The film adaptation for Dmitry Glukhovsky's 2005 novel Metro 2033, which was successfully made into a video game back in 2010, has been cancelled and all rights have reverted back to the author. In his book, the post-apocalyptic story is set in the Moscow Metro and tackles themes of communism and xenophobia, both of which Glukhovsky felt were in jeopardy when MGM decided to relocated the story to America. 

The author explained that, "In Washington D.C., Nazis don’t work, communists don’t work at all, and the Dark Ones don’t work," and that, "They had to replace the Dark Ones with some kind of random beasts and as long as the beasts don’t look human, the entire story of xenophobia doesn’t work."

Though it must be difficult to see a project so long in the making get scrapped – MGM originally gained the rights to Metro 2033 in 2012 – Glukhovsy has another Metro project to look forward to. Metro Exodus, a game being made by Deep Silver and 4A Games, is set to release on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC February 22. You can check out their concept for the snowy Russia wasteland here. 

Rockstar has just released its latest DLC for Grand Theft Auto Online, and it looks like players will be able to enter the Maze Bank Arena for some car-on-car gladiatorial combat.  

Arena Wars brings with it a new workshop capable of turning your car into a death machine, seven new arena event modes, and the ability to track your progress in the events to unlock trophies and new outfits. Players can also get their hands on 12 new contender vehicles all capable of receiving metal-shearing upgrades, available in three new styles: apocalypse, future shock, and nightmare.

Among the many modes announced, players can jump into the area for the free-for-all mode of carnage where players will battle it out with a host of other weaponized vehicles until there’s only one left standing. There are also classic modes like flag war (capture the flag) and some new ones like here comes the monsters, which unleashes a horde of monster trucks upon some hapless compact cars to see if even one of the eco-friendly vehicles can survive. Players who are eliminated will also become spectators capable of unleashing explosive-armed RC cars and lethal drones upon the remaining drivers.

Epic Games has removed the Infinity Blade Trilogy from the iOS app store, citing concerns about being able to support it as developer Chair works on its next game, Spyjinx.

The company made the official announcement on its blog yesterday. "With the development of Spyjinx and other projects, it has become increasingly difficult for our team to support the Infinity Blade series at a level that meets our standards," Epic said. The company will support Infinity Blade III with Clash Mobs over the next month.

Although new buyers can no longer access the games on the store, those who've already purchased and downloaded the games will continue to have access to them (and be able to re-download them) "for the foreseeable future." All in-app purchases for the game have also been removed.

A ratings leak a few weeks ago accidentally let slip the title Nier: Automata Game of the Yorha Edition, a pun on Game of the Year using the organization name within the game. It's not a high-level pun or anything, but it's serviceable. In a way that makes me wonder whether or not Square Enix remembered if they had already announced it or not, the Nier: Automata Twitter account today confirmed the existence of the game with a message from director Yoko Taro, complete with spelling errors.

Attention all androids:
We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming with a special message direct from @yokotaro... pic.twitter.com/IE9seYUBzH

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Bandai Namco has announced that their newest Tales of game, a mobile title named Tales of Crestoria, will be coming stateside in 2019. While not quite dubbed the next mainline or flagship Tales of game, Crestoria has all the resources of one and will be releasing in 2019 on iOS and Android.

"Tales of Crestoria takes place in an oppressive dystopia where every citizen must carry with them an all-seeing 'Vision Orb' that monitors for criminal violations," Bandai Namco writes. "The game follows protagonists Kanata, a naive boy blindly accepting of to the Vision Orbs’ justice, and Misella, an audacious orphan unbridled in her dedication to defending Kanata. Due to the horrific events of one fateful night, the duo find themselves branded “Transgressors”, and condemned to death by society’s popular vote—the draconian system of justice by which their world is governed. With eyes now opened to the injustices of society, a chance meeting with Vicious, “The Great Transgressor,” gives Kanata and Misella a defining choice: Own your fate, or let fate own you."

To celebrate, Bandai Namco has released a concept movie to show off the themes of that description in a fairly cool artstyle Check it out below.

Almost ten years ago, Glen Schofield surprised a lot of industry watchers and fans alike by announcing that he was leaving EA Visceral and founding a new studio at Activision called Sledgehammer Games. Today, Schofield announced on Twitter that particular journey is over as he moves on to further things outside the company.

I’ve had a great run here at Activision; 3 COD’s- MW3, AW and WWll- that I’m proud of. I feel it’s time to try something new tho. I’ll be leaving Activision end of Dec. and taking some time off to relax. Then off to something else exciting. Thank u Activision for everything!

Schofield founded Sledgehammer in 2009 under the auspices of Activision to work mostly on Call of Duty as part of Activision's plan to start trading off yearly titles in the series between three studios. As Schofield mentions in his tweet, Sledgehammer oversaw Modern Warfare 3, Advanced Warfare, and World War II. The last of those games was such a success that Schofield and co-founding partner Michael Condrey were brought into Activision's corporate team to oversee all of the company's games just earlier this year.

Earlier today, Sega and a company named Forever Entertainment announced that they would be co-creating and co-publishing remakes for Sega's Saturn shooter Panzer Dragoon and its sequel Panzer Dragoon II: Zwei. The first game will be made available before the end of 2019, if all things go according to schedule.

Forever Entertainment is a Polish publisher and developer which is known for a large number of games, but most notably the recent Fear Effect: Sedna. The company obtained the license through a Square Enix program that licenses out old IPs to developers that want to do something with them, which they certainly did as you can tell from our review.

The company describes the games as "refreshes" that conform to modern graphical standards, though it is unclear exactly what they mean by either descriptor. 

It was kind of a surprise last year when Doom was abruptly announced and then quickly released for the Nintendo Switch. The game had to make some concessions to fit on Nintendo's lower-powered console compared to its PS4 and Xbox One releases, but porting studio Panic Button did a noticeably good job with a tough task. Now, a year after release, the developer is issuing an anniversary patch to, among other things, help the game run better.

Happy 25th Anniversary, @DOOM fans!
We got you a little something – an update to DOOM for #NintendoSwitch with increased performance, and you can now add recent players to your Friend List.

Oh – And video capture.

Godzilla, the newest kaiju movie from Warner Bros and the latest film in their self-dubbed MonsterVerse, has finally gotten a second trailer elucidating a little on the odds stacked up against Godzilla. Of course humans are at risk, too, but that seems less important.

Check out the trailer below.

The trailer openly pontificates on the idea of weaponizing Godzilla, which is an idea that seems great with basically no flaws in it. Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidorah eventually make the decision way easier by wrecking things up in, well, a war of the monsters.

Back in July, Stardew Valley developer ConcernedApe and former/sporadic publisher Chucklefish announced that multiplayer would be coming to the Harvest Moon-like game eventually. While it has been out on PC since August, the Switch version hasn't had any updates beyond a brief mention last week that it is in submission. Now it looks like we'll be seeing the multiplayer update in just a matter of days.

The update letting the game access multiplayer is coming Wednesday, December 12. The new multiplayer will let you build a farm with friends, get married, attend events together, and basically live the dream farm life with someone else. 

There's also a number of single-player improvements, such as a traveling night market, new characters, and your horse can wear hats. You can find the full list of changes and improvements here. Updates for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are also on their way, while the Vita version was confirmed not to be getting the multiplayer update due to technological reasons.