Visitors play Just Dance, a video game published by Ubisoft at the Paris Games Week, a trade fair for video games in Paris, France, Sunday, Nov. 1, 2015. Paris Games week runs from October 28 to November 1, 2015. (AP)
This past week, a major gaming event was held in France. Paris Games Week is rising in popularity: this is substantiated by Sony Computer Entertainment forgoing GamesCom, an expo in Germany, earlier this year in order to unveil their upcoming software for Playstation 4 in France. This and several other announcements left the video game world in much anticipation.
A major announcement was for a new installment of the “Gran Turismo” racing game series, titled “Gran Turismo Sport.” The new title is a collaboration between the “Gran Turismo” video game franchise and the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile: the primary governing body for the overwhelming majority of motorsport and responsible for massive motorsport events such as the Monaco Grand Prix and the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
The resulting game will cross over into real-world motorsport, as a competent player of the upcoming “Gran Turismo Sport” will be able to compete in one of two championships – one where you can represent your country and another where you can represent your favorite automaker.
Visitors react at the Paris Games Week, a trade fair for video games in Paris, France, Sunday, Nov. 1, 2015. (AP)
The final winners of each competition will be awarded alongside winners of FIA-sanctioned series, such as “Formula One Championship.” A public beta for the game will also be released early next year and the game is currently being worked on to be compatible with “Playstation VR,” a virtual reality headset similar to the more widely-known Oculus Rift.
“No Man’s Sky,” an open-world space exploration game previously teased gamers with no release date in sight. Finally, the independently developed game has a release window of June 2016. More details also emerged on the new “NieR” game initially announced at E3 this past summer. Now known as “NieR Automata,” the game is being headed by the creator of the first “NieR” title, Yoko Taro, who also created the controversial cult hit “Drakengard.”
Visitors play with the Playstation at the Paris Games Week, a trade fair for video games in Paris, France. (AP)
In other news, Nintendo’s newest hit, “Super Mario Maker,” has released an update allowing players to implement checkpoints into their levels, which makes the creation and playing of longer levels less of a hassle. The EA-published first-person shooter “Battlefield 4” will soon receive a massive complimentary update, with over thirty pages of changes and additions. One such addition is a free map influenced by fan input, now called “Operation Outbreak.” Many balancing fixes were made as well. Some underpowered weapons and accessories gained additional damaging power and some over-used weapons were kicked down a notch. There also are tweaks to the game’s netcode and fixes for a myriad of glitches.
Overall, there seems to be many titles and features to anticipate in the video game field. It remains a mystery as to what collaborations and installments have yet to be announced, and even for the titles that are confirmed, there are still many details we simply don’t know about. Hopefully, at the Playstation Experience event this December, some of those mysteries will have some light shone on them.
Max Engel is a campus correspondent for The Daily Campus. He can be reached via email at max.engel@uconn.edu.