Archived News:
This preliminary website is a bilingual
English and German home to The Dark Eye: Demonicon, an upcoming
action/RPG in the works at The Games Company using the same "The Dark Eye"
setting as Drakensang. The site has a vague outline of the project, some concept
art, and links to the user forums, and more details about the game will be
revealed in the imminent issue of German print magazine
PC Games. In the meantime, here's the rough-edged blurb from the website:
"Demonicon is an action-based PC- and Next-Generation-Console game which reverts
to former rules and gaming environment of 'The Dark Eye', the epically and
Movie-like told story along with the in detail elaborated characters and exiting
quests in a successful result of TGC's internal Silver Style Entertainment
Studio."
The Prototype Website has a
splash page with a countdown timer that will presumably conclude with some news
or other revelation related to Radical Entertainment's upcoming open-world
action game. The countdown currently reads 18 days and 20-some hours, putting
the zero hour on Thursday, January 8, right around the kickoff for the
2009 International Consumer Electronics Show. Thanks
IGN.
The
Tabula Rasa Website has word that Tabula Rasa is subscription-free as
of right now, about a month earlier than was planned when closure
of the MMOFPS was announced (thanks
Massively). This offer is open to new players as well as those who have
played the game already, though there is no indication that the plan to close
the game down at the end of February has changed. On a related note, the
Interview with Auto Assault's
Scott Brown on Ten Ton Hammer talks with the NetDevil designer about plans
to kill Tabula Rasa, since Scott worked on Auto Assault, another MMORPG
shut down by NCsoft for underperformance. While he doesn't have all the facts at
hand, he doesn't understand why you would shut a game down: "So basically what
happens is the game doesn’t meet expectations and people start trying to figure
out how the game is going to make a profit. In the case of Auto Assault, NCsoft
opted to just close the game versus running it with a smaller team. I don’t have
any insight into the situation, but it looks like they did the same sort of
thing with Tabula Rasa. On the other hand, with the original Jumpgate we just
scaled our team back until it was profitable. I really don’t understand why
you’d ever shut off a game, in my opinion."
A post to
Mythic Entertainment's Warhammer Herald by boss-man Mark Jacobs, who
reassures Warhammer Online subscribers that some glitches they may have
experienced are being addressed, as they are working on curing problems that can
cause client freezing and crashes to desktop in the MMORPG. He also announces
that leveling up in the game will be more rapid for the next few weeks: "We’re
going to increase the rest experience multiplier bonus in a hotfix today as well
as reducing the time that it takes you to earn rested xp while logged out of the
game, especially in Tiers 3 and 4. This will result in players’ time to level
being approximately 10% faster in Tier 2 and 20% faster in Tiers 3 and 4. We
hope you enjoy the changes and have a great holiday season as you speed through
the Tiers faster than ever before!" Thanks
Voodoo Extreme.
Kotaku reports the recent epidemic of game-related layoffs and contractions
has now hit Aspyr, as this publisher of Mac ports of PC games as well as a few
PC titles has cut an unspecified number of jobs from its Austin, TX-based
offices. They have an official statement from Aspyr on the situation: "The
current economic environment has forced Aspyr to make some tough decisions. The
most difficult of which has been a reduction in staff and the loss of some very
talented, valuable team members and friends. We have taken these steps in an
effort to restructure to better meet the challenges ahead. No additional staff
reductions are planned or expected, and operations will continue without
interruption on all titles scheduled to ship in 2009 and beyond." Thanks
Gamasutra.
The EVE
Online Insider has further follow-up on the exploited bug in EVE Online that
made the news recently. To recap, a bug in how star bases work
made it possible to reuse the same raw materials in the manufacturing process,
and like any good scandal, questions have been raised about who knew what, and
when. Though they say a full investigation will take weeks, CCP now offers some
preliminary findings, including their belief that the bug has probably existed
since player owned structures were introduced on November 24th, 2004 as:
"Changes to the Starbases code from launch until February 2007 are minimal and
very unlikely to have caused the bug," that they still don't know when
exploiting it began (but at least since the beginning of this year), that they have
been so far unable to find an older petition reporting the bug, that they have
found no connection between their staff or the Council of Stellar Management
with the exploit, and that: "Our actions so far have included the eradication of
178 starbases that were exploiting this issue. Some had multiple reactors
running in the bugged state. We have also banned all those we have found
directly involved and all accounts we have found to be connected to those
players. The investigation is still under way and will take a while to
conclude." Thanks
Massively.
An article on CNBC.com analyzes
three attempted tech-sector mergers that failed this year, examining Microsoft's
unsuccessful attempt at acquiring Yahoo!, Samsung's failed SanDisk bid, and
Electronic Arts' high-profile run at Take-Two, referring to the failures of
these deals as "fiduciary stupidity." He recaps the EA/Take-Two
deal, referring to Take-Two's rejection of a $26.00/share bid as "Grand Theft
Shareholder" in light of the company's current sub-$10.00/share value. Here's
the analysis of what went down: "I posted then that unlike Yahoo, Take-Two was
in a strong negotiating position with the upcoming release of the latest 'Grand
Theft Auto' installment coming to market. But CEO Strauss Zelnick had to know
that his company's 'position of strength' had a limited shelf life. Yet he and
his board held out for more. Postured. And the posturing only got louder as
Zelnick's position got crumbled beneath him."
The Batman: Arkham
Asylum Developer Interview on 1Up talks with David "Lego My" Hego of
Rocksteady Studios about their efforts at creating a quality superhero game.
Topics include their costume design direction considering the numerous
variations of Batman from comics, movies, and TV; living up to fan expectations,
villains, their depiction of the Joker, detective work.
Dragon Age: Origins Updated Q&A on GameSpot chats up Dan Tudge about
BioWare's upcoming role-playing game, going into staggering detail about the
story and various gameplay elements, including "Morrigan's relationship with her
mother," adding dogs to your party, moral choices, party interaction, and more.
In other Dragon Age: Origins news,
The World section on the
game's official website has a new entry outlining political structure of
Ferelden, which sounds a lot like real-life politics: "very turbulent, full of
deception, and dripping with intrigue."
Players Don’t Like New Game Features on The MMO Gamer is a conversation with
Matt Firor of ZeniMax Online Studios, discussing the refinement of the MMOG, as
opposed to adding new features. Another interesting topic of the conversation is
his opinion that too many MMOGs take the PC-centric route of over-emphasizing
hardware: "Even if the game isn’t hard core, the fact that they’re PC based and
the fact that you almost always need some crazy graphics card to play them -
like, say, Age of Conan - it’s like you’re restricting your user base so much by
doing that. And WoW has shown that you don’t need high graphics capability on
your computer to have a great looking game and I don’t know why people, or
developers, try to aim for the Crysis market with MMOs because it’s two totally
different things. Crysis players can spend lots of money on their PCs, but MMO
players - you want a large user base."
Well we had our first major snow of the season yesterday, there was probably
about six inches on the ground when I shoveled, and it looks like I have a
little follow-up shoveling to do today for what fell overnight. I was very
pleased with getting to shovel our new sidewalk, as having an unbroken surface
to clear makes things a lot easier than our old broken up walkway, though while
this makes the process less aggravating, it doesn't make it effort-free, as I
managed to get a blister on my thumb through my heavy winter gloves. Actually,
that's probably more a tribute to my girly callous-free hands as anything, so I
should probably have just kept that detail to myself.
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