After twelve years Blizzard has released StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty.
No professional reviews at Metacritic yet. I think a week of playing would be needed for single player and a couple of weeks for multi-player before realistic reviews could be given.
A twelve year long wait will end on July 27 with the release of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. The sequel to possibly the best classic real time strategy (RTS) game was announced three years ago and has recently been in extensive public beta testing. It will be released for PC and Mac. The single player campaign is being released in three parts. Wings of Liberty will focus on the Terrans specifically, while the follow-ups Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void will focus on the Zerg and Protoss, respectively.
Sid Meier is preparing another assault on gamer’s productivity with the announcement that Firaxis Games is will be releasing Sid Meier's Civilization V for the PC this fall. New features include:
They will also be developing Sid Meier's Civilization Network, a Civ game for Facebook.
Ars Technica reports that Command and Conquer 4 will require an internet connection at all times as a result of its inclusion of a 'player progression' feature as described in this Gamespot interview. The developers state that this will not turn Command and Conquer 4 into a MMO but will share the always online requirement. Since this results in the very useful side-effect of making pirated copies useless, C&C 4 will not include any DRM.
Will this be the wave of the future, PC games requiring an always on internet connection even in single player mode? Or will single player mode be reduced to a tutorial for the real play in the multiple player game that requires a connection to the gaming server run by the publisher?
One set of guesses based on the splash screen of Blizzard’s web site has proved correct as Blizzard has officially announced the upcoming release of Diablo III at its Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in Paris, France. Matt Peckham in PC World has write-up of the announcement, some screen shots and a description of game play changes. Gamasutra has some quotes from lead designer Jay Wilson:
Wilson admitted: “We could just make Diablo 2 again – and the fans would probably be happy with that,” but went on to say that in order to be worthy of Blizzard and worthy of the fans, the game had to be a significant step forward.
One of the overarching features that Wilson sees as doing this is the game's generative systems. “Is there randomness?” he asked - “absolutely there is" - citing random monster encounters and items as being a key part of the new game.
Usability and accessibility are also important to the team. “Better gameplay, less carpal tunnel,” is one way that Wilson described it, and he went on to say that the game will be usable by the casual, while retaining depth: “We have a saying – if you can click a mouse, you can play Diablo.”
“That’s not to say you won’t break some mice playing Diablo 3 – you will, it’s a mouse killer,” he reassured the audience. In fact, the team at Blizzard “...view Diablo as an extremely fast-paced combat game.”
Sounds perfect, I'm willing to sacrifice a mouse for Diablo III.
A year and a half after it was rebranded as the Games for Windows: The Official Magazine, the former Computer Gaming World magazine is closing and its editorial staff moving to the 1up.com network to expand its PC gaming coverage. In his blog editor Jeff Green states he hopes that the move to a quicker online format will lead to improvements: “some ways, this change will both liberate and, uh, empower (sorry, I was trying to avoid that word) us to drill down into certain key aspects of PC gaming in the 21st century--modding, patches, MMO updates--that were always challenging for us in print.”
This shift may be for naught however. The magazine’s owner, Ziff Davis filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy last month listing assets of $313 million and liabilities of $500 million. Its main publication is PC Magazine with has been looking rather thin for years now.
Recent sales numbers from research firm NPD show just how big the gap between PC and console game sales is. The Tech Report notes that while Call of Duty 4 and Assassin’s Creed, both for the Xbox 360 sold 1.57 million and 980,000 copies respectively in November, the much hyped PC games Crysis by Crytek and Epic Games' Unreal Tournament 3 only sold 86,633 units and 33,995 units, respectively. Overall expected sales also pale in comparison:
Overall, NPD and the simExchange forecast sales of 716,000 copies of Crysis and 540,000 copies for Unreal Tournament 3. Those numbers pale in comparison to the expected sales of 2.71 million for Assassin's Creed and 4.57 million for Call of Duty 4.
Did Crytek hurt their sales by focusing so much on having superb graphics for powerful PC’s? Were potential buyers scared away from a game in which even CPUs released last year fall below the supported processor specification.
Moving to new manufacturing processes can really pay off for CPU vendors:
Earlier this week Intel lifted the non-disclosure agreement on the details (except for price) of its upcoming Core 2 Extreme QX9650 CPU, the first 45nm updated Core 2 architecture CPU. Reviewers are finding that in addition to a slight speed increase over existing quad-core Core 2 chips, the new chip is cooler, consumes less power and has more overclocking potential.
In the same week NVIDIA released its new GeForce 8800 GT GPU with a dramatically lower price and in most cases more speed than the year old 90nm based GeForce 8800 GTS. Priced at $200 to $250 the 65nm part out performs the more expensive $300 to $370 GeForce 8800 GTS cards because of a higher core and memory clock and more stream processors. Again the 45nm process leads to cooler chips than consume less power.
Finally it was revealed that Sony will be joining Microsoft in using 65nm CPUs in its game consoles when the 40 GB Playstation 3 due in the US in November uses a 65nm Cell chip. Like with the newer 65nm based Xbox 360 this will lower manufacturing costs and make the systems run cooler.
As part of Gamefest 2007, Microsoft’s Game Technology Conference in Seattle, the XNA Team announced the upcoming release of XNA Game Studio 2.0, the next release of its cross-platform game development toolkit. Major changes include support for all versions of Visual C# and Xbox LIVE support.
Microsoft also announced the winners of its Dream-Build-Play contest in which developers compete for a chance have a Xbox Live™ Arcade Publishing Contract, win cash and machines worth nearly $20,000. Two teams tied for first and Microsoft is also extending a publishing contract to the two teams that tied for second.
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Mark Fox's Weblog in the Gaming category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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