Category: Gamespot

Online services for Devil’s Third Online will end in March, it has been announced.

A statement from publisher Nexon on the game’s website, translated by Kotaku, explains that services for the Japanese PC game will come to an end on March 29. The game launched in the island nation on June 8, 2016, so it will have only been online for fewer than 10 months when it is shut down in March.

Online services were shut off for the main version of Devil’s Third, the Wii U game, in December 2016, just 16 months after the game launched.

The game was originally going to be published by the now-defunct publisher THQ. At the time, it was an Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC game, but later shifted to become a Nintendo-exclusive.

Reviews of Devil’s Third were generally negative. It received a score of 3 in GameSpot’s review, which said it’s nearly impossible to recommend, despite its wonderfully weird multiplayer modes and occasional laughs. The game was developed by Valhalla Game Studios.

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Grand Theft Auto V continues to perform amazingly well in the UK. According to data from trade body UKIE and sales monitor Chart-Track (via GamesIndustry.biz), Rockstar’s open-world behemoth was the fifth best-selling physical game in the UK, in its third year on the market.

That’s above 2016 releases such as Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (No. 6), Watch Dogs 2 (No. 8), and Overwatch (No. 9).

FIFA 17 beat Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (No. 2) to the top of the chart. Those two giants were followed by Battlefield 1 (No. 3), The Division (No. 4), and, as previously mentioned, GTA V (No. 5), which has now sold over six million copies in the UK alone. It should be noted that the data in the report do not include digital sales.

Elsewhere in the report, it was revealed that the PS4 was well above Xbox One in terms of software sales. Around 45 percent of all boxed games sold in the UK last year were for Sony’s platform, while Microsoft’s console grabbed 34.1 percent. Nintendo will be pleased that the 3DS increased its market share year-on-year to 7 percent, though the Wii U was below even the Xbox 360 and PS3.

Overall, game sales were down 16.4 percent compared to 2015, to around £776 million. That follows the news in late 2016 that big games like Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Watch Dogs 2, and Dishonored 2 all sold considerably less than their predecessors.

Hardware sales were down 27 percent, despite the release of the PS4 Pro and Xbox One S. The only portion of the market that grew was the accessories sector, up 1 percent thanks to the release of PSVR.

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Star Wars series creator George Lucas has made his selection for where his museum will be built.

In a news release this week, it was announced that the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will be build in Los Angeles, at Exposition Park. San Francisco was also in the running.

“We have been humbled by the overwhelmingly positive support we received from both San Francisco and Los Angeles during our selection process,” the museum’s board of directors said in a statement. “Settling on a location proved to be an extremely difficult decision precisely because of the desirability of both sites and cities.”

The board thanked San Francisco mayor Ed Lee and other city personnel for their “tremendous efforts and engagement” around bringing the museum to that city.

“While each location offers many unique and wonderful attributes, South Los Angeles’ Promise Zone best positions the museum to have the greatest impact on the broader community, fulfilling our goal of inspiring, engaging, and educating a broad and diverse visitorship,” the board said in its statement.

“Exposition Park is a magnet for the region and accessible from all parts of the city. As a museum uniquely focused on narrative art, we look forward to becoming part of a dynamic museum community, surrounded by more than 100 elementary and high schools, one of the country’s leading universities as well as three other world-class museums.”

Now that the location for the museum has been confirmed, the organization will focus on finalizing its plans for the group and beginning construction. They have high hopes, saying the museum aims to be “one of the most imaginative and inclusive art museums in the world.”

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the $1 billion Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will include memorabilia from Star Wars movies (and others), as well as classic photos and traditional paintings from people like Norman Rockwell. It’s reportedly being readied to open on on Star Wars Day, May 4, in 2020. Importantly, it is “not a Star Wars museum,” according to Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti.

You can see a concept for the museum in the image above, via THR.

Lucas sold the Star Wars brand (and other properties) to Disney in 2012 for $4.05 billion.

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Over the weekend, a video and details about a canceled Halo Mega Bloks game for Xbox 360 emerged online. Not long after that, 343 Industries boss Bonnie Ross confirmed the game was in development but never moved past the prototype stage.

Now, the person who posted the footage initially, Andrew Borman of Preserve Gaming History, has posted a follow-up video containing raw gameplay footage of the game. While Haggar, as the game was known, was only a prototype, developer N-Space did at least 10 months of work on it, Borman said. He added that it looked like N-Space had a contract with Microsoft for the game.

Borman also reports in this newest video that N-Space was not the only studio that pitched Microsoft on the idea for a Mega Bloks Halo game, apparently. “As you might expect, there were a few other pitches before N-Space got their contract to develop their’s further,” he said. “I can’t tell you yet what studios worked on their own pitches but at least one of them was feeling pretty confident in their pitch.”

Borman added that the cancellation of the Halo Mega Bloks game might have come as a surprise to N-Space. The game’s cancellation, according to sources, might have happened “after a period of a month or two where Microsoft simply went silent and wasn’t talking to N-Space anymore.”

Although Haggar never came to fruition, 343 Industries boss Bonnie Ross recently said the developer is receiving requests to make Halo games that appeal to a younger audience. So maybe a Halo Mega Bloks game or something like it could come out in the future. In another recent interview, Ross talked about growing the Halo franchise with new ideas without losing the “core spirit” of the series.

Here is Ross’ full statement on Haggar:

“Over the past few days, footage has recently made the rounds of an exploratory Xbox 360 project we worked on several years ago, known as ‘Haggar.’ Since then, we’ve received a lot of great feedback from the community. Haggar was something we prototyped with our friends at Mega Bloks that focused on the elements of action, exploration and user creativity found within the Halo universe. Haggar had a lot of fun ideas and invention behind it, but ultimately didn’t progress beyond the early prototyping levels that are shown in the recent video.

“This is just one example of several similar projects we have evaluated throughout the years–a process that we continue exploring on an ongoing basis.”

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We already know that billionaire inventor Elon Musk loves Blizzard’s hero shooter Overwatch. But what other games is he into? Musk sat down with Y Combiner’s Sam Altman recently to discuss the subject.

Musk started off by name-dropping Overwatch again, adding that “generally Blizzard does great stuff.” This led to his next reccomendation, the free-to-play card game Hearthstone, which he said his kids play a lot. Musk also said he enjoyed the original Deus Ex, but lamented that the newest game, Mankind Divided, didn’t have such a great story.

“I think [story] is really neglected [in modern games],” Musk said. “That’s the criticism of the latest Deus Ex; the storytelling is kind of lame. Some of the oldest games, the graphics and sound were terrible, so they had to rely on storytelling.”

Check out the full video above (via Game Informer).

Last year, when Musk talked about his love of Overwatch, the inventor also said human existence is actually a simulation being controlled by some being of higher intelligence.

“The strongest argument for us being in a simulation is the following: 40 years ago, we had Pong. Two rectangles and a dot. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic 3D with millions playing simultaneously. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by 1000 from what it is now.”

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