Zach Lott

Pachter: Dragon Age Team Focused on Keeping Old Republic Afloat

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May 092012
 

Over at GamesIndustry International, they’ve got the scoop on why news on a new Dragon Age title is scarce. According to industry analyst Michael Pachter, Bioware has been slow to begin work on a third entry in the fantasy RPG series because the team responsible for its development has been too busy working on Star Wars: The Old Republic. It was previously revealed that the team will make a sequel instead of developing additional DLC for Dragon Age II.

“Dragon Age III appears to have slipped to FY:14. We had previously expected the next Dragon Age to be released in Q4:13, two years after its predecessor. However, we believe that a significant portion of the BioWare team responsible for the game was reassigned to Star Wars in order to create content and fix bugs to keep the game’s audience engaged,” he said in the report.

The third game has yet to be officially announced, but we know that it will 1) feature a new protagonist, 2) use the dialogue wheel from the second game, 3) allow players to import save files, and 4) have a map four to five times larger than that of the first game.

Old Republic was supposed to be the game that would wrestle away control of the MMO space from World of Warcraft, or at least be the first game to coexist peacefully with it. Instead, the game is bleeding subscribers just months after launch, losing 400,000 just in the past two months. Meanwhile, Blizzard’s MMO-to-end-them-all trucks along with around 10 million active subscribers and a new expansion set for a holiday release.

Elder Scrolls Online is its next challenger, and my colleague Ryan Hillis has a few things to say about that.

Source: GamesIndustry International

Bioshock Infinite Pushed Into 2013

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May 092012
 

Take Two announced this morning that Bioshock Infinite has been delayed and will now be released on February 26, 2013, according to a report from Kotaku. The series’ third entry was originally slated for an October release, but Irrational Games creative director Ken Levine said that the delay was necessary to implement “some specific tweaks and improvements” that “will make Infinite into something even more extraordinary.”

“I won’t kid you: BioShock Infinite is a very big game, and we’re doing things that no one has ever done in a first-person shooter. We had a similar experience with the original BioShock, which was delayed several months as our original ship date drew near,” he said in a statement to the press. “Why? Because the Big Daddies weren’t the Big Daddies you’ve since come to know and love. Because Andrew Ryan’s golf club didn’t have exactly the right swing. Because Rapture needed one more coat of grimy Art Deco.”

The game, set in 1912, focuses on Booker DeWitt, who is tasked with rescuing a woman named Elizabeth from the sky-city of Columbia. Much like the dystopian setting of the original game was heavily influenced by writers such as Ayn Rand and George Orwell, Bioshock Infinite focuses on the idea of American exceptionalism and issues of race. The concept of faction also plays a critical role, drawing from the progressive movement contemporary to the setting of the game to the “Occupy” movement of today.

To paraphrase Shigeru Miyamoto, delays ensure that a game will be good, but a bad game will always be bad. I’m in favor of giving Levine and his team as much time as they need to deliver a stellar experience.

Source: Kotaku

Nintendo announces New Super Mario Bros. 2

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Apr 212012
 

Last night during Nintendo’s Direct conference, Satoru Iwata revealed the second 3DS Mario title that had been confirmed to be in development: New Super Mario Bros. 2.

Where the original title, the top-selling game on the DS, borrowed many of its elements from Super Mario Bros., this one seems to strongly influenced by Super Mario Bros 3. In one of the screenshots shown during the announcement, Mario is shown utilizing the classic raccoon tail as a p-meter tracks his remaining flight time on the bottom left corner of the screen. As someone whose earliest gaming memories are of traversing the skies of SMB3, this is quite a treat. I wonder if Kuribo’s Shoe will make it in, as well?

The game is currently set for an August release.

Report: Former THQ Exec Blasts Gamestop, Other Retailers Over Used Games

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Apr 132012
 

Over at GamesIndustry International, former THQ executive Richard Browne has penned a piece castigating the practices of used video game retailers such as GameStop and indicting them for damaging the “the creativity and variety of games available to the consumer” and for “the death of single player gaming.”

Browne’s harangue comes a couple of weeks after Kotaku reported rumors that the PS4 will block owners from playing used games by locking titles to their PSN accounts. He condones such measures as a necessary “Nuclear Option” from Sony and Microsoft to combat the stagnation of new game sales and notes that several developments in modern gaming — including DLC and the ubiquity of multiplayer modes — are the direct result of publishers attempting to stop the “churn” created by used game sales.

“The real cost of used games has been the destruction of the mid-tier publisher and the elimination of many an independent development studio who in the past conducted work in that space. With next generation budgets leaping yet again only the ‘mini-publishers’ – such as Epic, Insomniac, Bungie – can possibly survive externally to an actual publisher. Beneficial to the customer? No,” he wrote.

Browne isn’t the only industry voice speaking out against used games – Frontier Developments founder David Braben was interviewed by Gamasutra last month and made similar comments, saying, “The real problem when you think about it brutally… [is] pre-owned has really killed core games…. I know publishers who have stopped games in development because most shops won’t reorder stock after initial release, because they rely on the churn from the resales.”

It’s worth noting, however, that digital distribution continues to grow in popularity, and many gamers opt for preloading games on Steam the night before a release instead of waiting in line at a retailer. It’s quickly becoming a matter of when, not if, future consoles lack media drives, and we could be only years away from used games being relics of the past.

Source: GamesIndustry International

Report: CliffyB Wants Fewer Scripted Games

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Apr 072012
 

The linearity of video games has been a hot topic on message boards over the past few years, and now it seems that a major developer has taken gamers’ cries for deviant gameplay experiences to heart.

Speaking to The Verge as part of a larger feature on the history of Epic Games, Cliff Bleszinski, perhaps best known as the lead designer for the Gears of War franchise, shared his thoughts on the direction of modern game design and his desire for less scripted experiences and more freeform games such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

“I always refer to that .gif that went around [comparing the] first-person shooter design of Doom to where we’ve gotten to: straight hall, cutscenes, straight hall, cutscenes, straight hall, cutscene. So many games these days, with their campaigns, feel like the game designer is chasing you with a sharp pointed stick saying,’You will feel something at this moment,’” he said.

Bleszinski goes on to admit that his games have gotten away from empowering players to experience games in their own way, adding that scripted sequences are both expensive and detrimental to gameplay.

“The amount of viral videos we sent around of Skyrim of millions of wheels of cheese going down a mountain or a frozen bear that flies off into space – it is just golden. You want a game where programmers are like, ‘How did that happen? Did I even code that?’ That is when things are great and we had that in many ways with Unreal Tournament [with] emerging gameplay [like] teleporting and the translocator. I want to get all of our games back towards that in the future,” he concluded.

It’s good to see developers beginning to address these issues more in public. Back in February, Twisted Metal mastermind David Jaffe spoke at DICE regarding the relationship between storytelling and video games, stating that the focus on narrative in many modern titles has “stunted the medium of video games, to our own peril.” A dialogue between developers and fans can only beneficial for all parties – ideally, developers will become less focused on self-indulgence and more focused on providing the best experience possible for consumers.

Source: The Verge