Video game companies are rallying together to try to save the planet. The United Nations Environment Program has announced a new “Playing for the Planet Alliance,” which sees 21 major game companies–including Sony and Microsoft–work together to share best practices for becoming more environmentally friendly. The companies are also quickly putting their words into action, as Sony’s PlayStation 5 will be more environmentally friendly as part of the initiative, while Microsoft is launching a pilot program to make 825,000 carbon neutral Xbox consoles.
In total, the efforts undertaken by the 21 game companies is estimated to result in a “30 million ton reduction of CO2 emissions by 2030.” Additionally, “millions” of trees will be planted, while game companies will enact practices to do better in the areas of “energy management, packaging, and device recycling.” A press release from the UN also mentions how some future games will be designed specifically with new “green nudges.” It’s unclear what this means, however.
The participating companies and platforms include Sony, Microsoft, Google Stadia, Rovio, Supercell, Sybo, Ubisoft, and Wildworks. Nintendo is the only major platform-holder that is missing.
Nintendo does, however, already operate an Environment Committee at the company’s headquarters in Japan, while each of its overseas subsidiaries have their own committees that look into environmental impact in their regions.
“The video games industry has the ability to engage, inspire and captivate the imaginations of billions of people across the world. This makes them a hugely important partner in addressing the climate emergency,” United Nations Environment Program executive director Inger Andersen said in a statement. “We are encouraged by the commitment of these gaming companies, which shows recognition that we all must play our role in the global effort to lower carbon emissions and effect real change towards sustainability.”
As for the carbon neutral Xbox, Microsoft says it will produce 825,000 of the consoles, though it’s unclear what version of the system this might be. Whatever the case, these will be the “first gaming consoles to be carbon neutral.” This is only a test program, Microsoft said, but the company is also looking to see “what we can do to further reduce and neutralize carbon across devices in the future.”
Microsoft’s business operations have been carbon neutral since 2012, so the new effort on a carbon neutral Xbox is an extension of that program.
The United Nations Environment Program said in its statement that it is possible for educational games to reach the masses, even if it hasn’t happened yet. In response to this, the UN said some of its Alliance members will host “design-jams” where developers will explore ideas to make games that are both fun and educational regarding environmental impact.
Here is what some of the member companies will do to help save the planet:
Sony — The PS5 will have a “low power” suspend mode, which is one part of Sony’s plan to have more energy effience technology overall. Sony will also “assess and report” their carbon footprint.
Microsoft — The company will make 825,000 Xbox consoles that are carbon neutral as part of a pilot program. These will be the first game consoles in history to have no carbon impact on the earth. Additionally, Microsoft is releasing a “Built the Better World” program in Minecraft to help people learn more about what they can do to help the cause.
Google Stadia — There will be a Sustainable Game Development guide for developers to help them implement “green nudges” into the gameplay; but again, it’s unclear what this means.
Supercell (Clash of Clans) — Will work on carbon impact initiatives to help offset the carbon impact of players charging their mobile devices.
Wild Works (Animal Jam) — The studio will “integrate restoration elements” in their games. They will also plant trees around world.
Green Man Gaming — Will also plant trees.
Ubisoft — The company will launch in-game “green themes” in unspecified titles, and will also look to source materials from “eco-friendly” factories.
Sports Interactive (Football Manager) — Will starting using a recycling alternative for future Football Manager games that will eliminate 20 tons of plastic packaging.
Creative Mobile — Their game ZooCraft will transition to becoming a “conservation-focused game”
Reliance Games (Little Singham) — The studio will offer in-game events across India.
iDreamSky — The studio will put “green nudges” in their games.
E-Line Media (Never Alone), Strange Loop (Eco), and Internet of Elephants (Safari Central) — The companies will “share their expertise of making high impact environmentally oriented games into the Alliance.”
Twitch — The company says it will use their streaming service to “spread this message [about climate change] to the global gaming community.”
Niantic (Pokemon Go) — Will “engage their community to act around sustainability issues.”
Full list of Playing for the Planet Alliance members:
The Joker may be heading to theaters soon, but The Batman isn’t too far behind. While filming on the movie from War for the Planet of the Apes director Matt Reeves doesn’t start for some time, casting is underway. It’s already been reported that Westworld star Jeffrey Wright is in talks to play Commissioner James Gordon in the film, which will see Robert Pattinson star as Batman, and now another interesting name is being touted as a potential cast addition.
Multiple outlets, including The Hollywood Reporter, Collider, and Deadline, are reporting that Jonah Hill is in talks to join the film as a villain. What’s less clear is who that villain is. According to Collider, the Maniac star is looking to play The Riddler. However, THR claims that no character has actually been chosen for Hill yet, with Riddler and The Penguin being the two possibilities.
THR’s report cites sources that say negotiations are at an early stage between Hill and Warner Bros., with the two sides still undecided on which role he would take. It’s noted that the film is set to feature “many” of the villains Batman fans recognize.
If he does sign on, The Batman will mark the first time Hill has appeared in a comic book movie. He does have some experience with the DC Universe, though. He voiced Green Lantern in The Lego Movie, The Lego Batman Movie, and The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part.
The Batman is currently scheduled to hit theaters on June 25, 2021. Before then, DC has a few movies up its sleeve. The Joker arrives on October 4, with Birds of Prey arrives on February 7 of next year. Wonder Woman 1984 is out on June 5, 2020.
Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne has found himself a brand-new partner in the Gotham City Police Department in Jeffery Wright (Westworld, Marvel’s What If…?), who is currently in talks to play Commissioner Jim Gordon according to THR. Wright is the first confirmed citizen of The Batman’s Gotham City, though THR has reported that the casting process for a “who’s who” of Batman villains and rogues is underway.
Commissioner Gordon has served as a staple of Batman’s war on crime from the very beginning as one of Bruce Wayne’s most important points of contact within the GCPD and the sole person responsible for the activation of the Bat-Signal.
Very little is known about The Batman aside from a few details shared by writer/director Matt Reeves, who called the film “a point of view-driven, noir Batman tale,” that will focus on Batman in his role as a detective rather than an action hero. Also, it will not cross over with the upcoming Joker solo film, according to Joker director Todd Philips–so don’t expect Wright to be going head to head with Joaquin Phoenix any time soon.
Up a short flight of stairs and down an alleyway from the initial hub of the first major area in The Surge 2 is a door that can only be opened from the other side. Roughly a dozen hours later you will find yourself standing on the other side of this door before opening it and returning to the very place in which you began, keenly aware of how far you’ve progressed while not really traveling anywhere at all.
Yes, The Surge 2 is that kind of game: an action RPG with a looping, labyrinthine structure and a heavy debt owed to Dark Souls. It’s a hard game in the sense that it demands patience and attention to detail, but it’s not especially punishing. Sure, when you die or rest at a medbay (read: bonfire) all the enemies respawn and many of them can kill you in a couple of hits. And sure, you have to make it back to where you died to recover your tech scrap (read: souls). But as with the Souls series and its ilk, this isn’t really a game about clearing an area and leveling up; it’s about learning through repetition and deepening your understanding of the game.
On a purely mechanical level, the robust combat engine, intricate level design and substantive gear, and crafting systems all leave The Surge 2 far from embarrassed by the From Software comparison. Yet where The Surge 2’s blushes are not spared is in giving you a reason to care about anything you’re doing. Lackluster world-building, forgettable characters and cringeworthy dialogue all conspire against persuading you this is a world worth saving.
It begins with a plane crash. On board was some sort of nanotechnology that triggers an environmental disaster requiring a city-wide quarantine and leaving those infected to wander the streets with a permanently hostile demeanor. You were also on the plane, yet somehow survived the crash and, at the start of the game, wake up in the medical wing of the Jericho City Police Department. Soon you’re having sporadic visions of a young girl, the granddaughter of the CEO of nanotech firm CREO Industries, who you’re sure was also on the plane and now appears to have been kidnapped by a mysterious security force.
There’s not a great deal to the story and what little there is quickly reduces to stale sci-fi musings about the relationship between humans and machines and all sorts of hackneyed military-industrial complex pot-boiling. Your pursuit of the elusive young girl is essentially the pretext for exploring the multi-faceted and interconnected districts of Jericho City and whacking nearly all of its inhabitants in the face.
Fighting in The Surge 2 feels strategic and skillful. There’s the element of stamina management you’d expect–you’ve got to understand when you can commit and when you need to pull back and recover. There’s the ability to manage multiple enemies when any one of them alone is dangerous enough to be life-threatening if you’re not careful. And there’s the necessity of learning to read enemy attack patterns–one may be quick and aggressive, while another is slower and turtles behind a shield, and a third may hang back and takes pot shots.
Combat is almost exclusively focused on melee attacks. There are dozens of weapons to be wielded in one hand or two and each can be deployed in heavy and light attacks as well as combos that alternate between the two. Movesets are shared across a weapon class but various stats–such as base damage, stamina consumption or additional damage types–serve to differentiate unique weapons within the same class. All spears, for example, have the same long reach and forward thrusting attacks, but this one hits slightly quicker for less damage while that one consumes more stamina per attack but delivers bonus electrical damage every hit.
Smartly, no weapons are simply outright better than the others, meaning your choice of armament comes down to a combination of what you’ve managed to find, which particular mix of moveset and stats suit your preferred playstyle, and to a lesser extent the nature of the obstacle you’re trying to overcome. Some weapons are better suited to certain situations, but ultimately it comes down to how you want to approach combat. Weapons taken from the one-handed (think futuristic longswords) and twin-rigged (think futuristic knuckle-dusters) classes hit with speed and will let you get the drop on an enemy then deliver a swift combo. Hammers and anything from the heavy-duty class will instead take longer to wind up but when they hit they hit hard and can easily stagger an opponent.
I enjoyed the flexibility of the double-duty class, a weapon type that can transform between slow, heavy hits and a quick flurry of blows. And for situations that warranted a different tactic I switched to a staff for the longer reach of its whirlwind attack and some added nano damage. There’s a huge amount of variety here and, after briefly testing out each new weapon I found during my initial playthrough, I’m looking forward to exploring different weapon loadouts in future playthroughs.
That’s mostly because fighting in The Surge 2 feels really good. Aided by the meaty impact of the sound effects and the responsiveness of the character animations, you can feel the weight of each attack in a manner that never fails to satisfy. Successfully deflecting an attack rewards you with wonderfully gratifying “whomp!” sound, a brief freeze-frame and slow-motion interlude as the enemy is staggered and you’re given the opening to launch a critical strike. Better, perhaps, are the cinematic slow-mos seen when you are able to sever the limb of your opponent, with your character drawing from an impressively wide range of stylish deathblow animations that are solely interested in making you look like the most effortless badass in the post-apocalypse. Be warned, however: they are not for the squeamish (and, fortunately, there’s an option to disable these scenes to reduce the gore factor.)
But it gets even more complex. When locked on to an enemy you are able to target individual limbs, switching between the head, body, arms, and legs with a flick of the right analogue stick. You want to do this for two reasons. One, some limbs may be unarmoured, thus targeting an exposed left arm will let you do more damage and hasten the kill. Two, if you do enough damage to a particular limb you’ll get the opportunity to chop it off and, in a curious application of game logic, claim it as a material for crafting. Once you’ve beheaded an enemy enough times you’ll have the materials necessary to craft a new piece of headgear or upgrade your existing one. The tantalizing risk/reward here is obvious: do you go for the weak point or prolong the fight in order to get that vital crafting component? Boss fights double down on this element, with some of them forcing you to hack off multiple limbs to bring it down while others drop special boss weapons if you target the relevant limb during the fight.
Furthering the complexity, you can also block attacks (assuming you have sufficient stamina) by holding down L1/LB, but to deflect an attack you’ve got to block and flick the right stick in the direction of the incoming blow at the precise moment; mis-time your attempt and you’re going to take the hit. It’s not just another great risk/reward setup, it also reveals one of the clever ways The Surge 2 handles its difficulty. While there aren’t selectable difficulty levels per se, you can equip various implants that boost your character in certain ways, one of which provides a UI indicator letting you know from which direction the next attack is incoming. So if you want to adopt a playstyle around deflecting attacks and you’re not yet familiar with reading enemy attack animations, you can equip this implant and receive a very useful visual aid.
It’s a really smart system that extends into other areas, too. Implants consume core power, a character stat that increases as you level up, and typically the more useful an implant the more power it consumes. Armour also draws power from the same source, and–yep, you guessed it–the better the defensive stats, the more power it draws. You never have enough core power to simply equip your best armour set and all your favorite implants, so this is where you have to make tough choices about what type of character you’re going to be. There were plenty of periods, especially in the early to mid-game, where I had to leave some armour and implant slots empty because I simply didn’t have the power available to fill them. It’s in these situations, when you’re having to sacrifice useful tools and really commit to a playstyle, that The Surge 2 shines as an RPG.
It also shines in its level design–at least it does so in a somewhat cold, theoretical fashion. Like Dark Souls, The Surge 2 trades heavily on a Metroidvania structure that sees you traversing its levels in a kind of circular fashion, pressing forward until you find yourself back where you started only now you’ve unlocked a shortcut that lets you press further forward. Later, you will return to many of the previously visited locations and explore them anew, having acquired certain key items that allow you to access areas previously inaccessible.
There’s nothing especially novel about that structure. The Surge 2 is simply an extremely accomplished version of it. The areas you explore are just so tightly designed, so compact and yet simultaneously sprawling and dense. There’s almost a honeycomb quality to the level design, this vast network of winding tunnels existing almost on top of each other, branching and converging in surprising ways. No space is wasted.
It’s just a shame few of the locations are memorable for reasons other than how they connect to other locations. There’s a midgame detour to a rather scenic wooded parkland, the odd impressive future city skyline vista, and the constant looming presence of the giant metal wall that was hastily erected after the nano-disaster struck. But in between everything is basically the same handful of debris-strewn streets, toxic tunnels and partially collapsed buildings–and it’s all so boringly brown and grey. More than a mere aesthetic complaint, it actually makes it difficult to find your bearings at times. I found myself getting lost and turned around on quite a few occasions thanks to the unremarkable nature of much of the scenery.
Worse, the characters you meet along the way are equally soulless, if not more so. Conversations with major NPCs are written as if they’re throwaway sidequests, eschewing any sense of character development in favor of laboured exposition. The actual sidequests, of course, fare no better–to their advantage at least they’re quick and to the point, even if they barely resolve and rarely offer a reward worth the effort.
Story and sidequests aside, however, The Surge 2 is absolutely worth the effort when the combat is taken in isolation. Not only does it pack a punch, but it also channels plenty of depth in its limb targeting and deflection systems, and is ably supported by a genuinely varied collection of weapons and potential character builds.
This is a mostly spoiler-free review of Fox’s Prodigal Son. We won’t be reviewing every episode weekly, but let us know what you think of the series and whether you plan to keep watching!
From creators Chris Fedak (Chuck, Deception) and Sam Sklaver (Deception, Blunt Talk) comes a new creepy series marked by fun performances from Michael Sheen and The Walking Dead’s Tom Payne. Sheen’s an incarcerated serial killer, who was arrested in the late ’90s for killing 23 people, while Payne plays the killer’s grown son – an erratic, sleepless criminal profiler. Together, like Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter, they crack cases while sifting through complex emotions. Though here, in Prodigal Son, the feelings are familial.
Even with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare releasing next month, Activision continues to support last year’s game, Black Ops 4, with new updates and more content. The newest wave of new content is out now in the form of the Operation Dark Divide update–and it’s a big one.
For the battle royale mode, Blackout, the update restores the map to its normal look from the previous refresh that sets the stage for a new mode. The new mode is Heavy Metal Heroes, and it is a vehicle-focused mode that encourages players to jump into armored ARAVs, ATVs, and motorcycles, while a new vehicle, the tank, has been added.
The tank is … a tank. It is equipped with a mighty powerful weapon that Activision says will “decimate” anyone found in its sights. The tank supports a drive and a passenger who sits in the gunner position. To call in the tank, players must find it on the map or use the flare gun to call it to your location on the map.
Elsewhere in Blackout, the Dark Divide update adds two new weapons taken from the Zombies mode: the Savage Impaler and Winter’s Fury.
Outside of Blackout, the Dark Divide update introduces new Elixirs (Secret Shopper, Power Vacuum) and a new Perk in the form of Blaze Phase. This allows you to transform into a “charging fireball” to scorch your enemies or knock them back.
Those who have the Black Ops Pass, meanwhile, are getting the final chapter in the Zombies Aether storyline; Tag Der Toten is available now. It sees the crew of the Victis travelling to Siberia to fight off even more zombies as they uncover secrets.
For standard multiplayer, the Dark Divide update adds a new map called Lair. This map is set on a volcanic island featuring a laser that players can activate to torch their enemies. A second “new” map is “Launch,” which is a reimagined version of the original Launch map from the first Black Ops.
Go to Activision’s blog to learn more about what’s new in Dark Divide. The update is available now on PlayStation 4 with releases for Xbox One and PC to follow.
One of the defining features of 2020’s Watch Dogs Legion is that you’re able to take control of basically anyone in the game’s version of London. Associate producer Shelley Johnson said in a new interview that the technical underpinnings of Legion are “complex almost beyond description.”
“This is probably one of the most ambitious games Ubi has ever imagined,” Johnson told Stevivor. “It was certainly from a management standpoint and a creative standpoint, the biggest challenge yet, certainly for me personally.”
Johnson told Gamecrate earlier this year that there is no limit to the number of different NPCs that players can assume control of in Legion. “One of the numbers that was floating around at one point was 9 million,” she said. “They’re procedurally generated characters. So we’ve spent four years building the technology to be able to deliver on this promise and that includes the ability to piece together this huge city of characters as far as animation, dialogue, census data, like all those bio pieces that you see when you profile somebody, faces, character kids, all of this comes together to produce a unique character every time.”
Johnson told Stevivor that it was an expensive, time-consuming process to make Legion a reality as it relates to the ambition under the hood. “[To] play as anyone, as a pillar–to really fulfil on the promise of that–it’s expensive,” she said. “This game is, in as far as challenge is concerned, complex almost beyond description.”
Testing a game like Legion sounds like a big challenge, and Johnson said it’s the first game from Ubisoft that reached the limits of what human testing was capable of. She added that, in the future, games with the complexity and scale of Legion may need to make use of AI to pick up “some of the heavy lifting.”
Watch Dogs Legion launches in March 2020 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Check out the video embedded above to learn more.
