Category: Games

By now you might have heard that NHL 20, which is launching today on PS4 and Xbox One, features a battle royale mode. How does battle royale work in an ice hockey context? Not the way you’d expect. GameSpot recently caught up with EA Sports producer Sean Ramjagsingh, and he spoke to us about NHL 20’s battle royale mode, called Eliminator, and lots more.

Ramjagsingh was careful to point out that Eliminator is not a true battle royale experience like another EA game, Apex Legends, or Fortnite and PUBG. “We don’t drop a hundred hockey players on an island to spear each other,” he explained, though it’s exciting–or actually probably horrifying–to think about that.

In the battle royale mode, you can go it alone in Ones or team up with two others in Threes to try to survive four consecutive rounds in a bracket to win the tournament. Like the battle royale games it’s inspired by, it’s challenging and high-stakes, and it encourages you to keep coming back and improve your skills and eventually get crowned winner.

Like a real battle royale game, NHL 20’s version of it aims to capture the intensity and the fear of losing and having to start over. In that way, it’s highly replayable, and the time investment is never too long. Winning four matches to win the overall tournament takes about 20 minutes.

Ramjagsingh also spoke to us about NHL 20’s updated pond hockey mode, Ones, which this year features an offline mode for local couch play, as well as four new rinks and other welcome adjustments.

“It’s in the little details that create that different look and feel. The ice is really different when you don’t have a Zamboni clean it after every 20 minutes of play,” he said. “The lighting is completely natural, creating shadows you don’t see playing under indoor lights. And you’ll hear ambient sounds of wildlife and city life that were created specifically for each rink.”

Pond hockey was introduced to the NHL series with NHL 19, and while Ramjagsingh declined to share player-usage numbers, he said the mode overall surpassed his expectations.

“I assumed it’d be a casual mode that players would play just to get their feet wet in World of Chel. But what happened was that players found Ones super competitive and came back over and over again, often to fill the time between longer matches in EASHL,” he said.

You can read GameSpot’s full interview with Ramjagsingh below. NHL 20 is out now for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

What’s new in pond hockey mode this year?

Pond hockey goes much wider this year. We have four gorgeous and memorable outdoor rinks. The Farm captures the nostalgia of the Canadian prairies and mid-western U.S. The Park is an urban oasis where kids anywhere might have dragged their skates and sticks to the local pond. The Canal brings to life the fantasy of playing hockey on the world’s largest skating rink. And The Peak elevates hockey to 20,000 feet above sea level.

Also, these outdoor rinks are available in more modes than before: Ones, EASHL 3v3/6v6, and now Threes. That last one looks absolutely incredible at night-time.

Specifically on the offline mode feature, can you talk about the decision to introduce offline play this year?

We knew that we’d have fans asking for a couch-play version this year. It was just too addictive for many players that it was an easy decision, but we wanted Ones Now to stand on its own offline. So we added a selection of NHL players, icons, and mascots to choose from. Each has its own style of AI to add variety to gameplay. We pulled together the four new outdoor rinks with the four from Carter Lake in NHL 19. And we added stat tracking per controller so you can easily track who has bragging rights, either for the current session for all-time. In short, it’s the ultimate party game for hockey fans.

Looking at the feedback from last year, what areas did you want to focus on for pond hockey across all facets like gameplay, presentation, etc.?

I think delivering a full-fleshed Ones Now mode was very important, so it could instantly appeal to casual and hardcore fans. Ones was a fast way to play to log lots of wins or to fill time between longer matches. But offline, it’s super-fast to play. There’s no waiting for matchmaking or syncing. And with preset characters to choose from, you don’t need to even create a custom players as you’d do in Ones in World of Chel.

One more key change was introducing a more compact format to Ones online. Playing for the Daily Ones Championship meant having to log literally hours on the top rink. And only one player could feel like the champ. In Ones Eliminator, we put you into a tournament quickly with 80 other players without sitting in a Dressing Room. Losing a game means starting over in a new tournament. Stringing together four wins in a row makes you a champ. These changes may sound really simple, but the result is a mode that’s actually easier to get in and harder to put down.

Pond hockey was brand-new in NHL 19. Apart from the Winter Classics, it was the first time the series had gone fully outdoors. How do you go about surprising and wowing people a second time?

I’m proud of how our artists captured the look and feel of playing outside on a cold winter’s day in NHL 19. But this year, each one of the new outdoor rinks has a very distinct vibe. For example, The Farm and its big sky and light snow make it awesome and quiet at the same time. And playing in the tree-cast shadows of The Canal turn a big city attraction into something that feels so natural. I’m sure our fans will be wowed, and will bring their own hockey memories and fantasies to these great venues.

The new locations look terrific and varied. What drew you to these locations specifically?

In recent years, EA Sports NHL has embraced the challenge of showing hockey in all of its forms. EASHL is the ultimate cooperative experience. Threes introduced over-the-top action and playing as mascots. Ones captured the freedom and creativity of outdoor pond hockey. We choose the new outdoor locations to bring new visual and emotional depth to this wide variety of game modes.

In creating the outdoor environments and replicating the pond hockey experience, what kind of research was involved?

Lots of photos, videos, and maps were involved. And the passion of an art team that re-iterated these rinks until everyone in the room was so proud of the results.

What kinds of things have you done with NHL 20 to replicate pond hockey culture?

It’s in the little details that create that different look and feel. The ice is really different when you don’t have a Zamboni clean it after every 20 minutes of play. The lighting is completely natural, creating shadows you don’t see playing under indoor lights. And you’ll hear ambient sounds of wildlife and city life that were created specifically for each rink.

How does progression work in Ones this year relative to last? And what kinds of things can you collect?

We split Ones into Ones Eliminator online and Ones Now couch play. In Ones Eliminator, you win your way through a four-round tournament. The further you get, the rarer the vanity items you can win. And in Ones Now, the more you play, the more choices you unlock. You’ll unlock more outdoor rinks, more NHL stars, more NHL icons (like Mario Lemieux), and more mascots (yes, Gritty is one of them).

Your version of battle royale is a cool standout feature for Ones this year. Can you talk about why you wanted to get involved with the battle royale phenomenon and how it works in NHL 20?

I’d say we didn’t get involved in Battle Royale per se. We don’t drop a hundred hockey players on an island to spear each other. For Ones Eliminator, we included elements that make sense for an online hockey tournament: fast matchmaking, match intensity because of the fear of losing and having to start over, and being able to be a champion within about 20 minutes. Our Ones daily tournament took, well, a day to be crowned champion. I’d say 20 minutes is a lot more accessible! (Note that we still have the daily championship for those dedicated enough to win the most Eliminators in a single day!)

Are there any player numbers or datapoints you can provide that speak to the popularity of Ones within the NHL package?

We don’t share usage numbers with the public. But what I can say is that Ones surpassed my expectations. I assumed it’d be a casual mode that players would play just to get their feet wet in World of Chel. But what happened was that players found Ones super competitive and came back over and over again, often to fill the time between longer matches in EASHL.

The NHL video game package altogether has multiple elements that are all quite different; the standard sim game, Franchise, Ultimate Team, Threes, and Ones. What are some of the challenges of making the overall experience feel cohesive with so many disparate elements?

I think it’s the second-to-second re-creation of hockey moments that runs through every mode. In NHL 19, we revamped shooting and hitting to great acclaim. In NHL 20, we revamped just about everything else you do at speed on the ice: passing, pick-ups, and one-timers. While we added better control and animation coverage that is more realistic, it’s also made gameplay more fun no matter which mode or game style you choose. EASHL and Ultimate Team fans benefit from more scoring chances. Threes players get even more end-to-end rushes. In Ones you have even more control to show off your individual skills. So it’s really our increasingly polished gameplay that ties the whole package together.

Do you see Ones as an experiment that you tried with ’19 and are honing for 20, or rather as part and parcel with the overall NHL game package these days and going forward?

I think Ones and also Threes showed that fans want more variations that broaden the skills and strategies you need to win. Having no rules or penalties in Ones is really fun when you also don’t have teammates or zones. Also having a sudden death overtime in which the third place skater can come back to win is really exciting. Moneypuck in Threes makes absolutely every goal meaningful. I think we will continue to search for new variations that leap ahead of real-life hockey, without sacrificing the authentic NHL experience when you want exactly that.

Anything more to share about Ones in NHL 20?

Check out the skills and styles specific to each skater in Ones Now. And give us feedback on who your favorites are and who you’d like to see in future updates.

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The new Joker movie starring Joaquin Phoenix is set for a huge opening weekend at the box office. A box office projection reported by Deadline claims the comic book movie is expected to make around $90 million for its opening weekend to set a new record for best October opening in movie history for the United States and Canada.

If it reaches that much money, Joker would surpass the previous domestic October record-holder, Venom, which made $80.2 million over its first weekend. A second tracking service said Joker was lining up to make $82 million over its opening weekend in the Americas. Deadline also reports that it heard earlier in the week, “from those close to Joker,” that the film was tracking towards an opening in the range of $65 million to $80 million.

Joker was produced on a relatively low budget of a reported $55 million (before marketing spend), so given these estimates (which don’t even include any international predictions), it seems like that the movie will be a big success commercially no matter where in the range it lands. That could spell a change for DC movies going forward, as director Todd Phillips spoke at the Toronto International Film Festival that he originally pitched Joker as a movie that exists inside a new label of standalone films. If Joker is a commercial success, you can imagine Warner Bros. looking to make more, though nothing is confirmed at this stage.

“The original idea when I went to Warners was not just about one movie but a label, a side-label to DC where you can do these kind of character study, low-rent, low-budget movies where you get a filmmaker to come in and do some deep dive into a character,” Phillips said.

The director added that Joker, and presumably the other movies that would come out of the new DC side-label, would not connect to the wider DC extended universe. That’s why Phoenix’s Joker is not expected to meet up with Robert Pattinson’s Batman.

Joker’s release on October 3 is still a few weeks off, so box office estimates could change. Keep checking back with GameSpot for the latest.

GameSpot’s Joker review scored the comic book movie a 10/10. “It might make you uncomfortable, and it will no doubt stay with you long after the curtains close; great movies often do,” reviewer Michael Rougeau said.

The NPD Group released its report for August 2019 US video game industry sales, providing a look at the health of the business in the states across consoles, games, and accessories.

Total spending on video game software in August 2019 dropped 22 percent to $257 million compared to August 2018, making it the worst software performance in an August month since August 1998 ($234 million). However, year-to-date dollar sales of video games in the US jumped 1 percent to $3.1 billion, with Nintendo Switch attributing to the uptick in sales.

Madden NFL 20 was August 2019’s best-seller, holding on the No. 1 position for a second straight month. Overall, Madden NFL 20 is the third best-selling game of 2019 so far, only behind Kingdom Hearts III and Mortal Kombat 11.

Also notable for August 2019 was that Minecraft was the No. 2 best-seller for August 2019, and that represents the highest the game has ever charted on NPD’s US sales charts.

One of August 2019’s new releases, Age of Wonders: Planetfall, debuted at No. 15, and its first-month sales were higher than any other title’s in the franchise’s history. Another noteworthy takeaway from the report is that five of the 10 top-selling games in August 2019 were Nintendo Switch exclusives.

You can see the full Top 20 best-sellers chart below.

Moving to hardware, total spending on consoles dropped 22 percent compared to August 2018 to $167 million. Spending on a year-to-date basis fell 21 percent to $1.6 billion. The Nintendo Switch was August 2019’s best-selling console, and it’s the best-selling system in 2019 altogether. PS4 and Xbox One console sales declined in August 2019 and the full year in 2019 so far, with the Switch standing as the only home console system that is seeing improved sales.

This all makes sense given the Switch is relatively new compared to the PS4 and Xbox One, which are both coming up on their sixth anniversaries, with next-generation systems expected in Holiday 2020.

Total spending on video games in the US for August 2019–across games, consoles, and accessories–reached $666 million, which is down 18 percent compared to August 2018. On a year-to-date basis, spending across all segments combined is down 6 percent to $7 billion.

Two men arrive on a barren island to tend the lighthouse that will keep ships from striking the rocky coast. They’ll stay there four full weeks. As they approach the structure, the men they’re replacing pass in silence, heading the opposite direction. Nobody speaks. Everything is black-and-white, shot on 35mm film in a square 1.19:1 ratio to add to the general anachronistic atmosphere.

This is Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, co-written with his brother, Max Eggers. It’s the director’s second feature-length film, after 2016’s The Witch, an impeccable low-budget horror movie about an isolated family of New England settlers terrorized by a witch in the early 17th century. At a festival screening in 2015, documented by IndieWire, Eggers said the films he had tried to make prior to The Witch “were too weird, too obscure,” and so he turned to the horror genre. The Witch earned critical acclaim, and The Lighthouse feels like the director seizing the opportunity of his success to extend beyond conventional movie-making and create something truly strange.

And The Lighthouse certainly is that. Willem Dafoe’s Thomas Wake and Robert Pattinson’s Ephraim Winslow embark on a terrifying, painfully circuitous voyage into madness. Neither character is a reliable viewpoint; by the end, you won’t even be sure what their names are. And that small point will be the least of your worries.

It starts out ordinarily enough. Winslow, the greener of the two lighthouse keepers, goes about his daily chores with bored resignation, while Wake mostly orders him around. Pattinson’s performance is initially understated; he just wants to put in his time and collect his check when it’s over. Meanwhile, Dafoe’s character is a cartoonish Captain Ahab (as Winslow literally points out at one point); an even sillier caricature than the sea captain from The Simpsons. But Dafoe utterly sells every word he barks or growls, whether he’s recounting the story of how he got his bum leg, or cursing Winslow to a slow, watery death for saying he doesn’t like his cooking, in a monologue that seems like it will never end, the camera pushing closer and closer to Dafoe’s weathered, bearded face, until it has nowhere left to go, and you’re left simply enraptured by this unbelievably odd performance.

The Lighthouse is undeniably impressive in its craft: The environment, the set design, the claustrophobic camerawork, the black-and-white, the inspired boxy picture, the classical, unnerving score–it all works together to create an engrossing uneasiness present from the very first shot to the moment the credits roll. But unfortunately, too much occurs in between those two points, and not enough of it actually matters.

Toward the beginning, as mysteries begin to unfold, The Lighthouse holds promise beyond its archaic aesthetic and eccentric performances. Winslow dreams of a mermaid’s siren call, of soggy logs floating in the tide, and the back of a fair-haired head. He’s tormented by a one-eyed seagull. He glimpses strange tentacles at the top of the titular lighthouse, where Wake has forbidden him to enter. The older keeper jealously guards the keys, along with a tome-like journal that might hold untold secrets.

The Lighthouse’s big problem is that few of these enticing enigmas ultimately amount to anything, and the movie’s few actual revelations come and go with little impact on the events playing out onscreen. Winslow might discover something incredible or horrifying, but after a moment of panic or ecstasy, he usually just goes back to feeding coal to the foghorn or swabbing the floors.

Winslow’s solitary facade evaporates as soon as he gives in to Wake’s constant pressure to have a drink together, and the movie’s reality breaks down quickly from there. Yet another enticing mystery is presented when a never-ending storm prevents the boat meant to relieve them from arriving; the movie begins to ask questions like, “How long have they actually been here?” and “Is any of this even real?”

The trouble is that there are no real answers, and without resolution, those questions become trite. You might spend the entire movie waiting for a payoff that never arrives; unlike in The Witch, there’s no Black Phillip moment in The Lighthouse. Pattinson and Dafoe’s characters seem stuck in a loop, stranded on this rock with diminishing supplies, plagued by suspicions and hallucinations, on a bender that never ends, even when they run out of booze (kerosene with honey does the trick just as well, if not better). The plot circles back on itself without reprieve–they work, they masturbate, they drink, they fight, they laugh, they dance, rinse, repeat. By the end, all the big questions and the answers that might have been go out the window and get washed away in the stormy sea as the whole thing devolves into an aggravating–albeit mesmerizing–orgy of salty weirdness.

The Lighthouse ultimately reveals itself to be more like Darren Aronofsky’s overstuffed, frustrating, and self-indulgent 2017 film Mother! than the tight, grounded, shocking thriller fans of The Witch might be hoping for. Watching The Lighthouse is a unique experience, and if the concept sounds intriguing to you, it’s worth diving in just to see for yourself. But unlike The Witch, this is one movie we won’t be rewatching every Halloween from now on.

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HBO is close to ordering a pilot for a Game of Thrones spin-off that would focus on House Targaryen. Deadline reports that it is a prequel series from A Song of Ice and Fire author George R. R. Martin, who also served as co-executive producer on the Game of Thrones series it inspired. Colony co-creator and executive producer Ryan Condal is also said to be involved as co-creator and writer.

Deadline reports that the spin-off will be set 300 years before the events of Game of Thrones and will chart the “beginning of the end for House Targaryen.” It is said to be based on Fire & Blood, which was written by Martin, and has been in the works since last fall.

This show is not believed to be one of the five Game of Thrones spin-offs planned by HBO, but began as an idea for that group. The Targaryan spin-off is “a brand new take on a world originally tackled by Bryan Cogman in one of the five GoT prequel scripts commissioned by HBO in 2017,” Deadline’s report reads.

HBO has not yet officially acknowledged or confirmed the report.

Currently, the only Game of Thrones spin-off that has been officially confirmed is what Martin called “The Long Night,” before backtracking on the name later. Naomi Watts has been cast in the show, which takes place thousands of years before Game of Thrones. Watts’ character is said to be “a charismatic socialite hiding a dark secret.”