Everyone has a fighting chance
The H1Z1 team has unveiled a fantastically hysterical new video showing the team reading the outraged letters from banned game hackers. Some claim innocence, others apologize, others spew on and on in long run on sentences. Sometimes, a video says it all. This is one of those. Enjoy!
A rather oblique Twitter post has appeared on the Overwatch feed that shows a magazine cover with a shadowed figure on it. While nothing on the cover says anything about Overwatch, the appearance on its Twitter feed and the follow up post by a fan for people to scan the QR-code seems to indicate that a new character will be revealed soon. See what you think!
Starr Long had mentioned during my last visit that they’d start rolling Shroud of the Avatar over to Unity 5 this month. When I bumped into Finn Staber, one of the Shroud developers, at a hub for Austin startups, I wasn’t surprised when he told me they’d been working on it. The shocking part was when I asked how much they’d managed to get rolled over for the updated engine over the last two weeks. "All of it," was his reply.
In the recent Producer’s Roadmap, Bruce Maclean dropped the news we’d known about for awhile, Star Wars: the Old Republic would have some kind of Outfit Designer. Coming in the spring with Game Update 3.2, it’s supposed to be an ‘awesome new feature’. Let’s speculate as to how this new feature will work and how it will integrate with the existing crafting system.
I think a change in acronyms is due to match the change. MMORPG has always been a mouthful and sort of sucked all of the immersive qualities out of the genre. MMORPG sounds like a scientific categorization. And, as this column hopefully shows, the semi- or pseudo-MMO market is alive and well within the blurry lines in between genres, so we need some new terms.
All games are hard to make. But when ranking my own personal experiences as a dev, I’d say that single-player games are the most straightforward and predictable of projects (relatively, of course), rescuing failing projects is vastly more complicated, but building MMOs from scratch is the most challenging of all.
The title pretty much says it all in a jumbled mouthful of adjectives drawing on nearly every genre of RPGs out there. Nexon and Socialspiel Entertainment have announced Legacy Quest that is described as a mobile roguelike action RPG dungeon crawler that will be available later in 2015 as a free to play title. If that’s not enough to get your heart pounding, it was also announced that Legacy Quest will feature permadeath but that defeated souls will unlock new traits for the next character.
The DC Universe Online team spent the end of last week addressing an exploit in one of the raids that shipped with Amazon Fury Part II. According to the post on the forums, players who took advantage of the exploit to gain high level items will have the gear removed. The team will also be exploring achievements earned through the exploit also possibly resulting in their removal from offending players.
The Star Citizen team has kicked off a brand new video series that will celebrate player and fan creations focused on Star Citizen. The series is hosted by Jared "Disco Lando" Huckaby who will shine the spotlight on podcasts, fanfics, videos, sites and more. Check out the first episode to see what it’s all about.
Bioware has partnered with ESL to announce a brand new tournament called Operation Victory. Teams of eight will be challenged to complete a story mode operation from Shadow of Revan as quickly as possible. Teams will have two weeks in which to complete the run and submit the time to Bioware. The fastest teams will advance to the finals to compete for both in-game and real world swag.