Plus major God of War Ragnarok character almost had a different fate and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive hits a new record
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KYLE: Hi I’m Kyle Pauletto
FIONA: and I’m Fiona Bartholomaeus
KYLE: Welcome to Walkthrough, SIFTER’s weekly recap on the biggest news in video games.
FIONA: This week God of War Ragnarok was almost very very different, CD Project apologises for including risque mod in Witcher 3 and nothing can stop Counter Strike which has just smashed its player record.
Here is the news for Sunday 19th of February. Let’s go!
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KYLE: Kratos’ gravelly voiced adventures might have been cut short in God of War Ragnarok, one of the early story plans saw a bit of a sticky end for the spartan warrior.
Matt Sophos, Narrative Director on Ragnarok said that at one point in development Kratos would cark it, that’s Australian for die for our international listeners.
MATT SOPHOS: "I don't care we can tell this because it's never it doesn't happen anymore, so this is all fan fiction at this point."
"There was the earliest earliest draft of an outline that we had come up with that we took to Eric (Williams), Kratos died in the Thor fight at the very beginning of the game."
"It wasn't a permanent death, it was what was going to happen. He would get pulled out of Hel essentially by Atreus but it's now been like 20 years have passed, a big time jump type thing."
"So just it didn't ultimately feel right but other than that, when as we were developing the story."
"Norse Mythology is all about fate and prophecy and everything and we wanted to say that, you know, nothing is written that can't be unwritten as long as you're willing to change make changes in your life, then then you know, you're not bound to fate."
It’s not the first time Kratos has died in the series but the development team felt it didn’t really work with this sequel’s story.
You can listen to the full interview with MinnMaxx by clicking the link in the show notes.
FIONA: There are some pretty strong parallels to another high profile PlayStation series with that original plan, I wonder if that played a part as well…
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FIONA: Here is a wild one, with the relaunch of the Witcher 3 for PS5 and Xbox Series X CD Project Red included a bunch of fan made mods, including as Kotaku discovered fully textured genitalia on naked female characters.
Yikes.
Fan mods have existed forever and it’s not uncommon for modders to create updated character models that are pretty not safe for work, but there is a reason retail games don’t include this sort of thing.
The creator of the original “Vaginas for Everyone” mod said it’s possible it was included in another mod “HD Monsters Reworked” which CD Project included for the Crone enemies in the game.
KYLE: CD Project have already confirmed they are removing the updated textures saying they were not meant to be present in the release version of the game.
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KYLE: Warner Brothers smash clone Multuiversus is in trouble, with its player count dropping 99 percent since launch.
According to the steam charts, the number of concurrent players has gone from over 150,000 at its peak in July 2022, to averaging just over 1,000 last month.
Video Games Chronicle is reporting that players are abandoning the game because of a lack of new content, with the last new character added in November last year
In other Multiversus news, some clever data miners have allegedly found evidence pointing to an upcoming Pickle Rick DLC, but given the controversy surrounding Rick and Morty co creator Justin Roiland, it’s hard to imagine that addition will do much to save this sinking ship.
FIONA: I think it’s great that we’re seeing some competition to the genre that super smash brothers pioneered, but I’m not sure that the Warner Brothers lineup was ever going to be the hit they wanted it to be. I’m just not convinced that there was ever a huge demographic for Lebron James fighting Scooby Doo.
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FIONA: On the flipside some games just keep going and going, Counter-Strike Global Offensive broke its all-time concurrent player record last week.
The multiplayer first person shooter first released in 2012 and has a decent following ever since, but on the 11th of February 1,320,219 people were playing simultaneously according to the Steam statistics.
It breaks the previous record in April 2020 of 1,308,963.
With little updates here and there, we can probably expect to see that number rise. Who knows, maybe we’ll see another record?
KYLE: Counter Strike is a massive global game, while it might not be front of mind for players in Australia and the US, in some parts of the world its just the main game that anyone plays
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KYLE: Hyper Light Drifter is getting a sequel but it’s a bit different to what was originally announced.
Developer Heart Machine last year announced the sequel game Hyper Light Breaker as a co-op roguelike, but now it’s transformed into a procedurally generated open world.
In the early stages of development the game was designed to be a stage-by-stage roguelike with procedural generation so each biome you visited would change every time.
But apparently due to how large these biomes were, it created problems of how to make each one interesting every time it changed.
So the solution is connecting each biome and making it open-world as it reduces the procedural generation workload.
The team behind the game have been very transparent with the community, releasing blog posts, Noclip documentaries and insights into the dev processes. So we highly recommend you check it out.
FIONA: Open-world always sounds like a lot more work so it’s really interesting to hear that this actually cuts that workload down, I”m really keen to see how it turns out in the end.
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FIONA: That’s it for news, here are the games releasing this week
KYLE: Out on the 21’st is one of my most highly anticipated games of the year, Atomic Heart. It’s a first person action RPG set in a dystopian future filled with killer robots, and it gives off big Bioshock vibes which is always a win in my books. It’s out on PC, Playstation, and Xbox on Tuesday
FIONA: PSVR 2 is launching on Wednesday with a stack of old VR games and a handful of new ones. There’s too many to list here but the most notable has to be Horizon Call of the Mountain. That’s coming on the 22nd for anyone who is willing to part with close to $1000 australian dollars.
KYLE: On the 24th we get the long awaited Kerbal Space Program 2. The first in this series is a favorite among gamers who love an insane deep dive, and still gets a log ot play despite being over a decade old. Space cadets can pick up the sequel on PC, Playstation, and Xbox this Friday.
FIONA: And another sequel out this week is Octopath Traveler 2, the follow up to the 2018 RPG hit. The first in the series blew fans away with its beautiful 2.5d art style, and this sequel is getting well reviewed by those who got their hands on it early. It’s out on PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Nintendo Switch on the 24th.
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KYLE: This has been Walkthrough by SIFTER, my name is Kyle Pauletto
FIONA: And my name is Fiona Bartholomaeus. Thank you so much for listening.
KYLE: We know you love our podcasts, so why not become a monthly backer on Ko-Fi? Your support lets us keep making our shows so if you want to be a legend like Rob D who recently signed up to be a monthly backer. It’s easy, head to sifter.com.au/support where support starts from just $1 a month that address again is sifter.com.au/support
FIONA: SIFTER is produced by Kyle Pauletto, Fiona Bartholomaeus, Daniel Ang & Adam Christou . Mitch Loh is Senior Producer and Gianni Di Giovanni is our Executive Producer who also edits each episode.
KYLE: Thanks to Brian Fairbanks from Salty Dog Sounds for composing the Walkthrough theme tune.
Thanks to both Audio Technica Australia and Omny Studio for their support of SIFTER’s three podcasts.
FIONA: Thanks again for listening, we’ll be back with more news next Sunday.
