Darksiders 2 will be an action RPG

The first Darksiders was a straight up action adventure game that many people compared to The Legend of Zelda if it were in a post apocalyptic setting. Vigil Games have made drastic changes to the formula from the first game, including many RPG elements to it making more in the vein of Diablo 3.

The sequel will feature loot, trading, side-quests and other RPG elements making it a totally different experience compared to the first game. Vigil marketing boss Jay Fitzloff said, “This is something we wanted to have in the first Darksiders, but there’s a lot more that goes into the making a game the first time; the engine-building, feeling stuff out, and so on. Stuff just got left on the cutting room floor,”

“We were making a sequel, so the easiest thing would have been to put War in the second game. The same moves, the same environments. Bigger. Maybe we’re masochists, but that’s just boring. We wanted to do something different. For the sequel we wanted to do a new horseman, to move it forward.” he continued.

“I think everyone had grandiose goals, but things start snapping up. You get a hard release date, and you start looking at what you have to accomplish. What can we do and what can’t we do? Obviously, the loot element and its balancing is huge. For the first game we couldn’t do it. But when it came to Darksiders II, what’s the one thing we want to add in?”

Check out the new gameplay video courtesy of VG247.

Article source: http://www.thebitbag.com/2012/05/21/darksiders-2-will-have-more-in-common-with-diablo-3-than-zelda/

“Mass Effect 3.” (Supplied)

Gaming has taken a lot of cues from Hollywood: professional voice actors, cinematic animation and talented script-writers, to name a few. But modern games are doing one thing Hollywood hasn’t dared: Bring audiences into the studio.

In the nascent days of video games (think Pong and Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past), games were developed by designers and engineers hidden away from the public.

Not so anymore. Jean-Paul Amore is the program coordinator for the game development and design program at George Brown College in Toronto. He said large studios producing big titles like Mass Effect and Diablo can have up to 300 people working, and so initial reviews and testing are mostly done internally. But “toward the mid-stage of development, it’s released to public to test.”

And that’s where things get interesting.

A few weeks before Diablo III was released, Blizzard Entertainment invited the public to stress-test the servers. The largely online game was a hotly anticipated title, so they needed to be sure their servers could handle millions of players at once. Players jumped at the opportunity.

These early testers also give the company an idea of how people play the game, where they stumble, what they spend more time on and what they complain about. It can significantly affect final tweaks to the product, and those polishes can make a world of difference.

When studios don’t take this process seriously, Mass Effect 3 happens.

Weeks before the release of the highly anticipated conclusion to one of the largest video game franchises of the past year, Bioware hosted a poll on its site to ask testers what they thought of the game. More than 90% disapproved of the ending.

But when the game was released, ending unchanged, the reaction was disastrous. The series had focused on decision-based gameplay, so when players decided to pursue one course of action over another, that changed the course of the story. But the finale negated all of those decisions and, combined with some lacklustre writing, fan outrage was enormous.

A Hitler reaction video, a meme generator and a bombarded Twitter feed later, the co-founder of Bioware had to stand up and take the heat.

“It’s incredibly painful to receive feedback from our core fans that the game’s endings were not up to their expectations,” he wrote. “I believe passionately that games are an art form, and that the power of our medium flows from our audience, who are deeply involved in how the story unfolds, and who have the uncontested right to provide constructive criticism.”

The studio is still releasing updates, new downloads and has promised an extended cut of the ending to help solve the problem. But big studios are a different beast than, say, small iPhone games which have a lot more flexibility.

Glen Watkinson, who developed the game Crack UP currently available for download, says iterative releases can be enormously useful for a small company. Instead of creating an entirely new product, they just have to push a new “version” to smartphones. New tools! New maps! Extra abilities! New versions can contain almost any tweaks the developer could imagine, even changing the story, and user feedback and reactions are front and centre in those decisions.

“Marketing is a tricky issue. Releasing an Easter-themed game on Easter is one way of dealing with it,” he said, noting how many “seasons” of Angry Birds are now available as entirely separate titles, let alone how many versions of each have been released.

Video games are becoming a bigger industry than Hollywood, and with audiences so deeply involved in their production and consumption it’s easy to see why. The only real question is when Hollywood will start to take cues from games.

Article source: http://www.lfpress.com/tech/games/2012/05/18/19776946.html

Gaming has taken a lot of cues from Hollywood: professional voice actors, cinematic animation and talented script-writers, to name a few. But modern games are doing one thing Hollywood hasn’t dared: Bring audiences into the studio.

In the nascent days of video games (think Pong and Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past), games were developed by designers and engineers hidden away from the public.

Not so anymore. Jean-Paul Amore is the program coordinator for the game development and design program at George Brown College in Toronto. He said large studios producing big titles like Mass Effect and Diablo can have up to 300 people working, and so initial reviews and testing are mostly done internally. But “toward the mid-stage of development, it’s released to public to test.”

And that’s where things get interesting.

A few weeks before Diablo III was released, Blizzard Entertainment invited the public to stress-test the servers. The largely online game was a hotly anticipated title, so they needed to be sure their servers could handle millions of players at once. Players jumped at the opportunity.

These early testers also give the company an idea of how people play the game, where they stumble, what they spend more time on and what they complain about. It can significantly affect final tweaks to the product, and those polishes can make a world of difference.

When studios don’t take this process seriously, Mass Effect 3 happens.

Weeks before the release of the highly anticipated conclusion to one of the largest video game franchises of the past year, Bioware hosted a poll on its site to ask testers what they thought of the game. More than 90% disapproved of the ending.

But when the game was released, ending unchanged, the reaction was disastrous. The series had focused on decision-based gameplay, so when players decided to pursue one course of action over another, that changed the course of the story. But the finale negated all of those decisions and, combined with some lacklustre writing, fan outrage was enormous.

A Hitler reaction video, a meme generator and a bombarded Twitter feed later, the co-founder of Bioware had to stand up and take the heat.

“It’s incredibly painful to receive feedback from our core fans that the game’s endings were not up to their expectations,” he wrote. “I believe passionately that games are an art form, and that the power of our medium flows from our audience, who are deeply involved in how the story unfolds, and who have the uncontested right to provide constructive criticism.”

The studio is still releasing updates, new downloads and has promised an extended cut of the ending to help solve the problem. But big studios are a different beast than, say, small iPhone games which have a lot more flexibility.

Glen Watkinson, who developed the game Crack UP currently available for download, says iterative releases can be enormously useful for a small company. Instead of creating an entirely new product, they just have to push a new “version” to smartphones. New tools! New maps! Extra abilities! New versions can contain almost any tweaks the developer could imagine, even changing the story, and user feedback and reactions are front and centre in those decisions.

“Marketing is a tricky issue. Releasing an Easter-themed game on Easter is one way of dealing with it,” he said, noting how many “seasons” of Angry Birds are now available as entirely separate titles, let alone how many versions of each have been released.

Video games are becoming a bigger industry than Hollywood, and with audiences so deeply involved in their production and consumption it’s easy to see why. The only real question is when Hollywood will start to take cues from games.

Article source: http://www.torontosun.com/2012/05/18/power-of-the-gamer

Last weekend my wife and I left our kids at their grandparents’ and headed down to the Southeast’s true cultural hub, Atlanta, Georgia, for a night on the town. Saturday evening the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre played host to a sold out performance of The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses, the latest marriage of highbrow art and tech-savvy pop culture from Jason Michael Paul Productions.

The night was hosted by producer Jeron Moore, whose reverence for the iconic compositions of Koji Kondo and simple, personal delivery ably complimented an eclectic crowd composed of twenty-something cosplayers, jeans-clad parents and their brood and formally attired music fans. Conductor Susie Seiter -– a name many will likely recognize from her work on the 25th Anniversary CD -– led a choir and orchestra composed of regional musicians in an overture to set the mood as in-game clips from across the breadth of the series’ history played on a monitor above the stage.

After a brief interlude wherein Moore explained the significance of the symphony’s title, a reference to the three Golden Goddesses of Zelda lore, the music and accompanying visuals focused on the origin and mythology of Hyrule. From there, and most certainly unsurprisingly, the first movement delved further into fan-favorite Ocarina of Time. The musical swell as a 64-bit Link rode Epona across the fields of Hyrule was the first of many truly breathtaking moments of the night’s performance.

Image: Z.

The symphony’s second moment, a Wind Waker suite, was a personal highlight from a game that’s cell-shaded style originally turned off many Zeldapurists. Its lushly layered strings and punctuating brass hits not only evoked the strong classical elements of the soundtrack, but also channeled every bit of the whimsy of its folksier, sea shanty leanings.

After a brief intermission we were refreshed by “The Great Fairy’s Fountain Theme” before proceeding into the darker sounds of the Twilight Princess movement. With a heavy focus on the interplay of darkness and light, both in the musical selection and the video, and a performance that highlighted theretofore-unnoticed (at least by me) hints of Mussorgsky’s “A Night on Bald Mountain,” it surely marked the symphony’s more intense moments.

This contrasted nicely against the fourth and final movement, a florid reinterpretation of selections from 16-bit classic A Link to the Past. This old school goodness extended into the first encore, which gave some love to one of the series’ portable iterations, Link’s Awakening. After thunderous applause a thankful conductor relented and presented a second encore, returning again to Ocarina of Time‘s “Gerudo Valley.” After another round of applause Moore and Seiter agreed to one more encore, and chose to close on a selection that fans had been begging for, Majora’s Mask.

While not every major title in the Legend of Zelda franchise was afforded its own movement, this performance of Symphony of the Goddesses did an excellent job in highlighting pivotal musical moments from throughout the series. These familiar instrumental soundscapes are sure to bring back memories of your 8-bit youth or spur you to revisit your favorite moments in more contemporary fare like Skyward Sword, but even those whose experience with Zelda games is minimal — my wife has, by her own admission, only played The Adventure of Link –- can’t help but get caught up in the power of these anthemic selections.

This was certainly no typical night at the symphony, what with its scores of casually attired listeners and musical subject matter. And similarly there was an obvious lack of the classical reservation one might expect; folks clapped and hollered and, as so often we do in the Deep South, wooh-ed at the slightest provocation, but, in a symphony that explored such comical tropes as Cucco attacks and falling down holes, it did little to dull an amazing musical experience. In fact, save the dreadful live camerawork that was interspersed amid the backing video clips -– which managed to capture an awful lot of spit valve-cleaning and brow-wiping –- The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses was an utterly flawless presentation.

Article source: http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/05/symphony-of-the-goddesses/

Hey guys! In this video I’m talking about a concept that I don’t feel like people talk about much… and that’s having a sense of exploration and almost… “treasure hunting” in a Zelda game. I think that a lot of Zelda games have an increased focus on finding chests, OR just finding the next dungeon, and aside from Twilight Princess and perhaps to a lesser degree The Minish Cap and The Wind Waker, modern Zelda games have less of this. You can watch the video here or view the embed after the jump.

I think this aspect of the series is very cool and I really want to see some more of it. Watch the video if you want full details, but I discuss how it was present in the original game but not as much in most of the 3D Zeldas… and for once I have a video without a single bad thing to say about Twilight Princess!

So what do you guys think? Am I nuts or is this something you’ve noticed too? Do you think this is an important aspect of the series or not? Tell me in the comments!

~~~Recent Content Updates~~~

• Skyward Sword Goddess Cubes
• Skyward Sword Gratitude Crystals
• Skyward Sword Pieces of Heart
• Skyward Sword Video Walkthrough
• Skyward Sword Walkthrough
• The Minish Cap Walkthrough
• Deku Baba

• first and i thought most of the exploration and finding some things you needed was mostly fun

• I love to explore and I would like a Zelda-game were you had to explore a little more to find extra things and small side-quests etc.

• I feel that some of the older exploration elements have been lost to a point. I find that Skyward sword brought some of this back to a point because you slowly got ways to explore new places and it always felt like more was being opened up. Exploration felt way more important in SS as apposed to the maps and whatnot from WW or the “Here’s the dungeon. Get to it, Link!” from the oldest of our 3D zelda brethren.

• Yeah I definitely agree that Skyward Sword is on the right track. If they would just open it up more it would pretty much have an ideal world and ideal exploration elements.

• Axle. Stop whatever you’re doing and work on a follow up video to this or else.

• …What kind of follow-up do you want me to do?

• I want a game with a world so huge it puts Skyrim to shame. I don’t care how Nintendo does it. I just want it done.
  And I want to have the main story take up about 1/3 of this land. And I want the other 2/3 to be completely optional exploration.

• Finally I know that more people agree with me.

• i wand more exploration. this is something I loved about the earlier games, and wind waker. I point out windwaker because the whole game was based around exploration, with sailing, and treasure charts, and the little weird fish guy that mapped out the islands for you. I feel like TP and SS have a lot of filler area, places that just fill space between two key points. Obviously wind waker was about 80% filler because the sea was too damn big, but this just made the islands that much more rich and each one had a side use and compelled you to exlpore and figure out what the heck you can do there. I want a game where most of the land has a purpose other than a means to an end. I hate comparing the elder scrolls to zelda because they are completely different styles of game. but, what is amazing about it is that every little area has something to offer, and some lore behind it that gives it depth and character. I feel the game in zelda that came closest to matching this was Majoras Mask. every area had unique characters with there own backstory and side “quest”. even termina field which is a transitional area has moments of this with the carving made by the skull kid near the swamp, or the dancer that you free near snowhead. This was lacking in TP, where hyrule field was massive and sectional but served almost no purpose other than to find those statue things and a few heart pieces. SS was even worse, because the sky was vacant other than the pumpkin thing a three mini games. and each surface area had a mini game, but none of the environments felt organic, they seemed to serve the purpose of a puzzle to get to the next point in the game (except lanyru, see axles video about lanyru).

• I actually thought that the game’s best overworld section was the first visit to Faron Woods, not Lanayru Desert (although that was definitely excellent because of the tone). In Faron Woods you were thrust into the confusing forest area and had to locate all the Kikwi, and I thought that part was nice and open.

• There were three things that I really connected with. I loved the lantern caverns in Twilight Princess and would absolutely love it if Nintendo puts these in future games. I also love the mundane items like lamps and resource management. The fact that dungeons are obviously placed in most Zelda games drives me crazy. I don’t like how we are now at a point in which pretty much every dungeon is found at the end of a path.
  I think the one thing I’d most like the series to do is try an overworld like A Link to the Past or other games in 3d in which the entire overworld is one large landmass in which everything’s connected and different geographical places aren’t separated so neatly. I think this would help the exploration of the games. Also I think the recent tradition of unlocking areas found in the DS Zeldas and Skyward Sword is very contrary to the spirit of the original game and hurts exploration.
  I would love it if Zelda games took little gameplay pieces back from the original game like resource management and exploration. One thing about Zelda 1 I really like is how pretty much every single thing you pick up is useful, and the resource management in that game is terrific. For instance rupees constantly matter, and the game only lets you have one potion at a time.

• Yeah I agree. Though I think Skyward Sword was excellent at almost all of this except for its linearity and how closed-off things were; it had resource management again, and the areas had tons going on within them, just like A Link to the Past did. It just needed to open up and stop forcing you down a path.

• That had to be the most boring video Axle ever posted.

  I did, however, agree with the caves in Twilight Princess adding an extra layer of excitement and exploration. More so than any installment before or since, I felt that twilight Princess had a plethora of quasi dungeons to enhance the experience.

  No. Nothing like “X marks the spot” for finding land treasures. Digging up stuff was featured in the DS games and was very mundane and tedious.

• Bravo, this is the first time I’ve agreed wholeheartedly with one of your videos. Exploration is not just an important aspect in Zelda, it’s arguably one of the most pivotal and essential ones. The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess pulled it off quite remarkably, whereas Skyward Sword’s overworld design seemed to almost actively discourage it in contrast. This needs to be focused on heavily in the next Zelda if Nintendo wants to remain true to the spirit of the franchise.

• you have some amazing points! dungeons should be hidden, but not completely invisible, and resource management would make games extra challenging and fun.
  also, in WW i found treasure charts completely optional, so that could have been fixed, though charts for story progression and other areas/items/treasures would be cool
  i could right a whole essay on ideas i have thanks to your inspirational video.

• I have actually considered the treasure hunting aspect in games before. I find the hunts fun because you have this objective on the side and it’s out of the way but often times can lead to something well worth the time you put in.

  Ten bombs Axle. Ten bombs in MC. But Minish Cap is probably one of my favorite games because of the treasure hunting. You had to go out of your way to find things like Kinstone pieces, then hunt down people to fuse with, then go to the place where, as you say, “X marks the spot”. Not only that but it has some rather useful items for treasure hunting. Specifically the Magic Boomerang sequence which leads to an item that I found useful in multiple places, specifically in the Palace of Winds (dungeon 5). Other items useful to treasure hunting were the Lantern which was week in terms of its uses but at the same time strong for its uses. You had to bypass those blocks of ice that held frozen treasure chests in the Temple of Droplets. Once you got the Lantern you could go back and get the items.The Mole Mitts were able get you to those random wall thingies in the digging caves. Once you got to those you could fuse Kinstones (provided you had the right one) and send another Goron into the cave to help out his brethren. Once you had them all in you could another bottle and then activate your ability to get more treasure by waking the giant goron. Overall I think that Minish Cap has some of the best treasure hunting, even more so than Twilight Princess.

  Now on the subject of Twilight Princess I still do think that treasure hunting was also quite good. The fact that you had to store oil for your lantern and that it didn’t rely on magic like other games (I’m talking to you A Link to the Past!) made for some strategic gameplay. You needed to decide how many bottles for oil and how many for health items before going into the lantern caverns. And health became pretty necessary in those caves. Granted not as necessary as the 50 level challenge out in Gerudo Desert but, but pretty damn necessary. Also the Dungeons weren’t necessarily hidden they were fairly well disguised.

  To me it seems that the problem you have with dungeons not being hidden is more to the fact that the games these days have begun to lead us to the dungeons just like a funnel. I blame it more on the fact that designers realize that they won’t get as many fans unless they do this because a lot of gamers who are picking up a Legend of Zelda game for their first time would be scared s***less if they were forced into playing the very first game. Why? Because games have become like this these days. I’d like to site this video as a source http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FpigqfcvlM. He explains exactly the reasons I just stated.

  So that’s pretty much my overall stand here. And Axle, don’t worry, I liked this video a lot!

Article source: http://www.zeldadungeon.net/2012/05/treasure-hunting-and-exploring-in-zelda-also-boring-gear/