Wait, So TITS SC is only going be on PC? NOOOOOO

PSP and Steam

Blizzard on why Diablo 3 PC will always be always-online; "Co-op is not a value added feature. It is the ideal"

http://www.pcgamesn.com/diablo/blizzard-why-diablo-3-pc-will-always-be-always-online-co-op-not-value-added-feature-it-ideal

Day[9] joins HTML5 real-time strategy developer as design lead

Artillery is made up of a small team of mostly Google and Facebook alumni, who together have mustered $2.5 million in venture capital to support their 10-year plan: “core games” at the click of a link, without recourse to cloud streaming a la OnLive or Gaikai. Their Day[9]-led RTS will be the flagship game for their magi-technology.

“We were using our technology to build a real-time strategy game and knew that Sean, one of the world’s authorities on competitive, multiplayer gaming, would ensure that that we were tuned in to the needs of our players,” said CEO Ankur Pansari. “After we worked with Sean for a few weeks, it became obvious that he was the right person to drive game design.”

continued: http://www.pcgamesn.com/starcraft/day9-joins-html5-real-time-strategy-developer-design-lead

Runescape 3 is doing quite well

Jagex report that 400,000 players have joined the game since Runescape 3.0 arrived at the tail end of July. Of those, a quarter are reactivating accounts - former teenagers returning to familiar haunts and finding they rather like the new paint job.

Between them and the existing player base, 600,000 hours of Runescape are being played each day - an astonishing number. I only have about 24 in my days - and like a hard drive, much of that space is taken up by things I didn’t anticipate.

Eurogamer point out that the Guiness World Records still hold Runescape to be the most popular free-to-play MMO there is - citing the 200 million+ accounts created since its release in the foggy environs of 12 years ago.

Our Nick went hands-on with Runescape 3 in May. He found it bolstered by HTML5-fuelled upgrades but playing very much “like an old friend”. Is Runescape one of your old friends too?

http://www.pcgamesn.com/runescape-3-doing-quite-well

Silly formatting

Letter from the Chairman: $18 Million!

Greetings Citizens,

Thanks to your incredible support, we have reached $18 million less than a week after hitting $17 million!

These numbers are amazing, and the credit goes entirely to the community that has come together to make Star Citizen happen. The best news in all of this is that the Hangar Module has inspired thousands of new fans to join the effort. The bigger our community, the better the game experience will be and greater chance we will have of making Star Citizen a game that continues for many years.

When we first proposed Squadron 42 and Star Citizen, the goal was to bring back space sims and prove that PC games never died. We thought that was an important goal worthy of our effort and your support. We never dreamed that you would take that even farther and become our partners in changing how games are developed. As always, thank you.

For hitting $18 million, you unlock the “exclusive star system for backers.” There’s been some confusion about what exactly this means. To clarify, what it means is that backers that got us to the $18 million goal will have the ability to start their journey in a system that is unavailable to others as a starting point. The only home base hangars there will belong to those that supported us early in the process! It would be immersion-breaking if backers couldn’t eventually share the jump coordinates of the system with other users… but no one else will have the option of starting a character there.

Reaching this point also means that it’s time to reveal our penultimate planned stretch goal, the $20 million level. While goals will continue after $21 million, they will take a new form representative of what additional funding can add to the game!
$20 million

    First person combat on select lawless planets. Don’t just battle on space stations and platforms… take the fight to the ground!

I would also like to take a moment to follow up on the Voyager Direct poll from Saturday. As you know, we put the solution in the hands of the community. It was a surprise that the largest group (43%) were happy with the way the store had been set up.

That said, as I mentioned on Saturday, I personally felt that perhaps some of the store items were overpriced relative to other ones and with 29% of backers that answered the poll (statistically the poll had enough respondents to be representative of the full Star Citizen population) thought that prices for certain items were too high I feel that’s a large enough block of our community to not ignore. Starting immediately, the prices for the decorative items like the posters and buggy will be reduced. If you paid the original price for these items, you will receive the difference in the form of additional UEC credited to your account in the near future (it will take a little time to develop the correct script, but we will have your accounts credited soon.)

We are making the following price changes as a result of your feedback:

    Cot – 2,000 UEC (was 5,000 UEC)
    RSI Zeus Model – 5,000 UEC (was 10,000 UEC)
    Lamp – 2,000 UEC (was 5,000 UEC)
    Greycat PTV – 15,000 UEC (was 20,000 UEC)
    Posters – 1,000 UEC each (was 5,000 UEC each)

(Note that we have not included the workbench; that’s because it will be a useful gameplay element in the future. It will be needed for pilots seeking to overclock their own ship components!)

We created the decorative items as an easy way for you to support the game and as a result their prices do not impact the overall economy. I believe that is one of the largest points of confusion about the store: in the Star Citizen world it seems unlikely that a poster would cost the same amount as a laser cannon. The prices for ship upgrades will not change, as they represent the final price we imagine they will be in the game: a laser cannon you buy today will be one you have access to in Star Citizen when it launches. Much of our system, including the daily purchase limit and the overall balance limit is intended to prevent users from stockpiling money before the game goes live and have an undue impact on the economy.

Also you should know that the current “dollar” price of a ship does not reflect its actual in-game value in UEC, so comparing the value of a gun against the UEC equivalent of an Aurora is not an accurate comparison. We intended backers to get a benefit for backing early rather than waiting for a finished game and one way was by obtaining ships that ultimately will be more expensive once the game is “live”. A $25 Aurora may cost 75,000 UEC in the finished universe!

As the game world takes shape, we will balance your starting credits – which is one of the reasons we are not allowing you to spend them on Voyager Direct items at this present time. If we find that you don’t have enough to begin the game (you should be able to start off buying a full load of cargo and several missions worth of fuel and landing fees and the higher packages should allow you to buy a couple of basic weapons in addition) then we will increase the amount included.

This balancing act is an ongoing process and I’m sure there will be adjustments along the way BUT we’re committed to delivering a game that doesn’t require grinding, is fun and balanced while allowing us to generate enough ongoing revenue to support the servers and continued content without requiring a subscription.

As we already are planning on implementing the ability to have “test” items and credits for the Dogfighting Module we’ve decided it is not worth re-prioritizing work by our web and game teams to bring this feature in earlier. As much as we appreciate everyone’s enthusiasm to help out not enough people requested this option to make it something we felt we needed to do right now… but when the time comes, we’re going to need help balancing how it performs in combat!

Finally, let me again stress that any purchases you make beyond your starter package are optional.

We deployed the Voyager Direct store before there was a way to earn credits in the game for two reasons; one, to allow people an additional way to support the game without having to buy ships (which are much more significant investments!). The second reason was to allow us to deploy a lot of game items as they are created allowing them the possibility to be used in the various modules that will need them – Hangar, Dogfighting, Planetside. We wanted these to be priced in game credits to underline the fact that everything available through Voyager Direct is ultimately a game item that will be purchasable with game credits that can be earned via gameplay when Star Citizen launches.

I hope this makes everything clear.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13249-Letter-From-The-Chairman-18-Million

If you ever wondered what Project CARS would look like at 4k check this out http://www.flickr.com/photos/94130748@N05/

Generally speaking the Diablo 3 on consoles sounds like it's a streamlined version of Diablo 3.

But that might actually work better for how diablo 3 was. Or it could be worse, I'm not going to play it anymore.

I'm not a big fan of diablo in general, even the ones people loved to high hell (diablo 2).

I have fun with the genre but never got super into it like some people I know, maybe because I was so late to the party with D2. Never bothered with Diablo 3...

I probably played more Titan Quest anything else in the genre and even then I never finished the expansion.

Elite: Dangerous space stations designed around “procedural algorithms,” plans for construction through Event System

Elite: Dangerous will have variations when it comes to station designs, according to Frontier Developments, and this will be accomplished through “procedural algorithms” which will construct stations out of “a range of modular assets.”

The developer said this would allow for “a wide range of possible station designs,” and allowing it to make the most of its library assets.

According to the latest newsletter, posted by Massively, the modular approach will allow players to watch stations expand over time or as a response to player-driven events.

“Beyond designs for more conventional stations, we also plan to have a few specialist station types that fulfill specific roles; each constructed using their own sets of rules and modules,” states the newsletter. “This will help to establish some stylistic differences between the stations, which will make it easier for players to define what the role of one is upon approach.”

Frontier said station designs need to be “structurally feasible, and make sense practically,” and one of the ideas the team is exploring is the concept that a station “does not need to be a single structure, but can have multiple satellite components around a central structure, linked only by rapid transport routes.”

“This idea is not only plausible but would offer the Elite stations a unique aesthetic that would be visually striking,” it was said. “As stations are such a huge part of the game, the aesthetic direction that we choose is not a decision that we’re going to rush.

“We have literally hundreds of ideas at this point for what we want to do with this area of the game, our task now is to choose what we believe will be the best ones for a new Elite.”

Other topics of note in the newsletter touch upon designing a docking cylinder, constructing stations through the Event System, building a Federal Battle Cruiser, gravity, and more.

Elite: Dangerous is expected on PC in March 2014 and Mac a few months after that.

http://www.vg247.com/2013/09/07/elite-dangerous-space-stations-designed-around-procedural-algorithms-plans-for-construction-through-event-system/

Starpoint Gemini 2 now available through early access on Steam

Starpoint Gemini 2 is now available through early access on Steam. The LGM Games’ space simulation game can be purchased ahead of time as a paid Alpha of sorts to help with development. “We are thrilled for our launch on Early Access today,” says Mario Mihokovic, CEO at LGM Games. “Starpoint Gemini 2 is, for a significant part created taking fan suggestions and improvements for the original game in mind. Now we have a chance to show our players how far we have come in implementing both our ideas and theirs in this much enhanced sequel.” The early access Alpha will run you $19.99. Thanks, Blue.

PROJECT FOUR: TRAILS IN THE SKY SC

This is the post I’ve wanted to make for two years now.

So, on very nearly the third anniversary of Recettear’s launch, we can at last say that yes, our fourth project is a collaboration with XSEED Games to localize and publish Trails in the Sky SC. This has, on some level, been in the works and worked on since before the first reveal of Fortune Summoners. So very much, from so very many, has gone into making this a reality, and at long, long last we can finally tell everyone everything about the long-discussed “Project Four”, which is not just our largest localization to date, but is without hyperbole one of the largest projects in the history of the industry.

This marks many things for us: our largest and perhaps most “important” game to date, the proper realization of the other half of our business model, and the end of our long silence. Let us begin with the latter.

The Lengthy Silence, The Health Of Carpe Fulgur

First of all, an apology is in order: I am sorry that we’ve had to be quiet about this for so long, and more importantly that we ended up scaring a number of our fans with our silence, as the quiet led many to believe that Carpe Fulgur had folded. This was not the case at all; we have been, at many times, busier in the period after the release of Fortune Summoners than we have been at any other time in our history until now. There have simply been so many moving parts to this particular project, so many interests to align, that speaking of what Project Four was until now was not possible. In a way, Project Four has not just involved Trails SC; elements of this extend all the way back to the Steam release of Ys: The Oath In Felghana in March of 2012. Though CF did not participate directly in the localization of that game, I, myself, did have a small hand in making that release happen. Getting Felghana, and its siblings, onto Steam to help prove a market even existed for a product like SC was pivotal to the project moving forward. There were so many pitfalls that the project could have faced that announcing it would have been, until very recently, premature.

Our silence does not reflect inactivity or a lack of will to continue on our part – just the opposite, in fact. Carpe Fulgur has never been healthier. Our warchest and cash buffer, even post-taxes, is quite large. And it’s in part because of our legions of fans, both old and new – in the midst of this new announcement, we can also say that Recettear has now sold three hundred thousand copies since its launch nearly three years ago to the day. Chantelise and Fortune Summoners have also been very successful for us – all our products have, to date, turned a profit for us inside of six months, and then proceeded to produce nothing but pure profit from there on out. Carpe Fulgur will not be going anywhere for a very long time.

Find the rest of the blog at http://www.carpefulgur.com/drakblog/?p=48

Deserves more, tho it's not bad for a localisation that had a 10k unit sales goal lol

Free-to-play is starting to shake its reputation of ad-filled tat. League of Legends, World of Tanks, and Team Fortress 2 are just some examples which show you can make full-featured games that aren’t always poking you for money and they can still be profitable for developers. But sometimes it’s just nice to have a game come out and you just give the developer some money and you get the whole thing.

Shipbreakers looks excellent and I can’t wait till we can learn more about the project, particularly as the team can now grow and development can begin properly.

http://www.pcgamesn.com/homeworld-shipbreakers-no-longer-free-play