scenes videos for players new to the upcoming Deluxe Edition.
Priced at $49.99, The Talos: Principle: Deluxe Edition is the PS4 version of last year's first person puzzler of the same name. It contains both the original game and its recently released expansion Road to Gehenna.
The video series details several aspects of the game and its expansion, including narrative, philosophy, puzzles, and tools. Check them out below.
Developer 343 Industries has taken a different approach in making Halo 5: Guardians. The Xbox One-exclusive shooter was first announced in 2013, and since then the studio has taken ample steps to ensure the game will have a trouble-free launch, having already gone through several beta testing phases and even a competitive tournament. I spoke to design director Kevin Franklin about how the studio is gearing for launch after the controversial release of Halo: The Master Chief Collection, making the game viable for esports, and why it decided to make post-launch downloadable content free to all players.
GameSpot: After the issues with Halo: The Master Chief Collection, what are you doing to ensure Halo 5 has a smooth roll-out?
Franklin: Our biggest thing is that Halo 5 is built from the ground up for Xbox One. All the technology is really lined up. There's only one network layer, we're not trying to build three to four different games in one. That's given us a huge advantage. We did our beta almost a year ago now, that gave us a whole bunch of time to stress test our servers and make sure everything was running, and work through some problems. Lastly, we have a lot of base skill testing we're doing with thousands of players almost every weekend before launch.
What did you learn from the Halo 5 beta last year with the subsequent feedback and how has that changed the Arena's multiplayer as a result?
It was kind of crazy to have a beta that early. Normally you have them, and you don't have time to change anything. This time we had tons to change. We changed ground pound, the whole way that entire feature worked. We changed a lot of the little tuners around escapability. Things like thrust, thrust recharge, the way sprint worked. We also changed the map. Several of the maps have completely different sight lines and paths changed directly in result to the beta feedback.
On top of that, we've also taken feedback from a lot of the pros. Like hey, do you have confidence in shoulder charging, do you have confidence in ground pound, do you think we should be keeping these things even if we fix them, are you cool with thrust always on? A lot of the pros are giving us great feedback that we've carried through.
Is that something you're doing so that Halo becomes more of an esport again?
It's definitely a goal for us. We want it to be like Halo 2, Halo 3, really show off the legacy of Halo within Arena. We really had to start that from the ground up. We want to say hey, we want to be an esport. We have built our own esport league--we're really inspired by the way Riot Games, Valve, and Blizzard built their own leagues in-house, so we have our Halo Championship Series we built in-house that is awesome. That really gives us a great platform to show off our new competitive experience.
We also have a pro team, a group of four competitive gamers that work on the game all day long and give us insane amounts of feedback. No matter what we change, what we do, they're on us. Keeps us really engaged with that pro side of the community.
We built a spectator mode into Halo 5 for the first time, which we're very excited about. The Halo Championship Series also has a great relationship with the pros and we're showing off tons of tournaments. We did a tournament already at Gamescom, before launch, which was crazy.
You're taking a unique approach to DLC by offering all maps free for the first year--why are you doing this and do you think it will become the norm in the industry?
I certainly hope it becomes the norm!
There's two reasons we're doing this. One, we decided from the get-go that we wanted to make a very big investment in our players. We didn't just want to release a game and hope it worked. We wanted to say okay, this is an investment in our players. So we're revealing two completely different multiplayer experiences. We're going at it big, we're giving them dedicated servers, so it really felt natural, when it came to the DLC question, to put all of our players in one place. With Halo 4, you could have the season pass, DLC 1, DLC 2, DLC 3, and all of a sudden you have six different buckets and players have to make decisions about whether they play new content or with their friends.
We just couldn't solve that in game design. The solution was to put everyone in the same playlist. The benefit of this is it's going to give us better match-making, because there's less buckets people have to filter through, everybody has access to the same content, it's going to give us a lot more focus on when we want to start adding things. So that was the biggest deal for us when we were making that decision.
I've been following the 'Hunt the Truth' campaign that is creating a lot of mystery surrounding the game. We still don't know a lot about the story, but what are the core themes of Halo 5?
The biggest theme is epic. That was written all over our whiteboards before we even started the game. You're going to see some very, very big things in the campaign that you've never seen before. The second one is the rivalry between Chief and Locke. I think there's a lot of mystery to explore. I can't go into too much detail, but I love that there's the two teams you can go back and forth between. Spinning out of those two teams we have co-op, which has been a huge focus for us. There's a lot of co-op mechanics like revive, tracking, and just the way the missions have been built, they've all been built with co-op in mind. So that's a big step forward. The team is very passionate about that on the campaign side. All the multiplayer developers, because we love playing with our friends, made it very natural for us to jump into co-op experiences on Halo 5.
Has the epic theme trickled down to design in terms of creating a level, where the team designs a level and the higher-ups say, "No, this is not enough. We need to make this more epic!"
I wouldn't say that the higher-ups will go back and say, hey this needs to be epic, or not. But what we have done, the developers will get together in a room and we'll start saying, "We want to see a Hunter kill like five Spartans at once in multiplayer," or "we want to see a map that's so big that there's a base in it that you could have an arena fight in."
We've come up with ideas like, we want to see five-on-five scorpion battles, or we want to have banshee dog-fighting. We've built a new vehicle, the flying Phaeton, and it's completely designed to wreak havoc on a huge battlefield. Epic was kind of synonymous with all of our thoughts for multiplayer, especially Warzone. We've got maps four times larger than we've ever built before, which is a tremendous challenge in itself.
Speaking of which, how do you think the fans will react to Warzone? What are you hoping to see?
We want to attract new players to Halo, who have never played multiplayer before, like on the campaign, because they can interact and go after the AI. We want to get Arena players into Warzone as well. We really feel like it's a great place for players to live a Halo fantasy of having a massive, massive, Halo battle.
Halo Wars.
If you've ever played Halo Wars (a real-time strategy game), there are these great moments where you can see like seven scorpions, five banshees, you've got wraiths on the battlefield, you've got three guys running around in circles in warthogs, and it created this controlled chaos. That was one of our visions for Warzone and when the team started, everyone was like, "That sounds awesome but you're insane, how are you going to do that?" The way we got there was a lot of controlled focus on what we wanted to build, simplifying the game rules down so that everyone could pick it up and understand it, and then just building it.
The team in Seattle is fantastic, they spent a long long time on Warzone. Lots of iterations; everything from tech, to scoring, working with the campaign team to bring AI and bosses into the mode. I think we've developed an incredible and new experience that people are going to love.
That sounds like it could get really chaotic. Any funny stories to share of when Warzone was still in its early testing days?
Yeah actually, that's a great question. We had one week where all the vehicles, instead of getting into them, you'd stand on top of them surfing! So it was even more of a motivator for everyone to buy vehicles. There was another week where some of the tuning broke on an A.I. boss who comes in halfway through the map Escape from ARC, and he just decided to kill everyone instantly. So the theme of that day, it wasn't like, hey everyone be careful, watch out for this player, it was "Stay the f*** indoors!" Another day, all the water you could just fall through, so we had to spend our entire day avoiding water, just jumping around.
These sound like they could be made into great GIFs!
Yeah, it's funny, our test team, they have a whole bunch of them!
When you announced details about the REQ system, some fans worried about how microtransactions would factor into the game. Can you explain how microtransactions will work in Halo 5?
Everything you can get in the REQ system, you can earn whether you spend money or not. There's no crazy special items that are only going to be reserved for people who spend a lot more money. Also, you get a lot of rewards whether you're playing Arena or Warzone, so you're always going to have a ton of stuff that you'll be able to use. The biggest thing for us the moment we started even talking about this system was that the game has to be balanced. At the end of the day, it's a multiplayer game. It's not a spend-more-to-win game. We wanted to make sure that if you spend a whole ton of money, and you thought you could get five scorpions just because you spent more money, it's not going to work. You're still going to have to earn the right to call these scorpions into the battlefield.
So we have a mid-session progression loop, which any MOBA player will be familiar with. You have to level your character up in-game, every game, by killing enemies, going after A.I., and contributing to your team. Then you'll unlock the ability to use these cards. So if you have ten scorpions, you can't just call in ten scorpions. You actually have an energy system, and that levelling system that will gate you and keep the end-game balanced. And that was really huge--we're multiplayer designers, we can't just make a really unbalanced game. It just wouldn't feel Halo.
How much pressure to do you feel working on Microsoft's crown jewel IP?
You know, from the day I started at 343 Industries we had pressure. That day, I was a Halo fan, and then all of a sudden I was a Halo developer and a Halo fan. So I knew if I was going to screw up Halo I'd be pissing off myself too. I think the entire team felt that pressure. It's not just pressure because it's Microsoft's crown IP, it's pressure because it's Halo and it's a worldwide brand. We're expected to lead. That's one of the reasons we took on a challenge like Warzone and decided to take on such an investment like splitting the multiplayer into two. It's awesome, and I think that drives a lot of the team.
Although a final determination has yet to be made, Electronic Arts is hoping its upcoming sci-fi shooter Star Wars Battlefront will receive a T-for-Teen rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board.
"Star Wars Battlefront is still rated 'RP' (Rating Pending) but we're targeting a rating of 'T' for Teen," the developer said through the game's Twitter account.
This isn't all that surprising. Overall, Star Wars isn't really considered a "mature" brand, nor is it necessarily a "kids" franchise either, which is why it probably won't receive an E or M rating. In addition, history is on the side of a T rating, as the first two Battlefront games each received T ratings from the ESRB.
Streaming star Jordan Maron, known to the millions of people who watch him play Minecraft as "CaptainSparklez," has purchased a new Los Angeles home for $4.5 million. Varietyreports that the 23-year-old's new, 4,100 square-foot house sits on a hillside above Sunset Strip--and it looks amazing.
As you can see in the image above, the defining characteristic of the three-bedroom, five-bathroom abode is its glass terraces. Views (on a clear day, at least) extend to the Pacific Ocean. There is also an outdoor fireplace, infinity pool (and "party-sized spa), sunken wet bar, and a stainless steel barbecue.
Variety also reports that Maron's home is only a few thousand feet away from the $70 million, 23,000-square-foot mansion that Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson bought last year.
Rapper, producer, fashionista, and potential future president of the United States of America, Kanye West, has a message for developers that include in-app purchases in their mobile games: "Just allow [kids] to have fun and give the parents a break for Christ sake."
Posting on Twitter, Yeezus made his opinions Cristal clear:
Fuck any game company that puts in-app purchases on kids games!!!
As of yet, it is unclear what sparked this outburst. Ye is known to deliver his thoughts on controversial issues out of the blue, so this may be another case of Mr. West just speaking his mind on something that's important to society. What's more likely, however, is that his daughter--North West--has been splashing out on in-game gems, the little scamp.
It's worth noting that West isn't actually complaining about the expense. As we all know, money isn't an issue for him, Kanye is all about going dumb again, people regularly see him pull up in his other Benz, just a week after he was in his other other Benz.
The issue seems to be that he's being informed of a new purchase every five minutes, indicating the notifcations of purchase may be the problem. This has not yet been confirmed, GameSpot has contacted Kanye's representatives for clarification.
"Right now I'm working on a video game for Only One, and the idea is that it's my mother going through the gates of heaven and you have to bring her to the highest gates of heaven by holding her to the light," West said. "We've been working on it for like six months."
PS4 horror game Until Dawn has exceeded sales expectations and a sequel is being discussed. Executive producer Pete Samuels says in a new interview with PlayStation Lifestyle, "It's definitely surpassed expectations," though a specific sales figure for the game has not been announced.
Samuels also teased that developer Supermassive Games is thinking about Until Dawn 2, though he admitted that it's "a little early" to talk specifics.
"We do talk internally about what Until Dawn 2 could be, as it clearly can't be a sequel in the traditional sense, with the same characters facing the same threat, not least of which because in different stories some or all of them are already dead!" he explained. "We've investigated other ways we could do Until Dawn 2 but it probably is a little early to be discussing that."
If Supermassive does not work on Until Dawn 2, you can still expect the studio's next game to benefit from lessons learned on the first game--whether they make a horror game or something different.
"I think that you should expect the team to build on what we've done with Until Dawn, whether it's in horror or in other genres," he said. "We're already working on one thing that does that, whilst exploring other avenues for our other teams in anticipation of them finishing their current projects."
PS4 Price Drop: Big news for the PlayStation 4 this week, as the console got a $50 price cut, bringing the starting cost down to $350. That's the same price as the base model Xbox One.
Far Cry Primal Announced: A Far Cry game set in 10,000 BC? Sounds cool to me. The game launches in February 2016 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.
Mashable has an excellent feature about Destiny's sound effects and music. Did you know Bungie's sound team used vegetables, cats, and styrofoam to do the job? Get the full story here.
Kellee Santiago, the former ThatGameCompany developer who joined Ouya, is now working at Google.
Announced at the #GISummit by @jmoledina - I'm joining the Google Play Games team in Mountain View!
A new Walking Dead mobile game launched this week--and it looks pretty good! The game is called No Man's Land, and it looks like it takes inspiration from XCOM, which is never a bad thing. Read more about it here.
Newly discovered PlayStation patents offer a tease for where PlayStation VR may be headed. Have a look.
The Star Wars Battlefront beta started this week. It's available now on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC, and you can play as much as you want through October 12. Best of all? You don't have to preorder. It's free and open to everyone. What are you waiting for? Go go go.
The Deus Ex franchise turns 15 this year. Has it really been that long?! To celebrate, Square Enix has released a retrospective video and an animated trailer. Watch them below.
The next update for PS4 racing game Driveclub will include a "little thank you" to fans, Sony has announced. Get the full story here.
A 1930s barber shop shaving game? Finally! Get the full story at Kill Screen.
Here's the music video for Sam Smith's new 007 Spectre song Writing's on the Wall. There's even some new footage from the movie to be seen here. What do you make of it?
Hey, this is a nice new feature. Amazon is now selling digital Blizzard games. Visit the store page on Amazon to see everything that's for sale.
Funcom is making a theme park-themed horror game. And it looks pretty darn spooky. Check it out.
It's October, which means it's almost November, which means BlizzCon is coming soon. Blizzard has now posted the schedules for Friday and Saturday. What catches your eye?
What does the future hold for Microsoft, Xbox, and Windows 10? The Verge caught up with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently for an in-depth interview. Watch it here.
The Sonic: Lost World PC port announced this week is the first of many, according to Sega. What games would you like to see brought to PC?
PC gaming and peripheral company Razer has announced its next product--but it may not be what you expect. Say hello to Razer Music, featuring Deadmau5, of course.
As discovered by the Steam Database Twitter, a recent update to Dota 2 included a number of files that reference things like an RPG, ziplines, and procedural spawning. The most intriguing file with obvious half-life implications is titled hl3.txt, which has lines like:
"Attribute.prop_zipline.max_ride_speed"
"NPCs that are in the same squad (i.e. have matching squad names) will share information about enemies, and will take turns attacking and covering each other."
"A permanent squad member cannot leave the player\'s squad unless killed or explicity removed by entity I/O. Only use this if you\'re sure you want to override the default AI."
"If you want your citizens to squad with the player but not obey commands the player gives to move the squad, put a concept here and this citizen will speak the concept instead of obeying the order."
If you don't want to pull the files from Dota yourself, you can find the full uploads here:
After a short-lived World Championship run, failing to make it out of group stages, several members of Counter Logic Gaming have considered retiring.
Following their final game in the tournament against paiN Gaming, mid-laner Eugene "Pobelter" Park stated in an interview with GameSpot, "For some people, this was their last game and they're heavily considering retirement."
Veteran AD carry Yiliang "Doublelift" Peng attributed their disappointing run to ineffective scrimmages, and their inability to schedule practice with teams they knew would "try hard" at Worlds. Despite these problems, he admits that if they were truly a Top 4 team, they would've adapted and managed to make it out of the group stage.
"We didn't play well as a team at Worlds, so it's pretty natural to have thoughts of retiring," he stated.
"For me personally, I think it's a bad time to retire. I think I got way better this year. I've been consistently--and statistically--the best AD in the NA LCS, at least this split," he went on to say. "I don't think I'd want to retire because--how crappy would that be? I went through relegations twice to getting ousted by my teammate to winning NA LCS and 3-0ing my rivals and making it to Worlds. Who knows what's going to happen next year?"
The pair refused to comment on who wanted to retire, but according to Doublelift, he has expressed no plans to retire any time soon.
"I think we can achieve a lot more," said the star AD carry. "So I hope my teammates don't retire."
Among the new Exotic weapons in Destiny's Taken King expansion pack is the fusion rifle Teleso, which now has a real-world counterpart crafted from Legos.
As featured in the video above from YouTube channel ZaziNombies Lego Creations, this is comprised of more than 650 Lego bricks. Many of the pieces are said to be "specialty" ones, which probably shouldn't come as a surprise given the distinct look of the weapon.
The best part of the recreation is probably the sort of purple light it has on top of it. This was created using a light brick which is housed inside of a purple wind screen.
Star Wars Battlefront's beta is underway, and it features many of the game's coolest features--namely, units like AT-ATs and heroes like Luke Skywalker. Unfortuantely, despite the latter's prowess with the Force, it's apparently no match for the sort of technique you'd use to kill an ant.
In the clip above, shared on YouTube by user Zephs, we see Skywalker sprint across the field in a match of Walker Assault. The player whose perspective we see this from understandably decides to flee when he starts getting too close, leading Skywalker toward an AT-AT. Just when it looks like he's going to get a kill, a nearby AT-AT crushes him.
It's not the most dignified of endings, though matters are only made worse when his glitched-out body, sticking out of the snow, is stepped on a second time.
Hi-Rez Studios today released a video showcasing the new, Halloween-themed Arena map it's releasing for Smite to celebrate the holiday this year.
We'd already seen a few screenshots of the map, but this offers a more comprehensive look at the redesign. Denton, the cyclops who is routinely abused in the post-game celebration screens, tours the map before bumping into a number of characters wearing their most Halloween-esque skins (like Chaac's Slaughterhouse and Thanatos's Jack the Reaper).
This is still the same map--things are laid out the same and games will play out no differently--but with a Halloween twist. The crowd is gone, minions are now zombies, statues are wearing pumpkins masks, and so on.
If you're a PC player, the map is already live. Those on Xbox One will have to continue to wait; patches are typically released on console about a month later, and this one only arrived on PC this week. Hi-Rez has already confirmed with GameSpot that the plan is to get the Xbox One patch out before the end of month, so players should get to enjoy this map before Halloween is over.
New details about the upcoming Assassin's Creed movie starring Michael Fassbender have been revealed, relating to its plot and more. Ubisoft Motion Pictures CEO Jean Julien Baronnet acknowledged in a new interview with French film magazinePremierethat video game movies don't have the best track record when it comes to quality--and he thinks he not only knows why that is, but also how to break the mold.
In the interview, translated by Den of Geek, Baronnet says the Assassin's Creed movie (and other Ubisoft films) will be different first because they are produced autonomously, without a big-name Hollywood studio. Signing the right talent, in this case Macbeth director Justin Kurzel, is also imperative if you want to make a good video game movie, while you should also involve the actors in the story and scripting process.
"We told [Fassbender] that we were going to build the project together," Barronet said. "That we have an enormous brand and we want to make a film modeled on features like Batman Begins or Blade Runner. That's what we're aiming for. We promised him that he could work with the scriptwriters, that we were going to bring him into all the key creative choices."
Movies based on video games in the past suffered for a number of reasons, one of which was that they were either made by movie studios that didn't understand, or didn't try to understand, video game culture, Baronnet said. For the Assassin's Creed movie, this won't be the case.
Also in the interview, Barronet talked about the Assassin's Creed movie's tone. "We obviously want the film to have depth, but also to be fun and for there to be some lightness," he explained.
In addition, he said the film's story will be just about evenly split between the past and the present. By comparison, the Assassin's Creed games focused more on the past.
Barronet also acknowledged that adapting Assassin's Creed for the big-screen was no easy task, in part because it has two heroes, Callum and Aguilar, each of which are played by Fassbender.
"Assassin's was complicated to develop, because you're working with two time periods, one contemporary and one historical," he said. "With two heroes, as you have Callum, the modern-day hero, and his ancestor Aguilar, who have two parallel stories which meet up. Generally in a film, you only have one hero. And with the link between the past and the present, you can't have one of the stories taking precedence over the other. So structurally, it's very complicated."
Barronet also revealed the estimated extent of Ubisoft's financial investment in the Assassin's Creed movie, revealing the film's budget is between $150-$200 million. To make the movie a financial success, he said he's hoping it appeals to basically everyone who likes movies.
"Our big gamble is that it works for three audiences," Barronet said. "Fans of our games, which there are some 95 million of; fans of mainstream cinema who are going to see Star Wars and Spider-Man; and in parallel, we're also aiming it people who would never think of going to see an Assassin's film, people who like independent films."
Assassin's Creed, as the movie is being called, lands in theater on December 21, 2016. In addition to Fassbender, its excellent cast includes Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard, Michael Kenneth Williams (The Wire), and Denis Menochet (Inglourious Basterds), while Jeremy Irons and Brendan Gleeson recently joined the cast.
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