Xbox Living

A new teaser trailer has arrived for Battlefield: Bad Company 2:

Although the trailer doesn’t show any specific gameplay, it does tell us a bit about the changes in Bad Company 2.  One obvious example is the ability for snipers to operate in prone position.  This was oddly missing from the first Bad Company, although I wonder if this will make snipers too powerful, if they can be even more stealthy.

The trailer also suggests that there may be blood effects as well, since blood is prominently displayed.  The way the knife is used in the trailer is also different from the standard slashing movement in the game — I’m not sure whether this is for show or not, though.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is due out next winter — probably in early 2010.  The 3-map Xbox Live Arcade title Battlefield 1943: Pacific will be out this May to keep us busy until then.

Lionhead’s Peter Molyneux has told Kotaku that the next batch of Fable II DLC will be out this spring.  The new content will be titled See The Future.

“This time we’ve taken a little bit more time on it, it’s a little bit more story driven. … If you’re a real fan of Fable, it answers some of those questions. It’s going to test you a little bit emotionally as well. But I think the real unique thing here is it starts to tease and hint at what it starting to happen in the world of Albion and what is happening in the future.”

This also hints at what’s to come in the next title, the rumored Fable III.

“If you play See the Future you’re going to be getting a flavor at what’s going to be happening.”

I’ll let you know when I find out more about the DLC.

The original Call of Duty seems to be set for re-release.  The game has been sighted online as having been rated and certified for release.

The original Call of Duty was released on PC platforms in 2003 and quickly became a hit.  The game will be appearing on Xbox Live Arcade sometime in the near future, and will also appear on the PlayStation Network.  No release date or official announcement has been made.

The news comes just after Activision and Treyarch have released the first map pack for Call of Duty: World at War, and Infinity Ward have given Modern Warfare 2, the CoD4 sequel, a November 10 release date.

Activision Blizzard and Infinity Ward have announced the release date of their upcoming first-person-shooter, Modern Warfare 2. The game will be released on November 10, 2009.

This is in keeping with the general trend of releasing a Call of Duty title anually, although the game will drop the Call of Duty brand from its name — the title Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has been shortened.

Modern Warfare 2 is the sequel to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the hugely-successful installation that broke the series out of its traditional World War II setting.  Although the series’ fifth game, Call of Duty: World at War returned to WWII, developer Treyarch employed Infinity Ward’s CoD4 game engine to create it.

Modern Warfare will, obviously, return to a modern setting.  Beyond that, little is known about the game’s setting or other new features.

Call of Duty fans were today treated to new maps for the online multiplayer in Call of Duty: World at War.  Map Pack 1 brings four new maps to the “addictive” online gameplay.

The official announcement describes the new maps:

“Players fight through the burning streets of Berlin in Nightfire and take up battle positions in fortified Japanese bunkers in Knee Deep. Station offers a bombed out underground train station, and the Nazi Zombies return in Verrückt (Zombie Asylum) featuring more weapons, new Perks-a-Cola machines and electroshock defenses.”

The new map pack is available on Xbox Live Marketplace for 800 Microsoft points.

Meanwhile, Infinity Ward, developers of Call of Duty 4 and the game engine powering World at War are hard at work on the next CoD title: Modern Warfare 2.

Microsoft has announced that its real-time strategy (RTS) game Halo Wars has sold over a million copies in less than a month.

The game also boasts about 200,000 players taking Halo Wars online via Xbox Live each day, with over 2.6 million matches completed so far.

Halo Wars is the RTS incarnation of the Halo Universe, allowing Halo fans to dive into the game’s growing storyline from a new perspective.  The game was developed by RTS legends Ensemble Studios, a  Microsoft shop that was closed following Halo Wars’ release. Some have speculated that Ensemble’s closing has been a result of their success in the RTS genre, leading them to be typecast as “the RTS guys”, and preventing them from working outside of that genre.

Since Ensemble closed, however, many of its former staff have formed Robot Entertainment.  The new firm has since announced a partnership with Microsoft, whereby it will offer support for both Halo Wars and its popular Age of Empires series while it works on its own projects.

Robot Entertainment is also working on upcoming downloadable content for Halo Wars.  More on that as it comes.