Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 parent company Take-Two has stated it has more unannounced games coming before the end of the financial year. The company, which owns publisher Rockstar, confirmed the news in an earnings call; CEO Strauss Zelnick said the company has “titles coming in the fiscal year that have not been announced yet.”
The current fiscal year ends on March 31, 2020, meaning these titles will arrive before then. It should be noted, however, that Take-Two also owns 2K Games, the publisher of games like XCOM and Borderlands 3, and 2K Sports. We therefore shouldn’t get too excited at the prospect of GTA 6 and Red Dead Redemption 3 launching in the next 10 months.
Welcome to start of our IGN First for the month of May, all about Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint! Over the next few weeks we’ll be bringing you exclusive inside peeks at this survival-focused follow-up to Ghost Recon Wildlands. Up first, we’ve got details about a part of Breakpoint that hasn’t been revealed yet: the hideout.
Called Erewhon, this village in a hidden cave on the main island of the Auroa archipelago is the shelter of a group called the Homesteaders. This multipurpose hideout acts as your central hub for story progression, a place to evaluate your objectives around Auroa, and even an online social hub where you can coordinate and meet up with other players for co-op and PvP.
IGN has the exclusive first trailer for Batman: Hush, the next feature-length DC Universe Original Movie from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment. You can watch it in the player above or embedded below.
Coming to Blu-ray, DVD and Digital later this summer, Batman: Hush is inspired by the acclaimed 2002-2003 storyline written by Jeph Loeb, penciled by Jim Lee, inked by Scott Williams, and colored by Alex Sinclair.
Batman: Hush centers on a mysterious new villain known only as Hush, who uses a rogues’ gallery of villains to destroy Batman’s crime-fighting career as well as Bruce Wayne’s personal life, which has been further complicated by a relationship with Selina Kyle/Catwoman.
Be sure to visit IGN Tech for all the latest comprehensive reviews and best-of roundups. Note that if you click on one of these links to buy the product, IGN may get a share of the sale. For more, read our Terms of Use.
The OnePlus 7 Pro is pretty much the phone of my dreams. It’s an incredible all-screen phone that doesn’t ruin its edge-to-edge display with a notch or hole punch front-facing camera—opting to move it to a pop-up module instead. Sure, other phones like the Oppo Find X, Nubia X, and Vivo Nex have pulled off the all-screen and pop-up camera move before, but none of them have had the specs or software to match up with the best flagship smartphones currently on the market.
If you buy something through this post, IGN may get a share of the sale. For more, read our Terms of Use.
Today only, you can save up to 50% off ARRIS Surfboard cable modems on Amazon. It’s the online retailer’s Deal of the Day, and while buying a cable modem on sale isn’t the most thrilling thing in the world, it’s something you should absolutely consider.
That’s because your internet service provider is probably taking advantage of you (shocking, I know.) By default, most cable providers charge a monthly fee of around $9 to lend you a not-very-expensive piece of equipment each month until you die. But if you buy your own cable modem, you can stop paying that fee right now and watch gleefully as your cable bill drops. The modem pays for itself in just a few months, and then you’re just saving money going forward. What’s not to love? Just hurry, because the deal ends at midnight.
After over six months in open beta, Red Dead Online is finally leaving its beta phase and rolling out a huge new update. This week, Red Dead Redemption 2‘s online mode is getting pumped up with new co-op story missions, Free Roam missions that feature new characters from the main game, new Posse Versus Challenges with activities like fishing and shooting, a new hostility system, poker games that seat up to six players, various gameplay improvements, and more.
To celebrate the occasion, Rockstar Games is making Red Dead Online available to all PS4 players, including those who aren’t subscribed to PlayStation Plus, as part of a special bonus period. From now through May 27, anyone who owns Red Dead Redemption 2 on PS4 can dive into its online multiplayer mode. With all the new additions and improvements, there’s no better time to see what Red Dead Online is all about.
If you want to keep playing Red Dead Online past May 27, PlayStation is temporarily lowering the price of PS Plus for Red Dead Redemption 2 owners in the US. The 12-month subscription is being offered for $48 (usually $60), while the three-month plan is available for $21 (usually $25); plus, you’ll receive 10 Gold Bars per month while your subscription lasts. This offer ends June 3 and must be purchased within Red Dead Redemption 2. The subscription will auto-renew at full price unless you cancel. (Psst–if you don’t care about the Gold Bars, you can get a 12-month PS Plus subscription for $40 at MassGenie right now.)
More content and bonuses are planned for Red Dead Online in the coming weeks, including new Free Roam missions, clothing, and PS4 Early Access content, which will release on May 21 in time for players without PS Plus to check it out. Another perk: Anyone who logs into Red Dead Online this week will get a one-time gift of 15 Gold Bars and receive a 15% XP increase on A Land of Opportunities, Free Roam missions and events, Showdown modes, and races. You’ll also find 25% extra cash and gold in chests. Finally, Ultimate Edition owners will also receive $100 in Red Dead Online cash and the Throat Slit emote for free.
Disney has reached a deal with Comcast that will give the company majority control of Hulu for $5.8 billion.
Per Variety, Comcast’s NBCUniversal will keep licensing content to Hulu through 2024, while retaining a 33% stake in the streaming provider. Over the next five years, NBCUniversal has the right to either cancel some of its existing content or offer it “on a nonexclusive basis for a reduced licensing fee.” Disney can buy out NBCUniversal’s remaining 33% share in 2024 for an evaluation price of $27.5 billion.
Bob Iger, Disney’s chairman, and CEO said, “We are now able to completely integrate Hulu into our direct-to-consumer business and leverage the full power of The Walt Disney Company’s brands and creative engines to make the service even more compelling and a greater value for consumers.”
Each week, digital storefronts and local retailers release a slew of new movies and TV series for you to purchase. While movies like Detective Pikachu are dominating the box office, maybe you want to stay home and watch something on your couch? This week is a pretty large week for releases, even though there isn’t anything huge of note.
Digitally, you can find new releases at digital storefronts like iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, and more. The Kevin Hart/Bryan Cranston dramedy The Upside drops this week. The movie follows a wealthy handicapped man who needs someone to help him with his daily routine. He hires a parolee who is trying to put his life back together.
Additionally, there is a new Batman movie available. In Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the dark night teams up with the heroes in the half shell to fight Shredder and Ra’s Al Ghul. This is very much a movie title that explains the entirety of the plot. Other releases of note are Apollo 11, Cold Pursuit, and the A24 horror movie Climax.
On the physical side of things, on DVD and Blu-ray this week is Fighting With My Family. The film is the real-life story of WWE superstar Paige and her family, who are also wrestlers. Paige starts off in the indies and works her way through WWE’s developmental system, NXT. While the movie tends to make choices that may annoy hardcore wrestling fans, Fighting with my Family is a lighthearted and fun flick. The DVD release includes deleted and extended scenes, a gag reel, commentary, and making-of featurettes, including in-ring training for the movie. If I had a pick of the week, this would be it–mainly because I love wrestling.
Below, you’ll find the full list for his week’s releases, both digitally and physically.
Digital:
Physical:
Some links to supporting retailers are automatically made into affiliate links, and GameSpot may receive a small share of those sales.
Last week, Disney revealed the release dates for the three Star Wars movies that will follow Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker this December. It has now been confirmed that Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss will be making the first of these, which is set to arrive in 2022.
As reported by io9, this news was announced by Disney boss Bob Iger while was speaking at the MoffetNathanson Media & Communications summit in New York. It’s not a big surprise, as it’s been known for some time that Benioff and Weiss have been working on a new series of Star Wars films.
The new Star Wars movies will be released on on December 16, 2022, December 20, 2024, and December 18, 2026. There are two sets of movies in development, one from Benioff and Weiss, and the other from The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson. It had been rumored that work on Benioff and Weiss’s series was further along, and Star Wars Net recently reported that their first movie will begin production this fall. It has also been reported that their films will be set in the days of the Old Republic, hundreds of years before the events of the current movies.
It’s notable that the Star Wars release schedule has slowed down. When the series relaunched in 2015 with The Force Awakens, Disney’s plan was to release a movie each year. However, the commercial failure of 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story reportedly led to plans for further spin-offs to be cancelled, with Iger admitting that the movies so far had been released “a little too much, too fast.” The new films will now be released every two years, alternating their December releases with James Cameron’s Avatar sequels.
In related news, the live-action Star Wars show The Mandalorian premieres in the fall, when the streaming platform Disney+ launches. There is also a show focusing on the Rogue One character Cassian Andor in development for the service.
Join GameSpot as we celebrate gaming history and give recognition to the most influential games of the 21st century. These aren’t the best games, and they aren’t necessarily games that you need to rush out and play today, but there’s no question that they left an indelible impact on game developers, players, and in some cases, society at large.
From Software’s Dark Souls launched in 2011 and, at the time, seemed destined for obscurity. As the spiritual successor to PS3 curio Demon’s Souls, it initially garnered interest from a small but passionate fanbase, but few would have bet on it to leave a lasting impression. After all, 2011 was a year littered with tentpole releases: Skyrim, The Witcher 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Batman: Arkham City, Uncharted 3, Portal 2, and Modern Warfare 3, to name just a few.
These were new entries in blockbuster franchises that leveraged the cachet of well-known and respected developers–Dark Souls, on the other hand, came from an underappreciated Japanese studio which had cultivated a niche following through the challenging gameplay and obscure design of its previous games. On lists of notable game releases of 2011, Dark Souls still looks like an awkward outsider. And yet, what it achieved resonated with game developers and players in a way that made it one of the century’s defining games.
From Software may have received mainstream recognition with Dark Souls, but what made that game special wasn’t that it came up with completely new ways to play, it was instead the execution of ideas that From Software had been playing with since its very first title, King’s Field. From Software is a studio that iterates more than it innovates, and the building blocks of what made Dark Souls a landmark title were laid out in Demon’s Souls, albeit in a configuration that felt less cohesive than they would be in the follow-up.
Dark Souls is a game in which players are cast as the Chosen Undead, a prophesied figure that would appear at the end of the Age of Fire and journey to Lordran to either sacrifice themselves to the flame and extend the Age of Fire, or snuff it out and usher in the Age of Dark. The Souls series has come to be notorious for its difficulty. Death is inevitable, and often woven in on a thematic level. Enemies, large and small, are ruthless, often punishing missteps and undoing progress in a way that feels particularly ruthless. This trait of Dark Souls is what is most prominently discussed and, at the time, showed that games didn’t have to be power fantasies where the player always has the upper hand. Instead, the grueling struggle of facing insurmountable odds and the satisfaction of overcoming them was a valuable and appreciated design philosophy.
In the wake of Dark Souls, games began to bear their teeth once again, harkening back to classic, punishing experiences of old school platformers and action games. Titles such as Titan Souls, Nioh, Lords of the Fallen, Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, Dragon’s Dogma, and The Surge, among many others, were built around offering the same sense of powerlessness that Dark Souls popularized. They challenged players to work for the satisfaction of victory and earn their progress, instead of handing it to them on a platter. This is perhaps the most immediate ramification of Dark Souls on games as a whole, but the game’s achievements extend so much farther.
Ask a From Software or Souls fanatic what the most impactful part of Dark Souls was, and why they think it has been influential, and they are more likely to cite the game’s delivery of narrative and its world-building. Demon’s and Dark Souls are games that reflect the way their director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, experienced stories as a child. Growing up poor, he became an avid reader, often delving into stories that were still beyond his comprehension. He would reach passages that were difficult for him to understand, and in those moments would craft his own narratives to fill in the blanks.
That kind of co-authorship is at the heart of Dark Souls. The world of Lordran is rich with history, with various gods, disciples, factions, and ideologies laid out to build a compelling world for players to unravel and understand. But all of the necessary details to do so are scattered around the game as small pieces of a larger puzzle. Those interested in seeing the full picture would need to read item descriptions, which contained small nuggets of information, or listen closely to the vague chatter of characters, and then draw their own connections. Like the gameplay, the process of experiencing the story demands patience, a studious nature, and the willingness to read between the lines and draw conclusions that may never be overtly verified. That sense of narrative minimalism also became pervasive in the post-Dark Souls era.
From Software’s depiction of Lordran is one of its crowning achievements, and to this day few games have been able to capture an atmosphere in the way Dark Souls did.
Audiences began placing scrutiny on aspects of games that were previously an afterthought. Things like item descriptions were no longer just treated as simple flavor text, and set dressing didn’t just have to be eye-candy. It became an expectation that even the smallest details should be meaningful to the game in some way. In turn, developers seized the opportunity to explore narratives in more emergent ways. Bungie’s Destiny, for example, is a game that–on the face of it–launched with a barebones story, but obsessives that read the text attached to guns, armor, and other items could find so much more buried beneath the surface. With that in mind, it’s perhaps more appropriate to say that Dark Souls was a game that emphasized lore more than story, and showed that players didn’t need to be held by the hand and dragged through a narrative. They could be teased with it and left to find meaning at their leisure. The delivery of narrative and lore became more sophisticated, and you only have to look at the massive online communities that have developed around dissecting Dark Souls’ story to see just how valuable this has been.
Lordran itself also holds as significant a place in the history of games. On a broader level, its construction stands out as intricate and thoughtful, with disparate areas connecting in a natural way that imprinted a vivid impression of its whole, but it’s the artistic expression that elevates it all. Lordran is a world that feels suspended in time and on the precipice of a great change, waiting for the player to arrive and instigate it. The Age of Fire has not been kind to its people, who have lost their purpose and become husks of themselves because of an endless cycle of death and rebirth. Lordran is oppressively somber, a sad echo of a kingdom that was once prosperous and ruled by a benevolent king. The desperate struggle to hold on to the Age of Light only served to plunge the land into further turmoil, and this is overwhelmingly apparent at every turn. From Software’s depiction of Lordran is one of its crowning achievements, and to this day few games have been able to capture an atmosphere in the way Dark Souls did. From its very outset, the game is melancholic, and as you stand in Firelink Shrine–a hub area that players return to frequently–evocative music makes you mourn for a world you barely even know. There’s a restraint to the way From Software presented Lordran, with many areas left eerily silent, devoid of life, and bearing the marks of cataclysmic events from ages gone.
In Dark Souls, less was very much more. It sought to instill feelings and evoke emotions: isolation, loneliness, fear, or uncertainty, these are what remain most memorable about the game. In GameSpot’s review of Dark Souls, Kevin VanOrd said, “Its terrors emanate from its very core … how amazing that such a terrible place could be so inviting. The game’s world is so memorable, and its action so thrilling, that it might invade your thoughts even when you aren’t playing, silently urging you to escape the real world and return to this far more treacherous one.” This achievement can’t be held up as entirely unique to Dark Souls, as games that came before it, most notably Nintendo’s Metroid series, Thief, Shadow of the Colossus, and more modern titles such as BioShock, managed similar feats. But somewhere along the way, this method of creating a striking sense of place through minimalism fell by the wayside. In the years following Dark Souls, however, they sprung back into the spotlight, obtuse, empty, and often hostile game world became the aesthetic du jour, with games like Hollow Knight, Sunless Sea, and Darkest Dungeon.
Dark Souls’ impact on gaming is undeniable. Such is its influence that the term Souls-like has become a genre in and of itself. But describing a game as “Souls-like” can mean so many things, from challenging gameplay to emergent storytelling, or even a distinct sense of place. The fact that the term can be used in such a diverse way to explain facets of action games, RPGs, puzzle games, or even text adventures is the strongest indication of just how important the game was and is to this day.
