Stellar Blade release, No Blizzcon 2024, Escape from Tarkov PvE, Stalker 2...
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Hello friends,
Today is April 30th 2024 and I hope you’ve had a great week 🙌
In today’s news:
🎮 Stellar Blade is here!
🎮 No Blizzcon for 2024
🎮 Escape from Tarkov and a new game mode for 250$
🎬 Poor Knuckles :(
🎮 New project by creators of Returnal
🎮 New Stalker 2 trailer
All of this is brought to you in a 5 min format ⏲️
Let’s dig in!
🎮 Stellar Blade is here!
On Friday last week, a highly anticipated action-adventure game from Shift Up and Sony finally hit the shelves and reviews are kind of mixed.
On one hand, the game seems to excel at all the gameplay elements. The character design, the battles, the environment, and every essential elements of an action game are at their best here. Everybody is praising the action inspired by Nier: Automata, Bayonetta and Souls-like games. The combat looks just challenging and exciting enough to keep you on your toes. Animations are intense, smooth and quite varied as well as the enemies and bosses. The devs did an amazing job of capturing what makes an action game truly fun and engaging. Pair it with the soundtrack and you get quite a decent game.
On the other, we have the thing that I was quietly concerned about from the first demo. The narrative seems to be kind of generic and the story feels like you’ve heard it before. Characters lack any kind of personality, charm, or charisma and the sidequests don’t always feel like they are worth the grind. The game does a decent job with exploration and collectables, but other than that everything seems to be there only to complement the action on screen, not the other way around.
But I mean, it’s an action game, right? ⚔️🤖
🎮 No Blizzcon for 2024
This is quite the surprise that I noticed on Kotaku and other media platforms last week.
Blizzcon (an annual dedicated event for Blizzard fans) has been on and off for the past several years. It’s been ongoing since 2005, but there have been several cancellations in the past, namely in 2006, 2012, 2020-2022 and now in 2024. While during the pandemic, the company had perfectly good reason to do it, they’ve decided not to give any reason this year.
There is some speculation on whether it’s a good or a bad sign. With the rising costs of development, the overall disappointing situation regarding Blizzard’s latest titles, Microsoft acquisitions and multiple rounds of layoffs, it’s quite understandable why the company doesn’t want to spend more money to host an event like that. It seems like Blizzard just can’t catch a break.
But maybe it’s for the best. Considering all the backlash they’ve experienced, maybe it’s time they went back to the drawing board and reevaluated their decisions. But with Microsoft cutting everything that can think of, it is quite difficult on its own.
One thing is for certain, when the dust settles, Blizzard will not be the same. For better or worse 🤔
🎮 Escape from Tarkov and a new game mode for 250$
This week I’ve already seen a ton of backlash in the media (originally on Insider Gaming) regarding a recent addition to the game.
Devs did a great thing, adding a highly anticipated PvE mode to the popular extraction shooter. What they didn’t account for is that the players will not be happy to see 250$ price tag on it. Especially the ones that bought an already expensive Edge of Darkness edition that promised that all the future DLCs are going to be included.
The game director tried to explain that this mode is technically not a DLC, which (to no surprise) brought even more anger into the community. It was quite a clever attempt to cut a corner, but I guess he didn’t account for the fact that not everybody has deep pockets. Certainly not for this.
When this attempt ultimately failed, they issued a statement going to back to what they should’ve done in the first place. Now, PvE mode will be free for everybody who has this Edge of Darkness edition and they even discounted an upgrade to this edition from 250$ to 100$. Which is still a lot of money for a game, but it looks like it’s the best we are going to get at the moment.
This is an interesting example of how community can influence a game company's monetization strategy. Go us! ✊
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🎬 Poor Knuckles :(
Last week The Knuckles series finally made it to streaming platforms (Paramount+) and the reviews are not looking great for Sega (at least according to Kotaku).
The main pain point of the series with the fans seems to be the missing hero of the series. Red punch-throwing echidna seems to be a secondary character in his own series. I mean, I’m not sure what they were thinking, but the series has more focus on a cop Wade Whipple dealing with his daddy issues than on the character that got his name in a title.
This is a great example of why I’m so hesitant to watch the majority of live-action movies or series. Instead of leaning into the cartoon characters to do the heavy lifting, some studios tend to focus on humans and their issues. This kind of defeats the whole purpose of the movie and you end up watching a regular subpar show that’s trying to cosplay a three-legged chair.
So far, it hasn’t been a complete disaster and the show is getting some publicity, but Sega might want to rethink its approach for the future project.
We, fans, are not so open to forgetting and forgiving when our patience is being tested like that 😡
🎮 New project by creators of Returnal
More news from Insider Gaming. Housemarque Studio just posted a cryptic image on X (Twitter) teasing that something is going to happen tomorrow.
By the looks of it, they are going to release some sort of a teaser for new content they are working on. Which is funny, because tomorrow is going to be the anniversary of Returnal’s release.
It’s unclear whether it’s going to be a new game or a DLC for Returnal, but it’s something to look forward to for everyone. This studio proved to be a solid game developer and I’m looking forward to whatever it’s they are cooking.🧑🍳
🎮 New Stalker 2 trailer
This is the news that’s especially close to me. GSC Game World just released a new trailer for a much-anticipated sequel that’s been in development for quite some time. And it is stunning!
A new trailer showcases a very detailed and alive open world, day and night cycles and interactions with NPCs.
Granted, it’s not a long one, but it’s definitely something to keep fans at bay while the dev team does its magic. And it’s been quite the road so far with the game getting constantly delayed (for obvious reasons).
As of right now, the game is set to be released on PC and Xbox Series X|S on September 5, 2024.
The only thing I can say to the devs is that we believe in you and we’ll wait as long as we need to. And once it’s there, this game is going to be amazing! ☢️
This is all the news I have for you folks today.
Thanks for making it this far! 🙌
If you are enjoying the journey, you might as well subscribe to start getting all of this goodness right to your mailbox ✉️
Have a great week!
Alex from Gamedev Relay.