Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Crafting in Diablo III, eh? Well, kind of. NPCs are going to be artisans who can do some crafting for you, as well as acting as vendors. They’re going to be characters you can – once you’ve discovered them – return to time and again, and they’ll develop and improve their skills as you bring them more interesting materials. Of course Blizzard don’t want to pull us too far away from killing beasts, meaning crafting is going to be sustained by salvaging the loot that will fall, so inevitably, from the pockets of your enemies. Anyway, go listen to Blizzard’s Jay Wilson explain how it works. It’s a huge aspect of the game that we’ve seen nothing of before. The slow hovering over menus in this trailer is quite at odds with the undead obliterations we’ve seen thus far, although it inevitable returns to that at the end of the footage, for a bit of gibby punctuation.
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A couple of new BioShock Infinite screenshots have appeared out of GamesCom. There’s not much more to say than that, but you can see them below, and continue wondering what on Earth the game is going to be like. You can read our coverage of the game so far by clicking here.

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There’s a peculiar bit of news for all those Realtime Worlds employees who have found themselves out of a job in the last week. As an anonymous insider told us, “It’s a shame… as Dundee can’t absorb the level of game dev redundancies that are about to hit, which means the Dundee scene gets that little bit smaller.” It seems that Activision is attempting to absorb at least some of them, by launching a recruitment drive of ex-RTWers in the city tomorrow afternoon.

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(trad.) Anyway, a big content patch for Star Trek Online has gone live. Subtitle “Ancient Enemies”, we speculate it involves some enemies of ancientness. A scan of the content seems to confirm this, with a whole load of new Klingon missions involving the return of the Fek’ihri. Oh God, I hate those Fek’ihri. They really are shits. Perhaps more interesting to my Star-Trek-Online inexperienced-eyes is the new option for the Federation – that of joining the Dilplomatic corp, going on first contact missions and generally not setting phasers-to-kill. Also, a new alien race, regular episodes with a new neutral race (“Deferi”) and the introduction of the gambling game Dabo. You can still try the demo, or have a gape at the new trailer, which shows very little latinum-betting and chatting, but a whole lot of the ancients being enemies. Hence, boom-booms.

Oh – and, as a bonus extra news, Bill Roper’s departed Cryptic after a couple of years.
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I learned through Quarter to Three that yesterday was Size Doesn’t Matter day where, organised by Jamie Cheng of Klei (Shank, Sugar Rush), a series of developers apologises to their partners for their ineffectual genitalia share their thoughts on the issue of what is “too small”, in terms of games. It’s been a theme in games discussion for a few years now, and seems to have been brought to a head by the few shadows cast on Limbo‘s generally triumphant reviews by people complaining it was “too short”. Which is silly. They should have complained it was just trial-and-error-nonsense with pretty graphics. Anyway, this lead to over 15 essays on the topic, which seem determined to precipitate the issue. Sample quotes plus links to all the ones I could find follow…
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Emerging from the jungles of Cologne is news of a classic PC series getting a reboot. Jagged Alliance is back as a browser based tactical MMO. And yes, there’s I can hear the sigh from here, even before I’ve published the story. But abstractly, this is the sort of game which could transfer interestingly across and – hey! – at least it’s turn based. There’s little details and certainly no screenshots I can find, but looking at the feature list one of the more interesting ideas is that as well as managing your own mercenary company, you can rent out your carefully trained troops to your friends to help them out. I’m going to publish the whole press release below, as there’s so few details and you’ll probably want to pick over them yourself, but if you’re really interested you can register for a chance of getting into its closed beta.
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(I was going for “Sixth Time’s The Hex”, but it didn’t fit.) Anyway, seems that Joystiq’s waggling info-nose has picked up the scent of a new Heroes of Might & Magic game, which is being developed by Black Hole, who previous made Warhammer: Mark Of Chaos. It will, once again, be a detail mixture of turn-based strategy and RPG, and it’s due some time next year. CGI trailer below.
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Going through the Gamecom 2010 trailers, I noticed Lord of the Rings: War In the North, by console Action-RPG specialists Snowblind (Including My Delightful Fiance and Jim’s Delightful Girlfriend’s favoured Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance). And it’s on the PC. This is, unless I’m very mistaken, the first time they’ve brought one of their games onto the PC, which means it’s time to raise a glass to cross-format development and/or throw that self-same glass into the fire (Depending on how annoyed you get by cross-format development). Go trailer!
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Postal III has been a touch delayed. In development since before 2006, we first mentioned it in 2008 when it was revealed it would include a badger as a gun. A couple of months later, during 2008′s Leipzig, the most remarkable video of footage was released, with the developer apparently not too impressed with his own game. Jump forward another year, March 2009, and we had a new trailer showing some third-person action. Yet another year goes past, little is heard, and that brings us to now. Two new trailers have been released, and they are of course below.

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Cataclysm is a huge event. Will Homeworld ever be the same agai.. what? Oh God. I’m showing my age. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm is in its Closed Beta and so the Escapist have done an entire issue about it. Relevantly, Boy Wonder Quinns wrote a piece about his experiences playing the opening of the game again, in all-messed-up-by-cats-o-vision. And since he’s deep in the pit of Gamecom, I’ll post it for him. He starts by saying things like…

Up goes the knife! Down comes the knife. The mottled boar squeals with indignation, its low-polygon face a terrible mask of icy confidence. A worthy opponent indeed. He gores me for 4 damage. I am wounded! Oh, friend, send word to my mother. Tell her I always… tell her…

But gets more sensitive, as is his wont. Read the rest here.

Last night DogFighter fully relaunched itself, with some significant changes. In response to player feedback, the biggest difference is the addition of dedicated servers, along with proper joystick and gamepad support, a long list of bug fixes, and on top of all that, a demo. And to celebrate, the game’s 50% off all this week.

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