A new video detailing the Halo Infinite campaign has revealed brand new footage of the Master Chief's next mission, as well as an introduction to his new AI and some of the activities that can be completed.
Halo Infinite's campaign – which 343 Industries claims is the biggest Halo campaign to date – is set on the Zeta Halo, an open world Halo ring where the Banished, a splinter faction from the Covenant, led by the Brutes, have settled. They've been building outposts, which can be found on your travels and taken out, akin to similar outposts in open world games like Far Cry. In the video, we can see Chief finding an outpost – named Ransom Keep – and scanning it for weak points. He then uses a rocket launcher to detonate a large silo, suggesting each outpost may have different ways of shutting them down. This is part of 343's intention to offer "more freedom to take down the Banished".
This chapter of the Halo saga will see Master Chief working with a new AI companion, known as The Weapon. Following the events of Halo 5 and Cortana's defection, The Weapon has been created to answer the question of what happened to Chief's previous AI, and to lock her down. It seems like once again the relationship between Cortana and Chief will be in the spotlight for Halo Infinite.
Also seen in the trailer is a glimpse at the upgrades tree, which includes enhancements for Chief's new Grappleshot, as well as his Thrusters, Shield Core, Threat Sensor radar, and a Drop Wall shield. Those thursters can be used to quickly dodge out of the way of incoming attacks, while the Drop Wall shield functions akin to the Titan's shield wall from Destiny. An amusing moment shows off the Grappleshot, in which Chief grapples onto a Banshee midair to hijack it. It all looks very dynamic and wild.
We see a few new enemies, including the flying Skimmers, a new named villain called Jega 'Rdomnai who's said to be a sadistic Spartan killer, and something that calls itself the "Harbinger of Truth" and claims that the Forerunners were liars.
We also see a new Chief using a Wasp, the VTOL aircraft first introduced in Halo 5. The Wasp is summon from a vehicle station, and we see Chief also had the option of other classic vehicles such as the Mongoose.
If you, like me, played the Square Enix-published Marvel’s Avengers and said to yourself “I wish this had just focused on the single-player campaign instead of all this game-as-a-service stuff,” then do I have good news for you: Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, also published by Square Enix, has flown in to save the day. With no microtransactions, no multiplayer, and a relatively meaty story, it’s further proof that linear, single-player campaigns haven’t gone anywhere. Its simple but entertaining combat and fairly straightforward level design won’t revolutionize the genre or anything, but those solid fundamentals and the metric ton of personality slathered on top of them are more than enough to make Guardians of the Galaxy some good old-fashioned fun.
Despite being named after the team, you spend the entirety of this roughly 18-hour campaign playing as Peter Quill, AKA Star-Lord. That was a surprising choice to me, but it’s one that ends up working very well for the story that’s being told. The main plot is basically exactly what you’d expect: a cosmic comic book adventure about the Guardians trying to get out of debt, learning to work together, and maybe saving the galaxy along the way – but it’s framed by events that are much more personal to Peter. The result is an engaging story that balances its constant barrage of spectacle and banter with some genuinely heartfelt moments, for both Peter and the rest of the crew: Gamora, Drax, Rocket, and Groot.
While that story is also entirely linear, developer Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex roots certainly show through with the amount of dialogue choice you are given during it. You’re constantly handed options for how Peter will respond to different conversations, whether those are during important story moments or while walking around chatting with your teammates – there’s rarely a moment where the Guardians aren’t talking, which is welcome when the writing and performances are all as amusing as they are. These dialogue choices are mostly just a fun bit of role playing in an otherwise on-rails story, but some of them can have an unexpected impact.
For example, making the right dialogue choices to save a character at one point could have them come back to help you later on. Another time I made a choice that resulted in the next level being a simple stealth section, only to find out after finishing the story that choosing the other option would have instead turned the entire level into a massive firefight. The vast majority of this campaign will likely look very similar for everyone, but these little differences did add a personal touch to my playthrough and got me more interested in trying New Game Plus to see what else could have happened.
Your choices add a neat little personal touch to each playthrough.
It’s not just the story that’s played from Peter’s perspective, either: in combat you only have direct control of him and his dual pistols. Instead of swapping into the shoes of the other Guardians, they unlock a total of four abilities each which you can instruct them to use on command. That could be Groot sending out roots to bind up enemies or Gamora dealing a massive amount of damage to a single target. This system gives you a lot of options at any given moment, and the pace at which they are rolled out and the intuitive way they are mapped to your controller makes it a rewardingly manageable task to juggle mid-fight.
Peter has a few tricks too, of course. He’ll get four powers of his own, one of which is the ability to activate his jet boots and fly for a short time, and four different types of elemental shots that can do stuff like freeze or burn baddies alongside his regular laser blasts. Combat is a lot of fun thanks to that variety of options, even if it isn’t exactly the deepest or most complicated dance I’ve ever taken part in. Between giving orders to your fellow Guardians, you’ll mostly be holding the left trigger to lock on to an enemy and the right trigger to unleash a fire hose of lasers. A simple active-reload system will reward you with extra damage and keep you paying attention, but for the most part you’re gonna be holding down that right trigger a lot.
Even still, combat never stopped being enjoyable for the entire campaign. That’s partially thanks to the enemy design, which is varied enough that you’re pushed to use different elemental attacks to exploit weaknesses or remove shields, as well as bigger enemies that can be staggered by certain abilities. Your teammates all have different roles they fill too – Gamora’s abilities generally have high damage, Drax is more about stagger, Rocket has the best AOE, and Groot can bind targets. It’s good that their abilities feel impactful, too, because apart from them you’ll be doing nearly all of the damage yourself; your teammates’ auto-attacks deal about as much damage as an aggressive massage.
Another thing that keeps combat fresh throughout is the banter. Seriously, there is so much voiced dialogue in this game, and the interplay between each team member is both entertaining and informative, in that you see their relationships evolve throughout the story. There were undoubtedly moments where I’d hear the same line yelled a few too many times, but on the whole there’s an impressive variety to all these barks. That meant overly similar fights could still be lent new appeal based on their context or the conversations that take place during them.
Dialogue choice is even brought directly into combat with a super move called The Huddle. When activated (which can be done accidentally a little too easily by pressing L1 and R1 at the same time), Peter gathers everyone around to talk about the fight, and then you have to choose a pep talk response based on the things they’ve said to earn a buff. It will also play one of Guardians of the Galaxy’s many licensed ‘80s songs for the duration of the buff, which can either be exciting or hysterical depending on the result. Fighting a giant alien squid boss while “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” by Wang Chung played has got to be one of the most absurdly joyous moments I’ve had in a game all year, while having Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” unexpectedly come on during a climactic endgame encounter was a different sort of hilarious.
Combat isn't the deepest, but it also never stopped being fun.
Between the fights and cutscenes you’ll make your way through Guardians of the Galaxy’s varied locations, which range from Nova Corp space ships to gorgeous alien worlds. Like the story itself, these sections are extremely linear paths with an occasional environmental puzzle to solve or optional collectible to find, broken up by fights in more open arenas. And similar to the combat, they stay entertaining the whole way through more thanks to the banter and visual variety rather than being especially deep or engaging on their own.
You’ll occasionally need to command your teammates here, too, potentially asking Rocket to hack a terminal or Drax to carry something big and heavy from one spot to another. That can make for some extremely simple but still relatively amusing puzzle solving as you figure out the right way to combine different abilities. Having your team around also adds a little more liveliness to these paths, with them wandering off to look at things on their own or standing around bored while you go search a side route – their presence also helps solve that completionist problem of knowing whether a path is the right way or the “wrong” way full of goodies, since they’ll usually move toward to the next main path on their own and make comments when you head off in search of loot.
The collectibles you’ll nab are either crafting currency used to upgrade Peter’s capabilities, cosmetic costumes for different team members to wear (all of which are cooler than a recolor, full of new outfits and throwback references alike), written logs for a bit of story flavor, or special items that unlock new conversations when you are hanging out back on your ship between chapters. It was always rewarding to collect these things, even if the side paths were often just as easy to find and navigate as the main ones. The only real complaint here is that crafting currency is so prevalent that it starts to become a bit tedious to pick up, but that’s probably primarily due to the unfortunate lack of a sprint button.
Continuing the overall trend, the upgrade system itself is also something that stays satisfying and enjoyable till the very end, even if it can be a little flat at times. Completing fights earns you ability points to unlock new powers, while crafting currency can be spent on any of 15 different perks that are available to unlock right from the start. Having everything on the table right away is nice because it means you get to prioritize the upgrades you want in the order you want them, but it also means there aren’t really any surprises as the campaign progresses. But even without that, I enjoyed that perks felt significant – only some of them are pure stat increases, while most unlock new moves like a dash punch or time slowing for a moment when you dodge at the last second.
As a final note, it’s worth mentioning that I did encounter a handful of bugs throughout my playtime on PlayStation 5. Apart from two hard crashes nothing was too dramatic, and Square Enix has said that a number of the issues I encountered will be fixed by release. That said, I did find my progress impeded a couple of times due to an event not triggering correctly or a button prompt breaking, as well as some weird visual issues here and there like the adult Peter model being horrifically squished into childhood Peter’s frame for one scene. All it ever took was a quick checkpoint reload to sort things out, and the auto-save and checkpointing are so forgiving that even the worst issues never left me sour, but it’s not clear how much of that will be there on launch day.
A new Marvel Studios book chronicles the storied meeting that MCU boss Kevin Feige held with Sony chairperson Amy Pascal about Spider-Man's cinematic future.
One section of the 512-page story, transcribed by The Direct, details a conversation between Marvel boss Kevin Feige and Sony Motion Picture Group chairperson Amy Pascal in which Feige proposed the idea of Spider-Man joining the MCU, as Marvel had already established "a good sense of how they would like to handle the character" if given the opportunity.
"Pascal wasted no time in expressing her strong desire to have Feige be more directly involved, creatively, in the making of Sony Pictures' The Amazing Spider-Man 3. Excited about the ideas her team currently had, Pascal said she would send Feige the latest draft." an excerpt from the book reads, revealing Sony's own stance on Spider-Man's future.
Feige, however, came straight out and told Pascal that Sony's plans for The Amazing Spider-Man 3 were not going to work. He instead offered a counter-proposal and suggested that Marvel handle the next Spider-Man movie. Initially, the idea of the crossover deal evoked an emotional reaction from Pascal who appeared reluctant to hand the responsibility over.
"The only way I know how to do anything is to just do it entirely," Feige is believed to have said in his pitch, which seemingly caught Pascal off-guard. "So why don't you let us do it? Don't think of it as two studios. And don't think of it as giving another studio back the rights. No change of hands of rights. No change of hands of money. Just engage us to produce it."
"At first, I was super resentful," Pascal admits in the book. "I think I started crying and threw him out of my office, or threw a sandwich at him – I'm not sure which… By the fifth movie, we weren't giving them anything new. And I have to be honest about it, we were trying so hard to be different, we even went into places to be different that we shouldn't have."
Pascal's change of heart came when she realized that Sony's plans for Spider-Man were not fresh anymore. She noted that Feige had always shared a mutual love for the character and that he had presented some really smart ideas on what to do with Spider-Man in the MCU, having found a new direction to set up the next stage for Spider-Man's journey.
"Pascal called Feige back the next day after their lunch. The concept of a collaboration between Sony and Marvel Studios had not left her mind," the book recounts. "[Pascal] admits, 'The idea of putting him up against a world where everybody had everything and he had nothing was a whole new way of telling his story. I thought, 'Goddamn, that guy's smart.'"
As a result of that conversation, Tom Holland went on to make his Spider-Man debut in 2016's Captain America: Civil War before swinging into his first solo outing as a young Peter Parker/Spider-Man in 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming. He will be wall-crawling across our screens again in Spider-Man: No Way Home when that Phase 4 movie hits theaters this December.
A video that plays at the end of the recently launched The Dark Pictures: House of Ashes has revealed The Devil in Me, the "season one finale" of Supermassive Games ' The Dark Pictures Anthology. This reveals not only what the next game in the anthology will be, but that the series will be split into seasons.
The trailer, which can be seen in the Tweet from TheHunters above, reveals a grotesque tease of The Devil in Me, which appears to involve a killer creating a mechanised automaton from human body parts. This suggests that the next game in The Dark Pictures Anthology may be less supernatural than its three predecessors, which have all feature ghost/monster-type foes and themes. What we may be facing in this next game is something more in the realm of Saw, with a focus on a twisted human killer.
The trailer also states that The Devil in Me is the "season one finale". We already knew that The Dark Pictures would be made up of eight games, but it looks as if those eight will be split into at least two seasons. What this means for the next four episodes remains unclear, but it may be that the series has a longer break between the release of The Devil in Me, presumably in 2022, and the unknown fifth game.
You can currently save £10 on Pokemon Shining Pearl and Brilliant Diamond preorders at Amazon, bringing the price down to just £49.99. This also includes the Palkia and Dialga figurines, limited to those who preorder before the November 19 release date.
You can also preorder Pokemon Legends Arceus right now for £49.99, getting with it the incredible Pokeball cartridge preorder bonus. Halo Infinite's campaign is also getting a brand new gameplay overview today, and you can preorder the Collector's Steelbook Edition for £54.99 right now.
TL;DR – Best Deals
Save £10 on Pokemon Shining Pearl and Brilliant Diamond Preorders
