Well now, this is just delightful. Obsidian – fresh off the at times (read: Old World Blues) hysterical Fallout: New Vegas – is teaming up with Trey Parker and Matt Stone to create a “full-scale” South Park RPG. This is no quick social or mobile cash-in, either. It’s a bonafide big-budget console/PC production backed by THQ.
On top of that, Parker and Stone are both writing and performing dialog, according to Game Informer. In other words, expect some of the most profane, probably amazing dialog options ever conceived. The game’s set for release “sometime in 2012,” but expect more info as soon as the new Game Informer issue hits.
Now then, precisely how many copies of this game will I need to buy to get a Team America FPS that relentlessly mocks the current glut of modern war shooters? Honestly, even all of them is an acceptable answer.
Ezio and Altair are finally on their way out the door (and off a ledge, and into a conveniently placed haystack), and that’s a very, very good thing. After all, Revelations marks the third entry in the story arc AC II kicked off. Ezio’s getting old, and – depending on who you talk to – so are his high-flying, face-piercing antics. So, what’s next for the series? A much-needed vacation? Hardly.
“Assassin’s Creed is a big brand not just for us, but for the industry,” Ubisoft senior VP of sales and marketing Tony Key told [a]list. “The meta story is supposed to be carried on forever. We can go on with this brand where we want to – that’s the exciting part about the way it’s constructed. As we’ve said all along, this is the end of Ezio’s story arc; it’s a great place to jump in the franchise and anyone who has played the previous games should have some satisfaction with the answers they get at the end.”
The gaming industry, of course, hasn’t gone a holiday season without having Ezio leap down its chimney since 2009. Key, however, insists that the yearly model doesn’t come at the expense of quality.
“One thing I keep hearing is, ‘How can you make it in one year?’ We work on it a lot longer than one year and that’s part of it; we have multiple studios. Assassin’s Creed is a blueprint brand. What that means is it has a lot of resources focused onto it. We constantly have people thinking about it, so we have a lot of people working on future iterations, while these games are being made we’re already thinking about the next one,” he explained.
“I hope people are getting over the idea that we rush them out; we don’t make Assassin’s Creed games in one year. That’s something we want people to understand, and hopefully the message can get out.”
Regardless, 2012 will almost certainly see yet another entry in the ornately cloaked parkour through time simulator thanks to a certain series plot element. Will it finally be a major change of pace, or simply more of the same? Fingers – symbolically chopped off to make room for a hidden blade or not – crossed for the former.
Agent 47 and his magical murder adventures may be what IO Interactive’s best known for, but that’s hardly the only number on the developer’s calling card. Most recently, IO gave the Hitman franchise a break in favor of Kane & Lynch. And sure, it wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but it was definitely different.
Never one to tread water, IO plans on taking a similar approach after Hitman: Absolution. Don’t worry, though: Thanks to a new Square Enix Montreal studio, Agent 47 and his oh-so-snazzy suit aren’t going anywhere.
“When people work on the same IP for some time, I believe that there’s a sort of creative drain,” studio head Niels Sorensen told Gamasutra. “Thankfully we managed to make sure we keep focusing on different IPs and keeping people fresh.”
“We’ve built an incubation department whose focus is work on new IP and prototypes, and all sorts of things for existing and new IP,” he added. “And that’s a really interesting sort of secret place where they cook up a lot of new things.”
Granted, “part” of IO will give Square Enix Montreal a cold, calculating hand with the next Hitman, but the exact capacity of that partnership wasn’t specified.
Ubisoft has released a list of the changes the Assassin’s Creed: Revelations day one patch will bring to the game. As reported by DSOGaming, the patch will improve Nvidia’s 3D vision with added sky rendering, and also fix “problems with running game in offline mode”.
Maybe Ubisoft aren’t all bad. Both Skyrim and Batman: Arkham City have required substantial post-launch patches to get them up and running properly on the PC, and these have taken a few weeks to appear. We won’t know if there are any more issues until we actually play it on December 2, but it seems Ubisoft is at least trying to nip some problems in the bud.
Germany may have banned Dead Island, but, you know, baby steps. As of now, Quake has been removed from the very same “Index List” Dead Island recently joined, according to Joystiq. The rocket-jump-pioneering FPS, of course, rocket-launched way, way back in 1996. It’s a very slow baby, OK?
Doom was given a similarly slightly behind-the-times go-ahead earlier this year. It was deemed “mainly of historical interest.” On a less depressing note, this also means that PCG US’ very own Chris Comiskey is finally allowed to set foot in Germany again. After all, thanks to a certain logo permanently etched into his arm, he’s technically a licensed Quake product.
As reported on Kotaku via Yonhap news, Maple Story – the hugely popular Korean MMO – has had its Korean database compromised by hackers. The incident has been reported to the Korea Communications Commission by developers, Nexon.
The Korean server was attacked last Thursday. Player’s user IDs, player names, passwords, and residential registration numbers were all compromised. Don’t know what a residential registration number is? You’re probably not playing a lot of Maple Story on the Korean servers so don’t need to worry.
The details were encrypted but Nexon recommends that anyone who might have used the same password on other accounts change it immediately.
You’re probably used to doing that by now. Sony, Codemasters, Bioware and, most recently, Steam have all had their databases attacked by hackers. These are sad times indeed; Uplink was fun. This isn’t.
A number of Assassin’s Creed fans have received a survey asking them where they’d like to see Assassin’s Creed set. It’s multiple choice, which means we get to see the options that Ubisoft are considering. Eurogamer got hold of a screenshot of the survey from Empire State Gamers, which offers eight different settings that range from Medieval China to the American revolution and Victorian London. But which is your favourite?
The violent conflicts of the Imperial Dynasties in Medieval China
The advent of the mighty British Empire during Victorian England
The culmination of the Pharaoh Reign in Ancient Egypt
The invasion of the Americas by the Spanish Conquistadors
The confrontation between British colonists and native Americans during The American Revolution
The overthrow of the Tsar Empire by the Communists during the Russian Revolution
The Warlord Battles in Feudal Japan
The rise of Cesar’s Empire in Ancient Rome
Victorian London is the best answer. Okay, I’m a little biased, but hear me out. Assassin’s Creed is great at giving major historical figures cameos. Think of the people you could meet in Victorian London. Just replace Brotherhood’s army of assassins with loyal chimney sweeps, Leonardo Da Vinci with Thomas Edison. Jack the Ripper can be a rival assassin. Queen Victoria could be a Templar commander. IT ALL FITS.
Medieval China would be great, too, as would the Russian Revolution and feudal Japan, and I’m surprised the French Revolution isn’t being considered (Assassin’s Creed in Paris, won’t that be perfect?). Which of the choices above is your favourite? Or is there a setting not listed that you think would be perfect for an Assassin’s Creed game?
As we reported yesterday, I Am Alive’s creative director Stanislas Mettra’s comments have caused uproar among PC Gamers. In an interview with IncGamers, Mettra said that his game wouldn’t be coming to the PC due to “bitching” (not in a good way) PC gamers and the levels of piracy apparently afflicting our beloved platform.
In a statement to Incgamers today, Mettra retracted his comments, putting it down to errors in translation. “I would really love to see a pc build of the game and I dont think I meant to say ‘the game won’t happen on pc,’” he said. “It’s probably an English language miscommunication (I am not native English speaker).”
Mettra goes on to say that his team are looking into the feasibility of the PC build. He finishes by saying: “Honestly, which game maker would not love his game to be playable on as many platforms and by as many people as possible?”
This either means one of two things. Mettra could be telling the truth about the mistranslation – although his original digs at PC gaming seemed too plentiful to be down to some kind of linguistic error. Or I Am Alive publishers Ubisoft gave him a bit of a telling off due to the bad publicity he’s caused, and put him on the naughty step until he issued a retraction.
One thing’s sure though – after all this kerfuffle, Ubisoft must give us I Am Alive on the PC. It’s the only way to compensate for the distress and suffering they’ve caused recently.
At one point in the above trailer for the Back to Karkand Gulf of Oman map I had the sudden feeling that I had seen something very odd in the middle of all the explosions and collapsing buildings. After a couple of rewinds I discovered what it was. A tiny yellow digger, driven by a pair of engineers waltzing right through an insane fight between a tank, two buggies and a jump jet. Brilliant, but what the hell is it for?
The VTOL jets should also prove more effective against infantry targets than their speedier brothers, bringing air and ground combat closer together. All the more reason to get excited about the upcoming Back to Karkand expansion for Battlefield 3. It’s out next month.
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