Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Speaking to Eurogamer, CCP CEO Hilmar Pétursson has explained a bit about what’s been going on with the Icelandic MMO company: “the message is that we have heard you and we are now taking action to be more aligned with the needs of Eve Online. As a company, we’ve been trying to achieve many things and it was just too much to do at the same time. Eve Online has hurt for it.” He also spoke about the layoffs, saying: “A lot of great people are leaving the company through this process, famous or otherwise. The people who are recognised members of the community get more of a spotlight but there are a lot of people leaving CCP at this juncture.”

Meanwhile, CCP’s Kristoffer Touborg has been talking to Gamespot, where he said: “I think designing a new subscription-based game is a flawed strategy, because you are basically competing with free.” He also called it a “trend”, and I would be surprised if companies didn’t find a way to bring subscriptions back. Interesting, anyway.

In anticipation of its release at the beginning of November (though apparently the end of November for us UK folk), Snowblind have released three new trailers for action RPG Lord of the Rings: War In The North. Each trailer focuses on a different hero: a dwarf champion, an elf lore-master and a human ranger. I always think of elves as ranging, so I was a little confused for a moment, but then I remembered that human rangers are quite the notables in Middle Earth. So, videos of ranged combat, close combat, lots of dodge-rolling and horrid hairy spiders below.

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To all things, DLC. It’s the law. The law of slightly tiring microtransactions. This law includes Robot Entertainment’s impressively ridiculous Orcs Must Die, which is due two globs of DLC in the not too distant. The first of these is Artifacts of power, which launches for $2.49 next Tuesday. I could describe them to you, but I have a headache and need a lie down/hug, so I’m going to show them to you instead. No, don’t weep for me. I’ll live. If you can really call it living.
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This falls into something of a grey area between trad. RPS posts and the Bargain Bucket, but I’m going to do it anyway because my last post was a trailer for a ludicrously high-budget first-person shooter and, were I to be struck down by lightning or a panther attack or angry Heroes of Might & Magic fans in the next half-hour, I don’t want that to be my legacy.

So, just a note that Farbs’ splendid Captain Forever quasi-trilogy has seen its pricetag shot down from $20 to a mere $9 – which also gets you all future updates in the adventure-tinged arena shooter series. It also includes a new build of the in-development third title Captain Jameson, which gets all RPGy. “This is an as-long-as-it’s-profitable sale, so as soon as income (sales x price) drops below regular levels the sale will end. If the games sell well enough then the sale could go on indefinitely, but it could also end tomorrow,” sez Farbs. Farbs, incidentally, is now part of the team making Card Hunter – whose latest news I shall post shortly.

DRAMATIC MUSIC SHOUTING MAN SHOOTING MAN FOREIGN MAN SWEARING MAN DRAMATIC MUSIC FALLING MAN FLYING MAN CAR CHASE GUNS GUNS GUNS WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR.

(Also, ‘who’s the real terrorist here?’-style political intrigue, which is presumably the long-hinted-at moral greyness of BF3′s plot).
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Edit: Gamersgate pack now reduced to £4.99, matching Steam.

Gamers Gate came unto the people and did say, “dost thou desire a grand dose of vehicular theft at a price pleasing to these times of economic hardship?” And the people didst sayeth ‘yea’ and ‘that sounds like quite a good idea, I am broke’. But now, for this weekend only, Steam has pronounced that it shall be the Don of sales, capiche? Gamersgate asked for what now seems the astronomical sum of £8.74. Steam says £4.99. That’s GTA, GTA 2, GTA III, GTA: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas and GTA IV along with its episodic content. The series spans the invention of the Roman numeral and the colon. (Thanks once again to Michael Rose for tweeting this.)

It’s been available on Microsoft’s 360th console for a while now, but rhythm-RPG mashup Sequence is now available on Steam. I’m tempted to call it Puzzle Quest but with rhythm game mechanics in place of match-3 mechanics and nothing I’ve seen suggests I’d be incorrect to do so. There’s a narrative, character customisation, magic and, underpinning it all, the hammering of cursor keys in time to music, which is how all fights would be resolved if I was the God of War. There’s a trailer for the Steam release below, which contains timely and pithy comments about Metacritic. I hope to take a proper look myself when I clamber from beneath the current pile of games entombing me.

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Actually it’s more like 30-something Qix, since the first appearance of this game type was in 1981. Anyway, there’s a demo of Lightfish, which is like Qix with Flow’s visuals, over on Steam. It throws in some novel gameplay variants, of course, but the heart of it is dividing up the game space to slowly destroy your enemy’s territories. It’s possibly that this might be worth playing if you need a few moment’s distraction from the inexorable horrors of your existence. Or not.