The Legends of Runeterra Team on How the Game Has Evolved, the Path Ahead and More
Riot Games made quite a splash during its ten year anniversary celebration, announcing – among many other things - Legends of Runeterra, a CCG based on the League of Legends universe. As anyone who was able to go hands-on during its initial five day “Preview Patch” would likely attest, the game is impressive: clever gameplay mechanics, iconic champions, slick presentation, and some of the best art you’re going to find in the world of video games.
Now that Legends of Runeterra is offline again and the community is looking forward to the next Preview Patch in mid-November, it’s a good time to take a look at where the game has come from – it’s been in development for several years, after all - not to mention how it got to where it is now, and what’s coming up. To do that, I’ve pulled together an extensive set of quotes from the interviews I did with the development team ahead of the announcement.
EA Expects New Star Wars Game Before April 2022
EA is expecting to release a new Star Wars game before April 2022, while Dragon Age fans may have to wait until after March 2022 for the next entry in the franchise.
Niko Partners senior analyst Daniel Ahmad reported the news on Twitter that was revealed during EA's fiscal results for Q2 2020 call. He also noted that the news was "given somewhat off hand," so obviously nothing is yet set in stone.
HBO Max Won’t Prevent Password Sharing… For Now
As WarnerMedia reveals new details regarding the pricing/release date of HBO Max and the growing lineup of original content, the company is also revealing more about how it plans to tackle one of the more difficult problems facing streaming services - what to do about all the subscribers who share their passwords with friends and family?
The good news is that WarnerMedia seems to have no immediate plan of cracking down on password sharing, much less taking legal action against subscribers. The bad news is that the company is taking this practice into account and may start pricing the HBO Max service accordingly. Long story short - expect to start paying more if your password is being shared among several friends and family members.
Wonder Woman 1984: New Footage Shows a Battle at the White House
While the first trailer for Wonder Woman 1984 isn't arriving until December, WarnerMedia debuted a brief but tantalizing new glimpse of the movie at today's HBO Max presentation.
Unfortunately, there's no indication Warners will be releasing this footage online, but read on for a breakdown of what we saw during the presentation.
Much of the footage appears to be set in Washington DC. We see a shot of Diana and Steve Trevor walking in front of the Washington Monument. Diana is wearing a white, Greek goddess-inspired dress and reaches out to caress Steve's cheek. Her voice-over narration mourns, “I can almost see it, like a beautiful dream.”
Joker Will Be Available to Stream on HBO Max at Launch
HBO is going all-in on DC movies when it launches its streaming service HBO Max in May 2020. The company announced that Joker will be available to stream when HBO Max premieres, along with other DC hits like Aquaman and Shazam.
Joker, which was released earlier this year and has broken several box office records, will be available for streaming in May 2020 exclusively on HBO Max and HBO. This is part of a big push to make DC films a pillar of HBO Max. Along with new releases like Joker, Shazam, Aquaman, and Wonder Woman, HBO Max will include a huge library of Superman and Batman movies.
Live-Action Green-Lantern Series Coming to HBO Max
WarnerMedia has announced a new live-action Green Lantern series executive producer Greg Berlanti calls "our biggest DC show ever made." That Green Lantern project is one of three new DC Comics-based shows coming exclusively to the HBO Max streaming platform.
The news comes out of a presentation at WarnerMedia's HBO Max presentation. WarnerMedia has yet to reveal a name for the Green Lantern project, describing it only as a "Green Lantern inspired series." Whether that implies the series will deviate from the traditional Green Lantern mythology or focus on characters other than traditional protagonists like Hal Jordan or John Stewart remains to be seen.
HBO Max Acquires the Exclusive Streaming Rights to South Park
WarnerMedia has just announced that its upcoming HBO Max streaming service will be the exclusive streaming home for every season of South Park. Also, new episodes of South Park will be available on HBO Max 24 hours after they premiere on Comedy Central.
During today’s WarnerMedia Day presentation, HBO Max chief content officer Kevin Reilly announced a multi-year licensing deal between WarnerMedia and South Park Digital Studios. South Park's streaming rights were reported to have kicked off a competitive bidding war that valued the deal at around $500 million. Every episode of South Park will be available in June 2020, a month after HBO Max is set to launch in May 2020.
HBO Max Launch Date and Price Revealed
HBO Max finally has a firm release window. WarnerMedia has revealed that their streaming service will launch in the US in May 2020. HBO Max will cost a monthly subscription price of $14.99.
HBO Max will launch with approximately 10,000 hours of content, featuring a mix of original projects and a hefty lineup of library and acquired programming. Existing HBO customers will get access to HBO Max at no extra charge.
This news comes out of WarnerMedia's HBO Max presentation. Stay tuned to IGN for more news from the presentation, as WarnerMedia sheds more light on the original projects in the works for HBO Max. For now, here's everything we know that's coming to the service.
EA Won’t Release a Battlefield Game Next Year, Breaking Usual Cycle
In the company's earnings call Tuesday, EA announced that it will not release a new Battlefield game next year. This is the first time EA has broken the usual one-and-a-half to two-year cycle between Battlefield games since Battlefield: Bad Company.
Games industry analyst Daniel Ahmad of Niko Partners noted that EA confirmed it will release the next Battlefield game will ship in fiscal year 2022, which begins April 2021 and ends March 2022.
EA also confirmed that Apex Legends would be its primary focus (as far as shooter games) for 2020. EA confirmed Apex Legends had reached 70 million players, with season 3 performing better than previous seasons. EA is planning on porting Apex Legends to mobile and "other" platforms, as well as making inroads with China's video game industry and esports industry.
WWE 2K20 Review: Botchamania
WWE 2K20 feels like a transitional entry in 2K's pro wrestling series. With longtime developer Yukes splitting from 2K in August this year, Visual Concepts took over sole development of the series after the two developers previously worked on the games together. The end result is a buggy mess of a game that takes several Big Show-sized steps backwards from its predecessor. It doesn't just lower the bar, it breaks it.
The problems begin with the sheer abundance of bugs and glitches found in almost every match and menu screen in 2K20--it borders on the absurd. I've seen superstars teleport across the ring and float in midair. Oftentimes objects will violently vibrate on the spot or sink into the floor. Characters have a tendency to get trapped inside the ropes, whereby their bodies will stretch and contort in ways the human body isn't supposed to. Sometimes wrestlers are invisible in cutscenes or duplicated in matches. Other times they'll completely stop moving, forcing you to restart the match over again. If you put a custom logo on your created wrestler, the game will crash whenever you try to start the MyCareer mode--this is something I frequently experienced and also has been widely reported as an issue. It will also crash if you try to create an arena, or during loading screens for no reason at all. Commentary will suddenly become fixated on talking about attacks to the core, even if you're hitting your opponent in the head, while every online match begins with around a minute of lag that's so bad the in-ring action resembles a slideshow.
Not all of these issues are entirely new considering the series has been riddled with glitches for a number of years now. But their pervasiveness is much more frequent in 2K20, with some kind of bug appearing in near enough every match if you're unlucky enough. Obviously, your mileage will vary when it comes to technical issues like this, but with the plethora of glitches lurking in every nook and cranny of 2K20, it's a matter of when you'll be afflicted and not if. Some of these glitches are hilarious, there's no denying that, but it doesn't take long before they lose their charm--even if they do add a goofy element of entertainment to matches that are painfully dull otherwise.
This is because the actual wrestling in 2K20 is significantly worse than it has been in previous years. The only new addition to gameplay is a reworking of the controls that makes it slightly less cumbersome to perform certain actions. Beyond this, the in-ring action is still overly-reliant on a binary reversal system and plodding combat. It's an acquired taste, for sure, and it's been solid enough in the past, but 2K20 undoes all of that goodwill by removing any semblance of the series' previous competence. Targeting and hitboxes are frequently terrible, resulting in numerous whiffs between both yourself and the AI, particularly when weapons are involved. The controls are unresponsive a lot of the time, and sometimes the reversal prompt will just refuse to appear. The AI will also occasionally forget it's in a wrestling match and stand still for 10 seconds at a time, or it will continuously run into things and wind up jogging on the spot until you bother to interrupt it. Some of the animations look good, but they're mostly stitched together with missing frames that just make everything feel slightly off. There's no real flow to the combat either, or any sense of hair-raising momentum. Matches are lifeless affairs that lack any sort of excitement, falling into the category of being either mind-numbingly boring or incredibly frustrating.
In terms of game modes, this year's MyCareer puts you in the laced-up wrestling boots of platonic best friends Tre and Red. The story begins with the pair reminiscing about their wrestling careers before they're inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, charting a course from high school to the main event of WrestleMania 2029 as they try to complete a literal to-do list of WWE dreams. The writing in MyCareer falls into a lot of the same pitfalls as modern WWE shows, presenting smug, unlikeable babyfaces that continually make poor decisions and lack any sort of depth or character development. Red is the angry hothead with lines like "I'm going to give your grandmother bed sores!", while Tre is an idiot who turns everything he says into a painful joke. Wrestling is inherently corny, but the writing in 2K20 is often insufferable, and its protagonists are impossible to care about.
The writing in MyCareer falls into a lot of the same pitfalls as modern WWE, presenting smug, unlikeable babyfaces that continually make poor decisions and lack any sort of depth or character development
MyCareer is at its best when you're interacting with current WWE superstars. Samoa Joe turns in an excellent performance as one of Tre's main rivals, and there's a delightful scene with Broken Matt Hardy when you're on a journey into the underworld to find the Undertaker. While the characters we see on TV each week are confined to the realms of reality, the writers on 2K20 are able to indulge in otherworldly fantasy elements and play around with the WWE's more eccentric personas. These moments are few and far between, though, and it takes far too long before you eventually reach the WWE. The first few hours of MyCareer are spent fighting on the indies in meaningless matches where the focus is entirely on Tre and Red and the inconsequential secrets they're hiding from each other, while the final act centers on Red's boring rivalry with her old school bully. The story's overlong and just drags for the vast majority of its runtime, making it a chore to play through.
Character progression is another sticking point in MyCareer, both in regards to customizing your characters and leveling them up. Almost every item included in 2K20's substantial creation suite--including hairstyles, attires, moves, taunts, and so on--is locked. The only way to gain access to all of this content is by praying to the RNG gods that you get what you want in loot boxes, or by buying each item outright for a considerable portion of your in-game currency. Thankfully, there's no real money involved, but structuring unlocks in this way is still a needless hassle that arbitrarily restricts your ability to create the kind of character you want to create--which is only exacerbated now that you have two characters to customize.
Leveling up each character isn't much better, either. At the outset you're asked to choose from a number of wrestling archetypes, such as luchador and technician, before gaining access to a mammoth skill tree. The problem with this is that the vast majority of said skill tree is hidden until you unlock an adjacent hex, making it impossible to plan out your character's build beyond the next few upgrades. Admittedly, this would be more annoying if improving your characters wasn't as unsatisfying as it is. The attributes you unlock provide such minuscule increases in your skills that they're almost imperceptible once you're out in the ring, to the point where I would go hours without bothering to level anyone up.
The other significant mode in 2K20 is Showcase Mode, which focuses on the Four Horsewomen of the WWE: Becky Lynch, Sasha Banks, Charlotte Flair, and Bayley. It explores how the four superstars ushered in WWE's women's revolution, focusing on the most important matches of their careers thus far, from the tremendous fatal-fourway between the four competitors at NXT Takeover: Rival, Sasha, and Bayley's redefining match at NXT Takeover: Brooklyn, and culminating with the main event of this year's WrestleMania between Becky, Charlotte, and Ronda Rousey. The video packages before each match are enjoyable if you have a fondness for these characters and those early days of NXT, even if the video quality is abysmal. But the matches themselves run into the same problems as the Showcase Modes of the past. During each match you're tasked with completing myriad objectives in order to recreate what actually happened to a certain degree. This results in some matches lasting upwards of half an hour, and with no mid-mission checkpoints, losing a match either because you were pinned, the AI was pinned, or because one of the glitches caused the game to break, is incredibly disheartening.
WWE 2K's annual release schedule has felt superfluous for a number of years now. This has never been more apparent than with WWE 2K20, a game that's not only riddled with frequent technical issues, but one that's notably worse than its predecessor in almost every area--whether it's the dull and unenjoyable combat, the fact half the roster look like terrifying goblin facsimiles of themselves, or MyCareer's obnoxious and tedious story. This is the moment the WWE 2K series hit Rock Bottom.