After Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, we wondered if the next step up was going to be something like Arkham State, or Arkham Nation (maybe Arkham World), but they're going old-school for the next Batman Title.
Literally.
Entiteld Arkham: Origins, the sieries will focus on the Batman's younger days as a hero, with eight super-assassins, looking to put a premature end to the Bat's career fighting crime. We'll see the game (and knockoff 2.5D fighters for handheld systems) in October.
In other news.. yet another horror story by an independent developer in trying to get their game on Xbox Live. Retro City Rampage was pulled from the market in a fit of pique by Microsoft (because the developer complained about the process and the fact that it took so long to certify). He then had to wait six months and get an outside publisher to assist to get the game back in the queue. This is turning into what we were afraid of with Microsoft. An overagressive corporate "grinder" making life hard for independent developers and publishers. You can read more about it, and a possible exodus of independent games from Xbox to Playstation, at Wired.
Just following up on the Kickstarter's we've been tracking, the Lord British Avatar game ended up over two million, and the Torment spiritual sequel became the most funded video game in Kickstarter history, with nearly 4.5 million in total. And with several other gaming kickstarters in the pipeline, it looks like it's not going away.
Saw some interesting news on the Shadowrun Returns kickstarter, it looks like they're moving on to making sure the phsysical rewards will be ready a few weeks after launch day, and announced Steam Integration (which sounds great, as Steam is a great way to distribute the CCC (that's Community Created Content). Hopefully we'll hear more about when that launch day is.
I'll be in the final closed beta for Neverwinter this week, and I'm investigating when the NDA ends on gameplay, so perhaps look for something on that early next week.
And finally, this follows on a bit from the "review" of Scarlet Blade I did the other day.. but it's kinda sad to see the video game market seemingly actively ignoring half their potential customers (that is, when they're not actively insulting them). Saw this in the Escapist.. where the creator of "The Last of Us" had to go back to their focus testing group and tell them.. "Don't only test the game with male gamers". The "Dudebro" market is very strong currently, and apparently the only females they want to see in games are A)Damsels in Distress B) Scantily Clad or C) both A and B.. but failing to test your game with ALL your potential customers, as well as actively trying to remove strong female protagonists from games does us all a great disservice.
No comments:
Post a Comment