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The weekly UK chart of the most popular games has just been released and to few people’s surprises Bethesda’s new Fallout game is top of the chart.
Fallout 4 released to great fanfare after Bethesda made the gamers wait for years for any sign of its actual existence, and beat out the other new releases of the week to claim top spot. It even surpassed its predecessor New Vegas by having its launch sales at 213% more than the 2010 hit. It also beat out the record for concurrent players on Steam with 470,000 players logged as playing at once and over 1.2 million owners of a copy of the game on day one.
Although full figures of all sales haven’t yet been released, Bethesda did say they’d produced and shipped 12 million copies of the game in preparation for the launch. Let’s hope nowhere ran out of copies.
HiRez Studios has been pretty successful with their third person action MOBA, SMITE. The game is headed to its World Championship tournament soon, and recently celebrated 10 million players. As a game that focuses on playable gods and demigods from various pantheons around the world, the characters in SMITE are at once familiar and unique. However, they all fall into one of seven pantheons: Chinese, Egyptuan, Greek, Roman, Hindu, Mayan and Norse. That may be about to change however. Recently, Scott Ghandi who works on the Xbox One side of SMITE tweeted out that everyone should tune in to the patch notes today at 4 PM EST for a special surprise. Along with that rather cryptic tweet, he posted this picture:
Each symbol is the emblem of one of the pantheons currently in SMITE. Speculation, of course is that the giant question mark heralds the reveal of a new pantheon to be added to the game. Speculation about a new pantheon has been going on for months, with Smitedatamining.com claiming to have unearthed references to the Celtic pantheon and Morrigan way back in March of this year. While this is, of course, still speculation, signs seem to indicate big changes coming to SMITE.
I know I’ll be tuned in today at 4 PM. You can catch the patch notes HERE.
Company president of Take-Two, Karl Slatoff, has confirmed that the development studios in established franchises as well as new IP in the publisher’s latest earnings call.
“Our worldwide development teams are working on numerous unannounced projects, including new intellectual properties, and offerings from our established franchises,” Slatoff said. One of these projects was also confirmed to be coming in 2016 by the CEO Strauss Zelnick.
We already know that XCOM 2 is coming in 2016, but as this is talking about unannounced projects that we don’t yet know about, it’s a fair bet to say this one that is coming next year could be coming in the second half of the year rather than the first. That’s not for sure though obviously.
With plenty of franchises having had games that involved Take-Two being released in the past, fans of those franchises now have a tiny little bit to go on if they were hoping for a sequel to their favourite game. Of course, we will have to wait and see what is coming and probably we won’t be told until 2016 some time.
People who pre-ordered the Fallout 4: Pip-Boy Edition from UK retailer GAME have been receiving e-mails from GAME saying that due to an issue processing payment many orders have been cancelled.
The e-mail suggests calling the customer service line to replace the order, but the sheer numbers of cancellations meant that the phonelines have been jammed now since the first of the e-mails were sent out on the 6th. Some people reported waiting for upwards of over an hour and others saying that when they do get through they get disconnected before they can resolve their complaints.
Some people pre-ordered their copies of the Pip-Boy Edition many months in advance and at £99 they didn’t come cheaply either. However it could have been worse – some reported that for some reason they were re-receiving their payment orders and had been charged twice for their copies.
GAME themselves have been looking into the issue and have blamed an error with their own ordering system for the cancellations and double-charges. They tweeted out on the 6th that every pre-order was safe and reserved for the customer who had ordered it and that none would be released for public sale in stores. They urged everyone to keep trying to contact their phonelines and updated 8 hours ago to assure everyone they were trying to get everyone’s complaint resolved.
The Fallout 4: Pip-Boy Edition comes with a copy of the game as well as a plastic replica of the wrist-mounted device of the same name which can have your smartphone inserted into it and use the Pip-Boy App.
Here it is, my weekly little update on what cool things are up and coming in the world of gaming Kickstarters.
As always I’ll start off with a brief recap of some previously covered games, and both Home Free and Dracucat have finished their campaigns funded. Home Free didn’t quite make its last stretch goal, but the completed campaign update makes me think that short-legged dogs haven’t been 100% ruled out of making their appearance within that game. The games covered in the Round-Up of Oct 9th all still have some ground to make up with less than a week to do it in, but while Boom Chicka Meow Wow and NinjaFrog are way out, Bertram Fiddle and Wolf & Hound at least have some chance of making their targets if their developers really push their campaigns.
Finally GOAT ARMY is still close to goal with plenty of time left to make it, and Wanderer and Crematory Bot are also doing decently well although have to pick up the pace to hit their goals within the time limit set.
The first game is one that’s actually been around for a little longer than the others, but it’s an interesting enough game that it’s been on my list for this week since I found out about it.
Doko Roko is a “2D rogue-like, vertical action game with an emphasis on lightning-fast combat and rich atmosphere” made because its creator envisioned a game that cared as much for its lore as it did its unique game mechanics. As a storyteller I do like a game with a good story and Doko Roko sees your character fighting through a tower where not everything is out to get you. Some will trade, some will fight and others merely wish to make small talk or even trade information. Weapons come in all forms to fight the hostile beings you meet as well, so each game could be a little bit different.
Doko Roko has made $22,656 of its $30,000 goal so far with 20 days remaining to make the rest.
This one is a turn-based strategy game set in space with randomly generated events, supplies to manage and a role play setting.
Solar Hideout sets you as an AI taking care of a group of human renegadess fleeing the forces of the “Space Clearance Forces” (SCF), an international military space force company of Earth. This military forces wishes to destroy them and your job is to navigate this band through perils both human, alien or natural as they randomly occur.
Solar Hideout is a new campaign so currently has made nothing of its €10,000 but has a full 30 days to go to make it.
This one is a Kickstarter staff pick and its easy to see why, it looks beautiful.
Pankapup is another throwback to the old 2D platform/action games of the 90s and features the titular character platforming through worlds and fending off opponents using a shield to block and a sword to attack back. The story is told to a child through a book and the game you play is therefore seen in the child’s mind, with parallels to the story and the child’s own world becoming more apparent as the game progresses through.
Pankapu has 27 days to go and has made more than half of its €40,000 goal at €20,079 currently.
I admit it, I chose this one because the idea of video game development as a card game was appealing to me as a journalist who has heard tales about it through the Indie Game Show.
As you can probably guess, GOTY the card game is all about using your cards to attempt to navigate the video game development process to create the next Game Of The Year. The game was created to give players a “different perspective of the industry” through funny and unexpected events based off real-life events. Since life is sometimes much stranger than fiction, that sounds great to me.
If you’re interested GOTY the card game has a €15,000 of which €6,418 with 35 days to go and a lot of Early Bird tiers are being offered.
Finally we have yet another Kickstarter staff pick, but one that so far hasn’t benefited too greatly from it.
Cold Blooded sets you in a city with the drug trade controlled by five gangs. You as a gang leader must create and manage your own gang, taking over and eliminating the competition and eventually aiming to control every drug spot in the city. It has taken inspiration from strategy, rogue-like and tycoon games, and the developers are aiming to release the game in 2016 on PC, Mac and Linux if they get their game funded.
Cold Blooded has 25 days to go and a target of just €3,000 to hit with €115 raised so far.
