Author: Jordan Middler

NME

During the Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 20th Anniversary showcase, Operation Motherland was revealed for Ghost Recon: Breakpoint.

• READ MORE: Why ‘Tomb Raider’ will always be a core part of my queer identity

The livestream was a celebration of 20 years of the franchise and featured interviews with developers and fans. The expansion itself comes as part of the continued post-launch support for Ghost Recon: Breakpoint.

The short trailer, which can be checked out below, shows the Ghosts travelling by helicopter back to Auroa, where a voice informs them that they’re needed to maintain peace on the island.

The DLC will release on November 2.

Despite a lukewarm reception at launch, Ubisoft has continued to support Ghost Recon: Breakpoint with post-launch content, a strategy for supporting their games that can be seen across their lineup.

The presentation also revealed that several of the classic titles in the series will be temporarily free until October 11 via Ubisoft Connect, or receive a heavy discount.

Also announced as part of the presentation was a new title in the Ghost Recon series, Ghost Recon Frontline, a 100 plus player game where teams of three are tasked with extracting intel from a large map. Technical tests will be taking place for the PC version of the game between October 14 and 21 as well, where anyone can sign up, as long as they are in Europe.

This entry into the franchise will differ from the traditional tactical games and instead adopt more of a battle royal style, except it won’t have the genre’s typical converging circle. Ghost Recon Frontline currently has no release date,  but will be coming to Xbox, PlayStation, and PC platforms.

In other news, the Nintendo Switch is getting a clock app that contains a secret side-scrolling game within it. Costing £8.99 (but on sale for a limited time for £1.79) the app is causing quite the stir.

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Sports Interactive has today revealed two new features for the upcoming sports simulation title, Football Manager 2022. These are a new animation system and a revamp of the way analytics and data are displayed.

READ MORE: ‘FIFA 22’ review: a beautiful game in nearly every aspect

These include a a new animation system and a revamp of the way analytics and data are displayed in the game.

The Data Hub is a new addition to the games sidebar which displays performance metrics such as possession, pass maps and other analysis that’ll let you know where things have gone so horribly wrong on the pitch. This view also allows you to follow the stats of an individual player, allowing for deeper insight into their performances.

Players will also be able to request bespoke reports on individual elements of the game, something that Sports Interactive and Sega are claiming uses the same technology that real football clubs do.

The other big addition is a refresh of the match engine, which Sports Interactive claims to be a start of a new era for their on-pitch simulation. Improvements such as player animations, player movement and the way AI behaves during passages of play have all been implemented.

These new improvements were discussed at further length during a video with James Alcott and Sports Interactive studio director, Miles Jacobson.

Football Manager 2022 launches on November 9 for PC and Xbox, with the game also coming to Xbox Game Pass.

Elsewhere in the world of virtual football, Konami has issued an apology for eFootball 2022. The game launched with plenty of negative feedback concerning both its unnaturally feeling gameplay and downright hilariously looking graphics. According to Konami and update will be coming some time in October for the game, alongside plenty of opportunities for fan feedback.

In other news, the new Nintendo Switch clock app is both a real thing, and it contains a super secret side-scrolling platformer in its time-keeping code.

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AAA Clock, a new app launching on October 8th for the Nintendo Switch will cost £8.99 ($9.99) it has been revealed.

READ MORE: The best Nintendo Switch games in 2021

The app is a bargain for those of us without a phone, an actual clock, or indeed, a Nintendo Switch, which also features a clock.

It launches alongside the OLED Nintendo Switch, the same day that Metroid: Dread releases as the updated model’s launch title. The app also claims to have “full support for OLED technology”, which must reassure those with a preorder for the new machine everywhere.

The clock can display in various colours, even matching the colour scheme of your joy-cons, a feature which probably accounts for around £4 or £5 of the asking price.

According to the trailer, there’s also a bonus game included, a mysterious retro side-scroller, which is a nice distraction for when you get slightly bored of checking the time.

In the long tradition of the Nintendo Switch calculator app, and going back as far as the various NotePad apps on NintendoDSi, AAA Clock is a testament to how open Nintendo has become as a publisher, as seemingly just about anything can get on the store now.

The app launches at an introductory price of £1.79 ($1.99), a reward for those early adopters that aren’t going to wait for the reviews to drop.

If you’ve got the time, why not read about the open-world ‘Metroid Prime’ game that was scrapped.

Developer on the game Bryan Walker said that “there was also an open world that was much less linear than he was proposing and the team was excited about. We weren’t able to prototype a lot of those because they were really big. We did have some ship prototypes, but the open-world one was much bigger.”

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BioShock, the critically acclaimed shooter from 2K Games, might be receiving a remaster according to a new discovery on Reddit.

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As spotted by GamesRadar, Reddit users have uncovered that the SteamDb database entries for BioShock, BioShock 2 and BioShock Infinite have all received updates.

This is an indication that some kind of new content or development for the Steam version of the games is currently taking place, although the extent to which work is happening is unclear.

This isn’t the first time rumours of a BioShock remaster have emerged. Recently Nvidia suffered a massive leak of data, included in which was a list of games associated with their GeForce Now platform. On this list was BioShock RTX, a new version of the game seemingly utilizing Nvidia’s ray-tracing technology.

While this list also contained games that have been confirmed not to exist, and the company themselves classified the list as ‘speculative’ several unannounced games, like the PC ports of Uncharted 4 and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy which first appeared on this list, were later confirmed.

This remaster may also be a precursor to the reveal and release of BioShock 4, a game that also appeared on the Nvidia leak, and has been in development for some time. While that leak implied that the game would release in 2022, 2K have asserted that the yet unannounced BioShock 4 is a few years away. It’s also been rumoured that BioShock 4 will be a more open game, and feature side-quests.

Speaking of games becoming more open, a producer on Metroid Prime 3 has revealed how the game almost went open-world. 

The post 2K Games might be working on a ‘BioShock’ remaster appeared first on NME.

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Since its release, fans of Valve’s long-dormant sci-fi series have been calling for a way to play its newest entry, Half-Life: Alyx, without the use of a VR headset. Now, thanks to a new mod, it’s finally possible.

• READ MORE: What we can learn from a decade of cancelled Valve projects

While other mods have attempted to convert the game to a traditional first-person shooter like the other entries in the series, they’ve often been clumsy, however, this new mod is extremely promising.

As first reported by DSOGaming, while the mod doesn’t have a release date yet, the modder who goes by the name SoMNst, has released a video showing how the team managed to accommodate the physics and the UI changes necessary in the transition from VR to traditional first-person.

The video shows off the opening area of the game, including the memorable moment wherein players can draw on a window using dry-wipe markers. The mod allows all of this to be interacted with without VR, allowing players to dictate depth with a mouse, rather than physically move forward with a VR controller.

Valve themselves have not announced plans to release a version of the game without the virtual reality requirement. This seems unlikely as the extremely positive critical reception to Half-Life: Alyx and its place as the system seller for Valve’s Index VR headset mean that releasing a traditional version of the game may undercut that success.

However, due to the clamouring for players for a new entry in the series after over a decade, should they decide to do it, it would likely be a huge sales success.

In other news, Neon Giant has acknowledged the fan demand for a PS5 version of the Xbox exclusive role-playing game, The Ascent.

The post ‘Half-Life: Alyx’ receives promising ‘No VR’ mod appeared first on NME.

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Former Retro Studios director of development and producer, Bryan Walker, recently revealed scrapped plans for an open-world Metroid Prime game.

• READ MORE: ‘No More Heroes 3’ review: a game of two halves

During an interview with Kiwi Talkz, the developer revealed that during production for Metroid Prime 3, he and series director, Mark Pacini, had drafted plans for a game that would see Samus explore a non-linear world.

While this concept made it through several stages of prototyping, the scale of the proposed additions was ultimately too much to handle. During the podcast, which was first reported on by VGC, Walker revealed that “Mark came forward with an interesting twist in the vision and some of the formulas for Metroid Prime 3, compared to Metroid Prime 2“.

Walker continued: “There was also an open world that was much less linear than he was proposing and the team was excited about. We weren’t able to prototype a lot of those because they were really big. We did have some ship prototypes, but the open-world one was much bigger.”

These plans were scrapped, due partially to the hardware of the Nintendo Wii, which Retro expected to be significantly more powerful than the system ended up being.

Comparing it to the Xbox 360, Walker said, “We knew what the Xbox 360 was going to have, we knew what the PS3 was going to have and the initial specs we were looking at [for Wii] were not competitive from a hardware and memory standpoint…”

While the developer did express some regret that the game didn’t live up to the lofty ambitions the team had, he remains proud of the work Retro did on Metroid Prime 3.

“We may have fallen short of our goals with Prime 3 in not being able to expand the formula a bit. We’re still very, very proud of Prime 3, it turned out to be a fantastic game…”

According to an industry insider, Nintendo plans to release a remaster of Metroid Prime for the Nintendo Switch.

The post Open-world ‘Metroid Prime’ game was planned reveals producer appeared first on NME.