Tag Archives: Games

Halo Infinite will be released on December 8, but in the meantime, IGN has exclusive coverage of Master Chief’s spiritual reboot all month long as part of our editorial IGN First “cover story” initiative. That means we’ll be dropping exclusive content throughout the month of November (and yes, we’ve played the campaign – the first four hours of it), starting with today’s reveal of a brand-new Arena multiplayer map called ‘Streets’.

As you can see in the video above with me and lead multiplayer level designer Cayle George, Streets is a small, asymmetrical battleground set in New Mombasa at night. This immediately sets it apart, visually speaking, from the other Halo Infinite multiplayer maps we’ve seen in the test flights thus far. It’s got numerous subtle artistic touches, such as the “Holodog” advertisement, the retro-style Halo Infinite arcade cabinet that plays a MIDI version of the Halo theme, the skyline you can see in the background from certain vantage points on the map, and the glass railings that you can just smash right through. It’s a very fast map with short sightlines, and I really enjoyed it.

We did the above walkthrough video before we actually played the map competitively; we wanted to capture our actual first impressions of it when walking through it with George. Hilariously, after he politely ribbed me for bringing up CTF on this asymmetrical map, the very first gametype that came up in 343’s internal custom-games test hopper when we sat down to play it was…you guessed it, Capture the Flag. And it was really fun! So it certainly can be done, just don’t expect to see it in ranked playlists.

As to other multiplayer tidbits, we sat down with the 343 multiplayer team for over an hour. Among other things, we asked about whether or not we should expect any remakes of classic maps, as has become Halo tradition. “That question is something we actively talk about quite a bit,” said lead multiplayer designer Andrew Witts. “I think that what we’ve done with [the Big Team Battle map] Fragmentation is something we want; we want things to feel new, but we want things to be a bit reminiscent without giving you the exact same layout or the same layout with slight differences, because we’re a different game with different needs.” He cites Valhalla and its remake Ragnarok as influences for Fragmentation. “There are some maps that have been coming out in almost every single iteration of Halo. So I wouldn’t say we would never do a remake, but again, we’re doing a spiritual reboot, so we look at how we kind of put our own twist on it, but still make it feel like a little bit of a nostalgia trip when you kind of run through them.” George added, “We’ve tried the one-to-one ports. They don’t work well.”

Later in our discussion, we also learned that there are at least two more BTB maps that we haven’t seen yet, called ‘Deadlock’ and ‘High Power’, respectively. Multiplayer creative director Tom French described Deadlock as “very dramatic,” saying it feels very “classic Halo.” It has a “very different mood” than the rest of the maps, he told us. High Power, meanwhile, started out as a “test gym” for BTB. And, 343 says, “Test gyms never ship. At all.” But they told a story about doing a BTB playtest on the-map-that-would-eventually-be-known-as-High-Power, and the hooting and hollering was so loud from developers and testers having so much fun that they all looked at each other and asked, “Oh, is this a [real] map?”

We’ll have much more Halo Infinite as November rolls on, including a look at what awaits in Season 1 of the Battle Pass, an IGN Unfiltered conversation with Halo Infinite head of creative and longtime Bungie veteran Joseph Staten, our hands-on impressions from the first few hours of the campaign, and more – starting with raw, full-match gameplay of ‘Streets’ this Wednesday!

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

The Weird West is a brutal place to live. The prairie boomtowns are overrun with bloodthirsty outlaws, the vengeful undead are climbing out of their graves, and scheming witches are brewing dark magic on the outskirts of society. A heavy, dirgeful soundtrack follows the player everywhere as they cash in bounties, stave off the carnivorous wildlife, and stay one step ahead of everyone who wants to see them dead. In Wolfeye Studios’ debut game, everyone is a suspect and nobody should be trusted; good thing you always have your trusty revolver.

Wolfeye Studios is composed of former Arkane veterans, and unsurprisingly, Weird West is steeped in that ill-defined “immersive sim” subgenre emblematized by games like Dishonored and Prey. This is a top-down action-RPG with a huge swathe of incisive, interlocking systems — all working in unison to submerge the player in this perverse interpretation of the American frontier. Weird West has multiple protagonists, but I spent my time with the game under the guise of an amnesiac bounty hunter tracking down her missing husband. You navigate to each encounter by moving from point to point on an all-encompassing map of the backcountry. As players carve through the main quest, they’ll stumble into side quests, random encounters, and the occasional mysterious locale off the beaten track. My favorite of those was a band of mysterious cultists guarding a stone temple that seemed to hold some ancient, terrible secrets. It’s exactly what you want out of a single-player adventure set in a beguiling, eldritch universe; the feeling that there’s always another macabre layer of intrigue left to find.

The combat in Weird West is expressive, modular, and christened by the aforementioned Arkane tradition. I had plenty of fun pumping out lead in vintage, John Wayne-style shootouts; the game lets you swap out your entire arsenal on the fly, and packs an awesome bullet time feature that adds an extra bit of cinematic oomph to your coup de gras. But Wolfeye is clearly encouraging players to be more cerebral in their approach. Case in point: in one bandit stronghold I found a well that could be explored with the rope that happened to be sitting in my inventory. My character plunged into the depths, discovering some vital intel, good loot, and a perfect flanking position on my enemies. The alternative tactical pathways in Weird West aren’t always that comprehensive — sometimes we’re just detonating an oil barrel next to a target — but the game is at its best when it engages our Dungeons & Dragons logic. It took me forever to realize that you could drink water from the cacti out in the desert, restoring a small touch of health. I can’t wait to learn about everything else I’ve been overlooking.

Weird West doesn’t overburden the player with a progression system. You won’t spend hours staring at a character sheet redepositing talent points. Instead, I found troves of purple “Nimp Relics” on my journey, stashed away like Zelda chests, which could be spent to unlock a variety of special powers. Within a few hours of play, my bounty hunter could lay down shrapnel mines, fasten a silencer to her rifle, and chuck the bottles and crates she found lingering around the arenas at a terminal velocity. You also uncover the occasional Golden Ace of Spades that are cashed into a perk system for some more conventional bonuses — faster reload speeds, more max health, and so on. It’s possible to minmax out an impeccable build in Weird West, but thankfully, nobody will have to calculate any percentages.

Frankly, the only notable concern I have about Weird West is its optimization before its January 11 release date. The gunplay is visceral, but the controls could be a little tighter. A number of my firefights devolved into both sides circle-strafing around each other, waiting for someone’s health to drop to zero, which doesn’t encapsulate the high-minded tactical flair that Wolfeye is going for. I also experienced one hard-crash to desktop, and a hilarious bug in which a cowboy devolved into a horrible polygonal monstrosity after I knocked him out. Those issues will likely be ironed out when Weird West is in the public’s hands, and if Wolfeye pulls it off, players might finally have the occult, grimdark western we’ve all been waiting for.