Month: January 2019

The stench of corruption permeates the streets of St. Denis. After a traumatic incident in Dirty Arty’s late adult life he decides to take up a life of crime fighting and clean up the streets of Red Dead Redemption 2 once and for all.

The Walking Dead returns to screens next month for the second half of Season 9, and a new teaser has been released. With Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan) having now left the series, this will be the first batch of episodes without them as main characters. However, the upcoming episodes will feature the arrival of villains that fans have been waiting a long time to see–The Whisperers.

The Whisperers wear the faces of the dead to blend in with zombies, and the new trailer gives us our first good look at them. There’s also a hint at the arrival of Samantha Morton, who will play the Whisperer leader Alpha. While we don’t see her, her daughter Lydia teases how scary she is. “My mom, you don’t mess with her,” she tells Darryl (Normal Reedus). Check the trailer out above.

In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Kang spoke about the upcoming conflict between The Whisperers and the show’s heroes. “It’s this amazing idea from the comics and we really delve deep into what that means,” she said. “It really takes a pretty brutal philosophy to believe that it’s not even worth trying to be something that approximates human in the way that we think of it.

“I think that really brings them right up against the things that our people are thinking about as they’re trying to rebuild something that’s like a civilization, and just the fact that this group just doesn’t even think any of that is worth preserving.”

Although Andrew Lincoln will no longer appear in the show, he is not finished with it entirely. In November it was announced that he will reprise his role as Rick in a Walking Dead movie. AMC is currently developing three spin-off films that the franchise’s chief content officer Scott Gimple described as “big, epic entertainments.”

A controversial bit of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey downloadable content will be changed in a future patch following a backlash from fans. Spoilers follow for the Shadow Heritage episode of Odyssey’s DLC.

At the end of the Shadow Heritage episode, your character has a child from a heterosexual relationship. Those who had spent hours playing their Kassandra or Alexios as LGBTQ–or simply not interested in relationships at all–felt forced into a plot development.

The backlash was enough to prompt an apology from Ubisoft, and now the company is taking it a step further. In a production update, the studio said that it will change a cutscene and dialogue choices for those who don’t want the storyline to go in that direction, and it will also change to the name of the associated trophy/achievement. All this will be coming in an upcoming patch, and Ubisoft is looking into the next episode, called Bloodline, to make sure that it doesn’t create a similar issue.

The bloodline aspect was the given reason for the controversial ending in the first place, as creative director Jonathan Dumont said that the idea was to show how “your character’s bloodline has a lasting impact on the Assassins.” At the same time, he acknowledged the problem.

“We want to extend an apology to players disappointed by a relationship your character partakes in,” he said. “Alexios/Kassandra realizing their own mortality and the sacrifice Leonidas and Myrrine made before them to keep their legacy alive, felt the desire and duty to preserve their important lineage. Our goal was to let players choose between a utilitarian view of ensuring your bloodline lived on or forming a romantic relationship. We attempted to distinguish between the two but could have done this more carefully as we were walking a narrow line between role-play choices and story, and the clarity and motivation for this decision was poorly executed.”

The LGBTQ organization GLAAD celebrated the move in a tweet, saying it is pleased with Ubisoft’s decision and that the change is “an important first step toward mitigating the damage done by the game’s latest DLC.”

While Assassin’s Creed Odyssey received a mostly positive reception, including in GameSpot’s review, the romance options were criticized as shallow.

“Romancing side characters is also possible in Odyssey. While some of these scenes can be amusing, they’re mostly just bizarre shows of affection that have no real purpose,” wrote critic Alessandro Fillari. “These scenes almost always result in a shallow aside during the conversation, with the characters slinking off-screen before returning to the conversation without skipping a beat. Most often, these awkward romance opportunities appear immediately after (or during) otherwise harrowing events. Aside from seeing some additional scenes with certain characters, there’s really no benefit to engaging in romance at all. The inclusion of these scenes feels cheap and can sully otherwise interesting conversations.”

Nintendo has provided an update on the state of Metroid Prime 4. In a video, senior managing executive officer Shinya Takahashi admitted that development of the game thus far hasn’t reached the standards the publisher wanted and the project has been rebooted. Additionally, Retro Studios, the Texas-based team that developed the three previous entries in the series, has been brought back to work on the sequel.

“Although this is very regrettable we must let you know that the current development progress has not reached the standards we seek in a sequel to Metroid Prime series,” Takahashi said. “Nintendo always strives for the highest quality in our games and in our development phase, we challenge ourselves and confront whether the game is living up to that quality on a daily basis.

“From this perspective, we have determined that the current development status of [Metroid Prime 4] is very challenged, and we had to make a difficult decision as a development team. We have decided to re-examine the development structure and change it.”

Takahashi went on to confirm Kensuke Tanabe, producer on the game, will work “in trust and collaboration with the studio that developed the original Metroid Prime series, Retro Studios … and restart development from the beginning.” This collaboration, he said, will allow Nintendo to make a sequel that will meet the expectations of fans.

Takahashi also attempted to reset some of these expectations, particularly around how soon people will be able to see and hear more about Metroid Prime 4. “This change will essentially mean restarting development from the beginning,” Takahashi reiterated, “So the completion of the game will be delayed from our initial internal plan.

“It will be a long road until the next time we will be able to update you on the development progress, and development time will be extensive. However, we will continue developing the game so that when it is completed, it will stand shoulder to shoulder with the past Metroid Prime series titles.”

Metroid Prime 4 was first announced at E3 2017, with a very short teaser that simply showed a logo and a message that read “Metroid Prime 4 – Now in development for Nintendo Switch.” Shortly after its reveal, it was confirmed that Retro did not have any involvement in the project. Reports later suggested that Bandai Namco was working on the game in some capacity. Bandai Namco has collaborated with Nintendo on multiple Smash Bros. games, but its involvement with Metroid Prime was never confirmed.

The return of Retro Studios will no doubt come as good news for fans of the Metroid Prime series. The team itself has changed somewhat since it was last working on Metroid, with key members of the Prime development team leaving to establish Armature Studio. Retro Studios has maintained a strong relationship with Nintendo, developing Mario Kart 7 for Nintendo 3DS and various Donkey Kong Country games for Wii, 3DS, Wii U, and Switch.