Couchpotato's Random RPG News

Idea Factory International has announced that Super Neptunia RPG will be released for PC via Steam this summer. The PC version will join the previously announced PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch versions currently planned for spring 2019. Idea Factory International is currently looking for closed beta testers, with those interested able to apply until April 8, 2019. The company also released a new selection of English screenshots, which can be viewed below.

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The team behind the “Unofficial Patch” project for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines has released a brand new version of it, fixing a number of issues. In case you weren’t aware of, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines Unofficial Patch is a must-have cumulative patch containing all the previous releases, and works with retail and downloadable versions of any kind as the Troika Games official patch 1.2 is included.

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It has been a hellish few months for BioWare and EA since the launch of Anthem. The game was panned by critics for being mind-numbingly boring, the fanbase has been displeased with the loot, and now Kotaku’s Jason Schrier has published an insightful and alarming piece that suggests the E3 2017 demo was a fake thanks to the game’s troubled development. However, while Anthem has rightfully been condemned for being a lackluster game that doesn’t have any of the “BioWare magic”, in hindsight the once renowned development team actually started to lose their identity with the popular Mass Effect 2.

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BioWare has plenty to answer for if the statements from employees are to be believed; the mismanagement of the project as a whole is arguably the root cause of why Anthem turned out the way it did.

Frostbite, however, has been a thorn in the developer’s side for too long. It has proven ineffective in every aspect except perhaps its potential for admittedly beautiful graphics.

With two high-profile catastrophes now tainting the reputation of EA’s premier studio, and the one before those almost imploding, too, it has to be time for Frostbite to either be retired or limited in its use to games it was originally designed to support like Battlefield.

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Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord features six distinct cultures, all of which are based on real-world medieval civilisations. Each of these cultures sports their own unique types of clothing, weapons, armour, and architectural styles, bringing a high-level of diversity to the continent of Calradia. However, there was one aspect of the game that was a little lacking and not entirely in keeping with our efforts to create a huge, believable game world. And for a game with the word Mount in the title, it is something we thought we should take a closer look at... We are of course talking about horses!

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Considering the fact war never changes, it might be surprising how much the Fallout series has transformed over the past two decades. Beginning life as an isometric CRPG bathed in the glow of both tabletop and pen-and-paper role-playing games, as well as its spiritual antecedent Wasteland, the series became a world-beater.

Going back to the first game now is an initial exercise in frustration—1997’s Fallout was, and remains, a brutally difficult, uncompromising game. If you mess up, you die. If you make the wrong decision, you die. If you don’t mess up or make the wrong decision, you still die. It’s dark, it’s (generally) presented with a straight face, and it wants you to know that the end of the world via nuclear holocaust is as cruel and vicious a thing as it sounds.

“I had been a post-apocalyptic fiction fan since I was a kid,” Brian Fargo, executive producer on Fallout (and founder of Interplay) tells us, “And Wasteland was my first attempt at bringing something to the genre. Shortly after finishing the Wasteland game, Interplay became a publisher and we no longer created games for other people. I tried to get EA to license me the rights back, but I was unable to succeed despite trying for many years. I finally decided we’d do our own post-apocalyptic game and call it Fallout.”

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Zen Studios is a name that is most commonly associated with pinball games, but soon, the developer is now putting out something quite different, and as such, quite intriguing. Operencia: The Stolen Sun is a first person dungeon crawling RPG inspired by European mythologies and folklore, and looking to evoke the experience of classic games in the genre like The Bard’s Tale and Wizardry. A couple weeks ago, we sent across some of the questions we had about the game to the devs, hoping to learn more about it. The following questions were answered by Mel Kirk, VP of Publishing at Zen Studios.

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Dear pathfinders,

As you all know, we're constantly at work, trying to make our game better, easier to understand and more comfortable to play. Apart from this, right now we're busy developing a console version of Pathfinder: Kingmaker. We love getting feedback from our players. In order to better understand your needs and to make a few important decisions about future development, we've decided to conduct this survey. It turned out to be pretty substantial in size, and still, we would like to ask you to spend a little time and help us out. Your insight and experience as the kings and queens of the Stolen Lands would be invaluable to us!

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Random tidbits from the front:

1) Programming: We're feature-complete for the demo as of 2 weeks ago. In plain English it means that all the systems (character, inventory, combat, gadgets, dialogue, trading, etc) are done and working well other than the stealth system which we won't need for the demo). Right now we're bug-fixing and tweaking things. For example, what happens when a bullet misses the target by an inch (you see the bullets flying) but hits the energy shield? It's a minor thing but there are lots of them. Enemy's shields didn't shut down when they were killed, fixed it too. Things like that.

2) Art assets:

- armor is still about 30% done, which is our biggest workflow problem to-date. Ivan, our animator who also handles armor, got very ill and spent the last 10 days in a hospital. He's recovering now. We hope to finish armor needed for the demo by the end of the month. By armor I mean all wearable items: vests, jacket/coats, helmets, boots, goggles, masks, breathers. At 8-12 items per category that's quite a lot, but once it's done we won't have to worry about it and would be able to focus on building content.

- portraits: we're making progress, but still behind; we'll probably need 8-10 weeks to finish all portraits needed for the demo but we can start earlier with some placeholders.

- animations: probably 2-3 weeks of work, minor tweaks as we have all animations already. It's not just the animations but setting up the blueprints (Unreal 4 thing) and fixing problems like a character in cover standing up to fire a one-handed SMG even though we have a proper animation for that. Etc.

- the gadgets and the gadget parts are done (3D models and icons), still need to do the implants but won't need any for the demo

3) Design & Balance

- since we keep playing the demo daily ironman style, the balance gets better and better (meaning dying gets easier and easier but good tactics can still save the day).
- all dialogues and ending were done (written and scripted) a long time ago; the demo is playable from start to finish.
- we still need to set the prices for the store and write most item descriptions.

4) Interface
Everything is functional but that's about it. We have a lot of (necessary) changes planned already, but we can do during the beta test as so far it's a low priority item.

That's about it.

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While we’ve struggled to learn from our mistakes, navigate the world of indie game marketing and distribution, and keep Transolar Games around, our fans keep asking us when the next Hero-U game - subtitled Wizards Way - will be out. We have postponed development on that game so far because it will be another expensive, high-risk development project.

Instead, we’re working on a much smaller game, called Summer Daze at Hero-U, with a smaller development team and a much shorter development process. This gives us room to experiment and fail rapidly, rather than make the same mistakes over the next five years. Summer Daze will use a different scripting engine, a streamlined time mechanic, and 2D art. All of these things would have shortened the development time of Hero-U; but then it wouldn’t have lived up to the expectations for “a new Quest for Glory game.”

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1. Time Mechanics
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It turned out that this was a nightmare to code, and a nightmare to design for. The beginning of the game felt overwhelming for a lot of players; the constant sense of the clock ticking discouraged exploration. The ending was also a bit empty, and there were sections of the game that were just slow. I fixed dozens of bugs where staying up past midnight broke scripting conditionals and made the game think the plot had already advanced to the following day.

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Welcome to GameInView (and, ModInView respectively) series! Here you can meet the people behind your favourite projects - both great mods and games. Watch a live conversation and learn about teams history, their members, history of the mods and games, and of course, fun moments and fresh news about them. In this special episode, we're opening the series with David Walgrave, executive producer at Larian Studios, a team behind Divinity series and the award winning, Divinity: Original Sin 2 - one of the best RPGs released during last decade. We'll talk about history of Larian studios, discuss the details behind the development, learn about Larian team "special juice", as well as team plans for future. Enjoy!

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As much as I love the free-flowing, role-playing nature of the past two Divinity games, I recognize that that computer RPG style of gameplay isn’t for everyone. The idea of splitting out their excellent turn-based tactical combat system into its own separate game seemed like a natural one. Their way of still incorporating narrative decisions and maintaining the general tone of the RPG games is great to see as well. It’s very much a streamlined version of the past games. It removes many of the advanced RPG features in favor of combat-focused gameplay, which I expect to appeal to fans of the series as well as newcomers looking to feed their fix for tactical gameplay.

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We had a chat with Warhorse Studios' Tobias Stolz-Zwilling at PAX about all that's coming to the already massive game, with the two huge questline packs involving Theresa and Johanka being the focus. The biggest DLC yet, A Woman's Lot, will add 15 hours of questline content for fans to enjoy as well as a completely new companion for both Theresa and Henry to take care of and use both in exploring and in combat.

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At PAX East we got to catch up on what's going on with Warhorse Studios' Kingdom Come: Deliverance with upcoming DLC, and here we got to talk to actor Victoria Hogan who plays Theresa in the game, where we hear about the direction this additional content is taking her in.

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Following 2015’s critically acclaimed Trespasser expansion, the Dragon Age team split up. Many of the people who’d worked on Inquisition moved to the troubled Mass Effect: Andromeda, while a few dozen developers including Darrah and Laidlaw started spinning up the next Dragon Age, which was code-named Joplin.
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Another former BioWare developer who worked on Joplin called it “some of the best work experiences” they’d ever had. “We were working towards something very cool, a hugely reactive game, smaller in scope than Dragon Age: Inquisition but much larger in player choice, followers, reactivity, and depth,” they said. “I’m sad that game will never get made.”

You’d play as a group of spies in Tevinter Imperium, a wizard-ruled country on the north end of Dragon Age’s main continent, Thedas. The goal was to focus as much as possible on choice and consequence, with smaller areas and fewer fetch quests than Dragon Age: Inquisition. (In other words, they wanted Joplin to be the opposite of the Hinterlands.) There was an emphasis on “repeat play,” one developer said, noting that they wanted to make areas that changed over time and missions that branched in interesting ways based on your decisions, to the point where you could even get “non-standard game overs” if you followed certain paths.
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High-ranking BioWare staff openly wondered: Did EA’s executives really care about narrative? Did they really care about RPGs? Those questions have always lingered, and still do today.

By the latter half of 2017, Anthem was in real trouble, and there was concern that it might never be finished unless the studio did something drastic. In October of 2017, not long after veteran Mass Effect director Casey Hudson returned to the studio to take over as general manager, EA and BioWare took that drastic action, canceling Joplin and moving the bulk of its staff, including executive producer Mark Darrah, onto Anthem.

A tiny team stuck around to work on a brand new Dragon Age 4, code-named Morrison, that would be built on Anthem’s tools and codebase. It’s the game being made now. Unlike Joplin, this new version of the fourth Dragon Age is planned with a live service component, built for long-term gameplay and revenue.

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Morrison is “Anthem with dragons”

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We are just over a month into the Synthesis League. As we look ahead to the remainder of the league, we wanted to give you an indication of what to expect and give you a general scope of what the team is working on.

Later this week, we're planning to deploy a small patch on PC that includes a few bug fixes as well as some backend changes that won't affect players but will improve infrastructure.

In just over two weeks we plan to announce the full details of an end-of-league event that we expect to begin around the 10th of May. We are currently investigating whether this event will be possible on console. It looks likely so far. This is likely to be something in the vein of either a Mayhem/Turmoil pair or Flashback. We always love to see community highlights from these events and can't wait to see what shenanigans you get up to!

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The great challenge of recording a BioWare RPG became apparent almost immediately: The game’s structure was, for the most part, nonlinear. Every character, therefore, was given their own unique version of the script, and each actor had to be recorded individually. “The first week that I was in LA, James [Ohlen] was there, and he had his laptop, and every so often we’d get to a point where we weren’t quite sure which way the branching was going,” O’Farrell says. “And he would jump on and dig into the code a little bit, and then we would have a clearer direction.” In later weeks, writer Drew Karpyshyn also assisted with some of the sessions.

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We sit down with Brian Mitsoda (Narrative Lead, Hardsuit Labs) and Christian Schlütter (Lead Producer, Paradox Interactive) to talk about the two studios collaborated to bring this 2004 cult classic out of retirement.

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Having worked super hard on the game for the past weeks, we are proud to announce that Druidstone has hit beta and is well on its way to release this Spring. Before you ask, the beta will be a closed one and we will work with a few chosen betatesters we know. This has worked well in the past and we’d like to continue the tradition. Below is an official press release we just sent out. We’ll blog more about the beta and about recent happenings on the development side later this week.

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Elder Scrolls 6 is a long way from release and we probably won't even hear about the game until Bethesda Game Studio's upcoming Sci-fi RPG Starfield hits the shelves, which also is not expected to launch anytime before 2020.

However as is indicated from the recent information that Elder Scrolls 6 is indeed set in Hammerfell, I wanted to acknowledge the fact as to why it's the perfect setting for the next entry in this long-running open world sandbox RPG.

Here are 4 reasons why I think Hammerfell is the best location for an Elder Scrolls game and why it will take Elder Scrolls 6 to unprecedented heights of success.

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New information about BioWare’s Dragon Age 4 has hype at a fever pitch. The game that many of us feared might never be released is now one of the most talked about titles in gaming.

The strange thing is that we actually don’t know that much about Dragon Age 4. There are a few things that have been confirmed (or close to it) but much about the game remains a mystery.

So, let’s look at Dragon Age 4 by breaking down the things we know, and thinks we think we know about the game.

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Couchpotato said:

Dragon Age 4: 5 Things We Know and 5 Big Rumors

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henriquejr said:

aka Dragon Age 4: 10 Big Rumors

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The official trailer for Spiderweb Software's new indie role-playing epic, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror. We celebrated 25 years in business with a hugely successful Kickstarter for this game, and it's close to done!

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Sieges are at the very core of the Mount & Blade experience. They are brutal affairs, the outcome of which can change the entire course of a war. And in Bannerlord, where villages and their respective resources are tied to castles, this is especially true, as the loss of a castle could result in the loss of a vital resource which is needed to feed the war machine.

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EA needs to understand what happened with the release of Anthem, and see that fans want (and expect) better from a studio like Bioware. If you want to make money, you need to allow Bioware to steer their games in their own creative direction. Give them the freedom to develop the games they want, with the engines that are necessary for the job. And if you can’t do that, then let Bioware go. Sell them to a company who understands the value in prioritizing creativity.

Of course, this will not happen. Because executives can’t deal with the humiliation of a rival company profiting from supportive fans, all because the rival company understood what they didn’t.

Electronic Arts would rather see a studio crumble to pieces than allow its strength to shine. They want studios to produce games the way they view as the profitable way, and if the studio can’t do that then it’s completely acceptable to burn them to the ground.

Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the video games business in 2019.

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More and more, companies try to give the idea of unionization a bad name, which makes one wonder why? Many industries have unions like construction, film, teachers, writers, and even your local supermarket. The basic function and the reason why unions exist in the first place to make sure wages are fair. Which in the era where more and more games are seeing loot boxes or microtransactions in games, which is already a billion-dollar industry in itself. One would think that some of that income trickles down to the individual, like books sales or the reruns of on tv, but they don’t. A lot of hires are usually contract work, so by the time one is finished with a game, they’re usually looking for another job. The other basic function is to help create safe work environments and healthier work hours, which at this point in the article its obviously not.

What I’m not saying is that unionization is the end all be all. It is not the sole fix the industry needs. There are downsides to the idea of unions, but the one thing developers have begun to notice are that big publishers don’t care for the idea. Big companies within the industry are resistant to unionization and out right against the idea entirely. One must ask themselves why? I think the answer lays with the status quo, is fine the way it is right now for a big publisher. The relationship from the outside looking in seems completely one sided.

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