Wander through ‘Dear Esther’ on PS4 and Xbox One next month

Before Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, indie developer The Chinese Room (TCR) wowed people with Dear Esther. The first-person narrative started as a mod for Half-life 2 in 2008 before the team released it as a standalone game in 2012. At that point, the game sold 16,000 copies on Steam in its first five-and-a-half hours and the team recouped its development costs ($55,000) in one fell swoop. Next month, it’ll finally grace the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in the form of Dear Esther: Landmark Edition. Fun fact: Original financier Indie Fund proposed releasing the game on PlayStation Network instead of Steam. So this is kind of a four-years-in-the-making homecoming for the game.

Come September 20th, $9.99 will net you the game with “graphical and gameplay tweaks.” Remastered audio is on deck in addition to larger subtitles and a crosshair. But maybe the biggest addition here is a commentary track featuring TCR’s Jessica Curry, Dan Pinchback and Rob Briscoe detailing the development process and its place in the grand scheme of gaming.

To hear a live version of that, The Guardian is hosting a “Directors’ Commentary Directors’ Commentary,’ according to a press release, where Pinchback and Curry will do a live commentary. As you might expect from the event’s name, of course. Tickets for that are £10 ($13.19) and are available directly from The Guardian; it takes place at The Scott room in London.

For a slightly different live version of the game, The Barbican is offering a performance of the soundtrack, conducted by Curry, who composed the score. There will also be a live playthrough (with narration by BAFTA-winner Nigel Carrington) of the game during the October 14th event held at the Milton Court Concert Hall.

Not bad for what started as a mod, right?

Source: The Chinese Room

Ubisoft delays ‘The Division’ DLC to fix the base game

Ubisoft’s survival shooter multiplayer title The Division had a successful launch back in March, but unpolished design choices erupted into outright game-breaking bugs in the free content additions released in the months thereafter. While the game’s DLC roadmap pegged its second paid expansion Survival to be the next out the door, the studio will push that back until later in 2017 and dedicate the upcoming October update to fixing the core game. That leaves the third planned release, Last Fall, delayed until sometime in 2018.

In a blog post, Ubisoft presented a laundry list of things the so-called Update 1.4 will address: fixing a ton of bugs in its Known Issues backlog, making loot drops more relevant, tweaking enemy difficulty, balancing gear and introductory adjustments to PvP and the Dark Zone. While admitting that there are too many issues to fix before you can release your shiny new expansion must be humbling, they’re going so far as offering weekly State of the Game updates for their fans. Hopefully this offers a better foundation before the Survival DLC is released so the company can avoid banning players for exploiting bugs, as happened after the first bonus content pack dropped in April.

Via: Destructoid

Source: Ubisoft blog

‘Virginia’ comes to PS4, Xbox One and Steam on September 22nd

Virginia, the long-awaited “first person interactive drama from” indie game studio Variable State will hit consoles and desktops on September 22nd. The game, which draws its inspiration from 90s supernatural thrillers like Twin Peaks and The X-Files, tells the story of FBI agent Anne Tarver working to solve a missing person investigation in Kingdom, Virginia — a small town hiding a big secret.

The story takes place, appropriately enough, in last days of summer 1992 where rookie detective Tarver must navigate the competing interests of her experienced partner, her superiors at the FBI and an ever-increasing list of interesting suspects. Although the game is being hailed for its cinematic “detective noir” storyline, there’s actually no dialogue and Virginia’s moody soundtrack does much of the talking for it. (The strings were recorded live by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra at the same studio that did the music for David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, by the way.)

Virginia will be available as a digital download for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles, or via Steam for Windows and macOS machines on September 22nd. To tide you over until then, Variable State has released a consumer demo, also available on Steam.

Source: Variable State

‘Evolve’ continues its rebirth with new co-op mode

The asymmetric shooter Evolve is experiencing a renaissance. Reacting to dwindling player number, developer Turtle Rock made Evolve free to play, rebalanced the gameplay and promised more additions down the line. The changes, at least so far, have been a success, and now the developer is introducing a new mode that scraps the core 4-vs-1 dynamic in favor of a more traditional co-op experience. Called “The Deepest Dark,” the mode sits alongside the other play options, rather than replacing them.

The Deepest Dark sees players face off an AI-controlled monster, hunting it down and destroying its eggs before they hatch. The monster, a Gorgon Queen, has different characteristics to the regular game’s human-controlled beasts. Rather than gaining energy from eating NPC fauna, the Gorgon extracts power from player-controlled characters. In addition to dealing with the Queen and her eggs, gamers will also find local wildlife aggressive. Gameplay is punctuated by a gravelly narrator, whose canned phrases will feel familiar to anyone that’s played the brutal Lovecraftian RPG Darkest Dungeon.

The new mode is out now on PC in open beta. As with the free-to-play switch, the developers will wait until they’ve perfected the changes before considering a console rollout. While you wait for that to happen, you can watch The Deepest Dark’s very ’80s trailer:

Via: Destructoid

Source: Turtle Rock