Playground Games, known for its success with the Forza Horizon series, has revealed that its next project is a new triple A open world action RPG. This follows an announcement from earlier in the year when the studio discussed branching out of Xbox-exclusive racing series.

How the news came about is interesting as the developer’s official Twitter announced that it secured a new office at St Albans House in Leaming Spa. The developer has already started refurbishing its new home and will take up the whole building by 2018 end, which should give some indication as to when the open world RPG will release.

In terms of open world design, Playground Games has a lot of experience with the Forza Horizon series, garnering critical and commercial acclaim for the world building and attention to detail across various hubs. The fact that it’s working on an action RPG doesn’t mean that it’s done with Forza just yet but we’ll have to wait for more information.

We have a home for our new AAA open-world action RPG project! https://t.co/CGywuQLbwK

— Playground Games (@WeArePlayground) November 22, 2017

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Horizon: Zero Dawn

Guerrilla Games is known for developing the Killzone franchise, a series of first-person shooters that are known for their beautiful graphics and tight gunplay. The studio is now leaving the realm of linear shooters for wide-open planes and desolate cities. Set a thousand years after an apocalyptic event, Horizon: Zero Dawn sets the player loose among glowing green forests, long-forgotten cities, and machine controlled wastelands. With dynamic combat, RPG elements and a compelling narrative, Horizon will offer a new, unique experience in a world that no one has braved before.

With the resolution debate out of the way – or more prominently featured thanks to the screenshot and video comparisons – Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes director Hideo Kojima is back to talking about the game’s open world approach.

On Twitter, Kojima stated that, “Since GZ is a real stealth simulator game, it’s a bit different from other open world game. On-rails games have players proceeding with flags according to the design programmed such as A→B→C→D→E→F→Goal.

“Cut scenes are included in every → and drag players into the game. GZ allows you to play the missions in an open world freely. It’s up to the player how you play tactically, moreover the way to evacuate. Thus after missions are cleared, you’ll want to play them again and again. Story goes carries over from mission to mission but you have total freedom in mission.”

While Game Informer infamously stated that the main mission could be completed in 2 hours, recent impressions indicate it will be longer. Nonetheless, Ground Zeroes will hopefully keep us busy till the release of The Phantom Pain, which is where the meat of the story is at.

Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes releases on March 18th in North America and March 20th in Europe for Xbox One, PS4, PS3 and Xbox 360.

When Titanfall was first announced, it was revealed that the game would be online-only. However, Respawn Entertainment saw fit to include single-player elements such as alternating paths, NPCs and story elements. Why not just make it a persistent open world online shooter? With games such as The Crew and Tom Clancy’s The Division on the horizon, and titles like PlanetSide 2 having done well on the PC, it would certainly make for a bigger experience.

However, when we spoke Respawn community manager Abbie Heppe, she explained that, “It didn’t fit the style of game we were making. Tons of mechanics and design elements need to change or be different if you’re creating an open world game, our style of gameplay fit best in more contained environments. It’s certainly fun to imagine an open world Titanfall game though!”

Titanfall is slated to release for Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC on March 11th 2014 in North America and March 13th 2014 in Europe.

Specifically, it’s due to the use of vehicles that the series avoids any modern day settings. This is because “‘memory imprinting’ in individuals is actually hampered by the semi-catatonic state most people enter when driving for medium and long periods of time – and this makes data retrieval somewhat more difficult.” It then states that it doesn’t want to go to the extra effort to code Animus features for the sake of “digging up memories of people driving around in cars. There are other and more efficient ways to experience that…”

Is that Ubisoft’s way of saying that driving in cars in open world games is boring and is better reserved for real life? What are your thoughts on the same?

Via: Reddit

The game is interesting due to the weather system, animals that interact with you and plants that actually grow and wither. You’ll have to use stealth to successfully maneuver your way past some odd monstrosities lurking in the forest. You can also psychopathy to build a tower of limbs and light it on fire as a warning to your foes. Or something.

Will you be able to handle this on Oculus Rift, especially given the number of beasts leaping at you? How about roaming through a dark cave full of even more imposing creatures? Let us know in the comments below.

10. Throwing People Out of Planes Without Parachutes

We’ve heard about sky-diving from airplanes and the amount of time it takes to reach the ground. However, what about throwing people out of airplanes without parachutes? The sensation of seeing our three heroes flailing about in the air as the wind rushes through their limbs and gravity invites them to meet their un-maker? We could never get tired of that. We could go to hell for torturing them, but we could never get tired of it.

9. The Long, Long Drive

Los Santos and Blaine County are huge. Compare them to the likes of Toronto (the real one) and it’s amazing how they match up in terms of scale. While this world is full of possibilities and activities, we’re more interested in driving around the whole place and just watching life play out. Why? Because more than anything else, it’s a joy to just see how Rockstar made it all possible – and make no mistake, it shouldn’t be possible – on current gen hardware.

8. Running Over People

Of course, the inverse of the long drive is mowing people down. It must be the way that it’s handled now or just by the fact that civilians rag-doll so convincingly, but running people over looks like a ton of fun in GTA V. We can’t even remember the last time an open world game let us drive a car from the cockpit perspective, thus watching the souls of puny mortals bounce off the hood from the first person. Carmageddon indeed.

7. Taking on the Police
As with any Grand Theft Auto, we’re keen to see what the police can throw at us this time. Sure, we won’t get Murderbots, aliens, UFOs, rolling droids and Wardrens arriving to stomp us down like in Saints Row IV. But given that the FIB will be returning and dishing out what special forces and helicopters to maintain low and order, we’re interested to see how the new cover and abilities will help us.

6. Aerial Supremacy

We already know that we’ll be able to pilot fighter jets in order to wreck chaos across the world of Los Santos. But will we be able to get into dog fights with the army? Will anti-aircraft missiles be used? Can we use anti-aircraft missiles? Or will we just be going around blowing up bridges and making people’s lives miserable from the comfort of a jet? Regardless, destruction. That is all.

5. Carrying Out Heists
We’ll be honest: We have no idea what to expect aside from the prospect that, yes, there will be a mission that pays homage to Heat and yes, we will be rappelling down the side of a building and asking our sniper to give us cover. Will it outdo a game like PayDay 2? Considering that game didn’t have the benefit of switchable characters, abilities and friggin’ fighter jets, we believe so. Will there be heists that we can play over and over again with different crews to gauge the differences? Will there be different ranks of missions, with harder objectives giving us better ranks? Regardless, bring on the bank robbery.

4. Hunting for Big Foot

It (he? she?) exists. We just know it. No matter what happens, we’re going to find this urban legend. Far from studying its exotic origins or even keeping the myth alive, doing our part to propagate it through the annals of history, we’re going to murder and mount that suckah. We’re also interested in trying out our abilities on those killer bears and other creatures, just because. Could we hunt pandas too? No sense in not dreaming.

3. Building a Steady Car Collection

The world of Grand Theft Auto 5 is huge, as we’ve pointed out time and time again. We want to own this goddamn monstrosity of a world. We want to purchase properties and have ordinary denizens fall to their knees to kiss our rings when we pass. We might not have the latter, but one of the benefits of amassing so much wealth in GTA 5 is having our own garage full of exotic beauties and then sitting back to admit that crime, indeed, does pay.

2. GTA Online

As fun as all of the above is, we’d love to do it with friends. The more the merrier, even if it means it’ll be raining bodies in Los Santos. Because screw the weather; we’re going to make it rain even if it kills us (get it?).

1. Just Having Fun

Grand Theft Auto 5 has a boat-load of things to do. It has so many things to do that in fact, you could fit them into TWO boats. That’s the scale of activities and side-missions. We may have frame rate troubles (as has been reported in some of the leaks) and sure, we may wax eloquently about how this would be better suited to next-gen consoles. But honestly, we’re looking forward to just hunkering down and enjoying this epic, sprawling mass of a game at last.

What are you looking forward to doing in Grand Theft Auto 5? Let us know below.

On asking Puha what was possible for Umbra on next generation consoles like the Xbox One and PS4, he stated, “The CPU’s of the new consoles are not that insanely powerful, but there’s a huge amount of memory to play around with and of course, a powerful GPU allowing for Compute stuff which we’ll see years down the line. Just in general the horsepower of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 is significant.

“Large static objects are the best occluders: buildings, mountains and such, but dynamic elements such as characters and cars are not. However, next-generation game worlds will be far more dynamic than before. Lots more characters and the ability for players to do things like build content on their own, so you need a system that is not so static, but more dynamic.

“We do have a system in place that allows you use, say a massive spaceship or a large boss character as an occluder, which is pretty cool.”

We’ve certainly seen larger worlds and greater amounts of characters for games like The Witcher 3 and with the large amount of open world games, like The Crew, Destiny and Tom Clancy’s The Division, on their way.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

There are plenty of great games on there way already and we can’t even get our hands on the new consoles yet. I for one have been chomping at the bit just waiting for my PS4 to show up so I can play some of these titles that have not failed in getting noticed by the public. With this leap in hardware it looks like we’re going to be seeing as a lot more cross-platform titles too. So no matter what you choose, there is going to be some great new worlds to explore come November. Even if open worlds aren’t your thing E3 had so many titles to offer this year there was a bit of something for everyone.

Following the games success and cult appeal it was granted the opportunity to be re-released on the Xbox One as the “Year One Survival Edition” that would include various visual enhancements alongside the game’s two impressive DLC packs, Breakdown and LifeLine.

• 1. Development
• 2. Story
• 3. Gameplay
• 4. DLC

Development

Originally titled as Class 3, ArenaNet and co-creator of World of Warcraft Jeff Strain said that he wanted to create a game where players could concoct their own zombie survival strategies and put them to the test. With that in mind he started to create the Class 3 (State of Decay) engine which would run on Crytek’s CryEngine 3. Undead Labs reportedly has plans to develop a MMO style game, based around State of Decay in the future.

Story

The player starts out as a store clerk named Marcus who is also an athlete and loves to hike. As he returns from a hunting trip, he finds the world as he knows it has gone out of control. While attempting to survive the apocalypse and its hardships, Marcus must now fend off zombies and unite with a few scattered survivors to band together and survive.

Gameplay

State of Decay is a real time evolving open sandbox world that will generate content based on your actions and the choices you make, with the ever present intimidating zombie threat. Players can decide if they would be better off creating a fortified place for themselves to recover their strength and then form raiding parties to gather resources and create supply chains. The players can also utilize the materials they have gathered to develop their community, but must be very vigilant as supplies and resources are very scarce and precious. Players must also be vigilant as any noises they make while scavenging can attract the attention of zombies.

Players can go all out and assault the zombies head on before they reach your base or they could keep on strengthening the home base and just wait till the attack and plan strategies accordingly. There will also be a 2 hour Day and Night cycle which means there will be 1 hour of daylight and 1 hour of night according to real world time.

Players have the option of being reckless through the game. They can dive through windows and jump on cars. There are various vehicles that can be used to run over the undead or make a hasty escape. While keeping in the mind that the resources are limited, players will have to do anything to stay alive while they hunt for weapons or food by breaking into a supermarket, police station etc.

Players can also recruit survivors based on their skill sets and needs. For example they could choose between gardeners, firearms experts, or chefs. There will be a variety of zombies that will be in the game such as runners, tanks and more. As of now, the full variety of zombies is unknown.

There will be a variety of weapons. Melee weapons such as baseball bats will be available along with firearms such as sniper rifles, handguns, and more. Environments will also be destructible, allowing players to use their surroundings in the fight against the zombies. There will also be a Skill progression system, in which the player has the option to upgrade a skill like Fighting by using melee weapons more and more.

DLC

Breakdown – Breakdown tasks the player with raw survival as you travel around the games map in a RV, moving from location to location in an effort to avoid the ever increasing hordes of undead. As the player moves, the game gets harder making for a more authentic zombie survival game.

LifeLine – LifeLine sees the player assume the role of a military unit that are tasked with ensuring the safety of survivors in the zombie infested game world.

This wiki was last updated on 5th, January 2015.