‘Titanfall 2’ will have a real single-player campaign
Respawn hasn’t said much about its Titanfall sequel beyond plans for multi-platform support, but some details are starting to trickle out… and they’ll be good news for fans of the robot-slash-infantry shooter. In a chat with Forbes, head writer Jesse Stern notes that Titanfall 2 will have a real, honest-to-goodness single-player campaign when it arrives either late this year or early next. That’s not completely shocking given that the team didn’t have the resources to flesh out its solo game the first time around. Still, it’s reassuring if you were frustrated by the original’s barely-there offline experience, which really just amounted to AI matches with a sliver of story in between.
Also, the interview is a friendly reminder that Titanfall won’t be limited to the video game world. Lionsgate quietly revealed in July that it’s working with Respawn on a TV series, and the show is still in development. However, it’s a daunting challenge — as Stern says, a sci-fi series involving giant robots could be “very expensive.” Assuming the project comes together, you could be waiting a while to see the IMC and Militia fight outside of a video game.
Via: VentureBeat
Source: Forbes
The HTC Vive isn’t limited to perfectly square rooms
I’m not gonna lie: I was jealous when I heard that my colleague Sean Buckley got to play 12 virtual reality games in Seattle last week. (He even moaned about it later.) I got to try “only” four on the Vive Pre at HTC’s Taipei headquarters. But that’s OK, because in the end I also had a blast — to the point that I ended up running around the room, high on adrenaline. Not even the zombies in Arizona Sunshine made me do this much exercise. As I sat down to recuperate afterwards, I caught up with one of the key execs on HTC’s VR team to learn about the Vive’s setup process and what other features are in the works.
Until now, little has been said about what the Vive’s setup process will be like when it goes on sale. (For the record, “Vive Pre” is still a pre-release name.) But in my interview, Associate Vice President Raymond Pao gave a little more insight into how this will work. The Vive system consists of five pieces: the wired headset, two wireless controllers and two “Lighthouse” base stations for laser tracking. Obviously, you’ll also need a Windows PC with a relatively powerful graphics card — preferably, at least an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 or an AMD Radeon R9 290, according to Pao, which is the same recommended requirement as for the Oculus Rift. For the diagonally placed Lighthouse hubs, you just need to secure them at somewhere just above the user’s height. Typically, they should be set at 2.2 meters in the US or 2 meters in Asia.
Pao added that the Vive works best in a 4.5 x 4.5–meter room, though a tiny 1.5 x 2–meter space is also fine, especially for titles like Elite Dangerous that require the gamer to be seated. Of course, not everyone’s room is a perfect square or rectangle; it might be slightly trapezoidal or there might be a table in the way. This is where Chaperone comes in.
Chaperone, which debuted last month at CES, is a safety mechanism that shows you a gray overlay of the physical world — be it a wall or an object — when you’re about to hit something, or whenever you double-tap the menu button on the controllers. To enable this feature, there’s a one-time calibration process: You need to go around the room and map the boundaries with one of the controllers. This is aided by a new front-facing pass-through camera introduced on the Vive Pre. Pao said his team is aiming for an overall installation time of somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes.
“We’ve been trying different [wireless] solutions, but none have truly fulfilled our needs thus far.”
For the sake of bandwidth and latency, the Vive Pre’s headset still needs to be wired to the PC. “Many wireless communication companies have approached us claiming they have the technology to solve these issues, so we’ve been trying different solutions, but none have truly fulfilled our needs thus far,” Pao said. However, as far as he knows, no one has yet tripped over the cable in the public demos, even after his team intentionally stopped holding the cables for the gamers.
“People are conscious [of the cable]. It could be to do with the games’ design, but it’s certainly not as hazardous as we thought it’d be.” That said, Pao also welcomes the idea of hanging the cable from above, but he’ll let users decide on this one.
As the owner of a cat and a dog, I’m actually more concerned about tripping over my pets, not the cable. Fortunately, Pao’s team has recently started working on a feature that will help detect incoming pets or other moving objects, but he doesn’t have much else to share at the moment. Though, come to think of it, it’s probably best if we just physically keep our pets out of the zone in the first place.
“We don’t want to make a compromise for the sake of compatibility with other platforms.”
During my visit, I got to try three cool new games by Futuretown, a Taiwan- and Canada-based studio that’s developing exclusively for the Vive. Johan Yang, the CEO and co-founder, made that decision when he met Peter Chou last year and experienced the Vive for the first time. Chou encouraged Yang to focus on VR, and ended up becoming his mentor as well as an investor in his company. That little detail aside, it’s still interesting that this team of 15 would risk limiting the size of their audience by making games for just one platform.
“We don’t want to make a compromise for the sake of compatibility with other platforms,” Yang said, “so our games are designed with the Vive’s every single feature in mind.”
Indeed, my colleagues and I were blown away with Futuretown’s games. We started off with an easy one called Cloudlands, which is simply a VR mini-golf game. (It was also shown at that Valve event last week.) We then switched to something much more intense: a first-person shooter called A-10, in which you stand on a platform floating above a planet (maybe Earth?) and you have to shoot down alien drones that are flying in from several wormholes. The game has the right balance between fun and intensity, as long as you remember to shake the controllers to reload your pistols once in a while.
What got me all sweaty was the third game, Jeeboman (pictured above), which lets you beam yourself between rooftops in a psychedelically colored city and shoot down enemy drones that come up to your face, with the added challenge of having to pick up batteries, ammo and health packs in order to survive. But even though I was running around in the room, the cable issue I mentioned earlier didn’t affect my gameplay that much.
As developers, Yang’s team have naturally tried their hands at other VR hardware, but they were left unimpressed, due largely to the lack of a room-scale experience and intuitive in-game interaction. For instance, it wasn’t until last June, when the Oculus Rift finally started supporting controller tracking, that the company even reached out to Yang’s team to discuss the possibility of porting their games to the Rift, which we now know won’t be happening anytime soon. The alternative solution would be to implement hand tracking using Leap Motion or similar offerings. But again, Yang wasn’t satisfied by their reliability or speed.
Similarly, the Samsung Gear VR — also powered by Oculus — lacks positional tracking, in the sense that there’s no tilt tracking, only rotational tracking, so your brain knows immediately that what you see isn’t real. For Yang, that’s a deal breaker, especially when he’s aiming for about 30 minutes per session in his own games.
VR devices will eventually replace our laptops.
Looking beyond gaming, Yang believes VR devices will get so compact that they’ll become standalone computers, to the point that they’ll eventually replace our laptops and thus let us set up a virtual workspace wherever we go. You won’t need to pay a premium for a large monitor, because in the virtual world your screen can be as large as you want it to be, or you can even have multiple screens. But of course, we’re still years away from that vision.
“I think the VR market is still at the ‘DynaTAC‘ stage right now, just like how it was a niche market at the beginning and only the bosses would use one,” Yang added. “People would ask, ‘Who needs a mobile phone? I can just go home and make phone calls.’ But look at what happened many years later.”
Photos and video by Andy Yang and Ross Wang of Engadget Chinese.
The fabulous life of a professional ‘Street Fighter’ player
Darryl Lewis stows his luggage in the plane’s overhead bin and settles into his seat, ready for another takeoff, another trip for work. He’s seated next to an older man who’s flying with his family. Eventually, the man turns to Lewis and asks him a standard question from the handbook of airplane small talk:
“What are you traveling for?”
Lewis pauses. He’s a professional Ultra Street Fighter 4 player known as “Snake Eyez,” and he’s on his way to a competition where he could win thousands of dollars for playing a video game better than anyone else in the room. Will this guy get it? Does he even know what video games are or how big the industry is? Has he heard of eSports? Will he laugh? Oh, well. There’s only one way to find out.
“I’m going to a video game tournament,” Lewis says.
The man smiles. “Ah! Vidyagames.” It’s clear that he has no idea what Lewis is talking about, but at least he isn’t laughing.
This is a fairly standard experience for Lewis, especially since the life of a professional, high-profile video game player involves a fair amount of traveling, whether for practice, tournaments or promotional events. Lewis has honed his response over the years and usually, he simply tells strangers that he’s “going to a convention.” It sounds respectable, and it’s not too far from the truth.
However, the truth is much more exciting: Lewis is a rock star in the world of competitive fighting games. He’s one of the top professional Ultra Street Fighter 4 players in the world, securing numerous championship titles since 2010 and recently locking down a sponsorship from Red Bull that includes a video series all about his life as a pro. He’s widely regarded as the best Zangief player on the planet, able to maneuver the game’s hulking, tank-like character in strategic and deadly ways.
“I like his style,” Lewis says. “I like the way he walks. The main thing I like about him, though, is that a lot of players are scared as hell of him.”
Lewis is 27 and has been competitive his entire life. He grew up playing video games and basketball, but was a relative latecomer to professional gaming. In high school, his friends — some of whom are nearly pro themselves — loved going to arcades to play Street Fighter 2, but Lewis didn’t care for the crowds.
“I was always a homebody,” he says. “I waited for my friends to come over to my house and play against me. I always wanted to see who could come to my house and give me a challenge.”
Lewis entered the professional gaming scene around 2006, though it wasn’t with Street Fighter. His first competition was a team-based Halo 2 tournament, and it effectively changed his life. Suddenly, he realized there was a community of other competitive video game players out in the wild. He wasn’t alone.
“I had no idea that an environment like that existed,” Lewis says. “When I first saw it, I was like, ‘Wow, it’s a bunch of people like me.”
Lewis dropped out of the Halo 2 scene after that tournament, partially because he didn’t enjoy playing with a team. That’s his competitive side taking over; he doesn’t want to just be the best, he wants to prove his skill, again and again, preferably on a big stage bathed in lights. It’s difficult to achieve that level of personal fulfillment within a squad of other players. So he turned to Street Fighter, a one-on-one fighting-game franchise.
Lewis showed up at the Evolution Championship Series in 2010 as a newcomer — and he won. Playing under the name “Snake Eyez,” he came in first place in the Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix championship, shocking many fighting-game fans and igniting his own career.
More importantly, the win convinced his mom that professional gaming was a valid endeavor.
“It wasn’t until I went to Evo and won that she was like, ‘OK. I can see you going somewhere with this,’” Lewis says. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is my passion, this is what I want to do, and there’s actually a big scene for this.’ There’s actually a professional scene for this kind of thing, which is very hard for people who don’t really know about video games to acknowledge.”
Today, Lewis’ mom is his biggest fan, attending tournaments and watching him play on live streams. “She loves it now,” he says.
And she’s not alone. eSports are the entertainment industry’s latest hotness. ESPN debuted a dedicated eSports section in January; television network CW plans to broadcast a professional Mortal Kombat X tournament this month; both Activision and EA have launched their own eSports businesses; and Amazon paid nearly $1 billion in 2014 for Twitch, a major player in live-streaming eSports.
For Lewis, professional gaming is a satisfying career that allows him to travel the globe, meet gaming superstars and satiate his competitive spirit. He played Street Fighter with series producer Yoshinori Ono in San Francisco about a month ago, and the two talked about the franchise’s origins and its future with Street Fighter 5. Red Bull sent Lewis to Japan for three weeks last year to train with the world’s best players and film part of his documentary series, Cultivation: House of Snake Eyez.
“I came back out here and everyone played me and they were just like, ‘Man, what the hell? How did you get this good?’” Lewis says.
The professional Street Fighter world is currently preparing for the release of Street Fighter 5 on February 16th. Lewis has been playing the beta and he’s lucky; his favorite character, Zangief, is in the new game, while other characters have been completely removed. Other pros will have to learn brand-new moves before the 2016 tournaments kick off. “I’ll probably have a huge advantage in that field,” Lewis says.
But, there’s still plenty for him to do: Lewis practices as much as he can, plus he streams and manages his social media presence nearly every day.
“I have to have a presence out there,” he says. “I can’t just play and be good at the game. That actually takes up more time than playing sometimes.”
Lewis makes most of his money from sponsorships and tournaments, but he isn’t kidding about the importance of live-streaming to a professional player, or even a casually competitive one. He knows a few players who could go pro, but they choose to make a living live-streaming instead. Their rationale? They can make more money streaming than winning first place at some tournaments.
For reference, Evo paid out roughly $33,000 to the winner of the Ultra Street Fighter 4 tournament in 2015, while the Capcom Cup 2016 has a prize pool of $500,000. These two are major competitions, but we’re not talking about chump change here.
Indeed, competition is where Lewis shines. It’s what he works for; it’s why he spends hours practicing with Zangief and other characters. He craves validation. Tournaments are a chance for him to test out the strategies he’s perfected at home: backing other players into a corner so they overcompensate and hand Lewis an opening for a big move, or letting his foes come to him, giving them false confidence and setting them up for a surprise grab.
Playing Street Fighter professionally takes strategy, quick reflexes and poise under pressure. The fact that he has to wrangle all of these things while performing for millions of people doesn’t faze Lewis. When the game starts, the rest of his world fades away.
“I definitely start to think faster,” Lewis says. “My mind starts racing. Everything around me doesn’t exist anymore. A lot of players, they get nervous because they’re on stage, but for me, I’m tuned in directly to the game. My focus is 100 percent there.”
That might be a big part of Lewis’ secret to success. After all the hours of training, traveling and tournaments, he still gets lost in the game. He still has fun playing Street Fighter.
“It’s amazing,” he says. “I get to stream whenever I want, I get to play whatever games I want. I’m definitely living the dream. It doesn’t feel real, but it is.”
‘Godus Wars’ developer kills microtransactions after outcry
Last week Peter Molyneux had to contend with a hacked Twitter account, but this week he’s dealing with disgruntled gamers. His 22cans studio just released a Steam Early Access version of Godus Wars, the much-anticipated, more fighty sequel to Godus. However, buyers weren’t happy to discover that the title, which is free to buyers of the original Godus and $14.99 for everyone else, included a $5 microtransaction package. As Steam user Mucker_2202 said, “to release this into early access and ask for any kind of payment should be a crime.”
Similar comments resulted in a “mostly negative” rating for the still-unfinished game, so 22cans decided to include the locked content for free. “It’s been brought to our attention that the extra content being a premium add-on really isn’t a popular choice,” said 22cans CEO Simon Phillips on Steam. “Therefore, based on your feedback, the extra content will be available to all free-of-charge.” That should quell the early access complaints, but based on other comments, there are still quite a few bugs to work out. That means even he wanted to, Molyneux will have to stay unretired.
Via: Kotaku
Source: 22cans (Steam)
Destiny’s new ‘Damage Referee’ will punish laggy players
Destiny is in a state of limbo right now as Bungie struggles with the pressures of developing a sequel while keeping existing gamers entertained. Many Year One players have downed tools altogether, but for those who have stuck around and kept Crucible arenas well populated, things have slowly started to improve. With its February update, Bungie is using that momentum to further balance online skirmishes with its new “Damage Referee.” It’s a new system designed shift power to Guardians with reliable connections and punish those who don’t.
Don’t worry, your PvP battles won’t soon be adjudicated by a virtual official in a black and white striped shirt. Instead, Bungie will implement new checks that can identify when a player is manipulating their connection to juice their kill stats or is unfairly profiting from poor connectivity. Guardians with a solid ping may notice that their weapons feel more reliable, kills are recognized quicker and slower players become less frustrating to fight.
Gamers with slower connections, on the other hand, may lose duels more often, even if they feel they shot first or it looked like they evaded a firestorm just in time. The colored connection indicators will still show the connection statuses of fireteam members, but the Damage Referee will now silently shift the balance of play in the favor of those with green bars.
The February update will also include another major change: the removal of Special ammo from some game types. In a bid to reduce instances where an opponent can sprint to a clearing and headshot a freshly spawned Guardian, Bungie will require players in all 3v3 playlists to pick up ammo from a Special crate before unleashing hell with their sniper rifle or shotgun.
When the update drops on February 9th, players will gain access to the Crimson Days event. Like the Festival of the Lost, this Valentine’s Day instance will introduce new game modes as well as new emblems, shaders and emotes for Guardians to equip. That might not be enough for some gamers, who prefer big DLC updates, but it may keep those in for the long haul happy until the next big instalment rolls out to consoles.
Source: Bungie
Warner Bros. cancels ‘Batman: Arkham Knight’ for Mac and Linux
Batman: Arkham Knight was one of the better big-budget games of last year — but its launch on the PC was an unmitigated disaster. Warner Bros. had to pull the game from Steam and retailers and offer refunds to buyers because it was so hopelessly broken at launch, and even when the game came back it still had some problems. That checkered past makes today’s news not entirely shocking: Warner Bros. has decided to cancel Arkham Knight for Mac and Linux gamers.
Those who pre-ordered the game will of course receive refunds, but it’s just another example of how badly the game’s computer launch has been handled. It’s also further evidence of how little attention Warner Bros. typically pays to the PC platform — just look at how it handled Mortal Kombat X. If you haven’t played the game yet and were still hoping to, it sounds like your best bet will be to try it on a console, where the game has performed pretty well.
Via: Gamespot
Source: Steam
Create VR experiences within VR itself using Unreal Engine
Epic Games has been teasing “the future of VR development” recently, and the team is finally ready to tell everyone what that is: Creating virtual reality content within virtual reality itself, using the full version of its Unreal Engine 4. Epic cofounder Tim Sweeney says that while the company’s been supporting the likes of the Oculus Rift from the outset, the irony is that, up to this point, the experiences we’ve seen so far have been developed using the same tools as traditional video games. “Now you can go into VR, have the entire Unreal editor functioning and do it live,” he says. “It almost gives you god-like powers to manipulate the world.”
So rather than using the same 2D tools (a keyboard, mouse and computer monitor) employed in traditional game development, people making experiences for VR in Unreal can now use a head-mounted display and motion controllers to manipulate objects in a 3D space. “Your brain already knows how to do this stuff because we all have an infinite amount of experience picking up and moving 3D objects,” Sweeney says. “The motions you’d do in the real world, you’d do in the editor and in the way you’d expect to; intuitively.”
Imagine walking around an environment you’re creating in real time, like a carpenter surveying his or her progress while building a house. Looking around, you notice that the pillar you dropped in place earlier is unexpectedly blocking some of the view through a window you just added. Now there isn’t a clear line of sight to the snowcapped mountain on the horizon. Within the VR update for Unreal Engine 4, you can pick the pillar up with your hands and adjust its placement until it’s right.
“You get far higher-quality content coming out of it because people are able to engage their brains in a much more natural way,” Sweeney adds.
This all feeds into Epic’s mission to demolish the barriers of entry to its nearly ubiquitous Unreal Engine (like making it free to use), and could further empower VR content creators of any ilk. Considering that so much of what’s available to “play” with today in the medium was made by the community itself and not professional developers, that’s a pretty big deal.
Sweeney likens it to Minecraft. He says the building tools in Mojang’s blocky game are “primitive” compared to a traditional game engine, but the game has introduced some 50 million people to creating their own 3D worlds. “I’d say the top half, or a quarter of [Minecraft players] would, in time, migrate to building 3D worlds using more advanced tools,” he says. “[Unreal Engine in VR] creates a much more intuitive path away from the game experiences into being a content creator yourself.”
See the new tricks in ‘Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD’
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD lands on the Wii U on March 4th, complete with a lineup of new gameplay treats. The first is a new item, the Ghost Lantern, which lights up when it’s near an evil spirit known as a Poe. The Ghost Lantern should make the game’s Poe soul-seeking quest much easier, Nintendo says in a press release. This is different than the standard Lantern from the original Twilight Princess, which lights the way and wards off nasty beasties throughout the game.
Twilight Princess HD also features Hero Mode, a new difficulty setting that makes Link take double the damage, removes all heart drops and changes how Rupees operate — Link’s wallet will hold more currency, but if he hits his limit and finds more Rupees in a treasure chest, the gems won’t return to that chest any longer. The Wii U Gamepad displays the map and inventory.
The Wolf Link amiibo opens up the Cave of Shadows challenge arena, as we learned in January, and some of the data stored in that figurine will transfer over to the new Legend of Zelda Wii U game set to drop this year.
The new ‘Doom’ drops on May 13th
The brand-new Doom hits Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC on Friday, May 13th, Bethesda and id Software announced in a trailer today. About this trailer — we’ve embedded it below, but make sure to watch it when you’re in the mood for some serious gore. This is Doom, after all.
Doom is up for pre-order right now, in a $60 Standard Edition and a $120 Collector’s Edition. The standard version includes the full game (solo campaign and multiplayer modes) and its new Snapmap level-editing system. The Collector’s Edition comes with all of that, plus a 12-inch, LED-lit statue of a Revenant demon.
Get a taste of Doom‘s Martian-demon mayhem in the campaign trailer below.
Pre-order #DOOM Collector’s Edition – available in limited quantities https://t.co/PcAQKb9kbn #FightLikeHell pic.twitter.com/2hl6Fuq9qx
— DOOM (@DOOM) February 4, 2016
I’m too out of shape for virtual reality
My knees and thighs ached. If my left shoulder moved more than half a foot out of its neutral position, it lit on fire. Breathing deeply made my back seize with stabbing waves of pain. My pride was hurt most of all. My physical ailments weren’t the result of visiting the gym or training for a marathon — they were the fallout of one afternoon of playing full-body virtual reality video games. Holy crap, am I out of shape.
I’ve always known that my sedentary lifestyle was killing me, but I never thought it would keep me from playing video games. Valve’s SteamVR Developer Showcase proved otherwise, albeit unintentionally. Virtual reality is wholly unlike the so-called “active” games of the last decade.
In Wii Sports, you lazily waggle and swing a remote. With Kinect, you sloppily wave and “dance” to match an on-screen beat. In virtual reality, you just move. If it’s an action game, you instinctively dodge a barrage of deadly lasers. You kneel down to hide behind a crate, only to leap up in a squat-jump to shoot at an enemy behind cover. You’re not thinking about it, you’re just doing what you have to in order to win. Twenty minutes later, and you’ve put yourself through an intense cardio workout.
That scenario sounds hypothetical, but it isn’t — that’s exactly what happened to me last week playing demos for Hover Junkers, Space Pirate Trainer and AudioShield. Although I only spent 15 minutes with each of these games, all of them tricked me into being far more active than I planned. That, I realized, was what made being active in VR so different than playing contemporary motion-controlled games: I was exercising by accident.
Audioshield, for instance, had me blocking rapid-fire abstract missiles to the beat of Metallica’s “No Leaf Clover,” effectively putting me through short bursts of fast-paced shadow boxing. Hover Junkers forced me to duck behind virtual cover to avoid enemy fire in what amounted to a ten-minute squat routine. At the time, I just thought I was playing a game, but each experience left me gasping for breath. I shamefully realized the truth: I’m too out of shape to play some of the best VR games coming to first-generation headsets. That won’t do.
For the first time in my life, video games are about to enact a positive change on my lifestyle. If I want to experience fast-paced action in standing, full-body VR of the kind I saw at Valve’s SteamVR showcase, I’m going to need to get into better shape. As an inherently lazy man, I’m not happy about that — but it’s a reality I’m going to have to accept. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go for a run. Because I want to play video games later. Man, the future is weird.
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