Gaming
Yooka-Laylee Quintuples Its Kickstarter Goal In 24 Hours
Yooka-Laylee has became the fastest video game to reach $1 million on Kickstarter. It reached the milestone in 6 hours, which knocks out the previous 7 hour record held by Torment: The Tides of Numenera. At the time of writing, the project has earned £1,276,868, or around $1.9 million USD, with more than 37 thousand backers. The game’s goal of £175,000 was actually reached in just 40 minutes.
Yooka-Laylee, formerly called Project Ukelele, is the spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie, the much-loved platformer series capable of stirring up tears of nostalgia in grown adults. Despite the series’ popularity, it’s been a long time since it’s had a title released thanks to the unclear status of the IP. Originally developed by Rare, the series was heavily associated with Nintendo until Microsoft bought it. The partnership didn’t work out. Most of the core team at Rare left shortly after. Nowadays Rare makes those dodgy Kinect sports games nobody buys, and the last we saw of Banjo-Kazooie was the 2008 Nuts and Bolts on Xbox 360 – a title fans don’t like to talk about.
But those members of Rare that left after the Microsoft takeover eventually came together again, forming their own company called Playtonic Studios. Yooka-Laylee is a Banjo-Kazooie game in everything but name, right down to the small-flying-animal-carrying-larger-non-flying-animal protagonists. But don’t worry – they quadruple checked with their lawyers. It’s not copyright infringement.
It’s not all that surprising to see Yooka-Laylee enjoy such a success on Kickstarter. Nostalgia is big business and projects that evoke our childhood memories have a history of success when it comes to crowdfunding. Banjo-Kazooie is no exception, and given that the 0nly platformers these days are from Nintendo and a few indie developers, it makes sense that people are seeing a hole Yooka-Laylee can fill.
Hitting the £1 million mark assures the game’s release across all the major platforms – Wii U, Xbox One, PS4, PC, Linux and Mac. Some people have expressed surprise over Playtonic’s decision to develop for Wii U, given that most developers have dropped the console like a hot potato. But it makes sense for the spiritual successor of a series that historically shared close ties with Nintendo, especially given the fact that Playtonic have designed Yooka-Laylee too pull all of our nostalgic strings.
With its original team now working on Yooka-Laylee, it’s unclear what future Rare faces. But there have been rumours they will present a new game at E3 and fans are hopeful for something new and exciting from the once great developer.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
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.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
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.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
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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