Final Fantasy 7’s opening sequence, known as the Bombing Mission, is one of the most recognizable moments in video game history. Whether you’re a fan of Square Enix’s RPG series or not, you’ll no doubt be familiar with some element of: the exciting music, the sweeping camera movement that pulls viewers into the world of Migar, or Cloud’s little backflip off the train. It’s an iconic moment, which makes seeing it in the upcoming remake an exciting prospect.
Those that have been keeping up on the Final Fantasy 7 Remake news will know that the game will be quite significantly different to the original. Much of it will take place in Midgar, which means players will be seeing more of the city and undertaking a variety of new adventures there. With that in mind, how much has developer Square Enix changed the opening Bombing Mission sequence and the sequence immediately following it? Does it stay true to the original or has it been reworked? You can watch the video above and find out for yourself.
Final Fantasy VII Remake is scheduled to release on PS4 exclusively on April 10. The game’s limited-time exclusivity is expected to last for a year, with releases expected thereafter.
Barret, Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie are joined by hired mercenary Cloud Strife as they make their way to Midgar’s Sector 1 reactor core. Their goal is to rid the planet of corrupt company Shinra’s influence. As they make their way through the reactor they have to fight Security Officers, Sentry Rays, Sweepers, and the dangerous Scorpion Sentinel boss.
In the video you’ll see Cloud and Barret using their various iconic moves including magic such as Thunder, Fire, and Cure, as well as offensive abilities such as Braver, Charge Attack, and more. The new combat system lets you switch between your party members on the fly, but you’ll see how Barret is definitely more effective against enemies such as the Sentry Rays. Final Fantasy VII Remake is set to come out April 10, 2020 on Playstation 4.
Seeing the reimagined opening of Final Fantasy VII Remake for the first time really is something special, if the original is something you’re familiar with. The establishing shots of Midgar, the train, the first couple of battles–there’s definitely an unavoidable nostalgia, no matter how reserved and wary you’re trying to be. I’d certainly been very skeptical about how Remake was going to turn out, and that’s partially on me–I generally avoid watching pre-release coverage of things I know I want to experience myself. But after getting the chance to spend somewhere between three and four hours playing the first two chapters and some mid-game stuff, I’m feeling much better about letting myself be very excited about Remake’s impending release.
You’re likely already aware that Square Enix is blowing out the Final Fantasy VII saga to encompass multiple releases. The first part is set solely in the corporate-owned slums of Midgar, and will extrapolate greatly on the beats of the original. Having started a replay of the PS1 FF7 shortly before I dove into the Remake demo, it’s a little shocking how much more detailed the new game feels. The original Final Fantasy VII was in no way a small or unambitious game, but if I were to imagine the same kind of treatment being given to the rest of VII–well, I hope I live to see it all happen.
A big part of the joy, of course, is simply seeing a more realistic depiction of a Midgar you likely know, and from all angles. There’s a big nostalgia factor, naturally–jumping off the train for the first time is pretty cool. But there’s a lot more about the setting that was never present in the original, and that certainly brings a feeling of curious wonder about something completely new. You can look up and see the plate far above, which physically separates the city’s rich from poor. The streets are populated with people, shopfronts, and ads for hair gel, giving the city a kind of character I never thought about it having.
Similarly, scenes that fly by in a minute in the original are expanded on for almost an hour. We encountered a handful of ‘slow walk’ scenes where the game spends time fostering a particular tone and atmosphere as it forces you to take a closer look at the aftermath of events through the city, listen to the citizens, and delve into Cloud’s fragile psyche. Speaking to Yoshinori Kitase, a producer on Remake and director on the original Final Fantasy VII, he pointed out that this would be the first time fans will see a greener, more unsure and inexperienced Cloud in this kind of realistic detail, and that’s something they paid a lot of attention to–the Cloud we saw in Advent Children and other supplementary Final Fantasy VII material in the years after the original release was far more hardened after the dramatic events of the game.
But the most notable example of expansion I saw in Remake was the entirety of Chapter 2, wherein Cloud, Barrett, and the rest of Avalanche split up, agreeing to rendezvous back at the train. Fans are used to seeing short scenes of Cloud running through the city streets, nonchalantly bumping into a seemingly inconsequential flower girl, and quickly being backed into a corner by Shinra guards before making a daring escape.
In Remake, a lot more focus and attention is given to that seemingly inconsequential flower girl. Cloud converses with her for longer, the two get into a bit of trouble with the guards, and there’s a very curious and unexpected wrinkle complicating things. Kitase mentioned that the development team did some research into scenes fans found particularly memorable from the original game, wanting to make sure they had some extra consideration in Remake. This feels like one of the results, but personally, the expanded flower girl scene was one of the points in the demo where I was left feeling a bit unsure–something I’ll only be able to resolve once I see where it goes in the full game.
Following this scene, Cloud’s originally quick escape from guards is extended out into an exploratory segment where you’re asked to move through the streets and rooftops of Midgar, trying to find your way to the meeting point. It feels primarily like a chance for you to get a better feel for the new tactical real-time combat system with more challenging enemies. The defacto ‘boss’ enemy of this area is a named elite unit called “The Huntsman,” an incredibly defensive shield unit who forces you to get used to dealing positional damage–you either have to distract him long enough to hit him from behind, or do what I do and perfect your parrying and countering skills to stagger him. At this early stage, and in my short time with the game, I was more than happy to spend time exploring every nook and cranny I could, finding out-of-the-way chests with equipment and Materia upgrades for Cloud, and just marvelling at a Midgar I hadn’t seen before.
But my biggest worry comes from wondering about the full game’s pacing, and the ifs and whens of whether roaming around expanded city streets and Mako reactors for the sake of a seamless Midgar will get tedious. These worries crept into my mind a few times during my hours with the game–when I was asked to wait for laser grids to momentarily come down before dashing across, when I had to hunt for keycards three different times before progressing, after climbing up my 20th ladder. I expect some roadblocks and puzzles, and the sequence where Cloud has to pull levers synchronously with Tifa and Barret was nice to see again (with additional unbridled enthusiasm from Barret), but I really hope there isn’t too much busywork placed between major beats.
But the thing that I just couldn’t get enough of, the part of Remake I’m dying to go back to, is the tactical real-time combat system. It’s accessible. It’s complex. It’s flashy, it’s challenging, and best of all, it has a good heft to it, a good feel.
If you’ve been following the reveal, you know have some idea about how it works: There’s a lot of focus on blocking and dodging, regular attacks are mapped to the Square button, and when you’re using melee characters like Tifa or Cloud, individual strikes are linked to discrete button presses. Characters with long-range weapons, like Barret’s gun arm or Aerith’s magic staff, require you to hold down Square for sustained fire. Sustaining attacks will build up segments of your ATB meter, at which point you can spend the segments on abilities and spells (which still require MP).
You can activate spells and abilities in two ways: the first by assigning them to shortcut commands (L1 in tandem with the face buttons), allowing you to trigger them instantaneously, which allows you to seamlessly combo into them from your regular strikes. Played this way, Remake’s combat can feel closer to a character action game, ala Devil May Cry. The second method is to hit a button to slow down time to a crawl, allowing you to more casually peruse a menu in order to weigh up the option available to you, and target them more specifically.
Even given the game’s huge focus on action in combat, I found that when playing some of the mid-game content, at which point your characters have dozens of skills, spells, and items under their belts, the tactical pause option is vital to make the most out of your assault. Slowing down time lets you squeeze out advantages without faltering for a second–taking advantage of elemental weaknesses, piling enough pressure onto enemies to lock them down, and making sure your positioning is optimal. To me, it evokes the same kinds of feelings of playing an intense FTL scenario.
This is especially true in boss fights. Those familiar with FFVII might recall the Air Buster fight, which takes place in Chapter 7 of Remake, where your team of Cloud, Barret, and Tifa are separated by the boss itself. I had to constantly switch between characters to make sure they were mitigating as much damage as possible when they were being targeted (with abilities like Barret’s Steelskin and plenty of heals) while pressing the advantage when they had the opportunity to attack Air Buster from behind. Your party members will behave of their own accord when you’re not directly in control, but they won’t be as effective, and won’t build up their ATB meters as quickly. During regular battles, I found it was usually okay to just stick to my preferred character (Tifa, of course), but making sure you’re optimizing your plan of attack during boss battles, where the dynamic can change dramatically on a dime, is a tense and welcome challenge in Remake’s combat. Summonable creatures (like Ifrit, Shiva, and Leviathan) act like extra party members when called upon, attacking of their own accord for a limited time. Anyone who has ATB meter to spend can use it to trigger one of the summoned creature’s special abilities, and once time is up, the summon will perform their big, cinematic attack before disappearing.
I was pleasantly surprised by how different each character feels to use. Not just because of melee vs. ranged weapon preference and abilities, but also the innate secondary skills each one has. Pressing Triangle with Cloud will switch his sword stance, for instance, giving him access to stronger hits and the ability to counter at the cost of his dodge. For Barret, however, Triangle is a single charged shot that does a huge amount of damage but has a long cooldown. Tifa has a Whirling Uppercut with a short cooldown that becomes a frequent part of her combo toolkit as she gets in close, and Aerith has a ranged ability called Tempest that gets more powerful the longer you hold the button to charge it, at the cost of, well, doing anything else.
The short time I did get to use Aerith in battle was the most divergent experience of the four. The last portion of the game I got to play was the fight with Abzu in the sewers, which takes place in Remake’s 10th chapter. Abzu is ferocious, pouncing all over the arena and unleashing huge area-of-effect attacks. Focusing your efforts as Aerith during this fight felt necessary because of how devastating Abzu can be. Staying far away from danger zones and repositioning when necessary, I spent most of my time laying down buffs, debuffs, and regular heals to avoid having to frantically throw Phoenix Downs around to revive everyone one by one. When things were generally okay, it was a matter of working out how long I could charge my Tempest ability for a big hit without getting interrupted. This supporting role is the kind of action that can really stall the momentum of a fight in a turn-based scenario, but with the constant dangers of Remake’s real-time combat, even the act of keeping everyone alive can be thrilling.
And with all that Remake experience now under my belt, it’s the constant thrill and excitement of combat that makes me happy to charge headlong into any and all battles the game wants to throw at me. I may have come away with some hesitations about how the structure of Remake’s first part might shake out in the full game, but so long as the fights keep coming, I think I’m going to have a buster of a good time.
Have any questions about the Final Fantasy VII Remake content we saw? Leave it in the comments below and we’ll answer what we can. For more coverage, read our interview with Yoshinori Kitase, director of the original Final Fantasy VII and a producer on Remake.
Until Final Fantasy VII Remake was officially announced in 2015, the frenzied fans that had been whipped up by a reimagining of the game’s opening, shown a decade earlier, had basically lost all hope that it was ever going to get off the ground. But developers at Square Enix had been working on it all along. Key members of the original game’s development team, including director/scenario writer Yoshinori Kitase, character designer Tetsuya Nomura, and Kazushige Nojima, also a scenario writer, were trying to get the ball rolling on the project for a long time. But other Final Fantasy projects, as well as the limits of console tech, were always a roadblock in making sure Square Enix had the right team to successfully revive and reinvent one of the most iconic games of all time.
Yoshinori Kitase, now a producer on Final Fantasy VII Remake, told GameSpot that even before the team started production on the original Final Fantasy VII, they strived for the already-popular series to both do more ambitious things and reach a broader audience than before. “When we finished doing Final Fantasy VI and moved to start work on Final Fantasy VII, there was that idea in our heads that we wanted to go outside of Japan for this game,” Kitase reminisced, through a translator. “I don’t think we had the expectation that it was going to be as big as it was in the end (Final Fantasy VII remains the series’ best-performing entry with over 12.3 million units sold) but we did have that passion to make this go out to the world–rather than VI, which was a much more domestic-focused title.”
Paramount to making an impact on a broader audience was taking advantage of Sony’s PlayStation, and considering what that meant for the series’ former, iconic pixel-art look. “There were a lot of debates within the team about the right style to go for when we were making that transition,” Kitase said. “We went around to a lot of international CG events, things like SIGGRAPH, looking at what we could do.”
“Those debates went right up until the start of production. Lots of different opinions–obviously there were people who were saying, ‘Final Fantasy should still evolve as a 2D type of game.’ There were still games that were being done in that classic style, maybe enhanced a little bit, so it was an obvious option. There were also people who were saying: ‘Maybe we should do a hybrid style. We can have the backgrounds done in 3D, and we’ll keep the characters as billboard-style 2D anime characters’ (SaGa Frontier and Grandia were a couple of notable titles that used this style around the same time). But in the end, the group that won out were the ones who said: ‘No. We should go all-in on the game–the characters, the backgrounds, should all be in full 3D’, and that was when the direction was really decided on.”
As a result, Final Fantasy VII was on the cutting edge of console gaming’s tech arms race. At the time, it was one of the games you had to play, if only to marvel at the remarkable FMV cutscenes–at least, that was the case in my schoolyard. Of course, VII hasn’t aged as gracefully as other Final Fantasy titles, and it’s perhaps serendipitous that the team had to hold off for so long. The technological leap is now much higher, and the impact of seeing the reimagined game is more astonishing.
“One common theme between the original and what we’re doing now is that idea of using new technology to make the characters more expressive–that was one of the main reasons why we wanted to move to polygon characters originally. We thought we could make them much more expressive than 2D sprites could be, and that’s pretty much the same now with Final Fantasy VII Remake.” Remake runs on Unreal Engine 4, with the team at Square Enix working with Epic on custom modifications and enhancements. “A lot of the new technology is all geared towards making the characters, facial expressions, much more dynamic and believable, just to be able to depict more emotions.”
Some of the new tech revolves heavily around the use of AI systems–one that produces bespoke death animations for enemies, depending on the condition of their final blows and their environment, as well as another that customises the mouth movements of each character to sync up exactly with the performance of voice actors whether they’re speaking in English, Japanese, or any number of the game’s language tracks.
But Final Fantasy VII Remake isn’t just a graphical overhaul. If you’ve been following the project, you know that the team decided to considerably expand upon the source material, to the point where the full adventure will be split between separate games. The release of the first part, which takes place solely in the initial location of Midgar, is imminent. From what I’ve seen of the first few hours of the game, it greatly meditates on the original beats of the story. Scenes that used to flash by in minutes can take up more than an hour. More time is spent with characters who have become beloved since its release. But as for the other 90% of the saga, that’s something Square Enix isn’t keen on discussing. At this point, it feels like it could even be another couple of decades.
Is this what long-awaiting fans want? Does that even matter? “The fans may be more familiar with the franchise than we are in some ways. They’ve played the game and have been returning to it ever since,” Kitase said. The team “looked on the internet for people’s comments and opinions to find out which particular scenes in the original game were memorable, which ones are the ones that people wanted to see, or which stayed with them.”
“But if we were just to make it a 100%, one-for-one remake of the original game, just follow the story exactly as it was, and not change anything… I think people would like it but it would just be ‘Oh yeah, I remember this. This was great, how nostalgic,’ and that’s all you get.”
“We have to meet people’s expectations, give them what they want to see… But we have to go beyond that and really exceed their expectations and give them new surprises as well. So it was something we had to pay a lot of attention to and we were very careful… it didn’t just stop at ‘Yeah, that was a great game, I remember this.’ We had to go further and provide a new experience.”
Part of the new experience, and part of having Final Fantasy VII once again reach for an even broader audience, came in the radical modernisation of its combat system. And as much as RPG fans still love a great turn-based battle system, it was never really on the cards for Remake. Kitase explains that it’s to do with “the changing tastes of the fanbase of the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole. We’ve got lots of younger gamers now and they like that very instinctive action-game style of control.” There is a whole new generation who has likely never played Final Fantasy VII, and the focus on refining the heavy action is to cater to that new, younger audience who “are familiar with that and expect that.”
But this is all in the service of being able to make sure Final Fantasy VII’s memorable characters and powerful themes–environmentalism, terrorism, life and death, among others–can live on. Thinking about VII’s themes in the world that Remake is releasing in certainly makes them seem more relevant than ever. Climate change and radicalism might immediately come to mind for some, but Kitase was hesitant to draw any correlations or speak about increased emphases in Remake.
“Obviously, it’s still a fantasy world. It’s a fantasy game and the concepts of Mako Energy and the Lifestream are very much fantasy concepts. We aren’t specifically trying to make it a comment on one specific thing or say anything specific about a real-world issue through that, we’re trying to make more timeless and universal themes.”
But all of that isn’t to say that he doesn’t hope audiences don’t engage with it intellectually. “I really want to see people look at the way that those issues are tackled in Final Fantasy VII, and maybe see how they resonate with some of the issues that are important to them. But we can only do that by keeping it as a kind of universal presentation rather than specifically pointing out one thing. The realism of what we’re showing now is much higher and the way that we’re depicting things is very different now. So I really want to see how the messages may be received differently by people these days in this new depiction.”
It surely is a long road until we get to see the end of the Final Fantasy VII Remake project, and Kitase told me that he and the team likely won’t even take a break once the first part is released–“I think we’ll probably get straight into it.” But personally, he isn’t worried about the possibility of having to work on Remake for the rest of his career: “I think it is a very important thing.”
Of all the games Kitase has worked on, Final Fantasy VII still remains his personal favourite, though his very first Squaresoft project, Seiken Densetsu (known as Final Fantasy Adventure in the West), holds a special place too. Despite working on a number of other very highly-regarded titles, like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI, he wouldn’t give me a hint about what other remakes he’d like to consider (“Even if I made a joke about it, it would still go around the world in seconds–it’s too dangerous to say something about that”), and wouldn’t even open up about whether people in the Final Fantasy universe eat chocobos or not (“I think that’s a secret for now”). FFVII is all he’s going to be focused on for the foreseeable future.
“Final Fantasy VII is a game which, if it just stayed as the original, would just be remembered as something from the past and people wouldn’t be as engaged with it. I think in order to be something that continues to be loved and followed by future generations we have to keep updating it as we’re doing now. And in 10 years time, 20 years time, it may need to be done again! So even if this is the only thing that I do in the rest of my career, I won’t be disappointed.”
The playable demo for Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 7 Remake is now available to download from the PlayStation Store. The demo allows you to play the first chapter of the game that includes the iconic Mako Reactor 1 bombing mission and the Guard Scorpion battle (now known as the Scorpion Sentinel).
Downloading the demo not only allows you to dive into the game and experience the FF7 remake over a month before release, but will also bag you a PlayStation theme that will unlock when the game launches.
If you want to check out what’s in the demo before you play, check out the full Mako Reactor 1 in the gameplay video below.
The store description states that the demo encompasses the first chapter of the game, which includes the now memorable Mako Reactor 1 bombing run that introduces Cloud to the Avalanche eco-terrorist group, and many of Final Fantasy VII’s main characters.
It also ends with the Guard Scorpion fight, but it’s not clear yet if this first boss fight will be included in the demo. The description also notes that your progress will not carry over into the final game–which launches on April 10–and that some content may differ from the final product.
Riot Games has officially revealed the title of its tactical shooter formerly known as Project A. Valorant is a 5v5, free-to-play shooter from the developers of League of Legends that is set launch in summer 2020.
Valorant features a cast of characters known as agents who are from real-world cultures and locations, meaning it’s not tied to the lore of its League of Legends series. Set in a near-future Earth, characters will come from a wide range of locations and cultures. Each agent has a set of unique abilities, though the core gameplay is focused on tactical, team-based shooting.
Riot Games executive producer Anna Donlon says that the shooter will “uphold the fundamental values of a competitive tactical shooter: precise shooting, lethal gunplay, and strategic execution.” Some examples Riot gives is how “a player with steady aim and a pistol will always beat an unsteady sniper.” Time-to-kill is also low, meaning headshots are usually instant kills and rifle kills take 3-4 bullets. Recoil is said to be punishing.
Two teams will work together and lock in as an agent for the entire duration of a round-based, attackers vs. defenders match. The team who wins a best-of-24-rounds match wins the game.
Riot says it has high-end performance in mind for Valorant and as such implemented dedicated 128-tick servers for global players, a custom-built netcode for precise hit registration, and proprietary anti-cheat prevention and detection.
Valorant PC Specs
Recommended Specs – 60fps
CPU: Intel i3-4150
GPU: Geforce GT730
High-end Specs – 144+fps
CPU: Intel Core i5-4460 3.2GHz
GPU: GTX 1050 Ti
Minimum Specs – 30fps
CPU: Intel i3-370M
GPU: Intel HD 3000
PC Hardware recommendations:
Windows 7/8/10 64-bit
4GB RAM
1GB VRAM
Valorant is the latest game from Riot, which spent the previous decade focusing primarily on a single game, the MOBA League of Legends. At its 10th anniversary, Riot announced a variety of new projects including the League of Legends card game Legends of Runeterra, a fighting game called Project L, and a mysterious social game called Project F.
Raphael van Lierop, the director of the popular survival game The Long Dark has a bone to pick with Nvidia’s GeForce Now game streaming service. In a post shared on Sunday, Lierop said that the studio had asked Nvidia to take The Long Dark off of their service, saying the graphics card and technology company did not ask for permission to host the game. The matter calls into question what rights a game company may have when a service like Nvidia’s GeForce Now aims to sell access to their product.
“Sorry to those who are disappointed you can no longer play #thelongdark on GeForce Now,” Lierop tweeted. “Nvidia didn’t ask for our permission to put the game on the platform so we asked them to remove it. Please take your complaints to them, not us. Devs should control where their games exist.”
Lierop followed up his statement by saying that “[Nvidia] offered us a free graphics card as an apology, so maybe they’ll offer you the same thing,” though it’s not entirely clear if he meant the comment in jest or was serious.
Nvidia GeForce Now is a game streaming service, much like Google Stadia or Microsoft’s Project xCloud, wherein customers stream games from a central cloud hub over wi-fi or a mobile connection. The trick with GeForce Now is that you can link your account to other services, such as Steam or the Epic Games Store, to prove that you already own a game. Depending on what level of membership you’re paying for (or not paying for), you may also have to wait a few minutes for an available PC rig to open up so you can play. Check our review of Nvidia GeForce Now for more details. There’s no one centralized page listing every game available on GeForce, but those interested in checking out the catalog (which Nvidia says includes “hundreds of games from more than 50 publishers) can use a search bar to see if a game they want pops up.
When pushed on the subject of game ownership and why The Long Dark developers should have any say in the matter (since any GeForce user playing The Long Dark ostensibly already paid for the game), Lierop reiterated that Nvidia had never formally signed any deal with the developer Hinterland Studio.
“Because they sell this service based on access to a library of content,” Lierop said. “We have the choice whether to be in that library or not. Our distribution agreement is with Valve, not with Nvidia.”
After another Twitter user pushed Lierop on the same subject, he responded: “It’s our content. We determine where it lives and where it does not.”
Funnily enough, this isn’t even the first time Nvidia has found itself being asked to remove a game from its service. Activision-Blizzard, the publisher of such massive properties as Overwatch, Diablo, Call of Duty, and Hearthstone, pulled its games from GeForce after the service exited its beta last month. Nvidia blamed the incident on a misunderstanding between the two companies, and says it hopes to work with Activision-Blizzard to bring the games back to its service.
Regardless, the string of incidents raises the question of just what legal rights and ethical guidelines game developers and publishers have when streaming services such as Nvidia GeForce Now hope to bolster their libraries with popular titles.
Business lawyer Richard Hoeg (of Hoeg Law and Virtual Legality) generally agrees with The Long Dark developer’s position, saying that Nvidia should have asked for the consent of the developer.
“I think Nvidia thought that they could convince developers/publishers of the value proposition of participating in “Now” and that just hasn’t coalesced, particularly with big publishers that may have their own streaming solutions in the works,” Hoeg told IGN, adding he’d be “very surprised” if Hinterland Studio somehow gave up distribution rights to their own game.
“As you know, a developer owns the copyright to their game, and they don’t lose the rights associated with that copyright when they license their game to a ‘buyer,'” Hoeg continued. “And games are, in general, licensed and not sold, with terms related to that license applied to the ‘buyer.’ Most of these are known or otherwise non-controversial (‘you won’t reverse engineer this product,’ ‘you won’t use it to post speech we find hateful.’ But some are probably less well known. Most licenses are going to say (some version of) ‘you have the right to play a single copy of the game on a personal computer/system in your control’ and you can’t use your copy for “commercial access, use your copy to run an arcade, etc.’ So in this case, the Long Dark folks (and probably Steam, GoG, Epic above that too) have similar language in their EULAs, and Nvidia probably should have gotten permission.”
IGN has reached out to both Nvidia and Lierop for comment, but did not immediately receive a reply. We’ll update this story accordingly.
No Time To Die is not out in cinemas yet, but it’s already broken a few franchise records. It’s set to be the longest film in Bond history, and it’s also the first to change composers in post-production. Now, the theme song by Billie Eilish has broken a record of its own, having the best first week debut of any song in the series’ history.
According to MI6 HQ, the film’s title track had the biggest first week ever for a Bond song in the UK. The track sold 90,000 copies, which is particularly impressive considering how prolific streaming is in 2020. The track has also been streamed 10.6 million times, and has been the biggest single of the year so far.
The record was previously held by Adele, whose track Skyfall sold 84,000 copies in its first week. It went on to stay in the top 100 sales charts for 32 weeks. It remains to be seen, of course, if No Time To Die can do the same.
The film that carries Billie Eilish’s track will release in cinemas on April 8, 2020. It’s directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, whose previous film was Beasts of No Nation.
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Halo: The Master Chief Collection continues to expand and improve with new updates, including a substantial upgrade to the audio design of one game in the collection. Currently, Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary supports only the updated audio for multiplayer, not the classic sounds. This has bugged some players, and 343 Industries has now confirmed it will add the classic Halo: CE sounds to multiplayer soon.
The option to hear the original Halo: CE sounds is available in the campaign on PC (which is currently in testing) and on Xbox, but only the updated audio for multiplayer is available.
“We are happy to announce that we are now putting the final polish on bringing the classic Halo: CE multiplayer sounds to the Halo: CE PC launch,” 343 said in a blog post. “Initial playtest feedback is that players are happy to have the original audio in place, which brings the overall Halo: CE multiplayer another step closer to the way we all remember it on the original Xbox.”
There will be a toggle option in the settings so players can choose if they want to hear original or updated sounds in multiplayer. This option is currently being tested in the game’s private beta tests, or “flights,” and it will be available at launch when Halo: CEA is ready for release on PC.
343 Industries is working with postproduction company Formosa Group (The Last of Us: Part II, God of War, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild) on bringing back the original sounds for Halo: Combat Evolved. Formosa’s Paul Lipson said in the blog that bringing back the original audio has “required some deep-code work to make it happen.”
“The good news is we already have two identical sound sets for H:CEA, the original and the Anniversary updated content,” Lipson added. “The trick has been to have these two sound trees live side by side, and then create a user-selectable option that loads one or the other on-demand. This is more complicated than it sounds but it is something we are delivering.”
Microsoft is working with Formosa on more than Halo: CE. Formosa is also working on upgrades and improvements for every title in Halo: MCC–Halo: Reach, Halo 2 Anniversary, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo 4.
“It is a large coordinated effort from content experts, coders, producers, and franchise leads to make it happen,” Lipson said. “The code side requires a heavy focus as we advance the experiences to PC; we want fans to feel the same joy as the original release of the games and feel good about the optimization and fidelity gains available to us today. Fixing bugs is never easy, but we are confident on how things should sound and appreciate the feedback and insight from the community of Halo faithful.”
Lipson added that the team has “some exciting things” to announce in the near future.
In addition to the ongoing development of Halo: MCC, developer 343 Industries has a second internal team working on Halo Infinite. The game is a launch title for Xbox Series X, and it will also play on Xbox One and PC. It’s part of Game Pass, so all subscribers get it at no extra cost. Additionally, Microsoft’s new cross-buy program, Smart Delivery, allows people to buy Halo Infinite on a regular Xbox One and get it for Xbox Series X as well.
