PC Gaming News Message Board older than one year ago

CCP's virtual-reality star fighter EVE: Valkyrie is also in development for Sony's recently announced VR headset, Project Morpheus.

Though CCP and Oculus VR had announced a co-publishing agreement for the game, a spokesperson from CCP has told Polygon that the exclusive partnership only extends to the PC version of the game, for use with the Oculus Rift headset.

"We partnered with Oculus VR to bring EVE: Valkyrie exclusively to the Oculus Rift on PC and we are thrilled to be working with Sony to bring EVE: Valkyrie to the PS4 with Project Morpheus," a CCP spokesperson said.

EVE: Valkyrie, previously known as EVE VR, is a multiplayer space fighting action game within the universe of the MMO EVE Online, designed with virtual reality in mind. CCP's VR title is expected to arrive on PC sometime in 2014. [Image: CCP]

Oculus Rift, get your Oculus Rift, here! Well, not here, but those ready to take the plunge into virtual reality can now pre-order the second version of the headset's developer kit via the Oculus company site. Nabbing one will cost you $350, and shipments are expected in July of this year.

The new kit - and the site stresses this is a kit, not a consumer product - features low-persistence OLED displays at a resolution of 960 x 1080 per eye, as well as positional head tracking via an external camera. The Developer Kit 2 announcement on the Oculus website notes that this opens up such possibilities as "peering around corners, leaning in to get a closer look at objects in the world, and kicking back on a virtual beach."

"DK2 is not the Holodeck yet," the company states on the kit's announcement page, "but it's a major step in the right direction." [Image: Oculus]

Design Producer Stephan Frost leads us through a level 35 dungeon and gives us insight on how to defeat each boss.

Oh, those sneaky monkeys. First-person adventure Ether One hasn’t quite launched on its journey to the centre of a dementia damaged mind, but they’ve released a launch trailer anyway. That’s a good week before the game is out. I’ll allow this: they’ve just added the review version to my Steam account, so it’s technically out there, and I am the most important person in the world. It also helps that the brief play I had of the game very encouraging. View the trailer with with working eyes below.

… [visit site to read more]

1.46 billion transfers and 725 million matches later, Ultimate Team is powering FIFA. Here are the ridiculous stats and the men behind its success.

The developers of Ubisoft's upcoming shooter The Division unveil the capabilities of the Snowdrop Engine in a new trailer.

At last! I have some actual news from GDC (I was beginning to worry that it had all been a hoax), and it’s the news I anticipated the most: Oculus has finally debuted the second version of the Rift headset. The new set has 1080p per-eye, positional head-tracking and a low persistence OLED display, something the tech cried out for when I tried it with Elite. They charmingly still don’t consider it a consumer-grade product, so they’re hopeful the device will end up on the faces of developers and not fans and gamers looking to get a quick tech fix, but the new headset does seem to make a compelling case for removing a significant amount of money from my wallet. … [visit site to read more]

$19 per month gains anyone access to everything, as Epic hopes to attract new indie developers.

The GDC War Train of Impossible Enrichment trundles on, and RPS is on the scene with gusto, aplomb, and a stuffed lion. Each day this week, I’ll be gathering impromptu panels of colossal brains inside frail (but very handsome) human bodies to dissect the show piece-by-piece. Yesterday, John, Cara, Hayden, and I did so by crawling into bed and talking about our socks. Also games. But day two was different. John fell to exhaustion, and Cara was carried away by a throng of adoring fans, presumably to be worshipped and then made into soup. Fortunately I was able to drag Gunpoint creator Tom Francis, writer and camera whisperer Nika Harper, and Incredipede creator Colin Northway over forests, woods, hills, and plains to fill their not-shoes. … [visit site to read more]

Oculus debuts new development kit that makes massive evolutionary leap over the original and is making it available for pre-order today.

Next in our series of firesideless chats with the developers of PC games nominated for an award at this year’s Independent Games Festival, it’s Michael ‘Smestorp’ Brough talking about his signature, haunting ‘glitch’ style, why he will continue to resist convention, his mixed feelings about the nomination and which of his two nominated games, Corrypt and 868-HACK, he’s most interested in. … [visit site to read more]

Linux is like the “unattractive” person in a movie who eventually becomes desirable just by hanging about for a bit. People were all over Windows, cooing over its icons and ease of use and the way it could form a cherry stem into a mobius strip, while poor Linux was in the corner, smelling of penguin puke and requiring root access. But Windows starts BSODing on a night out, and we then realised that Linux is actually Paul Rudd. Which exactly explains why GOG is about to support Linux.

It’s early days, but the plan to support Ubuntu and Mint (and probably others), starting in the coming Autumn. GOG expects to launch with at least 100 games, though we won’t know what they are for a while.

… [visit site to read more]

Project Spark has had its microtransaction model revamped following feedback from beta testers.

Sound the unexpected announcement alarms and check to make sure over-jerked knees are covered by your insurance plan. Paradox has announced that it’s publishing Obsidian’s notoriously independent old-school RPG Pillars of Eternity, a big, (not, by most definitions) bad publishing type dipping its pinky toe into the brave new world of Kickstarter. “…Er, why?” You might ask. “Also didn’t Obsidian get oodles of cash from backers? What happens to the game they paid for if Paradox decides all bets are off?” Well, good news is, Paradox can’t actually do that. I quizzed Paradox CEO Fred Wester and Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart about their new partnership, creative control, what this means for backers, why the two companies struck a deal in the first place, whether Paradox is interested in pursuing other classic RPG revivals like Torment, and how South Park ended up glitchy despite Obsidian’s allegedly renewed QA efforts. It’s all below. 

… [visit site to read more]

I was less than thirty seconds into the trailer for Echo Of The Wilds when a quivering sense of outrage overcame me. The scenes in the trailer alternate between mysterious, peaceful, beautiful and spooky, and it was the combination of these things gathered together that caused me to flip the desk over, bellow an obscenity and snap a pencil in two.

The source of my fury was obvious – why the hell has nobody told me about Echo Of The Wilds before now? I was sure that a search of the archives would reveal that John or Graham had already have nodded in its direction approvingly. Not so. Well, take a bloody good look because it’s a gorgeous and mysterious wilderness survival adventure and it’s OUT NOW WITH A DEMO AND EVERYTHING, FER CRYIN’ OUT LOUD.

… [visit site to read more]

Jim was so taken with the robotic land-grab MMO Perpetuum that he wrote the world’s bestest diary about his time in it. It was spread over five months, which just goes to show how much it grabbed him. That was in 2012, and the game is not only still around, but is about to land on Steam. With a potential pile of new customers, the developers have taken the decision to shift from a monthly subscription to a one-off payment of 28.99 USD/EUR that’s “augmented with optional in-game purchases of previously unavailable services and cosmetic upgrades.” Hmm.

… [visit site to read more]

Both are 'confident' that Pillars will be wrapped up by the end of the year.

The Oddworld creator said today that selling half a million units of the upcoming remake could fund a new title.

Pippin Barr is an expert in crafting oddly insightful, simplistic games, and his latest collection is a testament to this skill. Durations is a group of mini-games, some quick and others that will last long after you're dead, running for hundreds or thousands of years. They have names that range from "One Second Typing Hour" and "One Hour to Write a Novella," to "One Month Maze," One Hundred Years of Solitary" and "One Millenium Avant-Garde Band."

Scroll through a list of the games and click the spacebar to play one here. On his blog, Barr writes about being "on the precipice of a game that will outlive you:"

"One thing about the longer games in the series, specifically '100 Years of Solitary' and 'One Millennium Avant-Garde Band,' is that they will outlast us. That is, when you start the game you're at the beginning of something you can't really figure on seeing the end of - you'll die. So there's a weird kind of 'memento mori' going on in those games that I hadn't really given a lot of thought to at the time. It's funny in particular to me because the games do have specific endings."

Barr created these games in a collaboration with the Marina Abramovic Institute, a crowdfunded, perpetual art space cultivated by artist Marina Abramovic. If you're into the eccentric, or want to be a part of something that will outlast your own life, check out Durations or some of Barr's other strangely engaging games here. [Image: Pippin Barr]

Iceberg Interactive, a publisher best known for releasing meticulously detailed games set in the void of space, has announced that Starpoint Gemini 2 has entered beta testing via Steam's Early Access program.

New to this incarnation of the tactical space simulation are wormholes that allow for faster travel while threatening to destroy ships with their instability, and the more helpful T-Drive which speeds transit times without the danger of killing travelers in a messy implosion. Additionally, Iceberg has added new classes, new events, new music and has improved the game's loading times and overall balance.

Those who would like to join the Early Access beta test can do so on Steam at a cost of $25. As with all Early Access games, that purchase price not only enters you into the beta test, it also guarantees you access to the final, retail build of the game once that comes available. [Image: Iceberg Interactive]

Campo Santo's first game draws inspiration from BioShock and Metroid Prime. Here's our first look.

NOTE: This column was started a few weeks ago, long before the disappearance of the Malaysian flight MH370. While there is no reference to air disasters in the column (only my irrational fear of flying) I wanted to assure readers that this column wasn’t written in the wake of that incident. I’m sure everyone would join me in hoping for the best possible outcome for the families of the crew and passengers of MH370.

Hello youse.

Why have I waited so long to talk about Robinson Crusoe? Let me tell you why. Sometimes I worry that in the discussion of board games we dig too far down into the detail of the mechanics of these things. You do THIS and then you do THIS and then you do THAT. I constantly worry about how we talk about games, because I’m that kind of guy. A worrier and an idiot. Great games never really feel like a string of IF and THEN commands. They feel like a living story, a true experience. So I did something different with Robinson Crusoe. I played it and then I gave it some distance. Some months later, stranded across an expanse of time, I’m ready to tell you about it. … [visit site to read more]

The reception of the game after two and a half years of work is better than expected.

The Stanley Parable casts you as a nondescript soul in a nondescript office building. From this mundane beginning emerges a skewed story of a man making choices, both small and serious, and a player expressing their importance in a video game. It's clearly a thoughtfully considered, deliberately tuned and - what's that? "We didn't actually think about this when we were designing the game"? So said William Pugh, one of the designers behind The Stanley Parable, the first-person adventure game that initially took form as a Half-Life 2 mod. Davey Wreden, creator of the original version in 2011, shared the stage with Pugh in a candid analysis of their game during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

As indie games grow in popularity, developers weigh in on their ideal future of the industry.

Paternal poser Octodad: Dadliest Catch sold more than 90,000 copies on PC, Mac, and Linux since its launch in January, which means it also passed the octomark of 88,888 sales, and that's grand, too. Developer Young Horses is ecstatic with the sales figures, and president Phil Tibitoski said "our expectations have been met and then some to say the least."

"Our Kickstarter funds for Octodad went towards some business costs and conference booths," Tibitoski wrote on the game's blog. "Outside of that our 9 person team at Young Horses worked on Octodad: Dadliest Catch for free for 2.5 years while holding other full-time jobs. Our hopes were that we would make back the amount of money that we felt our time was worth and be given the opportunity to bring forth from our noodly noggins other weird stuff for our next game."

"This puts us in a position where we've been able to pay ourselves back for our time spent AND continue to pay ourselves in the future," he added on Twitter. "We no longer have day jobs, and it's looking like we'll get to make another game. Mission Accomplished."

The tentacular concept for Dadliest Catch is controlling an octopus who's trying to hide the fact he's not human. Not only is he not what he seems, but he's also a father with a lot to do, and you have to try and help him complete the challenges of daily life. We say try, but what we really mean is watch him sprawl around like a, well, octopus in human's clothing.

Dadliest Catch is expected to arrive on PS4 next month, with Move support adding to the mayhem. There's no word yet on a concrete release date. [Image: Young Horses]

Miegakure is a 4-dimensional puzzle game. What this means is that I am going to struggle to convey exactly what playing it entails. That’s not to say that the game’s designer, Marc Ten Bosch, has made something alienating or overly intellectual. It’s a warm, funny, deeply intelligent game, which I was pleased to have the opportunity play on the periphery of this year’s GDC.

I think it could be very important indeed.

… [visit site to read more]

Up to now, options have been limited for those that want nothing more than to control lanes while also making Superman punch people in the face. With Infinite Crisis, Turbine Inc. and Warner Bros. Interactive have finally created an ideal way to satiate those particularly hungry fans of MOBAs and DC Comics. Infinite Crisis won't officially open for business until later this year, but Turbine has opened the doors on a beta version of the game this month and it's joining Joystiq Streams to show it off. Ryan Bendar, lead game designer on Infinite Crisis, will square off against Joystiq's Sam Prell in the beta on Joystiq Streams today at 4PM EST on the Joystiq Twitch channel. Our champions will be testing the balance of heroes like Aquaman against villains like Harley Quinn in maps based on famous DC locales like Gotham and Coast City. Anthony John Agnello will be feeding your questions to the players alongside Adam Mersky, Turbine's Executive Director of Digital Communications.

Again, you can catch all the Infinite Crisis beta action on the Joystiq Twitch channel at 4PM EST, the very same time Joystiq Streams broadcasts every Tuesday and Thursday. [Images: Turbine Inc. / Warner Bros. Interactive]

Not content with remodelling Wang for the sophisticated modern gamer, Devolver Digital have been snapping up promising indie titles to unleash on the masses. Not content with his machinations in the interactive sphere, the devilish and devious Fork Parker has now set his eyes on the medium of documentary film. Super Game Jam is a five-episode series, with each instalment following two developers over a 48 hour period as they attempt to make a game together. Episode one, featuring Richard ‘Ibb and Obb’ Boeser and Vlambeer’s Jan Willem Nijman, is due in April. Trailer, details and thoughts below.

… [visit site to read more]

No more fiddling about in the command line.