The most exciting news I’ve heard in a long time is today’s announcement of Failbetter Games’ Sunless Sea. Why is it exciting?
After the jump, ten important facts about a game you’ve never heard of. Continue reading →
The next Living World update for Guild Wars 2 will invite players to take part in the country-wide celebrations for Quenn Jennah’s 10th anniversary of being crowned. Hot air ballon rides, ceremonies, the Queen’s Gauntlet, and other attractions will await players on August 6th when the Queen’s Jubilee goes live. As with previous Living World installments, the update comes with a host of permanent in-game improvements.
– A shared Account Wallet for all your characters’ currency
– PvP Solo Queue for solo arena matches
– Bonus in-game monetary rewards for dungeons
– Champion loot drops will get an upgrade
– A new level of detail system for effects will clear up large battles
– Supply Master ability line will be added to World vs World
– Permanent Finishers
The current Living World event is Cutthroat Politics and Tom is still trying to gather every bit of lore he can find.
That’s the trailer for the long-awaited first DLC for Bioshock Infinite called Clash in the Clouds. Remember when Irrational said their DLC was going to be substantial single player stuff?
This pack features 60 challenges in four brand-new maps. Complete Blue Ribbon Challenges and unlock concept art, Voxophones, Kinetoscopes, and more in The Columbian Archeological Society. Climb the Leaderboards and earn new achievements.
You get challenge maps. Congratulations. At least it’s cheap at $4.99 or 400 Microsoft points.
The next DLC looks a little better. Burial at Sea promises some actual story.
Zombies!!! (punctuation theirs) is a competitive zombie apocalypse boardgame in which players set up a city one tile and one turn at a time. Eventually a helipad appears and everyone scrambles to reach it. Until then, the objective is staying alive with very limited ammo, very limited health, a handful of cards to tweak the action, and the brutality of six-sided die rolls. Now Zombies!!! is also a terrible iOS port.
After the jump, zoinks, gadzooks, and ah-ooh-gah! Continue reading →
Sony has confirmed that a Playstations Plus subscription will not be needed to use online apps such as Netflix or Hulu Plus on the PS4, and that party chat will also be free unlike Microsoft’s Xbox One which will require a Gold subscription to use. In a Playstation Access video, Sony says that the PS4 friends list can have up to 2000 members (twice as many as the Xbox One) and free-to-play games will not require a Playstation Plus subscription to play, unlike Microsoft’s current console rules.
Sony had revealed at E3 that playing online multiplayer games would require a Playstation Plus subscription, following in the footsteps of Microsoft’s Xbox Live Gold requirements. With today’s video, Sony separates themselves from many of the restrictions that the Xbox 360 and Xbox One will have without Gold access.
Phil Fish, creator of Fez, says he’s quit making games and canceled development of Fez II. The dramatic event occurred over the weekend when Fish abruptly posted his goodbye on his Polytron site.
FEZ II is cancelled.
i am done.
i take the money and run.
this is as much as i can stomach.
this isn’t the result of any one thing, but the end of a long, bloody campaign.you win.
The outspoken Fez developer canceled Fez II following an episode of Invisible Walls on GameTrailers in which host Marcus Beer called Fish names because he refused to comment on Microsoft’s Xbox One indie self-publishing program. After the broadcast, Fish went on Twitter and told Beer to “compare your life to mine and then kill yourself.” Fish was in turn attacked on Twitter by fans of GameTrailers and gamers that expressed outrage over his comment and for his past behavior.
For his part, Fish maintains that his quitting the industry was not motivated because one person “said something stupid” but so he can “get out of games.” He confirmed to Joystiq that Fez II is really canceled.
Despite rumors to the contrary, Sony’s PS4 will not be using more than 5.5GB of its GDDR5 8GB RAM for gaming. According to Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry, the console is limited to 4.5GB allocated directly to games with another 1GB that can be used by developers depending on what the console OS needs to do.
Current PlayStation 4 dev kits have a “Game Memory Budget Mode” in the debug settings featuring two options: normal and large. The normal mode setting confirms that 4.5GB of memory is usable for game applications. The large mode increases this considerably to 5.25GB, but the docs are clear that the extra RAM here is only available for application development, presumably in order to house debugging data. From what we understand, the extra gig of flexible memory appears to work in addition to these allowances.
Unfortunately for fans of the PS4, this brings the specs closer to parity with the Xbox One. The difference of GDDR5 memory in Sony’s console versus the DDR3 in Microsoft’s could still be a key factor for developers.
Activision Blizzard is buying itself out from under Vivendi in a share aquisition deal for $8.17 billion. The details of the deal note that this will be a two-part buyout with $5.83 billion coming from 429 million company shares and another $2.34 billion from 172 million shares owned by CEO Bobby Kotick and Co-Chairman Brian Kelly. Kotick seemed excited by the opportunity to break away from their parent company.
“These transactions together represent a tremendous opportunity for Activision Blizzard and all its shareholders, including Vivendi. We should emerge even stronger – an independent company with a best-in-class franchise portfolio and the focus and flexibility to drive long-term shareholder value and expand our leadership position as one of the world’s most important entertainment companies. The transactions announced today will allow us to take advantage of attractive financing markets while still retaining more than $3 billion cash on hand to preserve financial stability.”
Activision Blizzard has been under Vivendi’s rule since mid-2008 when the companies merged with Vivendi claiming majority shareholder status. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Vivendi board had been considering extracting $3 billion from Activision Blizzard’s coffers after their stock hit a nine-year low following disappointing financial results for the media conglomerate.
The announcement of Activision Blizzard’s independence comes one day before StarCraft II’s third anniversary.
Torchlight 2 has sold over 2 million copies. Runic Games announced that the action RPG sequel to Torchlight has doubled the original’s sales in the ten months since its launch in September 2012. That’s a lot of mouse clicking and hotkeys pushed in a panic! Runic’s President Travis Baldree expressed gratitude for their loyal fans.
“I’d just like to say a big thank you to all the players who offered their suggestions on what we could improve, and who stuck with us and supported us during development. It wouldn’t have been possible without you, and we’re humbled and grateful at your response.”
Tom really liked Torchlight 2 in his review, but became disenchanted with the game when he discovered that the difficulty level did not influence the loot drops.
This is an oldie, but a goodie. I still can’t believe someone at Sega wasn’t having a laugh with the localization. “They’re really big bad dudes, you know. I think they drink a lot of booze at the bars or someplace.”
(Thanks, Gordo!)
Yesterday’s news that Microsoft will allow indie developers to self-publish on the Xbox One came as good news to gamers. Microsoft’s previous policies of not allowing self-publishing and charging to host game updates were major roadblocks for small studios. With both policies apparently being reversed, Microsoft looks to be trying recapture some of the magic from the early days of the Xbox 360 when it seemed to be a haven for indie developers.
Joystiq asked some developers for their reaction to the news and they expressed cautious optimism. Most seem to be taking a wait-and-see attitude. Peter Bartholow, CEO of Lab Zero Games, said that he’d “need to see the final details to really know one way or another” while Rami Ismail of Vlambeer said that he would “have to wait until Gamescom to hear all the details” to make any decisions. Gaijin Games wanted to “do a little more research into the specifics” before committing to the platform.
Engadget spoke to Retro City Rampage developer Brian Provinciano who was less positive about Microsoft’s indie game policy changes.
After my experience working with them to release on Xbox 360, I have no interest in even buying an Xbox One, let alone developing for it. The policy changes are great, but they don’t undo the experience I had. I’m not ready to forget what I went through. Working with Microsoft was the unhappiest point of my career. Policies are one thing, but developer relations are another.
Although Micorosft said they will have more details of the path to self-publishing at Gamescom in August, Marc Whitten did confirm to Kotaku that the system won’t be ready for the console’s launch, but hopes to have it set within the first year. The ability to change a retail Xbox One into a dev kit via an online update will also come later.
Meanwhile, Sony continues to woo indie developers. While a PS4 dev kit normally costs $2500, sources speaking to Polygon said that Sony is letting developers borrow them for up to a year for free. Additionally, Develop reports that Sony Europe will host a quarterly indie developer event at their London offices.
There have been rumors for a few days now that Microsoft was going to announce a change to their indie game strategy for the Xbox One. The lack of a pathway to self-publishing had been a point of criticism with both gamers and developers because Sony made it a point to embrace indies on the PS4 during and after E3. GameInformer posted a report based on anonymous sources earlier, but Polygon got the official confirmation that Microsoft is going to offer a way for developers without publisher sponsorship to get their games on the Xbox One.
“Our vision is that every person can be a creator,” Marc Whitten, corporate vice president at Xbox said in a statement. “That every Xbox One can be used for development. That every game and experience can take advantage of all of the features of Xbox One and Xbox LIVE. This means self-publishing. This means Kinect, the cloud, achievements. This means great discoverability on Xbox LIVE. We’ll have more details on the program and the timeline at Gamescom in August.”
One of the points in the GameInformer article was that any Xbox One could be turned into a debug console via an online code update. The statement from Whitten would seem to support that rumor.
See that boardgame in the image above? Savor it. That’s as close as most of us will ever get to playing The Doom That Came to Atlantic City despite a successful crowd-funding campaign that closed in June of 2012. It was described by the creator on the Kickstarter page as a sort of reverse Monopoly in which players took the role of a Lovecraftian Elder God and tried to destroy Atlantic City instead of building it up.
People were excited by the tongue-in-cheek concept and by the art which mixed whimsy with horror. Wired wrote about it as did Tom on Quarter to Three. By the time the Kickstarter closed, the funding effort raised about four times more than the creator was asking for.
Unfortunately, it appears the game will never be a reality. The project lead, Erik Chevalier has admitted that the creation of the game as well as the establishment of a new company has gotten beyond his control and that the whole thing is being terminated. In an update to backers, Chevalier wrote that the failure of the game rests on his inexperience managing a project of this size.
From the beginning the intention was to launch a new board game company with the Kickstarted funds, with The Doom that Came to Atlantic City as only our first of hopefully many projects. Everyone involved agreed on this. Since then rifts have formed and every error compounded the growing frustration, causing only more issues. After paying to form the company, for the miniature statues, moving back to Portland, getting software licenses and hiring artists to do things like rule book design and art conforming the money was approaching a point of no return. We had to print at that point or never. Unfortunately that wasn’t in the cards for a variety of reasons.
As for the crowd-funded money, Chevalier said that he will try to return the pledges when he can secure employment and begin paying into a fund he will set up. He explained that he will try to pay back the people that pre-ordered the game through their webstore before returning money to Kickstarter backers.
Gun Monkeys is a “procedurally-generated, physics-based, online deathmatch platform game” from Size Five Games. If that sounds confusing, you can check out the Steam page to see a video of it in action which will probably explain it better than mere words can. The game launched earlier this month, but head of Size Five Dan Marshall has learned that the sales of any online multiplayer game depends largely on the health of the community.
So, Gun Monkeys needs players in order to play it. You need other people milling around. At times, the servers are quite busy, you can quite happily play for hours. At other times, they’re dead, because everyone who owns a copy of Gun Monkeys is at work or at school or sleeping or playing Rogue Legacy. You have to sell HYPER-LOTS of copies in order for the servers to have anyone in them, triply so if you’re trying to get a game at 4am. This is a fact I now know that I didn’t really appreciate before.
In response to the low multiplayer population, Marshall is dropping the price of Gun Monkeys from $10 to $5.99, and every purchase will come with a gift copy of the game to give to someone else. He hopes this will solve the problem and get the multiplayer community going. Marshall also offered this advice to fellow indie developers:
Here’s the takeaway from this, for any indie dev considering adding multiplayer to a game: the number of games you have to sell in order to have people playing *constantly* is HUGE. Hugerer than you think, even. Even hugerer than your revised figure. It’s massive, and it might not happen.
Eidos Montreal founder and general manager, Stephane D’Astous has left the company. After a tweet announcing his departure, D’Astous explained to Develop that his decision was based on his perception of the leadership at his parent company Square Enix Europe.
“Since last year’s financial short-coming performance of Square Enix Europe, we (HQ London and GM Eidos-Montreal) have had growing and divergent opinions on what needed to be done to correct the situation.”
“The lack of leadership, lack of courage and the lack of communication were so evident, that I wasn’t able to conduct my job correctly. I realised that our differences were irreconcilable, and that the best decision was unfortunately to part ways.”
In an interview with Polygon, Stephane D’Astous went on the say that recent changes at Square Enix resulted in strategic planning counter to his thinking. Compounding that difficulty, he felt that SE’s inability to market Eidos Montreal’s games exacerbated the disappointing fiscal results.
Square Enix, D’Astous said, “has some things to learn about how to sell their games.”
“We are in a situation that we have great games that could have sold more,” he said. “They need to attack that very, very seriously. Last year was supposed to be a home-run season, but we didn’t hit a single home run; maybe a double or a triple, but they weren’t home runs.
Despite his feelings for the parent company and the recent reports of troubled development, D’Astous remains confident that the team working on Thief 4 will be able to deliver a game that will be successful and well-recieved.
