Gaming
Rock Band 4 Console Only Over Piracy Fears
There will be no PC version of Rock Band 4, developer Harmonix confirmed. This may not be all that surprising to long-time fans of the franchise, who will know Rock Band has never been on PC. But the resurgence of PC gaming over the past few years, as well as the ever-closer launch of Valve’s Steam Machines, had many hoping Rock Band 4 would be the series’ first installment that wasn’t console-only.
Daniel Sussman from Harmonix explained to Eurogamer some of the reasons for the decision. One of them was concerns over a lack of audience on PC. “For players who want it on PC, really you’re looking at a new audience that hasn’t played before, and I don’t know to what degree there is an audience for new players who have never played Rock Band before on the PC,” Sussman said.
Sussman offered a few other reasons, but what many suspect to be the real reason that Rock Band 4 won’t be on PC is piracy. Any music game needs to maintain good relations with the rights holders of the songs it’s using, and wanting to release the game on PC, a comparatively open platform, may have strained that relationship. “There’s something comforting about the closed network that comes along with the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. That’s important to our partners in the music industry,” Sussman said.
The issue of piracy being a reason for withholding the game from PC seems pretty silly, but maybe that’s just where the music industry is right now. It’s not as though music pirates are now going to hang up their hats, their attempts to grab some free songs foiled by Rock Band 4 only being available on consoles.
This decision was down to the music rights holders, not Harmonix. Eurogamer published an extra statement from Harmonix on the issue, who wished to clarify their position: “We’re not concerned about software piracy on PC. We have and will release games for PC. In fact, last year we released A City Sleeps for PC, Mac, and Linux. As Daniel stated, the security in question is related to licensed music in the game. PlayStation 4 and Xbox One have robust functionality in that area. It’s added security that’s handled by the platform holders.”
It’s not that surprising, really. The music industry in particular has a history of trying to fight piracy in some of the dumbest but also the most heavy-handed ways. Nobody who understands anything about the internet is going to believe releasing Rock Band 4 on PC will have any impact whatsoever on the piracy rates of the songs involved.
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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