Daily Briefing: Thursday 26th August

Apologies for the late brief! We're running short-staffed this week due to absences.

Saints Row Reboot Announced For February 25th

Saints Row will be a return to the franchise's roots focusing on gang warfare, rather than the over-the-top craziness of 3 and 4. The main character will be 'the boss' of a new gang vying for supremacy in fictional Santo Ileso, with the most extensive character customisation system seen in a Saints Row game yet, according to Volition. Also, in celebration, the Epic Games Store is offering the Saint's Row 3 Remaster for free.

• Sadly, the new visual and character style has not went down well, with comparisons to Fortnite being drawn. The new sense of humour certainly seems more modern than Saints Row, which may not to be to everyone's taste. However, the game seems solid according to VGC: "The extended presentation we were shown behind closed doors has us eagerly anticipating the game’s release in February, as long as the standard of quality we were shown is maintained throughout the course of the entire game."

Traveller's Tales founder claims Insomniac were 'misleading' customers with Ratchet and Clank.

His main claim, made on his Coding Secrets Youtube channel, is that the 'Rift' effect would have been possible on older hardware. Insomniac claimed that it required the PS5's SSD, but Jon Burton alleges the pre-determined set-piece nature of the rift sequences means they could have been accomplished by loading the required assets ahead of time.

• He's right, but it's not a yes or no answer. A similar effect could have been managed, but memory constraints would have limited how many objects could be loaded in each scene. With the PS5, being able to load assets extremely quickly makes it substantially easier and can avoid memory limitations. The same effect could have been done on old hardware, but it would have looked a fraction as good. It would be a different story if those rift segments were dynamic through gameplay, which was arguably implied during marketing.

Horizon Forbidden West Delayed Until February 2022

At Gamescom last night, Horizon Forbidden West was given a release date - Feb 18th, 2022. It was never given a solid release date, but they had openly planned for 2021. This isn't news to many as it was reported to have been delayed many weeks ago. In the meantime, Horizon Zero Dawn received a patch on PS5 yesterday, allowing backwards compatibility mode to run the game at 60FPS, up from the 30FPS lock.

• Makes sense! It's sad that a lot of Sony's early PS5 promises have turned out to be misleading in retrospect, but this is good news for fans of the game - more time to get a PS5, and more time for Guerrilla to polish it up. The same-day Zero Dawn patch is a nice touch, too.

McCree's Name Is Being Changed

The Overwatch team has provided a statement, announcing that McCree will have a name change due to sharing his full name with the recently fired employee embroiled in the Cosby Suite allegations. As a result, narrative content featuring the character has been delayed. They will launch a new FFA map in September in its place. Going forward, in-game characters will no longer be named after employees and they will be more thoughtful about real-world references in future, as Overwatch is an entirely fictional universe.

• It's up to them to do so, so fair enough - the same occurred with references to Alex Afrasiabi in World of Warcraft, as well as references to content creator Swifty and lines by voice actor Quinton Flynn, although the latter two have been acquitted of wrongdoing without being restored to the game. No word on whether the World of Warcraft zone Mac'Aree, also a reference to Jesse McCree, will be updated.