Random Wednesdays
The Enhanced Edition of Baldur’s Gate, produced by Edmonton-based Overhaul Games, was released today for PC. The other targeted platforms — Android, iOS, and OS X — will have to wait a bit, as the game is subject to the app approvals process for each ecosystem. Also, Overhaul evidently found a rather nasty crash bug at the last minute, and had to re-submit the game to each app store for re-approval as a result, further delaying things.
Still, reviews of the game have been coming in, and have generally been positive; it would seem that Overhaul has done well, and we can probably look forward to seeing Baldur’s Gate 2 soon enough.
And in case your gaming career has been limited to Halo and/or you’ve been living under a rock, Kotaku has published an article to bring you up to speed on what Baldur’s Gate is and what the Enhanced Edition brings to it.
Trent Oster has been a bit of an interview machine over the last week, speaking with Tor, Pocket Tactics, RPGamer, PC Games N, and 1 More Castle. And Zero1Gaming managed to score an early preview of the game.
Korean sandbox MMORPG ArcheAge has also been getting a lot of publicity lately, with over 20 minutes of gameplay footage being shown in various ads for it. The game’s criminal system was also explained recently, and a new trailer was released that showed off a bunch of the game’s features. The Chinese beta of the game will begin in mid-2013, which means we can probably expect to see it here in North America by about 2017.
There’s a pretty in-depth “making of” article about System Shock 2 posted over at Edge Online. In somewhat related news, actress Terri Brosius — who voiced SHODAN in the game — has evidently signed on to voice another AI in the upcoming game Interstellar Marines, being developed by Zero Point Software.
The Coles were interviewed on Matt Chat recently. Most of the discussion focused on the Quest for Glory series, but Hero-U and its narrow Kickstarter success also came up.
Irrational Games confirmed this week that BioShock Infinite will not have a multiplayer mode. And Movieline is really quite excited about the Deus Ex move that’s in the works.
Also, these charts are awesome. I’ve embedded lower-resolution versions below, but do click on through to see the larger versions.
Game Platforms Over Time
Game Genres Over Time
Sounds like the people writing the reviews for BGEE didn’t have to deal with the terrible pre-load sequence. Also, they must be part of that happy 50% that the game works for – the rest of us are waiting on patches for various loading crashes. That doesn’t include the crashes in game play when resting, entering/leaving building, unreadable/blurred text, white boxes instead of graphics, etc.
Funny thing, I had Baldur’s Gate installed and was starting to play a new game back in March when BGEE was announced. So I went ahead and uninstalled and decided to wait for the “enhanced edition”. Oh well, guess I’ll have to wait a few more weeks. I’m glad they took those extra weeks to “fix issues” before release … maybe they should have taken a few more weeks. Ha!
I am seeing more and more such comments. I’ll try to remember to make a note of the issue(s) next week.
Oh, double post …
The charts look nice, but they’re way off … he took data from 24,000 video game releases? Unfortunately, that number is far too small for the amount of systems he has on the chart. The Commodore 64 itself has over 20,000 commercial releases, ZX Spectrum over 8,000, etc.
Pretty charts, but rather useless really.