Syndicate Message Board

Here's some fresh gameplay footage from that new cyberpunk, squad-based Syndicate tribute, Satellite Reign, which got funded via Kickstarter last Summer. I'm happy to report that this time there's significantly less purple . And it looks quite shiny for a pre-alpha, too! Not to mention fun. Vid's above, have a look.Read more...

Want first proper in-game, in-mission footage of spiritual Syndicate remake Satellite Reign? With agents and cars and civilians and cities and miniguns and all? Step right this way.

I think you’re going to like what you see. … [visit site to read more]

Oh my god, it’s a mirage, I’m telling you all it’s sabotage. Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” is apparently a big inspiration for LA Cops‘ overall attitude/look, but I’m even more pleased that it describes the top-down shooter strategy’s moment-to-moment gameplay. Inspired by Hotline Miami‘s gore-spattered thrills and (classic) Syndicate‘s cold strategizing, this one puts you in control of two hard-boiled eggs law enforcement professionals at any given moment. Positioning is key, but so are split-second smarts and reflexes. So you might, for instance, use one cop as bait and then run them right into a bullet firehose – aka, your partner. SABOTAGE. This looks like one to watch, and watch it you shall in a pair of videos below.

… [visit site to read more]

Nostalgia is a weird beast — one that bubbles up and gets excited for the most random things. If this trailer is any indication, Matador is giving my inner PC gaming child a run for its money.Read more...

Aha, good to see the spiritual Syndicate sequel (the real one, not that dreary cash-grab from Starbreeze a couple of years back) breaking cover again after its successful Kickstarter. The good stuff – an early glimpse of Satellite Reign’s unfinished world, with its newly animated civilians scampering about – doesn’t kick in until 6m40s mark, but let’s not be churlish – it’s always fascinating to see how videogames get made. Especially when it involves quite as much brutal puppy sacrifice and breaking into DARPA bases as the 5 Lives team gets up to. Frankly I’m amazed they’re prepared to show all that in public. And so much nudity too! Whatever makes a more comfortable working environment, I guess.(more…)

It's raining expansion packs. GOG, still celebrating its fifth birthday, has made the expansion packs for five of its classic PC games available for free. So, owners of Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper, Magic Carpet, Populous, or Populous: The Beginning, know that another small part of your childhood has now been restored.Read more...

Henrik Sahlström works as a concept artist at Battlefield developers DICE. But hey, that's not all he does. Guy also did stuff for the gorgeous Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons.Read more...

All of a sudden, espionage is cool again. I’d suggest it has something to do with WikiLeaks, but the last time I typed a nice thing about WikiLeaks my PC started making funny noises and a flower delivery truck spent three days outside my house. And I hadn’t ordered any flowers, sheeple. Anyway, I blew that van up and then the police came. Coincidence? I think not. So now I’m writing about Black Annex from the front room of the Cuban embassy: Developer Lance E. McDonald streamed it as part of the Greenlight SuperShow, showing off his incredibly silly strategy action game. I think it looks rather lovely.(more…)

Don't get me wrong. I quite enjoyed the Syndicate shooter from last year. But it wasn't really Syndicate, was it? Now this teaser trailer, for something called Satellite Reign, this appears to be a Syndicate game. At least in spirit. Saying that the mystery project will be the return of a Bullfrog classic from 1996, and featuring cyberpunk imagery, it's obviously referencing Syndicate Wars, the third - and first to be in 3D - Syndicate action/strategy game. While that name is owned by EA, the man behind the project - obviously Syndicate Wars designer Mike Diskett - isn't, so given the content and tone of the trailer above we're probably looking at a modern reboot of the game. We'll know more when the game's Kickstarter campaign begins in 35 days. Satellite Reign [Site]

Will the Kickstarter controversies never end? Simon Roth stopped making his crowdfunded procedurally generated management game, Maia, for at least five seconds this morning. I know that it happened because he spent that time sending me a link to Black Annex, a one-man production built in QBASIC that will probably remind readers of a certain age that Syndicate used to be about controlling a squad of tiny, violent cyber(punk)men from afar rather than violently dismissing a first-person shooter from afar. The hot-off-the-presses trailer shows four agents infiltrating buildings, shooting enemies and hacking computers, and it looks wonderful.

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Several of EA's classic PC games have had their prices slashed to ridiculous levels on GOG for this weekend - games like Alpha Centauri, Syndicate, Populous and more can be had for under $3 each.

Other EA games taking part in the sale include a whole bunch of Ultimas, the Wing Commander series and SimCity 2000. All of the games listed on GOG's weekend promo page will set you back $2.39 a pop. If you want to purchase all 26 eligible games, it'll cost $62.14.

Last week I found myself in two conversations about resurrecting dead games. One was about Homeworld: I’d made a flippant comment about pressuring Relic to do a Kickstarter to make a sequel, and other people agreed. If Double Fine can raise millions for a point ‘n click, then why not millions for our lost and beloved space RTS? The other was about Syndicate. Wouldn’t it be great if we got a Syndicate sequel, finally, in the way we got a “proper” X-Com remake? No right-minded gamer would disagree. Hell, Paradox even seem to be planning to do so.

But I got to thinking about how this turn to “how games used to be” shouldn’t be about nostalgia, or the past at all, really. It should be about the future. The point of looking back must be to identify, rescue and save the futures we were promised.

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#fineart And here you thought Fine Art was just about the guys making the stuff that goes in the game. Today, we're looking at the work of design firm 1910, who design stuff that goes before, or on top of, a game. More »

#syndicate Early this year, Starbreeze Studios and EA launched Syndicate, an FPS reboot of a 1990s tactical classic. The game met with decidedly mixed reviews, and although some players enjoyed it, in terms of sales it's mostly gone down as a flop. More »

Clearly a positive review on Joystiq isn't the sales driver we thought it was. Despite having a good time with it ourselves, it would seem EA's Syndicate reboot was not the commercial success the company had hoped for. So says EA Labels president Frank Gibeau.

"Syndicate was something that we took a risk on. It didn't pay off - it didn't work," Gibeau told CVG. "But in general it doesn't change my appetite for wanting to go look in the library and see what we have and maybe bring back some IPs for the next-generation. That's the nature of the business; some stuff works, some stuff doesn't."

EA's other big reboot this year, SSX, apparently fared a bit better. Gibeau called this year's revival "a very successful launch for us," and lauded the game's "online innovation" as a catalyst for bringing the series back. "It's done well and you'll probably see more in the future," Gibeau concluded.

GOG.com is having a big sale this weekend until Monday on "EA Guns and Spells." Everything's half off down to $2.99, including the first Syndicate, Magic Carpet, hack-and-slasher Nox, Lands of Lore 1 and 2, and two Crusader games, No Regret and No Remorse.

CEO and President of Starbreeze Studios Mikael Nermark appears to have mixed feelings about Syndicate, the FPS reboot his team launched earlier this year. Syndicate snagged the No. 2 spot during its launch week with sales of 34,000, just 2,000 shy of Asura's Wrath. Even after such a squeeze, Nermark tells Joystiq he isn't disappointed in Syndicate, numerically or otherwise:

"Sales? What can I say?" Nermark says, inadvertently answering his own rhetorical question. "So many things depend on whether sales are good or not good. And it can always be better, right? You always want it to be better."

Being "not disappointed" isn't the same as being overwhelmingly, truly happy with a title, nor is it the same as being devastated - it seems Nermark is still working out how exactly he feels about Syndicate, but he's made up his mind about Starbreeze itself.

"Personally, I've never been satisfied with any games I've worked on. I never play my own games," Nermark says. "I was brought into Starbreeze two and a half years ago, and the first year I worked on other things than on production. But what I saw coming out of this long production time, I'm proud of what we did at Starbreeze."

We have a name, Cold Mercury, and we have a vague notion as to what the business model will be, free-to-play, but that’s all there is to know about Syndicate developer Starbreeze’s next game. Business smarties GamesIndustry.biz dug up the details from Starbreeze’s CEO Mikael Nermark. He said.

“Starbreeze will not leave the AAA segment. We are discussing with several leading game publisher on publisher financed games, but we will broaden our product portfolio of games in the new business models and segments that have arisen in the games industry. I am convinced that Starbreeze will be successful with the new games.”

So what are we looking at, here? Adam reckons “The first in a series of episodic FPS games following the career of American Music Club. The next one will be called Temperate San Francisco.”

#fineart Say what you will about the game's departure from both the look and feel of the original, there were sections of the latest Syndicate that looked just great. Mostly anything involving an office from the future. More »

In its first week of sales during the last week of February, 36,000 copies of Asura's Wrath ended up in gamers hands, NPD tells Joystiq. Bizarrely, despite Syndicate's business savvy nature, EA's big reboot came up approximately 2,000 copies short of matching the Capcom god destroyer, with just 34,000 copies sold at retail in February. As NPD doesn't track digital sales, the launch sales number is a comparison of each title's console numbers -- in so many words, Syndicate could've sold many thousands of digital copies, but they aren't accounted for here.

We're proscribing the disparity as a direct correlation to our own reviews of each game, of course, with only a half star difference between the two (which apparently equates to roughly 2,000 units). The two games launched on February 21 in North America, giving each eight days of February -- including this year's "leap" day -- to arrive at said sales numbers.

#syndicate Those unscrupulous sorts pirating the recent PC release of Starbreeze's Syndicate have found a little surprise buried inside the release. And it's not some kind of punishment or DRM. More »

#syndicate I know a lot of people have nostalgia for the 1993 Bullfrog classic Syndicate (myself included). I also know that critical reception to the new game has been a bit mixed. But I will say one thing the new game has going for it: At least they don't recruit agents by slamming into total strangers with a hover-car. More »

Alright, I’ve spent today investigating Syndicate’s four-player co-operative online mode, and while I’m obviously several decades away from reaching all the unlocks and whatnot, I’ve got a firm handle on how it all works and if I think it’s any cop. Is it as forgettable as the singleplayer? Is it anything like Syndicate? What would the world be like if Mr Mark Question of Shoreham-on-Sea hadn’t invented the question mark in 1913? Read on for answers to at least two of those questions.(more…)

Jeff and the employees of Giant Bomb Heavy Industries attempt a hostile takeover of the Internet.

#syndicate It's not like the original Syndicate. We've accept that. Moved beyond it. This is not Bullfrog's beloved tactical shooting game from 1993. This is something altogether different, and not every game reviewer likes it. More »

Jeff and Brad infiltrate buildings and skulls on their mission to hack the planet.

Fans were perturbed when they learned the classic Bullfrog-developed strategy series, Syndicate, would be rebooted in first-person form. The original was a beautiful and brutal affair, set in a cyberpunk world filled with corporate conspiracy. In its reboot, developer Starbreeze manages to hold onto some of those elements that made the original such an intriguing beast. Syndicate showcases its own beautiful brutality, shaking off the label of "just another shooter."

It's 2069. Corporations have ascended beyond the reach of simple governments and battle one another for technological advancement. Civilians are inconsequential, seen merely as pawns in the midst of each company's boardroom brawl, and are often gunned down by characters throughout the campaign simply for "getting in the way." You take the role of the mostly faceless Miles Kilo, an agent at the industry giant EuroCorp, where you have been outfitted with a prototype version of a chip that gives you control over connected devices around you, as well as a number of other abilities. Like other agents, you must work to keep your corporation at peak profitability.

There are plenty of office spaces and apartment buildings to shoot apart in the future.

The original Syndicate is a beautiful, brutal strategy game that gave you a team of futuristic super agents, the drugs you'd need to keep them under control, and a cyberpunk setting that was just enough to let your imagination run wild. In 1993, back when we weren't busy trying to cram network connectivity into every single device we interact with, from cars to refrigerators, that was enough. The gameplay was stellar and the Gibson-style setting fit with our increasingly "cyber" times. Some of those basic ideas translate well into Starbreeze's new Syndicate, which takes on the same "megacorporations as the new government" as the original Syndicate and so many other pieces of cyberspace fiction have in the past. The world view and ideas put forth in this Syndicate reboot are decidedly well-worn territory, but it's still a world worth exploring, mostly thanks to Starbreeze's continued gift for crafting first-person action games that don't feel like just another Shooter of the Day experience.

It's 2069 and you're an "agent" for Eurocorp, one of the aforementioned megacorporations. Your name is Miles Kilo, which is either the greatest or worst name for a video game character of all time. But his name hardly matters because you'll spend much of the game as a largely faceless guy that has a prototype version of a chip in your head that lets you access the "datascape," which is Syndicate's fancy term for "the future Internet." This chip is what gives you your abilities, like a tactical overlay that lets you track any enemy you've spotted even when they're behind a wall by using an alternate vision mode. And testing out the capabilities of this new version of the chip is how the story gets started. From there, you delve into acts of industrial espionage, which in the future means preventing Eurocorp employees from defecting to other corporations and protecting company secrets by any means necessary while the unchipped proletariat sit in their slums, attempting to find a way to make all the corporations come crashing down.

With the overlay from your DART chip enabled, you'll also slow down time and take less damage, making it absolutely necessary if you want to stay alive. You'll also have three abilities to use. Backfire overrides the chips found in most weapons and causes them to, well, backfire. This knocks down up to three enemies at once, opening them up for extra damage while they scramble to recover. The suicide ability causes your target to pull out a grenade (in the future, all enemies have grenades!) and detonate it, which is potentially useful for taking out large groups of tightly-clustered enemies, but I didn't run into too many of those outside of the training simulation where you're first learning how to use the ability. The final power is persuade, which is a clear nod to the Persuadertron found in the original game. Persuading a target in Syndicate flips his alignment for a period of time, causing him to target his allies and open fire. If he runs out of targets or time, he turns the gun on himself and blasts his own face off, which is a terrific and brutal touch. All three abilities recharge as you take down enemies with your firearms, which are your primary tools for interacting with the world of Syndicate.

There are a lot of people to shoot in the Syndicate campaign, and more than enough guns to do it with. Most are fairly traditional takes on sub-machine guns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, and shotguns, but you'll run into a few other interesting tools, as well. The gauss gun--which was actually a rocket launcher in the original game--is an automatic rifle with a lock-on targeting system that lets you bend bullets around cover. You'll see that sort of lock-on a little later on in the game when you encounter a rocket launcher that can fire at multiple locked-on targets, too. But the game isn't really about flashy weaponry. It's more about making every weapon at your disposal feel great. Even the default pistol is fun to fire in Syndicate, largely because when you start to run, your agent holds the pistol out at a slight angle and, unlike the other weapons in the game, you can fire that pistol while you're still running, giving it that Hong Kong action cinema style that, even after all these years, still makes you feel like you're a bad dude.

The DART chip in your skull lets you see through walls and highlight enemies.

The way the game handles its weapons is more than just a running animation, though. It has a fairly dynamic cover system that automatically reacts when you're ducked behind an object. Pushing up against cover causes you to raise the gun up and over cover for a believable-looking blind fire animation, and you can easily pop up for shots by hitting the aiming trigger. When you approach doors, walls, and other surfaces, the agent automatically moves the gun appropriately--lowering it when you're pressed up against a door, angling it around corners, and so on. Again, this isn't something that directly translates into gameplay, but all that weapon handling gives the game a great look and helps establish a more realistic tone... right up until you saw a cowering scientist in half with shots from an assault rifle, of course.

Between the gunplay and the abilities, you're given a good number of options when it comes to dealing with a combat situation. Sometimes you'll encounter UAVs or armored enemies that must be "breached" with your hacking ability in order to make them vulnerable to weapon fire. So part of the game deals with closing the gap on those enemies to get within hacking range while finding a way to not get ripped into pieces by a heavy enemy's minigun or flamethrower. Dealing with high numbers of enemies, some of whom require special tactics, keeps you on your toes and forces you to use every ability at your disposal. The agents in Syndicate certainly aren't invincible--you'll go down quickly under sustained fire--but when you're comfortable with the mechanics and using everything properly, it all clicks in an extremely satisfying way. That feeling carries over to the multiplayer, which replaces your default campaign abilities with some more configurable options.

The multiplayer is a series of cooperative missions for up to four players. You can opt to play with fewer, but even a properly upgraded agent will have an extremely hard time taking on four enemy agents at once, and the difficulty doesn't appear to scale to fit the number of players. Prior to going into one of the game's nine scenarios, you can set up your loadout of weapons and choose two abilities to bring with you. As I seemed to be matched up with a lot of gung-ho lunatics that clearly didn't understand how to stay alive, I found the shielding ability, which gives your team a bit of armor when you pop it, to be pretty useful. Any teammate can heal and revive other players if they go down by breaching them the same way you'd breach a grenade to prevent it from going off or breach an enemy to drop his armor. But I also found the squad heal ability to be useful, since you need to have line-of-sight on a teammate in order to use the standard heal. Other abilities speed up your breaching, infect enemies with a health-lowering virus, and so on. If you're playing with a crew of people who know what they're doing, this means you can easily specialize in certain tasks and designate a healer, a breacher, and so on. But on the game's normal and hard difficulties, that doesn't seem to be required. More tactics and deadly accuracy seem like they'll be the things that allow players to complete the missions on the hardest difficulty setting, though.

There are also plenty of uncharacteristically bright outdoor areas.

As you play online, you'll gain levels and earn upgrade points for your agent, your weapons, and your applications. The agent upgrades are similar to the single-player upgrades and they let you spend more time using your vision overlay, carry more ammo, regenerate health more quickly, and so on. Weapons and applications must be researched, so you'll spend tokens to, for example, allow the virus ability to spread from one enemy to another, and then you'll have to earn a set number of experience points with research on that item active before the upgrade is enabled. Red dot sights, secondary weapon abilities, improved damage, rate of fire, and so on all work the same way, but use weapon upgrade tokens, which come when you "chip rip" a heavy enemy after downing him during a mission. In a weekend of intense co-op play, I was able to unlock the vast majority of agent upgrades and most of the weapon and app upgrades that fit my play style.

The cooperative mode attempts to follow a loose story about your up-and-coming corporation fending off challenges from other, more-established units, but it's really only told during the mission briefings. The single-player campaign doesn't really go too deep, either, but voice work from Rosario Dawson and Brian Cox, who's clearly doing what he does best by playing yet another slimy government/corporate dirtbag, keeps things moving just the same. Michael Wincott does a nice job with the role of your early-game partner, Jules Merit, who provides the requisite amount of gravelly voice that is now required by law in any game dealing with a dystopian cyberfuture. If you're interested in the backstory behind the world, you'll find plenty of additional items in the world that fill in a codex-like list of entries about various characters, locations, and syndicates. I found myself somewhat interested in reading things as I found them, but you won't miss anything vital if you skip it. All told, the campaign lasts around six hours and doesn't linger long enough to overstay its welcome, though a few of the boss fights provide difficulty spikes that some may find annoying. The cooperative campaign will probably take longer to complete, depending, of course, on the quality of your teammates.

Syndicate looks and sounds great, for the most part. You'll find a crummy texture here and there on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but it makes up for that with some terrific lighting and a good sense of style. The nice "upzone" areas where the sheep live have the pristine, futuristic look that you'd expect from a world run by corporations that want to keep the populace in line. Alternately, your trips downzone, where the unchipped live and are regularly identified by your HUD as simply "hobo," look every bit like the forgotten slums they're built up to be. Also, despite what the pre-release promotion may have led you to believe, this game is not accompanied by an all-dubstep soundtrack. That Skrillex remix of the original game's theme song makes it in during a boss fight, but the rest is standard, moody video game music that fits the tone of the action just fine. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is, obviously, up to you.

The DART overlay gives you a nice, slowed-down look at moments like this.

I had an outstanding time with Syndicate and really took to the game's cooperative mode in a way that I really didn't expect. The teamwork required there is just enough to get you angry when someone's letting the side down, but not so much that you'll have to organize and coordinate every little move. Rushing into a room full of enemy corporate scum and mowing them all down as they scramble for cover makes you feel invincible due to your own skill at playing the game, rather than some sort of overpowering ability or story reason that puts you above all. The smart players will rise to the challenge and feel like they've been appropriately rewarded for their prowess. The campaign gives you a great look at an interesting world, though its abrupt, too-clean ending feels out of place. It's a somewhat disappointing reward for an otherwise exciting adventure that puts a terrific and fun spin on first-person shooting.

Recreating a classic game in a new genre runs an overwhelming risk of failure. Not only must the product satiate fans of the original experience, the new game also needs to stand on its own with successful design choices and innovation. Oftentimes the redo reflects the exact standards and formulas o...

Having completed Syndicate before EA ships it next week, Swedish developer Starbreeze has let several employees go. The company employed 93 individuals while working on the FPS reboot, 25 of which have been dismissed, according to GamesIndustry.biz (registration required). Starbreeze chairman Peter Tornquist has also reportedly resigned.

"It is sad that we are forced to make staff cutbacks affecting employees. But we have to reduce staff after the final delivery of the Syndicate," CEO Mikael Nermark told GI.biz. Layoffs at development studios on the cusp of shipping a title has quickly become the norm for the industry. We don't like to see anyone lose their job and hope the individuals in Sweden affected by our least favorite tag find new work as soon as possible.