Nuclear Monster

  • The developers behind Battlefield 4, DICE, have put out this video titled Create Your Own Battlefield 4 Map

    Watch it and if you haven’t had your coffee yet this morning you might miss that at no point do they mention players getting access to a map editor. Okay, well, the video description links to a blog post maybe they’ll mention it there:

    Ok. This is something we’ve never done before. There’s a piece of content coming in 2015 that we’re really excited about. We will build a Battlefield 4 map together with you — the community. Together with our development team, you will get to shape a playable map based on your input and expertise on what makes a fun multiplayer level. This map will then be tested and tweaked in the CTE (Community Test Environment), available for Battlefield 4 Premium members.

    …

    As part of this CTE testing you will be providing feedback* on the map, and creating the final thing together with us. During this process we’ll be sharing behind-the-scenes details of what the development process for making a multiplayer map looks like.

    As a thank you to the Battlefield community for sticking to your Battlefield 4 guns and giving excellent feedback to improve the game, we want to show our appreciation by releasing the “Community Map” on all platforms.

    All that players get to do is provide feedback on the map that DICE designs.

    While it would be a huge hurdle at this point for DICE to shoe-horn a public map editor into the game along with a method for players to get access to player-created levels, and it is difficult to summarize a DICE-developed-with-community-feedback-map into a video title, Create Your Own Battlefield 4 Map isn’t accurate. No players watching that video at home will have access to the tools to do so. Disappointing.

  • Ben Kuchera writing about turning the Samsung and Oculus’ Gear VR into a portable movie theater:

    The rewards are great, even if the resolution is slightly lower than you may be used to on your standard HDTV. With a good set of headphones I’m completely isolated from my real environment. I look around and all I see is the theater and the movie. There is no Twitter, no Facebook and no background noise. No usher will ever come in and start cleaning. The floor is never sticky. There are no distractions.

    This is the power of portable virtual reality; the ability to find yourself alone in a huge space using a device that fits into your backpack. The illusion of watching a film on a giant screen is complete, and being alone for two hours is amazing. Isolation on demand feels almost luxurious, as having your own personal movie theater isn’t something possible for most people, and the fact this virtual version requires no physical upkeep is even better.

    Gear VR isn’t very exciting as a product because of the limited hardware capabilities and how unlikely it would be for Samsung to continue in VR. Altogether it seems like a complete waste of time for developers to target that platform and a derailment for Oculus. Maybe there is some advantage to it that I’m not seeing yet, but it just feels like another feature on the endless list of things that Samsung attaches to their mobile products in order to pretend to be innovative. I hope that Oculus got something really good out of the deal.

    However, I am super excited for the ability to replace your environment at-will. Also please join me for an “Activation” We’re all doing it. Please remain seated while the VR matrix takes hold. You will experience a tingling sensation as the VR spike gently pierces your cranium and then we’ll be watching Sneakers in a theater like oldsters used to  do back before the sharing economy destroyed the world.

    You’ll be a little groggy after the movie ends and you return to realspace, but we’ll worship the Divine Bomb afterwards and take off our masks to reveal that we’re really irradiated monsters to the camera. It’ll be fun!

  • InstadoomDoom’s stalwart champion, Linguica, has put together Instadoom. It’s a Doom mod that, as you can see above, allows Doom Guy to take selfies and apply filters similar to those popularized by Instagram.

    Thanks to Ensiform for the tip.

  • I need to get better at Rocksmith.

  • There are two new interviews this morning with Peter Molyneux about the failure of Godus to ship a finished PC version two years and change after the game’s kickstarter crowdfunding completed with over half a million pounds which had an expected delivery date of September 2013.

    First up is Laura Kate Dale’s interview with Molyneux titled It’s over, I will not speak to the press again via Gameranx where we find out that he’s both quitting giving out interviews anymore and that his family is being harassed:

    “People get so frustrated with me, so much so that they’ve threatened me, they’ve threatened my family and it just cannot go on, it really can’t,” he says. 

    Awful. Failing to ship a game successfully isn’t worthy of harassment.

    The second interview is from John Walker, which is just an incredible read. Super long, but well worth going through.

    It makes particular mention of the Linux version, a financial stretch goal on the original Godus kickstarter that was reached, but will probably never ship due to an issue with the engine:

    Peter Molyneux: No, it wasn’t shitty of us. If you look at Kickstarter campaigns a lot of people do this, and at that time, you know, Linux seemed more than possible, and we’re waiting for an update from Marmalade to do Linux and they just haven’t supplied it. At that time, it was on the cards for them to develop. They haven’t developed it. And us going back and re-writing the whole of the middleware is, would mean that the development of Godus would stop. We’ve considered it. But you know, it’s months of work.

    In both of these interviews Molyneux says it is the last he’ll ever do, which is what both journalists believed until reading the other interviews.

    I still hope that Godus eventually becomes a great game, but it does not seem likely based on the mobile version at least. The world-sculpting there was as much fun as it seemed like it would be from the kickstarter, but the game limited the sculpting and gated all progress through micro transactions or the standard free to play timers thave have been with us since the old facebook game Mafia Wars.

    If Godus hadn’t been free-to-play on mobile it would have been work that could have gone into the PC version and both versions could have been better and probably would have been completable.