Star Trek fans are among the most loyal and passionate in the entire spectrum of pop culture aficionados. That makes it all the more shameful that they've had their hearts broken by video game adaptations numerous times over the years.A fan of the property himself, Disruptor Beam CEO Jon Radoff knows that it hasn't always received the most love and care from game designers."Too many games have been made where they take some existing title, re-skin it, add a little Star Trek dust on top to make it look like Star Trek, and they ship it," Radoff said to Gamezebo at PAX East. "Frankly, I think fans rightfully have some cynicism about these poor licensed products."Awareness of that state of affairs is front and center in Radoff's mind as his company gets set to boldly go into full scale development of its next game, Star Trek Timelines. The Boston-area studio announced the project recently and has revealed some of the initial details.
Crafting isn't something I generally spend a lot of time with in MMOs. I usually find anything I want can be bought with gold I earned doing something more interesting than clicking "create" and watching progress bars fill up.The Elder Scrolls Online puts a surprisingly tall - and very enjoyable - emphasis on crafting. I was skeptical at first, but after spending most of an entire day exploring Cyrodiil, gathering materials and custom-building my personal arsenal I'm quite hooked.You see, crafting isn't treated like a completely separate aspect of the TESO experience. Each trade has its own skill tree, augmented with the same skill points used to build up a character's combat abilities. Some might groan at the tough choice between learning a new spell and being able to highlight resource nodes - and it does feel like a sacrifice at first - but it shows how important the developers want crafting to be.In most games, crafting is a gradual, granular slog. You build the crappy equipment until you've leveled up enough to make the slightly-less-crappy equipment and so on. TESO makes the time I spend feel worthwhile, as I leave a personal mark on each unique steel snowflake.
If you want an intense and fantastic example of Real Games Journalism, I recommend checking out Kyle Orland's exhaustive analysis of Steam user data at Ars Technica. It shows some incredibly interesting trends on how Steam users are buying -- and playing -- their games.What I'm most interested in is what this means for free-to-play games and development in general. The top two games on Steam right now -- both in terms of total users and hours played -- are free-to-play. Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 both cost nothing to play, are essentially multiplayer-only, and started out as paid games. (In the case of Dota 2, that payment was to get into the closed beta.)Ignoring Team Fortress 2 for a moment, I think Dota 2 is particularly interesting. About four thousand human years have been put into the game since it hit beta in 2011. My Steam profile says I account for nearly 400 hours of that, so I can hardly feign surprise.Steam is estimated to account for three-fourths of the PC gaming market so it's not surprising that a game by Valve, the service's creator, would have a top spot in downloads. Dota 2 gets understandably preferential treatment on Steam's front page just about daily. It's not surprising that a Valve game, according to Ars' statistics, makes up a fifth of total playtime on a Valve service.
At least that's how it was described to me in a tweet from Andrew Webster, former Gamezebo editor and current scribe at The Verge. And after hearing a description like that, there was no way around it: I just had to learn more.Now on Kickstarter, Last Life is a murder mystery with a twist:The murder you're trying to solve is your own."LAST LIFE is a sci-fi noir adventure game for PC, Mac and Linux about a transhumanist colony on Mars," reads the official Kickstarter page. "When a murdered detective is 3D printed back into existence, he reopens his last case to uncover what he missed--a hunt that reveals AI corruption, corporate espionage, and the conspiracy that may have led to Earth's doom."If that sounds as incredible to you as it does to me, you're not alone. The folks at Double Fine happen to agree with us, so much so that Last Life has become the second game to earn the "Double Fine Presents," distinction - an initiative that Tim Schafer & Co. have launched to help raise the visibility of deserving indie games that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
Ciro Continisio of Tiny Colossus took to Reddit over the weekend in order to promote his strategy game UFHO2. After nearly two years stagnating on Steam Greenlight, and measly sales through Desura and Humble, Continisio has resigned himself to the fact that "nobody is going to buy it unless it's on Steam" and released a UFHO2 torrent onto The Pirate Bay. The release of the torrent came a little over a week after UFHO2 was released onto the iTunes Appstore where it's available for $3.99.UFHO2, which stands for Unidentified Flying Hexagonal Object, was posted to Steam Greenlight in August of 2012. Six months prior the game managed to pull in over $10,000 through a successful Kickstarter campaign. However, it is worth noting that about half of those earnings came from just around 10% of the backers. The game is a sequel to the 2007 game, UFHO, also developed by Continisio, which was available to play for free online. The servers for UFHO have since been shut down and the game is no longer playable.
You know who's great making PAX East announcements? Firaxis. Last year the studio used the Boston convention to announce the mobile port of XCOM: Enemy Unknown which, yes, managed to live up to the lofty promises they'd made. This year, they decided to go one step further and announce the next entry in everyone's favorite strategy series, Civilization.Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth will take players on a journey into the stars for the very first time (unless you count 1999's spin-off Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which the devs of Beyond Earth love, but stressed they're going in their "own direction" from in a conversation with Kotaku).Following a series of events that Firaxis refers to as "The Great Mistake," the Earth is looking a little rough around the edges. As a result, humanity sets off to colonize a strange new world. Unlike past games in the series that draw from history, Beyond Earth will be about making choices to shape humanity's future.
Guild of Dungeoneering is an upcoming reverse roguelike from developer Gambrinous. The game has players constructing the dungeon gauntlet that the hero will have to venture through, but the catch is that the player does not control the hero. The goal of the player is to, of course, ensure the survival of the hero through a careful balance of gameplay. Make a dungeon too easy and the hero won't get the experience they may need later on to defeat enemies. Make a dungeon too hard and it will more than likely result in a not-so-heroic ending.Gambrinous reinforces the design aspect of the game through Guild of Dungeoneering's aesthetics. The game has a hand-drawn look that reminds me of the little warriors I used to draw on folders, back in middle school math class. I know I'm not the only one who did that.While Guild of Dungeoneering is still in Alpha testing, Gambrinous are selling access to the current build for $9.99 on the game's official website. Gambrinous also posted Guild of Dungeoneering on to Steam Greenlight, for voting. Look for the game to be released late this year for Windows and Mac, with the possibility of a Linux release as well.
Curse of Naxxramas: A Hearthstone Adventure will be the first-ever expansion for Blizzard's free-to-play digital card game, featuring 30 new cards, a new game board and single-player class challenges.The expansion takes the form of a card-based dungeon crawler, with five "wings" unlocking over as many weeks simultaneously on all platforms. Each will feature new single-player encounters with boss fights and unique cards. The first wing, The Arachnid Quarter, will be available for free to all Hearthstone players at launch. The remaining content, true to the game's free-to-play model, will be available either with real money orin-game gold.Hearthstone saw official release on PC last year, while the iOS version launched in Canada, Australia and New Zealand last week (though if you want to be sneaky, you can learn how to get around that here).There's no word on the expansion's pricing or release at this time.