Saturday, April 7, 2012

WW2, Japan, and Egypt “most boring” potential settings for Assassin’s Creed — Ubisoft

As you should know by now, Assassin’s Creed III will be set in the time of the American Revolution, spanning many of the North American colonies during the 18th century. According to the hotly-anticipated title’s creative director, however, this location may have been chosen because some of the other options presented to them were, well, boring.

Speaking to OXM about other possible settings for ACIII, Ubisoft’s Alex Hutchinson said, “People on the internet suggest the most boring settings. The three most wanted are WWII, feudal Japan and Egypt. They’re kind of the three worst settings for an AC game.” Hutchinson didn’t elaborate much beyond this general dismissal.
So what places would Ubisoft be willing to set future Assassin’s Creed games, then? According to Hutchinson, players may be slitting throats in India if he and ACIII lead writer Corey May get their way. “[May] really wants to do India. I would too. I’d really love to do the Raj.”
Personally, I’ll still be advocating for future Assassin’s Creed games to take place during the prehistoric era, because, as we all know, everything is better with dinosaurs.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a date with Mac

Mac users are getting one of 2011′s best games at the end of this month, as Feral Interactive has announced that Deus Ex: Human Revolution is coming to the system on April 27.

This is the Ultimate Edition of the game, adding the Explosive Mission and Tactical Enhancement packs as well as The Missing Link expansion DLC that followed shortly after the original game’s release.

It’ll go for $49.99 in the US and £34.99 in the UK, available from digital stores like the Mac App Store or Feral Interactive’s own service.

Looking to get it? Then you’ll need a 2.0GHz Intel Mac with at least 4GB RAM, 20GB Hard Drive space, 256MB+ graphics card, and Mac OS X 10.7.3 or later. The following graphics cards are not supported: ATI X1xxx series, ATI HD2xxx series, NVIDIA 9400, NVIDIA 7xxx series, NVIDIA 320M, Intel HD3000 and Intel GMA series.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Horror genre has to get over “shoddy gameplay” – Silent Hill developer

Silent Hill: Downpour developer Vatra games has spoken out about the future of the horror genre in gaming, targeting poor gameplay and visuals as faults that have to go.
The team’s Tomm Hulett reasoned as much to MCV Pacific (via), saying: “I think the genre was lucky, to an extent, when it started out. A lot of horror elements ‘clicked’ such as clunky combat, confusing cameras, and so on.

“However, shoddy gameplay can’t be a feature forever, and so everyone fixed the combat – resulting in action games with creepier monsters. If horror games are going to be ‘scary’ in the future, it’s going to take careful game design to do it.”

Downpour released a few weeks ago to a lukewarm reception. That hasn’t phased Hulett’s design philosophies, though. “While many other games have gone the route of more action oriented game design, attempting to appeal to more mainstream audiences, we’ve taken a very careful approach to the pacing of Downpour to make sure it maintains that original ‘slow-burn’ and keeping the player off guard with less predictability,” he said.

Scary games are hard to pull off, but Hulett hopes they’re coming back in a big way.

“If you have tense, frightening gameplay happening naturally, and then some carefully orchestrated designed-scares, you would have a very memorable horror game,” he said.

“Hopefully that’s the direction the genre is headed.”
We’ll join him in those hopes; scary games are too few and far between these days.

Wii is Epic Mickey 2′s lead platform, HD versions not just “up-rezzed”

Epic Mickey 2 lead designer Warren Spector has revealed that the Wii is still the lead platform for the upcoming sequel, but the PC, PS3 and 360 versions won’t just be “up-rezzed” ports, instead using new assets.

The game is being developed by Junction Point on the Wii and Blitz games on 360 and PS3. Spector reasoned to Eurogamer that this would allow his team to focus on the Wii version while the other versions could also get full attention.

“One of the goals for the first game was to make a Wii game that had even other developers saying, ‘Holy cow! I didn’t know you could do that on a Wii.’ And so, at the end of the day, we decided we wanted to make the same game for all three platforms,” Spector said.
“And because we have Wii tech and Wii expertise and because we needed to build next-gen tech, which we didn’t have, we prototyped, essentially, on the Wii. And the next-gen versions are running about a month behind everything. Just recently, everything caught up, so now we’re running in lock step, making them simultaneous.
“If we come up with something in tuning the game at Junction Point on the Wii version we think will benefit the 360 and PS3 version, that gets integrated into the 360 and PS3 version. If the guys at Blitz working on the next-gen platforms come up with something that will benefit, it comes back the other way.”
In this sense, Spector suggested that the Wii is the real lead platform: ”I guess you could say the Wii is the lead platform, because we’re driving the creative on all three platforms. But really, it’s been a two-way street. They’re both feeding into each other,” he said.
“The power of the next-gen platforms allows us to do cool shader effects, higher resolution graphics, and more and better visual effects. It is the same game across all platforms, but graphically, the assets are not shared. We created all new assets for both next-gen platforms, so it isn’t just up-rezzed stuff.”
Of course, there’s also a 3DS Epic Mickey game inbound which is reportedly nothing like its console counterparts.

Ezio DLC, more headed to Final Fantasy XIII-2

Commander Shepard’s armor not doing it for you, Final Fantasy XIII-2 players? Maybe this’ll help.

Noel is about to get ahold of Ezio’s iconic garments from the Assassin’s Creed series. Sera of course won’t be left in the cold; she’s getting an “Exposure and Defense” outfit designed by AKB48 member Yuko Oshima.

They won’t be all dressed up with nowhere to go, either; Gilgamesh has been announced as the next Coliseum monster.

No dates for the contents yet though.

Kinect “the future of interactive storytelling” — BioWare

Following Mass Effect 3, BioWare can’t get enough of Kinect. To a point even where the sci-fi franchise’s executive producer Casey Hudson finds it to be “the future of interactive storytelling.” That’s some mighty high praise.

He’s explained to OXM: “It feels like the future of interactive storytelling. You’re just talking to a character, and you’re going deeper into their conversation, asking them questions and telling them things and after it’s over you pick up the controller, and it’s a cold piece of plastic, and you think ‘this is the old way, and what I was doing was the future’.”
It’s one thing to give squad commands by voice, but the real deal comes from the conversation system; “It’s very fortunate how it works with the existing system, which is that we have paraphrases. Speak those paraphrases, and they trigger that line.
“Once you start doing that, you realise you’re using different mental pathways to interact with the game. You’re not pressing buttons to talk, you’re talking to talk. And it makes conversation totally different, especially because the Kinect can isolate room noise really well.
“You don’t have to project out to your TV in any way. You can speak quietly in a conversational tone. And it hears you, and then you’re having this amazingly realistic conversation with a character.”
So, Hudson and co are quite fond of the Microsoft device. All eyes are on the company this week for quite a different reason though. Have your fingers crossed all nice and tight?

GET SET, GO!