Developer: Rocksteady Studios
Genre: Fantasy Action Adventure
Release Date: Q4 2011(more)
ESRB: TEEN
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Batman Arkham City New Screens
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Rocksteady Studios
Genre: Fantasy Action Adventure
Release Date: Q4 2011(more)
ESRB: TEEN
Developer: Rocksteady Studios
Genre: Fantasy Action Adventure
Release Date: Q4 2011(more)
ESRB: TEEN
Crysis 2 Story Trailer
Have a look at what the CryEngine 3 can create! 3 years after the mission on the island which took place in the first Crysis we find out what happened after these 3 interesting years. Just hope they will say what exactly happened with earth after the island mission when the game will be out. So check out the trailer!
Elder Scrolls V - Skyrim Official Screenshots
Here are the official Skyrim screenshots from Bethesda Softworks.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Dragon Age 2 Hands-On from Gamespot
However invested you were in the Warden hero of Dragon Age: Origins, it was hard to shake the feeling you were a mute telepath with a chatty entourage. Picking dialogue options as the silent protagonist and getting a vocal response felt distinctly old school. It was by no means a deal breaker, but the difference in the fully voiced Dragon Age II is striking--the branching conversations on which the story turns are more natural and immersive, as we found with Marian Hawke, the well-spoken (English, apparently) mage heroine of our demo.
The visuals, with more distinctive design and fewer rough edges, are another change with immediate impact. Other differences, such as the glossier presentation and punchier combat, will be fully felt after hours of play--and there will be plenty of hours. Where the first game sprawled across the kingdom of Ferelden, the sequel spreads through time, spanning years. Much has been said about the framed narrative: the story is told in flashback, as the recollections of Hawke's dwarf comrade Varric. This gives the plot a start and an end point, with room for the fiction to manoeuvre in between.
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We played the Xbox 360 version of the game through a section of the main quest line about 20 hours in and joined our level 10 Hawke in the Deep Roads, Ferelden's network of abandoned dwarven tunnels. In Hawke’s party was Aveline, a knight-like human warrior, Isabela, a pirate-like human rogue, and Varric, also a rogue, packing a huge crossbow. The character models are refined over those of the previous game, with finer facial details and better-looking costumes--or less absurd headgear, at any rate. Animations are less stiff, too, with more nifty flourishes in combat and more natural posing outside of it.
Hawke and her crew, part of an expedition led by Varric's brother Bartrand, had come to a forgotten city, where they had stumbled on a magical artefact--"an idol of pure lyrium". Soon after we joined the game, Bartrand pilfered the idol and fled, leaving Hawke trapped underground with a host of unfriendly natives: a dragon flanked by little dragonlings, magical rock golems ("profanes"), and screeching demonic shades. Cue a lot of fighting in Dragon Age II's lightly rejigged combat system.
Though it's more obvious when you play as a melee class character than a mage, there's a new immediacy to combat, which feels more like fighting and less like queuing a command. You hit a face button and deliver a blow, cooldowns notwithstanding, with the punchiness underlined by more dynamic animations. The pause-and-play system is still in place, if that's more your bag, letting you freeze combat and flit between characters, issuing commands before restarting the action. Our Hawke had been levelled as a spellcaster focused on lightning-type magic, with a chain lightning spell and tempest--a stormy, wide-ranging, area-of-effect spell--among her attacks. These looked nice and sparky; we didn't notice any of the slowdown that sometimes troubled the biggest, flashiest spells in the original Dragon Age.
A glance at Hawke's ability screen revealed a slicker, friendlier-looking menu, with spells clustered together into small talent trees laid out on a single page. These trees are grouped by school of magic (elemental, primal, and the like) or specialisation (spirit healer, blood mage), with the latter needing a specialisation point to unlock--granted at levels seven and 14, said the menu. The menu screens are more polished and less utilitarian generally, except for the tactics screen in which you can program party member behaviour (if property X is less than Y, attack A with spell B), which is still on the uninviting side.
There will be blood (all over your face).
After cutting a swathe through the forgotten city, we met a rock wraith abomination (a demonically possessed rock creature), triggering the meatiest conversation in our demo. It played out in radial dialogue menus, Mass Effect 2-style, with a dialogue option's intent denoted by an emblem on the wheel: an olive branch for a peaceful line, a hammer for an aggressive one, and so on. Not all tones of dialogue option were available at each juncture, but others came with, for example, a heart, a star, or a Greek comedy mask. Coupled with more cinematic framing and the voiced Hawke, conversations are much closer to Mass Effect 2's gold standard, though characters are still extravagantly spattered with blood on occasion. We struck a deal with the creature that demanded we find an ancient crypt and destroy its guardian in return for an escape route from the underground city.
Accordingly, we found the crypt--a flinty cavern with glowing red veins--and faced off with its guardian: another huge rock wraith, this one with a powerful rock fist and the ability to summon profanes. This boss-like fight and the absence of a healer character had us micromanaging the party members, not least to keep them out of the way of the rock wraith's periodic rolling knockdown attack. Here, the rhythm of combat started to feel familiar, as we flipped between characters to keep everyone healthy and in the right spot, a la Dragon Age: Origins. It remains to be seen, then, how radically overhauled the combat feels in the long run--but certainly in its visuals, presentation, and dialogue system, Dragon Age II is looking to be a more confident, polished adventure than its predecessor.
The visuals, with more distinctive design and fewer rough edges, are another change with immediate impact. Other differences, such as the glossier presentation and punchier combat, will be fully felt after hours of play--and there will be plenty of hours. Where the first game sprawled across the kingdom of Ferelden, the sequel spreads through time, spanning years. Much has been said about the framed narrative: the story is told in flashback, as the recollections of Hawke's dwarf comrade Varric. This gives the plot a start and an end point, with room for the fiction to manoeuvre in between.
Comment on this videoWatch this video in High Def
We played the Xbox 360 version of the game through a section of the main quest line about 20 hours in and joined our level 10 Hawke in the Deep Roads, Ferelden's network of abandoned dwarven tunnels. In Hawke’s party was Aveline, a knight-like human warrior, Isabela, a pirate-like human rogue, and Varric, also a rogue, packing a huge crossbow. The character models are refined over those of the previous game, with finer facial details and better-looking costumes--or less absurd headgear, at any rate. Animations are less stiff, too, with more nifty flourishes in combat and more natural posing outside of it.
Hawke and her crew, part of an expedition led by Varric's brother Bartrand, had come to a forgotten city, where they had stumbled on a magical artefact--"an idol of pure lyrium". Soon after we joined the game, Bartrand pilfered the idol and fled, leaving Hawke trapped underground with a host of unfriendly natives: a dragon flanked by little dragonlings, magical rock golems ("profanes"), and screeching demonic shades. Cue a lot of fighting in Dragon Age II's lightly rejigged combat system.
Though it's more obvious when you play as a melee class character than a mage, there's a new immediacy to combat, which feels more like fighting and less like queuing a command. You hit a face button and deliver a blow, cooldowns notwithstanding, with the punchiness underlined by more dynamic animations. The pause-and-play system is still in place, if that's more your bag, letting you freeze combat and flit between characters, issuing commands before restarting the action. Our Hawke had been levelled as a spellcaster focused on lightning-type magic, with a chain lightning spell and tempest--a stormy, wide-ranging, area-of-effect spell--among her attacks. These looked nice and sparky; we didn't notice any of the slowdown that sometimes troubled the biggest, flashiest spells in the original Dragon Age.
A glance at Hawke's ability screen revealed a slicker, friendlier-looking menu, with spells clustered together into small talent trees laid out on a single page. These trees are grouped by school of magic (elemental, primal, and the like) or specialisation (spirit healer, blood mage), with the latter needing a specialisation point to unlock--granted at levels seven and 14, said the menu. The menu screens are more polished and less utilitarian generally, except for the tactics screen in which you can program party member behaviour (if property X is less than Y, attack A with spell B), which is still on the uninviting side.
There will be blood (all over your face).
After cutting a swathe through the forgotten city, we met a rock wraith abomination (a demonically possessed rock creature), triggering the meatiest conversation in our demo. It played out in radial dialogue menus, Mass Effect 2-style, with a dialogue option's intent denoted by an emblem on the wheel: an olive branch for a peaceful line, a hammer for an aggressive one, and so on. Not all tones of dialogue option were available at each juncture, but others came with, for example, a heart, a star, or a Greek comedy mask. Coupled with more cinematic framing and the voiced Hawke, conversations are much closer to Mass Effect 2's gold standard, though characters are still extravagantly spattered with blood on occasion. We struck a deal with the creature that demanded we find an ancient crypt and destroy its guardian in return for an escape route from the underground city.
Accordingly, we found the crypt--a flinty cavern with glowing red veins--and faced off with its guardian: another huge rock wraith, this one with a powerful rock fist and the ability to summon profanes. This boss-like fight and the absence of a healer character had us micromanaging the party members, not least to keep them out of the way of the rock wraith's periodic rolling knockdown attack. Here, the rhythm of combat started to feel familiar, as we flipped between characters to keep everyone healthy and in the right spot, a la Dragon Age: Origins. It remains to be seen, then, how radically overhauled the combat feels in the long run--but certainly in its visuals, presentation, and dialogue system, Dragon Age II is looking to be a more confident, polished adventure than its predecessor.
Dungeon Siege III
With input from the original developer, Gas Powered Games, Obsidian Entertainment is developing the next incarnation of the Dungeon Siege franchise.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Deus-EX Human Revolution Hands On
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So go the early moments of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the highly anticipated sequel to an all-time classic. We're introduced to a troubled world and characters that aren't spared any shelter from its chaos. Jensen is an especially intriguing figure because of the way he's pulled into the heart of the conflict through no choice of his own. To set the stage, Human Revolution takes place in a stylized and not entirely optimistic vision of the year 2027. It's a world where powerful corporations are pioneering biomechanical science at a breakneck pace, producing a fractured population of those eager to upgrade themselves and those deeply disturbed by this technology's effect on humanity. Through the ambient chatter of news reports and whispered uncertainties among side characters, the game establishes an atmosphere of tension and unease early on in the story. To recycle Eidos Montreal's catchy slogan, "It's not the end of the world… but you can see it from here."
Likewise, you don't have to wait long to see what triggers Jensen's metamorphosis. The game begins with our protagonist walking through the hallways and laboratories of Sarif Industries, an augmentations company where Jensen, an ex-SWAT officer, provides private security. Glancing around the research and development labs, you get a good idea of what sort of technology this company is working on when you catch sight of fleeting but thoroughly creepy visuals--a sea of dismembered limbs and people being rebuilt with mechanical attachments. (Though, oddly enough, the most unsettling visual we saw was a guy just running along on a treadmill right next to a pair of robot legs lacking an upper torso matching his pace.) Imagery like this certainly helps to understand the motivations behind the reluctant Jensen we see early on, a guy who's unsure of these augmentations as a way to develop his role within the company. After all, who's all that eager wants to run home and eat steak when you work at the slaughterhouse all day?
Meet Sarif, your boss. Clearly he's a man who indulges in his own product.
We should mention, though, that this is a very pretty slaughterhouse. If you've seen the various screenshots and trailers for Human Revolution, you know that Eidos Montreal is aiming for a very specific look; namely, a gilded cyberpunk landscape rendered in various shades of gold and black. The aesthetic that the CGI trailers established carries over to the game astoundingly well. Even doing something as simple as walking through office hallways, the sense of atmosphere is terrific. The game's art director, Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, calls this a "visual texture" designed to let you know right away which game you're playing. It's hard to say Eidos Montreal hasn't succeeded there. While the facial detail is a little underwhelming during cutscenes that really focus on character faces--at least on the Xbox 360 version we played--the overall art style more than makes up for it.
Eventually, you make it up to the office of the head honcho who has called you in for a meeting. But before you can get down to business, an alarm sounds and you're sent rushing back down to the labs to see what has gone wrong. What follows is your first taste of combat, as armed mercenaries have overtaken the labs and left a trail of burning offices and bloodied scientists in their wake. All you have is a simple assault rifle and a knack for using cover to avoid gunfire. Nevertheless, we were pleased to discover that even when you strip the combat of all its biomechanical bells and augmented whistles, there's a solid foundation underneath it all. The guns carry a heavy impact and the fluid cover system manages to avoid feeling jarring as you switch from first person while running around to third person while you hunker down behind an object.
Carrying on the Deus Ex legacy, you can also pick up objects and throw them at enemies, but in our limited experience, we didn't find much practical application for flinging empty cardboard boxes at armed mercenaries. We imagine that particular ability will come into use later in the game when you begin to really explore and dig apart environments--this opening level was a strictly run-and-gun affair apparently designed to get our feet wet.
The game's opening prologue is more Call of Duty than Deus Ex, but that changes once you get your augmentations.
Whatever success you feel after this quick-and-simple introduction to the game's combat soon comes to a sudden and violent halt. It's here that Jensen runs into a mysterious augmented figure that turns his one-man security operation on its ear. We won't go into details, but suffice it to say Jensen is left for dead and the doctors tasked with rescuing him elect to go the full-on biomechanical recovery route. The opening credits sequence that follows paints a grim picture of the transformation Jensen goes through, and in keeping with the game's uniformly stylish aesthetic, it's a thoroughly awesome montage with an art design that can't really be overstated. This despite the fact that you're essentially watching a man on the verge of death being outfitted with robot arms--and not exactly by his own choice.
At this point, we were about a half-hour into a three-hour demo of Human Revolution's opening moments. We'll have another preview coming your way in a few weeks that details how combat works once you settle into your augmentations, so be sure to check back for it.
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