We haven’t heard much out of Brothers in Arms: Furious 4, a game announced a year ago at E3, one that is quite a departure from the tone of other games preceding it. That, coupled with the lapsed trademarks surrounding the game, sent out the rumour that the game was cancelled.
At last year’s E3, lots of people sat up and took notice at Brothers in Arms: Furious 4, Gearbox Studios’ radical reinvention of their earnest World War II first-person-shooter franchise.
The next Brothers in Arms will be the E3-announced over-the-top, gleeful Nazi-killing Furious 4, but fans of the series’ earlier historically authentic games need not fret. “We’re going to do more of that,” Gearbox chief Randy PItchford said at PAX today. More of Sgt. Baker’s exploits are in the works, but he had nothing to announce.
Borderlands is a fresh take on the first-person shooter. Even then, there was concern at developer Gearbox Software about the game standing out in the crowded FPS genre.
In game after game, there they are: guns. Weapons are a common trope. They are a catalyst for action and an instrument for destruction. In-game guns and, well, guns are different. What do game developers know about the real deal?
Sixty five years after the end of World War II, the second world war seems to have lost it attraction for video game developers.
In the 1940s, 1950s and right on through the 1960s, Hollywood churned out war epic after war epic. Sure, we still get war movies, but Hollywood isn’t exactly popping them out bam bam bam. Video game developers are. But why?
War is a theme as old as the video game medium itself; leaps in game presentation have typically corresponded to some kind of combat themed game.