The Biggest News in Gaming (Week Beginning 11/11/19)
Google Stadia’s impending release comes with a host of missing features, according to recent reports; elsewhere, everybody’s favourite blue hedgehog has a new look — again. Read on for these stories and more!
Google Stadia Will Launch With a Fraction of Its Promised Features
As we recently reported, the Google Stadia: Founder’s Edition launches on the 19th of this month; however, in a recent AMA with Stadia’s Andrey Doronichev and Beri Lee, it emerged that many expected features of the platform will not be available at launch.
Stream Connect, State Share, and Crowd play will all be missing on day one, despite these features supposedly being integral to the Stadia experience. Stream Connect will possibly launch before the end of this year, but early adopters will have to wait until 2020 for State Share and Crowd Play to be patched in.
The promised 4K, HDR, and 5.1 surround sound will all be unavailable to users playing on PC Chrome at launch, meaning anybody wanting to stream games on their highest settings must do so from the Chromecast Ultra; PC Chrome users will have to wait until 2020 for all of these features. Furthermore, the Stadia controller’s wireless capability is only compatible with the Chromecast Ultra, meaning to play on PC, tablet, or mobile will require a wired connection. Perhaps the most inexcusable oversight is that existing Chromecast Ultras won’t support Stadia until a firmware patch hits sometime after launch day, meaning to make use of Stadia’s mainstay features relies on players using the Chromecast that comes in the box — this restriction is in direct opposition to the idea that players no longer need to be tied to one console to enjoy their games.
Finally, Stadia Founders will be disappointed to find that controllers are being shipped separately, meaning some people won’t receive theirs on launch day; the promised “buddy passes” that give Stadia access to another person of the user’s choice will also not arrive until two weeks after the original packages.
Stardew Valley to Receive Major 1.4 Update, Introducing New Romance Events
Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone, developer of indie hit Stardew Valley, announced in a blog post this week that the 1.4 “everything” update for the game is right around the corner.
In the post, he describes his intention with the patch: “One of my main goals with 1.4 was to finally “polish” the game to the degree that I’ve always wanted. What I mean by that is that I wanted to fix all the bugs that have been lingering in the game, to fix a lot of weird or annoying things about the controls & feel of the game, and add in a lot of “quality of life” features that will make the game more seamless to play. I feel pretty confident that this goal has been met!”
He gave the example of Wild Bait, a fishing item in the game that served little purpose pre-patch, that will soon allow the player to catch two fish in one go. While a small change on its own, Barone promises that the patch will bring a host of little tweaks and fixes like this to bring the game in line with his original vision. There will also be more narrative content available going forward, with special “14-heart events” being introduced for partners after marriage that will apparently bring some closure to players’ romantic narrative arcs.
This patch marks the first time Barone has had help on the project in the seven years since he began development; he took on two extra people to work on the patch, stating that “having some help (particularly on the technical/programming side of things) is nice & will be good for Stardew Valley”. He is still working on a mystery solo project in tandem with these Stardew updates, and has “no plans” to bring anybody else on board to help with that.
Sonic the Hedgehog’s New Look is a Drastic Improvement
After the hellish reveal trailer of Paramount Pictures’ Sonic the Hedgehog movie in April of this year, fan backlash was instant, vocal, and aggressive. “Why are his eyes so small?” “Why are his legs so long?” “Why does he have human teeth?” The studio was quick to address fan’s concerns, pushing back the film’s release date to February 2020 and promising that animators would be taking a much-needed second pass at Sonic’s design before then.
After more than six months of silence, we’ve finally been gifted with a look at Sonic’s new design — and boy, is it an improvement. The new design is more in line with Sonic’s iconic, cartoonish look, with bigger, more exaggerated facial features and shorter limbs that make him look cute and stylised instead of, well… horrifying.
No word has emerged from the studio on how this crunch process affected the movie’s animators, who will have had to rebuild most of Sonic’s appearances in the film from the ground up. Whether this sets a dangerous precedent in the age of instant feedback, one which will increasingly see studio employees suffer at the hands of fans who don’t understand the workload, remains to be seen.
