Lionsgate Films and Payday publisher Starbreeze announced that they have teamed up to develop a virtual reality first-person shooter based on the hit Keanu Reeves-led action film John Wick. The game is expected to launch on most commercial VR headsets in Spring 2016.
“We’re thrilled to partner with the best of the best in VR and game development with Starbreeze, WEVR, and Grab, who are collaborating with the movie’s producers to ensure an exciting, immersive and authentic virtual experience,” said Lionsgate President of Interactive Ventures & Games Peter Levin. “John Wick is the perfect cross-platform property to extend into the fast-growing gaming world, and we believe that a cutting edge VR game will deepen fan engagement and accelerate John Wick’s evolution into one of our next big action franchises.”
Development is being spearheaded by Grab Games, primarily a creator of mobile titles such as Hero Havoc and Gold Miner Go! and WEVR, the VR production studio responsible for the impressive theBlu: Encounter, a deep-sea demo which was used to show off the HTC Vive VR headset earlier this year. Starbreeze, the Stockholm-based developer and publisher behind the Payday series of heist games and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, will publish. Starbreeze and Lionsgate have already collaborated on a John Wick DLC character pack for Payday 2.
Few details about the game have been announced, but it will feature the characters and story of the John Wick film, centered around “the infamous Continental Hotel.” A preview of the game will be shown off as part of the HTC Vive World Tour this summer all around the United States and Europe. A demo will be available when the Vive launches later this year (it is not clear whether this is the same demo being shown as part of the tour) through SteamVR. The full game is then expected to launch in Spring 2016.
John Wick stars Keanu Reeves as a retired hit man who gets back into the game to exact revenge on some gangsters that screwed him. It was a surprise hit that we really enjoyed. A sequel is currently in development, indicating that it is already in the process of becoming a multimedia blockbuster franchise.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.