Month: April 2019

Where exactly to start with Need for Speed Payback, Ghost Games’ third take on EA’s long-running arcade racer series? Let’s go with Tyler Morgan, the figurehead of the three-strong crew you take control of in your attempt to win back the streets of Fortune City, an expansive caricature of Las Vegas that stretches from a city that bustles with casinos out to the dusty wilds. This is Tyler – or ‘Ty’, to his friends.

He is an indistinguishable smear of a human, and after a dozen hours in his presence I can’t think of a single defining characteristic of his barely written personality. I think perhaps he’s a bit rebellious, because his t-shirt says so, but really it tells you everything that EA decides to lead its return to a more narrative brand of Need for Speed with this complete non-entity of a character. It is, in so many ways, an indistinguishable smear of a video game.

How swiftly this series has fallen from grace, and how long ago Criterion’s brief yet wonderful stint on Need for Speed now feels. All that, and its premise promises so much more – a playable spin on Fast & Furious, that glorious series where Buicks and the high-wire stunts of Buster Keaton combine, Payback should be a slam dunk. It’s obvious quite early on that it isn’t, when you’re playing one of its handful of cinematic missions and control is rudely wrestled from you just as things get interesting. In Need for Speed Payback, cars will make daring lunges for speeding cargo trucks, or bring down low-flying helicopters. And all you can do is sit back and watch.

It makes for an exceptionally dreary opening 90 minutes, in which you’re essentially reduced to driving between blue loops in-between cutscenes – inviting unwelcome but not entirely unwarranted comparisons to Superman 64, another infamous video game dud. Things do get better once introductions are out of the way and you’re allowed to enjoy Need for Speed Payback’s expansive playground. At that point, it shifts up a gear, elevating itself from a dreary disaster towards a grossly unremarkable open world racer.

The open world itself is absolutely fine, and it’s most certainly on a grander scale than what’s gone before in the Need for Speed series. Its city, a tangled knot of freeways and sidestreets that work their way through the neon chaos, brings to mind Most Wanted, while further out in the desert the long open road recalls the highs of Hot Pursuit. It’s certainly filled with things to do, as well; there are billboards to smash, speed traps to trigger and derelict vehicles to discover. Need for Speed Payback does all that you’d expect of a modern day open world racer, though rarely does it do any more.

And more often it marks a significant step back from its predecessors. Handling is noticeably dumbed down, that languid sense of momentum that Criterion introduced and Rivals maintained lost to something much blunter, and much less enjoyable. Car combat is in, nominally, but there’s none of the weight or chunky sense of connection when taking down a pursuer. You can only ever do so within events, too, seeing as the open world seems entirely absent of the police force, and given how the more interesting mechanics that saw you escape their attention in past games has been ditched completely.

It’s a series of downgrades, and the only area in which Payback can claim a categorical victory over its 2015 predecessor is in how its single-player mode is now completely partitioned from its multiplayer, meaning you’re now able to play offline. Even then, there’s a catch – the multiplayer takes a hit, with free roaming essentially a thing of the past as you’re reduced to taking part in a series of casual or ranked races.

The focus feels like it’s firmly on the single-player, then, and there’s certainly a lot of it to get through. Missions are threaded together by a story that essentially boils down to One of Our Koenigseggs Is Missing, with various disciplines catered for by events. There are straight-up races, drift events and missions in which you must flee aggressive pursuers (though sadly it’s a watered down form of car combat, with success mostly coming when you reach a set point rather than when you’ve outwitted or shut down your opponents).

Need for Speed Payback even has some decent ideas of its own. Well, it’s got one – Sidebets, in keeping with the Vegas theme, allow you to gamble on the outcome of an event, and push you to engage with events from different angles. Lay some money on being able to lead an event for a whole 90 seconds, or for holding a drift for a set amount of time. Or, even better, lay some money on sitting down in last place for the best part of a race before surging through to the win.

It’s never quite enough to rescue Need for Speed Payback from mundanity, though. Its open world is a little too vast, its events too thinly spread and the sense of progression is slow enough to make it all feel like an absolute slog. There’s vehicle customisation here – enabled, performance-wise, by a card system that’s been sloppily and unwisely appropriated from the world of mobile, while cosmetic enhancements are now locked until you’ve managed a number of in-game achievements – but it takes an age to achieve anything, and well over half a dozen hours until your garage begins to flourish. Latter events require a soulless grind, and given the presence of loot boxes and microtransactions it’s easy to be cynical of why exactly your progress feels wilfully stunted.

But it’s hard getting angry at Need for Speed Payback when instead a more fitting reaction seems to be one of complete apathy. I feel for developer Ghost Games, and after its promising debut with 2013’s Rivals this clearly talented studio’s spirit seems to have been crushed by the sheer weight of Need for Speed and the corporate burden it carries. In its hands the series has gone from accomplished to flawed to this, a joyless obligation of a game.

Final Fantasy 15’s Episode Ignis expansion now has a release date: 13th December.

There’s a new trailer, too, for you to marvel over everyone’s pretty hair:

As previously announced, Final Fantasy 15’s upcoming fishing-based VR spin-off Monster of the Deep is also on the way, due 21st November.

Eurogamer has become quite used to attending Blizzcon and asking the World of Warcraft team about their stance on Legacy servers. We’re not so used to Blizzard actually having anything to say on that front.

That all changed at this morning’s opening ceremony as executive producer J. Allen Brack took to the stage and announced the team’s plans to return to Vanilla WOW, with a new project entitled World of Warcraft Classic.

I spoke to Brack shortly after this surprise reveal and although he was wary of giving too many details, we were able to get a better sense of how much work will be involved in making oldschool WOW a reality once again.

I’m still not over the ice cream gag you managed to pull off during the announcement. That was brilliant, well done.

J. Allen Brack: Yeah, that ice cream joke was the best joke I’ve ever written. I’m glad it was well received.

I’ll get a couple of questions out of the way here, which I suspect you can’t answer. When is WOW Classic going live?

J. Allen Brack: We don’t know yet. Just like every Blizzard game.

And I suppose you’re not ready to talk, in any detail, about how it’ll work?

J. Allen Brack: Some of the reason for why we’re not ready to talk about that is… we actually don’t know yet. The important announcement today was: we’re doing this. We’ve heard the community, we’ve heard our own internal teams, we’ve heard all the comments over the years. When it comes to the details, we don’t know all of the answers just yet.

There’s also the fact that now we’ve announced this, we might want to partner with the community on some of those answers. WOW changed a lot in the first two years, before The Burning Crusade came along, and so, how exactly should it work? Those are questions we need to talk about, for sure.

The unofficial servers were clearly a huge factor in Blizzard’s decision to return to vanilla WOW. Am I right in thinking the Nostalrius team provided you with access to their build at some point?

J. Allen Brack: Yeah, they did. We did a dungeon run with some of the folks, it was an old school Scholomance run. It was interesting.

Anything jump out at you that you’d forgotten about old school World of Warcraft?

J. Allen Brack: Yeah, I’d forgotten that whenever you buffed one of your party members with Intellect, you had to actually sit down and drink after that. Then you stood up, buffed another party member with Intellect and then you had to drink again. It’s a much slower pace. There’s a lot of prep time.

It’s an interesting part of human memories, right? I think we like to remember the good parts, but the bad parts sometimes go away over time.

Do you think there’ll be a line to walk for the team, then? Somewhere between creating that authentic experience that people have asked for, while also figuring out what doesn’t make sense anymore? For example, with the Intellect buff, is it important to you that players do need to drink after casting it?

J. Allen Brack: Yes. That’s part of the level 60 experience. Our goal is to recreate that classic 1-60 gameplay. Some things changed as time went on, with different patches. How does that get manifested? That’s one of the outstanding questions. But yeah, the goal is to recreate that exact experience, for better or for worse.

How far into this process are you? Do you have a build that you can actually play, internally, and figure some of this stuff out?

J. Allen Brack: We’ve got some infrastructure stuff in place. We’ve got an old build that’s up and running that we’re using for reference. Most of this job is going to be infrastructure: making sure everything can work on a more modern setup. Then there’ll be the design questions, ones that the community will have strong opinions on: should UBRS be 10-person, or 5-person? Things like that.

What are the big issues that you’re going to need to face here? You mentioned during the presentation that the server infrastructure that was there originally, is no longer in place. In fact, the way the game was programmed at that point must be wildly different to today. What else is there?

J. Allen Brack: You’ve highlighted the big ones. Before we started work on this project, we couldn’t actually run vanilla WOW. The hardware is different. The operating systems are different. There was no way for it to just work.

Are these going to be separate development teams? One working on Battle for Azeroth and one working on WOW Classic?

J. Allen Brack: Yeah, so it was really important for us to be able to answer the community honestly. How many raids is this going to cost them in Battle for Azeroth? The answer is zero. We’re going to hire people specifically for this effort. We already are.

How are players going to pay for WOW Classic?

J. Allen Brack: No idea.

Okay. What happens if WOW Classic ends up being a huge success? That’s potentially expensive for Blizzard in terms of server cost, right?

J. Allen Brack: That’s a problem for future us. I mean, it’s a great problem. I think there will be a lot of initial interest and then some sustained interest. But if if happens, we’ll figure it out then.

I’ve had a number of interview with the WOW team in which I’ve asked about Legacy servers and you couldn’t talk about it. So, why it’s happening now? What’s changed?

J. Allen Brack: We said for several years that if there was a way for us to flip a switch and have it work, we’d flip that switch. It’s not something that we didn’t want to do for any arbitrary reason. There were legitimate, significant technical reasons.

I know you’re not ready to talk about the release date here. It sounds like you’re at the very early stages of development here and as you’ve mentioned, you’re still in the hiring process. But are we talking about months of development before this goes live, or years?

J. Allen Brack: This is a massive effort. This is a very, very significant effort. I would not expect it to be soon. We actually don’t know when we’re going to release it. I know that’s a generic answer that we give for all of our Blizzard titles, but with this one, we don’t actually know how long it will take.

But do you suspect we’re talking about months here, or years?

J. Allen Brack: This is a massive effort.

Ha, alright then. A couple of years ago, there was a quote going around from you after somebody asked you about legacy servers. You told them it’s not actually something they’d want to play.

J. Allen Brack: I’m familiar with that quote [laughs].

Have you changed your mind since then?

J. Allen Brack: I think the sentiment I was trying to communicate back then was: nostalgia is a very real thing. But that doesn’t diminish the fact that there are people that want that game experience, right? I think sentimentality and nostalgia are worthwhile. I wasn’t trying to say that players didn’t deserve this thing or anything like that.

Are you expecting players to come back to vanilla WOW and properly invest in that game, or just have a look around for nostalgia’s sake?

J. Allen Brack: Both, I think. One of the things we do know is that by announcing this, we’re in the WOW Classic business forever. Once that starts, there’s a commitment on our end that we’re going to continue maintaining those servers for as long as there is a World of Warcraft. I think there will be people that come and do the nostalgia trip, they go to the Barrens and find Mankrik’s wife, and then they’re done. That’s fine. Some amount of people, however, are going to create a new Classic community and that’s what we’ll be providing.

Those people don’t just want the old gameplay features, they want the constant social connection. And so we can’t just support it for a couple of months and then if it’s not working out, ditch it. There has to be an assurance that you can build this character, build this guild, build these friendships, and the server will continue.

Has Blizzard maintained a relationship with the people behind the unofficial legacy servers? I know the Nostalrius guys visited Blizzard at one point.

J. Allen Brack: We’ve talked to Daemon and Viper, the leads for that project, a handful of times since that visit.

Do you see them being more heavily involved in WOW Classic?

J. Allen Brack: We would welcome their involvement, for sure. I think one of the challenges is that they’re both French and so there’s a little bit of a visa concern, but we’d be open to it. They’re very passionate and strong Blizzard fans, clearly.

I think they’ve certainly proven that! Thanks for your time.

Marvel Heroes has shut down over a month earlier than planned.

Developer Gazillion Entertainment – now officially closed down – had said the free-to-play Diablo-esque action role-playing online game would go dark on 31st December, but a note published yesterday from the official Marvel Heroes Twitter account announced the closure with immediate effect.

pic.twitter.com/Q12AUQ61c3

— Marvel Heroes Omega (@MarvelHeroes) November 27, 2017

Last week, MassivelyOP said it had seen a termination letter written by Gazillion CEO Dave Dohrmann, which claimed “banking creditors have effectively pulled the plug on the company, leading to the termination of almost every employee at the studio and the apparent renege of benefits including accrued PTO [paid time off]”.

That mention of paid time off was highlighted by angry ex-staff who took to Twitter to say they were let go the day before Thanksgiving.

Players have spent some time trying to secure refunds relating to Marvel Heroes. The official Marvel Heroes website is now offline, its Steam page is deleted and the game itself is unavailable to download.

Marvel Heroes first launched on PC back in 2013, and arrived on PS4 and Xbox One earlier this year under the somewhat streamlined guise of Marvel Heroes Omega.

Neither Gazillion management nor Marvel representatives have so far issued an explanation for the closure of the company. However, in the video below, Anthony Gallegos, who worked at Gazillion for almost three years, told Kinda Funny Games’ Greg Miller the March 2017 release of the console version of Marvel Heroes did not bring in as much money as the company had expected. Gazillion then suffered a damaging round of layoffs that saw around 30 people let go, and, according to Gallegos, the developer actually lost its contract to run Marvel Heroes back in October.

“When we lost the ability to run it, they were trying to negotiate something to bring it back,” he said.

“To be clear, this isn’t like a, Disney’s the bad guy thing. There were obligations Gazillion had in this contract and something must have not worked out and so Marvel pulled the plug. It’s just business. I’m sure there was something that was like, if you don’t do this, then we pull the plug. That’s how it goes.”