Winners & Losers of January 26th, 2014

Welcome back!

The video game industry has been slowly pulling together its image of the coming year, and a trickle of news has finally begun to pick up again. With some declaring 2013 one of the best years in gaming and others disagreeing, it brings to question what 2014 will be.

We’ll take it week by week, game by game, and there’s no better way to look back on an interesting week than pointing and laughing and some winners and losers.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

People are split on how “honest” this just-announced Assassin’s Creed/Dishonored hybrid is to the Lord of the Rings source material, but just about everyone can agree that it looks pretty freaking cool. The climb-tastic traversal we’ve come to expect in our third person assassin-y open world-ish games is here and looks great (almost too great, says one Assassin’s Creed II designer claiming the game is using Ubisoft’s code), and the combat’s use of the environment (such as throwing enemies into campfires) looks to offer a lot of variety in battle. 

The real star is their “Nemesis” system, in which foes will learn of your battles and dynamically react upon encountering you, manifesting in interesting ways: Dispatching (but not killing) a high-ranked enemy will cause one of his underlings to comment on how you went after his master, and confronting that master once again shows him scarred from your previous battle and voicing his desire for revenge. If this works as planned, it could be impressive. Check out Brad’s analysis of the trailer for more nitty-gritty details.

Microsoft

As the kids say, Microsoft be rollin’ in that cheddar. Microsoft sold 3.9 million Xbox Ones in their last financial quarter, a hearty number regardless of its comparison to Sony’s sales, and the company as a whole reported a revenue of $24.52 billion. The thing about Microsoft and Sony in comparison to Nintendo is that, for the most part, all of Nintendo’s chips are in one basket. If video games ended tomorrow, Nintendo would die. Microsoft and Sony would brush themselves off and say “finally, that department that was costing us so much money can close down.”

Thief

Announcements about changes to the Thief series formula for the reboot have rightfully caused consternation among fans. In a world of hand-holding and dumbed-down stealth games, Thief was always the razor’s edge of darkness and challenge. Death waited around every corner, and save for Those Supernatural Levels, that death was what caused true fear within players. They were tricky and complicated, and mentions of an slow-mo and night-vision Focus mode as well as takedowns and XP points seemed to violate what the series stood for. Well, Eidos Montreal has good news.

Players craving that old Thief challenge need only hop into the options menu and effectively turn these hand-holding features off. There is even a mode for the truly hardcore in which death will kick the player out and delete their save file. Ouch. If the level design is too linear or the story is dishonest to the series then these features won’t fix that, but this is absolutely a positive sign.

inFAMOUS: Second Son

In an industry of executive meddling demanding multiplayer modes in their games, I respect when developers know multiplayer isn’t right for their work. Sucker Punch, the developers of inFAMOUS: Second Son, have received the message. The inFAMOUS games have never had multiplayer and still won’t. All of their efforts will go into creating as rich a single-player experience as possible, and that sounds a-o-great to me.

All of us

2014 releases are pretty freaking awesome. The Witcher 3, Thief, Super Smash Bros., Dragon Age Inquisition, Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes (even if I have worries), Persona 5 (for those of us familiar with Japanese), Dark Souls II, inFAMOUS: Second Son, Titanfall, and even some for which we don’t know the release dates but 2014 seems likely or possible: Watch Dogs, Drive Club, Hotline Miami 2, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright, Tales of Xillia 2, The Evil Within, The Legend of Zelda, Tom Clancy’s The Divison, Rainbow 6: Patriots, Uncharted 4, X…

This is going to be great, you guys.

Bethesda

…but you might note that The Elder Scrolls Online didn’t make that list, because all reports coming from the beta are that it is not so good. And Bethesda has decided to continue a trend that is puzzling and a little frustrating: they’re throwing Hollywood voices at it.

They don't get it, do they? This happens every game, and it’s never worth a whole hell of a lot. Looking back on Skyrim, I never think to myself “thank goodness Max Von Sydow was in the game.” I think “Man. That combat, huh?” Whenever I do think about the voices, I think about how nice it would have been had they used the money from all of those celebrities to hire more voice actors so as to avoid the series tradition of having ten actors voice two hundred people. Considering ESO’s budget is rumored to be $200 million, this was a completely unnecessary expense.

Nintendo

Nintendo predicted a profit of 100 billion yen for this last fiscal year. Instead, they reported a loss of 25 billion yen. They have also had to slash in half their expectation for Wii U sales and even dip expectations of 3DS game sales (though not by as large a margin at all: 80 million brought down to 66 million). This really isn’t looking very good, and their stocks leapt down 18% at the news.

The price is bouncing back, but things could be coming apart at the house that Miyamoto built. 2014 has some coming hits for the console, and they need those hits right now.

David Jaffe

A game designer posted this image to her twitter feed on behalf of a friend who was sexually harassed by a game journalist while hoping to get coverage from him. It’s pretty nasty stuff, particularly his second-to-last paragraph, which is… disturbing to read. This garnered universally disgusted reactions from industry figures such as Harvey Smith and George Broussard… until David Jaffe came along.

Kicking off what would become a day of arguments with virtually all of twitter, Jaffe commented that while “I think the dude is a creep,” blame should also be shifted to the developer because “if she didn’t tell him to take a hike what are you shaming him for other than simply being a totally lame freak?” That’s victim-blamin’, kids! After hours of Jaffe arguing with many, many, many people, reactions from outsiders ranged from frustration to disbelief. It was most appropriately summed up by this tweet from writer David Rayfield, in which he asked: “You’re for real today aren’t you David? Like, you’re not being held hostage and being forced to tweet this stuff, right?”

Xbox One

The gulf between Xbox One and Playstation 4 is becoming more apparent. We’re still ridiculously early in the lifespan of both consoles, but the PS4 is providing an objectively superior experience on multiple games now, including Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition, which is flat-out running at 60 FPS on PS4 in comparison to 30 on the Xbox One.

Additionally, this translation of an Italian Eurogamer article isn’t perfect but undeniably declares that Thief simply will not be running at the true HD 1080p resolution on the Xbox One edition.

I’m not a huge stickler for the nitty-gritty of graphical detail and wouldn’t usually consider this a huge point between the consoles were it not for the damn thing being $100 more expensive. Hopefully some of the exclusives coming to the device will perk things up a bit, but we can only say “Titanfall looks pretty good” so many times.