Welcome to Beyond Co-Op, a weekly piece that talks about industry stories that may or may not be related to co-op gaming.
The stories for this week:
- Gears of War 3 Accidentally Announced Even After Reveal Delay to Monday
- F.E.A.R. 3 Announced
- StarCraft II Collector's Edition Announced, People Go Nuts!
- Crysis 2 World Premiere Shown in Times Square (Good Idea?)
- Sam Fisher Stands Alone This Week
Gears of War 3 Accidentally Announced Even After Reveal Delay to Monday
Someone at Microsoft must not have gotten the memo about Cliff’s appearance on the Late Show with Jimmy Fallon being delayed to Monday because early Friday morning there was a Gears of War 3 announcement on Xbox Live giving it an April 2011 release and it being the conclusion to the epic story. Whoops! The picture is below and expect Cliff to “announce” it on Monday:
Source: Colony of Gamers
F.E.A.R. 3 Announced
No big surprise since it is a healthy franchise and now wholly owned by Warner Bros. The slightly bigger surprise is that Monolith is not making it, but Day 1 Studios is. Their last game was Fracture, not a game I would put on my resume necessarily. The game is scheduled to come out in the fall and will supposedly have full campaign co-op as its main claim to fame.
Source: Colony of Gamers
StarCraft II Collector's Edition Announced, People Go Nuts!
It will run $99.99, but it includes quite a bit of stuff:
* The Art of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, a 176-page book featuring artwork from the game
* An exclusive 2GB USB flash drive replica of Jim Raynor's dog tag, which comes preloaded with the original StarCraft and the StarCraft: Brood War expansion set
* A behind-the-scenes DVD containing over an hour of developer interviews, cinematics with director's commentary, and more
* The official StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty soundtrack CD, containing 14 epic tracks from the game along with exclusive bonus tracks
* StarCraft comic book issue #0, a prequel to the comic series
* A World of Warcraft mini Thor in-game pet that can be applied to all World of Warcraft characters on a single Battle.net account
* Exclusive Battle.net downloadable content, including special portraits for your Battle.net profile, decals to customize your units in-game, and a visually unique version of the terran Thor unit
The bigger news is that Blizzard also announced that the standalone game would cost $59.99 and that started up a big flame up on the internet. People are still mad about the splitting of the game into thirds, but I think a lot of people gloss over the fact that at least this first release with the Terran campaign will have as many missions (or more) than the total of the 3 factions from the first game. Along with this you will be able to play all 3 races in multiplayer and not just the Terrans, but once again people seem to be confused over all of this. Also the thought process by many is that each successive release will be priced at $59.99 as well or the CE edition of them will match the one here. We really don’t know at this point, but Blizzard has used the word “expansion” to explain the Zerg and Protoss releases. That word usually means a lower price, but we won’t know until they announce the next release.
In many ways any game from Activision or one of its subsidiaries, no matter how golden they may be, is going to be under massive scrutiny nowadays with the bad blood consumers seem to have with the company. However I think people should bring their vitriol down a bit. $59.99 does suck, but it isn’t unheard of for such a high profile computer game with most likely millions of development dollars behind it.
Source: Colony of Gamers
Crysis 2 World Premiere Shown in Times Square (Good Idea?)
EA showed off a 30-second teaser for the upcoming Crysis 2 in Times Square this week. This is all well and good, but it is a teaser that shows off New York in disarray and unpopulated with a vocalist singing a downtrodden version of “New York, New York”. Luckily they didn’t show the longer clip with the military being killed by aliens and vehicles being destroyed that you can find at the Crysis 2 Homepage. The graphics are looking good and the 2.0 version of the Nanosuit looks good as well. This game is coming this holiday season on PC as well as the 360 and PS3 for the first time.
Source: Colony of Gamers
Sam Fisher Stands Alone This Week
April continues to be a relatively quiet month in releases as Splinter Cell: Conviction takes center stage on the 360 this week. The PC version was delayed two weeks for a bit of “polish”. Ubisoft has denied it has anything to do with their beautiful DRM that has screwed things up royally for their recent PC releases. It will be interesting to see if this game is a success. It has had at least one retooling since first announced as a 360 exclusive game and possibly two or more. The demo seemed good, but I reserve my thoughts until the full game is in my hands. I’ve always been an SC fan, but it has been a long time since the last one.
Source: me