Episode 526: New York State of Mind

This week’s episode of Gaming Podcast features the first news of 2019 for the podcast, and there’s some juicy items to discuss. There’s no Gaming Flashback, but there is more discussion of the latest Civilization VI: Gathering Storm civs to be discussed.

The news includes:

  • “Exciting Halo: The Master Chief Collection news” teased for SXSW 2019
  • EA cancels open-world Star Wars game
  • Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is getting turn-based combat later this week

Let us know what you think.

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Ubisoft was asked by gamespot if they’d release a date or confirm the 2010 release of Assassin’s Creed 2 and Ubisoft had a very simple answer: “we’re not answering that question” and “what we just can say is that we are working hard on the product.”

They won’t promise a date for Asassin’s Creed 2 but this at least gives us an indication that they’re working on a game to follow up the initial release. There are plenty of creative concepts that can be done even better in a second game release including branching out the quests to make them a bit less tedious and repeating. The graphics were stunning, the moves were fluid and the battles were a dance of blades.

We’re waiting. Bring it on Ubisoft.

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Microsoft has announced they’ll be giving Xbox Live silver accounts access to play some multi-player cross-platform games for free until the fall update. Recently, Microsoft announced free online play with Games for Windows titles, effectively giving PC gamers “gold accounts” to play online.

Most people agree the move to give gold subscriptions to PC gamers was done because PC gamers don’t care to play Games for Windows games online if they have to pay for it. The culture of PC gaming is much different than console gaming on XBL, gamers expect the online experience at no cost; they’re already paying an ISP for network access, paying for a match-making system with a yearly subscription is not desired.

Console gamers don’t have a choice, buying the 360 experience arrives with simple to play games (no drivers, no installs) but limited online choices: pay or go away. Now, silver members will get a little taste of network play, along side PC gamers in the cross-platform Games for Windows titles.

“Supported cross-platform titles include Universe at War, Shadowrun, and Lost Planet: Colonies Edition.” (gamespot)

We question the intention here… is this as a good faith move or are they wetting people’s appitite for XBL so they’ll want to upgrade to gold in the fall? Or, maybe there are some logistical reasons to doing this in the Xbox Live infrastructure to prepare for upgrades where making it free solves a few of their internal upgrade paths and, as a side effect, gives gamers some games to play.

Of course, we’ve seen few people playing Shadowrun or Lost Planet lately. Maybe this will re-popularize a few older titles as well.