It's nice when evil can organise itself to a schedule. For Guild Wars 2's world of Tyria, its various bad things have now mapped out their plans for the rest of the year, giving the various heroes of the world a much needed heads-up.
The first update, due later today, is the game's annual Halloween event. It will be a repeat of last year's festivities—as will the game's Wintersday event, due 16 December. Expect Mad Realms and a jumping puzzle for the former, and Workshops and another jumping puzzle for the latter. Despite featuring the same activities, both will offer "refreshed rewards".
Between these two events comes the return of Living World: Season 2. The fifth episode is due 4 November, and will continue on from the mid-season cliffhanger. ArenaNet is teasing the final episode of this series, referring to "points of no return".
"Tyria has already decided to take the battle to Mordremoth," explains the latest blog post. "As we go on this journey we ll learn dark secrets of Tyria s past, venture into stories with roots deep in the very heart of Guild Wars lore, and visit places that have only been rumored to exist."
Andy recently ran down the contents of GalCiv 3's Beta 2 update. But, if reading words makes you itch uncontrollably... well, first, I'm very sorry, this very page must be unbearably hellish. Second, there's now a video that runs through the diplomacy patch's contents.
In addition to diplomacy, the update adds new victory conditions and trade networks. It's a significant step along the road to the early access 4X's eventual full release.
That's free to play, not free-to-play—an important distinction. Steam is again playing host to more (temporarily) free goodies, with a midweek trial of Civilization 5. The offer, which lets you play the full game until Thursday, 10am PDT, will give everyone a chance to experience the unstoppable wrath of Gandhi.
This, of course, is designed to prepare people for the upcoming Civilization: Beyond Earth, which has begun pre-loading ahead of this Friday's release. That game bears many similarities to Civ 5, only it's on an alien planet in the future. It is not, for instance, a game in which Genghis Khan can negotiate a beneficial spice deal with Bismarck.
Unfortunately, the free trial doesn't include the excellent expansions. Nevertheless, it's worth an investigation if, somehow, you've managed to hold off this long.
When Bandai Namco announced a PC port for Dark Souls there was much rejoicing. Then, when it was announced that it would release on the dreaded Games For Windows Live platform, there was much rage. Well here's good news: come November, those who own Dark Souls on GFWL will have the opportunity to transition over to Steam.
Next month users can redeem their GFWL tokens on Steam in order to access Dark Souls. While you'll be able to do this indefinitely, the transferal of save data and achievements will be possible for a limited time only. More specific dates will be provided soon, Bandai Namco posted today.
The publisher announced earlier this year that it had plans to accommodate those still playing Dark Souls, despite GFWL's imminent death. It's one of the last games with ties remaining to the service, with most studios and publishers making the jump to other platforms much earlier.
Voxel-based rogue-like shooter
Paranautical Activity has been removed from Steam, following an online outburst by its creator Mike Maulbeck. The developer reportedly made death threats to Gabe Newell after Steam failed to update Paranautical Activity from an Early Access title to a full game in a timely fashion.
The alleged death threat has since been deleted, though Maulbeck has since admitted that posting the deleted Tweet was wrong.
People telling me it's fucking stupid to say I wanna kill gabe. Can I set up a "no shit" autoresponse on twitter?
Other Tweets remain where Maulbeck describes Steam as an "incompetent piece of fucking shit" and a "monopoly", among other things. "It's just not possible to make a living in this industry without Steam," Maulbeck wrote, "so I'm just out."
Speaking to
Polygon, Maulbeck reiterated that he regrets the outburst. "I have since obviously replied to them saying that I didn't mean what I said and pleaded that they consider the monopoly they have on the PC market before totally writing us off," he said, "but let's be real. If they took the game off the store, they're fuckin sure about their decision. There's probably nothing to be done."
Valve's Doug Lombardi confirmed the news to Polygon. "Yes, we have removed the game's sales page and ceased relations with the developer after he threatened to kill one of our employees."
Paranautical Activity is still available on Desura and the Humble Store, though neither come close to the effectiveness of Steam. "Don't worry guys, everything is gonna be OK, we sold TWELVE copies on non-steam platforms today," Maulbeck later Tweeted.
"We were selling more than that a minute on Steam."
According to our recent interview with Metrocide studio Flat Earth Games, the stealth shooter was due to release in August. That hasn't happened yet, and fair enough too: the indie studio has been too busy optimising the game's difficulty. Should it be "really hard" or "excruciatingly hard"? How hard is too hard? Flat Earth Games wants you to help them answer these questions, thus they've made the game available on Early Access until the game's final November / December release date.
From the very beginning, we decided we wanted Metrocide to be hard," a spokeperson for the studio wrote on the game's Steam page. "Every time we've finished the game, we've made it harder and tried again. Cops, security cameras, gang members and vigilantes mix with permadeath to make sure that no matter how armed to the teeth you might be, one wrong move and you're back at square one (although you will keep all the unlocks)."
The studio said that it's happy with the game from a technical perspective but that it didn't want to go overboard with the difficulty. "The short time we intend to be in Early Access will be centred around balancing the game (the last third or so in particular), to make sure that it's as punishing as we intend it to be, but also that it's punishing in the right way.
Tactical strategy game Massive Chalice is Double Fine's second Kickstarted project, and one of many that fans have been able to watch very closely during development. Between Amnesia Fortnight projects such as Spacebase DF-9 and other Early Access games such as Hack 'n' Slash, Double Fine has invited fans to watch them pitch concepts, create art, and balance character stats in spreadsheets via developer diaries and Twitch streams.
It's all super interesting stuff if you want to see how games are made, but there have been problems. Recently, there was some controversy around Spacebase's unexpected transition from Early Access to v1.0, and planned features lost in the process. When I sat down with Massive Chalice Project Lead Brad Muir, I asked him if this caused Double Fine to reconsider its approach.
PC Gamer: Did you discuss how to better manage expectations when developing a game in full view after the reaction to Spacebase's release?
Brad Muir: We talked about it a little bit but I think our communication has been good, really transparent...Massive Chalice is really mechanical and procedural, so we're content complete at this point. There are small features, enemy behavior, some abilities we want to tweak. Lots of number tweaks. Overall balance to the game is going to change dramatically, especially the second half of it. That's one thing about any sort of long term, strategic game: the further you deviate from the beginning, the less testing you're going to get on it. I'm excited to have all these people helping test the game.
What's it been like developing Massive Chalice with constant feedback from backers?
One of our tenants as a Kickstarter project is that we didn't have the whole thing designed, and we had a lot of people come to us with ideas that were better than ours. One of our classes is an alchemist that throws exploding flasks. This guy on the forums, zdesert, did this quick talent tree in MS Paint and drew all these icons that the alchemist character would have. Some of them were fine, some of them were bad, but one of them, it was a jar of bees. I wanted some kind of area denial ability, like poison gas, but this kid...I actually don't even know if he's a kid, maybe he's like 45, I have no idea, but he made this thing that's even more interesting because it can move around the map, it can create this hazard that can break up and shift for a few turns before it dissipates, and that's a lot more interesting than a cloud of poison gas.
Does he know it's in the game?
Absolutely he knows. He's so stoked. He will forever be able to say that he had an idea that went right into this game.
The origin of 'bees in a bottle.'
Creatively, what's the downside of working this way? If I had to write something on a Twitch stream I'd be too self-conscious.
It's impossible to know what this game would look like if we just closed the doors and developed it internally. For sure, you have to have thick skin because people are going to talk shit about it, and say some inflammatory, angry things, and you just have to do your best to ignore it I guess. Just the other day, there was a guy who came into our forums, TrashMan, and he was like, "What the fuck, these classes are stupid."
We have three core classes in the game and we tried to make something that's not just magic and wizards and fireballs flying around. That stuff is cool, but there are so many games that exhibit that kind of orcs and elves, Tolkien-esque high fantasy stuff.
When someone like the TrashMan appears—I love that he's called that, it's so perfect—there are other backers saying "check out Teamstream number 3, where they went through all this stuff." It's been nice, but there's an ugly side to it—the internet gives everyone a voice. And the other thing is, I don't know anything about these people, that's one part I find very strange about this. I would like to know more about zdesert. He might be a girl, I don't know. It's weird. And this TrashMan guy, I'd like to think that he's just an angry kid, but he might be 40 and through two divorces.
Are you scared that this is taking some of the magic away, showing how the sausage is made?
I think one of the cool things about Kickstarter is you're choosing to be more involved, you're choosing to make this thing happen, though you don't have too. You don't have to gaze upon the making of the sausage.
I don't think that it will ruin it for people. I hope there are more people like zdesert that are just that much more invested because of it, because they saw it grow from nothing. We made Massive Chalice with their help. That's really cool.
I loved the idea of Human Resources from the moment I read about it: Humanity inflicts technological doom on itself, then makes things worse by invoking the Ancient Ones and ends up as nothing more than a generic resource used as fuel in the ensuing war. Alas, as good as the idea is, it wasn't quite good to separate enough people from their crowdfunding dollars.
The decision to pull the plug was announced today by John Comes, the design director at developer Uber Entertainment, which had a big hit on Kickstarter in 2012 with Planetary Annihilation. The Human Resources effort had brought in more than $384,000 from 9326 backers, which sounds impressive in a vacuum. The goal, however, was $1.4 million, and after nearly three weeks it clearly wasn't going to get there.
"Every Kickstarter prediction model is showing that we will come up woefully short of our goal," Comes wrote in an update. "Running a Kickstarter is a full time job for several people. As a small indie, we can t continue spending time and money focusing on a project that won t get funded."
Comes said Uber Entertainment is "profoundly grateful" to everyone who supported the project, and that after some "recovery time," the studio would figure out its next step. "One thing is for sure, Human Resources, as pitched in this Kickstarter, is over," he wrote. "But we adore the world of Human Resources and will endeavor to do what we can to bring it to life in some form."
There's at least some defiant bravado in there, but I hope Uber is able to follow through on it somehow; I'm not much of an RTS fan but this is too good an idea to let die. Comes also reminded everyone who backed the project, as we will repeat here in case the question comes up, that because it was not funded, no money will be taken, and no rewards will be delivered.
Work on the Myst-inspired Obduction is proceeding apace, according to the latest update on Kickstarter, and in fact the game is now playable from start to finish, albeit in a very pre-alpha state. And even though it should probably go without saying under the circumstances, developer Cyan also made a point of noting that despite what you may have heard, it has not actually run out of money.
I'm not sure where the "no more money" impression came from, to be honest. The October 16 update offers a Kickstarter post-mortem and a breakdown of what, in Cyan's opinion, made it such a successful campaign. But nothing else about it, at least to my eye, has a ring of, "Oh, by the way, the money is gone." Yet that's how some backers took it, and so in a second update, posted the day after, Obduction Project Manager Ryan Warzecha clarified that this is not the case at all.
He also revealed that the full game is now playable "in a very rough pre-pre-pre-alpha state," and that the studio is actually expanding to meet the project's needs. There's now a website up at obduction.com as well, although it doesn't yet contain any new information about the game.
There is one small spot of bad news: Backer rewards, specifically the Obduction t-shirts, have been delayed. "Everything takes longer than expected, and because we want to keep the team small, everyone is taking on multiple roles. (Rand is even the maintainer of the Kickstarter/Paypal database code.)," Warzecha wrote. "This all to say, we are being very careful up front so we can provide you the best possible experience later."
Receipts will be sent to backers within the next few weeks, he added, and once shipping information has been confirmed, the order will be placed and shipped. Obduction itself, a "real-time, first-person adventure that harkens back to the spirit of Cyan s earlier games Myst and Riven," is currently scheduled to come out in mid-to-late 2015.
As anyone who's ever taken a driver's test knows, parallel parking sucks. But parallel parking in space? That's awesome, especially when it's done at ludicrous speed, with no regard for the safety of yourself or those around you. And if you happen to have a talent for that sort of intergalactic hotdogging, you might be able to score some free Elite: Dangerous loot with it.
Inspiration for the "Frontier Competition" speed docking contest goes back to July, when Elite: Dangerous forum user EidLeWeise, aka Ben Mos-Woodward, posted the rules and some videos from a competition held during Lavecon 2014. Naturally, it didn't take long for other pilots to try to best his mark, and earlier today Frontier Developments decided to make it an official contest.
"At the end of the working week (Friday 4PM BST) we'll be putting the top ten times in to a prize draw—the winner will get an Elite: Dangerous goodie bag," Community Relations Manager Edward Lewis wrote. He initially said that different classes of ships could be used in the contest, but the studio eventually decided to keep the challenge as it was originally laid out: An unmodified Sidewinder starting from 5 km out, facing away from the station.
At last check, the top gun was Kerrash, who went from the start position to landed in a ridiculous 39 seconds. Watching him hit the spot in the video above, it becomes clear that this is going to be a tough time to beat; the only place I can see other pilots shaving a second or two off is during the landing sequence, although since I've never played Elite: Dangerous myself I don't know how quickly you can actually get these things turned around and on the ground. This might be as good as it gets.
It's not quite as exciting (or dangerous) as Isinona's famous and thoroughly crazy
unpowered smuggling run, but standing on it through such a tiny slot, and then getting on the brakes hard enough and fast enough to land without turning yourself into a smear, is still a risky business—risky enough for Frontier to warn on Twitter that you pays your dime, you takes your chances.
We cannot be held responsible for any damaged ship parts as a result of this competition!
Full contest rules (although there's really no more to it than what's mentioned above), entry links, and other relevant information can be found on the
Elite: Dangerous Fan Creations forum.
[Update: The report originally stated that the contest "began" with EidLeWeise's July forum post. We've edited for clarity.]
