Welcome to the Primal Newscast where Gaming Instincts goes over the hottest and most interesting news of the week that took place in the gaming industry.
First let’s talk about how a few writers from Rocksteady Games are joining up with Microsoft to work with Forza Developers, Playground Games. That’s right, The developers of Forza are taking in some new staff in order to work on a certain RPG game. From the past, Senior Scriptwriter from Arkham Knight, Kim MacAskill, joined Playground in August 2019, then the lead scriptwriter for Arkham Knight Martin Lancaster became PG’s new narrative director. Even Craig Owens, one of the Senior Scriptwriters is a principal scriptwriter at Playground.
There isn’t any real evidence out there to support that the RPG they’re working on is Fable, but we can probably assume as Microsoft has not made a new Fable game since 2017 and unless they’re working on a new IP, we have a high probability that the new game could be a Fable Reboot.
Playing for the Plane is an initiative that calls for the gaming industry to join forces with the United Nations in order to combat Climate Change. Several key companies in the industry have joined together including Microsoft, Google, Twitch, Ubisoft, Niantic, and more. The most recent member of the initiative were Playstation, in which the CEO announced that the next PlayStation console, the PS5, will include the possibility to suspend gameplay with much lower power consumption than the PS4.
Now that’s energy conservation. Microsoft made a commitment to reduce CO2 emissions by 30% by 2013, and Google has joined to produce a guide for sustainable development in video games. We can probably expect quite a few more companies to join the Initiative at this rate, and hopefully we will enjoy the benefits of preventing Climate Change.
Recently Hideo Kojima thanked his development team and fans for making Death Stranding possible. He addressed this on Twitter as he thanked absolutely everybody for the development on his new game.
A few days before addressed that the game was “a Hideo Kojima game” and people definitely reacted negatively, fortunately Kojima did not take the credit all to himself, as the game probably have the lamest credit sequence ever. Kojima is not a native speaker and didn’t actually mean that he made the game all on his own.
In the end he’s a humble guy and the translation simply wasn’t correct. I suppose even the most faithful translation can lose the intent of the message, let alone the fan-made translations on Twitter.
Aaron Greenberg who is the General manager of Xbox Games Marketing was recently surprised by Xbox Game Studios’ Acquisition very recently. In fact he’s so surprised and impressed that he definitely thinks that these companies will be able to bring out all sorts of games throughout all of the developers they’ve acquired. During an interview wit Xbox: The Official Magazine, he for the most part talked about how much innovation is being made with what Xbox Game Studios has.
“I think people are going to see, before too long, just how much content is coming. Those are just from the studios that we’ve acquired. I think we have a lot to surprise fans with and a lot to share over the next year. You can expect more new games. You can expect sequels. You can expect new IP. You can expect things you’ve never thought of. That’s the fun part of it.”
In between this he talks about how many secret projects these developers have including teams working on Outer Worlds, Pillars, and “another secret thing.” He continues to talk about these other teams working on other things and how he fully supports the developers work on their games make. As to whatever these secret games are, we can probably expect to see some news in the future.
Gran Turismo Sport is the racing simulator developed Polyphony Digital that released on October 17, 2017. Since then the game has gotten several updates and expansions that add all the cars and tracks that a racing gamer would easily get excited over. Well what would you do if we told you that the game is getting re-released pretty soon on October 4 that includes 275 of the 293 cars with the 75 race tracks in the game? Well that’s what GT Sport Spec II will be and it’s all for just $27 and that’s basically a low price for all of that content.
Players will also get 2.5 million credits and 10 Fr.3 race cars for users to play around with. This is basically similar to when Street Fighter V added the Arcade Edition to their games in order to add all of the characters at a lower price, and for a game that’s been lasting for two years with all of those paid expansions, you should expect that they package that altogether.
During PlayStation State of Play, NaughtyDog introduced us to to the game’s story that features Ellie. If you saw from the previous trailers she’s got a girlfriend named Dina and they do things like go on missions and generally hang out a lot. Well now there’s this new cult going around purging survivors of the apocalypse and killing them. Well after finding Dina in position where she’s getting executed by this cult, Ellie turns her despair into rage as she swears revenge against the cult. It turns out that the journey will take us through several new scenery as Ellie travels to Washington. Also if you didn’t know, Joel is back. That’s right, Joel came back and wants to aide Ellie in her new adventure as it’s obviously going to be dangerous.
Also at the end of the trailer, it was revealed that the game will be releasing February 21, 2020. Which means that it’s quite ways away, but will assuredly come early next year. Also if you didn’t know, special bundles are available with the most expensive one being $169.99 which includes a Dark Horse art book, some ps4 add-ons including some in-game supplies, a steelbook, 12″ Ellie Statue, Ellie’s Bracelet, a Lithography art print, 5 stickers, and a set of 6 enamel pins. That’s a lot, but if you got a lot of money you can go for it.
This week, Google recently released their new mobile game subscription service to compete with Apple Arcade. They released a pretty impressive trailer that shows off the Google Play Pass all of the games someone can play. The Google Pass is currently available for $4.99 a month to access a library of 350 games that are also ad-free. This seems to be in direct opposition to Apple Arcade which released earlier this month. Hopefully these services will have their own ups and downs that will truly make them unique.
Microsofts’s new Cloud service will be available possibly sometime this year, and it looks pretty interesting. Playing your games from your console from everywhere seems pretty tempting and Microsoft will allow for sign-ups for a preview that will go live in October. Players will be able to use an Xbox controller with their device and they will be able to stream from their console into their phones.
Will the lag be as bad as everyone says, or does this project seem like something Microsoft will continue to work on? Hopefully they got got everything sorted out for this.
Thanks for tuning into this week’s Primal Newscast episode. Be sure to tune in next week for the most intriguing and exciting news stories of the week.
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A new developer trailer was also released.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is available now
Grand Theft Auto 6 will launch in fall 2025.
A Nintendo Switch trailer was also released.