Activision Blizzard, one of the biggest publishers in gaming, has announced a major leadership change. The company has hired veteran Google executive Daniel Alegre to become its new president and chief operating officer, effective April 7, 2020.
He will replace Coddy Johnson, the former Bush-Cheney field director who became Activision Blizzard’s president in 2017 after more than seven years with the company before that. Johnson will transition to a new “special advisor” role where he will report to Activision Blizzard CEO Kotick.
In his position as president and COO of Activision Blizzard, Alegre will oversee all of the company’s major business units: Activision Publishing, Blizzard Entertainment, and King Digital. He will report directly to Kotick.
“I was deeply impressed by Daniel’s entrepreneurial drive and broad and deep experience in driving global growth across a variety of businesses in a rapidly changing industry,” Kotick said in a statement. “Our greatest challenges are prioritizing the many opportunities we have and recruiting and retaining the talent needed to execute with focus and excellence. Daniel is a proven leader with a long track record of success doing both.”
For his part, Alegre said, “I look forward to helping players around the world connect through quality and immersive games.”
Alegre was Google’s president of global retail and shopping most recently. Before that, he served as Google’s president for global and strategic partnerships. Earlier in his career, Alegre headed up Google’s business in the Asia Pacific region, and he also opened Google’s first operations in China, Southeast Asia, and India.
According to a government filing, Alegre is getting a lucrative pay package as Activision Blizzard’s new president and CEO. He will earn an annual base salary of $1.35 million, in addition to “annual discretionary bonuses” that could be 100% of that base salary. He is also eligible to earn an additional bonus of another 100% of the base salary for years where Activision Blizzard’s earnings-per-share growth is 20% better than expected results.
Alegre is also getting a company-paid $5 million life insurance policy for himself and his wife, as well as a one-time payment of $2.5 million as a “contract inducement.” Alegre is also set to receive stock options with a $5 million grant value.
Call of Duty: Warzone, the free-to-play Call of Duty battle royale game set in the Modern Warfare universe, is off to a very good start. Activision has confirmed that more than 6 million people played Warzone over its first 24 hours.
For comparison, Titanfall developer Respawn’s battle royale game, Apex Legends, hit 2.5 million players over its first 24 hours. That’s not a terrific comparison, however, as Call of Duty is an established franchise while Apex Legends was a new IP that no one knew about.
In terms of what’s to come in the future for Warzone, Activision has said fans can look forward to new DLC and live events that will keep you guessing. This will be on top of the content headed to Modern Warfare’s standard multiplayer mode.
Additionally, Activision is developing a brand-new Call of Duty game for release later this year. It hasn’t been officially announced yet, but rumors peg it to be Black Ops 5 from developer Treyarch.
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CinemaCon, the film industry’s largest trade show gathering of theater owners from around the world, has been canceled due to concerns over the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, organizers announced Wednesday.
The event, which was to have taken place from March 30-April 2, 2020 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, would have seen the major studios touting their upcoming films to exhibitors along with appearances by a bevy of stars there to promote their next films.
“Each spring, motion picture exhibitors, distributors and industry partners from around the world meet in Las Vegas to share information and celebrate the moviegoing experience. This year, due to the travel ban from the European Union, the unique travel difficulties in many other areas of the world and other challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic, a significant portion of the worldwide motion picture community is not able to attend CinemaCon.”
Fans of the KONOSUBA anime will be happy to hear that the first KONOSUBA movie, KONOSUBA: Legend Of Crimson, will be coming to Crunchyroll for streaming on March 25.
The movie is a direct sequel to the second season of the anime KONOSUBA, where an otaku named Satou Kazuma is reborn into a magical world after sacrificing himself to save the life of someone else. In this world he is offered up a special gift to make his transition to magical life easier, and he chooses to take the Goddess Aqua with him as a guide, only to soon find out she isn’t all that helpful.
The two struggle to get by in this new world. They’re joined by a young wizard who can only cast explosion magic once before passing out, and a masochistic knight who can’t hit anything. The gang party up and go on various adventures together, generally ending in some kind of catastrophe for Kazuma.
KONOSUBA: Legend Of Crimson debuted late last year in theatres. Crunchyroll teamed up with Fathom Events to distribute the film in over 600 theatres around the country.
The English-dubbed version of the movie will release later on in April, for now fans will have to watch the subbed edition on March 25.
Crunchyroll will also be releasing the first full season of KONOSUBA -God’s Blessing on this Wonderful World on Blu-Ray in the US on the same day. This Blu-Ray contains all ten episodes and OVAs in high definition. Both subbed and dubbed versions are available.
Call of Duty: Warzone is off to a great start, with over 6 million players in its first 24 hours, and plenty of happy players. But Warzone–which is technically still in Beta–was always bound to have some hiccups, too, and one pair of players has found a big one.
The video below, which was posted to Reddit by the user who recorded it, shows two players winning a Warzone match by staying outside the safe zone and repeatedly reviving each other until the match ends. Once every other player is eliminated, they win by default.
The title of the video, and the Reddit post, ask for this issue to please be fixed–it’s potentially game-ruining, and it’s been posted to raise awareness of the bug. As such, we can’t imagine it’ll be possible to pull off this tactic for too long once Activision is aware of it. After all, the first patch rolled out very soon after launch.
For those of you who use an NVIDIA compatible GeForce NOW graphics card, you’ll be glad to hear that NVIDIA has expanded the list games supported by the streaming service, which lets players experience tech beyond what is available in their PCs, by seven.
Like a beautiful butterfly unraveling its wings, we too are expanding our library of supported games: 🦋 Conglomerate 451 🦋 Heroes & Generals 🦋 Kingdom Come Deliverance 🦋 Richman10 🦋 Titan Quest Anniversary Edition 🦋 Victoria II 🦋 Wolfenstein: Youngblood (Steam – Germany)
The seven games included in the update can be seen in the tweet above. This brings the total amount of supported games to a whooping 527. As long as you own these games in their respective digital libraries, you can use NVIDIA GeForce NOW to launch them and run them with NVIDIA GeForce NOW selecting the best settings for your PC.
Call of Duty: Warzone, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s free-to-play battle royale mode, has been played by over 6 million players in its first 24 hours.
Call of Duty revealed the news on Twitter, celebrating its first day since releasing the long-rumored mode into the wild.
It stands apart from other battle royale titles like Fortnite and Apex Legends with such features as the Gulag, which allows eliminated players to battle another 1v1 for a chance at a second life.
Warzone supports crossplay between consoles and PC and allows players to carry their progress wherever they choose to play.
The next expansion for Two Point Hospital, Off The Grid, will be available for PC via Steam on March 18. It will add 35 new diseases and three new areas to explore and build up hospitals within, and it’ll encourage players to devise hospitals where patients can live off the land.
The DLC is based on Two Point County mayor Tabitha Windsock’s ecological ambitions, and players will be able to grow produce, churn butter, and eventually harness green energy to power their hospital in Windsock City. It looks like a unique twist on the standard Two Point Hospital gameplay.
The DLC will sell on Steam for $9, with a 10% pre-purchase discount currently active. A trailer is below.
Two Point Hospital recently released for Switch, PS4, and Xbox One, and the base game came with the first two expansions, Bigfoot and Pebberley Island. There’s no release date set for the console versions of the Close Encounters or Off the Grid DLC packs.
Ori and the Blind Forest was a delight in 2015–a tough-as-nails combination of a metroidvania structure and Meat Boy-like demands with a surprising amount of heartfelt heft. Five years later, Moon Studios’ followup, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, is every bit as graceful and lovely as its predecessor, even if some of the emotional beats and exploration feel a little less novel the second time around.
Will of the Wisps picks up almost immediately where Blind Forest left off, with Ori’s patchwork family unit welcoming a new member, the owlet Ku. The family is happy and loving, but Ku wants to fly and Ori wants to help her. Soon the two are swept off in a gale to a new forest deep with rot, which begins the adventure in earnest.
Because this setting is disconnected from the one in Blind Forest, the geography is new, yet familiar. The painterly imagery is comforting, especially in the opening hours as you explore similar biomes. They’re beautifully rendered again, but a little samey if you’ve played the first game. After a while, Will of the Wisps opens up to more varied locales, like an almost pitch-black spider’s den or a windswept desert. The theme throughout the story is the encroachment of the Decay, a creeping evil that overtook this neighboring forest after its own magical life tree withered. But if it’s meant to be ugly, you wouldn’t know it from many of the lush backgrounds–especially in the case of a vibrant underwater section. Ori is often swallowed up by these sweeping environments, emphasizing just how small the little forest spirit is compared to their massive surroundings.
Ori’s suite of acrobatic moves makes delving into new areas a thrilling treat. Exploration becomes especially engaging as you unlock more abilities and become increasingly adept. Some of them are lifted directly from the first game, which can be disappointing next to the excitement of discovering a shiny new ability. Still, those old standbys still work well and make the improvisational leaps and bounds feel as great as ever.
The picturesque vistas seem to be pushing the hardware hard, however. Playing on an Xbox One X, I encountered visual glitches like screen freezes on a semi-regular basis, and the map would stutter. Usually these were a simple nuisance, but once in a while it would come mid-leap and throw off my sense of momentum and direction. A day-one patch significantly reduced the freezing and fixed the map issue altogether.
While Ori is ostensibly a metroidvania, Will of the Wisps is less focused on exploration and backtracking than is typical for the genre. Your objectives are usually clear, straight lines, and shortcuts littered throughout the environments get you back to the main path quickly. Most of the wanderlust comes in the form of plentiful sidequests, like delivering a message or finding a knick-knack for a critter. There’s even a trading chain. Eventually you open up a hub area that can be built into a small community for the forest denizens. These upgrades are largely cosmetic, so it’s mostly a visual showcase of having collected the specialized items used for it. The sidequests are almost entirely optional. I was glad for the freedom to pursue the critical path without artificial barriers, but I also plan to go back and plumb the depths simply to spend more time in the world.
The reduced emphasis on exploration seems to have been replaced by a major expansion of combat. Rather than the passing nuisance of the occasional enemy, Will of the Wisps introduces myriad threats that are a near-constant presence. Thankfully, the combat system has been overhauled to match the elegance of the platforming. The story progress provides a sword and bow, with other optional weapons for purchase, and you can map any combat moves to X, Y, or B. The combat does take some getting used to, though, in part because it’s built to work in conjunction with Ori’s nimble moves. While I felt awkward and imprecise in combat at the start, slashing my sword wildly at even the mildest of monsters, my comfort level grew as I gained new platforming skills. Around the mid-game I realized I had become adept at stringing together platforming and combat skills, air-dashing and bounding between threats with balletic rhythm and barely touching the ground until the screen had been cleared.
That level of finesse is necessary, because Ori and the Will of the Wisps introduces a series of massive boss battles, each more complex than anything in Blind Forest. Their attack patterns are often signaled by barely perceptible tells. Most of the time, the boss fills up a significant portion of the interactable foreground, and even more of the background–but this can make it frustratingly difficult to tell what is and isn’t vulnerable to your attacks, or what parts will do crash damage. This all makes defeating them feel like a relief and accomplishment, though sometimes more of the former than the latter.
Likewise, tension-filled escape sequences dot the map, requiring almost perfect precision and execution of your tool set to survive a gauntlet of threats. The game offers occasional checkpoints in these sections, as well as a more generous checkpointing feature around the overworld.
The sprawling bosses and climactic escapes are ways to express a larger, more operatic feel for Will of the Wisps. Blind Forest was a humble little game that told an intimate, relatable fable. Wisps has a grander, sweeping scope, and in the process it loses some of that intimacy. It still has moments with emotional heft, both exhilarating and heartbreaking, and Moon Studios still has a way of expressing an incredible degree of wordless emotion with subtle moments of body language.
The story in Will of the Wisps is often darker, and even its touching moments are more bittersweet. The chief antagonist, an owl named Shriek, is similar to the first game’s Kuro in having suffered a tragedy in the past. But how the story addresses that tragedy is significantly sadder, and stands as a moment of haunting animation that will stay with me more than any other single image from the game. Even the moments of finality that end the story, while appropriately heroic and hopeful, are tinged with quiet sadness and inevitability–the sense that everything ends.
That finality could signal that this is the last Ori game, a farewell to the fantastical world and memorable characters that made Moon Studios such a standout developer from its very first effort. If that is the case, you could hardly ask for a better send-off. Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a remarkable synthesis of artful design and beautiful moments.
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