TGO Daily | February 26, 2021 | Sony State of Play
February 26, 2021
Hey everyone! This is the last newsletter of the week :) Just wanted to give you a heads up that I might be migrating newsletter hosts this weekend from Substack to Revue (recently acquired by Twitter). It opens up a few more options for me, and I’ve had some recent frustrations with Substack, as cool as the service is.
All to say, apologies if there are any interruptions or issues with the migration. Be sure to follow me on Twitter for any updates, though I don’t anticipate any major issues.
Sending love <3
Adrian
Sony State of Play
Sony held a “State of Play” today with some pretty minor announcements. Here are the biggest things.
Final Fantasy VII Remake will be releasing on the PlayStation 5 on June 10. They’ll be upgrading the graphics, improving load times, adding haptic feedback for the DualSense, and adding a photo mode. Most importantly, there will be a new episode for the game which will have new characters and storylines. This version of the game will be officially called Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, and will be a free upgrade for anyone who owns it on the PS4 (though the new episode will be extra).
Oddworld Soulstorm is releasing on April 6, and will be free to download with PS+ on PS5. Not much else to say there, but its cool that it will be free for a month.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits gets a release date of August 24. They also showed off a new trailer, which I encourage you to watch above. It is probably one of the best looking trailers you’ll ever see for a video game (the dev team is also an animation studio).
Sony Shuts Down Japan Studio
Sony’s oldest first-party developer, Japan Studio (Ape Escape, Knack, Patapon), is being shut down. The company has been winding down for the past year, with many key people leaving — such as Keiichiro Toyama forming a whole new studio alongside other Sony vets.
According to VGC, Sony is shutting them down because
“…[it] simply hasn’t been profitable enough in recent years; the developer wanted to create games that appealed to the Japanese market first with hopes of having global appeal, while PlayStation wants the kind of global hits that its other first-party studios produce.”
The move is a pretty big indicator that Sony’s focus on Japan is drifting even farther away. While their messaging about it has been conflicting, stuff like this and moving their HQ to California are pretty damning.
A subsidiary of Japan Studio, ASOBI Team (Astro Bot) will remain as an independent subsidiary of Sony.
Dragon Age 4 Update
Electronic Arts has decided to completely remove all planned multiplayer content for Dragon Age 4. This was apparently considered a major pivot for the game, because it was going to have big multiplayer components.
According to Bloomberg, there were two reasons for the change. One was the success of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a single-player only game. The other was what we talked about yesterday, BioWare’s Anthem.
“The games showed that single-player games could still be lucrative and that BioWare, traditionally known for its single-player, role-playing games, might be better off returning to its roots.”
BioWare is in a precarious state with their next two games. They haven’t had a critical success in seven years, with Dragon Age Inquisition. We’ll see if things like the Mass Effect remasters and Dragon Age 4 will bring them back.
It’s also worth noting that EA has cancelled a project that they’ve been working on for six years called Gaia. They never really released much information about it, but it was apparently quite ambitious. And any game getting cancelled after six years of work must be a tough pill to swallow. It was being developed by Motive Studio, who recently found success with Star Wars: Squadrons.
CoD Game Sizes…
Activision has recently pushed out another big update for Black Ops Cold War, which has particularly brought up the issue of storage. As they themselves noted, if you own a base PlayStation 4 with 500GB of storage, you are no longer able to have the latest 3 Call of Duty’s installed on your machine (Modern Warfare, Warzone, Cold War) with everything installed.
THREE games. And they’re filling up entire machines. What the heck is going on over there?
Also In The News
Destruction AllStars will be $20 instead of the planned $70. It’s free on PlayStation right now, but people were pretty surprised at how pricey it was planned to be. Unfortunately the game didn’t review that well either.
Destiny 2 gets “Witch Queen” expansion delayed to 2022. COVID-19, developing cross-play, and narrative ambitions were cited as cause.
PUBG New State takes place in the future, releasing on mobile only.
Square Enix announces Final Fantasy VII The First Solider (battle royale) and Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis (single-player story), both releasing on mobile.
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