Bethesda & All the Rest-a Thursdays
BioShock Infinite is available for pre-order! And if you pre-order the game now, you’ll get access to Industrial Revolution, a web-based game that presents players with a series of puzzles that unlock bits of content in BioShock Infinite. (Oh, and if you already pre-ordered, but didn’t get access to Industrial Revolution, cancel your old pre-order and pre-order again. Yes, I’m serious.)
There’s also a new trailer out for the game, and it looks darn cool, frankly. A couple of special and even-more-special editions of the game were also announced recently. Oh, and there’s a neat BioShock Infinite easter egg in Borderlands 2.
Torchlight 2 has seen a couple of updates in the last week; Runic are taking full advantage of Steam to stay on top of even the smallest issues in the game. The developers also went on record with some musing about how in a future update, Torchlight 2 might take some cues from Minecraft to enhance the already excellent gameplay experience.
And the auction of 38 Studios assets took place this week. I wrote about it for my Examiner column, so I’ll direct you all there to read up on the details. Also of note here: Turbine has hired former Reckoning designer Ken Rolston.
EverQuest Next hasn’t come up in these round-ups before, but I’ll make a brief mention of it here because it’s being touted as a “sandbox MMO”.
“What we’re building is something that we will be very proud to call EverQuest,” Smedley said. “It will be the largest sandbox style MMO ever designed with the same exciting content delivered in a new way. Something you’ve never seen before and the MMO world has never seen before.
“We didn’t want more ‘kill 10 rats’ quests. We didn’t want more of the same. If you look at the MMOs out there, they’re delivering the same content over and over again. So are we. We need to change that. When we released EverQuest, we changed the world. We want to do that again with a different type of game.”
It will be interesting to see how this next chapter in the EverQuest series measures up to Ultima Online, which is still very much the gold standard for sandbox MMORPGs.
Oh, and if you have a copy of Doom 3 laying about, do check out The Dark Mod, a Thief total conversion for id Software’s shooter.
Another Skyrim beta patch has been released, which corrects a few minor issues with the game. That’ll be particularly handy to any of you who happen to be students at Rice University, which now uses Skyrim as a course component for a class on Nordic mythology. And hey…three credits is three credits!
A few different gaming news sites got a hands-on look at The Elder Scrolls Online last week, which means there are quite a lot of new screenshots of the game to be found. The game does look pretty, although Zenimax Online has definitely taken the game’s aesthetic feel in a bit of a different direction since last we saw media for the game. It looks much more like a The Elder Scrolls game, and while that makes sense…I find it less appealing overall. But that’s probably just me.
Oh, and the OpenMW team have published another update. Evidently, the world editor for the engine is progressing well. Zini, from the Titans of Ether, has been working on getting death working properly, it would seem.
Dishonored, meanwhile, will get its first bit of DLC in December. Entitled Dunwall City Trials, the first addon for the game will feature wave-based arena battles. Which…meh.
Those of you who’ve played the game: have you fould do check out this concept art for Corvo, the game’s protagonist, which predate the conception of his fancy skull-mask. And if you missed it last week, be sure to catch this interview with the game’s art director.
There are evidently a few cheats in Dishonored…it seems strange now to talk about such things. Also available now is a mod to add a machine gun to the game’s already formidable mix of weaponry. And for those of you who play Minecraft, there’s a Dishonored-inspired texture mod for that.
In regards to Elder Scrolls Online, I’ve been ignoring it mostly. But I decided to click on your links before finishing reading what you said. And my first thought was “OMG! It actually looks like Elder Scrolls now!” and was much excited. Then I read your comment… So yeah, it might just be you 😛
Yeah, probably. Don’t know why, but I just don’t care that much for the Elder Scrolls aesthetic. I recognize the technical achievement in the engine and what Bethesda has wrought therewith, but it fails to appeal to me on any other level.
Here’s my FUD regarding TES:O.
1) TES has an amazing set of lore, possibly one of the strongest I’ve seen in a game series. It’s deep. Incredibly deep. The flavor and aesthetic (sorry WtF 🙁 ) are inventive and unique. They respect multiple aspects of earth’s own history (Asian and Mideast influences thanks in part to Ken Rolston). They provide alternative explanations to standard fantasy tropes. It’s like it’s fantasy but with a twist and a whole lot deeper. I love it.
2) I get my roleplaying experience from the emergent gameplay for once. I can, as they say, live another life in another world.
3) I don’t like MMOs. That whole living another life thing? Doesn’t happen here. At least not in the way I’d like it to play out. I can’t get lost when other people from real life keep intruding on the story I’m telling myself. It’s certainly not a knock against MMO players. It’s a legitimate form of fun and play, but because MMOs get lumped with RPGs so easily (MMO is same but Better because you have Friends!) when they actually play as wildly different games, I see them as an intrusive threat on the enjoyment I get out of SP games. I don’t even like playing coop. I hang out with friends for other reasons than to play games. Not a LAN player
4) I’m very leery about the track record regarding existing IP. Origin and Blizzard both let very successful non-MMO brands lie fallow after their MMO work became super popular. Both were reasonable business decisions to throw available resources at growing a new brand and a new game. But the successful single-player lines died; the lines that I think attracted a different subset of gamers. UO players and SP Ultima players have some overlap, but are a pretty distinct and different bunch. So it seems clear to me that the businesses, if they see a successful business model to exploit, will leave the SP people behind and we’re left to start over from scratch.
Regarding the fourth point only, it’s worth noting that The Elder Scrolls Online is being developed by Zenimax Online, a totally separate studio from anything related to Bethesda. Bethesda will continue to develop Fallout and The Elder Scrolls single-player titles only.
Which should hopefully avoid the pitfalls that befell Origin and Blizzard.
Now, the fanbases…yes. There, we’ll see a lot of fragmentation.
That’d be inevitable whichever way you look at it. Hopefully they won’t be too disparate, or too hostile to one another.
Oh, the logo you’re using in the header for Zenimax Onine’s out of date.