And in other PC gaming news…
It’s Friday! We made it! Congratulations all round. Well done us, well done you. Yes, even you. We all deserve a pat on the back and a nice long sit down with a great PC game. There’s plenty to choose from but I can’t stop thinking about what’s just around the corner. Namely, Mass Effect 3. Because Bioware threw out six trailers in a day and all can think of is what it would be like to be a Volus.
Hmm, what’s that? Why is there a picture of Finn and Jake from Adventure Time at the top of this post? Oh, no reason, except the one at the top of today’s list of newsy links.
World of Warcraft Annual Pass has more than one million subscribers
Blizzard have hinted at the success of the World of Warcraft Annual Pass deal that they launched at Blizzcon last year. In last night’s Activision Blizzard earnings call, transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Blizzard CEO Mark Morhaime revealed that “to date, we have signed up more than 1 million players in the West.”
The deal offers subscribers a free copy of Diablo 3 along with 12 months of WoW game time, which could be paid for monthly. At £8.99 a month, the Annual Pass essentially costs £107.88 per player, which means the scheme has made at least £107,880,000.
Ghost Recon Online closed beta sign-ups available, new trailer talks classes
Ubisoft’s free-to-play multiplayer shooter, Ghost Recon Online will be heading into closed beta on March 5. Blues news mention that you can sign up for a slot now on the Ghost Recon Online site. The new trailer above shows off the three classes. Cowardly long-range shooty man (recon), mid-range shooty man (assault) and mad-gadget man (specialist). You can see more of the interesting super-weapons each class can wield in the recent Ghost Recon Online gadgets trailer.
Diablo 3 release date set for Spring
Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime narrowed down a release period for Diablo 3 in an Activision-Blizzard earnings call last night, recorded by Seeking Alpha. “We are targeting a Q2 launch for Diablo III,” he said, placing the release date somewhere between April and June. “We expect to announce more details about the release schedule in the coming weeks,” he added.
Blizzard clash with Valve over DOTA trademark
Blizzard are appealing against Valve’s use of the DOTA trademark. Kotaku have spotted a NeoGaf post that brings to light the appeal notice put before the US Patent and Trademarks office late last year
Blizzard argue that “by attempting to register the mark DOTA, Valve seeks to appropriate the more than seven years of goodwill that Blizzard has developed in the mark DOTA and in its Warcraft III computer game”
The appeal says that the original DOTA mod was originally “distributed, marketed, and promoted by Blizzard and its fans” and is “built upon the 1 Warcraft III game engine, interface, and gameplay mechanics; that is comprised of Warcraft III characters, items, spells, artwork, textures, and color palates; that can be played only using Warcraft III software and via Blizzard’s online service Battle.net.”
Double Fine donations pass $1.2 million, breaking Kickstarter records. 32 days to go
My word. If I’d known how easy it was to raise a million dollars in a day, I’d be updating the website from a roaming limousine right now. Of course, it helps to be a successful game developer headed up by the brains behind Monkey Island. Even so, the response has been stunning. After passing their target in just eight hours, donations for Double Fine’s new adventure game now stands at $1,236,374, and it’s still rising.
The kickstarter page has been updated with a message that celebrates passing the $400,000 target. “You people are amazing! But it’s not over yet”, it says. “The number keeps going up and now the question is just how much news do we want to make with this? We’re getting a lot of attention already and it seems like this little project could have an impact beyond itself.”
And in other PC gaming news…
Here’s a tasty bit of machinima spotted on Gamefront, made in Skyrim by one chap and a lot of mods. It throws about a thousand warriors at each other and then blows them up with magi-bombs. It’s a great showcase for Midas Magic, which is one of the top rated mods on the Steam workshop right now. For more Skyrim goodness, check out the demo reel of features that Bethesda didn’t have time to put into the full game. WERE-BEARS!
But what else has been happening in the world of PC gaming? Quite a bit, as it happens, Read on for todays links, including a couple of bundles, sexy voxels (are there any other kind?) and the Bafta Audience Award nominees.
Introversion on why they’re done with Darwinia
We had the chance to catch up with Introversion at Bit of Alright recently, to talk about their new project, Prison Architect, the fate of Subversion and their plans for the future. One thing’s for sure, Darwinia won’t be part of it. Creative director, Chris Delay and managing director Mark Morris told us how the company ended up working on one game for so long when, in the beginning, they set out determined to keep making new games every one or two years.
“We’d started it in 2002 and it didn’t ship until 2005″ said creative director Chris Delay. “Then we had Multiwinia, which was 2008. And we had Darwinia+, which was 2010. So we’ve kind of been working on Darwinia for 10 years and it was never meant to be that big a project. To say that we were sick of it is an understatement.”
One of the strengths of a small team of indie developers is their ability to throw up new ideas and change direction faster than large, publisher-funded studios. In Introversion’s case, Darwinia’s runaway success only slowed them down.
Rift weddings announced, world record attempt scheduled for Valentine’s day
Got a special someone you quest with regularly in Rift? If you like it, put a ring of +1 endurance on it. Trion are angling to break the Guinness world record for most game marriages in a day on February 14. If you’d like to join in, GMs across Telara will be wandering around marrying people, or you can head to Hammerknell and Orphiel’s Spire to use the new wedding instance.
Star Trek Online season four kicks off on Saturday, the Jem’Hadar are back
Star Trek Online’s following up on its recent relaunch as a free-to-play MMO with a new episode titled “the 2800,” which will start on Saturday. The new season of story quests will kick off with the reappearance of a Dominion fleet of genetically engineered super-soldiers called the Jem’Hadar at Deep Space 9.
The remaining four episodes will be released every Saturday after that until the season finale on March 10, in which the [glowing light/sparkly cloud/space amoeba] you thought was god turns out to be [an advanced alien lifeform/a satellite that's reached the edges of space and evolved into a troll] who can only be stopped using [a really big missile/ a discombobulated tachyon energy pulse/ true love].
You can play Star Trek Online for free by signing up and downloading the client from the Star Trek Online site. As well as the trailer above, there are these four screenshots featuring wormholes and space-walking.
Graph: how Double Fine raised $450,000 for an adventure game in eight hours
Not long after the creator of Minecraft offered to fund a sequel to their much-loved Psychonauts, Double Fine looked to a different source to fund a different game. Kickstarter lets anyone donate to a project in return for rewards proportional to their investment, and they don’t have to pay anything unless the project gets enough pledges to go ahead. Double Fine set out to raise $400,000 for a point-and-click adventure game, in 34 days. They raised $450,000 in eight hours.
It’s a fantastic and exciting accomplishment that reflects how the games industry is shifting towards one where passion, as much as mass market appeal, can make games happen. But, much more importantly, it involves a bunch of nerdy numbers I can make a graph from.
Double Fine give increasingly ridiculous rewards for donations of amounts varying from $15 to $150,000. As you’d expect, the cheapest options were the most popular, but not proportionally so. Which of them actually made Double Fine the most money? I know, because I made a graph.
Tim Schafer to fund new adventure game with Kickstarter
About seven or so hours ago Tim Schafer announced on Twitter that Double Fine wanted to make a point a “downloadable “Point-and-Click” graphic adventure game for the modern age”. A kickstarter page went live asking for donations with a big $400,000 target at the top. There’s still 33 days left if you want to throw some money in the pot but, astonishingly, the target has already been passed.
The project had already received $100k in donations after just a couple of hours. On twitter, Schafer expressed his appreciation in typically muted fashion. “Holy smokes, we just hit $100k!!! I think that’s higher than the budget of Monkey Island! Adventure gaaaaaaames!!!”
Two hours later, another landmark had been reached. “300! 300! 300! 300! 300! 300! 300! 300! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!” he said.
Watch an indie developer program a feature in real time
Playing games can desensitize you to the fact that they’re really an amalgamation of number and letter strings, each of which was painstakingly placed in the proper order. This Matrix-like wizardry isn’t often seen in full, but Daniel Tabár of Data Realms has done us the kindness of offering a window into the intricate labor that goes into coding a game.
In a series of three videos spanning nearly five hours in total (!), Tabár walks us through his process for adding the Techs feature to the indie sidescrolling shooter Cortex Command. You might recognize the game from 2010′s Humble Indie Bundle 2—now see a fraction of all the work that went into making it.
PC Gamer US Game of the Year awards 2011
If it happens in videogames, it happens on the PC first. Every year, developers conjure new ways to dazzle, mystify, challenge, and entertain us—some with a handful of deceptively simple game mechanics and a unique art style, others by building entire worlds that accommodate whatever role we choose to play in them. Whatever the approach, the big advancements always take place on the only platform without masters or limitations.
That makes handing out our awards every year an excruciating task. Because there are plenty of games that did things well and many games that do them extraordinarily well, but only one that can be said to have done something best. These awards are a tribute to those games—the ones that, in a year of outstanding work, stood above the rest; the games that set the high mark for each category and put the challenge to developers in 2012: top that.
Time to take down Braniac: exclusive reveal of DC Universe Online’s next big update
That intergalactic jerk Braniac has been bottling the cities in DC Universe Online and stealing Earth’s citizens for too long. His attempted take-over for Earth has been the primary storyline in DC Universe Online for the past year, since the game’s launch in January 2011. A year and a few raids later, we’re finally going to be able to go toe-to-toe with Mr. smarty-pants when the next content pack takes us to Wonder Woman’s native island of Themyscira. We’ve got the exclusive scoop on what players will find there, and where DCUO is headed after its big, bad villain is down for the count.
