The Biggest News In Gaming (Week Beginning 21/10/19)
The Last of Us Part II Gets Delayed
Despite its release date being announced less than a month ago, Naughty Dog has delayed The Last of Us Part II.
The hotly anticipated sequel to 2013's The Last of Us will now release on May 29th, 2020.
The news comes by way of the PlayStation Blog, on which game director Neil Druckmann posted an unapologetic update on the game.
“Let me cut to the chase and get the news out of the way,” Druckmann said.
“The Last of Us Part II has a new release date of May 29, 2020.”
“I know. It was just about a month ago when we had our big blowout for the game, letting media play over two hours of it along with debuting our new story trailer and revealing the release date.”
“The positive response we saw from our community was overwhelming. You can feel the energy among the team members,” he noted.
“However, it was during the last few weeks, as we were closing out sections of the game, that we realized we simply didn’t have enough time to bring the entire game up to a level of polish we would call Naughty Dog quality. At this point we were faced with two options: compromise parts of the game or get more time. We went with the latter, and this new release date allows us to finish everything to our level of satisfaction while also reducing stress on the team.”
The full post by Druckmann can be found here.
Ubisoft Admits Breakpoint Has Been A Disaster, Delays Three Games
During an earnings call this week, Ubisoft has evaluated that the latest release in the Tom Clancy game franchise, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint, has not had the strong release the company had hoped for.
In a press release from the conference call, they said they had seen “a sharp downward revision in the revenues expected from Ghost Recon Breakpoint and, to a lesser extent, The Division 2”.
Before the earnings call took place, Ubisoft also delayed three of their upcoming projects: Watch Dogs Legion, Rainbow Six Quarantine, and Gods & Monsters.
Yves Guillemot, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, said “Over the past few years, we have delivered many high-quality titles, built a portfolio of diversified franchises and successfully conducted the digital transformation of our business.
“However, we have not capitalized on the potential of our latest two AAA releases. For Ghost Recon Breakpoint, while the game’s quality appeared on track — based on E3, Gamescom, previews and our latest internal playtests –, critical reception and sales during the game’s first weeks were very disappointing,” he added.
The CEO of Ubisoft identified three main reasons behind the game’s under-performance. Firstly, he said that it is “harder to generate interest for a sequel to a live multiplayer game when prior iterations benefited from years of optimization,” and said that in the future Ubisoft will try to leave more time between iterations of these games.
Guillemot said that Breakpoint also did not integrate new gameplay elements smoothly enough, and did not “come in with enough differentiation factors, which prevented the game’s intrinsic qualities from standing out.”
Finally, he concluded “In this overall context, we have decided to postpone the releases of Gods & Monsters, Rainbow Six Quarantine, and Watch Dogs Legion until 2020–21. This decision will have a very significant impact on our financial results for this fiscal year and goes against our recent successes in building a more stable development model.”
A New Study Finds No Evidence of Gaming As A Clinical Disorder
A recent study from the Oxford Internet Institute has found that excessive gaming does not cause any emotional, social, or behavioural problems.
The study, titled “Investigating the Motivational and Psychosocial Dynamics of Dysregulated Gaming” came in response to The World Health Organisation classifying gaming disorder as a clinical disease.
On the contrary, the new study has found that from over 1,000 teenage participants and their caregivers, the subjects were using gaming as a refuge and hobby, as opposed to being negatively affected by it.
Director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute and co-author of the study, Professor Andrew Przybylski, said that other research carried out on the subject had “failed to examine the wider context of what is going on in these young peoples’ lives.”
“For the first time, we apply motivational theory and open science principles to investigate if psychological need satisfactions and frustrations in adolescents’ daily lives are linked to dysregulated — or obsessive — gaming engagement.”
“In light of our findings we do not believe sufficient evidence exists to warrant thinking about gaming as a clinical disorder in its own right,” Przybylski said.
Ghost Story Games Job Listing Hints at BioShock Creator’s Next Project
A new job listing on Gamasutra has hinted that Ghost Story Games, formerly Irrational Games, is working on an immersive sim game.
Ghost Story Games have been utterly silent in their time since re-founding in the wake of 2013’s BioShock Infinite, however, the job listing posted this week suggests the studio is finally working on releasing something.
The job listing reads “Ghost Story Games (formerly known as Irrational Games) is a self-publishing game studio owned by Take-Two Interactive. Our mission is simple: to create immersive, story-driven video games for people who love games that ask something of them.”
In the “What We Offer” portion of the listing, the studio said “The opportunity to work on a creatively ambitious project in the immersive sim genre. A world-class team of less than 40 people. We are committed to making games that we judge by quality, not arbitrary timeliness.”
An immersive sim is typically a first-person game that puts emphasis on player choice, usually in harmony with some kind of action gameplay. Examples include the BioShock series, Dishonored, System Shock, and Deus Ex. This genre is, therefore, in-keeping with creative director Ken Levine’s development pedigree.
Back in 2014, Levine gave a talk at GDC about the idea of “narrative Lego” in games, which may breathe some insight into the narrative goals of the upcoming game.
The job listing itself is for a cinematic narrative scripter. You can apply and see the full advert here.
Bethesda Offers $100 Per Year Subscription Service For Fallout 76
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