It took longer than usual for some of Take-Two Interactive’s most recent successes–Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2–to hit the market. While the publisher is likely pleased with the results of such ambitious games, CEO Strauss Zelnick is convinced the development gap between releases will shorten thanks in part to post-launch content.
In a GamesIndustry.Biz interview during E3 2019, Zelnick envisions the trend of extensive time between game releases coming to an end. “I don’t see it expanding further. In fact, I would expect in many instances it may compress,” Zelnick said. “We find that intersection between the time it takes our creators to do the best work in the industry on the one hand, and what the consumer wants, recognizing that building anticipation is a good thing.” Zelnick cements his argument by saying “eight years is probably too long,” likely referring to the development time between Red Dead Redemption and its direct sequel.
Post-launch content might be the force that causes the pendulum to swing, according to Zelnick. “It’s possible that the ability to deliver content on an ongoing basis for a long time after an initial release,” he said. “Would mean that perhaps that initial release wouldn’t be as long in terms of [the] number of hours of gameplay as previously had been demanded in a world where that was all you were getting.”
He suggests the development could shorten because teams would be primarily focused on finishing a product first and delivering further content once the game is released. While Zelnick doesn’t predict a change in the way AAA publishers shoot for less ambitious titles, he does find the idea of post-launch content shortening development to be “a fewer, bigger, better strategy.”
Take-Two is the parent company of developers like 2K–and its properties 2K Play, 2K Games, and 2K Sports–and Rockstar Games. The big-name publisher has some games launching throughout the rest of the year. Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is set to launch on August 27 for PC and sometime in December for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Borderlands 3 will launch on September 13 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, and November 14 for Google Stadia. The Outer Worlds is scheduled to release on October 25 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
The appearance of the next game from Ninja Theory, Bleeding Edge, was something of a surprise during Microsoft’s press conference at E3 2019. It’s a competitive game in the vein of something like Overwatch or Apex Legends, pitting teams of four players against each other as they try to capture objectives while wailing on each other. That’s pretty far removed from the studio’s past games–third-person narrative action titles such as Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and DmC: Devil May Cry.
Bleeding Edge is looking to marry online competitive games with the kind of combat experiences you might expect from Ninja Theory. It’s principally a sort of competitive brawler–the majority of the characters specialize in melee combat. Think Overwatch, but fewer guns and more combos.
That’s the kind of game creative director Rahni Tucker wanted to play, so that’s the one she and her team made, she told GameSpot at E3.
“For me, combat is my interest, that’s what I love to make,” Tucker said. “At home, I play competitive team multiplayer games. So, it just seemed like a natural synergy. Like, an ‘Ah!’ moment. I was like, ‘Where’s third-person action combat meets competitive team multiplayer? I feel like this game doesn’t exist and I would play it, so why don’t we make that? It’s just the game that I love basically, my passion project.”
Close-Range Combat
In Bleeding Edge, most characters are melee fighters, although there are different roles among the cast. Some are support class fighters with ranged attacks, meant to stay out of the fray to heal or buff teammates, while others are tank-like and designed to get in close and wreck people. All 10 characters have a variety of abilities, which we tried out in a match we played at the Microsoft Showcase. Melee DPS fighter Daemon, for instance, carries a samurai sword, can briefly turn himself invisible, and uses a dash move to close gaps and land quick hits. The witchy Maeve can cage opponents in place and siphon life from them, while saw-wielding tank Buttercup has a Roadhog-style chain move that can pull enemies to her. All those abilities have cooldown timers, and every character also has an ultimate move that charges up over time; Daemon’s ultimate turned him into a fast-slashing killing machine against anyone who stumbled into a certain radius around him. Each character has two ultimates for you to pick from at the start of a match.
I was like, ‘Where’s third-person action combat meets competitive team multiplayer?'”
The round we played took place on an industrial map with a train track running through the center–and happening to cross over its three control points. Capturing those spots earns your team points (as does landing kills), but the trains that occasionally run through the map are a hazard to be either avoided or used against the other team. The map also had jump pads that made it possible to reach higher levels, adding some verticality, and health drops scattered around that were key to keeping alive.
It’s all the sort of thing you’d expect from other character-based competitive games. Bleeding Edge stands out with its combat, though; it all feels much more MOBA-like as two teams converge and start wailing away at each other. As soon as you get into a fight, the action-adventure pedigree of the Ninja Theory team asserts itself. Hitting an enemy with a series of melee strikes can stun them, and linking regular attacks with your special abilities can extend a combo and let you hammer away opponents. You’ve also got a dodge move that helps you break free of a combo executed by someone else, but it has limited charges, requiring you to think about how best to use your moves to control the fight and avoid getting locked down.
“The main thing, I think, is the design sensibilities that go into making the combat feel right because the game, to play, is very different, as you know,” Tucker said. “Single-player hack-and-slash games, you can run in versus 50 guys and own them all in the face, and do a 50-hit combo where they don’t get to do anything. But playing against that is not very fun. [Bleeding Edge] is definitely a team game and that was a big thing that I wanted it to be, because I like playing support and you can’t play support if it’s not a team game. That was important to me as well. I think that’s one of the things people struggle a little bit when they see third-person action, is they go, ‘Oh, cool, I’m just gonna run in and kill everything!’ And it’s like, well, yeah, but so are they. You can’t run in versus four people and just kill everything because they’re as powerful as you are.
“The thing that I’m bringing, I think, from DmC into this is the design sensibility. So making the combat feel good, making the hits feel like they’re connecting, the animation slick, it feels right in your hand, got good response control.”
It might not feel exactly like DmC, but Bleeding Edge does capture that responsive, strategic feeling of fighting–while amping it up with the frantic unpredictability inherent in taking on other players.
Modding Your Heroes
Bleeding Edge also separates itself in the ways you can customize your characters. The premise of the title, as Tucker explained, is a friendly competition between cyborgs set some 50 or so years in the future. The characters are all at the “bleeding edge” of cybernetic body modification, using technology to do all sorts of weird things to themselves, and beating and blowing each other up are how they try out their latest enhancements.
Customization is part of the underlying premise, so in addition to picking different characters with a variety of abilities (and switching between them mid-match to adjust your strategy), you can also unlock “mods” to install on your characters, which change the way their abilities work. Each character gets three mod slots, and you can unlock more character-specific mods over time as you play (there are about 20 for each), which allow to you build different loadouts of each character that fit your playstyle and the strategies of a match.
The thing that I’m bringing, I think, from DmC into this is the design sensibility.”
“Using Daemon as an example, his default mod set is base attack/damage, a bit of extra health and more range for his shooting but if you wanted to you could go fully into, say, stealth and you can have a mod that makes stealth last forever, you have a mod that makes him move faster under stealth and there’s a mod, say, that does extra damage coming out of stealth. You can equip those three into a build and call it the Stealth Build, and then if you’re playing on a team where you don’t really need to care about survivability and you just want to get around the back and kill [support character] Zero Cool time and time again, then you might take that build.”
It all sounds like a potent recipe for a competitive game, and Bleeding Edge created some fun, chaotic moments as all eight players wailed on each other in an attempt to take control points in our match. It’s tough to gauge after just one battle, of course, but there’s a depth to Bleeding Edge’s melee combat that should entice fans of MOBAs and other competitive games, with a bright, easygoing art style and accessibility that make it easy to pick up. The question is whether Bleeding Edge can make a dent in a crowded competitive game market–but at the very least, it has the potential to scratch a combat itch no other games of this type are addressing.
Though there’s no price point or release date for Bleeding Edge yet, Tucker said Ninja Theory intends to support the game after launch with additional characters (there are 10 at launch and Ninja Theory is already teasing two more) and maps (beyond the three that’ll be available at release). Tucker also said she wants to work on a more robust spectator mode for the game as well. Microsoft and Ninja Theory are also running a technical alpha on June 27, which you can sign up for on the Bleeding Edge website.
On Sunday, June 23, the next WWE event, Stomping Grounds, is coming to PPV and the WWE Network. It’s a bit of a summer-lull right now, coming out of a Saudi Arabia show, and the event formerly known as Backlash got a name change–probably because WWE didn’t want a PPV named “Backlash” after all of the backlash they got for the Saudi show.
The next WWE show takes place at the Tacoma Dome in Tacoma, Washington. If you’re in the Seattle/Tacoma area, there are still plenty of tickets available, even ringside, for as cheap as a little more than $100. Even more interesting is that Stomping Grounds is offering “two for one” tickets to the event, so you and a friend can go to the show for the price of one ticket.
Date & Times
As previously mentioned, Stomping Grounds takes place on Sunday, June 23. Depending on where you live on this planet, the time will be different. Check out the times for Stomping Grounds below. Keep in mind, that the Kickoff Show starts one prior to the main card.
4 PM PT
6 PM C
7 PM ET
12 AM BST (June 24)
9 AM AET (June 24)
How To Watch
If you’re planning to watch the event, there are a couple different ways to see it. You can get it through your cable or satellite provider, but that comes at a price. However, you can watch it on the WWE Network for $10 a month, and the first month is free if you’re a new subscriber. You’re under no obligation to continue your subscription, so you could cancel right after your trial is over.
Stomping Grounds Match Card
As of this writing, there are only seven matches on the card, but there is still an episode of Smackdown to air tonight, and more than likely, more matches will be added. There are five title matches on this card, and one of them is a steel cage match. Check out the full match card below, and we’ll be updating it as more is added.
Seth Rollins (c) vs. Baron Corbin (Universal Championship)
Kofi Kingston (c) vs. Dolph Ziggler (Steel Cage Match for the WWE Championship)
Becky Lynch (c) vs. Lacey Evans (Raw Women’s Championship)
Bayley (c) vs. Alexa Bliss (Smackdown Women’s Championship)
Roman Reigns vs. Drew McIntyre
Samoa Joe (c) vs. Ricochet (United States Championship)
Big E & Xavier Woods vs. Kevin Owens & Sami Zayn
Make sure to come back to GameSpot on Sunday, June 23 for live coverage and a review of the show.
While most mainline Pokemon games to date have allowed you to carry your monsters over from previous titles, we learned at E3 2019 that the upcoming Pokemon Sword and Shield for Switch will be bucking this trend. During a Treehouse Live segment, producer Junichi Masuda revealed that players can’t transfer every old Pokemon to the games–only those that already appear in the Galar Pokedex. And it seems Sword and Shield may not be the last Pokemon titles with this restriction.
In an interview with Famitsu (via Eurogamer), Masuda reiterates that the reason behind this controversial limitation is due to the amount of time it would take to balance every Pokemon and improve them visually thanks to the sheer size of the series’ Pokedex, which now encompasses more than 1,000 Pokemon including alternate forms. “As a result, it has become extremely difficult to make Pokemon with a new personality play an active part and to balance their compatibility,” Masuda said. “That is the reason for this decision, and we have decided that it is difficult to make all Pokemon appear in future works.”
Masuda’s response suggests that future Pokemon games may likewise not include every monster in the series, although it doesn’t necessarily rule out the possibility that more could be added in to the titles down the line. Famitsu asked if that would be the case with Sword and Shield, but Masuda said that was still “undecided” at this point.
To transfer previous monsters over to Sword and Shield, you’ll first need to bring them over to Pokemon Home, a new Pokemon Bank-like cloud service launching for Nintendo Switch and smartphones in early 2020. Pokemon Home allows you to store any monster from Pokemon Bank on 3DS, as well as Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee, Sword and Shield, and Pokemon Go, then bring those into Sword and Shield (provided they’re in the Galar Pokedex). Unlike Pokemon Bank, you can also trade Pokemon with other players directly from Pokemon Home. The Pokemon Company hasn’t shared any pricing details for the service yet, but Pokemon Bank requires players to have a subscription, which cost $5 per year.
Pokemon Sword and Shield launch for Switch on November 15. Nintendo revealed a ton of new details about the games during a special Pokemon Direct ahead of E3. Among other things, we learned about the games’ new Dynamax battle mechanic, which allows Pokemon to temporarily grow into the size of a building during battle. We also got a look at the open-world Wild Area that stretches between towns in the Galar region, as well as the multiplayer Max Raid Battles. You can read more about the games in our Pokemon Sword and Shield pre-order guide.
Update 06/18/2019: Google’s Patrick Seybold has told IGN that Stadia users will indeed be able to change their username at any time, but will only offer that change for free once.
Seybold also clarified that name-changing, and the one-time free change, is not a Stadia Pro-exclusive feature. However, he did not not speak to what the name change service would cost. We’ll update you on that as we find out more.
Stadia, Google’s foray into the home console/streaming market, will allow users to change their names at any time they want, according to a Google spokesperson.
Gears 5’s Escape is the newest game mode in the franchise, and it comes with a whole new story. Three new characters are on a suicide mission to help rid Swarm hives from Sera, and though their story doesn’t directly impact the mode, it is an interesting bit of worldbuilding that enriches the Gears universe further.
Lahni, Keegan, and Mac are Hivebusters. As we see in Escape’s gameplay, their mission is to get caught by Snatchers to infiltrate the heart of a hive, plant a venom bomb, then escape as the hive dies. Though there are some in-game details about the Hivebuster, including banter between them while you’re playing through Escape, the best way to learn about their story is through the new Gears of War: Hivebusters comic.
Last year, Cyberpunk 2077’s E3 demo had us visit (IRL) a hip nightclub overlooking Night City. This year, it takes us down into a grungy underground dive covered wall-to-wall with awesome references to CD Projekt Red’s dystopian future.
The nightclub appears to be called Totentanz, German for “The Dance of Death”, and features posters from all sorts of live performances, plus a guitar “once owned” by the man himself, Johnny Silverhand.
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In the past, when you upgraded to a new generation of consoles, you had to bid goodbye to all your controllers and peripherals. Not so with Xbox anymore. Microsoft is pushing forward and backward compatibility, and has said today’s Xbox One controllers and accessories will work with Project Scarlett, the company’s next console. That’s great news for anyone who needs a new controller and doesn’t want to chuck it in the garbage the moment they move to the next console generation. Here are some great Xbox One controllers you can use until the rubber comes off the sticks.
LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga may offer players the option to use a classic ‘grunting’ voice track instead of full voice acting.
Over the past few days, fans of LEGO Star Wars have been tweeting that they would like to see grunts in LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, the upcoming entry in the long-running series from TT Games. In the replies to a recent tweet from the developer, many have been expressing their wish that the game would use the grunts, grumbling, and other sounds to represent characters talking, as they did in the original games, rather than full voice acting.
At E3 2019, IGN spoke to TT Games’s Head of Design Arthur Parsons, who said that the classic grunts may not be out of the question: “At the minute the plan is that the game is fully voiced, But we are talking to the team about having an additional mode for grunts.”
