I’m not sure what I was expecting. Initially concepted as a content patch when Star Wars: The Old Republic was still using the subscription model, Rise of the Hutt Cartel released on April 14 and I’m already finished. I’m not level 55 though; I’m only about half way through level 52, but I’m done with Makeb. What seemed like a full, fleshed-out planet turned out to not even last 10% of length of the base game. Instead of something like Tatooine or Corellia, I got Quesh.
Disney announced today the closing of recently acquired LucasArts, publisher of games such as the Monkey Island series, Grim Fandango, and all Star Wars video games.
In a statement to Game Informer, Disney said, “After evaluating our position in the games market, we've decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company's risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games. As a result of this change, we've had layoffs across the organization. We are incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented teams who have been developing our new titles.”
The shift from internal development to licensing means more studios will have opportunities to work on previously LucasArts owned titles, most notably Star Wars games. The most recent LucasArts-developed game was Star Wars: The Force Unleashed in 2008, and the last published game was last year’s Kinect Star Wars, developed by Terminal Reality.
Star Wars 1313, unveiled at E3 2012, along with the recently uncovered downloadable shooter, Star Wars: First Assault, are still up in the air whether they will see release. A Disney representative did note, “There's always a possibility that it [Star Wars 1313] can still come out via licensing,” but with the recent cancelling of The Clone Wars TV series, it seems Disney and Lucasfilm are focusing all their efforts on post-Return of the Jedi content.
When Disney acquired LucasArts back in October as part of the $4.05 billion deal for Lucasfilm, Disney CEO Bob Iger noted, “We're likely to focus more on social and mobile than we are on console. We'll look opportunistically at console, most likely in licensing rather than publishing, but we think that given the nature of these characters and how well known they are, and the storytelling, that they lend themselves quite nicely, as they've already demonstrated on other platforms.”
Square Enix unveiled the first trailer for the recently re-announced Thief game. Previously slated as Thief 4 back when it was first announced back in 2009, it's now positioned as a reboot, taking Garret back into the industrial metropolis known simply as the City to take anything and everything. For those unaware of the lineage of the Thief series, there are sure to be comparison to last year’s Dishonored, which the trailer doesn’t try to sidestep. Thief is due to hit PC, PlayStation 4, and other next generation platforms sometime in 2014.
Games tell stories through dialogue, narration, and cutscenes, but it’s environmental storytelling, often referred to as atmosphere, that usually tells the most about a character or setting. One of the first things they teach in film study classes is the phrase, Mise en scène, translated from French meaning placing on stage. It means nothing in a scene is there by accident, everything is meticulously placed and serves a purpose.
Most games set up their environments effectively, but BioShock is one of the few games in recent years to do it eloquently, making the underwater city of Rapture feel not only natural, but real. From its art direction, taking on a retro 50s era aesthetic, to its inclusion of timely music from that era, BioShock created a unique place that, despite its dead and abandoned nature, felt alive and left its mark on players.
What makes up the atmosphere is a combination of art direction, sound design, and environmental details. The clip above encapsulates all these with the corpse of a Big Daddy sitting in the middle of the room, the wooden beam breaking from his dead weight, and the blood stains against the far wall, probably from the struggle between the Big Daddy and its attacker. But it’s the sound design that relies most heavily in this moment.
If you listen to the clip above and with your eyes closed, it’s amazing what you can interpret through just the audio. The voice of Dr. Tenenbaum realizing where her hatred is rooted from, the flooded area sways with the sound of water, the creaking of walls as water pressure pushes against them, the moan of the Big Daddy draws dread with each clamoring footstep, the mutterings of a splicer just outside the room looking for you. All of that is illustrated just with sound.
No matter how fantastic or unrealistic a premise might be, small details like stumbling uponwhat looks like a lived-in bedroom, rather than just a sterile room, helps create the sense of place. It’s one thing to find a crate lying around lifelessly that has no connection or context to it, it’s another to come across a half-played game of pool with bags of potato chips and bottles of liquor strewed about unfinished. It conjures narrative questions like, who was here, and what happened to them?
February was a weird month for the Aliens and Predator franchises. Both have always played off each other since the aliens skull appeared in the trophy room in Predator 2, transitioning to books, comics, and two crossover movies. It came to a head last month in games, though. Dead Space 3 released to fairly warm reception, though not as the best in the series. The Dead Space series clearly took inspiration from the tension, dread, and horror of the Aliens franchise, creating its own world and fiction. Then, an actual Aliens game released.
Poised as the official sequel to the Aliens movie, Aliens: Colonial Marines, released to an almost industry wide panning that even made several outlets question the role of previews. It was fascinating to see a game that only took inspiration receive better than the series it took inspiration from. At the end of February came Crysis 3, the last in a series that takes elements of the Predator movies and flips it in reverse, casting the player as a super-powered solider taking out aliens.
The next Assassin’s Creed game may already have a name. Kotaku received the poster to the left earlier today along with other marketing materials for something called Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.
Ubisoft hasn’t officially announced the name or any details of the next Assassin’s Creed, but they did confirm during their last financial conference call a new game would be coming in their 2014 fiscal year with a new hero and a new setting.
The poster shows an assassin in garb similar to Conner from Assassin’s Creed 3, standing on a pirate ship with a knife in one hand and a pistol in the other. The artwork is apparently from comic-artist Todd McFarlene, leading to the speculation that the poster is legitimate as it wouldn’t be the first time Ubisoft used a comic artist for the Assassin’s Creed series. Promotional materials for Assassin’s Creed 3 used artwork from Alex Ross.
Rumored details for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flags include the main character Edward Kenway, Haythem’s father. Edward is a privateer, assassin, and sometimes pirate, leading to locations in the Caribbean such as Jamaica, Cuba, and the Bahamas. If this is true, Ubisoft seems to be leaning on the strong naval missions from Assassin’s Creed 3, while possibly exploring the narrative behind Haythem’s turn from the assassins to the Templars.
Ubisoft has only said so far that the next Assassin’s Creed game will be coming sometime in the next year. The Examiner ran first screenshot, running on an Xbox 360, showing what looks like an improved lighting model. It’s unknown if the game will be solely for current generation platforms, or have next generation versions as well. Ubisoft is holding an event tomorrow on February 27 presumably to discuss more details about the next game.
As Corporal Winters aboard the USS Sephora, you awake out of cryosleep to respond to a distress call aboard the USS Sulaco. The Sulaco, last seen over Fiorina "Fury" 161 (as noted in Aliens 3), is orbiting back over LV-426. Your squad, Rhino 2-3, is the second squad sent in to assess the situation and recover the flight recorder of the USS Sulaco. Oorah to ashes.
If the first Dead Space is a survival-horror game, and Dead Space 2 was all about its sense of dread, then Dead Space 3 tends to lean the side of action-horror. You won’t be guns blazing all the time like in a Call of Duty campaign, but the action does kick up whenever human enemies are involved. Despite this, Visceral manages to balance the tension and action with environments that look amazing and sound design matching what set the first Dead Space apart.
Over the weekend, Bungie unveiled their upcoming ‘shared-world’ first-person shooter, Destiny. Set among the Earth’s solar system, players will become Knights and Guardians, empowered by The Traveler, a mysterious white orb hovering above the Earth’s last city, to discover what caused the genocide of our species, and who or what is The Traveler. Destiny aims to marry emergent gameplay of an MMO with a persistent first-person shooter, giving players a world that lives and breathes even when they’re not playing. Designed to span over the next 10 years, Destiny will give players a reason to keep coming back as new content and expansions are developed and released, without the need for a subscription fee.
And that’s about all we know about Destiny. Despite the press event held at their headquarters in Bellevue, Wash., Bungie showed little to no gameplay, offering only a high-level look at it through concept art, the engine, in-game models, and music. The assets released thus far have are all concept art shown at the event, with small snippets of gameplay in a video documentary explaining the ideas of Destiny. At one point during the event, they showed a reel not of gameplay, but the reactions of play-testers encountering the emergent gameplay that comes with the MMO design. If testers are involved, Destiny must already be in some sort of playable state, so it begs the question of why Bungie showed things like concept art, but no gameplay.
That’s not to say they can’t pull it off. Bungie did learn how to adapt for consoles with Halo, making it the standard for console first-person shooters. But Destiny is much more ambitious game, both technically and narratively. Without more information like what gameplay is like, how classes work, how multiplayer will work, when it’s coming out, and how it will sustain itself over the next 10 years, I remain skeptical. It’s another reminder that things like CG trailers and early announcements are less relevant.
Destiny is destined for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 sometime in 2014, along other future consoles. Bungie didn’t come out and say it, but expect to see Destiny on the next Xbox and PlayStation. They made no mention of a PC version, but COO Peter Parsons said to Eurogamer, “We would absolutely love to be on the PC. If you talk to the people upstairs, we play it on all platforms. So, stay tuned.” While that sounds promising, I’m not holding my breath. Bungie co-founder and Destiny project director Jason Jones noted, “We've learned a bunch of lessons from MMOs and Facebook games… but Destiny is a console shooter.”
Unlike most, I was excited when BioWare announced Star Wars: The Old Republic would go free-to-play. I played free-to-play games in the past, but they hardly held my interest for more than week. With SWTOR, I could dive deep into the free-to-play experience in a game I already played and enjoyed. My playstyle wasn’t vigorous enough to warrant paying $15 a month when I only completed a flashpoint two or three times a week, and luck out into a spot in an operations group on the weekend.
