This is it. The 24th door. The panel behind which every developer on Earth desperately hopes to be. Last year it was Far Cry 3. In 2011 it was Skyrim. 2010 saw Minecraft grab it, 2009 went to Dragon Age, in 2008 it was World Of Goo, and the very first was Portal in 2007.
So what is it this time? Did you guess?
Oh my, what an astounding little thing Titan Souls is, especially given that it was developed as part of Ludum Dare 28 in only a couple days. It’s open and sparse, but all the more powerful for it. A lilting piano melody beckons you into a world of giants with each come-hither note, and as A Videogame Character, it’s your job to slay them. The twist? In line with LD28′s theme of “you only get one,” you have just one arrow and one HP with which to bring down four titans. Also, you can dodge roll like a crazy person. I highly recommend it. Titan Souls is not an easy game.
The Dark Souls series is known for throwing as many obstacles as possible in the way of your happiness and physical well-being, but apparently DLC won’t be one of them. While most games slather themselves with the stuff like Hedonism Bot on holiday, Dark Souls II will walk the path of the spartan. It will bring with it only what’s necessary for a complete game. And nothing more.
Are all of your friends in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft‘s closed beta? Have they replaced the you-shaped hole in their lives with shiny virtual trading cards? Well, for one, you should probably get new friends. Yours sound a bit, um, terrible. But, if you reeeeally >want to join them in their quest for gold and glory and more trading cards, I’m afraid I have a bit of bad news for you: the open beta’s been delayed. The already nicely polished card battler was supposed to open its floodgates to every Tom, Dick, and Yu-Gi-Oh around this month, but now that won’t be happening until January-ish.
Hello? Is anyone here? Hello? Where is everyone? Where have they all gone? Maybe they’re under all these ring binders?
Doing all your Christmas shopping for your distant desert-island-stranded relatives who you’ve not heard from in over a decade on Steam? Well, relish the convenience while you can, because Valve’s added an option for developers and publishers to disallow cross-region gifting and trading. In addition to the obvious ramifications, this may pull the rug out from people who use those features to get around arbitrarily raised regional pricing and/or censorship. In the words of a handless person who’s just come across the world’s most pettable kitty, “bummer.”
Reset blew us all away with its opening trailer. Heck, it blew me away with its opening screenshots. A single-player co-op where you time travel to interact with yourself, in inexplicably gorgeous graphics. That was all last year. Things went understandably quiet. And then the Finnish pair went to IndieGoGo to try to raise 65,000. Because I’m incapable of guessing the ways of mankind, this is the sort of project I’d be sure would ding its targets straight away, just because people would be interested to see such a beautiful-looking game with such a splendid premise get a chance. With 38 hours left, they’re still 22k short.
Sundays are for being on holiday before Christmas! So just a quick one this week.
As the Warhammer Age Of Reckoning MMO closes down, former developer Josh Drescher writes about how he believes WAR is still everywhere, as so many of the game’s team have gone on to work on other leading MMOs, and how many other MMOs have picked up ideas from Warhammer. “If you look around the industry today at pretty much any major MMO being developed in the Western market, you will find WAR there. Sometimes, it will be in the games themselves where concepts and ideas that first showed up in WAR have been gently borrowed . Mostly, however, it s in the people making those games. You ll be hard-pressed to find a major MMORPG team whose leadership doesn t feature someone who cut their teeth as a developer on WAR.”>
ROCK PAPER SHOTGUN Corporation Database Access entry:Castle Shotgun
Location:All over, reallyDistance to Earth: really very close
Research fields:Calendar Entry #22
Oh ho, the plot thickens! Or rather, it congeals from thin air, because I suppose there wasn’t much of a plot before this. EA yanked the cord on Warhammer Online’s servers (and then presumably bit it in half and bathed in its blood), and that was that. The end. Roll credits. But now a former Mythic developer who’s currently working on Camelot Unchained has revealed the existence of a single-player, server-free version of the sadly short-lived (by MMO standards) game, and he’s pleading that EA release it for history’s sake.