Latest news with #BlooberTeam
The Verge
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Verge
The Switch 2 is off to a speedy start for big third-party games
With the Switch 2, Nintendo seems to be closing the release date gap with some of its third-party games. It's a problem that plagued previous Nintendo consoles, which often received games years after other platforms, if at all. While today's Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase may have lacked the splash of anticipated third-party games like Hades 2 or FromSoftware's The Duskbloods, what was on display offered some interesting insight. Showcases like this one offer Nintendo's second- and third-party development and publishing partners the chance to show off what they've got on the way. In the original Switch days, multiplatform games like Control would get Switch release dates months or even years after their initial launch, if they came to the Switch at all. And even then, the game might sometimes be the cloud version, requiring it to be streamed on the console, and these were generally hated for their inconsistent graphics and performance issues. With this Direct, it seems like Nintendo is working to bring third-party games to the Switch 2 faster and, hopefully, with gameplay experiences similar to the other consoles. During this Direct, we got a look at Cronos: The New Dawn, a new game from Silent Hill 2 remake studio Bloober Team. Cronos looks like the kind of game that would have struggled on the original Switch, but it's releasing across all three consoles and PC on September 5th. Madden NFL 2026 is also launching across the Big 3 at the same time — August 14th — a feat of note considering the last time a Madden title was on a Nintendo console was Madden NFL 13 more than a decade ago. Star Wars Outlaws has been out since August of last year. Its arrival on the Switch 2 in September represents Ubisoft's most graphically and technically complex game on the platform since the Assassin's Creed Anniversary Edition Mega Bundle. (And the most recent game in that collection was released more than 10 years ago.) Borderlands 4, while not launching exactly day and date, will come out on the Switch 2 a mere three weeks after its PC/Xbox/PlayStation launch. Even the third-party games that weren't shown today still represent exciting new prospects for the Switch 2. During the Switch 2 Direct in April, Elden Ring was shown as one of the games coming to the new console. With the way the original Switch struggled with more complex games, even ones designed with that console in mind, a big-ass, pretty-ass, particle-y effect-ass game like Elden Ring running on it was unthinkable. But Elden Ring Tarnished Edition, along with The Duskbloods, a totally original FromSoftware multiplayer joint, are both coming to the Switch 2. Final Fantasy VII Remake, a game with the same kind of, if not higher, technical complexity as Elden Ring, is on the way too. Nintendo's always been the kind of company to do what it wants rather than chase market trends, and that strategy has served the company very well. The original Switch wasn't at the bleeding technical edge and, because of the high quality of its games, it didn't have to be. The Switch 2, similarly, isn't pushing the same kind of power as Xbox and PlayStation, but the console has evolved just enough that it can support some of the still-popular recent games of its competitors. And even if not everything new will come to the Switch 2, the console still has a robust back catalog to bring forward. During today's Direct we saw that Sega's Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio is bringing the Yakuza Kiwami series to the Switch 2. We don't know how any of these games will perform when they're finally released on the Switch 2. We'll have to wait and see if the console fulfills the promise of bigger and better games running on improved hardware. We also don't know if the trend will continue beyond the initial excitement of a new console's launch window. But if the critical acclaim of the Switch 2 edition of Cyberpunk 2077 is anything to go by, the ports won't just be coming faster; they'll be good, too. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Ash Parrish Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Analysis Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Entertainment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Features Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Gaming Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Nintendo
Gizmodo
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
‘Gremlins 3' Is Waiting for Steve Spielberg's Approval
Bloober Team's The Medium is heading to the big screen. Friday 13th prequel Crystal Lake adds another deep cut connection to its cast. Plus, what's coming on Revival. Spoilers away!During a recent appearance at Manchester's Comic-Con (via Games Radar), Zach Galligan revealed a script has been written for a third Gremlins movie Warner Bros. is 'waiting on' Steven Spielberg to 'read and approve.' After 35 years, they've come up with a script […] Warner Bros. is incredibly interested in doing it, apparently it's waiting on Mr. Spielberg to read it and approve it. But you can thank the success of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. According to Deadline, Julie Benz, Jason Behr, Allison Dunbar, Doug Jones, Aimeé Teegarden, Busy Philipps, Ron Perlman, and Jim Rash will star in Horrified, a horror-comedy in which a 'down-on-her-luck scream queen (Benz) returns to the horror convention circuit for fast cash. The comeback veers off course when she finds herself up against a pig-masked killer from her old franchise weaponizing her cult legacy against her friends and fans, forcing her to confront past demons and fight for survival in a blood-soaked slasher showdown.' THR reports Gary Dauberman's production company, Coin Operated, has secured the film rights to The Medium, the award-winning video game from Bloober Team. While the search for a screenwriter is currently underway, the game is set 'in the post-communist era of Poland in the 1990s' and concerns 'a woman named Marianna, imbued with psychic abilities, who is called to unravel the mystery of the death of an innocent child.' Empire has a new image from Justin Tipping's 'sports-horror' movie, Him. Deadline reports Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells will star in Stay Tuned, a TV series based on the 1992 comedy from Akiva Goldsman, Jordan Cahan, and Greg Lessans. Much like in the movie it's based on, the series will see Rannells and Gad 'trapped on the wrong side of the screen and forced to navigate their way through TV's most binge-worthy obsessions.' According to a new report from Friday the 13th Franchise, Nancy Vagrant has been cast as Kay Christy, an unspecified 'relative' of Steve Christy, the mustachioed camp owner from the original Friday the 13th in Crystal Lake. Deadline reports Rohan Campbell is the latest actor to join the cast of the still-untitled Netflix series about a sea monster attacking Newfoundland starring Josh Hartnett, Makenzie Davis and Charlie Heaton. TV Line also has word Jeremy Swift, Dominic Monaghan, Josh Gates, Stefan Kapičić , Oliver Dench, Ty Tennant, Flula Borg, Alan Emrys, Malcolm Sinclair, Reece Ritchie, Cat White, Gledisa Arthur, Jack Cunningham-Nuttall, Danny Rea, Luka Divac and Alex Henry will make guest appearances on the second season of The Librarians: Next Chapter. Additionally, Christian Kane and Lindy Booth will both reprise their role as the original series' characters Jacob Stone and Cassandra Cillian, respectively. Finally, Syfy has released a clip from tonight's new episode of Revival. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Newsweek
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Newsweek
Bloober Team Says Its Newest Game Isn't Meant to be About the Pandemic
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Entertainment gossip and news from Newsweek's network of contributors Bloober Team, the developer behind the very well received Silent Hill 2 remake, is about to launch a new original game, but despite first appearances, it's not actually about or directly inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic. Cronos: The New Dawn features a devastating pandemic that wiped out a big chunk of humanity and brought the world to its knees, as part of a cataclysmic event called The Change. A twisted, tar-like creature among a mountain of burnt corpses in Cronos: The New Dawn. A twisted, tar-like creature among a mountain of burnt corpses in Cronos: The New Dawn. Bloober Team According to a new interview with DBLTAP, though, the game's co-director Jacek Zieba has revealed that the events of the game weren't inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic – at least not consciously – and that the similarities were mostly coincidental. "It's something we realized after, like 'oh f***, we are making a game about a pandemic.' We didn't intend it, that wasn't the idea," Zieba told DBLTAP. "I think, subconsciously, we may have gone through some kind of therapy by including that. We know it lands as it lands, but [it's not a game about COVID]. There will be some themes – it's horror, we are touching on that – but it's not a game about that. It's a game about change — even symbolic change." The COVID-19 pandemic hit the games industry particularly hard, with a rapid shift to remote working necessitating major changes across the industry that many developers weren't particularly equipped for. Dozens of games, from tiny indies to massive triple-A productions, were delayed or changed significantly as a result, the effects of which are still being seen to this day, five years after the start of the pandemic. That said, it wasn't all doom and gloom for the industry, as Zieba points out. Moving to remote development meant broadening the talent pool when the time came to expand teams for new projects, and Bloober Team – whose projects were previously largely staffed by Polish developers – found a lot of fresh faces who otherwise wouldn't have been able to join the team. "The pandemic also helped us," Zieba says. "Because the games industry in Poland was growing, but without the people that are working remotely right now, I think we wouldn't be in the place we are right now. We hired people not just from Poland, but from Europe and so on. This really leveled us up as developers." Bloober previously revealed in interviews that Cronos: The New Dawn won't have an easy mode, citing the game's horror-focused roots as the primary reason, with Zieba at the time saying "it's survival horror, to make it work it needs to be a bit challenging." "The first experience is the first experience," Zeiba said at the time. "So if you do easy mode, okay, somebody will play it and maybe have less scares or something, but to play as intended, this is why we decided to go with our difficulty at the beginning." Cronos: The New Dawn is set to be released on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam in 2025.
Daily Mirror
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Cronos: The New Dawn's mix of time travel and merging enemies could make for a new breed of horror
Following its stellar work with last year's Silent Hill 2 remake, Bloober Team returns to over-the-shoulder horror with a promising time travel story. After playing a solid chunk of Bloober Team's upcoming survival horror, Cronos: The New Dawn, it's clear that there's plenty of potential due to the way enemies are prone to overwhelm you. Nobody would blame developer Bloober Team for playing it safe with its first project following last year's pretty great remake of Silent Hill 2. And yet, after having played an early preview build of Cronos: The New Dawn for roughly two hours, I sense a willingness here to push forward the genre envelope – ever so slightly. The Polish studio's latest builds upon classic survival horror traditions such as inventory crafting and limited resources not just by relying on past tropes, but by creating a universe and ruleset all its own. The upcoming game isn't just another attempt to recapture the magic of Dead Space or Resident Evil 4; it's Silent Hill meets Twelve Monkeys. Which is to say an atmospheric time travel story neatly blended with a new style of enemy, made scarier due to how tough it can be to put down if left unchecked. At the centre of it all is The Traveler, a mysterious, faceless figure clad in armour who makes a striking first impression. She emerges from her travel sphere with two simple goals: pick up the mission data left by the last fallen Traveler and find your target in need of teleportation, yes, back to the future. Your job is to dive back in specific moments of the past and save people who didn't survive the end of the world the first time. I'm a sucker for a good time travel story as it is, but when you serve me up a premise as specific yet thought-provoking as this? It helps makes every action I take in the demo all the more weighty. Taking place right at the start of the game, my demo set me on a path that required exploring a series of dilapidated, brutalist buildings that offer little respite from the stormy sky and wrecked landscapes that surround. Cronos: The New Dawn very much throws you into the deep end, as it were, instantly setting the stakes impossibly high with The Traveler equipped with little more than a simple pistol and a pretty beefy stomp – a la Isaac Clarke. Both manners of dispatch do well to help me get closer to my objective. Not helping, however, is the fact that – at least in this timeline – the world has been plagued by a series of mutated creatures disturbingly referred to in-universe as 'Orphans'. Bloober Team is keeping quiet as to the nature of how these gloopy, grotesque-looking Orphans came to be and in what ways they tie into the world-ending event at the heart of Cronos. But if EA's addition to the survival horror oeuvre served as one simple instruction, 'cut off their limbs', Bloober Team's original over-the-shoulder take asks something very different from you: 'don't let them merge'. It's a piece of advice left behind for the Traveler to find fairly early on into this reality-tearing journey. But not only can it cause problems from a hypothetical standpoint. In practice, letting any Orphan merge with another can cause series problems when your back is against the wall. I'm on fire Putting an Orphan down and then moving on to your next target isn't enough, you see. Instead, The Traveler comes equipped with a flame burst technique that means burning the bodies of her enemies so that larger, more terrifying variants of the foe just taken down don't suddenly rise off the floor. The problem is, fuel tanks that power the flame burst aren't always something to be relied upon, forcing you to try and lure any existing sludgy Orphans away from those lying on the floor – yet even then this might not be enough to stop them seeking any available former friends to consume. There were various points in my demo where Cronos: The New Dawn locked me down into specific locations, unable to progress beyond a locked door until every enemy was dealt with. So far, so standard, as far as applying pressure in a game is concerned. However, here it's easily to quickly find yourself overwhelmed and make the situation worse for yourself, should you not act swiftly or take the initiative to seek enemies out (rather than the other way around). The threat of enemies merging and becoming significantly tougher brings a great deal of strategy to the modern survival horror format. The kind of which I've not seen since Mr. X was introduced in the Resident Evil 2 remake as Leon and Claire's determined pursuer. Outside of these high tension moments, Cronos admittedly elects to play it a bit safer. While exploring the abandoned wasteland of what used to be Krakow's Nowa Huta steelworks, there's the usual rigamarole of moving through areas while searching for resources, a light but of code-centric puzzle solving, and making the most of newly unlocked suit and weapon upgrades after reaching any one of the conveniently situated safe zones. All this is coated in a decent amount of lore-building texture, however, which for a short while ground you enough to temporarily forget where you might have seen such systems before. But then again, Bloober Team, did a good job with Silent Hill 2, so it'd be a shame to not lean into this knowledge somewhat. By the time my preview demo ends I've survived several bouts of tense 'me versus them' where my ammo reserves have been depleted, fuel tanks are scarce, and the enemies merge far more often than I'd like. All this, plus a newly acquired function that lets my gun manipulate the environment between various states of degradation, leave me hopeful that Bloober Team is attempting to strike the right balance between survival horror nightmare with neat puzzles, and atmospheric time travel story where all is not as it seems. Sadly, it's when jumping into a portal to find my first target that the screen fades to black, and I'm left wondering whether the capturing sequences that follow will be just as intriguing. After all, this element of 'rescuing' people from the past won't just be a one and done deal, according to Bloober Team, as The Traveler's suit will increasingly become more haunted with their essence. None of this was available to experience in my short, hour-and-a-half demo, so I'm curious to see how it plays out. For now, however, Cronos: The New Dawn is doing a pretty good job at taking familiar aspects from the modern survival horror genre and mixing in new elements of its own. It doesn't make or a gameplay experience that's entirely new per se, but one willing to take chances on features you think you know by twisting and tweaking the usual rules; particularly with regards to enemies. Rather appropriately for a game based around time travel, Cronos is remixing elements from the past to (hopefully) build an exciting future.
Bloomberg
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Bloomberg
Polish Studio Behind ‘Silent Hill' Remake Plans Original Games
Few expected a small Polish studio like Bloober Team SA to do justice to Silent Hill 2 with their remake of the survival horror classic. Yet the game turned out to be one of last year's biggest hits, selling two million copies in just four months while winning award nominations and critical acclaim. The game has been a windfall for the 17-year-old outfit and its founder Piotr Babieno after starting out making low-effort games for quick cash. Shares of Bloober have surged more than 13% since Silent Hill 2' s release, and last year earnings grew sevenfold to about $6 million. Fresh off that success, the studio is returning to the franchise with another Konami Group Corp. collaboration — a remake of the series' 1999 debut title, which is already in production
