Episode 417: One In, One Out

This week is a celebration of the 250th episode of the Videogame Roundtable, and Dan Quick is back for the special edition, joining fellow PolyCaster Scott Dirk. However, TJ Denzer was at the bowling alley, so he wasn’t available. There’s a lot of Cards Against Humanity and Town of Salem talk, as well as a lot of long-missed byplay between Dan and Jonah Falcon. Unfortunately, Paul Nowak couldn’t make it.

The news this week includes:

  • Bethesda working on a “bleeding-edge” RPG
  • Diablo II gets first official patch since 2011
  • Forza Motorsport 6: Apex won’t crossplay with Xbox One version
  • Nintendo explains why only the New 3DS plays SNES games
  • U.S. DoJ increases hostility towards Apple in latest court filing

Let us know what you think.

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The patience of PlayStation 3 owners is wearing thin as retailers are reporting a 200% increase in PlayStation 3 trade-ins, usually for Xbox 360 consoles, as well as sales slumps for PSN points cards and fewer multiplatform game sales for PS3.

“In the first week of downtime we did not really see any major change in sales or trades,” says one source, a store manager at a major UK retailer speaking on condition of anonymity. “However from the second week onwards we have seen an increase of over 200 per cent on PS3 consoles being traded in, split almost 50/50 between those trading for cash and those taking a 360 instead.”

Another UK source has reported that the independent retailer had seen a “massive increase” in the volume of PS3s traded in in recent weeks, and has pegged the biggest trade-in demographic as “the hardcore online shooter crowd”, who are logically the group most likely to defect when their online gaming is wiped.

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Gaming Podcast 141: iPhone vs. Consoles?Gaming Podcast 141: iPhone vs. Consoles?

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Oddly enough, there wasn’t too much exciting news to talk about even given TGS. Slow week, but we had some great community comments and a new question of the week: what game do you recall playing that you felt maxed out the platform it released on?

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Now that Blizzard feels their engine is solid, it’s time to move on to creating content for the full game. Jay Wilson, Diablo 3‘s lead designer, says the game engine is in an advance stage of completion and much of the art team has moved onto Act 2. Don’t read into that, he said game engine.

Blizzard is obviously not hurting for money, given the success of World of Warcraft and they’ve always taken their time with projects to make them solid products. Blizzard’s name is on the line and they’re brand consists of three major franchises: Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo. When you produce so few games you’re expected to do them perfectly.

How do they do it? As Wilson says, “If we haven’t rebuilt something five times it really doesn’t deserve to be shipped. That’s pretty much our policy.” (eurogamer) While a game engine is the foundation for a great game experience, the content is king. Blizzard is deep in the mire of content production so, although the engine might be solid, the final product is probably still far from complete.

End result, expect a high quality product once again from Blizzard.