This week Jamie Fristrom, the designer of Spiderman 2, joins us to talk about getting around in open-world games. Which games do it well? Which games do it poorly? How do we feel about repeatedly mashing a button to run in Rockstar’s games? And will Fristrom’s upcoming Energy Hook replace the Spiderman 2 shaped hole in our hearts? We also talk about the latest Red Orchestra, we don’t talk about Save the Date because that would ruin it, and we wonder what the heck the designers of State of Decay were thinking.
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Frictional Games posted in their official forums that Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs will be delayed again to the end of summer. Frictional explained that co-developer thechineseroom is optimizing the horror game and language translations are being worked on for its release. They also mentioned ports of the game in their statement.
The porting guys are porting away. Deals are being made. Things are prepared for launching the game through more online stores than any other FG game before. In general occupied with all things related.
Console versions of A Machine for Pigs would be a new development, but it’s unclear what Frictional may have meant. The game was orginally supposed to launch on Halloween of 2012, but that release date was changed to Q2 2013 when it was missed.
Yesterday, Square Enix got fans excited by teasing a little bit of something related to Deus Ex. A new standalone game? Some DLC to the 2011 action hit? Perhaps another tie-in book? SE ended all that speculation this morning by revealing that Deus Ex: The Fall would be an iOS exclusive game. Developed by N-Fusion in collaboration with Eidos Montreal, Deus Ex: The Fall will put players into the cyber-shoes of mercenary Ben Saxon as he investigates a drug conspiracy. SE promises that the game will have controls for intuitive touchscreen gameplay and will give players a “full Deus Ex experience.”
Despite that promise, fans of the series are already predicting the worst for Deus Ex: The Fall. Gamers used to shoddy ports, limited gameplay, and nickel & dime in-app purchases are wary of the game being just another cash grab.
SE spoke to MCV to allay those fears and to explain the strategy of releasing this for mobile devices. SE Europe’s marketing director Jon Brooke says it’s all a part of the overall plan to shake things up in the mobile gaming market.
“This isn’t about tablets vs next gen,” he said. “We’re a big publisher, so you know we’ll be showing next gen gaming at E3 next week.
“We’re as serious about next gen as we are about tablet gaming.”
SE outlined plans to seriously expand into the mobile market following their last quarterly statement. Deus Ex: the Fall will launch later this summer for $6.99.
The news out of Zynga the past few days has been pretty grim. Their strategy to turn the company towards gambling hasn’t paid off. They just laid off 18% of their workforce. They wound up closing down OMGPOP, the company they paid $180 million for barely a year ago largely based on the success of Draw Something.
On June 3rd, OMGPOP employees were called into a suprise mid-day meeting with HR and given the bad news. According to ex-employees speaking to Business Insider, the closure was cause for celebration.
“Most layoffs are sad. You imagine big corporate settings where security is there to lead people out of the office so they don’t make a scene. This was the opposite,” says the former employee. “Music was being played loudly, and people were ripping up Zynga hoodies and T-shirts. Anything that was Zynga was completely left there. The sentiment felt positive.”
Few of the ex-OMGPOP staff had any regrets. Meanwhile, Zynga is now projecting quarterly net losses of between $39 million and $28.5 million.
State of Decay, a supposedly open-world zombie survival sandbox, doesn’t seem very sandboxy at first. Two buddies are coming back from a camping trip only to discover the zombie apocalypse happened while they were out of range of cell phone service. Don’t you hate it when that happens? So they throw in with a handful of survivors at the ranger’s station to play a sort of third-person sneaker with some headshotting, meleeing, resource management, and even driving. Some scripted stuff happens. So far, all this could have happened in Dead Island: Rip Tide.
But I hadn’t met Ondrej yet.
After the jump, things that absolutely couldn’t happen in Dead Island: Rip Tide Continue reading →
