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The new Star Wars Battlefront game seems to have been quite popular in its beta stage if the numbers released are any indication of its popularity.
The number of people who played the beta during its run was around 9.5 million across all the three platforms that had a version active, with a combined playtime of 1.6 billion minutes. That’s a lot of blaster fire and thermal detonators sailing around a battlefield of players.
Playable ‘hero’ characters Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader have each been spawned just under 6 million times, while 783,392 walkers were taken down. The most popular Star Cards from those that were available during the beta (and that wasn’t a lot) were the Cycler Rifle, the Thermal Detonator and the Jump Pack, in that order.
While popular, the beta did have its problems with an inbalance of power between the sides that led EA to admit that it was too easy for the Empire side to win and some rebalancing would need to be done to fix it. Mind you, that’s one purpose of a beta – to identify these things before release (although it was kind of obvious).
Digm tried out the beta and while fun he didn’t feel like the game offered much in the way of uniqueness. What about you? Did you get to play and what did you think?
It wouldn’t be a Call of Duty game if there wasn’t some map or mode that involved zombies and asked you to survive against waves of them. Black Ops 3’s is coming in a few weeks time at the same time as the game, although that means it’ll release a week after Halloween. Not that a delay is a bad thing, it’s preferred to having a game with bugs out in the market.
The map, entitled “The Giant” asks players to survive against zombies, but also hellhounds and giant robots using a variety of special weaponry to hold back the hordes. It’s a reimagining of a classic map ‘Der Riese’ and will involve the characters of Dempsey, Nikolai, Takeo and Richthofen as they fight to return to their own worlds.
Check out the trailer for it below, filled with a lot of slow-motion zombie shooting:
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will release on November 6th and players can gain access to The Giant bonus map on day one with a purchase of the Collector’s Edition or the Season Pass.
Starting off as always with a review of games I’ve covered in the past, Home Free has 6 days to go until campaign end and has reached its next stretch goal; adding cats to the cities for your low-poly puppies to interact with although it won’t be possible to play as a cat. As expected Aberford didn’t reach its funding target in time, and pretty much all of the projects from the Round-Up of Oct 9th have more than half of their totals to make up in just under two weeks.
Of last week’s selection only GOAT ARMY is close to target, having less than €300 to make up in 29 days.
First up is a little mobile game with a simple task: set alight and burn corpses of monsters and fallen heroes to gain loot for your master. Also you play as quite a cute but angry looking little fire-spitting robot and that’s just cool.
Crematory Bot tasks you with charring the corpses being produced by a war without letting a single one past, collecting loot pick-ups as well as upgrading The Bot through collecting enough scrap pick-ups then using them to generate a randomly selected upgrade for The Bot. Each corpse will have some different attributes and you’ll even get to face ‘boss-level’ corpses. Makes a difference to play a game where your ‘enemies’ are technically already dead!
Crematory Bot has made nothing of its goal yet, but it has a target of only $300 to make in 27 days.
This game’s page describes it as “a love letter to platform games”. As someone who grew up with a number of good platformers, that’s appealing.
Super Axe Boy will feature a combination of 2D and 3D levels, sometimes switching between the two perspectives in the same level. The creator is advertising that the game could be available for many platforms both computer and console but the console versions are only going to be made if their stretch goals are met in time. It’ll feature pop culture references and some leaning on the forth wall and has a silly story that sees our hero and his sidekick Bebop as the sole people not abducted by beaver-like aliens for the purposes of slave labour/meat products.
Super Axe Boy has a target of €25,000 of which €5,297 has already been raised with a further 26 days to go.
I admit it, this one caught my eye because the hero is an anthropomorphic kick-ass rabbit. Who doesn’t like battle bunnies?
Dusty Raging Fist is a beat’em up action game with 3 player co-op play, both locally and online and is actually the sequel to a 2014 Steam game; Dusty Revenge. It follows the heroic lapine Dusty and his allies as they fight their way through levels, using their hands and feet to fight as well as picking up elemental power pick-ups to use against foes as well. The three have been sent on a quest to acquire elemental powers from the world’s Guardians to fight an evil that resides in the dark Catacombs.
Dusty Raging Fist has 27 days to go and has made $3,988AUD of its $60,000AUD target so far.
Wrapping it up with a tabletop board game with miniatures this week, one that includes a group of players working against one ‘game master’ player. Those are always fun.
Fanthoms is described on its Kickstarter as “a cooperative adventure game, with miniatures, in which a group of players fight against hordes of undersea monsters controlled by a game master”. It features either a campaign to help players grow their characters and acquire skills to help them deal with the undersea terrors and hull breaches or a number of stand-alone scenarios that have been included in the game for game masters who are a little less sure of crafting their own. Each game comes with five character miniatures, several monster miniatures, a series of weapon cards and a foldable game board, although you can only receive this core game if you back at $60 or higher.
Fathoms has 26 days to go to make a $35,603 goal (I know, it’s not a nice rounded number for once) and has made $5,022 so far.
Whatever happened to the damn good guy? I liked the damn good guy, the damn good guy was a…Damn. Good. Guy.
You’re probably wondering what I mean by “the damn good guy”. What I mean is pieces of entertainment that aren’t huge, massive, world changing, innovative behemoths that somehow seem to fail living up to the expectations of the creator. The damn good guy refers to pieces of media that are just enjoyable because they’re well put together, well written and don’t try to cast a net so wide and cast that they can’t possibly hope to be considered a success.
Example, Tomb Raider 2013. That was a good game, really good in fact. Solid gameplay/mechanics, great voice acting, very good atmosphere and was a nice long length. Square Enix however deemed the game a failure despite it selling a whopping 3.4 million units worldwide. Seriously Square? How big were your expectations of the game that you needed to re-release it for Playstation 4 and Xbox One just to beef up the sales? How much was the budget for this endeavour?
According to an article from Eurogamer.net the budget for Tomb Raider was $60 Million…HO-LY FUCK!!
I think we can all agree that’s pretty tall order to fill, a really tall order to fill. And there’s my point, set the bar too high and the chances of you hauling your arse over it decreases, don’t get me wrong I really enjoyed Tom Raider, but to have it deemed a failure due to unreasonable expectations just seems rude (for the lack of a better word), I’m no game designer but even I can see effort when it’s right in front of me.
Square sadly seemed to act like EA is constantly acting with their Battlefield franchise which ends up with a game that makes a huge amount of money and sells an insane amount of copies but is deems a failure anyway. Instead EA just end up aping Call of Duty in order to try and win over their audience, which they seem to keep failing at. These developers can clearly dominate in their fields of work but they’re tunnel-visioning so hard that they forget that they’ve still made a metric fuckton anyway. There’s nothing wrong with 2nd place is what I’m saying and there’s also nothing wrong with not releasing a game every fucking year, yeah I’m looking at you Assassin’s Creed, I love you but slow the hell down, you make tons of money with what you have maybe you should take the time to enjoy it? You know make some use of that company yacht you undoubtedly have, maybe take it for a sail and unwind?
See, this is why I love the damn good guy. The damn good guy gets their budget and knows exactly what to do with it, the damn good guy thought process I imagine would be something akin to this:
“Ok, I’ve been given $25,000,000 to make a piece of entertainment”
“My piece of entertainment will be about this”
“I will spend the money accordingly in all the necessary areas in order to make this piece of entertainment as appealing to its target audience as possible”
“The product has been released, sales figures are strong and we’ve made the budget back plus a little extra, even the reviews are positive I’m going to spend some time with my kids as I’ve been coming home late recently”
The damn good guy thought process probably does not resemble,
“OHDEARGOD, WE’VE BEEN GIVEN $70,000,000 TO MAKE A PIECE OF ENTERTAINMENT, WE MUST BE BETTER THEN EVERYONE ELSE IN ORDER TO BECOME ANY KIND OF SUCCESS”
“But sir we’re making a ton of money anyway…”
“DAMMIT HENDERSON NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR YOUR INSANE RAMBLINGS ABOUT THIS MYTHICAL MONEY NONSENSE, WE MUST BEAT THE COMPETITION OR BE BRANDED AS FAILURES AND BE CAST OUT FOR ALL ETERNITY BY THE HUMAN RACE”
“Sir we’ve been getting ratings up in the 90% range…”
“WE NEED TO TRY AGAIN AT BEATING THEM, WE’VE ONLY GOT A FEW MINUTES”
At this point Henderson has defected to a Studio that isn’t staffed by impatient tunnel-visioning weirdos who scream a lot.
This is why we need to support the damn good guy, the damn good guy takes their time, evaluates their options and sets themselves a reasonable goal and when all is said and done, the result is damn good. The result is
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
Solomon Kane
Dishonoured
Darkman
Hellboy
Dredd
The A-Team (2010)
The Grey,
Do you see what I’m driving at? Not to say that giant bits of game changing innovation are a bad thing, they can just get out of hand fast and end up bloated, fat and always hungry for more.
Bottom line, support the Damn Good Guy. Because he’s a damn good guy.
Battleborn is soon going to enter a period of closed beta at the end of the month. Because of that registrations are now open so you can sign up to take part, if you get chosen.
Of course, being a closed beta you can expect it not to be fully bug-free quite yet. That is the purpose of alphas and betas after all, testing while giving a few a taste of the game in its almost-finished state so they can hopefully whip up some excitement and interest among their friends when they’re allowed to speak freely of their time in-game.
To register you first need a SHiFT account, and obviously you must also agree to the game’s NDA. This prevents players from capturing gameplay footage, livestreaming, posting images, or publicly discussing the tests online so you’ll need to keep certain things close to your chest until it expires. You also need to meet the minimum spec requirements:
