Cars 3: Driven To Win is Avalanche Software's latest title (not to be confused with Avalanche Studios, the maker of Mad Max and the Just Cause series). It's an action-adventure racing game that will be released the same day as the upcoming movie. It will be available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Nintendo Switch, and Wii U (yes, all of them). Check the game's brand new trailer below.
Cars 3: Driven To Win will pick up where Cars 3 the movie leaves off. There are more than 20 customizable characters (including Lightning McQueen, of course) and players will race on more than 20 unique tracks from the film against Lightning's chief rival, Jackson Storm.
"We wanted to create a game that allows fans to extend their experience with this great film, and also feel the thrill of speeding through the tracks, participating in races, and mastering tricks and techniques for fun with the whole family" said John Blackburn, head of the game's studio Avalanche Software.
There are six different modes, many different skills and abilities, and players can train up their character through challenges and tests, unlocking new modes, tracks, and characters along the way. There's also a split-screen local cooperative mode that allows two players to team up together at home.
For years, Netflix users could rate videos they watched through the streaming service using a five-star rating system. Now, the company has decided to incorporate a new, simpler system.
The new rating system--as seen in the video above--will have one of two choices: thumbs up or thumbs down. Based on your votes, Netflix will be able to find content that matches what you might be interested in, when compared to the user's previous ratings, other users who vote similar to your tastes, and other factors. The match percentage will also appear on the card with the video, in place of the star rating.
Considering that Netflix has exploded in popularity since the company started its streaming service back in 2007, the new system may turn people on to content they normally wouldn't watch. Many times, users may pass on watching something based on the low ratings of other subscribers, even if the content is something they'd like. The new rating system is more streamlined and will hopefully bring an end to the struggle of browsing for the perfect content.
The new system was tested last year with some Netflix subscribers. Director of Product Innovation, Cameron Johnson, explained why this system is better for their users on the Netflix blog: "[W]hen people see thumbs, they know that they are used to teach the system about their tastes with the goal of finding more great content. That's why when we tested replacing stars with thumbs we saw an astounding 200% increase in ratings activity."
Currently, the new system is not in place, and there is no information for when it will go into effect.
Marvel has announced it is partnering with Freeform and ABC Signature on a TV series called Marvel's New Warriors. It is described as a "comedic live-action adaptation of the popular Marvel comic featuring young adult heroes."
The TV show is about "six young people with powers living and working together," and aims to focus on "that time in your life when you first enter adulthood and feel like you can do everything and nothing at once." Doreen "Squirrel Girl" Green has been revealed as one of its six main characters.
"[Doreen is] a totally empowering fan girl--tough, optimistic and a natural leader," Marvel explains. "[She's] confident and has the powers of a squirrel ... She's acrobatic, can fight and talk to other squirrels. Her most important trait is that she has faith in people and teaches them to believe in themselves."
The remaining five characters that make up the New Warriors are still a mystery, but Marvel says they'll all have "powers and abilities on the opposite end of the spectrum of The Avengers." Together "the New Warriors want to make a difference in the world … Even if the world isn't ready."
Freeform is the cable channel formerly known as ABC Family, and its programming is aimed at teenagers and young adults. A series based on Marvel's Cloak & Dagger is also in development there.
"Marvel's New Warriors have always been fan favorites and now, particularly with the addition of Squirrel Girl, they are Marvel Television favorites as well," said Jeph Loeb, Marvel's head of television and executive producer. "After the amazing experience we've had with Freeform on Marvel's Cloak & Dagger we can't think of a better place for our young heroes."
Loeb is serving as executive producer on the series alongside Jim Chory (Marvel's The Punisher, Marvel's The Defenders). Marvel's New Warriors has not been given an air date yet.
Adapting The Legend of Zelda to the structure of a modern, open world may be Nintendo's greatest feat of the last decade; to say nothing of Breath of the Wild's role in fueling sales of Switch consoles. But perhaps more notable than what Breath of the Wild means for Zelda or Switch is the unshakable impact Nintendo has made on the future of open world games. Breath of the Wild is almost without compare, and any open world game in its wake will no doubt be measured against it in some way. For the first time in years, Nintendo is a trendsetter.
As you might expect, creating such an ambitious game was a monumental undertaking. As Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma revealed to us at E3 last year, Breath of the Wild was the biggest Nintendo project to date. When you consider the enormity of its world, the litany of mechanics at play, and the seamless yet varied atmosphere that connects it all, it wasn't surprising when Aonuma felt challenged to keep such a large team--consisting of both Nintendo and Monolith Soft. employees--focused on a single vision:
Nintendo Producer, Eiji Aonuma
"When we're building something, we all have to have a shared perspective and goal, and it's important that everyone has this concrete image in [their] mind. When you have this many people, you may say the same thing to everybody, but everyone has a different perspective on it. If we made a game with that, we would have a very broken and disjointed game. One of the biggest challenges is making sure we all have a shared vision."
Breath of the Wild shipped, and by all accounts, Aonuma met his challenge well. Whether you're catching butterflies or infiltrating the ransacked halls of a once-great castle, Breath of the Wild consistently reflects a unified spirit. Around the game's release last month, we had the chance to chat with three Breath of the Wild directors about their experiences crafting this incredible adventure; about the events that transpired while Aonuma fought to unite his own kingdom at Nintendo.
Hidemaro Fujibayashi is the director of Breath of the Wild, but he got his start working on Zelda games back at Capcom during the Game Boy Color days, directing both The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. During our chat, though he did most of the talking, Fujibayashi sat between technical director Takuhiro Dohta and art director Satoru Takizawa--cohorts that have worked closely on Zelda games like Twilight Princess and Wind Waker HD. Though Aonuma and Shigeru Miyamoto are the names most people associate with Zelda, the three developers that sat across from us arguably deserve a lion's share of the credit that's been laid at the feet of Nintendo's more prominent personalities.
Breath of the Wild is an unwavering adventure set in a world dominated by nature, where elements and objects become the subjects of experiments as you piece together how the world works, and what you can do within that ruleset. Slowly but surely, you learn how to control fire, lightning, gravity, and magnetism. As Fujibayashi was quick to point out, giving the player freedom to experiment was the solution to keeping players engaged while exploring a massive world--one practically devoid of typical open-world filler quests.
Satoru Takizawa, Takuhiro Dohta, and Hidemaro Fujibayashi.
"So the easiest way to go about addressing that problem--of not tiring out the player or boring the player--would be to add puzzles here or add elements there," said Fujibayashi. "But then we would have to make all of that, and that's a lot of resources that we would have to devote to that." The now famous multiplicative gameplay was the answer, he added: "So say we make one, two, or three, different calculations. [Between] those calculations there are things that occur. So it looks like we calculated for all of these things, but only just the three."
"We tried to avoid [creating scenarios] where there's only one possible outcome," he continued. "We tried to remove those as much as possible, and this ideal was really well understood by all of the designers and artists that design terrains and landscapes."
The game that resulted from this concept no doubt thrives because of it, and even a month after its release, players around the world continue to make and share their discoveries. What about the people responsible for crafting the game's collection of cause-and-effect mechanics? Even among Nintendo's staff, occasional surprises delighted the team despite their unrivaled familiarity with the game. According to Takizawa: "one thing we saw at E3 was one of the NOA demonstrating staff, just in their downtime figured out a way to use magnesis to make themselves fly in a way, and we're like, 'Okay, we hadn't thought of that.' We all had to go back and try it ourselves."
"At times we would even show Mr. Miyamoto once a week what we'd been working on, because if we don't do that, and then go face-to-face and present the idea, tables might be flipped!'"
He tried to explain the trick, which we were unfortunately unable to replicate. "If you laid two of the metal platforms on top of each other, and got them just in the right position, you could use one of them to lift the other and kind of make yourself float." He relayed another surprise, this time from watching a new player tinker with the game. "We also saw, and I think this was just an E3 attendee," he recalled, that used objects to fashion their own catapult and then fling themselves across the landscape. That also looked pretty fun. And that made me feel, 'Yeah, this freedom we wanted to give players is really coming through here.'"
Breath of the Wild isn't short on challenges or solutions to overcome them, but it wasn't surprising to hear that some ideas were left by the wayside. Takizawa chimed in with one such example that lasted far into development, and the reasoning behind its ultimate disappearance.
"Until about halfway through the development, we had a spec where you could take your weapon and stab it into a wall. When your stamina gauge was dwindling you could stab the weapon and kind of hang out and rest there." Given the emphasis on climbing in the game, it was surprising to hear this option was removed. The reason? Miyamoto's disapproval.
Nintendo Director/Creative Fellow, Shigeru Miyamoto
"So the answer," according to Fujibayashi," is that Mr. Miyamoto heard of the concept he said, 'You can't stand on the tip of a sword. This is strange.' And then we explained, "No no no, you stab it in." Then he's like, 'No, it's not going to work.' Another idea is that it's very hard to actually stab a sword into a big piece of rock. We considered that you can stab them into cracks or crevices in the wall, but then you can't freely use that feature anywhere you want, so I decided not to implement it."
Miyamoto may not have been directly involved in creating gameplay concepts himself, but by the sound of it, he kept a close eye on everything the team was doing. "So starting from the early stages of development we had been constantly showing Mr. Miyamoto our progress. At times we would even show him once a week what we'd been working on, because if we don't do that, and then go face-to-face and present the idea, tables might be flipped!'"
Though the team had plenty of leaders and a judicious overseer, Breath of the Wild is a product of the group, and the life experiences its members brought to the team were a key component of its success, particularly when it came to interacting with the environment. Fujibayashi drove this point home."The staff that was involved in creating the game, they all have their own hobbies. Some of them like camping or outdoor sports, and we tried to make it a point that they take all of the experiences that they have in their lives and drop it into the game."
When we told the directors how the game matched up with our own meaningful experiences in nature, Fujibayashi beamed. "Hearing you express that you have this emotion that comes up [while playing], that you haven't felt since you went hiking, makes me really happy because I feel like we were able to convey what we really wanted to."
Part of the allure of hiking through woods or over complicated mountain passes is the joy of discovering something that makes you look at your environment, and maybe the world at large, in new ways. But even in our day to day lives, we experience a version of discovery on a smaller scale. According to Takizawa, "One of the things that we were considering was to incorporate this phenomena, which is very common for us in Japanese culture. Every day you take the same road to school and back, but on the way you're like, 'Oh look, I remember this guy over here has a dog so I'm gonna go over there and pet that dog. And then over here, there's this field I want to explore. There's some plants I want to pluck, or there are things I want to do that make that road itself interesting.' We said, 'Let's create an environment that does just that.'"
"And it's not just the terrain," he continued. "It's all the items and elements within the terrain...you soon get distracted by this shiny thing over here, that cool thing over there. And again, we had that very active conversation to create that world. So kids really like stopping to pick the weeds or stopping to smell the flowers, so we wanted to create a world that not only enabled them to do that but enticed them to do so."
Gazillion Entertainment, the developer of 2013's PC RPG Marvel Heroes, has announced a follow-up called Marvel Heroes Omega, coming to PlayStation 4 this spring.
Marvel Heroes Omega "draws inspiration from both action-RPGs and MMOs," says community manager David Lee. Headline characters include Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, and the Guardians of the Galaxy, while villains Loki and Doctor Doom will also make an appearance in the game's nine-chapter story campaign.
You can take a look at the game's reveal trailer above, or if you want to try it out for yourself, Gazillion has stated a closed beta will come to PS4 soon.
It's unclear whether Omega represents a full sequel to Marvel Heroes--which Gazillion has continued to support since its launch four years ago--or if it's to be a port of that PC game. We do know, however, that the new game will be free-to-play, just like the original title.
In other Marvel news, upcoming Spider-Man reboot movie, Homecoming, recently saw a new trailer released. The film--which is set to hit theaters on July 7--stars Tom Holland in action as Spidey, plus Michael Keaton as the villainous Vulture, and Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is also scheduled for this year, while a new teaser for Netflix's Defenders series recently got a new teaser--check it out here.
Screenwriter Eric Heisserer was nominated for an Oscar this past award season for his work on Arrival. While he continues to write for Hollywood, with films like Lights Out and future films like Van Helsing, he's also started writing for comic publisher Valiant. During a recent visit to WonderCon in Anaheim, California, we talked to him about his transition in comics and his upcoming film projects.
GameSpot: You adapted Arrival from a story by Ted Chiang, and it's a very science fiction movie that isn't so science fiction. How far did you dive into linguistics and how language works for the film?
Eric Heisserer: I took what I learned from the novella, from Ted's work, and I dove in with a lot of reading and research on my own and got to where I was like, "Yeah, I know this s*** really well." Then I sat down with linguist and I was like, "I don't know anything at all. I'm not that smart."
The best thing to do in these kinds of situations is surround yourself with the people that do these kinds of things and just let them talk. Listening to how a theoretical physicist and a linguist talk about their work is a little bit like you and I talking about a new comic we love or a new movie that came out which we're infatuated with. For them, it's ideas. It's theories. It's whatever part of their work that they're really grappling with or excited about.
In a sense, would you say that it was a bit overwhelming with the intelligence in the room with you while working on Arrival?
It was! Here I am writing characters that are way smarter than I am, and they're facing the challenge of a lifetime. To try and make that believable was so intimidating to me. I didn't want to mess that up. The best thing I could do would be a surrogate for their approaches, their philosophies, and their ideas and find out how linguists would try and crack this in that situation. Some of that was in the [Ted Chiang] story, and that helped. Ted has done the heavy lifting for me. Time and again, if I ran into a dead end, I could go back to the story and say, "This is what he did."
You've also worked on a few horror films as well: Lights Out, The Thing (2011), A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010). Are you going back to horror? Is that something you gravitate towards as a writer?
It's the mafia, for me. Every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in with another horror movie. I got stuck in that lane, and I wrote other stuff, specifically to get out of that. But now that I am, the best material I find ends up being horror.
When [director] David Sandberg came to me and said, "I have an idea for how to make Lights Out a feature." I was like, "[sighs] Yes. I see that. That works. I can do that." And I adapted a novel by Josh Malerman called Birdbox, which if you haven't read it, read this novel. You will love it. It's holy s***, it's great. And that is, right now, my favorite unproduced screenplay out there. I'm really proud of that one and I hope it gets made sometime.
I saw you were attached to a new Van Helsing film.
Yeah. I wrote that with Jon Spaihts (Doctor Strange). We co-wrote that last year. We turned in a draft that we were so proud of and so excited for. I think we both knew our version of Van Helsing, which you hadn't seen before... It's like... take Mad Max, put him in contemporary times, throw him in the caravan, so he's "this close" to being homeless, and have him know everyone in the occult. [laughs] That's just cool. Have him be the MacGyver of the world. It's a little like Batman around the Justice League. Everyone else has ridiculous, god-like powers, and he's rich. And a poor Van Helsing isn't even that. We had a lot of fun with it, and I don't know what the situation is with that. We turned our draft, and it just takes forever in the system today. We'll see what happens with it.
With that character, we've seen a lot of different versions of him, and a lot of it gravitates towards action. He's a guy that lives in a world of horror. How much of your version of the character deals with that?
Quite a lot. His viewpoint, specifically, is even with horror. You're dealing with creatures and sometimes scientists that are larger than life. They're superheroes in a horror world, and so to speak, sometimes anti-heroes. When a big problem comes along, they're the ones to solve it.
What Van Helsing doesn't like is this culture of--which is almost like anti-superhero culture--we, as human beings, have to stop outsourcing our problems to people that are bigger than us or larger than us and expecting them to solve the problems. We gotta do it ourselves. We have to own up, take some responsibilities, find our balls, go and tackle whatever this thing is because the more we keep doing this and relying on somebody else, when they're done with one problem, they're gonna turn to feeding on us again. That makes him a bit of a radical, and I believe there was a moment when we were in the room talking about all the other monsters movies.
I brazenly said, 'The moment your monster movie bombs, Van Helsing is going to kill your guy.' [laughs] They didn't like that. [laughs] You start in one place and where you end up is the result of a million different decisions along the way, half of a which you're not even in the room for.
Do you feel more comfortable in the realm of adaptation or creating new stories?
I found that it's a little easier to get work in the adaptation world. I may shed a tear talking about the original pieces that I tried to launch that have fallen short because there's just not a built-in audience for them. I've gone as far as selling some things that I don't think will ever get made. But that's why I like comics because there's a market. I'm like, "Hey! I want to do a brand new title and introduce new characters," and they're like, "sure!"
What brought you to Valiant, writing comics?
I had been pulled in to consider adapting Harbinger for them and for Sony. And I had not seen any of the new run of Harbinger at Valiant, prior to that. And so the week before my meeting, I went and did a crash course, and I went and bought all of [Joshua] Dysart's books and dove in. It went from, "I'll consider talking about a comic book movie" that seems to be increasingly difficult to make in a time where there are a lot of comic book movies. And I fell in love. I was like, "I have to do this now. This is an American Akira. I've got to do this. Holy s***." I kept coming back to them.
I think, at one point in time, Dinesh Shamdasani [Valiant CEO] said, "Eric, you got the job already." But I kept auditioning through the final draft of that. Then I had so many ideas for Livewire in particular. I really fell in love with her as a character and had all these interesting notions of how she might use her powers and who she might mentor in her next life, so to speak. I told them I have enough to make her own book and they said, "Challenge accepted." Before I knew it, I was writing.
Did you talk to Dysart prior to getting into his work?
Yeah. I reached out to him. First to find out how the people were here, and second of all, what challenges he had with the characters, with Pete. He was helpful. He was also understandably critical of Hollywood screenwriters. The advantage is that my wife has known him for a long time. He could just tell me to take a leap.
Did you feel like there are a lot of challenges going from screenwriting into comic book writing? There are a lot of similarities in the format of the writing, but it is very different at the same time with things like pacing.
There is, yeah. Pacing is making sure where you are on the page and on the spread, having some idea of how the panels will flow without spoon-feeding your artist so you're not doing too much or too little. They love when you do too little because they go crazy, but you want to make sure the pacing works. And beyond that, you got to be so much more of a director and a writer at the same time to know where you want the focus. You can put that in the script for a comic book and really say, "This is the action we're going to highlight. This is the moment we're going to capture. This is the emotion I want to see drawn large." I think it makes me a better screenwriter. I come off of that and feel like I flexed some muscles there. For the first draft of the next thing I write, I'm like, "Yeah, I can direct this."
It does open your eyes going from screenwriting to comic books because it is so similar yet so different.
Totally. And the ability to… you gotta know how to be torse in your dialogue. You can't just prattle-off and give people soliloquies. They gotta earn that s*** on the page.
Because you wrote the Harbinger movie, how was the transition into comic book movies?
The transition is to be aware of every comic book movie that's come before you. And we went six months down a path and finally had a draft we got excited about. We took a month off and went back it and said, "This is still too much like X-Men." We can't do that. It required a reinvention, and I was down for that because I love the characters. I love the world so much. We finally figured out a sweet spot to land in, and as I mention now, we created the David Bowie of comic book movies, with Harbinger. It's off-center and it's punk and it's interesting. It just looks cool.
Do feel there's a lot of pressure to write a story for that movie that's like everything else even though there's a bit of over-saturation with comic book films?
Well, I gotta say it's easy to start with something familiar because you know what works, but then you realize when you go familiar, you're gonna get second place at best. If you really want to have a breakout hit, you gotta do something that's bold and different, impossibly controversial, and see how that works. I imagine it will still undergo another transformation before it ever gets to screen, but it started from the place of, "We know how comic books movies work, and we can write one like that," and we wound up throwing it all out and reinventing it. It was a hard process that I think yielded a good product. I'm really proud of it.
Who else within comics would you like to work with?
Doctor Mirage.
I think that's right up your alley.
I think it is! I may have a handful of great story pitches that never saw the light of day.
What attracts you to that character?
E: I like that her and her husband are kind of modeled after The Warrens, and I did a little work on Conjuring 2, so I've had a taste of the Warrens, and I was like, "I got to write that relationship again." I like that there is a voice that I find so comforting and inviting, so I want to try my hand at writing in the charatcer's voice, so to speak. They aren't X-Files stories, and they aren't Supernatural stories. They're Doctor Mirage stories, and I'm grateful for that.
Are there any personality or character types you struggle to write, trying to find their voice?
Yeah. I had trouble, not within any of the Valiant stuff. I felt pretty connected to those characters. But I've had trouble with… I gotta tell you how hard it can be to find the right voice for a character if they've been around for a long time. And therefore, are on a spectrum. So then everyone in the room will have their favorite version of that character. Then to try and write something that feels loyal to that but is a little bit of your own voice can be maddening.
Would it be fair to say that Freddy Krueger is one of those characters?
Yes. I was in trouble when I realized that one person in a lot of power in that room wanted a super-scary, serious Freddy, and the other one wanted the wise-cracking one.
Like Dream Warriors.
Yeah! Exactly. I'm like, "Oh, we're in trouble now." One is gonna keep pushing me to put in puns and wise-cracking comments, and the other is gonna be like, "No! You gotta have a goat that he slaughters!"
That is a very diverse character, if you look at that entire series. New Nightmare is a very serious version of Freddy, even if that wasn't technically Freddy. While the middle of the franchise is very wacky. Were there days where you were conflicted and didn't know which route to take?
I was. I was really paralyzed in moments with that. I gave it my best with the one pass I had at it, and then ultimately, maybe 5% of what I wrote wound up on the screen, which is how it goes, and by the way, that was my first credit. I was the little man in the room there, and there's really not a chance to talk much. I talk a lot about, in terms of screenwriting, that you either get hired as an architect or as a hard hat worker. But also, the reason I kept going back to New Line is that the guys at New Line, in particular, love genre, they know their stuff, they were advocates for me from the start, and I didn't have any problem with them. If you're listening, I love you, New Line.
I was very excited that Arrival got nominated for an Oscar. What was your experience with the show and the nomination?
It was an interesting experience. I've been watching the Oscars, like a ritual, for years and years. The first thing that struck me, when I got into that theater was, "That's actually smaller than I thought." It seems to huge on television, and yet, here, it's just a stage. It feels a little bit like some all-star episode of something because you look around and every face you recognize. "Oh my god, Samuel L Jackson is on my row. This is weird." Beyond that, it's just an award show, like anything else, and I've been to a few others earlier in the season, and there's something comforting about that.
Was it an incredible boost to your ego to know you're kind of on that echelon with everyone else?
It should have been. I think I have a malfunctioning ego, where I was more rooting for Barry Jenkins [writer of Moonlight] for a long while. We met each other on the road. I am a big fan of his writing, and his philosophy and his approach. Once I found out that he and I were sharing the category, I was like, "Well, obviously, I would vote for you, so…"
"We have plotted out many years," said Sher. "We put together this group of writers to talk about where we were going. There'll be a film that feels more like Black Ops, the story behind the story. The Modern Warfare series looks at what it's like to fight a war with the eyes of the world on you. And then maybe something that is more of a hybrid, where you are looking at private, covert operations, while a public operation is going on."
It's not clear whether Sher is referring to three separate movies--one based on Black Ops, one on Modern Warfare, and one a hybrid--or if she is discussing one film that draws on multiple Call of Duty sources.
"It's going to have the same sort of high-adrenaline, high-energy aesthetic as the game, but it's not a literal adaptation," added van Dyk. "It's a much more broad and inclusive, global in scope ... a big, tentpole, Marvel-esque movie."
In addition to a number of films--the first of which could, according to the Guardian, arrive as early as 2018--the studio is also considering a TV series based on historical conflicts, such as those in Vietnam and World War II. Call of Duty has visited both those eras in the past with Black Ops and the early, numbered games respectively. The next Call of Duty game is rumored to return the franchise to the Second World War after multiple futuristic entries.
Any potential Call of Duty movie would not be Activision Blizzard's first foray into the world of film: the company released a World of Warcraft motion picture, simply called Warcraft, in 2016. Warcraft went on to be the highest-grossing video game movie ever, earning $337 million at the worldwide box office, though it was a critical failure. However it should be noted that Warcraft was licensed out to a third-party studio, Legendary Pictures, while the Call of Duty films will seemingly be produced in house.
Terraria: Otherworld, a spinoff PC game announced back in February 2015, has seen its developer ditched as the project is "well behind schedule," according to publisher Re-Logic.
The game was in development at Engine Software, a Dutch developer behind a number of licensed games and handheld ports. However, in a forum post, Re-Logic stated it has had to end Engine's involvement with the game as "the game is still equal parts far from [our] vision and well behind schedule."
"Re-Logic's focus has and always will be on delivering complete and quality game experiences to our fanbase," the publisher said. "This means that we will not compromise game quality for speed to market or for any other reasons within our control. Our team had a clear vision for this game--one that we shared with all of you with much shared excitement--and, as much as we hate to say it (and in spite of all of the reforms we tried last year)--the current state of the game is still equal parts far from that vision and well behind schedule.
"As a result, we have made the decision to move on from having Engine Software continue development of Terraria: Otherworld. Re-Logic has possession of the game (code, art, sounds, etc.) as it exists today, and we have been examining the array of options available to us to get TOW to a place to where we can confidently deliver on the vision and expectations we all have for this game. After taking a good hard look at everything, we feel that a new and fresh start/direction is the only way Otherworld will ever reach its full potential at this point."
Re-Logic, who developed the original game and published it on PC, stated it has shifted development of the spinoff open-world strategy game to Pipeworks, which previously worked on the console and mobile versions of Terraria.
"Based upon their really impressive work to date with the Terraria re-write on console/mobile," said the publisher, "coupled with an amazingly on-point proposal for completing Otherworld (after a thorough review of the game on their end), we have made the decision to bring Pipeworks on board as our new development partner for Terraria: Otherworld."
Re-Logic goes on to state that it expects a "quiet period" while Pipeworks gets started on its version of the game. The new developer will "staff up" appropriately so that work on Otherworld "does not have any impact on the timing/quality of console/mobile/Switch launch." The main game is due to launch on Nintendo Switch at some point in 2017.
A study commissioned by Google has found that teenagers find the Xbox brand "cooler" than they find PlayStation. That preference was switched in millennials, however, as 18-25 year olds thought Sony's gaming brand was cooler than Microsoft's.
According to the report, children aged 13-17 thought Xbox was the fourth coolest brand in the world, with PlayStation down in seventh. Top of that list was Google's own video streaming service, YouTube, with Netflix and Google's overall brand in No.2 and No.3, respectively.
Nintendo is seen to be less cool than Xbox and PlayStation among both millennial and teenagers, while EA Sports is even further behind, says the report. Additionally, VR and AR are seen as some of the coolest things in the world of technology, along with smartphones and iOS in particular.
The study--which was intended to discover what young people's favourite brands were--was commissioned by Google but carried out by YouGov and Gutcheck across three surveys. In total, around 1600 teenagers and 800 millenials were polled between May and July 2016, though much of the data came from one particular survey that queried 1100 teens. It should be noted that much of the actual data was omitted from the final report in favor of qualitative statements, while it also appears the survey was limited to young people in the US.
Virtual reality is a big trend in gaming and across other entertainment mediums. There is some concern, however, that the technology might not be the best thing for society.
John Hanke, the CEO of Pokemon Go developer Niantic Labs, offered his thoughts on the subject today at the Mixed Reality Summit in London. According to GI.biz, Hanke said VR has the potential to be "too good" and might lead to people wanting to spend extended periods of time in digital worlds.
"My thing about VR is I'm afraid it can be too good, in the sense of being an experience that people want to spend a huge amount of time in," he said. "I mean I already have concerns about my kids playing too much Minecraft, and that's a wonderful game.
"We're human beings and there's a lot of research out there that shows we're actually a lot happier when we get exercise, when we go outside--and outside in nature in particular," he added. "I think it's a problem for us as a society if we forgo that and spend all of time in a Ready Player One-style VR universe."
Hanke has been critical of VR in the past. Speaking to Recode last year, Hanke said VR can be an isolationist activity. "In a VR situation, you're isolating yourself from everyone around you and entering this completely virtual space," he said at the time.
Going back to his talk at the Mixed Reality Summit, Hanke said augmented reality--which is at the core of Pokemon Go--has a "huge amount of potential" to do things that have a positive impact on humanity. Niantic has said one of its goals for Pokemon Go is to help make the world a better place.
"There is research about the health impact of Pokemon Go in particular but you can expand that to apply to all AR games," he said. "These games can encourage people to be more active than they would normally be. As a parent, part of my motivation for building this kind of game was to try and get my kids out of the house. I think there's a ton of good that can be done."
Also during the talk, Hanke said he foresees a day when AR and VR "converge into a single set of experiences."
Marvel today announced that its next Netflix show, The Defenders, will premiere on the streaming site on August 18. This was confirmed alongside a new teaser that shows members of the Defenders, including Iron Fist (Finn Jones), Like Cage (Mike Colter), Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter), and Daredevil (Charlie Cox) in an elevator. Jessica Jones ends the clip by smashing the camera.
This teaser is not much to go on, though you can see the name Midland Circle Financial in the elevator. And according to Bleeding Cool, the voice saying "going down" is that of Sigourney Weaver, who plays the show's villain, Alexandra.
The characters in the elevator are joined by a variety of characters from the individual Netflix shows, including Daredevil's Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), Jessica Jones's Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss), and Luke Cage's Misty Knight, played by Simone Missick.
The new Square Enix RPG Nier: Automata has reached a new sales milestone. About a month after the game launched on PlayStation 4 and PC.
The Japanese publisher announced today that the Platinum Games-developed game has passed 1 million in combined worldwide shipments and digital sales.
Nier: Automata is available on PS4 and PC, though Square Enix did not provide a sales breakdown by platform. If you're interested in trying it out, a free demo is available on PS4.
Marvel's Agents of SHIELD returned after a six-week break. In the last episode, Aida, a Life Model Decoy succeeded in replacing the top agents within SHIELD. They were replaced by LMDs and are trapped inside the Framework--a super-advanced virtual reality world. A small group of agents--including Daisy, Simmons, and Yo Yo--managed to escape. Daisy and Simmons entered the Framework in order to locate their teammates. The episode ended with a glimpse into a shocking upside-down world with Hydra in power.
Warning: Spoilers for Season 4, Episode 16 of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, "What If...," will be discussed below.
Ward and Skye Are Back Together
When Daisy awoke inside the Framework, she received a text telling her to wake up her boyfriend and head into the office. She assumed it was Lincoln, who died last season. It turned out to be Grant Ward. This was a shock, and she immediately attempted to use her Quake powers on him with no success. (Daisy developed feelings for Ward in the first season before finding out he was really a part of Hydra).
In this world, Daisy is still going by "Skye" and they are both agents of Hydra. She and Ward have been together for several years, and her Framework version just asked him to move in the night before. Apparently he told her the time wasn't right and he needed some space. He also said, "There are things about me you wouldn't like if you knew." These are the exact words he said in Season 1, Episode 19.
May Is The Third In Command Of Hydra
When they arrive at the Triskelion (last seen in Captain America: The Winter Soldier), it is now Hydra's main headquarters. Daisy managed to get onto her computer at her work station to look up some friends. Lincoln died during testing, and Simmons died at the SHIELD Academy from a contamination. Before she can diver further into the file, May demanded she get into the briefing. Daisy is relieved to see her, but May had no idea the entire world is wrong.
In the briefing, May put Skye and Ward on the task to get answers from an Inhuman they've detained. It turned out to be Vijay Nadeer using a false name. In the real world, Vijay was killed by his sister--the senator--because she despised anything alien and was working with The Superior. In the Framework, Vijay managed to get a false Hydra-issued ID--which meant there's a mole inside Hydra.
Simmons Is "Dead"
Since Simmons is dead in the Framework, that meant the real Jemma awoke buried out in the woods. The dead Simmons' body was supposed to have been taken back to England, but Simmons realized she was murdered and buried by the SHIELD Academy. Her sweater had a couple bullet holes, and there were other bodies beneath her. Simmons is questioned by a couple Hydra agents in a coffee shop, but she managed to overpower them. Using the computer in their car, she found there is no record of Daisy Johnson and Fitz's file was restricted. Looking up Coulson, she learned he's a high school teacher and sought him out.
Coulson Lost The Urge To Fight
Coulson lectures his class about the evil of Inhumans. He mentioned the "Cambridge Incident" in which an Inhuman girl from Bahrain was rescued and taken there. This was the same child May was forced to kill in the real world. The child killed an untold number of people which allowed Hydra to use this and declare a war against Inhumans.
When Simmons arrived, Coulson didn't recognize her. He freaked out when she showed him the SHIELD ID card in her pocket. When Simmons saw Coulson's hula girl bobble and mentioned "Tahiti is a wonderful place," he forced her to leave. Coulson then reported her to the authorities as a possible "subversive."
Later in his office, he pulled out an old file with newspaper clippings related to key moments in the real world. He also had several sheets of paper with "It's a wonderful place" written over and over.
Fitz Is Pretty Evil Now
Fitz is referred to as The Doctor here. He's the second in command of Hydra and developed a way to painfully test potential Inhumans without them going through the Terrigenesis process. After barking orders at May, he visited Madame Hydra, who turned out to be Aida. Aida is naturally in charge of the world in the Framework. She became aware there were some subversives and disabled their escape. Fitz wanted to deal with them himself, passionately stating he wanted to protect everything they've built as well as Aida. If the world wasn't freaky enough, Fitz and Aida kiss.
Who Is Part Of The Resistance?
Daisy found Simmons at their meeting point. The extraction device they programmed into the Framework won't allow them to leave (because Aida disabled it). Ward popped out at them with his gun drawn. Confused when Simmons called him by name, he asked Daisy if this was her contact in the resistance. They both adamantly proclaimed they were not in the resistance. A Hydra agent came upon them and Ward shot him, admitting he was working against Hydra. He saw Skye's test results that revealed she was an Inhuman so he hid them. He was the one that gave Vijay a false ID and is the mole in Hydra.
At the end, Daisy visited Coulson in the hopes he'd remember her. When he doesn't, she apologized saying because she always goes to him when she needs help. He was like family, and she thought that connection would be inside him as well. Hearing this, Coulson recalled her name was Daisy.
Our Thoughts
The show is loosely following the idea behind the What If?comics. The characters are all leading different lives from the result of one event happening differently. A lot of detail was put into fleshing out the world including the changes to the Triskelion and all the propaganda posters seen throughout. Seeing alternate versions of characters may not be a new concept, but it's fascinating to see the actors take on the changes. With most of the Framework characters pretty much all taking opposite allegiances, it shouldn't be a surprise to see this version of Grant Ward only has good intentions. It's a way to redeem the character and provide awkward and confusing moments for Daisy and Simmons. Because they're trapped in the Framework now, they'll need all the help they can get.
What is Aida's overall plan? Is she hoping to replace all of humanity with their counterparts in the Framework? We still haven't seen who the leader of the resistance is. It was mentioned at WonderCon this past weekend and is also in our interviews with the cast and showrunners. The interviews will be posted soon.
It's been a while since we've gotten new information about Crackdown 3, but that is going to change soon, it seems. More information about the Xbox One and PC is "on the horizon," reads a tweet from the game's official Twitter account.
"2017 is shaping up to be great!" the developer said (via WindowsCentral). "Crackdown 3 info is on the horizon, and we're ready to bring the boom!"
Asked on Twitter if the Crackdown 3 news might come on Thursday as part of the Project Scorpio reveal, the developer said, "We have no insight in to what other teams are working on, but Crackdown news will start rolling out BIG TIME in the coming months."
Crackdown 3 is in development at Reagent Games, under the guidance of Crackdown series veteran David Jones. For more on the game, you can see all of GameSpot's previous written and video coverage here.
After rolling out offline viewing for Netflix's iOS and Android apps last year, the streaming giant is now extending the option to desktop. Netflix announced today that Windows 10 users can download Netflix shows and movies and then watch them offline.
As is the case on iOS and Android, not everything on Netflix is available to download. A lot of Netflix original content is available for offline viewing, while Breaking Bad and Parks and Recreation are also available (via The Verge). Here's a trailer that Netflix released to promote the announcement:
The offline viewing option for Netflix does not cost extra. The ability to download TV shows and movies is not available yet on consoles or other Netflix streaming apps.
In other Netflix news, the company has renewed its Drew Barrymore zombie/cannibal show The Santa Clarita Diet and announced four more movies with Adam Sandler.
With Hearthstone's next expansion, Journey to Un'Goro, slated to arrive very soon, Blizzard has now pushed out a new update for the popular collectible card game.
Starting off, the update lays the groundwork for the upcoming Year of the Mammoth, which starts on April 6 when Journey to Un'Goro comes out. It also adds a new Rogue hero, Maiev Shadowsong, though you can't unlock her until the expansion arrives. Once it does, you need to win 10 standard ranked or casual mode matches to get her.
Elsewhere, today's Hearthstone update introduces the behind-the-scenes groundwork for the upcoming closed beta launch for Fireside Gatherings Tavern. It also introduces a new UI element in the form of a tooltip that shows the number of cards in your hand, while the patch also gives Android users the option to download the game's data directly to an SD card when starting for the first time.
Additionally, there are a number of bug fixes included with today's Hearthstone update. You can see a full rundown of these below, as written and shared by Blizzard.
Bug Fixes
Jade Spirit will now correctly appear in searches using the term "Jade Golem."
When Herald Volazj copies a silenced minion, the copies it creates will now correctly also be silenced.
Resolved an issue that would make it impossible to cast a spell that costs Health to kill your Hero, even while immune.
Resolved an issue that would cause casting a 0 mana cost Jade Blossom to still sometimes consume mana.
Nozdormu's sandstorm visual will no longer persist if he is returned to a player's hand.
Resolved several minor UI and graphics issues.
Journey to Un'Goro adds 135 new cards to collect, including Quest cards. These are one-mana cards that provide you with a mission to complete over the course of a match for a big reward.
In other news, Sony also today shared a list of some of the most popular PlayStation Now games during March 2017, all of which can be seen below. It wasn't mentioned if this list is ranked by popularity.
For the second time ever, PlayStation Network games are featured in a Humble Bundle. Today, THQ Nordic announced a partnership with PlayStation and Humble Bundle for the Humble THQ Nordic PlayStation Bundle, which offers up PS4 and PS3 games at pay-what-you-want prices.
The charity being supported with this Humble Bundle is Hand in Hand International, an organization that fights poverty with grassroots entrepreneurship. As with all Humble Bundles, you can decide where your money goes between THQ Nordic, the game developers, Hand in Hands International, or any of the thousands of other charities.
Microsoft has announced the details of Gears of War 4's April update, which adds new maps, Easter-themed content, and balance changes, among other things. All of this was covered on Xbox Wire.
Starting with the Easter content, this includes a new mode called "Bunny Hunt" that gives players giant bunny heads that sort of look like Frank from Donnie Darko. Additionally, there are five chocolate Easter egg weapon skins that you can unlock. Microsoft will announced more details on the Easter content next week, with the event itself starting on April 14. Easter itself is on April 16.
As for the new maps, April's Gears of War 4 update adds two more that you may recognize from Gears of War 3: Hotel and Slab. They have been "updated and refined" for the new game.
People who own the Gears of War 4 season pass can play the new maps right now in the game's Developer Playlist, and can earn double XP and a 20 percent bonus credits boost. The maps will become available for everyone (for free) starting on April 11.
You can watch the videos embedded in this story to get a closer look at the maps.
Also coming to Gears of War 4 in the April update is another COG character for the Legacy Character lineup, following Tai who was released in March. Additionally, the Locust character Kantus is coming to Gears of War 4 through a Gear Pack in April.
What's more, new Horde and Versus events are scheduled to begin on April 21 and April 28, respectively, though Microsoft did not share any more details about these.
Finally, Microsoft is rolling out new weapon tuning changes for Gears of War 4 in April. This is described as a "major update" for both Core and Competitive.
"Our Core changes mostly focus on making the starting weapons fit their role better than before, with reduced range on the Gnasher, improvements to the Hammerburst and slight tweaks to the Lancer," Microsoft said. "For Competitive, it's all about adjustments that highlight the teamwork and competitive nature of playing with these team-focused settings."
If you already own these games on Xbox 360, they should show up automatically on your Xbox One. If not, you can buy them on your console or through the Xbox Store links below.
In other backwards compatibility news, Microsoft's Bill Stillwell posted an detailed message last month in which he discussed the technical and operational considerations for games in the catalog. People have been clamoring for Call of Duty: Black Ops II, but it hasn't happened yet.
"I can't underestimate the complexity of the non-technical part of this," Stillwell said. "We are in some cases reviewing licensing agreements that are a decade old, evaluating the impact of new technology on those agreements, and then negotiating with a host of other parties for terms to get renewed/changed. This is not a quick process most times."
You can read the full message below, but remember that it's from March 14.
No BC releases today, but the week isn't over. More importantly though, a message that might help explain the state of things today. pic.twitter.com/9ML0VPDqJx
[Updated April 4 with two more games: Civilization: Revolution and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet]
The Xbox One's backwards compatibility feature, introduced in November 2015, lets you play Xbox 360 games on the new console. But what games are available? We've now rounded them all up--and we'll continue to update this post as new games are made available.
New details about Microsoft's highly anticipated new console, Project Scorpio, will be announced later this week. As rumored, the information will come from at least one site, Eurogamer's Digital Foundry.
In a tweet today, the site said it has an "exclusive Xbox Scorpio reveal" coming on Thursday, April 6, at 6 AM PT / 9 AM ET / 2 PM UK. That's all we know for now.
Digital Foundry specializes in hardware and performance breakdowns, so it might be that their reveal has something to do with Scorpio's specs or power.
This week's Scorpio reveal likely won't tell the full story, as we would expect Microsoft to make its own announcements--about the price, release date, and other specifics--on its own at a later date. The console will surely be a part of Microsoft's E3 2017 briefing in June.
What are you hoping to see from this week's Scorpio reveal? Let us know in the comments below!
Persona 5 may have open-world elements, but at the core, it's a linear story full of delights and surprises. Now, its developer is drawing a line in the sand for streamers who might spoil the plot for others.
"If you decide to stream past 7/7 (I HIGHLY RECOMMEND NOT DOING THIS, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED), you do so at the risk of being issued a content ID claim or worse, a channel strike/account suspension," it says.
7/7 refers to July 7 in the game's school year. Considering the school year only begins in April, that means streamers need to stop broadcasting a mere one third of the way through the game's story. Atlus has also blocked the PlayStation 4's sharing features while playing the game, and the post gives specific examples on what is--and isn't--acceptable for players to share online. Here are their guidelines:
You can post however many additional videos you'd like, but please limit each to be at most 90 minutes long.
No major story spoilers, and I'll leave that up to your good judgment. If you need some guidelines, avoid showing/spoiling the ending segments of the first three palaces. While you can show initial interactions with Yusuke, avoid his awakening scene, and that whole deal about THE painting. Also, don't post anything about a certain student investigator.
I know I mentioned not showing the end of each palace, but you can grab footage from the Kamoshida boss fight. However, don't capture video from the other major boss fights.
Must not focus solely on cutscenes/animated scenes, should prominently feature dungeon crawling/spending time in Tokyo.
You can post straight gameplay or have commentary.
"Please, PLEASE do not post any specific plot points or story spoilers, and only talk about the game in broad strokes," writes Atlus.
"Its cast approaches complex issues and takes on overwhelming odds with a clarity and gusto that can only be born from teenage naivety, and there's a refreshing, cathartic quality to being part of that," she wrote, giving the game a 9/10.
"Just like in the real world, things aren't always black and white, and the game does an excellent job of showing how even well-meaning actions can have adverse consequences...It's a refined, effortlessly stylish RPG that will be talked about for years to come." she said.
Skybound Entertainment, the comic book company behind The Walking Dead, have announced that its long-running comic book series Invincible will be made into a feature film as a joint venture with Point Grey Pictures and Universal Pictures. This will be the third Robert Kirkman-created comic translation, which also includes Cinemax's Outcast.
The minds behind the current AMC series Preacher, Seth Rogan and Evan Golberg, will write, direct, and produce the film, adapted from the Skybound comic, which debuted in 2003 from creators Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Bill Crabtree. The comic follows Mark Grayson, whose father is the most powerful superhero on Earth. Very quickly, Grayson learns he has powers of his own. There are very little details about the film at this time.
What makes Invincible different from the average Marvel or DC superhero book is that it's aimed at a more adult market. The series is known to be bloody and violent, thanks to current artist Ryan Ottley. In addition, it deals with more adult themes that both Marvel and DC wouldn't normally hit on.
"For nearly a decade I've had to endure the 'what about Invincible?' question as fans have watched The Walking Dead grow into the multi-media monstrosity it has become over the years," creator Robert Kirkman said in a press release. "The answer was always that we were waiting for the right team to partner with. The esteemed misters Goldberg and Rogen have proven themselves to be top-notch directors with a keen collective eye for stunning visuals after slumming it by writing hit after juggernaut hit.
"Invincible's surprising, edgy, shocking, and oftentimes blood-soaked story couldn't be in more capable hands. With the team of Rogen, Goldberg and Universal, I'm very confident this will be another superhero movie, in a long line of superhero movies that continues to prove that it's a viable, thrilling genre that will keep people coming to the cinema for years to come."
Action, adventure, and a big dose of humor; the hallmarks of Lego games are all there in Lego City Undercover, and now you can play the game on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC for US $60 / £50 / AU $90. The game is out today in North America, on April 5 in Australia, and in Europe on April 6.
The game was originally released for the Wii U in 2013, and we here at GameSpot gave it an 8/10 for its joyful, open-world gameplay. It follows Chase McCain, undercover police officer and Lego disguise expert, as he tracks down public enemy number one Rex Fury. Fury has been on a city-wide crime wave and, of course, only you can stop him.
Lego City Undercover features an open-world environment with 20 unique districts. You bust thieves, drive a variety of vehicles, and collect items across Lego City. The game also features a two-player cooperative mode.
The game gives you the ability to choose between eight disguises. Each one gives Chase unique skills and abilities. In true Lego fashion, you meet characters throughout the game that become playable. There are more than 300 unlockable characters in Lego City.
Jeff Kaplan is a man that wears many hats: He's director of Overwatch--Blizzard's acclaimed multiplayer shooter--a peanut butter enthusiast, and a beloved meme. Naturally, he's got plenty of wisdom and insight to offer on each of these subjects, and more. During a recent visit to London, we caught up with him and talked about everything from the continuously re-balancing Overwatch and the possibility of introducing a map editor, to his YouTube stardom and beard woes.
On a scale of 1-10, how stressed does having to make tweaks to Overwatch make you?
It doesn't make me stressed at all. If one is the lowest end, I'd say one. It's one of the greatest things that we get to do. We feel really fortunate that we get to work on this game and we absolutely love it. All of us as players say to ourselves, "This is working really well" or "This could be a little bit better, I wish we could go in and do something about it." And we literally can do that. We feel very lucky to be part of that.
It must feel like pulling Jenga blocks out of a stacked tower though. Doesn't that stress you out?
We just need to be really careful. I think when we read feedback and hear players comment about the balance that they'd like to see, most players either main one or two heroes, or they gravitate towards a certain role. When they tend to talk about imbalance in other heroes, they just want to make them go away. Like if you play a lot of Mercy, and Genji is harassing you, the feedback we tend to get is like, "Remove all critical chance and he should only fire one shuriken instead of three, and...", it's all these sledgehammer approaches.
The trick for us is trying to approach the balance in a way where we say, "We've got these 24 heroes and there's a main out there for each player. We have to represent all those people, to make sure that they're all fun to play and play against; that nothing dominates the balance. So that part of it is what's tricky. It's easy to nerf or buff a hero but you don't want to create a situation where you just literally define whether or not that hero is always played in every single match or never played.
We like to take it a little more slowly than I think the players would like us to.
What kind of shampoo do you use? Because your hair always looks great in the developer updates.
[Laughs] Oh, awesome! I don't even know the name of it! It's whatever my wife puts in the shower. I'm so terrible.
Do you have an upper limit for how many heroes you want in the game? At some point balancing is going to become an impossible task, right?
I don't have a number in my head. It's funny because when we first came up with the game concept we had a really huge number in mind. And then we kept shrinking that number and now we're more evaluating things almost like an evolving process. Each hero that comes out makes us evaluate how much time it should take for the next hero to come out. I really do feel that we should not be in a mode where we're shooting to have one hero a month or something like that. MoBAs need to do that because of the type of gameplay they have and the business model. I think we need to take a step back from hero development in Overwatch and really evaluate what it does to the meta--but also there's some other factors.
One of the factors is our time and attention. The more heroes we add, the less attention we're giving to the existing 24 heroes that are already out there. Then also I think there's something that's really valuable in player affinity for a hero. That has to do with how the hero looks, the backstory, their relationships with other heroes in the game, and I feel like the more heroes we add the less we can invest in each hero that already exists.
So, I would like to see hero development not go any faster than it currently is and maybe over time even slow down somewhat. I want each hero to feel like a really special event where you're just so excited, they fit in, and once they're added, it feels like they were always meant to be there. [I don't want] to get into a mode where we're like, "What's the hero of the week" and they start to homogenize with each other or take away from each other.
Can you patch out Genji?
[Laughs] We can! Now the question is, "Should we patch out Genji?" I think we had some problems with Genji when the game was released. He was really challenging for people to deal with. I think Genji has increasingly become easier for people to deal with and we've made some balance changes. We're also seeing Winston become more prevalent in the meta and Winston gives Genji a whole lot of trouble.
So that's a no then?
That's a no [laughs].
Genji here. Genji is with you... forever
Do you find it difficult to reconcile how your very passionate fanbase believes characters should play or the game should play, with your own vision for it? Everyone's an expert these days…
I think the community has really good instincts at this point. I feel like one of the things that we're fortunate to enjoy with Overwatch is a shared vision with the community about how the game should play and what the meta should feel like at any given point. In that regard I actually feel like we're pretty aligned. Usually when they start to boil up about something we're feeling something similar internally.
I do think there are some parts of the community that has unrealistic expectations about how the metagame should work. For example, there's some people that feel like every hero should be picked equally all the time, and I'm just not sure in the day and age of information that we live in, and communal discussions about games and strategies, that's ever a realistic situation. Let's say every single hero was equally balanced against each other, I think there's sort of a groupthink to the community that's going to follow certain trends at different times anyway.
I don't think it's terrible for there sometimes to be situationally picked heroes in certain settings. One of the reasons that we've been very vocal, I almost want to say aggressive about … I don't want to say "forcing" but "highly encouraging" the map pool to always stay large--we haven't reduced the map pool in competitive play--is because the map variety directly influences the hero variety. There are areas like the streets of King's Row where Reaper is suddenly really viable for certain reasons. Or you get to the backlot in Hollywood and now Widowmaker and Pharah are coming into play in ways that they weren't before.
I think that's okay in the balance; if we have enough variance in the maps the heroes will sort of ebb and flow. It's funny because, and I won't mention which hero because it would anger people, but there was a hero that we nerfed recently and fans of that hero are very vocal. They point to the pick percentages in the pro scene, which is a very unrealistic way to look at the entire game because it only represents a very small percentage, and their hero used to be picked 60 percent of the time and now it's down to 40 percent. They were up in arms saying, "Look at that, we're down to 40 percent."
I never said this, but I kind of wanted to hint at, really if everything was equally balanced your hero would be picked less than five percent of the time so, let's not make up these weird rules for ourselves about how balance should work.
How come Symmetra doesn't have to aim but everyone else does? Seems a bit unfair.
That was very deliberate! When we were designing the game we wanted it to be very approachable. And approachability came in a lot of different ways: it's a bright, beautiful world, there are heroes from all walks of life that represent all these different fantasies that we all wanted to be part of, and another one was making sure to have a good mix of tactical and strategic heroes.
All heroes have some amount of strategy and tactics to them but we didn't want the only people who came to Overwatch and have success to be these people that are great at putting crosshairs over something at 50 meters out and hit it every time. We wanted a variety in the gameplay.
As much as Symmetra doesn't need to aim when someone is in close on her, she's about territory control. Usually most players know that if they got in that range of Symmetra, more often than not, it was their fault. You know what her thing is, so stay out of her range. And she has to aim those big, slow moving balls.
I understand that, but I hate her with the fire of a thousand suns.
[Laughs] Yeah, she can be tricky. The worst is when you're Reinhardt and you walk in on the turrets and you're swinging your hammer and yelling at your team, "Can SOMEONE shoot these turrets for me?!"
I'm like Winston in that if I had one food that I had to survive off of for the rest of my life, it'd be peanut butter.
Jeff Kaplan
Does it worry or frustrate you how focused your community is on the next big content drop? It's almost to the point where it distracts from what's available now. Maybe that limits how thoroughly they explore available characters…
I don't get frustrated or worried. I feel very lucky and fortunate that they're so into the game. They have such a passion for it and I've never seen a community with this much passion. I've never seen a community own a game themselves as much as the Overwatch community. The game belongs to them and I've said this before but at this point Blizzard is just custodians of the experience. We just deliver what they want.
It's a lot of pressure knowing how much they want and the rate at which they want it. But it's also really exciting. I spent six and a half years working on World of Warcraft and I loved being engaged with that community, seeing how passionate they were, learning the things they wanted. Then I had a good five years where I was working on internal development on unreleased projects and, you don't realise it at the time since you're working on a live game, thinking about how much pressure it is, wishing you could make the forum go away for a week so you can mentally have a break, but once that's gone, when you're in a period where you don't have an audience to feed off of, it gives you time to reflect on how valuable and how much a part of game making the people who play it really are. I think we're very lucky that we get to riff of them and feed off their energy.
We actually change what we're doing … we'll hear about something they want and we'll change like, "They seem really excited about this direction maybe we'll pull the game this way." I feel lucky.
Does Winston like crunchy or smooth peanut butter?
I think he likes both. I think if left to his own devices it's smooth, but he wouldn't turn down crunchy either.
Does Jeff Kaplan like crunchy or smooth peanut butter?
I like smooth for sure. And I love peanut butter. I'm like Winston in that if I had one food that I had to survive off of for the rest of my life, it'd be peanut butter.
Same. I once purchased 10 kilograms of peanut butter just because it was on discount.
NICE! That's awesome.
Have you thought about introducing a proper story-driven campaign or are you content with the little morsels of narrative you're peppering in?
We've been talking about this topic a lot lately. We've had so much fun doing the animated shorts and we have some cool surprises in store for people in that direction. It's probably one of our favourite things to do. I feel like in some ways we can do better storytelling in those than we could through gameplay.
I'm very excited because we have a new comic coming out very soon. I think it's our best comic to date and it tells more about Overwatch than any of our comics have in the past. I'm very excited for our players to get their hands on that.
One of the most interesting things for us was the Junkenstein event that we made for Halloween. We had never made any player versus environment content. The game is very deliberately designed to be this player versus player experience, but a lot of us on the Overwatch team come from either the StarCraft team or World of Warcraft. The guys who sit in my room love making that kind of content and Junkenstein was a really good experiment for us to go, "What could PvE feel like?" in not only how it played but how we delivered story. We narrated Junkenstein, we used Reinhardt, made a comic about it, the chatter between the four heroes … I think it's something we'd like to experiment with.
For a 6v6 PvP game coming out with a whole single-player campaign is like making a brand new game in and of itself. I'm not sure our players understand the magnitude of development that would go behind that. But certainly it's a fascinating idea.
They say you shouldn't have a favourite son but who is your favourite Shimada brother and why?
Oh, Hanzo for sure! I think Genji is the one on the positive side. He's the one who is a little bit broken and is more fixed. He's found his inner peace. But Hanzo is a very broken individual. I sympathise greatly with him and I also think his gameplay is really fun.
I can't play Genji to save my life. Like, Genji comes up to me and does the combo, deflects, wall climbs, and is out. I play Genji, jump in there, do the deflect, and someone shoots me in the head and it's like, "What are you doing you fool?" But I like playing Hanzo and I can play him okay.
Did you hear the story about the girl who called another kid a "Hanzo Main"?
I did, yes.
Do you endorse calling people a "Hanzo Main" as a way to dunk on them?
Not as a derogatory way. We need to love and respect all mains, including Hanzo mains [Laughs]. It's a funny story, we actually reached out to the girl and her family, we sent them a note. The parents sent back this lovely letter to us and said, "We appreciate it so much that you guys reached out. We've been talking to our daughter about not making fun of somebody for maining a certain hero." I think the whole community learned a little lesson in there.
Respect everyone, even Hanzo
Have you ever considered introducing a pick and ban system, similar to MoBAs like DotA to push people into making more appropriate picks for each match?
We've talked about it. So, there's two types of pick and ban systems, one that relates to maps and one that relates to heroes. I'm not a fan of either. I think they work very well for a MoBA where you don't have hero switching. I think the problem with Overwatch as it pertains to pick and ban systems is that the game was designed to have a certain level of fluidity to it. I think that fluidity would go away [with a pick and ban system].
We've talked about a system where you could pick and ban heroes, where you had to queue as a role to say, "I will play a tank." But there are these interesting times where you might start off a match with two support, two DPS, and two tank, but by the end you have one tank, one support, and four DPS and it was absolutely the right call to make those decisions. I really don't think we want that fluidity to go away.
I have been thinking about--and this is purely brainstorming so we don't have anything in the works for this--how do we, in particular for competitive play, allow groups to form outside of the natural matchmaking, so somebody could say, "Hey, I'm just a support player and I'm going to play support this whole match" and we don't need a pick and ban system to force people into the right role, they can just tell everyone what they do. That would still allow there to be some fluidity where somebody could yell at me, "They're going to take the point, switch to D.Va to fly out there really fast or switch to Tracer to cap." The game wouldn't be preventing that from happening.
Is there any truth to the story that Orisa's origin started with you rolling around on the floor at the Blizzard Christmas party pretending to be Junkrat's ultimate? I believe that was reported by YouTuber DinoFlask.
I think that was [principal designer] Geoff Goodman. The two Jeffs often get confused so I'm almost certain that was Geoff Goodman.
You recently talked about including a Map Editor in the future. Was that always on the cards or was it a response to the community now asking for it?
We've always wanted one. The reason I clarified that is because sometimes the community perception of us and our design philosophies is a little bit skewed. I've seen this comment before like, "Oh Blizzard would never add a map editor because they don't want anybody touching their stuff." That was kind of shocking to me because Warcraft 3 and StarCraft 2 have some of the greatest editors of all time. The whole DotA genre wouldn't exist if it weren't for that. World of Warcraft also had the amazing interface which we supported.
It was more getting a statement out there to say, philosophically, we're totally on board with things like a map editor. The problem is because we're a brand new engine, for us to get our tools in players' hands is literally going to take years. It's not even something I could say like, "Oh that's our top priority now and in the next couple patches you'll see it." It's literally years away, the amount of work it will take to get there someday. But philosophically, the team is super excited to someday get there. But it's not trivial.
Both Zangief and Zarya have wrestled bears, but who would win in a contest between themselves?
Oh Zarya, no doubt.
I agree.
Yeah.
The community worked itself up into a bit of a frenzy around Doomfist but we got Orisa. Will Doomfist have his moment to shine in the future?
I am actually fascinated by Doomfist in the sense that … We know when we talked about Sombra we did some things incorrectly. We got people excited too early and in the wrong ways, and we've tried to express our sincere apologies to the community on how we handled the Sombra situation. But Doomfist we've literally not hyped at all. The community has just decided to get themselves excited for Doomfist.
Obviously, from the very first announcement cinematic, Doomfist was a character in our world. We've learned more about him now with Orisa. But we'll leave it at that for now. The community will continue to ramp itself up over this character though.
Thank you. Have you noticed how you elongate "team"?
Do I really?
Yeah, I've watched that video hundreds of times.
I think about DinoFlask often.
I'm sure DinoFlask would be very happy to know that.
Yeah, well, he's this individual … he and I have spent a lot of time together, but we don't know each other at all. He must look at me as some weird science experiment at this point. He must know quirks about me that my own mother and wife don't know.
Yeah. His Twitter bio is "I make a grown man say funny things."
Yeah. It's fascinating.
What's the deal with your beard? You look so badass when it's grown out but you keep shaving it.
My wife doesn't like it. But I'm here [in London] for a week so I can do whatever I want.
Grow it out mate.
[Laughs]
Who is your favourite member of the Fast and Furious family?
I've never seen a Fast and Furious film.
What?
Yeah. I have not seen a single movie in that series.
[To PR] How have you allowed this to happen?
PR: I haven't seen any either.
WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE?
PR: I don't know how this has happened.
You should watch them because they are both awful and spectacular.
Okay I love movies like that.
Vin Diesel, before he went rogue and broke our hearts
Have you seen Get Out?
Not yet but I'm dying to see it. Aaron Keller, our assistant game director, saw it and he said it was fantastic.
It really is.
It was made by [Jordan] Peele from Key & Peele right?
Yeah! And they're reportedly being lined up for the live-action Akira project.
Wow that's cool. I'm lagging months behind on movies. I watched Rogue One on the flight over here.
Did you like it?
I thought it was fantastic. I want to see it on a big screen again. I was so excited by it.
Do you have any plans to make Loot Boxes great again?
Yes. We have some amazing Loot Box content coming up. I'll just leave it at that.
Do they have any Zarya costumes because she's my girl and for the last few events she's been a bit left out.
I will tell you this, for Zarya in particular the next event won't have anything and I apologise.
Jeff, this is devastating.
BUT! Shortly after that there will an amazing Zarya skin.
So are ARG character reveals completely out of the question now or what?
The ARG was a big experiment for us. What's funny is we had talked about doing an ARG for the announcement of Overwatch itself since we have a lot of people that are passionate about ARGs at Blizzard. When we were starting the ARG to announce the game, I was somebody who wanted to steer away from it because, as a game designer, I was thinking, "I know how hard it is to design a game and a lot of people who aren't game designers think it's easy and want to do it." I was thinking to myself an ARG requires the same level of design expertise that a game would, but we don't have that. It wasn't an area where we were comfortable, so we steered away from it.
With Sombra, because she's a hacker, it was fun to put these hints of things around. But I think the hints got away from us. I don't think we have any plans to do another ARG.
Have you ever thought about making a cat hero? Surely the Internet would love that.
The answer is yes. This is an exclusive, no one has ever heard this before, but when we were first starting to make Overwatch we had to test the boundaries. It was a new IP and we didn't know how far or wide we could go, so Winston was kind of this cornerstone in a lot of ways. It was like, "Hey there's a gorilla and he talks, is that okay? Yeah, that's okay." Then on the other end of the spectrum you've got guys like Soldier 76 who is a soldier guy and they were good bookends. But we had explored much further out from that.
We had done a lot of concepting. We had one hero who was just a hockey player. Literally a hockey player. We later made a Lucio skin for a hockey player. But he was just a hockey player hero. Then there was this one hero that was a huge internal debate on the team because we just loved it so much but it didn't make it. It was this jetpack and it had this cat that laid in it, like a cat does. Then every once in awhile it would paw at the controls. It was a cat in a jetpack.
That was one of those moments that helped define Overwatch. We just went, "Yeah that's probably too far." But yes. We had a cat hero.
That sounds incredible and you should bring it back.
I just can't imagine it from first-person, seeing those little cat paws because--do you have a cat?
Yes I have two cats named Kiki.
Okay. When I'm playing Overwatch the cat is on the desk and walking in front of me or if I have a bottlecap on the desk it has to walk over and knock it off. We just imagined having that and....
My cats have activated my ultimate accidentally multiple times.
[Laughs] Of course. Why not?
Have you thought about introducing context based voice lines or lines that help people coordinate ultimate timings better when they're not on mic?
I think we have an opportunity … when we added the customizable spray wheel and the emotes we talked about letting you do more voice line customisation. But what tends to happen is players ask, "I want this line, this line, this line" and then add them all to the wheel to where we have 36 little pie slices on the wheel. What I think what would be a better system is if we gave you some customisation on those pieces of the pie, then you could unlock all these voice lines and decide as a player what you want to slot in.
We have the system where you hit Z which sends an Ult alert by default, if another player targets the character using that line and hits F it will acknowledge that you know the ultimate is ready. It's a little bit buried in there but that system is kind of there. Our thought was that's how you would coordinate with somebody.
Do you know what Sombra says when she activates her ultimate? The first time we heard it, it sounded like "scandalous uses" and now that's all we hear and shout.
I haven't taken Spanish in about 20 years but I think it's, "apagando las luces," and I think it means something about turning off the lights.
Pretty sure it's "scandalous uses," Jeff.
She had a different ultimate line and it sounded amazing. It was something like, "Here we go into the midnight" and it contrasted with McCree a lot, because he was talking about High Noon.
Are you aware that if you Google your name this is the first picture that shows up?
Source: A miscreant on Google Images
That is awesome.
You should probably do something about that…
What can I do?
If you read So You've been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson he meets people that specialise in burying unwanted search engine results. Might be useful.
Oh really?
Though, to be honest, I think it's a pretty good picture…
People who get to know me know how easy going I am. As somebody who literally grew up on the internet, like I was there the day we all started being gamers on the internet, I think you have to roll with the punches. There's no way I'm going to manipulate my Google Image search results because there's probably someone out there who will manipulate it back. Somebody probably manipulated it to be that in the first place.
Definitely. It's a very specific snapshot from a developer update.
You know when you're in school as a young teenager and you have all the insecurities? This is the kind of thing you have nightmares about. Like, "Oh, what if that picture ends up on the Internet." But I'm old enough now that I'm over it.
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