Turbine Inc. is out and Standing Stone is in. The Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online have both passed from Turbine’s care to a newly created studio consisting of MMO veterans called Standing Stone Games. Rob Ciccolini, executive producer on both games, announced that the new studio will partner with Daybreak Games for publishing. Ciccolini assures current players that plans for both games remain unchanged and that there will be no interruption in service.
Daybreak Games is the publisher of PlanetSide 2, H1Z1, EverQuest 2, and DC Universe Online as well as other titles.
Only a rogue one of these three podcasters will stand up for Rogue One. At the 1:39 mark, the three of us do a 3×3 about threes of characters in movies.
Is there anything better in Final Fantasy XV than Prompto’s delightful pictures? They capture the buddy road trip goofiness of a bunch of dudes hanging out, having adventures, high-fiving each other, and generally being a gaggle of lovable lunkheads. There’s an update for Final Fantasy XV coming on December 22nd that adds a free Holiday Pack DLC which includes a New Game Plus feature and themed photo frames for Prompto’s shutterbug hobby. It’s exactly what this bro-tastic posse of tourists needs. There’s also a couple of in-game goodies like a ticket that will transport the player’s party to a time-limited Moogle Chocobo Carnival in January. Owners of the season pass will have access to a premium version of the Holiday Pack that adds more special loot like a Ring of Resistance and a Stamina Badge.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 on PC now offers a way for players to host their own private servers for multiplayer. Update 18 for Black Ops 3 comes with a dedicated server tool for unranked multiplayer. Hosts can manage who plays on the server, match rules, the map rotation, and even use custom assets. Speaking of new assets, the update includes more content from the campaign and zombies maps for use by custom map creators. Instructions for the server tool are here.
In related news, Treyarch revealed that more content would be coming to Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 in 2017 for everyone. Developers Dan Bunting and Jason Blundell hinted that there is something called “Newton’s Crookbook” coming which likely involves Gobblegum crafting.
Although the new hotness of Infinite Warfare and the retro hotness of Modern Warfare Remastered are the primary push for Activision’s Call of Duty studios, it’s always good when the older titles remain supported. On PC, the Black Ops series remains the most popular of the Call of Duty entries, and Black Ops 3 in particular, is still the most played installment on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
I can think of at least nine reasons this list might be lacking: Gears of War 4, Uncharted 4, Titanfall 2, Salt and Sanctuary, Kathy Rain, Virginia, Forza Down Under, Dead Rising 4, and The Last Guardian. All games I didn’t get to play this year. I’ll throw in Just Dance 2017 to make it an even ten.
But from among the games I did play this year, let me tell you about my ten favorites.
After the jump, okay, maybe I did play Just Dance 2017, but I’d like to keep that between us.Continue reading →
Dishonored 2 has a lot of ways to kill enemies, but half of them will be locked away until a second playthrough with a different character. Empress Emily Kaldwin can’t do everything Corvo Attano can, and vice versa. Until now. There’s a beta patch available for the PC version of the game that adds a New Game Plus feature. The main addition in the update is the ability to choose Corvo or Emily and create your own suite of powers out of all the available abilities. Give Emily dominion over murderous rats, or let Corvo turn into a living shadow! All you have to do is beat the game once and New Game Plus will be available from the main menu. This new mode will also let you re-assign all the Runes you collected in the previous game.
Although it’s only available in beta on PC now, the New Game Plus update will launch for all platforms on December 19th. This is the first of two planned free content updates for Dishonored 2. The second update should arrive in January and will contain custom difficulty settings and a mission select menu.
Overrated is a loaded term. It looks good in a headline. It’s often used for no purpose other than to goad a reaction. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. When I call a game overrated, I don’t mean it’s bad, that the reviews were wrong, that the people who liked it were dopes, or even that I didn’t like it. It just means I’m surprised more people weren’t more critical, that the conversation wasn’t more often about ways the game could have been better.
I’m not really good at math, but here are the raw numbers. American Truck Simulator used to be at a scale of 1:35. With today’s update, it’s at a scale of 1:20. According to the developers at SCS Software, this means the maps are 1.75 times larger. I think they need to check their work. By my math, 1:35 minus 1:20 means the maps are :15 larger. Maybe it’s a metric thing. They’re European.
Math errors aside, this is a Big Deal. A fundamental part of level design, and especially open-world design, is the density of stuff. Which is directly related to the size of the maps. On one end of the scale, you have Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, which squeezed the Caribbean Sea into a tightly packed pond of concentrated naval action. On the other end of the scale, you have the original Battlezone in 1980, which didn’t have a single thing in it no matter how many quarters you spent looking for something. So when a developer releases a game and later says, “Uh, we’re going to rework the world to make it this much bigger, it’s going to have an effect on the gameplay experience.
And in the case of a laidback truck driving simulation like American Truck Simulator, more open space is appropriate. In Europe, everything is close together. That’s why they have so many wars. So Europe should have a high map density. You drive a half hour out of Paris and you’re practically in Warsaw. But going from Los Angeles to Las Vegas? It’s like playing Battlezone.
Mostly I’m just glad to have more room to drag that big-ass trailer around without constantly scraping other cars. In the words of Moe Howard, “Spread out!”
The Overwatch Winter Wonderland seasonal event is now live. Special loot boxes with Christmas-themed cosmetic skins and items will be available to earn (or buy) until January 2nd. There’s also a special instagib 6v6 mode called Mei’s Snowball Offensive that replaces the ice queen’s weapon with a single shot snowball gun. If the popularity of previous Overwatch skins are any indicator, we should see a brisk uptick in Overwatch porn with the new outfits.
So if the most disappointing category is a list of games that should have been better, the most surprising category is the opposite. These are games that were better than they should have been. Just as disappointing is about falling short of expectations, these surprising games exceeded expectations and, in some cases, were among the best games of the year.
After the jump, the ten most surprising games of 2016.Continue reading →
Universal Studios amusement parks and Nintendo are teaming up to bring Mario to life. Super Nintendo World, a special Nintendo-themed area of Universal Studios Japan, was revealed on Twitter. The theme park area will feature “gameplay, heroes and villains” from Nintendo’s most famous videogames. The companies hope to have Super Nintendo World open for visitors in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. It will cost an estimated $430 million to build.
Nintendo characters and the worlds they inhabit will be re-created at the highest level of quality through the strong partnership between Mr. Shigeru Miyamoto, Creative Fellow at Nintendo, and Mark Woodbury, President of Universal Creative, renowned for creative and technical excellence.
Similar Nintendo theme park additions are planned for Universal Orlando and Universal Studios Hollywood, but no specifics have been given. The partnership between Universal and Nintendo was first announced in May.
Calling a game disappointing arguably has more to do with me than the game itself. Disappointment isn’t an inherent quality. It can’t exist without some sort of expectation in the first place. In many cases, these games are sequels, or the creations of developers with proven track records, or entries in established genres, or games with promising beginnings. But for various reasons, a central fact about these games is that I had personally hoped they would be better.
After the jump, the ten most disappointing games of 2016.Continue reading →
We love so many of the people in this movie! The movie itself? Well, not so much. At the 45-minute, we try to stuff a 3×3 about suitcases into the overhead compartment while everyone waits impatiently in the aisle.
Kill Command director Steve Gomez has a background in visual effects and it shows. Here is a great example of how to use CG to make a low budget movie look like a big budget movie. Gomez presents a narrow but sharply focused view of near-future tech, follwing a squad of soldiers on a training mission. Their uniforms, their weapons, their hardware, their corporate liason with her cybernetic implants. It’s all so deliciously Deus Exxy even if it doesn’t have fancy cityscapes. You don’t need the sprawl of Blade Runner to do smart cyberpunk.
The cast is as solid as the production values. They look great, and they move through and between the action sequences as gracefully as Gomez shoots them. Vanessa Kirby in particular stands out as a cross between Lara Croft, Adam Jensen, Ripley in Aliens, and Burke in Aliens. Gomez isn’t shy about channeling his influences. Kill Command leans easily on classics like Aliens, Predator, Terminator, and even Westworld. In fact, if you watched HBO’s series to see robots run amok killing people, you were probably disappointed the season ended just as that was going to happen. Kill Command has got you covered.
The match ends and congratulations! You got a loot box reward! Do you click the button to unlock the chest? Do you scrap it? If you don’t get what you wanted, do you dole out some real-world money for some more turns at the slot machine? If only you knew what the odds were of getting that rare skin. Thanks to a new law in China, you might. (Translation available here.) Beginning May 1st, 2017, any company issuing virtual prizes with random rewards, like cosmetic skins that might pop out of loot chests, must publicly post the draw probabilities for each prize, and the draw results must be available for public review for at least 90 days.
China’s stance seems to be that if you’re going to have gambling mechanics in your game, then you’ll be subject to the same kinds of laws that regulate gambling in their country. In this case, companies will have to openly state the odds of winning, something most videogame loot reward schemes do not currently do.
This law may have far-reaching effects in the rest of the world for a lot of videogame companies. Unless publishers create specific rewards and odds tables for their games in China, (which may be more trouble than its worth) we could all start seeing exactly how rare that one mega-ultra-legendary skin is in the game. Regardless, like similar regulations for gambling, it’s doubtful that this will put any crimp in the brisk business of rolling the virtual dice.
