It’s been a pretty big couple of days for video games. We’ll start with the big one, an announcement from Nintendo that came out just this morning:
Series producer Eiji Aonuma delivered the unfortunate news. “Spring of 2023” is a fancy way of saying that we have to wait an entire year for it. This may not be a complete loss, however. Personally I would rather wait longer for a better game. I’ve sunk over 200 hours into BoTW when it first came out, and still consider it one of my favorite games ever. There’s plenty out now to keep me busy, so maybe this is a blessing in disguise.
As for the rest of the video, we see some new tidbits. We get a good look at Link’s arm, which looks like at one point was completely blown off and artificially repaired, and a similar look at the Master Sword. Too early to tell exactly what’s happening here, but I’m sure this time around will have a ton of important story beats for us to look forward to.
During the One Piece News Livestream yesterday, a new open world action RPG was announced for the franchise, “One Piece: Odyssey”:
Looks like we’ll get a brand new original story, location and characters along with this one. For some reason, One Piece is stuck in this weird space in video games, without really getting that one signature “great” game yet. Sure, there have been plenty of alright titles. I’m personally a huge fan of the Pirate Warriors line of games, but they’re not ground breaking video games. Hopefully this time around we’ll get something that will really shake things up for the franchise. Obviously, I’ll be getting and playing this on day one.
In what I consider to be great news, Fortnite has announced that “Zero Build” mode will be a permanent thing:
Fortnite is the king of “Love/Hate Relationships” for me in gaming. For a solid few years, there was no game that even came close to the attention I gave Fortnite. I was as swept up in the craze as anyone, and no lie probably have close to 500 or more hours spent online playing with my friends. Some of the best memories I’ve ever had came from these sessions. But that’s not because we were competitive players who would go on to develop incredible skills in the game, we just had fun with the basics. After a while, a skill gap presented itself so wide in the game that revolved around building to the point that casual players were better off just not turning the game on.
Enter “Zero Build.” This levels the playing field a little bit, bringing the focus to combat. I thought maybe I was being a little soft quitting because building wasn’t fun, but turns out I’m in the majority, as Zero Build seems to be a widespread success. Making is a separate mode is fantastic, and will hopefully help keep the crowd that came back to the game for no builds around. Myself included; I’ve played a few nights with the boys since the change, and we had a blast. I missed Fortnite being a regular part of my gaming life, so I welcome it back with open arms.
Finally, Sony announced their plays for the PlayStation Plus revamp:
The real important thing here to note is that they split the subscription into three tiers: Essential, Extra, and Premium. The first being what user are already getting, Extra allowing downloads of a catalog of 400+ PS4/5 games, and the premium including 350+ more PS1, 2, 3 and PSP games. It’s Sony’s answer to Xbox’s Gamepass, a crowning achievement for this sort of concept. Will be interesting to see how this plays out. For $18 a month, the premium just might be worth it if you ever wanted to have your pick of playing a ton of older PlayStation games.
I personally have the Xbox Gamepass, and the best way to describe what these things are if you’re unfamiliar is Netflix, but video games. And not like the old Netflix where you’d rent the games and they would send them to you, I mean game streaming. You have full access to the games, but you don’t really own them. I think it’s awesome, as it’s let me play and experience some games I would have never spent the money on, and really enjoyed. The downside is that it can feel overwhelming, and if you get hooked on one game, or spend a ton of time playing a $60 title like Elden Ring instead, you’re not benefitting from the value of the service. Think of a month where you’ve been really busy, and you get the Netflix charge to your card and realize you haven’t even watched anything in weeks. Kinda sucks doesn’t it? There’s good and bad to the model, but overall I enjoy the service.
We’ll call it a wrap here on some video game news. Never a dull day in the industry.
Hub World 