Bluepoint Games, as part of their GDC presentation, spoke about their mysterious new project, talking about its scope and mentioning how it’s one that is larger in scope than one might imagine. It’s not just as bold as their last title, the acclaimed remake of Sony’s Shadow of the Colossus (which you can read our take on here)- but something they promise to be even bigger and bolder.

“For Shadow of the Colossus we don’t call it a remaster, we coin it a remake due to the complexity of the project,” technical director Peter Dalton said. “And moving forward to our next project, we call it a re-envisioning given that it goes well beyond what we thought was possible on Shadow of the Colossus.”

It’s not the first time Bluepoint has talked about their next project in grand terms, saying shortly after their last release their next game would be bigger than Shadow of the Colossus. What game that could possibly be, or what platforms it will be available on is anyone’s best guess.

Bluepoint Games rose to prominence as a remastering studio working on enhanced ports from series like God of War and Metal Gear Solid, but made a new name for themselves with a full remake of Team Ico’s PlayStation 2 classic, Shadow of the Colossus, that released last year. It was universally acclaimed as both a faithful recreation of the original and including many quality of life upgrades that were well-received as solid additions. It’ll be interesting to see what they think towers over that.

Larian Studios achieved a lot with Divinity: Original Sin 2, delivering what’s one of the greatest role-playing games of all time. It wasn’t an easy journey though. As Larian founder Swen Vincke revealed during a panel at the Game Developers Conference, the original plan was to have the game’s four Acts contained in a single map.

Currently, the game has a map for each Act. The first Act takes place on Fort Joy, the second on Reaper’s Coast, and so on. However, these were all meant to be part of a single map. Even more interesting is that this would have been the map of the human lands, with other maps dedicated to the other races.

PC Gamer reports Vincke as stating, “Once we started realizing that we were in trouble and that we weren’t going to be able to make everything that we planned on, we had to make cuts. Originally Original Sin 2 had a map for the human lands, one for the dwarven lands, one for the undead, basically for each of the races present in the game. What you’re looking at here is a map of the human lands, which contains the city of Arx, Driftwood, and Fort Joy, all on one map. Which is essentially the entire game. That gives you an idea of the level of cuts that we had to do.”

This also affected the stories of the Origin characters as well, since each of their stories would take place in their respective race’s location. “Each of these maps had a lot of action going on, and when we cut it, we suddenly started cutting into what was supposed to be the real estate for the origin stories.

“So that meant that we had to go and change our origin stories again. This constant ping-ponging between adapting to the fact that we were going to be late and having to make cuts had an impact on the story. The fact that it had an impact on the story meant that the rest of the production was going to be delayed. We struggled quite a lot with that, but eventually managed to have it under control.”

Despite all of the content cutting, Divinity: Original Sin 2 turned out incredibly well. It’s story-telling, quest design, and combat are some of the best in the genre. The game received a fairly large overhaul with the Definitive Edition and also released for Xbox One and PS4. Larian Studios is still updating it with free content, but also has another project in development.

Motion Twin’s Dead Cells received a fair amount of acclaim when it launched in August 2018 out of Steam Early Access. It received tons of critical acclaim for its combat, the sheer brilliance of its design, and the gorgeous aesthetic. Thankfully, it’s also done well commercially.

At GDC 2019 (as per PC Gamer), designer Sébastien Bénard revealed during a postmortem for the game that it had sold more than one million copies. PC sales accounted for about 60 percent of that (which makes sense given that the game entered Steam Early Access in May 2017). Among consoles though, it sold the most on the Nintendo Switch.

While this may not seem like a huge sales number, it has helped Motion Twin to stay afloat especially, since Dead Cells was a “last chance project” according to Bénard. As for what’s coming next, the developer is gearing up for the release of Dead Cells’ first major DLC, Rise of the Giant, which adds new weapons, new bosses, a new biome, and much more. It’s out on March 28th for all platforms, free of charge.

Microsoft may not be putting all their eggs in the cloud-exclusive basket the way Google is doing with Stadia, but there’s no doubt in anybody’s mind that xCloud is still a huge focus for them. At their recent GDC 2019 panel, they went into detail about their vision for the upcoming streaming service, while also giving out some information on how their infrastructure is going to enable them to work toward their ambitions.

Windows Central’s Russell Holly and Easy Allies’ Daniel Bloodworth both put up updates on their respective Twitter pages, which included details from the Microsoft panel. xCloud, it seems, is aiming to become a user-friendly platform that essentially allows you to “play the games you want, with the people you want, on the devices you want.” To serve as illustrations of the same, Microsoft showed off how custom controls will work for Xbox games that you might be playing on your touch screen devices, including the likes of Dead Cells, Cuphead, and Forza Horizon 4. 

Microsoft also talked about the infrastructure they have in place for xCloud, which includes, all across the globe, over 135 Edge sites, 54 Azure regions, and north of 161 km of fiber. xCloud also purports cloud awareness, which allows games to “make targeted modifications to enhance gameplay while streaming.”

There’s plenty of other interesting information to be found in the tweets below. Clearly, xCloud is going to be a huge push for Microsoft in the coming months and years, and how well they kick things off isn’t something we have to wait too long to find out- public trials begin later this year, after all.

https://twitter.com/russellholly/status/1108777295060172800

https://twitter.com/russellholly/status/1108780828761350144

https://twitter.com/russellholly/status/1108781179770044418

Custom controls for Forza pic.twitter.com/8mj19ruKfq

— Daniel Bloodworth (@dbloodworth2) March 21, 2019

https://twitter.com/russellholly/status/1108782295329075201

https://twitter.com/russellholly/status/1108782915624689664

MS current Azure centers pic.twitter.com/AxEjI1Ibk8

— Daniel Bloodworth (@dbloodworth2) March 21, 2019

pic.twitter.com/Vziv6ZfqPo

— Daniel Bloodworth (@dbloodworth2) March 21, 2019

Default touch layout but adaptable per genre/ developer pic.twitter.com/LiSQP3r2uj

— Daniel Bloodworth (@dbloodworth2) March 21, 2019

Menus adapt to controls mobile users expect pic.twitter.com/lsW7smgSNr

— Daniel Bloodworth (@dbloodworth2) March 21, 2019

https://twitter.com/russellholly/status/1108785823720206336

https://twitter.com/russellholly/status/1108786157024763904

Capcom’s Devil May Cry 5 launched on March 8th for PS4, Xbox One and PC and was the first mainline sequel in the franchise since 2008. It’s a critical success, and now, less than two weeks later, it’s a commercial one as well. According to PC Gamer, at GDC 2019, director Hideaki Itsuno confirmed that the game has sold over 2 million copies since launch.

The hack and slash, action adventure title had some pretty solid starts across the world at launch. In Japan, Media Create reported over 110,000 units sold in its debut week. In the United Kingdom, it topped physical retail sales charts as per Gfk Chart-Track/UKIE.

In comparison, Ninja Theory’s DmC: Devil May Cry launched in January 2013 and hit 2.4 million units sold by June 2018. Though Capcom doesn’t have extensive post-launch plans for Devil May Cry 5, it will receive The Bloody Palace on April 1st completely free. With this success we could see more updates in the future, so stay tuned.

Cuphead isn’t the only game jumping ecosystems into a totally unexpected one, it seems like. Today during their GDC panel, Epic Games and Quantic Dream together announced that the latter’s three PlayStation exclusive games—Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, and yes, Detroit: Become Human as well—will all be coming to PC. And they will be coming via the Epic Games Store.

To be fair, Epic has directly worked on getting these games ported to PC with Quantic Dream, so this exclusivity arrangement makes far more sense than some of their other ones. That said, the exclusivity is not permanent—they will be exclusive to Epic’s store for one year. After that, we may see them launch on other storefronts.

The big news here, of course, is that Sony published games are launching on PC at all—other than the availability of PS Now on PC, Sony has largely kept its games exclusive to PlayStation hardware. While it’s unlikely that Sony’s first party games such as Horizon: Zero Dawn will come to PC (remember, Quantic Dream had already announced it will go multiplatform, albeit for future games), at least their other “second party” games, such as Bloodborne, now have a chance. Even if they are locked to Epic’s store.

id Software has been one of the most high profile developers to have pledged their support to Google’s new upcoming cloud-based gaming platform, Stadia, which was solidified yesterday when it was announced that DOOM Eternal would be launching on it. And we now actually have a taste of what the game will run like on the platform.

It’s looking very impressive, to tell you the truth. The video below showcases new gameplay footage of DOOM Eternal, running on Stadia, captured off a screen (courtesy of GameSpot). Though the final product will support 4K and 60 frames per second, the footage below seems to be 1080p, which means it’s comparable to how the game will look on a PS4 or an Xbox One. Even if you’re not too concerned about its performance on Stadia and just want some excellent new footage of the game itself, the video below will appeal to you- there’s some good old fashion demon slaying in there, not too mention some pretty cool platforming bits. Check it out.

Google Stadia is going to go live later this year, but an exact release date and price point for its subscriptions (assuming it is subscription-based) haven’t yet been announced. DOOM Eternal also doesn’t have an exact release date yet, but we can expect to hear more on that front at Bethesda’s E3 presser in June. When it does launch, alongside Stadia, it’ll also be launching on PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch.

The concept of a collectible card game rogue-lite tower run may not be easily imaginable, but it’s excellently handled in Mega Crit Games’ Slay the Spire. The title has been available for PC via Steam since leaving early access in January and has seen fairly strong success. A company spokesman revealed at GDC 2019 (according to PC Games N) that Slay the Spire has sold over 1.5 million copies since launch.

However, the most interesting part is that 43 percent of the CCG rogue-lite’s sales come from China. “This is before any localisation was available in the game, so there were a lot of confused players,” said the spokesman. It was also revealed that only 41 percent of the game’s audience spoke English, and that localizing in one region created demand in others like Korea, Russia, and Japan.

“We started our localisation efforts, and so the game is now translated to (…) 18 languages. Don’t forget China, there’s a lot of people there!”

Slay the Spire has seen a number of updates and mods since launch. Mega Crit Games promises that more content is coming, but further details have yet to be revealed. A port for Nintendo Switch is also out this year, though we still lack a release date. Perhaps more information will be provided at the upcoming Nindies Showcase? Stay tuned for more details.

While you won’t have a console box sitting under your TV with Google’s Stadia, Google will still be hosting all the games you are playing on hardware in their server stacks. And today, at their Stadia unveiling, they revealed what kinds of specs an individual unit for Stadia will have—it’s pretty loaded, basically, so you can expect high-end games this generation, and maybe even going into the next generation.

Google announced that their hardware uses a custom x86 CPU (which is best for compatibility with PC, PlayStation, and Xbox), with a 9.5MB L2+L3 cache and AVX2 SIMD. They also have a custom AMD GPU with 10.7 TFLOPs of power, HBM2 memory, and 56 compute units; 16GB of RAM, with bandwidth of up to 484 GB/s, and SSD storage.

This is all far beyond anything any other console on the market currently offers—it’s basically a generation beyond the Xbox One X. It’s unclear whether or not Sony or Microsoft will be able to deliver local hardware for next generation that matches this and doesn’t break the bank—which certainly gives Google a step up for now.

Google’s Stadia will use the power of its server-side hardware stacks (since it is a streaming service, without any local hardware or box doing any kind of computing for you) to actually end up with some enhancements for how you play games, too. One very cool example Google talked about earlier today was how couch co-op will be affected by Stadia.

Specifically, Google will allow local couch split-screen co-op by letting each player run their instance of the game side by side—effectively delivering split-screen co-op without any degradation in image quality, performance, or the likes, which are compromises that usually come with the territory of split-screen gaming. Local co-op multiplayer has largely become a lost art outside of Nintendo in the last few years, and this is definitely my favorite announcement made by Google today.

Another thing relating to multiplayer Google confirmed today was that Stadia will support full cross-platform play. I take it more as they won’t stand in the way of developers wanting to implement it, unlike, say, Sony—but Sony (and Microsoft, and Nintendo) still have to approve it, and developers have to implement it. Stadia isn’t magic, after all.

But on the whole, no matter what brand of multiplayer you prefer, Stadia has some good news to offer.