Can you only announce a game once?

Look, I wanted to write about Battlefield today, but I'm not going to force you to listen to me banging on about 10 seconds of new footage. I'm just going to say that the new footage looks good, and we'll leave it at that. At least until we get to Gibs, I guess. 

Elsewhere, I've been playing a few different things, but I wanted to flag up COP BASTARD, which I'll actually keep in its stylistic choice of all caps because it fits with the ridiculous '90s action cinema vibe. You're a cop in Osaka, but the demo I played mostly involves blasting your way around an apartment complex. It's pretty stripped back and feels a bit rough around the edges right now. You don't pick up a weapon so much as pick up ammo for the arsenal you're already carrying, and there's not even a jump button. Regardless, I love the video nasty feel of COP BASTARD, especially when you blast a baddie up close with a shotgun and it turns them into a puff of fine red mist. Vibes can help you forgive a lot in shooters, and COP BASTARD is knee-deep in them. 

Another game that impressed me with sheer style this week was '83, exploding back onto the scene with a re-announcement trailer five years after the game was originally unveiled.

Before we dive into the trailer, there's a bit of a history lesson.  '83 is a tactical shooter in the same vein as Rising Storm and Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, but set in an alternate history where the cold war was pretty damn hot. Think Red Orchestra but with FALs and DPM camo.

The first we saw of the game was this trailer all the way back in 2019. At the time, the game was being developed by Antimatter Games, the developer on Rising Storm 2: Vietnam. Sadly, Antimatter Games went under in 2023 and it looked like '83 would vanish with it. I loved Rising Storm 2: Vietnam and I was excited for '83, but it didn't feel like there was a lot of awareness around the game. I was gutted when Antimatter Games closed because I felt like '83 had some promise, and it was also developing a sequel to Project IGI, one of the formative shooters of my teenage years.

I didn't hear much else, but then '83 appeared back on my radar when Blue Dot Games got in touch. Blue Dot Games is a smaller company formed by some former Antimatter Games developers and they had been left clutching '83, but hadn't yet worked out their exact plan to bring the game to market. Those early conversations led to '83 appearing in the PC Gaming Show last summer.

That was last year, and I watched as they found investment and worked seriously on the game. But then, a few days back, Blue Dot re-announced the game. You can watch the trailer now. 

Looks pretty good, right? I think it sets the stall well. '83 is planning to come to early access on Steam within the year, and the calm voiceover explains both the theme and scale of the game (accessible realism, authentic combat, cold war setting), shows some pretty visceral combat and ends with a call to action to wishlist the game. At time of writing it's had 315k views, and comments seem to put people into two camps: "the tactical realism fans are here and waiting" and "I've been waiting for a game like this forever" 

It's long been viewed as a general truth that you can only ever launch your game once. This truth ignores that Fortnite became the biggest game in the world for a few years despite the original Fortnite being a co-op survival game that was so naff I once declined to review it. Regardless, conventional wisdom is that you only get one big bite of the attention apple, one chance to make it big. ]

Over the last few years, I've stopped believing in this so much. Fortnite is the most obvious example, but I also see Cyberpunk 2077's redemption arc and the way tiny early-access games have launched to silence and then rallied players for their 1.0 months or years later. Sometimes those same games have then gone on to bring players back yet again with a wedge of new content.

So if that conventional wisdom is no longer true, I'm starting to have my doubts about the idea you only get to announce once, too. After all, '83 seems to have finally gotten the buzzy announcement trailer it deserves. The game looks great, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it myself. I hope it adds the instant kill shots to the spine and heart, my favourite part of Red Orchestra and Rising Storm. That and the chance to tool around with a Minimi, of course. I'll forgive a lot for a squad automatic weapon.

It isn't the only game getting to enjoy that "just announced" feel despite having announced in a different calendar year. Take a bow, Battlefield. The still unnamed shooter from EA was quietly announced last year, but now seems to have a ton of attention after putting its first wedge of gameplay footage into yesterday's announcement of Battlefield Labs, which ties the newsletter into a nice Battlefield Ouroboros. 

Gibs

• EA has announced Battlefield Labs, which it describes as its " most ambitious community development collaboration ever." It seems to be some beta tests to help shape the next Battlefield to ensure it lands with fans. You can sign up now if you're into that, and participants will get to try early iterations of the game across a few different pillars, like core combat and destruction. Don't expect this to be like Call of Duty's ultra-polished beta weekends. There's a little bit of new footage in the video and it looks fairly tight, but obviously it's hard to say until I've had a chance to run around in it myself. 
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's guns are really bad, but apparently they're bad on purpose 
• Will Sawyer cooked every recipe in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and got a) fishcakes b) food poisoning.
• I saw Paula Tape this weekend, she's pretty good - this wasn't the set she played, but it's a good one.