Electronic Arts says its decision to discontinue its Online Pass program remains unchanged in the wake of announcements from Microsoft and Sony about their respective next-generation consoles. The scheme is still "dead," according to an EA spokesperson.
"[There is] no change to our decision to discontinue Online Pass," EA senior director of corporate communications John Reseburg told Polygon. "It is dead."
"As we said a few weeks ago, none of our new EA titles will include online pass, and we are removing it from existing games as well," Reseburg said. "Nothing else on today's news, but did want to be clear that our online pass decision was based on player feedback, and there's no change."
EA confirmed in May it was ending its Online Pass program, an attempt to both curb and generate...
Nordic Games, buyer of most of THQ's remaining IPs, is getting the ball rolling on plans for its acquired games. Nintendo blames itself for poor Wii U sales. The state of Rhode Island will honor the bonds that financed defunct developer 38 Studios. Steam could allow users to share their game libraries with friends in the future. GameStop has burned through its allocated pre-orders for the Xbox One. Our E3 Editor's Choice List is up, and our final Human Angle is about Red Dead Redemption voice actor Rob Wiethoff.
Nordic Games' plans for THQ titles in early stages, Deadly Creatures high on the list
Nintendo is to blame for poor Wii U sales, says Iwata
Rhode Island will honor bond repayment for 38 Studios
Steam could allow for game sharing between friends in the future
GameStop stores...
Mark Cerny, the PlayStation 4's lead system architect and the game director of PS4 launch title Knack, appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon recently to talk about the PS4, play Knack and differentiate the next-gen console from the Xbox One.
Check out the video above to see the design Sony unveiled last week, as well as a mention of the console's used game policy that Sony demonstrated in a video posted shortly after the company's E3 2013 press conference. The duo also picks up the PS4 controller and plays a bit of Knack, which Cerny describes as a "story-driven family adventure."
For more on Cerny, Knack and the PS4, be sure to check out Polygon's recent interview, conducted during E3. You can also see Microsoft's Phil Spencer demo the Xbox One on Late Night here.
Details of a series of canceled Legacy of Kain games have been posted online, prompting an official release from Square Enix that includes assets from terminated project Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun.
Yesterday, NeoGAF user Mama Robotnik posted documented evidence for ten Legacy of Kain games that had been in some form of production, stretching back to the early 1990s, but had been canceled. The most recent was Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun, developed by Climax with multiplayer help from Psyonix.
The Unreal Engine 3-based game was to be launched on consoles and Windows and was set in a future long after the events of the Legacy of Kain games released between 1999 and 2003. It included a multiplayer section called 'War For Nosgoth'.
Dead Sun was cancelled by Square Enix in 2012, but earlier...
Infamous: Second Son will explore the tradeoffs made between freedom and security, Brian Fleming, a producer at developer Sucker Punch Productions, told Polygon during E3.
When Sucker Punch's game director Nate Fox unveiled the game during the February event in which Sony revealed the PlayStation 4, he recounted the story of being tear-gassed by police forces during a World Trade Organization protest in 1999. That event, he said, taught him that "Our security comes at a hight price: our freedom."
Fleming said that Infamous: Second Son explores that theme, through the game isn't necessarily didactic.
"I think the themes of Infamous[: Second Son] are maybe along those lines, but maybe more the tradeoffs that you and I and really all Americans make about trading off our freedoms...
PlayStation 4 architect and Knack director Mark Cerny will give the keynote talk for the 2013 Develop in Brighton conference, organizers announced today.
Cerny's keynote, titled "Changing the Game: Developing into the Next Generation," will highlight the challenges in developing the PS4 and the lessons developers can learn from the previous console generations. Cerny will also discuss Sony's vision for the future of its next-gen console and the role of the indie community within those plans. He will also discuss his role in the production of platform title Knack, which was unveiled alongside the PS4 in February.
"Following the rave reception Sony received for the PlayStation 4 at E3 earlier this month, we are delighted that Mark Cerny is delivering the Develop in Brighton keynote this...
In a presentation during E3 at Sony's PlayStation booth, Supergiant Games' showed off their upcoming game Transistor running on PlayStation 4, with developers Greg Kasavin and Amir Rao providing commentary over a gameplay trailer released earlier this year.
Kasavin says Red's weapon, the Transistor, has been infused with the consciousness of a man who has passed away. Part of the game's story will be unravelling the nature of the relationship between Red and the man who has become the Transistor, Kasavin said.
Players will be able to set up attack sequences, scheduling out a series of moves that will best combat the enemies Red has to face. Players will be able to "set up a strategy on their own terms," Kasavin said. The Transistor will be able to take on new abilities through...
At this year's show, neither Sony nor Microsoft showed a single motion control demo on stage in their press conferences, and Nintendo's Mario and Zelda franchises showed up missing the shaking and pointing they had last time around.
Motion controls weren't absent from this year's show, with Harmonix revealing music spectacle Fantasia and Ubisoft annualizing the massively successful Just Dance. But for the first time since Nintendo introduced Wii eight years ago, motion controls seem to have found a comfortable place amongst the rest of the industry, with some games cutting them out, many making them optional and others hinting at new potential.
On Monday at the show, Microsoft started the trend by revealing two of its previously motion-only games will now work with traditional...
GameStop has ceased taking pre-orders for Xbox One. Employees from a number of retail locations around the country tell Polygon that the company reached its launch-day allocation last weekend. The company says it is still taking orders via its online site.
Retail managers say senior managers sent out a nationwide email to store managers a few days ago telling them to cease taking pre-orders. Many had already stopped taking launch-date orders, because they had run out of individual store-level allocations.
Polygon called stores around the country, all of which declined to take Xbox One pre-orders. They are still taking PlayStation 4 orders. Store managers say allocations for Sony's machine are considerably higher than Microsoft's.
One store manager in California said, "We were only...
Titanfall
"The development veterans who created Modern Warfare and the team they’ve assembled are making their debut with Titanfall, an online-only multiplayer-focused shooter that takes all the chances they never could with a billion-dollar juggernaut." — Arthur Gies
Transistor
"Transistor is a science-fiction-set RPG that allows players to take on the role of a woman who is nearly killed by a mysterious group of assailants, who later gains access to a particular weapon and fights from street to street in a futuristic city against enemies attempting to take it back." — Emily Gera
Hohokum
"If a player really wants to find objectives in the game, then there are a few that can be found, such as the seed-collecting mechanic in the Kite Village. However, the...
The scariest thing about Outlast isn't its mountain asylum setting, or even the thing stalking you through the bloodied building, it's that the game features a hide button.
The ability to hide isn't always there and it's not the only thing you can do in the game. Sometimes you can run, crouch, climb. What you can't do, no matter how desperate things get, is fight back.
"The core gameplay experience is about no combat," Red Barrels' co-founder Philippe Morin tells me before I have a chance to play the PC and PlayStation 4 game. "It's about having the player suffer."
Outlast tells the story of a reporter who gets a tip from an anonymous informant that something fishy is going on at a mountain asylum. The reporter goes there to investigate, but when he arrives he realizes that all hell...
Loot and weapons in Destiny will be distributed through private streams, meaning that every player will find weapons suited to their class without competing with teammates, according to Bungie COO Pete Parsons.
Speaking with Polygon at E3 last week, Parsons said Destiny players working together won't have to fight over weapons dropped by enemies and will have the opportunity to claim all weapons them for themselves.
"We have a set number of weapons [and we] balance each and every one of them, including all of [the] achievements, it's just a huge amount of work," Parsons said. "That number will continue to grow, and we also have exotics on top of that.
"We want everybody to be excited to come in and play, so we have private loot streams, which means everything in Destiny is meant for...
Sony's latest PlayStation 4 video offers a look at what users can expect from the new console's interface, including social networking-style features, video chats, and various download options.
PS4 owners will be able to share tips on how to beat sections of games by uploading videos directly from their account. More interesting than that, the video suggests it will be possible to download Killzone: Shadow Fall directly through the console, allowing players to choose whether to download single player or multiplayer modes first in order to access the title faster. It is unknown whether this feature will be available for all games.
Messages from friends are also shown popping up in-game, while the PS4 messaging system is now upgraded to allow mobile phone-styled auto-insert words. PS4...
Kingdom Hearts 3 had its first trailer unveiled at last week's E3, but other than the fact it's a PlayStation 4 and Xbox One game, we don't know much about it beyond the rumors of the past few years. Famitsu magazine attempted to get some solid answers out of director Tetsuya Nomura in this week's issue, and here are the results:
Nomura confirmed that KH3's story begins where Dream Drop Distance's left off. "We're proceeding along with which worlds we'll be selecting for the game," he said. "It's the final episode in the 'Dark Seeker' saga that began with the original KH, and it'll depict the final battle with Xehanort."
The new visual style seen in the trailer reflects the results of a long trial-and-error effort. "We spent a while figuring out what direction to take KH's visuals in...
Seven years and a month after it was first announced in E3 2006 under the name Final Fantasy Versus 13, Final Fantasy 15 finally had its first "real" debut trailer revealed at the LA Convention Center last week; However, as director Tetsuya Nomura revealed to Famitsu magazine in this week's issue, the decision to rename the project got its start a lot earlier than you'd think.
"Around one or two years after we announced FF Versus 13," he said, "it was suggested to us to shift to FF15 as part of the company's direction. By that time, a fair amount of time had already passed since the announcement and Versus was a well-known title, so it wasn't a given that this would be 15; it could have still been Versus. Personally, I came to accept the idea once FF Agito 13's name was changed to F...
Nintendo is not worried over the affect the PlayStation 4's relatively low price-point will have on Nintendo products, president of Nintendo of America Reggie Fils-Aime told Kotaku.
Despite low sales of Wii U systems and president Satoru Iwata's recent acknowledgement of Nintendo's role in this, Fils-Aime stated the publisher is not focused on the business direction of Sony and Microsoft despite being direct competition.
"It puts no pressure on us at all," Fils-Aime said regarding the reveal of the next-gen systems and pricing. "Sony and Microsoft are going to do what they're going to do. My bet is that there are going to be more announcements the closer we get to whatever their launch date is.
"From my perspective, I can't focus on that. I have to focus on: How do we satisfy the...
While Ray's was initially announced for PCs, designer Chris Cobb told Polygon "Sony has removed all barriers, quite literally, on their system. ... It's been easier to get our game onto a Sony platform than it has been to get on Steam." While Sony isn't funding Ragtag, they did give the developer a pretty decent piece of real estate on the show floor, where a fairly substantional chunk of Ray's The Dead was playable.
After playing through the entirety of that demo, it's clear that Ray's and Ragtag have a few primary challenges ahead of them. The fundamentals of the game are easy enough to grasp, as Ray wanders first a graveyard then a small town and its streets, amassing a mob of zombies under his control in an effort to solve various action-based puzzles and progress further. But R...
PlayStation 4's social features will not require a PlayStation Plus subscription and all PS4 users will now be able to use the auto-update functionality for free, VideoGamer.com reports.
On the PlayStation 3, only Plus members had the ability to auto-update. Speaking with SCEE UK and Ireland MD Fergal Gara, the site reports that television and movie streaming services will also still be free.
"A PlayStation Plus subscriber for PlayStation 4 comes away with a hell of a lot," Gara said. "First of all, the subscription applies across all three platforms [PS4, PS3 & PS Vita], so if you have the three platforms then you have an instant game collection on all three. So that's hugely powerful in its own right. But it is true to say that the online multiplayer element for PS4, you do require...
If console gaming is going to maintain the presence it once had, the developers are simply going to have to learn some lessons from the world of PC gaming, which has done an excellent job of keeping up with the changing online community and its increasingly user-centric demands.
With this in mind, here are five things console gaming could stand to learn from their PC cousins:
1. Openness to Publishers and Patches
A patch is a downloadable file that fixes or adds to a game after it's been released. Most people don't know that it can cost something to the tune of $40,000 to get a patch up for an Xbox 360 or PS3 because of internal certification processes. These outlandish costs can make it tough for even the most successful game development companies to afford regular patches and...
Development of AI for Call of Duty: Ghosts is taking longer than the game's graphics because Infinity Ward has yet to receive finalized versions of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One hardware, executive producer Mark Rubin told Official PlayStation Magazine.
Rubin said work on AI is "slower than some of the graphics" because the studio lacks the final hardware, noting the delay has caused Infinity Ward to be more cautious with the scope of the game at this point in time.
"Obviously we are in crazy early development and we will have to see how the consoles play out," Rubin said.
According to Rubin, AI enemies in Ghosts will react differently to certain events in the environment, as well as other dynamic instances such as Riley attacking.
"They might behave differently to the dog, or...
Developer Eidos Montreal has unveiled a 33-minute video presentation of its upcoming next-gen title Thief shown running on PlayStation 4.
As presented by producer Stefane Roy, the in-game footage takes place a number of hours into the game and introduces both the city environment mid-revolution and its ruler The Baron.
Roi emphasizes the importance of shadow in the game, which is a necessity for protagonist Garrett's stealth actions. Users are made aware of their visibility through a gem icon on the left-hand side of the UI. Similarly, sound can alert guards to your presence.
A new feature, Focus, increases Garrett's aiming ability when taking out enemies, while players can also make use of the environment to put them down. Oil patches, for example, can be targeted then set aflame...
Wolfenstein: The New Order, MachineGame's reimagining of iD Software's military shooter, is more than just a regular first-person shooter, according to gameplay designer Andreas Öjerfors. It's also an action adventure game.
Speaking to Polygon, Öjerfors said that the theme of Wolfenstein — that of a retro, sci-fi future set in the 1960s where the Nazis won World War II — offered the development team opportunities to explore larger-than-life political leaders, weird technology and strange experiments, so it embraced these elements and made the game a first-person action adventure game.
"In the adventure aspect ... players [will be taken] around the world to explore all of these different places [and] explore the realities of this new world where the Nazi have taken over the...
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