Gaming
Divinity: Original Sin Dev: “Where Are The Women?”
Divinity: Original Sin developer Swen Vincke, head of Larian Studios, has written a fascinating blog post asking “where are the women?” He’s referring to the female fans of Divinity: Original Sin. The game was a massive success on Kickstarter a couple of years back, and after its release in 2014, the old-style RPG grew quite popular. Now, Larian Studios has run a Kickstarter campaign for the sequel, Divinity: Original Sin 2, and Vincke has noticed some stark statistics.
Vincke happened upon the statistics of his most recent Kickstarter campaign and found that just 4% of visitors to the project’s page were women. Similarly, only 9% of the game’s Facebook fan page are women.
“One of the blind assumptions I’ve always made about Divinity: Original Sin is that many women play it,” Vincke writes. “My feeling that many women play D:OS is further reinforced by the people I meet at trade shows. For every two or three male fans, there’s always at least one woman. Based on that, my lazy mind concluded that at least 25% to 33% of our audience is female, if not more (given that trade shows are not exactly gender balanced).”
To Vincke, the low number of women shown in the analytics and his anecdotal experiences just “didn’t compute at all.” So the first thing he did was check Kickstarter’s overall gender statistics. What he found, and what my own research found, was that around 70% of Kickstarter users are male as opposed to around 30% female. This left Vincke still feeling rather confused about why less than 5% of his project’s visits came from women.
Sadly, Vincke was unable to find gender statistics from the Steam analytics for Divinity: Original Sin. “This seriously sucked, because it could’ve validated (or invalidated) an idea that had formed on our group chat i.e. The women who play our games will play the hell out of them, but they will only take an active interest when the games are released or about to be released. Our male audience on the contrary might be more interested in backing us sooner, for what I guess will be a variety of reasons.”
It’s worth noting here that Google Analytics’ method of determining the gender of a site’s visitors can often be quite inaccurate, but even with that in mind, 4% does still seem low.
Vincke told Polygon that Larian Studios “put a lot of effort in so that it’s equally appealing to men and women, and it would be really sad if that did not reach its target audience.” They actually redrew the original concept art (shown below) so that the female character wasn’t showing as much midriff later on in the game’s development.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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