Accéder au contenu principal

Sélection

Gears Of War: E-Day Is Shaping Up To Be Exactly The Comeback Gears Needed

Gears Of War: E-Day Is Shaping Up To Be Exactly The Comeback Gears Needed https://ift.tt/SPqnvOa Gears of War started out as an Epic Games-developed title, but the franchise has been in the experienced hands of The Coalition for over a decade. With Gears of War: E-Day dropping in October, the studio is aiming to bring the franchise back with a bang after a lengthy hiatus. We recently went hands-on with the game--you can check out the video preview below--and our immediate takeaway was that The Coalition hasn't skipped a beat as it still knows how to put together a Gears game that looks and feels great. Set during the cataclysmic events of Emergence Day, Gears of War: E-Day tells the story of humanity's first encounter with the Locust. Outgunned and caught by surprise, it's up to Marcus Fenix to rally the survivors and turn the tide of the conflict. While we didn't get to experience the campaign, we did check out the game's Horde and Versus modes. Gears of War ...

How Borderlands Ensures Character-Driven Storytelling Remains A Focus 14 Years Later

How Borderlands Ensures Character-Driven Storytelling Remains A Focus 14 Years Later https://ift.tt/GvgXNM4

The Borderlands franchise holds a peculiar place within the history of the gaming industry, kickstarting a genre that has gone on to become a different kind of beast. After all, though the concept of combining both RPG and first-person shooter mechanics was first seen in 2007's Hellgate: London, the loot-shooter genre owes its popularity to 2009's Borderlands. And yet, today, many of the most popular loot-shooters are also live-service games (like Destiny 2 and Warframe). Borderlands is not, having never adopted that format. It instead has multiple sequels--some of which diverge from the original game and don't feature any looting or shooting.

Like these other live-service game franchises, however, character-driven storytelling has been one of the main unifying pillars of Borderlands, which has been supported by a writer's room. "Gearbox is casually unique in the sense that we maintain a writer's room," Gearbox Entertainment associate director of narrative properties April Johnson told me. "So we don't just plunk you to work on a project and say, 'Okay, enjoy the two of you doing this--we have multiple things that we are working on, so we won't Voltron up as a full unit until later.'"

Having a constant writer's room is a strategy you usually see in story-driven live-service games where maintaining a narrative vision over multiple years--over a decade in the case of some games like Destiny--is important. It's not often seen in AAA franchises that feature several sequels and recruit a new set of writers from project to project. Gearbox Entertainment is not wholly unique in this strategy within the gaming industry, but it is a rare exception and the team points to this as one of the reasons for how the studio has managed to curate a specific narrative voice across all its projects.

Continue Reading at GameSpot

Commentaires