Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past year, you know EA has a
lot vested in Battlefield 3. EA has been very vocal in regards to the
what they want to do with the franchise: sock it to Call of Duty. So
now that Battlefield 3 is out, how does it stand up? Did DICE deliver
some bite to that EA brass bark? The answer, as you might expect, is
complicated.
It has been confirmed that at the upcoming VGA’s, Bioware, makers of Dragon Age and Mass Effect, will be showing off their next big game for the first time that surprisingly is an entirely new IP. It could very well be their first big title to release on the next wave of consoles, which would be very cool to see. Though I can only assume it will be a pre-rendered teaser of some kind.
We will also be seeing Alan Wake’s sequel in some form. And the third big game to be confirmed is none other than Metal Gear Rising, which Konami has been silent about since E3 2010, so this could finally be some proper gameplay and perhaps even a solid date announcement. Many speculated it might have been cancelled due to being quiet for so long, so it’s awesome to know this isn’t the case. I can’t wait to slice some watermelons.
Changes are coming to the PlayStation Network and they are set to ruin your life… if you’re a pirate. As of November 18th, downloaded game content will only be accessible to two activated systems for PlayStation Network users. However, this does not affect any games purchased before the 18th. In case you didn’t know, PlayStation Network has always allowed you access to your purchased digital game content on up to five systems.
This policy change affects both PS3 and PSP digital content. The good news is, Sony is adding some convenience along with the changes. Sony plans on providing a dedicated website for PSN users to activate or deactivate systems tied to their PSN account via the PC. This is great news, as previously, deactivating a system required a call into the Sony PlayStation customer service group. If you’d like to know more about deactivating/activating a system, you can go here. Thank you to the PlayStation blog for providing the details for this story.
PS3 exclusive Heavy Rain is getting a director’s cut re-release on November 8th. People who’ve yet to check out the highly successful murder mystery thriller can look forward to a bunch of nifty extras if they decide to pick it up next week including:
I’ve been curious to see what exactly Ridge Racer Unbounded would turn out to be for some time, and come March 6th, I and everyone else will find out.
For those of you who aren’t aware, this Ridge Racer is the first in the series not made by one of Namco’s teams and has been outsourced to American studio BugBear Entertainment, creators of the Flatoutseries. The big selling point behind Unbounded is the game’s track creator, which allows players to build entire cities’ worth of tracks and share them online. If done well enough, this sort of thing can result in near limitless replayability, though I don’t think it will be quite as insane as something like Trackmania. It’s still nice to see other devs take a crack at giving players these kinds of features in a racing title rather than just shipping a boxed product with a set number of tracks you’ll eventually grow really tired of.
In the spirit of Halloween, I’m going to air some of my wishes for a game that I really hope comes out at some point, and nothing says Halloween like zombies! I am talking about Dead Rising 3, or whatever they decide to call the next game in that series. My time with Off the Record a couple of weeks ago really allowed me to narrow down what exactly the next game simply needs to have in order for me to carry on buying them.
One of my favorite things to do in Dead Rising (as of 2) is build the combo weapons and hunt for new ones. This system is really fun, but can get annoyingly particular at times with what it actually lets you bind together with the magical powers of duck tape. A couple of examples that always bug me, you can attach hunting knives to boxing gloves, but not machetes or butcher knives. You can attach chainsaws to paddles, but not plain old power saws or just a bunch of swords for that matter. Any sense of realism has always been left at the door with Dead Rising, and I really wish they would ease up on how exact these combo weapons are when there are other combinations that would yield the exact same effect. If there were, say, at least two variants on some of the rarer combo weapons it would be a huge improvement. If this is asking too much, then there at least needs to be a way to store or repair your combo weapons for future use. Repairing would be simple enough: find a work bench, which fortunately there are tons of in Dead Rising, and pay money to fully repair it. Allowing the player to do this three times per creation would really encourage them to build the more (for lack of a better word) interesting combo weapons.
A posting put up earlier on a site called Creative Heads (a
site used for recruitment to specific jobs) could have lead to the
unintentional leak of a new God of War game. The posting was put up by Sony Computer Entertainment
America – Santa Monica, the company who made the first three GoW games, and the
posting lists the start date as “immediately”. Fingers point to the project being God of War IV, as the
first paragraph in the description says “Join the GOW Team!” and “Join us as we
embark on our next project.”
If the project is true, could this mark the fact that the
next generation of consoles is coming sooner rather than later? While three games is not necessarily
enough to make generalizations about how the GoW series works, God of War 2 did
come out on the PS2 after the PS3 had already been released. Because the job posting was set as
immediately, could they be looking for a 2013 release with the new PS3 coming
out sometime in the widely assumed 2014 range? It doesn’t necessarily say which specific platform the game
will be developed on, so could it also reveal that the company is making the
game on both systems simultaneously?
While the last statement is much more of a long shot, the fact remains
that there will be a new God of War game, and it will be coming to you much
sooner than you may have imagined.
