Author: Game Infliction

This week’s reveal trailer for Mutant Mayhem has us extremely stoked for the next generation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the big screen, but more than anything, it just makes me want a new TMNT game. As much as we loved last summer’s throwback beat-em-up Shredder’s Revenge, this is one pop-culture franchise that desperately needs the triple-A game treatment. And no, adding Shredder to Call of Duty doesn’t count (nor does it make much sense to bring a guy made out of knives to a gunfight.) But you know what really stings? We just got an incredible AAA open-world co-op action game that captured all the fun of TMNT… it just happened to be centered around Batman characters: Gotham knights.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: four masked vigilantes take to the streets and wage war on crime using martial arts skills and gadgets. You’ve got the leader in blue, the tech expert in purple, the surly short-tempered heavy-hitter in red, and of course the youngest member of the team who offers some comic relief. They operate out of a cool hideout in the middle of the city where they train, park their extremely toyetic vehicles, play video games to unwind and receive guidance and/or scoldings from an elderly mentor who drinks a lot of tea. They fight a variety of animal-themed villains, but their biggest threat is a gang of ruthless assassins who operate from the shadows, and which has a high-ranking member whose namesake is something that can cut you.

All the above is true of both Gotham Knights and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Part of the reason I can’t unsee this is that the last big, triple-A non-LEGO, non-cartoony DC game was Injustice 2. In addition to a roster full of characters who appear in Gotham Knights, the Turtles also showed up as DLC. We’ve seen Raph and Leo taking on Harley and Mr. Freeze already, now let me take them bounding across skyscraper rooftops looking for gangs of street punks to beat up.

There are a variety of reasons why Gotham Knights is NOT a TMNT game, no matter how much I might want it to be. First and foremost, WB has full ownership of DC characters, while TMNT is a Nickelodeon property, and Nick is a subsidiary of Paramount Global, which is one of WB’s competitors. WB Discovery CEO David Zaslav has a historic dislike of talking animals that solve mysteries, so that could be a factor too. (Okay, not really, but he did shelve Scoob!: Holiday Haunt and I’m still sore about it.)

Also, WB Interactive has cracked the code to making solid Batman games. The sky-high expectations set by the Arkham series may have ultimately worked against Gotham Knights’ reception, but it’s also what paved the way for it in the first place. Either way, Ninja Turtles hasn’t had the same luck as Batman in the triple-A space, so the higher-ups at Paramount might not think pumping millions of dollars into game development is exactly, uh, paramount.

That said, between the massive success of Shredder’s Revenge and the possibility of Mutant Mayhem exerting some Turtle Power over the box office, maybe it’s just a matter of time before a big huge modern TMNT game comes out of the shadows.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll have to use my imagination. I can pretend that Professor Pyg is Bebop and Man Bat is Wingnut and Clayface is Muckman. And hey, maybe if I’m lucky, somebody will whip up some PC mods that mutate Gotham Knights into a TMNT game. After all, if someone made a mod where you can play through Spider-Man as IGN’s gotham knights review score, anything’s possible. Cowabunga!

Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 2: MEGA, arrives today, bringing with it a host of map changes, new vehicles and traversal mechanics, an Eren Jaeger skin, and a whole lot more.

One of the biggest map changes is the introduction of the neon-lit urban playground of MEGA city. Beyond this seemingly cyberpunk-inspired cityscape, a range of new biomes have also been added, including Steamy Springs, Drift Ridge, Kenjutsu Crossing, and more besides.

Chapter 4 Season 2 also brings new traversal mechanics to the game. Players will be able to zip around MEGA city with the help of the omni-directional mobility gear (ODM) ripped straight from the anime Attack on Titan, which is not so coincidentally ramping up to an epic endgame that has been 10 years in the making.

Incoming… #FortniteMEGA pic.twitter.com/n8QBNv2Pcg

— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) March 10, 2023

Beyond that, players will be able to jump on grind rails to get around quickly, or make use of the two-person Rogue bike or the Nitro Drifter four-seater sports car.

Season 2 also comes with a fresh Battle Pass, the purchase of which will immediately unlock an outfit for the “fine-tailored Renzo the Destroyer”, while the “streetwear savant” Thunder, and “The elegantly casual Highwire” will also be available with a Battle Pass purchase. Later on, players will also be able to gain access to the Eren Jaeger skin.

New Reality Augments are also being added in Chapter 4 Season 2, seven of which will be available immediately, including the Munitions Slide, Shotgun Recycle, and the Dignified Finish.

Check out the official Fortnite blog for a full list of the updates coming to Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 2.

A few weeks ago, Devin Reimer was doing a bunch of game testing at VR developer Owlchemy Labs, when one of the developers asked him, in VR, if he would like a donut. He said he did. But instead of reaching out and taking it with his hand, the developer passed Reimer the donut and put it in his mouth. His character ate it.

It’s a simple gesture, one that any of us could do in the real world any time there are donuts around. But in VR, this sort of combination of simplicity and playfulness has been the successful brand of Owlchemy Labs for over 12 years. And it’s a legacy Reimer is deeply proud of as he steps down from the post of “CEOwl” to move into philanthropic work using climate tech to fight the ongoing global climate crisis, leaving his colleague Andrew Eiche as the new “CEOwl” in his stead.

Speaking to me at DICE, the two are ecstatic about the leaps and bounds Owlchemy and VR as a whole have been able to make over the years. Hand tracking technology, for instance, is progressing well, and is a major staple of Owlchemy’s plans for multiplayer play in its upcoming new, untitled VR game. Specifically, they tell me, they want to work on multiplayer play that’s collaborative, not competitive, because they believe it just works that much better in the VR space specifically.

“VR multiplayer in the current state, which is totally great and fine, is a lot like, I lay on my floor and shoot you with a big sniper rifle, or I’m flying around an arena throwing the ball,” Eiche explains. “But people haven’t conceptualized: we’re playing a duet on the piano, the equivalent to that, or we’re writing together on a whiteboard or we’re sculpting together. And we are experimenting with those things.”

Affording Chaos

But with experimentation comes a whole host of technical challenges. The physical space has to be believable not just with one person running around in it and interacting with objects, but multiple. Eiche calls it a “technical nightmare, but worth solving.”

“The things that make console games great are not the things that make VR games great,” he continues. “VR games just tend to work best when you get sand boxing and you get explorative as a core feature and not explorative in the ‘going through a Zelda world’ exploration. But explorative as in, I’m messing with the environment.”

Which is where hand tracking comes in. Eiche tells me that hand tracking is great technology for exploring interactions with worlds that controllers can’t accomplish. A controller can give you a button to pick up an object, and maybe do a single interaction with it, then get rid of it. But what a controller can’t do is what Eiche calls “affordances,” or secondary interactions. Extra stuff that a person might want to do with an object in a world that might be extraneous or even silly. Like clicking a pen.

“Spraying a spray bottle, squeezing a sponge, those are all things that controllers don’t do well because they’re so binary in their state,” he says. “Even with analog controls, it never feels right. But you can do a soft pickup with hand tracking and then squeeze. Eggs were the best. Because you pick up an egg. And then you’re like, ‘Ah, an egg.’ And you squeeze as hard as you can and it crushes and you’re like, ‘Yeah, I did that.’

“We used to say the water bottle on the table is the worst. If you have a water bottle on the table and you reach through it, that disappoints people. So then you pick it up and the next thing is, I should be able to uncap it and then I should be able to drink it. I should be able to pour it. I should be able to…affordances is what we talk about a lot.”

The pair tells me when they playtest, the only time they speak to the playtester is during those moments when the tester tries to do something with an object, nothing happens, and they momentarily look dismayed. Eiche will then ask them what they expected to happen in that moment, and write it down. Often, these are affordances they decide to add later.

But affordances also seem like an infinite rabbit hole of adding features, which seems like it could lead to scope creep quite easily. Eiche says that the team is quite adventuring internally, often supporting developers who preface sentences with “Okay, this is a really bad idea, but…” in whatever harebrained ideas they want to try out. But Eiche also keeps a pretty strict philosophy on cutting content.

“Once you’ve conceptualized the cut, so once you’ve thought about it and you’re like, ‘I think that if we had to cut this we could,’ it’s now your moral obligation to do that cut. Because once you’ve conceptualized it, you’ve already solved the hardest problem. So your game will be better if you just see that through…So developers are a little bit more gun shy to come up to me and be like, ‘I’ve thought of this cut.’ Because I’ll immediately be like, ‘Yes, do it now. Go cut.’ But I’ve never encountered a situation where somebody hasn’t walked through the steps and the game has not been better on the other side…We throw 90% of stuff away. And it’s just, that’s the nature of it.”

Hand tracking isn’t the only other VR tech that Eiche and Reimer are excited about. Face tracking is another big one, because of the level of emotional depth they hope it will allow players to express in virtual spaces, especially cooperatively. And Reimer was thrilled that Sony committed to putting a rumble in the head of its PSVR2 headset, in no small part due to a very specific interaction in Job Simulator.

“In the kitchen there’s a blender and if you turn on the blender and then you stick your face in it down to the blades, there’s haptics in the headsets and the headsets like this,” he holds his hands up to his head and vibrates for a moment. “And it cracks me up so much.”

Eiche adds: “Sony was the only group crazy enough to do it because every time we’d ask another headset manufacturer, they’re like, ‘Are you kidding me? We have trouble enough getting it on the head. Right? We’re not going to shake their face.’”

The Wrong MetaVRse

One technological concept that they’re a little less high on is the metaverse. Reimer likes the word, but says it’s been ruined.

“A lot of people think of the Metaverse as a space where we dump 10,000 people into the same location and they’re doing stuff together,” he says. “And I don’t think that’s going to work.”

Eiche chimes in: “Once a year we go to GDC I’m like, ‘Wow, this is what 10,000 people looks like. And then we’re like, I got to get the fuck out of here.”

Reimer notes that even in a space like a big conference, you don’t hang out with all 10,000 people. You find small groups of friends and spend time with them. That’s closer to what he thinks a “metaverse” might end up being successful at.

“I think they’re always solving the wrong problem,” Eiche continues. “You’re solving the tech problem. And it’s a content problem. And I read a tweet that I just love, which is, ‘It’s easier to create a pen and paper than it is to write Ulysses.’ And over and over again, each metaverse creates a pen and paper…So every time somebody talks about it and they’re like, ‘We’ll have so many users generate this content.’ It’s like you’re making the pen and paper again and hoping that some genius writer shows up and creates the world that you wanted in there. And I mean, Roblox existed for, what, 15 years before it became popular? Anyone thinking about embarking in the Metaverse should look at that and go, holy shit, we have a content problem, not a tech problem.”

Eiche does believe that VR is a likely component of a metaverse idea, and in fact is already a part of it, because it’s already part of an online society. But he doesn’t want VR to be “put in a box.”

“VR can do a lot more than just this thing that you’re trying to shove it into because you read a lot of Neil Stephenson and you think it’s super cool. And it is super cool…But those worlds were also dystopias, right? Ready Player One, they lived in stacks of trailers and everybody went to the Oasis to hide from reality. And then you see people get on stage, they go, we’re building the oasis. And it’s like, are you building both sides of it? Because I don’t like that.”

As Reimer departs, he’s happy with what he’s built and the space he’s helped carve out for Owlchemy in the VR market, especially given that they started at a time when many questioned if VR was about to die for good. Now, there’s no question VR is here to stay, and it’s on Eiche to think about Owlchemy’s place in defining its future. He wants to get the VR industry to move toward the vision Owlchemy has of VR spaces as instinctive, inventive playgrounds that aren’t dependent on current ideas of what a video game should be.

Eiche explains that when games are dependent on controllers, they tend to gravitate toward specific kinds of verbs in their gameplay: shoot, throw, things that are easily mapped to buttons. But with VR, you can bypass all that and conceivably remove most limitations from what a person could do in a virtual space. Why, then, would the VR industry need to keep making video games like the console industry? Why spend investment money on trying to translate another AAA shooter into VR when there are so many other possibilities?

“I think it would be a failure of VR if Job Simulator is still [one of the top VR games] in five years,” Eiche says. “It’s like Wii Sports, right? You need to get past that. We need the industry to move on. Financially we’d love it if we’re in the top 10 forever. But is that healthy for the industry?”

Reimer adds: “Any individual studio, including Owlchemy, is only successful if other studios are also making awesome stuff.”

Rebekah Valentine is a reporter at IGN.