June 2021

Resident Evil Village Producer Leaves For Bungie As Studio Hires For New 'Multiplayer Action Game'

2 years 9 months ago

We've known that Bungie has been working on a new IP for a while now, but it looks like things may just be ramping up. As the studio hires more talent for a new "multiplayer action game," Bungie also just nabbed some serious talent found in Resident Evil Village producer Peter Fabiano. 

Fabiano has produced several of the most recent Resident Evil games in the Capcom franchise, but after 13 years with the company, he is leaving to pursue new adventures. Namely, Bungie. Fabiano took to Twitter over the weekend to share the news, saying, "Hard to write this best, so I've decided to keep it simple: Thank you, everyone, at Capcom for allowing me to grow together with you over the past 12 years. I'm thankful and will cherish the experience forever." He later added, "I've taken a new position at Bungie, working with some great people and continuing my journey."

Author
Liana Ruppert

E3 2021 Awards Show Will Take Place On Showcase's Final Day, Celebrating Game Reveals

2 years 9 months ago

E3 2021 is just around the corner and promises a ton of game reveals, first looks, and more news for gamers worldwide to feast those eyes on. The all-digital event will have many surprises in store, in addition to the E3 2021 Awards Show celebrating them all at the end of this year's showcase. 

According to The Hollywood ReporterThe E3 2021 Awards Show will be a small affair, nothing as large as The Game Awards that happen every December. It will be kicking off on June 15, E3's final day, and will feature an eclectic list of "winners" regarding which titles have the community the most excited. 

“For this year’s event, we are collaborating with editors at some of the world’s leading video game media outlets to create the Official E3 2021 Awards Show, recognizing the show’s most anticipated games,” said Stanley Pierre-Louis, president, and CEO of the ESA, in a recent press statement. “The broadcast is going to be packed with exciting announcements and reveals, and celebrating innovative publishers and developers is an ideal way to close E3 2021.”

The small awards celebration will feature journalists from various sites, including GameSpot and IGN, and will look back at all of the games revealed during the week-long event to close E3 2021 out with a bang. 

Author
Liana Ruppert

Netflix's The Witcher Prequel, Blood Origin, Reportedly Casts A Familiar Villain From The Games

2 years 9 months ago

With Netflix's The Witcher season 2 preparing for a trailer and release date reveal, the company's creative team has been hard at work on a different sort of project with the prequel called Blood Origin. We've learned a little bit about the upcoming spinoff in the past, but it was recently revealed that a familiar villain from the games will also be sharing that anticipated spotlight. 

According to the folks at Redanian Intelligencethe same site that has given fans first looks at on-set photos of The Witcher season 2, Australia actor Jacob Collins-Levy is set to join the Blood Origin cast as none other than Eredin Breacc Glas. Name sound familiar? It should, especially if you've played the games. This Aen Elle elf became the commander of the elven calvary known as the Wild Hunt. As the King of the Wild Hunt, Eredin earned his role after killing his successor, effectively becoming the new leader that sought after young Ciri. 

Author
Liana Ruppert

Was Burning Crusade World of Warcraft's greatest expansion?

2 years 9 months ago

You can point to many moments from World of Warcraft's early history that define, comment on, or cement its status as the biggest game in the world at the time and a potent pop-cultural force. Its success was both immediate and gradual, which is to say that it launched big and then got bigger, at a rapid rate, for years. Its peak audience size didn't come until late 2010, six years on from its launch, but it was in the first three or four years that it seemed to loom largest in the culture.

One moment that sticks out for me was the launch of first expansion, The Burning Crusade, in January 2007. I remember covering the midnight launch at HMV in London's Oxford Street and being gobsmacked by the size and fervour of the crowd. This was something of the scale of a console launch - beyond it, frankly - only for an expansion pack for an online game. Not only were people there in huge numbers, but there was a specificity, an emotional tenor to their ardour that I would see on an even grander scale at BlizzCon later that year - something more tribal, more communal than the excitement of the console fans. These people belonged.

In a masterstroke of dramatic staging that must have been cursed by the studio's network engineers, Blizzard also gave the launch an in-game focal point with the opening of the Dark Portal, which saw players gather ready to step through the dread gate and enter a shattered new world. It broke the servers, of course, but even that became part of the story. Even while watching the login queues tick down, you knew you were participating in something huge.

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Watch Dogs: Legion of the Dead is a standalone zombies mode released in alpha for PC today

2 years 9 months ago

Ubisoft has surprise-released a zombie survival mode for Watch Dogs: Legion, and it is available to try today on PC.

Anyone with a PC copy of Watch Dogs: Legion will be able to nab Legion of the Dead via the Ubisoft Connect launcher. The survival-themed mode is still in alpha, and will come to consoles when it is ready to hit beta.

"In a London filled with zombies, Albion soldiers and Clan Kelley enforcers are hoarding valuable supplies that you must get your hands on to ensure the survival of your crew," Ubisoft explained in a blog post.

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Monument Valley dev's Alba: A Wildlife Adventure comes to consoles next week

2 years 9 months ago

Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, the acclaimed open-world exploration game from Monument Valley developer UsTwo, will - after winning over iOS and Steam audiences last year - be making its way to Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch next Wednesday, 9th June.

Alba shares a similar focus on good deeds and community spirit as UsTwo's antique restoration game Assemble with Care, but fashions a much more open-ended adventure around that feel-good core, casting players as young girl Alba as she whiles away the summer on the sprawling Mediterranean island of Pinar del Mar, her best friend Ines in tow.

"However, when Alba finds out about plans to build a garish hotel on the site of the island's nature reserve," explains UsTwo, "she sets out to stop it!"

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Humankind has that special something

2 years 9 months ago

There's something kind of special about playing a new 4X game, especially a historical one. These games are about playing through history - all of history - which means that as much as they're about expanding, exploiting and the rest, they're really about discovery. This is the game: discovering your way through time, via The Wheel, or Irrigation, or Thermonuclear Weapons or whatever, until you reach the end of history and that game ends. And you do this over and over again, until you can fly your little towns through the neolithic age, a couple wars and a dalliance or two with Authoritarianism right the way to the future without really thinking about it.

The thinking about it, obviously, is the joy of any good 4X though, and that too is the special pleasure of a new one. I don't know the way from Masonry to Telecommunications anymore, I have to discover it - re-discover it, really. Like digging up an old Roman path.

Anyway, this is what I've been thinking about while playing Humankind for a lovely dozen or so hours, and for a time after it. Humankind is a game full of systems and empty space. The things to think about, deeply and lengthily, and the time to do the thinking. It's wonderfully moreish, and importantly now quite fully-formed. It's been roughly a year since I last previewed Humankind, and it's been delayed by a good year or so in that time too, but the game now feels close to the real thing.

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EA delists five Need for Speed games ahead of August online shutdown

2 years 9 months ago

EA has pulled five Need for Speed games from sale ahead of an August shutdown of online services.

On 31st May, EA announced the removal of Need for Speed Carbon (2006), Need for Speed Undercover (2008), Need for Speed Shift (2009), Need for Speed Shift 2: Unleashed (2011) and Need for Speed The Run (2011) from digital storefronts. In-game stores have also closed.

EA said this move, which was announced and implemented on the same day, is in "preparation" for the "retirement" of the online services for these games, which is set for 31st August. Until then, you can still play and race your friends online. But from 1st September onwards, you can play offline only.

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Masterpieces of Streaming

2 years 9 months ago
Illustration by Ricky Linn

The Wizard of Oz premiered in 1939 to box office success, earned re-releases in 1949 and 1955, then premiered to an audience of 45 million in 1956. Scholars agree the staggering viewership was the moment the Technicolor musical became a classic.

Today, 45 million people make a genius work of short form video go viral, discover an off-the-radar Netflix movie on their own time, or watch 10 episodes of a TV series in an entire week, even if the show’s only destined for three seasons. In the Streaming Age, where “content” is king, we still mint classics, but it’s easy to mistake the high points as ephemera.

Polygon’s new series, “The Masterpieces of Streaming,” pins down the movies, series, and the video creations that have been forged in an...

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Author
Polygon Staff

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The video essays that spawned an entire YouTube genre

2 years 9 months ago

Polygon’s latest series, The Masterpieces of Streaming, looks at the new batch of classics that have emerged from an evolving era of entertainment.

Like every medium before it, “video essays” on YouTube had a long road of production before being taken seriously. Film was undervalued in favor of literature, TV was undervalued in favor of film, and YouTube was undervalued in favor of TV. In over 10 years of video essays, though, there are some that stand out as landmarks of the form,...

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Author
Wil Williams

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The cinematic triumphs of Vine

2 years 9 months ago

Polygon’s latest series, The Masterpieces of Streaming, looks at the new batch of classics that have emerged from an evolving era of entertainment.

When Vine first launched in 2013, people were immediately intrigued by the concept of a video sharing platform containing endlessly looping six-second videos. Yet with videos being restricted to such a short timespan, how much substance could each one actually contain? That constraint ended up being one of the platform’s greatest strengths....

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Author
Bonnie Qu

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The greatest achievements in Dumb Internet Video

2 years 9 months ago

Polygon’s latest series, The Masterpieces of Streaming, looks at the new batch of classics that have emerged from an evolving era of entertainment.

The genre of “Dumb Internet Video” has evolved considerably since connection speeds became fast enough for file-sharing. For a long time, online videos were something special — uploaded to archaic file-sharing sites or hosted as Flash animations or passed around message boards as very early-stage YouTube links.

Then, suddenly, there were tons of...

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Author
Ryan Broderick

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The great binge-watches of the streaming era

2 years 9 months ago

The idea of marathoning TV shows existed before the advent of streaming, but Netflix turned it into a moel. Though the term began popping up in the 1990s, the streaming service popularized “binge-watching” in 2013 once Netflix rebranded from a TV-on-DVD mail service to a platform producing original content. In the years since, this model has changed not only the way we as consumers and fans watch television, but arguably also how it’s created and written. More and more shows feel designed...

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Author
Kaitlin Thomas

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Can the Streaming Age deliver a genuine classic?

2 years 9 months ago

Cinema is a religion to its most devout adherents, and the movie theater is its church. Whether in the reverent silence of an arthouse cathedral or the vocally participatory Friday-night popcorn sermons of the neighborhood cineplex, something about the communal element intensifies the experience of worship. One can observe around the house, the post-dinner living-room screening equivalent to saying grace, but it’s still a holdover between spiritual replenishments at a dedicated temple. The...

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Author
Charles Bramesco

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The 50 great films of the streaming era

2 years 9 months ago

The nice thing about streaming video is that there’s a lot of it, forever eliminating the cable TV era’s complaint of nothing being on. The daunting, demoralizing, anxiety-producing thing about streaming video is also that there’s a lot of it.

With major platforms losing waves of new movies and hour-gobbling series at a weekly clip, it’s nearly impossible to even be aware of everything new to the various online libraries, nevermind watching it. Every media outlet under the sun has dedicated...

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Author
Charles Bramesco

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Battlefield 6 Reveal Set For Next Week Ahead Of E3 2021

2 years 9 months ago

There have been so many rumors about what the Battlefield 6 experience will have to offer, but now that we're in the thick of E3 2021? It's time to find out for ourselves. Our first look at Battlefield 6 is set for next week, confirming and denying what's been hot on the latest rumor mill.

The official Battlefield Twitter account shared a small animated teaser for the reveal planned for next Wednesday: 

Our official first look, beyond the leaks and rumors, will kick off on June 9. In the small teaser video above, you can see the Battlefield 6 name glitch into existence with its high-tech aesthetic. The visual appeal of the teaser does fall in line with many of the rumors out there, including previous footage leaks that seemingly confirmed a return to a modern-day storyline. 

Author
Liana Ruppert

Giveaway: Godzilla Vs. Kong Digital Movie

2 years 9 months ago

From the Studio: Legends collide as Godzilla and Kong clash in a spectacular battle for the ages. As Monarch embarks on a perilous mission into uncharted terrain, unearthing clues to the Titans’ very origins, a human conspiracy threatens to wipe the creatures, both good and bad, from the face of the earth forever. 

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While it is available for purchase on digital now, we have 10 Godzilla Vs. Kong digital movies to give away, all you need to do is enter below by 6/14/2021 for your chance to win one. You can enter once per day via some methods below. Winners will be selected by random drawing from all eligible entries on or after 6/15/2021 and digital codes will be sent via email. Godzilla Vs. Kong is rated PG-13. NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Must be a legal resident of the U.S. age 13 or older to redeem movie code. Full rules available with each entry method below. Good Luck!

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Game Informer Contests