It’s official: a prequel to the Arkham games has been announced. The game is set to take place before both Arkham Assylum and Arkham City and is being developed by Warner Bros. Montreal. The first two installments of the franchise were developed by Rocksteady Games. This change shouldn’t drastically change the property as WB Montreal is familiar with the Arkham franchise having ported Arkham City to the WiiU. Batman: Arkham Origins will be released on current-gen home consoles and PC on October 25, 2013.
In addition to Arkham Origins, an additional prequel game is being developed for 3DS and Vita. Titled Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate, this portable entry in the franchise will take place after the events of its home console counterpart. Blackgate is being developed by Armature Studios, which was formed by staff from Nintendo’s Retro Studio (developer of the Metroid Prime series and Donkey Kong Country Returns). The game will be a 2.5D Metroid-vania style game and is set to release alongside Arkham Origins.
Sources: Game Informer, Joystiq
Deep Silver, Saints Row’s new owner after 
American McGee, creator of the twisted Alice games inspired by the works of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland tales, may be looking into developing a third game in the franchise. Posting on his Facebook a picture featuring a caption that asks fans if they would be interested in said game if he could get the rights from EA and if they would help fund the game on Kickstarter. As a fan of American McGee’s Alice Madness Returns, finding it to be one of the best games of 2011, I’m hoping that this is something that is followed up on and made a reality.
Here’s a brief rundown of the system: The PS4’s new controller will feature a touch pad, a light bar which can indicate character health as well as act as work in tandem with PlayStation Eye (similar to PS Motion), has redesigned analogue sticks with concave grips, and a new “social” button which opens up a social menu. The PlayStation Eye has also been vastly improved and now features two cameras with 1200 x 800 resolution–the two cameras allow depth recognition.
It’s also worth noting that the PS4 will play used games, contradicting past rumors that the system would block the use of pre-owned titles. The PS4 will not, however, be backwards compatible and past PSN purchases on previous platforms will not be accessible on the new system. While Sony plans to circumvent the backwards compatibility issue with a streaming service, the lack of any native support for older titles is discouraging.
CD Projekt RED has announced the third installment of its The Witcher franchise. The developer claims that the game will be the largest modern RPG and will be 30x larger than The Witcher 2. This next installment will use CD Projekt’s new engine REDengine 3 and will be the first game to utilize said engine. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will be an open world game said to be 20% larger than the world in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim–the map will take over 30 minutes to cross on horseback!
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