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Archived News:
Diablo III Designer Explains Why Necromancer Was Cut, Hints At Return on MTV
Multiplayer justifies cutting the Necromancer class from the action/RPG
sequel, and hints that this may not be a permanent situation: The reason it was
cut was because they didn't want to rehash the characters from previous Diablos
(the Barbarian returns because they thought they had a new take on the
character), but lead designer Jay Wilson indicates this was not a universal
opinion, even among the Diablo III developers, so the Necromancer may eventually
be, yes, resurrected: “There’s a lot of people on our team who aren’t
happy with our class choices,” he admitted. “But after we’ve established ‘Diablo
III’ as its own game with its own type of gameplay and experiences, I wouldn’t
be opposed to looking at old classes. We are trying to design [the Witch Doctor]
class so that if we did bring back the Necromancer, there’s room for him. We’re
looking out ahead of time at what our expansions are going to be, so we’ve got
to keep room open for some of those other classes down the road.”
The Star Trek Online Website
has word that Spock actor Leonard Nimoy will appear with Cryptic in Las Vegas to
help unveil Star Trek Online: We are thrilled to announce that
legendary Star Trek actor and director Leonard Nimoy will be our special guest
at the reveal of the first gameplay footage from Star Trek Online!
Mr. Nimoy will be appearing at our event at the Official Star Trek Convention in
Las Vegas. The event will take place at 1:30 p.m. PDT on Sunday, August 10 in
the Gene Roddenberry Theater at the Las Vegas Hilton.
For those who cannot make the convention, we do not want to leave you out! We
will broadcast the event LIVE via webcast. Please stay tuned for details on how
to join the webcast.
And join the Star Trek Online community by 11:59 p.m. PDT on Sunday, August 17,
for a chance to win a copy of Star Trek Online and a lifetime subscription! You
can learn more about how to win
here!
A
Q&A on MTV Multiplayer with John Riccitiello is a frank discussion of EA
games with the EA CEO, who continues to speak of elevating the quality of their
output, this time specifically criticizing "crappy" licensed games, saying: "I
think what redeems our industry is quality, and I think we take a step back
every time we take a license and exploit it with a crappy game. That’s not what
we’re about." This is not to say they are giving up licensed games (just the
crappy ones), but it does illustrate a renewed emphasis on new IPs:
Frankly I think that a lot of the intellectual property we create are
better than the licenses. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for great licenses.
We’ve had a 20-year partnership with the NFL. We’re incredibly proud of that. A
15-ish year partnership with the NBA. NHL, etc. But also we partner with J.K.
Rowling and Warner Brothers in bringing over the Harry Potter games to market
and a great partnership with Hasbro — a lot of new stuff this year for the more
casual consumer. There’s room for both. I think what you’re noticing is that in
years gone by we haven’t had as many great, original intellectual properties.
There’s a lot more of that this year from EA and I think from here forward.
The Ken
Levine Q&A Part One on GamesIndustry.biz talks with the 2K Boston honcho
about rising game development costs and other relevant industry issues. They
also ask about what he's up to now, learning that if he told us, he'd have to
kill us: "I actually can't talk about it, without talking about the game itself.
There are things related to story, gameplay and...I don't know how to describe
it...people's relationship with the game over the long term. That's what we're
thinking about, but it's about as clear as I can be." He does confirm that
whatever his next project is, it will have a heavy dose of awesome: "I think for
any company to look at the team to make BioShock and not have some faith in them
doesn't make any sense. I think it would be crazy to say that we shouldn't try
to do something awesome."
The second in a series of four new movies showing off Brothers in Arms:
Hell's Highway is now on the information superhighway. This "roll call" clip
features narration from Randy Pitchford and other developers from Gearbox
discussing the story of the upcoming World War II shooter. They discuss
character development and storytelling and the emphasis being placed on the
emotional impact of losing squad mates during the game's battles, both on the
player, and his Sergeant Baker character. In-game footage is included, but this
is mostly depictions of characters from the game. The clip can be found on
ActionTrip,
AtomicGamer, and
FileFront.
Today's server move was not without its glitches, but ultimately worked out
pretty smoothly. There is still an odd behavior when posting comments, but
hopefully this can be tracked down over the next couple of days. If you notice
anything else that seems broken, please feel free to let me know.
This Telltale press release announces episode one of Strong Bad's Cool Game for
Attractive People launches August 11 for PC worldwide and for WiiWare in
North and South America: SAN RAFAEL, CA, August 5, 2008 – Telltale Inc.,
the leader in interactive episodic entertainment, is announcing that "Homestar
Ruiner", the first of five monthly Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People
episodes, will premiere Monday, August 11. "Homestar Ruiner" will release on
Nintendo's WiiWare™ download service in North and South America and worldwide on
PC simultaneously. WiiWare availability for Europe, Australia and New Zealand
will follow shortly.
As the star of the popular Homestarrunner.com web cartoons, Strong Bad has been
answering emails (in boxing gloves), pranking his friends, pummeling his
enemies, and making people with questionable taste snort milk out of their noses
for years. Now he's branching out to star in the monthly Strong Bad's Cool Game
for Attractive People series developed in partnership with Homestarrunner.com
creators Mike and Matt Chapman.
In the season premiere, Strong Bad's plans to beat the snot out of his rival
Homestar Runner backfire, and he ends up with an unwanted houseguest cramping
his style. Now he needs to get life back to normal, by any means possible.
Comical point-and-click gameplay progresses the story, with side quests, mini
games, achievements, and an "extended play" sandbox mode that unlocks after the
story is completed rounding out the game experience.
A new unofficial version 1.3 beta 4a patch is now available for Battlezone II,
Pandemic's action/strategy sequel. This continues the work on the no-longer
supported game by programmers Ken Miller and Nathan Mates in a beta that has now
gone on for over four years. The patch is available on this
Battlezone II support page,
and a mirror can be found on
The Patches Scrolls.
Another new Pro Cycling Manager 2008: Tour de France patch is now
available, updating the sports management game to version 1.0.2.3 by addressing
a ladder bug introduced in the recent version 1.0.2.2 patch. The download is
located on AtomicGamer,
FileFront, Gamer's Hell,
and The
Patches Scrolls.
This is just to let you know you may get erratic results when visiting here over
the next 24 hours as our new DNS entry propagates (you may have already
encountered a 404 error or two this afternoon, and/or perhaps a trip to a different site). The good news is this is because the
site is being moved to a new location where it will be running on a cluster of
eight servers, which will hopefully provide greater reliability, so hopefully
any inconvenience in the short term will pay off with better uptime going
forward. In the meantime, apologies for any wonky behavior from the site during
the transition.
A Q&A with
Valve's Lombardi Gamasutra from yesterday (thanks Ant and
Play.tm) makes mention of Valve's
openness to being acquired, though it seems like this is more an answer to a
hypothetical question, rather than an indication that a deal for the developer
is in the works. On being acquired Lombardi says they are "happy to have that
conversation," but adds: "By the same token, the company's doing pretty well,
and we're really happy with what we're doing, So we'll see. I mean, anything is
possible." The remainder of that piece concentrates on heaping praise on
Electronic Arts. The
main body
of the Q&A is posted separately on Gamasutra, focusing on Valve's
acquisition of Turtle Rock Studios and progress on Left 4 Dead.
The Fury
Forums have word that Auran is shutting down Fury, their arena combat
game that has been struggling since late last year (thanks
Kotaku Australia). In December cuts were announced at Auran
( story), followed quickly by word that Fury was going
free-to-play ( story), and just days later Auran cut down to a
minimal staff to support the project ( story). Following all this,
three months ago it was announced they were launching Fury League
( story), offering the chance to play the game for cash money, but
the last shoe has seemingly dropped on the game, which will be going offline in
the next 48 hours: We have reached our time limit to find a solution that
would help us keep the Fury servers open. Sadly, no solution has been found and
so we have no alternative than to shut the servers down in 48 hours.
To all those players who have enjoyed Fury and played countless battles, I am
sorry that we could not find a viable business model that would allow you to
continue playing. To all those naysayers and doomsdayers, we know that deep down
you wanted Fury to succeed. Have fun with your parting wishes
To the Auran team, who put their heart and soul into making Fury, thanks for
your efforts. As I said many times before, we need to be much better than the
competition to have a chance of succeeding. We gave it everything we had and
history now judges that it still wasn’t good enough.
Whilst this marks the end of the Fury chapter, who knows what the future may
bring. There were many gems hidden within Fury and many lessons learned.
Hopefully one day the full potential can be realized in some other form.
So for now, so long and thanks for all the fish.
P.S. We informed all stores more than a month ago to remove stock from their
shelves. If you have purchased a copy of Fury in the past month, we suggest you
return it to the store.
P.P.S. This website will also close down in 48 hours.
__________________
Bossman
Wishing things had turned out better.
Matrix Games announces the availability of Great Invasions, "the
classic strategy game of survival, advancement and conquest in the Dark Ages."
Word is: Take command of several of almost 80 playable nations throughout
700 years of history starting in 350 AD, and lead each of your historical
nations from birth through growth, stability and decline. It will not be easy to
expand or, indeed, survive across the centuries - but master the arts of
diplomacy, war, economics, and administration and there will be no limit to your
ambitions!
There's a pretty extensive
Saints
Row 2 Interview on VideoGamer.com talking with Dan Sutton, associate
producer on Volition's upcoming open-world sequel. Some of the ground they cover
includes the difficulties of open-world development, testing, developing for
different platforms, the possibility of an MMO Saints Row game, DLC, a
lot of PS3-specific questions, and more. One answer reveals they may endeavor to
overcome the inherent difficulties of making a demo for this sort of
game: It's possible to make, yes. We haven't said if we're going to or
not, but it's definitely possible. We did it for the first one and it was really
really good for us. We're definitely looking into doing that. Our main focus
right now is making sure we get the game looking hot. After that we look into
getting a demo out during out Microsoft submission time or PlayStation
submission time. Usually with game companies you submit to them a couple of
months before the final product and you have time between there to decide if you
want to or not. I think it depends. PlayStation owners would definitely like to
see it and have hands on, because it really sold the Xbox for us, having a demo
I think. Especially as PlayStation hasn't had a hands-on, it would be
beneficial. We're definitely looking at doing that. It's on our radar right now.
It just depends what the big bosses at Volition and THQ decide. I think there
are studies that came out like two or three weeks ago where they said that
actually demos don't help sales. Which is tough for developers, as we want to
give it to people too. With our game we have a fun enough game and a sandbox
experience that people are only going to buy it because of that. As long as that
stays the same we definitely want to do it.
A German-language demo for Drakensang: The Dark Eye offers the chance to sample
Radon Labs game based on a German pen-and-paper RPG. The demo is a 490 MB
download, available on
AtomicGamer and Gamer's
Hell.
So I have an appointment with the tree guy today, and my instructions are to
have him even out the appearance of the tree that I mauled without actually
cutting any more away. I'm not very clear on how he's supposed to accomplish
that… I think I need to find out if we can get a tree toupee.
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