Smalltalk with James Robertson

Spotted in Joystiq:

The Xbox Live Arcade version of Minecraft is selling at a good clip, shifting between 40,000 and 60,000 copies a week - it's just below Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Halo 4 in the weekly Xbox Live activity charts. As of November's end, total XBLA sales are at 4,476,904.

Think about that - Mojang is still a small shop, and the amount of money that has been spent on Minecraft development is tiny compared to any of the other titles mentioned above. There's a lesson in there somewhere for the AAA development shops, but I rather suspect that they'll miss it.

Tags: minecraft

Polygon Reports:

"The other thing I can tell you is that, while it will be very respectful of the heritage built over the course of the first three games, with the original trilogy now concluded and the switch over to a new engine, we are exploring new directions, both on the gameplay and story fronts," Roy wrote. "You can still expect the pillars the franchise is known for to be fully intact though, including diverse alien races, a huge galaxy to explore, and of course rich, cinematic storytelling."

I'm not sure that BioWare really understands what the ME audience wants. We don't need a better 3rd person shooter; if that's what we wanted, we'd just keep playing Gears of War. What we want is the classic BioWare story, along with the classic branching dialog choices. The choices you make as a player have to mean something, rather than be boiled down to 3 possible endings (or, as in DA2, one possible ending). We aren't watching a movie - to a very large extent, time spent on cinematics is time wasted.

Technorati Tags: bioware, games, mass effect

Alan Kay was right all those years ago:

Nathan Adams from Mojangs says that this will be no small task as it requires the studio to change Minecraft's basic infrastructure. He says in order to build an official mod API the studio has to rewrite the client side of the game from scratch this means it might be a few months before an early version of the API can be seen.

It's one thing to build something that works; it's something else again to deal with changing requirements once you have the thing that works :)

Technorati Tags: minecraft

Polygon Reports:

Skyrim content that has been available for the Xbox 360 but delayed for the PlayStation 3 for months might soon be on its way, according to a tweet Skyrim developer Bethesda sent out today. The company tweeted: "To update, we're also close on new Skyrim content for PS3 and PC" and "Thanks to all our fans. We think you'll love the new stuff. We know it takes us time and thanks for all your support and patience!"

I wonder how much Sony regrets the very different architecture they picked for the PS3 at this point - I suspect it's at the heart of a lot of these problems. Not because it's technically inferior, but simply because it's so different from the PC and XBox setup that a proper port has to do more than cross compile...

Technorati Tags: skyrim

Spotted in Polygon - All

A teaser image for what may be upcoming downloadable content for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was posted to Bethesda's Twitter account this afternoon, along with the announcement of a full trailer coming Monday, Nov. 5.

I wonder if they'll time it for the one year anniversary of the game's release?

Technorati Tags: skyrim

Spotted in Polygon:

Speaking to Gizmodo, Windows Corporate VP of Web Services Antoine Leblond said the guidelines will be changed by December. "It basically ends up disqualifying games that would be ESRB Mature," he said of the original guidelines. In announcing that the guideline changes would be introduced in December, Leblond added: "This is to give developers a heads up that that's where we're going, so they can have the peace of mind around developing the kinds of games that will have those ratings."

I suspect that the original guidelines were put out by someone who doesn't play games, and was looking to prevent certain classes of "mature" apps from landing in the store with the MS stamp of approval. It probably took awhile for the people at MS who play games - and understood the impact - to get the problem explained to the powers that be :)

What do you do after you take down a bunch of guards? Stash them in the guard post, of course:

Technorati Tags: dishonored

I was a little wary about getting Dishonored for my Windows 7 VM (I have a 13" Macbook pro, 2011 vintage). The minimum specs for the game call for a 3.0 Ghz Core Duo, and this machine has 2.4 Ghz Core Duo - and it's a VM, after all. Then again, the game uses Unreal 3, just like Mass Effect 3 does - and ME3 ran just fine for me. So I pulled the trigger on Steam, and tried it out - and it runs fine (better than Deus Ex: HR, actually). With that out of the way, I can enjoy the game as I travel away from my Xbox :)

Ok, this is funny:

Technorati Tags: skyrim, elder scrolls

What happens at BioWare after you completely screw up the ending of Mass Effect? Why, you get put in charge of developing a whole new game universe, that's what:

Both Dragon Age and Mass Effect started as single games but grew into vast universes. But we aren't stopping there. While Casey continues to oversee the development of our new Mass Effect project, he and his leads are putting together their vision for an all new game set in a fictional universe, built from the bottom-up with all new gaming technology.

Add in the idiotic EA theory that every game needs multi-player, and you've got all the components you need for a complete, utter, and total failure.

Technorati Tags: bioware, stupidity