State of Decay for PC

I don’t happen to own an Xbox 360, though I did at one point in time.  I switched over to Sony’s black box and haven’t been disappointed with it, especially since it mostly just plays my blue rays now and I leave the gaming for my PC.  But not owning an Xbox 360 doesn’t change the fact that I been extremely excited for the title “State of Decay” for some time now.

 

For those who haven’t heard of it before, it’s basically and survival zombie rpg that combines “Dead Rising with Grand Theft Auto and adds some perma death to the mix.  In a nut shell,. you manage a group of survivors through third person controls and level them up by playing each of them.  From what I have seen and gathered, it is wise to continuously switch between characters because if a character dies, they are gone forever and the game saves the second they die. It’s a tough system but one that I’m really interested in.

 

It went live June 5 and has sold over 250,000 copies already.  A huge deal for a 20 dollar xbox live arcade game.  Reviews have been great and the more I watch and learn, the more excited I am that this game is making it’s way to the PC.  Undead Labs. the games creators, haven’t given a date yet, but they have stated that they are working on the PC version and that they will be releasing more information about the PC version with the next three weeks.

 

I was hoping for years that someone would make a true zombie survival game and it looks like Undead Labs has given me what I’ve always wanted.  Though we’ll have to wait a few more weeks to get the exact info, and hopefully the release date, for this little gem.  If you want to know more, the folks at IGN have a great let’s play series about the game and give far more info about it than I could in a reasonable sized blog post.  Enjoy!

 

Warning game is rated M for violence and language.

Blizzard Entertainment Announces Staff Reductions

Blizzard Entertainment, publisher of the best-selling MMO World of Warcraft, said on February 29th that it is going to be cutting its staff by 600 employees.

“Constant evaluation of teams and processes is necessary for the long-term health of any business,” Blizzard president Mike Morhaime said. “Over the last several years, we’ve grown our organization tremendously and made large investments in our infrastructure in order to better serve our global community. However, as Blizzard and the industry have evolved we’ve also had to make some difficult decisions in order to address the changing needs of our company.”

These layoffs are the biggest in the company’s history.   The Irvine, California based company currently employees 5,000 employees so 600 people is a large percentage of the company.

The cuts are speculated to focus on the company’s community service department, especially the World of Warcraft customer service department. World of Warcraft, the company’s flagship title, has seen its subscriber numbers fall from 12 million in 2010 to 10.2 million subscribers in the last quarter.

Atul Bagga, an analyst at Lazard Capital Markets, said that the layoffs were probably 20 to 30 percent of the company’s customer service staff. He said the reduction is likely linked to the downward slope of World of Warcraft usage. He believes that WoW’s subscriber base will fall to as low as 300,000 users in the current quarter, due to competition from titles such as Star Wars: The Old Republic and a lack of new content for WoW.

Blizzard said that these cuts will not affect the games currently in development and says it remains committed to shipping several games this year, including Diablo 3, Blizzard DOTA, and expansions for Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft. Blizzard will reportedly announce Diablo 3’s release date in the coming weeks.

I Am Alive: The Survival Game That Had To So Some Surviving of Its Own

I’m excited for “I Am Alive”, the upcoming survival game being made by Ubisoft Shanghai and being released as a download only title this coming March.

For those unfamiliar with the game, “I Am Alive” is a survival game set in a post-apocalyptic world.  But unlike most post apocalyptic games, “I Am Alive” is focusing on the survival aspect and less on gun play.  If “Mad Max is “Fallout 3” then “I Am Alive” is “The Road.”

In fact, I Am Alive is a story of survival, both in the game and outside of it.  The original developer Darkworks announced the game back in 2008.  As the months went by, however, “I Am Alive” continued to experience frequent delays.  Eventually, Darkworks announced that it would no longer be working due to a “mutual decision” and that the studio had other obligations.  Darkworks also announced that the game would  be finished by Ubisoft Shanghai.   Ubisoft announced that it planned to  release “I Am Alive” between  April 2010 and March 2011. The nearly year long release window came and went without any further news about the game.  Many assumed the game was dead in the water.   This fear escalated in May 2011, when Ubisoft cancelled a number of games that were currently in development.

Then, in June 2011, is was announced that “I Am Alive” was not one of the titles being cancelled. A rumor began to circle that the game could see a release in late 2011.  On September 29, 2011, a new trailer for the game aired with a release date of “this winter” flashing at the end of the trailer.  Again, “I Am Alive” missed its release date.

Recently, on January 23, in fact, the developers announced that the game would be available on March 7, 2012, giving the game a solid release date for the first time in its development.

So after much surviving of its own, “I Am Alive” is almost ready to let its players survive in its broken world.

If you are interested in information about “I Am Alive” and it’s game play, the video below is for you.

Amazon claims Guild Wars 2 will launch June 30th,

 

Once Again, a retail company is announcing a game’s release date before the company has announced it.

This is getting rather bizzare.

But back on topic.

Guild Wars 2 may launch June 30, according to a date available on Amazon.de.  The Dutch branch of Amazon has already started taking pre-orders for ArenaNet’s upcoming MMO.

While many, myself  included, want June 30th to be the release date, we have to remember that “an official launch date within 2012 as feedback from our closed and open marketing betas will help us determine an exact release date. We will release Guild Wars 2 when it is ready.”

 

Diablo 3: Even More Changes Still to Come Devs Say

People who played the Diablo 3 beta have been commenting that the game seems extremly polish ed and seems ready to release as is.  However,game director Jay Wilson has announced that Diablo 3 still has some big changes ahead of it.

What does that mean for the release date? I don’t think anyone outside Blizzard can tell you that, and maybe even Blizzard isn’t sure.

What Blizzard is sure of is the changes it wants to bring to the game and that they are always trying to make it better.

Wilson wrote on the Diablo 3 blog: “In addition to finishing and polishing the content of the game we’re continuing to iterate on some of the core game systems.”

“We’re changing some of the systems we’ve gotten the most feedback on both internally and from the beta test, including crafting, items, core attributes, and inventory.”

“In addition we’re working on major changes to the skill and rune systems that we’re not ready to talk about, but I promise you we can’t possibly ship without a finished skill and rune system.”

Another, huge change is that Blizzard is going to be changing character attributes.

“We’re dropping Defense, Attack, and Precision as attributes, Armor is taking over for what Defense used to provide, +Physical Resist will take over for Armor, and +Chance to Crit will fill in for Precision. Obviously these stat changes are one of the bigger systems changes we’re currently working on as they have far reaching requirements to re-itemize and balance the game.”
“This change makes the stats more intuitive and fixes some of the itemization issues we were running into. We want to make it clear that junk items aren’t worth picking up, and make it easy to identify other items as not for your character. We want to drop a ton of items, but to really pull off a sense of excitement when finding a great item, there needs to be non-optimal items, both for your class, and in general. By specifically targeting stats at classes, we can reduce the amount of item overlap, diversify our item pool, and create a cleaner, more exciting itemization system.”
“By and large these changes have little impact on which items you’re going to want. The item hunt has always been based on secondary stats and affixes, and we’re working hard to ensure build diversity is as large as possible by getting as many affixes into the game as possible (adding more item affixes is also something we’ve been working on). Simply including affixes that augment specific skills greatly expands the itemization pool and build possibilities.”

Wilson ended his blog with:

“We want Diablo III to be the best game it can be when it launches. To get there, we’re going to be iterating on designs we’ve had in place for a long time, making changes to systems you’ve spent a lot of time theorycrafting, and removing features you may have come to associate with the core of the experience. Our hope is that by embracing our iterative design process in which we question ourselves and our decisions, Diablo III won’t just live up to our expectations, but will continue to do so a decade after it’s released.”

TERA’s Re-Twitter contest and Release date

TERA, the action MMORPG, has a realse date.  It was announced today that TERA will release May 1st.  To commemorate this occasion, En Masse Entertainment is giving away 25 beta passes in its Retweetstakes going on now.

Best of luck to all those entering.