As a blog post explains, "In Whispers of Oblivion, players will join Zeratul for the first time since Wings of Liberty to unravel the final piece of the Xel'naga prophecy."
More details will be shared in July.
Additionally, Blizzard announced that the expansion is getting another beta test in July. Keep an eye on GameSpot for more news about the beta, the prologue, and the expansion as it becomes available.
"Please play on PlayStation 4," he said in response to a question about what Xbox players can expect.
Taro and Saito explained that the new Nier project is more focused on creating an original story within the game world, and won't follow the narrative of the original. However, we can expect several Nier characters to make cameos. There will be these kind of connections, but Taro emphasized that newcomers won't feel alienated if they come to the new game without playing the original. Returning players, however, will enjoy a lot of nods and easter eggs from its predecessor.
Another feature that made Nier unique was how it treated player choice at the end of it the game and incentivized repeat playthroughs. There are five possible endings in Nier, all of which encourage you to go back into the game and try your hand at saving things again.
In one particular ending, you're asked to either sacrifice yourself to save someone or let them die. If you sacrifice yourself, the game wipes your save file--effectively deleting all traces of your adventure. To add insult to injury, it won't let you use the same file name you did on your previous playthrough, as if the game itself was telling you to move on. It's a bold move for a game, one that unfortunately (fortunately?) won't be repeated.
"We are going to maintain that multiple playthrough idea for the new project, but in terms of the save file deletion thing, we probably won't do it, since we did it in the original one and want to do new things," Taro explained. "But we will have multiple playthroughs involved. But you know... we're still in early phases of development. Maybe we will delete you save files."
The original Nier's level design was a mash of different genres; Players spent most of the time controlling Nier as you would in a typical third-person action game, but for select fights, the camera would swing up to a top-down perspective. On other occasions, it would switch to a side-on platformer, with some sequences more closely following conventions of shoot-em-up. This worked for some players, but not all, but the constant switching ensured that gameplay rarely got stale. The new game likely won't follow this pattern, however.
"Members of the media told me the original Nier is like a puppy someone threw out."
director Yoko Taro
The new Nier will, however, retain the tone of the original game and the Drakengard series. It will keep its mature subject matter and approach to dialogue and presentation, not shying away from hyper-violence and sexualization.
"Drakengard was my first game as director, and we were actually told a lot by our advisory board to do retakes and make changes and honestly, I said, screw this, I'm not making another one," Taro said.
"I thought, with Nier, I'm going to make a normal game. That's what I tried to make, a normal game, though people think it's very dark and somber. But for me, that's normal."
He added: "The way I look at original Nier is like your mom's home cooking: it may not be the best, but it's okay, you're comfortable with it. Members of the media told me the original Nier is like a puppy someone threw out. It's cute in a way, but there's something wrong in a sense, and you can't help but love it even though there's something missing and you can't put your finger on it.
"But now we're working with Platinum games, and with Yoshida and Okabe, and we feel we have these great ingredients now. Is it going to be too perfect? We have all these great chefs, if you will, working together, and now, is it going to be missing that thing that made it so endearing to our fans? But after thinking about it, we think, we're just going to try it and see how it goes."
The hunter Aloy stood on a cliff, surveying the expansive landscape before her. Grassy plains stretched outwards towards mountains topped with snow and peppered with tall trees. A healthy blue sky set the backdrop for the scene. It was a picturesque presentation of the natural world, and one that players could expect to explore most of, a developer explained.
will be an open-world game which players can choose to explore at their own pace. Its setting juxtaposes a natural world inhabited by very unnatural machinery and somehow makes the two blend together in a fashion that works. It was during a live play-through of the game with developer Guerilla Games at E3 2015 that I realised the game's ability to mix the old and the new in a way that allowed them to fit together.
For all of the natural beauty on display in the world of Horizon: Zero Dawn, strange robotic creatures would be its lifeblood. Aloy stalked through the underbrush towards her prey, armed with a bow and arrow for long-ranged attacks and a knife for quick stealth kills. She sprang out from cover to take down her target, but it was not an animal like I would have expected a hunter like her to tackle; no, it was a mechanical four-legged creature comprised of metal and tubes. Despite its cold grey exterior jutting out sharply against the warm greens and oranges of the vegetation around it, it fit in. Aloy stabbed at it in the same manner that I would have expected her to do with animal prey. Its last cries quickly dissipated as she muttered a brief prayer for it. It was a seemingly strange thing to do for a robot, but the action spoke volumes of how mechanical lifeforms were viewed in this world. All things natural and synthetic were equally respected, and it was that prayer which cemented the relationship between the two in my mind.
Even when faced with a large lumbering metal beast Aloy's tactical arrow shots were similar to how an archer would take down a mammoth. She was a hunter garbed in simple cloth and furs, and yet her weapons and enemies were seemingly synthetic, human-made, technologically advanced.
Aloy rained down explosive arrows, harpoon-like arrows with ropes, and armor piercing arrows to take the mechanical beast down. It wasn't supposed to make sense, but it did, and the ancient-modern oxymoron of the setting was what made it so interesting.
The paradoxical nature of Horizon: Zero Dawn both intrigues and perplexes me, and I look forward to unearthing its secrets when the game is out next year.
After only a couple of minutes with its co-op mode, Survival, playing , Dice’s other shooter franchise. It does not have destruction, nor does it have the same sort of hectic and high-octane atmosphere. Battlefront is, at its core, a Star Wars game, and its enemies, weapons, and sound go a long way to helping it feel like it has a place in the Star Wars universe.
At the end of the demo, I didn’t think that the co-op mode itself was anything special. But the promise of joining up with a friend and taking on an AT-ST and a wave of Stormtroopers together is something I cannot ignore.
You'll be able to play Battlefront's co-op mode either split-screen or online when the game launches on November 17.
Kinda Funny was surprised to hear about The Last Guardian's upcoming release. In this video they discuss the trailer and the talks surrounding the game.
This week at E3, Bethesda officially , with supported mods coming to Xbox One sometime later. The functionality is expected to launch on PS4 further into the future.
"We're hopeful that it's out on PS4," Hines said. "We'd like this to be something that works across [all] platforms."
Hines stressed, however, that the functionality doesn't yet work on Xbox One--there are still a range of problems that must be overcome.
"It's not a thing right now where we can go, 'Oh, we'll take this SDK and drop it into our game, and it works.' It doesn't exist as it needs to on any of these platforms and we have to build it," Hines said, noting that Microsoft and Sony have very specific requirements about how they want it to work.
"The simplest things have very specific requirements, and each one is going to be its own undertaking," Hines said.
What do you think about Fallout 4 mods on console? Let us know in the comments below. And be sure to check back later this week for even sight from Bethesda about Fallout 4 and mods.
"Our goal is, because you are able to obtain world-specific Keyblades after you beat certain worlds, the transformations of each Keyblade will be related to the world you visit," Yasue explained. "We've made each transformation unique to the world.”
Another thing you can expect from Kingdom Hearts III is giant, Shadow of the Colossus-style boss battles. There will be fights against smaller enemies, but some of KHIII's bosses will be gargantuan, allowing Sora greater freedom of movement and room to experiment with attacks--including the new theme-park-ride summon attacks.
"When creating a Kingdom Hearts game, we start with a gameplay system that I think would be a fun element," Nomura said of designing gameplay, "and once we have an idea of what kind of gameplay or system we want in place, we flesh out the story around it, surrounding the basic concept of what kind of fun we’re going to have with this new instalment."
He added: "The gameplay mechanic is the skeleton, the root of building the game. As an example of how some concepts come about… the game system in Dream Drop Distance where you switch between Sora and Riku and interchange, that concept fell into place first and then I built the story.”
Kingdom Hearts III still doesn't have a release date. For more details, check out our trailer breakdown below.
I sat down to see about 20 minutes’ worth of Dark Souls III at E3 2015. My reaction to the first 10 minutes? “Yes, this is Dark Souls.” My reaction to the latter minutes? “Yes! This is Dark Souls!”
Game players reserve a special kind of cynicism for series that oversaturate the market, and as special as
Miyazaki says that fluid controls were a major focus for Dark Souls III, and to that end, not only are the dual blades apparently ultra-responsive to player input, but short-bow attacks can be combined with slashes, allowing you to land shots quickly, even under duress. Miyazaki compared these moves to those you might see from The Lord of the Rings’ Legolas, though I didn’t see anything quite that acrobatic. The tour de force of the presentation, of course, was the boss fight that closed it--and what a boss fight it was. Miyazaki referred to the lithe, imposing knight that descended from the ceiling as the Dancer of the Frigid Valley. This beastly foe moved about the arena with moves you might see in a ferocious ballet, and the creature’s ghostly cape and veil made its unpredictable moves all the more frightening.
The fight grew more and tense as the beast swung its flaming blade, which had an amazingly long reach, and set the room aflame as the battle raged on. Alas, the demo ended when the player succumbed to one last sizzling swipe, and my reservations had been vanquished, at least in part. Do I still worry that Dark Souls III is retreading too much familiar ground too soon? A little. But at least it is ground that has proven itself worth treading in the first place.
We saw a demo of Deus Ex, and it’s basically Deus Ex with more stuff. That’s not a bad thing. Hear Rob and Kevin share their thoughts from E3 2015.
Ghost games joins Lucy on the GameSpot stage to talk about the fast cars and bad attitudes of Need for Speed.
Check out the E3 2015 Trailer for Take On Mars.
Check out the E3 2015 trailer for Planet Coaster.
Check out the E3 2015 trailer for Soul Axiom.
Mighty No 9 shows off their latest gameplay on the GameSpot E3 2015 stage show.
Kinda Funny was surprised to hear about The Last Guardian's upcoming release. In this video they discuss the trailer and the talks surrounding the game.
