Did you enjoy the Borderlands series? Then stop reading and go see Mad Max: Fury Road right meow. Didn’t play Borderlands? Go see Fury Road anyway!
Today BioWare turns 20! Using the hashtag #BioWare20, fans and devs alike are celebrating thecompany’s birthday. BioWare is responsible for hits (and personal favorites) like the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, and classics like Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, and Knights of the Old Republic.
Designer Jos Hendriks tweeted:
Got the job despite telling my interviewer, the lead level designer, that the parts I liked least about ME1 were his. #BioWare20
— Jos Hendriks (@Sjosz) May 22, 2015
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt released this week, and has been met with several positive reviews ( 4.5 on metacritic, 92 on PCGamer, 10/10 Gamespot). The third installment of the popular Witcher RPG series has been met with some controversy, however, because of its early gameplay trailers, which looked much better than what was released. CD Projekt admitted to changing the graphics engine because it didn’t create a consistently appealing environment. Marcin Iwinski, co-founder of CD Projekt, told Eurogamer, “If you’re looking at the development process, we do a certain build for a tradeshow and you pack it, it works, it looks amazing. And you are extremely far away from completing the game. Then you put it in the open world, regardless of the platform, and it’s like, ‘Oh shit, it doesn’t really work.’ We’ve already showed it, now we have to make it work. And then we try to make it work on a huge scale. This is the nature of games development.” They confirmed it was indeed captured PC footage, not pre-rendered, and that there were “complex technical reasons behind [the change].” Patches will come to the PC and console versions soon, which may eventually adjust some graphics and will address bugs.
source: PCGamer
Blizzard continues to release gameplay videos of the much-anticipated Overwatch. This time, we get a chance to watch two new characters in action: Hanzo, the game’s nimble archer; and McCree, the “bamf” shoot-em-up bounty hunter.
source: Polygon
While everyone is still mourning the loss of P.T., Eurogamer uploaded this Let’s Play video of P.T. in Minecraft. Is it just as terrifying?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS6N5wMzVac&w=560&h=315]
Some other things you might want to read about:
- What’s Your Most Embarrassing Gaming Moment?
- Why Rock Band 4’s Next-Gen Tech Matters
- Happy 30th NES, we got you a museum exhibit
- In my GDC roundup post, I told you about Ashly Burch and Rosalind Wiseman’s presentation on kids, gender and video games like gorrila go wild slots. Charlie Hall from Polygon got more in-depth into these findings and the women behind them. The piece talks about Wiseman’s goal to teach better ways of conflict resolution (she says using games in her presentations really resonates with the kids), and why she brought in Ashly Burch. Hall details Wiseman’s first bit of evidence that adults misunderstood kids and gaming; a young, “generically pretty” blonde girl came up to Wiseman and said how she enjoyed playing Call of Duty and GTAV. “I just was looking at her and I’m thinking to myself, no one in the world thinks that this girl plays GTA5,” Wiseman thought. “This is just not the stereotype that you think of. You make these kinds of cultural judgments. If you looked at this girl you would think that she’s the girl who sits next to her boyfriend while he plays Call of Duty.” So, if you would like to read more about their findings and how they got there, I suggest reading “INSIDE THE RESEARCH THAT COULD CHANGE THE PERCEPTION OF KIDS, GAMING AND GENDER.”
