Why do all great things come to an end?
This past weekend has been rather busy on the eSports front. While GDC 2018 closed out on a high note with the crowd moving to WonderCon and Sea of Thieves had some maintenance work done. The Forza Racing Championships 2018 kicked off with their PreSeason Invitational and the Halo World Championships continued in North America.
Once the dust settled these following news stories trended for the most part of the weekend.
GDC 2018 concludes with indie games and all things VR
The annual week-long conference ended on a high this past Friday as conference goers experienced the best in gaming and technology over the past week. Some key moments from the conference included a massive spotlight on independent games at the GDC Play Area to smaller demonstrations like the ID@Xbox booth. Games that grabbed the attention of visitors included Descenders, Black Future ’88, Children of Morta and City of Brass which all are expected to release in 2018. Black Future ’88, the side-scrolling shooter has that “moves like Strider and looks like Blade Runner” by visitors and critics and rightfully so. City of Brass was covered sometime last year, is a game if Lawrence of Arabia had actually fought against ghastly foes. While the combat did pose of slight difficulty, the combat and environments more than made up for the game’s difficulty levels.
On the flip side, many visitors would probably want to run as far away as possible when Epic Games demonstrated “Siren”.
This digital personality, developed using Unreal Engine, pretty much freaked everyone out as it displayed how the evolution of technology has been able to blur lines between CGI and reality. While the advancements are stunning and breathtaking, this new mo-cap (motion capture) would probably make Andy Serkis hug and kiss its developers, this technology has great involvements not just in film and television, but gaming too.
Thanks for the memories, GDC!!!
Latest Overwatch feature goes live on PTR
As discussed in the latest Developer Update, game director Jeff Kaplan explained a brand new feature which could arrive soon to Overwatch.
The “Avoid as Teammate” feature works from the social interface that players can have access to and select a player to be avoided for a full seven days. This means that this avoided player won’t during matchmaking be placed on your team but could be on the opposing team instead. Once you’ve marked a player as “Avoid as Teammate” it will come into effect from the next match. This could be due to a disagreement over gameplay styles or lack of communication or a clash of personalities that might be the reasoning a player could be avoided but Blizzard ensured that this will not replace other forms of reporting like Abusive Chat, Inactivity or Gameplay Sabotage.
Could we get an open world Star Wars title?
A recent job listing grabbed the attention, leading many to further speculate the possibility of an open world driven Star Wars title.
Spotted on EA Vancouver’s jobs page was a listing for a lead online engineer in which the studio is looking for an engineer to “join an established, experienced team of developers working on an AAA Star Wars title in development”. The description further read that if hired, the applicant would “join a veteran team to design, architect, and implement the Online infrastructure for the project” and “ensure designs will maintain high-traffic services for multi-platform games”.
EA’s Patrick Söderlund commented on the possibility of an open world Star Wars title when Visceral Games closed down last year in a bid to meet the players demand and keep them happy while at it thus adopting an online approach along the veins of Sea of Thieves and Destiny which are mainly online-focused.
This indeed could be up for a demonstration or preview at E3 2018 hopefully revealing more information about this interesting project but well be waiting with great anticipation.
