Displaying items by tag: Gaming

Ubisoft dumbing down Watchdogs for PC, Crytek losing money, game devs claiming next gen consoles will match the graphical look of the PC on Ultra: all of these are interesting signs to a troubling possibility. Is the gaming industry moving away from the PC and focusing on the close environment of the console? From some of the information and the items we listed above it would seem so. Is this a trend of the future? Or is this simply what the industry does whenever they see new consoles hit the market?

A couple of days ago the rumor that Crytek was in serious financial trouble spread around the internet like a clickbait video. We saw it pop up on multiple social media sites with links to multiple sources. As with many viral stories like this everything could be traced back to a single article once you got through the mess. This original article was published on GameStar.de and is hidden behind a paywall (again not unexpected).

Remember the news about the “locked” out graphical features in Watch Dogs? Well Ubisoft has finally released a statement about those options and a claim as to why they were hidden in the first place. According to Ubisoft the reason they were hidden had nothing to do with denying users game settings. It was all about “possible impacts on visual fidelity, stability, performance and overall gameplay quality”.

After taking something of a beating in the news the other day with the revelation of locked features in Watchdogs, Ubisoft is back in the news today. However, today’s news is both good and bad for them. This time the title in question is Far Cry 4. Apparently Ubisoft is very fond of the current next gen consoles (Xbox One and PS4) and found them to be a great benefit when developing Far Cry 4.

Unless you have been under a rock you have probably heard all about the Doom 4 teaser that was shown off at E3 2014. We saw it a couple of days ago, but at the time really did not think it was all that news worthy (ducks as people throw things). However, this morning as I watched it again I noted a couple of things that must have slipped by me during my first viewing.

Wow! Ok this is a new one for me. Apparently it is simply too difficult to draw and code for the female form in games. At least that is what Ubisoft’s Creative Director, Alex Amancio said recently in a video interview posted on the site Polygon. Because of this difficulty there will be no women in Ubisoft’s next installment of Assassin’s Creed, at least the Co-Op part. Now, either this is one of the dumbest things ever said by a gaming executive, or it is a bad attempt to draw attention to a game that does not need any help.

When the Xbox One was released Microsoft pushed it as the center of an new ecosystem that started in the living room. The message was clear, start with the One and build out from there using Microsoft products from the Surface Tablet, to Windows 8.x to Windows Phones. The whole world would fall to the domination of Microsoft… Well the problem with that is no one truly rules the living room. It is the one place where the one-size-fits-all concept does not work. Apple, Google, and others have tried and failed to dominate this space without success.

If you have never heard of the developer Bungie then you probably are not a Halo fan. Bungie is the company that was responsible for Halo 1-3. Now they are working on another project that is to be a little less exclusive, Destiny.  As Bungie is only known for their work on Halo the industry and consumers are sure to be keeping an eye on Destiny to see if Halo was a fluke or if Bungie can really write a game.

One of the big games under scrutiny and therefore on display at E3 is Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed. The franchise (that is an odd word to use about gaming) is very popular. IN many ways the popularity did not come from the theme of the game, but from the open environment and the freedom that you have to explore it. At E3 Ubisoft had a pretty cool demo that showed off an expansion of this philosophy even if there was not really that much added to the actual game play.

There are some concerned gamers out there today as BioWare made some interesting comments about the future of Mass Effect. One of the biggest ones was a continual reference to Next Generation. The game, which puts players into a trouble future, is a highly popular one even if the ending to the last installment did annoy some of the more hardcore fans.