Julius

A formal invitation to... ...GET HYPED. 34/35 DAYS (depending on where you’ll be in the world come release) AND COUNTING! How would you rank the MCU films to date? And do you expect Infinity War to crush a box office record or two?

I’m really excited for what this game could entail, not just as a playable game (though it admittedly looks like a lot of fun), but as a tool for potential future game designers and developers to get creative and put themselves out there. I’d want to support it for that reason alone, and I’m definitely getting some good vibes from the whole Dreams concept because of this.

They already have Source: “...We haven’t yet put in the facial expressions. Until a month ago, we had put in the facial animations, but for the moment, they’ve been removed.”

CD Projekt Red have opened a third studio in Wroclaw to aid in the development of Cyberpunk 2077; the studio is comprised of 18 veteran game developers, many of whom are former members of Wroclaw-based developer Strange New Things (which was founded by former Techland and IO Interactive developers). Pawel Zawodny, Head of CD Projekt Red Wroclaw, had this to say: CD Projekt President and Joint CEO Adam Kicinski added: Elsewhere, CDPR has also been confirmed to be attending Gamescom this August, and Gwent’s Community Specialist has recently stated in an AMA that there will be no Thronebreaker at E3, which is yet another strong hint that Cyberpunk 2077 will be present this June.

Hellz yeah

The first episode of Kyle Bosman's (of EZA) paper-animated series, Box Peek, is up. It's only a preview episode, so it will be a while before the rest of the series is up, but it's awesome

Kiwami 2 is coming to the West on August 28th!

I think it’s definitely going to be great for the neutrals. We saw it earlier this season and quite a lot in their prior meetings, but Klopp is about as close to Pep’s kryptonite as I can think of at this stage of his career. As for Salah breaking the record, I honestly can’t think of a reason against him breaking it. He’s been in peak form almost all season, and only needs a hat trick of goals to equal the record — with seven games to potentially score them in (probably less considering the likelihood of being rested for UCL matches), I’d honestly put my money on him doing it. It’s insane the near-instant chemistry that he’s had with Firmino and Mané since arriving last summer, which just makes the potential record-breaking that much more eye-opening. If Kane weren’t injured, I’d actually go so far as suggesting that both of them could break it. On a different note but sort of on the same topic, as a Chelsea fan, watching us play in the Prem has only been getting more and more frustrating recently. Conte is very clearly an excellent tactician and a great man-to-man manager, but he just isn’t backed up in the transfer market to allow his desired formation to flourish. Matters are only made worse when I see players like Lukaku, De Bruyne, Salah and Matic enjoying themselves and performing well on a consistent basis at rival clubs. It’s just crushing.

Awesome. I have to imagine a demo on the Switch wouldn’t leave too many pieces lying around either, then! Well, that sucks. I’m guessing that that was by someone working in the game? In which case, I have to imagine they got demoted/fired/moved to another project...

Yeah...the main series Pokémon game demos on eShop (ORAS and SM only, iirc?) were also guilty of containing far more than they needed to and being relatively easy to get into (for dataminers, at least). I really hope they stay quiet on the demo front with the new Pokémon games for Switch, because it’s a seriously odd genre of game to put a demo out for in the first place, besides the fact that it leads to leaked story elements and previously unrevealed Pokémon. I think the reason that they’re having such a big problem with demos isn’t because they’re easy to get into, but because the developers of the demo — and I hate to say this — are being pretty lazy about the actual contents of the demo. The ORAS and SM demos, for example, were created using large amounts of game assets pretty much just copy and pasted from the actual games, with entire locations in the demo present exactly as they are in the game, as well as multiple Pokémon models and items that weren’t present in the demo themselves present in the demo’s code. Ideally, it shouldn’t be the case that the demo is just a pared back version of the game; I think the demo should be screened for required code prior to the movement of assets (i.e. in the case of the Pokémon demos I mentioned above, only Pokémon, items and locations in the demo should be imported from the actual game) so that code is kept at a minimum, and only the bare necessities are included in the final version of the demo. I didn’t play Smash for 3DS/Wii U or keep up with the news on them, so I’ll have to look up whether those demos were datamined as extensively as some other Nintendo games, but I do recall reading that Sakurai is fairly secretive about the Smash games, and that he was left frustrated when Brawl’s cutscenes were leaked online. If that’s anything to go by, I think the demo’s in safe hands, when compared to some their first-party demos from Nintendo.

I think that’s a great idea, @Glen-i! Nintendo has been doing reeeeeally well with implementing demos/online tests/tournaments/etc. for the Switch, and whilst Smash doesn’t necessarily need one, I think that it would just be a great tool for Nintendo to use as a PR and hype-building move. On a completely different note, what are everyone’s opinions on the effect that the Smash reveal could have on the Switch community’s/Nintendo fan base’s expectations going into E3? Does it make easier or harder for Nintendo to navigate the waves of fan expectation?

Considering that those games were already revealed prior to the E3 at which they they were the centrepiece, and that we’re not expecting any other major announcements from Ninty (and their subsidiaries) until E3, I think Super Smash Bros. is the most likely game to be at the centre of attention this time around. It’s also a much easier game to hop in and out of on the show floor/in a booth than either a new Pokémon or Animal Crossing entry would be. I also expect a Mario Tennis Aces tournament at E3 this year, considering that they held an ARMS one last year (a few days before its release).

Delayed until 2019.

Yeah, I don’t think we’ll be getting the PS5 for a while yet, simply because of how much Guerrilla and Bluepoint managed to squeeze out of the PS4 with Horizon Zero Dawn and Shadow of the Colossus, respectively. I’m actually not too sure about 2020 as a release year for PS5, though. If the PS4 loses sales momentum and drops off for a while, then putting the PS5 out around then would seem a good idea, and it depends almost entirely on if the consumer base wants - and is ready for - the next and new PlayStation Console. However, if the PS4 continues to sell well, and more and more developers continue to squeeze out what they can from the base model - and then the Pro - I think we could end up actually waiting until the 2021-2023 window for a PS5 release, as console life cycles should, theoretically, only be getting longer from a technological standpoint (not accounting for consumer interest). This is because the visual fidelity of games is already nearing a threshold, and the reason why we’ve been seeing diminishing returns from the visuals of games is because there’s a limit to what the human eye can detect, and also because the observation that the number of of transistors in an integrated circuits doubles over a relatively short period of time (1-2 years; i.e. Moore’s Law) has already been seeing diminishing processing returns since the early 2000s (see below). As the video game industry has been effectively catching up to modern technologies since its inception, and with the end of Moore’s Law nearing (i.e. the point at which we can no longer produce smaller transistors), as well as video game developers having effectively caught up to produce optimal visual results from current systems (be that console or PC), the introduction of new and faster processors with future systems won’t have as much of an impact as it might have before, which means that the industry will have to look elsewhere to continue getting the most out of the modern system. I think this is very likely to be related to more sophisticated AI integration into video gaming (for more efficient asset creation, game rendering, etc.), but, as it takes exponentially longer to produce a sophisticated AI for a video game than it would to simply slip in a new processor, I can see that pushing the next console generation back a fair bit if we are to see more technological leaps made within the industry in the next decade or so with the next set of consoles. We’ll just have to wait and see. We’re at a bit of a tipping point in terms of technological evolution in general, so I think it will definitely be interesting to see which direction PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo — and any other potential console manufacturer — takes next.

Sakurai confirmed.

Seriously, I think that's probably the best Nintendo Direct yet. Flew through the 3DS stuff, threw a couple of Switch titles our way...check the clock and we're only 13 minutes in. A little break for some tennis talk, before returning with a slew of great third party and indie titles, as well as that Dark Souls amiibo. I have to admit, that rather long focus on Splatoon 2 prior to Smash at the end threw me off a little bit, and I though we might be lazily winding it down...but nope. They smashed that Smash button. For now, I think there's a lot to enjoy from this Direct, but it does leave me with some questions going forwards: where's Fire Emblem, and does this make it more or less difficult to manage fan expectations going into E3?

For anyone who missed the Direct...or just wants to watch the Octopath Traveller stuff again

Still, I find it a bit odd that we heard nothing about Fire Emblem. Probably an E3 showing with an October/November release date?

THEY DID IT THEY HIT THE SMASH BUTTON

Nintendo Direct - March 8th The game is revealed at the end of the March Nintendo Direct. Inklings are confirmed, as was Breath of the Wild Link confirmed, though it was unclear if this was a new/replacement character for the existing Link, or a new variant of the existing Link character. Masahiro Sakurai has also confirmed that he will be returning to the franchise with this game.