Crystal Dynamics studio head Darrell Gallagher today told a GDC panel that their
Tomb Raider reboot had the "biggest opening" of any videogame so far this year, and that in selling 3.4 million units in a week, has set a franchise record. This is reported on
GameSpot, where they also note
Square Enix has stated the game has not met its sales targets, which raises the question of how they arrived at such lofty Crofty expectations.
Steam now offers the
Operation Zombie Bunker DLC for
Painkiller Hell & Damnation, The Farm 51's first-person shooter sequel.
The announcement has a concise description of this: "Heaven's Hitman is pulled into a world more despicable than you can imagine. The evil demonic forces throw him into a chaotic and insane military world. American, Russian, German military forces of different eras all blend together to form one gigantic army-themed nightmare…"
A
Kickstarter update on
Divinity: Original Sin offers
a new video showing off the power of the game editor that will be one of the central points of Larian Studios' upcoming role-playing game. The clip shows the how users will be able to script their own quests by showing the famed Butcher encounter from a certain other RPG recreated in short order using the editor.
Continue here to read the full story.
This awesome trailer promotes
Star Trek: The Video Game and celebrates the upcoming Trekkie game's Gorn antagonists by bringing in William Shatner to rematch with the Gorn, an awesome homage to
their original battle, arguably the laziest fight scene ever filmed. "It never ceases to amaze me how many people still ask me about that scene," commented Shatner. "It’s 46 years later, and he hasn’t aged as well as I have."
Continue here to read the full story.
This trailer offers an "Infiltrator"
Unreal Engine 4 tech demo from GDC 2013. According to the description this is running on single NVIDIA GTX 680. There's also
a tech demo showing the engine running on a PS4.
Continue here to read the full story.
Former
Diablo III game director Jay Wilson admitted the real-money and gold auction houses "really hurt the game," as Blizzard underestimated the number of players who would turn to auctions to outfit their characters.
Joystiq has details from a GDC talk where Wilson said they thought the auction houses were a service players of their action/RPG sequel wanted, and that hosting them in-house would reduce fraud and abuse, but as in the end, they created an environment where collecting money was a primary goal over defeating Diablo and his hordes. He also says they would turn off auctions if they could, but they have "no idea" how many players this would disappoint. His contention that Blizzard thought only a small number of players would use the auction houses is hard to fathom in light of the game's design, which, for a considerable time before a series of balance changes required the very best gear to complete on the highest levels, even though such gear dropped so rarely it was impractical to try to collect it without using the auctions. Blizzard has a
GDC talk scheduled for today discussing their iterative design process for Diablo III, and their preview of that mentions a number of systems that were reworked during the game's design because they were unsatisfactory, but all the examples they use are gameplay mechanics, and not things like auctions.
Crytek's David Adams
tweets his desire to bid on the
Darksiders intellectual property, as the Vigil co-founder wants to bring the franchise to Crytek's new U.S. studio, which is staffed by other former Vigil developers, saying: "Going to bid on Darksiders IP. Put 7 years of heart and soul into that franchise, and I think it belongs at home with its creators." Darksiders is one of the IPs
unsold during the
bankruptcy sale of THQ's assets.
Destructoid has a follow-up confirmation. "When the Darksiders IP goes up for auction, Crytek will be bidding for it," Vigil co-founder Ryan Stefanelli told them. "Not much more to say since the rest is left up to courts and legal shenanigans, but we're all excited at the prospect."
Slitherine announces Panzer Corps: Allied Corps, an upcoming installment in their World War II strategy series that's borrowing a page from the Ms. Pac Man playbook in choosing a paradoxical title. Word is: "This new stand-alone title in the Panzer Corps series put the player in charge of the Western Allies. It starts in the Western Desert with British and Italian forces fighting in 1940 before Operation Compass. It will move from North Africa, Crete, Italy to North West Europe and into Germany." A
product section for the game is live, revealing the game will invade on D-Day, June 6, 2013.
This page is where to sign up if you are interested in being a beta tester.
I seem to have narrowed down the
odd behavior of embedded videos I've been noticing to Chrome, as I've been able to properly use the buttons on videos using other browsers. This is not the first time I've experienced problems with YouTube specific to Chrome, which seems odd in light of them both being Google products. Hopefully they'll work this out before I'm forced to switch browsers
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