Gaming
Sonic Mania Has Dropped on PC, but DRM Has Fans Upset
The long awaited Sonic Mania has finally dropped for PC users, a whole two weeks after consoles got their hands on it. Those 14 days were agony for most, but it’s finally time for them to sink their teeth into the Blue Blur’s latest adventure…sort of.
Although the game itself has been met with much praise from the community and is undoubtedly everything most fans wanted, the PC release didn’t exactly come smoothly.
The main issue is the Denuvo DRM that was added to the game, likely during the two week delay. This essentially requires that the player has an internet connection to play Sonic Mania at any time, which makes very little sense for a game with no online multiplayer. Without delving too deeply into whether or not this is a smart business practice, it’s clear that many fans are upset by this discovery.
To some people the addition of DRM maybe has little to no effect on them—I’ll even admit to being one of those people. But for those without consistent internet (or even those who don’t have the internet at all), simply playing a single player game that they’ve likely been looking forward to has been turned into a chore.
Aaron Webber himself, a PR and Social Media worker for Sonic Team, tweeted about the DRM. He advised anyone experiencing issues with it to submit a support ticket to SEGA and have their voice be heard. In fact, most of Sonic Team seems to have been out of the loop and is against the DRM addition.
As of August 30th it’s been confirmed by SEGA Europe that the ability to play offline has been returned, but Denuvo remains in the game. Other than the issue of DRM, some players have encountered a bug where either music or all sound suddenly cuts out and the game must be restarted to restore it.
Aside from these issues, Sonic Mania still seems to be the game most people were hoping for. Now it’s just a matter of whether SEGA will listen to fans and remove Denuvo entirely.
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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