In this month’s edition of “industry people who lost their jobs because of saying dumb stuff on Twitter”, we turn our attention away from Adam Orth to watch the surely imminent employment meltdown of one Bob Summerwill.

Earlier, EA confirmed that they have absolutely nothing in pipelines for Nintendo’s Wii U console. This is likely due to the fact that the über massive Frostbite engine will not be making an appearance on the Wii U; that’s problematic when you remember that EA is using Frostbite to power pretty much everything, including the company filter coffee machines.

In the wake of this information, Mr. Summerwill of EA Sports’ Canada studios fired out a couple of foolish tweets in response to a prompt for information on why EA isn’t supporting the console: “The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an XBOX360. Poor online/store. Nintendo are walking dead at this point.”

It didn’t stop there, with Summerwill adding that Nintendo platforms “have always been very poor revenue-wise for third parties” adding that only the Zelda and Mario games generate money. There’s more, but a lot of what was tweeted has since been deleted. If you want to see a couple more shining examples of how to destroy your career in games development, then head over to this NeoGAF thread, which has screencaps of the offending tweets.

It’ll be interesting to see whether EA does anything about this considering their modus operandi of late has been to adopt a silent stance in the hopes that all the drama disappears; which it eventually does. I’m looking at you, SimCity.

Source: NeoGAF
Via: Kotaku

If you play Diablo III, then you likely already know that from May 15 to  May 21, players have a “Happy Anniversary, Diablo III” buff in-game that boosts Magic Find and +EXP by 25% (that does stack with Nephalim Valor and Paragon Levels). There’s never been a better time to level some alts and make use of that stash of crafting materials you’ve been hoarding. If you didn’t know about the buff: there’s only one day left, don’t waste it!

Unfortunately, the Anniversary buff doesn’t contribute to the drop chance of Keywarden keys, so if you’re still trying to craft your  Hellfire Ring, I feel you. I’ve a pretty competent Witch Doctor, but running Monster Power 10, and getting 5 stacks of NV, before engaging the Keywarden, is no easy task. The Matchmaking Tags introduced in 1.0.8 help with finding groups to do Keywarden runs, but it’s still a pretty high-risk endeavor.

It’s almost time for Blizzcon (November 8-9), and I’m sure I can’t be the only one hoping they’ll announce a big content update for Diablo III (previously known as “expansions”), because even though the game gets much right, it does need more content first and foremost.

American McGee has this preoccupation with transforming popular children’s literature into twisted video games. He’s the guy behind the two Alice games as well as the more recent Akaneiro: Demon Hunters (based on Little Red Riding Hood) action RPG. McGee and his development team, Spicy Horse, have a Kickstarter campaign for a third Alice game; it sounds quite a bit different to the previous two. In addition to a potential new Alice (if IP owner Electronic Arts provides its blessing), Spicy Horse has revealed Ozombie – a zombie infested take on The Wizard of Oz.

Those of you with a good memory might recall the ill-fated Oz game American McGee first teased back in 2004. That game was supposed to be published by Atari, but it never actually materialised. Ozombie has absolutely nothing to do with the cancelled 2004 Oz game.

Details are slim but the game will feature Dorothy, Toto, TinMan, Lion and Scarecrow – although Scarecrow will likely be a zombie considering his search for brains. Overall the game will have a Steam Punk aesthetic; planned platforms are tablets, PC, Mac and Linux. Head on over to the official Facebook page for lots of concept art and updates. And in case you were wondering: yes, there’ll be a Kickstarter for this game too.

Source: Facebook
Via: Polygon

Good news everyone! Nintendo held one of their budget-friendly and super-efficient Nintendo Direct conferences last week Friday. As such, we’ve got a couple of neat bits of Wii U news to share with you. If your brain has become programmed to associate “Wii U” and “News” with negative articles, then don’t panic just yet because we have another piece coming up later today that is sure to counteract all this wanton Wii U positivity. Boo!

First and most importantly, two games have release dates: Pikmin 3 is out on 04 August (which we already knew from the previous Nintendo Direct) and Platinum Games’ The Wonderful 101 is out on 15 September.

Further details regarding Pikmin 3 included a finalisation of the control schemes. If you played the game at last year’s rAge, then you would have been using a Wii Nunchuck and Wii Remote; that control scheme still stays, but Nintendo has confirmed that the entire game will be playable with just the Wii U Game Pad or the more traditional Pro Controller. The game will star three new captains in addition to series’ staple Olimar: Alph, Brittany and Charlie. Together, the team of captains has to forage for food to aid their starving planet.

The New Super Mario Bros. U DLC starring Mario’s greener brother Luigi, has been announced as a standalone retail product as well. No, Nintendo hasn’t retraced the DLC option and you’ll still be able to pick up New Super Luigi U as DLC on 20 June, but it’ll also be available at retail about a month later.

New Super Luigi U will include Nabbit (the kleptomaniacal rabbit thing from New Super Mario Bros. U) as a playable character in place of Mario. Nabbit will only be available as a multiplayer character and will be handy for those levels that you might battle with: he’s invulnerable to all enemies, but the caveat is that he cannot benefit from power-ups.

Finally, Nintendo and Sega have revealed a multiple game partnership that will bring three new Sonic games exclusively to the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. The first game is called Sonic Lost World; the deal, according to Nintendo and Sega, makes Nintendo hardware the “the number one destination for Sonic gaming”. While it’s welcomed news (the Wii U needs as many exclusives as possible), Shacknews has rather ominously reminded the world that a similar deal happened between Sega and Nintendo for the Dreamcast, and we all know what happened to that console.

Sources: Shacknews Article 1, Article 2, Article 3

Hello fellow NAGians (NAGites?) and welcome back once again to your weekly dose of my opinion masquerading as objective journalism. This week was a bit slow, but I’ve got more news of the Wii U’s demise, a rant on Sony’s awful marketing team, the videos you actually clicked through for and your usual mix of whatever it is I felt like talking about.

Console News

Okay, so I know I keep hating on the Wii U. But it’s not just me – it’s developers as well. In another blow to Nintendo’s flailing next-gen console, EA have said that they have no games in development for the Wii U. None.

This comes in the wake of EA’s announce that there will be no Frostbite 3 support for the Wii U. What’s really surprising here, however, is that the publisher is seemingly ditching the console for its sports titles as well, having already stated that the next Madden game won’t be making an appearance on the device.

No word yet on FIFA 14, but the Wii U has been confirmed to not be getting NHL 14 nor Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14. Spokesperson Jeff Brown said EA aren’t ruling out developing games on the console in the future, but honestly right now it’s not looking good.

EA dropped support for the Dreamcast too. And we all know how that turned out.

While we’re Wii U bashing, industry analyst and crystal ball-gazer Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities has released estimated sales for the Wii U – which show that it’s still being outsold by it’s predecessor.

In the month of April, Wii U sales are down 19 percent month-over-month, selling just 55,000 units. It gets a little awkward when compared with sales of the original Wii, which managed to scrape 75,000 sales in the same period.

The 3DS continues to perform extremely well however, Pachter estimates sales of 185,000 units, an increase of 46 percent.

On a slightly more cheerful note, Insomniac Games CEO Ted Price has said that even while their new game Fuse wasn’t developed for the Wii U, they still haven’t ruled anything out.

Price said, “We had to focus on delivering a great game on multiple platforms, but there’s a point where we had to make hard choices, and for us we needed to limit the number of platforms for Fuse.”

This is starting to feel like that tired conundrum of needing experience to get a job, but being unable to get experience without a job. Developers are dropping the Wii U due to lack of consumer support, but with no one developing for the console it’s impossible to get consumers to buy in. Nintendo can still bounce back with a few stellar first-party releases, as they have in the past.

Speaking of failures, Sony has trademarked “Greatness Awaits”, rumoured to be a new marketing catchphrase for the PS4. Greatness Awaits? Really? It sounds like the tagline for some B-grade Gladiator knock-off on the bottom shelf of the DVD store.

“Greatness Awaits!”

Can you imagine how much money Sony paid a team of people to come up with that? How did that meeting even go? “Gentlemen, we want something generic, unexciting and completely unoriginal. We also need to submit it within the next 7 minutes.”  Ugh, I’d want to buy an Xbox now if that didn’t sound so terrible as well.

I’m not just talking about the rumours about always online requirements and generic controllers either – how about the name itself? If “Greatness Awaits” walked me onto the ledge, “Xbox Infinity” will be what sends me over the edge. Who the hell is signing these people’s cheques? The Xbox Infinity? I swear I’m not going to be surprised if the PS4 is unveiled as the “Playstation Xtreme”. With no “E”, because it’s the hardest of core.

Some other people that aren’t too happy with Sony and Nintendo are hacker group Lulzsec, who you may remember as wreaking havoc across back in 2011 with “50 days of lulz”. Through some pretty monumental DDOS attacks and a lot of information theft, Lulzsec consistently made the news for taking down some major companies.

However, [cyber]crime doesn’t pay (unless you really could download a car), and three of the members have been sentenced to two to three years in prison, while a fourth managed to scrape through with a suspended sentence, likely because he’s a teenager.

To end off on a positive note, Microsoft is reportedly scrapping “MS Points”, their ridiculous and entirely unnecessary currency system used to purchase things on the Xbox.  People will actually be able to use real money now, which makes so much sense you can’t help but wonder why the points system existed in the first place.

Sources: Kotaku, CVG, DigitallyDownloaded, Siliconera, Mashable, NAG

Gaming News

You know what no one has said, ever? “I wish there were more MOBA games.” That’s not what EA heard however, and are reportedly publishing a new one called Dawngate, which is being developed by the lesser-known Waypoint Games.

According to the new website for the game, Dawngate is “built from the ground up to look and feel familiar while offering a whole new way to experience MOBA gameplay.”

Well, they have nailed the “look familiar” part.

Here’s the thing – I play a LOT of DotA 2. More than I’d care to admit (okay, fine, 703 hours played according to Steam) and I’m not sure that it can become some kind of genre of which there are many. It’s a limited space. You don’t play MOBA games like you play FPSs, generally you’ll find one you like and stick to it (seriously, 700 hours? What the hell am I doing with my life?).

I’m just not sure there’s that much room for variety, and I think it’s a ridiculously hard market to break into; dedicated League of Legends or DotA 2 players are almost certainly not going to switch games very easily.

As if one wasn’t enough, there is speculation that EA is behind yet another MOBA game, called Battledrome. I don’t know where the ceiling is on how many of these games can be successful at one time, but this does not feel like a good idea to me.

Lionhead is reportedly looking to make a new IP, putting out feelers for developers who have “leading industry experience on AAA titles, including large scale RPG, Action Adventure and RTS genres.”

The studio is well known for some more out of the box ideas, so hopefully they’ve got something original and exciting. I just really hope it’s not a freakin’ MOBA (seriously, 703 hours is a full month of non-stop playing, I just looked it up).

Other games we’re not going to be seeing anytime soon include the most anticipated game of all time bar Half-Life 3, GTA V. Publisher Take-Two has confirmed  that we won’t be getting any GTA V goodness, as Rockstar and 2K games won’t have a booth this year.

The publisher said, “Both Rockstar Games and 2K have instead decided to focus their marketing and PR efforts on a series of events throughout the spring and summer. Our team, however, will be present at the show, and we look forward to seeing many of you-“ Zzzz. Don’t count on it.

“That sounds really interesting, please tell me more.”

Now I know I promised I wouldn’t, but let’s talk about piracy. A new, very comprehensive study has claimed that piracy isn’t nearly as much of a problem as the industry makes it out to be.

Academics from three different universities gathered three months of data, and while they found that piracy was pretty widespread, they also said it’s not as bad as we’ve been led to believe.

One of the authors, Anders Drachen, had this to say: “First and foremost, P2P game piracy is extraordinarily prevalent and geographically distributed.

“However, the numbers in our investigation suggest that previously reported magnitudes in game piracy are too high. It also appears that some common myths are wrong, eg that it is only shooters that get pirated, as we see a lot of activity for children’s and family games on BitTorrent for the period we investigated.”

Sources: TheEscapist, CVG, OXM, Wired

Metro: Last Light studio is a sweat shop

Okay, that title may be somewhat sensational. Still, according to former THQ president Jason Rubin, the game was developed on a tiny budget with less than stellar working conditions.

“The budget of Last Light is less than some of its competitors spend on cut scenes, a mere ten per cent of the budget of its biggest competitors,” Rubin wrote.

He goes on to talk about dev kits and PCs having to be smuggled into the Ukraine where the studio is, out of worry that corrupt customs officials would nick their stuff.

They drew straws to see who had to “smuggle” the controller.

Sounds pretty rough, and Rubin himself speculates that the game could have been amazing if they’d had a better budget to work with and less hardships, especially since they had to suddenly switch publishers as well.

Creative director Andrew Prokhorov responded to the report, acknowledging that the conditions are significantly worse than the US and Europe, but also saying that they “don’t want to be all dramatic that.” Good for them.

Sources: GamesIndustry, GamesIndustry

Videos

Here’s everyone’s favourite section, requiring the bare minimum of cognitive process. If you scrolled straight to here, shame on you. That’s bad and you should feel bad.

Anyway, we’re kicking things off this week with a very lengthy Last of Us gameplay video, a game I think looks freakin’ awesome.

With PS4 around the corner, one game console players may be looking forward to is Diablo III, which for the first time you’ll be able to play with an analogue stick. Check out this discussion with the developers, where they go over what you can expect from the next-gen release.

Okay that was all a bit long and I’m sure you’re exhausted, so here’s something a little more digestible: a 40 second teaser for the upcoming Batman: Arkham Origins.

Now for something a little weirder, a rather odd Norwegian Kickstarter project has reached its goal, and will be finishing their game that lets you take control of a toddler exploring a possessed house. Check out the teaser and tell me what you think.

Best of NAG

Do you like free stuff? Of course you do, that’s a stupid question. If you throw a T-shirt into a crowd of people, someone is going to get stabbed. People really like free stuff. So head over here and do the least amount of effort and submit a comment, you could win some fancy Razer swag.

Gran Turismo had a super sick reveal event, and the hardest working man in gaming journalism, Wesley Fick, has covered it for you here. Go check it out; he worked really hard on it. Shame man.

For the opposite of working hard, go and check out my column for the week, where I go over some of the coolest/uncoolest villains we’ve ever seen in games. There’s only five, because I’m not Wesley Fick (contrary to popular belief).

Oh and what’s this? Wesley Fick is working again. Dammit man, get some sleep. Moving straight from the GT6 reveal, the mighty Fick scurried over to the Google I/O event, and yup, he’s covered that too. Go look at it. Go now.

Sony Pictures Entertainment has picked up the worldwide distribution rights to the long discussed Angry Birds movie. The movie is very specifically scheduled to hit cinemas on 1 July 2016. It is unsurprisingly being created  in 3D and is being developed, produced and funded by Rovio; the company responsible for the entire franchise to date. Iron Man and Despicable Me producers David Maisel and John Cohen have officially signed on to the project.

Sony chairpeople Michael Lynton and Amy Pascal said, “Every studio in town would love to add Angry Birds to their slate. There are few titles out there that bring this kind of excitement, brand awareness and built-in audience to the table.”

The idea of an Angry Birds feature film is one that I’m sure many will find disturbing. However, with downloads across the franchise to date (across all the platforms on which it appears combined) exceeding 1.7 billion, there’s no doubt that the movie will have an audience.

Don’t Starve has redefined my relationship with digital death.

I mean, I’ve died a lot. There is only so much in the way of mauling, biting, goring, pecking and downright elephanting one can take before pulling the permadeath plug. Usually, dying this much in a game with (for the most part) permanent death would cause me to ragequit and never return ever.

So why am I still playing?

Don’t Starve begins by dropping you into the middle of an almost entirely unfriendly world with nothing but the clothes on your back and some pretty advanced Boy Scout (or Girl Guide, depending on which character you choose) training. In the beginning, you gather rudimentary resources to make tools to gather more resources, to make more tools, and so on, while keeping an eye on your health, hunger and sanity meters.

Much of Don’t Starve involves exploring the procedurally generated world looking for stuff, and building up a camp with enough supplies to survive the impending winter. In the beginning this is pretty easy: most of the things you need for your immediate survival are just lying around – berries and carrots to eat, grass and twigs and flint to construct basic tools, and trees to chop down for firewood – and all you really need to do is be sure to make a fire before dark (or else the invisible darkness monsters will kill you) and keep your belly topped up.

Then one day you’re innocently gathering firewood for the evening’s fire, and one of the trees comes alive and starts to attack you just for chopping down one of its brethren. Then mother nature in all her wisdom appears to start holding back on the carrots and berries – and they’re not really satisfying your grumbling belly so very much anyway – and you realise that this game is going to involve a lot more strategy than you first thought.

So you die, and start again. If you’re like me, probably a few times.

And eventually you start to get the balance right between exploring and gathering and creating a safe home base and building better stuff. Maybe you’re even fighting monsters and winning. And then a lightning storm hits, or the hounds come, or a weird hand-ghost-thing snuffs out your fire in the middle of the night, and…

You can see where this is going.

But somehow it never gets boring or frustrating. The procedurally generated map helps, along with the random distribution of resources, and the little bonus pickups that are different every time. There are a bunch of different characters to unlock too, each with their own quirks, strengths and weaknesses. There are hats, the like of which have not been seen on this side of sanity.

The things that inhabit the world – both the friendly and the not-so-friendly – have their own personalities, and if they happen to come into contact they interact in not-unpredictable ways. What I particularly like is that, while there’s a lot going on in this world, there’s not too much going on; it doesn’t take terribly long to get a handle on what’s available and what you need to do with it all, and play is straightforward and intuitive.

Everything makes sense (except maybe those damn killer trees) – so when you get killed by a pack of wolves, it’s kinda like, okay, that sort of thing happens when you’re a lunatic trying to survive in a whacked-out wilderness; I’d better make me a bigger spear. Or a meat effigy. (This is a thing.)

As you build up your camp you’re catching bugs and bunnies, cooking varied meals (frogleg sarnie anyone?), growing crops, keeping birds and bees as pets and resource generators, and even harnessing the dark spirit powers of something-or-other; you’re having fun, in other words – and it’s worth bearing in mind that this is still very much a game under development. In a few days after this review comes out, for example, Klei will add caves to their delightfully harrowing sim.

It’s all tied together by a visual spirit tugged straight from Where the Wild Things Are, along with a minimalist script and rock-solid mechanics.

And when you do, finally, make it through your first winter, it’s incredibly satisfying.

Don’t Starve is available right now on Steam for $14.99, or you can buy it directly from Klei Entertainment’s website.

City Interactive Games, the Poland based developer and publisher responsible for the Sniper: Ghost Warrior games, has announced Lords of the Fallen for the PC, PlayStation 4 and next Xbox. The game is described as a “hardcore action-RPG” with combat and difficulty akin to Dark Souls, and a skill tree like those found in Borderlands.

The game is being headed by Tomasz Gop, who was the senior producer for the critically acclaimed The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings. “Our team is building Lords of the Fallen specifically for players who enjoy taking on huge challenges, where the odds are stacked against them,” explained Gop. “From the very beginning, Lords of the Fallen will intrigue and satisfy players’ hunger to explore each corner of a brand new world, freely customize and build their own character, and take down some of the most epic enemies ever seen.”

The game takes place in a “richly created fantasy world”. According to the game’s lore, the gods of this world have failed mankind and as such there’s an “apparently unstoppable supernatural force” which is causing all sorts of chaos. Players will take on the role of a bloke called Harkyn who decides to try and make a difference. The game will feature player decisions that will alter the state of the world around them. No release date as yet but we’ll keep an eye on this one; there’s potential here.

Source: CI Games
Via: Polygon

There’s less than a month to go before The Last of Us hits the PlayStation 3. I’ve got this feeling that the game will be the final hoorah for Sony’s console before the PlayStation 4 begins to hog the limelight; a swan-song of sorts, I guess.

Despite the fact that the game is still a few weeks away, Sony Computer Entertainment of America is not wasting any time when it comes to planning the future of the IP. Domain names for lastofus2.com and lastofus3.com have just been registered. As Shacknews points out, every title that Naughty Dog has developed thus far has been turned into a long-running series, so it wouldn’t be surprising if The Last of Us maintained this tradition.

This could, of course, all just be cautionary planning. As we’ve seen in the past, private individuals regularly squat on domain names with the sole intention of selling it on to big companies. It’s likely that SCEA is moving to prevent this happening for the off-chance that the game gets two sequels. Hell, at least they didn’t go nuts like EA recently did when they registered domains for Battlefield13.com all the way to battlefield20.com.

Source: Shacknews

In this episode of “Conversations with Creators”, Sony has rounded up three Blizzard folks integral to the porting of Diablo III to PS3 and PS4, and made them gush about how awesome the PlayStation 4 is going to be. They also make frequent assertions that the PlayStation 4 and Diablo III were practically made for each other in some infernal fire pit of hell.

While it’s easy to roll your eyes and sigh in the face of this rather gaudy PS4 marketing campaign, this particular episode of what will probably be a very long-running web series for Sony, actually manages to discuss some aspects of Diablo III as well. It is actually pretty interesting to hear how much the control scheme is going to be different, and how Blizzard realises that a change of control scheme fundamentally changes the connection one has with a character. I haven’t thought about it much until now, but there is this remarkable disconnect between player and character in the Diablo games on PC. When Diablo III is played on console however, there’s far more direct control over one’s character, and this will probably lead to a greater sense of connection. I found myself not really giving a crap about my characters in Diablo III, but my character in Skyrim I find myself quite firmly attached to.

Hit the jump for the video. Maybe grab some coffee beforehand because it’s about seven minutes long, which is practically a feature film by Internet standards.

Source: The PlayStation Blog