Good news everybody! Epic’s Mark Rein told the audience of a roundtable discussion at the Game Horizon conference that Sony and Microsoft are investing in the kinds of gaming business models that core gamers rail against.
“The next-gen consoles are going to be fully embracing the free-to-play and these IAP-type business models,” Rein told the audience, “So in case you don’t know that I’m putting that out there. Sony and Microsoft are both going heavily in that area.”
Roundtable chair Matt Martin of GamesIndustry International said that’s what both platform holders are saying, but that “we still need to see some kind of evidence.”
Rein replied, “Well, I’m telling you. I’m telling you what they’re telling developers.”
The statement was immediately followed by the villainous guffaws of Ming the Merciless while gamers gnashed their teeth and wailed to the heavens.
That’s obviously a dog, right? Or is it? Uncle Misha’s shadow puppets are one of the early domestic scenes you’ll come across in Metro: Last Light. Well, as “domestic” as you can get given the survivors of an apocalypse huddled in subway tunnels. Since the Metro games largely take place in these tunnels, they get more of a pass than the usual corridor shooter for carefully parading you past scenes like this. A game like Mass Effect or Bioshock Infinite pretends to afford you the freedom to miss them.
I’m glad I didn’t miss Uncle Misha’s shadow puppets and particularly the reaction of the kids watching. Kids who don’t know what a bird is. Lovely bits of writing like this are part of what makes the Metro games worth playing. But then I watched the variety show just down the corridor from Uncle Misha. Two thumbs down. And I gave a stripper about twenty of my bullets to see if something interesting was going to happen. It didn’t. Not all domestic scenes are created equal.
Nothing beats rounding up your armies of cavalry and totally crushing your enemies in Civilization V. Take that Ghandi! But suppose you could create enough foofy statues and paintings to grind the other rulers under your heel? The Brave New World expansion doesn’t just add badass rulers like Shaka Zulu and Casimir, it also allows players to choke out their rivals with art!
Eurogamer sat down with Firaxis to look at how you can make Ghengis Khan cry over your culturally important works of art.
The way the new culture victory’s implemented may truly make it sing. Great works are stored in your cities in specific buildings – places like museums and amphitheatres – and many of these structures come with more than one slot. This leads to a compulsive little mini-game – the poker bit – where you get an additional boost to both culture and tourism when matching works that go together thematically
It’s not just about the avant-garde. Brave New World will also add a new wrinkle to the later game in the form of archaeology.
“What happens is that as the game starts up and you have initial battles with the barbarians in the early and classical era, we keep track of that, and it effectively gets written onto the map,” says Beach. “Then, when the first civilisation unlocks archaeology, we generate a new resource on the map – just like iron or uranium. But this new resource is antiquity sites, and it’s generated from the location data that’s been built up during the course of the game so far.”
I’ll finally be able to crush native barbarians and use the excuse that I’m just preserving their cultural history for future generations to learn about.
Also, if none of this does it for you, remember that Brave New World will let you create the XCOM squad (pictured) to destroy Paris.
Saints Row IV caps the Third Street Saints saga with gonzo craziness, random violence, and 100% pure wacky, if the trailer is any indication. The fourth installment promises to continue the descent into cartoon madness. Volition has made it very clear that their open-world crime game falls squarely on the juvenile side. (The GTA series is that way if you want serious.) The President of the United States happily kicks people in the balls and disintegrates aliens to a wub-wub soundtrack. I guess he ran as an Independent.
This week we consider the finer points of not starving in games like Minecraft, Terraria, and Don’t Starve. Then we discuss the latest and not-so-greatest in tower defense, why people are mad at Warren Spector, Diablo III’s Black Tuesday, how close we are and aren’t to getting to the heart of Peter Molyneux’s latest gimmick, who would win in a fight between Robin and Aqua Man, and why Victoria II is one of the Most Important Games of the 21st Century. Also, you haven’t heard Maureen Dowd’s name pronounced until you’ve heard it pronounced by Jason McMaster in this week’s message from our sponsor.
Sony continues to court indie game makers. The official PlayStation Blog notes that Sony will waive the $99 licensing fee to develop games for their mobile platforms.
This summer we’re throwing down the gauntlet for PlayStation Mobile development and are removing any existing barriers to get your brainchild of a game on this new PlayStation platform. As you saw with our recent Indie Arcade event at GDC, we’re always looking to support new developer talent, so we’ve decided to waive the $99 publisher license fee for PlayStation Mobile, which means you can bring your games to PlayStation Vita or any PlayStation-certified device free of cost.
Get to it lazybones! If the $99 fee was going to blow out your development budget, then you have no excuse now. You could make the next Chronovolt or Hustle Kings!
Electronic Arts is severing its licensing relationships with firearms manufacturers. Reuters reports that EA will no longer seek licensing permission from gun makers to use the names and likenesses of their firearms in their games. EA says it will still use those real-world weapons in their games, by asserting fair use and a constitutional right to free speech.
“We’re telling a story and we have a point of view,” EA’s President of Labels Frank Gibeau, who leads product development of EA’s biggest franchises, said in an interview. “A book doesn’t pay for saying the word ‘Colt,’ for example.”
Publishers initially approached gun companies for licenses to safeguard themselves from potential lawsuits when using real-world weapons in their games during the late 1990’s. These licenses were usually traded for little to no financial compensation because gun manufacturers knew that having their weapon appear in a game was good advertising.
The latest Diablo III patch just added a few cool new elements like re-tuned incentives to play cooperatively, some class changes, and a gold duping loophole. I’m personally most excited about the new incentives to cooperative play, which include a boost to experience points and the likelihood to find valuable magic items, as well a few interface improvements that make it easier to keep up with your buddy when he invariably runs after one of those treasure goblins. But a quick glance at Blizzard’s forums — something I would almost never recommend — reveals that many of the players over there seem most excited about the gold duping.
I have no idea how it works, and frankly, there’s enough inflation in the game that I couldn’t care less about it. It’s trivially easy to undermine the loot chase, even without a gold dupe, which will only make it easier to undermine the loot chase. Why should I care if the latest patch further dings an already gimped economy. I might as well fret about about a half point drop in the unemployment rate in Nigeria.
As much as I like Diablo III, I’m constantly reminded that the folks who made Path of Exile did the exact right thing by removing cash from their economy.
UPDATE: This looks like it actually might be a middling to big deal! The auction house has been taken down and some players who used the gold duping exploit have been banned.
Wizards of the Coast has revealed some new information about the upcoming Magic 2014: Duels of the Planeswalkers. Sealed Decks will be available to players for use in a campaign or against other mana-flinging wizards, but details were scarce until now.
The game will come with two available slots for players to start Sealed Campaigns. These slots will keep all the deck edits and additions you make, plus your progress though the Sealed Deck Campaign. If you’d like to save more than two Sealed Decks, additional slots can be purchased for $1.99 each, and each slot will give you access to a different pool of cards and allows you to unlock different boosters. All Booster Packs use cards from a 180+ card “set” that’s unique to the game. To begin a Campaign, players will pick an open slot and get six 14-card Booster Packs to open. Players are then taken to the Deck Editor so they can create a 40-card Sealed Deck out of the 84 card pool they’ve opened (plus Basic Lands).
When finished creating a deck, players can then battle their way through the Sealed Deck Campaign in order to unlock an additional three Booster Packs along the way. At the end of the Campaign there will be a boss fight where the player will play to defeat another Sealed Deck. You can also use your Sealed Decks to play against other players.
Sealed Deck gameplay has been a long-requested feature from avid Magic players.
Ubisoft and Patrice Desilets just can’t seem to work things out. Desilets, designer of Assassin’s Creed, left Ubisoft in 2010 to work for THQ as a creative director heading up two projects codenamed 1666 and Underdog. THQ went bankrupt and Ubisoft acquired the Montreal studio in the January asset auction. Desilets came along with the studio and Ubisoft said they were pleased to be working with him again.
Things must not have been as friendly as we were lead to believe. Patrice Desilets has left Ubisoft and a spokesperson had this to say about his departure:
“The acquisition of THQ Montreal in January allowed Ubisoft to welcome 170 experienced developers, including Patrice Desilets, to our existing and renowned workforce. Unfortunately, since the acquisition, the good faith discussions between Patrice and Ubisoft aimed at aligning Patrice’s and the studio’s visions have been inconclusive. As a result, Patrice has left the studio. Our priorities remain with the teams already hard at work on projects in development. They are at the root of Ubisoft Montreal’s past and future successes.”
Desilet disputes this version of events and told Polygon that he was fired without cause.
“Contrary to any statements made earlier today, this morning I was terminated by Ubisoft. I was notified of this termination in person, handed a termination notice and was unceremoniously escorted out of the building by two guards without being able to say goodbye to my team or collect my personal belongings.”
“This was not my decision.”
“Ubisoft’s actions are baseless and without merit. I intend to fight Ubisoft vigorously for my rights, for my team and for my game.”
Sources within Ubisoft say that both of Desilets’ projects have been canceled.
Bethesda announced Wolfenstein: The New Order, the next chapter in the Wolfenstein saga, will be coming to gamers in Q4 2013. The game will showcase an alternate universe 1960 in which the Nazi menace has taken over the world. Players will infiltrate their strongholds, and fight against Nazi super-weapons. The game is being developed by MachineGames, which was founded by ex-Starbreeze Studios employees.
“We are excited to bring a new chapter of Wolfenstein to gamers everywhere,” said Jens Matthies, creative director at MachineGames. “As fans of the series, working on this game is an honor, and our team is driven to create an unforgettable action-adventure experience that will make FPS fans proud.”
I expect occult-powered machine guns, Don Draper, and Austin Powers. If you’re in the nostalgic mood, check out the original game in all its pixelated glory here.
Will Wright spoke to GamesIndustry International after he gave a lecture at the University of California’s Santa Cruz. During the interview he said EA’s SimCity server problems were “inexcusable.”
When the discussion turned to the launch of Sim City Online, Wright was quick to declare his first thought. “I feel bad for the team,” Wright said. Beyond that, Wright had some definite opinions about the launch. “I could have predicted – I kind of did predict there’d be a big backlash about the DRM stuff. It’s a good game; I enjoy playing it a lot.” Still, Wright understands the audience response. “It was kind of like, ‘EA is the evil empire, there was a lot of ‘Let’s bash EA over it,'” Wright said. “That was basically inexcusable, that you charge somebody $60 for a game and they can’t play it. I can understand the outrage. If I was a consumer buying the game and that happened to me, I’d feel the same.”
Wright also talked about the state of EA and the general direction of the industry. He noted that Google’s recent hiring of veteran game designer Noah Falstein was probably related to their efforts to get better at understanding games.
This weekend, Baz Luhrmann takes a crack at interpreting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby seems to already miss the point, but given how sexy the trailer is, I couldn’t care less.
While we wait for the movie to open, there’s always the Great Gatsby videogame. Like Gatsby himself, you can’t really be sure where this NES tie-in came from. One version of its backstory is that a guy named Charlie Hoey made it. The backstory I prefer, supported by a magazine ad not nearly tacky enough for videogame ads from the 90s, goes as follows:
I found it at a yard sale. I bought it for 50 cents and went home to try it out. After dusting off my NES for like, 20 minutes I got it working, and jesus. So weird. Apparently it’s an unreleased localization of a Japanese cart called “Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari”
Whatever its true origins, The Great Gatsby videogame has not been gunned down while floating on an air mattress in its pool. Instead, it is fully playable here. I can’t get past the Valley of Ashes myself, which is probably for the best where Myrtle Wilson is concerned.
That’s no moon! That’s EA and Disney teaming up! EA announced that they have signed a multi-year agreement to develop and publish new Star Wars games for Disney. EA Labels President Frank Gibeau disclosed a few of the studios that will develop new games starring beloved characters like Watto, Nute Gunray, and Kit Fisto.
“DICE and Visceral will produce new games, joining the BioWare team which continues to develop for the Star Wars franchise. The new experiences we create may borrow from films, but the games will be entirely original with all new stories and gameplay.”
DICE and Star Wars. Maybe now, we’ll finally get Battlefront 3.
EA has officially announced The Sims 4 will be coming in 2014. There’s a newsletter sign-up form here if you need more junk email. There aren’t many details, but the Sims team did want to address the elephant in the room right away.
The Sims 4 celebrates the heart and soul of the Sims themselves, giving players a deeper connection with the most expressive, surprising and charming Sims ever in this single-player offline experience. The Sims 4 encourages players to personalize their world with new and intuitive tools while offering them the ability to effortlessly share their creativity with friends and fans.
If you just want more details now, you’ll have to wait for someone to translate the simlish on the announcement page.
