Video Games Daily News Digest

It’s truly fascinating how the world works and even more fascinating is how the world to which virtual worlds revolve works. It seems that irony is a very cruel mistress as just last week we wrote about how NCSoft with specific regards to Aion and how they’re advocating security across the board. In an interesting twist of fate we have some news related to security and Aion.

The website AionSource.com came under a massive hacker attack on Jan. 24th and while the site’s admins defended against the attack and beefed up their security, some information was still leaked out. The email addresses of many of the website’s members have been leaked to hackers and have been subjected to subsequent phishing scams to gain access to player’s Aion accounts. So take this as a warning, do not under any circumstances provide account information through an email, especially if it comes from AionSource.com.

What is most surprising about this turn of events is that a site on the Curse network was hacked in such a manner. If anyone who’s anyone that plays MMOs, then they have visited the Curse network for mods, strategy guides, among other boat loads of information on the most popular MMOs. If Curse is susceptible to these sort of attacks, should we be more worried about our accounts’ security and worried about our personal information getting out? We would like to think that developers databases are more secure but the recent turn of events leaves us wondering.

Shifting gears into something a bit more positive, the Fallen Earth devs have given players a whole lot to be excited about. In a recent state of the game address, conveniently timed around another recent type of address, outlines the game’s future patch by patch. The first patch, 1.3, will bring in two new zones — Kaibab Forest and Deadfall Point — with extended level caps and added experience.

The next 1.4 patch will bring the full Deadfall zone to be explored by players and increasing the level cap by four. With the new zone comes many more evils to face and the new levels will bring about new crafts. In the last patch of the outline, 1.5, brings joy to the hearts of PvP players. This patch brings in arena style battles where clans will be able to fight it out on the blood soaked stage. They’ll be reworking animations for the new game mode as well as an achievement system. Needless to say Fallen Earth players have a lot laid out before them, literally.

It seems like for the die-hard players of Champions Online the journey has been full of ups and downs. It seems that the latest patch has proven to be one of those down turns in the adventure as it has made things worse rather than improving them. The patch was supposed to address a number of issues including lag problems in Lemuria. Around the same time as this patch, Cryptic announced that the rumored Vibora Bay contact update would now be a paid update. Needless to say players are feeling rather heated about the whole situation as the patch not only left out new content for 37-40 players and are now making players pay for it, but also made the lag issues worse.

As any MMO player will tell you, lag is not something that players want to deal with but sadly that isn’t where the issues end. Apparently crafting tables are consuming players’ materials without actually giving them the crafted item in return. Players are upset by the state of the game and the fact that there is a paid content patch coming so soon after launch. They’re feeling that the effort should rather be put into fixing the current content before trying to sell them new content, or at least offer the new content as free to make up for all the game breaking issues that still exist today.

In other MMO news:

• Star Trek: Online’s head start begins.
• Zatanna Zatara joins the cast of DC Universe, comic book fans explode.
• Cities XL to be MMO no more, but you’ll still be able to play it as a single player game.
• Everquest II goes battlegrounds, doesn’t look back.
• PC and PS2 versions of Phantasy Star Universe getting shut down, Xbox 360 version still kicking.
• Want a preview for Warhammer Online’s 1.3.4 patch? Well here you go!

Microsoft preemptively has called Bungie’s Halo: Reach the biggest game of 2010. At the same time, it’s calling the release of Project Natal, its upcoming motion-sensing peripheral, the biggest thing to hit gaming and beyond. Now, we have learned that two of the (so we’ve been told) biggest things about this new year are not going to work together.

In Bungie’s latest weekly update on the game, they added in a Halo: Reach Mythbusters section where they dispel the rumor in one simple sentence, “Halo: Reach is NOT a Natal title and is being developed expressly with the traditional Xbox 360 controller in mind.” This is consistent with Microsoft’s plans for focusing on original content on the device. Whether the Halo franchise and Natal have a future together is speculation at this point, but it’d be surprising if it didn’t happen. Regardless, expect two of the year’s biggest to arrive close to each other toward the end of said year.

If your fondest arcade memories are of playing gratuitously violent games without your parents knowing, then Microsoft’s Game Room probably won’t give you the sense of nostalgia you’re looking for. According to a Microsoft representative, there are no plans to carry Mature or even Teen rated titles in the feature.

“Games available for download within ‘Game Room’ will carry either E or E10+ ratings,” this representative said to GamerBytes (via Kotaku). “We currently have no plans to feature titles of those [higher Teen and Mature] ratings.”

The reasoning behind this is where things get a little tricky, though. Originally, GamerBytes reported that Microsoft elected to get an ESRB rating for the Game Room feature itself, rather than have to rate every title that will launch within it. As such, they limited themselves to E and E10+ games only, and will have to continue to do so for every new game released for Game Room. The logic here is this will save Microsoft tons of money in ESRB rating fees since they supposedly wouldn’t have to rate future games for the service.

Namco Bandai has announced that Dead to Rights: Retribution, the reboot of sorts for their canine-friendly action game series last seen in 2005, will release on April 13 (via Eurogamer).

Retribution was first announced back in February of 2009, and really, hasn’t been seen very much since. We know the game will once again star the unfortunately Flintstones-esque named Jack Slate, a canine officer who fights crime with his loyal dog Shadow. Retribution will also feature deeper hand-to-hand combat, and entire levels where the player controls Shadow directly.

We last got a look at Retribution way back in May of last year, so it’ll be interesting to see how this reboot shaped up. It’ll be released on both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and evidently there will be pre-order bonuses including a “MadWorld-style” graphic filter called “noir mode,” and exclusive dog camouflage for Shadow.

Final Fantasy XIII has been a long time coming, and no doubt part of that is because it’s the first big PlayStation 3 game for Square Enix. But as it turns out, there’s another reason for the long wait: It started its development life on the PlayStation 2.

“Final Fantasy XIII was originally meant to be a PS2 title, but we had to switch systems due to the arrival of the PS3,” said producer Yoshinori Kitase to the Dutch version of Official PlayStation Magazine (as translated by FinalFantasy-XIII.net, via VG247). “That cost us about one and a half years and was constantly a case of trial and error.”

So what did this ill-fated PS2 version of Final Fantasy XIII look like? Thanks to a book covering all things FFXIII recently released in Japan called “Scenario and Battle Ultimania,” we can see for ourselves — it provided screenshots from what were apparently two different builds with wildly different graphical styles, and FinalFantasy-XIII.net again comes through with a few (very blurry) scans. Check out two shots below of the versions of FFXIII that were not to be.

Despite Sony jumping on the 3D bandwagon early, EA Sports President Peter Moore has made it clear that they are not working on anything in the third dimension right now. Moore said that the industry needs to take notice of Sony’s excitement over the new tech, “But believe me there’s nothing going on right now that would say I’m ready to demo a 3D sports game. Nothing at all.”

That’s a little bit surprising considering that EA Sports’ cable buddy ESPN is going to debut 3D cable channels in time for the World Cup this June. Still, it doesn’t mean Moore and his underlings are just sitting around waiting to make money on Madden 11. They’re hard at work getting ready to produce software for Microsoft’s Project Natal and Sony’s “Arc”. Says Moore, “We’re getting in sync with Sony’s motion controller and Project Natal with what Sony and Microsoft want to do with their publishing partners, so stay tuned for further information on that as we get closer to the date.”

It’s clear that Moore and his teams are focusing their energy on the new motion control technology due out later this year. However, Moore has expressed some frustration, as the lack of knowledge over exact release dates is making it hard to plan for which games are adapted to which devices. “Don’t know. I do not know when they’re launching. Certainly Sony has made no public pronouncement at all, and Microsoft has said ‘holiday’, which obviously gives fudge room, so stay tuned,” Moore said when discussing release dates.

It’s good to know that EA Sports is seriously focused on the new technology, but I can see why they’re frustrated. After all, Madden pretty much has to be released in August in order to catch the NFL hype wave. If Moore doesn’t know what tech will be released by then, it becomes very difficult to plan for.

With the release of a batch of Halo: Reach screenshots came the usual amount of obsessive fan analysis, which in turn produced a lot of intriguing rumors — a lot of intriguing rumors that are turning out to be wrong. In Bungie’s latest weekly update, they engaged in a round of “Halo: Reach Mythbusters,” shooting down some of the bigger rumors floating around the net. And the biggest: that Halo: Reach would use Natal motion controls.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the targeting reticule — typically in the middle of the screen for a first-person shooter — is mysteriously off to the left, leading many to wonder if it’s because you can aim the reticule independently using some form of motion controls. The answer is much less elaborate: “Truth be told, it’s just a good ole fashioned bug. Bug #15163 to be exact,” Bungie writes. “Halo: Reach is NOT a Natal title and is being developed expressly with the traditional Xbox 360 controller in mind.”

This screenshot alone created a couple of other rumors, including that the HUD will in fact be yellow (evidently it won’t), and more intriguingly, that a portion of the screen was pixelated (area is circled in the image above) because Bungie was hiding something super top secret. Here we will quote Bungie’s explanation in full, because it’s the sort of awesomely jerk-ish behavior we really respect:

It was only a year ago that the head of Ubisoft, Yves Guillemot, mentioned upcoming tools to significantly reduce piracy of their PC games. A year later, Ubisoft is ready to unleash their plans to counter PC piracy and it begins with creating or using existing an account for their website.

Upon authentication through a Ubi.com account, users will be able to install games on an unlimited number of PCs as well as play a game without the disc in the drive. “If you own a hundred PCs, you can install your games on a hundred PCs,” said Brent Wilkinson, Director of Customer Service and Production Planning for Ubisoft. The thing is, users will always have to be connected to their respective Ubisoft accounts before playing in order to authenticate.

The new system won’t just manage authentication as users will gain a benefit for save games. Save games will be stored on Ubisoft’s servers, giving the user the ability to access them from any machine and will be available for the majority of Ubisoft’s PC titles.

Of course, with a system that will require an internet connection whenever one wants to play their game, there’s going to be some concern from users that don’t always have an available internet connection. Ubisoft’s reply? “We think most people are going to be fine with it. Most people are always connected to an Internet connection,” Wilkinson told Gamespy.

The first Ubisoft title to utilize the system will be The Settlers 7.

EA Redwood’s adaptation of Dante Alighieri’s epic poem draws near, with a release date of February 9, and so the marketing wheels continue to turn for the game. While not quite up there with a fake motion-sensing church sim or picketers outside world-renown trade shows, a modest but solid minute and twenty seconds of pure gameplay gives some glimpses into the potential fun in this third-person action bonanza of literary proportions. Sadly, the real goods are being held back for the final release, so no money shots on that demon penis, sadly. In the meantime, the demo’s around to get a feel for what’s coming in less than two weeks.

Talking to Develop, Sony has confirmed that their Studio Liverpool (Wipeout HD) will see some restructuring in the near future as part of “project prioritisation.”

“It has been decided that production on a number of projects within Studio Liverpool will cease immediately due to project prioritisation. Our North West Studio Group has been, and will continue to be, a vital cog in the WWS family, with a history of producing genre defining games such as MotorStorm, WipEout, Formula 1 and WRC,” a representative said in a statement. Sony did confirm though that ”this decision will have no impact of the role that the North West Studio Group will play in the future of all PlayStation platforms.”

It is Develop’s belief, and unfortunately ours as well, that people might be losing their jobs should Sony not find a way to reallocate the people directly affected by this decision.

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