Category: Games

Disney has dropped a new trailer for Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which returns for one final season exclusively on Disney+ this February.

The trailer comes accompanied by a new key art poster, featuring Annakin, Obi-Wan, Ahsoka Tano, and Darth Maul, as well as a collection of Clone Troopers. The logo predominantly declares that this is the final season, and is accompanied by the February 21 release date.

Like The Mandalorian, the episodes are streaming “beginning Friday, February 21”, indicating a week-by-week rollout rather than a Netflix-style full season drop. The Clone Wars will be made up of twelve new episodes, exploring the events leading up to Revenge of the Sith.

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If you’re looking to catch up on The Clone Wars, check out our correct episode order guide, as well as our look at the connection between the show and The Mandalorian. And if you’re worried about fan-favourite character Ahsoka’s fate, don’t worry: Gandalf has a few words for you.

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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. You can follow him on Twitter. 

One of the reasons why Halo co-creator Marcus Lehto left Bungie was because of the extended periods of crunch that negatively impacted his life. Speaking during a roundtable interview for his new game, Disintegration, Lehto said his new studio, V1 Interactive, is taking a stance against crunch and trying to do right by its employees for their health and happiness.

“One of the reasons I left Bungie–and I know one of the reasons people from the industry have joined us here at V1–is that many of us have seen the bad side of extended crunch periods that would go on for months and months … and what kind of human toll that took,” Lehto explained. “We don’t want to experience that, we don’t want to replicate that at all again [at V1]. So at V1, one of our primary goals with the studio is making sure that we create an atmosphere where everybody is intimately involved with what we’re working on, so there is a lot of responsibility on everybody’s shoulders. And everybody wears several hats.”

“We also value, incredibly, the health of everybody here–both physically and mentally. Making sure they have that time outside the office to be with their family,” Lehto added. “And we support them to be home when they need to be home, to go to their kids’ school concerts and to have the weekends to themselves. That is a very important part to me, and it’s one thing we’ve extended to everyone here at the studio.”

“We also value, incredibly, the health of everybody here–both physically and mentally.” — Marcus Lehto

Lehto assured people that he and his team work hard, while he also acknowledged that the team pushes extra hard when milestones come up. However, these periods of extended working hours are limited to around “a week or so.”

“It’s not like we don’t work hard–we work really hard. And at the end of every milestone, we maybe spend a week or so working extra hours,” he said.

This kind of intense work schedule, so long as it doesn’t lead to burn-out, can actually be a good thing, Lehto said. That’s because it brings the team even closer together as they collectively grind on a particular objective. So long as these periods of crunch are few and far between, this can be a positive, Lehto said.

Bungie is known for its periods of crunch. Engineering boss Luke Timmins recalled to GI.biz in 2017 how the 18 months leading up to the release of Halo 2 in 2004 were “brutal” and nearly destroyed Bungie. The developer was crunching for nearly the entire 18 months, he said, and during that time, developers were spending at least 50 hours per week.

“The Halo 2 crunch almost killed Bungie as a company,” he said. “It is the most I’ve ever seen humans work in a year and a half. It was brutal.”

Bungie is said to have adopted policies and practices after that to lessen the instances of crunch, but it still happened. For the first Destiny, there was a “department-wide crunch” for the engineering team, Timmins said, though the team never had to crunch on any of the game’s numerous expansions. Destiny 2 also had no “full, enforced crunch,” he said.

In 2019, following Bungie’s split from Activision for the Destiny series, Bungie announced it would delay a Destiny 2 patch so its developers did not have to crunch.

As for Lehto, he left Bungie in 2012 while the original Destiny was just getting started.

Going back to Lehto’s new game, Disintegration, the first beta test for the FPS launches on January 28–here’s how to sign up. The game, which is made by a team of around 30 people, mixes FPS and strategy elements to create a type of game that Lehto says has never existed before. You fly around the map on a “grav-cycle” while simultaneously commanding soldiers on the ground. Check out the gameplay footage above to see Disintegration in action.

Here are some other things Lehto said about Disintegration:

• The “incredibly ambitious” campaign will take you around 9-10 hours to complete, though it could stretch into the mid-teens depending on how you play
• There will be no ranked multiplayer or stat-tracking at launch, though this could be added down the road
• There will be microtransactions that allow players to customize their grav-cycles
• It’s possible V1 will support the PS5 and Xbox Series X down the road, but nothing is confirmed yet. The same is true for Nintendo Switch

Disintegration is published by Private Division, the independent games label run by Grand Theft Auto parent company Take-Two. Private Division also published Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds and Assassin’s Creed creator Patrice Desilets’ new game, Ancestors.

A collection of Mortal Kombat remasters that Warner Bros. reportedly pulled the plug on back in early 2019 appears to have been resurrected, based on a new rating spotted in the Pan European Game Information (PEGI) database. Mortal Kombat Kollection Online, for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch, has been rated PEGI 18 due to “frequent strong violence.” The entry can still be found in the PEGI rating database at the time of writing.

The explanatory text provided alongside the new PEGI rating describes Mortal Kombat Kollection Online as “the original Mortal Kombat trilogy that MK fans always wanted” and makes reference to “[u]pgraded art, gameplay, and online features.”

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In April 2019 it was reported that Blind Squirrel Games (BioShock: The Collection, Forklift Simulator 2019) had been preparing to work on a remastered collection of the first three Mortal Kombat games following a successful pitch to Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon, but Warner Bros. quickly opted not to have Blind Squirrel Games continue on the project. WB reportedly claimed it could not “trust development of such an important project to a team without any completed game titles.”

The PEGI scheme covers the bulk of Europe and the UK (and Israel) in a similar fashion to North America’s Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB).

There’s certainly plenty going on in the Mortal Kombat realm at the moment, with Joker joining the Mortal Kombat 11 roster next week, production on the upcoming live-action film reboot wrapping last month, and the recent announcement of the new animated movie Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion’s Revenge.

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Luke is Games Editor at IGN’s Sydney office. You can find him on Twitter every few days @MrLukeReilly.

Temtem, a new PC MMO that is clearly inspired by Pokemon, has just launched in Early Access on Steam. The game, which costs $35, lets you catch, train, and battle with your Temtem, and explore the world alongside other players.

It’s a good proposition for PC players who want a Pokemon-style game, or even players who were disappointed with Pokemon Sword/Shield, which it’s currently cheaper than. That might not remain the game forever, though, as developer Crema has suggested that the game’s price will rise in the future, before it has left Early Access.

On the game’s Steam page, a developer Q&A states that the game is about 50% complete right now, and will take about 20 hours to play through. The final product will be much bigger, but people buying the game now are paying less than customers will have to pay for later versions of the game.

“We believe in giving advantages to our early supporters, so the current Early Access price will be raised gradually as we ship new content and features,” it says. It’s unclear when this might happen, or how high the price would go, but if you’re interested in the game it might be worth picking it up sooner rather than later.

In her hands-on preview, Kallie Plagge said that the game is an interesting twist on what we’ve seen before from the Pokemon series.

Gears of War boss Rod Fergusson has spoken about the importance of inclusive game design and diversity in the workplace. During his keynote address as PAX South, Fergusson said he was inspired by the Stephen Frost quote, “Unless you consciously include, you will unconsciously exclude.”

“We had to find a way to welcome new players and create an on-board for them. The way we really focused on doing that was through inclusive design,” Fergusson explained.

The veteran game developer said his perspective as a straight white man limits his ability to create games that appeal to people from all different walks of life and social circles.

“If you live within your own tower, and your own insular base–I’m a straight white old male–my social circles and my demographics and all the people I reach could potentially be limited, or if not limited, biased in some ways,” he said. “If I don’t consciously make the decision to break out of that idea and go and talk to other people and hire people who are diverse to bring new opinions and new ideas and grow–if you don’t do that intentionally, then you are going to accidentally leave people out.”

Over the years, Fergusson said the Gears of War franchise has done more to “lean in” to further inclusivity and diversity. He acknowledged that the franchise is known for being macho–it features giant men and huge guns, after all–though he said he is proud of the steps the studio has taken to make games that appeal to more people. The latest entry, Gears 5, features the Kait Diaz in the lead role; it’s the first female protagonist in the series.

The newest episode of GameSpot’s Audio Logs features Fergusson speaking about, among other things, inclusive game design. Check it out in the video embed above.

Fergusson’s talk at PAX South was wide-ranging. He also touched on his time working on BioShock Infinite, while he also recalled leaving 2K over “creative differences.”

The next Gears game coming up is Gears Tactics, which is a turn-based strategy game for Xbox One and PC made by Splash Damage. No new entries in the mainline series have been announced, but given Gears 5 was such a huge success, a sequel is likely in the works.