Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A whole bunch of news has emerged from the nameless tendrils of the Acti-Blizz games leviathan, as the company makes its public financials call. The biggest of these regards World Of Warcraft, which has basically stopped growing. No! But yes! Because it’s the same as it was back in 2008. Arguably this has something to do with all the trouble the game has had in China, where it has been suspended for the best part of a year. Also interesting is this story, which says that only 30% of new WoW players ever get past level 10.

Blizz-o-News continues below.
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I started the day with a micro-webgame which one Mr DMcCool discovered over at the Indie game Blog. “As far as I can tell its a hilarious minimalist critique of Mass Effect,” says DMcCool, which sounds so much the sort of thing I’d write, I’m just going to quote it. Tricky moral dilemmas! Memorable characters! Upgradeable characters! Questionable and repetitive gameplay! Shocking twists! It’s Starfeld.

A quick NEWS DOANLOAD – YES! DOANLOAD! DOANLOAD – before I head bedwards. As brought to our attention by Mr Diamond’s Unfortunate Sex-tape in the recent comments thread, gameskeeper-turned-poacher (or vice-versa, depending how you look on games journos going industry-wards) Jeff Green twittered noting that Dead Space 2 is totally on the PC. And he should know. We should all be calm. Calm.

EDIT: Actually, Jeff’s retracted it a bit. It’s “under consideration”. Which, as anyone who’s been drunk and sharking possible sexual targets knows, means “I will go for them after three more drinks”. Ah – the PC. The boozy one night stand of the videogames industry.

Developers do listen, you know. If you thought Relic were consciously ignoring the common complaint that Dawn of War 2 was too lightweight, its maps and challenges too relentlessly similar, you’re wrong. Of course, they might get Chaos Rising, the first expansion (albeit standalone), wrong in new and interesting ways, but by all accounts they’re very conscious that, largely speaking, DOW2 didn’t net the same sky-high review scores most of their previous oeuvre has. Chaos Rising is a bigger, broader game, leaving the tactically-rewarding but rinse and repeat skirmish mentality of the parent game’s missions in favour of 15 heavily story-led, handcrafted levels. (There are plenty of non-mandatory, bonus-laden sidemissions, in case your reactive to the number 15 was to start writing something sweary and in capital letters). Each of the main missions is scripted up the wazoo, doling out new challenges and objectives at the point where, in DOW2-plain, the mission would have ended. The Blood Ravens are going on an adventure…
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We’ve talked about Daniel Benmergui’s poetic work before, when Alec wrote about I Wish I Were The Moon and – relevantly – when John Wrote about this. It’s poetic, short-form work which has been shortlisted for the Nuovo award in this year’s festival. You can play it here, watch the spoiler-filled-video walkthrough below and then read what’s on Daniel’s mind in our interview.
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RPS says: Ugh, Moddb is down at the minute, so some of these links are dead.

RPS needs more mod coverage, you say? Who they gonna call? Me, Lewis Denby, apparently. So here’s a digest of the more interesting happenings on the modding scene from the last week-and-a-bit.
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This piece over on CNET, which looks at Tiny Speck‘s social puzzle MMO, Glitch. I love the idea:

“The whole world was spun out of the imagination of 11 great giants,” said Stewart Butterfield, the president of Glitch developer Tiny Speck, and better known as the co-founder of Flickr. “So you have to go back into the past, into the world of the giants’ imaginations and grow…the number of things in the world, grow it in terms of physical dimensions, to make sure the future actually happens. So all the game play takes place in the past inside the world of the giants’ imagination.”

The developers are hoping that the 2D MMO – which is based on developing in-game resources and co-operatively solving puzzles – will appeal to the older gamer of more sophisticated tastes. “There’s not a better way to say [who we're targeting] than people with above average intelligence and sophisticated tastes, in their 20s or early 30s…The intersection of NPR listeners and game players,” says Butterfield. You can sign up for “private alpha test” on the site.

The RPS battle of Neptune’s Pride treads steadily on. We’re reaching that late-1917 in WW1 period of exhaustion, and we’re still trying to work out how we’re going to write it up. However, to get a taste for it, here’s Quinns writing about it for Game Set Watch. He sums up the game so…

Neptune’s Pride is a game of two things:

#1: Intergalactic War
#2: Being a jerk

He’s not entirely wrong. Read more here.

Now, I was considering posting about this when it was released as part of the Experimental Gameplay project. I didn’t. Then creator Alex Austin mailed us, and I’ve decided to. Is it because it’s a 100-person online (with up to 4 people on a PC) melee slaughterfest with a crest-designer? Partially. But mainly because the site’s story section says, in terms of motivation for the bloodbath, “The other team killed your wife.” Oh no! Our wives. You can get C: Medieval from here and then go play. There’s a server up right now, but it’s empty. I figure RPS can bum-rush it and try it out. I don’t know what bum-rush means. I got it from the Public Enemy album. Man! Footage follows…
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Ubisoft made their promised announcement last night. Are we excited to hear the words: Ghost Recon: Future Soldier? Very little is known at this point, beyond that it’s the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter team, and seemingly with a multiplayer focus. A few scraps of detail below, and the teaser video.

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Thanks to a strange person who loves to go through patent filings, the world now knows that Square-Enix (newish overlords of what once was Eidos) have very recently trademarked a new Deus Ex title. You’ll find it beneath the cut… Oh, I’m not that cruel. It’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
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