Halo Infinite is a launch title for Microsoft’s next-generation console, the Xbox Series X, but it’s also coming to the relatively less powerful Xbox One. Not only that, but the game will also be released on PC. This multiplatform release strategy is far different than 2015’s Halo 5: Guardians, which was only released on Xbox One (before a scaled-back edition came to PC for free).
343 studio head Chris Lee recently spoke about this multiplatform development, saying it was made possible thanks to Microsoft’s investment in its new SlipSpace Engine.
“When we started building Halo Infinite we knew we had to really invest in our technology to achieve the ambition that the vision of this game had. So we invested a lot in our SlipSpace Engine,” Lee said during a recent interview. “We’ve been developing it over time with the idea and the concept of being cross-platform so we could support the Xbox One family of devices, the Xbox Series X, and of course, PC when we release on Steam as well.”
Lee went on to say that Microsoft was developing Halo Infinite as a cross-gen title “from the very beginning.” While Halo Infinite will be available across a variety of platforms, that doesn’t mean it will be held back on any system.
“From the very beginning we wanted to make sure we were developing all of these experiences in parallel and had the right technology to power those experiences and optimize them for each device,” Lee said.
The floodgates for Halo Infinite have finally begun to open. During an Xbox event recently, Microsoft showcased a first look at campaign gameplay, including Craig the Brute.
For more, check out the stories linked below.
Click To Unmute
Size:
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
New Releases highlights some of the top games releasing each week. This episode has a lot of variety: Skater XL for the skateboard kids, Ageless for the puzzle solvers, and Fairy Tail for the Shonen Jump fans. Did you miss out on the original Destroy All Humans? Good news, the remake is on its way. Lastly, Xbox One gamers get their own Yakuza Kiwami 2 port this week.
Destroy All Humans! — July 28
Available on: PS4, Xbox One, PC
This is a remake of the original Destroy All Humans from 2005. Once again, you’ll be stepping into the space boots of alien invader Crypto as he extracts DNA from the residents of a Midwestern town, using all types of alien weapons and gadgets. This remake includes content cut from the original game, too.
More Coverage:
Skater XL — July 28
Available on: PS4, Xbox One, PC, Switch
Skater XL
Skater XL is all about control, letting you choose how you move your feet and kick the board for each trick–just note that you do need a controller to play it on PC. It’s full of real-world skate parks and skaters, but you can also pull off sick tricks with your own custom character.
More Coverage:
Ageless — July 28
Available on: PC, Switch
Ageless
Ageless puts you in the shoes of Kiara, whose magical bow fires arrows that send their targets forward and backward in time. You’ll have to age and de-age plants and animals to solve each of the game’s puzzles. There are secret challenges to overcome along your journey, too.
More Coverage:
Yakuza Kiwami 2 — July 30
Available on: Xbox One
Yakuza Kiwami 2
Kiwami 2 is a remake of the original Yakuza 2 with improved combat mechanics and all-new content focused on secondary protagonist Goro Majima. Of course, you’ll spend plenty of time with series staple Kazuma Kiryu, too. Game Pass subscribers can jump right in on day one.
More Coverage:
Fairy Tail — July 30 (PC), July 31 (PS4, Switch)
Available on: PS4, PC, Switch
Fairy Tale
The Shonen Jump anime/manga series is getting a turn-based RPG. Your goal is to build up the top magic guild, and you’ve got 16 fan-favorite characters to help you pull it off. Expect to battle plenty of powerful rival magicians along the way.
After announcing all the player ratings for Madden NFL 21, EA Sports will reveal the first of the new X-Factor super-abilities for the professional football game on Monday, July 27.
The Madden NFL 21 Twitter account revealed the news with a nice-looking poster made by illustrator/concept artist Conrad Javier. The poster teases, “New abilities unleashed,” while a graphic in the top-left corner seems to suggest that the X-Factor reveals will happen over the course of the week, wrapping up on July 31.
Introduced in Madden NFL 20, X-Factor abilities are special abilities that some of the highest-rated players in the game that players unlock during gameplay by completing certain objectives.
For example, Madden NFL 20 cover star Patrick Mahomes had an X-Factor called “Bazooka” that increases his maximum throwing distance, while Stephen Gilmore’s X-Factor was called “Shutdown” and it increases his defensive skills and the likelihood he’ll make an interception.
A post on EA’s website states that Madden NFL 21 will have more than 50 new X-Factor abilities that are “fresh out of the lab designed to elevate the stars of a new generation in Madden NFL 21.”
In other news, EA Sports has confirmed that it’s making a last-minute change to Madden NFL 21 to remove the Washington Redskins after the real-world sports team dropped the name that was widely criticized for being racist. The game will be updated with a generic Washington team and logo until the actual sports group decides on and announces a new name.
Madden NFL 21 is coming on August 28 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. It will also be coming to the next-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X, with free upgrades for current-gen owners through EA’s Dual Entitlement program. For more details, check out our Madden NFL 21 pre-order guide.
Click To Unmute
Size:
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
If you’re an aspiring horror writer with an established Reddit account, the tale of “My Wife And I Bought A Ranch” is a dream-come-true. Deadline is reporting that Netflix has won the rights to a short story posted to the No Sleep subreddit. You can see the post here, although the full story is divided across six parts.
The story, about an ex-marine and his wife who purchase a ranch and soon find out that there’s a malevolent force at work there, was written by Matt Query. It’s well-regarded among the No Sleep community, and has received 3000 upvotes since the first part was posted five months ago.
The rights to the story were bought for a figure in the low seven-figure range, likely meaning between $1-5 million.
The script will be handled by his brother, Harrison Query, who is already working on a Three Musketeers project for the streaming service. Scott Glassgold and Ground Control Entertainment are producing, but talks are underway with potential co-producers, including Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen at 21 Laps (Stranger Things) and Aquaman-director James Wan’s Atomic Monster.
No director has been attached to the project as of yet.
Back in 2018, Ryan Reynolds signed on to adapt The Patient Who Nearly Drove Me Out Of Medicine, another story posted to No Sleep. There have been few updates on the project since then.
Click To Unmute
Size:
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
Tannenberg, from M2H Game Studio, is available now on PS4 and Xbox One. The game is the second installment in the WWI Game Series, following 2015’s Verdun, and features 40-player matches across maps based on real battlefields. Unlike Verdun, this port was handled entirely in-house by the original developer.
The game, which released on Steam Early Access in February 2019, comes to consoles with all the updates the game has received since its initial launch, including a new map (Przemyśl) that has also been added to the PC release. Players can fight over control points using time-authentic weapons, including gas barrages and mounted machine guns.
While there’s no single-player campaign, you can play with up to 20 bots, or add them to a multiplayer match. You can play as troops from Russia, Romania, Latvia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Bulgaria.
You can watch the game’s launch trailer below.
There’s a focus on squad combat, and the large maps have different weather variants to mix things up. The controls have also been optimized for console.
The game costs $20, and PS4 Pro and Xbox Series X owners will see more detailed graphics in the game.
Writer-director Taika Waititi has shared some new insight on the next Thor movie, Love and Thunder, calling it “insane” and “romantic.”
Speaking to the BBC, Waititi said he and his team has been working sporadically on the script for more than a year already. It might not be a surprise given the title Love and Thunder, but Waititi said he is incorporating some romantic elements, and he’s excited about that because it’s out of his wheelhouse.
“We’ve been writing the script off and on for over a year, and this week I’m doing another pass on it. It is so insane. It’s also very romantic. I’m into romances now,” he said. “I just want to make a romance. I want to make something I’ve never done or never cared for. I would like to attack something like that.”
Love and Thunder will be the first new Thor movie since 2017’s Ragnarok, which Waititi also directed.
Also in the BBC interview, Waititi offered only the tiniest teases for his new Star Wars movie, confirming, “We’re writing” and sharing no more insight.
The Fugitive, the hit 1993 film starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, is being reborn as a Quibi series, and the first trailer is now available. As with all Quibi shows, the episodes will be short, and some big stars are attached to the series.
Kiefer Sutherland plays Detective Clay Bryce, while the titular fugitive is Mike Ferro, played by Boyd Holbrook (Narcos). Ferro is a recently released former inmate, falsely accused of orchestrating an explosion in an LA subway station, and must go on the run when Bryce declares him the only suspect, with a “shoot on sight” directive.
You can watch the trailer below. Like all Quibi shows, the episodes will be short (10 minutes or under). It looks like this one will have a sub-plot about irresponsible journalists, too.
According to a synopsis provided to Deadline, Mike Ferro is worried about the well-being of his wife and daughter, who were on a train at the time of the explosion. Whether or not this means we’ll get a version of the iconic “I didn’t kill my wife” scene from the film remains to be seen, as they both appear to be alive in the trailer.
The Fugitive actually started life as a TV series in the 1960s, starring David Janseen and Barry Morse. It ran for four seasons. This new series drops on August 3.
One of Netflix’s popular original movie franchises, The Kissing Booth, recently returned with a sequel that debuted on July 24. That won’t be the last entry in the series, however, as it’s been confirmed that a third Kissing Booth movie was filmed in secret alongside the sequel.
Deadline reports that The Kissing Booth 3 was secretly filmed concurrently with Kissing Booth 2 in South Africa. Filming is finished, and all that’s left is post-production. The Kissing Booth 3 is expected to come to Netflix sometime in 2021, and bring back the stars of the original movies, Joey King, Jacob Elordi, and Joel Courtney. Additionally, director Vince Marcello, who directed the first two movies, came back.
THANK YOU SO MUCH EVERYBODY! I’m totally over the moon that we’re doing a third one (and yes, with all the same cast!) It’s been tough keeping this secret from you all but thank you for all the lovely messages about #TheKissingBooth3! Your support is everything to me 💋💋💋
The entire Kissing Booth series is based on the novels by Beth Reekles, the first of which she wrote when she was just 15 years old. Reekles said on Twitter, “It’s been tough keeping this secret from you all but thank you for all the lovely messages.”
With July winding down, you might be wondering what’s headed to Netflix in August. A lot of good stuff is coming, in the US at least, including the original Jurassic Park trilogy (August 1), the beloved animated show The Legend of Korra (August 14), and the James Bond movies Quantum of Solace and Casino Royale (August 31).
Ghost of Tsushima, the recently released PS4 exclusive, relies heavily on sound to guide players and flesh out its 13th century Japanese setting. As you might expect, getting the sound just right took a lot of work and tools–and the sound is even more important than you might realize while playing.
Over at A Sound Effect, the game’s audio director Rev. Dr. Bradley D. Meyer and its senior sound designer Josh Lord have delved into the game’s sound design, and how they captured the sounds of the era. They also explained how sound is used to guide the player through the open world.
Meyer reveals that the sound of the wind, which guides players, is even more intricate than it might seem. “We built a system where the sound travels on three splines pointing towards the player’s current objective, one centered over the player and one on either side spaced about 5 meters away,” he says. “These wind gusts are all reactive to the current environment the player is in. So if you’re skirting a grassland on one side and a bamboo forest on the other, the wind will sound like tall grass rustling on your one side and clacking bamboo on the other. This directionality helps players key into where they should be headed as they traverse the island.”
Meyer also reveals that the use of a Black Naped Oriole as the game’s “guide bird” is largely due to a spot of luck that allowed him to record the bird’s sounds. “It was chosen for three reasons: it could be found in Japan, it was visually unique, and I was fortunate enough to record one when I was on vacation in Sri Lanka in 2018.”
Meyer reveals that the sword noises were recorded using the same sword blanks that were previously used for God of War, and that he and Josh Lord “spent a lot of time recording them in all manner of ways from scraping them against each other, clanging them together, swinging them, suspending them from the ceiling and spinning them around to get interesting resonant tones, etc.” The team had custom-made katana and wakizashi, engraved with the game’s logo, to record sheathing and unsheating noises, plus additional sword noises. Recording sessions also involved using blades to slice through fruit, vegetables, and cloth–those are the noises you’ll hear when you cut through an enemy.
Various straw and bamboo mats, Japanese yukata, jinbei, and waraji footwear were all used in recordings. The team made period-authentic boiled leather armor and paper armor, too, which was used for recordings. Bamboo was purchased wholesale so that they could test out its sound properties in numerous situations.
One extra fun note: when you hear a Mongol sleeping in the game, you’re hearing game director Nate Fox snoring. “We shared a room at the Game Developer’s Conference once and when I came in one night, he was passed out and snoring LOUD, so, you know I had to do my field recording duty,” Meyer recalls.
The full interview digs much deeper, including anecdotes about recording animals, details about UI sounds, and discussion on the challenges of featuring both English and Japanese voice tracks. It’s worth a read if you want to know more about sound design at a major studio, or the specifics of how Ghost of Tsushima came together.
