Horizon: Zero Dawn was a critical and commercial success, so it’s been somewhat surprising that Sony has yet to announce a sequel. That remains the case, but now yet another piece of evidence has emerged that Horizon: Zero Dawn 2 is in development.

A job listing at Guerrilla Games for a “Technical Vegetation Artist” (via GamesRadar) specifically mentions that the candidate would be working on creating “the stunning environments of Horizon.”

Given that Horizon is more than two years old now, it seems likely that this job ad is for a new Horizon game, potentially a sequel. The job ad states that Guerrilla has a total of four teams dedicated to making the environments of Horizon.

Guerrilla has numerous open positions on its website, but this is seemingly the only one that directly mentions Horizon. Other job ads mention that Guerrilla is working on a new open-world game, and that could be yet another reference to Horizon: Zero Dawn 2.

2017’s Horizon: Zero Dawn was a big change for Guerrilla, as the studio previously made the first-person shooter franchise Killzone. Guerrilla reportedly has multiple internal development teams, and one of these is said to be working on a multiplayer game that some people believe could be a new Killzone.

Guerrilla hired Rainbow Six Siege’s director, Simon Larouche, to work on a new project at the studio. Larouche’s history, people believe this may be a multiplayer game.

Guerrilla, which is based in the Netherlands, recently announced plans to grow in size to 400 or more developers with the aiming of releasing new games every two or three years, according to wccftech.

The studio also created the Decima engine, which Hideo Kojima used for his new game, Death Stranding.

Janina Gavankar, who played Tatai in Horizon: Zero Dawn’s Frozen Wilds expansion, said at an event earlier this year that a sequel to Horizon is on the way. “It’s incredible; wait ’til you see the sequel,” she said. “You’re gonna die–I know some secrets!”

Whatever projects Guerrilla (which is owned by Sony) is indeed working on, it seems likely they’ll be released on the upcoming PlayStation 5. That console launches in Holiday 2020.

from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/horizon-zero-dawn-2-seems-even-more-likely/1100-6471157/

The next DLC fighter for Super Smash Bros Ultimate is Terry Bogard, one of the most recognizable fighters from the Fatal Fury series. We haven’t seen much of what Terry can do yet, but that’s set to change in an upcoming livestream.

Nintendo has announced via their Nintendo Versus Twitter account that Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai will host a 45 minute livestream of the game at 5 AM PT on November 6, showing off the upcoming fighter’s abilities and fighting style. In the past, these videos have released very shortly before the characters themselves were made available to purchase: Joker, Hero and Banjo-Kazooie all followed a similar pattern.

Terry Bogard is the fourth DLC character to be added to Super Smash Bros Ultimate since the game’s release. An unannounced fifth character will be added as part of the first Fighter’s Pass, but more DLC characters will arrive beyond that too.

In our original Super Smash Bros Ultimate review, Edmond Tran gave the game a 9/10, writing that “Ultimate’s diverse content is compelling, its strong mechanics are refined, and the encompassing collection is simply superb.”

from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/smash-bros-ultimate-direct-dated-will-focus-on-ter/1100-6471155/

Overwatch 2 is an unusual sequel in that a lot of the new content it introduces–including new characters, maps, and PvP modes–will also be added to the original Overwatch on all platforms. Overwatch 2 will feature an exclusive campaign mode with PvE combat and a story that will delve deeper into the series’ lore, but if you’re just playing Overwatch for the PvP experience, you won’t miss out on anything if you don’t upgrade. It goes the other way as well–all cosmetics you’ve unlocked in the original game will carry over into Overwatch 2.

This is not a standard model for a sequel, but game director Jeff Kaplan has told Kotaku Australia that, while it was a difficult decision to make, he believes that this is the model that best benefits Overwatch’s player base. “It’s very challenging because the industry has done things the same way for so long,” he said. “And so it’s hard to get people, push them out of their comfort zone and say, hey, I think we could do it a better way.”

Kaplan said that convincing people at Blizzard to do this meant explaining how it would ultimately benefit their players. “I try to tell them if we do what’s right by the players, they will be happy, we will have a better game, and we will end up in a better place in the long run.” He believes that cutting off players from the first Overwatch to “make that game just sort of die on the vine” is the wrong approach. “I always try to come at things from a player-first standpoint,” Kaplan said. Ultimately, this model will allow Overwatch 1 and 2 to coexist, and will allow for crossplay between the two games.

Overwatch 2 is just one of several big announcements to come out of BlizzCon 2019, where Diablo IV and World of Warcraft: Shadowlands were also shown for the first time. Overwatch 2 will release on Switch as well as PC, PS4 and Xbox One, and might feature a ping system similar to Apex Legends.

from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/merging-overwatch-1-and-2-was-a-hard-sell-but-the-/1100-6471148/

The next expansion for World of Warcraft, Shadowlands, is taking the conflicts of Azeroth to a whole new place: the afterlife. Venturing to a new plane of existence–one that Blizzard hasn’t explored much either in its games or in WoW’s lore–offers opportunities for the developer to add new ways to play WoW in the expansion that haven’t been a part of Azeroth before.

Torghast, the Tower of the Damned, is a pretty literal expression of the Shadowlands offering something strange and different to the WoW formula. The new endgame activity in the Shadowlands basically imagines WoW as a rogue-like. On paper, it shares similarities with Final Fantasy XIV’s Deep Dungeons called “Palace of the Dead” and “Heaven-on-High” which use a rogue-like structure and throw challenging enemies and variables at you as you ascend a number of floors. And here, WoW seems to be providing an endless challenge that plays differently from the rest of the game in some key ways.

At Blizzcon 2019, executive producer John Hight and senior game designer Johnny Cash explained how Torghast gave Blizzard a chance to mess with the WoW formula and experiment a bit. Essentially, Torghast is a tower in which you face a variety of battles that ratchet up in difficulty the higher you climb. Your goal is to get as far as you can before you’re eventually killed.

“We really wanted to give you a place to be able to go, commit maybe 45 minutes of your time, but have a very exciting replayable experience,” Hight said. “The way that’s designed is you alone, or up to five people in your party, begin ascending this tower that was really designed to kill you, or to put an end to you.

“The reason it’s replayable is because everything changes each time you play through. You might enter that first level, and the walkway that you were used to that goes to the right now goes to the left, and the traps that you were about to face, be it fire or blades, will be completely different. The bosses that you encounter, the spawns you encounter, and more importantly, the crazy loop that you’re going to get when you go in there. Because these are in the form of buffs and power-ups, and if you get lucky, you’ll find some combinations that make you completely [overpowered]. You’ll be able to completely clear a level, master it, be the hero amongst your group, walk to the next level and find a completely different setup.”

The shifting reality of Torghast also applies to the items you’ll find in it along the way. The tower is full of buffs and power-ups you’ll earn that linger only for a particular run, like the power-ups and equipment you’d get in a rogue-like game. It sounds fundamentally different from other World of Warcraft activities because, by design, it’s not focused on balancing your abilities against the enemies you’re facing.

“One of the things we can do is really fundamentally play with the rules of what you assume. and what we’ve all assumed, WoW is,” Cash said. “Normally you’re getting gear, and it might be an incremental power upgrade, and over time you’re going to get a bunch of those, and then you’ll gradually grow in strength. In Torghast, there’s the cool opportunity amongst the ever-changing layouts and monsters and traps, what if we can give you a buff that you find that doubles your power instantly? And that combos with another thing and another thing and another thing, such that you can instantly blow up enemies, and when they blow up, they chain to blow up other enemies, and those enemies heal you. These crazy combinations, and you need them to defeat those more powerful levels.”

“It’s an opportunity to explore a space that–you know, we can’t double your power in the outdoor world because people would farm the hell out of that, and clear the raid way too fast or way too easily,” he said. “And so it lets us play with rules that we normally can’t.”

There’s no timer in Torghast, and eventually, you will die. But ascending the tower isn’t just about seeing how far you can get and having a randomized activity you can replay over and over. Torghast also provides rewards beyond the buffs you can find along the way to make a particular run more enticing.

Working through Torghast will reward you with runes that will let you craft new Legendary items. The system also gives you some control over the gear you earn as you fight your way through the tower’s torments.

“We know that people love loading in their Legendaries,” Hight said. “They told us after Legion, ‘Where are my Legendaries?’ They’re not Legendary weapons, but they are going to be Legendary pieces that you can equip–up to one, but you can build more than that and you can swap out. You’re going to have a lot of control over the aspects, the abilities that are on those Legendaries.”

The challenges of Torghast sound as though they’ll give WoW players something new to think about when they hit the endgame of Shadowlands. You might bring different builds to bear in the rogue-like tower, or take advantage of other elements, like the new Soulbinds system. It all seems like a fresh take on the WoW formula that has allowed Blizzard a little freedom in playing with the game’s underlying formula–and will likely provide players with an opportunity to shake up how they play as well.

from GameSpot – Game News https://www.gamespot.com/articles/shadowlands-torghast-tower-brings-rogue-like-gamep/1100-6471150/