"We want to make the Graham Norton of video games," says Kirsty Rigden, the chief executive of Brighton-based FuturLab, which makes PowerWash Simulator. Aspiring to emulate a talkshow host who has a reputation for being affable rather than for setting pulses racing is perhaps an unusual ambition for a gaming studio.
"I thought about two books that I'd read. The first book is by an author called Miyamoto Musashi, it's called The Book of Five Rings, and the other book I was thinking about was called Here Be Dragons, which is a physics book about wormholes, and advanced physics, and extraterrestrial life and so forth."
We believe we can respect each other as creators and make games together. And I think with Hyung-Tae, we can even enjoy the hard parts.... Seeing my own vision and ideals come into focus like this, and finding someone whose direction aligns so closely is something I've rarely experienced before in my career.
3v3 duos is always the sweatiest version of anything like battle royale, objective modes, wingman, you know it, I name it. It requires such a high intensity of communication with your team, and team play, that it doesn't leave much room for casualness. I think that was the biggest thing that turned a lot of players off Highguard.
In Raid Rush, 2 teams of 5 players will take turns attacking and defending their bases with no pesky looting phase in between. Instead, select your base and use Trader Flynn to upgrade your weapons and equipment in a round based format. After each round, you'll switch sides between attacking and defending.
Dragon Ball has its own take on the MOBA genre with Gekishin Squadra. The name sure is a mouthful, but this is one of the most welcoming experiences for newer MOBA players, even if you aren't too familiar with the Dragon Ball universe. But if you are an existing fan of the late Akira Toriyama's masterful manga and anime series, you'll be pleased with the wide selection of characters and abilities.
The best new co-op games are those that do something a bit different, offering more than a single-player experience with another player thoughtlessly tacked on. These multiplayer games account for groups of friends all wanting their own role, with a shared goal in sight and plenty of chaos on the path to getting there.
It is a tale as old as time itself: a hack gets a third-person game to run in first-person, or vice-versa, and the result is unspeakable horror. Sometimes that horror comes from the monstrosities that result, but other times it can just be that the new perspective makes the game far more terrifying. It's the latter that appears to apply for Arc Raiders, after someone managed to get the game running in first-person mode and discovered it became even more intense.
A small update has arrived to Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and Warzone on January 13, and the patch notes reveal a focus on weapon balancing for Season 1 Reloaded. This includes a nerf for the akimbo variant of the Velox 5.7 pistol in Warzone, and the Maddox RFB assault rifle now has decreased damage ranges in multiplayer and Zombies.