IGN Video Games |
- EA, Gearbox, and Microsoft Sign Open Letter Opposing Texas' Anti-Trans Bill
- Perfect Dark Game Director Dan Neuburger Seemingly Leaves The Initiative
- Reggie Fils-Aimé Isn't a Believer in the 'Current Definition' of Facebook's Metaverse Vision
- Video Game Accessibility Awards 2021 - All the Winners
- Aquamarine Is a Mysterious, Aquatic Adventure for 70s Sci-Fi Lovers
| EA, Gearbox, and Microsoft Sign Open Letter Opposing Texas' Anti-Trans Bill Posted: 13 Mar 2022 12:49 AM PST Following Texas Governor Greg Abbott's order in February 2022 that called for child protective services to investigate families of transgender children who were receiving gender-affirming healthcare for child abuse, 65 companies have signed a letter asking for Abbot to abandon these anti-LGBTQ+ efforts. As reported by Kotaku, these 65 companies - a list that includes Electronic Arts, Gearbox Entertainment, and Microsoft - signed the letter that was organized by the LGBTQ+ organization the Human Rights Campaign and was posted in the Friday edition of the Dallas Morning News as a full-page advertisement. The ad copy was shared by Rebecca Marques, the Texas director of HRC, on Twitter.
"Our companies do business, create jobs, and serve customers in Texas," the letter reads. "We are committed to building inclusive environments where our employees can thrive inside and outside of the workplace. For years we have stood to ensure LGBTQ+ people - our employees, customers, and their families - are safe and welcomed in the communities where we do business. "The recent attempt to criminalize a parent for helping their transgender child access medically necessary, age-appropriate healthcare in the state of Texas goes against the values of our companies. This policy creates fear for employees and their families, especially those with transgender children, who might now be faced with choosing to provide the best possible medical care for their children but risk having those children removed by child protective services for doing so. It is only one of several efforts discriminating against transgender youth that are advancing across the country. "We call on our public leaders - in Texas and across the country - to abandon efforts to write discrimination into law and policy. It's not just wrong, it has an impact on our employees, our customers, their families, and our work." EA, Microsoft, and Gearbox are members of the pro-LGBTQ business network Texas Competes and Gearbox itself has previously taken a stand against a previous bill that proposed banning transgender youth from participating in sports. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com. Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch. |
| Perfect Dark Game Director Dan Neuburger Seemingly Leaves The Initiative Posted: 13 Mar 2022 12:32 AM PST Perfect Dark game director Dan Neuburger has seemingly left The Initiative after working with the company for nearly four years. As reported by VGC, ResetERA user Klobrille noticed the change on Neuburger's LinkedIn profile that shows February 2022 was his last month at The Initiative. Furthermore, his profile page says that he is Neuburger had worked at Tomb Raider's Crystal Dynamics for over 12 years before his time with The Initiative - the same studio that has teamed up with The Initiative to help finish development on the reboot of Perfect Dark. This isn't the first high-level departure from The Initiative, as the company's former design director Drew Murray announced that he was leaving the company in February 2021 and would be returning to his old studio Insomniac Games. Perfect Dark was revealed at The Game Awards 2020 and is set to be a first-person shooter with an "eco-sci-fi" that is "aiming to deliver a secret agent thriller set in a near-future world." The Initiative itself was announced at E3 2018 as Microsoft's first-ever 'AAAA' studio that would be "challenging themselves to do new things (and old things) in new ways." Perfect Dark, a franchise that began on the N64 in 2000, currently has no release date. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com. Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch. |
| Reggie Fils-Aimé Isn't a Believer in the 'Current Definition' of Facebook's Metaverse Vision Posted: 12 Mar 2022 08:14 PM PST Former Nintendo of America President and COO Reggie Fils-Aimé has questioned the "current definition" of Facebook's metaverse vision, saying that "Facebook itself is not an innovative company." Speaking to Bloomberg's Emily Chang during SXSW, Fils-Aimé shared his thoughts on the current state of the so-called metaverse and discussed why he doesn't believe Facebook is currently on the right track to lead the way. "Facebook itself is not an innovative company," Fils-Aimé said. "They have either acquired interesting things like Oculus and Instagram, or they've been a fast follower of people's ideas. I don't think their current definition will be successful." Instead, Fils-Aimé thinks this digital future so many are striving towards will be led by "smaller companies that are really innovating" and companies like Epic Games who are doing "really compelling" things. Fils-Aimé also talked about how he believes that more acquisitions by gaming companies are on the way following Microsoft's "fantastic purchase" of Activision Blizzard and how the games industry still has a long way to go in terms of diversity. "This is a global industry touching 3 billion people across the world; it's a $200 billion business," Fils-Aimé said. "The representation in the game and in leadership is not at all where it needs to be." Lastly, he shed some light on his time on the board of GameStop and shared some criticism towards the company's management and plan for the future. Fils-Aime left the board in early 2021. "There has not been an articulated strategy. Leadership says we don't want to articulate our strategy because they don't want it to be stolen," he said. "To me that was not acceptable." For more on Fils-Aimé, who is set to release a book chronicling his career called 'Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo' in May 2022, check out the eight best Reggie Fils-Aimé moments of all time, why the Switch's success made it "easy" for him to retire, and how he had to "politely decline" an offer to work with Kanye West on a game. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com. Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch. |
| Video Game Accessibility Awards 2021 - All the Winners Posted: 12 Mar 2022 07:41 PM PST The second annual Video Game Accessibility Awards have arrived and they have honored the games that have gone above and beyond to push forward the bar of accessibility by making their games available to so many more. The winners were announced in a livestream hosted by Accessibility Awards co-creators Steven Spohn and Alanah Pearce. IGN alum Alanah Pearce is a writer at Sony Santa Monica and Steven Spohn is a Senior Director at AbleGamers, and the awards show was founded in partnership with AbleGames to highlight these games doing incredible work in the field of accessibility. The judging panel is made up entirely of disabled gamers and the categories are based on accessibility guidelines that AbleGamers created as tools for game developers. There were nine categories in total, and Halo Infinite led the way with two victories in Clear Text and Training Grounds. Guardians of the Galaxy, Before Your Eyes, Forza Horizon 5, Far Cry 6, It Takes Two, Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker, and Life Is Strange: True Colors also took home awards. The full list of winners and nominees for the 2021 Video Game Accessibility Awards are as follows; Second Channel - For games that give players a second means or interface to get the information they may need to progress.
Clear Text - For games that allow players to reliably read text in the game or its interfaces.
Input Reduction - For games that allow players to decrease the amount of input reduction needed to successfully undertake a sequence of actions required by the game.
AI Assistance - For games that allow players to progress through challenges with assistance from in-game AI.
Improved Precision - For games that allow players to increase or decrease things like movement sensitivity so that they may be precise with their actions in the game or its interfaces.
Peer Assistance - For games that allow players to progress through challenges presented by the game with assistance from another player.
Remapping - For games that allow players to remap or reconfigure standard control figurations.
Training Grounds - For games that give players a place or means to increase their skill level outside on their own time, outside of the usual means of training used by the game.
Ability to Bypass - For games that allow players to bypass or skip sections that they are unable to successfully engage with.
For more in the world of accessibility, check out how Spohn was able to raise over $1 million for AbleGamers and why Forza Horizon 5 was chosen as IGN's noteworthy advancement in accessibility for 2021 winner. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com. Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch. |
| Aquamarine Is a Mysterious, Aquatic Adventure for 70s Sci-Fi Lovers Posted: 12 Mar 2022 12:00 PM PST You know that feeling of finding an old, yellowing sci-fi novel from the 70s at a used bookstore, with some once-bright planet on the cover alongside a weird, alien creature? If you love that vibe, you might be interested in climbing into the spherical, seafaring pod of Aquamarine to check out its mysterious, dream-like planet. Aquamarine is a beautiful, turn-based adventure about a spacefaring woman who crash lands on an aquatic world. She must survive by studying and coexisting with the local ecosystem, and eventually find a way home. It's slow paced; everything you do is turn-based, with movements consuming the fuel of your survival pod and your own energy as you search for more resources and your crashed ship. In between, you'll grow your own food and upgrade your pod with mods that let you explore further and deeper. All the while, Aquamarine's oceanic ecosystems will react in both subtle and grander ways to your choices, shifting the environment as you live in it. Aquamarine's art-style and sound look like they're pulled from a sci-fi comic or cartoon…likely because that's precisely what inspired creator Patric Fallon when he first conceived it. In 2017, Fallon was an unemployed music journalist who was teaching himself to make games as a hobby using Unity video tutorials and a lot of practice on tiny projects. During that time, he and his then-partner became enamored with the work of French comic book artist Jean 'Moebius' Giraud - leading Fallon to realize that there weren't many or any games that looked like Moebius' work (Sable had yet to be announced, Fallon notes). So they set out to create one with Aquamarine. Of course, Moebius isn't the only inspiration. Fallon tells me he was also inspired by the entire vibe of 70s and 80s sci-fi: French filmmaker René Laloux's Fantastic Planet, early Studio Ghibli films like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and synth musicians like Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre. You know, the whole used book vibe I mentioned before. "Really this whole package of those sci-fi paperback novel covers and the dusty vinyl of early synth music and comic books," Fallon affirms. His partner eventually departed the project, making Fallon the sole full-time member of what became Moebial Studios, though he's worked with a number of contractors including composer Thomas Hoey over the last several years. Aquamarine ran an unsuccessful Kickstarter back in 2018, the failure of which Fallon says gives him mixed feelings. He's happy that, since Aquamarine was in such an early state when the Kickstarter happened, he was able to use the extra time and space to reflect, add on, and improve it considerably. But Fallon says it was a bit of a curse too. "Kickstarters, it's no secret, are extremely difficult things to run and launch and I was basically doing it on my own. My partner was helping with some of the art stuff, but as far as managing and preparing it and promoting it, that was all me. For it not to be successful is really, really difficult." The Kickstarter's failure made Fallon realize he needed to move out of his expensive Brooklyn apartment and back home to the West Coast. While there, he took up gardening, an activity that ultimately inspired him to add a gardening feature to Aquamarine. "This game is about someone who has suffered a loss and who has a large goal to attain, and who has to grow in many different ways in order to reach that goal. And that really resonated with me in terms of growing something in a garden…Doing that was really therapeutic and really just a nice change of pace from living in Brooklyn, New York, to having my own little backyard garden in the mountains." Alongside the garden, another major system that Fallon was able to flesh out in that extra time was the way Aquamarine's choices and ecosystem work. Throughout Aquamarine, you'll have to make choices about how to interact with the creatures and environment you encounter. Do you kill a potentially dangerous creature you've never seen before? Do you approach a mysterious cache of resources, or leave it alone? Those choices will impact you and the environment in permanent ways because, notably, Aquamarine only has one save file at a time, and autosaves as you go. So unless you want to completely restart, there's no turning back or save-scumming for "better" outcomes. And the music, too, is adaptive. It responds to the things you do, with composer Hoey having deconstructed his own compositions and rebuilt them to create different versions for different world states, rather than just looping different tracks for different zones. "The game feeling is meant to be chill and slow-paced and not necessarily relaxing, but definitely something that you can sit and think about, and so I wanted to counteract that with a weight to the choices you make," Fallon says. "And so, if you make a choice to kill a creature for one reason or another, I didn't want that to just be something that happens and then you can go back and undo it. That was a choice that you made and the effects of that choice will be seen. It just didn't make sense to me that you should be able to do that as many times as you want, and you should be able to jump back and forth and change the states of it all. You're here." I'm still slowly sailing through my own alien adventure in Aquamarine, unsure just yet of what it all means. I'm growing a little garden of aquatic plants, and I've already met some strange, cute watery creatures who don't seem to mean any harm, though I'm keeping my distance for now. I'm not the best at the resource management bits, but my little pod does its best to keep me safe as I trek onward through the depths in search of my crashed ship. Aquamarine, like the art and films and novels that inspired it, is doing a wonderful job of enticing me with beautiful mystery, and I can't wait to dive even deeper. Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine. |
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