Valve took over a large section of the Game Developers Conference to show off the Vive and virtual reality games coming soon for the device.
Universe Sandbox ²’s VR mode was one of the stars of the demos. Universe Sandbox ², by Giant Army, has previously impressed me with its gorgeous space simulations, but seeing and interacting with them in virtual reality brought the experience to a completely new level. Planets zipped by my head, I threw suns and moons out into the nether and the rings of Saturn swirled beautiful around me after I displaced the planet.
If you have read any of my content at all on this site you know I absolutely love anything in the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. So when I heard that Tindalos Interactive was bringing their expertise in space combat to the Warhammer universe I was extremely excited. The resultof all of their hard work is Battlefleet Gothic Armada. Fans of the Warhammer table top games will know that Battlefleet Gothic is the space branch of the 40K universe of games, and involves a much different rule set than the tabletop game. Ships still have gear, and crew, and all sorts of manuvers, but Gothic is a slower more strategic game. Knowing that I went in expecting a fairly faithful recreation of the game, and Tindalos has done a really good job of that. The game is real time, but other than that change, it feels extremely similar to the tabletop.
To understand the story mode you may want to dig in to 40K lore a little bit, but basically the Gothic Sector is its own area of space, quite close to the eye of terror. From the eye of Terror, which is a rent in space emerges Abadon the despoiler and he’s here to kill humans, in the name of Chaos.So stars the Gothic War. That’s about the entire story I needed. It should be mentioned here that the Beta we were given access to, only gave us access to the first act of the story. This arc, which is a tutorial of sorts and showed off only three of the 4 races, but already, I am in love with this game and its story.
The real question of course is how does that story and gameplay translate to the PC experience? So far very well. The game is fun, its deep but not impossible to get in to, it has plenty of room for charging in and trying to just brute force things, but also requires strategy and longer term planning and larger thinking to overrule brute force.A very nice tutorial is provided for players who may not understand how RTS style games work. This is really important because moving a ship is nothing like moving units in standard RTS. The huge ships of the world of Warhammer do not turn on a dime, instead they shift, have weight, and move like you might expect a spaceship to move.
I was surprised to hear that Doom would have multiplayer support, and when it showed up on video looking a dead ringer for quake, I officially became excited. Now a new trailer from the developers is showing off nine multiplayer maps that will be present at launch.
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Just look at all that shiny pretty map. The green stuff is so green it looks like Hi-C Ecto cooler! The hell maps are grim and dark, and the whole thing just looks fantastic. I for one cant wait to get my hands on this game. Even if the single player suffers from modern shooter syndrome, this multiplayer alone looks like it will make the game worth 60$.
An entire family make up the development team over at Disparity Games and I got the chance to sit down with Nicole Stark from the team to chat about her family’s company, representation in indie games and learn a little bit about their first title Ninja Pizza Girl.
Nicole was the recipient of a GDC Scholarship through #IneedDiverseGames and we also had time to chat about what it’s like to travel all the way from Australia to attend GDC for the first time.
Their first game, Ninja Pizza Girl, is already available on Steam. Here’s the official description:
Ninja Pizza Girl is a serious game about self-esteem, bullying and resilience – and pizza delivering ninjas! Its deeply-woven story follows Gemma, a sixteen-year-old girl working as a pizza delivery ninja for her father’s independent Pizzeria.
Check out the video interview in the embedded player below and look out for more coverage from GDC 2016 later today.
Microsoft held a one hour brief for developers interested in their software development platform for the Xbox One console this morning at GDC. This talk was delivered by the head of the ATG (Advanced Technology Group) and not only served as a recap of some of the major advancements on both the Xbox One platform & Windows 10 Platform but also reconfirmed Microsoft’s vision of a unified development environment with a streamlined pipeline for the delivery of digital games.Read More
