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Pinball FX is being rebooted in 2021, teases 'Pinball Royale'

The Pinball FX series is being rebooted for a new generation later this year and will feature some new ideas, including this mysterious one called 'Pinball Royale.'
Ozzie Mejia
Ozzie Mejia
3

Few game developers have nailed down the pure essence of video game pinball like Zen Studios. While the team could have coasted on Pinball FX 3, their ambition looks to be much greater than that. On Wednesday, Zen Studios announced that they would be rebooting the Pinball FX series entirely in 2021 for new platforms.

"There's a lot going on with this game and when we summed up all the pieces and we looked at the big picture, we realized that we were actually really rebooting Pinball FX," Zen Studios COO Mel Kirk said during the premiere episode of The Pinball Show. "We needed to just start over from scratch. We have new technology we're working in. There's new consoles. I consider this our next-gen platform. There's a lot of new features. There's maybe some new business models, this new feature like Pinball Royale and so it just didn't really fit into the [Pinball] FX 3 framework, as the game is not packaged the way that you knew it from before. So it is a total reboot. I expect this will be a platform that we support for the next huge phase. You're not going to see 'FX 2' come. Consoles are operating differently now. Technology changes much faster. And so to support that, you just need a game that can operate across platforms. That's really what FX is designed to do."

Readers may have noticed Kirk say something about "Pinball Royale." What exactly this entails is not entirely clear and the Pinball FX website doesn't go into further detail. What it does note is that players can expect a new Career mode, new challenges, a clan system, and more to go along with new IPs. Whether Pinball FX's ability to "operate across platforms," as Kirk put it, means that it will support cross-buy and cross-play remains to be seen.

The other big question that will be on players' minds will be whether Pinball FX will work with older Pinball FX 2/3 content. This may be important considering that there are still several Pinball FX 3 tables on the docket for later this year, including a new table based on breakout Star Wars hit The Mandalorian, which is set to release in Spring 2021. There's no clear answer on this yet, but we'll keep an eye out for any new information.

There's no release date at this time for the new Pinball FX, but look for it to come to PC and modern consoles later this year.

Senior Editor
Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?

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