This week on Wrestle Buddies, GameSpot’s professional wrestling podcast, Chris E. Hayner and Mat Elfring are getting personal. How personal, you ask? Chris is digging up the past–literally–while Mat is settling an online beef with someone he’s never met.
First up, Mat got a comment from a stranger on the internet about how wrestling is fake. Is it really, though? That’s the question we tackle by looking at the history of sports entertainment and trying to figure out exactly what “fake” means. After all, Mick Foley falling through the Hell in a Cell structure most certainly wasn’t done using computer graphics.
Then, Chris cleaned out his closet and found a wild array of wrestling items–including a number of very old wrestling games. The Wrestle Buddies break it all down and look back on some live events they’ve attended, and Mat even tells the story of staying in a hotel next to a Korn concert that resulted in him buying Chris the absolute worst luchador mask of all time.
All of that, plus we answer your questions and there’s a new installment of Gangrel Watch, in which we track down noted vampire warrior professional wrestler Gangrel. New episodes of Wrestle Buddies are released every Thursday on the podcast platform or app of your choice, including Spotify, Stitcher, and Apple Podcasts.
“Well, crap,” I mutter, as I begin to run. It’s far too late of course. My pursuers have seen me and are now riddling my backside with bullets as I try to duck and weave among the environmental cover that’s slowly deleting. And then I see it: my salvation. Around another player’s corpse is a Hack pick-up with a circle on it. I quickly slide into it and pick it up, cackling with glee as I transform into a giant ball and bounce away from the squad chasing me.
My laughter stops as I turn around and realize, to my horror, that every one of my pursuers has the Ball Hack as well. I continue to flee but I can hear the quiet thumps of their murderous bounces keeping pace with me.
If you’ve ever played a battle royale game before, then the goal of Hyper Scape is an old song and dance by this point. Players begin each match by dropping onto a battlefield with nothing to their name, forced to survive by any means necessary–whether that’s searching for the best weapons, hunting and killing enemy players, or avoiding and hiding from fights. As the match progresses, the battlefield shrinks, increasing the likelihood of firefights breaking out amongst the survivors. You win by being the last one standing.
None of which is to say that Hyper Scape doesn’t bring its own sense of style to the battle royale genre. For one, being the last one alive isn’t the only way to win; you can also be crowned the winner. The game spawns a crown onto the battlefield when the survivable area shrinks to its final size. Nabbing the crown puts you on everyone’s radar. If you die, you drop it, but teams that manage to hold onto it for 45 seconds automatically win. It’s a pretty substantial contribution to Hyper Scape’s frantic battles and encouragement to fight quickly, not just efficiently.
It’s in this emphasis that Hyper Scape finds its strengths. The game’s vertically-influenced environment and quick loot management all contribute to fast and fun fights, but Hyper Scape is also held back by that same environment and collection of weapons and Hacks (the latter of which is a choice-driven take on hero abilities). It all combines into a battle royale game that has great moments, but ultimately feels like it relies too much on randomness to lead to satisfying victories.
Season 1: The First Principle
With the start of Season 1: The First Principle, Hyper Scape has officially been released for Xbox One and PS4. I haven’t noticed a drop in quality when transitioning between PC and consoles, something that’s easy to do since Hyper Scape supports cross progression–your account follows you from system to system.
Season 1 adds a battle pass, daily and weekly challenges, and tons of new rewards to unlock which are just what a game like Hyper Scape needs–it’s only got one map for its two permanent modes, solo and squads, so there’s just not enough there to keep playing the game every day without an additional incentive.
Here’s the thing: I don’t like Hyper Scape’s battle pass. It’s got a free track and paid one, which normally would be fine except that nearly half of the items (12 of the 33) on the free track can’t be accessed unless you have Prime Gaming, which requires paying the $13 USD/month for an Amazon Prime subscription. So, if you want to complete either the free or paid track, you need to drop some cash. You can ignore it, of course, but the battle pass highlights that you’re missing items if you don’t have Prime Gaming, which feels a little predatory.
Certain rewards on the free battle pass track will only unlock if you have Prime Gaming.
Though maybe it’s for the best. Most of Hyper Scape’s in-game rewards are weapon and character skins, emotes and sprays, and new characters–and they’re all kind of meh. None of the weapon or character skins are particularly exciting; it’s your standard affair of simple recolor options. The emotes and sprays at least allow you to add a bit more of your own personal style to your character, though it’s rare to find opportunities to paint the walls with a cute design or interact with your teammates with silly movements in the midst of a battle royale game that’s as fast-paced as Hyper Scape.
The new characters are really the only reward worth pursuing, as they do have an impact on your personal experience with the game, albeit one that is pretty insignificant. None of the characters change the gameplay, but each has their own personality and sounds off with unique one-liners and quips when they pick up weapons or Hacks, ping a location, or make note that they’re under fire or wandering away from their squad. There’s not much variety in the spoken lines for each individual character, though, so each one gets old real fast and switching between them constantly is really the only way I can maintain my sanity.
To put it bluntly, these characters are shallow; most seem to be completely defined by their culture or profession. There’s no backstory or reason to like any of them, so I’ve ended up disliking pretty much all of them. Of the black characters I’ve unlocked, there’s an athlete, a “street-smart” journalist, and an artist. There’s also bubbly streamer girl Noor, strict mom Myrto, and “a big punch in a small package” Cruz. If you like accents, there’s Scottish Burns and Japanese Takeshi–the former is described as “brains and brawn” and the latter is a fanboy for the character you get at level 100 in the paid battle pass track. And who could forget the “shy and awkward” white boy Adi, who gains confidence with a gun in his hands and tells his competition to “git gud.” There are more you can buy in the in-game store, but the lack of depth in the characters I currently have isn’t making me eager to spend real-world money to meet more of them. These characters feel like someone trying to check off a diversity list, not create well-written individuals.
I think, “containing dark depths” is the deepest character development I’ve found in Hyper Scape so far.
It wouldn’t be too much of an issue if it wasn’t for the fact that Hyper Scape has a story now which provides context for just how bland and stereotypically written each of the characters are. Season 1 fleshes out the game’s world with lore by noting the relationships between certain characters and adding Memories, which you unlock by discovering Memory Shards that are hidden in specific places in-game. For how difficult these Shards are to find, the Memories they unlock have a poor pay-off: just a wall of text that isn’t all that interesting. So far, there’s nothing further fleshing out the characters or revealing what threat they’re coming together to stop–it’s just a bunch of boring backstory about how VR became popular in Hyper Scape’s version of Earth, leading to the creation of the battle royale called Crown Rush.
Without a doubt, the best new additions with Season 1 are the new weapon and Hack. Between the two, I like the new Magnet Hack more–it allows you to set a device that attracts all nearby targets. This adds a welcome method of controlling distance between you and an enemy, and also opens up new ways for you to use Neo Arcadia’s environment to your advantage. For example, you can use Magnet to pull someone off a roof or outside the safe zone or into your teammate’s shotgun. The new Dragonfly assault rifle isn’t as impactful. A semi-automatic rifle with a decent scope, it offers you the choice of a firearm that falls in between the close-range automatic Ripper assault rifle and long-range bolt-action Phantom V sniper rifle, but I haven’t encountered a situation where I’ve needed something like that. I either want the speed of the Ripper or the range and power of the Phantom V. But I don’t have any issues with the Dragonfly; it’s a well-balanced gun that doesn’t negatively impact the in-match meta in any significant way.
Crown Rush
Outside of those aforementioned additions, Hyper Scape is pretty much the exact same game we had during the beta. In short, if you played the beta, your overall opinion of the game is unlikely to change even with the new content. But if you’re looking for the long version, keep reading.
Hyper Scape possesses a variety of weapons, each of which is diverse enough to offer different playstyles. There’s nothing wildly different about any of them in comparison to most sci-fi shooters (if you’ve played a first-person shooter before, you can identify how most of the guns work as soon as you pick them up), other than the D-Tap, the weaker of the two game’s pistols, which incorporates a lock-on targeting system that allows you to curve its shots. There’s some good sound design behind Hyper Scape’s weapons, too; you can identify what’s being shot at you via the noise that each gun makes.
Though the in-match meta is fairly balanced, some guns are just better. A lot of fights take place in enclosed spaces, lending greater utility to Hyper Scape’s only shotgun, the Mammoth MK1, as well as the automatic Ripper assault rifle, SMG Harpy, and LMG Hexfire. You pretty much want to have at least one of the four on you, as going without seems to put you at a disadvantage.
Pretty much the exact same thing can be said about Hyper Scape’s Hacks, the game’s version of hero abilities. As opposed to attaching specific abilities to certain characters, Hyper Scape has different abilities that you can pick up and equip. You can only hold two at a time, and since each Hack can accomplish different tasks, you can curate very different builds based on what you pick up. But like weapons, there are some Hacks that just seem ideal for success. The most important use of a Hack is to run from a fight you can’t handle with your guns alone, which emphasizes the ones geared towards traversal or escape, like Slam (sends you flying into the air to then descend in a new location) or Ball (transform into a protective ball that allows you to bounce away from a fight). Even after playing Hyper Scape for several hours, it’s rare for me to run into someone who doesn’t have Slam, Ball, Invisibility, or Wall equipped as one of their Hacks–all of which are best used to run from a losing fight.
I like running with the Ripper and Mammoth MK1, but I’ll sometimes shuffle the Protocol V into my loadout.
This leads to a bit of a stagnation in Hyper Scape’s in-match meta. You can win with any combination of weapons and Hacks, but there’s definitely a path that has a higher chance of success. And in something like a battle royale, where loot is random, this can occasionally lead to matches where the odds are stacked against you from the beginning if no one in your squad managed to find the weapons and Hacks that can lead to an ideal loadout. Randomness is only fun if it doesn’t screw you over right from the start. You should feel like your squad stands a chance no matter where you land on Neo Arcadia. You technically do, of course. How you move is just as important as what weapons and Hacks you have equipped, and there’s something to be said about actual skill when it comes to first-person shooters. It’s also worth pointing out that most of the guns feel balanced in their respective damage output and fire rate; none of them feel too overpowered. But since Hyper Scape’s battles can take place inside multistory buildings, it lowers the usefulness of weapons like the Protocol V and Dragonfly (both of which pretty much only excel in battles that occur outdoors) in comparison to guns like the Mammoth MK1 and Ripper (that handle well whether you’re inside or outside).
Whereas most battle royale games have horizontally built maps, Hyper Scape takes place on the vertically-focused Neo Arcadia. Most buildings are at least three stories, and stairways and jump pads ensure you almost always have a means of accessing their rooftops. Many battles in Hyper Scape quickly transition between the ground, the tops of buildings, and midair–you have to be just as aware of an attack coming from above or below you as you do from the front or the back.
Hyper Scape definitely leans towards a faster pace, a speed that’s certainly encouraged via its mechanics. Diving into a crouch from a sprint will fling you forward in an aggressive slide, and a double jump and ledge grab allows you to more easily maneuver around the map in comparison to most battle royales. Sprinting, sliding, climbing, and using navigation-based Hacks (like Teleport) to parkour around the map is joyful fun. There’s a real sense of momentum to your movements as you catapult yourself through the air and over or around obstacles–I think I’ve gotten a bigger adrenaline rush from expertly pulling off several impressive movements in quick succession to escape a battle than I have winning one. When it comes to navigating the immediate area, Hyper Scape does a lot to make you feel like a superhuman parkour expert.
However, it’s difficult to know where you’re going once you’ve finished up a fight or looted all the buildings around you. Outside of the major landmarks, most of the buildings and locations in Neo Arcadia all look exactly the same. Even after hours with the game, I still have to open the map to check where I am–I can’t reliably identify my location based on my surroundings, which can be a big problem if I’m being shot at and trying to figure out where to run. Everything is just vibrant white, soft grey, and shiny blue. Granted, this makes it easy to spot enemies, as they’re highlighted with a red outline when you aim at them that really stands out. So the map design helps in that regard, but it’s all too monotonous to aid in exploration and navigation.
I like Hyper Scape’s hub area–it’s cool how you walk between the battle pass, online marketplace, tutorial area, and Crown Rush instead of flipping through menus.
This is a huge problem with how zone closure works in Hyper Scape. Instead of the closing ring seen in most battle royale games, in Hyper Scape, individual zones slowly delete themselves over time. This deletion sees environments slowly transform into a dark blue shade. It’s a cool-looking effect, but it ultimately makes everything in the environment look even more similar, making it incredibly difficult to get your bearings while you’re trying to reach a safe zone–occasionally while you’re also under fire and need to consider avoiding bullets as much as escaping the deleting world. An arrow at least points in the direction of the nearest safe zone, but a straight path to safety is not always the best one.
Thankfully, even though you’ll be frequently stopping to look at your map in Hyper Scape, you won’t have to do the same for loot. Hyper Scape forgoes an attachment-based system when it comes to improving your arsenal for a system that’s far simpler. Say you find and equip a Ripper; finding and picking up another Ripper will improve the stats of the one you’re currently holding. This system applies to your Hacks too, allowing you to lower the cooldown and increase the offensive potential of your special abilities by discovering copies of the ones you already have equipped.
With no grenades or healing items in Hyper Scape (you auto-heal after staying out of combat for a few seconds), and since there are no extended mags or damage-enhancing hop-up attachments to consider, the time spent in your inventory is practically nonexistent. The only time I’ve ever opened my inventory was to drop one of my weapons for a teammate I’d recently revived–it was near the end of a match and there wasn’t time to go looting.
Speaking of, Hyper Scape has a rather nifty revive mechanic. It might be my favorite version I’ve seen in a battle royale game yet. When you die in Hyper Scape, your digital Echo falls out of your corpse. In this form, you’re limited to only being able to move and ping, but enemies can’t see you. If your living squadmates manage to kill an enemy player, they can interact with the corpse to bring you back to life.
When it comes to navigating the immediate area, Hyper Scape does a lot to make you feel like a superhuman parkour expert.
This gives dead players something to do; you can scout ahead for your living squadmates and actively contribute to ensuring your team wins its next fight so that you can be revived. Even better, the dead body that’s used to revive a squadmate typically has the deceased’s weapons and Hacks still nearby. So you’re usually not coming back completely naked. This isn’t always the case, of course. You may be respawned on a body that’s already been looted. And at that point, you’re just at the mercy of the game’s randomness. Were you paired up with good teammates who will share loot with you, or do you have to go find weapons and Hacks on your own and hope that enemy squads haven’t looted everything?
Hyper Scape is an okay battle royale game. The game has solid weapons and hero-like Hack abilities, but you’re at the mercy of being lucky enough to get what you need to have a higher chance of winning. The battleground doesn’t help in this regard, since it’s difficult to know where you’re going and make a plan about where to loot next without stopping to open the map. At least the individual moments in Hyper Scape are fun. A match could be ruined by the randomness working against you, but that doesn’t stop moments like turning into a ball and trying to out bounce three enemy balls any less fun in how ridiculously silly it is.
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Amazon tends to offer some of the best prices on games and accessories year-round, but its Amazon Warehouse sales beat those prices even more. The Warehouse division of Amazon focuses on reselling open-box and used products for even steeper discounts, and the latest sale offers an additional 20% off the used price for a range of gaming accessories for Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and PC. The sale even includes a few games and a PS4 console bundle, but be aware that many of these items are in extremely limited supply and will sell out fast, as is usually the case with Amazon Warehouse sales.
Be sure to note the condition of an item before purchasing. Amazon Warehouse inspects each item and will indicate its condition on the listing. If you hover over “Details” underneath the price, you’ll get more information about the product.
You can check out some of the highlights from today’s Amazon Warehouse sale below and browse more of the deals at Amazon. You can also check out the full sale for items outside of gaming–over 10,000 products are currently marked down even cheaper, including Amazon smart devices, AirPods, and more. The prices indicated below reflect the full Warehouse price with the 20% off applied compared to the regular list price on Amazon.
In the 20 years since the last mainline entry in the Baldur’s Gate franchise launched, we’ve seen some hit-or-miss expansions, “enhanced” editions of the originals, and plenty of other digital adventures based in the Forgotten Realms of D&D lore – but none have found a place in audiences’ hearts quite like BioWare’s original games.
Now, after two decades, three full editions of tabletop rules, and more than 100 years in-fiction, the banner has finally been passed on to Larian Studios, of Divinity series fame, for Baldur’s Gate 3. The studio – which was told by D&D parent company Wizards of the Cost that they were “too green” until they launched Divinity 2 – is doing its damndest to create a sequel that takes the spirit of the original games and evolves it for a new generation of gaming.
“We want it to be the best game we’ve ever made, but we also want it to be the best Baldur’s Gate game possible,” says Larian’s Senior Writer Adam Smith in a recent interview with IGN, explaining that to do so, the team is focused on not only modernizing Baldur’s Gate for new audiences, but pushing the boundaries current of RPGs as well, rather than just making another Baldur’s Gate with fancier graphics. “Baldur’s Gate wouldn’t have been the success that it was – critically, commercially, or in terms of reviving what a CRPG could be,” Smith says, “if it hadn’t been looking forward. And so Baldur’s Gate 3 has to do the same.”
Historical Continuity
That doesn’t mean that Larian is just scrapping all of the lore established by Baldur’s Gate I & II, though. The team is looking at everything that happens up until the end of Baldur’s Gate 2 as canonical history. ”No one’s ever going to know if you picked the pocket of that one innkeeper,” Smith laughs. “But everything that happened, happened.”
The city’s changed, Smith continues, and they’ve had fun looking at what would have happened, politically or socially, in the gap between games. “So we look at all of that, but [the gap between games] is enough time to give us a clean slate for new characters. Although some of them have long memories, as well,” he adds, wryly.
It is a relatively traditional fantasy setting, after all. Elves, for example, regularly live well into their 700s, so it’s entirely possible that characters – even our own, given the options available during creation – would remember the Bhaalspawn crises, or that we’ll see characters like Kivan or Coran or make a return in Larian’s take on the Sword Coast. “One of the interesting things,” Smith says, “is for some people that’s ancient history, for some people, it’s recent history… We’re 100 years later, but that’s not a long time for a deity.”
The team is also pulling from more current events, as well. The studio’s recent Panel from Hell stream detailed not just the Early Access release date and content, but also the how Baldur’s Gate 3 adapts parts of the most recent D&D tabletop adventure, Descent into Avernus, and the impact of those events have on the story of BG3. “[Avernus] was a very, very lovely thing for us to have,” said Smith. “Like, [the D&D team said to us] ‘Okay, so, you’ve got all the stuff that you’re thinking about over in Baldur’s Gate. Uh, something just happened over here, as well.’ And we’re like, ‘Lovely.’”
“There’s always gonna be things happening in the Forgotten Realms that are cataclysmic,” he says, “because that’s where a lot of the things impel adventure come from. It’s, ‘How do I save this catastrophe?’ or ‘How do I instigate this catastrophe?’” he chuckles. “That’s often what adventures do… So we start off somewhere in the middle of that. You’ll see the effect of it, just like you’ll see the effect of BG1 and 2… There’s something quite liberating about telling a story and then being like, ‘Oh, I have all this supporting material that gives you different angles that you not necessarily have come up with yourself.”
The Essence of Baldur’s Gate
Throughout development, the team have focused heavily on finding what’s at the “core” of the Baldur’s Gate experience. “I think if you ask 20 different Baldur’s Gate fans, then you get 20 different answers,” Smith laughs.
For Smith, it seems to boil down to a trusty few factors – the first one being tone. Baldur’s Gate always managed to blend a bunch of different styles together, rather than placing all its chips on one fantasy subgenre or another. “I see people talk about the darkness of Baldur’s Gate,” he says. “And it’s absolutely something that we want to bring out. But Baldur’s Gate was very, very lighthearted and strange and silly and bizarre in places, as well. And that’s really a quality that I think separates it from a lot of other RPGs. It is tonally all over the place and it hits its beats so, so well.
“Occasionally it wants to be romantic, and it’s very good at being romantic. Occasionally it wants to be darkly romantic, occasionally it wants to have fun. There are characters that are so cartoonish and strange, and they coexist alongside torture and horror… and getting all those things to sit well together, I think, is part of what Baldur’s Gate is.”
The biggest pieces of the Baldur’s Gate puzzle, though, are unanimously agreed upon: one is your relationship to your adventuring party, and another is how your decisions and actions impact those relationships and the world around you – and vice versa. “Some of my favorite moments in Baldur’s Gate are party interactions,” says Smith, “and I think BG2 improved on them massively. That sense of ‘it really matters what I do and it really matters what they think of me’. And that was hugely important. You can really piss people off, and you can let people down… it’s all these emotional things which are very powerful.”
It’s all about knowing who you can trust, knowing who you can rely on, continues Smith, and that sense of striving for a common goal as a group. “Pulling together and fighting against the things in yourself that aren’t necessarily good for you, or good for anybody else. And that’s a huge part of what we wanna do.”
Relationship Building
So, what does it take to incorporate all these pillars of a classic franchise and deliver a sequel that fans will appreciate and Larian is proud of? According to Smith, it’s about doing everything they can to replicate the reactivity of the tabletop experience, harkening back to the idea that BG3 is a D&D game where Larian is your Dungeon Master. “We have some advantages over a flesh and blood DM in the sense of the things we can conjure and the way that we can display things.”
What they don’t have, however, is the ability to react immediately to players like an in-person game master. To rout this issue, the team relies on adding an almost absurdly complex amount of systemic story branches based on your decision-making. “If you play Tabletop,” he continues, “then you know that players will deviate from the best laid plans. So, as a DM – or as a writer on Baldur’s Gate III – we’re saying, ‘I have a very clear story that I wanna tell. It has all these points that I wanna hit.’ and you’re gonna trample through some of them, you’re gonna deviate from some of them. You’re gonna throw curve balls at me, so we’re reacting to about as much as you can.”
The key is to blur the line between the quest hooks or planned moments and the choices that players are making for themselves. So Larian will offer players story beats, but (after the tutorial) avoids sections that feel like they’re on rails. “We never want to take away control and say, ‘This is the story bit,’” says Smith. “The story bit is also the bit where [a player might say], ‘Hey, I might wanna steal from this guy,’ or, ‘This guy’s got a quest, but how does he react iif he suddenly wants to give me something, but one of my partners has stolen it from him?’ So, you’re always looking at these things and saying, ‘How do we make sure that the characters react in a believable way to the crazy things that the players might have done? There are things that I am super proud of, personally, that if I look at the Venn diagram of who’s gonna experience them, it’s just so small,” he laughs.
The team is also very focused on maintaining the personal relationship players had with their companions and the NPCs throughout the world in the originals, hoping to immerse the player enough that they make choices that they normally wouldn’t. Not necessarily out of a decision to do a “good” or “evil” playthrough, but to affect their choices through the world and its characters. “I hope this doesn’t sound like a terrible to say,” Smith starts, “but I’d feel very, very good about writing a situation or a character where people get into it and think, ‘You know what? I don’t want to be a vengeful person, but fuck that guy,’ and they pull the trigger. I want people to get into those situations where the player thinks ‘In all good consciousness, I think I have to do something that I wouldn’t normally do’… and then seeing what those consequences are.”
Community Feedback
We (hopefully) won’t have to wait too much longer to see how these situations play out. On the development side, it sounds like new ideas and changes to existing content (in addition to everything still listed as “work-in-progress”) are constant.
“We iterate constantly,” Smith says. “We never say, ‘Okay, that’s good. Put it to one side.’ We’re constantly looking at things and trying to improve them; every day we’re better at making this game.”
Come October (and sure, technically the last day of September), Smith’s team – and the rest of the Larian crew – will start taking suggestions from players as they continue to refine the systems and develop the game beyond the first act that makes up the early access build. It’s the first time in nearly two decades that people will get their hands on a new Baldur’s Gate – which amounts to a lot of pressure, to be sure. But Smith says the team isn’t worried, largely because of how far they’ve come already.
“We know that we’re making something that we’re already happy with,” he says. “Part of it is just being lucky that you work with incredibly talented people, and part of it is just being willing to adapt and to change when something doesn’t work. To say, ‘You know what? That one doesn’t work. Throw it away. Start again. Do this one instead. Try it a different way.’ And we’re all really good at that.”
JR is a Senior Editor at IGN, and is very much looking forward to infuriating his BG3 party members with his terrible decision making. You can cheer him on (or scold him appropriately) on Twitter. He also urges you to donate to the ACLU or NAACPLDF if you’re able.
Hitman 3 is a launch exclusive for the Epic Games Store on PC, developer IO Interactive announced today.
Hitman 3 was revealed back in the June PS5 reveal event, where it was announced that the game would be coming to PS5, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC in January 2021. We now know that the game will launch exclusively for PC on the Epic Games Store in January – the implication being that this is a timed deal.
“Epic Games and IO Interactive today are excited to announce that Hitman 3 will launch exclusively on the Epic Games Store when it releases in January 2021,” IO Interactive said. “Additionally, from August 27 through September 3, 2016’s critically-acclaimed Hitman will be completely free for players to download and keep.”
IO Interactive will self-publish the game and it said doing this is a “big step” for the company in “achieving [its] highly ambitious goals as an independent studio,” according to IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak. He said this partnership with Epic Games has given the studio the “freedom to create the game exactly as we imagined, for our fans and for our community uncompromised.”
“For our long-term fans that have supported us on the World of Assassination journey, we’re happy to have mastery and location carry over from their existing progress into Hitman 3 on Epic Games Store.”
IGN reached out to IO Interactive asking if and how players will be able carry save data from Hitman 1 and 2 on Steam into their Epic Games Store version of Hitman 3. The developer responded by saying, “In the coming months, we’ll share precise details about how location and progression carryover will work.”
Looking for something new to watch on Netflix? A documentary about the video game industry called High Score is out now, and it’s really good.
High Score tells the story of the formative years of gaming. The limited series debuted on August 19, and GameSpot’s review said it’s the “most impressive video game documentary to date.”
There are six episodes, spanning 4.5 hours in total. The show begins in the ’70s and covers notable events through the early ’90s, exploring the stories of the games and people who made them. “The result is a crash course on the golden age of gaming filled with insightful interviews, brilliant writing, and most importantly, an inspiring and inclusive message,” GameSpot reviewer Steven Petite said in his review.
The series is narrated by none other than Mario voice actor Charles Martinet, and it’s directed by William Acks, France Costrel, and Sam LaCroix, all of whom worked on Showtime’s series about the dark web, Dark Net.
“All told, High Score is the most comprehensive video game documentary to date. It has a large scope but manages to tell intimate, relatable stories about people who fell in love with games and decided to dedicate themselves to what has become one of the most ubiquitous entertainment mediums in the world,” Petite said in GameSpot’s review.
The Halo Infinite gameplay reveal sparked the imagination of many players, inspiring guitar covers, video recreations, and a playable version built in Halo 5‘s Forge. When we first reported on that last one, it was still in the works–but it’s already complete.
Ducain23, a level creator who said that he spent “about 30-40 hours” working on this playable Halo Infinite recreation, has made a full recreation of the demo, and you can try it yourself. You can download the level through Halo Waypoint, and Ducain23 has plenty of other builds on his account, too.
The creator shows off his level in the video below, and chats about the process. There are two versions of the map–an “aesthetic” map that you can explore, and a “race” map, where you drive around and do a “lap” of the map.
There’s also a comparison video, showing his Forge map against the demo video.
Ducain23 is also planning to recreate the demo within Far Cry 5‘s level editor, which he says is more flexible.
Following a delay, Halo Infinite will arrive for Xbox Series X, Xbox One, and PC in 2021.
The Halo Infinite rumor mill kicked into high gear recently with a report that claimed to offer some inside information about the development of the game and some of the issues going on behind the scenes. Microsoft released an official statement that denies on element of the report, that production on the Halo TV show has negatively impacted Halo Infinite, and now Halo’s community director has addressed another part of the story.
Writing on Reddit, Halo community director Brian Jarrard responded to the conjecture about how Microsoft considered splitting up Halo Infinite’s campaign and multiplayer elements and releasing them individually.
An initial report from Brad Sams stated that Halo Infinite’s campaign mode would launch in Fall 2020 with multiplayer coming later. Xbox boss Phil Spencer appeared on the Animal Crossing TV show and seemingly lent credence to this rumor, but that isn’t entirely accurate, Jarrard said.
Spencer said in the interview that Microsoft briefly considered splitting up campaign and multiplayer before making the call to move the entire product to 2021.
Regarding Sams’ original reporting and Spencer’s comments more recently, Jarrard said “these are not the same things. At all.”
“Sams’ unsubstantiated ‘report’ in late July was 100% false and no such plan or discussion had ever happened. Campaign was never going to ship without MP, period,” Jarrard said. “More recently, as it became clear that the project needed more time, part of that assessment did entail trying to see if perhaps just MP could launch as planned but was deemed a non-starter. So even if that would’ve been the outcome, it’s the opposite of what was reported in late July.”
Jarrard said he wouldn’t normally choose to comment on rumor and speculation, but he was getting “personally implicated” so he decided to weigh in.
“People can, and will, make up whatever stories they want but I have to draw the line at being personally implicated as being dishonest with the community,” Jarrard said. “I may not always be allowed to say what I want to say (for example I’m probably not allowed to really get into a point by point response to this article), but I will always speak the truth.”
