As part of the publisher’s strong fiscal year-end earnings report this morning, Ubisoft confirmed that Ghost Recon: Future Soldier will be arriving toward that back end of that revised schedule. In a post-earnings conference call, CEO Yves Guillemot said that the game is now scheduled to release during its January-March 2012 quarter.
“It will be released in fiscal Q4 as we want first to have the best quality possible, as well as to avoid the very crowded Christmas landscape in the shooter genre,” Guillemot said. Shooters that are expected to arrive during the holiday quarter include a new Call of Duty game, Battlefield 3, Resistance 3, and Gears of War 3.
Ghost Recon: Future Soldier gets its name from the “Future Soldier” programs being conducted by the US and its NATO allies. The initiative, currently part of the US Army’s Brigade Combat Team Modernization Program, focuses on outfitting infantrymen with networked communications and high-tech equipment.
The latest installment in the Ghost Recon franchise has been announced for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PSP, Wii, and DS. For more on the game, check out GameSpot’s previous coverage.
We go underground on the Red Planet in the sequel to 2009′s Red Faction: Guerrilla.
In Red Faction: Armageddon we are on Mars with a shaven-headed Mason once again: Darius Mason this time, grandson of Alex, hero of 2009′s Red Faction: Guerrilla. But where Guerrilla had us rove around on the Martian surface, Armageddon takes us underground. Terraforming has failed since the events of the last game, making Mars uninhabitable aboveground, forcing the human population to relocate into deep networks of rocky caverns. And where Guerrilla was open-world, Armageddon is basically linear, though with some larger, open areas suitable for sandbox-style play linked by the game’s subterranean roads and corridors.
The game’s producer, Jim Boone, tells us Armageddon’s linearity comes from player feedback. Though fans of the previous game enjoyed the vehicles and free-form destruction, he says, they were less keen on trundling long distances through an open environment. He also tells us that some 20 percent of the third-person action still takes place topside, though we didn’t see any sky for the few-hour duration of our hands-on demo, which was taken from early in the game.
As the demo began, the humans were already besieged by huge and vicious insectile beasties. Since these came from deep within the planet Mars and the humans from planet Earth, they are technically the natives. For the purposes of this preview, however, and because they are huge and vicious insectile beasties, we shall call them aliens. Our hero Darius is somehow to blame for the alien uprising–but inadvertently, mind you, and doing his best to make up for it. In the course of the demo, he escorts a convoy through hostile territory, fetches power cells and fixes water pumps for beleaguered civilians, and demolishes all manner of alien-infested structures.
Among the enemies are various brightly coloured red and green creatures, accessorised with organic blades and spikes and ranged bioweapon fire–glowing green globs that explode just after impact. We encountered plenty of ravagers: fast-moving, wall-climbing aliens with bone-bladed arms. Another alien creature, a stealthy variant, is invisible except when attacking but signals its proximity with a blurring effect on Darius’ vision. Others are less subtle and less buglike: one creature was a hulking, horned biped, like a Martian minotaur.
We weren’t short of hardware to see off the alien hordes, with Armageddon forever dropping new weapons in our path, but chief among them was the tremendously fun magnet gun. With this, the game’s signature weapon, you shoot item A (say, the side of a building) and then shoot item B (say, a spiky ravager) to fling the one into the other, as if by magnetic attraction. The quick two-shot operation works a bit like Dead Space’s kinesis module, letting you smash large chunks of the level furniture–girders, walkways, shacks, and the like–into your squishable foes, but also letting you launch enemies up and away, by firing at them and then at the distant cavern ceiling.
This making-of video features new gameplay footage and key insights from the development team tasked with creating the most polished, balanced, and action-packed “Gears of War” multiplayer experience to date.
Game and book publishers teaming up to create transmedia properties across “multiple mediums,” plan to translate more offerings from game library into novels.
THQ is a big fan of transmedia. The game publisher is currently helping with a SyFy channel miniseries that will bridge the story between Red Faction Guerilla and the upcoming Armageddon. It also recently backed Homefront: Voice of Freedom, the novelization of its already-platinum shooter Homefront.
Now THQ is taking another step forward in its transmedia efforts. Today, the company announced that it has inked a deal with book publishing giant Random House Publishing Group to develop all-new intellectual properties. The agreement will see a creative team assembled from representatives of both companies that will create “a rich IP universe” that will manifest itself in “a collection of games and books.”
One aspect of the collaboration will be the creation of “world bibles” for THQ game series through the Random House Publishing Group’s IP creation and development group, Random House Worlds. No further details were given other than THQ would continue to try and bring its current IP library to “all existing book formats” with Random House’s assistance. Whether or not that means a WWE: Smackdown vs. Raw novel is in the works remains to be seen.
