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via Kotaku


After corrupted files ruined yesterday's launch of Fallout 3's The Pitt DLC for Xbox 360 players, Bethesda saves face by quickly getting a non-broken version of the update uploaded to Xbox Live.

The solution to the missing textures, incomplete geography, and freezing issues that plagued yesterday's launch to The Pitt for the Xbox 360 is now only a delete and a download away. Simply go to Settings->System Settings->Memory on your Xbox 360, select Fallout 3, and then select Fallout 3: The Pitt. Delete what you've got there, re-download the file, and you should be good to go.

While the situation surely did suck, we've got to give Bethesda kudos for getting the issue resolved quickly, especially in the middle of the Game Developers Conference. Good on ya, Bethesda. ...

via IGN


The wait is at long last coming to an end for Bionic Commando, the new 3D rethinking of the classic series. Over in Japan, Capcom announced today a final release date for the Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game. Our friends on the island nation will get the game on June 25, priced at 7,340 yen (about $74).

For most games, a Japanese date usually has little relation to an overseas release. But this is Capcom here, so we expect the international versions of Bionic Commando to arrive close to the Japanese version. We'll let you know if Capcom's domestic office makes any announcements. ...

Square Enix superstar producer -- and master of the zipper -- Tetsuya Nomura is featured in this week's Famitsu through a two page interview. Although most of the space was taken up by Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete talk, Nomura opened up towards the end about a few of his other projects.

First up, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days. Development on the DS title is approaching completion, he said. The staff is now going through the final areas of debugging. In case you don't keep up with the Nippon gaming seen, the Japanese version is due for release on May 30.

Sharing the sales points of the title, Nomura noted that because it's mission-based, players who want to get through to the end quickly can simply play just the required missions. However, those who do clear all the missions will find a lot of content.

Next up, Kingdom Hearts Coded. Noting that the mobile title will be distributed as a series of episodes, Nomura revealed that the development staff is currently working on building up a stock of such episodes.

Finally, the main event: Final Fantasy Versus XIII. Nomura didn't share much here, stating only that the designs for the main characters' clothing is complete. These designs were previously announced as being a collaboration with Roen. He hopes to unveil them at a major event.

The magazine also asked Nomura about future possibilities for the Final Fantasy VII compilation series. He said that he believes he's done all he wants to do for Advent Children. However, he does have ideas for the next product in the compilation. Don't start celebrating yet, though! Nomura also said that he doesn't expect any developments on the series for the time being.

http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/966/966108p1.html ...

Even just on paper, the number for Insomniac Games' second Resistance title is impressive: 60 players in the competitive modes (which include straight deathmatch as well as more objective-based modes that divvy up all those players into squads) and 8 players in the cooperative one. While one would naturally assume that adding 20 more players to what was already an impressive feat in the original Resistance's 40 online players would just mean bigger maps, there were far bigger ramifications.

In a session titled "Pushing the Limits: The Technical, Design, and Social Ramifications from Increasing Player Counts in Online Multiplayer Games," Resistance 2 Cooperative Design Lead Jake Biegel and R2 Competitive Design Lead Mike Roloson detailed some of the issues they came across when upping the player counts to the largest seen in a console game thus far.

To facilitate including the three main components of R2's experience, the Campaign, Cooperative and Competitive Modes, the team was actually split into three separate, semi-autonomous units that were each building their own part of the game. Though they obviously shared resources, it wasn't until they came together in a move Biegel claims was "analogous to Voltron" that the game really became a whole; disparate units that combined to become greater than the sum of its parts.

The teams had almost no ties to each other's modes, and the difficulty, Biegel explains, was to continue to promote teamwork and sense of unity despite the sequestered bits of development happening simultaneously. As it turns out, these were themes that carried over into the game because, as Insomniac discovered in moving to a comparatively huge number of players in on a map, things graduated from simple game design issues to overall social dynamics.

Nowhere was this more apparent than when they first dropped 60 players into a map. Juggling these "mob dynamics" was especially difficult because nobody had really attempted a game of that magnitude before. It created what the team affectionately called "The Ball of Death" -- a huge lump of chaos that would move around a map and draw in other players into the conflict. The problem with this was that the chaos in the middle was largely impregnable; players would spawn, run to where the chaos was, and then get killed on the periphery.

This would eventually give rise to the game's objectives and, most importantly, the squad system that would not only split up the 60 players into groups, but assign them objectives and a rival squad to give the game a sense of rivalry and familiarity. After all, when there are 60 players running around, it's almost impossible to keep track of friends, much less that one person that keeps gunning you down throughout a match.

It was an example of the admittedly fascinating dynamics of social interaction. Mike Roloson equated it to a series of small gatherings. A six or so person dinner lets everyone stay cordial, encourages a central conversation, and lets some people dig a little deeper into topics as the flow dictates. When you double or even triple that, moving to around 15 people, then you start to see individual conversations and people starting to glom together into groups. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, as it's impossible to juggle four or five conversations at once with any real involvement, but it was nevertheless an issue when trying to pit people against each other. At 24+ players (or, as Roloson compared it, the "bar" setting), people begin to arrive in cliques and tend to stay in those, sometimes largely ignoring everyone else and staying within their bubble.

The trick, you see, is to have a central focal point (in the bar analogy, that could be a band or a sports even on TV) that bands everyone together and creates a channeled objective for the whole, while still allowing the freedom of having smaller groups. Thus, the squad system was created and forced rivalries were introduced -- apparently a source of internal contention. "The debate still rages," Roloson joked.

By breaking things up, the Ball of Death was mitigated to a degree and could even be manipulated as needed to create a sense that the matches had culminated into something bigger at the end. In truth, Insomniac actually designed their matches in both Competitive and Cooperative Modes to grow as they went on, keeping things isolated at first, and then layering in more squads until the matches reached a chaotic apex.

This worked no matter what the player count because of an innate ability by the dev team to scale the entirety of the experience. What begin as more compartmentalized map designs eventually gave way to shared maps that could then be divvied up into chunks for specific modes like Capture the Flag. In this way, the teams were able to share resources and hit their milestones, which Insomniac has oft prided itself on never missing.

http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/966/966265p1.html ...

via Computer and Video Games


Resident Evil 5 producer Masachika Kawata has said that gamers may have to wait up to eight years for Resident Evil 6, assuming the project gets the go ahead.

"We haven't decided whether we're going to make Resident Evil 6 yet," Kawata told The Gadget Show. "But if we do, it could take anywhere up to eight years, but hopefully only four."

Fellow Resi 5 producer Jun Takeuchi said previously that the next instalment in the series will be a full franchise reboot, but we'd be more than a little bit surprised if it took eight years to rework the formula.

The horror series has already undergone somewhat of a change in formula recently, with the latest entry more action-orientated than previous releases. ...

Gaz has updated his Jazzier suite:

...

At the Game Developers Conference panel titled "Inspiration Behind Nintendo DSi Development," Nintendo's project lead Matato Kuwahara revealed that there will be a variety of ways to distribute Nintendo DSi software to users, both digitally distributed as well as via retail packaged software.

The first way is, obviously, through the DSiWare Channel where game developers can create small DSi concepts for small or no cost to the consumer, and have them downloadable straight to the DSi internal memory.

Via retail, developers can choose two routes. DSi Enhanced Game Cards will give developers the ability to incorporate DSi features, such as the camera or the SD cartridge, into their DS games. These Enhanced cards will play as standard DS games on the Nintendo DS or Nintendo DS Lite but will only open up the unique elements of the DSi on those consoles. Kuwahara used the idea of bringing in pictures taken with the camera and utilizing them as in-game textures as an example.

The other option is DSi Game Cards. Kuwahara recommended this option for those looking to place DSi-exclusive concepts into retail stores. These cartridges will not play on the Nintendo DS or DS Lite.

The DSi Enhanced Game Cards and DSi Game Cards are still being worked on at Nintendo, but should be available in the near future.

http://uk.ds.ign.com/articles/966/966301p1.html ...