When 2K Games announced that NBA 2K21 will be priced at $70 for next-generation consoles, it kicked off speculation that there will finally be another price hike for video game software in the PS5 and Xbox Series X generation.
Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick defended the price point for NBA 2K21 and said that the price hike reflects “the quality of the experience,” in a new interview. Zelnick also spoke on the price hike during today’s Q1 earnings call with investors.
“There hasn’t been a price increase for frontline titles for a really long time, despite the fact that it costs a great deal more to make those titles,” Zelnick says in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. “And we think with the value we offer consumers… and the kind of experience you can really only have on these next-generation consoles, and the price is justified.”
During the Q1 earnings call, Zelnick clarified that it will announce pricing “on a title-by-title basis,” but defended the price point as a great value based on the hours of entertainment games like NBA 2K offers.
Other video game developers have been asked about a potential price hike for next-gen video game software. Ubisoft says its next-gen titles being released in holiday 2020 will be $60, though future titles may have different pricing.
For more than a decade, Crossfire has been a powerhouse in PC first-person shooters outside the US, especially in Asia. The free-to-play title is primed to make the leap to Xbox One and Xbox Series X later this year as CrossfireX, and with it will come a new addition: a single-player campaign created by Remedy Entertainment, the studio behind Control, Alan Wake, and Max Payne.
During Microsoft’s recent Xbox Games Showcase, we got a closer look at what Remedy has planned for CrossfireX, although the details were still pretty vague. After the show, Remedy gave a more thorough presentation to media that provided more insight on what CrossfireX’s campaign will be like. The presentation also provided a sense of what Remedy is adding to the Crossfire formula and how the studio will boil down more than a decade of growth, adaptations, and alterations into a coherent story.
The hands-off gameplay demo we saw expanded on the CrossfireX trailer that appeared during the showcase, focusing on Luis Torres, a “skilled thief” and civilian in the game’s world. The mission we saw started with Luis handcuffed on a prison bus, where a guard speaks with him in a brief character-building moment–before a drone flies beneath the bus and explodes, flipping it. It seems that Global Risk, one of the two factions at the heart of Crossfire, and its leader, General Maddox, are after Luis. Luckily, he escapes the crash and absconds into a hospital, where the player takes control of him to shoot their way through Global Risk goons and meets up with Black List operatives hoping to extract him.
As far as gameplay is concerned, CrossfireX currently looks pretty similar to other military shooters of the type. There’s a lot of aiming down sights, a lot of checking corners and doorways, a lot of dropping enemies with a quick burst to the chest or a well-placed headshot before moving on to the next corridor. We didn’t see much of the game in action, but the presentation did show off a mechanic that distinguishes CrossfireX from being another Call of Duty or Battlefield: Combat Breaker–an ability that slows down time to allow Luis an extra second or two to line up shots and take down enemies, not unlike the Bullet Time mechanic in Remedy’s Max Payne series.
Apart from that, however, CrossfireX currently seems to play very similarly to the other big FPS titles on the market, at least in its single-player campaign. It’ll be released in batches called “Operations,” which Remedy says will last around three hours each. Two are confirmed at the moment, one played from Black List’s point of view and the other from that of Global Risk.
A lot of Crossfire’s world has been established in broad strokes–the two factions are private military corporations whose employees differing worldviews, both engaged in a “sprawling, global conflict,” communications director Thomas Puha said in an email interview with GameSpot. “Black List is more of an emotional ragtag group of members, whereas Global Risk is organized and well stocked,” he explained.
The factions, their viewpoints, the people who fight for them, and their conflict is the key to Crossfire’s identity and the thing that Remedy is trying to get across in the campaign.
“At the same time (Smilegate) has been expanding multiplayer, they’ve actually been doing quite a bit of worldbuilding,” explained executive producer Tuukka Taipalvesi. “So they’ve tried to connect the various game modes to one another with story bridges, and they’ve built, I don’t know how deliberately, a timeline for their IP. So that’s where we started. We took all that information and did some data archeology on it, and basically built a baseline layer of a Crossfire universe timeline from all of this that was available. And from that, we started to see a historic event within the timeline that’s a good spot to set a game in, kind of like a historic junction point within the universe, so that it’s interesting from both factions’ perspectives.”
Crossfire’s years of multiplayer support have led to a huge number of modes. Some of them are straightforward deathmatch or objective-based games that don’t stray far from the original formula: two groups of soldiers battling it out. But as modes got more diverse, they also got weird. For instance, there’s a horror-tinged zombie and mutants mode in which characters become huge, hulking creatures.
Remedy was cagey about whether mutants and zombies might make their way into future content for CrossfireX’s single-player, but for now, the focus is on establishing and developing gameplay that serves the story and also feels like Crossfire.
“It’s the first single-player campaign for the franchise, as well as being on console, so while there’s a decade worth of multiplayer game modes and history out there, the campaign has to establish its own identity and it definitely took a while to achieve that,” Taipalvesi said. “I think the connecting tissue and backbone really are the two factions: Global Risk and Black List.”
Remedy worked closely with Smilegate to make sure that whatever it was creating for the story side of CrossfireX would feel true to the rest of the game. This extends to gameplay itself, since Remedy is using its Northlight engine, which we last saw in Control, while the multiplayer side uses Unreal 4 Tuning controls and guns to make them feel consistent across both modes is part of that process.
Not everything in the weirder realm is getting left behind, though. There’s also a multiplayer mode in PC Crossfire and CrossfireX, Spectre Mode, in which some players use active camouflage to become invisible and terrorize other players–and we’ve seen hints that these camouflaged soldiers will be part of the campaign. In fact, the gameplay portion shown during the Xbox showcase and the hands-off demo is from a set of missions collectively known as Operation: Spectre. CrossfireX’s campaign will come in sets known as “operations,” which Remedy says will last about around three to four hours each. Two are currently confirmed: Operation: Spectre and another operation played from the point of view of Global Risk.
Much of the mission with Luis found him working with Black List operative, Nicholas, who was sent to help him escape his Global Risk enemies. The back-and-forth between the characters hints at some of what Remedy is bringing to the table from a storytelling standpoint. Taipalvesi said the characters in CrossfireX have “slightly more melodrama than perhaps you’ve grown accustomed to,” which goes along with the campaign’s more in-your-face tone than Remedy’s other titles.
After shooting through some corridors, the demo amped up the action, with Luis fighting his way to two Black List operatives, Cora and Logan, who were waiting for him in an ambulance. A chase followed, with Cora cracking wise before she and Luis opened fire out the back of the ambulance while Global Risk vehicles pursued.
Things hit a climax when an armored truck rammed into the ambulance, its occupants unloading on the ambulance with a heavy machine gun. Instead of blasting away at it ineffectually, Cora threw an oxygen tank at the truck, which Luis shot with the help of his Combat Breaker. The tank exploded, taking the truck with it–but also starting a chain reaction of collapsing the overpass roof under which the ambulance was fleeing. The demo ended with Logan taking the ambulance through the barricade and over a cliff toward a waiting lake below.
It was an intense demo that carries all the frenetic action and over-the-top set pieces you’re used to seeing in similar blockbuster shooter franchises, but so far, we’ve only seen an inkling of what CrossfireX will be like in the moment-to-moment. What we’ve seen of the gunplay looks fairly standard for the genre, and military shooters live and die by how good their gunplay feels, as well as how smartly their missions are designed–two elements that are still unknown for CrossfireX.
And although Remedy is known for its storytelling as much as its gameplay mechanics, we’ve seen only the barest hints of where CrossfireX is actually going. Banter between characters seems promising, but much of it also carried that action movie cadence of one-liners that gives little indication of how deep or well-rounded the story and characters might be. Right now, CrossfireX has a lot to live up to, both in a crowded shooter genre and with a years-long multiplayer legacy. What we’ve seen so far shows promise, but we’re still waiting to find out how CrossfireX will distinguish itself on the single-player side.
Here’s a good deal for all the nineties kids out there, or anyone interested in retro gaming. Right now at Amazon and GameStop you can scoop up a Sega Genesis Mini for $49.99, a nearly 40% discount off the MSRP. That’s a great deal on what what we called “the closest thing we have to a perfect all-in-one mini console so far” in our Sega Genesis Mini review. Grab one for yourself before the price goes back up.
What makes the Genesis Mini so great? For starters, it comes loaded with 42 classic games, most of which are excellent. On top of that, the hardware is great. The miniaturized console features a high level of detail, and the two full-sized controllers are 1:1 reproductions.
The UI is also beautifully designed. You get a number of viewing options for the collection, including game covers and spines. And if you switch the language to Japanese, the entire UI switches to the Japanese covers (and ROMs) of the games. Speaking of games, here’s the full list of what’s included in the Sega Genesis Mini.
This $49.99 price point is close to the lowest we’ve ever seen this retro mini console go. And since it’s unclear when the price will go back up, you’ll probably want to grab one sooner than later.
But by announcing a hero exclusively to PS4 and PS5 players, Square Enix and Marvel Games have stirred frustrations for non-PlayStation players, and raised some odd questions about Marvel’s Avengers’ future.
Spider-Man — a new take on the hero and not the same version as the Peter Parker we played in 2018’s Marvel’s Spider-Man — will be made exclusive to PlayStation players sometime in 2021. Square Enix has not confirmed if there’s any timed exclusivity window to this or if he’s permanently only available to PS4 and PS5 players. And as of writing, there’s no indication Xbox and PC players will receive platform-exclusive characters to balance things out.
So, if you want to play as Marvel’s flagship hero (and the U.S.’s current favorite Marvel hero), you have to buy Avengers on PlayStation.
Despite some rocky showings at E3 last year, recent War Table presentations have earned a lot of goodwill for Marvel’s Avengers, and on a more general note, the game is, of course, coming off of the box office record-shattering, blockbuster filmmaking-defining run of MCU movies that culminated in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Avengers as a brand is bigger than ever, and so to have such a beloved hero only available on your systems makes the PlayStation version the clear winner for those who own multiple systems.
It’s, quite simply, a brilliant marketing move on a brand recognition level. This only further solidifies PlayStation’s connection with Spider-Man. Even if it’s not the same Spidey as in the 2018 game, that PS4 exclusive is one of the biggest games of the generation, and the best-selling superhero game ever in the U.S. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is positioned as one of THE reasons to buy a PS5 this holiday. And now, if you want to play the Spider-Man featured in Marvel’s big Avengers game and see him team up with other Marvel heroes, PlayStation is the only place to do just that.
And that brand connection is, on the surface, only even more beneficial to the wider Sony corporation. As far as we publicly know, Marvel still holds ultimate rights to Spider-Man, and that’s why we can see the character appear in the multiplatform LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2 or a Nintendo Switch-exclusive like Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order. But Sony has held the movie rights to Spidey for a long time and looks determined to maintain that hold, famously leading to the brief dark times when Spider-Man was going to be yanked out of the MCU, only for Sony and Marvel Studios to come to a renewed agreement to keep him involved… for now. But make no mistake, Sony is doing everything it can to build out a Spider-Man universe that all but features the character. From Venom to Morbius (and its odd inclusion of a Marvel’s Spider-Man trailer Easter egg) to the burgeoning Spider-Verse franchise, many more planned Spider-Man-adjacent character movies, Sony is obviously hoping to use what it can to build out a live-action Spidey-verse either to eventually bring the character into its fold exclusively once more or to at least make the best of both cinematic universes.
Spider-Man is the crown jewel of Sony’s film lineup, even if they’re currently sharing custody with Marvel, and so to have the character in any medium possible associated with the brand is a good thing not just for PlayStation but Sony overall.
But for Players…
At the very least, this announcement likely ensures a healthy playerbase for Marvel’s Avengers on PS4 and PS5 going into 2021. Regardless of how the game is received at launch, the story of many games-as-a-service titles is often written in the months and years after. Giving players on PS4 and PS5 a reason to check in on the game next year as big as Spider-Man will surely bring back even some players who may not stick with the game after launch.
But it’s sure as hell not fair for players on Xbox or PC, who have no idea at this stage if they’ll ever get to play as Spider-Man in Avengers, if they’ll receive other exclusive characters to balance things out, or if they’ll just never see the webhead swinging around their games. Cross-play between consoles isn’t announced for Avengers yet (only between generations, so PS4 and PS5 players can play together, but not with Xbox or PC players), and system-exclusive characters make the idea of that even less likely at a time when cross-play and cross-progression have become ever more routinely part of gaming. Sure, it’s entirely possible he will eventually be brought to other systems and the terms of this agreement just prevent that from being announced yet, but as of right now, that remains cruelly unclear.
It also raises the unfortunate question of how substantial the Spider-Man content will be, and how essential it will feel to the overall game if only a portion of the audience can play it. Marvel has promised all future DLC characters, which will be free to players, will come with their own story-related content. If Spider-Man’s story is only part of some Avengers players’ experiences, will it not be well integrated into the rest of the team or world’s ongoing story? Will it be particularly self-contained, and will character interactions be superficial, since they theoretically can’t drastically affect ongoing narratives? Or does Crystal Dynamics create a multiverse of Marvel’s Avengers stories, one for Xbox and PC players and one for those on PlayStation?
The latter sounds too unwieldy, and the former is a valid concern that could dampen potential excitement for Spidey content in Marvel’s Avengers. Personally, the thrill of playing Marvel’s Avengers comes from the interconnectedness between the characters and the ongoing nature of its storytelling.True, comic-book style storytelling can be integrated into an ambitious Marvel gaming world on a level not seen before in consoles and PC games. But if such a major character – it’s Spider-Man! – can only be played by some players, how does that translate to the overall story ambitions of Avengers, and to the Spidey-specific stories they’re planning?
It’s all unclear at this point, but what is clear is that creating a fractured player-base is like dividing kids in a schoolyard but only some of them get all of the equipment while the rest have something half-built. Destiny players were upset about PS4-exclusive weapons and missions, and it makes sense – when a game is meant to be played across different platforms, not one made by or for a platform holder, you roughly expect to get the same experience from one system to the next. And a full, playable, new character and associated content is a much larger pill to swallow than, say, some exclusive costumes or even sidequests.
Platform exclusives like this always feel mean, even if they make sense from a business perspective. PlayStation wants to bring players into its systems with likely one of the most requested characters for Avengers’ lineup and there’s already an association of the character with Sony. But for players on other platforms, it feels like a slap in the face, and only fuels the console divide further at a time when playing together, no matter where we play, is becoming more important than ever.
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Jonathon Dornbush is IGN’s Senior News Editor and host of Podcast Beyond! Talk to him on Twitter @jmdornbush.
Take-Two Interactive was the first publisher to break the next-gen price seal with the announcement that NBA 2K21 will cost $70 on next-gen consoles, $10 more than the standard current-gen price. Just ahead of its earnings call, CEO Strauss Zelnick explained why he feels the price hike is justified.
“There hasn’t been a price increase for frontline titles for a really long time, despite the fact that it costs a great deal more to make those titles,” Zelnick told GamesIndustry.biz. “And we think with the value we offer consumers… and the kind of experience you can really only have on these next-generation consoles, that the price is justified. But it’s easy to say that when you’re delivering extraordinary quality, and that’s what our company prides itself on doing.”
Pressed further on the subject, in light of Ubisoft not following suit, he explained that he can only speak for Take-Two, and he doesn’t expect the industry to all move to the same price point in a coordinated fashion.
“We just speak for ourselves,” he said. “Obviously, we don’t speak for the industry and the industry naturally does not coordinate on these matters, to say the very least. The pricing has to reflect the quality of the experience, and we aim to provide the best experiences in the business. And from our point of view, it’s an extremely modest price change given that prices haven’t changed for a very long time.”
For the time being, Ubisoft games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Watch Dogs Legion on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X will remain at $60. The company has not addressed whether that will change after 2020. Other publishers haven’t announced next-gen pricing. The question of price increases could also impact upgrade offers like Microsoft’s Smart Delivery and EA’s Dual Entitlement. Microsoft has reportedly told developers not to charge for next-gen upgrades as DLC, though other upgrade models remain on the table–which could be partly why Take-Two is offering a two-pack for NBA 2K21.
Dark Horse has put out some gorgeous Witcher 3 figures over the years. Right now at Amazon you can grab the second series of these figures on sale for up to 30% off. The Dark Horse Series 2 figures include Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri wearing alternate costumes from beloved game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
Take a look at the Series 2 deals below. A few of the figures from the original series are also on sale, but stock is running low in some cases, while others are sold out.
All of these figures stand roughly 10 inches tall and normally retail for $49.99. Yennefer’s Series 2 costume is a bit more colorful than her original outfit. Ciri is dressed in red and blue armor. Geralt’s Series 2 figure is clad in his Grandmaster Feline armor, the pieces of which you may have collected in the game. If you prefer the traditional Geralt look, you can grab his original figure for a few bucks off if you grab it while stock is still available.
Other Series 1 figures available at a discount right now include Regis, who comes with an interchangeable vampire head and claws, Dandelion the bard, and the doctor Shani. You can find all the available Witcher 3 figures here.
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Chris Reed is IGN’s shopping and commerce editor. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.
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Despite originally releasing in 2002, Final Fantasy XI is still being supported by developer Square Enix. Producer Akihiko Matsui announced on the game’s official forum that August’s update will see the first new story content in the game in nearly five years. The new storyline, called “The Voracious Resurgence,” will take place over “many version updates,” so don’t expect to finish it soon. Square Enix says that the story will revolve revolve around the appearance of small eggs of unknown origin and it’s up to adventurers to figure out “a conspiracy that threatens the very fabric of the world.”
Due to the success of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, updates for Square Enix’s prior MMORPG have been sparse. In 2015, the game received a scenario called “Rhapsodies of Vana’diel,” which was meant to be the final storyline. Players will have to complete “Rhapsodies of Vana’diel” in order to access the new content, which Matsui claims “explores a side of Vana’diel that’s never before seen the light.”
The new storyline isn’t all that the August update will have to offer as the beastmaster job will be receiving an adjustment as well. Changes to the job type’s magic accuracy have been made to encourage beastmasters to battle alongside their pets. There are also unspecified additional pets arriving in August that include “very specific strengths and weaknesses.”
Rounding out the update are two new ambuscade battles. The normal-difficulty fight will pit adventurers against a Rafflesia that relies on mandragora allies for power. Meanwhile, the intense ambuscade is against a magic-using Mamool Ja. Players can earn themed rewards for the new battle, which will go away in September.
While Final Fantasy XI launched on PlayStation 2 and eventually came to Xbox 360, it is only playable on PC as of 2016. A mobile version of the MMORPG developed by Nexon was announced in 2015, although its development status is currently uncertain. The worlds of both Final Fantasy MMOs recently collided in FFXIV’s “The Maiden’s Rhapsody: Memories of an Unseen Realm” event.
Sam Neill, the New Zealand actor who portrayed Dr. Alan Grant in 1993’s Jurassic Park and 2001’s Jurassic Park III, has been increasingly sounding off and sharing his excitement about his role in 2021’s upcoming Jurassic World: Dominion. His enthusiasm cannot be understated: Over the weekend, Neill tweeted that Dominion is the “best yet.”
There is reason to believe this outsized claim isn’t in the category of standard hype leading up to any major tentpole blockbuster. Dominion’s director Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World) recently shared in a Comic-Con@Home panel that the upcoming film is continuing a tradition that may have gone unnoticed for many.
“We’ve actually gone more practical with every Jurassic movie we’ve made since the first one, and we’ve made more animatronics in this one than we have in the previous two,” Trevorrow said in the recent panel. “And the thing that I’ve found, especially in working in the past couple months, is that we finally reached a point where it’s possible to… digital extensions on animatronics will be able to match the texture and the level of fidelity that, on film, an animatronic is going to be able to bring. And you didn’t use to be able to really mix them. You could really see the seams. And so that part of it is very exciting for me.”
Dominion is expected to close out the trilogy kicked off by 2015’s Jurassic World. In addition to Neill, the cast is a mix of earlier franchise stars Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum and series newcomers Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt.
Despite previous reports to the contrary, the film is continuing to carry on production safely.
