This week the gang reacts to Ubisoft’s pseudo-E3 presentation showing off their upcoming games, including Watch Dogs Legion, Immortals Fenyx Rising, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World: The Game: The Remaster, and Riders Republic, and Yves Guillemot’s strange pre-show video.
Other news items include:
Let us know what you think.
Despite the announced shutdown of Star Wars: Galaxies and the approaching new Star Wars-based MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, loyal subscribers don’t want Galaxies to end. They’ve begun a petition to try to convince Sony to let the MMO live on as a free-to-play MMO.
The petition asks Sony to convert the game to a ‘freemium’, microtransaction-based MMO, and that Sony consolidate players onto a smaller number of servers and facilitate character transfer to reduce operational costs in order to keep the game running. The petition has already gotten thousands signatures in a few days.
One of the petition leaders posted:
We are not your typical gamers.
We are not a commodity.
But if you look at the recent decision by Lucasarts to shut down Star Wars Galaxies, you might be inclined to think we are both of those things. Lucasarts thinks that we are a non-perishable commodity that can be shoved into a shipping crate and moved down the road to their next project. That is not the case. Not even close.
We are a vibrant community. We have seen our ups and downs, but we are only stronger because of it. We have endured all manner of broken promises and misleading “improvements” to this game, and throughout all of it, we have continued to build our community, and show support and loyalty to this great game. But we didn’t do it because of a game. We did it because of our community here.
One of the great downfalls of an acquisition or merger, in the game industry, is the loss of great franchise titles. Sierra, or Sierra Online, once stood on its own as a company with great gaming titles but later fell into the depths of Hades under many different company names.
Sierra’s last stop on the acquisition highway was Vivendi, years after much of Sierra’s steam had slowed. Now, they’re part of Activision Blizzard so we had high hopes they’d find a great use for some of the old Sierra properties long since collecting dust. Space Quest, Kings Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and especially Gabrielle Knight were some of our favorites, but times have changed.
“We are retaining only those franchises that are a strong fit with our long-term strategy including Crash Bandicoot, Ice Age and Spyro, as well as Prototype and a second game that has not yet been announced. We will not publish any other titles that previously were part of the Vivendi Games portfolio and we are currently reviewing our options regarding those titles,” says Activision Blizzard (joystiq)
This is unfortunate news, Activision Blizzard now has a large set of franchises on their hands, many of which have collected dust for years. Those dust collecting franchises could rise from the dead and reinvigorate their old fan base… or be dropped to the earth as unwanted scrapes after a big hunt with the vultures awaiting their take (sorry, too much watching of Animal Planet)
A reworked Kings Quest or Gabriel Knight could have seriously awesome potential in this time and age, imagine a dark comedy version of Gabriel Knight or a huge scaled world in King Quest using todays graphic engines. Although, these titles could also go the way Atari has gone and taken a well remembered franchise and made mud of its great name (*cough* Alone in the Dark).
Unfortunately, we’ll probably never know the distance an old franchise could go in this new world. We’ll have to pull out an old copy of our prized posessions and remember just how great they once where.
Welcome to the future, as Jonah, Scott and TJ ring in the new year, as this week’s Gaming Flashback reminds Jonah of what his favorite game of the decade was. (Spoiler: Mass Effect 2.) In fact, the game is so good Jonah and TJ talk about it for an hour before discussing the week’s generally weak news.
This week’s topics include:
Was 2010 the best year for games in the 2010’s? Let us know.
