Almost three years after its announcement, development has stopped on the next iteration of the long-lived MMO franchise.

Daybreak Studios’ president Russ Shanks announced the news on the game’s official site:

I’m writing today to let you know that, after much review and consideration, Daybreak is discontinuing development of EverQuest Next.

 

For the past 20 years EverQuest has been a labor of love. What started as a deep passion of ours, as game creators, grew into a much larger passion shared by you, millions of players and Daybreakers alike. Watching EverQuest’s ability to entertain and bring people together has inspired and humbled us. It’s shaped our culture and has emboldened us to take aggressive risks with our game ideas and products. When we decided to create the next chapter in the EverQuest journey, we didn’t aim low. We set out to make something revolutionary.

 

For those familiar with the internals of game development, you know that cancellations are a reality we must face from time to time. Inherent to the creative process are dreaming big, pushing hard and being brutally honest with where you land. In the case of EverQuest Next, we accomplished incredible feats that astonished industry insiders. Unfortunately, as we put together the pieces, we found that it wasn’t fun. We know you have high standards when it comes to Norrath and we do too. In final review, we had to face the fact that EverQuest Nextwould not meet the expectations we – and all of you – have for the worlds of Norrath.

 

The future of the EverQuest franchise as a whole is important to us here at Daybreak.  EverQuest in all its forms is near and dear to our hearts.  EverQuest and EverQuest II are going strong.  Rest assured that our passion to grow the world of EverQuest remains undiminished.

EverQuest Next was an ambitious attempt to evolve the franchise. The first phase of that evolution was EverQuest Next Landmark, which was released as a beta in 2013. Landmark was focused on player creation, letting users craft huge structures and then sell the blueprints to each other.

EverQuest Next began development at Sony Online Entertainment, a corporate cousin to the PlayStation brand that was sold off last year to investment firm Columbus Nova and rebranded as Daybreak Studios.

In an interview with MMORPG, Shanks says that EverQuest and EverQuest II are still in active development. He also says that Daybreak will continue to explore ways to modernize EverQuest and notes the company’s current priorities:

The future of the EverQuest franchise is important to our company and you have not seen the last of Norrath by any means. It’s just as engrained in our hearts as it is for our players. We helped usher in the era of MMOs because we loved the idea of bringing gamers together within the game worlds in massive numbers, and we’ve continued to build on that over our 20-year history. The adventures within the worlds of EQ and EQII continue unabated today, and there is plenty of room for more.

 

Right now, we are focused on launching Landmark, advancing H1Z1: Just Survive, bringing DC Universe Online to Xbox One players, and launching H1Z1: King of the Kill on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Nintendo rose a fair few eyebrows in technology circles, as well as here at Sanitarium Towers, when it announced the 3D Classics line – classic games from older consoles such as the NES and Game Boy with a 3D graphic upgrade, offering a unique way to show of the power of the Nintendo 3DS handheld. While the idea has its merits, with a number of classic Nintendo titles getting the 3D Treatment – and persuading SEGA to join in and do the same to some classic SEGA titles – it has to be said that there are actually very few titles that have had the 3D Classic treatment.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could take a NES game of your own choosing, and add 3D? If you’ve found yourself thinking that, you may want to check out Geod Studio’s new project, 3DNes – a work-in-progress Unity-based emulator that, as the name suggests, converts NES games into 3D.

Considering the simplicity of NES games, translating them into 3D is actually a difficult task. Unlike SNES games, which have four background layers, NES games have a single layer for the entire background. Imagine a diorama or a board game – everything in the background is printed on one board, while all the sprites – like your character the ground, enemies, items – are all just pieces on top. To allow the entire game to look 3D, 3DNes uses an algorithm that analyses the flat background and cuts it up into the pieces that make it up, then attempts to turn each piece into a 3D Object. The software is even clever enough to turn round objects into spheres or tubes, so for example, a ball will actually look like a ball instead of just a circle.

Exactly how well this works depends on the game in question, with things getting messier as the backgrounds get more complex. Games like my favourite franchise, Mega Man are translated well and benefit greatly from the effect, but games such as Contra or Castlevania somewhat struggle. Perhaps the best-emulated game is the original Super Mario Bros., which the developer admits was the main focus of the emulator and the most tested, which may explain the gap in quality between it and other games.

This having been said, Geod Studio hopes to improve the number of games that work well through subsequent beta releases, with head of the project Trần Vũ Trúc aiming for one-tenth of the entire NES library as his marker for success. He also suggests that there might be the potential for users to individually tailor the emulator for certain games, but is quick to state this is not currently the case, as he wants to ensure there’s “a strong emulation engine as the backbone” first.

At the moment, the emulator exists only online, as a WebGL game playable through the Unity Player. This means it only properly supports Mozilla-based browsers, such as Firefox or Seamonkey. It’s also extremely unstable, particularly when not using a AMD Graphics card, and may fail to go beyond loading the ROM, or even fail to work at all. However, Trần states that future releases of the emulator will be made available as software downloads, so it should only be a matter of time before we all get to try it properly.

This article originally appeared on Technically Motivated.

Don’t you just love it when big sites and companies make little slip-ups?

Earlier an ad campaign for Overwatch went up on IGN before being taken down again quickly. The reason? It contained the release date for the game, as well as mention of a beta that would be starting a few weeks earlier. Whoops.

Spotted by Reddit user DeadpooltheGreat, they managed to capture some screencaps before IGN took down the adverts:

Since the news was already out, Blizzard have since come out to confirm that the release date is indeed May 24th, and there will be a beta weekend for pre-orderers starting from May 3rd before the rest of the beta period from the 5th to the 9th will be a totally open, free for all beta before the game is taken offline again for the final few tweaks. The open beta will be on both PC and consoles and will feature everything that we’ve been shown – all 21 heroes, all the maps, full progression system. Also if you pre-ordered you’ll get an extra key to give to a friend to give them access to the first two days that are otherwise closed off.

There’s even been some videos put out to give all the information out:

Again, don’t you just love it when little slip-ups like this happen? Somehow it makes big reveals like this even better.

Well, this is quite a blow to fans of the Fable series.

Today Microsoft have announced that the upcoming game Fable Legends has stopped development, and what’s more Lionhead Studios could also be no more soon. All this comes from an update that’s detailing changes to the company’s internal development studios, one of which is Lionhead. The update also mentions that other studio Press Play is a certain to be shut down:

After much consideration we have decided to cease development on Fable Legends, and are in discussions with employees about the proposed closure of Lionhead Studios in the UK. Additionally, we will close Press Play Studios in Denmark, and sunset development on Project Knoxville.

 

These have been tough decisions and we have not made them lightly, nor are they a reflection on these development teams – we are incredibly fortunate to have the talent, creativity and commitment of the people at these studios… These changes are taking effect as Microsoft Studios continues to focus its investment and development on the games and franchises that fans find most exciting and want to play.

Fable Legends would have been a multiplayer title that would have taken the series in a new direction – pitting the majority of players as heroes against their sole opponent who would have been controlling the monsters and other various hazards. It even had a beta and a lot of time had already been spent promoting the game to players so it’s a shame to see all that effort going to waste.

Press Play was currently working on a third-person multiplayer survival game codenamed Project Knoxville, chosen through a fan vote campaign. With the studio’s closure it seems this project might be dead in the water as well.

Of course, given the wording of the update, it’s not yet certain that Lionhead will be closed although Microsoft say they are in talks with the studio discussing its closure.

Either way, it’s a sad day for anyone who was looking forward to the next Fable game and our thoughts are with those people at Lionhead and Press Play.

Those of you who remember our Indie Game Show might remember one of our guests Shaz.

He came presenting his local co-op game BFF or Die in which teamwork is required to progress through all the levels and screwing over your teammates might mean screwing yourself over too. Now the 2-4 player game is up on Steam Greenlight waiting to get approved. It is a very good game, and I can say that having actually given it a try at one event. Go give it a look even if you don’t have some nearby friends to play this game with – it also comes with a singleplayer mode.

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BFF or Die Greenlight: [x]