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Righto, Diablo 4 season 8 is starting next week, and today Blizzard have dropped a whole bunch of details on it ahead of its release on April 29th, so let’s see what they are! First up, there’s that Belial guy who the season is named after. He’s back, but his “motive is unknown”, and you’ll eventually be able to face off against him in a new quest which introduces a couple of new NPCs. That’s all well and good, but the big thing this season is its new main mechanic, boss powers.
The closed alpha for Marathon is soon due to roll out to players who signed up, meaning Bungie’s colourful futuristic servers are warming up. Sadly, we weren’t invited – the alpha is only open to North Americans. But, aha, something went awry today and the game became available to play early for those on Xbox. And one quick-witted player streamed a full hour of the game before the servers clamped shut once again.
At some point in their development of the most recent trilogy, someone at Id Software apparently decided that the most interesting thing about their FPS was the character of the Doom Slayer himself – an odd though not entirely disastrous decision that I’d argue is mostly responsible for the design shape of Doom Eternal. I’m a big fan, even despite this misplaced fascination with its unnecessarily fleshed out gun-numpad-with-legs. I’m hoping to be a fan of Doom: The Dark Ages too, but based on the latest trailer, I’m still trying to tell whether they’ve scaled the Slayer lore back or are still banking on me being enraptured to learn the millenia-long backstory to why I’m yanking a Cacodemon’s eyeball out like clogged hair from shower drain.
Ah, well thank heck for that. I thought I’d spent my weekend hunched over a screen in a goblinesque sweat-trance. No! Says Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 voice actor Andy Serkis: I was simply partaking in some vital culture; a veritable Wildean sophisticate. Film industry folks thought games were “not an art form in any stretch,” Serkis told Game Watcher, “and gradually it’s taken over the film industry, which could not exist without it.” Take that, Roger Ebert’s dead wrong dead horse of a dead body.
The maker of cryptic block-seeding puzzler Starseed Pilgrim has announced a new game in which you are invited to do the unspeakable and “kill gameplay”. The End Of Gameplay will be an exploratory 2D platformer according to the tags on its Steam page but anyone who has played the work of creator Droqen might predict those labels to prove looser than a toddler’s shoelace. Enjoyers of obscure and poetic wanderings in minimalist spaces will probably be happy with the trailer below.
Everything is expensive. Everything! Bills, food, video games, you name it. I mean, £75 for a game where you drive around as an Italian plumber? Not entirely convinced by this one, Mr. Bowser. I could get into the weeds of why all of this is happening (none of it for being particularly good reasons), but I won’t because I bring word of something actually getting less expensive. Shock horror, I know, and yet here are Rockfish Games announcing that Everspace 2’s upcoming Wrath of the Ancients DLC will be a bit cheaper when it launches.
I always find it a bit odd when people make comparisons like “new game is the next game you really love” because you’re most likely setting yourself up for some kind of disappointment. Atomfall was the most recent game to fall victim to such a framing, with many dubbing it as British Fallout, which it didn’t end up being, nor was it likely intended to be. Thus, alongside some other issues, it’s had a general reception of “yeah, it’s not bad”, which in a world of sequels upon sequels isn’t always the response a developer might want. Still, a sequel is still clearly on developer Rebellion’s mind.
Look, here’s the thing. I’m no narc, but when it comes to online games, you probably shouldn’t cheat. Do what you want in single-player games! But in the multiplayer space you’re there to have a nice time with everybody, you know? And as it turns out in the case of Monster Hunter Wilds, things can end pretty badly for you (I promise this isn’t a Mafia-style threat). The official Monster Hunter Twitter account shared a post yesterday announcing that Capcom have “confirmed the unauthorized modification of game data in Monster Hunter Wilds for High Rank environment Investigations, Field Surveys, and more.”
It’s Star Wars Celebration right now, which as I gather is about celebrating giant balls of gas fighting one another. Sorry, I’m being told that it’s actually about some multimedia franchise that has so much going on it’s impossible to keep track of? Doesn’t sound right to me, but I’ll have to trust it. Arguably the biggest Star Warsy game announcement of the weekend is the first trailer for the Star Wars meets XCOM game Star Wars Zero Company, but it wasn’t the only one. Turns out last year’s Star Wars Outlaws‘ second story pack got a reveal too, and a release date to boot.
We’ve all known it’s coming for a long while now, three years in fact, but Star Wars Zero Company got a proper reveal today. In case you aren’t sure which one this was meant to be, it’s the strategy one from Respawn and Bit Reactor, led by former XCOM devs. For the most part the announcement trailer is just a CGI cutscene, you’ve been round this rodeo before, you know how these things go. Though, it does end with a smidge of gameplay and yeah, it really does just look like Star Wars by way of XCOM, which is likely to be an instant winner.
