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Archived News:
The
Obsidian Forums have word that Pillars of Eternity is nearing the
transition from the alpha stage to beta testing, providing "an update about the
general state of affairs for each department on the project now that we are
getting ready to head into our Beta period." They outline the status of various
systems, and conclude with the following: "Overall, the project is coming
together nicely. We have a ton of work that still needs to be done, but the team
is starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. There are no major
roadblocks ahead of us at this point and now it's a focus on getting as much
polish done as we can before our final release candidate." Thanks nin.
Ars Technica interviews Oculus Rift CEO Brendan Iribe, talking about the
next steps in bringing their Ovulus VR headsets to market. He talks of how the
influx of Facebook money will help speed take up by allowing them to sell early
units closer to cost, and will also make for better hardware in the version two
headsets. He says they hope to release the first consumer version by the end of
next year, and they see things really taking off a year or two after that with
the release of the second consumer version: It's only after that first
consumer version has been out for a year or two that Oculus will be ready to
release its second consumer version, Iribe says. That's when he sees VR and the
Rift really starting to reach their full potential, market-wise. "That's when
we'll get these incredible, holy grail [games], the killer app for VR," he said.
"And that's when we think the scale will really goal, and hopefully you'll get
many millions of people into VR, playing great games and other stuff."
After some
pretty significant blowback from Ubisoft's initial assertion that
cutting a female
protagonist option from Assassin's Creed Unity was "a reality of game
development" based on limited resources,
Kotaku has a new statement from Ubisoft that no longer implies this would
take up too much of their development resources, but rather highlights the
diversity of their developers, their other games, and some of the supporting
cast in Unity: We recognize the valid concern around diversity in video
game narrative. Assassin's Creed is developed by a multicultural team of various
faiths and beliefs and we hope this attention to diversity is reflected in the
settings of our games and our characters.
Assassin's Creed Unity is focused on the story of the lead character, Arno.
Whether playing by yourself or with the co-op Shared Experiences, you the gamer
will always be playing as Arno, complete with his broad range of gear and skill
sets that will make you feel unique.
With regard to diversity in our playable Assassins, we've featured Aveline,
Connor, Adewale and Altair in Assassin's Creed games and we continue to look at
showcasing diverse characters. We look forward to introducing you to some of the
strong female characters in Assassin's Creed Unity.
Eterlands is a newly announced project hoping to make its mark in the
ever-more-competitive MOBA genre. More details are promised soon, but the
Eterlands website is online with some early
details, and the following explanation of what they hope will set this
apart: Alongside of its realistic graphics and effects never seen before, Eterlands
bring something new and fresh to the world of MOBA games. It offers you a well
thought through, clearly defined and well balanced gaming environment, with
emphasis on social elements as well as true to type, fair and easy to follow
structure. Eterlands would cherish elements offered by the popular predecessors
like League of Legends and DOTA but also widening the palette with unique
features never seen before:
- Realistic graphics
- Destructible and movable environment
- Realistic combat system
- Unique character build
- Socially focused gaming experience
- Educational system
- Strategy and rank oriented features
The
WMD Portal now features the
Project CARS E3 trailer,
showing off some of the snazzy rides in the motorsports game. In the description
they call this "the most authentic, beautiful, intense, and technically-advanced
racing game on the planet," and offer gameplay footage to back up the
claim. Continue here to read the full story.
The E3 2014 trailer
from Elite: Dangerous is now available, showing off Frontier's space combat
remake. They say: "400 Billion Star Systems - Infinite Freedom - Blaze your own
trail. Elite: Dangerous trailer showcasing the vast scope and freedom available
in the largest, richest gaming sandbox ever created." Thanks nin. Continue here to read the full story.
A new E3 trailer for
Homefront 2 The Revolution shows off gameplay from Crytek's upcoming open world
shooter sequel. The clip is a little fuzzy and juddery, which is probably
because it was captured from a Twitch stream. Continue here to read the full story.
Blizzard
announces the deployment of some back-end updates for Diablo III
intended to remedy how some players have not been awarded achievements for which
they've already qualified. Here's part of the explanation: Without going
too deep into the technical details, basically what we did was implement a
system that looks at your account upon login to try and identify any
achievements for which you have fulfilled all the criteria, but have not been
awarded the actual achievement. If the system identifies a broken achievement,
the server will attempt to immediately “heal” your broken achievement and grant
it to you. I say “try” because each server will only attempt to run a certain
number of instances of this healing operation at one time. What this means is it
may take several logins to heal any achievements that are broken on your account
in this way. This is expected behavior, and just because you haven’t seen any
changes to your achievements just yet, doesn’t mean that the fix did not work
for you at all.
I know that many of you have been waiting for this for a long time, but it is
somewhat likely that this fix may not resolve every single achievement issue
that every player has. This particular fix is specifically targeted at
achievements with tracked criteria (basically this means requirements that were
tracked with checkboxes). Also as I said above, this fix may not take effect for
everyone immediately. What this means is that we are going to need to let the
dust settle over the next few days to see what other types of issues
remain.
AMD writes of plans for more upcoming games that will support the advanced
Mantle API support in the AMD Radeon R9 series of graphics cards (thanks
HARDOCP). Most of the items are over a month old, but they have news from E3
of Mantle support plans for Battlefield Hardline, Dragon Age
Inquisition, and Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare. Here's word:
- On March 19
we announced a
technology partnership that will add Mantle support to CRYENGINE® — the game
engine behind blockbuster titles like Crysis and FarCry.
- On March 20 Microsoft announced DirectX® 12, the
next major evolution of its own game API. This is terrific news because it
really draws attention to the value of low-level programming and Mantle’s
leading contribution. With DirectX 12 games still over 18 months away and no
alternatives in sight for Linux gamers, Mantle’s future looks bright.
- On April 14
we announced that the
upcoming release of Sid Meier’s Civilization®: Beyond Earth will support
Mantle. In case you’re not familiar with the series, the current iteration
is Civilization V, which, despite being nearly four years old, remains the
sixth most played game according to Steam1.
With Mantle in its arsenal,
the next installment could be even bigger.
- On April 16 we published a
Mantle whitepaper,
giving developers and enthusiast gamers a deep, technical insight into the
technology. Have a look to find out how Mantle delivers such dramatic
performance increases.
- On May 1 we launched the
Mantle SDK
beta, which made Mantle available to a much
greater number and variety of game developers. That should help accelerate
the proliferation of Mantle-enabled game titles.
- On June 9 EA announced that three of its upcoming
games would support Mantle: Battlefield Hardline, Dragon Age Inquisition and
Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare. Each of these brings new features, maps
and gameplay to already-popular franchises. If the results we saw with
Mantle in Battlefield 4 are anything to go by, these games should absolutely
fly on AMD Radeon™ hardware.
Speaking at E3 with Ubisoft technical director James Therien,
Videogamer learned that a planned female version of the Assassin's Creed
Unity protagonist was recently cut from the design of the stealth/action
series because of how it would impact the development time: "It was on our
feature list until not too long ago, but it's a question of focus and
production," Therien explained. "So we wanted to make sure we had the best
experience for the character. A female character means that you have to redo a
lot of animation, a lot of costumes [inaudible]. It would have doubled the work
on those things. And I mean it's something the team really wanted, but we had to
make a decision... It's unfortunate, but it's a reality of game development."
When pressed on the issue, specifically that we didn't think his excuse would
wash with the community given the amount of resources at the studio's disposal,
Therien continued:
"Again, it's not a question of philosophy or choice in this case at all I don't
really [inaudible] it was a question of focus and a question of production. Yes,
we have tonnes of resources, but we're putting them into this game, and we have
huge teams, nine studios working on this game and we need all of these people to
make what we are doing here."
Niche Gamer - Why It's Not Ok There Were More Severed Heads at E3 2014 than
Female Presenters. Thanks Icewind.
I think before we get any traction on equal gender or racial
representation in games and the gaming industry, we’re going to have to
address the completely insane amount of games that simply want you to kill
people, or animals, or aliens, or zombies, or sometimes even all of the
aforementioned things. Sure, protagonist in game X doesn’t have every
possible combination of traits that you can identify with, but it’s fun
right?
- Grand Theft Auto V PS3 vs PS4 GIF Comparison on
Gameranx. Thanks nin
Things certainly stayed active at E3 through yesterday, though things may be
slowing down at this point. Wonder if anyone is being crafty by holding back a
bombshell announcement?
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