Bioshock's Latest: Civil War in a City in the Sky

The first release by the Massachusetts studio Irrational Games since the original Bioshocks transfixed players more than five years ago there were open fears on blogs, in discussion forums and in conversations among video game journalists that the new BioShock game just wouldn't be any good.

Surely that was why it was taking so long to make it, why its release was twice delayed, why the studio seemed to be bleeding personnel. Some people even asked themselves if the impeccable reputation of Ken Levine, the mercurial creative director at Irrational, was perhaps undeserved, given that it was largely dependent on only two games, System Shock 2 (1999) and BioShock (2007), made almost a decade apart.

Everyone can stop worrying. With BioShock Infinite, which goes on sale on Tuesday, Mr. Levine and his colleagues at Irrational have produced yet another video game that is a model of what the medium can achieve. This world — an alternate history with a dollop of science fiction that is set in the United States of 1912 — is dense, fascinating and inventive. The combat is exhilarating. The ending manages to be both mind-bending and moving.

The game begins at a lighthouse off the coast of Maine but quickly moves to Columbia, a utopian — or dystopian — city in the sky built by Zachary Hale Comstock, who calls himself an American prophet. Comstock has transformed this country’s secular religion of Constitutionalism into a theocratic system of white supremacy that worships the founders as gods.

Booker DeWitt, the playable character, is a former Pinkerton agent turned private investigator who was sent to Columbia to find a girl named Elizabeth and bring her to New York City. Booker and Elizabeth are caught in the middle of a civil war between Comstock and the Vox Populi, a violent leftist group modeled partly on the socialists and anarchists of the period.

Source: nytimes

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Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag “not the legacy of AC3 only”

Assassin’sCreed 4: Black Flag will not simply import mechanics from much-criticisedAssassin’s Creed 3, preferring to cherry pick from the franchise as a whole.

In an internally produced interview with creative director Jean Guesdon, Ubisoft described Assassin’s Creed3′s gameplay mechanics as not “attractive or not introduced properly”, asking how the development team will ensure that “the player has a fun, intelligent and progressive experience from start to end”.

“AC is a great franchise that allows us to learn from previous iterations. We’ve identified some areas of improvements and will definitely make sure that all systems are properly introduced and relevant to the player’s own motivations. We’re not the legacy of AC3 only but of all previous AC games and we spent a lot of time analysing the best things we could use from all of them,” Guesdon said.

One of the features the team is hoping to bring back is stealth, which has gradually decreased in importance and was somewhat poorly implemented in Assassin’s Creed 3.

“We are putting a lot of effort to improve that pillar of the franchise. Being a pirate was also about taking places by surprise, and this would require stealth abilities,” Guesdon said.

“So yes, stealth will be back. Infiltrations, tails and exploration of islands are all part of it. We are making sure that the level design not only support but encourage stealth. We’re working hard at providing missions and environments that always allow the player to choose this type of play.”

Guesdon said the key challenge of Black Flag is delivering a realistic, fun, open world naval and pirate game while remaining true to the pillars of the Assassin’s Creed franchise.

“Ultimately my objective with [Black Flag] is to provide a very good, polished and fun game that players will enjoy as much as we enjoy creating it,” he said.

“I would be thrilled to receive testimonies telling us that the way we’re depicting this period in history helped some of our audience to realize what the Golden Age of Piracy was really like.”

Assassin’sCreed 4: Black Flag is headed to PC, PS3, PS4, Wii U and Xbox 360,and is also expected on Microsoft’s new console.

Source: vg247

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Path of Exile hosted almost 70,000 gamers over weekend

The Grinding Gear's free-to-play ARPG Path of exile entered open beta last week. Grinding Gear Lead Designer Chris Wilson stated the deluge crashed Exile's account system and servers over the weekend but the team quickly brought everything back online today with stability and bug fixes.

“We’re getting absolutely crushed under the number of players trying out Path of Exile, and this has manifested as a server crash that has been occurring hourly today,” Wilson wrote previously. “For those interested, player concurrency hit 69,850 players before it was high enough to take down the realm.”

GrindingGear also fixed a few pesky login bugs, including a rare and strange issue where players somehow could log into accounts owned by other players as the servers shuddered beneath the load. To keep character info stable, the studio simply switched off Exile’s servers until it whipped up a fix.

Source: pcgamer.com

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