Epic Games has revealed their plans for bringing back Unreal Tournament. During a stream on Twitch, Epic announced that work has begun on the next installment of their flagship arena shooter franchise. The game will be free and supported through a community-driven model similar to Valve’s Team Fortress 2. Subscribers to Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 development tools will be able to create content for the game and sell their creations with a percentage of those sales going to Epic. Developer Steven Polge posted an outline of the plan, including a caveat explaining that this will be a collaborative effort.
A lot of this is brand new for Epic, and we don’t yet have everything figured out. Things will probably definitely go wrong from time to time, and when they do, we’ll have to work through them together. There will be a lot of tough decisions to make, and not every feature will make it into the game. But if you’re a fan of Unreal Tournament, a UE4 developer, or a future modder – or if you just want to learn how we make games – we hope you’ll join us. It’s going to be fun.
Epic says that the development process with the community begins today on the forums.
Killing Floor 2 has been announced. PC Gamer has the scoop straight from Tripwire Interactive. The sequel to the co-op zombie shooter is being designed with a sort of “holy trinity” for undead-killing. Bullets, blades, and blood.
“When we started designing the game we decided gore was going to be the most important feature,” says David Hensley, art director on Killing Floor 2. “We were really inspired by Soldier of Fortune, the GHOUL system. We wanted to outdo Soldier of Fortune’s gore.”
Killing Floor came out in 2009 exactly like the undead horde it featured. It was dirty, a little clunky, jerky, and violent. Unlike Left 4 Dead’s slick presentation of the zombie apocalypse, Killing Floor was obviously a mod that had gone retail, and that origin turned out to be one of its greatest assets. You can feel the enthusiasm in the frantic gameplay and the levels designed by late-night caffeine. Hopefully, the sequel retains the magic of the original while improving the visuals.
Don’t Starve is getting a multiplayer update. Klei Entertainment announced the plan to bring multiplayer to their survival crafting game on their official forums. The developer plans to update the base game for free with multiplayer functionality in late Summer. Although they didn’t have many specifics, the post mentioned public and private games, 2-4 simultaneous players, multiplayer balancing, and the possibility of other new features. In the past, Klei had shut down speculation regarding multiplayer to keep the community focused on the single player game.
Over the past few months, we’ve quietly smuggled in some new people onto our team who immediately said “Heck yeah, this can be a thing!” and actually threw together a proof of concept. After a couple months and an office-wide session of multiplayer Don’t Starve, we were convinced it was worth exploring and bringing it to our community.
Although the multiplayer expansion will be free to current owners of Don’t Starve, Klei plans to increase the price of the base game to $19.99 once the update launches.
The GameSpy shutdown will claim another two titles. Star Wars: Battlefront 2 and Star Wars: Empire at War will lose multiplayer functionality after May 31st when GameSpy shuts down their multiplayer servers. Unfortunately, both titles were recently featured in the recent May 4th Star Wars Day Sale on Steam. The loss of service is especially galling in the case of Star Wars: Battlefront 2 because it’s a multiplayer-focused shooter with limited single player appeal. (There is a single player campaign of sorts, but it’s played against brain-dead bots.) At least with Star Wars: Empire at War, broken multiplayer won’t impact the primary mode of play which is the galaxy-spanning strategic conquest campaign meant for the solo player. Both games’ Steam listings have been updated to reflect the news.
As of May 31, 2014, online functionality, including network multiplayer and wireless chat, will no longer be available for this title. We regret any disappointment as a result of the shutdown of the services supporting these online features.
Unlike some newer games faced with the GameSpy closure, it appears neither title will be getting official publisher support to transition to a different multiplayer back-end solution.
Activision’s full start-up tab for Destiny is $500 million. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick revealed the full price for Bungie’s next blockbuster video game during a conference in Los Angeles. The record-breaking game budget was mentioned when Kotick was explaining why he signed a ten-year exclusive contract with Bungie for Destiny that gave Activision worldwide distribution rights and a significant say over the franchise’s course of development.
“If you’re making a $500 million bet you can’t take that chance with someone else’s IP. The stakes for us are getting bigger.”
Activision acknowledged the figure was correct to Reuters, but clarified that the humongous price tag included marketing, royalties, and other associated costs. Activision expects to recoup the cost over the course of the series.
Harmonix has turned to Kickstarter to create a new version of Amplitude, their 2003 PlayStation 2 game. The new Amplitude will feature hi-def graphics, updated soundtrack, and fine-tuned controls supplied through Harmonix’s proprietary engine. The developers plan to use the ten years of experience they gained since the original Amplitude to create a fully modern version for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 consoles.
The game, as designed for this Kickstarter, focuses on the core Amplitude experience. Single player and local multiplayer are included in the design, as are leaderboards for online bragging rights. The Beat Blaster (the ship), music notes, tracks and FX will all be modernized and gorgeous. The cyberworld around the tracks will be designed by artists and crafted by coders so that every pixel on screen can be driven by the underlying music. Even as we work through our plans for this Kickstarter, the game is beginning to take shape – an HD reinvisioning of the cult classic, smartly updated for today on every axis. We believe this is the game that fans of Amplitude have been asking for and a game that can only come from Harmonix.
The Kickstarter drive ends on May 23rd with the final goal set at $775,000. Pledge at the $10,000 level and you can have a jam session with Harmonix.
Defiance, the MMO from Trion Worlds that was developed as part of a cross-media effort with the television show of the same name, is going free-to-play. According to the official notice, the pricing changeover to a transaction-supported model will happen on June 4th for the PC, and July 15th for the PlayStation 3. (Trion says they are working with Microsoft on the Xbox 360 version, but no date has been set.) Although Defiance never had a required subscription plan, the game did have a buy-and-play model which required players to purchase the client software. Original players will get free bonuses to their account, while new players after the June switch will need to purchase optional additions to enjoy the same bonuses. There is a handy FAQ detailing the different access levels.
In related news, the second season of the Defiance TV show starts June 19th on the Syfy channel.
That’s a digital Kevin Spacey hamming it up in the trailer for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Sledgehammer Games and Activision have been teasing the big reveal for the next installment in the long-running shooter franchise for days and this is it. The official site isn’t up yet. (There’s still two days to go on the countdown.) We do know that the game is set sometime in the future and that private military companies are the focus. Activision and VICE have even teamed up to produce this synergistic mini-documentary on the subject.
In an earlier earnings call to shareholders, Activision described the new game as “next-gen first” implying that it will be available on the older consoles, but it won’t be the focus of development. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare launches on November 4th, 2014.
CCP has created a real-world physical monument to Eve Online and its players. The large sculpture was unveiled yesterday in Reykjavik, Iceland with onlookers, CCP fans, and city officials attending the dedication ceremony. If you were an active paying player of Eve Online on March 1st of this year, your main character’s name – the one with the highest amount of skill points – now adorns the base of the statue. (That’s assuming your main character’s name wasn’t in violation of copyright or offensive.) There’s even an online tool to find your name. Congratulations, Wolfblood Mountainwater and Sinfull Jester! You’ve been immortalized!
The artist, Sigurour Guomundsson, says the piece is entitled Worlds Within a World and is a reflection of the way Eve Online melds this world with its own reality.
Hacker! Bot! Cheater! These are accusations that get thrown around in online games a lot. Outdistance your opponents by a significant margin and you may see these words splash onto the chat feed. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a wild beatdown, it’s understandable how someone may think another player is using a cheat. How is he hitting me from over there? He shot me from across the map! No one can possibly be that good.
It’s not always just sour grapes. There are lots of cheaters and they pay good money to stay on the bleeding edge of cheat software. It’s big business. PC Gamer looked into the subscription side of cheating and found a thriving industry. Companies that create and sell access to cheat programs have their own investors, outsourced customer support, and amazingly enough, their own DRM! One such company operating out of Brazil, (given the moniker “Ultra Cheats” by PC Gamer) rakes in a fairly respectable annual haul.
On March 20, over 2,500 members logged into the Ultra Cheats’ forums, almost all of whom are plainly listed as paying for standard or more expensive cheat packages. At an average of $10 per user a month, Ultra Cheats makes $300,000 a year. Add to this the fact that the forum has almost 150,000 members overall (though we don’t know how many are active, paying users), the Brazil site, and resellers, and it’s not hard to imagine Ultra Cheats breaking a million dollars a year. Slayer declined to share the exact number of their active users.
The next time you think someone is cheating, try to keep in mind that they may be helping to keep the economy going! Capitalism, ho!
Stealth Inc. 2 will be an exclusive for Nintendo’s Wii U. It’s a surprising announcement from indie developer Curve Studios. They have been vocal about their preference for Sony’s PlayStation platform over Microsoft’s Xbox console. Back in 2013, Curve even publicly expressed their disappointment in Microsoft’s seeming lack of interest in indie games, while offering their assistance to other developers that wanted to get their games on Sony’s network. Curve went on to develop Thomas Was Alone, Lone Survivor and Proteus for the PlayStation 3 and Vita. So why shift their Stealth Inc. sequel to the Wii U? Jason Perkins, managing director at Curve, explained their reasoning CVG.
“There isn’t much competition on Nintendo’s store, so we thought that commercially it’s a really good opportunity for us. Nintendo has sold a few million Wii Us too, so the audience is there. We want to see what the market is like. We want to test it.”
As for how “exclusive” the deal is, Curve refuses to say if it’s for a timed period of exclusivity or a permanent arrangement. Stealth Inc. 2 will include will include co-op gameplay using the Wii U Gamepad. No release date has been announced.
Snowbird Games has announced that they have released a major update to Eador: Masters of the Broken World. The free Sacred Gift update adds shard multiplayer, 17 new units, (including the super sexy succubus) and many bug fixes. The studio acknowledged the support of the fans for keeping the game alive.
Our studio will never forget the release of Eador. It was a complete chaotic mess in the best of Russian traditions.
Emergency patching helped the game to stay alive but it wasn’t us who truly saved Eador. First and foremost the game survived thanks to the players, their patience, critique and understanding of the situation.
Eador: Masters of the Broken World is also on sale for 75% off to celebrate the one-year anniversary since launch.
PlayStation 4 exclusive DriveClub is being delayed again to improve the social menu features and optimize visuals. DriveClub, originally revealed at E3 2013 as a PS4 launch title, was delayed just before the console’s launch date to “early 2014.” This release window has slipped and Evolution Studios has posted an explanation on Sony’s PlayStation blog. Director Paul Rustchynsky stressed the importance of the game’s manu.
The dynamic menu is key to how much fun you’re going to get out of the game because it is the glue that connects you to everyone else in the DRIVECLUB community. Whenever you fire up the game; between every race you play, and when you log in to DRIVECLUB on your phone or tablet, the dynamic menu has to be slick to ensure your experience is seamlessly connected. Essentially it’s where you discover what to play, and who to play with.
It’s also absolutely vital to our ambition of growing a vibrant network of millions of connected clubs, who all share the excitement of driving amazing cars together. Whether they play just to have fun, or to complete every challenge and beat their rivals in every race, it’s this connected community who will keep the game fresh and enjoyable well after launch, so it makes sense for the connectivity to be perfect.
No racing title has ever combined the development of a socially charged, multi-platform dynamic menu with all the other connected online elements that DRIVECLUB delivers.
DriveClub’s new launch date is October 7 in North America, October 10 in the UK, and October 8 in the rest of Europe.
Whistleblower, the add-on for Red Barrels Games’ first-person horror title Outlast will launch on May 6th for $8.99 on PC and PlayStation 4. The DLC was originally supposed to be released last month, but was delayed. Outlast: Whistleblower features more of the gameplay you know and love from all the videos of people screaming while playing the game. There will be more running from monsters, hiding in the dark, and saying “Nope!” while wandering the spooky rooms of Mount Massive Asylum.
In more horror asylum-related news, Daylight, the first-person horror game from Zombie Studios is out now on Steam. Daylight’s distinguishing features include the way it mixes level layouts from game to game to keep things fresh on new playthroughs, and how it integrates spectators in streams. People watching someone play Daylight on Twitch can type chat commands to cause things to happen in-game. So far, it means people spamming “meow meow meow meow meow” to get the game to play the sound of a screeching cat, which is arguably pretty horrifying. Daylight is available for $14.99.
Ubisoft has detailed the probable contents of the Watch Dogs Season Pass. For $19.99, players will get a new single-player campaign featuring hacker T-Bone Grady, three optional missions for regular protagonist Aiden Pearce, a cyborg zombie horde mode, and some in-game accessories like additional weapons and clothing. The zombie mode gameplay will be integrated into the story as part of Watch Dogs’ “Digital Trips” that alters reality for Aiden Pearce.
But why are the Digital Trips part of the game? Are they perhaps Watch Dogs’ in-game Blood Dragon? Not at all. Every digital trip is subtly related to the core game, not just mechanically but narratively as well. Each says something about Aiden’s emotional state or relationship with the world around him.
Watch Dogs launches on May 27th for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.
