Latest Gaming and MMORPG Updates

Latest Gaming and MMORPG Updates

PlayStation Vita Scorecard

Posted: 13 Feb 2012 07:57 AM PST


B

Launch Date: 02/21/2012

Price: $249.99/$299.99 MSRP (Wi-Fi/3G)

What is it?: The successor to Sony’s PSP, boasting impressive visual capabilities, a large OLED screen, touch and accelerometer interface features, dual analog stick input, games available both digitally and via compact Memory Stick-style media, and optional 3G wireless.

Recommended Games: Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Wipeout 2048, Army Corps of Hell, Escape Plan, Gravity Rush.

The PlayStation Portable couldn’t miss. It was going to stomp Nintendo, bringing an end to 15 years of handheld gaming domination by the Game Boy family. It was going to win. Sony couldn’t be stopped. Nintendo’s desperate last-ditch counter, a weird and underpowered device called the DS, only made this outcome more certain. In 2005, the PSP was the future.

Seven years later, the PSP could hardly be considered a failure — its worldwide sales recently edged past those of the famous Nintendo Entertainment System — but that puts it at roughly half the units moved as the DS. And the bulk of its popularity has been seen in Japan, where a thriving community of Monster Hunter-obsessed gamers have sustained the platform’s reign at the top of the charts for years. Here in the U.S., however, the PSP never quite found that kind of traction, and the past 18 months have seen only a handful of game releases as the system desperately holds its ground against the double threat of piracy and disinterest.

Now it’s time for Sony’s second attempt: The PlayStation Vita. Yet this new platform faces an even more complicated battlefield than its predecessor. The market has changed since 2005, and this time Sony has to best not only Nintendo but overcome the direct threat of the mobile market (spearheaded by Apple) as well. Does the PS Vita have what it takes to conquer its rivals and assume the handheld throne assumed to rightfully belong to PSP so long ago? Or is Vita doomed to obscurity?

The Hardware

Whatever criticism you may choose to lob Sony’s way over their performance in the post-PlayStation-2 years, you certainly can’t accuse them of being complacent. PlayStation 3 managed to pull itself out of the miserable hole it was born in to stand as a vital platform packed with great software, and PS Vita likewise serves as a direct answer to nearly every complaint ever directed at PSP. It’s an extraordinary machine: Powerful, rich in features, ideally designed for portable play, and even more gorgeous than its predecessor. The PSP hardware suffered a good many flaws, but those issues are largely resolved here — and, even more impressively, within a piece of hardware that doesn’t stray too far from its predecessor. The Vita is clearly the PSP’s child, but bigger, stronger, and handsomer — metaphorically speaking, of course.

Let’s start with that screen. Oh, that screen.

The PSP screen represented an impressive step beyond what gamers were accustomed to at the time, no question; at four inches across and boasting a resolution of 480×272 pixels, it was a tremendous leap over the Game Boy Advance’s visuals — to say nothing of the 8-bit Game Boy, which had only been retired a few years prior. Yet Vita’s screen leaves the PSP’s in the dust. It’s the first thing you’ll notice about the system, because everything looks unspeakably gorgeous on Vita, even from a distance and at oblique angles. While it’s not quite as pixel-dense as Apple’s heavily hyped “retina display,” it’s close. And while its resolution of 960×540 pixels offers only one-quarter of the full 1080p potential of an HD system, it’s also five inches wide; those half-million-plus pixels are more than good enough. We’ll see better portable gaming screens than this (and quite likely within the year on some smartphone or another), but for now this is as good as you can buy.

The quality of the screen helps, too. Unlike the iPhone, Vita boasts an OLED screen that offers incredibly rich colors and pure, deep blacks and a wide viewing angle. Compare the same game running on a top-of-the-line model 3000 PSP against the same game on Vita and the difference is startling; the once-gorgeous PSP looks washed out and dull. The iPhone 4S feels surprisingly small and cheap next to the Vita; the best Android phones offer similar screen dimensions but lack Vita’s visual quality; and Nintendo’s 3DS is practically laughable.

Of course, the DS looked laughable next to the PSP, and we all know how that battle turned out. There’s more to a system’s success than hardware design. To Sony’s credit, though, the hardware seems much better thought-out this time around, and some of the fundamental flaws that hobbled PSP have been wiped away. For starters, it’s a solid-state system. The PSP’s UMD drive has always stood as one of the dumbest features ever seen in a handheld console. The complicated moving parts required for an optical drive made the PSP far more fragile than the cartridge-based DS, not to mention more power-hungry. Vita drops the optical drive, becoming in the process more solid in the hands, less fragile, less susceptible to parts breaking down, and less likely to unexpectedly eject UMDs at the slightest sign of torque.

At the same time, battery life is decent enough. The system can snooze in sleep mode for a month without need for a recharge (yes, we’ve tested it) and is good for about three-and-a-half to four hours of high-performance play with a game like Uncharted: Golden Abyss running at full screen brightness and Near’s networking features pinging away in the background. That’s not precisely amazing, but it’s the standard for a portable device these days and puts it on par with most phones and the 3DS. We’re well beyond the days of Game Boy’s 40 hours of play time from two AAs, and the only device you can expect better life from is a tablet like the iPad (which is basically a giant battery with a screen attached). In sleep mode with Near searching for other connections, the Vita is good for a couple of days before needing a recharge — much better than the 3DS, which needs to stagger back to an electrical outlet after about 18 hours of Street Passing.

Pretty screens and portable longevity are great, but on a strictly gameplay-oriented level the most important change to Vita over any of its portable predecessors is the addition of a right analog stick. Technically, Nintendo beat Sony to the punch by a few days with the Circle Pad Pro, but that thing’s kind of a mess, and its long-term prospects are anyone’s guess. Vita has a right stick built right in, which means developers can design for it and be certain that everyone will have the ability to use it. One could argue that portable games shouldn’t just be scaled-down console games, and that’s certainly true… but we’ve seen enough portable games over the years that would have benefitted from a second stick for camera control (or even for, say, ease of rolling a katamari) that Vita will almost certainly be most developers’ go-to platform for handheld 3D action experiences, hardware power notwithstanding.


Posted by: admin in Gaming News
Find related article at: http://www.1up.com/features/playstation-vita-scorecard

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Gala Lab reveals FlyFF 2

Posted: 13 Feb 2012 01:55 AM PST


Earlier this morning, Gala Lab, the development arm of Gala Net, revealed a teaser artwork for its next upcoming game, currently codenamed F2. This will be the 2nd title the company has released within the past few months, with the other being Eternal Blade (link). Given the feathers spotted, this is no doubt the true sequel to the popular FlyFF. According to the press release, F2 will have large-scale duel and PvP arenas, aerial combat, sieges and various types of PvP quests. More information to come tomorrow!


Posted by: admin in Gaming News
Find related article at: http://www.mmoculture.com/2012/02/gala-lab-reveals-flyff-2.html

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Eden Eternal (TW)

Posted: 13 Feb 2012 01:27 AM PST


(English website) There seems to be a wave of features update before X-Legend is adding the supposed final race, Turtles to Eden Eternal (TW). The latest patch to hit the Taiwanese server added the new siege weapons, which can be used in the Territory Wars. As you can see below, there are basically 3 different siege weapons players can choose from.


How do players ride in these cool structures? Upon entering a Territory War, players can speak to one of the NPCs and purchase a blueprint. The amount needed will be deducted from the guild’s funds, hence only guild members with the appropriate authority can purchase the blueprint. Besides the blueprint, there are other materials needed to craft the siege weapons as well. Players should be reminded that all these items will disappear once they exit the Territory Wars.


The Battle Tank (or so I call it) on the left (above) can carry up to 8 players to move around; the Siege Bomb Tower provides excellent firepower and support from a range and the Defensive Bomb Kart deals good area damage and inflicts targets with different negative elements. The update also added a few new dungeons, but I shan’t spoil the game for the English gamers!


Posted by: admin in Gaming News
Find related article at: http://www.mmoculture.com/2011/09/eden-eternal-tw-siege-weapons-update.html

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Why Are Game Budgets So Secretive?

Posted: 12 Feb 2012 07:55 PM PST

Game budgets

Before asking the question above to a bunch of people at this year’s DICE conference, I assumed everyone would agree with me that the game industry doesn’t like talking about how much games cost to make. It turns out I was mostly right, but not entirely — some weren’t aware of what I was suggesting, though almost everyone had a unique take on why things are the way they are.

Check out all the replies below, and we won’t complain if you want to offer your own take in the comments at the bottom of the page. Promise.

Brian Reynolds, Zynga
“Because it’s a competitive advantage. When you’ve spent all this time figuring out what a business model is and how to make a profit, you don’t want everybody else to know how good of a business it is. You know, if it’s doing really well, you don’t want everybody jumping in going, ‘Well they’re paying so little to get so much. Let’s go do that and compete with them.” Or the other way if you’re not doing well, you don’t want all your creditors coming after you. [Laughs]”

Marc Merrill, Riot Games
“I don’t know. Maybe because — and this may be true in the games industry — maybe because most games unfortunately don’t make it. The 80/20 rule kind of applies to games, where 20% of the games have 80% of the success. People don’t necessarily want to go on the record for how much they spend. I don’t know. We’ve been pretty transparent about it, and so I don’t think there’s a good reason.”

Don James, Nintendo
“Well in the game industry, the budget evolves. When you go into the movie industry, as I understand it, you kind of set a budget, and you’re either over budget, or you’re under budget, or you hit your budget. In the game industry, because it’s an interactive environment and you have to continually work on the game until you get it right, until you feel it’s good enough for release — it’s not too hard, it’s not too easy, it’s not too frustrating — your budget’s going to float around. So I think that’s the reason why they
don’t come up.”

Mike Capps, Epic Games
“I think you see a little bit more us thinking that way, because you’re wanting to create the phenomenon. And you get that with an Avatar by saying how much you spent. For us, game budget in many respects in the game industry has always been the size of the E3 booth. That’s always been the way you show that the publisher’s really behind this title, because ‘check this big booth.’ So that was kind of the way we did that in the past, but I think it’s got to change.”

Randy Pitchford, Gearbox Software
“I think the distance between the shareholders who are publicly trading the shares of these businesses that are making videogames — that distance between the shareholders and the decision making is really short. You know, most of the movie studios are part of larger conglomerates, and it’s part of a wider network, so I think the idea of fiscal information becomes a very precious commodity to these guys, so they get nervous about talking about it. I don’t care. I’ll talk about stuff…

[1UP: What does Borderlands 2 cost?]

I think by the time all is said and done, we’re somewhere in the 30-35 million dollar range. We’re still going, so we’ll see what happens, but yeah the publisher took a lot of risk in that. What’s neat about this is because I take my own risk too, nobody gets to know how much Take-Two risked on that.”

Robert Bowling, Infinity Ward
“I don’t know why they’re so secretive. I think the development cost is less sensitive than the marketing dollars. I don’t think anyone wants to be perceived as wasting marketing dollars. I think right now, you know, especially in the games we work on — we make Call of Duty — I think we have some absurdly large budgets that could easily be cut down. So I would be secretive about it because it’s embarrassing to have a giant budget in game development. I think in game development you can be modest, and you should be modest wherever you can.”

Tim Sweeney, Epic Games
“Well geez. Epic has always been a very lean and mean company, so we’ve been fairly open about our budgets. I think a lot of companies have been applying brute force methods to game development, and I think they end up with a budget that in many cases might be considered embarrassing… We’ve generally said that the first Gears of War cost somewhere between 10 and 12 million dollars to develop. I couldn’t tell you the most recent numbers with Gears of War 3 — it’s a significantly larger number because we had a bigger team working for a longer period of time.”

Michael Condrey, Sledgehammer Games
“I don’t know why companies may not be transparent about it. For us, we put a lot of time and energy into these games, and the focus is on the quality of the game. Triple-A blockbuster titles are expensive; I’ll tell you that. I hear quotes out there ranging from 50 to 200 million; I personally don’t know what other companies are doing. I know what we spent. It was a lot. [Laughs] I’ll tell you that. So I don’t know. What we talk about is the game and that second to second experience, and let Activision talk about the
numbers I guess.”

Matthew Lee Johnston, PopCap
“From my own personal perspective, and in my past I’ve done a lot of external development — now I’m doing a lot of internal development at PopCap — when it’s internal, you sort of have a culture that just supports great game development and you’re not really exposing a lot of those details to every single member of the team. For a specific reason — you don’t want them to be focused internally on the cost of development; you want them to be focused on making a great game. So I think that can go pretty high up, and I think exposing those details to people sometimes when they’re creative is a bad idea.”

Amir Rao, Supergiant Games
“I can speak to it as a small independent developer. We put our own savings in to make Bastion, and a lot of times people ask us, ‘How much did it cost to make?’ And usually they’re asking it from the perspective of, ‘How much money do I need to make a game like that?’ And I think it’s really not instructive of what it actually takes to make a game if you just fund a game with enough to live out of a house, which is what we did for two years. The second thing is, publishers often want to know how much a game costs, and I think part of avoiding the answer is that if it didn’t cost you very much, you don’t want to say that it didn’t cost you very much because you don’t want to appear cheap. And if it did cost you a lot, you may not want to say it cost you a lot because maybe the quality wasn’t where you want it to be. So there’s almost no way you can win, I think, by answering the budget question.”

David Jaffe, Eat Sleep Play
“Are they really [secretive in the game industry]? I wasn’t aware. I’m so I guess on the inside of that — I know what games cost, so.

[1UP: If I was to ask, would you tell me?]

I wouldn’t because it’s not my place to, but not because I wouldn’t want to tell you. I would love to tell you. Umm I don’t know. I could probably speculate, and it would probably be some right, some wrong. Maybe it’s that they’re public companies? Though the movie studios are public too. I would have no problem with people knowing how much the games we make cost and what it means to break even. Why not? I don’t care.”

Tomonobu Itagaki, Valhalla Game Studios
“It’s not cool to reveal such information. That’s all.”

Danny Bilson, THQ
“Actually, I didn’t know that we were secretive or I might have told you the budget, but now you’ve warned me and I guess I better be secretive… But I originally came from the film business, and we’d usually inflate them because we were sort of telling the audience ‘look how much we’ve invested in you.’ And that was always kind of my opinion. If Itagaki-san and I were making a very expensive game — which we are — it’s all good for the consumer, because we’re spending all that money to give them a great experience.”

Ted Price, Insomniac Games
“I think it’s harder to pin down for games, because today there are so many different types of development processes, and there are so many different types of games that are successful. You don’t have to necessarily spend lots of money to have a success… I [also] think it’s somewhat irrelevant. When you use budgets to try to justify a game’s quality, it’s a slippery slope. What’s important is the idea and the execution, not necessarily the amount of money it made. Of course, money’s important, because there are limits to what you can do based on the money you have and the size of the team, but when you start comparing dollars it gets away from the core question, which is ‘what makes the game great.”

Todd Howard, Bethesda
“I would just give you my own opinion on why I wouldn’t want to. This isn’t like corporate policy or why anybody else does it. I don’t want you to change your expectation of Skyrim with that number. I want you to look at it as, ‘It’s 60 bucks, the rest of these games are 60 bucks, how do you feel about what we gave you.’ It doesn’t matter what we spent, and I don’t want that to flavor what anybody thinks about the game.”


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Team ICO Working Hard to Make The Last Guardian’s Level Design Unpredictable

Posted: 12 Feb 2012 01:26 PM PST

Shadow…

Posted: 2 days ago by  GodHandCooper

came out of nowhere for me personally, ICO was a cult classic among those who played it but I never had.  SotC was not really covered like crazy as most games are now.  The Last Guardian gets coverage where it can, but the devs will be sure not to spoil anything significant i’m sure….

 

I am a huge follower of upcoming game news and I had literally not heard anything before Sony sent me a Demo Disc direct(i had no idea it was coming, I must’ve been on some list from the Underground days or something) with nothing but the SotC demo on it.  We had no idea what to think, we tried it, it taught you how to ride a horse, then how to climb, then we went out and BAM there’s a colossus, go for it….  It took us about an hour to realize you actually had to climb the thing, it’s like you “you have a bow, and a sword, shine your sword around to find weakpoints, now kill it.”

 

It really was one of the most gripping gaming experiences I ever had, and me and my friends immediately took turns playing the demo over and over again, pretty much until the game came out.


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