The 2024 vintage Game Awards ceremony, which was held last night, was rich in announcements. Among them, a sumptuous cinematic from the already highly anticipated “The Witcher 4'”, or the next game from the creators of “The Last of us”.
The 2024 Game Awards evening took place last night at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, and saw the triumph of the formidable Astro Bot game, developed by the Japanese studio Team Asobi, crowned Best Game of the Year.
We could see Harrison Ford walking the stage alongside Troy Baker and Todd Howard, the boss of Bethesda, to welcome in particular the release of Indiana Jones and the Ancient Circle, while the adaptation of the studio's license, Fallout , broadcast on Prime Video, received the prize for best adaptation. To the surprise of many people, who thought that the animated series Arcane, broadcast on Netflix and based on the League of Legends license, would win the trophy.
Game Awards obliged, it was also an opportunity for publishers and studios to unveil the first images of upcoming titles; some being particularly anticipated. Selected pieces.
The Witcher IV
In March 2020, the brilliant Polish studio CD Projekt Red, behind the video game adaptation of the novel franchise The Witcher and more recently Cyberpunk 2077, announced the start of work on a new part of The Witcher. The ax fell last night with the broadcast of a sumptuous cinematic trailer for The Witcher 4, created by the wizards of Platige image.
A sumptuous trailer to see below..
In this nearly six-minute trailer, we discover Ciri, the adopted daughter of Geralt of Rivia, as she accepts a contract as a witcher in an isolated village terrorized for generations by a formidable monster demanding human sacrifices.
“We're launching a brand new Witcher saga, this time with Ciri at the heart of the story!” comments Sebastian Kalemba, Game Director of the game, in the press release accompanying the images.
“It feels so good to finally be able to say these words – for a very long time we knew we wanted Ciri to be the protagonist of The Witcher IV; it felt natural to us and we think Ciri deserves it. In this game, we “We want to explore what it means to truly become a witcher by following Ciri on her path. This trailer is a taste of that and how dark the world of The Witcher can be.”
As is often the case, if not always with this studio, you will have to be patient to be able to play it… The Witcher IV currently has no release date.
The new game from the creators of The Last of us
It is an understatement to say that the new game developed by the Naughty Dog studio, the father of the Uncharted saga and The Last of Us, was eagerly awaited by battalions of fans; especially since the cancellation of the multiplayer game based on TLOU.
So it’s a 180° turnaround that the studio offered us last night, with the reveal of its new game: Intergalactic : The Heretic Prophet. Currently in development for PlayStation 5. Naughty Dog has been working on this brand new adventure since 2020.
Here are the pictures…
Intergalactic features a new protagonist, Jordan A. Mun, a dangerous bounty hunter who ends up on Sempiria, a distant planet whose communication with the outside universe was interrupted hundreds of years ago.
All those who went there in the hope of elucidating its mysterious past never gave any sign of life again. Jordan will need to use all her skills and sagacity if she hopes to be the first person in over 600 years to leave the planet's orbit.
Mafia : The Old Country
The Mafia games saga brings together three games, sold in total on PC and consoles at 34 million copies. The last opus was released in 2016. Each of them is set in a very distinct historical period and a fictional city, but always based on a very real city.
For example, the first game (2002) was set in the 1930s, in the fictional town of Lost Heavenlargely inspired by Chicago in the 1930s. The player played Tommy Angelo, a taxi driver who had to prove his worth to the city's mafia before gradually climbing its ranks.
In the second game, the period began after the war, in 1945, until the beginning of the 1960s, and followed an American of Sicilian origin, Vitto Scaletta, demobilized after the war, having joined the ranks of the mafia. The action took place in the fictional town ofEmpire Bayvery inspired by the cities of New York and San Francisco.
Mafia III took place in 1968 in the fictional town of New Bordeaux, a real video game counterpart to New Orleans. A game in which we followed the rise of an African-American named Lincoln Clay, demobilized and idle after the Vietnam War, setting up a crime empire by bringing down the Italian mafia. The three games are not artificially connected, since we found for example in Mafia II very important characters from the first part of the saga.
Already at work on Mafia III, the Hangar 13 studio is back at work with Mafia : The Old Country. The game will take place in Sicily in the 1900s, and will put players in the shoes of Enzo Favara, who will have to prove his worth within Cosa Nostra. Release planned for 2025.
Hangar 13 has experienced quite a few setbacks in recent years, with no less than three games canceled, forcing it to make layoffs in 2017 and 2018. We therefore hope that this Mafia: The Old Country will really allow it to get back on track .
Borderlands 4
Like a delicious irony. While the adaptation of the Borderlands video game license to the cinema is one of the biggest theatrical failures of the year, its historic studio, Gearbox Software, announced last August a Borderlands 4expected for 2025.
It's still 6 years after the last opus. A nice title, but which was content to caress the fans in the wrong direction while taking no risks. Sold 87 million copies since its beginnings, it is hard to imagine that its parents would deprive themselves of this already largely billionaire martingale…
Anyway, here is the trailer revealed last night…
The Outer Worlds 2
In video games, there are studios which, like in cinema, have more aura than others. And when one of them announces that he is returning to service with a title in the genre that he masters perfectly, all the players are celebrating.
This studio is Obsidian, founded in 2003. Having collaborated on the Baldur's Gate series or being at the origin of masterpieces such as Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II and Fallout: New Vegas, and even delirious and ultra faithful South Park: the stick of truth, this development studio has a very great reputation in the field of role-playing games, and more precisely games based on “choices and consequences”.
Released in October 2019, his game The Outer Worlds was an FPS RPG (first-person shooter with role-playing game) in a dystopian future, and seemed to be the spiritual sequel to the excellent Fallout: New Vegas in the form and substance.
Largely irrigated by the current of retro-futurism in SF which has nourished a number of films, from the cult Forbidden Planet to The Survivors of Infinity, The Star of Silence and The Clash of the Worlds, The Outer Worlds plunged us into a deliciously retro universe, of which we told you here all the good things we thought of it.
The Outer Worlds 2 was therefore unveiled last night, and it is expected for 2025.
Game of Thrones: Kingsroad
The Game of Thrones universe is having a hard time being extended onto the small screen. Despite the success of the spin-off series House of the Dragon, other spin-off projects do not seem to satisfy HBO executives. Will it be more successful in video games? To have.
The world created by George RR Martin has in fact already been translated into video games, on all possible media, from smartphones to PCs, including of course home consoles: we note no less than eleven games exploiting the universe.
A twelfth will soon surface, in the form of a massively multiplayer role-playing game called Game of Thrones: Kingsroad. The game is developed by a studio owned by the company Nexonbased in South Korea. And takes place at the height of the series broadcast on HBO, namely between seasons 4 and 5.
The huge problem is that this game will only be released on smartphones…
