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Recently 3D Realms and Interceptor have been in the gaming press owing to the dispute around the ownership of Duke Nukem rights, more specifically if they had the rights to make a new one without the approval of the people who owned the rights: Gearbox.
Now though they’ve announced a new game, which sounds very similar to their previously announced but so far unreleased Duke Nukem: Mass Destruction. It’s an action, role-playing game, top down and takes place across many planets to save the President from an alien threat. The only difference? The Duke is nowhere to be seen.
The new game, titled Bombshell, stars a new female protagonist called Shelly ‘Bombshell’ Harrison who appears to be a cyborg and is introduced to us through the trailer linked below. It would appear that due to the lawsuit brought against 3DR and Interceptor by Gearbox, they’ve decided to take Mass Destruction and re-work it into the new game, which is still planned to be released on the same platforms of PC and PS4, although not until some time in 2015.
Interceptor and 3DR have promised that the game will contain “out-of-this-world enemies, a never-before-seen arsenal of devastating weaponry and a variety genre-crossing mechanics” and it can be guessed that the extra time will give them some time to tweak the graphics and sound to make them better than the Duke’s postponed game could have. It can also be guessed that the drama that surrounded them owing to the question of who owned the Duke can only work for them as far as promoting the game goes.
Valve have long since wanted Steam to be a service that they are as hands-off as possible with regards to interference, preferring instead to add tools that allow users to control what content gets promoted and what doesn’t. User reviews are a key part of this and today they got a little more useful.
With the recent proliferation of Early Access games, an awful lot of reviews are now being made for games while they are in an unfinished state, and unless you know the dates of when a game went from Early Access to Published there was no way to tell… until now. If a review is made on a game that is in the Early Access program, the review will now have a little tag that says ‘Early Access Review’ prominently stamped between the ‘Recommended/Time Played’ header and the actual text of the review itself. It’s quite a useful way of knowing if a bug that a comment mentions might be due to poor coding or just that the game’s developers haven’t gotten around to patching it out yet.
However as of right now, the ‘Early Access Review’ label appears only on the reviews on games which are currently still in Early Access, and not on those games which have already left Early Access and been fully Published. Maybe Valve will go back and add the labels later, and certainly it would be a useful thing to do mainly for the reason mentioned above. For now though, it seems that Valve are on the right track with adding useful features that users can make use of to judge for themselves a game’s quality.
It may seem hard to believe, but as of tomorrow (15th May 2014), Diablo 3 will be two years old. Cake and singing songs just isn’t in the style of the popular dungeon-based Hack-and-Slasher, however. Nor is a single day of celebration enough. No, Blizzard has something better in mind.
To celebrate the game’s second anniversary and the community that made it all possible, Starting tomorrow and running until May 22, players who log in to defend Sanctuary will receive double Rift Fragments as well as a +100% boost to their chance to find Legendary items.
While the buffs will apply to all characters; and will stack with other buffs a Player may have to add further bonuses to their drop rate etc, those with a console version of the game are unfortunately excluded – this event is for PC & Mac only. However, as Console releases already have better drop rates than the PC equivalent, this is hardly a big loss. What MIGHT be a big loss is the timing, as many Diablo 3 players are complaining the week-long event falls into a period where many students are completing major exams – thus limiting the time they have to take advantage. However, the most hardcore of Diablo 3 players are already clearing their schedule to make room for a whole week of non-stop action.
Whether you’re a casual or hardcore Diablo 3 player, looks like Diablo’s demons better prepare for a lot more bloodshed than usual.
Nordic Games seem to have decided to try an experiment with their Planetary Annihilation game. They’ve decided to offer a proper boxed, hard-copy of the game on Amazon. This is the same version of the game that is currently on Steam Early Access. In other words – this is not the finished game that is being sold here.
The boxed version won’t actually be released until June 20th, but it is open to pre-orders costing £39.99, which is a tenner more than it costs on Steam right now. It will of course be updated like the digital copy, both requiring an Internet connection to receive them. So why is Nordic offering a hard-copy of a game that isn’t finished yet?
We think of it as an alternative to the typical pre-order, where you usually get cosmetic DLCs, skins and stuff like that, instead of actual gameplay,” Nordic said in an interview, adding that they wanted to try out this idea for themselves to see how many people would be interested in buying the boxed game. They’re also including a piece of content exclusive to this version, a playable in-game commander supplied by Uber Entertainment.
Planetary Annihilation is currently in what Nordic have called its ‘gamma’ phase. It is a big update but still not a final version, just a phase in the development as they continue to update the game in the ‘next few months and weeks’. This could mean that picking up the game even a month or two after its release could mean a sizeable download before the game is even playable.
Guess we’ll see how well this experiment will work out for Nordic and their game. What do you think? Is offering what is essentially a ‘beta’ game for full price something you are okay with or do you think ‘Early Access’ is beginning to go too far now?
