biteho.com

This week’s episode of New Releases is action-packed. You can lead armies in Tiny Metal: Full Metal Rumble, battle invading computers in Blazing Chrome, and take down giant monsters in God Eater 3. You can also slow things down and create the world you want in Dragon Quest Builders 2 or break down bad bacteria in Dr. Mario World. There’s plenty to play this week!

Dr. Mario World — July 10

Available on: iOS, Android

The next Nintendo mobile venture is Dr. Mario World, a free-to-play take on the retro puzzle classic. Unlike the original, this mobile game features six different colors of viruses and multiple playable doctors, each with their own special powers. Also the pills move up the screen instead of down, which might take a moment to get used to.

More Coverage:

Tiny Metal: Full Metal Rumble — July 11

Available on: PC, Switch

This strategy sequel sees Commander Wolfram searching for her brother among the Zipanese forces. If you’re a fan of tactics games like Advance Wars, you’ll feel right at home deploying units on the grid and moving them into strategic positions. You can also skirmish with the AI or take on other armies online.

More Coverage:

Blazing Chrome — July 11

Available on: PS4, Xbox One, PC, Switch

You can probably tell just by looking, but Blazing Chrome takes inspiration from the Contra and Metal Slug series. This run-and-gun game is set in a world taken over by evil computers, and it’s up to Mavra and Doyle to liberate the people. Yes, two characters means you can save the world with a friend in co-op.

More Coverage:

Dragon Quest Builders 2 — July 12

Available on: PS4, Switch

This sequel is finally getting a worldwide release this week. Builders 2 continues the pattern of building massive structures and helpful items, but this time you’ve got the mysterious Malroth at your side. The sequel also introduces underwater travel and flying. And yes, up to four players can build cooperatively.

More Coverage:

God Eater 3 — July 12

Available on: Switch

The Nintendo Switch version of God Eater 3 lands this week, allowing you to meet up with other Switch owners anywhere to battle the big beasts together via local communication. For every monsters you slay, you can absorb their power to unleash even stronger attacks. There are plenty of god weapons to try out when you step into the fight.

More Coverage:

July has only just begun, and there are a bunch more video games on the way. Next week, New Releases will take a look at the much-anticipated Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order and the video game adaptation of card game Gloomhaven.

The main character of the God of War series is Kratos, but Sony almost went with a different name–one that was very close to developer Stig Asmussen. He recalled in an interview with Game Informer that the marketing team didn’t like the name Dominus, which is what the developers used as a working name throughout development.

“Marketing didn’t like that,” Asmussen said.

To get a bigger pool of potential names, game director David Jaffe enlisted his team to submit their own names for consideration. Asmussen himself submitted four or five names (which he didn’t share), but he was surprised when his own name, Stig, came back as a frontrunner.

Asmussen clarified that he didn’t add his own name, but the confusion was that he wrote his name on the document with his suggestions so people knew it was his list. The marketing team apparently thought Stig was in fact one of his name submissions.

“I totally would have been cool with it,” Asmussen said with a laugh.

It was ultimately decided that Kratos would be his name. It’s not clear what other names besides Dominus and Stig were considered.

Another part of the game that was up for debate was the title of it. In development, the team was making the game with the working title “Dark Odyssey,” which Asmussen recalled that the team “really liked.” However, the marketing department said it “might be too high-brow, and people might not get it,” Asmussen said.

They eventually landed on God of War, and that seemed to work out. God of War as a franchise and Kratos as the main character have gone on to become massive in stature in gaming. As Game Informer reminds us, the name “God of War” is sort of a spoiler, but then again, so was “Return of the King.”

Asmussen had a hang in developing every God of War game except the 2018 game. Asmussen is now working at Respawn, where he’s heading up development on the new Star Wars game Jedi Fallen Order.

Veteran Electronic Arts executive Patrick Soderlund’s new development outfit, Embark Studios, has been acquired by free-to-play giant Nexon.

Nexon was already working with Embark and had invested in it, but now Nexon owns 66.1 percent of Embark’s outstanding shares, increasing its investment from 32.8 percent. As such, Embark is now the majority shareholder.

As part of the move, Embark becomes a subsidiary of Nexon. Soderlund joined Nexon’s board of directors as part of the company’s first investment into Embark, and that is unchanged now.

Nexon president and CEO Owen Mahoney said in a statement that Embark continues to make “incredible progress” on the games it is working on. “Patrick Soderlund has been essential in helping drive our vision forward, so it only made sense to bring the companies even closer together,” Mahoney said.

For his part, Soderlund said Embark and Nexon share a “fundamentally similar world view.”

“Both our companies know that game development needs an overhaul, and we’re both convinced that new technology, methodologies, and perspectives will completely reshape what games can become,” he said.

Embark is working on at least two games currently, one of which is free-to-play cooperative action game set in the “distant future.” The game is about “overcoming seemingly impossible odds by working together.”

In a post on Medium, Soderlund said Embark has grown to almost 80 developers

“The game team has been deep into prototyping over the spring, and we’re beginning to see the early seeds of something unique,” Soderlund said. “The other week we started running weekly (and gloriously buggy) playtests, which means we have begun iterating on our ideas and can start to identify the things that are good and the things that are less good.”

Embark’s other internal team, comprising around a quarter of the studio, is working on a platform that will help a broader group of people make games.

“We’ve started working on a platform that we hope will let anyone create interactive experiences, even people with no prior experience with game development tools,” Soderlund said. “Much of the work on the platform so far has gone into building up the core, and there are some large and interesting challenges ahead.”

In particular, Soderlund said animation and movement can be especially tricky. Embark has created an AI system that uses physics to create animations automatically. As an example, check out the video below where the spider’s walking animations were automatically generated without any manual input.

Soderlund was the CEO of Battlefield developer DICE, which EA acquired in 2006 for $23 million. He later held various different positions at EA, including chief design officer and executive vice president of Worldwide Studios up until his departure from EA in October 2018.

The latest weekend box office numbers are in via Entertainment Weekly, and Sony’s Spider-Man: Far From Home was easily No. 1 for the weekend. It made a massive $93.6 million in the US and Canada over the July 5-7 weekend, which was close to setting a new record for the 4th of July weekend.

The record-holder continues to be 2011’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which made $97.9 million over the 4th of July weekend years ago.

The numbers and analysis for Far From Home are not traditional because the movie opened on a Tuesday compared to the usual Friday premiere for many big films. Far From Home set the record for biggest domestic Tuesday ever with $39.3 million. The Amazing Spider-Man was the previous record-holder for a Tuesday, bringing it $35 million when it opened on Tuesday, July 3, 2012.

Looking at the six-day box office period from Tuesday through Sunday, Far From Home made $185 million in the US and Canada. That’s a six-day 4th of July record, surpassing Spider-Man 2.

With domestic and international figures combined, Far From Home has already made $580 million worldwide after less than a week. The movie picked up an excellent A rating on CinemaScore, which suggests positive world-of-mouth will keep ticket sales strong in Week 2 and beyond.

Toy Story 4 was No. 2 this weekend with $34.3 million, while Danny Boyle’s Yesterday made $10.8 million. Another entrant, Hereditary director Ari Aster’s new horror movie Midsommar, made $6.7 million to finish No. 6. The movie actually premiered on Wednesday, and with the full five-day period accounted for, Midsommar made $10.9 million. Producer A24 says that’s the best opening for an indie movie so far in 2019.

July 5-7 US/Canada Box Office

Via EW

1. Spider-Man: Far From Home — $93.6 million
2. Toy Story 4 — $34.3 million
3. Yesterday — $10.8 million
4. Annabelle Comes Home — $9.8 million
5. Aladdin — $7.6 million
6. Midsommar — $6.7 million
7. The Secret Life of Pets 2 — $4.8 million
8. Men In Black International — $3.6 million
9. Avengers: Endgame — $3.1 million
10. Rocketman — $2.8 million

As was made clear from the first teasers and trailers for The Outer Worlds, it is a game where megacorporations are taking over planets throughout space. As such, the game appears to have something to say about capitalism and power. And now, co-director Leonard Boyarsky has come forward to talk about how the game doesn’t aim to be “politically charged.”

“I don’t want people to think this is a really hard, politically charged game: it’s supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to be humorous,” he explained to VGC.

The game is more about how power is used against people who don’t have it rather than acting as a critique of capitalism. “It can be insidious; the way which people control the stories you tell about the world. If you let other people control that narrative, then they can control you to a certain degree. That can be any form of government: if it wasn’t capitalism it could be something else,” he said.

Boyarsky added that development on The Outer Worlds began in April 2016, which was before “things happened [in world politics]” that “nobody expected.” He didn’t mention any specific events but you can read into what he’s saying.

He and other members of the development team grew up during the “onslaught of consumer culture.” As such, the developers are familiar with those events and will use the game to “poke fun at it,” Boyarsky said.

Boyarsky said the team at Obsidian has been “very careful” about how it tells its story about power imbalances, just Boyarsky did with the 2001 RPG Arcanum that dealt with racial issues. Overall, Obsidian’s aim with The Outer Worlds is to tell a story and write characters that look at “all aspects of issues.”

“The last thing we want to do is make a game that people feel is lecturing them,” Boyarsky said.

The Outer Worlds launches on October 25. Though it is developed by the Microsoft-owned Obsidian, the game is published byGrand Theft Auto V parent publisher Take-Two Interactive’s new indie games label, Private Division.

The game is coming to Xbox One and PlayStation 4, as well as PC where it’s exclusive to the Epic Games Store for a period of time. It’ll come to Steam sometime in 2020. Like all of Microsoft’s other games, it’ll be playable at no extra charge for Xbox Game Pass subscribers.