New Preview Beta, Delta and Omega System Update – 2/2/18
Preview Beta, Delta and Omega Insiders can expect another new update today, complete with brand new fixes. This update (1802.180131-1450) will begin rolling out at 6.00 p.m. PST and will become mandatory shortly after that. Read on to learn more about the fixes and known issues related to this build. Given this is the first build the Omega Ring users are receiving we have listed the New Features in this build.
New Features:
Next Achievements
With this update, you’ll be able to use the “Next Achievements” feature in the Guide, which enables you to view and sort a cross-games list of upcoming Achievements. Easily see which Achievements you are closest to, and quickly launch the game to obtain them. Sort filters allow you to prioritize next Achievements by closest, most common, rarest, most common rare, and highest Gamerscore. You can also hide/unhide a specific achievement or entire game from the Next Achievements section!
Mini Game Hubs
Mini Game Hubs are available in the Guide. With this feature, you’ll be able to access great content for the games you’ve played recently from a Game Hub without ever having to leave the action. Mini Game Hubs provide an easy way to see friends who are currently playing, upcoming Achievements, Looking for Group posts, and more. To find the Mini Game Hub, launch the Guide and look for a new icon to the right of all Game tiles in the Home section.
Do Not Disturb
Sometimes all you want to do is avoid all distractions and focus entirely on your game. This build has the new feature of “Do not disturb” online status, which will suppress notifications and let your friends know that you’re not available for another game or activity right now.
Open the Guide and select your profile icon to the far left.
Select My profile.
From the Appear online dropdown to the right, select Do not disturb.
Community Feed
We’re tweaking the community feed to make it easier to view comments. You’ll soon be able to see a peek of the most recent comment on community posts while viewing the activity in full screen. Comments are also being rearranged to place those that are most recent at the top. You’ll also be able to see who has liked your comments.
Power Settings
To address user feedback, we have added additional inactivity shutdown options to the Power mode & startup menu. In addition to shutting down the console after one or six hours of inactivity, you will be able to select options for two, three, four and five hours.
Navigate to Settings > Power & startup > Power mode & startup.
Under Options, select the “Turn off after” dropdown menu.
Fixes:
Mixer
Fixed an issue which caused the Mixer app to crash when connecting a headset while the app is in use.
General
Resolved an issue which sometimes caused degraded console performance in games, apps, and on the dashboard.
Party Chat
Miscellaneous performance improvements for party chat.
Known Issues:
Dynamic Themes
We are disabling the Dynamic/Scheduled themes feature in this build. We will continue to work on this functionality for a future release. Thank you all for testing this feature and providing feedback.
Games Installation
Games that are installed fail to launch. Workaround: If the games are installed to an external drive please copy the game to the internal drive or attempt to delete the title and redownload to fix the launch error.
Display
We are investigating the inaccurate RGB colors that have been reported when displaying in 4K HDR mode when playing a UHD disc.
Tournaments
The left and right navigation for selecting date and time during Tournament creation is currently reversed when the console language is set to Arabic or Hebrew.
Left and right navigation in Tournament twists is reversed when the console language is set to Arabic or Hebrew.
Left and right navigation in the bracket view of Tournaments is reversed when the console language is set to Arabic or Hebrew.
Avatars on Home
Users wishing to represent themselves as an avatar can do so by changing their settings under My profile > Customize profile > Show my avatar.
Video: Get An Official Glimpse Of Castle Of Heart’s Gameplay In Action
Polish developer 7LEVELS has unveiled the first official gameplay footage for upcoming side-scrolling action-adventure Castle Of Heart. It’s a short one, but it does show off the game’s meaty combat and platforming action in the early stages of its opening level.
Here’s a tasty snippet from the official synopsis to whet your appetite:
“The protagonist of Castle of Heart is a knight, turned to stone by the curse of the evil mage. If he doesn’t replenish his energy level regularly, he begins to crumble. This may lead to losing an arm, which makes using one of the 50 different side weapons acquired during his journey impossible. The game offers 20 levels set in 4 unique environments, providing over 7 hours of intense experience. Castle of Heart utilizes unique Nintendo Switch features, such as HD Rumble.”
Castle Of Heart is set to arrive on Nintendo Switch somewhere within Q1 2018. Does this side-scrolling adventure pique your interest? Either way, let us know what you think…
Back in 2014, the 3DS eShop received AeternoBlade, a hack ‘n’ slash focused Metroidvania that’s centered around the gameplay concept of controlling time. After a failed attempt at Kickstarting a sequel, Corecell Technology has opted to port the game to the Switch eShop, no doubt in hopes of building up the fanbase further. We weren’t huge fans of the game when it launched on 3DS, but there’s always room for second chances. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that much has changed.
The story of AeternoBlade revolves around Freyja, a warrior hailing from a village destroyed by the Dark Lord, Beladim. After being easily killed by him in the opening scene, Freyja is transported back seven days by the titular blade to prepare for her fateful encounter again. Though the plot takes some mildly interesting twists and turns over its seven-or-so-hour run, there’s very little here that hasn’t been done to death before. Granted, an engaging plot isn’t expected in a game of this sort, but the utter lack of charm or originality in characters doesn’t do AeternoBlade any favors.
It’s a Metroidvania at its heart, but it opts to stack some interesting modifiers on that core formula which, unfortunately, aren’t terribly well executed. Rather than one massive map, the game is divied up into separate levels, and while this helps streamline level designs, it comes at the cost of incentive to explore. Secrets are often found in predictable and relatively easily accessed places, with time manipulation abilities playing into many of the basic puzzles you come across. Backtracking is encouraged by some paths being placed tantalizingly out of reach, though these can often have disappointing rewards waiting for you at the end. Overall level design, then, tends to feel unsurprising in many instances, and we couldn’t help but feel that the Metroidvania elements were added late in development.
Clearly, the focus here is being put on the combat, which is the best aspect of AeternoBlade, though it takes quite a bit of time to build up into an interesting system. Freyja starts out with some exceptionally basic combo moves, with more and more being unlocked with experience orbs you gain from downed enemies. The problem is that it takes quite a bit of time before Freyja’s options really start to open up, meaning that you’ll be spending lots of time mindlessly mashing the same button and watching the same attacks over and over. Adding insult to injury, most of the enemies – with the exception of end level bosses – fail to match your abilities in any meaningful way, acting as easily stunned sword fodder and little more. It’s a real shame, too, because the combat starts to get diverse and interesting once you pass a few levels, offering a tantalising glimpse at the better game that could’ve been.
Aside from upgrading her combo abilities, Freyja also has more traditional upgradeable stats, and a system of held items called Relics. These can be found throughout the game world and equipped to Freyja in sets, offering a wealth of different buffs and benefits. It’s nice that there’s this element of character building, as it enables you to skew your enhancements toward your particular playstyle, though it’s fairly surface-level character customization. Still, the potential of a better relic gives you some incentive to travel off the beaten path every now and then to see what can be picked up, and it breathes some much-needed life into the otherwise monotonous exploration.
From a presentation perspective, AeternoBlade falls quite flat, failing to provide much in the way of interesting audio or visual feedback. Its roots as a 3DS game are painfully obvious; the original release was considered so-so on that hardware, and not much has been done to pretty it up for Switch. Jagged geometry, stilted animations, a murky color palette, and blurry textures make for environments and characters that are passable at best and downright ugly at the worst. To be fair, running the game on more powerful hardware has allowed for some slightly better details in minor places, but the harsh reality is that putting lipstick on a pig does not do much to change the pig. The game appears to run the same whether docked or portable, but it looks better in portable mode, if only because the sub-par visuals aren’t nearly as noticeable.
Conclusion
AeternoBlade is one of those games that’s frustrating, not because anything in it is broken, but because brief glimpses of excellence show what could’ve been. It’s a decent game, but mediocrity rears its ugly head in nearly every aspect. You could do much worse with Metroidvania games than this, but there’s very little here that you haven’t seen done before, probably better. If you are chomping at the bit for every Metroidvania you can find for Switch, then perhaps AeternoBlade is worth the punt. If that’s not you, we’d suggest a better release in the genre – such as like Axiom Verge or Shantae: Half-Genie Hero – and to sit this one out.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 02-09-2018, 01:39 AM - Forum: Lounge
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This Week At Bungie –2/08/2018
This week at Bungie, we’re decorating the world for the big dance.
Yesterday, we revealed that Crimson Days is coming to Destiny 2. If you haven’t had a chance to read the details about the new 2v2 playlist and the rewards you can earn in any activity, please check it out now. We’d be honored to have you join us for the celebration.
Earlier this week, Lord Saladin packed up his wares and left the Tower. We heard some good things about Iron Banner in Season 2. If you are still holding tokens, you can use them the next time the ritual returns. If you still need to punch some Guardians to get that chest ornament, you can also continue your progress when Lord Saladin returns.
Settle the Score
“Do you see the stars flutter? Now listen. They scream from the lacerations of our enemies. The balance has been threatened. Nightfall is upon us. This burden of Light has never been heavier. We can sleep no more.” — Ulan-Tan
Last week, we published a Destiny 2 Development roadmap, to forecast some changes coming to Destiny 2. You may have noticed some changes coming to Nightfall strikes. The Nightfall has been the subject of a lot of feedback since launch. Many of you felt that the timer was pretty stressful and preferred being able to slowly work your way through the challenges at your own pace. We plan to address this feedback with upcoming changes.
Before we get to the details, Game Director Christopher Barrett has some context to frame up the essential fantasy that we’d like for the Nightfall to serve.
Barrett: Nightfall should be a challenging test that only the bravest Guardians dare face. Fireteams of any size should be able to participate, from organized clan groups to skilled solo players. Players should be able to determine their own challenge level, by going slow and steady or fast and wild, with elective modifiers to test the most hardcore veterans. Your final score will separate the best from the rest, and with high risk comes high reward. Each terrible villain that players face should have a very rare and powerful unique item, themed to them, that tumbles to the ground as they collapse into a pile of bones. Conquering Nightfall should be a badge of honor, with the best players able to show off their achievements with new dynamic emblems and exclusive auras.
That’s the vision of where we want to take Nightfall, you’ll be seeing the first of this direction in the next patch, with more being added over time.
With those goals in mind, we asked Designer John Favaro and Senior Design Lead Tyson Green to share some facts on how they plan to enhance Nightfall strikes.
Tyson: As we are working on new sandbox improvements, we recognized the need for a venue in which those improvements matter more. The weekly Nightfall, especially on the Prestige difficulty, was intended to be such a venue, but the controversial time limit mechanic is a simple pass-fail mechanism. It only acknowledges success as being a clear, with no degrees of success past that, so no competition exists in that space. It turns a lot of people off of Nightfall too, since it is both difficult and indexes performance solely on speed.
Nightfall Scoring
We are repositioning strike scoring in Destiny 2 to enable you to achieve something prestigious in the weekly Nightfall and as a way to amplify difficulty. The new scoring rules are intended to be better at a few specific things:
Reward you for engaging and defeating enemies instead of running past them.
Avoid over-emphasizing specific mechanics like precision kills that highlight certain areas of the sandbox (and/or punish other areas), so that players are the ones who determine the most effective Meta.
Reward you for taking on greater challenges up to the limits of your own capabilities.
Reward you for doing the above quickly and over the course of a short run versus long slogs over several hours.
The updated mechanics look like this:
Scoring is team-based and the sum of individual performances. A team should be able to focus on what works best, not feeling put out by who stole whose kill.
Scoring is primarily driven by kills and secondarily by orb generation. We want you to find what works best for clearing strikes instead of telling you which weapons to use, but we want coordinated use of Supers and other team support mechanics to contribute to high scores. We’re interested in restoring special point awards based on medals, but we want your input to understand the basic meta first.
Score bleeds over time. We are watching this closely — score decay can feel bad, but all else being equal, a team that clears faster than another team should score higher. Score decay achieves this in the most transparent fashion.
Scoring cuts off after time thresholds. At 15 minutes, new points earned are reduced by 50%. At 18 minutes, you stop earning new points and it’s a race to finish the run and post your score. We want time to matter (see above), but we also want to avoid some of the problems we saw with Prison of Elders, where a “high score” might involve punishing respawning combatants (and yourself) for a few hours until the novelty wore off. A good Nightfall clear shouldn’t feel like a slog.
Challenge
On top of the above mechanics are Challenge Cards, items that offer ways to boost the challenge in exchange for score multipliers. In 1.1.3 there will be a challenge card that drops from completing a Nightfall run. It has some customization options to help tune the challenge level to what you and your fireteam are capable of.
Rewards
Players will be able to see their (and your) scores on new Nightfall Emblems available as drops in each Nightfall strike. These emblems (and others like them) are now the source of auras, which are automatically enabled if your personal score is above a global threshold. At first the thresholds will be set based on what we think might be tough for players to reach, but we look forward to you showing us how much we underestimated you. Then we can raise the bar based on community scores.
Along with the aura, a personal score over the threshold will also unlock a fireteam-wide buff that boosts Vanguard Token drops in that strike by 25%. When your fireteam sees the Nightfall Aura on your head, they know who’s hooking them up.
Lastly, some rarer variants of these Nightfall Emblems will be available as drops at higher score thresholds. Obtaining these rewards is meant to be challenging, so we don’t expect everyone to reach these scores or collect these items.
Version 0.9
Update 1.1.3 will have a first pass on this feature. Before we can call it a competitive activity, we need your help pushing the limits and finding where it breaks. Future updates will react to your input, as well as add more rewards and recognition to posting competitive scores. We also hope to extend the Challenge Cards to support more difficulty customization and deepen the scoring options. All of the feedback you give us in this release will go into making our upcoming releases better. Thank you in advance!
Designer John Favaro has some additional info about what you can expect from the new Nightfall modifiers in the Prestige mode.
John: The current Nightfall climate encourages play that pushes players through the encounters as fast as possible, focusing on extending bonus timers, and skipping encounters unless they are required, which was more stressful than fun. With Nightfall strike scoring, we were looking to give players a little more control, allowing them to modify their experiences to provide them the challenge they want and incentivize more methodical progression through the activities. People like big numbers, and the best way to get big numbers is to kill everything. We’ve been listening to the community’s feedback, and this is our first step in making a few improvements. We’re hoping you’ll put some time in and let us know how you feel.
The modifiers will apply a multiplier to your score in the Prestige Nightfall. It isn’t all more, more, more though; there are plenty of ways to lose points. There is an ever-present score bleed to apply pressure to keep you moving, and a timer that will reduce your multiplier if you take too long. Here are the current modifiers we’re going to ship in this first iteration:
Void/Solar/Arc Singe – currently provides a +25% increase to player and enemy damage of the corresponding element. Extinguish – fireteam wipes return the team to orbit Power modifier – voluntarily decrease your power to gain a score bonus.
These are just our initial modifier offerings. This release is focusing more on how the system as a whole feels, so we can get feedback on the core experience to fine-tune it before we dive in head first to creating additional modifiers.
There you have it. If you still enjoy the thrill of racing through quickly, you will be rewarded with a higher score. If you prefer to go in solo and take your time, you might lose some points, but will still finish the activity and collect a reward. You can complete the normal Nightfall and get a score, or you can take on the Prestige Nightfall and ratchet up your score with some modifiers. We’re eager to see you jump into the new Nightfall and give us feedback on these changes.
Raid Plans
Another thing that may have jumped out at you as you read the Destiny 2 Development roadmap was that the Eater of Worlds Prestige mode was pushed out until May. You may have even said, “What is taking them so long?”
It’s a fair question. The answer is that we didn’t want to release it in its current form. Before rolling it out, we thought we could add some more flavor to this special activity that will make it worth the wait. Here to tell you more about our plans for raid activities is Senior Designer Joe Blackburn.
Joe: Hey, Guardians. For Destiny 2, we wanted to release raid content on a more regular cadence than we did during the first years of Destiny. In our original estimation of this work, we knew we would have to focus on normal modes, forgoing Lair challenge modes, and having their Prestige Modes rely on enemies that are more lethal and harder to kill.
As we got closer to releasing Prestige Eater of Worlds, we knew we wanted to do something more. Over the past few months, we have been prototyping a new way of adding difficulty and replayability to raid activities. Today, I’m happy to announce that we have decided to push this feature forward and release it for all the Leviathan Raid Content with the release of Expansion 2.
Going forward, all raids will all have a normal mode active at all times, and each week one raid or Raid Lair will have a curated loadout mode.
This new version of Prestige requires players to complete raids filled with deadly enemies using a curated loadout of weapons and a special modifier that enhances the way you play. The Raid Team never likes to let you know exactly what to expect, but let’s look at some hypothetical examples. These are not the plan of record, but they give you a basic idea of what you might find.
Week 1
Raid Activity: Eater of Worlds
Modifier: Marksman. Precision damage is increased. Landing a precision shot grants one ammo directly to the magazine.
Required Loadout:
Kinetic: Hand Cannon
Energy: Scout Rifle
Power: Linear Fusion
Week 2
Raid Activity: Expansion 2 Raid Lair
Modifier: Gladiator. Your melee damage is increased and melee kills grant bonus Super.
Required Loadout:
Kinetic: Sidearm
Energy: Submachine gun
Power: Shotgun
Week 3
Raid Activity: Eater of Worlds
Modifier: Conduit. Each kill you get before reloading or swapping weapons gives you increasingly more ability energy.
Required Loadout:
Kinetic: Auto Rifle
Energy: Riskrunner
Power: Grenade Launcher
We should also note that, while Eater of Worlds is not getting any specific encounter changes, all the previous Prestige changes in Leviathan will be active when players engage in its new loadout difficulty.
The goal of the new Prestige mode is simple: provide new ways to engage with raid content each week, new ways to engage with different weapons in your vault, and new rewards to chase.
This is currently slotted on the roadmap for May, but this is a major overhaul and could be pushed out further. We’ll keep you updated.
We can’t wait for you to play it, talk about it, and help us make it better for years to come.
Thanks,
Joe
Get it Off Your Chest
Last week, we deployed Destiny Update 1.1.2. With it, we shipped a temporary fix for a lockout on Lost Sector chests bringing the time down from 10 minutes to 5. This wasn’t the solution we were looking for. We have a better one coming to you next week, so we invited Senior Designer Alex Velicky to explain what we have planned.
Alex: In the 1.1.2.1 Hot Fix, we’ve fixed the underlying issue that caused the Lost Sector chest exploit. Players can now only open the boss chest once after killing a Lost Sector boss, as was originally intended. The chest may still respawn if you leave and return rapidly (due to a larger issue with our activity tech that would require significant changes to fix) but you won’t be able to open it again. You’ll get the ‘code required’ prompt unless the boss also respawns and you defeat them again. We’ve also completely removed the reward throttle from Lost Sectors as it is no longer necessary and we agree it was a poor player experience.
We want to acknowledge all of the interest we’ve seen from players in us expanding the Lost Sectors system. We agree and are currently looking into ways to do that. We’re not yet sure what form it will take and we don’t have anything specific to talk about yet, but it’s something we’re working towards. Look out for someone to talk about that in a future TWAB when we have more solid plans to share.
The next download arrives on Tuesday. Destiny Player Support will be on station to monitor your progress in installing the bits. Which is the perfect segue into…
Check Your Vitals
Destiny Player Support is dedicated to keeping you in the game. The best place to find them is the Help forum. Once a week, they make an appearance here to keep you informed.
This is their report.
Destiny 2 Maintenance and Downtime
On Tuesday February 13, Destiny 2 Hotfix 1.1.2.1 will be deployed to address timeouts on Lost Sector chests. There will be a period of maintenance before this hotfix becomes available. For times, please see below:
8 AM Pacific – 1600 UTC
Destiny server maintenance is scheduled to begin
Players may no longer sign in to Destiny services
9 AM Pacific – 1700 UTC
Players still in Destiny 2 activities will be returned to the title screen
12 PM Pacific – 2000 UTC
Destiny server maintenance is scheduled to conclude
Destiny 2 Hotfix 1.1.2.1 will be available to download and install
Crimson Days will begin as soon as maintenance concludes
Crimson Days Vital Information
Immediately after maintenance completion, Crimson Days will become available to all Destiny 2 players. The following items are potential points of confusion that players may experience during this event, and we’d like to give a heads up.
Welcome to Crimson Days Waypoint: Under some circumstances, players may not receive a waypoint leading them to Tower vendors for the “Welcome to Crimson Days” Milestone. Players may still complete these steps by simply speaking with the Tower vendor listed in the milestone.
Crucible Tokens in Loot Stream: Upon completion of a Crimson Days Crucible match, post-game rewards may push Crucible Tokens out of view in the player’s loot stream. Players should always receive Crucible Tokens upon Crimson Days match completion and may find them in their Consumables inventory.
Romantic Comedies About Time Travel
Grab your popcorn and pour some of the gooey butter simulation sauce on it. It’s movie time!
We have been flipping through the pages of the Creation page looking for the best movies to highlight here for everyone to see. We will give the creators a special emblem as a small memento to remember their accomplishment. If you want your shot at it, just submit your video to the Creations page. If you do end up winning, make sure you put the player names of everyone who helped create the video in the description so we can give out the emblems to the right players. Now, on to the winners.
Movie of the Week: Pleasure Gardens with two Guardians (Warning: Language)
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Honorable Mention: Happy Crimson Days
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We shared more of our plans with you this week. As always, we‘ll be reading your thoughts and feedback on what we laid out. Tell us what you think. We’ll continue to keep you updated.
Crimson Days is only 5 sleeps away. I plan on teaming up with dmg04. Hopefully, he can keep up so we can stick together. Keep an eye out; maybe you can best us.
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend.
This week’s highlights include a video profile of SOS creators Outpost Games, an analysis of Bubsy’s Japanese translation and a longform Tetris documentary, among others.
One thing I’m noticing in today’s video picks – some of these high-quality interviews and documentaries are getting low numbers of views, sometimes less than 1,000. This is mainly due to the sheer amount of videos available nowadays, of course.
But some vids are tricky to find because they’re posted on ‘Let’s Play’ channels that are otherwise high-volume & low-subscriber. Conversely, that great Tetris doc has >100,000 views already. Intriguing differences…
I was a video game sceptic, but now I’m a fan(Jessica Furseth / The Guardian – ARTICLE) “Luke, how do I get this power moon? Luke!” I’m playing Super Mario Odyssey while my partner, Luke, is trying to work. “You’ll figure it out,” he says patiently. Luke has been playing video games since he was a child, but this is my first ever game, and he’s thrilled that I’m invested in Mario’s quest to save Princess Peach.”
Outpost Games and SOS Documentary(Gameumentary / Destructoid – YouTube – VIDEO) “Gameumentary recently traveled to South San Francisco to tell the story of a new game development studio called Outpost Games. The studio is working on their first title, SOS, which is a battle royale-like game, but with a focus on players as live performers. Think of it like an episode of Survivor. [SIMON’S NOTE: Outpost is super-interesting, being a VC-backed studio making a ‘made for Twitch’-style game – a rarity!]”
The Xbox One has a serious exclusive games problem(Colin Campbell / Polygon – ARTICLE) “Microsoft has given Xbox head Phil Spencer a vote of confidence, promoting him to executive vice president of gaming. In return, Spencer will be expected to solve the company’s immediate problem: The Xbox One doesn’t have enough big-name exclusives.”
Getting Over It (Spoilers?)(Errant Signal / YouTube – VIDEO) “I managed to make a Getting Over It video on YouTube without screaming or losing my cool even once! Do I get a cookie? Also, we talk about boring game design things and the concept of failure in videogames and frustration and pain as express aesthetic goals.”
Xbox Live Indie Games – A 2D Retrospective(AJ Johnson / 8 Bit Horse – ARTICLE) “Still, it was a wild ride while it lasted, and there were a handful of developers who made the service worthwhile, some of whom used this as a springboard toward a full-time career in game development. To that end, we’re taking a chronological look at the notable developers of 2D video games who found their place on Xbox Live Indie Games…”
How They Translated Bubsy into Japanese(Clyde Mandelin / Legends Of Localization – ARTICLE) “Several years back, a reader asked about how the Super NES version of Bubsy had been translated into Japanese. The game is filled with 90s American “attitude”, movie references, and bad cat puns – many of which are presented as voice clips. So how did the Japanese version handle all of these translation challenges?”
Fairlight an Interview – A talk with Bo Jangeborg – ZX Spectrum(Gears Of Games / YouTube – VIDEO) “An interview with the creator of Fairlight I and II (ZX Spectrum) : Bo Jangeborg. [SIMON’S NOTE: Very worthy and historically important, for those who remember this spectrum isometric classic.]”
How The Room devs succeeded on mobile, ‘the only option left to us’(Jennifer Allen / Gamasutra – ARTICLE) “At this point, Fireproof Games’ Room games seem so entrenched as to almost be part of the foundation of the mobile game market. But when we caught up with Fireproof cofounder Barry Meade last week, he confessed to something many devs may empathize with: a sense of optimistic nervousness.”
In Praise Of Video Game Castles(Philip Boyes / Eurogamer – ARTICLE) “I can’t help feeling that in their own 80s and 90s childhood, video games shared something of my infatuation. In those days – that early flush of creativity when everything was bright and cartoonish and simple – it seems like games were filled with castles.”
What Works And Why: Emergence(Tom Francis / RockPaperShotgun – ARTICLE) “I love Deus Ex, System Shock 2, and Dishonored 2, and the name for these games is dumb: they’re ‘immersive sims’. If you asked me what I liked about them, my answer would be a phrase almost as dumb: ’emergent gameplay!’”
4-2: The History of Super Mario Bros.’ Most Infamous Level(Summoning Salt / YouTube – VIDEO) “[SIMON’S NOTE: Almost 1 million views already! This is a spectacularly entertaining retrospective of how speedrunners have morphed approaches to a Super Mario Bros level over a decade plus!]”
AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook: Nathan Vella(Ted Price / Libsyn – PODCAST) “Capy’s Nathan Vella stops by to chat with Ted Price of Insomniac Games about his journey from film into game development, leading a multi-project studio, comedy in games, and the future of indie development.”
The (still) uncertain state of video game streaming online(Willie Clark / Ars Technica – ARTICLE) “As these streamers and personalities have grown in popularity, so too has the discussion over the rights of streamers and developers in regards to said content. Are streams covered under fair use with content creators allowed to make money off of them? Or should the original creators of the games have a say in how their products are used in the public eye, not to mention a chance to generate profit?”
The Sierra Network(Jimmy Maher / The Digital Antiquarian – ARTICLE) “Ken Williams got the online religion early or late, depending on how you look at it. Despite running a company whose official name was Sierra On-Line — admittedly, the second part of the name was already being de-emphasized by the end of the 1980s, and would eventually be dropped entirely — he had paid no more attention than most of his peers to the rise of commercial online services like CompuServe.”
Roadside To The IGF 2018(Gulmer / Medium – ARTICLE) “I would like to honor some of the more unique and interesting games I’ve had a chance to play during the judging phase – focusing on the ones that didn’t become finalists in any award category. [SIMON’S NOTE: this is a really amazing piece, picking things outside of the also-great finalists.]”
Huddle up! Making the [SPOILER] of INSIDE(Playdead / YouTube – VIDEO) “In this 2017 GDC talk, Playdead’s Andreas, Normand Grntved, Sren Trautner Madsen, Lasse Jon Fuglsang Pedersen and Mikkel Bogeskov Svendsen peel apart the layers woven together to make INSIDE’s horrific [SPOILER], showing how its dynamic arms are imposed on a sack of physics bodies, moved by physics and animation as one unit, and glued together by specialized shading.”
The story of The Crossing, Arkane’s lost game(Blake Hester / Polygon – ARTICLE) “When asked about The Crossing, Raphael Colantonio and Viktor Antonov, two of the game’s leads, liken it to an ex-girlfriend. They were passionate about the project. They still have love for it. When they walked away, it was painful. But they’d never go back.”
How Human: Fall Flat has kept its head held high(John Walker / RockPaperShotgun – ARTICLE) “Human: Fall Flat is a sweet physics puzzle game that, well, was fine when it came out. A cute, entertaining little thing, but not something that was going to covet awards or expect breakthrough success. However, since a reasonably successful launch, Tomas Sakalauskas has been persistently smart.”
The Story of Tetris(Gaming Historian / YouTube – VIDEO) “In 1984, during the Cold War, a Russian programmer named Alexey Pajitnov created something special: A puzzle game called Tetris. It soon gained a cult following within the Soviet Union. A battle for the rights to publish Tetris erupted when the game crossed the Iron Curtain.”
Plants vs. Zombies creator George Fan on past success, future risks, and drafts with Edmund McMillen(Chris Carter / Destructoid – ARTICLE) “George Fan is pretty modest for someone who created Insaniquarium and Plants vs. Zombies, two of the most memorable and replayable games ever released. His career has spanned almost two decades, from freaky Flash games to creating a major franchise in Zombies, which is endlessly iterated upon by industry behemoth Electronic Arts.”
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Q& A: Translating the humor & tone of Yakuza games for the West
Each of Sega’s Yakuza games contains multitudes.
For example, Yakuza 0(the series prequel released outside of Japan early last year) sets itself up as a playable crime serial set in ’80s Japan.
But it can also be a cabaret management game, a blind date sim, a 3D beat-’em-up, an emulator of old Sega arcade classics, a rhythm game, a light-hearted RPG about solving stranger’s problems, a real estate management game, and a surprisingly good place to learn the basics of tabletop games like shogi and mahjong.
From a developer’s perspective, the scope of such a project seems daunting. From a player’s perspective, it can be overwhelming — my partner and I recently completed Yakuza 0, and saw that our 87 hours of combined play merited a “completion” score of roughly 33 percent.
The hook that holds together all these disparate game design elements, that pulled us and scores of Western players like us through the game, is the writing. For all its focus on cold-hearted criminals and petty evil, Yakuza 0 is a remarkably funny game; it affords players the freedom to quickly jump from incredibly serious, macabre scenes (a criminal is tortured in a warehouse) to (teach a shy punk band to act like Cool Rude Dudes in public).
That writing is translated and localized for the West by Atlus, starting with Yakuza 0 and continuing on through Yakuza Kiwami (a remake of the original 2005 game) and Yakuza 6. The localization of all three games has been overseen by Scott Strichart, who recently sat down to chat about the ins and outs of adapting these games’ humor and gravity for Western players.
It was an interesting conversation that went beyond the localization process (Atlus uses a translator/editor tag-team approach, rather than relying on translators alone) to touch on how, exactly, you translate humor, and how players in different regions can view a game or its characters completely differently. What follows is a version of that conversation we’ve edited for clarity.
The Yakuza games have a winning sense of humor. How do you translate that for a Western audience?
Strichart: The humor of a Yakuza game is a fine line to walk. It’s very clear when the developers want to be funny. It’s very clear to us when the writing that exists in the game is supposed to be like, “ha ha here’s a joke.” So we just want to make sure that if they intended for it to be funny, it also has to be funny to our audience. Whether or not that means changing the dialogue a little bit, changing the style in which it’s delivered, making dialogue options a little bit more punchy, that kind of thing.
One of the perfect examples is, [in Yakuza 0] Majima encounters this…did you play the substory where he goes to infiltrate a cult? In that substory, one of the options he has is to crack a pun, in order to get this girl to snap out of her cult tendencies. So in Japanese, that pun is “futon ga futon da”, which means “a futon is a futon” or, “a futon flies.” It’s a pun on words. It’s basically a “why did the chicken cross the road” kind of joke.
If we literally translated that, it wouldn’t work. If we put in “why did the chicken cross the road?” it’s not much of a pun; it doesn’t feel in line with Majima’s character.
So that’s where we had to come up with this pun that we ultimately went with, which was “how do you avoid dangerous cults? Practice safe sects!”
Okay, let’s drill into that localization process — how, exactly, did you go from a flying futon joke to a safe sex joke?
Well it wasn’t just me — we have a team of translators and editors who approach these games. These games are massive; if they were left to just me, i’d be buried under each of these games for years! Most of these Yakuza games actually are on par or greater than your average JRPG, in terms of volume of text.
How many lines of text were you working with in Yakuza 0?
Yakuza 0 is 1.8 million JPC (Japanese characters), and the average JRPG is, I think, 1 million to 1.2. So we were well above the average there.
So anyway, how our process works is, the scripts come in from Japan, and we divvy them up to certain translators and editors to make sure there’s consistency among the sections that they’re doing.
“We just want to make sure that if [the devs] intended for it to be funny, it also has to be funny to our audience. Whether or not that means changing the dialogue a little bit, changing the style in which it’s delivered, making dialogue options a little bit more punchy, that kind of thing.”
So that particular pun was in a substory, for instance, so the translation team who was on that was one of our outsourced translators, who was doing most of the Majima substories. Because they were familiar with Majima as a character, they were familiar with the substory content, and all that kind of stuff.
These kinds of localization issues, we don’t know about them until we hit them. We’re doing it line by line, and suddenly we’re like “oh shit, here’s a pun.” And when you hit that, you have to take a step back and say okay, this isn’t going to be a direct translation. We have to deal with it — sometimes that comes down to a discussion amongst editors and translators, or sometimes a translator will flag it for the editor to say “I didn’t know what to do with this, man. Let’s talk about this.”
So when that gets to the editor, the editor’s job might be to come up with a way to make that pun palatable to the Western audience. That’s generally the Atlus approach, is we use editors to refine the translated English text to make sure it makes sense to Western players.
A lot of companies don’t do it this way. And it’s not right or wrong, but a lot of companies dedicate a single translator who has the ability to translate Japanese to English, and make it good English. Whereas we use a method where the translators give an editor, not a literal translation, but translated words off the page that don’t necessarily scream “this is great English.” That allows an editor to come in and refine that text to make it palatable to a Western audience, whether or not that editor even speaks Japanese.
I really enjoy that style, actually. Back when I was the first localization employee at Level-5, it was kind of up to me to establish that style. I could have just thrown the work at a translation agency and let them go, but I thought it was a good idea to give it a more personal touch.
So we brought in a translator and, you know, when an editor meets a translator and they learn their style through working with them on a game or two, and you can almost feel their style through the text, you develop this like, symbiotic relationship with that translator. And that’s kind of how I felt about that translator who was working onAttack of the Friday Monsters with me. It worked out really well.
So why do you think it’s a good idea to use an editor/translator team, rather than just a single translator?
Well, it’s not right or wrong. I think that both ways of doing localization have advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of this method are that it’s a little more collaborative.
A translator gets to talk to an editor, and if you hit a line you’re gonna stumble on, you can actually get a lot of insight into what that character is about, what they’re saying, and kind of hash it out between you. If the editor kind of strays too far, the translator can kind of rein them back in and say “well, it’s a little closer to the Japanese this way”, and you end up refining a line to the point where it’s a bit more accurate, or more true to what a Japanese developer was trying to convey. And that’s something you can’t get if you’re just a single translator, a single mind trying to parse a game’s text as best you can. There’s no dialogue.
The second advantage is that, when editors are working on something, and they have less or no Japanese fluency — I don’t claim to have Japanese fluency — we bring a creative writing aspect to these texts that might otherwise be just a direct translation. And a direct translation, that’s not a localization. Not if you just translate something directly, that’s often not enjoyable to read. It leaves humor behind, it ends up dry, it ends up boring to read.
What do you lose by using this tag-team method? Besides the extra costs, of course.
Here’s the disadvantages: we’re slower. When a game is translated, that’s work that could be finalized, but then it then goes to an editor, who is then tasked with finalizing it. We try to mitigate that by making sure translators are going when editors roll onto a project, so you end up with this kind of lock-step process. But at the end of the day, it is a bit slower than if a single mind just translated the text and delivered it.
Is that why the Yakuza games seem to take a year or more, on average, to come to the West?
No, that is not why! [Laughs] We are closing the gap. That is my directive from management: “close the gap.” Yakuza 5 was two years in the process, and that was because Sega literally closed their office up here [in San Francisco] and the project sort of stumbled out the door. 0 came back into our hands, once we’d established operation out of Atlus, and that took us, I want to say, a year and a half?
Kiwami was a little bit less, a year and two months. And Yakuza 6 was….a year? A year and three months? If you look at the past 6 months, where we’ve released essentially 3 titles, a Yakuza game every 6 months, no one else is accomplishing this. This is practically impossible. The fact that we’re getting it done, with the quality level tht we’re held to for this series, is a marvel for my team. I’m nothing but impressed with everyone’s hard work on this.
Fair enough! What challenges have you faced along the way towards closing that gap?
To go back to that other disadvantage, on the translator/editor route. It’s consistency. The more people you bring onto a team, the more people who touch it, the more likely you are to create inconsistencies. Amongst terms, amongst the way characters talk, amongst spellings, all of that stuff has to be mitigated. You have to have a strategy for that.
“The more people you bring onto a team, the more people who touch it, the more likely you are to create inconsistencies…You have to have a strategy for that.”
What I’m talking about is like, this person is capitalizing the word patriarch. Or this person is using “jeez” with j instead of “geez” with a g. And you end up with a character that seems to speak in two different ways, or worse, you end up with literally different interpretations of a character.
When we didRadiant Historia, I decided that a character was going to have a little bit of a British lean in his voice. And I talked to the other editor about it, and even with that understanding…we ended up with completely different British leans! Because one of us understood cockney and one of us didn’t.
And that’s something that’s now actually getting fixed. And you can mitigate some of that in QA, but those little miscommunications, if you don’t have very strong communication amongst your group, especially as it grows beyond a couple editors and translators, these consistency problems balloon, and it has to be mitigated by a producer and/or a consistency pass on the text.
What advice would you give others trying to do something similar with their own games?
Focus on consistency and clarity. As a producer, I am the consistency pass. I am the voice on how characters should sound. I’m very upfront with my teams; we have daily standing meetings about our challenges that we’re hitting, and we discuss these things upfront in terms-less meetings.
We try to frontload the localization as much as possible, with these meetings, with regular discussions to hammer out the fine details. And at the end, you know text goes through a translator, it goes through an editor, and then I act as a consistency pass.
With Yakuza 6, for instance, we rolled a new editor into writing the main story, and he didn’t have a strong grasp of Kiryu’s character. Until probably, halfway through the game. So in going back through his text, I end up tweaking probably 80 percent of the text. Because I’m a perfectionist. I shouldn’t be doing it that much, but I do. And I told him, you know, your Kiryu’s way stronger in the latter half than in the beginning. So I’m going to go back and kind of rewrite your beginning. And he was totally onboard with that.
Do you have any sense of how Japanese players perceive the Yakuza protagonists?
In Japanese, I feel like Kiryu is a little bit more of an avatar for the player. He uses a lot more ellipses than we do in the English version, because we actually want our audience to identify with Kiryu as a character. Whereas in Japanese, you might want to be like, I can put myself in Kiryu’s shoes. I can be this Japanese badass.
It’s a bigger leap to expect a Western audience to be like “ah, I can be this Japanese badass.” So we give Kiryu a little bit more of his own characterization, that is very much in line with the Japanese when they do characterize him. So there’s no gap there; it’s just a matter of trying to bridge that gap Western audiences might face in trying to fully identify with a Japanese character.
How do you decide when to write in an original response, one that’s not in the Japanese version?
When a Japanese person would know what he’s thinking, because they’re able to put himself in his shoes, or they might have a better idea of what’s going through Kiryu’s head, that’s when we bridge the gap. When we decide okay, the player needs to understand a little bit more of what’s going through Kiryu’s head, because this isn’t an immediately known quantity to them.
And Japanese storytelling can be very subtle, at times. And we don’t want to be blunt and hammer players over the head with “hey this is what they’re trying to say”, but sometimes we do have to lead them a bit. We have to look at the text and be like, this is clearly trying to convey this subtle aspect of masculinity, or honor, because this is what these cultural signifiers mean. And then we have to present something to the player that makes it clear hey, this is a Japanese concept of honor, so please understand that through this thought process that Kiryu is having in the middle of it all.
What’s a good example of that?
So, Majima’s whole transformation from Yakuza 0 to Yakuza Kiwami. Longtime Yakuza fans know Majima is this class clown, kind of joker-esque personality. And when 0 [a prequel] came along, they decided to completely flip the script on this character [and present him very differently]. So you might get the idea that in playing through 0, Majima is going to be going kind of insane.
But that’s not really the Japanese take on that. The whole point of 0 is not to show that he goes insane, but to show that he makes a conscious choice to…let loose. And it is subtle in the game, even despite our best efforts to be a bit more blunt about it, especially in the scenes with Nishitani [a loud, brash character] where it’s clear Majima is gaining insight into how someone like that would live.
We brought that out a little bit more, specifically asking the devs “did you mean to communicate this?” Because even we were like, this is really, really subtle, guys. Were you trying to communicate a direct kind of correlation between Nishitani and Majima? And they were like, “yes. If you feel like you can bring that a little more obviously, without adjusting the text to the point that it doesn’t make sense or it’s not in line with the original, then go for it.” And we did! And it’s still very subtle. People, at the end of the game, they say well, Majima went insane. And it’s like well, heh, let me show you the scenes where he didn’t go insane, where it’s supposed to be clear he made a deliberate choice.
Preview Alpha Insiders can expect another new update today, complete with brand new fixes. This update (1802.180131-1450) will begin rolling out at 6.00 p.m. PST and will become mandatory shortly after that. Read on to learn more about the fixes and known issues related to this build.
Fixes:
Mixer
Fixed an issue which caused the Mixer app to crash when connecting a headset while the app is in use.
General
Resolved an issue which sometimes caused degraded console performance in games, apps, and on the dashboard.
Party Chat
Miscellaneous performance improvements for party chat.
Dynamic Theming
Additional fixes to address an issue which caused switching between Light and Dark themes to occur at incorrect times.
Known Issues:
Games Installation
Games that are installed fail to launch. Workaround: If the games are installed to an external drive please copy the game to the internal drive or attempt to delete the title and redownload to fix the launch error.
Display
We are investigating the inaccurate RGB colors that have been reported when displaying in 4K HDR mode when playing a UHD disc.
Tournaments
The left and right navigation for selecting date and time during Tournament creation is currently reversed when the console language is set to Arabic or Hebrew.
Left and right navigation in Tournament twists is reversed when the console language is set to Arabic or Hebrew.
Left and right navigation in the bracket view of Tournaments is reversed when the console language is set to Arabic or Hebrew.
Avatars on Home
Users wishing to represent themselves as an avatar can do so by changing their settings under My profile > Customize profile > Show my avatar.
Nintendo Life shmup heads rejoice as Brazilian metal band and inventors of the game metal genre Megadriver have just released their latest album. For Great Justice is a twenty track metal cover album with some very iconic tunes from several classic shmups, including songs from Thunder Force IV, After Burner, Gradius III, U.N Squadron, R-Type and (of course!) the infamous Zero Wing. The album is dedicated in memory of Spanish artist Daniel Vendrell who designed the above artwork used for the album cover and sadly passed away early last year.
You can buy and stream the album from Bandcamp or listen to it on Spotify. Just make sure you play it very loud indeed. Any memorable tracks from your favourite shmups covered on the album? Hit us up in the comments below. In case anyone is wondering: No, they are not called “Genesider” in the USA.
The Longest Five Minutes has one of the most interesting concepts we’ve seen from an RPG in some time. Starting immediately at the final boss battle, the game’s almost cringefully named protagonist ‘Flash Back’ has no memory of why he is suddenly fighting the Demon King, or even who any of his friends and allies are. During this battle Flash Back has lots of – well, flash backs – which play out as small chapters leading you up to this final moment.
Essentially, this boss battle is made up entirely of dialogue; there’s a timer in the corner indicating how long the fight has been going on in the present, and you’ll occasionally make key decisions that affect how your memories will play back to you. Certain moments in the battle or specific words that are said will trigger one of these memories, sending you back in time to play through a chapter of RPG action. You’ll be going back and forth from the present to past, learning all about how and why your heroes are in this fight to the death.
The RPG side of the game is actually very light. Each chapter has you playing through random parts of the story, not necessarily in the order in which they happened, and this creates a strange situation where you don’t really need to focus on the usual aspects of games of the genre. There is very little need to spend too much attention on levelling up your party or collecting every last item as you’ll soon be playing an entirely new chapter where your characters might be much more advanced, or weaker, than they are currently.
Instead, each chapter is all about ticking off objectives – usually one that is essential, and two that are optional, to progress the story. Objectives usually task you with the sort of things you might expect such as fulfilling side quests for NPCs, travelling to new destinations via the world map, and combat. Most chapters will lead up to a dungeon that plays out over several floors; you’ll need to make your way to the end, taking on enemies that spawn and fight in a very similar way to games in the Pokémon series, until you reach, and essentially defeat, the dungeon’s boss.
Just like before, the combat within these dungeons (which can also sometimes take place when travelling between key locations) is a very watered down affair when compared to your usual RPG. You play with a typical party of four that each have their own specialist areas such as physical combat, magical combat, and healing, but for the first half of the game you’ll get by without using the majority of these skills at all. You’ll likely be able to clear most battles by simply using each member’s most standard attack, and there is a mechanic available that lets you heal your entire party whenever you like outside of battle for a very small mana cost.
Things do start to get a little tougher towards the end, but if you experiment with your party’s different abilities, you’ll likely be absolutely fine. This easier approach might sound slightly disappointing on paper but it actually suits the style of the game really well; this isn’t your typical, hardcore, life-consuming RPG, but instead is perhaps best appreciated when played in short bursts and looked at as a story-telling adventure with some easily accessible RPG-style gameplay at its centre.
There are actually only a couple of places in which the game falls a little short. Firstly, the narrative can sometimes take strange and unnecessary directions; the more you engage in conversation with the locals, the more you’ll get from the game (and add on to the already 10+ hour campaign), but having an entire chapter that revolves around men ‘peeping’ on women in baths seems completely out of place.
Secondly, the lack of challenge from the game’s combat system effectively makes your in-game currency, and the weapon shops, resting inns, and supply stores, almost entirely useless. We never once bought any additional equipment for battle during our entire run-through – you’d only end up losing your items when you get sent off to the next chapter anyway.
Back to more positive aspects of the game, though, it is also worth mentioning the inclusion of the three optional mini-games. Often used to fill an objective task in various chapters, these mini-games offer a very welcome break from the dramatic storyline and are actually great fun in their own right. A particular highlight was Haunted Run, a simple auto-runner that has you jumping over ghosts and collecting coins. These games offer more of a challenge than the main quest and you are free to play them for as long as you like while in a relevant chapter.
All in all, this is a game that puts a heavy focus on its storytelling and, if you allow yourself to completely dive in to this and fully explore the world around you, you’ll likely enjoy the adventure. There are plot twists with multiple potential story arcs, a lovable cast of characters (apart from possibly Regent who we could happily fire from a cannon), and the whole aesthetic of the game is to die for. The visuals suit the vibe perfectly with artwork that will drench you in nostalgic wonder, and there are two or three musical themes playing throughout that are so beautiful we almost ended up sharing poetic love songs around the office.
Conclusion
The Longest Five Minutes uses a truly gripping concept, throwing the classic RPG formula on its head by having you put the pieces of an already existing story together as you go. While the combat and general gameplay are almost too easy-going, the story, characters, and overall aesthetic had us always wanting more, never wanting to put the game down. The asking price is perhaps a little steep for the amount of content available, and the strange take on a usually well-understood genre may throw some players off, but there is an indescribable charm that is worth exploring here.
