The crew gets excited about the announcement of The Wolf Among Us 2, although it won’t be out for a while, and bemoan the infestation of live service games everywhere these days in videogames.
The news includes:
Let us know what you think on Gaming Podcast’s Facebook page here.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, this episode was recorded on Monday, but despite the lateness, it’s full of rich news items, including some very disturbing trends in videogames, as well as a question by a listener that got mental juices flowing. This week’s Gaming Flashback is Professor Pac-Man.
The news items include:
This week’s Question of the Week: “What do you think is the future of older games?”
The podcast slowly inches towards the magic 500th episode of Gaming Podcast, representing over 11 years of yakking about video games. For a Gaming Flashback, the gang looks at arguably the last good Mario game, Super Mario Galaxy. They also discuss the phenomenon that is Fortnite.
As for the gaming news, this week includes:
Do you play Fortnite? Let us know.
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.
