The Weekly News Roundup: Spyro, Black Ops 4, and The Initiative

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Welcome back to another weekly news roundup; the only place you need when it comes to catching up on the biggest stories of the week. It was tough to figure out which stories made it in this week, mostly because of the slew of news. Both The Chinese Room and the IP for Timesplitter were bought up this week, and let’s not forget that Dark Souls for the Switch for a release date. But we’re pretty sure we’ve got the stories that you might not – but need – to know about.

Building a Dream Team: Microsoft Strengthens The Initiative

Microsoft has boosted the number of their newly acquired indie studio, The Initiative, with industry old guards who’ve worked on the likes of Red Dead Redemption and God of War.
Christian Cantamessa, who was part of the Rockstar team who made Red Dead Redemption, joins The Initiative as a narrative consultant, whilst ex-God of War senior producer Brian Westergaard’s new role is currently unknown.

Coming along for the ride with those two scamps are fellow reprobates Blake Fischer and Dan Neuburger, a former game director at Crystal Dynamics. They’re followed by ex-Respawn recruiter Annie Lohr – who joins in the same capacity for The Initiative.

There’s a lot of new names from a lot of different backgrounds, hopefully, this mixture can become a proper dream team and begin to get some projects on the go that’ll turn our heads over the next few months – or years.

It’s Learning: Treyarch Plan Changes Based on the Beta Feedback

The Black Ops 4 beta is all wrapped up – and those of you who joined in all worked together to murder and die to send over valuable data to Treyarch, who are reacting to the feedback they got to tweak the game here and there before its launch.

The big rollback will be on the body armour. Treyarch got a lot of responses about this and took to their Reddit thread to confirm they’d be changing up the feature. Instead of body armour deflecting all damage, it will now simply reduce the amount of damage you take, y’know, like it does it all other games. This will hopefully put an end to the time to kill issues a lot players voiced concerns over, though there’s still a number of fans who’d rather the feature be abolished altogether.

Also in the queue for a spit of polish is the new fog of war minimap. Rather than being a small circle that shows everything that’s happening, the visibility will be minimised to a cone of vision based on your perspective. You will still be able to get the original circle vision but it’ll become a character trait, requiring a skill point to use. And to help balance any issues this may give rise to, there are plans to update your HUD to include warning of when your visible to other players – similar to the warnings players get in Titanfall 2 when you’re in a map hack area (I don’t need much of a reason to bring the conversation back to Titanfall 2).

Finally, there’ll be tweaks to the spawns using the “Tac Deploy” tool. Players will now be limited to 10 uses of the tool each round and the cooldown of it will be lengthened. This is being done in the hopes that players will have a more freedom to move around in and not just get murderised at every corner.

And Finally… Spyro’s Reignited Remaster has been delayed

Fans of the for-some-reason-popular Spyro games who have been waiting for the remaster to arrive are in for some bad news, with the games being delayed until November 13.

The trilogy was originally set for a September 21 release but was deemed to need “more love and care” by Toys for Bob in a blog post. The initial release date would’ve seen Spyro in a fairly comfortable spot, with Spider-Man and Shadow of the Tomb Raider already out for a couple of weeks. The new release date will see the game launch on the same day as Hitman 2 and just one day before Fallout 76 – so whilst it might be a nice Christmas gift for the kids, it still seems that the game will face a much tougher launch than previously planned.