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It seems that nowadays any big game beta seems to have some problems, and they usually include a problem with the framerates. It seems that the latest Hitman game’s no exception to this rule.
The people at Gaming Bolt have been putting the beta of the assassin game through its paces in the last few days before they lose access to it (the access being a bonus of pre-ordering the game) and the results are… well, not great.
Running the game on a Radeon R9290 4GB GPU along with an AMD FX 8350, they’re reporting that during the opening training mission the game is failing to maintain even a steady 30FPS. Other tests done seem to confirm this, with an hour spent on the training mission ship using two 980 TIs it’s hard to get a steady 60FPS. Admittedly the beta isn’t configured for dual GPU set-ups, but even on a single 980 the framerates drop. And this is on quite good hardware too, so you can imagine the issues more affordable hardware could have with it.
Unsurprisingly, it’s the NPC crowds that do it. Less populated areas run faster as there’s a lot less on screen to process and keep track of. Since this is a game about murdering targets that are generally located in very populated areas though, you have to hope that IO Interactive is planning some further tightening of the game’s optimization before the full release.
Mind you, there’s a good track record because Hitman:Absolution was apparently well received on its PC port. So there is hope that IO will have it sorted by launch. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Welcome to your weekly update in interesting things going on in the world of Kickstarter campaigns.
As always I’m starting with news to do with previously covered projects and we’ll start with the bad news first. Space Revolver did not reach its funding target in time, although the developers have said that they are still planning to release the game onto Steam Early Access soon with multiplayer, but a smaller set of weapons and other things that they plan to add to over time. The funding for Ghost Theory was also cancelled a few days ago as they were running far short of their goal. For now the developers are debating whether to approach publishers to get the game made, or to revise their campaign and relaunch it in a few months. Either way, the game is not dead.
Other not so good news comes from the fact that a handful of other games are looking like they won’t be reaching their targets in time, including Project Elliott (and I was really hoping that this one would get made), Dread Bot Factory and Mission to Mars.
However there is some good news to report this week. Invisigun Heroes managed to beat its target with a “huge surge” of attention that pushed it past the goal in the last day or so of the campaign, as well as Poison Bottles having comfortably surpassed its target with 12 more days remaining as of writing. Which Friend and MachiaVillain are also doing well, although both still have a little way to go yet to reach the set funding goals.
Now a note before I go into this – this is not a game. It is however a fairly interesting looking game builder, so I’ve decided to break the rules for once because dammit, it’s my article.
GameSpawner is designed to be a game creation tool that allows for more than one person to work on a game at the same time, using real time updating for teams who might not all be in the same location. It’s built for those who aren’t good at coding and includes a lot of free and editable content to help construct the games. There’s also a hope that GameSpawner can be implemented as a learning tool for colleges and other course that require it.
GameSpawner is looking to make £7,000, and has made £225 already with 27 days to go.
Next up is a game that we actually got a press release through for and has launched only recently.
Wounded is a story of a search. You and your daughter Lisa have had a terrible accident and now you are looking for Lisa, in a world of horror and nightmares. Gather clues to avoid falling into the darkness and giving into your terror. The only way to end the nightmare is “to find Lisa and escape or to die. Horribly.” It’s also got people working on it with credits from games like Watch Dogs, Assassin’s Creed and Outlast.
Wounded has 29 days left to go and has made €106 of its €15,000 goal so far.
Now we have the card game of the week, and its another drinking one, albeit this time crossed over with some hero/RPG elements.
Beer Hero requires you to assemble a team of heroes with stats that vary based on how intoxicated they are. It also requires you as the player to stay sober enough to continue playing. Some heroes fight better drunk, some need to be sober and others have a sweet spot in between. All of this can be altered through playable cards that can raise and lower all stats including intoxication levels. And in case you aren’t a big drinker, they’re planning to have Lite and Dry versions of the game too!
Beer Hero has made $505 so far of its $7,500 goal and has 29 more days to go on its campaign.
The final game for this week is a sandbox adventure game that is said to take inspiration from Sunless Sea and Majora’s Mask.
Set in a city that seems alive, A Place for the Unwilling is the developers attempting to remedy that issue they find with most adventure-filled open-world games – a lot of space that seems empty and devoid of life. So this game will see them fill the urban landscape with characters to meet and engage with as you play.
A Place for the Unwilling has a target set of €20,000 and has 23 days left. So far it has made €7,831.
For their new game, Ubisoft constructed a game engine they called Snowdrop. It’s supposed to help support its lobby-free multiplayer functions along with the open-world, dynamic weathers and so on. Now we could see it being used for some of Ubi’s other IPs in the future.
Head of IP at Ubisoft Massive, Martin Hultberg, was interviewed and revealed that Snowdrop could be seen in other franchises in future.
“Internally we try to share as much technology as possible between the studios. It’s just more efficient that way. In our case we developed the Snowdrop Engine from the ground-up because we needed middleware that could run on the new consoles and PC, while doing everything we wanted to do with the open world, the weather, time of day and such features. Now we’ve made that engine available to other studios, and not just the Clancy teams. Any Ubisoft team can use Snowdrop now.”
Also, the Division’s ‘Dark Zone’ could see the functionality traveling across to other teams under Ubisoft’s umbrella as well in future. “I think that feature could definitely be incorporated into other Ubisoft games like Assassin’s Creed. It’s a really immersive feature that I think fits with pretty much all Ubisoft’s IPs.”
Ubisoft have recently announced their intention not to make a new Assassin’s Creed game in 2016, so I wonder if a desire to build their next game in that series upon this game engine is a part of that? It’ll be interesting to see if that theory holds water when the next one is announced.
XCOM 2’s release was quite good as far as the launches of big-name games has gone in recent years. No big issues, although some have reported performance issues that affected their gameplay by tkaing framerates down below what they should have been. And in a game that is all about getting things done in as few turns as possible… it sort of ruins the immersion, you know?
Last week publisher 2K Games acknowledged the issues, saying that they were “gathering more information from users” and today Lead Designer Jake Solomon said that the developer Firaxis was “working very furiously” to get XCOM 2 running smoothly.
He also said that the issues hadn’t been caught before launch purely because it doesn’t seem to effect every computer and every build. Where as some less powerful computers have reported no problems, so high-end expensive custom rigs have been seeing issues left, right and centre.
“We didn’t catch this stuff in compatibility testing. We’re fully, fully accountable for the product in people’s hands, so we certainly take responsibility.”
He admits that some of the camera pauses after events take far too long, and that all the issues with the stuttering and framerates annoy the developers as much as the players. While he couldn’t say when the fixes would be coming he was adamant that Firaxis was working hard on them and that there would be “fixes coming soon.”
In the world of Hearthstone there are a lot of well known players, and one of them who is known as one of the best Hearthstone Arena players in the world is Hafu Chan. However, Hafu is female and that means that she has to put up with some stuff that people would never dream of directing towards a male player.
Now such issues and experiences are being shown off in a ten-minute documentary about the subject entitled “The Trials of a Female Esports Champion” in which she is interviewed about the abuse she has faced both now as a Hearthstone player and streamer, but also before that when she was a WoW pro player as well. She was previously turned off from that game’s competitive scene by such incidents as the time a team formed for a WoW Tournament Realm called “Gonna Rape Hafu At Regionals”. Just, wow.
In the documentary she talks about this and also why even though she loves Hearthstone, she’s thinking about walking away from streaming it for similar reasons.
“When you have 70,000 people watching a stream, and all you see is terrible things being said about you, it’s kind of like, why am I competing?” she says. “[Viewers] know to press where it hurts, right? And when you kind of show where it hurts, people will just keep pressing.”
Of course, there are some watching who claim that she has it wrong and that the abuse and harassment does not come from her being female – but simply because she is a streamer and therefore should expect such insults and attacks upon her person. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a male livestreamer being told that said commenter would love to “rape them” or tell them that they’re only using their bodies to get them attention for their videos (not specific examples from Hafu’s video but commonly seen around many websites sadly). All streamers get trolls, but females are significantly more likely to get abuse related to reducing them to nothing more than their appearance or something to have sex with.
Either way, whether you disagree or agree with what Hafu is saying I’d recommend at least giving the video a watch. It’s just ten minutes of your life after all.
