The Evening Report: I’ll Take Two Edition

E3 is coming soon. The amount of news that is circulating in the video game world normally reflects this. Thankfully, Take-Two had an investor call, which brought on some news that will surprise you even this early. Sitting through the business-centric conferences is enough to melt your face Raiders style, so you should be thankful that I care about you readers to have done just that.

Delays, games going gold, Ghost Recon free-to-play, and more after the jump!

Last week, Agent entered my mind for the first time since the Sony E3 press conference in 2009. I wondered if the game was just vaporware or they still had plans for it. As it turns out, others had the same question and posed it to the CEO of Take-Two Strauss Zelnick. Apparently “Max Payne 3 and Agent are still in development,” says Zelnick. Max Payne 3 had some screens leaked a couple of months ago, so I wasn’t as keen on that info as I was about Agent. If no news comes this E3 of the game, I am writing it off as ‘not coming’. To go this long without even some concept art is a little ridiculous.

Source: Giant Bomb

Another game that was announced in 2009 got delayed today: Spec Ops: The Line. Take-Two disclosed their upcoming release calender and Spec Ops was now listed for the second half of fiscal 2013. Having played the game already in a closed beta, I can attest to the fact that this game very much still exists. It may have lacked polish, but it was already an extremely fun third-person shooter. Not often does a delay hurt a game, so I am not that upset by this announcement.

Source: Game Informer

Free is great, right? Well, most of us agree, so we welcome the news about Ghost Recon Online being a free-to-play game. Running on the ‘freemium’ model (free, with purchasable content to customize), GRO will hit towards the end of this year, with a closed beta coming sometime in the Summer. The beta is invite only and can be found here. There is also a trailer available for the game in the source link, so go check it out!

Source: Joystiq

I still won’t believe it until the game is in stores, but Duke Nukem Forever has finally reached its developmental end. Or, at least the version that is going to be on the disc is complete. Ben Kuchera of Ars points out that going gold now “is likely to simply start a countdown to the inevitable day-one patch.” If you even asked me a year ago if this was possible, I would have laughed at you. So much changes in so little time in our industry!

Source: Ars Technica