Rogue Lords Debut at PC Gaming Show

Lesquin, France, June 15, 2020 – NACON today revealed the first gameplay trailer for Rogue Lords, a new tactical rogue-like game co-developed by Cyanide and Leikir Studio, set in a murky and macabre 17th-century dystopia named The New World.

Rogue Lords casts players as The Devil in an age when Evil has been defeated and the world has been left out of balance. Unable to physically manifest in The New World, The Devil turns to his more faithful disciples to spread darkness across the land. Dracula, Bloody Mary, the Headless Horseman, the White Lady, and other evil icons unite in an unholy crusade against the Demon Hunters and cultists who conquered the forces of evil once before.

In Rogue Lords players explore a 3D map thanks to a team of three Disciples of Evil and sow chaos and corruption, making important choices and engaging in challenging turn-based combat where outright defeat means game over and the end of the story… this time.

Each run is unique, with new paths, new encounters and new opportunities on every playthrough. Players might choose to burn a farm to the ground on one run or spare the land and recruit its residents to The Devil’s cause on another. Some choices are riskier than others, and the disciples’ talents will change the outcome of the encounter. Dracula can calmly persuade mortals with his vampiric charm while the Headless Horseman might end the conversation through sheer terror alone.

When all is lost, players can draw upon The Devil’s powers and use their harvested souls to transcend the bounds of the game world and cheat. Enemy health bars, luck and other variables can be manipulated at will to tilt the balance of power in Evil’s favour and literally change the game.

Rogue Lords will be released in 2021 for PC, PlayStation®4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch™.

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About NACON

NACON is a company of the BIGBEN Group founded in 2019 to optimize its know-how through strong synergies in the video game market. By bringing together its 8 development studios, the publishing of AA video games, the design, and distribution of premium gaming devices, NACON focuses 20 years of expertise at the service of players. This new unified business unit strengthens NACON's position in the market, enables it to innovate by creating new unique competitive advantages, and achieve its ambition to become one of the world's leading players in gaming. https://www.nacongaming.com/

About Cyanide

Cyanide is a French video game development studio created in 2000 and based in Nanterre. It has two subsidiaries located in Montreal and Bordeaux. The studio is known for its sports games, such as the popular PC series Cycling Manager and its console version, Tour de France. Cyanide is also the author of Blood Bowl (Sport/Fantasy, 2009), the adaptation of the famous Games Workshop board game; Game of Thrones (RPG, 2012); Styx: Master of Shadows and the sequel Styx: Shards of Darkness (Infiltration, 2014/2017); and Call of Cthulhu, a game adapted from the tormented world of HP Lovecraft (investigative RPG, 2018). More information can be found at www.cyanide-studio.com

About Leikir Studio

Leikir Studio is a cross-media company. Its objective is to deploy original worlds on all media platforms. Today, the studio is made up of a web team and a video game development team, creators of the brawler Wondershot and the platformer/bullet hell Isbarah.

Article by: Susan N.

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Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory - PC Review

Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory by developers Black Shamrock, Cyanide Studio and by publisher Bigben Interactive—PC(Epic) review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

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Remember citizen, success is mandatory. Failure is treason. Happiness is also Mandatory.

Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory is an interesting blend of ideas in the vein of a top down third person isometric RPG. Being first in the line of a series of clones, as you don’t remember anything like you apparently should, you’re told to listen up, do as your told and walk within the lines. Anything outside these lines is considered treason and if you take it too far? Well they’ll just kill you and move onto the next clone in line. As long as you still have clones left to come back as.

Paranoia is bonkers. But in a good way. Being named team lead, you and three other trouble shooters will have to go out on missions in order to do, well, whatever you’re told. With my journey starting off on a literal cleanup mission where the previous crew were all left in a bloody mess, I had to essentially escort a super large version of Mo from Wall-E to clean the floor and reassure it that I would keep it safe from harm. Yeah. Even the robots are paranoid, and for good reason as once we got back I went from a mere 15% traitorous to a whopping 50%. I didn’t like my teammates. I didn’t like them one bit.

That said, this is exactly where Paranoia shines as you REALLY need to be careful about what you do and how you do it. Being sent on missions from the master control unit, you get to choose three people to tag along. Each of these people have their own specialties that can be either extremely useful or quite useless depending on the situation. Having a happiness officer for example is pretty useless in a firefight, but when investigating multiple murders and questioning witnesses and suspects, it comes in handy as they’ll bring a person’s happiness to a level where they can actually be reasoned with.

Where you need to be careful with the above however is that, the only person “on your side”, is you. How you talk to other people, what you do while out on a mission, all of it is being watched by those with you and they will gladly throw you under the proverbial bus if it makes them look good. There are chances to maybe get them to go along with it, but that will entirely depend on your clone’s reasoning abilities. More often than not? They’ll tell and then you’ll have to decide, do you go for once more mission? Call it quits and terminate your clone for a new one? Or, do you walk outside of the lines of your current access restrictions and have the termination force sent after for you an epic firefight? Choice is yours!

There are a lot of things that are told to your early enough but they may not make sense right away. One of these is the fact that I was told that I had a red access level clearance. This literally meant that I could only ever walk inside of the red lines. One step outside and my treason level rose by seven or eight percent. Once you’ve crossed it’ll won’t keep going up so you may as well try to do whatever once you’re over the line, but if you keep crossing by poking your toe repeatedly over? 100% comes very fast. So adding that to whatever your teammates say about you, it really doesn’t take long before you’re facing termination in one way or the other. Thankfully though, you have a storage box.

This box is perhaps one of your only saving graces. For every mission, whether it’s for cleanup, investigation or interrogation, you receive a voucher for the vending machine that gives you a gun, some ammo, and some sort of happiness which acts as health boosters. Once the mission is over and it’s been reported to the central computer however, those fancy everything including everything that you picked up while on mission gets taken away. So before any of that happens, you have a box, with limited space, to stash things into. Health items, guns, ammo, the “basic” stuff that you’ll need if you’re going to find yourself in a firefight for having hit 100% treason. It keeps between clones as well, because let’s be honest, it’s YOUR box.

Paranoia isn’t perfect though. It has some issues that come out to play both in terms of gameplay and performance. There are a lot of little things that may not be covered, or be covered properly making you wonder exactly that you are supposed to do next. This happened when I mopped the floors with everyone that tried to attack me but couldn’t open a damned door because I didn’t know how to hack it. I had done what was needed to hack it but I couldn’t see what was needed to actually perform the operation. Turns out, I just had to switch tabs inside of the vending machine… yeah that was a bit of a facepalm, but if you don’t know? You’ll be looking for a while.

The other thing is that there’s at least one game breaking bug that I hit and it basically stopped any and all progression. Paranoia, to keep you on your toes, is autosaved after anything you do. So when I went to bed and then my mission status didn’t update past the, go to bed to start the next day, that was it. I tried re-loading, killing off my clone and spawning a new one. Nothing. I had to restart from scratch but at least that time was faster because I knew what I was doing. Or at least knew how to do what I should be doing.

Summary

Overall though, if you’re a fan of RPGs, loads of dialog, cheezy yet well thought out retorts and just some good old fashioned fire fights between clones and robots? Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory is worth looking into and remember, trust no one. Report everything. But most importantly, remain happy. Happiness is mandatory.

Score: 7 / 10

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Werewolf: The Apocalypse Earthblood Available in 2020

Lesquin, France, October 19, 2019 – Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood is one of the flagship games of the latest PDXCon. Presented on stage a few hours ago by Patch, Cyanide's Game Director, the fans of the pen-and-paper role-playing game learned a lot more about the game which comes out in Summer 2020.

In a very first trailer revealed in a sneak peek, fans were given a preview of Cahal, a werewolf who has been exiled for several years and who has come back to his endangered tribe. Endron, the oil-producing subsidiary of the multinational Pentex, is installing an extraction site and is destroying the forest around a sanctuary. At times a wolf, at times a human, Cahal can transform into a werewolf when rage consumes him.

Following the presentation of the trailer, Patch gave more details on the principal characteristics of the game. As a big fan of the pen-and-paper game, it's only natural that he became the driving force for this project within Cyanide. The video game carries over all the main aspects of the pen-and-paper game in an unflinchingly mature universe overflowing with current topics such as the destruction of nature by man and their machines. Rage, a central element of the game, brings a subtlety to the game which requires players to learn to control it in order to make the most of it.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood is the first action-RPG game adapted from the eponymous game. Mature, brutal, and complex, it invites the player to embody Cahal throughout his quest of bloody redemption. He'll play an essential role in the great war led by the Garous against Pentex, whose activities are devastating the natural world.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood will be available on PS4, Xbox One and PC in 2020.

About Bigben

Bigben, a leading publisher of video games on PC and consoles, is known for its creativity and innovation. After its acquisition of four development studios (Cyanide, Eko, KT Racing and Spiders), which are all internationally recognised for their expertise in different genres, Bigben is strengthening its position as a developer and publisher of premium games and is aiming to become the world's leading AA publisher. www.bigben.fr

About Cyanide

Cyanide is a French video game development studio created in 2000 and based in Nanterre. It has two subsidiaries located in Montreal and Bordeaux. The studio is known for its sports games, such as the popular PC series Cycling Manager and its console version, Tour de France. Cyanide is also the author of Blood Bowl (Sport/Fantasy, 2009), the adaptation of the famous Games Workshop board game; Game of Thrones (RPG, 2012); Styx: Master of Shadows and the sequel Styx: Shards of Darkness (Infiltration, 2014/2017); and Call of Cthulhu, a game adapted from the tormented world of HP Lovecraft (investigative RPG, 2018). More information can be found at www.cyanide-studio.com

About White Wolf

White Wolf is a licensing company focused on creating the best participatory brands in the world. Since its original entry into the roleplaying game market in 1991, White Wolf’s World of Darkness has grown to be one of the most recognized and successful brands in the hobby game space with collective book sales in excess of 10 million copies during this time. White Wolf’s World of Darkness brands, which include Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Wraith: The Oblivion, and Orpheus, has been licensed for television series, console and computer video games, interactive media events, and a myriad of merchandise and other entertainment products. More information at: www.worldofdarkness.com


Article by Susan N.

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Vampire the Masquerade: Swansong Announced for 2021

Lesquin, France, October 19, 2019 - On the heels of Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood, Bigben’s catalogue is expanding its presence in The World of Darkness with the production of a new video game based on the famous franchise Vampire: The Masquerade. Already teased at Bigben Week 2019, this new game titled Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong will release in 2021. It will be developed by Big Bad Wolf studio, a narrative RPG specialist and author of the award-winning game The Council.

Vampire: The Masquerade is the most iconic role-playing game of its generation and sets the standard for many tabletop gamers. The first setting in the World of Darkness universe created by White Wolf Publishing in 1991, Vampire: The Masquerade transposes the vampire myth into modern societies. The player takes control of one of these immortal creatures hiding in the shadows of our cities. They struggle to control their bloodthirsty instincts by leading a life of both predator and outcast, in a world where the boundaries between reality and the supernatural are always blurred. Vampires in The World of Darkness are nothing like the solitary monsters of the ancient legends. They are superior and sophisticated creatures who live among humans behind a shield of secrecy: The Masquerade. Organised into complex secret societies, they create their own laws and are members of distinct clans with contrasting visions of their role in the world.

Thrilled with the success of The Council, Big Bad Wolf studio intends to continue specialising in narrative RPGs, a new genre that they are helping to define with their creations. With this adaptation of Vampire: The Masquerade, the team is working on its most ambitious project. The game will feature a strong story, supported by solid RPG mechanics that respect the rules of the fifth edition of Vampire: The Masquerade and the universe of The World of Darkness.

"At the studio, we're long-time and passionate fans of the tabletop role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade. We have wanted to create a video game inspired by this universe for several years now. This project fits perfectly with Bigben’s desire to expand its catalogue of narrative games. We are very happy to be unveiling it together," says Thomas Veauclin, Creative & Art Director at Big Bad Wolf. 

"My past experience as an editor and author of role-playing games, and also as Editor-in-Chief of an RPG magazine, is proof of how important this project means to me personally," adds Benoit Clerc, Head of Publishing at Bigben." Just like me, many fans have been waiting a long time for a new adaptation of this cult game, which will be developed by one of the most talented studios of its generation."

In this narrative RPG adapted from the 5th edition of Vampire: The Masquerade, the player takes control of 3 vampires belonging to different clans of the Camarilla, the secret society to which most vampires belong. Weaving between their intertwined tales, the player has to confront the different points of view of his characters to unravel fact from fiction. With whispers of conspiracy, murder and power struggles, the player must protect his clan, discover the truth and above all enforce the Masquerade, the vampire law designed to conceal the existence of creatures of the night from humans. 

About Bigben

Bigben, a leading publisher of video games on PC and consoles, is known for its creativity and innovation. After its acquisition of four development studios (Cyanide, Eko, KT Racing and Spiders), which are all internationally recognised for their expertise in different genres, Bigben is strengthening its position as a developer and publisher of premium games and is aiming to become the world's leading AA publisher. www.bigben.fr

About Cyanide

Cyanide is a French video game development studio created in 2000 and based in Nanterre. It has two subsidiaries located in Montreal and Bordeaux (Big bad Wolf). The studio is known for its sports games, such as the popular PC series Cycling Manager and its console version, Tour de France. Cyanide is also the author of Blood Bowl (Sport/Fantasy, 2009), the adaptation of the famous Games Workshop board game; Game of Thrones (RPG, 2012); Styx: Master of Shadows and the sequel Styx: Shards of Darkness (Infiltration, 2014/2017); and Call of Cthulhu, a game adapted from the tormented world of HP Lovecraft (investigative RPG, 2018). More information can be found at www.cyanide-studio.com

About White Wolf

White Wolf is a licensing company focused on creating the best participatory brands in the world. Since its original entry into the roleplaying game market in 1991, White Wolf’s World of Darkness has grown to be one of the most recognized and successful brands in the hobby game space with collective book sales in excess of 10 million copies during this time. White Wolf’s World of Darkness brands, which include Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Wraith: The Oblivion, and Orpheus, has been licensed for television series, console and computer video games, interactive media events, and a myriad of merchandise and other entertainment products. More information at: www.worldofdarkness.com


Article by Susan N.

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Blood Bowl 2 - PS4 Review

Admittedly, I was someone who felt let down by the original Blood Bowl when it came out. I thought its mix of dark humor, fantasy elements and football would really resonate with me, but for a variety of reasons that game fell flat for me. I have been guardedly optimistic that the team at Cyanide Studios would right the ship and make Blood Bowl 2 a more compelling experience. Thankfully my faith was rewarded.

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