Industry News / Upcoming Games

[Antimatter]

What I've watched is what I think is the worst showcase of 2022, sorry, Ubisoft, but still, for Assassin's Creed fans, it had a lot of stuff to get through.

Everything announced at Ubisoft Forward 2022 and the Assassin's Creed Showcase

Four new Assassin's Creed games, updates on three The Division Games, and so much more!

www.gamesradar.com

My personal highlight of the show:

Assassin’s Creed Codename Red will finally take the series to Japan – just don’t expect it soon

It’s been 15 years, but the Assassin’s Creed series is finally setting sail for Japan with Codename Red.

www.vg247.com

It's from the same team that created my favourite AC game, Odyssey.

 

[Antimatter]

And here is quite surprising news, unexpected even from Ubisoft:

(Update) Assassin's Creed Mirage Has Been Rated Adults Only By The ESRB For "Real Gambling"

If true, this would make it the first-ever Ubisoft game to get an Adults Only rating.

www.thegamer.com

"For those unaware, there are only 33 games that have been given an AO rating between 1993 and 2018, including the likes of Manhunt, Outlast 2, and Agony. The reason that Mirage has joined the ranks of these notoriously violent and controversial games is that the ESRB now considers any game with "real gambling" to be worthy of an Adults Only rating.

By "real gambling", the ESRB means in-game virtual gambling that you can spend real-world money on. The official descriptor for the content warning on the ESRB states that it is when a "player can gamble, including betting or wagering real cash or currency". Comparatively, simulated gambling is where a "player can gamble without betting or wagering real cash or currency".

 

[Antimatter]

I meant in the context of Ubisoft previously using loot boxes & microtransactions heavily. If their game is about to get the AO rating, then it means they've brought that to the next level.

2018:

Ubisoft: “Loot crates have been a huge boon for the gaming industry”

Ubisoft has defended the use of loot boxes and microtransactions in full-price games, describing them as a "huge boon" …

www.gamesindustry.biz

Ubisoft Explains Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s Microtransactions And Some Of The Math Behind Them

The presence of microtransactions in a big video game can poison the player’s experience, leaving them to wonder if things have been designed in a way to drive them to pay extra. So it goes with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, a very good $60 game that launched with at least $80 in microtransactions.

kotaku.com

2020:

Ubisoft can't help itself, adds an XP-boosting microtransaction to Assassin's Creed Valhalla

History is doomed to repeat itself Ubisoft caught a lot of flak for a time-saving microtransaction in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey that...

www.destructoid.com

2021:

2024 - New loot boxes: Ubisoft boss defends controversial feature

For the NFTs in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint did Ubisoft received overwhelmingly negative feedback from the community. The implementation of the

gettotext.com

And yes, I definitely agree that gambling for real money should be Adults Only.

 

[Chronicler]

As a kid we had Pokemon Cards, which were kind of in the same vein as these loot boxes and gacha mechanics.

But it was all brick and mortar. Your parents would stop at the store on the way home from work and buy you a pack of pokemon cards as a nice surprise and you'd be happy.

There's something so much more insidious about the modern version of it where it's right on your phone. Kid can get the stuff with a click of a button. It's not necessarily immediately clear to them whether they're spending game money or real money and they kind of don't have much of a concept of money yet to begin with.

Parent messes up what permissions the kid has on their device and they can drain the entire account in minutes.

 

[shmity72]

yes this is scary to me chronicler. Gambling in games is a strange subject.
As Urdnot said it is banned in several countries such as Belgium.
my friend there cannot purchase 'crown crates' for cash in elder scrolls online, that have a random horse skin or whatever in them.
I'm not entirely sure where I stand on this but I definitely see both sides of the issue 'coin' as it were.

 

[Antimatter]

Stray Gods' Initial Pitch Was BioWare DLC

The musical game Stray Gods could've been DLC.

screenrant.com

"Yeah, I brought it up back in the BioWare days, kind of half as a joke. "We should do a musical DLC." The more I talked about it at BioWare, the more the cinematic people and VO people were like, "Yeah, how would we do that?" And the management was kinda like, "Woah. Let's not get crazy." They kind of kiboshed it, but in the back of my mind, I was like, "But we could do something like that..."

 

[Chronicler]

Definitely a good philosophy for game development. A lot of the best games are made because somebody came up with one solid and fun mechanic, then built the whole game around that, and a lot of the worst games happen because some overambitious studio decided to make every distinct activity in their game its own game within a game with its own internal logic, then ran out of time and money with a hundred half finished concepts.

There's also something to be said for clarity of purpose. A guy who picks up your game doesn't necessarily want to do everything. He can play one game when he wants to do one thing and another game when he wants to do the other, but joining them both into one singular experience can actually be counterproductive.

Don't know if I'd necessarily trust ubisoft to put their money where their mouth is, but it's a good school of thought for any studio to pursue really.

 

[Chronicler]

Wow, Overwatch was all anybody would talk about for like that one year, but I guess it really was a flash in the pan.

 

[Antimatter]

The biggest news of this weekend is the huge leak of GTA 6 (probably, the biggest leak gaming has ever known).

This Massive Possible 'Grand Theft Auto VI' Leak Sure Is Looking Legit [UPDATES]

Apparent GTA 6 development footage has turned up online via the Rockstar forums

kotaku.com

Any leak is bad for the game that is being leaked and for the team working on that game, period. However, there are crazy suggestions online that such a leak is part of the marketing campaign. I would quote the following in response to such "suggestions":

 

[Antimatter]

Other Developers Share Footage Of What Their Games Looked Like Early In Development

A timely reminder that it's not just Grand Theft Auto VI that looked 'bad'

kotaku.com

 

[Antimatter]

Yeah, true. That post Mark responded to actually had sent waves across the industry, that's why many developers started reacting (as the Kotaku article summarizes). Here is what Trent Oster thinks:

 

[Chronicler]

Saw somebody talking about videogame previews recently.

They said it's like you're building a car for somebody, and it's 70% complete, but they want to see the car now. So you decide to show them a door. You grind everything to a halt so you can finish up this door, polish it, paint it, the whole deal, get it super presentable. You show them the door and they ask "Is the whole car just a door?"

 

[shmity72]

Saw somebody talking about videogame previews recently.

They said it's like you're building a car for somebody, and it's 70% complete, but they want to see the car now. So you decide to show them a door. You grind everything to a halt so you can finish up this door, polish it, paint it, the whole deal, get it super presentable. You show them the door and they ask "Is the whole car just a door?"

1000 percent. my movie visuals have been done for 5 months as i finish up the audio. i showed people the movie with a few captions and they're like...it would be better with voices.... *palm to face. yes imagine the voices lol.

 

[shmity72]

1000 percent. my movie visuals have been done for 5 months as i finish up the audio. i showed people the movie with a few captions and they're like...it would be better with voices.... *palm to face. yes imagine the voices lol.

watch this short video of the movie the doors by Oliver stone WITHOUT sound. lol be like eh...pretty much sucks, be better if they were talking?
I network with about 20 friends a day. One learns that the majority of people need to be led by the nose for their art.

 

[O_Bruce]

Pokemon introduces autobattling.

EDIT: Yes, I know. My reflexes are on point

 

[Antimatter]

The biggest news of today:

A message about Stadia and our long term streaming strategy

We’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.

blog.google

Experiment: failed

 

[Chronicler]

That's the platform that Baldur's Gate 3 was gonna be on, right? The one where people were like "No, don't worry about its hardware requirements, you can just stream it through this service instead of actually running it on your computer."

 

[Antimatter]

Right, that's where Swen Vincke's assumptions didn't turn out correct.

"He also said Stadia’s promise of better interconnectivity, including being able to simply send links to other players that allow them to join you in-game, was very appealing: “We’re making a game that has over 100 hours of content, so if you want to play that multiplayer it takes a lot of investment and syncing up with each other. If they can just do it on one link on any device that’s a lot easier to start doing it rather than having to sit behind your PC.”

“So that’s the thing that attracted me to Stadia when they started talking about it, and that’s why I said ‘we really have to be doing this,’” Vincke continued, “because if I can just have people send links to each other, say ‘try it out, we’re playing Baldur’s Gate 3,” that’s going to help a lot with the game.”

Vincke also said he’s excited that Stadia will allow Larian to “put the production values up without having to worry too much about the min-specs.” Since all of the graphics processing will be handled by Stadia’s servers, you won’t have to pay for a pricey PC to play it on the highest graphics settings. “It’s really cool tech so I really hope it succeeds, because it’s a democratization of the platform.”

Why Baldur's Gate 3 Won't Be a Google Stadia Exclusive - IGN

Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios says it's "not going to participate in the exclusivity game."

www.ign.com

 

[Antimatter]

This is probably the saddest news for me regarding gaming by a long mile.

Founding member of Disco Elysium studio claims core devs 'involuntarily' left the company

Martin Luiga asserts the dissolution of ZA/UM as a "cultural association" as distinct from ZA/UM the company.

www.pcgamer.com

I consider Disco Elysium to have one of the best (if not the best) writing in gaming I've ever seen (and read), and I also enjoyed the visual style a lot. It seems, the original writers and artist left the company in 2021, so I guess there will never be a true sequel to Disco Elysium. Business killed art.

 

[Antimatter]

CD Projekt Red just revealed their entire upcoming roadmap:

• Sirius: An entire New Trilogy of Witcher Games
• Orion: The Code Name for the Next Cyberpunk Game which is already beginning pre-production
• Hadar: A New IP

Going forward, CD Projekt Red will also include multiplayer in their next projects as well.



It's pretty cool to see a big game company be this transparent about everything they're working on!