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John Wick Hex - "action-oriented strategy game" by Mike Bithell

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https://johnwickhex.com




https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/johnwickhex/home



John Wick Hex is in development for consoles and will be available for Windows PC and Mac exclusively via the Epic Games Store at launch. For more information and the latest updates, visit JohnWickHex.com, and follow @mikeBithell and @GoodShepherdEnt on Twitter.

John Wick Hex is the first John Wick PC/console game inspired by Lionsgate’s hit action franchise. From acclaimed Game Director, Mike Bithell (Volume, Thomas Was Alone, Subsurface Circular), John Wick Hex is a fast-paced, action-oriented strategy game that makes you think and strike like the professional hitman.

Created in close cooperation with the creative teams behind the films, John Wick Hex is fight-choreographed chess brought to life as a video game, capturing the series’ signature gun fu style while expanding its story universe. Players must choose every action and attack they make, while considering their immediate cost and consequences. Every move in John Wick Hex feels like a scene from the movies, and every fight contributes to your progress on the job and requires precise strategic thinking.

Perform well and progress in the main story mode (which features an original story created for the game) to unlock new weapons, suit options and locations. Each weapon changes up the tactics you’ll use and the manner in which you’ll play. Ammo is finite and realistically simulated, so time your reloads and make the most of weapons you scavenge on the job.

John Wick Hex complements the style of the films with a unique graphic noir art design and features the world class voice talents of Ian McShane and Lance Reddick amongst its stellar cast, with more to be revealed later.
 
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udm

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I love the films, and this game looks pretty neat, but they're still not enough to make me want to install the Epic Games Launcher on my PC.
 

lightbane

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OH SHIT! A JOHN WICK gam- *Epic store* Fuck that. Worse, the director behind seemingly only has done artsy, hipsterish games and the art style looks bad.

Might be worth pirating, I suppose.
 

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Cyberpunk 2077 is good marketing for this game: https://www.pcgamer.com/john-wick-hex-plays-like-xcom-via-superhot/

John Wick Hex plays like XCOM via Superhot
Hands-on with the game that was originally conceived as 'one man XCOM'.

db4U4M5oUmXYMdZ8sRG2vH-320-80.png


I played three levels of John Wick Hex at E3 today, and I completed two and died during another. It's not a turn-based game. Instead, the action is continuous, but it pauses while you make decisions. At the top of the screen, a timeline of what's going to happen next allows you to make informed decisions on the fly.

Is an enemy going to shoot you in 1.5 seconds? You might want to move to reduce the chances of John being hit. It's faster to perform a melee attack than to shoot your gun, which will factor into your thinking. And if you've got no bullets left, you'll have to think about how you're going to grab a dead enemy's gun without being killed.

Collectively, it approximates the feeling of a John Wick set piece, with enemies continually spilling out of doors until you've dealt with all of them however you can. All of this plays out on a hexagonal grid, with a fog of war that obscures enemy positions.

The levels in this build are basically extended set pieces of a few minutes each. Once one enemy goon appears, they don't really stop coming. John Wick Hex has been made so you're always forced to be aggressive, rather than defensive. To me it feels like Superhot more than anything else, right down to the fact John can throw his gun at enemies like he does in a popular moment from John Wick Chapter Two. That on-the-fly panic planning evokes a similar feeling of risk and reward, even though it's an isometric strategy game rather than an FPS.

Similarly, too, John Wick Hex will have a replay feature, which developer Mike Bithell can't talk about at the moment. Hopefully this'll cut your encounter together in the style of a furious set piece from the movies, and will be easy to share online. Even with all the pauses, it definitely captures the feeling of stringing together these improvisational kills as Wick does in the movies. Don't expect any high-concept set pieces like car chases or gunfights on horseback, though: this game will be played entirely on foot. To keep things interesting, different weapons and more difficult enemy types will be cycled into the game later on, and in my demo I encounter a few melee-only enemies, suggesting it won't all be gunfights.

It's a prequel to the films, with an original story and close collaboration between the filmmakers and the developers at Bithell Games. The choreographers from the movies even created a new John Wick push attack that the developers filmed and then animated, to make sure all of his attacks feel authentic. When I ask whether Keanu Reeves will return to voice his character, developer Mike Bithell says he can't talk about that yet. It'd be weird if he was in Cyberpunk 2077 but not a game based on his own film series, but obviously this is a much smaller project.

Also: because I ask the important questions, John Wick won't have a dog in this one, for the obvious reason that it's a prequel. It makes sense that his first dog is the dog you meet in the first movie (RIP).

John Wick Hex is a pleasantly unusual and tasteful translation of a popular movie series. I like that John Wick has crossed over into games as a light touch but tricky strategy game rather than a Max Payne knock-off.
 

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https://www.pcgamesn.com/john-wick-hex/replay

John Wick Hex will let you watch your murder ballets in replay
john-wick-hex-580x334.jpg


John Wick Hex turns the purest action film series of the past decade into a more cerebral strategy game, letting you choose your actions, plan your murder ballet, and see how it all plays out. It’s a smart way to capture the feeling of being John Wick through gameplay, but the question we’ve been asking since we saw the first trailer is whether the game will have a replay function.

We can confirm that John Wick Hex will have replays – there was a whole button dedicated to them in our preview session with the game – and we can hint at a little more than that. Mike Bithell, lead developer behind the game, isn’t talking about the details of the replay function just yet, but he did give a knowing nod to our hopes for it.

We asked if Hex replays would offer a proper timeline, and whether camera work would be involved, and Bithell responded that “These all sound like brilliant ideas. I guess it ultimately comes down to how good we are as a team.”

John Wick Hex doesn’t yet have a release date, but it will be heading to the Epic store.

Of course, John Wick himself was killing (it) during E3 this year, and Keanu Reeves was breathtaking. But that’s Johnny Silverhand – the murderific style of Keanu’s other John is looking mighty fine in Hex.
 

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https://www.pcgamesn.com/john-wick-hex/mike-bithell-john-wick-movies-lets-play

John Wick Hex was designed as a John Wick game from the start
John_Wick_Hex_combat-580x334.jpg


Plenty of games that use movie licenses begin their lives as something else – Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, for example, is rumored to have been conceived as a Batman game. But John Wick Hex director Mike Bithell says his upcoming game was designed from the beginning for the John Wick franchise, and that the source material has guided the game’s design.

“I think … Lionsgate and Good Shepherd also really wanted to make something you could only actually do with John Wick,” Bithell told us. “Something whee John Wick was not just wallpaper over a different kind of game and is actually a game that was built to be a John Wick game.”

It may be a bit of a surprise, then, to learn that Bithell’s take on John Wick is a considered, turn-based strategy game in the vein of XCOM, rather than a Max Payne-style third-person shooter. But the mix makes sense on reflection: John Wick the assassin does everything according to carefully-considered plans and super-human instincts. With the ability to replay the action in real-time after a round, it’s easy to see how turn-based strategy works with the films’ balletic combat.

“It’s like making a game where you start with a ‘Let’s Play’ of the game you’re making, because you have the movies, you have this reference of how the game is meant to play,” Bithell explained. ” A good player of the game should play like we’ve seen in the movies, and all you have to do – the easiest thing in the world – is go and work out a game where that’s the outcome of someone playing it well.”

Bithell may have been pulling our leg a bit with that last statement – we can think of several things that are probably easier than making high-level play look like it does from the movies – but his comments do show that the concepts that underpin the John Wick films have been baked into John Wick Hex from the word go.
 

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Can't think of any game that has tried to do same kind of gameplay, but what's stopping this game turning into turn based Dragon's Lair which would be about getting correct choice by trial and error so player could see next part of the animation?
 

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https://www.pcgamesn.com/john-wick-hex/stunts

John Wick Hex devs got roughed up by the movie’s stunt team in the name of authenticity
john-wick-hex-580x334.jpg



John Wick has been expanding across mediums since the first movie’s breakout success, and John Wick Hex sees that process hit the world of videogames. A big part of the movie series’ style is its stunts, and capturing that work accurately in John Wick Hex gameplay meant the developers needed to work closely with the film’s stunt coordinators – and occasionally get a little roughed up by them.

There’s a move in John Wick Hex, for example, that lets you push an enemy back a few feet. “There’s no moment in John Wick where he pushes someone three meters like that,” lead developer Mike Bithell tells us. “It doesn’t really exist in the movie, but we knew it was something that made sense in the game.

Bithell says he was “able to turn to Jojo [Eusebio], the stunt coordinator, and show him a really rough version of that mechanic in the game and be like, ‘what should that look like?’ And him saying ‘stand up,’ and grabbing me, grabbing my shirt, and being like ‘do we do it like that?’”

With a rough idea of how the move should go in mind, Eusebio would then grab a fellow stunt performer and work out the details. Then Bithell was able to film the drills, and give the developers back at home reference material for what those moves should look like.

Even with some gentle violence, Bithell says the stunt team was “lovely” – and that he got the vicarious thrill of doing something like a simple wrist twist and watching a trained stunt professional do “do four spins and go flying across the room. It makes you look cool.”

Bithell also gave us some quick insight into the replay function for John Wick Hex – at least, as much as he could when he’s clearly not allowed to talk about it just yet. (He’s clearly excited for it, though.)
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.pcgamesn.com/john-wick-hex/john-wick-hex-story-lionsgate-chad-stahelski

John Wick Hex: “If you’re not trying to push the medium forward, you’re wasting your time”
Bithell Games’ latest rewrites the tactics genre blueprint, then sticks a pencil into the neck of licensing clichés

john-wick-hex-story-900x506.jpg



As with the man himself, the full context of John Wick Hex is difficult to discern. Bithell Games’ licenced collaboration with entertainment powerhouse Lionsgate is an idiosyncratic interpretation of the all-action movie series. Where lesser minds may have proffered a reskinned brawler, Hex swerves unapologetically close to turn-based tactics territory – in fact, as game director Mike Bithell reveals, it started life as a single-character XCOM-like, “until we realised how boring XCOM with one character was”.

Will Keanu be part of the game? Bithell can’t confirm that yet. What’s the setup? Well, it’s a prequel that takes place before John meets ill-fated wife Helen, but beyond that the story is entirely under wraps. What’s with that replay button? You’ll have to wait a little longer for more info. Why Hex? Well, here’s one we can answer – sort of. There’s deeper meaning buried in the story that Bithell can’t yet reveal, natch, but the name was originally the most logical working title for a game that plays out on a hex grid. Hard, angular facts be praised!

So, hex grids and thoughtful strategy. It’s an odd choice on paper, seeming unlikely to support the rough-edged, fraught, and instinctive combat that defines the movies. But it all makes sense once you experience it in motion. The game pauses while you decide how to react to each situation, but everything plays out in real time when you end your planning phase. Each action available to you costs time, and is added to a timeline at the top of the screen which resembles the kind of thing you might find in video editing software.

You can see enemies’ timelines, too, allowing you to make educated decisions on how to respond. You may not have time to get into cover before an adversary opens fire, for example, but you could interrupt the action by tossing your empty gun at their head to stagger them, buying you a few extra seconds to roll behind that table and grab the discarded weapon next to the goon whose neck you recently snapped. It feels desperate but controlled, animalistic yet cool-headed. Most importantly, you feel like John Wick. It’s a disarmingly convincing representation of the films’ combat, and it all flows beautifully.

“When you move your eyes, your brain doesn’t see the movement,” Bithell enthuses when we ask him about the design. “When you look from here to over there, your brain deletes all the information that happened in between, otherwise you’d get motion sickness. That’s how I think the stop-start nature of [Hex] works – because you’re thinking in those moments, between the action, your memory of playing the game doesn’t have those pauses in it because that’s just your consideration time.”



It’s certainly effective, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that the tactics genre, semi-real time or otherwise, isn’t exactly a mainstream proposition. Is there any concern at all, we wonder, whether enough John Wick fans will warm to the game?

“For me, it felt like an interesting opportunity to be a little bit cocky in that indie way, and go, ‘Well, what if we tried to make a good licenced game?’,” Bithell retorts. “That’s an interesting challenge. The licenced games I absolutely love – the Batman Arkham series, Chronicles of Riddick, the ones that always get trotted out – are projects where they took the thing they were adapting very seriously and built a game. Especially with Batman – that really was built from the ground up as ‘How do you turn Batman into a videogame protagonist?’, and that was the big thing.

“No one on the Batman team sat down and went, ‘What can we adapt from games we like? What can we clone and then stick a batsuit on?’ That approach stood out for me – I loved that game for that, because it felt so fresh. There were a litany of ideas in there that weren’t in other games – it was just completely its own thing.”



According to Bithell, the Hex team went on a similar journey with its game, and has benefitted from a uniquely close relationship with the film’s production crew. “Even though we started with something that was a bit more of a run-of-the-mill XCOM strategy turn-based thing, it’s morphed as we’ve developed it because the stunt team’s helped us work out a move, or [trilogy director] Chad Stahelski had a question about line of sight and wanted us to tweak how it works. We’ve created a game that we couldn’t have made without John Wick.

“Because of the respect we have for the franchise, and because we’ve taken it so seriously, we have the room to do more things. Because we’re not just cloning the movie, we’re talking to the people who created the movie – we have access to their thought processes, and so we can build on their intent rather than their output when it comes to the art style, the story, and so on.”

The result is a game that looks familiar in many ways – there’s a recognisable approximation of Keanu, we’ve all seen hex grids before – but feels unusual at every level. This isn’t Bithell’s first licensed project – he worked on a number of such endeavours during his stint at Blitz Games – but it’s the first one he’s had this level of creative control over. And though undoubtedly buoyed by the trust and enthusiasm Lionsgate has shown, he is boldly sanguine when it comes to the inherent risk of trying something a bit different with a property people already know and love.

“I think you’ve got to take the opportunity and make something cool,” he tells me, without pausing to construct his answer. “If you’re making a licensed game and not trying to push the medium forward, in my opinion you’re wasting your time.“

It’s a worthy sentiment with which we couldn’t agree more, and we’re keen to see what else John Wick Hex has in store.
 

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https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...ended-up-a-strategy-game-instead-of-a-shooter

Why John Wick Hex ended up a strategy game instead of a shooter

I'll be honest: when John Wick Hex was first unveiled back in May, I had my doubts. Although the trailer displayed a clear vision and original approach, I wondered how the John Wick films - notoriously fast and improvisational in style - could be translated into a slower-paced strategy game without losing... well, their John Wick-ness. How on earth would that fluid, choreographed, almost-balletic fighting style be represented in the game?

All this scepticism meant that when I tried John Wick Hex at E3, I was in for a big surprise. I found myself really engaging with the decision-making process, and gradually speeding up to the point I could dominate a room (in style) without batting an eyelid.

But how did John Wick Hex end up as a strategy game in the first place, and how did the team behind it make it work? As I discovered from speaking to designer Mike Bithell (of Thomas Was Alone and Volume), the decision to select an unexpected genre seemed to be mutual from both publisher and designer.

"Lionsgate and Good Shepherd were chatting about doing games, and John Wick immediately jumped out as something you could make a game about," Bithell explained.

"But they brought in Ben [Andac] to produce it, and specifically wanted a game that wasn't the obvious solution to the problem. They obviously got a lot of pitches for third person shooter games, but the reason I didn't pitch that was because I'm clumsy and stupid in third person shooters. I'm running around shooting a gun, you can put neon around me, you can give me a suit, dress it up as John Wick - but it's not going to feel like John Wick.

"So for me, I wanted to give players that sense of a strategic thinking, that high-level choreography. Then came the process of making that, pitching that, working with them, and then getting all of the filmmakers from the movies involved. They were telling me how John makes decisions, and then we went 'OK how do we make that into a game that explores that', and that to me seemed way more interesting than doing a shooter."

jpg

Parabellum thinking.

After Bithell was approached by Andac (who knew Bithell enjoyed John Wick, having watched the film with him a month before), the next stage was to build a prototype - but the strategy genre didn't instantly fit with the films, and certain adjustments had to be made.

"The initial prototype was turn-based, pretty much one-character X-COM", Bithell said. "I remember showing it to Jason Constantine who's the big head honcho of John Wick, the executive producer - basically the guy who controls the franchise. I demoed it to him and he said 'why's John Wick waiting while everyone else shoots him before he does something?'. I was bringing up monitors on other strategy games being like 'this is how it works, see?' and realised about mid-way through this speech how stupid I was being explaining to this guy.

"So we went away and that's where that timeline strategy experience really came from - the way those overlapping beats work, getting that feeling good so you're actually playing with the timing - that's when John Wick really came out of that collaboration."

The timeline Bithell described is one of the most unique aspects of John Wick Hex, and forms the true core of the game. Your planned actions, and the actions of enemies, are both shown through this timeline - creating an easy visualisation so players can manage complex situations. As actions play out simultaneously, the gameplay feels more in-the-moment than a typical turn-based strategy title, and brings the game closer to its cinematic source material.

timeline.gif

Players need to keep an eye on ammo, focus and health - while fog of war means enemies can easily sneak up on you from unexpected directions. Changing stance or repositioning can improve your chances of hitting someone (or avoiding bullets), but comes with a movement cost. At least you can chuck your gun at someone once it's empty.
As I noticed myself when testing the game, the more you play, the more fluid it feels - with the pace at which you progress increasing as you figure out the mechanics. "Once you've been playing it for a while, your confidence increases - and while it's not quite real-time it basically speeds up," Bithell said.

"It moves at the speed of your thought".

On top of all this, there's also a replay button at the end of each level. While this was greyed out for our demo session, this will allow players to watch their level progression in real time - so to speak.

push.gif

The team collaborated with the John Wick stunt coordinators to get the game's moves to look authentic. One of these was a 'push' knockback, which the stunt crew demonstrated and filmed as reference material for the game.
Aside from the genre choice explanation, what else did I discover about the game from Bithell? Narrative details remain tightly controlled, but Bithell did say John Wick Hex is a prequel to the first film, set before he meets his wife Helen - and he's obviously no longer a teenager. "You can find yourself a window in there," Bithell said.

The unfortunate side-effect of choosing this narrative setting is the game cannot feature a dog. The reason for this, Bithell explained, is because it would "diminish the importance" of the dog in the first film. "If it was his second dog he'd ever owned, that would undermine it," he said. "We're working with filmmakers: making sure we tell a story that supports what they've done in the movies, rather than interrupting or confusing that, has been very important."

The infamous Can You Pet the Dog? Twitter account will be very disappointed.

jpg

The final game will have a similar variety of weapons to the movies, but you unfortunately cannot kill anyone with a pencil. As the focus is on the gunplay and Jiu-Jitsu moves (and how the two interact), adding melee weapons to the martial arts apparently didn't contribute to the gameplay.

Finally, I asked the most important question of all: was Bithell surprised Keanu Reeves popped up in Cyberpunk 2077 during the Xbox briefing?

"Yeah of course I was surprised. There's been points in time where something's been announced at E3 on a game I'm working on that I've not known!", he said.

(I also asked whether Keanu will be in John Wick Hex - but casting decisions are not yet being discussed.)

jpg

A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one.

Overall, I was incredibly impressed with John Wick Hex: aside from it feeling surprisingly fluid, the concept of "pressing pause" to see Wick's tactical decision-making from moment-to-moment is an intriguing premise that really works. The game has its own unique take on the franchise (including a distinctive art style), but it's also making an effort to stay authentic. And, while the demo I saw kept things simple - with just a 9mm pistol and basic enemies - the potential for more complex and varied combat scenarios is very much there. When the release date gets unveiled, I'll certainly pencil this one in the diary.
 

udm

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I'll be honest: when John Wick Hex was first unveiled back in May, I had my doubts. Although the trailer displayed a clear vision and original approach, I wondered how the John Wick films - notoriously fast and improvisational in style - could be translated into a slower-paced strategy game without losing... well, their John Wick-ness. How on earth would that fluid, choreographed, almost-balletic fighting style be represented in the game?

Yeah because all turn-based games must have slow pacing :roll:
 

Axioms

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No idea if the execution will hold up and not really my genre but it sounds great. As a hobby developer its cool to see someone thinking outside the box and taking a fun risk for thematic reasons.
 

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https://www.pcgamesn.com/john-wick-hex/camera

John Wick Hex team experimented with an XCOM-style action camera
john-wick-hex-gameplay-580x334.jpg


John Wick Hex will have a replay function to let you see your strategic murder in real time, but it won’t let you direct the action as you’re playing. You won’t have fine control over the camera as you’re playing, since the wider angle the game adopts is better for making strategic decisions – but it’s not out of the question that this “choreography game” could become a “director game” down the line.

“I’ve definitely talked to people about it and I think it’s an interesting idea,” Mike Bithell tells us in regards to fine camera controls. “Currently no plans, but let’s see if the game takes off, you never know.” As some of the people close to the project have asked Bithell, “‘You’ve made a stunt choreography game, could there be a director game?’ I’m not sure, but definitely not in the base game.”

But Bithell is a good bit less cagey about John Wick Hex replays than he was at E3. “The reason we didn’t show it at E3 was that we were still working on it and I don’t like promising stuff I don’t have on my computer. That’s tripped up many a game developer over the years. It was something that came up very quickly while we were working on those first prototypes, and obviously we’ve always been from this kind of top-down perspective.”

Regular game players recognise why Hex goes with that traditional camera system, but efforts to bring a more filmic presentation in-game haven’t really worked. “We experimented with some kind of that XCOM camera that comes in when you’re taking your action and stuff like that,” Bithell says.

“The problem with that is, because we have all this overlapping action that’s really cool, if we jump cut into a close camera while you’re playing, we can remove some situational awareness from you because we’re framing up so you can see that you’re shooting this guy, but you can’t see the guy who’s shooting in the back.”

Yet that kind of experimentation eventually led to the implementation of replays, as “the idea just kind of then grew organically out of that.” The art is built for close scrutiny, so bringing in more cinematic views for replays was a natural fit. “You’re never seeing it that way in gameplay so we started talking about a replay, like ‘oh well, let’s make it that you can watch at the end of a level, and it plays through in real-time.’”
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.pcgamesn.com/john-wick-hex/licensed-games

John Wick Hex lead says “innovation” is the key to a successful licensed game
John_Wick_Hex_combat-580x334.jpg


We’re long past the days when a mediocre platformer would accompany every film that hit screens, but there are still a lot of licensed games on the horizon. Whether games like Marvel’s Avengers, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, or Blair Witch turn out well remains to be seen, but they’re much more ambitious and original takes on those respective properties.

With those titles in mind, the lead developer behind John Wick Hex believes the industry has wisened up to the fact that licensed games don’t have to be quick and dirty cash-ins. “I think there’s an understanding that we can do good licensed games,” Mike Bithell tells us. “There are these stories we can tell in an interesting way, and I think there’s a lot more variety that’s available.

“I don’t think the way people think of success anymore is to stick a license on a clone of a successful game. Innovation, time and again, has been demonstrated to be the approach to getting visibility. I think that’s not been lost on the publishers and the film industry.”

Certainly, if John Wick had come around a few years earlier, we might’ve ended up with a straight-up shooter rather than a semi-real-time strategy game focused on tactical murder.

John Wick Hex still doesn’t have a release date, but it will be an Epic Games store exclusive at launch.
 

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John Wick Hex, from esteemed developer boy Mike Bithell, probably isn’t the kind of game you’d expect for the John Wick movie series. It’s a turn-based tactical combat game, similar to something like Frozen Synapse. But is this potentially the best way you could make a good John Wick game? Astrid sat down with RPS Deputy Editor Alice Bell, who got to play a bit of the game at Gamescom last week, and had a chat with her about it.

Thanks to Logitech G and the G432 7.1 Surround Sound gaming headset for sponsoring this video. Check out the tech behind the G432 over on the Logitech G site: http://bit.ly/2FkTkbi

This John Wick Hex gameplay was taken from the Gamescom build which Alice played as part of her John Wick Hex preview at Gamescom 2019. It’s a timeline strategy mixed with some resource management, which doesn’t sound like what you would assume a John Wick game would be. But Mike Bithell, developer of Thomas Was Alone and Subsurface Circular, might be making a game that fits John Wick better than a first-person shooter or a third-person action game.

The John Wick Hex Gamescom 2019 demo shows off how the timeline strategy system works, letting you plan out your moves and anticipate what your enemies will do at every moment. When you’ve completed levels, you might be able to watch your slick and stylish John Wick Hex gameplay back in real time, though developer of John Wick Mike Bithell hasn’t confirmed this yet, it’s something that’s being worked on in the office.

We hope you enjoyed this John Wick Hex impressions video, and Alice Bell’s debut on the Rock Paper Shotgun channel. If you did enjoy it, why not subscribe to Rock Paper Shotgun, so you don't miss any future John Wick coverage - including the inevitable John Wick Hex review.

If you have any more questions about this John Wick Hex game, let us know in the comments. Please do check out the rest of our Gamescom 2019 coverage too while you’re here, especially our Cyberpunk 2077 interview with Mike Pondsmith (https://youtu.be/K2j8cKfGb-M) and our other one with lead concept artist Marthe Jonkers about how Night City was made (https://youtu.be/uwSiz5KOe28). Thanks for watching!
 

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