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343 Industries has been largely quiet since the release of Halo Wars 2 earlier this year. With this year being the 10th anniversary of Halo 3, fans have been wondering what if anything is to be done to celebrate. In a recent news update, 343 Industries has confirmed that there are plenty of summer events on the way to celebrate as well as a smattering of other tidbits.

The post is broken up into multiple sections, each of which goes over something Halo-related that is coming up. Starting with the section about the series on Xbox One X, it has been announced that a 4K update is coming to Halo 5: Guardians. Already an impressive-looking game on the base Xbox One, the post ensures that the update will be “true 4K” as opposed to upscaling.

The next big announcement is that a bunch of old titles in the series are set to be added to the Xbox One’s backward compatibility lineup. Combat Evolved Anniversary, 3, ODST, and 4 are all part of this list, allowing gamers who still own the titles on their 360s to play them on Xbox One. This also allows players to do so without having to buy The Master Chief Collection. Who wants to spend more money on games they already own, right? Halo 2 wasn’t included in the list since it is an original Xbox game, backwards compatibility isn’t yet available for original Xbox content.

Halo Wars 2 got some more coverage during this blog post. 343 Industries briefly summarized of all the game’s updates until now and the announcement of the “Awakening the Nightmare” expansion for Halo Wars 2. The post confirms that this expansion adds new campaign content from the perspective of the Banished, and brings back the fan-favorite Flood. Two new playable leaders are set to be added, as well as the new “Terminus Firefight” game mode. The expansion should be releasing later this fall for $19.99 USD.

There is a section on upcoming events that the 343 team will be attending. This includes RTX Austin 2017, HCS Summer Finals, China Joy, and Gamescom. In each section, the post goes into detail about the events and what fans can expect from the studio there. This includes early access to the Halo Wars 2 expansion, sports opportunities and prize pools, continued announcements, etc. There’s also a section afterward that goes into detail about various other Halo goodies such as new tie-in comics and books as well as figures, models, and various artworks.

Finally, there is a section on Halo 5’s future specifically. It mostly discusses matchmaking updates, but the biggest bit of information is plans for Halo 3’s anniversary. Even though they’ve already confirmed that 3 won’t be getting the Anniversary remaster treatment, they double down on it here. Instead, there’ll be a bunch of throwback multiplayer game modes, maps, etc. put into a playlist by the developers. Some of this content will be originally made by the team but it is confirmed that a lot of it comes from the community through Forge mode.

I spend most of my days working towards my Writing and Rhetoric degree at the University of Central Florida, but I spend a lot of my down time keeping up to date on the best TV, movies, and video games the industry has to offer. Here I put all of that extended time to use discussing each of them in-depth.

Gaming

Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made

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As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.

Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”

You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.

 

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Gaming

You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.

The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.

The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.

The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.

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Gaming

This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive

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Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.

For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”

Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.

Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.

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