Gaming
Witcher 3 Standard Edition Comes Packed With Goodies
If you told me you hadn’t stepped into a physical games retailer for years, I’d find it understandable. After all, digital versions of games can be purchased online for a fraction of the price, and buying physical copies of games continues to look like a rip off. So if you’re not familiar with the tendency for triple-A games to come out with both a standard edition and some form of special edition, you could be forgiven.
These days, you can’t throw a rock in a game store without hitting a special or limited edition of some game or another. You can tell them apart from the standard editions because they’ll likely be in a larger box, containing not just the game but a stack of other supposedly exclusive goodies. Take Batman: Arkham Knight. The limited edition comes with, among other things, a Batman statue, an art book, and a comic book. Some are just lazy. The Assassin’s Creed: Unity special edition came with nothing but a piece of glorified DLC. What all these special or limited editions have in common is that they’re ridiculously pricey. Being just a lowly games writer, I don’t even bother to look at them. Why make myself sad with the knowledge I can’t afford the awesomeness?
CD Projekt Red are taking a different approach. The standard edition of The Witcher 3 contains a bundle of bonuses normally reserved for overpriced special editions. The box contains a very nice map of the northern realms, a pack of stickers, a CD containing the soundtrack, The Witcher Universe Compendium Booklet, and codes for both The Witcher Battle Arena and the House of Glass Digital Comic Book. CDPR has also promised an amazing 16 pieces of free DLC.
On top of those nice goodies, there’s also a very nice letter from CDPR to their beloved customers. “Dear Gamer,” it begins. “First of all, we would like to thank you for your support. We really appreciate that you have decided to spend your hard-earned money our game and hope that you will have a fun time playing it.” It’s the little things like this that prove the developers really have put their hearts and souls into a game. They’re genuinely thrilled that people are going to play it and enjoy it.
The letter is also a reminder that, even when we feel like all those triple-A developers are just sucking money out of us, there are still some that make games because that’s what they love doing. “At CD Projekt Red, we believe that when you buy our games, you’re entitled to continuous, free support – updates, patches and bits of new and amazing content. We owe you that for believing in us and purchasing our game. To thank you, we have prepared something really special – 16 DLCs for you to download, totally free of charge, regardless of the platform or edition of the game you own.” With a philosophy like that, these are developers we can all be happy to support.
For a photo of the full letter, take a look on VG24/7.
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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