News for the week of March 12th, 2021.
Halo Infinite deep dive announces a lengthy list of gameplay features coming to Halo Infinite.
343 announced today a lot of features and gameplay mechanics that will be coming to Halo Infinite when it launches at the end of this year. The game will see day and night cycles, and these will be represented in the real-time cutscenes as well, making additional playthroughs fairly different from one another. You’ll also face off against different enemies at different times of the day, which will also impact some levels of combat as well. There will be real-time weather, but some of the more dire conditions won’t make it for launch.
The Zeta Halo ring you will explore in Infinite is fully 3D rendered, offering a slight twist with eclipses, seen in-game when the sun passes behind it. The team was also asked whether or not a player could simply hijack a banshee and fly to the next objective, bypassing large chunks of the environment. 343 responded that they encourage players to simply do what they want, indicating that they can do just that if they so wish.
343 also stated that the game won’t have dual-wielding, opting to work more on the established arsenal as well as not having any significant weapon upgrade system. You also won’t be able to play as Elites during launch, and the environments won’t have any hostile enemies.
With Bethesda officially part of Xbox, Game Pass sees a massive catalog bump of titles.
With the ink finally dry on the Bethesda acquisition, Microsoft has released a ton of Bethesda games to many forms of Game Pass. This includes titles that were already on the system finally seeing either a PC release or playability through XCloud. Some of these titles will also see an FPS boost as well. The titles added today were:
Dishonored Definitive Edition - Console, PC, Cloud
Dishonored 2 - Console, PC, Cloud
Doom 1993 - Console, PC, Cloud
Doom II - Console, PC, Cloud
Doom 3 - Console, PC, Cloud
Doom 64 - Console, PC, Cloud
Doom Eternal - Console, PC, Cloud
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind - Cloud, PC
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Console, PC
The Elder Scrolls V: Skryim Special Edition - Console, PC, Cloud
The Elder Scrolls Online - Cloud, Console
The Evil Within - Console, PC, Cloud
Fallout 4 - Console, PC, Cloud
Fallout 76 - Console, PC, Cloud
Fallout: New Vegas - Console
Prey - Console, PC, Cloud
Rage 2 - Console, PC, Cloud
Wolfenstein: The New Order - Console, PC, Cloud
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood - Console, PC, Cloud
Wolfenstein: Youngblood - Console, PC, Cloud
New SquareEnix event will reveal the newest entry into Life is Strange.
On March 18th, SquareEnix will be dropping a ton of new info regarding new and existing titles, one of which will be a new entry into the Life is Strange series. This game will feature a whole new protagonist, with a new power that will fundamentally rip their world apart. Here is hoping that we see a whole new engine to bring this series a big visual upgrade.
COWABUNGA! A new TMNT game has been announced!
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are back! Shredder’s Revenge is a new co-op brawler that is based upon the late 80’s/90’s cartoon that largely started it all. The game looks like a true sequel to the TMNT arcade game, featuring 4-player co-op with visuals that seriously invokes a ton of nostalgia. The game is being developed by two teams; Dotemu (known for Streets of Rage 4), and Tribute Games (known for Panzer Paladin). The game will feature online and local co-op, with a tremendous amount of care and detail into bringing this era of TMNT to life.
Tribute Games co-founder, Jean Francois Major spoke on the game:
“We wanted to bring back a game for the fans of the ‘87 animated series and also the old arcade games of the ‘90s. Because we felt that people missed it. And including us, because, personally, I played those games a lot as a kid and I missed them a lot. So that was the idea that started it.”
Now, it’s hinted at during the trailer that we may end up playing as Master Splinter and April O’Neil as they are shown in the trailer prepping for a battle. Sadly, the developer wouldn’t comment on that or the inclusion of Casey Jones. Personally, if they are going to dive into the depth of TMNT, I would love to see Usagi Yojimbo as well as some other deep cuts from the graphic novels or comics.
Shredder’s Revenge looks to be the TMNT game that fans have wanted for years, sparking massive applause online by a dire hard community of Turtle-loving fans. The game has been announced that it will hit PC and unspecified consoles, but it is likely to hit the Switch, PS4, and Xbox One, with compatiblity to PS5 and Series X/S as well.
Marvel’s Avengers finally add the most requested feature to its game on March 18th.
Easily the highlight of the Avengers game was its campaign, and upon completing it, fans, such as myself, were largely shocked you couldn’t replay it. But, as of March 18th, you will be able to select the campaign from the war table and dive right back in. This will hit with patch 1.5, which will also introduce Hawkeye to the team and is the day the game launches on Series X/S and PS5 as well.
To access the campaign, you’ll go into the Operation Database in the main menu, and select “Part 1: Reassemble” and then reset your campaign progress, allowing you to replay missions. The game will warn you of this reset, so you’ll want to make sure you’ve fully completed the campaign before you reset your progress. It’s a convoluted way to allow this, but I’m just excited to finally be able to dive back into what is easily the best part of this game.
That’s everything I could fit into this feature, what was your favorite news of the week? Comment below!