Random Wednesdays

We got a look at Neverwinter’s Devoted Cleric class in the last week, and quite a few people from Cryptic Studios also gave interviews in that same time. Or at least saw their interviews with various gaming media outlets published, let’s say.

As well, a teaser trailer for Thief, the franchise reboot being worked on at Eidos Montreal, was released recently, as well as some rather dark concept art. A full trailer for Thief also came out…evidently in a leak of some kind.

It was also announced that Stephen Russell will not be reprising his role as a voice artist for the new Thief game, which fact has evidently offended more than a few fans of the original Thief games.

Eidos Montreal also deserves props (or derision; YMMV) for executing a truly excellent (or horrible; YMMV) April Fool’s prank. After teasing a new Deus Ex property called Human Defiance (which we heard rumours of a few weeks back), they released…an 8-bit parody (I guess you’d call it) game.

Supergiant Games revealed that their upcoming action-RPG, Transistor, will sport “under the hood” multiplayer features. No deathmatches, just some form of co-operative play. Whatever; the game still looks intriguing.

Grant Kirkhope wants to make Banjo Kazooie 3, apparently. Kirkhope is a Rare alumnus who scored, among other things, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

Path of Exile is about six months from its version 1.0 release. Expect the game to see yearly expansions thereafter, for a good five or ten years in total.

Trion Worlds’ Victoria Voss shed some light on the localization process for ArcheAge. She also revealed that Trion have an “internal ETA” for a closed beta of the North American version of the game, but declined to give specifics thereabout.

Runic Games released Torchlight 2’s modding kit just this week. Rest assured that I’ll be cracking into those post-haste!

BioShock Infinite continues to score rave reviews, and is the top-selling game in the United Kingdom at present. Others have begun to pick the characters and story of the game apart, and performance benchmarks have also been published for it.

Strangely, the level of violence in the game has also been seeing some discussion. I say “strangely” because even though tongue-clicking at violence in games is nothing new or surprising, it should have been obvious to all and sundry that a BioShock game would feature some pretty intense action.

Also, a couple of neat Easter eggs in the game have come to light. Fair warning: them there links contain spoilers. And really, in all fairness, the presence of Jennifer Hale in the voice cast isn’t an Easter egg, although Kotaku’s point about how it’s kind of hard to not just hear her as Commander Shepard is one I can sympathize with.

Oh, and this guy did a playthrough of the game, and then cut and edited it into a movie. This guy, meanwhile, decided to take a flying leap off of the edge of the game’s setting, the floating city of Columbia. The game has also inspired some pretty impressive cosplay, and even a board game.

Also, I’m rather sad to report that there are evidently some people who have mistaken the “Wounded Knee” reference in Infinite for a Skyrim joke.