Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 has been delayed into next year, publisher Focus Home Interactive has announced.
Originally scheduled for release in September, developer Tindalos Interactive has now pushed the game—which pits Cathedral-sized spaceships against one another in gigantic RTS battles—into January 2019.
“These couple of additional months of development will allow developers Tindalos to polish the game and bring all their ambitions to life after the great success met by the first game,” Focus Home said in a statement.
These months won’t be used purely for fine-tuning, however. Focus Home added that the extra time will also see a new feature added to the game; cooperative multiplayer. This will be functional across the three new narrative campaigns the sequel offers.
What’s more, Players who pre-order will be able to get involved in this coop action early, through two closed betas. “More details about the dates and content of these pre-order betas will be communicated shortly,” Focus Home said.
Battlefleet Gothic: Armada II aims to expand upon the success of the first game, making all 12 of the original tabletop game’s factions available to play at launch.
Alongside news of the delay, Focus Home released a new faction trailer showing the different fleets in action. It also includes a scene in which a spaceship literally devours another spaceship, which certainly piqued my interest. You can watch that below.
Astera, the main hub of Monster Hunter: World, is one of the biggest hub areas in the series' history. It's got blacksmiths, feline chefs and vendors galore, to say nothing of dozens of NPC hunters traipsing about. But you know what it doesn't have? Big ol' flags from your country. Thankfully, modder highsouled recently released a mod that adds just that.
Dozens of flags are available, and highsouled has added many more following user requests, including the flags for Brazil, France, Malaysia, Germany, Finland and Scotland. It's a neat way to personalize Astera, and hell, we've already made 10,000 pairs of mittens out of the local fauna so we may as well claim the land for ourselves too.
If you too want to represent your country in-game, you can find download and installation instructions on Nexus Mods.
The Binding of Isaac creator Edmund McMillen said April's Forgotten update for The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+, a collection of add-ons for The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, would be the game's final free booster pack. However, earlier this year McMillen told Polygon that he's "never done" with Isaac, and according to publisher Nicalis, there's more Isaac in store—in addition to the Four Souls card game, that is. The publisher tweeted a brief teaser for a new game (or add-on) titled The Binding of Isaac: Repentance last night. Give it a look:
Some players have pointed out that the logo for Repentance bears a strong resemblance to The Binding of Isaac: Antibirth, a free fan-made expansion released in December 2016. At the time, McMillen discussed officially adding the mod to Afterbirth+, and when we spoke with him about the influence mods had on Isaac's popularity, he described Antibirth creator The-Vinh Truong as being "on a whole other level" from other modders. So it's possible Repentance will integrate Antibirth or other mods in some way, but take that as the speculation that it is, since neither Nicarlis nor McMillen have confirmed anything.
For his part, McMillen offered a tease of his own on Twitter around the time the trailer went live:
The Binding of Isaac: Repentance will be at PAX West, and so will we, so sit tight for more information.
There's an unappreciated art to adventure game backgrounds. They need to be pleasant backdrops to walk in front of multiple times while you're trying to figure out what to do with the custard and the octopus, yet they also need to stand up to the rigorous attention of players hunting for a hotspot because there's a vital clue hidden in that long grass (it's a tiny snake scale, of course). Maybe that's why these environments stick with us. All it takes is a glimpse of the carnival America of Sam & Max: Hit the Road or the imposing Ankh-Morpork buildings of Discworld to take me right back to playing those games.
An urban fantasy story set in New York, where a secret society protects the world from various supernatural evils, Unavowed brings some new ideas to the genre. There are four companions with their own abilities, a customisable protagonist, and pop-up descriptions that appear at mouseover so you don't have to right-click to look at every single thing. But Unavowed is still a classic point-and-click, as this collection of backgrounds shows. From its Chinatown streets to a dive bar and a spooky basement, these are all places that immediately look like they're worth waggling a mouse cursor over.
Click the top-right of each image to embiggen them.
It's hard to imagine that many games go from design doc to finished product without any twisting and turning along the way—we just don't get to see all the failed prototypes, scrapped levels, and deleted placeholder art. Every now and then, though, we do get a glimpse into the process, sometimes finding that the games we know today once looked very different.
There have surely been many, many mid-development pivots that we never heard anything about, but here are a few we do know about that stick out to us: games that may not have found the same success, or wielded the same influence over PC gaming, had they never made dramatic changes during development.
Splinter Cell Conviction
The original take on Sam Fisher's next adventure was going to be this melee combat-heavy game set in urban locations, and it didn't really look like Splinter Cell. It didn't look like anything, actually, other than a janky old third-person game with someone's dad as the lead character. When Conviction re-emerged it was a very straightforward stealth action game, but it was still a stylish update for Sam Fisher that people actually wanted to play.
Beyond Good & Evil 2
This one isn't even out yet, but at least one version of it has been in the works before—and it wasn't a co-op space game, or whatever the new one is going to be. It looked like a more conventional third-person thing, made in the wake of the Gears games. This doesn't look like much more than a proof of concept, but the project was canned in 2009, when Michel Ancel and his team went to work on Rayman: Origins. It at least reached the stage where Ubisoft were comfortable sharing footage of it in public.
Diablo
Diablo birthed the PC action-RPG as we know it today, but it was originally going to be turn-based—and designer David Brevik wasn't at all interested in changing that. He told Blizzard as much when they approached him with the idea. "What are you guys talking about? Realtime? No, no, no, no, this isn’t one of your strategy games," Brevik recalled himself saying during a 2016 GDC talk. The change came to a vote, and Brevik voted no, but was the only one to do so. And so it was decided: Diablo would be a real-time action RPG.
How did Brevik make the change from turn-based to realtime? It was shockingly simple. "I just made the turns happen 20 times a second, or whatever it was, and it all just kind of worked, magically," he said. "I remember taking the mouse. I clicked on the mouse, and the warrior walked over and smacked the skeleton down. And I was like, ‘Oh my god! ...That was awesome!’ And the sun shone through the window, and god passed by, and the angels sung and sure enough, that was when the ARPG was kinda born, at that moment. And I was lucky enough to be there, it was an amazing, amazing moment, I’ll never forget it."
Borderlands
Borderlands' signature comic-book style wasn't its original look. The change is common knowledge now, but still one of the most dramatic examples (that we've been able to see) of a change in art direction, a tonal adjustment made to stand out from other shooters of the time, namely Fallout 3 and Rage. It obviously worked, and it's hard to imagine Borderlands now as anything other than the goofy, colorful, somewhat messily-inked series it became. The sad side of the story is that, according to a trio of Gearbox leads (as relayed by Gamespot), the original art director quit the job and the industry after having all her work thrown out.
Resident Evil 4
Before it became one of the greatest action games ever made, Resident Evil 4 was a very different game—several times over. Between 2001 and 2004, several iterations of Resident Evil 4 were shown off at Tokyo Game Show and E3. The video above is probably the most well-known, from E3 2003. The graphics and camera are similar to what we'd see in the game that finally hit the GameCube, but Leon's coat model is different, it moves more realistically as he walks, and the lighting is also much moodier. The really big difference, though, is that this version of RE4 had a psychological horror thing going on, with a blue filter appearing over the screen as freaky stuff starts happening. You'll also spot Resident Evil's classic fixed camera angles and the "hook man" enemy this version is sometimes named for.
That version of the game was an evolution of the 2002 iteration, sometimes called "Castle," which had gotten a trailer the year before. None of these ever quite worked out—you can read more about them in this profile of Capcom's Yasuhisa Kawamura, and the struggles with the GameCube hardware that eventually lead Shinji Mikami to come in and direct the version of Resident Evil 4 that was finally released. But the best part of the story is that Resident Evil 4 was, once upon a time, an action game directed by Hideki Kamiya. As it diverged more and more from the survival horror of prior Resident Evils, the project eventually got a new name: Devil May Cry.
Halo
Bungie made its name on the Marathon series of first-person shooters for the Mac, but its more famous shooter series actually started life as a real-time strategy game. This is probably one of the most famous mid-development changes in gaming history, as Microsoft buying Bungie in 2000 was a huge blow to Mac gaming, and eventually the reason the Xbox got off the ground. Back in 1998, Halo looked more like the video above, evolving from a strategy prototype to some kind of third-person shooter before finally becoming the Halo we know today. You can read more about its evolution in our article about Halo's strange history with the PC.
Technically, Fortnite changed after development, and its original design remains intact and playable. But who's talking about the cooperative game Epic spent years working on when they say 'Fortnite'? Pretty much no one. Fortnite now refers to Fortnite Battle Royale, which borrowed the shooting and building from the original game, but completely overhauled the format to take advantage of the new popularity of last-player-standing battle royale games, namely PUBG. Without that sudden pivot, we probably wouldn't be talking about Fortnite at all today. Some of our readers might prefer that hypothetical timeline, but we don't want to live in a world without intense cube speculation.
Duke Nukem Forever
Duke Nukem Forever is the ultimate tale of development hell. The first footage was unveiled at E3 1998. At that time, it was running on the Quake 2 engine, but that same year 3D Realms switched to the Unreal Engine, and so began the saga. Duke Nukem Forever continued to change over the next few years, switching to a new version of Unreal in the process and later a new physics engine, and publishing rights bounced around until they landed with Take-Two.
Jump all the way to the late 2000s, and it began to appear like DNF might actually be released—there was even a new trailer in 2007—but in 2009 development was shut down after an argument between 3D Realms and Take-Two over funding. The dev team was laid off, Take-Two and 3D Realms went to court. Though development would continue—including by ex-3D Realms employees—it seemed like DNF would never be released.
Come 2010, and a surprise re-announcement came at PAX thanks to Gearbox Software, which had helped reignite development and eventually purchased the IP, with 2K remaining publisher. And so Duke Nukem Forever finally released. It was not, however, running on the Quake 2 engine. (It also wasn't very good.)
Had the original development plan been stuck to, DNF would've released sometime in 1998 or 1999. Only a few people truly know what it would've looked like had it been finished then, but had 3D Realms put it out there and made its profit, the shape of PC gaming might be very different today.
Unknown Worlds has made no secret of the fact that it's been working on an expansion to the undersea survival game Subnautica, and has even shared some info on what's coming, including (via the Subnautica Wiki) an Arctic setting and an orbital station. Today it finally made everything official with the announcement of Subnautica: Below Zero, a standalone story that takes place in a new region of planet 4546B after the events of the original game.
That's the good news. The bad news is that aside from some concept art, the announcement doesn't tell us much that we didn't already know—mainly because there's still not much to see.
"The concept of Below Zero is still developing. We are keeping the core gameplay mechanics, such as base building and open-ended exploration," the site says. "We are also exploring new ones, such as thermal management, and more voiced dialogue at the core of the plot. We're still in early stages and nothing is set in ice."
The site does hint at what's coming in Below Zero. The presence of an orbital station, "designed to provide a sustainable environment for research personnel stationed far from Federation space," indicates that this visit to 4546B is more intentional (and hopefully better equipped) than the previous trip, and a quote attributed to an "unknown Alterra employee"—that's the company you were working for when you crashed on the planet the first time around—suggests that you'll be digging deeper into some of the mysteries you brushed up against in the first game.
Unknown Worlds has previously said that the Subnautica expansion would go into early access release later this year, with full launch coming sometime in 2019, but no mention of that timeline is made on the Below Zero page. "In the coming months, we will release an unfinished, early version of Below Zero in Early Access," it says. "We will then begin releasing consistent content updates, carefully crafting the game based on your feedback—just like the original Subnautica."
The Subnautica: Below Zero concept art is... below.
I picked up Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark right where I left off at the end of the Kickstarter Backers’ build, guiding my team of fantasy sheriffs on a globetrotting adventure to root out the corruption in their order of peacekeepers. Now, in Early Access, I’m hunting down a cure for one of my suddenly indisposed party members (the cliffhanger from the Kickstarter build) and kicking a party of amateur temple crashers in the pants.
I don’t want to spoil the details of what's happening in Fell Seal, because its story has so far been inventive, and its characters as serious and interesting as the ones in Final Fantasy Tactics, its main inspiration. So far it's perfectly playable in Early Access—but I don't think you should play it yet. I've had no issues with crashing or game-stopping bugs, but playing Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark now, with its story unfinished, would feel a little bit like peeking at your presents.
Brave new world map
Since the build released to Kickstarter backers in March, Fell Seal has been expanded significantly. The campaign has doubled in length, with yet more to come. New animations and sound effects have made it feel far more complete. My favorite addition is the new world map, which doubles down on the painterly look of the previous version—so much so that I had to flip back through my older screenshots to remind myself what the map had looked like before. Not that different, it turns out, but the animated props and sketchier style give it so much more personality. I’ve rarely had such strong feelings about a map, but here we are.
There are more story missions, which means there's also higher level equipment and new classes with new skills. I eagerly dumped my cash into new gear for my favorite characters. There aren’t a plethora of available options yet, but just enough to get my imagination working.
The best investment I’ve made so far is a cape for my wizard (his name is Barrow, thank you for asking) that boosts his fire resistance to 100 percent. It’s likely overpowered, but it allowed me to take Barrow into a crowd of enemies and have him drop a Fire II spell on his own head. He’s immune, but the bandits around him were boiled in their boots.
I haven't tried the same play with other elements, but there are also capes for 100% resistance to water, earth, and lightning damage, and I imagine they’ll work the same. It’s a move that I’ve used to get into plenty of trouble. I've yet to perfect the part where I get back out again.
The “in” crowd
I now have a mixture of story characters and custom units that I like to take into battle. My wizard Barrow, for instance, and my knight Thane are both custom characters that I’ve taken a shine to for no reason other than that I made them myself. They have no involvement in the story, though you can see their sprites hanging about camp during cutscenes as if they might have some hidden personality of their own, if only they had the chance to speak up.
With so many classes to try out, it feels like I ll fall into bad habits unless all party members, present in the fight or not, earn the same experience.
I ended up neglecting about half of my troops throughout the new round of missions. Characters only earn experience by participating in fights, so I now inevitably have a handful of level four and five characters hanging about with my otherwise level eight to twelve crew. I’m supposed to be encouraged to spread my attention evenly by leaving injured characters, those who were downed in the previous encounter, at camp. I can jog around to map to take on random encounters and rack up experience, which also kills time and lets a character recover from an injury. The further back my neglected units fall from the main party though, the less likely it is I’ll bother taking them on a non-story mission to catch them up.
Characters being injured and forced to sit out a fight (or suffer a penalty) is a welcome alternative to the permadeath of Final Fantasy Tactics or Fire Emblem, but it's also caused this big gap between by A team and B team fighters. One of the main three protagonists, the mercenary Reiner, has even begun to fall behind my other characters in level. It’s now difficult to bring him along without saddling him with another injury and thus another missed fight and more unclaimed experience.
With so many classes to try out, it feels like I’ll fall into bad habits unless all party members, present in the fight or not, earn the same experience. Otherwise, I imagine any new class I’d like to try I’ll need to spend the gold to recruit a high level custom character.
The higher level you want to recruit, the more gold you’ll spend, and that's not even including the gear you'll want to buy for them. It’s a pricey venture, but I’ve never been one to tolerate random battle grinding without story beats to prop it up. In the significantly shorter Kickstarter demo, it was easy to sweep level disparity under the rug. Now it looks like the power imbalance will only grow as I play more.
Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark has grown significantly since the first time I played, but its developers plan to add many more missions before its story is finished. Pleasantly, they have added mod support, which is great for those who’d like to tweak skills and classes. But unless you’re an avid modder with a thirst for tactical RPGs, or an absolute devotee to the genre who wants to have their voice heard during the planned six months of Early Access, you’re better off giving it a few more months. There’s plenty of polish yet to be done, as with any game in Early Access.
Fell Seal is a singleplayer game with a story you may only want to play through once. And because that story so far has been enjoyable, my gut says hold off playing until the final version. Fell Seal is planned for release in early 2019, which isn’t too long a wait to see the game at its best.
Hunt: Showdown is primarily a cooperative venture, but from today until September 6, players can opt to take on Solo contracts instead. The time-limited Solo Event pits up to 10 individual players against one another in a competition for a bloody bounty that only one can claim—and you know what that means.
Alongside the usual rewards for collecting heads and getting out alive, the Solo Event will award 3500 in-game dollars to the top 50 DIY hunters at the end of the event; the top ten will get the money and a custom name for one of their characters; the top five players will get the cash, the handle, three weapons of their choice (one large, one medium, and one small), three consumables, three tools, and 50 trait points; and the top three will get all of the above plus one prestige level. Other rewards will be handed out during the event as well, but Crytek didn't get into the details on what they might be.
To take part in the Hunt: Showdown Solo Event, just select "Solo" from the contracts screen. It runs until 7 am PT/10 am ET on September 6.
“How do you have so much money?” asks the Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord booth manager at Gamescom as I end my half-hour session. People trafficking, my good man. During my short time with the game I made thousands fighting bandits, taking prisoners, and selling the prisoners on to a local town. A guy in town paid me for neutralising the bandit threat as well, and I steal some extra armour for myself after battle. I'm making money all the way down this chain.
It's refreshing to be dropped into Mount and Blade 2's medieval sandbox with no objectives whatsoever. There are no arch demons to thwart, or evil kings to overthrow, I'm free to quest for riches and better pants instead.
Like the first game you can hire warriors and fight alongside them in third-person battles, and as a mercenary you're free to take jobs with any town vendors you fancy. You can enter towns and wander up to a quest-giver, or pick them from a menu screen to save time. As you complete jobs they will like you more, and you can hire more advanced soldiers. Soldiers level up after battles and evolve into better troops over time.
The sequel looks a lot better than the first game, but it's still endearingly low-fi compared to RPGs with a similar tone like Kingdom Come Deliverance. Instead of graphical fidelity, Mount and Blade 2 promises freedom. You move between towns on a map of Calradia that feels like a JRPG world map. Roaming warbands are represented as lone soldiers or horseriders. Traders zip between towns like little board game pieces. If you stand still the sandbox busily swarms around you.
Roaming warbands are represented as lone soldiers or horseriders. Traders zip between towns like little board game pieces.
There isn't time to dig into Mount and Blade 2's most ambitious features. Eventually you can go to war with entire armies, and lay siege to castles in massive battles. In the beginning you're just another citizen. I could have entered some tournaments to win money and favour in duels, or I could have allied with the criminal elements in town. Instead, I played as a roaming enforcer helping the local militia to fight off bandits.
Combat will be very familiar to Mount and Blade: Warband players. From horseback I hold the mouse button to wind up a strike and then release at just the right point to cleave the enemy. The horse's momentum factors into the power of the blow, which guarantees a kill if I chop roughly in the head area.
Fighting requires careful cursor control because blows don't track or lock on to targets. You can move your body angle and feet as you swing to make sure you connect. As the enemy swings at you, you adjust your body angle to make sure the blow misses or lands on your shield. The flailing and disconnected leg movements make the fights look and feel desperate, but there's skill to it, and the wide array of weapons, shields, and armour create meaningful variation between troops. Your units fight in gaggles that you can direct, to an extent, with commands. Fights are nonetheless quite haphazard, as you might expect from a rabble of bandits and hastily assembled militia fighters.
There are a lot of amusing little moments. When you win a battle by routing or killing the enemy, everyone in your rag-tag army stops and cheers as though they've just won a football match. I went into town to meet up with some criminal types in a back alley. I found both staring at a brick wall. When I questioned them they gave me the exact same paragraph of dialogue about being loyal to their gang leader. Mount and Blade has always been a bit wonky, but that's part of its appeal, and the sequel shows a strong commitment to player-driven stories in a bustling sandbox world.
Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord's release date is yet to be announced.
If you hop into No Man's Sky today, you'll receive a radio broadcast from space. Specialist Polo, the alien imp typically found chilling in the mysterious space anomaly, has a quest for you. And not just for you but for everyone, because No Man's Sky has begun hosting community events. Participate, and you'll earn Quicksilver, a currency you'll be able to spend on new emotes, cosmetics, and base decorations at a new vendor aboard the anomaly.
The current event takes place over the next week. Polo will give you coordinates and direct to you a nearby portal. Activate the portal with the coordinates, and you'll be transported to a planet where you'll be asked to dig for buried technology capsules. You'll probably find lots of other players there, too, and maybe one of them will be blasting Wayne Brady's game show Let's Make a Deal over their open mic at an excruciating volume. Or maybe that was just my personal community experience.
After muting Wayne Brady, use your visor to look for buried modules, and you'll find a new resource inside them: hex cores. Collect 25, and you can head back into space, where Polo will give you Quicksilver in exchange for your cores. Visit the anomaly and you'll find the new vendor in the back room.
There are two pages of new stuff you can buy from the new vendor using Quicksilver: a new emote, a cool-looking helmet, plus decorations like decals and statues you can build at your base. (You'll need resources to build them: I bought a gold statue and now I need gold to construct it.)
You've got the next six days to dig up hex cores to turn into Quicksilver, so get digging if you want to collect all of the items in this week's event. (Offer not valid in creative mode.)
