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Friday 18 October 2013

Skyjacker lets you play space pirate in customized, destructible ships


After a long drought, the space-flight sim is coming back into vogue. Skyjacker, a new space combat simulator from indie developer Digitilus, simulates the lives of ruthless space pirates in an open, deep-space setting. Players’ ships will be fully customizable, and each mission lets them hijack, destroy, and loot enemy vessels for parts. To expand this experience, Digitilus is returning to Kickstarter to help raise funds for development.
Based on a series of novels written by Digitilus co-founder Eugene Zhukov, Skyjacker will feature a system of fully-destructible ships owned by numerous alien races. Players will follow the story of the ruthless pirate Ael, fighting as mercenary pilots harassing enemy ships traveling across the galaxy. While Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen is focused on creating a massive persistent MMO-like universe, Skyjacker will tell the story of a single pirate amid a vast galaxy.
The heart of Skyjacker will be first-person dogfighting combat, a system that the team is already very proud of. Skyjacker is only in alpha right now, but already has full joystick support. Each scripted mission will take place in a solar system generated from random variables such as the number of suns and locations of planets.
“Currently we have 24 basic types of mission scenarios which we’ll multiply to over 30 environmental assets,” Zhukov tells PC Gamer. “This way, we’re getting over one hundred possible mission conditions.”
Digitilus has turned to Kickstarter to raise funds before, and the result was the intricately detailed Starship Constructor app. Allowing players to build ships and experiment with in-game systems with the sandbox freedom of Kerbal Space Program or Minecraft was really important to the team, according to Zhukov. “Freedom is always good,” he says.
The question for me is, will the spaceship creator live up to the full creative promise of that freedom? There’s nothing wrong with ambition, but Skyjacker is a much larger project than anything Digitilus has tried before.

Zhukov was able to show me an ungainly eel-like starship built by an artist as a joke and, although he assured me it would fly “if you stuck an engine on the back,” the practicality of outlandish ships is still undetermined. It will do me no good if I can build a praying mantis starship, for example, if I can’t get it to perform in combat.
According to the developer, this freedom also manifests itself in combat, where players will be able to coordinate with each other to destroy enemy shields and disable engines without obliterating ships entirely. Having an intact ship to salvage will provide upgrades and raw materials to sell on the black market.
Players will also be able to express their creativity with the mission creator, a new toolset that Digitilus is hoping to develop with funds raised by fans. A new Kickstarter drive launches today to raise $150,000 for mission development tools as well as more powerful co-op and PvP multiplayer modes. Currently a server can support 12 players in a multiplayer match, but with funding that number could grow.

“We’ve received immense support from players,” Zhukov says, “and although we are committed to funding and completing the project ourselves, a successful Kickstarter will enable us to solidify the game and speed up the launch, providing galactic aficionados with all the features they want, much sooner than planned.”
Skyjacker is currently in alpha, and Digitilus has released a playable demo that you can play at their website.

Space Hulk’s latest free update includes new campaign to show fan appreciation


In a nod to its fans, indie strategy game Space Hulk has released a new—and free—three-mission campaign as part of its latest patch which went live today. The appropriately titled Messenger of Purgatory campaign surfaces as part of update 1.2, which also addresses the game’s optimization, visuals, and a variety of other improvements, according to its official changelog.
“We have had both a rough start as well as great support from all of you,” the developers report in the changelog. “So we decided to give you this one for free as a big THANK YOU!!”
Set—as always—in the Warhammer 40k universe, the new Space Hulk missions send you on the hunt for the remains of Captain Atarius. Thomas Hentschel Lund, CEO of the game’s developer Full Control, highlighted player feedback in his comments about the patch in the official press release today: “This game update addresses many of the fan requests and suggestions that continue to hone and refine the experience of Space Hulk.”
For some more background on Full Control’s PC translation of the classic board game, check out our preview of the turn-based strategy game.
Hat tip, Joystiq.

Interview: Assassin’s Creed IV game director Ashraf Ismail on the future of open worlds

People are obsessed with pirate ships. Before we sat down to chat proper, Assassin’s Creed IV game director Ashraf Ismail told me a story about how one playtester became so enamoured with the Jackdaw that he spent hours boarding it from every possible angle. “You know, we kinda needed to get some other things tested, but we let him at it anyway,” Ismail laughed.
Ismail’s in Sydney to show off a new build of Assassin’s Creed IV, ahead of its release in November. During a hands on preview, another Australian journalist spent an hour trying to overtake an enemy pirate ship. He died dozens of times apparently (because it’s a fairly high level feat to pull off) but eventually he did it without resorting to cannons.
People are obsessed with pirate ships. Ubisoft is banking on this obsession, because Black Flag will usher in one of the most dramatic changes to the Assassin’s Creed series we’ve seen over the course of its six titles. Naval combat and navigation is one of the core mechanics in the forthcoming installment, which releases for PC on November 22.
PC Gamer: You’re working across six platforms and two console generations with Black Flag. Is there more pressure on this title than ever before?
Ashraf Ismail: For sure. As a brand there is a pressure to bring something new and something fresh, but in terms of the number of platforms, no – that’s not really an added pressure. You can argue that with the next-gen stuff we need to raise the game a bit in terms of visual quality and immersiveness. So, yes there is multiple angles of pressure rising. But I think globally we deeply know as a dev team, as a company and as a brand that we need to surprise our fans. That was the objective when we started Black Flag two years ago: the key words were fresh and fun. We know we risk going stale, but the job is on us as developers to surprise people and that’s one of the reasons we went with a pirate theme and especially with doing a naval sandbox.
When you think of next-gen people have this notion that you need to experience something that you haven’t experienced before. Visual quality goes up, but the games also need to get bigger and immerse you more, and that’s where the idea of the naval sandbox came from. Not that it’s unique to next-gen, but it forced us to ask how do we take the city building that we know and just exaggerate and go much bigger and create a world that we’ve never had in AC, and hopefully which gamers have never seen. So yes, there is pressure but it’s a really strong motivator for us to try something different and to take a risk.
I remind people that it’s really risky to take a brand like Assassin’s Creed, which is very successful in terms of sales and fanbase, and then to say “you know what, part of the core experience now is naval combat.” I love the fact that Ubisoft went with it and supported us in attempting to do this. It’s a very risky thing and we could have totally screwed it up, but because of the pressure we know we need to take risks. It’s been a positive experience.
Is there a risk there that you’re fragmenting the series’ core elements – freerunning, stealth, land combat etc – with the introduction of naval combat?
AI: Again, it’s our job to ensure that the core of Assassin’s Creed is there. We do have a brand team, which is outside of the development team. That team is composed of writers, designers, project managers and so on, and they look at the larger arc that is Assassin’s Creed. There are people there who pay attention to what direction the game is going in and whether it is still fitting in with the brand pillars. Things like freerunning, fighting and stealth: these are really core and we’re never going to lose those.
I always say there’s a reason there are very few good pirate references in video games. Actually there’s almost none. The best in my opinion is Sid Meier’s Pirates. And that’s because if you want to do a credible pirate game you need to have cities, you need natural locations, you need to have an insane naval combat system but also a naval world, and to do that in one shot… I don’t know how any team could do it. There’s few pirate games because it’s a huge undertaking. We have such a solid foundation in Assassin’s Creed, because Assassin’s Creed 3 started pushing the naval navigation and nature, and they started the naval combat, so we had the ingredients in place. We could spend a good two and a half years developing something spectacular on those foundations. So yes, there’s risk involved in whether the naval stuff fits into the freerunning, but I feel like when people play the game they’ll feel like it’s Assassin’s Creed, yet the core experience will be so different and fresh that it will surprise people.
What are the most important elements of an open-world moving forward, apart from graphical fidelity? What do consumers want the most?

“We’ll always have an historical element because it’s core to the brand. Mark my words”

AI: For me, at its heart an open world game is a promise of an experience. The more immersed you are in that experience the more lost you can get inside the world. We worked pretty hard on making the world believable and credible. Having NPCs that look like real people who exist in that world, that’s always been a tenet of Assassin’s Creed since the first game. I think we can push that further. Beyond that – and this isn’t a hint of any future mechanics – I personally feel like there will be some element of connectivity. We’ve seen games that are single player games that somehow try to integrate the idea of other people interacting with your world. I’m sure that at some point with Assassin’s Creed, and with other open worlds, we’re going to see more of this. Demon’s Souls is a prime example of a single player game which is very personal which [nonetheless] let’s other people interact with you. I think that’s the best reference out there. I think we’ll see more of this, but all in the hope of immersing you more in the world.
With Black Flag, we want players to be completely lost in the Caribbean. What I mean is, you have a mission that is at the top of the map, but when you move in that direction the game world will keep inviting you to move off that path without you knowing it. Maybe if you find yourself, 45 minutes later, nowhere near that mission start, but you’ve done a bunch of harpooning and found a bunch of treasures and updated the Jackdaw, this for me is achieving a level of immersiveness that really only open world games can achieve. Those are the two fronts. We’re always going to push the immersiveness layer, having systems that attract you and pull your attention. On a pure feature basis there will probably be more social stuff, though I’m not entirely sure how yet.
Assassin’s Creed has become more generous with those distractions you mention. Is there an awareness within the dev teams that there might be a stretching point for these distractions? Is it possible to give the player too much to do?
AI: Yes, and I think the balance lay in what the purpose of this extra stuff is. We wanted to make sure that all the side missions and activities have a very simple function that a player can understand. So for example in this game, we’re blessed to have enemies that are not human: ships, inanimate objects that you can upgrade, more cannons and hulls, more defenses. All this allows us to have a progression system, and this system is a really easy way to reward the player. You need gold to buy the upgrades, therefore as you start to understand the economy of the game you start to understand what activities you need to do to get that gold. So you think: I need gold so I need to do this and this, which is better than selecting from a bunch of random icons on the map and trying them out.
We run into issues when we just put in activities that have no real purpose and are just there as content. As a game director I won’t do that – you can have some really cool stuff but it’s just meaningless. So the balance is really about the purpose and the function: if I’m doing this activity because it leads me somewhere, then it has a place in the game. You’ll see that in Black Flag: almost every single collectible, activity, side mission has a purpose, whether it’s to upgrade the ship or to upgrade Edward. There’s a function that’s clear and simple. We focused on that because we know that people can get lost in all the extra activities in open world games that are just there [for no reason].
It’s well known that naval combat and traversal was a difficult technical achievement. Specifically, what were some of the more difficult aspects?
AI: There are a million different things! I’ll start simple: the ship is an avatar. There is this psychological connection with players where you have a 3D figure on camera and you start to associate yourself with that character. You understand that the shadow beneath it places you somewhere inside the 3D world. These are mechanics that have been developed over years, starting with the likes of Mario 64. They’d been explored before that, but Mario 64 really defined a lot of this stuff.
So all of the sudden we have this ship that’s really big: its dimensions are awkward and we’re not used to it, and so where do you put the camera? How do you shoot, how do you drive? And at the same time not only is it a massive 3D ship, but you also need to feel that it’s a ship and still have it be fun to play and for it to be intuitive. When we started we had a lot of different prototypes for sailing, and some of them looked at sailing from a very accurate perspective. I’d say on some level they were fun, but on another they were completely unintuitive and unplayable. Just trying to sail and shoot an enemy was impossible. Finding the balance where it feels like a ship that you’re sailing on an ocean which has physics and you can feel the waves and wind, but you can also be in a combat situation: to not overwhelm the player with too many variables is really tricky. It took a lot of time with R&D and prototyping and trying different things.
The ocean itself is honestly one of the greatest achievements we’ve made. It’s fully physics simulated but we have full control over it. If we want it to go from a calm sea to an intense hurricane, we can do it. It feels natural and normal and logical and it’s beautiful visually. The guys who pulled it off, my hats off to them.
With the Abstergo narrative backdrop Assassin’s Creed could feasibly go anywhere. Is it possible the series could ever make a break from its historical settings?
AI: Feasibly, but I don’t think that makes sense. One of the pillars of Assassin’s Creed is that it’s historical fiction. I think it’s one of the biggest reasons why the series is so successful. Everybody in this world can love a certain time period or a certain historical figure, and I think one of our successes is that we go to time periods that you’ll never be able to physically visit or see. We excite people around this concept. To me, it doesn’t make any sense to have an Assassin’s Creed game that doesn’t have an historical element to it because it’s core to the DNA. I’ve been asked about whether Assassin’s Creed will make it to space in the future, and while anything is possible I think we’ll always have an historical element because it’s core to the brand.  Mark my words.
Users are given the opportunity to rate missions, which will offer feedback directly to Ubisoft. Do you expect conclusive results?
AI: This is a very contentious feature in the game. I really wanted it in the game but our mission guys really hated it, which I understand why. We had many avenues of feedback, and one of the most important things a designer needs to be able to do is take in lots of feedback, whether its ideas or playtest results or just watching someone play and writing down notes. You need to absorb this information and then digest it. You don’t take it at face value – some stuff you can – but you need to be able to digest and understand what is happening. For me this is just another avenue of feedback. Of course when we see a mission is rated extremely poorly then okay, something went wrong. We’ll ask whether it was the writing, a bug, or was it just not a fun mechanic that was being used. On the other hand if something is rated really well, then for future games we can look at that and analyse why this mission was great.

Thursday 17 October 2013

TowerFall setting its sights on a January launch for PC


Indie platformer TowerFall may land on PC as early as January, according to comments made by the game’s creator Matt Thorson to Shacknews. Previously exclusive to the Ouya system, TowerFall won the Media Choice Award Sunday at the IndieCade Games Festival and still looks set to include at least some of the new content we first heard about back in August.
“There’s two new archers and five new towers,” Thorson tells to Shacknews.
Already one of the Ouya console’s most popular games, TowerFall’s PC version will surely find a wider audience on PC for its 4-player combat archery. Thorson’s comments didn’t include word of the previously hinted-at single-player mode or online play, although he did mention to Shacknews at the IndieCade festival that he hoped to include a level editor as well as Steam Workshop functionality.
While the transition of a game from a console-based version to a PC can sometimes be problematic, it’s great to hear that Thorson has in mind some options for players to customize their experience, either through their own level editing or the always wild and wonderful universe of Steam Workshop.

Call of Duty: Ghosts system requirements posted by Nvidia


Update: Well, that didn’t take long. Activision’s support Twitter account has just confirmed that these specs are not official.
Original story follows below.
While it’s not official, the likely PC requirements for Call of Duty: Ghosts have been posted on Nvidia’s website. The minimum requirements are pretty friendly to those without giant rigs, but a slight step up from previous CoDs given the transition to new console hardware.
According to Nvidia, Call of Duty: Ghosts’ helicopter-crashing dog antics (and other things) will require at least the following specs to run fluidly:
  • OS: Windows 7 64-Bit / Windows 8 64-Bit
  • CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 2.66 GHZ / AMD Phenom X3 8750 2.4 GHZ or better
  • RAM: 6 GB RAM
  • HDD: 50 GB HD space
  • Video: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti / ATI Radeon HD 5870 or better
  • Sound: DirectX Compatible Sound Card
  • DirectX: 11
  • Internet: Broadband connection and service required for Multiplayer Connectivity. Internet connection required for activation.
Nvidia also “recommends” a GeForce GTX 780, but that’s an extreme jump from a GTX 550 Ti. Unless of course you already have one. In which case, go for it, Mr./Ms. Badass—it is possible that the game scales well between mid-range and high-end.
For comparison’s sake, these specs are similar to the minimum requirements that Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs will reportedly require, except for the crazy 50 gigs of space.
Ghosts comes out on PC November 5, apparently with dedicated servers this time. We’ve contacted Activision to confirm whether or not Nvidia’s post represents the official system requirements.

Indie dev shares thoughts on Steam Controller after getting hands-on


Dan Tabár, the game designer behind Cortex Command, got his hands on a prototype of the recently announced Steam Controller and says he has “no qualms” with the ergonomic feel of the controller and is “surprised how well it worked.” He told us he’s excited to see how the device will affect the feasibility of PC gaming in the living room.
Tabár tested the controller during a visit to Valve in September and had a chance to play some Borderlands with the new hardware, which he described as fresh off of an in-house 3D printer.
“What I like about controller specifically, is how surprisingly usable and good the touchpads felt almost immediately,” Tabár said. “It certainly is not the laptop touchpad experience frankensteined onto a gamepad. The new paddles on the back are a stroke of genius that makes me smack my forehead…and in general I just dig that Valve is clearly taking a fresh approach and leaving nothing because of some kind of sacred legacy expectations of what makes a good game input device.”
The controller’s touchpads will use a tactile-feedback technology in order to replace the thumbsticks that are mounted on the front of most traditional gamepads. At least in shooters like Borderlands, this is one area, according to Tabár, where the controller is still a work-in-progress.
“They do have some work to do on the haptic feedback for these kinds of games, because my impression was that it was rumbling and making klicky sensations constantly, not really giving me much useful tactile feedback,” Tabár said. “I see that as a polish/tweaking issue more than a dealbreaker though, and [definitely] something that will be fundamentally less of an issue with games that are built with the controller in mind.”
While he caveats that he only got to use the prototype in an FPS game, Tabár did wonder how people would adapt the controller to other genres, especially real-time strategy games.
“I do worry about people trying to use this with fast-paced RTS games and hope to stay competitive, or arcade fighting games, as another example,” he said. “Some game genres just lend themselves to specialized hardware like arcade sticks, auto racing wheels, flight joysticks, et cetera. However, as a universal controller, this seems to be a very flexible compromise.”
And as one of the three cornerstones of developer Valve’s plan to take PC gamers away from the traditional, desk-based, mouse and keyboard setups that most of us know, a feasible controller has got to be central to making couch-based PC gaming a reality. But it’s always tough to predict how new input devices will actually function without getting your hands on them.
Tabár says he’s “confident” the graphical editor for his upcoming Planetoid Pioneers project could be operated using the Steam Controller, even though the interface was designed for a mouse cursor. What’s clear from his experience is that many of the real advantages of such a radically new device won’t appear until we see games that are designed—from the very beginning—to work seamlessly with the new apparatus.

Wednesday 16 October 2013

Following the tradition of most fighting game ports, NetherRealm Studios‘ clash of DC heroes and villains will enter the PC arena a few months after the initial brawl of its console brethren in the form of the Injustice: Gods Among Us Ultimate Edition on November 12. As you’d expect, the Ultimate Edition includes the base game along with all the previously-released DLC, which includes the characters Batgirl, Martian Manhunter, General Zod, Lobo, Zatanna, and a re-imagined Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. The DLC also includes over 40 new costumes and 60 S.T.A.R. Labs missions. Americans (or those who ship themselves an American copy) also get the game soundtrack. The Ultimate Edition comes out on November 12 in North America and Europe for $50/£30, and other territories “beginning November 29” with High Voltage Software at the helm rather than NetherRealm. I’m usually weary of ports not developed in house, but considering High Voltage ported the PC version of Mortal Kombat: Komplete Edition, I’m not overly concerned.


President of Worldwide Studios for Sony Computer Entetainment Shuhei Yoshida has confirmed over Twitter that the “basic functions” of the PS4’s DualShock 4 will be compatible on Windows PCs without the need for additional drivers.
When asked whether Sony planned to release PC compatibility drivers for the DualShock 4, Yoshida tweeted back “the analog sticks and buttons will work just fine” and the “basic functions” of the controller will work by default. Of course, Yoshida remained vague about what those “basic functions” actually were.


The folks at Joystiq noted that most third-party controllers use the XInput API, which sort of tricks your computer into thinking that controller is actually an Xbox 360 controller. It’s worth mentioning that the DualShock 3 controller doesn’t have XInput, and requires additional software, tweaks, and quite possibly headaches to properly run on a PC.
When asked if games would automatically recognize a DualShock 4 as a DualShock 4, Yoshida tersely said to wait for a field report after the PS4 launch. There are plenty of other questions out there regarding the DS4’s touchpad and motion controls, though I’d be perfectly content if games just recognized the controller’s buttons and joysticks. Here’s hoping that’s the case come November.

Injustice: Gods Among Us Ultimate Edition coming to PC


Following the tradition of most fighting game ports, NetherRealm Studios‘ clash of DC heroes and villains will enter the PC arena a few months after the initial brawl of its console brethren in the form of the Injustice: Gods Among Us Ultimate Edition on November 12.
As you’d expect, the Ultimate Edition includes the base game along with all the previously-released DLC, which includes the characters Batgirl, Martian Manhunter, General Zod, Lobo, Zatanna, and a re-imagined Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. The DLC also includes over 40 new costumes and 60 S.T.A.R. Labs missions. Americans (or those who ship themselves an American copy) also get the game soundtrack.
The Ultimate Edition comes out on November 12 in North America and Europe for $50/£30, and other territories “beginning November 29” with High Voltage Software at the helm rather than NetherRealm. I’m usually weary of ports not developed in house, but considering High Voltage ported the PC version of Mortal Kombat: Komplete Edition, I’m not overly concerned.

Asylum Jam to focus on horror without stigmatizing illness


Decrepit psychiatric hospitals with Gothic architecture and their mentally ill patients still constitute a lot of horror fiction. The recently-released Outlast and Bethesda’s upcoming The Evil Within both take place in insane asylums housing horrific monstrosities, but Lucy Morris dislikes those tropes and seeks to challenge developers to create a different kind of horror game.
“You should not use asylums, psychiatric institutes, medical professionals, or violent/antipathic/’insane’ patients as settings or triggers,” states the Asylum Jam’s website. The 48-hour jam, running from Oct 11-13, was inspired by Ian Mahar’s Kotaku article that examined the negative effects of the horror genre’s prolific use of mental illness, including the societal perceptions that come with having one such illness.
In an interview with Polygon,Morris and participants in the game jam go in-depth on the stigmatization of mental illness, the potential for the jam to open a discussion, and their desire to explore other avenues for the genre’s future. So while Morris and developers, who can still sign up at the jam’s site, admirably try to move away from the popular horror tropes, they will try to create new, inventive ways to frighten people.
Great. Now games can make me squeal like a child for even more reasons.