A version of this post appeared on the Quarter to Three forums. It has been reprinted here with the gracious permission of the author.
The currently available version of Incognita, a tactical stealth/hacking game from Don’t Starve and Shank developer Klei Entertainment, is one of those early pre-release alphas. What’s there right now is really limited. It’s essentially a procedural office building generator. You take a two man team into the office building to rescue a captured agent. That’s it.
But, after the jump, I’m really happy with the promise shown at this stage.Continue reading →
Today’s diary entry will focus on the meat and potatoes of Card Hunter –the combat. When I first watched some gameplay I was able to figure out the general idea behind how the game works – you play a movement card to move, you play an attack card to attack, simple. However, it was confusing to try and wrap my head around who was taking a turn, when a turn ended, and why someone would want to pass their turn with a handful of cards. Roll up your sleeves and grab a beverage and I’ll take you through a tour of what is happening during a match of Card Hunter.
Red 5 Studios is suspending the player-vs-player portion of Firefall. In a post on the official forums, CEO Mark Kern stated that the shooter MMO’s PvP mode will be shut down so the team can rework PvP into a more popular offering. Kern revealed that less than 3% of Firefall players use the PvP feature on a regular basis due to the mode’s concentration on high skill eSports-compatible gameplay.
People want more content, fewer bugs, and more polish on these world systems. For these reasons, we have made the tough decision to suspend PvP and take the system offline so that we can rethink it and relaunch it. PvP is an important part of our game, and we want to get it right.
Firefall launched their open beta in July. They released one of the greatest live-action commercials ever made to celebrate the launch.
When I started playing Grand Theft Auto V, I thought this was where the review would go. But somewhere on the way to Monday morning, it became clear that wasn’t going to happen. Not because I couldn’t get to the end of the story. I probably could. But because I didn’t want to get to the end of the story. I like this game too much to not let it take as long as it wants to take. In fact, I’m not even sure a review will appear this week. I’m pretty far along, but in the tension between wanting to find out what happens next and wanting to luxuriate in Rockstar’s richly realized San Andreas, the luxuriating tends to win out. If there’s one thing Rockstar’s games deserve, whether I like them or not, it’s seeing them through to the end at their own pace.
Rockstar has reached out to their modest audience for Grand Theft Auto 5 and warned them via Twitter that on the Xbox 360, installing data from both discs to the console hard drive is not recommended. The Xbox 360 version of the game comes with an install disc as well as a play disc. Rockstar advises that only the install disc should actually be copied to the console drive to speed up streaming of data. Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry explained the technical reason for the warning.
Well, optimal streaming is achieved by making use of all the available bandwidth in the system. Why stream just from the hard drive when you can run in data simultaneously from both the disc and the HDD? Based on what we’re seeing on the Xbox 360 version, perhaps running both DVD and HDD assets from just the one source slows down access times, impacting streaming performance.
That PlayStation 3 version of GTA 5 doesn’t require the warning since it ships on only one disc that will require an 8GB install before playing.
The wonderful The Wonderful 101 for the Wii U is out this week. Read more here about why it’s wonderful. If you’ve got a Wii U, you can also get Legend of Zelda: Wind Walker in HD. If you know enough to correct me on the title, you know enough to know it’s worth an HD playthrough.
Foul Play, available on Xbox Live Arcade this week, is just another beat-’em-up, but it’s got unique 19th century theatrical style. That goes a long way. Mechwarrior Online is officially live for free-to-play mech-on-mech action after its long beta period. There’s a third Infinity Blade out for the iPad. Metro: Last Light gets another round of DLC called The Developers Pack, which includes a gun sandbox, an AI vs AI arena, and a spider’s nest scenario.
Not long ago I would roll my eyes at a free-to-play game, web based or otherwise. This year has seen a few terrific gems that have changed my mind, such as Path of Exile, Neverwinter, and Mechwarrior Online. But the only free-to-play game to actually get money from me is Card Hunter. A few days ago, I spent $20 on in-game currency, called pizza, even though I’d seen most of the game’s content already in the beta.
Developers say the PS4 is about 50% more powerful than the Xbox One. EDGE gathered the opinions of a multiple developer sources that said the gap between Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One could be wider than analysts initially thought. The sources told EDGE that the power difference is significant.
One basic example we were given suggested that without optimisation for either console, a platform-agnostic development build can run at around 30FPS in 1920×1080 on PS4, but it’ll run at “20-something” FPS in 1600×900 on Xbox One. “Xbox One is weaker and it’s a pain to use its ESRAM,” concluded one developer.
One source also claimed that cross-platform games could suffer due to political pressure from publishers or hardware manufacturers to keep parity between consoles. Games could be hobbled on the PS4 to not outperform the Xbox One version.
Earlier in the week, Ars Technica analyzed comments from Microsoft’s Albert Penello downplaying the power gap between consoles. Their conclusion was that much of Penello’s statements were meaningless or needed more explanation.
Update: Microsoft’s response follows:
“Ten years ago, you could argue that a console’s power was summed up in terms of a few of its specs, but Xbox One is designed as a powerful machine to deliver the best blockbuster games today and for the next decade.
Xbox One architecture is much more complex than what any single figure can convey. It was designed with balanced performance in mind, and we think the games we continue to show running on near-final hardware demonstrate that performance. In the end, we’ll let the consoles and their games speak for themselves.”
Erez Goren, CEO of Hi-Rez Studios, revealed on Reddit that both Global Agenda and Tribes Ascend lost money. While discussing future plans for Smite, the free-to-play MOBA, Goren wanted to clear up the notion that some people had that his company had been “milking” Tribes Ascend in order to fund development of Smite. He denied this accusation by pointing out that Smite was already profitable and that he had largely funded Global Agenda and Tribes Ascend with his own money from previous business ventures.
“How much did it cost to do the above? At that point I personally funded all the game development with over $30 million of funding (losses) and generated about $10 million in revenue (split fairly evenly between GA and Tribes) so overall we spend about $40 million running the company vs $10 million in revenue. Yes, my wife thinks I’m crazy, but what does she know about playing and making video games :)”
Erez Goren also said that outside companies looked at publishing Tribes Ascend as a console port or taking it to China, but the game was deemed “too niche” for a wider audience. In the end, Smite ended up supporting Hi-Rez and keeping the Tribes Ascend servers online.
I don’t know what stage of what chapter I’m on and I don’t know how many times I’ve tried it. I lost count when it got above twenty. I can’t even remember which mask I have on. Is it the one that makes dogs ignore me, the one that lets me absorb one bullet, or the one that lets me kill instantly with thrown weapons? All I know is that I’m in a closet. More like a vestibule, really. And beyond this door there’s a man with a shotgun. I need him dead and, more importantly, I need his shotgun.
Jason Alexander’s character on Seinfeld learned a lesson about nicknames the hard way. It’s almost impossible to determine your own nickname. Whatever resonates with the crowd is going to be it. You may want to be called “T-Bone” but you could end up as a “Koko.”
Almost immediately after Microsoft revealed the Xbox One, internet wiseguys started calling it the “XBONE.” It stuck because it fulfilled the requirements of a good nickname. It’s short, memorable, and can be said in a derogatory way. Although Microsoft has reversed almost every unpopular facet of the Xbox One, as George Costanza learned, nicknames stick. Microsoft’s Major Nelson even expressed his dislike for the name, but “XBONE” is just too good to stop using.
“I don’t like it…it disrespects the teams that have put in thousands of hours (already) into the development of the product. Sure, it’s cheeky but I don’t care for it myself.”
Fusible reports that Microsoft has purchased the Xbone.com domain, cementing the nickname forever. For now, the site just redirects to a Bing search for “xbone” but it will likely get tied to the official Xbox page eventually. For example, xbox180.com, a snarky reference to the console policy reversals, already sends internet surfers to Xbox.com.
Take heart Microsoft! At least people aren’t calling your console “Koko.”
The PC version of Terraria will finally get the long-awaited 1.2 update. According to a post on the official forums, the free patch will be released on October 1st through Steam. Developer Andrew Spinks previewed the update back in May, showing off some of the new additions to the Minecraft and Metroid mash-up game. New items, monsters, bosses, and a minimap are just some of the things that Terraria will gain with the patch, but the rocket launcher looks like it’s going to give me the best way to blow myself up while battling a giant skull boss.
Contributor Scott Lufkin, a card carrying Card Hunter fan, will be covering the first week of Blue Manchu’s tactical fantasy combat meets deck-building game, which you can play here. Scott previously wrote our Tactics Ogre game diary, which starts here.
At last year’s Penny Arcade Expo, I saw a demo of an indie game called Card Hunter. The gameplay featured a player moving virtual cardboard units straight out of a boardgame on a tile based landscape lovingly detailed to look like a cardboard map, complete with dice and pencils off to the side. It was called Card Hunter. It was a free to play, browser based game, which at that point I believed was a pox on gaming.
Arma 3, the latest combined arms military sandbox game from Bohemia Interactive has officially launched. The game features a new lighting engine, improved animation, Steam Workshop integration, and almost 300 square kilometers of sun-dappled Mediterranean island on which players can experience the lethal mechanisms of war. Lay out on a beach. Take in the sights. Kill the enemy. Although the game releases without a traditional singleplayer campaign, Bohemia has promised to add that in three installments of free DLC. Joris-Jan van’t Land, project lead on Arma 3, spoke about the lengthy Early Access period.
“We’re incredibly proud of the release of Arma 3, as well as of the unique collaboration with the people who joined for the early-access development. We experienced some significant setbacks in the past years, but the fantastic public response to the Alpha and Beta kept us going.”
If you’ve ever wanted to play a military sim that unapologetically lets players get shot from 200 meters away, or that pits a squad of infantry against a tank platoon, then this is the game for you. Arma 3 is available on Steam, at retail locations, and the developer’s web store.
The best thing you can say about Drinking Buddies is something you can say about far too few romantic comedies: there’s a lot of emotional nakedness here. It’s not a conventional romantic comedy, but it hits all the conventional beats in its story about two people who work at a brewery and how they each triangulate with their set of significant others. It might sound complicated, but it’s not. We’ve all been there. You’re with her and she’s with him, and it sometimes bubbles up in the back of your head perhaps something’s backwards. It’s not about hashing it out or making a big complicated deal out of it or turning into some grand dark thing. It’s just happening. Or not. Drinking Buddies has a heady uncertainty in terms of how it unfolds and where it may or may not go.
Director Joe Swanberg — also an actor — gives the actors room to move, to improvise, to exchange gestures, to sit in silence, to just breathe. For better or worse — mostly better — this is a seriously mumblecore movie. Somewhere there’s a producer immensely frustrated that Drinking Buddies isn’t at least ten minutes shorter, because all this extra air is going to confound the people who showed up because Jake Johnson is so funny in New Girl or because Olivia Wilde is hot. But everyone else will be delighted at their effusive effortless chemistry. They both seem to bubble with joy as they work with each other, slipping into an easy back-and-forth as if they’ve been friends all their lives, as if they belong together, as if the camera just happened to be sitting in front of these two people close enough to have their own private wordless language. Johnson is a real natural with this kind of laid back whatthefuckever style, but it’s a delight to see how he carries the more conventionally Hollywood Wilde along with him, almost like slipstreaming. Plus you’ve got the always reliable and eminently watchable Anna Kendrick and Ron Livingston providing back-up. And you’ll even get a glimpse of director Joe Swanberg and Ti West, each unharassed by crossbow bolts.
