Diablo II is remembered very fondly as one of the best games of the year 2000, and 20 years on it’s still regarded as one of Blizzard’s best games. Now, reflecting back on the game, former Blizzard North president David Brevik has talked about the creation of the game–and the terrible period of crunch the team undertook to release it when they did.
Speaking at Devcom Digital, as reported by Gamesindustry.biz, Brevik opened up about the game’s development process, recalling how for the original Diablo the team crunched for “three or four months” to get it done. Following this, it took “a couple of months” for the developers to want to think about making a sequel.
For the sequel, the team wanted to implement improved online multiplayer, a version where there was “a real economy and you can trade items and it means something,” Brevik says. “That was one of the biggest motivations; seeing how people loved Diablo, but being very critical–and rightly so–about how things had been going with the online part of the game.”
The development team doubled from 20 to 40 (which is, of course, a small team by modern standards), and set about making a game that was also “at least twice as large”. However, the ambitious size of the game meant that there was a major grind at the end of production.
“It’s not a good decision,” Brevik admits. “I don’t recommend it. It cost me dearly. It cost everybody dearly. But it was what it was. We crunched.” He estimates that he worked, on average, 12 hours a day for seven days a week during the game’s crunch period, which ran from late April through to the game’s release in June 2000.
Brevik says that “everybody was working on the weekends,” and that many people slept in the office. “It was an incredible grind on myself, my relationships, my life, and my soul,” he says. The grind relaxed a bit when it became clear that the game would be delayed into 2000, but he only took three days off in this entire period.
Reflecting today, Brevik is glad that Diablo II is still “very, very popular,” although the development was extremely difficult. “For it to be so beloved is a wonderful experience. We’re very blessed to have that.”
Diablo IV is currently in the works, but Blizzard does not make a habit of setting firm release dates far in advance anymore. We expect to learn more at 2021’s Virtual BlizzCon.
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Apple has taken an early victory in its legal battle with Epic Games, as the court ruled it doesn’t have to “immediately reinstate” Fortnite on its App Store.
As reported by Bloomberg, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers made the ruling late Monday night, but it wasn’t a total loss for Epic Games as she also granted Epic’s request for “a temporary order blocking Apple from limiting the game developer’s ability to provide Unreal Engine, key graphics technology, for other apps.”
Rogers was very clear in saying that the case isn’t a “slam dunk” for either Apple or Epic Games, and that these temporary ruling will not “dictate the final outcome of the litigation.” There will be another hearing on September 28 to discuss a “longer-term solution.”
Microsoft filed a statement in support of Epic, saying that “ensuring that Epic has access to the latest Apple technology is the right thing for gamer developers & gamers,” as the Unreal Engine is used by many developers, Microsoft included.
This decision by the courts is an unfortunate one for Fortnite players on iOS devices, as Fortnite’s Chapter 2, Season 4 will launch on August 27 and will lock out those iPhone and iPad players who won’t be able to update the game.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Microsoft has tapped top talent from Bungie and Crystal Dynamics to join its mysterious ‘AAAA’ studio, The Initiative.
Among the 16 new hires revealed on LinkedIn by studio head Darrell Gallagher, we can see that Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Marvel’s Avengers director Remi Lacoste has made the jump to The Initiative to work as an Experiental Director. Destiny 2 narrative lead Christine Thompson has also joined the studio in a lead writer position.
Microsoft revealed it had founded The Initiative in Santa Monica as part of its E3 2018 conference, where it announced a slew of acquisitions. The studio is being led by Darrell Gallagher, who previously worked at Rockstar Games, Crystal Dynamics and later Activision, overseeing the development of games like GTA IV, Tomb Raider and Destiny 2. At the time, Spencer touted Gallagher’s abilities, calling him a “visionary storyteller.”
It’s rock versus EDM in a bid to bring equality and electricity to all the people in Vinyl City and yes–it’s exactly as ridiculous as that sounds. No Straight Roads is an action game that is pure punk rock down to its soul and DNA. Much like punk, it’s kind of a mess at times, and not always in a way that works in the game’s favour. It reminds me of a talented and good-natured garage band who really believe they can make it but need a bit of support to reach the top. That’s part of the charm, though, and No Straight Roads features a lot of really good concepts and some absolutely excellent music to back them all up.
In No Straight Roads, you play as the rock duo Bunk Bed Junction. The band is made up of the hyperactive lead guitarist Mayday and chill technical drum wizard Zuke, who live in the sewers of the futuristic Vinyl City where electricity is powered by music. No Straight Roads (NSR) is the name of the governing company which controls this power, and thus also music, and it’s decided that EDM is king. May and Zuke want to bring rock music back to the city, but when they’re unjustly booted from a competition that might have seen them join NSR, they start to talk about revolution instead. The deal is sealed upon witnessing yet another blackout in the city where only NSR bigwigs have access to emergency power; all they do with it is throw sick EDM concerts. Thus Bunk Bed Junction decides to take out the top five NSR artists in music battles to rise to the top and bring electricity and musical equality back to the masses.
This journey requires navigating the overworld which makes up Vinyl City. Here, you collect tubes of qwasa, the electricity this world runs on, and spend them to power faulty lights and other electronics in the area. Doing this earns you a small number of fans each time, which are the currency you can use to level up your skill tree and buy new abilities. You also find stickers that give your instruments of destruction passive buffs. This loop begins as an entertaining activity that encourage exploration, especially as it’s introduced before everything else, but it dwindles when you realize that qwasa is in far more supply than what you could ever hope to use–there’s not actually that much to repair, and more lucrative ways to get upgrades reveal themselves later on. The city itself ends up feeling small and compact as a result, and while I enjoyed finding the odd characters and other pieces of world building, I felt disappointed by how limited it ended up being.
At the end of each area, you challenge the next NSR artist to unlock the next district. These battles are typically split into two segments: an approach and the actual boss battle against the artist. The approach is a series of small 3D platforming levels where you take down enemies, progressing past the various levels of security until you reach the boss. Movement is quite floaty, which works well for combat and avoiding attacks but makes platforming activities like jumping precise gaps and landing on a small surface much harder. It can also be difficult to judge depth in this game, especially when playing on the graphically stripped-down Switch version. This not only affects platforming but combat as well–judging the distance to an enemy can be tricky. It’s something I got better at as I played, and I definitely found it easier on PC with the higher detail and character shadows, but there were still frustrating moments where things didn’t line up how I expected.
Battles take place in real-time, and enemies, including bosses, always attack in time with the music–but not always in the same way. There are several different classes of NSR robot, for example, who all jump and do a ripple of damage around them. Some will jump more times in a row than others, some on off beats. It will also depend on the song itself. The swell of an incoming chorus can indicate a different set of attacks from the boss; you learn to dodge on the beat or look out for certain attacks during parts of the corresponding songs. It ends up feeling really good when it works well, like you have a sort of sixth sense because you’re so in tune with the music. You also start to associate parts of the song with the motions you do to survive them and it becomes almost more like a dance than a video game battle.
Mayday and Zuke play quite differently, with May having heavier melee attacks and Zuke being all about quicker combos–which feel especially good to nail in time to the music. They also have different special moves that you can unlock and equip, which can heal you, do ranged damage, or provide some other buff. Being able to choose and edit this loadout per battle gives you a lot of control over different strategies. For example, some bosses may stay further away and require more ranged attacks, so kitting the characters out to take advantage of this gives a tactical streak to the engagements.
Playing solo, you can swap between both characters at a push of a button to use whoever is more suited, or you take advantage of couch co-op and have a friend take on the other role. I didn’t realise how different their playstyles were until my partner and I were arguing over the best method to take out a boss, realising we were trying to cater to each character’s strengths.
This became more evident when playing by myself. I expected to mostly stick to May but found myself really enjoying sapping between the pair. More importantly, I had to relearn how to play as a solo performer. Whichever character you’re not using won’t do a whole lot, which means you do far less damage playing solo. However, they regain health and energy for special moves so there’s a different strategy to it–battles can be longer but you feel much more in control of them, swapping for best use cases and survivability.
Playing solo means you also aren’t plagued as much by the camera issues that come with co-op mode. The two-player camera made me curse–while playing docked on the Switch, the combination of physical distance from the screen and lower resolution can exacerbate all the aforementioned depth issues. In overworld environments, only the primary player can control the camera, so it only really works if one player moves through the city while the other just allows themselves to let the game bring them forward between areas. It’s better during levels because the camera is fixed and will often pan out to accommodate both players. However, if the camera is at its limit it makes the action very difficult to parse, and will drag players at the edge into the field of view and often into harm’s way. A few times our controls would bug out and stop functioning all together, and while I have had it happen in single-player mode too, it seemed much more egregious when two people were involved. My partner and I still managed to play through every level together, but it wasn’t without frustration and it took easily twice as long as my solo playthrough because of it.
That said, there are some especially unique and well-thought-out levels, boss ones especially. Each boss has their own distinct style and subgenre of EDM. One will have you dodging dozens of digital projectiles in a virtual underwater world against a digital Cutecore idol. Another has you in a surrealist artist’s weird mirror world with deep Psydub synths where she pops in and out of dimensions split between May and Zuke. I was always impressed with whatever new weird wonderful thing No Straight Roads had to throw at me but by far, the best part was always the music.
During the levels you’ll see a metre between rock and EDM in the centre of your screen. Each phase you make it through will push it to rock and then reset back to EDM for the next phase, but the reason this is so damned cool is because the music reflects this change. The EDM tracks are still absolutely banging, but the introduction of heavier rock elements of guitar and drums as the metre pushes over feels powerful. One of my favourite stages starts out as a young virtuoso’s piano recital which you crash in a very “Are we the baddies?” moment. The electronics intermixed with the just stunning piano melody was already great, but hearing the rock seep in made it even better again. You can hear that you’re winning as the songs get meatier with additional layers of sound. It makes you feel as though you really do wield the power of music and can change the atmosphere around you. It’s incredibly impactful.
No Straight Roads feels best when you can lean into the musical nature of it, but the game doesn’t always make this easy. My relationship to No Straight Roads changed depending on how well I was performing. When you’re doing terribly, it feels terrible, because things can snowball so quickly with the feeling of missing the beat, taking huge damaging hits and running into frustrating bugs. When you are doing well, it is completely engrossing. You feel one with the music–listening to it, reacting to it, and changing it. At its best, I was treating the game like a musical album–headphones on, controller in hand, and fully immersed in the music. Now that I’m actually decent it feels like a great session game I can experience in about three or four hours, or pick single tracks to play through in order to try for high scores. It’s quite a contrast to my 18-hour original save file filled with multiplayer failings and unnecessary busywork.
And while the story is silly and dumb, it’s still got heart. The jaunt of rock rebellion has some real lessons to share, about why people love music, what drives their passions, and whether or not those reasons are good ones. This is backed up by a great cast of voice work. May’s voice is full of life and fire while Zuke’s feels perfectly patient. In fact, pretty much the whole cast feels fitting. The main antagonist Tatiana especially has a voice like rich butter I could listen to for hours with wonderful and interesting inflections. There’s also a wonderful sense of culture here that draws from the studio’s Malaysian home. The South-East Asian accents and colloquialisms are unique and lovely to hear; full sentences are spoken in Malay and subtitled in English. There’s even one music snob with an Australian accent which feels like a believable testament to my country’s proximity to the region.
My time in No Straight Roads was torn between true enjoyment and wanting to hurl my controller at the screen. Between camera issues, bugginess, and other weird little problems (especially in multiplayer mode), there’s enough to put a damper on the whole experience. However, The characters, bright futuristic world, imaginative boss battles, and excellent music act as wonderful antidotes. Once I eventually got into the groove, I found a really special and evocative musical experience in No Straight Roads. But I had to work pretty hard to get here. No Straight Roads asks a bit of its fans, but I’m glad I put the effort in and I’d gladly buy the t-shirt.
Microsoft’s newest in-house studio The Initiative still has yet to announce or even tease its first game, but it’s already building up hype by building a talented and well-regarded team. Studio head Darrell Gallagher just announced a slew of new hires on LinkedIn, joining a team that already has some very big names on it.
The announcement included 16 new names working across various departments, including developers from Respawn Entertainment, Crystal Dynamics, Naughty Dog, Bungie, as well as talent making the switch from other areas of the entertainment industry.
The new hires have an impressive list of shipped games between them, and include Crystal Dynamics’ Remi Lacoste, game director on Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Marvel’s Avengers and lead on many of its earlier games, as well as Christine Thompson, a lead writer on Destiny 2 and Star Trek Online.
The project they’re working on is still top secret, as Initiative design director Drew Murray reiterates in his pinned tweet:
Quick Q&A to cover 75% of questions about @TheInitiative:
Can you tell me what game you’re making? No. What kind of game it is? No. When it will be revealed? No. How many people work there? No. Why not? I’ll get fired. What good are you? 🤷♂️
Given the backgrounds of the developers being hired, it seems pretty safe to assume that The Initiative’s first big game will be in the same vein as AAA games like The Last of Us orRed Dead Redemption, but the studio could yet surprise us.
While The Initiative has previously said it would like to remain small, it’s yet to be seen what the studio’s idea of “small” actually looks like. Eight new positions are still open for applications on the studio’s careers website.
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If you’re getting caught up in Fall Guys mania but want to bring it into a game that’s a little easier to win, this Skyrim mod is for you. As picked up by PC Gamer, the Fall Guys Followers mod adds a bunch of the game’s little jelly bean characters (and one really big one) to follow your dragonborn around and help them in battle.
As you can see in the mod’s trailer, the Fall Guys seem pretty good in battle, plus you can craft little sweet roll hats or guards helmets for them. The mod’s creator built the assets from scratch rather than using official Fall Guys materials, and it looks like they did a pretty good job of it.
The Skyrim Special Edition mod can be found at Nexus Mods or for Xbox One, and requires the Dragonborn DLC to run–once you have it installed, you just have to go and pick up these little fellas at Whitewatch Tower so they can join your party.
Skyrim isn’t the only game that’s had a Fall Guys crossover since the game released to record-breaking popularity–another fantasy mash-up has seen the Fall Guys added to D&D as a playable race called “Fallen Beans.”
Written by Jaron Johnson, the creator of D&D parody Monsters of Murka, the Fallen Beans are sure to spice up many a homebrew campaign.
“Our highest estimates have been absolutely obliterated by the actual response … you can’t plan those things. You can’t predict it. Sometimes, it’s just right place, right time,” he said.
Walsh said the concept for Fall Guys “always felt like a good idea,” but the studio did not imagine just how much of a success the title would become. “As soon as you start thinking about your game being a success you feel like you’re going to jinx it,” Walsh said.
Looking ahead, Walsh said Mediatonic will focus on developing more content for Fall Guys to keep people interested and engaged.
“Game shows are built on variety and they’re built on novelty so for Fall Guys to achieve its goal of being the ‘greatest game show ever made’ we need to create that sort of variety and that sort of novelty,” Walsh explained.
The developer is currently playtesting new ideas, as well as “new interesting ways to play” including cross-play and a “squad” mode. The studio is also tinkering with “special playlists with weird combinations of rounds.”
Mediatonic wants to get Fall Guys to a place where, every time you play, there is something new that you haven’t seen before. “It’s a lofty goal and it’s going to take a while to get there but I think that’s the biggest focus for the team right now,” Walsh said.
The Apple/Epic legal case over Fortnite continues, with a new ruling from Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the case denying part of Epic’s appeal for a temporary restraining order–but also granting another part. As reported by The Verge, Judge Rogers has denied Epic Games the rights to temporarily return Fortnite to the App Store, but has also prevented Apple from cutting off developer’s Unreal Engine accounts.
The full court order outlines the part of Epic’s appeal that has been granted: “Apple and all persons in active concert or participation with Apple, are temporarily restrained from taking adverse action against Epic Games with respect to restricting, suspending or terminating any affiliate of Epic Games, such as Epic International, from Apple’s Developer Program, including as to Unreal Engine, on the basis that Epic Games enabled in-app payment processing in Fortnite through means other than IAP or on the basis of the steps Epic took to do so.”
Blocking these developer tools would have had wider implications, negatively impacting not just Epic, but also developers who use their tools for mobile development.
However, when it comes to Fortnite, Rogers states that “the current predicament appears of (Epic’s) own making,” denying the request to have the game restored. “The Court observes that Epic Games strategically chose to breach its agreements with Apple which changed the status quo,” it reads. “No equities have been identified suggesting that the Court should impose a new status quo in favor of Epic Games. By contrast, with respect to the Unreal Engine and the developer tools, the Court finds the opposite result.”
As The Verge notes, this is a minor ruling in the grand scheme of things–the trial between Epic and Apple is unlikely to begin until 2021. A hearing on the injunction is expected to happen on September 28, which will determine the scope of the trial. In the meantime, it seems that Fortnite likely won’t be available on your iPhone or Android device, even if you buy one off eBay.
Today’s ruling is limited in scope, meant only to preserve the status quo while the court can hear more detailed arguments concerning a preliminary injunction. That injunction would determine whether Apple can take action against Fortnite, the Unreal Engine, or various other Epic products over the course of the trial. The two parties are expected to file their arguments in the coming weeks, with a full hearing on the injunction scheduled for September 28th.
For now, if you’re playing on an Apple or Android mobile, you’ll likely want to consider moving over to another device to play before the start of Chapter 2, Season 4.
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It’s a big week for Call of Duty. Activision will officially announce and unveil Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War on August 26, but ahead of that, the Season 5 Reloaded update for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and the battle royale game Warzone will arrive late in the day on August 24.
The full patch notes for the update will arrive soon, Infinity Ward’s community director Ashton Williams said in a tweet. We’ll post the full patch notes here when they are released.
Patch notes for tonight’s update will go live later tonight. Keep your 👀 on @InfinityWard for details.
Season 5 Reloaded adds a new weapon, the FiNN LMG, as well as a new Warzone mode called King Slayer. A new operator named Morte is coming to the game as well, while there is a new Games of Summer event where players can represent their country in single-player missions where they can earn rewards. For more on Season 5 Reloaded, check out GameSpot’s breakdown of everything you need to know.
The Season 5 Reloaded update will be released across PS4, Xbox One, and PC starting at 11 PM PT, so there isn’t much more time to wait.
Call Of Duty Warzone/Modern Warfare Season 5 Reloaded Patch Notes:
Grand Theft Auto V is one of the most commercially successful games and pieces of entertainment in human history, and it’s set to grow bigger still when it comes to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X in 2021. Given the enormous success of the title and its online mode, it makes sense that developer Rockstar Games would make a sequel … eventually.
It probably won’t happen soon, but Rockstar’s parent company, Take-Two, is now seemingly protecting its future right to do so by renewing the domain registration for GTAVI.com.
This is nothing new or extraordinary; it’s normal and expected for video game companies to secure domains for upcoming or unannounced titles, whether they intend to actually make them or not. Take-Two has also renewed its domain for gtavicecityonline.com, according to GamesRadar.
In April, Kotaku reported that Rockstar Games had begun work on the next Grand Theft Auto title. The game is reportedly “early in development.”
