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For those of you who follow Mojang a bit closer than your casual Minecraft player, you might remember that Mojang is an indie games developer. That means, even if you’ve got a hit on your hands and continue to support it, you still need to invest some time in developing some new properties.
Mojang or more precisely Notch was working on another game besides Minecraft. 0x10c was to be a game to follow on Minecraft’s footsteps, to hopefully gain some spotlight from its older brother and gain its own slightly different audience. At least that was the plan. Development stalled some time around early 2013 and in August of that same year Notch confirmed that the game project was dead in the water. However it seems that some elements of that game had been finished.
C418, better known as the composer of the tunes you hear in Minecraft, has released two tracks through Twitter to his Bandcamp for players to listen to. They’re short but they’re not bad. The low bitrate sound is intentional too, as C418 wanted that to be the identifier for the game. Little music, lots of drone.
I think now is a good time to release the 0x10c music. You can pay for it if you want. https://t.co/aFfAm8qIqK
Talking about Notch’s recent departure from Mojang, C418 echoed what had been said by Notch then, adding that he couldn’t have taken the strain any longer without snapping.
“Do you know that feeling that you have had a great day, but then some guy on twitter that you don’t even know tells you you’re the worst thing that ever happened to this planet? … That feeling also happens with Markus, except it’s amplified times two million.”
He has said though that he is going to continue to work with Mojang on Minecraft for as long as possible.
Blizzard may not expect World of Warcraft to grow again in the future, but that doesn’t mean it’s giving up on the game. In fact, Tom Chilton, lead game designer at Blizzard, says the studio has actually expanded the game’s development team over the past couple of years.
It’s inevitable that a game as long-lived as World of Warcraft will lose players, and new players aren’t as likely to stick with it over the long term as those from ten years ago, according to Chilton. That, and the sheer volume of new content that’s been added to the game over the past decade, has led Blizzard to change its approach to creating new expansions.
“The game can only get so complicated before it starts to collapse under its own weight, and becomes very cumbersome to do anything new with,” he told MCV. “So we are always trying to simplify the game, while at the same time add new things so that the total complexity does not get completely out of control. And you could already argue that the complexity of WoW is already huge. That can be overwhelming to new people coming in.”
The World of Warcraft development team has actually expanded from 150 employees to 220, he explained, which will be good for the game in the long run. But it’s also one of the reasons the Warlords of Draenor expansion took so long to come to fruition.
“By growing by 50 per cent, you don’t get people in off the street who can make content exactly in the way that we would want. There’s an acclimatization process,” Chilton said. “That has resulted in slowing us down. But in the long-term we are now positioned to release expansions more frequently.”
The truth is that even though World of Warcraft’s numbers have tumbled precipitously over the past few years, 6.8 million subscribers is the kind of user base most MMOs would kill to have. Sustained, long-term growth may not be on the table anymore, but it’s clear that the game is going to be around for a long time yet.
10 weeks ago myself and the team from the station held a 48 hour charity event on Twitch in aid of GamesAid, a fantastic charity that is close to my heart.
Over the weekend we managed to raise just £236 of the £1500 we had hoped to raise via our Just Giving page and through a combined use of the station radio stream and Twitch streaming, we had some great shows and some fantastic input from our fans
The stand out moments we have kept on Youtube here:
During the weekend we played LOADs of great games, both PC and console based. (and got very little sleep that weekend too)
But thank you to all the team and the fans for chipping in, plus to the great guys over at Subterranean Games for joining us and talking about War for the Overworld
The new Aliens game is coming with some special unlockable items for another game if you order it on Steam before October 7th? The other game in question? Team Fortress 2. That’s right, there’s going to be Alien-themed hats.
The picture provided seems to show a xenomorph themed head and tail hat, and the iconic environmental suit helmet so it’s a fair bet that they’ll be included. There’s also a third item that will come as a pre-order bonus that we don’t know much about so it’ll be interesting to see what they are.
The new World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor is fast approaching and many players are gearing up to play the new region and all it has to offer. Blizzard have been busy though with a little more than just the addition of the Draenor region though; they’re actually working with the coding underneath the entire game to make sure it stays up-to-date.
A new blog series, Engineer’s Workshop, aims to help players understand what changes Blizzard are making to the engine of the game. First is anti-aliasing; Blizzard’s replaced multisample anti-aliasing in favour of the newer CMAA, Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing. The aim of the upgrades is to bring WoW firmly into the modern-day era of technological advancements in gaming say Blizzard, “We’re thinking long-term with this change.”
The reason they are dropping MSAA is due to World of Warcraft’s changes meant that it had moved away from being CPU-bound, freeing up the GPU, allowing it to handle MSAA. But an increased demand on the GPU means that Blizzard have had to change strategies.
“We explored a number of options to reconcile this increased GPU demand with the game’s anti-aliasing needs, and ultimately decided to embrace CMAA as our anti-aliasing technology for Warlords of Draenor… It also integrates well with technologies we have planned for the future, and helps us bring those to the game sooner.”
CMAA means that performance cost has also been reduced which means that they’ve been able to add new graphical things such as a new shadowing technique and soft particles. It’s also just the start as Blizzard explore more ways to make the best of higher-end graphics cards.
Engineer’s Workshop “Engine Evolution in Warlords of Draenor”: [x]
