Lord of the Rings: Rise To War is a mobile strategy game based on the Third Age of Middle-earth. It’s due to release soon, dropping just a day after Bilbo and Frodo’s shared birthday on September 23, and developer NetEase is sharing some juicy new details on how the game will play.
NetEase released a video with senior game designer Nicolas Perrin, who discusses the appeal of bringing Middle-earth to life in a video game before going into more detail as to how Rise To War has handled that task.
Perrin says the game’s format alone sets Rise To War apart from the numerous other Lord of the Rings games that have been made over the years. “While most of the other Lord of the Rings games are about roleplay, our game is about strategy,” Perrin said. “We think that it’s an opportunity for players to experience going to war in Middle-earth.”
To that end, players will be able to experience battles across the entire map of Middle-earth. “We paid especially great attention to recreating the game map as faithfully as possible,” Perrin said. “It will include all the classic places of Middle-earth like Dol Guldur, Minas Tirith, Edoras.”
You’ll also be able to play with some of Tolkien’s most beloved characters, whether you know them from the movies or the original novels. “We will include all the fan favorites Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli,” Perrin said. “But also we hope to include less famous characters and hopefully give them a chance to get some time in the spotlight.”
The video shows off a few sneak peeks of the actual gameplay, revealing that players will be able to create and deploy different combat units belonging to a faction of their choice. A shot in the video shows a number of factions available to choose from including Isengard, Rohan, Gondor, Mordor, Lothlorien, and Erebor.
Rise To War is due out on mobile platforms later this month on September 23. If that doesn’t scratch your Lord Of The Rings itch, there are plenty of other projects on the horizon including a Gollum-centered game and a number of enhancements for the long-running Lord Of The Rings Online MMO.
The Eternals is set to be a big entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 4, introducing a whole new cast of characters to the comic-based saga. In an interview with GamesRadar’s Total Film, director Chloé Zhao has promised that the new movie will have a big impact on the MCU going forward.
“I think we stand alone as a film for sure,” Zhao told Total Film. “But I do think we will have a very big effect on the future of the MCU with what happens in this film. Which, you know, as a fan, is really satisfying for me! I geek out.”
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Of course, the MCU being the MCU, we can’t expect too many early details on just how The Eternals will impact the already sprawling Marvel universe. Members of the cast who were also interviewed refused to give away details, though they were happy to talk about the real-world ways they believe The Eternals is going to be influential.
“No one [normally] calls and says, ‘I’ve been thinking about you for my next film. And it’s also a huge movie, and you are one of the leads. And you get to be a superhero in your fifties, when you’re Mexican Lebanese,'” said Salma Hayek, who plays Ajak. “The Eternals were smarter than Hollywood. You see that they’ve got the essence of something. Our diversity goes beyond the geography. It’s just a group of unique individuals.”
“I feel that with more representation and diversity within the MCU, that sense of optimism and ‘can-do’ becomes more strong, more palpable,” said Lauren Ridloff, who plays Deaf hero Makkari. “I hope that people who feel seen also feel empowered to dream bigger.”
The Eternals will release in cinemas on November 5 and, following in the footsteps of latest release Shang Chi and the Legend Of The Ten Rings, will be a theatrical exclusive for at least 45 days until a possible release on Disney Plus.
One-part tiny Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and one-part Micro Machines, Skatebird is a little bit like a Photoshop Friday pun parody brought to life; it’s extremely small birds riding Tech Decks on small-scale stunt ramps scattered around a messy bedroom, plus various locations around an office. Beneath the joke is an ambitious attempt at a 3D arcade skateboarding game, and it’s heavily inspired by the early Neversoft Tony Hawk games. The result is cute, earnest, and undeniably eye-catching, but it’s also pretty unrefined, light on content, and regularly irritating to play.
The general vibe is as though someone brought up the legendary aforementioned Birdman and someone else sprang up from their empty pint glass and exclaimed, “Birds, man!” – only instead of cobbling together a crude JPEG of a pigeon doing a 900 they spent several years building a bona fide video game based on a loose gag. Developer Glass Bottom Games has obviously injected a boatload of bird-themed touches throughout, but the studio sticks largely to the Tony template: big air, wild tricks, and an assortment of maps sprinkled with tasks to complete and letters and tapes to collect.
Developer Glass Bottom Games has obviously injected a boatload of bird-themed touches throughout, but the studio sticks largely to the Tony template.
The key influence appears to be Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, where Neversoft dropped the iconic two-minute timer in favour of allowing players to cruise the maps searching for individual mini-missions. Like THPS4, Skatebird doesn’t supply an overt list of challenges before each level and time every run; you need to skate around the environment and find NPCs – or NPBs in this case, I guess – scattered around the map to discover the challenges you need to complete. While challenges themselves are timed, the lack of a countdown clock on general exploring suits Skatebird’s relaxed nature – an atmosphere that’s served very well by its catchy set list of original, bird-themed tunes.
The soundtrack itself is easily the most polished part of Skatebird, and it’s stacked with relaxing, skate-friendly earworms full of bird calls and samples of overzealous nature filmmakers from public domain documentaries. It’s very well done; even the birds enjoy it, bopping along as they skate.
Do a Chickflip
Unlike THPS4, however, Skatebird doesn’t highlight fellow birds with missions to assign you in any particular way, so skating around searching for the next mission can sometimes be a punishment. They’re not hidden, but you do just have to coast about until you happen upon them. Also, sometimes the birds disappear after you’ve completed their mission, and sometimes they don’t – but there’s no distinction between the birds who remain on the map after you’ve done their mission and have nothing further for you to do, and the ones that do have a new task for you. This meant I often found myself skating up to (and directly through) birds with no objectives for me while combing the map for the one that did.
The tasks are generally very easy, and the time limits Skatebird provides to collect stuff and build scores are mostly very generous. Items and letters required for individual objectives are often placed quite close together in a single area of the map, but even if they’re more spread out an onscreen marker will lead you directly to them. Unfortunately, this tends to make a lot of Skatebird’s challenges surprisingly boring, with collection closer to a formality than a challenge (except whenever some dodgy hit detection decides you didn’t grab an object despite literally banging it with your beak, or skating through it several times).
There were a few challenges I did get hung up on for a few extra attempts, but the headache in these instances was mostly related to the jankiness of the camera and the controls. The camera often struggles to smoothly track the avian action onscreen, and there were plenty of occasions when I got temporarily trapped in 90-degree corners or other random parts of the level, sending the camera into a tailspin. It’s also a bit taxing to get out of a tight squeeze; having the birds flutter to turn on the spot may look authentic but in practice it just makes it cumbersome and sluggish.
Tiny Hawks Know Skating
There’s a huge amount of imagination on show in Skatebird, from the greasy pizza box ramps, to the fake issues of Thrasher rip-off ‘Thrusher’ magazine bent into quarter pipes, to the plastic straws acting as coping, even if the overall art style is a bit basic and angular. It’s cute, too, and there’s certainly something to be said about a game that lets you be a galah wearing a piece of bok choy for a hat, or a cockatoo cosplaying as the first guy to always get arrested at a music festival.
Glass Bottom Games has leaned hard into the feathered framing of Skatebird, and I certainly can’t accuse it of lacking originality, even if I’m way too old for heckin’ satirical zoomer misspellings of words like “birb” and “screm.” Once the novelty of birds on toy skateboards wears off, however, the skating itself is revealed to be quite rough. It’s easy enough to bash out a few flips and grabs, but the tricks seem quite limited and they’re neither very exciting to watch or easy to distinguish from one another. Grabs in particular are boring, and the way birds instantly snap into stalls makes these feel noticeably unfinished.
Once the novelty of birds on toy skateboards wears off, however, the skating itself is revealed to be quite rough.
What’s more, there are also only five levels available, including a small, barren, and boring rooftop level that’s disappointingly plain and really a poor showcase of Skatebird’s shtick. With no multiplayer and minimal maps there really isn’t a ton of game here.
The latest Roblox key metrics report also revealed that monthly earnings were between $167 million and $170 million, an increase of around 100% year on year.
The game, a self-described “human co-experience platform”, exploded in popularity last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, cementing itself as a popular online hangout for players who couldn’t meet up in real life. Since then it has been able to maintain its steady growth in both user numbers and revenue.
The company has made use of its platform to replace real-life events, hosting huge experiences like last year’s Lil Nas X concert. The company is set to try and replicate that success again this week, when Twenty One Pilots are due to host a concert and related “experience” within the game.
Roblox has big ambitions to continue its growth, as one of the numerous companies now determined to grow its platform into a “metaverse”–other companies leaning on the metaverse concept include Epic Games and Facebook. Most recently, Roblox rolled out a test of an in-game voice chat system that would help Roblox players communicate seamlessly like they would in real life, but also to go beyond the restrictions of the real world.
Time Magazine has released its 100 Most Influential People List for the year, featuring the likes of Simone Biles, Britney Spears, and crypto pioneer Vitalik Buterin. Among their number is Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA–one of only three tech CEOs included in this year’s list, alongside Elon Musk and Tim Cook.
While NVIDIA is a well-known brand in the gaming industry, with the company’s newest Ampere line of graphics cards still highly coveted and near impossible to obtain, Huang is included in the Time list for the company’s work enabling AI through neural networks.
“The software that enables computers to do things that once required human perception and judgment depends largely on hardware made possible by Jensen Huang,” reads the Time profile written by DeepLearning.AI founder Andrew Ng. “With still emerging AI technologies creating an insatiable hunger for more computation, Huang’s team is well-positioned to keep driving technological advances for decades to come.”
As well as powering gaming and neural networks, NVIDIA’s GPUs are also increasingly being used to mine cryptocurrency, especially Ethereum–whose co-founder Vitalik Buterin was also included on the Influential People list. Their popularity for mining has exacerbated chip supply shortages, with NVIDIA having re-released older cards for mining, while slashing mining performance on new stocks of gaming-focused GPUS.
In this video, DeVante talks about the delay of Battlefield 2042 from October 22 to November 19, 2021. The game will release after competitor Call of Duty: Vanguard and not long before Halo Infinite.
Later on, DeVante breaks down the Nintendo Switch’s latest update that introduces Bluetooth audio output functionality, as well as Splitgate developer 1047 Games raising $100 Million and retaining their independence.
Deltarune: Chapter 2, which is the second entry in the follow-up to Undertale, will be released on both PC and Mac on September 17, 2021, at 5pm PT/8pm ET/1am BST (9/18).
A short video of Deltarune: Chapter 2 was released on Twitter alongside the announcement from Undertale’s 6th-anniversary celebration event, and Deltarune.com has been updated with a few more details regarding save transfers and more.
To ensure your Deltarune: Chapter 1 save file is transferred to Deltarune: Chapter 2, players will need to see the credits of the first game. Chapter 1’s “completion data” will be created when you “go to sleep in your bed at the end of the game.”
If you happen to be on a different computer than the one you played Deltarune: Chapter 1 on, the FAQ also reassures that, “as long as you generally remember what happened story-wise, you’ll be fine.”
The much-anticipated release date annoucement came after Undertale creator Toby Fox was part of a playthrough of Deltarune: Chapter 1, and the extended glimpse of Chapter 2 includes a tease of what fans can expect in this game that is arriving around three years after the original.
What is yet unclear is how much Deltarune: Chapter 2 will cost, or if it will also be free like Chapter 1.
He also mentioned that he believes that Chapter 3 of Deltarune should be a bit easier to make as the team can use what they learned in Chapter 2 as a guiding light.
Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Sadly, not all AAA games and their servers can stay golden. The sun is about to set on Forza Motorsport 7, a racing king that shall no longer be available to buy through the Microsoft Store. Don’t let it (and a whole bunch of other deals I’ve found today) drive away from you, forever.
I recently got the chance to attend a hands-off preview for Solar Ash to get eyes on how the game looked outside an orchestrated trailer. Despite the seemingly effortless movement behind protagonist Rei’s actions, there was a palpable tension surrounding her as she skated over clouds, grinded across rails, and dashed from one end of a room to another. Since I didn’t have the chance to try out the game myself, I couldn’t tell, but it seemed as if every movement was carefully calculated.
With how graceful Rei was moving through the level, it all looked rather simple. But if the repeated efforts to correctly maneuver through the same time-based puzzle or multiphase boss fight were any indication, Solar Ash is anything but simple.
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Now Playing: Solar Ash – Official Gameplay Trailer
Though Solar Ash is a movement-based game, creative director Alx Preston told me that just going fast isn’t the goal. Solar Ash is a game all about using different moves to achieve the right level of speed and get the ideal window for timing an attack. It’s as much about achieving mastery in how you move as it is about moving quickly.
To that end, Rei doesn’t grow stronger and acquire new moves over the course of Solar Ash to help her go faster. The player has all of her moves from the start, but the game’s high skill ceiling will push you to perform those same moves in different combinations to pull off faster and more efficient means of movement–think freerunning in Titanfall 2 or air dribbling in Rocket League. Solar Ash pulls from earlier inspirations, however; Preston compares it to Super Mario 64.
“[Solar Ash] is intentionally set up to be a little bit Mario-style where you have your suite of moves from the start,” Preston told me. “You can get some different [abilities] throughout via different suit powers, but you can beat the game without getting any of them.”
“It’s a little bit like Super Mario 64–the depth of control out of the box, you have a lot to learn in order to build your skill and get better. To me, that’s the most enjoyable start–good character controls out of the box.”
Solar Ash is the sophomore effort from developer Heart Machine, the studio behind 2016’s Hyper Light Drifter. You play as Rei, a voidrunner who enters a black hole in order to save her planet. According to Preston, Solar Ash is a game where everyone is trying to “escape their own pain.”
“You’ll learn about the story in a multitude of ways,” Preston said. “We have a lot of visual storytelling that’s prominent throughout the game. It’s all very meticulously crafted. We introduced [voice-over] with our characters as well. It’s going to run the gamut of storytelling methodologies. We put a lot of time and care and effort into those story spaces and set pieces to make sure it communicates things about the world that you wouldn’t otherwise know through just pure text. So that observation is going to be important.”
As just mentioned, Rei and the other characters actually speak in Solar Ash, a major departure from Hyper Light Drifter which didn’t feature voices (or even words) and conveyed conversations via still images. When speaking to other characters in Solar Ash, the player is given dialogue options that allow Rei to dig deeper into the lore of the game–based on the hands-off preview, it looks like something that will regularly pop up throughout the campaign.
Which isn’t to say that Solar Ash is crowded with folks to talk to–similar to Hyper Light Drifter, this is a lonely experience. But even that loneliness will be different this time around, as Rei will quietly muse about what she sees and is feeling instead of remaining stoically silent.
“She definitely has her own handful of bits of dialogue in any given zone,” Preston said. “She comments on things. She reminds players of certain things at different times. We have her speaking a good amount.”
“But we try to leave enough open for interpretation for the player, because those are the types of stories that I enjoy the most–the ones that can have explicit components, where they can be telling a clear story, but they have an implicit nature to really let the player make the story their own.”
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Solar Ash Trailer | Summer Game Fest 2021
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So even though Solar Ash isn’t a linear game, it’s been designed with a definitive overarching narrative path. You can wander off that path for optional content, but you can’t explore all of the biomes from the very start and break the intended arc of the story. Heart Machine designed Solar Ash with movement mechanics in mind first, but this isn’t like Neon White where speedrunning and sequence breaking has been planned for in advance.
“You will learn the spaces pretty well and learn which things you have to do and which things you don’t,” Preston said. “I’m very curious to see if anybody will be able to sequence break things–I’m sure that they’ll find some way, but there’s nothing explicit.”
There are tools in the game to help you stay on the right track. Solar Ash doesn’t have a map; instead, the design of each biome guides the player towards their objective. “We spent a lot of time on the environments and sight lines, guiding the player’s eyes to certain things,” Preston said.
And beyond that, Rei carries a scanner to help her highlight and pinpoint objectives, though it won’t provide the player with as much information as the Arkham series’ detective vision or Assassin’s Creed’s eagle vision. “It’s really just about your core objectives,” Preston said. “It’s not going to do anything too much more granular than that. We want to let players explore and not hold their hands.”
“There will be a clear progression for you overall. There is a lot of variation within there–you’ll see what I mean when you dig into it, there’s plenty of openness to how you tackle certain things. But there is a clear progression overall.”
We’ll be able to see soon enough, given that Solar Ash’s release date is right around the corner. Solar Ash is scheduled to launch for PS5, PS4, and PC on October 26.
At one point, it was believed that The Forever Purge would be the final installment in the dystopian horror franchise. That’s no longer the case, though. Not only is a sixth Purge movie evidently in the works, but Frank Grillo–who starred in The Purge: Anarchy and The Purge: Election Year–will return to star.
At least, that’s what Grillo says. In an interview with The Playlist, the actor who also appeared in Captain America: Civil War, said another Purge movie is on the way and it centers on his character, Leo Barnes.
“Committed! We committed to doing that–Purge 6 with [James DeMonaco] directing,” he said. “It’s based on the Leo Barnes character. I’m excited. He’s going to send me the script. He just finished it. So, yeah, I’m really psyched about that. I love doing the Purge movies.”
It remains to be seen what’s happened with his character since Election Year. At the end of that movie, the senator he was protecting had been elected President of the United States and ended the annual Purge. However, by the time The Forever Purge rolled around, she’d been voted out of office and the Purge was reinstated. It seems logical to think that the next movie will find Leo after the events of the most recent film, in which a large portion of the United States had decided to purge year-round with no rules. However, no story details have been revealed at this point.
If you haven’t seen The Forever Purge yet, the film is available on Blu-ray and digital release now.