Welcome to another edition of Beyond Co-Op, the weekly news round-up where we look at the gaming news around the industry that may or may not necessarily relate to cooperative gaming. It was a fairly quiet week as many gear up for the next Xbox announcement this coming week and E3 a few weeks away - still there's a few tidbits worth mentioning.
Holy crap, we launched a new website! Have you seen it? We're pretty proud of it. You should take the tour. While some of us continue to tweak what we've birthed, we'll also be enjoying some of the gaming backlog we've acquired and avoiding the scorching temperatures of summer. Here's what the Co-Optimus staff is playing this weekend.
You would think that making a game free would be enough to get people to continue playing it, but that's not the case. Happy Wars has continued to be successful because it keeps providing new content and updates. If these don't tickle your fancy, how about a weekend of Double XP?
Who said you couldn't get great video game freebies with your snacks? You may have recalled how Activision made a special set of Skylander figurines available through a promotion with Frito-Lay products. In much the same way, Activision has once again paired with Frito-Lay in order to offer a few limited edition sidekicks for Skylanders Giants.
I was about to post the new trailer announcing the console release of Farming Simulator 2013. I was hoping this was a joke, and the game would actually let us hunt colossal ninja dragons in enormous zombie-powered steampunk mechs or something like that. It turns out it's a game that simulates farming in 2013. Go figure.
Now that things are settled down a bit, we wanted to show you some of the new features of Co-Optimus and how the site can better serve your needs for finding co-op games, co-op game news, more content and features. The entire site was rebuilt from the ground up to support PC, tablet, and mobile platforms with the same functionality available on across each device.
Good news for fans of open-world shooters. Red 5 Studios has announced that there free-to-play open world shooter Firefall has entered stage one of open beta testing. Blending the best parts of skill-based combat and sci-fi action, the developers encourage everyone to try their game and contribute feedback in order to make the game even better. You can follow this link to join the open beta for free.
Payday 2 is a little more than a month away, and quite frankly I can't wait. July is a dog for co-op releases. The online cooperative heist game will allow four players to rob banks, knock off jewelry stores, wear snazzy masks, and more.
Apparently some people on the internets have been spreading around their opinion that now that the Borderlands 2 Season Pass has released its fourth and final promised DLC, there won't be any more Borderlands 2 DLC. Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, however, has recently put a stop to these rumors.
The Grand Theft Auto V video finally revealed a multiplayer component! Great. Now I can cover it. The big gameplay trailer debuted yesterday. Here it is, in all of its "look at all the s*** you can do" glory:
The Call of Duty franchise has featured quite a bit of co-op over the past few years, starting in earnest with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's "Special Ops" mode. The various offshoots and separate titles that followed continued to feature a co-op mode, whether it was "Spec Ops" or zombie-related, so it would seem only natural for Infinity Ward's next-gen title, Call of Duty: Ghosts, to include it too, right? Well, maybe?
We saw Lovers In a Dangerous Spacetime at E3 2013 this year and, well frankly, we fell in love with it so much we nominated it for a Co-Op Game of Show award. The game is still in active development for PC with a release date sometime later this year, but two new screens have surfaced exciting us for what's to come.
