Doublejump Digest: March 25, 2018
This week in gaming: PUBG Corp. shows off a new map, Epic Games shifts its focus to Fortnite, more clues about an open-world Star Wars title, and more!
In the spirit of keeping our readers up-to-date with what’s going on in the video game industry, the Doublejump Digest is a brief collection of the major news stories that happened in the past week. Keep an eye out for the Digest every Sunday night, and head into the archive if you’ve missed any!
From Doublejump:
- Emily played through Bluepoint Games’ beautiful Shadow of the Colossus remaster, calling it a “beautifully-executed remake that preserves the essence of the 2005 action-adventure title while still managing to improve it across the board.”
Major news releases:
Most of Epic Games is working on Fortnite:
Epic Games co-founder Tim Sweeney has told Rolling Stone’s Glixel blog that the “majority” of the veteran game studio’s staff is now actively working on Fortnite.
“We have 700 people at Epic, and it’s the majority, but it’s a fairly unusual situation,” he said. “We shipped it with 25 people and now we’re responding to the reaction.“
Sweeney added that having so many staff resources dedicated to a single project is “not the long-term intent” and that Epic has used its experience building Fortnite Battle Royale to improve its Unreal Engine 4 game engine. He also added that this work also allowed for the development team to experiment in a relatively short amount of time.
“One of the lessons from Fortnite Battle Royale is that we spent years building a base game that was fun and achieved a base level of success,” he said. “Then we had a small team do an experiment, which turned out to be a complete game changer for a whole game. Being able to experiment like that is important.”
As for Fortnite’s original Save the World mode, Sweeney assured fans that Epic is still committed to improving it going forward.
“We are putting a lot of effort into Save the World,” he said. “It’s a much bigger game and has a much larger content base, so progress there tends to be visibly slower than Battle Royale.”
PUBG Corp. shows off new PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS map in new video:
PUBG Corp. CEO C. H. Kim and Creative Director Brendan “PLAYERUNKNOWN” Greene introduced the map in a short “Thank You” video to mark the first anniversary of the game’s early access release.
Kim noted that “public testing phases” for the map are scheduled to “begin in early April” but stopped short of announcing a time frame for its final release. The map itself is approximately one-quarter the size (16 square kilometres versus 64 square kilometres) of the existing two maps and appears to be set within a Pacific island given the abundance of lush vegetation and corrugated iron-roofed buildings.
In related news, PUBG Corp. also announced that it is adding an “Event Mode” to the PC version’s test servers that features a curated experience for “trying new things and experimenting with different game parameters”. This week’s Event Mode is currently running until approximately 1PM AEDT on March 26.
Microsoft, NVIDIA, and AMD announce support for next-gen rendering technology:
The three software and hardware giants made their respective announcements for live “ray tracing” during this week’s Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. According to Anandtech, Microsoft led the initiative by confirming that it is planning to introduce DirectX Raytracing (DXR) to DirectX 12 later this year.
“[R]ay tracing works like human vision in reverse (in a manner of speaking), casting rays out from the viewer to objects and then bouncing from those objects to the rest of the world, ultimately determining the interactions between light sources and objects in a realistic manner,” Anandtech’s Ryan Smith explained. “As a result, ray tracing has been the go-to method for high quality rendering, particularly static images, movies, and even pre-baked game assets.”
Ray tracing is very demanding process, so it has not been used by game developers to render games live, but NVIDIA and AMD have commited to supporting this process. NVIDIA announced that its next generation of graphics cards will feature NVIDIA RTX hardware (to handle live ray tracing) while existing cards will only feature software support, which is much less efficient. AMD did not specify whether its upcoming graphics will also feature new hardware or will only rely on a software solution.
As of this writing, Epic Games (Unreal Engine 4), DICE (Frostbite), Unity Technologies (Unity), are the main game engine developers to announce support for DXR, with Metro Exodus studio 4A Games releasing the following video showcasing the game’s use of NVIDIA RTX to improve its lighting system:
EA accidentally reveals that it’s working on an open-world Star Wars game:
The information comes to us via a listing on the company’s Careers portal, searching for “a talented and experienced Lead Online Engineer to join an established, experienced team of developers working on a AAA Star Wars title in development at EA Vancouver.”
EA hasn’t followed up on the accidental reveal as of yet, and the listing doesn’t share much information about the game, but it does ask for applicants with “experience implementing Online features such as Matchmaking, Asynchronous interactions, Live services, Server-host migration, etc.”
Of course, we will keep our ears to the ground and update in the unlikely event that any further information comes to light.
Blizzard tests new “Avoid as Teammate” feature in Overwatch:
In the latest Developer Update video, Game Director Jeff Kaplan revealed that Blizzard is currently testing a new feature that will allow players to avoid being put on the same team as other individuals.
He explained that the Avoid as Teammate option is currently set to last for seven days and is selectable for up to two players at any one time. Marked players will have a notification pop up once they have been flagged by “many many players” and result in longer matchmaking times when playing solo.
Blizzard’s Scott Mercer separately confirmed that the feature is now live on the game’s Public Test realm.
Notable game releases:
- A Way Out (PC, PS4, and Xbox One)
- Assassin’s Creed Rogue Remastered (PS4 and Xbox One)
- Far Cry 5 (PC, PS4, and Xbox One)
- Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom (PC and PS4)
- Sea of Thieves (PC and Xbox One)
Major video releases:
Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom — Launch Trailer:
It’s a massive week for JRPG fans!
God of War — Fighting with Atreus:
Creative Director Cory Barlog talks briefly about how Kratos’s son helps his father in combat.
Detective Pikachu — Launch Trailer:
There’s something different about this Pikachu…
Assassin’s Creed Rogue Remastered — Launch Trailer:
The “forgotten” entry has been updated for Microsoft and Sony’s latest systems.
Indie spotlight:
LUMINES and Mark of the Ninja return as part of new Nindies campaign: Nintendo celebrated GDC 2018 with a slew of independent game announcements that are coming to the Switch over the next few months including remasters of Klei Entertianment’s stealth platformer Mark of the Ninja and Q Entertainment’s PSP classic LUMINES.
Fantasy Strike coming to Nintendo Switch later this year:
The 2D brawler from Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Lead Designer David Sirlin is currently available in Steam Early Access, but is now set to launch on Nintendo’s console-handheld hybrid on the same day as it launches on PlayStation 4 and Steam (Mac and Windows). This date hasn’t been announced as of this writing, but developer and publisher Sirlin Games suggests that it will be launching “in mid 2018”.
Other news:
- Report: Rainbow Six Siege’s next two operators may have been leaked on Reddit: GameSpot
- Brigitte is now open to every Overwatch player: YouTube
- Crytek has partnered with PlayFusion to add augmented reality features to CRYENGINE: DualShockers
- The man behind Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon has left Ubisoft: Game Informer
- Report: the original Punch-Out!!! is headed to the Switch in Japan: DualShockers
- Blizzard has banned Minseok “OGE” Son from the Dallas Fuel for “account boosting”: Official
- Check out Black Desert Online running on an Xbox One X: YouTube
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