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Today was the press day at Gamescom, and the time when things begin to shift up a gear as far as reveals and presentations go.
One of Ubisoft’s reveals centred around a new expansion to their open-world racer game The Crew. Following on from their extreme sports-themed Wild Run expansion which brought motorbikes and more off-road events to the game, their latest expansion will be focusing on a different aspect of the game world – the police.
Calling All Units will add new cops vs racers gameplay, as well as bringing tweaked AI for the cops, increasing the level cap and the introduction of new vehicles to fit some of the new events. Apparently developed as a result of the community’s feedback, Ubisoft are going to be releasing the expansion November 29th.
“Racers have been owning the place until today – time to set the record straight! Join the cops and put an end to their supremacy in frantic, high-risk pursuits all over the USA.
Inspired by our community’s feedback, The Crew: Calling All Units includes a brand new Cops vs. Racers gameplay, retuned police AI, 10 extra levels, and of course a wide range of new vehicles.”
Tinybuild has had a large presence distributing indie games, as well as publishing their own games. Their time today at Gamescom 2016 was spent showing off a number of things.
First up was Clustertruck, a runner type game where you “jump on trucks and stay on trucks”. Various abilities are also available, including a grapple and teleport. Massive crashes and mayhem were also shown off. The game looked frantic as even the devs struggled to cross the finish line a few times using the double jump, jetpack and other items. It was fast paced and looked to be an interesting, and as a plus….it had lasers and a mode called “epic mode” which gives the screen black bars and epic music. For a small studio- Landfall Games only has 4 memebers- Clustertruck certainly looks impressive. Fans of creating their own levels will also be pleased to know the game has a level editor. According to the developers, Clustertruck will be released sometime in September.
*Landfall is also the studio working on Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, which was only shown briefly, but looks hilarious with googly eyed soldiers fighting it out.
“The Climb” is a VR game for oculus rift from Crytek that looks little better than a tech demo for what the oculus can do, as opposed to a fully-fledged title.
From what was shown the one of the challenges in the game is that certain hand holds in the game might be “dirty” at which point you will need to brush them off to clean them before being able to continue the climb or possibly having to climb in the dark. As it stands the game doesn’t seem massively appealing and the inclusion of “99 achievements” seems more of an afterthought as a bullet point for talking of the game, a very interesting addition would be doing a climb race versus friends.
You can check out the trailer from this years GamesCom here…
Among the games shown off today was Ubisoft’s combat simulator For Honor, one of many games that caught people’s attention just through the use of a brilliant looking trailer.
Among the things we discovered today is that the game is due to have a public alpha test next month. It’ll be starting on September 15th, and in order to be eligible for invites you need to sign-up at the site for the game at forhonorgame.com and then hope that you are chosen as one of the lucky people chosen for entrance into the alpha testing period.
About the game itself it is said that already they’ve been working on trying to make the game suit all types of playstyles to draw in the most players they can. There will be a campaign singleplayer as well as multiplayer and characters you play can learn new skills and tricks as you progress more. There will also be offered bonuses for people who pre-order, including some access to game before release.
The last big thing about the game was that it was revealed that For Honor would be coming out for Playstation 4, Xbox One and PC in the first few months of the next year. It’s due for release on February 14th 2017.
As part of Gamescom’s first set of livestreams, EA showed off a number of their properties and talked about some of the things we could expect to see from some of their biggest upcoming games.
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Among the games shown was the much anticipated followup to the Titanfall game, Titanfall 2. Through trailers and talk, we found out that Titanfall 2’s beta will take place over two weekends with the first taking place this very weekend. The betas will be deemed technical tests, in which Respawn will be trying to get as many people in as possible to stress and probably break the game so they can know what to fix. The beta will only be including people in both consoles though as we covered yesterday, unfortunately PC players will not be included in these tests.
The beta will only show off a small slice of the game, with two maps and two game modes – Bounty Hunt and Pilot vs Pilot – being available for the first beta; the second beta also adding on another game mode – Amped Hardpoint which is a slightly changed up version of the old Hardpoint game mode from the first game. There will also be two new titans available, Ion with a vortex shield and Scorch with the fire weapon.
If you’re looking to play in one of the betas, they’ll be taking place from August 19th to 21st and then the weekend after that, August 26th to 28th. Then the full game will be coming later on in the year in October.
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The other big game presented was of course Battlefield 1, set in the First World War and with battle taking place over land, sea and air. Again we had a trailer but a lot of the talk was around the different modes of battle (horses, tanks, planes are all useable vehicles) and a game play demonstration of four matches (that last one being unplanned to resolve the draw) showed off the chaos of a battlefield in a fairly destructible environment.
Talked up were two other points, the armoured train behemoth that one side can call in during the battle based on which side is losing at the time it is made available and the specialised ‘Elite Classes’ of soldiers which spawn as pick ups on the field that can be acquired by a player and then transform them into a soldier with a particular speciality but weaknesses in all other areas.
A beta was also mentioned for Battlefield, with the beta opening up for PS4, Xbox One and PC on August 31st. At first only people who have signed up at battlefield.com as Battlefield Insiders will be able to play in the beta but it will eventually be opened up to all players a little further down the line.
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The last thing that caught our attention during EA’s stream was little more than an announcement of something that will be releasing at the end of the year.
EA have been working in partnership with Lucasfilms to make a Star Wars game based off the upcoming Rogue One film – a VR game at that. Titlled Star Wars Battlefront: Rogue One X-Wing VR Mission you will take to space as one of a wing of Rebel-aligned X-Wing pilots in fights with TIE Fighters and possibly a Star Destroyer too was hinted at. However, there was not a lot of information as they had to keep most details under wraps for now.
However, the game will be available to owners of the Star Wars Battlefront game on PS4 for free when it launches during the holiday season at the end of the year.
