There was plenty of news coming out of The Game Awards last week, with dozens of new games announced and some new footage shown of games we already knew about.
The biggest reveal for me was the announcement of a new Star Wars game. A couple weeks ago in this column, I predicted we might get our first look at the upcoming sequel to 2019’s excellent “Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.”
That didn’t happen. Instead, we got a beautiful trailer for a brand new game called “Star Wars: Eclipse” being developed by Quantic Dream, the developer of “Heavy Rain,” and “Detroit: Become Human.”
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This will be the first Star Wars game set during the High Republic era being explored in books and comics now that last from about 300 years to roughly 80 years before the events of the original “Star Wars” movie. It is a time when the galaxy has been mostly at peace and the Jedi are at their peak.
As excited as I always am when there’s a new Star Wars game announced, I do have some serious concerns about this one. Since about 2018, there have been multiple allegations of Quantic Dream leadership fostering a hostile work environment and studio founder David Cage was quoted as saying some horrible things in the French media.
My hope is that Lucasfilm Games did some serious vetting of Quantic Dream and its leadership to make sure its controversial practices are definitely in the past before giving them the keys to Star Wars.
The Game Awards gave us our first look at gameplay from next year’s “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League” game from the makers of the Batman: Arkham series. Those games have been some of the best comic book-inspired titles ever. The gameplay looked amazing, showing off some of the combat in the game, it’s platforming and the Squad taking on the Flash.
In more DC Comics news, the makers of the recent Middle Earth games are developing a new Wonder Woman game that was revealed during the show.
Another game that received a stunning gameplay reveal was the Xbox exclusive “Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II.”
Occasionally during The Game Awards or the E3 showcases, a new game or demo is announced and made available to the public that day. That happened this year with The Game Awards and “The Matrix Awakens,” which was leaked the week before.
Rather than a full game, “The Matrix Awakens” is free experience available for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X consoles. The experience was created by Epic Games (“Fortnite”) with its new game engine, Unreal Engine 5.
“The Matrix Awakens” features Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss reprising their roles from The Matrix films and is the best showcase of what’s going to be possible with these new game consoles that I’ve seen.
The experience is broken up into two missions. The first and more exciting of the two has Trinity behind the wheel of a car during a high speed chase and has you taking out Agents trying to pursue you. The other half of the experience lets you explore the open world city created for the experience on foot, in a car or even flying through the skies.
The Game Awards also had some pretty big gaming-adjacent reveals. The first trailers for the “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” movie and the “Halo” television series coming to Paramount+ next year were both revealed. The “Halo” trailer didn’t show much, but it does look like the series is going to be faithful to the games, with Master Chief’s suit looking incredible.
And really, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The Game Awards really was loaded this year with announcements and reveals. If you play games at all, there was almost certainly something announced last week that you’ll be interested in.
Dusty Ricketts
Dusty Ricketts can be reached at [email protected]. He is currently playing “Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic” and “Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.” You can find him through his PlayStation Network ID: DustRAG316.
This article originally appeared on Northwest Florida Daily News: Game Awards announce new video games: Suicide Squad, Star Wars
Source: https://news.yahoo.com/game-awards-announce-video-games-120039896.html
