Tag Archives: Video game sequels

Technology

Ubisoft Working On Far Cry 7 And Standalone Multiplayer

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Image: Ubisoft

Assassin’s Creed publisher Ubisoft has at least two new Far Cry experiences coming down the road. One will effectively be Far Cry 7, the next mainline game in the hit first-person shooter series. The other is a standalone multiplayer spin-off and likely the company’s latest attempt to create a live-service money-maker around one of its most successful franchises.

Insider Gaming reported on Thursday that the next single-player game in the Far Cry series is internally known as Project Blackbird and that the standalone multiplayer component is internally called Project Maverick. It also says that both were originally born of a single game that was previously under the supervision of Dan Hay, the franchise’s former overseer at Ubisoft Montreal. He left Ubisoft in 2021 and is now working at Blizzard on its unannounced survival game.

While Kotaku can’t corroborate the projects’ origins, it can confirm that Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot referenced both of these games in an internal company update last week, according to sources present. Far Cry has often included both co-op and competitive multiplayer, but this would be the first time in the franchise’s history that online multiplayer was packaged into a standalone title. Kotaku can’t yet confirm exactly what it will include, or whether it will have overlap with the story campaign of Far Cry 7.

According to three current and former Ubisoft developers, however, the next mainline game in the series will be switching from its existing Dunia engine to Snowdrop, the engine used for The Division 2 and Ubisoft’s upcoming open-world Star Wars game. They considered this an improvement over the legacy engine, which originally grew out of the CryEngine belonging to Crytek, the studio behind 2004’s very first Far Cry.

Ubisoft has been trying to make a fully multiplayer Far Cry game for many years now, sources have told Kotaku. Those efforts were often either canceled or morphed into other projects, including the single-player-driven Far Cry games that were eventually released. It’s possible the current split is yet another compromise of that nature.

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But the appeal of a robust live-service Far Cry game for Ubisoft is clear. 2015’s Rainbow Six Siege continues to be a huge money maker for the publisher. Meanwhile, Far Cry 5’s arcade content creator never really took off, and Far Cry 6 lacked a competitive mode entirely. The series’ post-launch DLC has also fallen flat compared to the multi-year seasons in Assassin’s Creed.

When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Ubisoft told Kotaku,“We don’t comment on rumors or speculation.”

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Technology

Halo Devs Use Fan’s Pokémon Map To Fix Game’s Aiming Issues

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Image: The Pokemon Company / 343 Industries / Kotaku

Halo has a long tradition of community-made maps and game modes that range everywhere from serious to silly. Recently, one map and mode combo that’s more on the playful and fun side of things caught the attention of 343 Industries as an opportunity to fix long-standing shooting issues. Named after a certain Pokémon notorious for digging and jumping out of holes, this community creation is now being used to pinpoint and fix aiming and shot registration woes, as they’ve plagued Halo Infinite since it launched just over a year ago.

Halo Infinite, the latest entry in the long-running and often critically acclaimed first person shooter series, only recently received an update that included a beta version of its in-game map creator: Forge. First premiering in Halo 3, Forge has been a staple of the series ever since 2007, allowing anyone to create a map of their own design with the tools necessary to create custom games for it, be those party and minigames or more traditional takes on the franchise’s well-known modes, like Slayer or Capture the Flag. One such community-created game, that takes its name from the Diglett Pokémon, seems to have caught 343’s eye as an opportunity to test drive fixes to the game’s core mechanics.

Read More: Someone Recreated The Entire Halo 1 Warthog Finale In Halo Infinite

With community Forge maps popping up on a regular basis these days, 343 Industries’ senior community manager John Junyszek put out a tweet asking for the community’s favorite Forge minigames so far. When competitive Halo player Linz shouted out Digletts, a game where players pop out of holes to take sniper shots at one another, Junyszek followed up with an interesting bit of behind-the-scenes trivia:

Kotaku has reached out to 343 Industries for more information.

As many Halo fans have known, while Infinite’s core mechanics are solid and work well, there have been issues around aiming, with many players suspecting that the game seems particularly off when trying to line up precision shots with a sniper rifle, either descoped or while aiming down sights. Whether this is due to the game’s auto-aim function that eases controller aim (and exists on most modern shooters that take controller inputs), bullet magnetism, or the notorious desync issues many players have had with Infinite isn’t totally certain. Since Diglet is a game that only features aiming and shooting, it’s a pretty perfect test environment for studying aiming behavior. Junyszek said that the “minigame has recently helped our team further test and investigate various shot registration situations, especially in regards to latency and networking. Since it’s a curated environment without many variables, it’s helped us investigate specific scenarios.”

Check out the the Diglett game mode in action here:

343 Industries / iSpiteful

Who knew RPing as a Diglet armed with a legendary anti-materiel rifle could be so productive?



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Technology

Revealing Mortal Kombat 2 Code Leak Pulled By Warner Bros.

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Image: Midway Games / Nether Realm / Warner Bros.

Over the Winter holiday, someone filled all Mortal Kombat appreciators’ Christmas stockings up with something a lil’ extra: Mortal Kombat II’s source code on GitHub. The lawyers at Warner Bros. took exception to this by issuing a swift DMCA takedown notice that Github adhered to by disabling public access—but don’t fret, as there are other ways to check out the content dump.

Initially reported by Exputer, the Github post was uploaded to the internet hosting service on December 27 before getting reshared on the r/MortalKombat subreddit. While MK II’s entire source code is no longer available thanks to that DMCA takedown, that hasn’t stopped MK fans from reuploading sprites and artwork on social media.

The most notable elements of content that the MK II source code dump unearthed was unused animations, artwork, and moves that didn’t make the cut for the game’s release in ‘93. One piece of artwork was an alternate attract mode screen featuring an oiled-up Shao Khan. Although the alternate panel of Sindel’s spurned lover looks the same as MK II’s final Shao Khan attract mode screen, the unused artwork has a bunch of cloaked wizards on floating platforms in the background instead of a roaring fire. According to Polygon, the original artwork is more imposing because it illustrates how stacked the odds are against Earth Realm. Honestly, yeah, a bunch of platforming wizards is leagues scarier than a generic flame, especially if you’ve had the misfortune of playing the ‘97 beat ‘em up spin-off, Mortal Kombat Mythologies.

Read More: WWE Superstar The Miz Should Play Johnny Cage In Mortal Kombat II, And You Know It

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The MK II leak also showcased some previously unused sprite animation and moves. If you don’t have time to parse through a nearly-three-hour YouTube video of some dude scrubbing through the GitHub files, here’s a detailed Twitter thread compiling all of the most notable findings, Twitter user Pegasus Kid combed through the leak and uploaded a comprehensive thread of cut moves, stage art, and fatalities. My favorite sprite, since everyone was wondering, is Kintaro walk cycle animation because it’s timed perfectly to the music in the Metal Gear Solid but its the Dr. Livesey Meme video.

Kotaku reached out to Warner Bros. and Nether Realm studios for comment.



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Technology

Capcom Shuts Down Popular Resident Evil Fan Remakes

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Image: Capcom

The developers behind fan remakes of Resident Evil and Resident Evil Code: Veronica have announced that development on both projects has ceased after Capcom allegedly contacted them and asked the developers to cancel the project.

1996’s Resident Evil was the start of modern “survival horror” games, and 2000’s Resident Evil Code: Veronica, its third sequel, first came out for the Sega Dreamcast in 2000. Capcom soon ported an updated version to PlayStation 2 and GameCube and then created HD versions for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Resident Evil 4 producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi recently confirmed to IGN that there were no plans for a new Code: Veronica remake. Two years ago, Briins Croft, Matt Croft, and the animator DarkNemesisUmbrella started their own remake projects for both games.

In a video announcing the Code: Veronica project’s cancellation, Briins Croft said that 90 percent of the Code: Veronica fan remake used existing assets from Capcom’s recent “Remake” games, such as 3D models, animations, and textures. The fans released an initial Code: Veronica demo back in June 2021, and planned to put out a much more substantial one in the beginning of 2023.

On December 23, Briins Croft announced in the projects’ Discord server that Capcom had sent them two cease-and-desist emails. One was “very kind” and inquired about where the animations and models had come from. The second was “hostile with a more aggressive tone.” Kotaku reached out to Croft to request a copy of the emails. He did not send the emails, but told Kotaku that Capcom started asking about the project on December 12.

The fan developers believed that Capcom canceled their unofficial remakes for being too visible and official-looking. “[The Code: Veronica remake] was going to be free, so we weren’t doing anyone any harm,” Croft said in the cancellation announcement video. The publisher seemed to disagree. Capcom allegedly cited copyright factors and licensing agreements as reasons why the project couldn’t proceed.

There’s been public speculation that the project was targeted for accepting financial donations via Kofi and PayPal. While they did accept such donations, the developers have refuted it as the reason for the project’s cancellation in both Discord and via an RT on their Twitter account. Kotaku reached out to Capcom to ask about its policies on fan projects, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

“I was personally a bit surprised by Capcom’s decision. But hey, we were using [their] toys to create a free game, which was already creating a lot of visibility,” said Croft in the video. “So it’s okay. We can understand the cancellation.”

Read More: Remastering Resident Evil Games Kept This Indie Developer From Giving Up

The developers’ announcements in their Discord were significantly less genial. “[Capcom] canceled it out of pure evil, since there are no signs that an official Code: Veronica is coming from them,” Briins wrote on the server. He also posted a meme that compared Capcom to Nintendo, which has a reputation for enforcing their copyrights aggressively.

The team will no longer be working on the Resident Evil remakes, but they intend to continue developing games. “We will continue a new project that will have a story inspired by Code: Veronica but without copyright problems.”



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Technology

The Worst Games Of 2022 According To Metacritic

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Another year in the books. Or ebooks. Or TikTok. I don’t know. I’m older now so I can’t keep up with all your newfangled gizmos and bookkeeping tools. What I do know is that this year is basically over. So, we can now look at Metacritic to see what game critics collectively declared as the worst of the worst in 2022.

We’ve said this before and it’s worth repeating: Liking a “bad” game isn’t a bad thing. Numbered scores come with all sorts of asterisks and caveats, which is part of the reason we don’t use them here. But if you see a game on this list that you happen to love, it just means you have a different taste than a bunch of other critics or players. That’s fine! Enjoy what you like and don’t be an asshole about it and everything will be fine. Now, as we’ve done before, here are the worst-rated games on Metacritic with at least seven reviews, the number the site deems necessary before placing any game on this list.

5. LEGO Brawls | Score: 46 (PS5)

LEGO / Sony

LEGO games tend to be pretty fine at worst and really great at best. However, LEGO Brawls, a Smash Bros-like fighting game, is an exception to this rule. It seems the main problem is that this is just a port of a 2019 phone game that wasn’t very good. (I played it and totally forgot about it until a few minutes ago.) And making matters worse, the publisher had the audacity to charge $40 for this no-frills port of a three-year-old mediocre mobile game. LEGO Brawls on PS5, you deserve this spot on the list!

4. XEL | Score: 43 (Switch)

Tiny Roar / Nintendo

For a split second, when I first saw the name of this sci-fi 3D open-world action game, I thought some weird XFL game had shipped without me knowing. That’s not the case and instead, the somewhat nice-looking XEL is undermined by bugs, unpolished gameplay, and frustrating technical issues that exist on the PC port, too.

3. Babylon’s Fall | Score: 41 (PS5)

Square Enix

It’s not shocking that a flop of a game like Babylon’s Fall made the top five worst games released in 2022. That’s probably down to its awful controls, tedious combat, and everything else feeling incomplete. At the same time, it’s a bit shocking that this live-service action RPG only snagged the third spot on the list. I’d warn you to not play Babylon’s Fall, but it’s actually incredibly cheap (even free in some cases) to pick up now after Square Enix announced it was killing the servers for this live-service game in February, less than a year after its release.

2. Crossfire X | Score: 38 (Xbox Series X/S)

Remedy / Smilegate / Xbox

Remedy Entertainment makes good shit. I love Alan Wake, Max Payne, and Control, games that average in the 83 to 89 range on Metacritic. So the idea of the studio building a brand new single-player FPS campaign, as Crossfire X was originally pitched, sounded great on paper. In practice, the actual game is a boring, meandering mess that mostly plays like a bad Call of Duty knock-off and doesn’t get interesting until too late. By the time the game started turning it around, I was so tired of it that I just couldn’t care. And then I tried to play the online PvP portion of the game (which wasn’t developed by Remedy) and remembered I have access to at least a dozen better, less buggy, more interesting shooters on my Xbox and stopped playing Crossfire X.

1. Postal 4: No Regerts | Score: 30 (PC)

Running With Scissors

There will be some people who see this low score and use it as a weapon in their fight against the so-called “WOKE” critics and journalists of the world. Here’s the thing though: I played open-world shooter Postal 4 and its various quests and side quests set in a depraved city and even if I ignore its shitty, punching-down humor and awful jokes, what I’m left with is a crappy shooter which plays like Postal 2 but worse. And when you’ve created a game that is being negatively compared to Postal fucking 2, you’ve made a mistake. The best thing I can say about Postal 4 is that well…at least it isn’t Postal 3!

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Technology

Warzone 2.0 Gets Stats Soon, But Your Current Kills Don’t Count

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Image: Infinity Ward

Call of Duty Warzone 2.0 players are about to get what they wanted…sort of. The red-hot online shooter is getting Combat Records with its Season 01 Reloaded midseason update, which will go live December 14. Sounds good. But the catch is, it’s starting fresh: no information from the games you completed before that date will be counted toward your stats.

Traditionally, all the Combat Record does is log your and other players’ performance, including total time played, kill/death ratios, killstreaks, and other competitive stats, and players have been wanting it to come to Warzone 2.0 since the game came out in November. However, a new blog Activision dropped today about the forthcoming patch revealed that the eagerly awaited feature comes with a significant caveat.

“Record will only be from the activation date forward, and will not include statistics from Season 01 launch through Season 01 Reloaded (November 16 to December 14),” read the update blog.

Kotaku reached out to Activision for comment.

For competitive players, this news comes down like a heavy slap in the face—nothing you do until December 14 will be officially documented. If you pop out your most impressive killstreak and no Combat Record is around to write it down, did you even have a killstreak?

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Personally, I’m not sure if this one is as bad as some fans are making it out to be. But I can understand their frustration, especially when considering the fact that Combat Record is a typical CoD feature that was missing from launch. It also doesn’t help that Warzone 2.0’s launch was one of this year’s most clunky and bugged. As pleasurable as the free game is to actually play, fans’ goodwill clearly has its limits.

But in the dark age between now and December 14, when stats will finally start being recorded, you can focus your attention to anticipating other midseason updates Warzone 2.0 is getting, like a Rocket League-inspired Warzone Cup with ATVs. Or you could, you know, try to just enjoy playing the game.

 



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Technology

343 Releases Previously Unseen Images From Halo 2 Development

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Image: 343

In Halo, “the sandbox” often refers to the weapons and vehicles on a map at any given time: all the toys you have to play with. But for a whole other set of Halo fans, that sandbox is the game itself. Be it through Forge or ambitious modding projects like SPV3, playing with the very core of the game itself is part of the legacy of the franchise. Now, Microsoft has made that even easier after publishing a thorough collection of modding resources for Halo: The Master Chief Collection. And as a surprise, some of these resources contain some never-before-seen images from Halo 2’s development way back in the early 2000s.

Today, Microsoft released official documentation for Halo: The Master Chief Collection’s mod tools, specifically Halo 2 and Halo 3 (other entries in the series are expected to receive documentation at a later date). As spotted by Halo modder Kiera on Twitter, some of the documentation for Halo 2 contains material directly from Bungie circa the early 2000s. With it are a few development images that few have seen until now.

Screenshot: Microsoft / Kotaku

What’s cool about these images is that they show off the inner workings of Halo 2’s engine. One of these images illustrates the “screenshot_cubemap” command. I’m not going to entirely pretend to know what this does, but based on the documentation, it’s for use in generating reflective surfaces, like we see in the old documentation photo provided.

Image: Microsoft / Kotaku

Another neat pair of images shows off debugging information, listing data for when a model is using specific weapons or playing out various animations.

Screenshot: Microsoft / Kotaku

Screenshot: Microsoft / Kotaku

Like many behind-the-scenes shots, these are hardly glamorous. But they are cool nonetheless. The development of Halo 2 is a tale of high ambition at the cost of abusive crunch, much of which has been talked about openly. Various materials from the game’s development have been seen before, while others remain out of reach, like the legendary 2003 E3 demo (which 343 has recently pondered finally making playable). Today, a little more has seen the light of day.



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The Call Of Duty MWII Battle Pass Is Pleasantly Non-Linear

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Image: Infinity Ward

In a November 9 blog, as part of a stuffed first season, Call of Duty announced that it was introducing a pliable battle pass system to both Modern Warfare II and Warzone 2.0, a huge deviation from Call of Duty’s norm.

CoD battle passes are often more direct, with battle pass tiers unlocking as you earn XP and progress normally through the game. But this latest battle pass doesn’t take a typical, linear, full-speed-ahead approach to CoD’s selection of unlockable skins, weapons, and Weapon Blueprints. Instead, as the blog puts it, it “takes the form of a multi-Sector map.”

This means you can unlock elements of the pass in the order you prefer, intentionally choosing features that interest you instead of slogging through levels that don’t. It could be a refreshing break from CoD’s familiar system.

“Each map has at least 20 Sectors with five items in each Sector—[earned Battle Token Tier Skips] can be used to either unlock adjacent Sectors or earn more items within an unlocked Sector,” the blog continued. “Essentially, these tokens can be used to unlock specific items within the Battle Pass at your own pace—whether it is a new free functional weapon or a cool new Operator Skin, you have control over what gets unlocked earlier on the road to 100% map completion.”

Outside of the battle pass, both games will get missions, maps, and more for their season one—Warzone will receive an open-world DMZ mode and different maps, including one for imagined capital city Al Mazrah, among other things, and MWII will also gain maps, including a “reimagined” version of Modern Warfare’s multiplayer Shoot House, fresh weapons, and playable characters.

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The CoD team said that players would get an even more detailed explanation of the battle pass next week, presumably after MWII’s and Warzone 2.0’s first season releases on November 16.

Until then, here’s are some additional highlights of MWII’s season one, both within and outside of the battle pass:

  • Four new weapons. Two of them, the Victus XMR Sniper Rifle and Bruen Ops Platform, are free with the battle pass.
  • Six new Operators, or playable characters. One of them, Nigerian counterterrorism group leader Zeus, unlocks automatically when you buy season one’s battle pass.
  • Surreally, football (the soccer kind) is also coming to MWII. Neymar Jr., Paul Pogba, and Leo Messi characters will roll out in bundles on November 21, November 25, and November 29 respectively. There will also apparently be a “limited-time CODBall mode.”
  • Hitting Rank 56 “will allow you to earn a persistent Prestige Rank across all seasons, rather than having it reset at the end of each season,” the blog said. After unlocking Prestige 1 with Rank 56, you will be able to go through four more ranks at your own pace.

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Amazing New God of War Ragnarok Cosplay Brings Kratos To Life

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We’ve featured German cosplayer Maul a ton of times on Kotaku, maybe more than any other individual cosplayer, and there’s a very good reason for that: just look at these photos.

Halo Infinite Winter Update’s New Multiplayer Maps

09:15

God of War Ragnarök’s First Nine Minutes

Today 4:04PM

While he’s best known for his recurring takes on Geralt of Rivia, ranging from “being Geralt” to “being Geralt skateboarding in LA”, Maul has also done a ton of work—both paid (like this, this one’s an ad for PlayStation) and personal—on series like Dishonored, Cyberpunk and Metal Gear Solid as well.

Today, though, we’re looking at his latest shoot, an incredible take on God of War’s Kratos for the release of Ragnarok that sees Maul (and his team) nailing just about everything, from the costume to the weathered leather to the bodypaint to the muscles to the beard to…more muscles (which, despite Maul’s considerable size IRL, are in this case a suit)

He’s joined by Korriban Cosplay, as Kratos’ son Atreus, and together they make about as good an inspiration for Amazon’s live-action TV adaptation as you’re ever going to get.

Also working on the costumes and shoot were Maja Felicitas, Lenora Costumes, hair specialists Bakka Cosplay, Tingilya Cosplay, Bucky Props & Cosplay, Flying Illustration, while all photos were taken by one of the best in the business, eosAndy.

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Ragnarok is out today, but we reviewed it last week, where Zack had this to say:

Yes, the axe is cool. Sure, the fights are tons of fun. And I definitely enjoyed exploring every nook and cranny of the large worlds you get to visit. But what kept me glued to my PS5 for nearly 40 hours was the story of a son becoming a man and a father trying to figure out how he feels about that. I probably could have enjoyed this story a tad more with about half as many puzzles and skill menus, but even so, I found myself smiling, feeling satisfied, as the credits rolled. As I said at the start, God of War Ragnarök is very good.



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Technology

PS Plus Is Getting Skyrim And Lots Of Kingdom Hearts This Month

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Screenshot: Square Enix / Kotaku

This month’s helping of PlayStation Plus games is as stuffed as a Thanksgiving turkey. A little seasonal analogy for you there, ahem. Anyway, it’s looking like a fantastic month for fans of a variety of popular game series.

Despite the subscription service recently losing nearly two million subscribers after a confusing relaunch—and adding an even more confusing PlayStation 5 discount program—the Sony faithful will be eating well when new PS Plus additions like Rainbow Six Siege, Skyrim, and a treasure trove of Kingdom Hearts games make their way to the paid service this month.

Here’s the full list of what gets added to PS Plus Extra and Premium on November 15:

  • Chorus (PS4, PS5)
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Special Edition (PS4, PS5)
  • The Gardens Between (PS4, PS5)
  • Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMIX (PS4)
  • Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue (PS4)
  • Kingdom Hearts III (PS4)
  • Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory (PS4)
  • Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 (PS4)
  • Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint (PS4)
  • Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege (PS4, PS5)
  • Oddworld: Soulstorm – Enhanced Edition (PS4, PS5)
  • What Remains of Edith Finch (PS4)

If you’ve been feeling inspired by Florida’s newly elected Gen-Z congressperson and self-confessed Kingdom Hearts fan Representative Maxwell Frost, now’s as good a time as any to brush up on your Disney Final Fantasy nonsense. Obviously, PS Plus doesn’t have all of the Kingdom Hearts games available, but it’ll definitely give you a great head start. You’ll be battling in empty parking lots in no time.

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In addition to the legion of Tom Clancy and Kingdom Hearts games, Earth Defense Force: World Brothers, Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain, and Onee Chanbara Origin are coming to PS Plus this month as well.

Also, hope you like the Ratchet & Clank franchise, because subscribers to PS Plus Premium, the third and most expensive tier of the service ($18 a month), are getting a bunch of classics from the series. Here be your Ratchet & Clank helpings:

  • Ratchet & Clank
  • Ratchet & Clank 2: Going Commando
  • Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal
  • Ratchet & Clank: Deadlocked
  • Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction

There are literally not enough hours in a single month to play all of these games. Forget holiday feasting, Sony’s ensured all your free time’s already spoken for.

 

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