It’s from a Stephen King book. What could possibly go wrong? At the 1:05 mark, we burst out into a discussion of people on fire for this week’s 3×3.
Next week: Atomic Blonde
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In September, Blizzard announced that they would stop referring to Battle.net in favor of generically branding each part of the system with the company name. We’d get Blizzard Voice or the Blizzard App to call out various components of the client. The studio cited “occasional confusion and inefficiencies” when it came to everyone writing or speaking about their products. At the time, people grumbled that it seemed like a change for change’s sake and they were disappointed that Blizzard was giving up the Battle.net name which they’d come to associate with titles like Diablo, StarCraft, and World of Warcraft.
Almost a year later, Blizzard is admitting defeat. Battle.net will stick around. The compromise is that the company will officially refer to their systems as “Blizzard Battle.net” which will hopefully cut down on any confusion and inefficiencies.
Atlas Rises, the coming update for Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky, finally adds a step towards real-time elbow-rubbing multiplayer. The joint exploration feature lets up to 16 players see and communicate with one another – as glowing orbs. Think of them as the ghostly shadows of players in parallel dimensions for now.
“While interaction with others is currently very limited, this is an important first step into the world of synchronous co-op in No Man’s Sky.”
The Atlas Rising update adds a bunch of improvements that may satisfy the many detractors of the game. There’s thirty more hours of story to uncover, portals that can beam you around the galaxy, a new mission system, terrain editing tools, improved space combat, low altitude planetary flight, and new ships and items to purchase and trade. Will the game finally rise above Spore? Spore didn’t have the glowing player orbs from Fable 2, so score one for space orbs!
Papers, Please the Eastern Bloc bureaucratic border control game from Lucas Pope, is getting its own official short film. First announced on Twitter in May, the teaser above shows off how well filmmakers Nikita and Liliya Ordynskiy have captured the depressing and grimy mundanity of manning a checkpoint booth in Arstotzka. Alas, the desk in the trailer looks a little too roomy to properly depict the tiny desktop the player had to use to shuffle paperwork while evaluating visitors.
The short film is due later this year.
Remember that scene in the one Friday the 13th movie when the snarky counselor turned on her fellow campers, and killed them with her machete? You probably don’t because it never happened. Jason, or his mother, are the killers! (Okay, there was the one psychotic killer ambulance driver, but the less said about A New Beginning, the better.) The kids are supposed to run around in a panic, scream, hide, and end up spit-roasted on an improvised weapon. Alas, the players of Friday the 13th: The Game have no loyalty to the movies’ tropes. Team-killing is rampant, leaving the poor Jason player to wander a mostly empty map seeking out the lone enemy. Once again, players prove they can ruin any concept no matter how simple.
The developers are responding by nerfing the heck out of the weapons. In public matches, the majority of lethal hardware will no longer work on the other campers. You’ll still be able to harm other players with traps and the car, so expect a lot more vehicular homicide after the next patch.
Valve has tactical shooting, hero shooting, and a MOBA. The two things missing from their catalog would be an MMO and a deck builder. With Artifact, Valve takes their Dota property into card flopping. Run, everybody! The 800-lb gorilla is entering the CCG room!
All we know for know for now is that it’s coming in 2018.
There’s permadeath, and there’s no fooling, for reals, forever death. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice features a game over mechanic that will eventually delete your save file if you fail enough times in-game. Ninja Theory’s hardcore game may be mechanically easier than something like Dark Souls, but the failure punishment goes one further. The player character, Senua, is infected with a creeping darkness on her hands and arms which grows with every death. Die too many times and the darkness will consume Senua leading to the ultimate consequence. The game deletes your save file. There’s no cute gravestone to mark your character’s death. No silly epilogue. Your save file is gone and you get to start all the way from the beginning, fresh as the minute you started. Consider this your public service announcement.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is available on PlayStation 4 and Windows PC.
Sometimes I think I have all the Pinball FX tables I’ll ever need. Then the developers at Zen Studios make announcements like this:
[In Universal Classic Pinball] players can get behind the wheel of the DeLorean time machine and travel through different eras of Hill Valley to fix the space-time continuum on the Back to the Future table, take on the terrifying great white shark on the Jaws table, and go on an adventure with Elliot as he helps E.T. contact his spaceship and return to the stars on the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial table!
I didn’t realize until I read that announcement, but I’ve gone my entire life with a hole in my soul the exact shape of a Jaws pinball table. The Universal Classics collection, which might as well be called Jaws Pinball and Two Other Things, will come out with the launch of Pinball FX3. The target date is only “this summer”.
Most of the podcast was really into this critically acclaimed sequel. Most. At the 1:18, we top off the podcast with a discussion of wigs in movies.
Next week: Dark Tower
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Derek Yu of Spelunky fame is working with the creators of Downwell, Time Barons, Skorpulac, and Madhouse to create a retro anthology of games sold in one bundle. UFO 50 will feature fifty little games that will add up to over 100 hours of content. Each title will be slightly smaller than the 8-bit inspirations from the 1980’s, but the goal is to pack each experience with the creator’s unique vision to give the player a variety pack of gaming. All the games will have a single-player mode, with about a third additionally offering cooperative or competitive multiplayer.
UFO 50 will launch on PC in 2018 first. Pricing has not been announced.
One of us is having, uh, issues with Long Dark. Then Tom Chick, Nick Diamon, and Jason McMaster discuss the long shallow difficulty curve of Fortnight, Battlefield 1’s latest maps, Titanfall 2’s new horde mode, and some poop farming game called Slime Rancher. And be sure not to miss the C-SPAN worthy legal hearing to determine whether Mad Max or Shadow of Mordor is the better game.
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One of the side activities people remember with fondness in Assassin’s Creed 2 was the tomb puzzles that could be unlocked under the game’s towns. These six puzzle areas consisted of platform timing, switch pulling, and navigation gauntlets that tested Ezio’s abilities. A little bit of Lara Croft spelunking in between the assassinating. Unfortunately, the series never really returned to that style of gameplay. Later Assassin’s Creed games would substitute the tombs with straightforward map icon collectathons or maddeningly obtuse hidden riddles that lead right back to map icons. Ubisoft is returning to the tomb idea in Assassin’s Creed Origins. Unlike the strangely out of place trap-filled tombs in Ezio’s Italy, having tombs in ancient Egypt makes sense.
“So we put a lot of effort into recreating these tombs. Everything that is actually known we’ve mapped it out, we have images, we have research that’s been done on tombs, we actually try to replicate it as close as possible. So for example, the Greek pyramid, all the chambers, all the corridors are an authentic representation. Now, of course, we have a bit of fun and go a bit further, like, what are the secret chambers that have not been discovered yet?”
Assassin’s Creed Origins will launch on October 27th.
Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians was supposed to be Playdek’s take on Final Fantasy Tactics with series helmer Yasumi Matsuno’s creative assistance. The Kickstarter ended successfully in February 2014 having raised over $660,000 in funding. It is now one of the most high-profile videogame Kickstarter failures. What started as a single player story-heavy strategy game became a player-vs-player boondoggle that consistently disappointed fans with each increasingly rare update. Now, two years past its initial release date, Playdek has sold the project off to Little Orbit.
Little Orbit CEO Matthew Scott says that they are starting from scratch on Unsung Story, and that they do not have the resources to refund dissatisfied backers. The good news is that Little Orbit is returning to the original single player direction of the game, and they are committed to delivering Kickstarter backer rewards at no additional cost. No schedule was announced, but at least someone seems to be working on something. Little Orbit does have a solid, if not unspectacular, record in the business. At this point, dependable may be more desirable than being too ambitious.
If Rapture: World Conquest feels like a port of a mobile game, that’s because it is a port of a mobile game. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But this facile little iteration on the usual “grow your armies and throw them up against the other growing armies” genre is about what you’d expect. It’s got swipe-n’-drag written all over the interface and the big fat buttons around the margins are built for tapping. You can see the micropayment hooks dangling from the edges of the design. You can’t turn off the cheap classical music soundtrack, probably because there’s no meaningful sound underneath it. But you want to know the game’s biggest crime? Continue reading →
Despite fairly positive reviews, when Blizzard’s Diablo III launched in 2012, there were problems. Between server login issues, pacing hiccups, and the dreaded auction house, a lot of fans were underwhelmed. This is what Blizzard gave us after Diablo II? It had been almost nine years since the last Diablo game, and the genre had matured. Why were we slogging through three difficulties to get to the actual game? What happened to the Stones of Jordan? Why was this damn auction house even here? Jason Schreier of Kotaku has a fascinating look at how Josh Mosqueira was brought on to the development team and how his early work on the console version of Diablo III formed the basis for the way the company would eventually revamp the game into the juggernaut we know now.
“And in some ways, looking back at it… there’s a level of being very naive. We’ve been mucking around with this game for about six months, not knowing all the history behind all the decisions leading up to this moment, just walking in like kids and pushing buttons.”
The article is an excerpt from Jason Schreier’s upcoming book “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels” and it’s a great reminder that what started as a bit of a disappointment to many, is now considered the genre leader.
