Wednesday, October 16, 2013

News::Intel delays production of Broadwell chips

Intel has just confirmed that its upcoming Broadwell PC chips would be facing a production delay of up to 3 months.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374607/intel-delays-production-of-broadwell-chips

News::Montagues Mount Review: A Plodding Attempt at a Scary Dear Esther | GameFront

GameFront - "For me, the cardinal sin of any video game is the wasting of my time. Im an adult at this point in my game-playing life, and my free time is limited by all sorts of obligations. So if a game wants to take up my time, it has to work for it. It must earn my attention, and it must recognize that keeping me waiting for stupid things, like slowly opening doors or the cranking of machinery as a puzzle is completed, becomes inexcusable if it happens too often."



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374595/montagues-mount-review-a-plodding-attempt-at-a-scary-dear-esther-gamefront

News::First Impressions: Defying Death in Dark Souls II

PS - "Our stamina bar drained slowly, as engulfed by utter darkness, the ominous sound of a huge armoured tortoises footsteps refused to fade into the black. This is the moment that it suddenly became clear that Dark Souls II would live up to every bit of its gruelling reputation and not only in terms of difficulty, but also in its continuation of the franchises tense, heart-stopping combat and fantastic, atmospheric level design."



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374599/first-impressions-defying-death-in-dark-souls-ii

News::Thoughts on The Stanley Parable Demonstration

Some of you might relish the experience of the completed game and not want it marred by having to repeat the same content over. The Average Gamer is here to tell you not to worry. The Stanley Parable Demonstration is a completely separate experience from the full game that shares nothing but tone.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374563/thoughts-on-the-stanley-parable-demonstration

News::Top 10 Swan Songs

IP Writes: "The video game industry has always been a volatile and unstable place to make a living. It was dangerous in the 80s, and maybe even more so now. Games cost vast amounts of money, and has become a business model that demands significant returns on a publishers investment if a development team wants to keep their jobs. Even when you create a remarkable game, theres no guarantee your job is safe; a difficult lesson that the inhabitants of this list all learned the hard way."



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374588/top-10-swan-songs

News::Hands-on Preview: How To Survive | The Average Gamer

Your first handy weapon will probably be the wooden stick, since a bunch of crates have shattered all over the beach. Hit zombies with it. Watch their heads fly off. Run away and hope to find a knife or stone and a rope to convert it into an axe. Find the materials to fashion bows and arrows and suddenly youre no longer running for your life. Youre standing your ground and tactically aiming for the big dumb zombie in the middle because you know hell explode and probably take the others with him.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374572/hands-on-preview-how-to-survive-the-average-gamer

News::You won’t need to keep a computer by the Xbox One to help you play games.

News::Watch Dogs Interview: Connectivity, stealth in plain sight, and the relevancy of reality

El33tonline writes: "El33tonline recently chatted with Watch Dogs lead game designer, Danny Belanger, to dive a little deeper into this open world and discover how we, too, might be able to shut down Chicago while escaping the police and much more."



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374593/watch-dogs-interview-connectivity-stealth-in-plain-sight-and-the-relevancy-of-reality

News::The Wolf Among Us Episode 1 Review | Geekenstein

"In spite of Jurassic Park, I have been a Telltale fan since they brought the adventure game back to us. Fables may have been my least favorite licensed acquired in the deal that brought us all of these games, but The Wolf Among Us has intrigued and entertained me in ways that none of the other games have. There are still the occasional technical hiccups that seem to mark a Telltale game, but the whole package rises above them." - David Rhinehart of Geekenstein



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374592/the-wolf-among-us-episode-1-review-geekenstein

News::Plus XP: Interview with Mike Bithell

Garvaos from Plus XP writes "After my hands on time with Mike Bithells new game Volume. At the Eurogamer Expo, I took some time out with the Indie developer. If you are looking to get into indie development or simply want to know some more about Thomas Was Alone and Volume then look no further."



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374458/plus-xp-interview-with-mike-bithell

News::New Minecraft import tool announced for Spark Rising

Wicked Loot has announced an all new feature for their upcoming indie game Spark Rising. Minecraft fans can now import their creations into Spark Rising. Spark Rising is a build and battle sandbox game, mixing gameplay elements from Minecraft and Star Wars Battlefront 2,



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374239/new-minecraft-import-tool-announced-for-spark-rising

News::Steam Machines: Two Perspectives

Two members of the IP team give their general thoughts on Valve's recent announcements of the Steam Machines, Valve's foray into the console market. One comes from the perspective of a PC gamer, and the other from a console gamer fascinated by PC gaming.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374325/steam-machines-two-perspectives

News::EVE Online: Battle of the Podcasters and other shenanigans

What happens when one podcaster from the EVE Online community baits another? Why, potential hilarity ensues of course!



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374543/eve-online-battle-of-the-podcasters-and-other-shenanigans

News::How The Watch Dogs Delay Solved my Next Gen Dilemma

Clickonline writes "thanks to Ubisofts great Quality Control and (perhaps) slightly less great time management, Im really not forking over a half grand for a single solitary game!"



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374525/how-the-watch-dogs-delay-solved-my-next-gen-dilemma

News::Borderlands 2 Headhunter 1: TK Bahas Bloody Harvest Date Announced

2K have given out details for Borderlands 2 Headhunter 1: TK Bahas Bloody Harvest !



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374556/borderlands-2-headhunter-1-tk-bahas-bloody-harvest-date-announced

News::Ubisoft Talks Watch_Dogs Disrupt Engine, Physics, Global Illumination, City Size, Modding Scene

DSOGaming writes: "A couple of days ago, we had the pleasure to interview Dominic Guay, Senior Producer of Watch_Dogs, Jonathan Morin, Creative Director of Watch_Dogs, and Francis Boivin, 3D Programming Team Lead, of Watch_Dogs about Ubisofts upcoming sandbox title. Dominic, Jonathan and Francis shared some new tech details about the Disrupt engine, its global illumination solution, its physics and the games city size."



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374552/ubisoft-talks-watch-dogs-disrupt-engine-physics-global-illumination-city-size-modding-scene

News::DICE: making Battlefield 4 look the same on all platforms would be "the coward's way out"

"You should compare it to other games on the same platform," not different versions - executive producer Patrick Bach.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374511/dice-making-battlefield-4-look-the-same-on-all-platforms-would-be-the-cowards-way-out

News::Gamestop Weekly Deals Include Savings on Assassins Creed 3, Black Ops 2, and More

Gamestop's weekly deals have been revealed including savings on Black Ops 2, Assassin's Creed 3, and more.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374569/gamestop-weekly-deals-include-savings-on-assassins-creed-3-black-ops-2-and-more

News::ZTGD | The Wolf Among Us: Episode 1 - Faith Review

Jae Lee writes: After the critical success of The Walking Dead season one, many were left wondering, Whats next for Telltale Games? While the seemingly inevitable sequel to The Walking Dead is fast approaching, Telltale releases a title based on the graphic novel series, Fables and shows just exactly how much theyve improved on their craft since their last release. What if the characters from the fairy tales we grew up with were all real? The big bad wolf, the three little pigs, humpty dumpty and more. What if they lived among us casting a veil over our eyes with elaborate magic while hiding in plain sight? That is precisely the case in the world of The Wolf Among Us. After what is referred to as the Exodus the Fables fled to New York and built themselves a place where they could call home.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374568/ztgd-the-wolf-among-us-episode-1-faith-review

News::Toki Tori for Wii U set to arrive on Halloween

When it was revealed that Two Tribes was releasing three games on the Wii U eShop, they noted that the original Toki Tori would be arriving sometime in October. Now we know that Nintendo has approved the game for release, and that they're shooting for October 31st.


We still have Edge coming in November, and Rush in December.


Two Tribes [Twitter]


Toki Tori for Wii U set to arrive on Halloween screenshot






via destructoid http://www.destructoid.com/toki-tori-for-wii-u-set-to-arrive-on-halloween-263656.phtml

News::Don't compare Xbox One and PS4 Battlefield 4 to PC, says DICE

Gamers shouldn't compare console editions of Battlefield 4 to the PC versions, the franchise's executive producer Patrick Bach has told OXM.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374548/dont-compare-xbox-one-and-ps4-battlefield-4-to-pc-says-dice

News::The Gamer Studio: Knock-Knock Review

The Gamer Studio reviews Knock-Knock. Knock-Knock is a Indie Horror game, developed by Ice-Pick Lodge which was made possible by crowd funding on Kickstarter. Itll get your heart racing as you try to escape from the monsters in your home, but will leave you wondering why youre being chased by these monsters at the end.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374111/the-gamer-studio-knock-knock-review

News::Dragon's Crown cross-platform multiplayer now live


Dragon's Crown is now equipped with cross-platform multiplayer in North America, Atlus USA has announced. A new title update allows PlayStation 3 and Vita players to set aside their differences and band together in four-player co-op adventures. Happy hunting!


Dragon's Crown cross-platform multiplayer now live screenshot






via destructoid http://www.destructoid.com/dragon-s-crown-cross-platform-multiplayer-now-live-263643.phtml

News::DICE: We want to make sure Battlefield 4 on PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 looks better than Battlefield 3

The upcoming latest addition to the Battlefield series, Battlefield 4, has been the center of criticism by many gamers. From low resolution announcement for next-gen consoles version to saying the game will look like current-gen consoles version for the sake of graphical parity, DICE hasnt been able to rest ever since the first showing of Battlefield 4.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374537/dice-we-want-to-make-sure-battlefield-4-on-playstation-3-xbox-360-looks-better-than-battlefield-3

News::Waiting For Cooldowns: Issue 1 | CalmDownTom

"In the run up to Season 4 of the worlds biggest video game, League of Legends, I landed a chance to start a LoL column for CalmDownTom. Could I resist? You bet your Rabadons I couldnt! Ive been playing League of Legends since pre-Season 3, and the chart-topping MOBA from California based Riot Games quickly took over all of my gaming time. My Xbox? Neglected on a shelf. My Wii? Gathering dust, remembering days gone by when it dominated my attention." Says CalmDownTom



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374512/waiting-for-cooldowns-issue-1-calmdowntom

News::War Thunder Review (PC) | CalmDownTom

If you like hardcore flight combat games, or even a Ace Combat fan then give this game a try. If youre not into planes then hold off playing this game until they add in tanks and boats.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374523/war-thunder-review-pc-calmdowntom

News::Game Guys review - Alien Rage

Jim Avery: "If there's one genre that I feel is a bit overdone, it's the gritty first-person shooter (FPS). Burly, armored men with enormous weaponry head to war with an alien species over the future of the human race, in a story that takes itself just a bit too seriously, trying too hard to be mature. Fortunately, there's another game company out there that apparently feels the same way, and it's this company, CI Games, that has given us Alien Rage. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, Alien Rage feels like a send-up of titles like Gears of War, while providing players with some pure shooter gameplay."



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374355/game-guys-review-alien-rage

News::Montagues Mount Review | CalmDownTom

"Montagues Mount from Polypusher Studios tries desperately to achieve Type A, the most difficult and rewarding form of horror and it fails spectacularly. The Irish island you find yourself on is a bland landscape indeed, and nothing about it draws you in. You wake up on a beach, no memory of who or where you are, and your first task is to find a walking stick; clearly, however you got here, you got injured along the way." Says CalmDownTom



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1373781/montagues-mount-review-calmdowntom

News::Grand Theft Auto 5: Top 10 Criminal Activities

Grand Theft Auto 5 is filled with crime and violence but what are the most dangerous and exciting activities that players cant miss while playing this Rockstar title?



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374487/grand-theft-auto-5-top-10-criminal-activities

News::City State Entertainment Love Duck

Over the weekend City State Entertainment published their first Piercing the Veil column which is aimed at answering questions sent in by community members. The first article includes some exciting information as well as some insight into the team behind the upcoming Camelot Unchained



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374368/city-state-entertainment-love-duck

News::Nvidia teasing "super secret" announcement on October 21st

According to PC Perspective's events updates, Nvidia will be holding a "super secret" live stream on October 21st. It appears that the GPU manufacturer is ready to respond to AMD's recent initiatives at GPU 14.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374497/nvidia-teasing-super-secret-announcement-on-october-21st

News::Otherworld: Shades of Fall - New Screens

This time round, Fiona has been turned into a stone statue while Shade and Huntsman are trying to hunt you down. Get ready for this third game in one of the most acclaimed HOPA series, hitting the stores real soon!



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374509/otherworld-shades-of-fall-new-screens

News::Assassin's Creed 4 predicted to sell 20% less than AC3

Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag is expected to sell at least 10 million units, Ubisoft has revealed. The figure pins Black Flag below last year's Assassin's Creed 3, which sold 12.5 million units during its first six months on sale.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374490/assassins-creed-4-predicted-to-sell-20-less-than-ac3

News::Most Anticipated MMOG Aura Kingdom Unveiled 9 Classes

Having gone through nearly 3 years of development by X-LEGEND Entertainment, Aura Kingdom, published by Aeria Games in North America, is coming close to the first closed beta test.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374415/most-anticipated-mmog-aura-kingdom-unveiled-9-classes

News::How to survive in How to Survive


Right here's a trailer for How to Survive, a zombie filled survival game. Thinly veiled as tips, the video runs down more like a feature list. Players will hunt and prepare food, build shelter, craft weapons and equipment... oh, and defend against zombies.


This kind of game appeals to me. I was pretty deeply invested in Don't Starve for a while. How to Survive looks along the same lines, albeit a little less fanciful, so it has my attention.


Expect How to Survive to appear on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 this month. A Wii U version is also expected, with a release date yet to be determined.


How to survive in How to Survive screenshot






via destructoid http://www.destructoid.com/how-to-survive-in-how-to-survive-263632.phtml

News::Goodbye Deponia Interview with Creator Jan Poki Müller-Michaelis

GamingLives sits down with the charismatic and quirky creator of Deponia, Poki. "It makes your brain somewhat strange when you write puzzles, because you want to surprise yourself, otherwise you dont know if youre really surprising the player, so you have to find a way to write things that surprise yourself all the time."



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374492/goodbye-deponia-interview-with-creator-jan-poki-m-ller-michaelis

News::Singer 'NS Yoon-G' Transforms Into Amazon Warrior For 'Migeum Online'

Korean singer NS Yoon-G (pictured) revealed a pictorial gallery on Oct 11 of herself as a Amazon warrior in a computer game. She recently drew attention when she appeared in the singer Youmes Cheap Ring music video, and now she has been chosen to model for the online game Migeum Online. An insider said, We chose her because her bold and diverse attractiveness fit well with the game characters.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374429/singer-ns-yoon-g-transforms-into-amazon-warrior-for-migeum-online

News::Haunted Memories: Episode One Review (Strategy Informer)

From Strategyinformer.com: "In games writing and in particular, games reviewing there is a certain expectation about who is the 'right' person to review a particular game or style of game. For instance, if you task someone with little experience of RTS with reviewing a new Starcraft game, you can expect them to miss some of the nuance, to struggle with army composition, build order or base construction. Someone whose experience of RPGs is largely limited to single-player, narrative driven titles will have no context when coming to an MMO and is likely to judge it on the wrong terms. But when it comes to horror games, things are a little different, how do we judge someone to be fit to review a horror game? Is it someone with a sense of timing and technique who can objectively look at the ways in which a game seeks to manipulate the player. Or is it perhaps a person with a background knowledge of the mythology of a title and can judge how well that property is used to construct the ex...



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374489/haunted-memories-episode-one-review-strategy-informer

News::Let's Build in Minecraft - Football

Lindsay joins Geoff and Gavin as they bring you another installment of Let's Build in Minecraft.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374363/lets-build-in-minecraft-football

News::New Call of Duty: Ghosts Trailer Shows Off Classic Ghost Multiplayer Pre-Order Character

MP1st - Those thinking of pre-ordering Call of Duty: Ghosts ahead of its November 5 release date can look forward to not only the exclusive Free Fall bonus multiplayer map, but also a bonus multiplayer character based off the iconic Modern Warfare 2 character, Ghost.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374365/new-call-of-duty-ghosts-trailer-shows-off-classic-ghost-multiplayer-pre-order-character

News::Primal Invasion Arrives In Kings And Legends

With the continued success of the closed beta for Hearthstone and rumors surrounding a possible Riot Games TCG game, everyone is excited about the Primal Invasion update for Kings And Legends, a free-to-play browser MMO that focuses on card collection and battles.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374397/primal-invasion-arrives-in-kings-and-legends

News::Grand Theft Auto 5 PC Release Hinted By HP

AliveGameZone - After Nvidia before they back off, and major European online retailers, HP is the latest to say that the PC version of the game is slated for a fall 2013 release.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374459/grand-theft-auto-5-pc-release-hinted-by-hp

News::Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 Review - digthatbox.com

Konami has just released Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 and it's the most ambitious version of the game in series history. With a new engine and a host of new options and improvements PES 2014 is the best version of the game so far, but is it enough to help this franchise step out of the shadow of it's primary rival? Read this review and find out.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374460/pro-evolution-soccer-2014-review-digthatbox-com

News::Shadowplay: Journey to Wonderland Review - Alice is Mad | Pixels for Breakfast

Pixels for Breakfast writes: Every now and then Lewis Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland will turn up some way or another in the video game universe, whether in Bioshock, Batman: Arkham City, Alice: Madness Returns and the Square Enix Kingdom Hearts series. Carrolls classic wonderland continues to serve as an inspiration for many writers and artists, and Shadowplay: Journey to Wonderland is no exception.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374413/shadowplay-journey-to-wonderland-review-alice-is-mad-pixels-for-breakfast

News::Watch Dogs 'already a great game' but delay will increase franchise potential - Ubi

Watch Dogs is "already a great game", Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot believes, but the decision to delay it into next year will offer opportunities for the publisher to build it as a key "long-term pillar" alongside games like Assassin's Creed and Far Cry.



via N4G: pc news feed http://n4g.com/news/1374475/watch-dogs-already-a-great-game-but-delay-will-increase-franchise-potential-ubi

News::Massive attack: the rise and rise of mingleplayer


Bungie’s Destiny seeks to mix single- and multiplayer play in unprecedented ways.



Mingleplayer, the broad notion of mixing single- and multiplayer in seamless and mutually beneficial ways, is a hot topic right now – which makes you wonder what it was for the many other years it’s been around. What, beyond everyone’s apparent need to put the ‘next’ into ‘next generation’, has brought it to the fore? If Destiny can be made for consoles almost eight years old, is there anything really ‘next gen’ about it at all?


The word itself was invented by Splash Damage to describe its wildly ambitious FPS Brink, and was used, according to CEO Paul Wedgwood, until “someone far senior to us banned it”. Why they might have done so is important, and we’ll come to it in a moment. But first let’s establish precisely what the term meant for a studio born in the fires of playing and modding Quake –- born, dare it be said, next to modern multiplayer itself.


Back then, as Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena came to embody online multiplayer, the solution to your friends going offline, leaving you ‘alone in the zone’, was offline play with bots. “People immediately assume that’s going to be a boring, bland deathmatch experience,” says Wedgwood, “and you want to say that a game is more than that: an offline experience that’s like playing with humans.”


Mingleplayer, then, is “the idea that you can mingle in singleplayer with co-op buddies, and if they all lose their connection then it doesn’t matter because you carry on playing on your own. You could drop into multiplayer and you can make that transition very smoothly. And there’s no distinction, so you progress through the entire game in any direction at any point, and anybody can be human or AI in any proportion, and it shouldn’t matter or affect the experience at all.”



‘Mingleplayer’ was a term invented by Splash Damage to describe its wildly ambitious FPS Brink.



Much of Brink’s problem upon release, he says, is that it was compared to modern shooters. “I should have found a higher and better schema, like racing games. They’ve done story modes for years where you’ve had an online game that’s been great, and you’ve been able to play offline in story mode and have a garage, collect cars, upgrade them and everything else – and in many ways that’s what Brink is.


“Its structure is exactly like a racing game, with an online mode that you can play with friends, where in a great match you can’t tell the difference between the two. And then, when you play offline in story mode, AI fills in for the people that are otherwise absent. One of the challenges with Brink, and with this as a whole, is that there’s a lot of pressure to describe your game by using other games as a comparison.”


Maybe that’s why the word ‘mingleplayer’ was banned. Features and modes have been the vocabulary of game marketing and discussion since before there even was an online; and if there’s one thing we now know more than ever, it’s that a feature you can’t explain can be worse than no feature at all. Dig up Brink’s reviews and you’ll spend more time reading about what it is – which, in many cases, reads like someone’s best guess – than how sporadically its army of bots pulls it off. This is poison to a marketing team.


Brink was hardly alone in trying to make offline gameplay relevant to increasingly connected consoles. Wedgwood himself admits that “if Left 4 Dead 2 had a fun asynchronous tablet connection – Valve has slightly more integrity than that, but imagine – they’d basically have done everything that people are saying is going to happen in every meaningful way”.


Furthermore, other models were emerging that, despite interfering much less with that vital messaging, felt just as portentous. The most obvious, when you think of how it’s essentially as old as gaming itself, was the asynchronous score-chasing of Geometry Wars and Chair Entertainment’s Shadow Complex. As its ephemeral Metroid-like stylings and value for money are forgotten, the simple fact that Shadow Complex compares your scores to those of your friends as you go is its legacy.



Shadow Complex played its part in the revival of social singleplayer.



All it really does, of course, is revive the social gameplay lost in the rush to take console gaming online. The most important development of the current generation has been challenging the assumption that multiplayer should be global just because it can be – that being schooled by strangers is a viable stand-in for playing with friends, or even part of the same equation.


That’s not how Matt Southern, game director at DriveClub maker Evolution, ever wants to play again. “I think everybody had similar thoughts at one point about removing the barrier [between singleplayer and multiplayer]. But of course it only removed the in-game barriers; it didn’t address how inadequate that would make you feel.” For Evolution, preproduction of MotorStorm: Apocalypse is where things started to change.


“’Use me as the guinea pig,’ I said, because I remember playing Pacific Rift and, if I had to summarise my experience, I wasn’t trying to finish first but trying not to lose, and that doesn’t feel nice,” Southern says. “Online synchronous gaming was becoming more mainstream, and I guess by that point the FIFA crowd had joined in, a broader audience. If anything, it made the abuse even more acute, because it wasn’t just your Quake-heads playing those kinds of games.”


The idea of switching from knockabout games against friends to elite competition against strangers is no more appetising or sensible to Southern than, his metaphor goes, walking straight from Sunday five-a-side football onto the pitch against his favourite team, Everton. In what he calls “the online wilderness” of global multiplayer, all that anyone has in common are the commandments of play that, generally speaking, involve chalking up kills with prejudice. This is a world apart from playing with friends where the rules are no different to co-op or singleplayer: enjoy moments, tell stories.



Splash Damage is using aspects of asymmetrical multiplayer in Batman: Arkham Origins, too.



Before and after Brink, with its Enemy Territory games and now the multiplayer component of Batman: Arkham Origins, Splash Damage has used asymmetrical multiplayer to reconcile the worlds of e-sports and social play. Proper roles, contextual military objectives, embedded fiction. “For a long time we’ve been able to tell stories in multiplayer games, and for a long time we’ve known that players don’t get bored with playing that in sequence,” Wedgwood says. “Their player stories start to overtake the game story in a really meaningful, interesting way.”


So why now, this rush of games like Destiny (Bungie’s scaling sandbox that alternates chance encounters and epic firefights), Tom Clancy’s The Division (an instanced massively multiplayer shooter with PvE and PvP), Ascend: Hand Of Kul, DriveClub (Evolution’s long-gestating social racer), and The Crew (a persistent online racer from Test Drive Unlimited veteran Ivory Tower and Driver creator Reflections)?


Partly it’s safety in numbers, with developers offering such a tidal wave of exotic new online features that players and the videogame press have no choice but to suss them out. Wedgwood suspects that “in some ways you could release Brink now and people would just get on with enjoying it. It’s a given. It was always a requirement, but people just weren’t giving fans what they needed in their games.”


The more compelling reason, then, is written throughout this feature: research. The mingleplayer trend started in racing, of course, where Bizarre Creations swapped sports network (Project Gotham Racing 3’s Gotham TV) for social network in Blur. Where asynchronous multiplayer has grown throughout Codemasters’ racers as the need to come first has diminished. Where MotorStorm 3’s XP and betting system (you pick a rival and thus only have to beat someone) evolved into the private challenges and intelligent leaderboards of MotorStorm RC.



Project Gotham Racing 3 introduced Gotham TV, Bizarre’s first dabble in mingleplayer.



“I used to work at a university on a games course, and the industry would accuse us of ivory tower research with very little relationship to reality,” Southern recalls. “This would frustrate me because it’s not a university’s job to apply theory, it’s that of the creatives and business development people to figure out if something can be applied or used. And the research we did into asynchronous multiplayer and connected singleplayer was a blend of academic research, marketing expertise and practical experience from other companies. Next gen needed that: solid thinking as well as just faster processors.


“One of the things the industry suffers from is that it doesn’t do its homework. Designers base all of their judgement on things they’ve played and nothing else. There was a lot of cynicism surrounding the very idea of learning from Facebook or, dare I say it, Zynga. But it was a case of saying, ‘Look, we don’t want to emulate these guys, but they might offer us lessons about future design and development’.”


In hindsight, it should have been quite obvious. At its core, Facebook is precisely what mingleplayer has been promoting for years: a virtualised circle of friends. It’s a place where people feel online even when they’re not, where users think nothing of the fact that just a handful of friends are ever actually signed in. Everything feels voluntary, and no one has to worry about being at the right place at the right time.


But the journey from this to, say, the terrific Autolog service pioneered by Criterion’s Need For Speed titles, has been tough. Most of the thinking behind it – a key text for Evolution and SCEE was the book Grouped by Paul Adams, the hotshot Google and Facebook researcher behind seminal study The Real Life Social Network, which identified the gap between virtual and actual social circles – was written for media and marketing communities. Early interpretations in gaming were then sullied, Southern recalls, by “our designers seeing grotesque spam on their Facebook and Twitter feeds fired out by various games. People were essentially saying, ‘We must never use these methods again; our social and gaming habits must stay separate because they compromise each other’.”



Criterion has contributed to the rise of migleplayer, too – its Autolog added asymmetrical multiplayer to EA’s Need For Speed series.



The resistance was short-lived, the spam made targeted and voluntary. User-experience experts were invited into the fabric of tomorrow’s games and consoles, helping designers to ‘think social’. The rise of iPad, furthermore, where there’s no such thing as synchronous multiplayer, has given developers in every genre a mass of case studies.


For shooters, Wedgwood now predicts “the rise of the massively multiplayer shooter – except that, unlike World Of Warcraft, you can’t have a dungeon with 50 people in it because there just isn’t the bandwidth for that single instanced connection. So you’re going to see a rise in shooters that have instanced co-op or PvP segments with smaller player counts to maintain low latency and high bandwidth per player, and a rise in the number of holding cities where people can spend real money.”


Will this worsen the existing habit of shoehorning modes into games where they don’t sit comfortably? Not for Splash Damage, it seems, for which Batman: Arkham Origins sounds like something of a catharsis. “Historically we’ve got a habit of thinking like 15-year-olds. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was like that. It ended up taking us four years, and at one point it was a full-blown realtime strategy game in firstperson, still with base-versus-base combat. We haven’t given up on the concept of mingleplayer, but our next game will be a hell of a lot easier to explain to people than Brink was. And my advice to aspiring developers is: try not to invent mingleplayer at the same time as, you know, direct-control free running and objective-based co-op multiplayer; and drop in and out support for transitioning from singleplayer to co-op to multiplayer; and a completely new gameworld and IP.”


The risk for them, he warns, is that “when marketing teams do problem detection studies, they’ll find a vocal minority who want a thing and then it quite easily becomes the thing they think solves what a game needs for the next iteration. Developers will be under pressure to add singleplayer to their [multiplayer] games, but for the most part it’s not a healthy pursuit.”


The post Massive attack: the rise and rise of mingleplayer appeared first on Edge Online.






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News::Preview: Strider (Reboot) @ NYCC '13 [First Drop]

"Capcom had some booths showcasing a demo of a Strider build at New York Comic Con this year. From what we can tell it featured one level with about 15 minutes of gameplay. That's not to say we actually made it to the end of the demo, But we saw others who did!"



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News::GamerZines | Goodbye Deponia Preview - 'A Fitting and Funny Finale'

GamerZines writes: If you call yourself a fan of adventure games and you havent heard of Daedalics Deponia series then please do us a favour. Go to your nearest mirror, look yourself squarely in the eye and slap yourself across the face as hard as possible. Go do it, well wait That hurt us a little bit less than it hurt you, but really you should have heard of this series! Along with Telltale Games and Double Fine, Daedalic are one of the last major studios flying the point-and-click flag, and their work is slowly but surely reaching that high-water quality mark forged by LucasArts in the early 90s



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News::How to Survive Launch Trailer

How long could you survive on a zombie-infested island? Check out the trailer for How to Survive from 505 Games and Eko Software to see what you are up against. In this arcade-action survival game, players must fulfill the most basic of needs -- food, water and shelter -- and learn to make use of anything and everything they can get their hands on to craft and combine weapons and tools from handmade shotguns to fishing rods or Molotov cocktails. Along the way, players encounter an ensemble of characters, some friendly, some less so, including the mysterious Kovac, author of the How to Survive guide. Will his work lead you to safety?



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News::Open World Games for Next-Gen: Better, Not Bigger Games

"The open world games of this generation are really good, but not quite great, when you think about it. Many times Ill get the same reaction or outcome from NPCs with my in-game actions. If youve played open world games, you know what Im talking about here, if not let me break it down for you." - Bobby Perez of Str N Gaming



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