Developer DontNod recently live-streamed a fifty minute chunk of their nocturnal action-RPG Vampyr, which is preparing to stalk the streets in just a few weeks' time.
The gameplay footage is presented for your consideration below. The game will tell the tale of unfortunate doctor Jonathan Reid, who has been struck with the vampire's curse and must now walk the streets of old London town, combating enemies and resisting - or even indulging - the murderous urges that haunt his soul.
Vampyr has the potential to be a real sleeper hit of the year, especially if it nails it role-playing mechanics. The game will feature multiple endings, with Reid's acceptance or rejection of his grim new desires entirely down to the player and their actions. Can you keep Reid from committing murder? Will you visit violence only on those who "deserve" it? Or will your tale see the doctor fall headlong into a ravenous world of bloodstained mayhem?
Vampyr launches worldwide on June 5, for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.
For years now folks have been modding Mario Kart Wii and Mario Kart DS, creating interesting new tracks to take on. Among that group is Atlas, who is probably the chief creator, constantly creating new courses and homages.
This time, by way of the Wii edition, they've crafted the circuit from Super Mario Odyssey's New Donk City -- you know, the one with the little RC car? It's not something I'd immediately think about even though I just ran through that level the other day, and it's a nice little nod.
It got me thinking about Mario Kart 9 and how there will probably be some Odyssey references abound. Heck, I think an Odyssey pack with playable Cappy and some new stages would sell well in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
Fighting games on mobile are a dime a dozen. The tactile feedback of a standard controller or joystick setup is absent on phones – barring any peripheral attachment. In lieu of that, developers have attempted many different approaches to bring the action of the genre to the device. Some go with swipe controls. Others give a digital button scheme an honest-to-God shot. But perhaps the most common and successful on the platform are card fighters.
Not to be confused with digital trading card games, card fighters usually feature a mash-up of simple taps of the touchscreen with a more direct use of specific attack and defense cards. These cards are tied to a constantly refilling energy meter, limiting how often you can use them. It’s simple, it in no shape or form even comes close to scratching the technicality of a traditional fighter, but relegating advanced moves to these cards does allow for some pretty breathtaking action. Case in point: Dragon Ball Legends.
Flixist has been around since 2010, but for many regular Destructoid readers you're just getting to know us. We're glad you seem to like us for the most part, but... do you really know us? We've had a bunch of new writers (some drawn straight from the community) come on board and share their own weird, bizarre sense of style and self with the internet. Long story short, there are a lot of new faces popping up, and we've decided to finally come out of our caves and share with you all a little about ourselves!
Waaaaaay back in 2010, our fearless leaders published a post about the 15 movies you need to see to understand Flixist. Essentially, that list took a hard look at what kind of movies Matt and Tom thought were important and helped inform the site as a whole. It was a sort of "get to know you" kind of post. So we're going to bring that back with a twist. Each writer on staff has chosen one movie that really exemplifies why they write about movies. What they look for in a movie, a movie that fascinates them, a movie that might be flaming hot garbage but still holds a sentimental place in their heart, or just a god-awful movie that encouraged them to spread the word why no one should ever see that movie for their own safety. Bottom line, we have movies that made us want to write about movies, and we want to share them with you.
Most of these movies are not our favorite movies. Hell, a few of the movies below might not even be good. But these are movies that we feel can communicate who we are as people and what we specifically bring to Flixist. If there's a movie on here that you haven't seen before, give it a watch. If you've seen all of these movies, then you completely understand all of us and we can be best friends and hang out all the time and you'll never leave me! Congratulations?
ESPN+ is a great option for streaming sports without the need for cable. And now, if you're more into jungling than free throws or penalty shots, the service has something for you as well: live League of Legends tournaments, including net month's North American Championship Series Summer Split, according to Variety. The broadcasts start June 16th, and matches will stream live on the app on weekends.
It shouldn't be much longer now before we hear about the next step in IO Interactive's plans for Hitman, but before an inevitable season-two reveal happens, it's worth checking in on how things are going. By last count, Hitman had pulled in 7 million players as of November 2017. In the time since, that figure has risen to "over 13 million players," according to IO Interactive CEO and co-owner Hakan Abrak.
Speaking at Nordic Game 2018, Abrak reflected on the Danish studio's move to independence.
As you might remember, last year, Square Enix decided to drop IO Interactive as a subsidiary and sought an external buyer. Hitman was a critical hit and something the team was immensely proud of, but by the time the game's six-episode season had wrapped up, sales weren't reflective of its quality -- they were "historically low," especially coming off of the commercially successful Hitman: Absolution.
"We were at the peak of our game, extremely agile, on top of the digital platforms, and we had a great game -- the best Hitman game in 20 years -- but we hadn't achieved the commercial aspect," said Abrak. "We were quite far from where we needed to be."
Part of that can be attributed to the game's not-always-straightforward release schedule, which left would-be players feeling confused or otherwise unsure, particularly early on when Hitman was digital-only. According to Abrak, in hindsight, the disc-based release launched "too late," but it still "sold well" and "gave a boost to digital sales" as people realized "now is the time to jump in because it's done."
While it was clear Hitman's live-game model would be a long-term gambit, and it needed sufficient time to flourish, IO's future was up in the air. Square Enix wanted to divest itself of the company.
As Square Enix CEO Yosuke Matsuda put it in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz last year, "Whether it's our Western studios or Japanese studios, at Square Enix we sometimes end up with conflicts or shortages in terms of resources. I felt that if we were not able to continue sufficiently investing in Hitman, it could wind up ruining the game - so we found ourselves in a difficult position. I wanted them to continue to develop the game, but I thought in terms of investing further in the game it would be best if they worked with another partner other than ourselves."
"About a year ago, we started talking to potential buyers and investors," said Abrak. "We had this fire inside, this belief, this vision in front of us, that 'we cannot stop here.' The things that we heard talking to the different potential partners going forward wasn't... it wasn't perfect. It wasn't what we wanted."
"There was a huge interest in IO, which really humbled us." In the end, the two parties agreed on a management buyout. "We succeeded in talking to Square Enix that the path forward for IO must be IO's own path. Although it took some time to get there, they did also believe the best thing for Hitman and IO is for IO to stand on their own feet and take this vision untainted, untouched by anyone else."
Just like that, IO became independent, taking the Hitman and Freedom Fighters IPs along with it.
From the outside looking in, it seems that much of the hard work is now behind the company, which should mean exciting things are in store. IO had to restructure itself to create and support Hitman as a live game, and along with that flexibility, the team now has more autonomy as independent entity.
"The energy, the culture we have at the studio right now I haven't seen for over a decade," said Abrak. "I believe the next 20 years of IO are the best years and that's gonna be with Hitman, and as you know us, that's gonna be with new things, new universes, [and] new characters."
The Pokemon Company is still trucking with their legendary Pokemon celebration, and coming off of Yveltal and Xerneas, the legendaries from the previous generation of X & Y, is Zygarde from the current gen.
To be clear it's a shiny Zygarde, and will have different stats depending on which version of the game you own -- Sun/Moon (level 100, with gold bottle cap, dragon dance, extreme speed, outrage, and thousand arrows) or Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon (level 60, dragon breath, land's wrath, safeguard, glare).
You can grab your Zygarde (one for each copy of the game) from June 1 until June 24 at GameStop. After catching every Pokemon from the Ultra duo I've cooled off a bit, and am basically just waiting for the Switch edition. Bring it on!
Next week sees the release of Capcom's Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, a compilation of classic titles that set the bar for the fighting game genre. Capcom have the released the next video in their retrospective series, looking at the memorable titles that make up the franchise' history. Narrated by FGC star James Chen, this new video looks at the Street Fighter: Alpha/Zero games.
The three Alpha titles launched in the mid-'90s, taking the series lore back to its roots and presenting events that take place before 1991's Street Fighter II. Alpha reinvented the wheel with a much more technical approach to every aspect of digital punching. They are the first titles in the Street Fighter series to fully explore the potential for extended combos, wake-up games and meter-management.
Alpha's varied roster gave us younger iterations characters we'd come to know and love, such as Ryu, Ken and Chun-Li, while also bringing back forgotten characters of games past, like Birdie and Gen. Even characters from 1989's Final Fight got in on the action. Adding to these recognisable faces were cool new stars such as Sakura, Karin and, my personal favourite Street Fighter of all-time, Rose.
Today, Alpha 3 is considered by some fans to be the best Street Fighter title, with its great soundtrack, wide cast of characters, detailed stages and slick anime visuals. My heart will always belong to Alpha 2.
Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection launches on PS4, Xbox One, PC and Switch on May 29.
In the past year since changing names from Beam to Mixer, Microsoft's game-broadcasting app has gone through a slew of updates and brought forth a number of innovations. Redmond says last December, the app had over 10 million active monthly users, and that the service keeps growing. The next year promises even more.
When Disney started rolling out their plans a long time ago for damn near every character in the Star Wars universe to have origin movies, the general reaction was one simple question: Why? Why was this necessary at all? It just seemed a bit needless, delivering nothing.
Well, turns out we were all right if Solo is any indication. Unlike Rogue One it doesn't deliver much new, doesn't open up any new characters, and doesn't hit with much emotional punch. The movie is needless, delivers nothing, and is devoid of almost anything important within the context of the Star Wars universe... and it kind of makes it a total blast.
Ikaruga is one of the purest gaming experiences out there. It's a brutally difficult shoot-'em-up, the kind of short-but-sweet game that takes a clever mechanic, explores it to its full extent, and doesn't pack on any unwanted fat. You could easily spend a hundred hours learning how to scrape your way through all five stages without continues. Then you could spend a thousand more perfecting your score.
After making its way to Xbox 360 in 2008 and slightly more recently PC in 2014, Ikaruga has found a new home on the Nintendo Switch eShop. The port has everything I've come to expect: remappable controls, two-player local co-op, downloadable replays, an art gallery, and a whole lot of misery.
This version of Ikaruga also includes a vertical screen mode, meaning you can turn your Switch on its side, prop it up, and play this essential shmup as it's meant to be played.
Look, I enjoyed Solo: A Star Wars Story plenty, but it gave me the definite feeling that I just wasn't going to be as excited about Star Wars movies anymore. Then Disney goes and pulls something like this. They've tapped James Mangold, writer and director of Loganand the underrated The Wolverine, to make a Boba Fett movie that he will direct while co-writing with Simon Kinberg.
I mean, how am I not supposed to be excited about this?
Hopefully, Disney has the balls that Fox did when they let Mangold do basically whatever he wanted with Logan. If we got an R-rated Star Wars films that really dug into some seedy territory it would give the franchise a new direction for sure, and open up the world of the original trilogy a bit more instead of just replicating it. It's hard to know if Disney would let him go his own way, though. They cut down Phil Lord and Chris Miller when Solo wasn't working out the way they wanted, but they also let Rian Johnson do his own very different thing with The Last Jedi.
So yea, I'm back on the hype train with this. There are no plot details yet, and a release date is waaaay far off, but we'll let you know.
To celebrate the ongoing Monster Hunter championships in Japan, Capcom continue to hand out free in-game items to players logging into their blockbuster title Monster Hunter: World.
This week, jumping into the game will bag you a free Scale Pack, colourfully titled The New World Way! Local Goods Gift Set. Included are 30 Great Gunpower Fish scales, 40 Sushifish scales and 10 of the rare Whetfish Fin+, all for just logging in, which you were probably going to do anyway, right? Isn't everybody playing this?
As usual, Capcom have also updated the game's Event Quest Schedule, a checklist of sorts for all the bounties just waiting to be claimed by your party. You can find the updated schedule right here.
Monster Hunter: World is available now on PS4 and Xbox One.
Earlier this week we learned about the existence of Battlefield V, its setting during World War II, and that it will not implement a season pass scheme or loot boxes. Yet, immediately after EA clarified that it will be using multiple forms of currency, one of which is available for real life cash.
It's not going to get quite as out of hand as Battlefront 2 though, as EA confirms that it's for use on cosmetic-only items. Again, loot boxes are out, so it seems like these will be aailable directly for purchase without gambling on what you're getting.
This is basically the League of Legends model. If they're going to sell the occasional amazing looking skin (Star Wars crossovers?) that everyone wants for $10, it's going to be predatory, but it's something I can deal with if all of the game's DLC and add-ons are free. We'll see if they follow through come October.
Valve's Steam Link was on course to come to mobile this week. While the beta version arrived on Google Play just fine, the iOS app appears to have hit an unexpected roadblock. Valve said in a statement that Apple approved then withdrew it from the App Store:
Did you miss us? Our e-mail hiatus turned out to be very brief (some would say nonexistent, but let's not get technical), and now we can keep bringing you the most relevant tech news, fresh every morning. Also, that news isn't (just) whatever Elon Musk tweeted during his last binge, we also have a review of the latest PS4 exclusive and an update on the never-ending Apple vs. Samsung patent saga.
Google and LG Display have joined forces to design the clearest OLED display to date. The 4.3-inch screen, which Google recently revealed at Display Week, is designed to push the boundaries of VR image quality with an incredible 1,443 ppi resolution. For comparison, Japan Display Inc unveiled its slightly smaller 1,001 ppi LCD screen earlier this month, which outclassed both the Oculus Go (538 ppi) and HTC's Vive Pro (615 ppi).
