It’s a new Call of Duty multiplayer video! Guns, perks, and lots of text popping up in your face! This time around, it appears Call of Duty: Ghosts will let players customize their characters instead of just being stuck with a few archetype looks. Also, there are dogs with vests, leaning around corners, and a surprise at the end of the video.
Quarter to Three would like to welcome the menacingly elegant Charles Dance to the world of videogame voiceover. CD Projekt Red announced Dance will lend his mellifluously arch tones to an emperor in The Witcher 3.
Daniel Day-Lewis, you can only hold out for so long.
CD Projekt RED’s The Witcher series of action roleplaying games thrives on giving the player morally ambiguous situations to deal with. Geralt of Rivia operates in a gritty world of monsters, corrupt merchants, overzealous clergy, and not-so-innocent peasants. Even though this video seems to depict a more clear-cut choice, I’d bet anything that if this scenario pops up in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, it will have a consequence later in the game that may make the player regret rescuing the maiden.
Chivalry: Medieval Warfare has been updated to add more character customization. Content Update 2 from Torn Banner Studios adds new helmets and crests, tabard and shield patterns, and you can make your warrior fabulous for Fall with a bright orange ensemble. Miscellaneous balance changes also come with the update, but you won’t care if your spear stab takes a bit longer when you’re sporting a bright lime green getup.
Chivalry has sold more than 1.2 million copies since its launch in October of last year.
Galactic Reign is shutting down. According to a Microsoft representative posting in the official forums, space strategy game developed by Slant Six will be taken off the Windows 8 and Windows Phone stores on August 15th. The servers will be turned off and no gameplay will be possible after December 31st since the game depends on the servers to calculate and synchronize battles. The power of the Cloud!
The forums will remain available until the end of the year, so that players can still communicate and exchange contacts. We will also continue support the Facebook and Twitter channels from now until server closure.
We are proud of the game we created and are thankful to our passionate community. We hope you have gotten many hours of enjoyment out Galactic Reign and will continue to do so until the end of this year.
Developer Slant Six appears to have closed down as well, but there has been no official confirmation. Slant Six has been incommunicado since their “temporary” layoffs in April.
See that? That’s a screenshot of one of the most amazing things I ever saw in wargaming: snow in 1941. As I pointed out a while back, that’s more of an observation about what computers could do for wargames back in 1981 than doubt about the weather in Russia. So I was glad the third bullet point in Shenandoah’s press release for their newly announced game, Drive on Moscow, proclaimed “a changing map based on weather conditions.”
After the jump, I predict famous designers. Continue reading →
The video above features Microsoft’s Major Nelson explaining the Xbox One’s new controller and touting the innovations in it. It’s important to PC gamers as well as Xbox fans because the new hardware will likely become the PC’s standard controller when it hits store shelves. Microsoft told CVG that they are working on software to make the Xbox One controller work seamlessly on PC and backwards compatible with older games.
“We know people want to use the Xbox One controller on their PC, and we do too – we expect to have the functionality available in 2014.”
The Xbox 360 controller has been the default choice on PC for a few years now. Putting software in Windows that automatically detected and configured the Xbox 360 wired controller once you plugged it in was probably the greatest thing they did for PC gaming.
As Kotaku reports, the designers and engineers in the Xbox Accessories department experiment with hundreds of ideas. Miniature speakers, a tiny screen, touchpads, even a special smell dispersal unit, were tried and rejected. What they ended with is a controller that hopefully improves on the 360’s flaws, but doesn’t try to fix what wasn’t broken.
American Express is teaming up with Riot Games to offer a League of Legends themed debit card. According to the New York Times, the prepaid American Express cards will be available for purchase on Wednesday. Stefan Happ, general manager for online and mobile at American Express in the US, said the card is part of their strategy to reach a traditionally less affluent, but still actively purchasing online audience.
Users receive 1,000 points when they sign up for the card and an additional 1,000 points after loading $20 onto the card. Additional points can be earned for the first 10 purchases made with the card, and 10,000 points are awarded the first time a card is linked to a direct deposit account.
Additional points can be earned for every dollar spent after that. The card requires no credit check, activation fee or minimum balance. Instead, like most prepaid cards, it is loaded with a cardholder’s own money and used in lieu of cash to make purchases.
Riot Games revealed that they are talking with other blue-chip companies for additional sponsorship opportunities to help defray the costs associated with bringing the game to a wider audience.
It’s not the first time a credit card company has reached out to the videogaming demographic. Visa offers a World of Warcraft credit card that offers points for purchases that can be exchanged for game time.
On Monday, we reported that Ouya’s first month of retail availability has resulted in generally low sales for developers’ games. Some of the studios complained about their performance on the console, while others like the folks behind TowerFall were positive about their 2,000 units sold. Ouya’s CEO Julie Uhrman defended her console’s ability to sell games by stating that 27% of Ouya owners have purchased a game so far. She told The Verge that 13 of the top 20 grossing titles in the console’s online store have experienced an 8% conversion rate from demo to full purchase.
“I think there are a lot of social and mobile app developers that would kill for an 8 percent attach rate on a platform that’s 30 days old,” Uhrman said. “These numbers will grow as more gamers pick up consoles, and as we attract more developers, and I believe that by the end of the year, we’ll see a few developers telling us they’ve made more than a million dollars on Ouya.”
Uhrman also dismissed the mixed reviews of the Ouya console itself by noting that the product is engaging players despite some negative critical reception.
Ouya, the crowd-funded $99 Android console, had its retail launch on June 25th. It garnered mixed reviews from critics for its combination of neat concept, somewhat underpowered hardware, an interface much improved from the beta, and a selection of games that mostly mirror the kinds of things you’d find in the dregs of the Google Play store. Early adopters seem pleased by the mostly fulfilled promises of the Kickstarter. For its part, OUYA Inc. announced a $1 million fund for indie game development to help improve the catalog of titles.
Consoles live and die by the developer support, so how is the Ouya treating its launch partners? Gamasutra rounded up some game developers to ask them how well the Ouya has been for their bottom line. Like the critics’ hardware reviews, the partner opinions are mixed. Ryan Wiemeyer, developer of Organ Trail, expressed disappointment.
It’s sold about half of what my low-end predictions were. Last I checked we were at 501 purchases from 13,112 downloads. (a 3.8 percent attach rate.) This accounts for about 0.1 percent of our total Organ Trail sales to date (which is over 400,000.) So, I don’t even know if it was worth the man hours yet. Then again… Organ Trail was a pain to add controller support to and that was the bulk of the port.
While some developers agreed that sales were less impressive than hoped for, others were less negative. Matt Thorson, creator of TowerFall, told Edge that he was pleased with his sales so far.
“We’ve made about 2,000 sales so far at $15 each,” Thorson said. “So sales have been surprisingly high for a new game on a new console. The game has definitely proven itself on Ouya, I think there’s enough demand to warrant bringing it to PC.”
Developers praised the ease of communicating with the Ouya company, including its engineers, but many pointed out that title discoverability remains an issue in the console catalog menus. Between the cool reception by critics and the low software sales, the Ouya has quite the hill to climb to reach the peak of the industry.
The venture firms of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, The Mayfield Group, and others have invested more than $15 million towards OUYA, the $99 Android-powered console. The Wall Street Journal interviewed CEO Julie Uhrman for details about the new funding.
“The money’s going to be used predominantly for two things: one is to support game development. We’d love to bring exclusive titles to OUYA. We announced an exclusive game from Airtight Games last week, we have others coming from Tripwire Interactive and high-profile games from high-profile independent games like Fez from Phil Fish. Tim Schafer’s DoubleFine is bringing ‘A Broken Age,’ so it’ll allow us to do more of those things.”
“The second is to support demand. We’ve seen incredible demand from retail and from the website. Obviously it depends on the retailer. It’s gonna be no different than what any other product.”
OUYA also announced that although some early backer units were shipped, the official launch date of the console has been pushed back to June 25th to fix controller manufacturing issues. The OUYA initially created waves by raising over $8 million in its Kickstarter funding when the company had only asked for $950K.
