Make a game like it's your last, and burn bright

"I remember you saying, 'We will make sure that we don't have any regrets.'"
- Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, speaking to Fire Emblem developer Hitoshi Yamagami
The Fire Emblem franchise was introduced during the NES era, but didn't make it to the West until the 2000s, and globally, its sales had begun to dwindle too far by the time the 3DS came around.

At that point, it was slated to be cancelled -- after one last game: Fire Emblem: Awakening .

"The Emblem series isn't making the numbers, so this is going to be the last one," a Nintendo sales exec told the team, as revealed in a new Iwata Asks interview publishedby the company alongside the Japanese release of the series' latest installment, Fire Emblem: Fates .

The team's response to that mandate? "'This is going to be the last one, so let's put in everything we want so we don't have any regrets.' Then we had a big list of different things, 'I want to do this' and 'I wanna do this,' and the result was Awakening ," says Nintendo producer Hitoshi Yamagami.

Awakening was, consequently, well-loved for its high quality, and became the best-selling game in the franchise in some time -- especially in the West, where it really caught on. This success also means that the series reached its 25th anniversary intact -- the first installment of the franchise hit Japan in 1990.

The result? "We were able to make a big comeback. It became the bestselling game in the Emblem series overseas," says Nintendo president and CEO, Satoru Iwata.

The consequence of burning brightly -- and expecting to make the last game in the franchise -- meant that the team had "used up" most of its ideas on Awakening . But then a request came in for a new title based on that success -- which created a panic but then resulted in the ambitious Fire Emblem: Fates , which is out now in Japan and due in the West next year. The game offers three full-length scenarios across three different releases.

The full Iwata Asks interview goes into more depthon the game, its development process, and in particular the team's collaboration with writer Shin Kibayashi, a prolific creator of manga, TV, and even kabuki theater. This is his first major game project.

Play Amnesia: The Dark Descent for free with OnLive

OnLive—the subscription service that lets you play a host of games on the cheap, regardless of your hardware—wants to scare their supporters, in the best way possible.

Amnesia 9

OnLive—the subscription service that lets you play a host of games on the cheap, regardless of your hardware—wants to scare their supporters, in the best way possible. They're giving away free copies of Frictional Games' indie-horror gem Amnesia: The Dark Descent, from now until 9pm PST tonight. All you have to do to snag one of the scariest games of all time is register at this link, download the free demo, then enter the promo code "THANKYOU" when it expires.

If you've somehow managed to miss playing this ingeniously-paced thriller (or you've been building up the courage to take a crack at it), now's the perfect time to pick it up. It's one thing to play a game in the dark, headphones on, terrified to move an inch further in fear that you might mess yourself when an invisible demon with a gaping mouth starts chasing you. It's another to be doing those things completely free of charge.

Darksiders II Arguls Tomb DLC review

Darksiders II gets it’s first DLC expansion, taking Death through an icy tomb where he’ll encounter new enemies, fight several bosses, and grab a ton of loot. Limited edition owners of Darksiders II already have access to the DLC, but those who are trying to decide whether to throw down $6.99 (560 Microsoft points) for the expansion, might want to proceed with caution. Argul’s Tomb is a higher-level

ESL and Azubu announce two year global eSports partnership

Leading eSports organizer ESL has entered into a two year partnership with eSports streaming service, Azubu.

In exchange for joining ESL's roster of streaming partners, Azubu will be provided with exclusive content and marketing collaborations, including licensing, distribution and sales representation

Although the terms of the deal are being kept under wraps, ESL has confirmed that Azubu will become a non-exclusive streaming partner at ESL events such as ESL One, IEM and ESL Pro League.

The arrangement will also see ESL's 4 Media Network become the sole sales representative for Azubu in Europe, handling advertising packages and global brand relationships.

Last year Azubu raised $59 million dollarsto, in the words of company CEO Ian Sharpe, take on Twitch by creating the "most monetizable streaming experience."

In a later interview the CEO reiterated that point, explaining that sponsors and advertisers need to start seeing "measurable" returns if the eSports industry wants to continue growing - a sentiment that appears to be shared by ESL.

“As eSports continue to grow […] it becomes increasingly important for us to partner with the best platforms to provide access to our events as well as more value to brands who want to reach those audiences,” said Nik Adams, SVP of sales and business development at ESL.

“Azubu’s reach, user experience and passionate dedication to the eSports lifestyle are second to none."

Frictional's next game teased, involves a big freaky machine somehow

Amnesia developers Frictional Games teased a website entitled www.nextfrictionalgame.com over the weekend, featuring a whole lot of nothing except for a loading bar slowly increasing as the hours went on.

over the weekend, featuring a whole lot of nothing except for a loading bar slowly increasing as the hours went on. Well, that bar has filled up to reveal...another tease in the form of some in-fiction text and a video of a woman fiddling about with an almost certainly evil big TV/computer thingy. The game seems to be called SOMA, and based on the font and the decor in that video, I'm picking up a serious SCP/sci-fi vibe.

I've no doubt that this video is the first of many teases - there are seven empty slots in the 'case files' section on the websiteafter all. Only 1% of the 'files' have been 'recovered' yet, so yes, don't expect this ARG-type thing to run out of steam just yet. My wild prediction is that SOMA is a horror game with a near-future setting, featuring an evil/rogue AI and tapping into surveillance/paranoia themes.

That or a MOBA.

Please don't let it be a MOBA.

Here's the first video, entitled Vivarium. It all gets a bit exciting right at the end, when...well, I won't spoil that for you.

Ta, RPS.

SOMA trailer takes you under the sea

Technology doesn't mix well with water, as anyone who's dropped their phone into a sink can tell you.* That's okay, though, because in SOMA, technology doesn't mix well with anything.

Technology doesn't mix well with water, as anyone who's dropped their phone into a sink can tell you.* That's okay, though, because in SOMA, technology doesn't mix well with anything. Frictional's sci-fi horror is the subject of another trailer, this time skimming the depths of claustrophobic, paranoid isolation. As with previous trailers, it's not particularly forthcoming with details, but does reveal the game's somewhat surprising setting: a rust-covered research base at the bottom of the sea.

There's a running theme through previous trailers of machines who think they're human. As a result, it was assumed the game would take place in some futuristic locale—possibly even in space. Instead, it seems that humanity still hasn't learned the lessons of Bioshock: that combining sea and science is never a good idea.

SOMA is due out in 2015.

*I assume. I definitely didn't do that only a few weeks into an eighteen month contract with no insurance, because that would have been really stupid and embarrassing probably.

Gearbox has made a start on a new Duke Nukem

Speaking at this year's Develop, Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford has said he wants to make a new Duke Nukem game, potentially via second developer. Hopefully, not taking as long to complete as the now legendary 14 year development that finally gave us Duke Nukem Forever. "I did not acquire the franchise merely so people could experience Duke Nukem Forever," explains Randy, adding, "that was, sort of,

Sci-fi horror game SOMA gets a new in-game trailer, is bleaker than bleak

SOMA , the space-borne horror show being built by Frictional Games, isn't due for release until sometime in 2015, but that doesn't stop a steady stream of trailers and teasers from showing off brief moments of hopefully frightening gameplay.

from showing off brief moments of hopefully frightening gameplay. The latest trailer features in-game environments specifically designed to deliver a case of the heebie jeebies.

The trailer itself is almost comically dark, but I imagine that a good story and some sound effects will make the overall atmosphere much less amusing. An oppressive, super-bleak atmosphere is exactly what the developers are going for, as written in their latest dev blog:”[T]he game's thematics will emerge through play. SOMA is meant to explore deep subjects such as consciousness and the nature of existence. We could have done this with cutscenes and long conversations, but we chose not to. We want players to become immersed in these thematics, and the discussions to emerge from within themselves.”

Existentialism is heady stuff, and if Frictional pulls it off, SOMAhas the potential to be a thoroughly frightening and mind-boggling affair.

Today we speak to Matt Hammill and Jamie Tucker of Asteroid Base, the team behind Love in a Dangerous

Spacetime , which is nominated for the Excellence in Visual Art thanks to its unique 2D viewpoint that is, in reality, taking advantage of 3D polygons. What is your team's game development background, if any?

Road to the IGF: Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime

As part of our Road to the IGFseries, Gamasutra is speaking to each of the finalists in the 2013 Independent Games Festival to find out the story behind the games.

Jamie: I have a background mostly in illustration and animation. When I moved back to Toronto from Calgary in 2009 I joined the indie game community and made my first game at TOJam 2010, and since then I have been making small jam-sized games and learning various tools and pipelines. I picked up programming through web development and eventually got into Game Maker and Unity.

Matt: I got my start tinkering with Quake mods as a kid, using qME. I got back into it when I discovered Adventure Game Studio around 2006, and continued working on projects in my spare time while I started working in animation. I released my first game, Gesundheit! , on iOS in 2011, and since then I've been balancing indie projects like this with freelance game contracts.
What game development tools are you using? Jamie: We built our first prototype at the Toronto Global Game Jam in January 2012 using Game Maker, and we used Photoshop and After Effects to create and animate the sprites. A few months later when we started on production of the "real" version, we switched to Unity and started animating the new spaceships in Maya because we could be more dynamic with the implementation.
Where did the concept come from? Jamie: Our teammate Adam had been telling us about the game Artemis , which is like a Star Trek simulator–everyone has their station and duties. Somehow we got talking about the scene in Star Wars where the Millennium Falcon was being attacked by TIE fighters and Luke and Han had to scramble to the turrets. We wanted something to capture that sense of frantic energy. Our only requirement going into the meeting was that we were going to make a co-op game, having been influenced by Damian Sommer's A Friendship in Four Colours and Spooky Squid's Cephalopods Co-op Cottage Defence .

Matt: We made some sketches from an overhead view of a ship divided into different rooms and control stations (not unlike FTL actually, which we found out about later) but as artists we didn't want to spend our time animating the the tops of heads and shoulders of the crewmen, so Jamie suggested we switch to a side view and the concept of the micro-platformer was born. At one point we were exploring other thematic settings too, like pirate ship battles, but the concept just seemed to lend itself to a space setting.
How long have you been working on the game? Jamie: The prototype was done in three days for the Global Game Jam. We sat on it until around June of 2012 when Matt started to recreate the game in Unity.

Matt: It was really slow at first, because I was also using the process as an excuse to learn Unity. But towards the end of that summer Jamie jumped back on the project too, and we've been working on it steadily since then (though we both balance that with contract work as well).
Have you played any of the other IGF finalists? Any standouts? Jamie: Of course we played FTL --such a great game. We actually considered dumping our game entirely last February when they had their immensely successful Kickstarter campaign, because our game was so close thematically.

Matt: We have this really long email thread with the subject "uhhhhhhh oh shit" which is from when we first saw their Kickstarter. We didn't want people to think we were trying to rip those guys off! But eventually we calmed down and realized that we're both coming at it from pretty different directions.

As for other games, I thought Dys4ia was totally wonderful and surprising, and Guacamelee! is gorgeous. That animation, oh man.

Jamie: I met Anna Anthropy when she was in Toronto, but I was too shy to say how much I enjoyed Dys4ia . I just said "hi" and bought a copy of her book. I really wasn't expecting the emotional reaction I felt from playing it.

Also being a part of the Toronto indie dev community we had been exposed to Guacamelee! from pretty early on. Yeah, that game looks so great.
How do you define an "indie" game developer? Matt: For me it's about having the freedom to make work that you believe in without needing permission or approval from anyone else, and of course facing the decisions and responsibilities that go along with that. What I like most about it though are all the different hats you get to wear -- I can bounce from game design to animation to programming to trailer editing and constantly be learning all these different fields.

Jamie: I am obsessed about being able to do everything. "Indie" game development has help me feed this need. I love learning new tools, languages, workflows, strategies, programs, paradigms, patterns, pasta recipes, etc...
LDS ' color palette evokes a certain late 80s/early 90s nostalgia for me. Is there anything in particular you were going for with it? Matt: Since we already felt bit guilty about doing yet another space game (the genre isn't exactly under-represented) we at least wanted to give it a fresh paint job. I think I OD'd on grim darkness as a Warhammer 40K-obsessed teenager, and I wanted our sci-fi space battles to go in the total opposite direction. And yeah, we grew up in the 80s/90s, so there's definitely some nostalgia in there, but we were trying to approach it in a fresh way, if that makes any sense. We wrote a blog post about our inspirations here: http://www.asteroidbase.com/devlog/3-drawing-inspiration/

Jamie: We definitely tried to capture something from the era of coin-op arcade games with the colors and arcade gameplay. A commenter (AxeMan808) on our YouTube trailer said that it was like "an updated Space Zap , with some Burgertime tossed in for extra fun." I wish I thought of that.
Some may be surprised to learn that the game is actually rendered in polygons. What advantages does this give you? Matt: The biggest advantage of working in 3-D is that it lets us use rigged characters with animated skeletons, rather than animated sprites. This lets us blend and modify animations in code, meaning we can have more dynamic, lively characters. For example, our evil space jellyfish swishes his tentacles differently depending on his speed and what angle he's moving at; it's a subtle difference but it really brings the character to life. This kind of thing is par for the course in 3-D games, but in 2-D it's still quite rare.
Wouldn't these two lovers be happier on the ground, where it's safe? Why would they put themselves out into dangerous spacetimes when they could be somewhere a little less stressful? Is that just like, what they're into? Matt: That's a good question. Perhaps they're having a midlife crisis and looking to put some spice back into their cosmic relationship.

Jamie: I don't think it matters where you are–haters gonna hate and lovers gonna love.

IndieFort Bundle: create your own package deal from a list of 24 games

The IndieFort Bundle over at GamersGate is a buffet of indie games with multiple package tiers to satisfy big and small appetites.

over at GamersGate is a buffet of indie games with multiple package tiers to satisfy big and small appetites. Purchasers can select any combination of three, six, or nine purchases from a list of 24 charmingly-titled games, such as Zombie Football Carnage, Devil Whiskey, and Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers.

Checking out with three games costs $4 (£2.49), six costs $7 (£4.49), and going for the nine-game-gold runs $9 (£6.49). The bundle lasts until October 1, with voting commencing September 21 for the best three indie games to be included in an Ultimate IndieFort Pack selling for a proposed $3. GamersGate also included a trailer showcasing the bundle's games - take a look below.

Western release of Shenmue City planned, says Yu Suzuki

Western release of Shenmue City planned, says Yu Suzuki Speaking exclusively to games™, Shenmue creator Yu Suzuki has revealed that he is currently planning to release the upcoming Shenmue City in English. When asked if the social network/mobile game might be converted to western-friendly platforms like iPhone or Facebook he teasingly replies, “There are plans but I cannot discuss them now.” Shenmue

Gamergate Freegames announced

As reported by RPS yesterday, and highlighted in the trailer, Gamersgate are launching an Ads-driven gaming service that'll let you download and play games free of charge.

yesterday, and highlighted in the trailer, Gamersgate are launching an Ads-driven gaming service that'll let you download and play games free of charge. The only catch is that you're forced to watch/ignore an advert each time you load one up.

The service will work on PC and Mac and will allow for up to five games to be downloaded at any one time. Theodore Bergquist, owner of Gamersgate has said: "This is the first service of its kind for computer games. That we've managed to sign deals for the American market says a lot about the interest for this kind of services and the biggest publisher in the world believes in us. Gamersgate was one of the first actors to offer games for download. This service is the biggest thing that has happened to the games market since Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 were released.”

The official site features a countdown to the games release, which is a whopping 82 days away. Still, it's probably worth signing up for the beta while you're over there.

We'll have more on Gamersgate's FreeGames in the next 81 days. Promise.

Diablo 3 first impressions

The Diablo 3 beta has been released.

Is the auction house truly deserving of internet rage We ll know next year

The Diablo 3 beta has been released. And the team have been obsessively playing since last night. Here's what four members of the PC Gamer team think so far. Hint: they like it.

Tim Edwards : So, we've played through the campaign as a group of four. Tom, you and I have completed a game as a two-some. The beta is about an hour-to-two hours long and runs up until the first boss: a skeleton king. Tom, you first. You've played it a few times now. What class did you pick, and what did you think?

Tom Francis : I went Barbarian. I didn't get much time with him when Blizzard let me play an early build of this beta at their offices a while back, and as soon as I hit something with him I wished I'd tried him first.

There's never any reason to 'attack' - the default skill that just swings your weapon normally. You start with a skill called Bash that does the same thing, but with tremendous force, extra damage, a manly grunt and spectacular knockback. And it doesn't cost any of your resource, Fury - it builds it. So you're this angry ball of muscle batting flimsy zombies away with one brutal crunch each. You hit some of them so hard their skin falls off.

Now that I've had more time to level up and mix in some of his later skills, what I'm loving about him is this very simple layer of strategy. Do you want to hit everyone quite hard, or one guy very hard? Cleave does the former, sweeping through everyone in front of you, and Bash does the latter. I burst rotting Grotesques with Bash, then slice the slithering corpseworms that spill out with Cleave.

He gets even better once you get Leap Attack. Clusters of enemies are like Christmas, a big giftwrapped parcel of potential damage you can slam into from anywhere. They're damaged when you land, stunned when you Stomp, then shredded when you Cleave. And if anyone's left standing: BASH.

Very, very early on, when they showed the first video of Diablo 3 at that big reveal I totally predicted, my main worry was that the weapon impacts didn't feel as tactile and heavy as Diablo 1's - that was the first thing I loved about the series. I don't know what they've changed since then, but suddenly it's brutal .

Tim : The leap attack is utterly brilliant, yes. But when I grow up, I want to be a wizard. I want to fire electricity from my hands, shoot icicles from my arse, and make corpses quiver with my sonic boom.

The Wizard feels like a conduit for raw energy. He crackles with power. I found a great trick where I'd kite a group of enemies until they were in a nice big pot, then run right into the centre and freeze them with Frost Nova. Use the Wave of Force to hammer them in place. Then finish up with electricity. Easy. Fun. Fast.

I'm finding the skill system interesting - it's way different from what we expect from RPGs. It feels much closer to a perk system from modern shooters. New skills unlock every level on a purely linear progression. You then unlock slots into which you can equip them as you level up. At the start, you can equip two skills. By level 30, you'll get to eight skills available on your action bars at any one time - from a pool of between 20 and 30 skills. Switching them is really easy - you don't need to respec - you just bring up the interface and drag them into position. By the end of the beta, we were all level 8, and could equip three skills at any one time.

The good side of this: you get to experiment very quickly. I very quickly found a build I enjoyed and seemed to be effective: the lightening, frost nova and wave of force combo. The bad side: I dunno. I don't actually feel like I'm making any choices early on. I like making choices. I think that the real choices will come from rune choice and armour equipment - most of which can't really be judged from such a small slice of the game.

Graham Smith : I agree that there's not many decisions to make in the early game. I chose Monk, because when I played the game at Gamescom two years ago, that's the class I immediately fell in love with. He has a skill, unlocked at Level 12, where the first two hits deal 100% damage, and the third hit triggers a countdown towards explosion. If you use it correctly, you can use that explosion to trigger further ticking monster timebombs. Also, he has a beard.

The problem: that skill unlocks at Level 12, but in completing the beta with Tim, Rich and Tom, I only got as far as Level 8. Those opening skills turned out not to be as amazing as the later abilities I had already become used to through two years of mental use. There was a lot of punching, some kicking, and some cool dashing moves, but I was a little underwhelmed.

That said, it hasn't dampened my excitement for the game. I'm now looking forward to going home tonight, putting my feet up, and digging in. I want to check to see if I was just missing something with the Monk, and then get stuck in to trying the Witch Doctor, Barbarian and Wizard.

Don't give a shit about the Demon Hunter, though.

Rich McCormick : Yeah, well she doesn't give a shit about you either. I asked her, when I was leading her around the dungeons. She said “that Graham guy? With his piddly melee attacks? Hah! Can he chuck grenades into a glob of skeletons? Can he vault into combat, spray knives everywhere, drop spiky lego-things on the floor, then hop away without getting touched? Can he? Bet he can't. The bald twat.”

Graham : I can whoosh into combat, hit people from three different sides at once, and then leave an exploding golden idol to distract everyone while I roundhouse them in the chops, you weak, too-scared-to-just-punch-people knob.

Rich : She also told you to shut up. Jumping around is for chumps, anyway. My Demon Hunter had the potential to be a bouncy little character: two skills I unlocked in our hour-and-a-bit playthrough saw her hopping pointedly away from close conflict. But with Tim's lumbering frame occupying most of the frontline assault, I wasn't too worried about being swarmed - I'll save those skills for singleplayer. In a group of four, I was free to focus on my true love: hurting things as much as possible from quite far away.

Decked out with hand crossbows, my base attack did a surprisingly large amount of damage. At level one and with only two skill slots to play with, I augmented that with caltrops that stunned enemies stupid enough to step into their radius, and a homing arrow. The homing arrow was particularly useful on shielded enemies: the first flight would often thwack off their shield, only to come around for a second pass to pierce the back of their skulls.

Firing the homing bolt - and other damage-first attacks - required 'hatred'. Hatred lives in a little jar on the side of the screen next to another Demon Hunter resource: discipline. Red skills - including the homing bolt, a pinning shot, and a hurled bolas that explodes after wrapping itself around an enemy neck - need enough of your constantly refilling hatred to fire. Blue skills need discipline, and the kind of planning that my advanced strategy of “stand at the back and spam the homing shot” didn't have room for.

With four people chucking all they can at Diablo III's bigger enemies, it's hard to tell exactly what damage /you/ are doing, but I'm fairly upbeat about my contribution to our multi-man murder. The Demon Hunter provides less visual feedback than the other classes seem to - you're further out from the action, and often can't see or feel your bolts tear through flesh - but the potential for pure damage output sets her as the kind of sensible class to get shit done.

Tim : Did you notice that when you start a campaign you're automatically online? There simply isn't an offline mode for the game. It's a funny semantic thing; but there's no such thing as a single player game. There's just “invite only”, “friends only”, or “public”. Single players can obviously choose not to invite anyone in to play, but the online element is threaded right through the game.

What did you guys think of the Battlenet infrastructure anyway? I know Blizzard have spent ages and ages making that feel smooth and slick. It's a point of massive emphasis for them.

Rich : It feels like StarCraft II's front end. I like StarCraft II's front end, it's got big shiny buttons that make comforting wooshy noises when you press them. I like StarCraft too, have I mentioned that?

Graham : I got a party invite from Tim, accepted it and was in the game. I didn't even see any infrastructure, which is what I want from a game. The thing that got me, though, was the "Customer Support" button under Options. Customer Support? That's normally the thing I have to dig the phone number out for, from the bottom of the developer's website, and it's in an American line, and it's expensive, and it's useless. Here, it's right there under Options, like an MMO. This really isn't a singleplayer game, is it?

I kind of wanted to click it just to have a nice chat. Hello Blizzard! How are you?

Tom Francis : I don't think they do emotional support. I agree, though - it's been seamless for me.

Tim : They do give emotional support. Blizzard employees give great hugs. Now: the gold auction house. The beta includes a first pass at the standard auction house. Playing around with it... I think it needs work. For one, I couldn't find an option to search for a specfic item - only to narrow down the search to a range of different items. If, for instance, I want to find a specific sword, say, “Griswold's Edge”, I can't just type that in, and compare auctions. I'm bidding on Griswold's Edge, by the way. Only two hours to go. Come on. Tom, you've got some strong opinions about the way the economy is going to play out. What do you think?

Tom : I think there are weird times ahead. We've only got access to the gold auction house, which doesn't let you buy stuff for real money, but the beta is already making me realise some strange stuff about Diablo 3's economy.

Gold is shared between all your characters. So I just started a Witch Doctor, and I had 4,500 gold at level 1. I could buy everything all the vendors in town had for sale. I also had a 10 DPS electric cudgel in my shared stash from my Barbarian, and that was better for my Witch Doctor than anything I found in the course of that character's life.

I didn't have to use that, of course, but I did have to inherit that money. It seems like gold is just going to mass up for everyone. The gold economy crashed in the last two games, and I think it will again.

I'm starting to think that's why they're doing the real-money auction house, because they can't stop the gold one from crashing. But I'd just rather not have either - I like having to scrimp and save for something cool from a vendor, and I don't want this ridiculous nest egg every time I start a new hero.

Tim : Last nitpick: I don't like the way the front-end is set up. I don't like the opening art (just a boring backdrop with your character superimposed, and I don't like that you have to pick your character before you decide to join a game. I'm convinced there should be an option to pick your character on the same screen as picking the section of the game you're going to play through. Man, I'm reaching for criticisms.

Last question. Are you having fun playing? I am. I think it's fantastic.

Graham : Sort of. I don't think playing it with you guys was the best way to experience my first playthrough. I missed a lot of the quest text, and ended up with no idea what we were doing, who for, and what we'd done to complete each task. The fighting ended up with no context and, even though it looked cool, was totally chaotic. It was sometimes hard to tell whether it was my punch that had thrown the skeleton across the room, or whether it was Tim's Barbarian axe, or Tom's hopping frogs.

I only knew it wasn't Rich. Because Demon Hunters are rubbish.

Rich : More like NOT rubbish. Yes, I am having fun. My dalliances with Diablos I and II were limited, but I've already been bitten by the numbers bat and turned into a vile numberpire. Tom has a 12.1 DPS bow? That's 0.7 DPS better than my current bow. Tom, come here to trade! Tom! TOM! GIEF BOW! TOOOOM! The actual act of killing stuff currently feels like a means to getting fresher and more exciting loot. I think I'm doing action-RPGs right.

Tom : I'm definitely having fun. I love figuring out new builds and exploring all the classes, and I'm enjoying each of them more than I did at the preview event. I do agree with Graham, though, that playing in a group of four actually isn't as fun as playing alone or as a pair. It's spectacular, but it's not really clear what's going on. I think when it comes out, we should each pair up with someone playing a complimentary class, like Wizard and Barbarian. That's the most fun I've had so far.

Tim : The Diablo 3 beta then: it is fun.

3D Realms drops Duke Nukem Forever royalties suit against Gearbox

3D Realms has dropped its suit against Gearbox for unpaid royalties from Duke Nukem Forever . The former issued a statement (via Game Informer ) absolving the latter of all blame, with a personal apology from founder and CEO Scott Miller. "After reviewing evidence regarding our business affairs, and without any money exchanging hands, we have satisfactorily resolved any and all differences that we

Cargo! trailer drops a steamship from orbit

Ice Pick Lodge are best known for the dark and strange survival horror, The Void , but they've taken a very different direction with their next game, Cargo, swapping moody existentialism for giant penguins.

The aim of the game is to entertain tiny fat naked baby-men, so that you can use the "fun" they produce to buy new objects from the sky. The video above gives us the first footage of the creation tools that will let you combine these bought objects into vehicles and other contraptions. It looks bonkers but wonderful.

3D Realms sues Gearbox over Duke Nukem royalties

Original Duke Nukem Forever studio 3D Realms has sued Gearbox for over $2 million in royalties it claims remain unpaid following the Borderlands maker’s acquisition of the rights to the property in 2010. According to Law360 , 3D Realms filed a breach of contract suit last Friday in a Texas state court, in which it alleged that Gearbox has failed to pay money owed and also blocked an independent audit

Cargo! demo! Out now!

Here's a wonderful slice of free insanity for a Friday.

Cargo

Here's a wonderful slice of free insanity for a Friday. Ice-Pick Lodge's vibrant entertain-'em-up has you building bizarre contraptions to amuse a race of naked baby-men. The new demo throws you onto a small island to learn the ways of the weird new world, in which you must collect and sacrifice objects to the gods to unlock new items. These can then be put together in the editor mode to create new vehicles or strange machines to inspire the island's inhabitants, generating "fun" that can be used to buy more impressive stuff, like steamships. The 800MB demo is available to download from the Cargo! sitenow. There's nothing quite like it.

Win StarCraft II goodies and a GeForce GTX 670 in PC Gamer UK 252

It's finally summer - or something like it - and that means its time to find brilliant reasons to stay inside and order tiny spacemen about.

It's finally summer - or something like it - and that means its time to find brilliant reasons to stay inside and order tiny spacemen about. That's why we're giving away a bundle of StarCraft II collectors' editions and a NVidia GeForce card with PC Gamer UK issue 252, on shelves now.

We're asking readers to come up with their own customised Zerg mutation, with the five most creative interpretations of the word 'evolution' taking home the collector's editions of both Heart of the Swarm and Wings of Liberty. The CEs include the games themselves plus art books and unlockable trinkets in World of Warcraft and Diablo III.

The very best entry will also receive a GeForce GTX 670 worth £250, which shares a GPU with its Kepler-powered sibling the 680. It's a solid, future-proof card that should shore your rig up against everything the next generation of games has to offer.

To enter the competition, pick up a copy of PC Gamer 252- the MMO issue - digitally via Zinio or iOS or in its traditional, printed-on-a-tree form. You must be a UK resident to enter.

New Cargo! screens show mechanical birds and tiny baby-men

In Cargo!

Cargo baby band

In Cargo! a bored god has turned gravity off, sending everything on earth hurtling off into space. As one of the last remaining humans it's down to you to entertain a race of tiny, bald baby-men called Brats to generate fun, which can then be spent to buy Earth's objects back. You can then combine these objects into wild contraptions that can better entertain the tiny populace. Read on for a selection of brand new screens fresh front he weird and wonderful world of Cargo!

The game is made by Ice-Lodge, formerly responsible for Pathologic and The Void, some of the darkest and most disturbing games of the last few years. As you can see from the screens below, Cargo! breaks that mould completely. Check out our Cargo! previewfor more on the game. You can click on the screens below to see them full size.

Friday Night Fights - Captain Price vs. Duke Nukem

As some of you rightly pointed out in the comments, last week's bout between Master Chief and Commander Shepard was problematic, given Halo's a system exclusive whereas Mass Effect will get on with anyone. But whatever, Chief's an against-all-odds warrior--you really think a couple of platforms can hold him down? Please. When a villain is loose, when war is imminent, when the very known galaxy is facing

Latest Call of Duty: Ghosts patch focuses on eSports

Just because we weren't the biggest fans of Call of Duty: Ghosts doesn't mean it isn't still immensely popular.

doesn't mean it isn't still immensely popular. It has a huge, highly competitive following, big enough to serve as a primary attraction to Major League Gaming's eSports streaming service, MLG.TV.Those players care passionately about details in the game the average player won't even notice, which would explain why Infinity Ward's latest update focuses on eSports and balancing.

As the only first-person shooter in MLG's 2014 season, it's also a big opportunity for Call of Duty to claim a spot in the growing business of eSports, currently dominated by MOBAs like League of Legends, Dota 2, and real-time strategy with StarCraft 2.

Some of the patch notesspecific to eSports and MLG in this latest update include:

Improvements to MLG Broadcast mode for highlighted players. Prevent eSports players (except COD Caster) from switching to 3rd Person Spectate cam. Better team identification in the MLG hud. Added killstreak count to eSports scoreboard. Added team names to in-game scoreboard for Broadcast mode. Restrict Ghillie Suits when eSports rules enabled (replaces with different game models). Add a kill feed to Broadcaster mode.

Improvements that non-pro players might care about include five new prestige ranks in Extinction mode, the addition of "Create a soldier" to Extinction mode, the return of the Gun Game mode to multiplayer, and many (many) other little balancing and performance tweaks.

The patch came out shortly after Infinity Ward announced what it will include in Onslaught, the first of four DLC packs for the game. It has yet to announce when the DLC will be available on PC.

You can read further details on fixes and additions in this latest patch on the official Call of Duty: Ghosts forums.

The Text Adventures That Never Were: Call of Duty: Ghosts

The holidays are a time for family gatherings, massive dinners, mildly disappointing presents, and visitations by ghosts who show you harrowing visions of what might have been.

The holidays are a time for family gatherings, massive dinners, mildly disappointing presents, and visitations by ghosts who show you harrowing visions of what might have been. This year, the Ghost of Video Games Past showed me what the games of 2013 would have been like if graphics cards had never been invented! I have no idea why he did that. The Ghost of Video Games Past is a little weird.

However you feel about the Call of Duty series, we can all agree that the visuals are among the most cinematic in gaming. What happens when you remove the visuals? Follow me (and do exactly what I tell you when I tell you) and we'll find out with Call of Duty: Ghosts: The Text Adventure!

Opinion – If Microsoft Doesn’t Understand Project Scorpio, How Can We?

Normally, the unveiling of new hardware is one of the most exciting events in the gaming industry.

Normally, the unveiling of new hardware is one of the most exciting events in the gaming industry. Hardware evolution carries with it the promise of new experiences, and those experiences ultimately serve as the motivation for consumers to purchase new consoles. When Microsoft revealed Project Scorpio at its E3 2016 press conference, it painted a rosy picture of a future filled with limitless power and 4K gaming – but in the following days, none of Microsoft’s spokespeople were on the same page when it came to articulating the system’s key features or its benefits. If Microsoft doesn’t have a clear vision for what Project Scorpio represents, how are gamers and developers supposed to get excited?

Let’s start by looking at the tentpole feature: 4K gaming. According to the reveal, Project Scorpio’s 6 teraflops of power will make it the most powerful console ever, and can be used to generate visual fidelity unlike any system before it. True 4K gaming sounds great, but what if you don’t have a 4K-capable TV? Xbox head Phil Spencer explainedto Xbox Live’s Major Nelson that all of the processing power doesn’t necessarily need to be applied to 4K, and developers could use it in other ways, apparently providing value for gamers without state-of-the-art televisions.

That makes sense so far, but Spencer seemed to contradict himself in a later interview with Eurogamer . When referring to gamers who own a standard 1080p television, Spencer said, “Then you should buy [the Xbox One S], because Scorpio is not going to do anything for you. Scorpio is designed as a 4K console, and if you don't have a 4K TV, the benefit we've designed for, you're not going to see. Clearly, you can buy Scorpio, and if and when you decide you want to buy a 4K television to take advantage of the increased performance, obviously the console will be ready for you.” When you’re revealing a brand new console that won’t be out for another year and a half, it probably isn’t wise to tell a large portion of your consumers that they don’t need to buy it.

Apart from 4K gaming, what other advantages do games on Project Scorpio have? The video shown at Microsoft’s press conference has one person describing the system as “the highest res, the best framerate, no compromises.” Gamers like when their games perform smoothly, so the prospect of a guaranteed framerate increase would be attractive to many. The problem is that it’s not happening. When we askedMicrosoft Studios general manager Shannon Loftis about the possibility of framerate superiority on Project Scorpio versus the game on other Xbox hardware, she replied, “No, there wouldn't be a frame rate difference, because typically the frame rate is determined by the game developer and what's right for the gameplay mechanic. You don't necessarily want to create two different mechanics for two different configurations." So though you might get a better resolution when playing in 4K, you may not be getting to jump in performance you’d expect from this supposed powerhouse of a system.

Casting even further doubt on the importance of upgrading is the fact that the Xbox One, Xbox One S, and Project Scorpio will be able to play the same games. “No one gets left behind,” Spencer said during the hardware reveal. In other words, though games on Project Scorpio can use the additional power, they can’t be exclusive to the new hardware; they need to work on Xbox One and Xbox One S, too. That seems pretty straightforward, but when Geoff Keighley askedLoftis about the possibility of Scorpio exclusives, she said, “I don't know about that. We'll see. It's up to the game development community.” This apparently opened the door for Scorpio-only games, though she later tweeteda clarification that she had made a mistake, and that all games would play on all Xbox systems.

Lastly, Microsoft seemed to anticipate the resistance some gamers would have to buying a new console at this point in the generation. In an interviewwith Wired , Spencer clarified that the company is not aiming for the continuous upgrades seen in the mobile phone industry. “Consumer expectation is that, if you wanted to, you could go buy a new cell phone every year,” Spencer said. “I don’t want to get into that mode with a console…We’re not on a hardware tick-tock that says I need to put out a console every two years or every one year to get people to upgrade. That’s not the console model.”

That’s reassuring. But according to Jeff Rivait, the Xbox platform marketing manager for Xbox Canada, that may not be the case. In an interviewwith Xbox Enthusiast , Rivait said, “When gamers get to carry forward their games, and they’re not losing the value invested in the ecosystem, in addition to getting more frequent and more powerful hardware, is looking at things like the mobile industry and how they’ve innovated. Yes, if you want to stay on top of things you may be buying consoles more frequently, but you’re also getting better looking and more powerful gaming experiences sooner than you would be getting in previous [generations].”

This implies that we might even see more incremental upgrade consoles, which would support Spencer’s on-stage claims about gaming “beyond generations” and creating a continuous platform service – though it also goes directly against his claims of this kind of cycle not being the console model. Since we can’t take the statements at face value, only time will tell which side of this issue Microsoft ultimately lands on.

I know this all sounds pretty harsh, but to be clear: I am not trying condemn Project Scorpio itself. This all comes down to Microsoft and its inability to deliver a clear, consistent message about what the system is and why we should care about it. If Microsoft can answer those questions between now and holiday 2017, I’ll be lining up to pick up my Scorpio on release day with everyone else. But as an unveiling, this E3 went badly for Project Scorpio thanks to all of the mixed messages. What was undoubtedly meant as a triumphant reveal failed to energize fans, and made Sony look smarter for focusing on games rather than pulling back the curtain on its confirmed “PlayStation Neo.” At least if you don’t say anything about a new system, you don’t run the risk of contradicting yourself and creating more confusion than hype.

Dungeons & Dragons Online druid trailer is beastly

Dungeons and Dragons Online will get the first full expansion of its six year history late next month, which will add new lands and new foes to thwart.

Dungeons and Dragons Online will get the first full expansion of its six year history late next month, which will add new lands and new foes to thwart. You could do this with one of the existing DDO classes of course, but where are the rabid animals in that? The druid's mastery of nature will let them have pets, summon additional companions and charm creatures in the wild to trample the invading dark elf forces using the deadly power of MAMMALS. Their spellbooks are full of more showy elemental magic and some healing tricks if you prefer a more varied approach. Find out more in our D&D Online: Menace of the Underdark preview. It's out on June 25.

Duke Nukem Forever delayed once again... in Japan

Poor Duke. Just when the troubled king of strip clubs and pig cops thought the negative press was behind him, now comes word the release of Duke Nukem Forever in Japan is suffering from the same old Duke delay blues. As reported by Famitsu magazine (and later translated by Kotaku ), Duke Nukem Forever will not be hitting its early March Japanese release, but instead arriving three weeks late on March

D&D Online: Menace of the Underdark gets trailer, will include shapeshifting tree huggers

Dungeons and Dragons Online was one of the first wave of western MMOs to experiment with free to play (along with Lord of the Rings Online and Age of Conan) revitalising the game's playerbase.

Dungeons and Dragons Online was one of the first wave of western MMOs to experiment with free to play (along with Lord of the Rings Online and Age of Conan) revitalising the game's playerbase. Nowadays of course everyone and his hat is going FTP, but back then Dungeons and Dragons was a trailblazer, so it's with a whiff of nostalgia that we hear news of the game's newest expansion, Menace of the Underdark.

Turbine have released a trailer taking a look behind the scenes on the new expansion, which they call their biggest update in six years. Menace of the Underdark will move away from Eberron, where Dungeons and Dragons Online has been set until now and into the popular Forgotten Realms setting, which gamers will remember from classic D&D based RPGs like Baldur's Gate.

Recently Turbine announced that Menace of the Underdark will give players the chance to play as Druids, one of D&D's most versatile classes. Druids are capable of casting spells like a Cleric, summoning an animal companion to send into battle or just turning into a wolf and pitching in themselves. From the information so far, it seems Turbine will be focusing on the shapeshifting aspect, promising players the ability to turn into a winter wolf, fire and water elementals, plus a dire bear ('dire' being D&D-speak for 'especially badass').

All of which sounds great fun to play, but not easy to balance. Back in the D&D 3.5 rules the game is based on, the tree huggers were one of the most notoriously overpowered classes in the game. Generally held to be better in combat than a fighter, while still able to sling spells with the best of wizards. This means the developers are in for a serious challenge in creating a class that stays true to its D&D origins while keeping the balance demanded of an MMO.

Will Menace of the Underdark let Dungeons and Dragons Online regain the spotlight in a more crowded FTP market? We'll find out on June 25th.

Super Mario Bros. meets Puzzle & Dragons : What's the big deal?

Last week, a new Super Mario Bros .

. game was announced. But it's not a platformer; it's a new edition of Japan's biggest mobile hit, Puzzle & Dragons , for the Nintendo 3DS.

What makes the announcement surprising, however, is not just its content -- it's who made it. GungHo Online Entertainment, the creator of Puzzle & Dragons , revealed the game, and is developing it. Nintendo has lent out its most valuable franchise to another publisher altogether.

That publisher happens to rule the Japanese mobile charts; Puzzle & Dragons has the ubiquity of Angry Birds at its most popular in its home country, and has raked in enough cash to turn an obscure MMO publisher into Japan's foremost 21st century game development success story.

But who's really benefiting from the relationship? And how significant is it that Nintendo gave Mario to GungHo?

Both companies got a stock bumpout of the news. The market has been hungry for Nintendo to go mobile for years, and while this is pretty damn far from that, it's also close enough to start investors drooling.

Serkan Toto, CEO of Tokyo-based consultancy Kantan Games, sees it as a meeting of equals: "Nintendo is the best game maker on console, while GungHo is the best maker on mobile."

He expands on this thought: "It is significant in a sense that Japan's biggest (and in my view 'best') game makers on console and mobile were able to close such a deal. It also means that Nintendo now acknowledges good content can actually be found on mobile -- even though Shigeru Miyamoto and President Iwata suggested otherwise in the past. They wouldn't let GungHo use their characters if they thought Puzzle & Dragons is a bad game."

The truth is: Both companies will benefit, and in different ways, which is what makes this deal enticing.

The 3DS isn't just the leading light of the Japanese console market; it effectively is the Japanese console market, at present. As for Puzzle & Dragons , "Every fourth Japanese is a registered user, and there is no one left in this country who doesn't know about Puzzle & Dragons anymore," Toto says.

The problem is that the company has reached saturation with the franchise. There's nowhere left to go. "It turned into a 'brand' that can be sustained over the next years, provided GungHo can iterate the game in ways we see right now," Toto says.

The company can't rest on its laurels, either, says Toto: "I think that GungHo reacts to the fact that each title has a lifespan and even the huge domestic mobile game market has its limits. The stock is under pressure, Mixi is catching upwith Monster Strike quickly, and Puzzle & Dragons ' international performance leaves a lot to be desired."

"Really both sides benefit -- Nintendo gets (potential) access to legions of Puzzle & Dragons fans who otherwise might not ever bother picking up a 3DS, and obviously Puzzle & Dragons hits a similar audience of 3DS owners who may have not yet dabbled in phone games before," says John Ricciardi, co-founder of Tokyo-based localization house 8-4, Ltd.

Toto even believes the deal could "help GungHo more than Nintendo," because of the strength of the 3DS -- there's more room to grow in that direction.

In particular, the game is now coming West, packed alongside earlier 3DS iteration Puzzle & Dragons Z -- and is being released with Nintendo's backing. GungHo has a small Los Angeles office; Nintendo of America is a titan of packaged software and consumer marketing, and has a knack for turning unusual titles like Tomodachi Life into surprising successes. Match-3 Mario ? Much more mainstream.

But is this mash-up really a big deal? It might not be as significant as it seems at first blush.

Japanese companies frequently join together for promotional purposes. The Japanese use the English word "collaboration" for the concept, and it's rampantin mobile games. In fact, the mobile version of Puzzle & Dragons constantly collaborates with other brands -- including the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, DC Comics, and Angry Birds .

It's also not the first time Nintendo has turned Mario over to a third party developer. Sega made the Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games titles (and published them in the West, though not Japan.) More relevant is Square Enix's Fortune Street , a long-running series of Monopoly-like games. The Wii edition featured Mario and friends. Square Enix published the result in Japan; the collaboration lead to the series' Western debut. That title makes this move seem less shocking.

However, Fortune Street was a NES-era family-game franchise well-suited to the Wii. I n contrast, "This is a collaboration between two famous companies and Japan's biggest two gaming platforms, which explains the buzz the deal generated," Toto observes. Says Ricciardi, "It’s no secret mobile is slowly taking over, especially in Japan, but it’s interesting to see the number one players from both sides (mobile and traditional) coming together."

Another unexpected but no-doubt relevant wrinkle is the two companies' cultural fit. As Toto puts it, "both companies are real game companies led by game geeks." Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata is a programmer, and was debugging game codeas recently as 2001; "I don't really do management, business-type stuff at work. A lot of people tell me to actually manage more, but I like to be on the creative, development side," GungHo president and CEO Kazuki Morishita told mein 2013, well after Puzzle & Dragons had taken off.

A year ago, as Nintendo's fortunes waned, Iwata informed shareholdersthat he'd open up the company to licensing its IP, and more recently he told them that a flood of offers had come in. This, then, likely represents the most appealing (and easily executed) of the initial offers. Shigeru Miyamoto even promisedthat Nintendo was pursuing that business opportunity.

What it isn't likely to represent, despite shareholder dreams and stock market bumps, is Nintendo experimenting with the mobile market.

"An actual Puzzle & Dragons Mario game on cell phones would probably rake in more money than anyone knows what to do with. But would they ever allow that to happen?" observes Ricciardi. "Hard to say…"

Toto is more definite: "I'd disagree with some people saying that the collaboration with Japan's biggest mobile game maker means Nintendo is dipping its toe into the smartphone app market. That's why you saw the Nintendo stock go up. But they made it very clear they are not interested multiple times in the past, and I believe it will stay that way."

In essence, then, this collaboration does represent a savvier, more open Nintendo; but its core conservatism and commitment to its own, dedicated game platforms, won't be blown away so easily. And with the success of Amiibo and Wii U sales looking to have increased enough to avoid any more loss-making quarters, it doesn't seem likely that the company will radically shift course anytime soon.

Amazon's Black Friday Week has 50% off over 150 game downloads

Amazon.com, clearly not run by Rebecca Black fans, is apparently unaware that Friday is only one day out of seven: the site's turned the whole week into Black Friday yet again, and is offering a plethora of game downloads at 50% or more off. Completists willing to wait until January 2012 will also get a bonus coupon for use on any 2011 bestsellers – provided you give in to instant gratification with

Druid class revealed for Dungeons & Dragons Online

I rolled a druid the very first time I ever played the pen-and-paper classic Dungeons & Dragons.

druid transformation2

I rolled a druid the very first time I ever played the pen-and-paper classic Dungeons & Dragons. I didn't get to shapeshift like these fancypants druids you see in games nowadays, but I did manage to save my group by streaking through a bug bear camp to divert the enemy's attention. The druid class is finally coming to Dungeons & Dragons Online in the Menace of the Underdark expansion, releasing on June 25th. I'm already taking my clothes off in preparation for any dangers my group may encounter.

The druid is the hippy's jack-of-all trades, throwing out that cumbersome metal armor to better attune with nature for a variety of roles. As a druid, you'll be able to play defensively as a Dire Bear or chew up your enemies as the Winter Wolf. If you prefer an elemental approach, the druid can also harness the form of a water or fire elemental. Each of the forms comes with its own unique set of skills and abilities. For players who prefer the naked form like myself, the class is also proficient in a number of standard weapons like staves, daggers, and sickles.

VIP accounts will get to play the druid for free, and non-VIPs will be able to purchase it separately. If you're interested in knowing more about the expansion or the druid class, visit the DDO official site.

Neverwinter: Fury of the Feywild now live, adds new zone, races, unicorns

Neverwinter's Fey aren't just wild, they're furious .

. Though I'm not sure why: they get to ride unicorns and have ridiculous fairy petsand everything, in this very first expansion to Cryptic Studios' free-to-play MMORPG. Fury of the Feywildadds playable Moon and Sun Elves to the game; it also adds a new zone, items and enemies and so on, though you'll have to part with your hard-earned real-world gold for some of it. Silly names and gorgeous vistas await in the launch trailer.

I like this narrator a lot better than the old one, though I'm slightly in awe at their old-timey cheesiness in either case. If you're unsure whether to try Neverwinter, well, it's free-to-play, so it shouldn't hurt too much to have a go. We were particularly impressed by the game's Foundry editing/modding tools in our review.

Ta, RPS.

RaiderZ preview

RaiderZ wasn't on the top of my "Must See" list when I went to PAX East a couple weeks ago.

SnowHammer small

RaiderZ wasn't on the top of my "Must See" list when I went to PAX East a couple weeks ago. I knew a few things about it, but I was really excited to see other games like Neverwinter, Smite, and DDO. But while I was at the Perfect World meeting room talking about Neverwinter, RaiderZ's producer Mark Hill came over and told me a bit about their upcoming monster hunter MMO. It sounded fairly intriguing, so I decided to give it a shot.

Players familiar with the original Monster Hunter game that RaiderZ takes heavy inspiration from will immediately be familiar with the core gameplay hook. From a third-person perspective on your cutesy champion, you go out into the wilderness, hunt down and destroy monsters, and then equip yourself with unique one-time-use items ripped from their corpses. If you're really lucky, you'll score some unique armor and weapons that won't be available anywhere else in game other than the corpse of that crab you just shattered.

Sounds great, but it raised a red flag in my mind. I asked Hill if there will be any mechanic in place to lessen the incentive to spawn-camp those monsters with unique items—there won't. Hill said that they think that the variety of monsters, and their spawn rate, should keep players from getting frustrated. A post-traumatic flashback to my EQ days tells me otherwise. I'm not eager to go back to waiting in line for my turn at a boss, just to have someone come along and grief me by tagging it first. Others may enjoy that super-competitive design mechanic, but I don't.

After that, Hill told me a bit about the class choices that players make as they level up. That's right: it's not a one-time, set-it-and-forget-it choice. Players will choose one of four archetypal jobs (tank, melee DPS, ranged DPS or healer) when they create their characters, but they'll be able to advance their character in any of the roles. For the first few levels, players will fill our the skill tree they chose at character creation. As they continue to level up, the other jobs' skill trees will open, and they'll be able to put points in those too.

Depending on the choices you make, you may find yourself with a spell-slinging warrior, or a sword-wielding mage. The theory behind this design is that players will be able to create "mage-y archers," and tanks that can heal. Of course, min-maxers and theorycrafters will inevtiably calculate the one “best” way to make your character, but I'm hopeful that the flexibility in character advancement sticks.

The gameplay looks great. The action-based combat is fluid, well-animated, and fun to watch--not wholely unlike TERA's free-targeting combat system. There's definitely no Tab-targeting here. The little archer twists and turns around the beachfront, aiming at the different monsters clutttering the sands and firing away. Forcing players to move their characters around, targeting monsters by aiming at them instead of with the tab button, is a mainstay of the action-MMO genre, and it looks to be in full force here.

The world itself was full of vibrant colors and the players and props have a great sense of weight to them. The characters realistically lurched around with huge maces and gigantic swords. The combination of great art direction (if the style is to your tastes) and interesting monsters has promise—the world felt lived in, and I didn't want to mess with who was livin' in it! The mage was a particulary fun, firing off his spells before he had to dive to one side to avoid the hammer of the troll that descended upon him. The hammer crashed into the ground right as the mage landed on his feet and let loose another barrage of fireballs at its scaly hide.

Perfect World seems to be aiming for the hardcore crowd with RaiderZ's mechanics, and, from my first impressions, I think it has a chance at success. As Hill said, this is a "very loot-heavy, very drop-heavy game," and we all know hardcore players love to amass loot. Just because I'm too "carebear" to appreciate it doesn't mean that other's won't fall for it's mix of lootz, monsters and style though. If you're itchin' for some MMO monster huntin', you can sign up for the betaright now.

Video: From Jem to Castleville -- a 'truly outrageous' narrative postmortem

As the creator of Jem and the Holograms and writer on hit franchises such as G.I. Joe, TMNT and He-Man, among others, Christy Marx has built a remarkable career bringing the craft of storytelling to new platforms that span from animation to comics to mobile games.

As part of GDC 2015's Narrative Summit, Marx took to the stage to share learnings from crafting narrative within mobile games, in the hopes that fellow game designers could make use of them in their own projects.

Through a narrative design postmortem of her work on Zynga's CastleVille Legends , Marx shared her thoughts on how narrative development intersects with mobile game design, and how the same principles used to write for animation and comics can be applied to games.

It was a great talk, and if you missed it in person you can watch the whole thing for free over on the GDC Vault.


About the GDC Vault

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vaultand its new YouTube channeloffers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC, GDC Europe, and GDC Next already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech

Battlefield Hardline's modes and maps detailed

Battlefield Hardline might be racing around the corner like that guy on that bike up there, but we still have time to learn slightly more about it before it busts onto hard drives the world over on March 17th.

Battlefield Hardline

Battlefield Hardline might be racing around the corner like that guy on that bike up there, but we still have time to learn slightly more about it before it busts onto hard drives the world over on March 17th. EA and Visceral have had a blowout of sorts on the Hardline site, revealing all the maps and all the modes we can expect to shoot each other in upon release. Let's have a little look at them, shall we?

Hardline's modesdon't contain too many surprises, comprising Battlefield favourites Conquest and Team Deathmatch, along with the cash-hungry Blood Money mode, the Payday-ish Heist, and the exciting-sounding Hotwire mode. (Exciting-sound because it's basically Need for Speed with rocket launchers.)

But wait: there's more. Rescue is "a cop-centric mode that lets you step into the boots of a SWAT operative tasked with saving innocent lives from the hands of criminals. Lead your team carefully into dangerous environments and get the hostages back to safety. Be careful though, because there are no second chances in this mode". Crosshair, meanwhile, is the criminal flipside of the above, putting you in the shoes of a bunch of wrong'uns trying to murder a witness before he can testify against them. EA/Visceral describe the previous as the game's two 'competitive' modes, but it's not clear what that means in this context. Surely all these modes are competitive?

Dust Bowl

Those mapsare a little more self-explanatory, comprising a bank premises, city streets, a Breaking Bad-style desert town (seriously, it's a dead ringer), a palatial mansion, swampland and a couple of drug dens. Basically: all the places cops and robbers tend to hang out. There are no libraries, is what I'm saying.

Hardline is heading back into beta soon, ahead of its release in mid-March.

Official Stalker Facebook page extends, then retracts, support for Areal Kickstarter

The official Facebook page of GSC Game World issued a statement over the weekend calling for an end to disparaging comments about Areal , the "definitive spiritual successor" to the Stalker games that's now on Kickstarter.

games that's now on Kickstarter. That led the makers of the Misery mod, one of Areal's most prominent critics, to remove all such criticism from its Facebook page; yet now GSC has reversed course, saying its expression of support for Areal was not official at all.

A recap of the situation is available herebut in a nutshell, West Games is seeking $50,000 from Kickstarterto fund the development of a new, very Stalker-like open-world game called Areal. The Kickstarter immediately raised suspicions, however, because of the studio's claim to be formed from the "core people" behind Stalker as well as its extensive and uncredited use of Stalker assets in its pitch. The crowdfunding campaign started strongly, earning more than half its goal in short order, but support seemed to wane as negative feedback, including from Survariumstudio Vostok Games, began to roll in.

Vostok effectively said its piece and then washed its hands of the matter but Misery Developments continued to make noise about it until this weekend, when the Stalker Facebook page, as noted by OnlySP, issued a wide-ranging appeal for peace.

"As the Official page for GSC Game World, we represent the interests and intellectual property of GSC Game World. Since GSC Game World is not currently producing any games, we have generously and tirelessly supported and promoted all those Games that former GSC Employees have been involved with in the past, currently and in the future. This includes Metro 2033, Survarium, Cradle, Nuclear Union ( no longer in production ) and now Areal. This is nothing new," it said. "We also have promoted the Modding Community with major titles such as Misery, The Seed, Lost Alpha and other works. Our position is that all in the Stalker Community benefit from such a diverse and unique variety of Games. The only thing we are not tolerant about is one part of the Stalker Community disparaging another. Thanks for your understanding and support."

According to screen captures included in an Areal update, the Stalker Facebook page also posted messages confirming that West Games is made up of "real ex-GSC Employees" and telling the Misery developers to remove all negative content about the studio from its Facebook page or risk losing support for its projects, including the Misery mod and the successfully Kickstarted stand-alone game The Seed. Misery Developments quickly complied, telling its followersthat it had been "formally asked" to stop commenting on West Games and Areal. "Misery Development Ltd. would like to state that whether or not to pledge on a Kickstarter campaign is for the community to decide, and an individual choice," it wrote.

But GSC Game World has since edited the post, effectively retracting the statements of support for Areal and, presumably, the threat against its critics. "While we do believe the community of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. should remain united and strong, the previously made statement does not represent the official stance of GSC Game World," it now says. "The post has therefore been edited. We apologize for the inconveniences."

The Areal Kickstarter is now at just over $33,500, with 23 days remaining.

Shenmue's social-gaming installment starts the year by cancelling support

Shenmue, Sega's long-dormant open-world adventure, just can't catch a damn break. Fans spent 2011 waiting for a smartphone port of social spinoff Shenmue Gai (aka Shenmue World or Shenmue Town). But Ysnet, the game's developer, quietly announced over the Christmas break that instead of expanding Shenmue Gai onto new platforms, it'll be canceling support for the title. Above: At least the series' last

Battlefield Hardline interview: jets are out, increased player speed is in

Battlefield 4's disastrous launch invited early skepticism, but Battlefield Hardline seems to be coming along since we last saw it, bringing with it a much more frenetic pace than the series is used to.

BFHL Screens Desert Hotwire

seems to be coming along since we last saw it, bringing with it a much more frenetic pace than the series is used to. With the imminent launch of a beta in the lead up to Hardline's March release, I sat down with Senior Producer Scott Probst and Senior Multiplayer Designer Evan Champlin to talk how Visceral has transferred Battlefield's established military setting into a cops-vs-robbers environment.

The main talking point is the new Hotwire mode, a ridiculous domination mode in which players vie for control over a handful of vehicles. It's in keeping with the studio's mission to inject a greater sense of speed into Battlefield, though no fighter jets will feature in this installment. You can see Tyler play the beta over here.

PC Gamer: Did the transition from the typical military setting to the cops and robbers setting present any interesting challenges in terms of the way maps are designed?

Evan Champlin : We had to understand the technology first, but also the philosophy of previous Battlefield games before developing our own. Because, you know, Hardline’s rock paper scissors are dramatically different to Battlefield 4’s. We have a lot more focus on transport vehicles, things that go super fast, and we had to account for that in our level design.

Did you encounter any roadblocks when designing for the new setting?

Scott Probst : I wouldn’t see anything as a roadblock. I almost think we had more opportunities than we could imagine. When we started talking about cops and criminals in the Battlefield world we thought we could go anywhere. It was more a question of what’s the time we have and what are the cool things that are going to boil to the top to make the best game possible.

There were a lot of discussions where we had a plate of spaghetti worth of ideas and we had to say, “Okay, what are the coolest things and what really stands out and let’s go after those things”. I don’t think it was about limitations, it was more about discipline.

You said before that speed is one of the core pillars of Hardline. Over the years a lot of FPSs have slowed down, especially those with military settings. Given that you’ve got infantry in the same playing field as hotted-up cars and helicopters, how does that balance out in the way the maps are put together?

Evan Champlin : It was definitely a challenge because we have vehicles that are three or four times faster than all the ground vehicles in Battlefield. So the trick was to design maps that have long enough open spaces where you can really feel the speed of vehicles, where you can open up and go full speed, and have opportunities where two cars can be next to each other, rubbing paint, or three guys hanging out of windows shooting each other. So the trick was looping vehicle flow and then having interconnected infantry passes that allowed you to circumvent that, or shortcut your way past.

We also slightly increased the player speed too, which helps a little bit because you can now compete a little bit more [with vehicles]. As an infantry player you can say “that guy [in a vehicle] is going around that turn, I’m pretty sure he’s going to be making this next turn, so now I can cut through this space and be there to meet him.”

tNBFfx38xLnF 878x0 Z Z96KYq

What’s the thinking behind having a beta so close to launch?

Scott Probst: There’s a few different thoughts behind it. From an engineering perspective, making sure everything is functional and that the whole backend works on all the different platforms is one, and making sure people are able to get into the game and that it’s a stable and fun experience.

From a design perspective a lot of it is about validating the design that the guys have gone and built, and making sure that the game modes, the player progression, the weapons and the gadgets are a fun and balanced experience. Then I also think it’s about looking at the data that comes out of the beta and seeing whether there are any last minute tweaks we can make based on the experiences people are having, like if someone finds a weapon that’s OP, or if there’s some player progression adjustment we want to make. [We want to] take all that into account and fold it into the game before it releases.

In the event that you do notice a fatal flaw during the beta, what happens then? Will the game be delayed?

Scott Probst : I don’t think there’s a world that exists where the game gets delayed. I also hope that we don’t find anything that’s fatal like that. In the event that we do, I think that we’ll find time to address whatever we do find. So if there’s anything that comes up that’s like “oh, that’s not good” we’ll find a way to fix it.

Both your publisher and Visceral have learnt from Battlefield 4’s dilemmas, but do you think it’s even possible to release a bulletproof software product in 2015?

Scott Probst : I think it’s a big challenge. I don’t think I’d call anything bulletproof, because there are always exploits and things that can be found and ways things can be broken. I think the important part of it is to be aware that everything isn’t bulletproof. By acknowledging that we can pay attention to the issues that are being found and go after them, as well as interact with the people who are experiencing them so we can listen and understand their problems, and ultimately fix them.

If we were to say “this thing is bulletproof, it’s ready to go,” that’s the wrong approach to take. At the end of the day there’s going to be millions of people playing the game and I’m sure people will find things that we haven’t found yet. The important part is that we’re going to be paying attention, and we want to speak to each and every one of those people in order to solve it.

BFHL Screens Bank Heist

I had the opportunity to play the single-player component a few months ago. Has the hard-boiled, black humour approach influenced the multiplayer? I ask because Hotwire is amazing fun but it’s nonsense, isn’t it? There's no justification for it in the fiction.

Scott Probst : [laughs] I think when it comes to multiplayer the focus is absolutely on fun. The handcuffs come off a bit in relation to the story because multiplayer is more about getting into the action and having a good time. With that said, I think the people who have written the game and paid attention to the dialogue have actually done an excellent job in multiplayer, bringing some of those elements across. You’ll hear cool voice over and snappy dialogue between characters. It feels like it’s cops and criminals banter. So I think that stuff does come across, and the more you play it the more it comes out, it’s just not as scripted and heavy-handed.

Will there be fighter jets and water vehicles in the multiplayer?

Evan Champlin : We do have some water vehicles in there. We have a couple of speed boats and gun boats. There are a couple of other water vehicles like air boats too. As far as jets and stuff goes, no. We felt that was a little too far from the fantasy. Over the course of development we played with a lot: we’d push the meter in both directions to hone what Battlefield Hardline was, to make sure we were bringing in the Battlefield experience but also changing enough to make Hardline unique. So it was just a little too far.

Scott Probst : One of the interesting points is that we actually had jets at one point, and we put it in front of the Game Changers [Visceral’s internal playtesters comprising veteran Battlefield players, YouTubers etc.], and everyone was like “that’s not really your thing”. In the package we were putting together with Hardline they said they really shouldn’t be in there. It was kinda split: some people wanted them and others didn’t, but in the end we did what was right by the players because they said it didn’t fit. They said that if we were to take them out it’d be better. So we removed them and they were right.

There may be a Bulletstorm remaster in the works

Of all the ways for a game to be revealed, finding a folder titled 'Bulletstorm Remaster' on an unrelated USB stick is...well, it's quite something isn't it?

Multipleoutlets are reportingthat a USB stick from Microsoft (often used to deliver assets to the press) contained a hidden surprise: a folder full of screenshots seemingly for a Bulletstorm re-release.

Mistake, or purposeful leak? Who knows, but here are the screenshots, if you're interested. They do look suitably remaster-y:

A prettier Bulletstorm not tied to *spit* Games For Windows Live would be a wonderful thing, but obviously we don't know whether this is real, or in active development yet.

Shenmue HD has been ready to go for well over a year [Rumor]

HD ports of Shenmue I and II for XBLA and PSN have been ready to go for over a year, but Sega's held back on raising fan hopes for the series until it knows the future for the long-dormant franchise. That's according to a “source who wishes to remain anonymous but does have ties to Sega,” says Gamerzines . Which is to say, take all of this with as many grains of salt as you see fit. Shenmue HD, which

Battlefield Hardline interview: jets are out, increased player speed is in

Battlefield 4's disastrous launch invited early skepticism, but Battlefield Hardline seems to be coming along since we last saw it, bringing with it a much more frenetic pace than the series is used to.

BFHL Screens Desert Hotwire

seems to be coming along since we last saw it, bringing with it a much more frenetic pace than the series is used to. With the imminent launch of a beta in the lead up to Hardline's March release, I sat down with Senior Producer Scott Probst and Senior Multiplayer Designer Evan Champlin to talk how Visceral has transferred Battlefield's established military setting into a cops-vs-robbers environment.

The main talking point is the new Hotwire mode, a ridiculous domination mode in which players vie for control over a handful of vehicles. It's in keeping with the studio's mission to inject a greater sense of speed into Battlefield, though no fighter jets will feature in this installment. You can see Tyler play the beta over here.

PC Gamer: Did the transition from the typical military setting to the cops and robbers setting present any interesting challenges in terms of the way maps are designed?

Evan Champlin : We had to understand the technology first, but also the philosophy of previous Battlefield games before developing our own. Because, you know, Hardline’s rock paper scissors are dramatically different to Battlefield 4’s. We have a lot more focus on transport vehicles, things that go super fast, and we had to account for that in our level design.

Did you encounter any roadblocks when designing for the new setting?

Scott Probst : I wouldn’t see anything as a roadblock. I almost think we had more opportunities than we could imagine. When we started talking about cops and criminals in the Battlefield world we thought we could go anywhere. It was more a question of what’s the time we have and what are the cool things that are going to boil to the top to make the best game possible.

There were a lot of discussions where we had a plate of spaghetti worth of ideas and we had to say, “Okay, what are the coolest things and what really stands out and let’s go after those things”. I don’t think it was about limitations, it was more about discipline.

You said before that speed is one of the core pillars of Hardline. Over the years a lot of FPSs have slowed down, especially those with military settings. Given that you’ve got infantry in the same playing field as hotted-up cars and helicopters, how does that balance out in the way the maps are put together?

Evan Champlin : It was definitely a challenge because we have vehicles that are three or four times faster than all the ground vehicles in Battlefield. So the trick was to design maps that have long enough open spaces where you can really feel the speed of vehicles, where you can open up and go full speed, and have opportunities where two cars can be next to each other, rubbing paint, or three guys hanging out of windows shooting each other. So the trick was looping vehicle flow and then having interconnected infantry passes that allowed you to circumvent that, or shortcut your way past.

We also slightly increased the player speed too, which helps a little bit because you can now compete a little bit more [with vehicles]. As an infantry player you can say “that guy [in a vehicle] is going around that turn, I’m pretty sure he’s going to be making this next turn, so now I can cut through this space and be there to meet him.”

tNBFfx38xLnF 878x0 Z Z96KYq

What’s the thinking behind having a beta so close to launch?

Scott Probst: There’s a few different thoughts behind it. From an engineering perspective, making sure everything is functional and that the whole backend works on all the different platforms is one, and making sure people are able to get into the game and that it’s a stable and fun experience.

From a design perspective a lot of it is about validating the design that the guys have gone and built, and making sure that the game modes, the player progression, the weapons and the gadgets are a fun and balanced experience. Then I also think it’s about looking at the data that comes out of the beta and seeing whether there are any last minute tweaks we can make based on the experiences people are having, like if someone finds a weapon that’s OP, or if there’s some player progression adjustment we want to make. [We want to] take all that into account and fold it into the game before it releases.

In the event that you do notice a fatal flaw during the beta, what happens then? Will the game be delayed?

Scott Probst : I don’t think there’s a world that exists where the game gets delayed. I also hope that we don’t find anything that’s fatal like that. In the event that we do, I think that we’ll find time to address whatever we do find. So if there’s anything that comes up that’s like “oh, that’s not good” we’ll find a way to fix it.

Both your publisher and Visceral have learnt from Battlefield 4’s dilemmas, but do you think it’s even possible to release a bulletproof software product in 2015?

Scott Probst : I think it’s a big challenge. I don’t think I’d call anything bulletproof, because there are always exploits and things that can be found and ways things can be broken. I think the important part of it is to be aware that everything isn’t bulletproof. By acknowledging that we can pay attention to the issues that are being found and go after them, as well as interact with the people who are experiencing them so we can listen and understand their problems, and ultimately fix them.

If we were to say “this thing is bulletproof, it’s ready to go,” that’s the wrong approach to take. At the end of the day there’s going to be millions of people playing the game and I’m sure people will find things that we haven’t found yet. The important part is that we’re going to be paying attention, and we want to speak to each and every one of those people in order to solve it.

BFHL Screens Bank Heist

I had the opportunity to play the single-player component a few months ago. Has the hard-boiled, black humour approach influenced the multiplayer? I ask because Hotwire is amazing fun but it’s nonsense, isn’t it? There's no justification for it in the fiction.

Scott Probst : [laughs] I think when it comes to multiplayer the focus is absolutely on fun. The handcuffs come off a bit in relation to the story because multiplayer is more about getting into the action and having a good time. With that said, I think the people who have written the game and paid attention to the dialogue have actually done an excellent job in multiplayer, bringing some of those elements across. You’ll hear cool voice over and snappy dialogue between characters. It feels like it’s cops and criminals banter. So I think that stuff does come across, and the more you play it the more it comes out, it’s just not as scripted and heavy-handed.

Will there be fighter jets and water vehicles in the multiplayer?

Evan Champlin : We do have some water vehicles in there. We have a couple of speed boats and gun boats. There are a couple of other water vehicles like air boats too. As far as jets and stuff goes, no. We felt that was a little too far from the fantasy. Over the course of development we played with a lot: we’d push the meter in both directions to hone what Battlefield Hardline was, to make sure we were bringing in the Battlefield experience but also changing enough to make Hardline unique. So it was just a little too far.

Scott Probst : One of the interesting points is that we actually had jets at one point, and we put it in front of the Game Changers [Visceral’s internal playtesters comprising veteran Battlefield players, YouTubers etc.], and everyone was like “that’s not really your thing”. In the package we were putting together with Hardline they said they really shouldn’t be in there. It was kinda split: some people wanted them and others didn’t, but in the end we did what was right by the players because they said it didn’t fit. They said that if we were to take them out it’d be better. So we removed them and they were right.

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