Month: March 2020

The director of the original Final Fantasy 7 and producer of the upcoming Final Fantasy 7 Remake has explained why Square Enix has opted to release the recreation project in episodic parts, rather than remake the entire game in one package. A new interview also reveals that there is a whole new upper floor added to the Shinra building.

Talking to the Square Enix blog, original director and remake producer Yoshinori Kitase explained that in order to replicate everything from the original game in the highest quality possible, without cutting content and also adding new elements, the game had to be over multiple entries.

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“In order to make [the entire game as a single release] work as a modern game, we wouldn’t be able to go for the highest visual quality and we’d also have to cut back on areas and scenes from the original,” he said. “Essentially, to make a single release viable the resulting game would have ended up being a digest of the original story, and we didn’t think that fans would be pleased with that.”

The first release in the remake project, which launches in April, contains the Midgar portion of the original game. By Kitase’s statements it should feature everything from the original rendered in new technology, plus some new zones to explore.

“There were a lot of parts in between sections of Midgar that were implied, but never seen,” said Kitase. “That was something that we wanted to address with Remake – to fill in all those gaps, show how the different parts of the city are connected, and make it a continuous experience.”

One of the bespoke areas in Remake is an entire new upper floor for the Shinra Building, which – according to Remake’s co-director Naoki Hamaguchi – adds “a climax that was not in the original.”

Interestingly, this upper floor apparently relies on Red XIII to explore, a character Square Enix has confirmed to be unplayable in this first game. “The key to navigating this floor lies in using Red XIII’s unique physical abilities to overcome environmental obstacles,” says Hamaguchi. “Letting the player experience his heroics in this way is something that I’m confident will please the fans.”

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That extra additional material also includes “endgame content”, although Hamaguchi refused to reveal what that is in the interview. It may be that optional bosses are available to fight, which are a staple in most Final Fantasy games.

For more, check out our hands-on preview of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, as well as our look at how the Sector 5 reactor has been changed, and how coronavirus may mean physical copies arrive later than planned.

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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer. You can follow him on Twitter. 

Missing football? So are we, but maybe we can help. If you need something to fill that pentagon laced spherical whole in your life then treat yourself to this full podcast series if you missed it first time around.

Some of us here at the IGN UK office spend more time than is healthy – both professionally and medically – talking about Football Manager. That’s why we’ve finally given into our desires and created a spin-off podcast all about the newest game in the series, Football Manager 2020. Join Cardy, Joe and Dale as they embark on a journey of a lifetime that covers most of the globe and all of your hearts.

Welcome to It’s Football Day, all about the greatest spreadsheets on this sweet Earth of ours. It’s also a tiny bit about Charlie Hunnam’s accent in Green Street. The saga awaits you:

Part 1: It’s Football Day: Episode 1

Part 2: It’s Football Day: Episode 2

Part 3: It’s Football Day: Episode 3

Part 4: It’s Football Day: Episode 4

Part 5: It’s Football Day: Episode 5

Part 6: It’s Football Day: Episode 6

Part 7: It’s Football Day: Episode 7

Part 8: It’s Football Day: Episode 8

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The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a huge number of changes to theatrical and home entertainment release schedules. Several movies have had their digital releases moved forward dramatically, and the latest title is the action sequel Bad Boys For Life.

The third movie in the Bad Boys series will now hit video-on-demand on March 31, with the 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD release following on April 21. The movie was released at the end of January, and following the standard 90 days window from when movies leave theaters, wouldn’t normally have arrived at home until May at the earliest. However, the coronavirus outbreak means that fans can watch it next week.

Bad Boys For Life, which stars Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, is the most successful movie released in the US so far this year, with a $204 million domestic gross. Admittedly, there hasn’t been much competition, given the only other big franchise movie, DC’s Birds of Prey, underperformed at the box office. But with virtually every other big movie that was due a spring and early summer release now postponed and millions of people isolating at home, Bad Boys For Life is likely to do extremely well on VOD.

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Nier: Automata director Yoko Taro’s mobile fairy tale role-playing game SinoAlice first launched in Japan back in 2017, and after being delayed from a planned 2019 launch, it’s finally going to launch worldwide.

SinoAlice will launch globally on July 1, and the pre-registration site is available for Google Play. The iOS registration will be available later, and players will get rewards based on the total number of registrations once the game launches. Rewards include extra events as well as a special spear.

As its title suggests, SinoAlice stars classic fairy tale character Alice along with Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Princess Kaguya, Sleeping Beauty, and several others. Despite the mostly child-appropriate inspiration, it’s a Yoko Taro game at heart, rife with violence and dark themes. It was also developed with composer Keiichi Okabe, a frequent Taro collaborator who also wrote the music for Nier: Automata. A sample of songs from the soundtrack is available on the game’s website.

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While you’re working to perfect your villager’s look in Animal Crossing: New Horizons for Switch, you can also update your own wardrobe with some appropriately themed T-shirts, long sleeves, and hoodies. Nintendo has added a bunch of cute new apparel to its Animal Crossing Amazon shop. Check out all of the best new items below, which are just a small sampling of the Animal Crossing-themed products you can buy to express your New Horizons love.

Also, if you’re just heading off on your island adventure, make sure to check out our eight crucial starting tips for New Horizons. We also have a checklist of things you should accomplish each day in the game, tips for making money fast, and more guides in GameSpot’s New Horizons hub. If you haven’t picked up New Horizons just yet or are unsure if you should, take a peek at our buying guide and review in progress.

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Endzone: A World Apart is a post-apocalyptic settlement building game from German developer Gentlymad Studios. The game is set 150 years after a nuclear apocalypse, setting the player up as the leader of a group sent to recolonize Earth after living in underground bunkers called Endzones.

The hostile management sim tasks players with building a new settlement on the radiation-ravaged Earth, gathering resources to sustain it and surviving threats including droughts, sandstorms, toxic rain, and the latent radioactivity lurking in the ground.

With radiation being key to the themes of the game, Endzone has an in-depth system to manage it. Each tile has its own radiation level, and these can change over time with events like sandstorms.

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On March 23, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds will officially be three years old, celebrating the anniversary of its 2017 beta release. While the battle royale market has become far more competitive since then, PUBG is still going strong with plans for updates, reworks, and new content in its fourth year.

In a blog post, the PUBG team has commemorated all the work that’s been done on the game in the past year, and gives us some idea of what to look forward to in the coming year..

First off the block is the re-worked Vikendi, the snow-covered map that was taken down earlier this year for renovations. The new version of the map, now featuring trains, has been play-tested in reduced circulation, and will be re-releasing again soon.

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Doom Eternal is off to a Hell of a good start, it seems. The game’s PC edition recorded almost 105,000 concurrent players on Steam recently after release. That’s a massive number, and to put it into further context, it’s more much higher than the reported all-time high concurrent player number for its predecessor, 2016’s Doom.

Benji Sales on Twitter crunched some numbers and reports that 105,000 concurrent players on Steam is far and away the biggest release for Bethesda in recent years. It surpasses peak concurrent player numbers on Steam for Doom 2016 (31,623), Dishonored 2 (22,269), Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (16,050), and The Evil Within 2 (9,846), according to Benji Sales’ numbers.

Steam’s own public statistics page shows Doom Eternal had more than 85,000 peak concurrent players on March 22, making it one of the top 15 most popular games on the service.

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