Remedy Entertainment just unveiled FBC: Firebreak at the Xbox October Partner Preview. The studio may be known for creating some of the best single-player games around – Alan Wake 2 and Control being its most recent efforts – but now the team is turning its attention to multiplayer for the first time in its 29-year history. FBC: Firebreak is a three-player co-op shooter set inside The Oldest House from Control. In it, you take on the roles of a fearless first responder from the Federal Bureau of Control, diving into the darkest recesses of The Oldest House to fend off para-natural threats with your friends. It’s a strictly PvE affair, with communications director Thomas Puha promising that Remedy isn’t pitching FBC: Firebreak as an all-consuming live service – but rather something you can dive into at your leisure. “FBC: Firebreak should be easy to get into and quickly understandable, not feel like a second job or that you have to spend an hour setting up your loadouts etc. before you get into a session. This is not that game,” Puha tells Xbox Wire. “It’s a pick-up-and-play experience [about] having fun with your friends when you have the time. That’s no…
Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii – Naval Combat Reveal | Xbox Partner Preview October 2024 – YouTube
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Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii has a new gameplay trailer with a release date that’s a week ahead of the previous one.Premiering during the Xbox Partner Showcase for October 2024, the new trailer offers up the first look at actual naval combat gameplay, which I presume is at the heart of Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. We’ve known from the cinematics in the reveal trailer, as well as just the premise of the game, that there would be ship combat, but this is our first proper glimpse of it in action.And, well, it looks like Yakuza’s take on Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. The trailer shows fan-favorite Yakuza antihero Goro Majima take the helm of a wooden battleship whose hull, sails, figurehead, and trimming can be customized, and cut through waves with his signature crazed determination for violence. An enemy ship approaches and Majima crashes into it and orders his crew to fire, with plenty of boat drifting to go around. The combat looks a lot faster than, say, Sea of Thieves, and indeed much more in line with Black Flag. The key difference he…
Today’s Xbox Partner Showcase gave us a look at Subnautica 2 – which is, of course, the third game in the Subnautica series. The new, direct sequel is set to launch into early access in 2025, and it’s finally answering fans’ prayers by adding multiplayer.The brief trailer for Subnautica 2 appears to be all cinematics, but it sets the tone for the new game with a brief look at a colorful, inviting coral reef dive followed up by the most terrifying deep sea encounter you can imagine. The big tease here is that we see multiple characters working together, a clear example of the long-awaited addition of cooperative multiplayer for up to four players.Subnautica now officially hits early access in 2025, and it’ll be available day one on Game Pass for Xbox Series X|S and PC. The devs have confirmed that it’ll also be available on PC via Steam and Epic, but there’s no word of a PS5 version just yet.In a new Xbox Wire blog we see a handful of screenshots alongside confirmation that we’ll “traverse beyond Planet 4546B.” Some of this info has already been teased out by publisher Krafton in recent years, though developer Unknown Worlds has had to do some damage control on certain pieces of tha…
Bloober Team is chasing its successful Silent Hill 2 remake launch with an announcement of a new IP and third-person survival horror game — Cronos: The New Dawn. “Our commitment to redefining the horror genre continues with this survival horror title, which represents a natural progression of our creative vision and our studio’s strategy,” CEO Piotr Babieno says in a press release. The nasty time travel adventure is the first original survival horror game from Bloober, whose breakout titles Layers of Fear and The Medium largely operate in the land of slow, sometimes lumbering, psychological creepiness. But a new cinematic trailer suggests that Cronos: The New Dawn will be more aggressively nauseating than that, with skinny H.R. Giger beasts and a desolate zero-gravity environment.
Cronos: The New Dawn – Official Cinematic Reveal Trailer – YouTube
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“Cronos: The New Dawn is a twisted time travel story set in an unforgiving post-apocalyptic future in 1980s Poland,” the press release continues. “Players will take on the role of a Traveler, an agent of the enigmatic Collective with a mission to extract selected people who didn’…
WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers – Official Trailer | Xbox Partner Preview October 2024 – YouTube
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Where the developers for games like Black Myth: Wukong and Phantom Blade Zero have come out and said they aren’t making a Soulslike, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is a loud-and-proud “Soulslike action RPG” set in a horror fiction take on the late Ming Dynasty. I got this vibe from its reveal earlier this year, and the new trailer fresh from today’s Xbox partner showcase seals the deal with phrenetic bosses and plentiful parries that are ringing my Sekiro alarms. There’s thankfully a lot more gameplay this time. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is a third-person action game promising a distinctly darker take on the Chinese history and mythology that’s (rather excitingly) becoming more prominent nowadays. Our hero, the female pirate Wuchang, is a one-woman army sporting dual swords, glaives, straight swords, magic clubs, magic flames, a spear gun, a flamethrower, a Sephiroth-esque blood wing, and a shotgun lightning bow. Let’s not forget the feathered arm, either – evidently a sign of Wuchang’s mixed bloodline. The sheer variety of weapons and attacks reminds me a bit of Nioh, a…
Five years after its formation, the 2K studio 31st Union has revealed its debut project: a free-to-play, third-person roguelike hero shooter tentatively titled Project Ethos.31st Union has had an interesting history since its formation in 2019. It was founded by Sledgehammer Games co-founder and former studio head Michael Condrey as 2K Silicon Valley in 2019 and officially named 31st Union in 2020. That’s not all that interesting, but it is pretty weird that the new studio said it would be focused on “a single new IP at the time” and then waited almost five years to reveal it. To be fair, a little something called COVID-19 happened between then and now, but that’s a long time between announcement and reveal regardless.Project Ethos is described in a new press release as “a new free-to-play, 3rd-person roguelike hero shooter and an exciting evolution on the genre.” The roguelike element sounds like an interesting twist on a well-established genre, and it sounds like it’ll revolve around something called Evolutions, which 31st describes as “powerful, semi-randomized, upgrades unique to each hero. Evolve a sniper into a close-range skirmisher, or a support role into a powerful lone wo…
Tekken 8 – despite being a formidable entry in the 30-year-old fighting game franchise – has been getting on fans’ nerves. Its Year 1 Pass did not include the recently released Genmaji Temple stage DLC, a fact that fueled players’ existing disappointment over excessive microtransactions. But now, after fans revolted through aggressive Steam review bombing and impassioned Reddit threads, Tekken 8 devs are trying to make things better. “We apologize for not meeting the community’s expectations for the ‘Playable Character Year 1 Pass’ content and the ‘Genmaji Temple’ DLC release method,” Tekken posted on Twitter. To pacify players, Tekken 8 will automatically add the upcoming winter battle stage DLC to Year 1 Pass owners’ games. Then, it will gift all online Tekken 8 players the cost of Genmaji Temple (500 Tekken coins, or $5) if they log in to the game any time between October 29 and November 26. “All members of the Tekken Project team continue working to improve Tekken 8, and we appreciate your feedback and continued support of Tekken 8,” the developers’ Twitter statement continues. “Actually kind of a huge W,” said one very upvoted Reddit comment. “You guys…
For the time being, the award for “Steam Next Fest demo that killed me the fastest” officially goes to Vividerie, which developer WangleLine proudly describes as “a hard bullet roguelike” that was explicitly “designed for those who crave a difficult game.” I mean, I don’t know what I expected after that sales pitch, but this demo still caught me off my guard. You get three hearts and a stick to bite down on and then it’s off to the bullet-filled dungeon. Punches are not being pulled, but boy is it fun. If you’ve played games like Enter the Gungeon, Nuclear Throne, or Brotato, you have a pretty good idea of what’s coming. But at the same time, you don’t. Fire your cooldown-based weapons at enemies and dodge the zillion projectiles coming your way. Vividerie ups the ante with a zippy dash that can damage enemies and let you pass through shots unharmed, and this allows for clutch finishes as well as clumsy mistakes. A big difference is that, instead of a seemingly bottomless arsenal of weapons, you collect items that augment your primary and secondary attacks, your dodge ability (presumably, though I haven’t seen any yet), and add a special active item to your loadout. That’…
Arma 3 launched way back on September 12, 2013, just five days before the original launch of Grand Theft Auto 5. I’m bringing up this comparison because it might help communicate to you just how long military simulation fans have been waiting for Arma 4, which developer Bohemia Interactive has just announced for 2027. Yes, 2027, as if that’s a real year any of us are going to live to see.A giant title card reading ‘Arma 4 coming 2027’ appeared during Bohemia Interactive’s 25th anniversary concert stream this week, and the devs soon after reiterated the news in a tweet. That’s literally all we know for now, but you’ve gotta respect the audacity of a studio dropping a release window that far off like it’s nothing.Arma is the biggest military simulation series around, built for people who wanna get very serious about tactical maneuvers in their shooters. Arma 3 was a technical wonder when it launched in 2013, but a decade later it’s certainly showing its age, and the stopgap Cold War spinoff Arma Reforger, which launched in 2023, hasn’t fully pulled people away from the last mainline game.Just in case the absurdity of the wait spanning from Arma 3 to Arma 4 hasn’t sunk in yet, here’s …
Assassin’s Creed actor and metroidvania director Abubakar Salim says “too much money is being spent on games people do not want” by figures “who are not in touch with the medium” and are chasing the next live-service hit.Speaking with Dexerto, Salim – who stars in House of the Dragon Season 2, played Bayek in Assassin’s Creed Origins, and last year released indie Metroidvania Tales of Kenzera: Zau – suggested that the process of making his own game “made me have a much deeper appreciation for developers and the work that goes into it.”However, he also suggested that that process had opened his eyes to the fact that “games are still very much treated as a business rather than necessarily as an art form.” That approach, he says, is why “a lot of these big game publishers and companies are going for the games as a service model. They want to try and recreate the next Fortnite because it’s going to make them more money. Games shouldn’t be about that. It shouldn’t be about money, it should be about expression.”Following up on those comments on Twitter, Salim said that “too much money is being spent on games people do not want.” The chase for the next Fortnite, he says, means that “there…