biteho.com

Almost every Pokemon game has given you a choice of one of three starter Pokemon with whom you’d set out on your adventure, and almost every Pokemon game gives one of the two Pokemon you didn’t choose to your predesignated rival. Choosing a starter Pokemon is always a big deal, but Pokemon Sword and Shield bring a lot more spectacle to it than previous games–so much so that the process of picking a starter, something I’ve always done based on a mix of aesthetic and mechanical preferences, actually made me kind of emotional (in a good way).

I recently played 90 minutes of Sword and Shield at a demo event. From the start, the newest Pokemon games have more flair than the previous ones; the opening sequence, which was once just the professor briefly talking about what Pokemon are, is now closer to a cinematic cutscene, befitting the mainline games’ transition to Switch. That same upgraded cutscene treatment extends to choosing your starter, and it gives Grookey, Scorbunny, and Sobble the chance to really show off their personalities before you make a decision.

Like in previous Sword and Shield trailers, the pick-your-starter cutscene shows a curious Grookey hitting things with its stick, an energetic Scorbunny hopping about, and a clearly anxious Sobble being adorably pathetic. I had already narrowed down my choice to either Grookey or Sobble (sorry, Scorbunny fans), and seeing them being cute didn’t really help me make a decision. The three Pokemon then stand around waiting to be chosen, and I felt like I had to pick Sobble, because the poor baby just needs a friend. When my rival, Hop, picked Scorbunny, I was surprised–older Pokemon games taught me that the rival always picks the Pokemon with the type advantage over yours, and while that hasn’t been true for a while, I still wasn’t expecting Hop to take the high road.

So that was all fine, but it left Grookey standing alone, absolutely devastated, because it didn’t get picked. I was very upset. Older Pokemon games also taught me that the third starter just sits in its ball for all eternity, which, again, is no longer true–Professor Kukui in Sun and Moon will take the third starter, for example–but I was, again, not expecting anyone to actually take the third Pokemon. When the Galar Champion, who brought us the starters in the first place, took Grookey, I was incredibly relieved. It was an absolute emotional rollercoaster.

After all this, I remain undecided about my starter Pokemon in Sword and Shield. If I’m honest, I’ll need to see their final forms before I can really make the call. But I could barely stand to see Grookey briefly upset, and I’m afraid to see how Sobble reacts if it doesn’t get chosen–so maybe I’ll have to go with Sobble after all.

Pokemon Sword and Shield release for Nintendo Switch on November 15. During this demo session, we also learned that the characters have British “accents” and that you can skip a key part of the tutorial for the first time in almost 20 years. Be sure to check out our Sword and Shield pre-order guide if you’re looking to get the games at launch.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

You need a javascript enabled browser to watch videos.

Please use a html5 video capable browser to watch videos.

This video has an invalid file format.

Sorry, but you can’t access this content!

When it was first teased at the beginning of 2017, there was a huge air of anticipation for Crystal Dynamics’ Marvel’s Avengers game. When it was officially revealed at E3 2019 however, there was a bit of confusion about what the game actually was. Was it a character-action game? Was it a Destiny-style perpetual game? Both? How did multiplayer and skill customization work with pre-defined characters, and why did they look a little weird?

Since then, Crystal Dynamics and studio head Scot Amos have been touring comic and video game conventions around the world to better explain their big, ambitious, AAA take on an Avengers video game. They’ve been outlining how the game will be split between a narrative campaign, where you’ll help reassemble the Avengers after a devastating loss, and the persistent multiplayer co-op game, where you’ll customise your heroes with new gear, and take on “Warzone” missions around the globe with friends.

At PAX Aus 2019, we got hands-on with the tutorial level where you play as Thor, Iron-Man, Hulk, Captain America, and Black Widow, as well as a 15-wave combat challenge room where you played as their latest-revealed character, Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel). While the tutorial level was something we’d played before, getting to take out a variety of different enemies with Kamala Khan’s unique, stretchy melee combat felt quite unique. Overall, our impressions of the existing roster is that they all definitely feel like diverse characters, especially when compared to something like Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3.

To better get our head around the conception and direction of the game, we had another chat to Amos, who was all too willing to tell us about a bunch of things: What it’s like working with Marvel, how Crystal Dynamics is imparting its signature on these beloved characters, how the development is split among the five different studios working on the game, what the working culture is like in the studio, and most importantly: whether or not Squirrel Girl is going to make an appearance.

Marvel’s Avengers will be available on PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Google Stadia on May 15, 2020. For more on the game, see our previous interview with Scot Amos at New York Comic-Con 2019.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and readability.

GameSpot: You’re pitching Avengers as an original story. But I feel like it’s almost impossible to make a comic book game without pulling least inspiration from somewhere. Can you talk about the touchstones you’re drawing upon?

Scot Amos: If you’re looking for like specific comics or specific references, I can’t, because we have the luxury and maybe the curse of 80 years of Marvel history. And having Bill Rosen as the VP Creative for Marvel Games and Shawn Skies, our creative director, we literally looked at everything and said, “What would be great?” Have you seen Joe Fix-It? Our purple suit for Hulk? That doesn’t specifically fit in any of the other storylines except the one that he was in, yet, we want to blend that in and looking at Kamala Khan, she’s only been on the scene since 2013. So she’s a fairly new face to Marvel, let alone anything about Avengers.

So for us, we’ve had this amazing capacity to look through all of that and say, “What’s going to tell the best story?” And the elements we want for that great story is a point of view or perspective character that people can relate to, that believes in these Avengers as a fan of them, that actually is trying to figure out their own path of becoming a hero, which is exactly where Kamala fits into our world as that point of view perspective character for the campaign.

But then, we want that familiarity of the core five that you know–Widow and Thor and Cap and Hulk and Iron Man. We want to have that as something people to go “I know who these guys are”, and then they show up and we want to put what we call the “Crystal Lens” on them, like we did with Lara Croft and Tomb Raider. We reimagined her back in 2013, saying, “This is an original origin tale, this is a hero that you may have thought you knew from your previous movies, or previous games that we’d even been part of.” But we reimagined her, it was saying: “What can we do that’s new, that’s fresh, that has a different take on it, but still is true to the overall spirit of that franchise and of that character?”

There are 9000-some heroes in the Marvel Universe–80 years of history. Have all the stories been told? No, like, that’s the fun part about what we do at Crystal, we go to that humanity behind the hero, look at breaking them down, and then look at having to build the individuals up, and then reassemble the team, and then rebuild that kind of epic, legendary reputation that the Avengers need to have.

You mention that Crystal is good at diving into the humanity of characters, but personally, I associate Crystal with mechanical innovation, like with Tomb Raider’s environmental puzzles. What is Crystal’s signature, mechanical flourish on Avengers?

Scot Amos: Well, when we looked at everything that Lara Croft could do and all the mechanics she had, those were a lot of gear based mechanics, a lot of just her wits, her ability to look for the truth, and her spirit, which is amazing. But how do you translate that into six heroes? And six heroes that can do things that no human can ever do. You get to play Kamala Khan with her polymorphic abilities–we had to reinvent combat because of how could she could stretch, how she can move, how she could traverse.

We didn’t have flying before in our engine, right? And now we have Iron Man and Thor. So it’s like–oh my god, how do we do that and make them feel both relevant and interesting and not tacked on, but like actually rebuilding our combat system to accommodate for both enemy flyers, as well as now these heroes we’re flying. So we’ve actually had to go pretty deep into it.

That’s why we hired Vince Napoli, who is our lead combat designer. Vince comes from the God of War series, and I knew him back in the day at Visceral Games, and Vince is one of those guys who just lives and breathes it. Like, his entire life has been about making great heroes have great combat, like he just loves it. He loves it to the point where he’s obsessed by it. And every time we give him a challenge, like “take Widow to the next level.” He figures it out, he just figures out what skills we have what gear we should add. And he’s just masterful with his team–it’s a great team called the P.E.T. team: Player, Enemies, Traversal.

These guys, whenever we throw a new challenge for one of the heroes, we think about how you expand upon it, and this is so we can build a platform. Because remember, post-launch, we’re going to have more heroes joining, they’re gonna have new skills, and new gear, and new outfits, and new hero missions, any warzone missions, so all of this stuff is us building this beginning. So you can actually expand it for years to come. So it’s daunting, it’s the biggest thing we’ve ever done.

Is Avengers using the same engine you guys used for Tomb Raider (2013)?

It is the next version of that engine–”Foundation” is the name the engine. It’s our proprietary tools and technology that we’ve been using for years. Our team has been upgrading it, every time we have a new version, a new platform, new technologies, we keep adding to it and say, “How do we expand upon its capabilities?” It’s one of our secret weapons.

Square Enix has a lot of studios working on this one. I’m interested in knowing how the workload is split.

Crystal is on point with all this. It literally started at Crystal–we were the beginning, and so we’re the largest group that is working on it.

Eidos Montreal is an amazing sister studio, we worked with them for all of our Tomb Raiders. On the last Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, we started with them and then we peeled off, and they finished it. So they actually were the point team on Shadow of the Tomb Raider and they owned it, but they’d worked with us and all the previous ones so they’ve been part and parcel to us forever.

We actually had to build another studio called Crystal Northwest in Bellevue Washington, so we actually added an entire team of technologists who were specializing in multiplayer, guys who had actually known each other work together for years.

Nixxes in the Netherlands is a group we’ve worked with for 21 years now, and they are one of those teams that just know our code as well as anybody and are knee-deep in it. They also have a content team–they’re now making assets for this game as well.

And then you have Square Enix Japan, you know, we even have folks there working on technology and some lighting, so we literally assembled five studios as kind of our five core teams.

Much like the Avengers.

Crazily enough–it’s a fun story. But yeah, we literally have these groups all working together, who are specialists in different things, but bringing them together under our responsibility as the point team.

Kamala Khan is an inspired choice. Does her unveiling now set the tone for future character reveals?

Interesting way to put it. I would say her choice was very much from the beginning. We’ve told a few people this, but if you look back at the beginning of our campaign, January 20 2017, that first voice you hear is Kamala.

So from the beginning, we’ve always been like, “This is going to be that perspective character who’s just like the fans. They love these heroes, they know these heroes, they want to find a way to fit in and be part of something bigger.” So it has always been a very calculated choice.

2014 is when she got her own series, and she came onto the market. She was so full of energy. Looking through the opportunities and what kind of heroes we could have at the centre, we looked at the core Avengers, and then beyond the core Avengers, there are literally hundreds of people who’ve been in the Avengers roster all the different times.

Kamala is a freshness, she hasn’t been really seen in any of the big-screen ways that these other heroes have. So we have the familiarity of the amazingly-loved Iron Man, some Thors and Hulks and everybody else. But then you look at Kamala, and it’s one of those amazing opportunities where Marvel is like, “Hey guys, we think this is a great idea. It has a great relatability to it.” We still have all the familiar folks, and they loved it. From the beginning of our collaboration with Marvel, we were all saying that this is the right hero at the right time.

I’ve noticed a lot of the Marvel Games projects are really emphasizing the new roster–Miles Morales, Spider-Gwen, Sam Wilson, Amadeus Cho and all those characters. Why have so many classic Avengers, when there is a whole new crew being pushed?

There’s an expectation that we want to fulfill–that dream, the superhero fantasy dream of being the Avengers. Everybody wants to do that, and being able to do it in this big AAA way with characters that you’ve known and loved in different formats.

There have been 80 years of heroes, but looking at the last 10 years, Marvel have done a brilliant job of bringing in people who had no idea what a Hulk was 10 years ago and are now wearing their t-shirts, right? So you have this mass audience, worldwide, that love these heroes. You can’t ignore that. You have to look at it and say, “This is a great way to onboard people into our version of these heroes,” and then you bring in the freshness with a Kamala.

We have all kinds of ideas for who the future heroes would be. We’d love to listen to our fans, we’re big fans of community, but we have some tricks up our sleeves for what’s coming next and down that path. I think people will be very excited what we have ahead of us.

Who’s at the top of your list?

Well, who says they’re not already in the game? I gotta say, Kamala, from the beginning, has been one of those exciting characters for us that just felt like untapped potential, particularly in the game world and particularly in this kind of large AAA screen approach. So it was a big deal for us to get her right. And I think getting the sense of her storyline through her abilities and how she plays.

Every time that Vince and his group work and a hero they become my new favourite. It’s the craziest thing, I know it sounds like a, “What the hell kind of an answer is that?” But literally, we threw Black Widow at him, and then after a couple of months we’re like, “Oh my god this is amazing. She plays beautifully.”

Then, we throw Hulk at him and I’m like, “Oh my god, you changed the skills and now you can do this.” He literally crafted these toys, these heroes, these tools, that can be played differently depending on what mood you’re in. They all have a slightly different feel and depending on the mood you’re in, you can find the right glove to fit.

A keen-eyed individual recently noticed that the look of Iron Man and Thor had changed since the E3 reveal. Tell me about that.

We were saying even back at E3 time–we aren’t done, we’re still months ahead, we’re still in pre-alpha. So things will iterate and improve where we can.

Thor, for example–one of things we love about Thor is changing his hairstyle, giving him a little bit more of that Norse mythology style to it and actually tightening it up. Because if you’re in combat and flying you don’t want this stuff scraggly in your face all the time, so we wanted to be able to tighten it back into a much tighter grab.

But all that stuff, including the costumes–and we have so many costumes, and those are full character changes for these heroes–you’ll see a lot of that kind of stuff. To us, that’s iteration and improvements to constantly make the characters better and better.

Tell me about the challenges of making an endlessly repeatable game. Is that difficult to balance with super-directed campaign experiences you’re used to?

The beauty of this game is that we have this amazing campaign that we’re talking about, starting with A-day, the whole thing with Kamala, reassembling all those heroes and unlocking them, basically adding to your roster. So there’s a complete campaign experience that has a beginning, middle and end so that you’ve actually done an entire arc of getting the story to a certain state that just sets up the world.

All the warzone missions actually add narrative to this as well and have their own expansive narrative, so it’s not just one place that’s just going to constantly rinse and repeat. In fact, it’s always growing. That’s the magic of what we built, that you have this campaign that sets up the world state, you have the world state itself evolving.

And remember, we’re going to add more regions and more heroes post-launch. Those are going to come with more hero missions, and more warzone missions, and more stories, and their own sets of skills, and new sets of gear and new enemies. So this world’s going to feel like it’s constantly moving down a path or a time period, that things are changing and evolving as you go forward.

So that’s a lot of content–obviously one of the big talking points in the industry now is developer crunch. What does the Crystal Dynamics working culture look like?

We believe absolutely, at the beginning of the day that we’re a goal based business. We have to say, what’s the goal? We have to have a great hero, you have a timeline certainly, but it’s all about quality. At the end of the day, if you put something out on time, and it’s terrible, you wasted your time. So it’s much more important to say what do we need as far as resources go? Be it time, be it money, be it people. But at the end of the day, what we believe in is saying: “what’s the right thing to do? What do we need to happen here?”

One of the philosophies we have at Crystal is “family first.” One of the things that I tell my team all the time: If you have a kid’s birthday, then go take care of your kid’s birthday, like what, what are you crazy?

I’ve heard studio horror stories that make me nuts, at the end of the day, we love what we do. One of the things that I love about my jobs–I’ve done this since ’91, I make games for a living because of my passion, and I turned my passion to my profession. I don’t think I work a day in my life ever, because it’s just what I love to do. So we want to find people who are like that, and like-minded, saying: “We’re craftsmen.” That’s what I think of Crystal is a studio.

So we all come to work every day to push each other to be better to work as hard as we possibly can on the right things. But we also want to do it in a smart, balanced way. And so we’ve actually changed everything from structures of how we do certain workdays with no meetings, go and get stuff done days which are very focused, “Hey, come in, and get your stuff done, we don’t want to interrupt you”, we’ll provide meals free, whatever it is.

But we also want to give people that flexibility of saying, here’s the workload, here’s how much time we have to get done. Help manage that on your own wherever you can, because we want to give that developer the flexibility and agency to say, “You know what we want to get done, we all want this to be great, how are we going to get there?”

Last question, and it’s one that’s very important to me: Can give me a hint as to whether Squirrel Girl is on the character list?

*15 seconds of laughing*

So, I will tell you that in one of the first meetings I ever had with Bill Rosen and his team, we sat there and started talking about the dream characters. So we went through the roster and were like “What about this? What about that? What about that?”

And I will say that her name came up.

Literally the first meeting, we had sushi restaurant near our office, we’re sitting there talking, we may have had a few shots of sake, I can’t confirm that or not. But it got to the point where it’s like, what would be fun? And we started saying what about this this, or this? What about this plus that?

It’s that ‘What If’ scenario, sitting with these guys who are masters of their world, sitting with us who love making games and love their world, and saying: “Could you imagine if you had this and this and this and this?”

So yes, at the very least that name has actually come up in conversation. I’ll leave it there.

I can’t wait to see the Crystal Dynamics Avengers take on Squirrel Girl. Thank you for your time.

*laughs* Thank you.

The newest season of Stranger Things was a massive success in terms of viewership. According to Netflix, 64 million Netflix member households watched the show over its first month. That makes it Netflix’s most-watched original show ever.

A “view” according to Netflix is when an account watches 70 percent of an episode of a show or 70 percent of a movie. The new streaming numbers were revealed as part of Netflix’s latest earnings report.

Stranger Things Season 3 opened to 40.7 million viewers in less than a week after its July 4 premiere, so the bigger numbers revealed this week are not surprising. According to Netflix, 18.2 million accounts finished the entirety of Season 3 in less than a week.

If you haven’t yet dived in, you can check out our Stranger Things Season 3 review for thoughts on how it’s bounced back from Season 2.

Stranger Things Season 4 was announced in October, and the first teaser suggests the show may move out of Hawkins for the new season. Netflix typically releases Stranger Things news around Halloween, so keep checking back with GameSpot for more.

For lots more on Stranger Things 3 and what’s to come, check out the story below (but beware, it contains spoilers!)

Little Town Hero, developed by Pokemon studio Game Freak, tries to do a lot with a little. Fast-traveling from the mines near its titular town to its main street, the two furthest points on the map, only saves you about a minute or so of travel time. But the game wants its small village to matter, as it spends several hours familiarizing you with the small area and its residents. Its gameplay works the same way, doing for card-battlers what Pokemon did for party-focused, turn-based RPGs: distilling it into something the average person can wrap their head around.

And it works, sometimes. When you face down an imposing monster and cobble together a hard-earned win with all the tools at your disposal, it can make the equipment upgrading, crafting systems, and myriad currencies of other games feel like bloat. But more often, Little Town Hero doesn’t leave the strict confines it creates for itself; instead, it plays things safe by constraining your options so things don’t get too out of hand. While that occasionally produces some challenging moments, battles quickly begin to repeat themselves, making you wish you could see what its combat might be capable of if it weren’t afraid to take more risks.

The star of Little Town Hero’s tiny village is Axe, a young troublemaker quickly thrust into defending his home from monsters after he acquires a red stone that gives him an edge against them in battle. Because the village is protected by a castle and surrounded by steep cliffs, no one knows where the monsters are coming from, so Axe and his friends begin tracking down their origins.

The crux of Little Town Hero is its turn-based gameplay, which borrows elements from card games but throws in a couple of twists. Fights revolve around a small deck of cards, called Ideas. Cards can be red (which have high attack values and can damage the opponent directly), yellow (which can fight multiple times a turn as long as they have the health for it, but can’t damage your opponent), or blue (which don’t have attack or defense values but activate powerful effects). The goal in most fights is to break all three of your opponent’s hearts by destroying all of their cards in a single turn by having them trade hits with yours, then attacking them directly.

Unfortunately, this setup lacks key aspects of other card games. The most glaring omission is that you can’t actually build a deck of your own; for most of the game, you’re stuck with a deck that caps out at just 13 cards. You can’t alter or customize which cards you bring to battle, so standard battles play out predictably; you look at the defense of your opponent’s cards, match them with the cards that can break them, and see if your hand can break theirs. Some cards have special effects, but you won’t see any outlandish gameplay mechanics; most effects either buff your current cards, deal damage, or add another card to your hand. Fights get boring quickly, especially after you upgrade your cards by working your way through the skill tree using the Eureka points earned from fights.

You can also mitigate much of the luck that factors into most other card games, which makes it easier to get the cards you need but also drives home how simple the strategy behind each fight is. In order to survive longer fights, you need to recycle cards by either losing a heart or spending BP (a resource you build whenever you destroy all of your opponent’s cards but don’t have a card to break through and damage them directly). You can even swap out cards in your hand for those in your deck at the cost of BP.

While this curbs the element of chance that can sometimes be aggravating in card games, it also emphasizes just how often you end up using the same strategies each fight. Already used the card you needed to pierce through a boss’ defense to win the last round? No problem; with 3 BP, you can revive your entire deck and add that car right back into your hand. You end up sticking to one or two strategies and running them time and again because, again, your deck is made up of just 13 cards.

Because of how small your deck is and how well you can mitigate the element of chance, decision-making is crucial, and I did have a few of the a-ha moments where I was backed into a corner but, through a series of smart decisions, came out on top. But those moments quickly give way to going on autopilot. There might be a few deviations based on whatever tricks your opponent pulls or which cards you draw in the first turn, but at some point, I was able to run my plan of making several of my defensive cards invincible, steamrolling whatever offense the boss had, and hitting them for obscene amounts of damage in a single turn.

Boss fights are a little more exciting, since they introduce a couple of strategic layers. Instead of fighting in place, you take on monsters across a large swath of the village, mapped out like a small board, moving a random number of spaces each turn (though you can control where you move with certain cards). Most spaces on the board have a special effect when you land on them, granting access to an ally who can deal direct damage, allowing you to combine two cards into one, or letting you use certain cards to activate explosive barrels or cannons. Some villagers might even have suggestions, like punching a monster in the nose, that add new, one-use cards to your deck specific to that fight. Planning out where I’d travel across multiple turns depending on which cards I had that turn made from some well-timed plays that won me some fights.

To counter these powerful bonuses, bosses offer up the kind of challenge the rest of the game lacks. Each boss has its own gimmick that nudges you toward different strategies; one boss might counterattack when you hurt it (encouraging you to find more indirect ways of wearing it down), or introduce cards that add a short timer to all of your moves until they’re destroyed, forcing you to be quick and possibly screw up. For the first half of the game, I had a tough time against monsters, since it seemed like they always had the upper hand. As I upgraded my deck, that tide slowly shifted.

This doesn’t make later boss fights breezy–some of them are tough. But even here, because you don’t have that many options to choose from, your path to victory doesn’t feel personal or creative. It also doesn’t help that during boss fights, both sides gain a protective shield that has to be whittled down before hearts will take damage, which makes boss fights take longer than regular fights–certain battles took the better part of an hour to get through. The combination of the gradually lowered difficulty and increased length of battles meant I knew I’d emerge victorious, but I dreaded the 15 to 20 turns it’d take to get there.

Outside of battles, you can trek back and forth across the village to run errands for shopkeepers and complete side quests that earn you Eureka points. But the village itself isn’t big enough to hold your attention for long; there are no other meaningful ways to engage with anyone outside of the couple of times they might ask you to get something for them, if at all. The only resource you have are Eureka points, so there are no minigames, equipment to buy, or anything else that might give combat more depth or provide an alternative from all the card-battling. The town only comes alive when monsters attack it.

Little Town Hero finds some success in avoiding some of the complex systems and tedious menus that can bog down other card games and RPGs, but it ends up suffering for it.

The story you unravel along the way and strings all the fights together is somewhat involved, but predictable and boring. Discovering the origin of all the monster attacks has a couple of twists, but mostly leads to a predictable story that moves at a crawl. Characters are largely forgettable, quickly fall into archetypes, and play out their roles without much room for nuance. A couple of later moments get some emotional weight thanks to a strong score from Undertale creator Toby Fox and longtime Pokemon composer Hitomi Sato, but characters are too shallow to hold up their end of the bargain, and the town doesn’t have enough going on to make it worth exploring beyond where quests tell you to go.

Little Town Hero finds some success in avoiding some of the complex systems and tedious menus that can bog down other card games and RPGs, but it ends up suffering for it. Keeping your card options limited allows you to approach encounters with clever instead of relying on luck of the draw, but the deck size is too limited to break the mounting doldrum of subsequent fights. And while I did get to know this town pretty well, that’s because of how small and suffocating it feels as it refuses to push outside its own boundaries.