Some belated good news

[P3nT4gR4m]

I kinda drifted onto fps rpg's with oblivion, Total War for strategy and GT series on Playstation and haven't really played much killsport FPS since then. Getting to old and slow for twitch shooters nowadays 

[Raz Tech]

Do you like entirely too much strategy in your strategy games? If so, you should try the europa universalis games if you haven't already.

[Junkenstein]

That looks quite good. Decent community / Easily moddable? Seems to share a lot of similarities to Mount and Blade series from what I can tell.

[Cain]

I've wondered about that.  Steam seem to push it at me pretty heavily.  I might try it out, once I get bored of Civ 5.

As for Black Flag...the visuals look pretty stunning, and the ship gameplay does seem interesting.  Which is just as well, since the stealth gameplay, after the AC3 uproar, are now a fucking joke.  Not that Ubisoft ever seem to have gotten stealth entirely right (see: Far Cry 3)

[P3nT4gR4m]

Yeah, I've skipped a couple of the series but I never really ranked it as particularly amazing. Good, fun couple of days diversion but that's about it. The ship stuff is a whole new dimension. Don't get me wrong, it does get predictable and a bit repetitive eventually but, until then, it's a total trip!

[Cain]

Circle strafe and bombard ALL THE THINGS

[P3nT4gR4m]

You bastard, how did you get a hold of my top-secret master strategy? 

[Cain]

The day we invent an AI who can lead its shots is the day humanity is doomed.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Sooner or later someone's going to hook a bot up to a neural net. Targetting is the kind of thing that neural nets are perfect for. Let the machine predict every possible aim point for a whole bunch of given target movement patterns then let it know which ones hit and where. Couple of billion iterations later, you've got yourself the ultimate aimbot.

[Cain]

Incidentally, remove the bot and add in "800 hours of practice" and this is why I can consistently get the 20 headshot medal in ME3MP.  Predictable movements FTW.  It's actually kinda hilarious some people resort to using aimbots in that game.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Oh fuck, yeah. My late, lamented Q3 had rockets for that. Airshots with rocket pwn'd the shit out of precision railgun twitch shots for my money.

[Junkenstein]

Hmm
http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/8/5695780/the-next-unreal-tournament-will-be-completely-free-and-developed-by

When the last Unreal Tournament came out seven years ago, Epic Games was riding high. The company's Unreal Engine 3 had become the de facto standard for big-budget video game development, and Gears of War was a flagship Xbox franchise. Much has changed since then, including a renaissance in indie development, and Unreal Engine isn't seeing the same success. But the company has an intriguing new plan. Epic Games has just announced that the next Unreal Tournament will be completely free, and developed entirely in the open. Starting today, anyone can contribute. While the project will be led by senior Epic Games programmers, the game will be effectively developed by you.

""From the very first line of code, the very first art created and design decision made, development will happen in the open, as a collaboration between Epic, UT fans and UE4 developers," writes longtime Unreal Tournament programmer Steve Polge, in a blog post discussing the plan. All the code and all the content will be freely accessible in a Github respository, which should be live soon. The company is also detailing the project on Twitch, and intends to issue regular video updates there.

I'm not entirely sure how to react to that. Opening up the development process seems like a good thing, however essentially asking the community to work on and develop it for free seems a little iffy. I can't really guess at the likely end result about now but I can't see it going well without a lot more structure to the overall development process.

Or maybe it'll be kittens and sunshine with no issues. Doubt it.

[Raz Tech]

Hmm
http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/8/5695780/the-next-unreal-tournament-will-be-completely-free-and-developed-by

When the last Unreal Tournament came out seven years ago, Epic Games was riding high. The company's Unreal Engine 3 had become the de facto standard for big-budget video game development, and Gears of War was a flagship Xbox franchise. Much has changed since then, including a renaissance in indie development, and Unreal Engine isn't seeing the same success. But the company has an intriguing new plan. Epic Games has just announced that the next Unreal Tournament will be completely free, and developed entirely in the open. Starting today, anyone can contribute. While the project will be led by senior Epic Games programmers, the game will be effectively developed by you.

""From the very first line of code, the very first art created and design decision made, development will happen in the open, as a collaboration between Epic, UT fans and UE4 developers," writes longtime Unreal Tournament programmer Steve Polge, in a blog post discussing the plan. All the code and all the content will be freely accessible in a Github respository, which should be live soon. The company is also detailing the project on Twitch, and intends to issue regular video updates there.

I'm not entirely sure how to react to that. Opening up the development process seems like a good thing, however essentially asking the community to work on and develop it for free seems a little iffy. I can't really guess at the likely end result about now but I can't see it going well without a lot more structure to the overall development process.

Or maybe it'll be kittens and sunshine with no issues. Doubt it.

Well they did something like that with the plot for snakes on a plane, and that turned out awesome.

Oh wait no, it was terrible.

[Junkenstein]

It also seems to mean that you can fuck with the development for the price of $19/month.

Now, if I was a rival developer, I would certainly not, never ever not even once, consider adding two metric tons of bugs features to the process. Yeah, yeah, it'll get caught in code review. Until the reviewer thinks it's funny enough and lets it slide through.

Calling it, on release will be a bug fucked mess producing some stunning AI fail videos. I think Colonial Marines still holds this title but I'm sure someone else is gunning for it.

[P3nT4gR4m]

UT is a dual purpose product for Epic. It's a video game, sure but it's also, traditionally, been the showcase tech demo for the engine. Makes perfect sense to crowdsource the dev, given that, plain and simple, you can get more done with a couple of thousand devs and artists than you can with a couple of dozen.

Project management will make or break it. Be interesting to see how it pans out