Former designer apologises for Sacred 3: "die-hard fans didn't get the game they wanted"
In our Sacred 3 review, Fraser found that Keen Games had eschewed the open world, day-night cycles and quests that once defined the series in favour of, well, not very much. A “banal premise” and “crude” co-op combat.
A junior designer who left during the action RPG’s development has taken it upon himself to apologise for the state of the eventual game.
Orc-ward: World of Warcraft UK subscription price to rise for Warlords of Draenor
Blizzard have reevaluated pricing for World of Warcraft in light of “local and regional market conditions”. Not in the Azeroth auction houses, but globally: the developers have compared currencies all over the world. They've decided to hike up the price of UK subscription by an extra pound a month when Warlords of Draenor launches on November 13.
Players with auto-renewing subscriptions need not worry, however: Blizzard are granting them a two-year price freeze.
Star Citizen reaches $50 million in funding by selling more virtual spaceships
Space garage simulator Star Citizen has rocketed past a slightly impressive $50 million milestone this weekend, thanks in large part to the sale of some new Constellation class spaceships.
A big chunk of that freshly donated cash will be spent on employing linguists, whose job it will be to create three real languages for the game's three biggest alien races.
Hearthstone spectator mode is in "active development" and "coming along"
Hearthstone became an unexpected Twitch sensation upon its beta launch in what feels like 1937. It transpires that watching somebody else think about playing a card for 30 seconds before deciding against it can be as fun as doing it yourself - and so players have clamoured for an in-game Hearthstone spectator mode ever since.
It’s now towards the top-end of Blizzard’s ‘to implement’ list, and in “active development”.
Why Riot Games aren't planning on matching the Dota 2 International's $10m prize pool
Even after the runaway success of the Dota 2 International Compendium and the $10 million prize pool it crowdfunded, Riot Games have decided to stick to a relatively tiddly $2m pool for the LoL Championship Series this year.
It’s part of a plan to ensure League of Legends will be around for decades to come.
Ever imagined an Assassin's Creed MMO? Unity's producer has
In some ways, Assassin’s Creed is prime MMO material that wouldn’t be tarnished in translation: it’s already about bunny-hopping through a world filled with visible artifacts, that flicks on and offline without warning.
Vincent Pontbriand made the same point last week without any mean jokes at the MMO genre’s expense. The Assassin’s Creed Unity producer said he’d “love” to build a massively-multiplayer entry in the stealth-parkour series.
Hands on with The Golf Club
After some testing I have figured out that the nice man who commentates over The Golf Club stops reading out your score after you reach about 20 over par. I'm guessing the developers didn't bother to have him record all of those extra lines, in the mistaken belief that nobody could be as bad at a golf game as I am at this golf game.
The Golf Club is currently in Early Access on Steam, launches properly tomorrow and deserves a much better player than me. It's definitely good though. I can at least tell that it's alright. So here, without deviating from the basic facts of the game in some futile effort to hit wordcount without betraying my ignorance of the sport, are some reasons why.
Sunless Sea's combat system has been thrown overboard
Sunless Sea, Failbetter’s eldrich nautical sandbox, is very good. It’s not finished yet, but it’s still worth buying and diving into. I wrote words about it in my Sunless Sea Early Access review, and some of those words detailed the sedentary battles. They were not-quite-turn-based affairs, and their premise - that before you shoot a ship or undersea beasties, you must illuminate it - was a bit more interesting than their execution.
But as Early Access games are wont to do - though not as frequently as one might expect/hope - Sunless Sea is going through some big changes. The old combat system is being thrown overboard, and its replacement is quite a different animal.
Surgeon Simulator: Anniversary Edition pits surgeons against teeth and eyeballs
Naming conventions for new versions of games are bloody odd. Games that got a luke-warm reception suddenly get Game of the Year versions, digital titles get Collector’s Editions even though there’s unlimited stock, and now, we’ve got Surgeon Simulator: Anniversary Edition, but there’s no anniversary.
I guess the A&E pun was too good to pass up.
No Man's Sky won't be infinite, but it might as well be
Skyrim is big. Grand Theft Auto V is big. Dragon Age Inquisition is big. No Man’s Sky is cosmically vast. It’s so huge, that it might as well be infinite given our fleeting, mortal lives.
Hello Games co-founder Sean Murray told IGN that the team started with a 32 bit number, which meant that it would take explorers around four or five thousand years to visit every planet - and that’s only if they spent a second on each world.
That wasn’t big enough for them, though.
Enemy Starfighter will be at the PAX Indie Megabooth, so let's watch a lovely trailer
That space flight sims are making a comeback is utterly bizarre. That the genre has regained momentum and is producing things like Star Citizen or Elite: Dangerous isn’t bizarre, it’s that it ever stopped being a prominent genre in the first place.
Potentially just as intriguing as the vast, detailed sims built by genre vets are games like Enemy Starfighter, with its minimalist art style and mechanics that are as evocative of Homeworld or Flotilla as they are Elite or Freespace.
It’s returning to the Indie Megabooth at PAX this year - our Rob took a gander at Enemy Starfighter at PAX East - which is as good an excuse as any for a new trailer.
Kholat is a horror game inspired by a 55-year-old mystery
The sort of horror that we get to experience in games tends to have a fantastical bent - whether it’s brain-munching zombies taking over a country or monstrous creatures prowling an asylum, whatever frightening things they may contain, the premise is never not silly.
The “Dyatlov Pass Incident” did happen, though, and it’s the setup for IGN.PRO’s upcoming horror game, Kholat.
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