EA has announced that we’ll be treated to the first gameplay reveal for Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order soon. Although it’s probably not a surprise for anyone, the company plans on unveiling the gameplay reveal next month, during EA Play 2019.
This year, EA is skipping out on hosting a press conference at E3 2019. Instead, the company’s annual EA Play event will be separated into multiple livestreams that air during the week prior to E3. The first day of EA Play will occur on Friday, June 7 and the event will continue until Tuesday, June 11. EA Play is scheduled to take place at the Hollywood Palladium, and attendees will be able to watch presentations and play unreleased games. Whether Jedi: Fallen Order is one of them has yet to be revealed.
Last year, EA used EA Play to show off gameplay for Anthem, BioWare’s ambitious if troubled loot-shooter, as well as detail its future plans for Battlefield V and announce several new EA Original titles, such as Sea of Solitude. Some of the games shown off at EA Play, like Sea of Solitude, have still not yet released, so there’s a chance we’ll hear more details or see new trailers for these titles at the event this year.
Jedi: Fallen Order was revealed at E3 2018, with the first major details and story trailer released during this year’s Star Wars Celebration. One of the six writers for Jedi: Fallen Order, Chris Avellone, said that story is “very important” to developer Respawn. “I think they do a good job of introducing various narrative layers into their games already, but they think the story is an important part of what they perceive to be a Star Wars game,” Avellone continued. “That’s one of the reasons I like Respawn, because when they tackle something like that, they understand what the important points are.”
Scheduled to release November 15 for Xbox One, PS4, and PC, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order takes place in the aftermath of Revenge of the Sith. The game puts you in the role of Cal Kestis, a Jedi padawan who escaped Order 66 and is now living in hiding from the Galactic Empire. However, he can’t remain hidden forever, and eventually the Empire sends one of its Jedi-hunting Inquisitors, the Second Sister, and Purge Troopers after him. Neither EA or Respawn has revealed much about Jedi: Fallen Order other than that, but there are quite a few people and places we hope we get to see in the game.
In honor of Star Wars Day (May 4), several movies, games, toys, and collectibles are also on sale.
Keeping track of the Infinity Stones is no easy task. From Asgard to Midgard, from Xandar to Vormir, the stones have been hidden, their presence mainly unknown to the galaxy except to a select few until it became everyone’s top priority to stop Thanos from collecting them.
So which was the stone that caused the most chatter? We tallied up every mention of each Infinity Stone up through Avengers: Infinity War:
The first stone to appear in the MCU was the Tesseract. The Red Skull pulled it out of a church in Norway in Captain America: The First Avenger. The second stone to be seen was the Mind Stone. Encased in a shell and used by Loki to manipulate the minds of men, he created havoc and chaos in New York.
Today’s Fortnite in-game event took players inside an interdimensional vault and saw the eruption of the giant volcano, resulting in the destruction of the long standing Tilted Towers.
A countdown appeared over the recently discovered vault at Loot Lake yesterday afternoon. After 24 hours, players gathered around the giant hatch and watched as it twisted opened, revealing a glowing purple light. Gliding into the vault transported players into a strange void where six tall pillars depicting previously removed weapons stood tall.
Players enthusiastically begging to bring the Drum Gun back moments before complaining it’s overpowered.
Ugh, I know. I’m sorry. It’s us again. Once again, it’s the weekend, which means an all-new Up At Noon, IGN’s nonsense horse-apples comedy variety show for grown-up children and dogs dressed up in people costumes. You can see the last two episodes here and here.
If you’ve never seen an episode before, give it a shot! Our goal was to create a live-action Saturday morning cartoon. I like to think that we failed, but in the same fortuitous way that the inventors of Champagne, Silly Putty, or Goat Simulator also failed.
Mega Man is one of gaming’s most recognizable mascots, yet the Blue Bomber seems often underutilized when compared to other Capcom franchises like Street Fighter and Monster Hunter. As we detailed in our feature focusing on Capcom’s continued success in recent years, the company has made a number of surprising decisions when it came to its slate of games, which included a canceled western reboot for Mega Man. Along with that, there was another planned Mega Man game that sought to shake up the traditional formula and take advantage of the budding surge of titles that took advantage of user-generated content. Spearheaded by the then head of global business Keiji Inafune, Mega Man Universe would allow players to explore an infinite number of “Megafied” worlds created by players and developers alike.
Essentially, Mega Man Universe was a Mega Man game by way of Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet, which at the time was one of the early pioneers of utilizing user-generated content. On a structural level, Universe seemed in line with the classic Mega Man games from the NES era. To go with the focus on exploring user-created levels and worlds, players could also customize their own version of the blue bomber–even allowing you to play as the crude incarnation from the Mega Man 2 North American box art. Furthermore, other characters from Capcom’s library, including Street Fighter’s Ryu and Ghost and Goblins’ Arthur, were also playable–letting you control drastically different characters within the framework of a Mega Man game. In addition to pulling upon Mega Man’s entire library games, it would also bring other Capcom properties into the mix.
It was a peculiar type of crossover to be sure, but there was something really engaging about what sort of content could be made from the game. However, what made the prospect of Mega Man Universe difficult to grasp at the time, however, was that its reveal left a very poor impression on its intended audience. At the time of the announcement, Universe was only four months into production, which producer Akiko Ito clarified in a 2010 interview with Joystiq. In the following year, not long after Keiji Inafune’s departure from Capcom, Mega Man Universe would be unceremoniously canceled. Eventually, fans of the Blue Bomber would get a more traditional game in the form of Mega Man 11 in 2018, which was generally well-received. Still, the concept of a continually expanding Mega Man game has great potential, especially considering how creative the fanbase is. With Nintendo’s Super Mario Maker series proving that the concept can work, it makes you wonder if Mega Man Universe would have fared better under different circumstances.
Warning: Full spoilers for Avengers: Endgame follow…
Losing half of the world’s population, including wildlife and other elements that would be absolutely crucial to ecosystems and the environment as a whole, is a catastrophe for sure. No one would argue this. Except for possibly Thanos, but even he’d have to admit that, despite new opportunities for progress, it’d all be a super bummer. Sacrifice galore.
After our remaining heroes in Avengers: Endgame learn the Infinity Stones are gone, and that there’s no way (discovered yet) to bring back everyone who’s been erased, the story jumps us five years into the forlorn future where the world is still in a stark and uncomfortable grieving period.
One of the most interesting periods in the story of Star Wars is the 19 years between the end of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and the beginning of Episode IV: A New Hope. That’s the section of time when Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa grew up on their respective planets, while the Empire consolidated its power and built the Death Star. The spookiest and most interesting story from that period, though, is the one about how Darth Vader scoured the galaxy after the formation of the Empire, hunting down and exterminating the last of the Jedi.
We haven’t seen much of what Darth Vader was up to in the years after he turned to the Dark Side. There’s a comic series about him that covers a part of that era, but there are still a lot of gaps about what happened to various Jedi in the Dark Times before what’s depicted in the original movie trilogy. But we’ll soon get a closer look at that period, thanks to one story directly related to Vader’s campaign to eliminate his former friends and comrades: Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order.
Not a lot is known about Respawn Entertainment’s Star Wars game, but the first trailer gives the gist of things. It follows a Jedi Padawan named Cal Kestis, who managed to escape Order 66–the order from the Emperor to his clone soldiers to execute the Jedi–and is now living in hiding. Cal uses his Force powers one day to save someone after an accident, and that exposes him; it looks like the rest of the game is about Cal becoming a fugitive as the Empire tries to hunt him down.
Click To Unmute
Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order — Official Story Reveal Trailer
Borderlands 3’s New Mechanics Are Exactly What We Want | Hands-On Impressions
Undoubtedly, Jedi Fallen Order will expand on the greater Star Wars story while focusing on the coolness of the moment-to-moment power of being a Jedi Knight. Surely, Cal will send storm troopers flying, lock lightsabers (or maybe vibroblades) with the Empire’s spooky Force-wielders, and maybe move some impossibly huge stuff with his mind.
It actually all sounds like another great Star Wars game about a Jedi and Darth Vader’s campaign to destroy them, which took place during the same period in Star Wars lore and greatly expanded on its story: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Though it was released 11 years ago, Lucasarts’ title is available on PC and through backward compatibility on Xbox One and Xbox One X. It remains one of the better realizations of Star Wars as a video game concept–and it told one of the Expanded Universe’s best tales, in terms of bridging the gap between the prequel films and the original trilogy, and in fleshing out the enigmatic Darth Vader.
The Force Unleashed provides a look at what Darth Vader could have been like as a father.
The Force Unleashed dealt with Vader’s campaign against the surviving Jedi, but from a different viewpoint: that of Vader’s secret apprentice, codenamed Starkiller. The game fleshes out an idea that comes up in The Empire Strikes Back, and which got strengthened in Revenge of the Sith: Vader actually hates Emperor Palpatine for what Vader has become. His falling to the Dark Side and siding with Palpatine cost him Padme and all his friends, plus his legs and the ability to breathe properly. Vader is a true believer in the Empire’s fascism as a means to peace, but he also wants to kill and overthrow the Emperor, as is the Sith way. Vader has secretly been training Starkiller to aid him with that goal.
Most of the game is just about getting more and more cool powers for Starkiller, who can pick up and throw people, zap them with Force lightning, throw his lightsaber and impale them on it, and a lot more. You defeat huge enemies like AT-ST walkers and rancors, slashing them apart with your lightsaber or using the Force to hurl huge objects at them at ridiculous speeds. Overall, no game has quite gotten at the phenomenal power we all like to imagine the Jedi wield (even if it’s a bit over the top) like The Force Unleashed has.
But it’s the story in The Force Unleashed that really shines. It does a lot to develop Vader, and to a lesser degree, Palpatine, with some great twists. We see Vader at his most intensely evil as he wields power in his abusive relationship with Starkiller, and the game provides a look at what Vader could have been like as a father. That’s something the movies only ever showed briefly at the end of Return of the Jedi, and then only in the moment of Vader’s redemption. Though he’s an adoptive father to Starkiller, Vader is also, basically, his slave master.
The battle between the Emperor and Vader doesn’t go as planned, though, when the Emperor finds out about Starkiller. Vader kills his apprentice to show his loyalty, but it’s a fakeout–Starkiller is secretly saved, and Vader gives him a new mission to gather up the Emperor’s strongest enemies and create an insurrection. The plan is to distract the Emperor with a rebellion (!) so Vader and Starkiller can surprise him and take him down.
In true Star Wars fashion, though, the conflict between good and evil in the formerly evil Starkiller starts to rage, thanks largely to the friends he’s made along the way. While Starkiller is struggling with whether to stay true to Vader or to his new allies, he finally gathers all the rebels together in one place, and The Force Unleashed pulls the rug out again. It turns out, Vader was never trying to use Starkiller to take down the Emperor. This was actually all an elaborate plan created by Palpatine himself, to use Starkiller to gather up all the dissidents into one place, so the Emperor could destroy them with a single blow.
Yup, in a paranoid, overly complex bid to destroy all his enemies, the Emperor accidentally creates the Rebel Alliance. The Force Unleashed recontextualizes the entire Star Wars original trilogy in a way that expands on the character of Palpatine as established in the prequel movies, mirroring the Emperor’s rise to power in the prequels with a move that results in his downfall. It takes Luke Skywalker’s line to Palpatine from Return of the Jedi–“Your overconfidence is your weakness”–and turns it into the game’s big twist. Meanwhile, it expands on Vader and Palpatine’s relationship, hinting at its turmoil while staying true to both characters. And it gets at just how evil Darth Vader really could be.
The Force Unleashed had its problems–its age definitely shows, it’s not particularly intuitive thanks to weaknesses with systems like locking onto enemies, and a lot of the story hinges on a love story between Starkiller and his pilot, Juno Eclipse, which does not get nearly enough development–but as a Star Wars video game, it tread a lot of new, interesting ground back in 2007. It’s a bummer that a supremely cool explanation for how the Rebel Alliance came to be is no longer a part of the official Star Wars story, but Jedi Fallen Order has the same chance to expand on what we know about the Star Wars films in the same interesting way. We can see more of the galaxy, learn more about what it means to be a Jedi (or not), and most importantly, send more stormtroopers flying into the vacuum of space, using more Force powers. Here’s hoping Respawn draws some inspiration from one of Star Wars’ best gaming outings.
Welcome to Daily Win, our way of giving back to the IGN community. To thank our awesome audience, we’re giving away a new game each day to one lucky winner. Be sure to check IGN.com every day to enter in each new giveaway.
Today we’re giving away a digital copy of Fade to Silence for Xbox One. To enter into this sweepstake, fill out the form below. You must be at least 18 years old and a legal U.S. resident to enter. Today’s sweepstake will end at 11:59 p.m. PDT. Entries entered after this time will not be considered.
