Hi Everyone! Starting off this week, we have lots of news to cover. The top stories include: Discord wants to bring an app to the Switch! (#5), Final Fantasy XV Episode Prompto Trailer (#6), and… Rabbid Peach has an instagram account… oh no (#16)
1- Dragon Quest XI goes gold; gameplay shows smithing, skill panel, horse racing, and casino (Source: Gematsu Sal Romano)
2- PS4 Exclusive Days Gone Release Date Possibly Leaked Through Official YouTube Channel (Source: Gearnuke Khurram Imtiaz)
3- Job listing states Microsoft is making a Horizon Zero Dawn-like game (Source: MSPowerUser Asher Madan
4- E3 2017 – PlayStation’s Shawn Layden on Death Stranding, Spider-man, and the nature of the console competition (Source: The Telegraph, Dan Silver, credit to NeoGAF user Theslammer). A long interview but lots of great stuff in there.
Looks like Sony will have a lot of games for the first half of 2018 as well.
5- Discord Wants to Bring Dedicated App to Nintendo Switch (Source: Nintendo Enthusiast, Shawn Long)
6- Final Fantasy XV – Episode Prompto Trailer Coming June 27
7- Nex Machina Review Thread
8- If you are still into this game.. Raid battles and new gym features are coming to Pokemon Go! (Source: NeoGAF User Broken Joystick)
9- Super Mario Odyssey interview with Yoshiaki Koizumi and Kenta Motokura (Source: Metro, David Jenkins)
10- Possible “Shadow of the Tomb Raider” Logos and Gameplay/Location Leaked (Source: NeoGAF user NeoRaider)
11- Dragon Quest XI Nintendo Direct set for June 21 (Source: Gematsu Sal Romano)
12- ‘God of War’ Creative Director Cory Barlog on Nihilism and Fatherhood (Source: Waypoint, Patrick Klepek)
13- E3 2017: How Real-World Issues, Including Terrorism, Affected Detroit: Become Human’s Story (Source: Gamespot, Oscar Dayus)
14- THE KING OF FIGHTER: DESTINY Trailer
15- Forza 7 on Xbox One X will achieve the same results as “a multi-thousand dollar PC” (Source: VG247 Shabana Arif)
16- Rabbid Peach has an official instagram account, and it’s unsettling (Source: Kotaku, Gita Jackson)
17- Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age Interview: Developers on tactical gameplay, cheats, legacy, and more (Source: RPG Site Alex Donaldson and John Davison, Credit to NeoGAF user LordofLore)
It’s sort of snuck up on us, but Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age isn’t far off now. A surprise announcement at last year’s E3, the remastered, rebalanced version of the classic Ivalice-based and tactically-driven epic that is FF12 will finally arrive a little over a year after its announcement in July. That’s a pretty fast turn-around for a Square Enix Japan game – even the FF10 remaster took a couple of years.
It’s an impressive-looking remaster, too. That’s partly thanks to just how good looking the original Final Fantasy XII was in the first place, but how this do-over impresses isn’t all about visuals. The Zodiac Age also makes significant changes to FF12’s gameplay systems, outright overhauling some to make for a very different experience.
18- Ever Oasis Director on Nintendo and Square Enix influences, challenges making the game (Source: Nintendo Everything Brian)
19- How Call of Duty WW2 handles swastikas and female soldier (Source: Eurogamer, Wesley Yin-Poole)
By setting the next Call of Duty in World War 2, Activision charged the developers at Sledgehammer Games with coming up with a philosophy for dealing with Nazi iconography and the possibility of playing as non-German male soldiers when the game puts players on the Axis side in multiplayer.
Sledgehammer’s approach was to treat the campaign very different than the multiplayer side of the game.
In an E3 interview with Eurogamer, Sledgehammer Games co-founder Michael Condrey told me swastikas will appear in Call of Duty: WW2’s campaign, but won’t be present in multiplayer.
20- Making A South Park Game Is Harder Than You Think (Source: Kotaku, Jason Schreier)
Last week, a poster on the message board NeoGAF asked why South Park: The Fractured But Whole was taking so long to develop. After all, isn’t 2D easy to draw? “First and foremost,” the poster wrote, “the game uses the same graphical style as the show. Which is probably the easiest to make.” Well, my dear Mousnis, making a crummy-looking 2D game can be tough.
The new South Park game, which comes out in October, has been in development for nearly three years. The developers at Ubisoft San Francisco have already delayed it at least once (from last December) and while the process has been smoother than the last game, Obsidian’s Stick of Truth, it’s still enormously complicated.
21- Yuzo Koshiro: Legendary game composer, family owner Interview (Source: Polygon, Jeremy Parish, Credit to NeoGAF user Oregano)
Nice Selections from Oregano: NeoGAF Post
22- Life is Strange: Before the Storm dev on Ashly Burch’s absence, season pass kerfuffle, and more (Source: Eurogamer, Tom Phillips)
When word first broke that beloved teen adventure Life is Strange was getting a prequel, many of the game’s hardcore fans were less than convinced.
Life is Strange: Before the Storm is being made by a different developer – the unproven US-based Deck Nine Games – compared to the original’s team at Dontnod in Paris. Dontnod is now working on an entirely new Life is Strange 2, and many fans considered the studio’s original tale completely wrapped up. Any attempt to go back and revisit those characters, especially by a different team, felt like a huge risk. And then there was the unwelcome news that Chloe Price voice actor Ashly Burch would not be returning, along with word that the game’s Season Pass would not include the season’s bonus episode.
23- Clearing up confusion surrounding Crackdown 3 (Source: Eurogamer, Wesley Yin-Poole)
When Microsoft showed more of open world blow ’em-up Crackdown 3 during its E3 2017 Xbox media briefing, it did so with a trailer that starred American actor Terry Crews. The only problem was, we didn’t get a good look at gameplay, nor did we see any of Crackdown 3’s ambitious destruction.
This sparked a number of questions about the destruction in Crackdown 3. Had it been ditched? Is the game still using the fancy dedicated server tech to make blowing up buildings ultra realistic in the open world?
