Yep, the title pretty much says it all, Bungie has announced that Halo 3\’s matchmaking feature has received a surprise updated today which is in effect right now. Check out all the details at bungie.net.
In February, Sony Pictures Entertainment vice chairman Yair Landau obliquely mentioned to If Its Games that along with a Metal Gear Solid silver-screen adaptation in production under the guidance of famed game designer Hideo Kojima, the studio was “working with one of my favorite producers right now on an idea for an EverQuest movie.” Unwilling to finger the mystery producer, Landau said, “I’ll let him disclose that.”
Not playing out exactly as Landau anticipated, If Its Games today has confirmed that former Marvel Studios chief Avi Arad would be producing the long-speculated EverQuest film. Arad, who resigned his positions as CEO and chairman at Marvel last year to form his own production company, is most recently responsible for the big-screen adaptation of Bratz: The Movie.
Joining Arad on the project, which first blipped onto the radar during EQ’s heyday in 2000, will be 300 scribe Michael Gordon. The Sony Pictures rep was unwilling to comment on plot details or when the theatrical release would take flight.
Despite being a massively multiplayer online game often defined by its users, EverQuest boasts a substantial tome of lore surrounding the world of Norrath and its outlying otherworldly planes. Now in its eighth year, the original EQ has received 13 expansion packs, with its 14th, EverQuest: Secrets of Faydwer, due in November. The game also spawned a semi-sequel, EverQuest 2, in 2004.
Back in 1996, computer game players everywhere became hooked on Diablo, a simple action role-playing game in which you played as a fantasy warrior and defeated your diabolical enemies by repeatedly clicking your mouse button to attack. One sequel and countless destroyed computer mice later, the creative forces behind the original Diablo games have reunited as Flagship Studios to create the soon-to-be-released Hellgate: London, a futuristic hack-and-slash game in which you’ll fight against a demonic invasion in a postapocalyptic version of London, England. Over the course of the game, your character will amass huge piles of randomly generated loot, much of which can be crafted together to assemble powerful weapons and armor. However, you’ll also be hacking your way through many areas that will be randomly generated themselves, and populated with random squads of hellish beasts. We sat down with chief visionary officer David Brevik for more details.
Hellgate: London will have randomized levels that won’t be the same area twice.
If Its Games: We understand that randomization will play a key role in adding variety to Hellgate: London’s gameplay. For instance, tell us about the role it will play in creating adventure environments for players, with different types of monsters scaling to players’ experience levels. How will the game offer a new experience each time without disrupting the experience (such as by having a key enemy spawn inside of a wall, or having the entrance and exit too close to each other)?
David Brevik: The monsters do not scale to the players’ experience levels. They are a set level range for that particular section of the game. We just try and track your level with theirs to keep an even difficulty.
That being said, we spent a lot of time designing and implementing random level generation in the game. We have designed it in such a way that we create rules to govern the look. These rules are run in an order to ensure that the level is a size we like. We can run rules a variable amount of times and loop and skip and all sorts of stuff. We can design exits and entrances to be right next to each other or start by placing it at the beginning, and then grow it, then add the exit at the end. It is an extremely flexible system–one that I believe could create any random level you could imagine.
As far as making sure the level is playable, we stick quest set pieces in the level generation, as well as many other layout props and nodes to ensure that things can look OK. Many of those layouts have random levels associated with them as well. There are layers and layers of randomness associated with the way we generate the levels.
IIG: We understand that random loot will play a huge role in what should be the addictive pastime of treasure hunting. What kind of item variety should players expect to see in-game? Will it be possible for players to randomly find items that are much more powerful than regular items suited for their current level? How will players avoid looking like motley clowns if they’re wearing armor from 12 different sets?
DB: Random items are the bread and butter of our game. The whole game is designed around the addictiveness that the random items systems possess. There are many looks associated with the different armors that you can find; each class has several complete sets of armor.
Even the good old Thames River may take on different forms.
It will always be possible to find random items that will increase your power. That is the most exciting aspect of what you are doing. Trying to find that one magic item that makes you a little overpowered is always a blast.
As for the clown suits, we don’t have any. Instead of a particular item having a particular color, each item has a color set associated with it. You can right-click on any item you are wearing and set your suit of armor to use that particular dye. We also have a slot that you can put rare dyes into and have suit colors that are difficult to obtain.
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N’Gai Croal, at the Newsweek blog LevelUp, had the chance to talk about the Manhunt 2 ban/re-rating fiasco on the CNN program American Morning. It’s an interesting discussion of the issue, and it sounds like for the most part he got a fair shake; this wasn’t yet another ‘ambush the games journalist’-style cable program. The one thing N’Gai tried to make clear - and may have gotten lost in the shuffle - was that this title categorically is not for kids. “We bring this up not because there’s anything sinister at work, but rather because [co-anchor Kiran Chetry] isn’t alone in her bedrock assumption that all videogames are primarily aimed at ‘kids.’ After all, had we gone on the show to discuss Ang Lee’s NC-17-rated erotic thriller ‘Lust, Caution,’ or the upcoming horror movie ‘30 Days of Night,’ we doubt that we’d have been asked ‘Would you let your kids watch it?’ It would have been assumed that those movies, like certain TV shows, books or plays, are not intended for children. Yet videogames often don’t get the same recognition.”.
The title Everyday Shooter isn’t just special because it’s a pretty good game, blending Geometry Wars-like gameplay with great music. It’s also the winner of numerous accolades from last year’s Independent Games Festival, and as of this week it will be headlining on the PlayStation Store. “The $10 game may be coming into a market clogged with dual-analog shooters, but I don’t think it will have a hard time fitting in. ‘Some days I would spend all day tweaking a level, sleep for a few hours, and then go back and tweak some more,’ Mak told me at E3. ‘The challenges I faced in this game were creative, not technical.’ The sense that someone slaved over this across many, many sleepless nights comes through pretty clearly. This is one to watch, and keep the name Jonathan Mak in your head. I doubt this will be the last thing we see from him.” For more on the background of this unique title Gamasutra interviewed Mak, the game’s sole creator, prior to the IGF last year..
A new beta build of the awesome movie streaming app for the PSP called PiMP streamer has just been released. Check it out here.
Analyst Mike Hickey with Janco Partners believes that the success of Halo 3 highlights that the market is underestimating the sales potential of Grand Theft Auto IV. The analyst expects GTA IV to ship 4.1 million units during its first week on Xbox 360 and PS3 compared to Halo 3\’s first week shipment of 5.2 million.
A video comparaison between PGR 3 and PGR 4 just to see all the improvements (or not)…
In announcing Halo 3’s first-week sales of $300 million, Microsoft called it “the fastest-selling video game ever.” That record might be relatively short-lived, if a new report from Janco Partners analyst Mike Hickey proves accurate.
Hickey attributes the success of Halo 3 to a growing fan base for the franchise, a general demand for high-quality content, and the game’s release early in the current generation’s lifecycle. Those same factors will be playing into next year’s release of Grand Theft Auto IV, Hickey said. In addition, the Xbox 360 installed user base will be significantly larger by the time GTA IV comes out, and the addition of a PlayStation 3 edition of the game should boost sales significantly as well. Putting those factors together, Hickey suggests that the market is generally underestimating the next GTA game’s initial success.
With Halo 3, Hickey believes Microsoft shipped 5.2 million copies of the game for its first week of release, and sold through 4.4 million. That leads to a 67 percent attach rate (percentage of all console owners who purchased the game) in the US, Hickey said. He believes that rate dips to 46 percent when adding in Europe.
Although Hickey doesn’t think Grand Theft Auto IV will sell to as large a