Hei, Outlanders.

Post-war Norway was quite a ride over the last months. As Vigor went free-to-play during the gamescom announcement, new Outlanders started to flow in. We are humbled by the number of players who decided to give Vigor a try. There were already over 2.5 million players who tried Vigor since the start of Xbox Game Preview, which means over 1.3 million players jumped in within the first month after the full release. The numbers far exceeded our expectations and, sincerely, we were not prepared enough for it. Finally, we recovered, and now plan to update the game more on a regular basis. We took our time to find and fix the most pressing issues (so called “ghost bullets” and impenetrable bushes, for example), as well as adding one big thing we were working on for a long time.

New Map

Brodalen Bridges. A new area for your encounters – a huge map with new approaches to verticality. If you considered Fjellkanten vertical, wait for the bridges on the new map. I cannot count how many times someone tried to snipe me from the top, or how many times I was doing the same during our playtests. Still, keep in mind bridges aren’t the only thing about the new map. It’s a distinctive setting with rural areas for long-range firefights, combined with eerie woods and sparse houses providing some close quarters engagements. It’s the valley along the meandering river with waterfalls and hidden caverns. And indeed, it has a ton of places to gather precious loot and fight for the airdrop.

Loot Rebalance

As I mentioned the loot… there’s more to loot than meets the eye. We went through all the maps and made them more distinguishable in terms of which resources you are able to find in each location. Common sense dictates there’s more wires along the Viktorsen Station, or possibly more fertilizer on the fields of Brodalen Bridges, and that common sense should be reflected even more than before. Together with that, we decided to make loot boosts even more pronounced to clearly show the difference. As the boosters stack, the amount of loot spots, and items in each of them, increase even more than before.

Buried Cache

If you’d prefer to look for some hidden treasure while on the loot run, we have you covered. There’s a new event in all the maps – we call it a Buried Cache. For this, you can find photos with clues around the map, and if you’re able to recognize and find the destination fast enough, a nice reward awaits you hidden underground. Keep in mind that while you may be the only one looking for the cache, other Outlanders could still be wandering the area. Stay alert and you’ll get a nice prize.

Weight Influence

You may have noticed that sprinting is rather easy in Vigor. No matter how much you carry, the Outlander is able to sprint easily. This is no longer true as the weight of your inventory reduces your available stamina. Thinking of outrunning others while taking the airdrop crate? Keep in mind that the crate is one of the heaviest items. And stamina isn’t the only thing affected by weight, as your footsteps will now be louder when you’re carrying a lot. On the other hand, we’ve made some quality of life improvements – interacting with loot, Shelter improvements, and various other things like using doors and ladders should be more intuitive than ever before. You don’t need to bow down to collect things on the floor anymore and there should not be cases where you need to be at a specific angle.

Threat and Team Killer distinction

We keep looking for your feedback, checking your streams and videos on various channels. One of the pressing issues, and often exploited features, was becoming a Threat after killing your teammate. We decided to make a proper distinction between these and added a Team Killer status. It clearly shows others what cruel deeds someone has done, and tracks the Outlander a lot more often compared to the Threat. Also, killing your teammates for challenges will no longer count, which should also help to severely limit this form of grieving. We are still vigilant about team killings and observe our data on the subject on a daily basis. The same goes for any other feedback – we are really happy for all of the posts and comments and we plan to evaluate them even more often from now on.

Game Updates

That leads me to other news – we have a solid plan for regular game updates. We would like to provide something new to the game ideally on a weekly basis; mostly new customizations. You can check the Featured Store every Wednesday for something new and we are yet to announce the new ways of showing new content. Not only that, we would even like to add more weapons along the way to provide more things you can aim for. And generally, while these minor updates should spice up the waiting, we aim to have a major update roughly every two months, the same as we did with Update 1.1: Bridges. Each of these major updates should provide a ton of tweaks and improvements accompanied with some bigger new feature.

Vigor is available now as a free-to-play tile for Xbox One on the Microsoft Store. Click here for additional details.

Unity has announced new pricing for its Unity Pro and Unity Plus subscriptions, giving both plans a slight price hike at the beginning of the next year.

Developers with existing Unity subscriptions won’t be affected by the change, but those that sign up, add additional seats, or renew expired custom agreements after January 1, 2020 will end up paying a little bit extra.

The current monthly rate for Until Pro is increasing from $125 to $150, while Until Plus will rise from $35 to $40 a month. In a blog post and accompanying FAQ, Unity says that it doesn’t routinely raise rates like this and doesn’t plan to do so regularly, but will “periodically review pricing and consider making adjustments” when appropriate.

“The price has remained the same for over three years and we are making these increases in order to continue investing in new technology, features, and services that will benefit all Unity creators,” explains the post. Unity Personal, the version of the engine open to developers with revenue or funding below $100,000 within the last year, is set to remain free.

These changes go into effect on January 1, leaving developers a few months to add seats to a current subscription or sign up under the Pro or Plus plans for the existing, slightly cheaper monthly rates.

As game development companies go larger and larger, more work has to go into the operations of keeping the studio doors open. No longer are studios just opened up in random office spaces–they’re designed and scoped out to be the best place for game employees to work.

At Sweden Games Conference this week, Avalanche Malmö studio manager Sara Ponnert offered insight into the process of building a Swedish game studio from scratch. In her words, she’d hoped to share some shortcuts that other developers can use to help build their studios, and lay the foundation for companies that will still be there years after the groundwork is laid.

Ponnert’s journey building Avalanche Malmö began in 2018, where she began laying the building blocks for the new branch of the studio that produces the Just Cause series.

“As soon as I got the job of studio manager, I started thinking about the values that I’d need to run the studio,” Ponnert explained. Those values included respect, diversity, openness, trust, collaboration, inclusion, passion, courage, and creativity. She scrawled them down on a sheet of paper that still sits on her desk to this day, and tried to make decisions around each value.

The studio began at Game Habitat DevHub, a coworking space in Malmö. From here, Ponnert began thinking about finding a permanent location that would fit her employees’ lifestyles. The goal was to find a place that would be no more than a 20 minute commute for employees. Ponnert herself lives on a farm outside of the city, so her own workload was something she was considering while planning a space for her coworkers.

Sustainability was not initially on Ponnert’s list of values, but she described it as a mentality that underlay all of her other values. “I wanted the office to be built with sustainability at the core…not just sustainable in terms of full free electricity, but not to buy stuff just because. Even if it’s a stapler, why do you need 3 staplers, for instance?”

Respecting the value of diversity proved especially challenging. Ponnert flashed a photo of what the Malmö team looked like when it started, and unfortunately, it was a team of mostly men. “We did not just get applications from women,” Ponnert said.

This wasn’t for a lack of trying. The company posted in women’s game dev groups, established gender-neutral language in its postings, but still struggled to find women candidates or candidates of color. “We just had to keep looking and searching all over the world to build that diversity.”

According to Ponnert, the studio has grown to a 20-80 women to men ratio, still not matching her diversity goals, but improving on the initial photo she showed to the crowd.

While building the team, getting into the final Malmö office took a total of four months. To Ponnert’s dismay, they found the previous tenant had cut off all the ethernet wires from the server room.

After the studio was built, Ponnert and the studio’s lead producer began taking time to meet with team members one on one, taking lunch meetings to try and get to know each individual employee and encourage them to keep communication open with studio management.

For routine communications, Ponnert tries to create special stand-ups that help everyone internalize team information. “Every Monday, we get the team together to sync with the studio in the Stockholm. Before we call Stockholm, I get everyone together to tell the team who’s visiting, who’s starting, what the budget looks like…some of this information they will forget, but at least I know I told them once.”

Once the studio was up and running, the management began implementing a feedback survey to try and evaluate the mood on the studio. Every Friday, the team tries to survey its employees to understand how they feel about etam spirit, inspiration, etc. According to the data shown onscreen, Ponnert says the team is still satisfied, but they’re aiming to keep those numbers up after the “honeymoon period.”

As for what Ponnert learned in this period, “Everyone loves to contribute, even if it’s the smallest thing,” she said. She also stressed the value of constant communication. “I’d rather people tell me to shut up than have them feel they didn’t know what was going on.”

During the Q&A, Ponnert circled back to the harder conversations that sometimes happen with employees. “We practice a lot of feedback, to try and give feedback without hurting anyone’s feelings. The lead groups train on each other before talking to anyone who may be a little more sensitive.”

“We want people to keep coming in and giving us ideas, and if you give feedback the wrong way, people may not feel as encouraged to give it.”

Gamasutra is a media partner of Sweden Games Conference, who provided travel and lodging to cover this event

Every year Google sponsors the Summer of Code, a program that pays students to work on open source projects.  This year’s GSoC is over and the results are being released.  Earlier in the week the Godot game engine reported their results, yesterday Blender reported the results of the 7 projects undertaken in the 2019 summer of code.

The 2019 GSoC projects at Blender were:

More details about the entries are available of the Blender Developer blog or learn more by watching the video below.

GameDev News Blender

By Mikey Campbell
Friday, September 13, 2019, 02:33 pm PT (05:33 pm ET)

Disney Chairman and CEO Bob Iger on Friday announced his resignation from Apple’s board of directors, a move that comes just two months before the two companies will go head-to-head in the highly competitive video streaming business.

Iger’s exit was revealed in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, which notes the media mogul resigned effective Sept. 10. Prior to his departure, Iger served as chair of Apple’s corporate governance committee and participated on the company’s compensation board.

Speculation that Iger would be forced off Apple’s board surfaced in March shortly after the two companies finalized plans to launch competing streaming services. Apple is due to debut Apple TV+ with a slate of original content on Nov. 1, while Disney will make its Disney+ product available less than two weeks later on Nov. 12.

“It has been an extraordinary privilege to have served on the Apple board for 8 years, and I have the utmost respect for Tim Cook, his team at Apple, and for my fellow board members,” Iger said in a statement, as reported by CNBC. “Apple is one of the world’s most admired companies, known for the quality and integrity of its products and its people, and I am forever grateful to have served as a member of the company’s board.”

Iger attempted to put rumors of an imminent withdrawal to bed during an interview in April, suggesting there would be no conflict of interest should he remain.

“Obviously I’m mindful of my fiduciary responsibility to Apple shareholders as a member of the board,” Iger told Bloomberg at the time. “When the subject is discussed at Apple board meetings, I’m careful to recuse myself, and I’m in constant dialogue about making sure that I’m not doing anything that in any way would essentially cause me to be wouldn’t be in keeping with what an Apple board member would do.”

The situation has apparently changed.

Disney said it plans to make Disney+ available to owners of Apple hardware, including Apple TV set-top boxes, likely through a dedicated app that will launch alongside the service.

Iger joined Apple’s board in 2011 and is credited with rebuilding relations between Disney and late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ Pixar studio following unrest under former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. The current Disney chief was also pivotal in negotiating deals to sell content owned by Disney and its subsidiaries through the iTunes store.

Disney and Apple grew to be close allies in the years after Iger’s installment to the board. Along with media distribution agreements, Apple has gone so far as to build special animated Apple Watch watch faces featuring Mickey and Minnie Mouse into its watchOS platform.

Iger is the second high-profile Apple board member to leave in the past decade due to potential conflicts of interest. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigned from his duties at Apple in 2009 as the search giant unleashed its Android mobile operating system as a market competitor to iPhone.

Earlier this week, Nintendo released a patch for Fire Emblem: Three Houses on Nintendo Switch. You can check out the full patch notes here if you’re interested (the change of voice actor for Male Byleth was one of the bigger stories to come from it), but fans have spotted something that wasn’t clearly spelt out in the list of updates.

As it happens, a specific piece of dialogue coming from character Bernadetta has been altered; anyone who updates the game will now see the revised text. Originally, the sentence in question was significantly longer, with Bernadetta sharing details of an abusive relationship. The new text doesn’t change the plot in any way, but does tone down some of the more sensitive parts of the quote.

As you’d expect, fan reaction to the news appears to be rather mixed. A quick look on social media shows that some players are understanding of the decision – which would appear to have been made in an attempt to protect players – while others have been left unhappy, either believing the situation to be unnecessary censorship, or because they felt that it was an important piece of dialogue that gives more weight to the character’s story.

The update in question is Version 1.0.2. If your game hasn’t been updated to this new version, the original text should still be present.

Overland has been in development for a long time now. Developer Finji – which began life back in 2006 when it was founded by Adam and Rebekah Saltsman – has been involved in several major releases over the years, including (deep breath) Canabalt, Gravity Hook, Hundreds, Feist, Panoramical, Runaway Toad and Night in the Woods. In recent times, they’ve made headlines for games like Wilmot’s Warehouse and Tunic. Yet all the while, Overland remained in the background, tinkered, toiled, and iterated. It became a highlighted game for Apple Arcade, it laboured into almost 600 development builds (according to their Twitter), and after five calendar years, it’s finally putting all pre-release builds in the rearview mirror. Here it finally is: Overland 1.0.

It’s worth a mention that during that long stretch of development time, the themes and pieces that make up Overland are far more commonplace in the gaming industry: its a post-apocalyptic, gridded strategy game, which we’ve seen plenty of recently. But hey, you can definitely pet the dog, at the cost of an action point, but with no benefit other than a warm, fuzzy feeling. “We thought it was fun to offer our First Access Players last year, so we added the mechanic in,” explains Rebekah Saltsman. “The Twitter account did make us laugh when it turned up earlier this year.”

It’s clear that this is quite an epic undertaking on Finji’s part. “Overland is a procedurally-generated strategy game, turn-based, and set in a post-apocalyptic version of North America,” adds Rebekah. “It is also a response to movies like Stalker, the book A Roadside Picnic, and collaborative game playing experiences like Pandemic. The sound-based enemy mechanic is not something we have seen in games before. The dialogue is responsive to what is happening on-screen; the stories and dialogue are also procedurally generated – and the game is located into like 14 languages. The game includes a new UI design interface which has stripped down the standards of the strategy genre while maintaining the ability for both hardcore strategy players and those new to the genre to engage and learn with appropriate feedback. It contains story-generating design hooks that encourage the players to create their own story. We broke most strategy game rules.”

It’s shaping up to be something special, then. What Overland really has going for it – and this is clear in even just half an hour with the game – is fantastic production values and gameplay that’s been heavily user-tested. You like your X-COM baddies looking sharp and with a dash of character? Do your procedurally generated games feel a little too random, not methodical enough? From the second you pick up the controller, Overland feels crisp, well written, and difficult – but fair.

Here’s all Overland wants you to do: get to the west coast of the United States any way you can. The problem is that you start off on the east coast, moments after hijacking a stray car and zooming away from your friend who gave his life to afford you a few extra seconds to escape an attack. Enter: the map.

Having a car is the (mostly) mandatory bit of the game, as it helps you to travel from grid to grid. You stay on each grid as long as you want (or can), with an exit available on the map’s edge, provided you can get to it. Your vehicle has a gas meter, and the further up and down the map you want to travel to, the more gas it’ll take. Each node along your path gives minimally two options with hints to what’s hidden there, again, provided you have enough gas to get to them.

Explore the unknown at your own risk, because running out of gas drops you in an enemy-infested grid with gas canisters scattered everywhere, but with hardly any options open to you but brute force.

The other mandatory win condition is that you must have at least one living party member at all times (yep, even a dog counts). Each person you find along the way comes with their own written backstory, skills, and all kinds of potential. We quickly met a girl with a flashlight, which definitely helped. Why? Well, time is a thing in Overland, and it gets dark, which drastically affects your field of view. Turns out, being able to see is important in a turn-based strategy game.

To that end, items like the aforementioned flashlight are the other things you’ll discover besides gas; useful items are tucked away in alleyways, dumpsters, boxes, near explosive generators, and much more. We found a big, wooden plank, which we strapped to one of our character’s backs and it absorbed two hits from one of those gross monster things. We dropped a teddy bear because we could only hold one item, despite its promise as a good thing to barter later on. A stick as a weapon was also in our path, which we picked up in order to avoid the pyrrhic victory we’d get from chasing the sturdier axe in the corner that was guarded by way too many bad guys.

That’s how Overland bills itself: a game of “hard choices”. And it’s true. In this way, permadeath isn’t a thing to avoid as much as it’s Overland’s currency. Who will you sacrifice to get at least one person through the grid? Given how valuable each item is, how critical gasoline is, and how detailed all the characters are, this game wants to give you an aneurysm. But a good one, if such a thing can exist.

At least the grids where you’ll be making all these tough decisions are beautiful. The game allows you to rotate each screen ever-so-slightly, but you’re mostly confined to an isometric view of wasteland America, displayed by Polly Pocket-slices of dilapidated towns, scary wooded areas, and rural, destroyed countryside. Everything in this game is made out of large polygons, giving the destruction a sleek, “video-game-y” feel, but the colour palettes are warm and muted to keep things bleak. It’s a nice way to take in the end of the world.

The levels are randomly generated, but there is a narrative story. Finji tells us you can beat the entire game in about four hours… but you won’t. “Our very best playtester, who has been playing the game for years, can play it in 4 hours but he also has like 300+ hours on record,” explains Rebekah Saltsman. “A normal player who is just trying to do their first run through could finish it in 8 hours, so long as they don’t die. The game has seven regions – five full 60-90 minute regions and two ‘half’ regions. All of this has heavy caveats on your death rate.”

That is, Overland is tough as nails. It takes a few, quick play-throughs to get your bearings, some more to build up strategy, then a few more on top of that to get lucky. A game over screen features a post-mortem and stats for every member of your party that went along for the ride, and works as motivation to get back up and try again. If there weren’t so many pre-booked appointments at PAX, we might have even tried again after our party perished.

If you’re a fan of FTL and Into the Breach, or other similarly-minded stat-driven, hard choice strategy games, Overland will absolutely keep your attention. If anything else, it might be the first video game ever made where players actually choose to sacrifice the dog. Listen, it’s the only way.

We know exactly what it’s like to look fresh, hip, and down with the cool kids of today (we really don’t), so you may or may not want to trust us when we say that this new Pokémon Switch Lite accessory is a must-have.

Jokes aside, this new product will, of course, be a great pick for any Pokémon fans who like its design. It’s been made with the new Switch Lite in mind, perhaps to go with your new Zacian and Zamazenta Edition console, and can also store a selection of your game cartridges.

Take a closer look in these images below:

It’s available to pre-order now from Amazon Japan if you’re interested (international shipping is available) and is priced at ¥3,278 before tax and delivery (approx. £24 / $30). It’s scheduled to release on 1st November.

In other Pokémon-related news, a brand new monster has just been teased by The Pokémon Company. You can check that out right here if you want to learn more.

Will you be treating yourself to this Pokémon Switch bag? Let us know with a comment.