Author: Game Infliction

Pokemon Go developer Niantic and Capcom have announced Monster Hunter Now, a real-world action RPG mobile game that is set to be released in September 2023 on iOS and Android devices that will allow you and your friends to take down iconic monsters like the Rathalos and Great Jagras on your next walk around the neighborhood.

IGN and other members of the press were able to attend a hands-off presentation of Monster Hunter Now and the team made it very clear that they want to keep the best parts of Monster Hunter intact during the transition to the mobile space. Additionally, Monster Hunter Now is meant to be accessible to newcomers and veterans of the franchise alike.

Some of these veterans and newcomers will be able to test that promise for themselves as Monster Hunter Now’s closed beta will begin on April 25. Players can register for the beta on MonsterHunterNow.com and the team confirmed that those accepted will be able to battle monsters with the Sword and Shield, Great Sword, and Light Bowgun. Now, on to the game itself.

Much like Pokemon GO, Monster Hunter Now will have players encountering monsters as they walk around the real world. However, it differs from Pokemon GO when the battles take place as it becomes an action RPG that is reminiscent of its console counterpart, if a bit simplified. Via taps and flicks, players will be able to use their favorite weapons to take down massive monsters in a stylish and powerful way. Niantic also teased that there will be a story of sorts in Monster Hunter Now and that new and familiar faces will show up along the way.

Players can adventure alone or with up to four friends, and there will be an option to team up with other hunters that are near you that are also playing Monster Hunter Now. Niantic wasn’t ready to get into all the details about how you can play with friends, especially those who may not live near you, but the multiplayer experience is a huge priority for the game.

As for the battles themselves, they will last up to 75 seconds and are aiming to be as fun and chaotic as a traditional Monster Hunter battle is. Parts will be flying off the monsters as you attack them, and the weapons and combat look similar to what fans are used to. Players will also have the choice to battle in vertical or landscape modes.

Rewards from those battles will be resources and monster parts that, in traditional Monster Hunter fashion, will let players create and upgrade gear that they can then take with them to battle to become more powerful and repeat that loop again.

Two other integral parts of Monster Hunter Now are your Palico companion and the Paintball mechanic. The Palico, which fans of the franchise will recognize as the wonderful cat-like creatures, will accompany each player on their adventures and will also be able to utilize the aforementioned Paintball mechanic.

Monster Hunter Now encourages players to get out and walk around their hometowns, by their work, on their travels, and much more. However, things may pop up that will prevent you from finishing a battle or encountering a particular monster. With the Paintball mechanic, you can tag a monster and then finish that battle once you get home or whenever it is more convenient for you.

Furthermore, Palicos will hunt monsters even when you aren’t playing the game and will tag them with Paintballs so you can challenge them when you are home, at work, etc. Alongside this being a very useful feature for not missing monsters, it will also give friends and family more chances to fight together when the time is right.

As for how you find the monsters to fight, there will be Wayspots/landmarks around the game world that will offer players resources when they are found. Monsters will spawn around these, but they will also appear randomly in the wild, which will be helpful for those who live in rural areas or places without a ton of landmarks.

There will also be an option use AR to see these monsters come to life in your town. In a short video shown during the presentation, we saw a player running up to meet his friends in a city and, when the camera panned up, we caught a glimpse of a massive Rathalos hovering above them with the skyline in the background.

We have opened an official Twitter account for Real-world hunting action RPG “Monster Hunter Now” from Niantic and Capcom which announced today!
Service is scheduled to begin in September 2023!

?Apply for the closed beta test here ? #MHNowhttps://t.co/eP8oR2MGPa pic.twitter.com/g8CwYQmVX3

— Monster Hunter Now (@MH_Now_EN) April 18, 2023

As previously mentioned, Monster Hunter Now will be released on iOS and Android devices in September 2023 and will be a free-to-play game with items to purchase at an additional cost. The team wasn’t willing to go into too much detail about the monetization strategy, but it was promised that there will be a “good balance” between the free experience and the one “enhanced” by the purchasing of items.

We also want to remind those interested that the Monster Hunter Now closed beta will begin on April 25 and registration is now open at MonsterHunterNow.com.

Monster Hunter Now has been in the works for about four years and it’s a project that garnered a ton of excitement right from the start. In fact, Ryozo Tsujimoto, a director and executive corporate officer at Capcom and the Monster Hunter series producer, said he can “still remember the first meeting. I immediately replied, ‘Let’s do it!” without a second thought.”

For more, check out all the details and our review of the Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak expansion, which will finally arrive on more platforms on April 28, 2023.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Alien has a long history with shooters, but not so much with RPGs. Obsidian tried to change that in the 2000s with Aliens: Crucible, an early Onyx engine game published by Sega described as “Mass Effect but more terrifying.” It was ultimately shelved with little explanation and subsequently forgotten until this past weekend, when Pentiment director Josh Sawyer talked about some of what he described as the “dysfunction” around the project.

“I got to work on an Aliens RPG for SEGA from 2006-2009. Obsidian didn’t have directors at that time, just leads who were all considered peers. It resulted in a lot of dysfunction when the leads didn’t agree on how to do something,” he explained.

There were a lot of cool ideas in the works, but you don’t ship ideas! The biggest lesson I learned from the experience is that if you don’t have playable levels, you don’t have much of a game (there are some exceptions, of course).

— Josh Sawyer (@jesawyer) April 16, 2023

In the thread that followed, Sawyer said that progress on Crucible was “slow,” and that Obsidian had “a lot of cool ideas in the works, but you don’t ship ideas.” One of those purported ideas, which has been described elsewhere, is that squadmates could get impregnated, whereupon you would have to decide whether to mercy kill them, put them in a sleep chamber and use them sparingly, or simply let them pop.

Ultimately, Sawyer’s biggest takeaway was that if you don’t have playable levels “you don’t have much of a game.” Thus, Obsidian moved on to Alpha Protocol, its secret agent RPG that retains a small but fervent fanbase to this day.

If you want to see some of Obsidian’s ideas in action, though, Sawyer does say there’s an alternative.

“I was happy to play Aliens: Fireteam Elite because the overall setup was similar: small team, 3rd person, with an emphasis on deployables and support actions. The similarities ended there, but it was nice to see the idea could actually be fun in practice. RIP, squad,” Sawyer wrote.

Sawyer also opened up about Aliens: Crucible in an interview for IGN Unfiltered back in 2018, where he talked more about his ideas behind the game while admitting that it was “too little, too late.”

As for Obsidian, the studio is now owned by Xbox, where it’s currently in the midst of developing Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2. Sawyer himself is coming off the success of Pentiment, which won Best Narrative at the 2023 Game Developer Choice Awards.

Kat Bailey is a Senior News Editor at IGN as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

Frank O’Connor is the latest longtime Halo developer to depart the series, with Xbox confirming to Axios in a statement that the longtime franchise director has departed after two decades with the series.

“We thank Frank for his numerous contributions to the Halo franchise and wish him well going forward,” Microsoft said in a statement.

Rumors of O’Connor’s departure began when fans noted a Linkedin update showing that he was no longer with the company. He began as a content manager for Bungie in late 2003, where he wrote the Bungie Weekly Update. He joined Microsoft Studios in 2008, which allowed him to stay with the franchise even after Bungie split.

Microsoft confirms the departure of longtime Halo franchise director Frank O’Connor, who worked on Master Chief’s games for two decades: “We thank Frank for his numerous contributions to the Halo franchise and wish him well going forward.”

— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo) April 17, 2023

He was a familiar figure among Halo fans, appearing in Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn as Beamish the Janitor and co-authoring Halo: Evolutions – Essential Tales of the Halo Universe. He subsequently rose to the role of development director on Halo 5 and Halo Infinite, frequently serving as a spokeperson for the franchise.

His departure follows on the heels of Joseph Staten, who joined Halo Infinite in 2020 in an effort to get the troubled project ready for launch. Staten announced today that he is joining Netflix Games to lead the development of a AAA game.

“I feel like it’s been long enough now to come out and say Star Wars Battlefront III was gonnae [sic] be legit incredible and the fact it got cancelled 2 yards from the finish line is an absolute crime,” former Star Wars Battlefront 3 developer Michael Barclay tweeted over the weekend.

Barclay was referring to Free Radical’s Star Wars Battlefront 3, which was in development until it was canceled in 2008. His statement came in response to a simple question posed at developers: “Alright #gamedev folks, what’s your ‘one that got away?’ It can be an IP you wanted to work on, a studio you wanted to work for, anything of the sort.”

Barclay, who now works as a lead designer at Naughty Dog, shared his own story and added, “Gamers don’t know what they were robbed of.”

I feel like it’s been long enough now to come out and say Star Wars Battlefront III was gonnae be legit incredible and the fact it got cancelled 2 yards from the finish line is an absolute crime. Gamers don’t know what they were robbed of. https://t.co/zZUu8JR3iV

— Michael Barclay (@MotleyGrue) April 16, 2023

Battlefront III’s complicated history.

Barclay’s claim isn’t a new one. Way back in 2012, Free Radical cofounder Steve Ellis also claimed that Star Wars Battlefront 3 was “99 percent done.” This prompted a former LucasArts employee to lash out at the studio, which has since undergone multiple iterations before reopening under Deep Silver in 2021.

“This 99 percent complete stuff is just bullsh*t,” the former employee claimed to GameSpot at the time. “A generous estimate would be 75 percent of a mediocre game.”

They went on to claim that Free Radical continually missed milestones and that the game didn’t work in 2007, but that LucasArts was “desperate” for what was then a next-gen follow-up to Battlefront on Xbox 360 and PS3, not the least because Star Wars Battlefront and its sequel sold extremely well on PS2 and Xbox.

The claims led to a war of words in the press, with Ellis posting a lengthy statement claiming that Battlefront 3 being “75 percent of a mediocre game” was “false” while pointing to leaked footage that he said backed him up. He went on to say that “LucasArts was a company with problems in 2008.” Shortly after Ellis’ comments, LucasArts was shuttered by Disney, which had acquired Star Wars the year before.

IGN reached out to Barclay to see if he had additional context to add, but did not receive a response.

Plenty of footage and even a playable build would emerge in the years that followed, allowing fans to decide for themselves what they were missing. Much of that footage would ultimately be pulled, with Battlefront III ultimately being lost to history.

EA would later reboot the series, though with notable differences from the original LucasArts games, such as how it handled space battles. The original Battlefront games remain beloved fan-favorites for the way that they combined the prequel and original trilogy eras, pitting players against each in large-scale space battles where they could board and attack enemy capital ships. It included an extensive single-player game, which EA’s games would not get until the sequel.

You can still play the original Star Wars Battlefront 2, though it requires some setup to work properly. It was voted the fifth best Star Wars game ever by IGN readers, with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic coming in at number one.

Kat Bailey is a Senior News Editor at IGN as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.