Forza Horizon 4 Announced
Playground Games and Microsoft have announced Forza Horizon 4, which is set for release worldwide on the Xbox One and Windows 10 PC, and as part of Xbox's Game Pass subscription service, on Oct. 2.
Featuring over 450 cars, Forza Horizon 4 features a shared open world with an open-ended campaign — according to Playground, "everything you do progresses your game." FH4 features dynamic seasons, so players will have to contend with driving in dry, snowy, muddy, wet, and icy conditions, all while racing throughout "beautiful, historic Britain."
Playground showed off the dynamic seasons with a lake, completely frozen during the winter, and also completely drivable. The lake was one example of how the "world changes with the seasons."
Sea of Thieves Gets Two New Expansions
Sea of Thieves players now have two more adventures on the horizon: Cursed Sails and Foresaken Shores.
Cursed Sails will come in July, with Foresaken Shores coming in September.
The announcement trailer teases the premise of the new expansions: "Skeleton crews will rise to curse the seas, an ancient evil set loose on the Sea of Thieves." The Forsaken Shores is “a place of darkness where fire and ash consume all."
This news comes on the heels of Sea of Thieves' first expansion, The Hungering Deep. The Hungering Deep introduced players to an adventuring group known as the Bilge Rats and more specifically Merrick, a bard who brushed with the unseen horror and lived to tell the tale. The Hungering Deep dropped on May 29.
Anthem Has No Romances, and That’s Just Fine
E3 began in earnest yesterday afternoon with the EA Play event, which meant a new and much more extensive look at BioWare’s sci-fi shooter, Anthem. Though the game definitely brought it on the gameplay level and talked a big game about its story, the most important question for many a BioWare fan was who they would be able to romance in this new IP.
The answer to that question came soon after thanks to the Game Informer cover reveal, and it turns out that it’s no one. There are no characters for the player to romance in Anthem, something that was an intentional design choice rather than something that was cut from the game proper.
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All the Kingdom Hearts 3 News From E3 2018 So Far
Nearly five years to the day since its announcement, the Kingdom Hearts III release date for PS4 and Xbox One has finally been revealed just ahead of E3 2018, while plenty of more KH3 info has come since the show's conferences began.
Square Enix will make Kingdom Hearts 3 available on the PS4 and Xbox One on January 29, 2019. It will be released five days earlier in Japan on Jan. 25, 2019. Kingdom Hearts 3 had previously been scheduled for 2018.
Franchise director Tetsuya Nomura apologized for the slightly delayed release date both at the concert and online.
"We’ve announced the release day for KINGDOM HEARTS III ahead of E3 at the KINGDOM HEARTS Orchestra -World Tour-. I’m sorry that we’re asking for a little more time than initially planned. Please look forward to other information, including a few trailers at E3. Thank you," a written statement on Twitter attributed to Nomura explained. The announcement came via the kickoff entry in the 2018 Kingdom Hearts Orchestra Tour.
EA Is Surprisingly Frank on Battlefront 2 and Anthem Loot Boxes
EA’s E3 2018 showcase might not have had a whole lot of surprise reveals, but it certainly had a very important message that permeated through the conference. At times, EA said and showed things that seemed to point towards a publisher and developer who has learned a lot of lessons from a very rough 2017, a lot of which is thanks to the controversy surrounding loot boxes and games as services. However, its silence in other portions, specifically when it came to sports games, sent a mixed message.
One of the defining news stories of 2017 revolved around the drama of Star Wars Battlefront 2, specifically its implementation of loot boxes and microtransactions. The road there was a long and strange one, filled with mixed messages and confusing rhetoric that ultimately came to a boil when the world got its hands on the beta in October 2017. And, of course, EA completely removed microtransactions for a period of time just hours before Battlefront 2 officially launched (after a week of negative reviews and feedback from early access for preorder customers).
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Anthem Will Not have PvP at Launch, Will Require Online Connection
Anthem will not have a player-vs-player mode at launch and will require an online connection to play, executive producer Mark Darrah confirmed on Twitter Saturday.
After EA debuted new gameplay footage of Anthem at its EA Play event, Darrah took to Twitter to answer fan questions.
“You need to be online to play,” Darrah answered to a Twitter user. When asked if Anthem would feature PvP modes, Darrah responded “no PvP at launch.”
The Rise of Streamed Gaming Is Video Games’ Scariest New Trend
This article was originally published during E3 2018 after several developers announced plans for a push toward streamed gaming. We are refreshing and republishing it now with the announcement of Google's streamed gaming platform, Stadia. Streamed gaming continues to be a growing topic, but the concerns expressed here a year ago are still as prevalent as ever.
Last year's E3 was full of signs pointing toward the coming rise of streamed gaming. EA announced a push toward it at its press conference, followed by Microsoft announcing similar plans of its own (which have been repeatedly backed up by rumors). Those both came hot on the heels of the very unexpected release of Resident Evil 7: Cloud Version, an exclusively streamed version of a game that assumedly wouldn’t have been able to run on the Switch’s hardware natively.
Anthem Will Not Feature Romances
A hallmark of BioWare games won't be making it into Anthem, as the developer confirmed there will be no romances in the game.
Revealed by GameInformer, lead producer Mike Gamble has said:
“There are no romances. There are friendships. Some of the stuff we did with Mass Effect – the Citadel DLC specifically – there was a lot of friendship moments. You and Garrus sitting up, shooting – that kind of stuff, we want to lean into that. The romantic stuff, we’re moving away from that for Anthem.”
There are relationships created in the course of the game, but they won't lead to romantic encounters as in Mass Effect and Dragon Age.