Capcom celebrated its 40th anniversary by shelling out the big bucks for the grand finale in the world premiere extravaganza that was this year’s Game Awards, debuting Monster Hunter Wilds to the world. The new trailer offers a 90-second glimpse into an open but perilous world.
No Rest for the Wicked is a new action role-playing game from Moon Studios, the developer behind Ori and the Blind Forest.
Announced tonight at The Game Awards, the project features a darker and more realistic visual design than the rather cute visuals of Ori. It'll launch via early access on Steam in the first quarter of 2024, then at some point later on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
More details will be announced in March during a showcase set to delve deeper into the game and its mechanics.
The Game Awards are packed with eager looks at highly anticipated games, but the ceremony is full of plenty of surprises too. One of them is a flashy Metroidvania called Tales of Kenzera: Zau, the debut game from Surgent Studios.
Zau is a boy on a quest to bring his father back from the dead. Guided by Kalunga, the God of Death, he uses his ability as a warrior shaman to defeat the ancestral spirits that roam the land of Kenzera. His main tools are a pair of magical masks; with the Moon mask he can manipulate time and crystalize enemies, and the Sun mask allows him to launch fiery spears. Studio founder Abubakar Salim says that the two masks are reminiscent of the Devil May Cry series with the way they allow the player to flip between ranged and melee modes.
Tonight during The Game Awards, Capcom revealed Monster Hunter: Wilds – the next tentpole title in the Monster Hunter series. The game is expected to be released on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC sometime in 2025.
The trailer shows off a slew of gameplay, including traversal and combat, as well as plenty of looks at its vast, vast world. Check it out below:
Wilds is the follow-up to 2018's Monster Hunter: World, Capcom's best-selling game.
Alan Wake 2's previously promised New Game Plus mode will arrive across platforms later this month, on Monday 11th December.
It is called The Final Draft, and will see the introduction of a harder difficulty mode known as Nightmare and a new ending for players to experience. A completed playthrough of Alan Wake 2 is required before New Game Plus can be accessed, as to be expected.
As already confirmed, players will still have all their previously unlocked weapons and upgrades to hand when they return to the game, as this is all retained in Alan Wake 2's New Game Plus.
Final Fantasy XVI may not have gotten a Game of the Year nomination (much to the chagrin of some Kotaku readers) at the 2023 Game Awards, but it did get shoutouts in the Best Role-Playing Game, Narrative, Music, and Performance categories. While it won’t be going home with the biggest trophy in hand, it did walk away…
The first part of Final Fantasy 16's DLC is out tonight: Echoes of the Fallen.
Game director Naoki Yoshida announced in September paid DLC was being developed (after initially stating the game was a "one-off", and then later hinting he was "thinking about" options).
Echoes of the Fallen is the first part of two DLC expansions. It will be followed by The Rising Tide in spring 2024, which will include the Eikon Leviathan as speculated by players, as well as a terrifying-looking Tonberry King.
How do you follow-up a game that attempts to simulate an entire universe for your exploratory enjoyment? Hello Games has just answered that very question with the reveal of its next title, Light No Fire, a co-operative adventure set on a procedurally generated fantasy planet.
Specifics are limited at present, but Hello describes Light No Fire as a game about "adventure, building, survival and exploration together" set on an ancient fantasy planet the size of Earth, that "brings the depth of a role playing game to the freedom of a survival sandbox".
The planet itself is procedurally generated, offering a "truly open world, with no boundaries at a scale never attempted before", consisting of "immersive biomes, unique enemies and valuable resources to discover". It's all inspired by classic fantasy - "lore, mystery, and a constant fight for survival" are promised - and it'll see players teaming up to "carve a life together", exploring and surviving, constructing persistent buildings and communities, and more.
Destructive, team-based multiplayer shooter The Finals has launched. The release was announced during this evening's Game Awards, but has been long expected. The Finals had a successful open beta last month, after which it became the most wishlisted game on Steam.
Hot new multiplayer shooter The Finals has surprised-dropped and is available right now on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X. The announcement came during The Game Awards moments ago.
The Finals is a free-to-play game so there's nothing to pay up front until you want to buy cosmetics or the Battle Pass, the first season of which obviously begins today.
I played a pre-launch build of The Finals last week ahead of today's surprise-drop. New in it was the Las Vegas casino level, which brings the total launch map-count to four. In Vegas you'll find huge casino buildings to play around in and on top of, and there are sandstorms and traps and tripwires to mix things up.
Nexon and Neople have announced The First Berserker: Khazan, a single-player action RPG from the Dungeon & Fighter universe. I’m not familiar with DNF, but going by The First Berserker’s trailer, it’s all about exceedingly grimdark blokes beating the paste out of each other. In this instalment, you play a once-proud general of the Pell Los Empire, who has been falsely accused of treason and sent into exile. He’s pretty miffed about this! Berserk, even.
After recently being delayed to late 2024, Focus Entertainment and Saber Interactive have been toying with our emotions over the last few weeks over whether or not they'll reveal an actual release date for Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2. Well, you can set your heart at ease. You might have missed its brief 30-second reveal during tonight's Game Awards, but at long last, we have a date.
Move over, Henry Cavill. Your time as PC gaming's celebrity uber nerd is under threat. There's a new faction leader in town and he's coming to take your RTS lunch money when Stormgate - the very Starcraft 2-looking strategy game that's being made by ex-Starcraft 2 devs - launches into Steam Early Access in summer 2024. Yep, it's Shang-Chi actor Simu Liu, who took to the stage at tonight's Game Awards to announce he's not only a dab hand at Starcraft (handy), but that he's also the voice of its demonic Infernal Host chief, Warz. Yes, they actually named him Warz. Never changes, does it?
Hello Games have announced Light No Fire, the Guildford, UK-based developer's most ambitious new game since 2016's space sim No Man's Sky. In development for roughly five years so far, it's an exploration-driven fantasy experience with building mechanics, a range of curious mythological creatures, and a procedurally generated open world that is apparently Earth-like in both geography and scale. Hello have just screened a trailer at this year's Game Awards. Earlier this week, they invited me down to their Guildford offices for a quick, informal chat about the game, which I am going to characterise as Fable meets Microsoft Flight Simulator.
The First Descendant is a free-to-play looter shooter from Nexon. There have been beta sessions before now, but the game is getting a full, proper launch next Summer. The exact date is up in the air still, but according to a blog post from the developers, it will be announced as soon as they can pin it down. Check out the latest trailer below.
In The First Descendant, you play as, you guessed, Descendants – a group of unique characters that each have distinct abilities and movesets. Your goal is to defend the planet from invaders called Colossi using the game's third-person shooting and RPG mechanics. The new trailer gives us a cinematic look at one of those fights, this time showcasing an entirely new Descendant.
There's no gameplay in this trailer, but the team assures fans that they're working to refine said gameplay, based on feedback from the nearly two million players who checked out their last open beta session. The main purpose of that beta was to test crossplay features, which makes sense, since the game is launching on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC. Check it out for free when it launches simultaneously on all of those platforms in Summer 2024.
Developer Sharkmob, makers of the battle royale Vampire: The Masquerade- Bloodhunt, have revealed a new open-world extraction shooter called Exoborne.
The game is a tactical shooter set in an apocalyptic Earth that is being torn asunder by extreme forces of nature, such as massive tornadoes and lightning storms. These calamities were somehow caused by the failure of a mysterious program called Project Rebirth, and now players find themselves fighting for survival in an environmentally unstable southwestern U.S. You play as a Reborn, a survivor outfitted in enhanced suits called Exo-Rigs with special weapons and augment your abilities to survive the myriad of threats, both human and elemental. Check out the cinematic trailer below.
Exoborne drops players into a shared open world where, either alone or in a party of allies, they will scavenge for resources and extract them while fending off other players. The Exo-Rig bestows special abilities, such as the ability to leap very high, and comes outfitted with a grappling hook and even a parachute, which players can use to engage in aerial combat or even ride maelstroms (think Just Cause).
Ten years ago, at Geoff Keighley's awards show (then known as the VGX Awards), the development team at Hello Games revealed No Man's Sky. The ambitious space-exploration title promised a universe of possibilities and has since become the poster child for bouncing back from a challenging launch period.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first teaser trailer, Sean Murray and Hello Games returned to Geoff Keighley's stage, now called The Game Awards, to give a brief retrospective and tease what's next. After a rundown of the last 10 years of active development of No Man's Sky, including several free updates, improvements, and expansions, the trailer teases big plans for 2024, with something that appears to involve more intricate space stations within the game.
Check out the No Man's Sky 10-Year Anniversary Trailer for yourself below:
No Man's Sky was released in 2016 to mixed reviews but received myriad updates and improvements in the years since, delivering something beyond what was even promised in the lead-up to launch. Today, it is widely praised by critics and fans and is put forward as the foremost model for how to improve a game after a rocky launch.
During TGA 2023, HoYoVerse revealed a new trailer teasing Penacony, which is the next stop for the Astral Express in Honkai: Star Rail, and it also showed the two new characters Black Swan and Acheron.
You can watch the trailer here. Black Swan features more prominently in this Honkai: Star Rail footage, however Acheron does make an appearance at the very end. We get to hear the voice acting for both of these newcomers.
Payday 3 might've failed to wow, but there's reason for heist fans to remain cheerful: GTFO studio 10 Chamber - which was co-founded by Payday 1 and 2 veterans including designer Ulf Andersson - has announced Den of Wolves, a sci-fi take on the Payday formula.
Den of Wolves (which was teased back in August) got its formal unveiling at this year's The Game Awards via an enigmatic reveal trailer, but I had the opportunity to spent some time with 10 Chambers co-founder and narrative director Simon Viklund ahead of the show, to learn a little more about the studio's plans for the project.
With development on 10 Chambers' debut game, acclaimed hardcore sci-fi shooter GTFO, formally at an end with the release of today's The Final Chapter update, the studio's focus is now on to Den of Wolves, which Viklund describes as a continuation and evolution of the mechanics seen in Payday: The Heist and Payday 2. It's a project that came about because the team felt there was still "untapped potential in the heist genre" - and because it was desperately keen to escape the oppressive squalor of GTFO's corridors for airier climes.
Development on 10 Chambers' rock-hard co-op horror shooter GTFO is officially coming to an end today after three years of robust post-launch support with one last update, the appropriately titled The Final Chapter.
GTFO - which sends teams of up to four players on regular expeditions deep into the bowels of a vast underground complex overrun by terrifying creatures - got its version 1.0 release back in December 2019 after two years of early access. It's essentially been run as a live-service-style title since then (albeit without any live-service-style monetisation), adding a succession of time-limited story missions, maps, and other content.
10 Chambers announced a change in its update strategy last December that would see it reinstate all Rundowns (as the limited-time events were known) so that players have permanent access to all previous story content - equating to over 80 expeditions - and today's Final Chapter update means GTFO now officially has a beginning, middle, and end.
Following the fascinating and horrifying co-op shooter GTFO, developers 10 Chambers today announced their second game, a cooperative sci-fi heist 'em up named Den Of Wolves. Expect corporate espionage, sabotage, assassinations, and more in a futuristic island city. Oh, and meat computers? Lovely. Learn more in the announcement trailer, below.
During The Game Awards 2023, Bethesda Softworks and Marvel Games have revealed that Arkane Studios is developing Marvel's Blade. No consoles were announced for the game at this time.
Arkane Lyon, known for developing Deathloop and Dishonored, will be working on a new single-player game based on the comic book character Blade to commemorate the character's 50th anniversary. Marvel's Blade will be set in Paris, France, and will have an original story not based on any specific comic book run. In the game's story, players will be greeted with a supernatural emergency where Paris has been quarantined to protect them from vampires that are terrorizing the city in the night. Residents of Paris must survive until sunrise or risk being attacked by their vampire invaders.
Dinga Bakaba will serve as the game's director. Sebastien Mitton will be the art director and co-creative on the project.
The announcement trailer for Marvel's Blade can be viewed below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=basLDO2bj2k&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.marvel.com%2F&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE&feature=emb_title
Skull And Bones was initially meant to launch in the autumn of 2018, but it's been delayed and delayed, rebooted and delayed some more. Its most recent slip was from November of this year into 2024, but Ubisoft have now put a new specific date on their multiplayer pirate 'em up: February 16th, 2024.
I have absolutely no room in my life for another live service looter shooter but if it has grappling hooks, well, maybe I will install it for a wee look-see. I'm only human. Summer 2024 is when we'll all get to play The First Descendant, makers Nexon announced today during Geoff Keighley's Big Flick Through The Argos Catalogue. The news comes via a new cinematic trailer showing more of the sci-fantasy setting and, yes, a grappling hook.
At The Game Awards 2023, HoYoVerse offered another look at Zenless Zone Zero with a new trailer. This time, the focus was again on Victoria Housekeeping characters and gameplay, but it also confirmed a 2024 launch window.
Here's the latest video. It seems as though the group of characters from Victoria Housekeeping are facing a boss in this footage. It shows off an array of different types of attack people can use in a fight.
Fans couldn’t believe it when Bandai Namco teased that a new Budokai Tenkaichi fighting game was in the works. We now know it’s called Dragon Ball Sparking Zero and it looks like something players who have been waiting almost two decades can get excited about.
After the disastrous launch of Redfall, you'd have thought that immersive sim experts Arkane would have wanted to bust open the curtains and stay as far away from vampire games as physically possible. And yet here we are, with tonight's Game Awards reveal that they're making a Marvel Blade game. What are the chances? Will this second bite at making a (hopefully good this time) vampire game be the one? It's still early on in development, from the sounds of things, but here's the reveal trailer.
Last Sentinel is a new triple-A open-world game announced at The Game Awards from Lightspeed LA, a Tencent-owned US-based developer. Lightspeed is led by Steve Martin, who previously worked on Rockstar Games and Electronic Arts.
The game was shown off via a cinematic trailer where a young girl and her ostensible cyborg mother are under attack before being saved by a motorcycle-riding hero. The trailer ends by panning up to show a massive cyberpunk city.
No release information was given.
Life Is Strange superstars Don't Nod are once again returning to spooky happenings amongst teenage girls, though this time in retrospect. In Geoff Keighley's Advert Amphitheatre today they announced Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, a new spooky story about young friends who encountered something strange in the summer of 1995 then became very much not friends for decades after. It looks interesting! Check out the announcement trailer.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has an all-new theme song written by series composer Nobuo Uematsu.
The song was performed at The Game Awards along with new footage of the game, though below is the official trailer with even more footage - most importantly including a look at the chainsmoking Cid, as well as summons Titan, Bahamut Arisen, and Phoenix for the first time.
There's also lots of Zack, a better look at the Gold Saucer, and nods to familiar scenes from the game - including that moment.
Arkane has announced that it's jumping into the Marvel universe by announcing a video game based on Blade.
The title, aptly named Marvel's Blade, is coming from Arkane Lyon, the team behind Deathloop and the Dishonored series, in collaboration with Marvel Games. Announced on Blade's 50th anniversary, the game is described as a single-player, mature-rated third-person action-adventure game set in Paris. The city has been plagued with vampires, so it's up to you to put a stop to it. Though it will feature plenty of action, it's described as a "very Arkane game", so fans should potentially expect it to have several of the studio's signature immersive sim hallmarks.
Marvel's Blade has no release date or platform.
During TGA 2023, it was announced that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth will appear in Apex Legends as part of an upcoming collaboration. It’ll start from January 9, 2024.
This announcement came at the end of the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth trailer that Square Enix showed. For the collaboration, we can see characters wielding iconic weapons from FFVII such as Cloud’s Buster Sword. There is also a key visual for the upcoming Apex Legends collaboration, which Nomura drew.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is an upcoming RPG that will serve as a sequel to Final Fantasy VII Remake. New characters that made an appearance in the new trailer include Vincent and Cid. As a reminder, you can watch the new trailer here:
It's official, dinosaurs are In again. Saber Interactive, Universal City Studios and Amblin Entertainment have unveiled Jurassic Park: Survival, a new first-person single player action-adventure based on Spielberg's 1993 monster movie starring a new character, InGen scientist Dr. Maya Joshi, who missed her chance to evacuate Isla Nublar alongside the movie's cast. Classic videogame origin story - the Hollywood actors surf off into the sunset, leaving your B-team protagonist to pick up the pieces.
A new game from Life is Strange developers Don't Nod was revealed at The Game Awards 2023, and it's called Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. It will be released in late 2024.
Here's the first trailer for the title. It starts with a flashback, showing a bunch of teenagers in a band.
The premise of Lost Records appears to build on Don't Nod's strengths, featuring a story centered on a group of teens encountering something supernatural. These teens are Swann, Nora, Autumn and Kat, who are in a band together. In 1995, they encounter a glowing crater in the woods. The trailer then skips ahead 27 years to reveal one of the cast as an adult, suggesting a game that skips between the two time periods.
Hoyoverse, the team behind Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail, has released a new trailer for its next game, Zenless Zone Zero. Unlike its other two games, Zenless Zone Zero puts players in a futuristic metropolis in control of various characters capable of fast-paced, stylish action.
Like Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail, Zenless Zone Zero features an anime-esque art style, with its characters and much of its world looking almost animated. This new trailer, which Hoyoverse revealed during The Game Awards 2023, showcases more of the game's narrative and its third-person action.
Check out the latest Zenless Zone Zero gameplay trailer for yourself below:
As you can see, Zenless Zone Zero is shaping up to be another great Hoyoverse game, and you don't have to wait too much longer to play it because it hits Android, iOS, and Windows PCs in 2024.
Are you going to check out Zenless Zone Zero next year? Let us know in the comments below!
Arkane Lyon is making a game featuring Marvel's Blade.
The half-human, half-vampire will star in a third-person action adventure from the studio behind Deathloop and Dishonored 2.
Tonight, via the The Game Awards, we got a stylish teaser trailer and word that the project is still early in development. There's no word on when we'll see it launch.
Skull and Bones, Ubisoft's beleaguered pirate adventure, finally has a release date.
It is set to arrive on 16th February, across PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. As is becoming custom, if you pre-order the premium edition, you will be able to play the game three days ahead of everyone else.
In addition, Ubisoft has announced (via Geoff Keighly) players can sign up for another closed beta. This will run between 15th and 18th December, on all platforms.
Announced tonight during The Game Awards, Arkane’s next game includes vampires, but it isn’t a Redfall sequel. Instead, the studio is making a Blade game that it says will be an “immersive third-person” adventure.