Bethesda announced paid mods for Skyrim: Special Edition and Fallout 4 via the upcoming Creation Club. This is something Bethesda has been creeping towards since their ill-fated experiment with Steam and the original version of Skyrim in 2015. This time, we’ll see if they get it right. It’s the Bethesda.net mod workshop but with curated community-made DLC you buy with credits. There’s no word yet on the exchange rate between real dollars and the Creation Club funny money, but you can assume it will be controversial no matter the cost.
The rest of Bethesda’s E3 2017 briefing was a parade of sequels and oddities. Doom VFR moves the demon ripping and tearing to virtual reality. How will Doom’s dance of death work in VR? It doesn’t. Movement seems to be changed to teleporting around. Fallout 4 VR offers the full open-world experience but with virtual fumbling and hand-waving. Dishonored: Death of the Outsider is a standalone serving of stealthy assassinating. Evil Within 2 showed off more inexplicable horror and things shuffling in the dark. Finally, BJ Blazkowicz returns in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.
Microsoft brought out a new Porsche for their E3 press briefing. The 2018 911 GT2 RS was silver and looked like it could go really fast. It was a “monster” according to the breathless presenters. The car was at the briefing to introduce Forza Motorsport 7, but it was obviously also a metaphor for the new Xbox One X console, formerly known as Project Scorpio. Scads of horsepower in a teeny package. And expensive. The Xbox One X will launch on November 7th for $499. I’m sure there will be holiday bundles for even more money.
Microsoft showed off 42 games in total. Some of them only got a couple of seconds of video during a buzz reel for the indie games program, but the company hammered on the fact that 22 of the games shown were exclusive to the console which is a fancy way of saying “Pay no attention to the PC you already have.”
4A Games kicked things off with a surprise announcement for Metro Exodus which puts fans back into post-apocalyptic Russia. Ubisoft showed Assassin’s Creed: Origins, which now has random loot and a Far Cry primal hawk buddy that acts like a sighting drone. If trolling and betrayal are your thing, PlayerUnkown’s Battlegrounds should be right up your alley. Speaking of trolling, Battlegrounds will be exclusive to Xbox. State of Decay 2‘s trailer presented a min-tale of finding a new survivor in the zombie apocalypse, saving her, letting her join your game, then ended with her ultimately leaving. Rare answered the question “How can we show Sea of Thieves with co-op plaers that do not exist in real life?” Super Lucky’s Tale looked like Conker’s Good Fur Day. Crackdown 3 rounded up the games section of the show with Terry Crews and some decidedly last-gen looking explosions.
Microsoft announced that the Backwards Compatibility Program will be extended to original Xbox games. Good news for people that have held on to their Crimson Skies or Fable disks.
Finally, BioWare ran through some canned gameplay for Anthem. Giant robots. Exosuits. Beasts. Open world co-op gameplay. Jump jets and random loot. It’s Destiny all smashed up with Horizon Zero Dawn and Titanfall. The video also took a cue from Sea of Thieves and presented co-op gaming wholly incongruous with reality.
E3, now starting even earlier, kicked off with Electronic Arts’ EA Play press conference on Saturday. There was a lot of Star Wars. It’s EA, so of course there was the sports and bombast of various flavors, but droids, lightsabers, and Darths loomed large over the proceedings.
There was a taste of Madden 18‘s first-ever cinematic and playable story campaign, Longshot, which seems to take cues from the work already being done in other sports titles. We saw a glimpses of NBA Live 18‘s gameplay. EA Sports was keen to let everyone know that Cristiano Ronaldo supplied mo-cap for FIFA 18.
With the obligatory sports titles out of the way, EA demonstrated how much Need for Speed Payback could look like The Crew mashed together with The Fast and Furious movies sprinkled with a dash of Burnout spice. Battlefield 1 piped up to ask everyone not to forget about it. Josef Fares, the writer and director of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, presented a first look at his cooperative story game A Way Out. BioWare teased a snippet of Anthem, their new game. EA was so excited to let everyone know that Anthem was a “new IP” that you could almost see the disappointment of Mass Effect Andromeda peel away and float into space.
Finally, they got to the headliner of the show: Star Wars Battlefront II. With stormtroopers and fanfare EA kicked off a thirty-minute extravaganza of Lucasfilm videogaming. Their preview began with a mea culpa of sorts; by sheepishly acknowledging the criticism of Battlefront’s absent story campaign and map packs that split the community. All corrected this time around. An epic campaign story! All post-launch maps and modes for free! More charcater customization options! Remember that bit in the Star Wars prequel trilogy when there was a running gun battle on Queen Amidala’s home planet? Throw Han Solo, Yoda, Rey, and Boba Fett into it. Eschewing any sense of timeline coherency, EA and DICE have opted to let fans play with their toys like they did as kids. Why can’t Han Solo fight Separatist droids on Theed? This isn’t Star Trek! No one cares if it doesn’t make any sense!
It’s been a long time since CD Projekt RED first announced Cyberpunk 2077 in 2013. You were probably still anticipating The Witcher 3, when that awesomely evocative trailer hit the web and shattered your world like it did for everyone else. But, you could wait. You still had Geralt to look forward to, and besides, the Mass Effect series was filling your need for hot sci-fi RPG action. Then CD Project RED said Cyberpunk was going to miss its late 2016 launch. And recently, Mass Effect: Andromeda turned out a bit broken. So, like many people in your position, an unfocused petty rage slowly built up towards CD Project RED. They were holding out on you! There they were in Poland play-testing their Cyberpunk work in progress, while you had to sit in your parents’ unfinished basement scamming people out of Counter-Strike skins. How unfair!
You did the only thing you knew to do. You crept into their network, (virtually, of course) dodged all their Black Ice and stole a bunch of Cyberpunk 2077 files. Then, because you didn’t have the skills necessary to do anything productive or creative, you sent the studio a ransom demand. Surely, this would turn out well. CD Projekt RED would send you money to save their files, and they might even see what a badass decker you could be. At the very least, your shut-in online acquaintances would have to acknowledge your chutzpah.
No, you buffoon. Take a lesson from Axel Gembe, the chap that stole Half-Life 2’s files from Valve in 2003. Not only did the studio not hire Gembe as he hoped, the authorities put Gembe on the “Let’s Make An Example Out of This Idiot” list, and every gamer on the planet immediately hated him for endangering their beloved Half-Life sequel. Axel Gembe will always be that jackass that almost killed Valve.
That’s you now. You’re the guy that’s screwing up CD Projekt RED and Cyberpunk 2077. No one thinks you’re cool. Nobody admires your skills. CD Projekt RED told you to pound sand and now you’ve got a pile of virtual stuff that’s only useful as evidence to use against you.
What can you do now? Run away. Go off the grid. Live somewhere in Chiba City. There are legions of Witcher and Cyberpunk fans that want to flatline you, and they all have access to the matrix. Your only hope is to go away for a long time and hope Cyberpunk 2077 comes out on schedule and is mind-blowingly terrific despite your attempt to sabotage it. Hire on as merchant marine for the Marcus Garvey. Hopefully, everyone will just forget about you. Years down the road, maybe after The Great Crash, tentatively fire up an antique Ono-Sendai and try to play Cyberpunk 2077 off a Gibson Archive before the Psycho Squad zeroes in on your signal.
What Remains of Edith Finch is one of those quiet games like Gone Home or Firewatch that spur conversations about narrative, art, and even gaming itself. While detractors are quick to toss it into the “walking simulator” pile, supporters say the key to enjoying it is letting the story of the Edith and the Finch family unfold naturally through the environments and the puzzles. They point to the Finch house and draw the stories of the Finches out of character vignettes nestled in the objects. Here, a tale of great-grandmother Edie. There, a yarn from uncle Gregory.
Ian Bogost, video game philosopher and creator of Cow Clicker, posits that story shouldn’t matter. In his essay in The Atlantic, Bogost argues that the industry obsession with being a narrative medium is in opposition to video gaming’s strength. Games are at their best when they present a new way of contextualizing the world.
At stake is not whether a game can tell a good story or even a better story than books or films or television. Rather, what it looks like when a game uses the materials of games to make those materials visible, operable, and beautiful.
Anyone who played Cow Clicker can tell you story is paramount. Cow Clicker wasn’t just an aimless trifle in which players clicked an image of a cow to watch numbers get bigger. It was about gamers defying logic and even Ian Bogost’s own expectations. It was about people clicking on enough cows that it went beyond a sick joke and became a phenomenon that had to be artificially stopped by the creator. It’s about gamers “beating” the game. Woo! We won!
If your character in Mass Effect: Andromeda is Scott Ryder and you were disappointed that you couldn’t have a romantic relationship with Jaal, then the 1.08 patch for the game is going to be good news for you. Once your game is updated, you’ll be able to get sweaty with the angaran resistance observer. BioWare assures fans that this change wasn’t done lightly. They consulted with members of the community and weighed the feedback they received before moving forward. That’s fine, but when are we going to get a Krogan as a love interest? This is a series in which you can woo an alien with such a weakened immune system that coupling with a dirty human should be a death sentence, but somehow that works. Let’s get some nookie from Wrex!
In other Mass Effect news, Kotaku has a report that alleges that most of the game’s development took place in the last 18 months prior to launch. Issues cited by studio sources include difficulties adapting the Frostbite engine, a change in project management, staffing problems, and communication challenges with geographically distant offices.
The Xbox One backwards compatibility program has been scooting along since November 2015. During the launch, Microsoft hailed it as one of the biggest requests from Xbox gamers. Certainly, gamers are willing to defend the feature. The forum to request new Xbox 360 BC additions lists hundreds of thousands of votes per title. Purchases of landmark games like Red Dead Redemption or Call of Duty: Black Ops II are strong enough to push them into current sales charts when they launch on the compatibility service. It’s a huge win for gamers in principle, but is it actually used much?
According to data compiled by Ars Technica, the answer is “not really.” In fact, looking at the total time that Xbox players spend across all services the console offers, it amounts to 1.5% of everyone’s activity. That’s not a lot of return on investment in sheer user time, but intangibles like marketing and retention may hold value to Microsoft beyond those disparaging figures. Everyone seems to want it, but very few people take advantage of backwards compatibility. Maybe Sony’s global sales executive Jim Ryan was on to something when he asked Time “Why would anybody play this?” in regards to how older games look on newer consoles.
Menaphos, the largest new area added to RuneScape, is now live. The venerable free-to-play MMO which has been trucking along since 2001, has expanded organically over the years, so Menaphos is a bit of new thing for the game. Instead of a progression of bits and bobs, developer Jagex is releasing one cohesive package of new content that includes two new cities, about 40 hours of quests, new skills, and new loot. Unlike the 2014 update of the Elvish lands of Prifddinas, which was previously the “largest” addition to the game, Menaphos is completely new content. Lead designer David Osborne told PCGamesN that Menaphos marks a change in the way Jagex will release content.
“We’re used to drip-feeding good, additive pieces of content weekly, but this is about bringing all of that together to give players something they can really immerse themselves in – a long-form story, a lot of skilling and combat content, an expansion to a level cap – all the things you’d want or expect from an expansion.”
Ever since the Nintendo Switch was announced, one of the big questions people had was how chat would work on the new console? Nintendo’s answer has been a bit vague and disappointing. Essentially, the company told everyone to wait for the launch of a separate phone app in late 2017. Did this mean voice chat wouldn’t be handled natively on the console? Thanks to peripheral manufacturer Hori, we now know how this will look, at least on early solutions. It’s not pretty. The upcoming Hori Switch Splatoon 2 headset plugs into the Switch portable unit and your phone at the same time via a cable splitter. It’s a mess of cables and plugs, but at least the splitter is being manufactured to look like a stylized squid. You can have your in-game Splatoon 2 character wear a set of the same headphones, so there’s that.
Tokyo 42 and Hover: Revolt of Gamers (pictured) are distinct types of games, the former based on teensy Crusder-style micro-gunplay with the slightest touch of Hitman, the latter based on nostalgia for Jet Set Radio in a post-rollerblading era. But they’re both futuristic open-worlds bathed in bright bright colors, the likes of which you haven’t seen since the invention of neon pink (some time in the 80s, no doubt). They both came out today, which makes this the most colorful Wednesday on record. And based on preliminary faffing about, I can vouch for both being made by people who know what they’re doing.
Bohemia Interactive, the studio behind the Arma series, is jumping into the free-to-play multiplayer shooter space with Argo. The project, initially started in November 2016, is ready for release on Steam in a few weeks. It’s a 5-on-5 competitive or 10-player cooperative shooter that will be entirely free for all players. There will be an optional $10 DLC offered that will give owners new animations for the match ending MVP screen, cosmetic gear, premium server access, and the ability to use vehicles in the editor. That editor will be a “trimmed down” version of the full Arma 3 scenario editor, which supports the initial vision of Argo as an incubator platform for Arma development.
The developers of RiME say they will disable the game’s anti-tamper software if anyone can crack it. The PC version of RiME uses Denuvo protection software, which has a controversial reputation with some gamers. Concerns over consumer rights, performance issues, and server outages have dogged the application since it took over the market from Starforce as the premiere third-party solution to stop piracy. Tequila Works, the Spanish developer of RiME, took to Steam’s discussion forums shortly after the game’s launch to answer complaints about their use of Denuvo while offering to remove the offending software if it is cracked. The developer bizarrely stated that Denuvo was used in an anti-tamper capacity for their single player game and not specifically to curb piracy.
We have had discussions about Denuvo internally, and one of the key points of all of those discussions have simply been, we want to ensure the best gaming experience for RiME players. RiME is a very personal experience told through both sight and sound. When a game is cracked, it runs the risk of creating issues with both of those items, and we want to do everything we can to preserve this quality in RiME.
Later, Cody Bradley, the game’s producer at Grey Box clarified the Denuvo situation.
The fact of the matter is that we looked at the piracy rate on games that were very similar to RiME, and it scared us. At the end of the day, our obligation as a publisher is to protect our development teams intellectual property to the best of our ability.
While Grey Box admits that Denuvo creates a “small performance hit” on RiME, they do not believe it is the cause of any major issues. Denuvo has been used in many PC games since it hit the market in 2014.
Hacknet, the popular game about computer hacking, now has Steam Workshop support so players can hack new adventures together and share them with other hackers. The Hacknet Extension update is free for all owners of Hacknet. You can’t hack the planet Zero Cool style, but the update allows players to create their own scenarios, themes, and in-game programs. True to the nature of the game, the update comes with instructions not meant for the faint of heart.
Monarch’s Reign, the next free DLC update for Titanfall 2, features a new multiplayer mech that players of the single player campaign should recognize. The Monarch is a “reverse-engineered” version of the Vanguard Titan, the same model of robo-buddy the player character bonds with in the story. Will the Monarch be as lovably snarky as “BT” is in the solo game? Likely not, but players can always recite deadpan lines in their heads if they’re feeling lonely. The update will also come with the usual array of cosmetic items to buy, a revamped version of the Relic map from the first game, and fixes for existing maps.
Monarch’s Reign will be released on May 30th, just in time to miss the long weekend!
War in Crusader Kings II is a complicated thing. New players are usually shocked to discover that despite the reputation of the time period covered, monarchs can’t just declare wars willy-nilly. Casus Belli is needed. That is, you must have a justification for warfare. Thankfully, there is a loophole for leaders that want to beat the drums. Players can fabricate a claim which will eventually give them the support they need to levy troops and get folks marching, but it takes time. Time they may not have before alliances and strengths shift on the map.
According to Paradox, players expressed frustration with the way Fabricate Claim currently works, so the studio is coming up with a different way to get on war footing.
We’re going to deemphasize the “Fabricate Claim” job by giving all playable entities (including Christians) a form of “Unjustified War” Casus Belli that will allow you to seize a single County for an upfront cost of Piety, Prestige or Gold.
As the Hottentots said to the Dutch, this could be really big. Assuming Paradox doesn’t muck it up, being able to declare war with just a bit of an upfront cost has the potential to upend gameplay. There’s no word on when this change will occur, but it’s a likely bet that an update of this importance will accompany the release of a major expansion, like the next one which is supposed to cover the Himalayas.
