Month: March 2018

A Way Out, the new co-op game from the creator of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, is launching next week on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. We caught up with game director Josef Fares recently, who gave us a demo and revealed some new details about the action game. Fares made headlines at the end of 2017 when he said “F**k the Oscars” and gave the middle finger directly to the camera during The Game Awards.

You can check out our complete, 35-minute demo in the video above, but we’ve pulled out some interesting takeaways into the bullet points at the bottom of this post.

A Way Out can only be played in co-op with another human, locally or online. Thankfully, there is a way to pretty much ensure you have someone to play with. At The Game Awards back in December, publisher EA announced a “friends pass free trial” for the game that lets you play the full title if your friend owns it.

Set in the ’70s, A Way Out focuses on the story of two convicts who are on the run after a prison escape. The game launches on March 23, though because it is an EA-published title, EA/Origin Access subscribers will presumably get to play a trial early.

A Way Out Details From Fares

• It will take you 6-8 hours to finish A Way Out
• Developer Hazelight started with just 10 people on the project, before ramping up to around 40 later in development. Only 12 people worked on Brothers.
• Fares wrote the script himself, though he worked with a “script doctor” as well.
• Fares says EA has been very supportive and hands-off. “If EA wants to make an apple greener, I can say no,” Fares said.
• 100 percent of the income from A Way Out will go to developer Hazelight. EA makes nothing, Fares said. EA helps with marketing and support, but apparently gets nothing from sales.
• He acknowledges that EA has its fair share of issues, as all publishers do. “They sh*t and take a pee like everybody else,” Fares said.
• Fares is incredibly passionate about A Way Out and particularly its co-op multiplayer, saying he would turn down $10 million to make a strictly single-player game.
• Fares would never make a game with mictrotransactions.
• There are no plans for a Nintendo Switch edition, at least not yet.

PAX Australia and EB Expo are combining to form one mega-gaming convention. The two events, which are the largest gaming shows in the Southern hemisphere, are joining forces in 2018 for a show that stands to be bigger than any PAX Australia in the show’s five years.

PAX Aus, a community event, has been running for five years now in Melbourne, offering attendees things like hands-on time with upcoming games, developer panels, concerts, eSports tournaments, and more. EB Expo, meanwhile, has a history of being more focused on the commercial side, which makes sense given the event is run by a retailer.

For 2018, however, PAX Aus will include the EB Expo. What this means is that more publishers than ever will attend and the number of panels is increasing. There will be an EB Expo Live Theatre this year, as well as the biggest pop-up EB Games store in Australia.

PAX Aus takes place October 26-28 in Melbourne. More than 180 companies are already confirmed to attend, with “thousands” of games playable on the show flow.

“PAX Aus grows every year, and in 2018, EB Expo is the red mushroom to our Italian plumber,” PAX Aus event manager Jono Whyman said. “We’re incredibly excited to partner with EB Games to level up PAX Aus and continue to put on the biggest, best gaming show for our die-hard fans and new members of the PAX family.”

PAX Aus and EB Expo have always been held in October, just a few weeks apart, which puts some amount of stress on people hoping to attend both events. Not only that, but the events were held in different cities.

There is no word yet about if there will be a price increase for PAX Aus tickets as a result of these changes.

ReedPop, the US-based events company that organises PAX, recently made a big play in the area of video game coverage. It acquired Gamer Network, which owns video game websites such as Eurogamer, GamesIndustry.biz, VG247, and RockPaperShotgun, among others.

The immense popularity of games like PUBG and Fortnite: Battle Royale is not lost on publishing giant Activision Blizzard, it seems. Investment first Oppenheimer recently met with executives from the video game giant and came away feeling positive, due in part to the company reportedly having its eye on the battle royale genre.

Activision management explained to the research firm that it is “keenly aware” of the popularity of the battle royale trend and how other publishers have benefitted from jumping on board, according to Wall Street Journal writer Sarah Needleman (via IGN).

“The investment firm says Activision is keenly aware of how other game publishers have recently benefited from releasing titles [in the] popular ‘battle royale’ genre,” the report said. According to Needleman, Oppenheimer’s report also noted, “Management reminded investors that the company is a faster follower.”

The suggestion here is that Activision might get involved in the battle royale phenomenon somehow, though there is no word on if Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 will have a battle royale mode. Whatever the case, it’s exciting to think about.

It’s no surprise to hear that Activision is keeping an eye on popular video game trends. It would be weird if they weren’t. And for that matter, we would expect all other video game publishers to be keeping tabs on the genre to potentially inform their own future decisions.

Activision isn’t the first major video game publisher to respond to the battle royale phenomenon. Take-Two, which owns Rockstar Games, said it is “really interesting” to see PUBG and Fortnite rise in popularity. But at the same time, Take-Two explained that it wants its studios at Rockstar and 2K to work on original ideas instead of being “derivative” and following a trend.

The success of PUBG and its impact on video games is undeniable. The game has been one of gaming’s biggest success stories of the past year (PUBG launched one year ago this month), and it inspired other popular battle royale games like Fornite and others. It will be interesting to see if other publishers follow along with battle royale modes in their own games, or create new experiences altogether in the battle royale genre.

As for Black Ops 4, the military shooter arrives on October 12 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. That’s about a month earlier than past entries in the series. Activision hasn’t said why it moved the game’s release up, but doing so gets the game a two-week headstart on Red Dead Redemption 2 (October 26).