Category: Games

Iconic video game designer Hideo Kojima is calling for world peace. In an interview during his acceptance of the New York Game Awards’ Legend Award, Kojima said the world remains divided, just as it was before he and his team made Death Stranding.

Part of the reason he wanted to make Death Stranding was to help bring people together. During the planning stages of Death Stranding, Kojima remarked that the world was becoming increasingly divided and people were becoming isolated from one another, and he observed that this trend has only continued in the time after Death Stranding was released.

In the future, Kojima said he hopes people can make peace and come together.

“The world was becoming divided. People were becoming isolated. So we made Death Stranding,” Kojima said. “Then, after it was released, the coronavirus hit, Brexit became a reality, and there was another [US] presidential election. The world is still very divided. But I hope that people can come together, like they do in the game. I hope the world comes together and that we can all live in peace.”

The full interview is fascinating and illuminating, with Kojima touching on numerous other subjects like next-gen consoles, the first game he ever worked on, and what his late mother might have thought about Death Stranding. Check it out in the video above.

This is just one of the high-profile interviews coming out of the New York Game Awards festivities. Former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime will appear alongside former executives from PlayStation and Xbox for a roundtable interview soon.

Kojima Productions is working on a new game now, but it remains to be seen if it’s a Death Stranding sequel or something else entirely.

Composers Jesper Kyd and Sarah Schachner, who both worked on the music for Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, will drop two new soundtrack albums this Friday on Spotify that are comprised of previously unreleased songs from the open-world Viking adventure, Game Informer reports.

Titled Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Sons of the Great North (Kyd) and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Twilight of the Gods (Schachner), the two albums offer 61 songs that will transport players all across England to further flesh out Valhalla’s soundscape and world.

Composed by the BAFTA Award-winning Kyd, who has also done the music for Assassin’s Creed’s Ezio Trilogy, Sons of the Great North packs two-and-a-half hours of music that Kyd said “reflects the brutality of the era infused with the spirituality of Norse mythology,” according to Game Informer. The album is 29-tracks long of “previously unreleased” music with natural environmental sounds punctuated by live instruments and “mixed with a modern electronic approach which gives the score a unique sound,” Kyd said.

Twilight of the Gods, composed by the Anthem and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare music engineer Schachner, will whisk players “from the fjords of Norway, through the hillsides of England, and everywhere in between,” Schachner told Game Informer. At 32-tracks in length, the album is an amalgam of Scandanavian and Anglo-Saxon cultures with “hints of Norse mythology woven throughout [to] create a deep and emotional backdrop for Eivor’s journey.”

Both soundtracks hit Spotify on January 29, with Game Informer previewing two songs before they drop this Friday: Kyd’s Nightfall of Wessex track and Schachner’s Voices of Fornburg.

In other Assassin’s Creed Valhalla news, Ubisoft released Title Update 1.1.1 earlier this month that addresses a large number of graphical bugs and adds various gameplay fixes.

The Medium is one of the first Microsoft published titles that will be exclusive to the company’s new consoles, with developer Bloober Team assuring fans that the horror with run well on the Xbox Series S.

In an interview with VG24/7, lead designer Wojciech Piejko and producer Jacek Zięba spoke about the experience of playing The Medium on Microsoft’s less powerful Xbox Series S. The pair agreed that the experience was identical, and that only small graphical differences really separate the two in almost indistinguishable ways.

“Yeah, so the graphics are still nice because we’ve got a really cool graphic art style and I love the art style of the game,” said Piejko. “It’s in lower resolution, but it’s still the same great experience.”

“Yeah, I even played the whole game on Series S like one week ago and I was blown away because I thought I played on Series X,” added Zięba. “Somebody told me, ‘man, this is Series S.’ What! Awesome, wonderful. Of course, you know, there will not be 4K because S does not support 4K, and of course it will maybe look different a little to Series X because X is twice as powerful, but the overall experience and fun from the game, it is the same.”

Considering the similarities between the Xbox Series S and last generation’s Xbox One X, the pair were asked whether The Medium could’ve worked on older consoles. They tended to agree that it might have been possible but not without significant changes to its structure, which they didn’t want to compromise on.

Bloober Team is also not talking about the possibility of The Medium coming to other consoles, with Zięba saying, “For now we are just focusing on Xbox and PC.” The Medium launches on Xbox Series S, Series X, and PC on January 28. It will also be part of Games Pass on Xbox and PC.

Even with the recent announcement that Netflix has surpassed 200 million subscribers worldwide, a new study has revealed that streaming services are in danger of losing customers due to an overabundance of choice.

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In 2020 alone, there were three new streaming services (HBO Max, Peacock, and Quibi) released, though Quibi ended up being the first major casualty in The Great Streaming Wars. Even with Quibi’s $2 billion demise, the demand for streaming is showing no signs of slowing down with the new Discovery+ platform joining the fray in January and Paramount+ set to launch in March.

While streaming appears to be at an all-time high, a recent study from professional service network Deloitte (per the Los Angeles Times), revealed that the overwhelming amount of streaming platforms and shows available may be causing customers to cancel their subscriptions and seek out something new. Deloitte’s survey, which consisted of 1,100 participants, showed that “46% of respondents canceled at least one streaming service in the last six months,” according to the LA Times, which is a major rise from only 20% who said the same in a similar January survey.

The majority of participants (62% to be exact) said they canceled a particular service after finishing a TV series or movie. “Churn” is the term used to describe this phenomenon in Hollywood. Deloitte’s data suggests that streaming providers are going to have a difficult time keeping subscribers as competition in the space increases. According to the LA Times, “streaming subscribers reported having an average of five services in October, up from the three they reported having before the COVID-19 pandemic,” but this increase also seems to indicate that viewers are more willing to cancel a service once they’ve seen the show or movie that initially prompted them to sign up.

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In an interview with the LA Times, Deloitte’s Media and Telecom Leader Kevin Westcott said, “the competition for the streaming services is shifting to a different level. Over the last few years, the focus was on having exclusive, original content. In 2021, it’s going to come down to the user experience, and do you feel like a special VIP for being a member.”

While Netflix is currently winning the war with its 200 million (and growing) subscriber base, Disney+ is catching up with an impressive 86.8 million of its own since launching in late 2019, with Peacock making a push with 26 million subscribers in under a year. And with so many services vying for subscribers, streamers are going to have to get creative to keep their audiences active. Disney+ will attempt to keep Marvel fans hooked all year long with an ambitious slate of original TV shows set in the MCU, with WandaVision’s weekly release schedule rolling right into The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s March release date, followed by Loki in May. Amazon has also experimented with a weekly release schedule for some of its shows, including Season 2 of its breakout hit The Boys and its upcoming Robert Kirkman animated superhero series Invincible.

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Looking ahead, Netflix has an ambitious lineup of at least 70 original movies releasing in 2021, while HBO Max rocked the film industry by announcing that 17 of its theatrically-released movies in 2021 will drop simultaneously on HBO Max for a one-month exclusive window.

What do you think of the results from the study? Do you cancel a particular streaming service after you finishing binging a show or watching a movie? Let us know in the comments.

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David Griffin still watches DuckTales in his pajamas with a cereal bowl in hand. He’s also the TV Editor for IGN. Say hi on Twitter.

A Resident Evil fan has released a concept video of what Resident Evil 7 could look like with the series’ original fixed camera angles – and we’re now hoping it becomes a fully-fledged mod.

YouTuber Enveloping Sounds has used a free camera mod to find fixed positions for the camera around Resident Evil 7’s Baker Mansion location, and another mod that depicts the game’s hero Ethan with a head for third-person mods. With some smart editing of both visuals and background sound effects, they’ve been able to show off an alternate reality version of Resident Evil 7 that didn’t even begin using Resi 4’s over-the-shoulder view, never mind 7’s first-person approach – and you can watch the video below (kindly provided by Enveloping Sounds).

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Sadly, this is just a concept right now. “Just to be clear, this is not an actual realized playable ‘mod’,” Enveloping Sounds tells IGN. “This is more of just a concept that I created using the free camera tool and spliced scenes together to show what COULD be.” So… any enterprising mod makers want to make this a reality?

Enveloping Sounds has previously given the same treatment to the Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 remakes, transplanting the original versions’ locked cameras into the shiny new games. Those earlier videos got a lot of fans of classic Resi in the comments wishing the new games had followed the original style. Seeing 7 – a game never designed to even be seen in third-person – presented this way is a very interesting follow-on  experiment. I’d say it’s a successfu one too.

In other Resi news, the much-rumoured Resident Evil 4 remake has reportedly seen a partial reboot and an internal delay, which may be in part due to it feeling too traditional. We also learned that Resident Evil Village will be released on May 7, and will seemingly be a successor to Resi 4. It will also come with a new multiplayer mode, RE:Verse.

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Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].

So no, Konami is NOT shutting down their gaming division. They probably have NOT sold their IPs to a company you like more than them either
I get the frustration with how Konami handles their gaming business these days, but that company is bigger than people think

— Nibel (@Nibellion) January 25, 2021

Correct. It’s just a restructure similar to the one they did in 2015.
Essentially they want to have teams focused on growth areas of the industry.

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) January 25, 2021