This week: A game about navigating time loops and some new game delays. But first: some strides for racial diversity in big-budget video games.

More Black heroes

Popular video games have always been dominated by white male protagonists. (Five hundred points if you can name everyone in this meme.) An assumption among big publishers has been that to sell as many games as possible, the hero has to look like a
generic Hollywood action star. The developers of the 2013 hit The Last of Us even had to push back against pressure to remove their female protagonist from the cover.

But things might be changing — ever so slowly. A recent string of announcements and releases from the leading game companies showcased diverse protagonists to an extent we haven’t seen before. In the past, you had to look to small, independent games to find this many Black heroes.

For example, this week’s release of the brilliant game Deathloop stars two Black characters, Colt and Julianna, as they battle to the death on an island where a single day repeats indefinitely. Developed by Bethesda Softworks’s Arkane Studios, Deathloop is one of the only big-budget video games in history (maybe the only one?) to feature two Black protagonists. “It’s putting a face and body and voice to something that people of color have always known, which is that there are a multitude of stories inside of them,” said Ozioma Akagha, the actress who voices Julianna, in an interview with Wired last year.

And then there was last year’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which gave center stage to the biracial superhero. Although it was a smaller-scale game than its 2018 predecessor, Spider-Man: Miles Morales set the stage for last week’s announcement of Spider-Man 2, which showcased Miles fighting alongside the traditional costumed hero, Peter Parker. 

The oddly titled Forspoken, coming from Square Enix Holdings Co. this spring, will star a Black woman played by actress Ella Balinska. (It looks awesome.)

Finally, a recent trailer for the upcoming God of War: Ragnarok teased a new character, Angrboda, who has what Vice reporter Gita Jackson, in a recent article, called “one of the most impressive examples of Black hair in video games.” The reveal was met with adulation from Black gamers who don’t often see that kind of meticulous detail in characters who look like them. Jackson (with whom I worked for several years) told me that after seeing Angrboda, she “felt like suddenly a lot of people’s desires were being taken seriously.”

Zaire Lanier, a writer and narrative designer for games, said she was thrilled to see a video game character that resembled her. “I think things are changing. It’s just going to take time,” she told me. “I’m enjoying Black leads in games that are just existing in their stories, without the story being about their Blackness.”

The video game industry still has plenty of work to do when it comes to systemic racism (and there are still new game studios popping up with their own diversity challenges) but these kind of strides are significant and welcome.

What to play this weekend

Fall is traditionally packed with excellent
new video games, and this year is no exception. One of my favorites so far is the aforementioned Deathloop, which blends the stealth and gunplay of Dishonored with the investigative time shenanigans of a game like Outer Wilds. The game is a little tricky to describe, but I’ll do my best. You, as Colt, are stuck on an island called Blackreef that exists in a Groundhog’s Day-style time loop where a single day repeats itself over and over again. Your goal is to break the loop by assassinating the eight “Visionaries” who have created it. To do that, you have to go through the loop multiple times, figuring out who will be where and how best to murder them all. Information is your weapon… as are, you know, actual weapons.

(There sure have been a lot of
time loop games recently! It’s almost like we’re all stuck in some sort of time loop in real life.)

On the money by Olga Kharif

While Jason is right about the season’s calendar of new releases, there are still a lot of titles that have been delayed this year — a bummer when people are showing a
huge appetite for gaming.

Electronic Arts Inc. pushed back the release of 
Battlefield 2042 by about a month, to Nov. 19, because “a global pandemic has created unforeseen challenges for our development teams.”

Earlier this month, Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. said it will deliver Grand Theft Auto V, which was planned for release on the PlayStation 5 this fall, in March instead, “to allow additional time to further polish the final products.” Zynga Inc.’s Star Wars: Hunters for Nintendo Co.’s Switch and mobile will now likely come out next year instead of in 2021. And Dying Light 2 Stay Human, which was supposed to ship in December, will now arrive in February. 

The list goes on and on.

Sometimes a delay is a good thing. EA might have been better off having pushed back Battlefield even further, to next year, said Doug Clinton, an analyst at Loup Ventures. “Not because it won’t be ready but because Q4 is already packed with first person shooters,” including Microsoft’s 
Halo Infinite (which is due out this holiday season after a year’s delay.) 

This week in gaming news

CD Projekt SA is still updating Cyberpunk 2077 following the game’s disastrous launch. The most important news? The game is now more wet.

Video games and consoles are still flying off the shelves, setting a new record for
August sales. And they’d be even higher if not for the chip shortage.

God of War’s Norse saga will come to an end next year with the next game, God of War Ragnarok. Previously the developers had planned on making it a trilogy, but they’ve decided to make it a duo for one simple reason: Games take too long to make.

The next chapter of Deltarune, the successor to wildly popular indie game Undertale, had a surprise release Friday.

Beautiful RPG Tales of Arise, spotlighted in last week’s newsletter as a game you should play, has sold 1 million copies. We’ll assume that’s due to the Game On bump.

You can reach me at jschreier10@bloomberg.net or confidentially at jasonschreier@protonmail.com.