Category: Games

Netflix has partnered up with Zack Snyder to create a new, as of yet untitled, anime series centered around Norse mythology with the help of storyboard artist and long-time collaborator Jay Oliva, whose credits include Snyder projects like Justice League and 300: Rise of an Empire.

Details of the project are still shrouded in mystery, but the series will add to Netflix’s growing roster of original anime projects including shows like Neo Yokio and Castlevania, as well as their recently released (and highly contentious) version of the classic Neon Genesis Evangelion. In a statement to Variety, Netflix’s director of anime programming, John Derderian, said “Zack Snyder’s innovation in visual storytelling has pushed the industry forward and established him as one of the most distinctive filmmakers of his generation. We are beyond excited to partner with him and his exceptional team to bring the iconic characters and stories of Norse mythology to life in his inimitable style.”

While the name and plot of the new series have been left up to the imagination, it’s safe to assume we’ll be treated to the Snyder-version of some classic Norse gods and heroes like Loki, Thor, Odin, and Hela–probably featuring some good ol’ fashioned Vikings with greased up, rock hard abs tossed in there for good measure. We all saw 300, right?

Snyder is currently at work on another Netflix project, Army of the Dead, a movie that was conceived of as a sequel to Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead reboot from 2004. Army of the Dead will mark Snyder’s return after a two-year directorial hiatus following the release of Justice League.

While retailers are offering game discounts left and right with Amazon Prime Day on the horizon, nothing beats free, and PC game Age of Wonders III is free to claim at Steam now until Monday, July 15. Once you add the game to your account, it’ll be yours to keep, so if you’re even remotely interested, you might as well grab it now. At full price, it sells for $30.

Age of Wonders III is a 4X turn-based strategy game with a high-fantasy fictional setting. A mix of empire-building, role-playing, and warfare, Age of Wonders III places you in the role of a ruler (with six different RPG-style leader classes, such as sorcerer and rogue) to explore the world map, negotiate with and battle other empires, build and improve your own civilization, and more. The latest game in the series, Age of Wonders: Planetfall, actually releases in just a few weeks on August 6, so this is a good chance to give the series a try if you’ve never played it. Plus, all DLC for Age of Wonders III is also 50% off right now.

Get Age of Wonders III for free at Steam »

The game earned a 7/10 in GameSpot’s Age of Wonders III review for its enjoyable tactical combat, streamlined empire management, and balanced randomization.

“Age of Wonders III is a well-crafted strategy game that doesn’t let itself get bogged down in needless busywork. It pushes your focus onto its strongest suit, the battlefield while keeping everything else in the background,” wrote critic Maxwell McGee. “Some smart elements of randomness help keep you on your toes after multiple sessions, though you will find several go-to strategies still apply regardless of the sort of army you lead. Age of Wonders III is the welcome return of a long-absent strategy series and a tactically rewarding game.”

Coming from Supermassive Games, The Dark Pictures is a new horror-adventure anthology series that serves as a spiritual successor to 2015’s Until Dawn. Hosted by the enigmatic Curator, an omnipresent and unnerving narrator who consistently hints at the inevitably grim circumstances of each tale, your choices will decide the fate of each story’s key players. The first episode of the series is called Man of Medan, and it focuses on a group of twenty-somethings who find themselves trapped on the high seas with a crew of pirates on board a haunted ship.

The original Until Dawn was a notable success due to its way of reworking mostly tired horror film tropes and cliches into a choice-driven narrative that felt all your own. Whereas the previous game felt more like a self-aware Wes Craven-style take on the slasher sub-genre, The Dark Pictures feels more in line with horror-anthologies like Creepshow or Tales from the Crypt. These separate episodes are stand-alone in nature, yet are tangentially related in some way thanks to the ever-curious Curator. However, there’s one significant change compared to Supermassive’s previous game. In addition to the traditional solo story, you can now experience the plot with a friend online or in a Movie Night mode that allows for local play with two to five players.

In Man of Medan’s prologue, which is set during World War II, you and a friend take control of two GIs on shore-leave in the South Pacific. What follows is a grim encounter on their battleship with supernatural forces, setting the stage for the main cast of characters decades later. This cold open serves as an ominous intro to the spooky story, yet it’s also an effective introduction for the pacing and approach to co-op play. Just like in Until Dawn, you’ll control one character, engaging in dialog sequences and quick-time events. However, The Dark Pictures puts a greater focus on the perspective that each character has. So while you’re focused on what your character is doing, your partner in the story will have their own interactions and events happening in the background.

After our hands-on with the opening hours of Man of Medan, we also spoke with Supermassive Games executive producer Pete Samuels about the making of the game, and how Until Dawn’s reception led to the decision to include multiplayer. According to the dev, including co-op play in their follow-up to Until Dawn felt like a natural evolution of their approach to the adventure genre.

“We already wanted a wide co-op element, but certainly [after] seeing the way people played Until Dawn in their groups as couch play, we would feel kinda stupid not to support it,” said Samuels. “The co-op play we have in place was based on all the lessons that we learned from Until Dawn and how much we enjoyed making it. We wanted to go down that road, again, but change it up this time–make it different. We weren’t sure how it was going to work either. So, we developed a prototype, just two characters, just a conversation, over a network with one player controlling the choices of each of the characters. And what we were trying to figure out was could we make the conversation feel natural, be dramatic, unbelievable, yet both players feel like they were influencing it, pushing it in a direction like in real life. As soon as we left that prototype, we knew we had something and we that we could build a game around it.”

Once the main cast of characters come into the story, things take a significant turn. Starting with the two brothers Alex and Brad, one a confident med school student and the other a timid introvert who’s often called a nerd, you’ll make several choices that will ripple throughout the plot. Choosing to spend more time with your brother over your girlfriend, or simply partaking in drinking beer can result in a noticeable change in tone and pace to some scenes. When more characters enter the picture, you and your partner will switch control over to others as the necessary story beats unfold, sometimes this means dealing with what’s been set into motion by other characters.

Just like Until Dawn, the overall writing and characterization of the characters can quickly descend into horror-film cliches and setups. The jock, the rich kid, and nerd archetypes are all present and accounted for, and the conflicts that often ensue when those three characters are in close proximities also occur. While that is mostly by design, which Until Dawn subverted by introducing some surprising character moments, The Dark Pictures tends to focus a lot on those cheesy encounters. In some cases it made me want to defy those expectations–which were to the detriment of my co-op partner. While several twists can catch you off-guard, the developers stated that each choice has a particular purpose, and it won’t be possible to sabotage the story thanks to an unruly co-op partner.

“The biggest thing that helps protect us [from griefing] is that you only play the story with a friend, said the executive producer. “It’s not matchmaking, and you’re never going to play with someone you don’t know. It has to be someone on your list of friends. We were very concerned that if people walked out of the story half-way through and didn’t carry on and you couldn’t find them again to finish the story, the one person is left hanging not knowing how that particular version of the story pans out. We’ve said before, but there’s so much branching in the plot. There’s much more than we’ve ever done.”

This first episode served to be a nice teaser for what’s to come. What’s interesting about this different approach to an adventure game is that the genre itself has traditionally been solitary. In the case of Until Dawn, you were in control of the story, and at the end of the day, the choices you made were your own. While that’s still the case in The Dark Pictures, as you can still play solo, co-op adds in an unpredictable variable into the mix–which can result in several different permutations to the story. The narrative can go in several directions, and the developers stated that Man of Medan and the upcoming episodes in the Dark Pictures series feature more tangents and twists compared to Until Dawn.

It’ll be interesting to see how things play out in the full story when it releases on August 30. At the end of our demo, the choices made by my co-op partner and I led to certain members of the group being separated. Of course, a variety of different decisions could have resulted in the gang still being together, or with some not making it at all. That sense of anticipation is what Until Dawn reveled in, and The Dark Pictures can ratchet up that anxiety with the addition of another player, who may put their own self-interests first when it comes down to it.

For more on The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan, check out Adam and Tamoor’s breakdown of co-op and our full interview with the developers at Supermassive Games.

Supermassive Games’ Until Dawn was somewhat of a sleeper hit. At launch, it garnered favorable reviews and built buzz as an interesting horror experience that offered a great deal of player choice and presented a story heavily inspired by slasher flicks. However, what really propelled its popularity and success was its uptake among the streaming community, who introduced an element of social play to a game that, in terms of its fundamental design, wasn’t made to accommodate it. Interacting with chat or even inviting friends and family to gather around and contribute to the decision-making processes driving its story gave Until Dawn new life, and it’s something that Supermassive Games paid close attention to for its follow-up title, Hidden Agenda, and now The Dark Pictures Anthology.

Man of Medan, the first chapter in the studio’s Dark Pictures anthology, is a product of the social play that emerged around Until Dawn. This time, multiplayer is at the core of the experience, and while going through its story in single-player is viable, connecting with another player and experiencing it together offers a new and interesting way to play. You can read our Man of Medan impressions to see we thought of the game after playing it at a recent preview event.

Having had the opportunity to play a section of the game (read our Man of Medan preview impressions here), we spoke to Pete Samuels, Gareth Betts, and Tom Heaton, who are CEO of Supermassive Games, publishing producer at Bandai Namco, and game director of Man of Medan, respectively. The trio discuss how and why Supermassive Games decided to introduce multiplayer, the challenges it presents, and what it brings to the overall experience.

What led you to focus on multiplayer for Man of Medan? After Until Dawn, a lot of people would probably expect more of the same.

Pete Samuels: It was one of the very first things that we built. Genuinely. Four years ago, we finished Until Dawn. We were deciding what to do next. We wanted to move forward, we didn’t want to just make something like it. And we did a few experiments in software. We had some theories about conversation trees, conversations between two playable characters and how much control could we give to the player. We can’t give them total control, but how much control? How many choices do we need to give them so that they feel like they are driving a conversation?

And those early prototypes were sometimes … you just get lucky with your very first prototypes because they worked so well. And we were sold on it at that point. Well, the interesting thing was then we were looking for a partner to work with and we spoke to other publishers and explained how building this thing was, how great it was going to be. It took us about a year to realize that we were just using the wrong words and we couldn’t find the right words so then we went and spent six months building a demo. We built a 20-minute free-play demo. And we showed it to a bunch of people and only then did people really understand what we were coming from.

Tom Heaton: To a large extent we have done exactly what you suggested. [The game is] fully playable in solo mode and has been designed as a solo single-player game right from the start. And we hope you’ll have a great time playing [that way]. Until Dawn happened to launch about the same time streaming took off and people watching games on YouTube. We kind of caught the wave on that and it was really good for us. That was a major way that people found out about the game. One of the things we saw was people invented their own rules for how they’re gonna play. And they got people around to play on a sofa and they played it together and made a party of it and they would shout out what people should do for the various choices. And they would pass the controller around.

So that was the inspiration for Movie Night. We take that and just give them the tools to make that slightly better, so you can input any player’s name and assign the characters yourself, and we’ll prompt you and say, “Greg, it’s your turn,” and pass the control to you. So we think that was a way that people were already playing and we were just enabling a little bit more. It just came about because we were just saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if I had a friend and they were in the story with me and they could control one of the other characters?”

We got a small team to work on a very small demo. All it was, really, was walking around an area and have a conversation. We played it and well I just thought, “That’s great, that’s just got some really good fun in it.” So that was the inspiration really and we thought, “Can we build a whole game around this and still be a really good single player?” And that’s what we’re trying to do.

Was it difficult to get a deal locked down? Or did the success of Until Dawn help?

Samuels: So, we were working for Sony, we worked with them for a long, long time, and on multiple things for them. And we built a relationship there. We were very keen to have our games played by a wider audience. And so that’s why we went out to talk to independent publishers. And we were delighted when Bandai Namco demonstrated that they were as enthusiastic about our dream for The Dark Pictures as we were.

Gareth Betts: Right. We were spoiled. We were offered something that was very unique and well-crafted. It far exceeds the branching that was previously displayed in Until Dawn. So, [we were] captivated by the immensity of it. Honestly. Great cast, great performances, some of the early performances we had the pleasure of listening to were just so well-crafted, so well-delivered, so believable that it just brings the experience to the fore. Added with that, we’ve got the multi-platform approach. Yeah, it’s been a pleasure, I mean it really has been a pleasure working with Supermassive.

How do you break down what you’re actually doing here? Because for someone who may not have the insight you have, it looks like you’ve taken something like Until Dawn and just kind of added the option to choose a thing on the [second player] side, but there’s clearly way more involved.

Betts: It is tough. I genuinely think only experiencing the software of the game itself can properly communicate it. We have always had trouble with that, other than getting people to get hands-on. If I was to try, I’d say yes, there’s much more to it than just putting the AI under second-player control. Because every choice needs to matter. Every choice needs to have an impact in some way. And quite often, what we do is, that one single choice can edge a character’s personality a certain way and then another choice that you make will either start to correct that or take the traits in a different way. Which means that they will then have potentially different choices, different options that make more sense to the way that the player has driven that character.

Because when you’ve got that happening simultaneously between two different characters, the branching can be immense. We have to find smart ways not to let it get completely out of hand. At the end of the day, we want to deliver a great experience that people can play one day. So, there has to be some containment of some kind. And that’s been the challenge of designing for two players.

And also, that both players have a great story and a story that makes sense. A story that drives that … they can get immensely connected to even though they’re seeing different things. That’s the huge challenge, but again [we’re] very, very delighted with the results and also with what we’ve learned in the process. We learned a huge amount in developing Until Dawn and some subsequent games and then we’ve moved onto multiplayer, which is a different mix altogether in the development of Man of Medan. We have learned so many things that we can put to use in the rest of the series.

We’re already producing a second game, which is well into development now. And I have a design of a third, a third and fourth, which are underway. So, yeah, very excited about the future and I hope we can just get better and better at it. That’s the aim, it’s not to make something and then just repeat it. It’s to get better every time.

How long do you expect the game is going to be in a single-player run?

Betts: Four to five hours, in a single-player run.

We played about an hour of it. How long does it take before it really leans into the supernatural stuff? Because like the hour and a half I played, it was like you get kind of a teaser of it.

Samuel: I’m not going to comment on any content you haven’t seen, but you ended with the big encounter with the ship in the middle of the ocean. And I tell you what, they’re going to go in the ship and it’s going to ramp up pretty quickly.

How do you experience the branches in single-player?

Betts: So some of it you’d see in the single-player and some of it you wouldn’t. Where we can, we stagger them on the timeline so that you can play both. There are parts that you don’t play, that you only see either in the two-player game or in the Curators Club, which is the pre-ordered bonus which we will be releasing to everybody at one point. So yeah, you can’t possibly [see it all], so you see [some] of the content in single-player mode.

When you’ve got two people playing Until Dawn, you play it multiple times, you see different branches of pathways. Whereas if you’ve got two people playing Man of Medan and relaying the information back and forth, does that mean that a lot of the ground’s being covered and there’s not as much reason to replay?

Heaton: We know there’s plenty of replayability. It’s a very, very branching game. Once you’ve played all the way through in terms of story with your friends, then you can go back and dip into chapters and keep playing and explore some of the other branches, try and keep people alive, try and kill everyone, whatever you want to do with it. There are 69 deaths so you’d have to play the game seven or eight times to see who dies anyway.

How do you maintain the atmosphere and tension with two players? Traditional thinking is with a second person nearby, you kind of diminish those elements somewhat.

Samuels: Well, there’s kind of three different ways that could work. So one is the two players are in the same space and they’re in the same sort of interaction, so in the drama–and it might be a conversation–they’re working on what to do and it can be quite intense. They’re making decisions. Another is that you’re in a space, but, you know, you don’t necessarily do the same thing, you’re exploring around, you can go to different places in that world. And then we’ve completely separated the events of the story, separate those kinds of moments.

Does it affect how the scares work? To some extent, yes. But the groundwork is the same. We can’t just do scares, we have to build tension, we have to get the players to a certain level of anxiety and raised emotional state. That’s still true in one or two players. Yes, it might feel safer if you feel you’ve got another person around–but not always.

One of the things that I found was really interesting, and only realized once I discussed it with my partner, was right at the start where you’re walking through the ship and the kid runs by. I mentioned that and my partner had no clue about it. He didn’t see the kid. How much do you play with that?

Samuels: Well, we play a lot with that. In general your overall task is to get everyone out alive, because every character can live and every character can die and there’s a shared thing that you have to do. But sometimes we kind of pit you against each other. We give you slightly different agendas or maybe you want to look out for your character and the other character is slightly in the way of that. What we have always done is give the player difficult choices and sometimes those choices are between your two characters. So it’s not always simple. Sometimes it’s, “No, no, don’t do that. I don’t want you to do that at all!”

How do you approach synchronizing the pacing? If you’re talking to your friend and your friend is having this amazing action sequence, but you’ve been separated and you’re in another area just reading text, you’ll get FOMO, right?

Samuels: It is very difficult and we’ve developed some solutions that I don’t really want to talk about in detail. It’s a thing we have to be constantly aware of and we have to be very careful with and we’ve got it to work.

So it won’t be a situation where one person feels that they’ve got the short end of the stick?

Samuels: It’s a difficult problem. It’s actually probably the biggest. There are some technical problems in there too, and in design terms, it is one of the hardest problems for two players. We want each player just to have a great experience and there’s quite a lot of work we have to do to make that happen.

What we don’t know is how often people talk to each other on the headsets. We don’t know if people will be communicating all the time and saying, “I’m doing this” or “I’m doing that.” We have a suspicion that people will probably be quiet on the first time through. [And when they play again] they might talk to each other like, “Oh, last time I did this, why don’t we try that.”

If you’re given control of the character, are you always the person that will control that character from then on?

Samuels: No. You don’t own that character. You shift between different characters.

That’s some low-key troublemaking. If I’ve defined a character one way and then pass it on that person could take the character in another direction…

Samuels: It’s important that you know if you’re gonna control the character, it’s important that you know what they know. We have to make sure you understand and have little scenes with the essential information. We do a lot of testing, and some people have got a little bit possessive about characters. I think, especially in the first time you’re playing, the aim is that you’re caught up in the story and we always leave you in a cliffhanger and give you control of another character, and then you get back to this character again later and it kind of works. The story always flows forward, so we think it’ll be okay.

Does the game track the way one player is defining a character and shift the response options to lean towards that?

Samuels: Sometimes, yeah. Usually, we want to get the choice of the player. So we have this whole trait system where every choice you make kinda defines a bit of your character and your traits. And the game uses that when it has to, when it’s not a player controlled-character, to make decisions for that character. So you’re still kind of influencing how that character steers through the game.

I guess my thought was if the end result is both players were playing a character on opposite ends of the spectrum, the final impression they’d have of the character is this wacky person who’s one way one minute and completely different a few scenes later.

Samuels: He would always be Alex and true to his character. And what you’re doing as a player is you’re looking at the bits of his character that are not fully formed. Is he going to be the Alpha male, or is he not quite that? Is he a bit more sensitive to what other people think? You can’t completely change him into someone else. He’s always Alex.

How can we expect the games to evolve as you move on to newer stories in the Dark Pictures anthology? Is this multiplayer aspect of the game going to be the core that defines the gameplay of the entire series, or are you going to come up with another mechanic or another way to approach the experience?

Samuels: That’s a very good question and we talk about it a lot. The core of the experience is a great story with great characters. Ways to play will be a solo story because a lot of people would really want to do that and enjoy it by themselves on their own, and they will be able to for everything we’ve got planned at the moment. They will [also] all have two player co-op. They’ll all have Movie Night as a mode.

We are looking at the timing of when we shift to introduce something fundamentally new. We’re talking now what that might be for the fifth game–what are we going to add to that.

The fifth game in this anthology series?

Samuels: Yes.

How many games are there in the series, do you know? Is there more than five?

Betts: We’re just going to keep going until somebody tells us to stop. We’ve got five at some point in development right now. One very early, because releasing two a year, they take more than six months to make. They each take a good couple of years from concept through to completion so we have to overlap. [We have to] get a different game director on each one and a different design team, so yeah, we will, at some point, mix it up with some new stuff, but part of what that will be based on what the community tells us. We’ll build a community around it and people will tell us what they want different and we’ll listen to that.

In terms of release, it sounds like [it’s] episodic. Can we expect pricing to follow the traditional model of episodic games too?

Pete Samuels: All that is in discussion with Bandai Namco. They’ll figure out how to best deliver it physically and digitally. But the stories aren’t connected as such, so you don’t need to have played the first one in order to fully understand what’s happening.

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Fortnite Season 9 is now in Week 10, which means there’s not long left before a new season arrives. It just so happens that there’s a new batch of challenges, so we’ve put together a quick overview of what needs to be done in Week 10. It includes a few that might prove tricky, such as tracking down the new Air Strike added in the latest patch. Others involve visiting public service announcements signs and harvest materials from certain locations you might not recognize, such as a Fork Knife or Umbrella or a Robot Factory. Here’s the rundown on what’s available.

As always, there are two sets of challenges: one available to all players and the other exclusively for those with a premium Battle Pass. In the former category, players will need to use air strikes, dish out damage with a shotgun, and search a bunch of ammo boxes. If you’ve spent V-Bucks on a Battle Pass, you can also visit public service announcement signs in a few locations, collect resources, kill enemies at specific spots, and do damage with a pickaxe for extra Battle Stars. Take a look at the full list of challenges below.

Fortnite Season 9, Week 10 Challenges

Free

• Use an Air Strike in different matches (3) — 5 Battle Stars
• Deal damage to opponents with Shotguns (500) — 5 Battle Stars
• Search Ammo Boxes in a single match (7) — 10 Battle Stars

Premium

• Visit public service announcement signs in Neo Tilted, Pressure Plant, or Mega Mall (5) — 5 Battle Stars
• Stage 1/3: Collect Wood from a Pirate Ship or Viking Ship – 2 Battle Stars
  • Stage 2/3: Collect Stone from a Fork Knife or Umbrella – 2 Battle Stars
  • Stage 3/3: Collect Metal from a Robot Factory – 1 Battle Star
• Eliminate opponents in Pleasant Park or Paradise Palms (3) — 10 Battle Stars
• Damage opponents with a pickaxe (200) — 5 Battle Stars

Developer Epic Games released a third content update for Fortnite patch 9.30 on July 10. It added one new item to Battle Royale mode and a handful of other content to Fortnite Creative and Save the World. The new item is the aforementioned Air Strike, a Legendary-tier throwable item that will call in a hail of missiles on other players. It just so happens that players will need to use this item to complete one of this week’s challenges. The Air Strike can be found as floor loot or in chests, supply drops, vending machines, or llamas, and you can only carry a maximum of two at a time.

With Season 10 likely just around the corner, you’re running out of time to earn Season 9’s various cosmetic unlocks. The best way to get them is to complete challenges the ones above and earn the Battle Stars required to level up your Battle Pass. Some rewards are available to all players, but most of them are reserved for those who spend the 950 V-Bucks on the Battle Pass.