The term “DLC” is always most welcome when preceded by the word “free”. It was always the point, really. Rewards for investing in the game in the first place. Remembering this is Overkill, with Payday 2, as it receives an appropriately gruesome Christmassy update today. Set in the bank from Counter-Strike: GO.
I was never too confident for Deathfire‘s chances. A classic-style RPG, aiming to breathe narrative life into a Wizardry style game, certainly sounded appealing. And coming from a well-loved RPG creator, Guido Henkel (Realms of Arkania), it was reasonable that it might get funded by Germany alone. But $390,000 was always an enormous figure for an archaic genre, and while it did pretty well, it could only bring together $200,000 in pledges. Of course, they’re not giving up. Instead the team is moving to a direct pledging model, and planning to release the game episodically. So far they’ve picked up $43k from just under a 1,000 people, but they’re going to need a lot more than that.
Last week, Valve sent out the first 300 prototypes of their Steam Machines. That’s exciting, but unless you were one of the few randomly chosen, you can’t get involved. They also released the first version of their SteamOS for everyone to download, which is exciting but you should not get involved>. Even Valve don’t think so. (more…)
“Any day now” is the timeframe given for the release of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance in a recent Kojima Productions Alert podcast. Responding to concerns that the port had been cancelled, host Sean Eyestone says that’s not the case at all:
It s in the final stages right now. You ll be seeing it pop up on Steam any day now.
This being the shooty-slicey side of Metal Gear rather than a game of the prowly-prolix variety, I’m hoping for DMC style silliness, with tongues thrust so far inside cheeks that everybody involved has begun to resemble the terrifying TV-dwelling puppet, Pob. I was slightly unnerved when I found a Youtube video containing every cutscene and cinematic in the game. It’s two hours and nineteen minutes long. The opening cinematic is below – fancy another two hours of that sort of thing?
It would be a fool who ignored the power of Maple Story. However, we arguably weren’t fools for not troubling you with the news of a MapleStory 2 last month. At that point Korean publishers Nexon had only put up a useless teaser site. Now there’s a trailer to make something of a more useful announcement.
You don’t care about MapleStory, you say? Sure, it’s not exactly core RPS material. But we should be interested it in anthropologically, if nothing else. This is a game that’s seen over 67 million players, and earned more than $300m before it was even famous. It’s a phenomenon, no question. And now it’s got a really stupid CGI trailer, complete with dubstep.
Graham mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, but since the release is today and it’s unlikely to be particularly visible for long on Steam, I though it best to draw attention to it again. Just Cause 2′s multiplayer mod is one of the crazier alterations to a game I’ve ever seen, turning the enjoyably daft open world game into a massive landscape of impossible stunts and unlikely vehicle bonding. Supporting hundreds of players, most with the single objective of causing as much hilarity and carnage as possible, it’s akin to a drunken superhero flashmob invading Far Cry 3 and turning the island into the world’s most expensive and ludicrous circus. The video below tells you everything you need to know.
Sundays are for work, for wishing it would stop getting dark at 2pm, and for panic-buying gifts for family and friends while wondering if you couldn’t just give them links to the week’s best game writing instead.
Have you read our recent mega-blowouts of Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity? Then congratulations: you know everything about Pillars of Eternity except what the pillars of eternity actually are. But Obsidian’s not planning to dip a furtive pinky toe into classic CRPG waters and then leave its legacy behind again. This time, it’s in control of its own destiny, and no one knows that better than CEO Feargus Urquhart. He wants to push the classic Black Isle mold further than it’s ever gone before, into worlds so immense that the classic Infinity Engine never would’ve been able to handle them. But that was then, and this is now. His company has new-old tech and new-old ideas. Hear all about Urquhart’s grandest plans below.>
