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:
- Assassin's Creed: Revelations Unveiled, Coming November
- Is the Next Xbox Prototype in Developer (Specifically EA) Hands?
- Black Rock Faces Unknown Number of Layoffs
- Mass Effect 3 Pushed Back to Q1 2012
- Brink Highlights Releases for This Week
Assassin's Creed: Revelations Unveiled, Coming November
After a good, but somewhat flawed first release in the Assassin’s Creed series, Ubisoft Montreal has hit successive home runs with Assassin’s Creed II and Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines chronicling the story of Ezio Auditore. This week Ubisoft announced the final piece of the Ezio trilogy with Assassin’s Creed: Revelations coming this November. This will mark three successive years that Ubisoft has brought an AC game out.
Brotherhood easily ranked on my top 10 best games last year and was easily the biggest surprise of last year since I figured there was no way Ubisoft Montreal could make a full-featured game within a year of AC2’s release. Not only did they make another long game with a thorough story, they also added a fantastic multiplayer option and continued the greatness of the series. I have no doubt that Revelations will probably also be good and probably great and it sounds like you will be playing as Ezio, Desmond and the main character from the first game, Altair. The game takes place at least partly in Altair’s geographic location from the first game. I’m super pumped for this game and it is easily a day one purchase.
Source: me
Is the Next Xbox Prototype in Developer (Specifically EA) Hands?
Develop has word from someone not connected to Microsoft or EA that the latter has their hands on the next Xbox system prototype to start development of games for it. Although EA would later deny this was true, I have a feeling it could be true. If you remember months ago, and maybe almost a year ago, there were rumors of EA and other companies having a NGP (Next Generation Portable) prototype to start work on games for the system. That rumor turned out to be true even though the developers were mostly denying it.
Will something be announced at E3? Probably not. Remember that the 360 was unveiled before E3 and was released later that year. I figure the same thing may happen here with Microsoft planning to take on Nintendo’s new system at the end of 2012.
Source: Develop
Black Rock Faces Unknown Number of Layoffs
Black Rock, the makers of the really good games Pure and Split/Second, are undergoing another round of layoffs as confirmed by Sony. The original rumor was that it was 40 people, but it is sounding like upwards of 100 may be laid off. Sad for the team, but no matter how great their games were, they didn’t sell very well.
Source: Joystiq
Mass Effect 3 Pushed Back to Q1 2012
I’m not totally surprised by this, although this does make the first big scheduled holiday game to be pushed into 2012, I expect there to be more. My guess would be it will come out like Mass Effect 2 did and release in January, unloading a nuclear bomb on the gaming universe once again. It is sad news, but the holiday season is pretty packed even without this coming out.
Source: me
Brink Highlights Releases for Next Week
Brink is the key release this week before things start to get interesting. I expect Brink to have the same sort of reception that Borderlands did and it will be interesting to see how many people are interested in it.
Source: me