Category: Games

One of Microsoft’s newest internal game studios, The Initiative, has heaps of big-name talent on staff. The company employs Christian Cantamessa, the writer and designer of Red Dead Redemption, as well as God of War producer Brian Westergaard. The Initiative also has veteran employees of Respawn, BioWare, and Naughty Dog among its ranks, while former Square Enix and Activision boss Darrell Gallagher is heading up the studio. Needless to say, Xbox fans–and the video game industry overall–are waiting to see what the studio might be cooking up.

It’s still too soon to know for sure what the team is working on, but The Initiative design director Drew Murray (Sunset Overdrive, Resistance 3) has now seemingly revealed that the studio has a game that is far enough along in development to be playtested. Murray said on Twitter that people shouldn’t read too far into this because, for him, playtesting begins when a studio has literally anything working on-screen. Reading between the lines here, it seems safe to assume that The Initiative’s new game is still nowhere near ready for release.

Murray also posted a picture of himself with other members of the development team enjoying some drinks following what sounded like a challenging but educational playtesting session.

“Playtesting is informative, essential, and, if you have any ego, will leave you in the gutter. Fortunately, the design team have souls of iron coated in Teflon, so we just have fancy cocktails and talk about what we learned and what to fix next,” Murray said.

Regarding getting out of the office and and enjoying time away from their screens, Murray said working flat-out constantly can be a bad way to make games.

“Constant heads-down is overrated. If you don’t have the breathing space to think, you’re wasting time making bad decisions,” he said. “If you can’t break bread with your team to build trust and community it’ll murder your game later on. Also, it’s hard for me to get in-studio shots.”

The Initiative appears to be ramping up development on its mysterious new title. In addition to the fact that it is already playable in some form, the studio has 18 open positions on its careers website spanning a number of different disciplines including art, design, engineering, operations, and production.

The Initiative says it wants to remain “small,” but it remains to be seen what that means in practice. Others developers in the video talk about how The Initiative plans to “push boundaries,” “challenge convention,” and take risks as they make something “spectacular and unique.”

The Initiative was announced at E3 2018 as part of Microsoft’s wider announcement of new studios and acquisitions. The company, which is based in Santa Monica, says its ambition is “about craft, creating story, innovating, and looking ahead to the next big thing.” While the company is owned by Microsoft, it claims to operate independently.

There is no word on when The Initiative’s new game may be announced. Microsoft’s next big event is X019 in London, which takes place in November.

Divinity: Original Sin developer Larian Studios has indefinitely postponed one of its upcoming projects. The studio announced that the tactics game Divinity: Fallen Heroes is now postponed with no new release date announced. Larian was working with Danish developer Logic Artists on the game.

“It is with a profound sense of regret that today we announce Divinity: Fallen Heroes has been put on hold, as we fondly celebrate the work done so far,” Larian said in a message posted to Twitter.

Fallen Heroes was announced in March 2019, though Larian was working with Logic Artists for more than a year before the game was officially announced. It was due for release in November 2019, but that is no longer going to happen.

Larian will place its focus now on the ongoing development of Baldur’s Gate 3, while Logic Artists is working on its own new game called Expeditions. “We’re sorry for the players excited for Fallen Heroes, who will have to wait an unspecified period of time, but we strongly believe that bringing Fallen Heroes to fans should be done in a timeline that allows it to be developed soundly.”

Logic Artists said in the joint statement, “It’s always said to put an exciting project on hold, but sometimes the realities of development and release schedules simply assert themselves in ways that are outside anyone’s control.”

While Fallen Heroes might not be coming anytime soon, you can always go back and play Original Sin 2–it is one of GameSpot’s favorite games ever.

In our review, we gave the game a 10/10, and the title went on to be one of our favorites of 2017. It’s definitive edition is also one of our best reissued games of 2018. A Nintendo Switch version launched in September 2019.

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Several sources have revealed that Jada Pinkett Smith is in current negotiations to reprise her role as Niobe in The Matrix 4.

As reported by Deadline, Smith starred as Niobe in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions and was the captain of the Logos hovercraft. Niobe also appeared in Enter the Matrix and The Matrix Online.

Smith has recently appeared in Angel Has Fallen, Girls Trip, Gotham, Bad Moms, and the Madagascar films.

While Smith is not yet a guarantee for The Matrix 4, both How I Met Your Mother’s Neil Patrick Harris and Aquaman’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II have been officially cast in the upcoming film.

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We can now officially confirm that we are playing Death Stranding and you will be able to read/watch the resulting review at 12AM Pacific time on Friday, November 1. If you’re keeping track, that’s a whole week before the release date of November 8. And that’s… literally everything Sony will allow us to say about it right now. Check back in a couple of weeks and we’ll give you an in-depth opinion of Kojima’s first non-Metal Gear game in forever, all while keeping it as spoiler-free as can reasonably be expected in a review where the whole idea is to tell you what we liked and what we didn’t.

So, to kill the time between now and then, why not flip through this massive list of info we’ve gleaned from all of the pre-release trailers and interviews?

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Death Stranding was first revealed at E3 2016, and in those three years creator Hideo Kojima has done his usual slow-drip of trailers and gameplay demos to stoke our curiosity and confusion. It’s only now that people outside of Kojima Productions are able to actually play the game, and while opinions of any kind are currently under wraps, we can at least share that the Death Stranding review embargo will officially lift on November 1 at 12:01AM PDT.

The most recent opportunity for Kojima to demonstrate what he’s been working on since leaving Konami was Tokyo Game Show 2019. There, over the course of two days, Kojima gave us a deeper look into the moment-to-moment gameplay of Death Stranding, which included everything from mundane traversal to battles against supernatural enemies. He followed that up with a closer look at the private quarters of Sam Porter Bridges, the main character played by Norman Reedus. It was a very revealing demo, though not in the way you might expect.

Reedus is but one of many celebrities that will appear in Death Stranding, along with Guillermo Del Toro, Mads Mikkelsen, and Lea Seydoux, to name but a few. Sadly, Keanu Reeves won’t make an appearance despite rumors. We’ve also learned that real-world brands like Monster Energy will also be prominently featured in the game–it’s anyone’s guess as to whether or not these inclusions will have an impact on the credibility of the fictional (and strange) world that Kojima has crafted.

In fact, the strangeness has been at the heart of the game’s messaging since the very beginning. If you fell off trying to make sense of Death Stranding a long time ago, now is the perfect time to brush up on everything we’ve learned so far, including details about the world, the characters that inhabit it, and the unusual constraints that will be set upon Sam as you guide him across treacherous terrain in a bid to reunite the once united states of America.

If our current Death Stranding guide isn’t enough, you can also take Kojima’s very straightforward explanation below:

After Death Stranding reviews land on November 1, the rest of us will have to wait until the game releases on November 8 to see what all the fuss is about. (Kept you waiting, huh?)