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Alien: Isolation studio is making a shooter about stealing Sega merch from the rich

Cristina Alexander
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Sega has announced Hyenas, a flashy, new sci-fi multiplayer first-person shooter that comes courtesy of European developer Creative Assembly, the creator of Total War and Alien: Isolation.

Hyenas stole the show at IGN’s Summer of Gaming showcase on Wednesday, showing off a trailer packed with gunfights on the ground and in zero gravity — as well as some Sega Easter eggs. The game pits five teams of three against each other as they shoot and steal their way to become the best space pirates in the universe.

HYENAS Official Announce Trailer [ESRB]

In Hyenas, billionaires take off for Mars, destroying Earth in the process and taking all the rare pop-culture merchandise with them in their spaceship shopping malls filled with the merch stolen from Earth’s remains, leaving ordinary class citizens drifting through space in a slum called the Taint. Players are tasked with assembling their crew of uniquely skilled and armed criminals to break into the Plunderships, exploit their environments, steal all the nostalgic merch that’s rightfully theirs — like the Rubix cube and a Sonic the Hedgehog keychain — and escape with their haul without getting caught by security.

To ensure that Hyenas is the best shooter game it can be, Sega launched the first wave of public alpha tests for players to sign up for after the game’s announcement.

“We believe the key to modern shooter success is understanding what players want to see and where they want to take their experience. We know we’ve got something interesting on our hands, but we also know the odds are stacked against us,” Hyenas executive producer David Nicholson said in a press release. “To take on the biggest games in the industry, we need to hear what players think, right upfront and early. If you’re in, we want to take you along for the ride.”

Since destroying capitalism is a running theme of Hyenas, the game won’t have any microtransactions. Any other details about what the game will include will be revealed in due time.

Hyenas will release on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S,  Xbox One, and PC in 2023.

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Ubisoft has a few notoriously troubled games in development that have left fans scratching their heads for years now. Aside from Beyond Good and Evil 2, the most curious game that has managed to avoid cancellation despite years of delays, restarts, and who knows what else behind the scenes is the pirate game Skull and Bones. It was first announced in 2017, and we've gotten almost nothing but bad news regarding this title in the years since. Despite having a playable build in 2018, for press only, the game has undergone major, if not complete overhauls.

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Atlas Fallen unexpectedly gives Forspoken some real competition
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Atlas Fallen has the potential to surprise a lot of people. Although it's launching in just two months, we haven't seen much about this new game from The Surge developer Deck13 and publisher Focus Entertainment since its reveal at Gamescom Opening Night Live 2022. That's a shame because after going hands-on with an early build of it, I've found that Atlas Fallen has the potential to appeal to people who didn't like one of the year's most divisive titles: Forspoken. 
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Square Enix's open-world action RPG featured some neat ideas with its fast-paced magical combat and freeing traversal abilities, but many people couldn't get into it. While more focused on melee combat than magic, Atlas Fallen is a similarly ambitious open-world game that delivers satisfying movement and action that's different from the norm. That makes it a game that might scratch some itches that Forspoken didn't fully reach due to its heavily criticized writing. If it's not on your radar yet, you might want to know what Atlas Fallen has to offer.
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Based on my demo, I'm not fully sure what to expect from Atlas Fallen's mysterious story yet. The basic premise is that player was a person from the lowest caste in this world's society who was bonded with an ancient gauntlet. That gauntlet has an amnesic spirit named Nyaal living inside it and is now trying to save the world from gods that have left it in desert-filled ruins. The narrative wasn't a big focus in my preview build, though, and the script is full of jargon that probably will only make sense once I play more of the game.
A talking companion bonded to the player's arm and hand is already an unexpected narrative coincidence between Forspoken and Atlas Fallen. But neither game's story is the appeal of either to me: It's their fun traversal and combat that interest me. The few seconds of Atlas Fallen's sand-surfing and fighting in its Gamescom trailer caught my eye last year, and both lived up to the hype.
 
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Deck13 and Focus Entertainment had yet to go into much detail about Atlas Fallen's combat before now, so I was shocked by how unique it was. The core combat revolves around attacking, dodging, and parrying, with weapons shapeshifting as you use them in different ways. It's faster-paced than I expected from a developer who previously made Souslikes, but it's the Ascension system that really caught my attention.
In between fights, players can equip their character with Essence Stones that buff or add abilities, assigning them to one of three tiers in the process. Once they are in a fight, attacking and defeating enemies causes players to gain momentum, which fills a bar at the bottom left of the screen. As this bar fills, or "ascends," players gradually gain those Essence Stone abilities, getting more powerful the more aggressive they are.
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Atlas Fallen will launch for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on May 16.

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As part of the Game Developers Conference (GDC), Nvidia is launching a new GPU bundle. Anyone making a new purchase of the RTX 4090, RTX 4080, and RTX 4070 Ti desktop graphics cards, as well as RTX 40-series Nvidia desktops and laptops, will receive a copy of the Redfall Bite Back Edition when it releases on May 2, 2023, for free.

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