Unreal Tournament and Fortnite developer Epic Games has warned users not to click links in e-mails purporting to be from the studio, as it is “experiencing a phishing attack.”
The warning was sent out on Twitter as well as a post on the Epic Games forum by Unreal Engine developer Jeff Wilson.
“We are experiencing a phishing attack,” he said. “Please DO NOT CLICK ANY LINKS contained within emails claiming to be from us (anyone at Epic Games) until further notice.
“As always do not give out sensitive information such as login credentials,” he continued. “If you have any questions regarding this matter, please post them here and we will try to answer them. We are currently investigating and will keep this thread updated as we have more information.”
The phishing attack follows a forum hack in July 2015, which Epic Games said may have resulted in data being “compromised by a hacker.” The studio advised users to change their passwords as the hackers gained “unauthorised access to usernames, email addresses, passwords, and the date of birth provided at registration.”
Epic Games’ is currently working on Fortnite, which combines first-person shooting, base building, and tower defense. The title has been in a closed alpha state for months now, but no official release date has been announced.
In May 2014, Epic Games also announced a new Unreal Tournament game was in development. Powered by Unreal Engine 4, the title will be free to players. The studio has stressed that it is not free-to-play, but will be supported by an in-game marketplace where users can create and sell content.
Thousands of people are now trying to play Dark Souls together on streaming site Twitch. As you might have guessed, it’s been pretty tough going so far.
Similar to Twitch Plays Pokemon and Twitch Plays Halo, player movement and combat is mapped to keyboard commands. When hundreds of people are inputting commands within seconds of each other, it leads to some pretty wild behavior noy really conducive to beating an already super-challenging game.
Right now, players are stuck in a dungeon and are being assault by arrows. It only took about a minute when I started watching to see the famous “You Died” screen. Take a look at the video below.
While Twitch Plays Pokemon players were eventually able to beat the game, the same might not be true for Dark Souls. Even the video’s title–“Can Twitch Play Dark Souls?”–doesn’t sound very positive about it.
But try they will, and you’ll be able to watch every minute of their attempt live on Twitch.
“We are thinking about it but it’s a way more complex process to do this on consoles so we can’t give you any details now,” the developer tells GameSpot when asked about plans to bring mods to consoles. “It’s really important for us not to partition The Witcher community and allow access to mods to console gamers, too. We’re considering various approaches to solve this and started initial talks with first-parties about this.”
Whether those talks have been fruitful is unclear; right now, all CD Projekt Red will commit to is exploring the possibility of mods on consoles. “We can’t make any hard promises yet, but you can be sure that we’re looking into it,” the company says.
The new mod tools “are not an editor. They’re meant for people who are somewhat experienced with modding software and are designed to make creating mods easier. They give access to game files and allow for easy extracting, compilation, and decompilation of resources.”
In terms of what that will allow modders to do, CD Projekt Red says, “With access to script files, players will be able to change nearly every aspect of gameplay mechanics, including creating new, custom skills for character development, adding new features to the game, modifying aspects of enemy AI, making changes to UI, and so on.”
Ever since the release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt back in May, a steady flow of mods have been trickling out for the PC version of the game. However, pretty soon modders will be getting new tools to help make content creation even easier via the introduction of official mod tools by CD Projekt Red.
But what can we expect from these tools? I recently got the chance to talk to CD Projekt Red about what The Witcher 3’s mod tools can do and what their plans are for mods in the future.
Was it your plan all along to offer mod tools? Or did the decision come about recently?
CD Projekt Red: Mods are kind of like the free DLCs we’ve been releasing, just made by the community. As devs, we’re pretty pumped that someone sat down and devoted their private time to create something for our game (because mods for Wild Hunt do exist already). Since it’s in our nature to support these kind of initiatives, we want to nurture that and help as much as we can. As soon as we saw that the community is eager to create mods, we wanted to help–we hope that these tools will empower modders to do more crazy and cool stuff.
How important are things like mod tools to the game’s longevity?
Mod tools definitely impact the longevity of the game but we like to think about them as something that primarily adds another way for gamers to interact with their favorite title. It’s something similar to house rules in board games: you love how a sword looks but it’s just too weak for you to use at the current level? Just change the stats and you’re set. Hell, sometimes it’s just cool to break stuff on purpose and watch the world burn, simply because you can.
Let’s go into some detail. What will players be able to do with the mod tools? Does it go beyond the cosmetic?
[The tools are] meant for people who are somewhat experienced with modding software and are designed to make creating mods easier.
First of all, the modding tools we are releasing are not an editor. They’re meant for people who are somewhat experienced with modding software and are designed to make creating mods easier. They give access to game files and allow for easy extracting, compilation, and decompilation of resources. Beside visual changes, like modifying textures and models, they will allow to change UI assets and script files. The majority of gameplay-related mechanics are written in scripts. Having access to these scripts will allow to create even more ambitious and complex modifications. If you’re not a modder and you’re wondering about real life applications, in short, all this means that from now on, people will be able to put their own textures on models to make them feel more personal (or cool, or whatever they wish!), or, say, substitute Roach’s model with a unicorn (and ride it towards the setting sun). You will be able to use these mods when they get published. Also, we hope the community builds on these resources and, who knows, maybe some people who haven’t ever dreamt of modding will start doing so? There might be future devs among you!
Obviously this opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for the community. What sort of things are you expecting people will create?
On one hand, we have the extremely popular character appearance modifications, which should be even easier to make now. On the other, we have gameplay modifications, which–so far–have been limited to XML files. With access to script files, players will be able to change nearly every aspect of gameplay mechanics, including creating new, custom skills for character development, adding new features to the game, modifying aspects of enemy AI, making changes to UI, and so on. To answer your question more directly, well, all these things can significantly change the gameplay experience so we imagine there will be a lot of “hardcore mode” mods, making the game more difficult or “power up” mods allowing Geralt to kill stuff with a flick of his fingers. Alternatively, someone can turbocharge village cats to run twice as fast, hell, we’re eager as hell to see ourselves!
Let’s talk about how people will be able to share/access mods. How will they be able to do that? And why did you decide to do it in that way?
There are several places on the web gamers can access The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt mods. Nexus Mods is what we see as a very prolific community right now–you can download Wild Hunt mods from there already and we hope more will come after modders get to play with the tool.
With mods, people can create basically anything they can imagine; how does this impact your feeling of authorship of The Witcher 3 if at all?
We are just happy to see people getting creative with the game. Some of the best mods for The Witcher 2 gave us ideas for improvements in The Witcher 3. We love to be surprised and, in the past, we have been floored with the creativity, passion and skills of the community. Bring it on galls and guys–we can’t wait to see what you create!
What are the plans, if any, to bring these mods across to console?
We are thinking about it but it’s a way more complex process to do this on consoles so we can’t give you any details now. It’s really important for us not to partition The Witcher community and allow access to mods to console gamers, too. We’re considering various approaches to solve this and started initial talks with first-parties about this. We can’t make any hard promises yet, but you can be sure that we’re looking into it.
What are the next steps when it comes to modding? Any future plans you can divulge about mods?
Well, the ball’s now on the community’s court. Let’s see what gets created and what we’ll be surprised with, and we’ll adapt and move on from there. Honestly, we can’t wait for all that stuff! In the meantime, we’re hard at work at the expansions and supporting the game!
The PES 2016 demo can be found on both consoles’ store front, and is packaged at more than three gigabytes. Eight playable teams are available; Juventus, AS Roma, Bayern Munich, Corinthians, Palmeiras, Germany, Brazil, and France.
Players can choose from a range of difficulties, in seven or 10 minute matches, and select one of two stadia; Juventus Stadium in Italy, and Arena Corinthians in São Paulo.
The next instalment in the long-running franchise Pro Evolution Soccer will run at 1080p on Xbox One, the developer confirmed today.
Pro Evolution Soccer 2016 launches on September 15 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. It will be released a week before its direct competitor, FIFA 16.
Games development visionary Hideo Kojima and his employer Konami should restore their fractured relationship for the good of both parties, a key executive at rival publisher Electronic Arts has said.
“I’ve always liked Kojima-san. I got on with him during my days at Microsoft. I just think… what’s going on there… I just think both of them should kiss and make up,” Moore replied.
“From my experience, and I’ve spent a lot of time working in Japan, I think that Konami and Kojima will figure it out. Those kinds of business relationships [in Japan] are typically for life, and Kojima is such an important part in what has gone on there.”
But Moore suggested EA wasn’t going to aggressively poach key talent such as Kojima, but instead keep an open-mind should any opportunity come his way. He also added that Kojima is not alone in being a visionary auteur with big ambitions that can potentially lead to milestone and budget problems.
“Clearly, Kojima and Konami are at a rocky stage in their marriage,” he said, “but you could take what is said about [Kojima Productions], about a game not adhering to budgets, about a game not being ready, and you could apply that to a lot of people.”
He continued: “Any game that isn’t iterative in nature the way an EA Sports game is, or any series that doesn’t ship every single year… those things can go on forever. There needs to be an agreement between the publisher and developer to make sure that both parties understand when the game is supposed to ship, and what it’s supposed to be.
But with regards to Kojima and Konami, they’ll kiss and make up. They’ll be fine.”
Elsewhere in his interview with GameSpot, Moore discusses on-disc DLC conspiracy theories, his views on the lack of single-player in Star Wars Battlefront, and why annually updating EA Sports via download-as opposed to selling boxes each year–would be “nirvana”.
There’s no third-party publisher that carries a history quite like Electronic Arts. Founded in 1982 through one man’s ambition to publish the best PC games, this Californian corporation surfed the unstoppable tide of PlayStation in the ’90s and 2000s, becoming a monstrously successful multi-national in the process. It made billions. It made enemies. It made a lot of Need for Speed.
Then in 2007, its chief executive at the time–John Riccitiello–gave his colleagues a stabbing wake-up call, in a meeting in New York now known as EA’s “Burning Platform” moment. Electronic Arts was not, JR explained, too big to fail. Quite the opposite was happening, in fact; The publisher simply could not sustain its own excessive costs.
A painful reorganisation followed, transforming this megalithic publisher of discs into a broader entertainment group, making inroads into the business of social games, mobile, free-to-play, and online passes. It wasn’t making as many billions, but it was still making new enemies. Zynga. Gameloft. Eric Hirshberg, et al.
And who can forget its biggest enemy of them all, the internet. Somehow along the way, EA was twice declared the Worst Company in America; a fine example of how short-sighted internet survey respondents can be, granted, but a bruising assessment of EA’s public image nonetheless.
What’s so surprising about this long-in-the-tooth publisher is that it still strikes me as a forward-thinking company; pioneering with loyalty initiatives such as EA Access, transforming its legacy sports franchises into successful around-the-clock services, and opening up new studios. All the while, dare I say, it has begun to restore that relationship with the online games community.
For now, EA’s future is a more interesting topic than its past. At Gamesom, GameSpot met with Peter Moore, chief operating officer at the company, to discuss the long journey ahead.
Peter Moore joined EA in 2007, following four years managing parts of the Xbox business
GAMESPOT: How important are season passes for the future of your business? I say that because the profit margins on triple-A games tend to be getting thinner and thinner.
MOORE: Well it depends on so many things. It depends on whether it’s a wholly owned IP, or whether it’s licensed. It depends on the volume you drive. But yeah, these things are high risk, with hundreds of people connected to it, and sometimes with their livelihoods connected to it. You have high capital investment, and you hope it pays off.
Eight years ago when I joined EA, we were publishing 70 games a year. 70. And this year we might do twelve.
That’s true of the whole triple-A industry, right? People are making fewer bets because the stakes are getting higher.
Yes, and there’s a reason for that. The big games drive so much engagement nowadays, because they are not games you play for a while and then walk away from. Triple-A games today have live elements to them, and things like season passes are a way of keeping people engaged.
Season passes themselves are also a huge investment. Today we’ve got what used to be the size of a whole game development team, of about 40 or 50 people, working solely on the extra content.
My desk in the office is about fifty feet away from Visceral, and it’s a hive of activity developing extra content for Battlefield Hardline.
And yet there is a pronounced resistance to this. Many fans express grievance towards obligatory DLC plans. On the other hand, I’ve heard executives tell me that DLC has become so important that, in some cases, it is sustaining the triple-A games business. How do you reconcile this conflict?
Well a lot of that resistance comes from the erroneous belief that somehow companies will ship a game incomplete, and then try to sell you stuff they have already made and held back. Nonsense. You come and stand where I am, next to Visceral’s studio, and you see the work that is being done right now. And it’s not just DLC, this is free updates and ongoing balance changes.
People will no doubt accuse me of being a total corporate shill for saying this, but I think there is some confusion within game communities that, when the foundations for future DLC is discovered in a game, such as the expansion levels in Destiny, people think that those expansions are already finished. The point being, development studios tend to put the basic foundations of future DLC on disc to help facilitate future updates, right?
“A lot of resistance to DLC comes from the erroneous belief that somehow companies will ship a game incomplete, and then try to sell you stuff they have already made and held back. Nonsense.”
Peter Moore
That’s true, and you have to do that from a technical perspective. Think of them as APIs. Knowing down the road that something needs to sit on what you’ve already made, means you have to put some foundations down.
What people are confused about is they think DLC is secretly on the disc, and that it’s somehow unlocked when we say.
I’d like to talk about Unravel, an idiosyncratic indie game that EA is putting its weight behind. What was the idea behind signing it?
It was less about strategy; I’d like to think about it more a commitment to do something that is good for gamers. We wanted to help a very small studio, that needed resources, that needed a home, that needed technology.
Patrick Soderlund [vice president of EA Studios] met with [Unravel creator] Martin Sahlin, and believed in his vision for the game. I’m the person responsible for publishing and selling it, and personally I think it’ll sell very well.
If it makes us some money, great, if it doesn’t, great, we will have still brought a game to market that a lot of people are going to thoroughly enjoy.
I think publishing Unravel is going to be a learning process for EA too. Supporting an indie game will give EA insight into their commercial potential, for example.
Yeah sure, and this is not your FIFA or Battlefield consumer, although I suspect a bunch of those people will buy it. It’s a classic platform game, solving challenges as you go, and it looks gorgeous.
Star Wars Battlefront, possibly EA’s biggest game of the year, does not include a dedicated single-player campaign. [Click on the thumbnails below to see more images in full-screen]
Do you want to publish more indie games at EA?
Well, you know, we publish thousands of indie games a year through a company called Chillingo. They’re a great company, and mobile is such an important part of the future of gaming.
Of course, I was specifically asking about console indie games.
I know you were and I immediately changed the subject. [Laughs]
Aha, thought you’d done that.
We’re always looking at opportunities for games that are worth our time and effort. But the truth is that there are far fewer of them than you think there are. Console games are not cheap to manufacture, so if you’re self-funded [it’s difficult].
We have a lot of studios, and we plan out three or four years in advance on what we’re working on, what our portfolio is looking like, and new IP is of course very important to us. If opportunities arrive from outside that, great.
Like any well-run company, we know what our people are doing, and they know what they are doing. I can look at fiscal 17/18 and off the top of my head tell you what EA’s games look like in two Christmas holidays from now, and that’s important for our own discipline. But, for things like Unravel, we’re always on the lookout.
You recently announced that you have hired Jade Raymond, who is widely respected for helping cultivate the Assassin’s Creed franchise. What was the vision behind hiring her, and opening a new studio, Motive, for her to lead?
Sure, I’ve known Jade for many years, and the hiring started with her pinging me on Facebook and saying, “hey, I’m thinking of a new start in my career.” I had worked with her at Xbox, and we had great success together working on Assassin’s Creed.
We love her, and her ability to bring fresh thinking to our company, especially when you think about the storytelling potential in teaming her up with Amy Hennig [former Naughty Dog writer, now at EA].
Jade is going to head up Motive in Montreal, that’s where her family wants to live, so we decided to build a studio around her. We already have a great presence in Montreal with BioWare, and we love Montreal as a development hub, so it wasn’t a difficult decision for us. Jade is also going to help us build new IP, and also, she’s also going to take control of Visceral in Redwood Shores.
You’re betting so much on her. Surely that will invite a lot of pressure.
Well I wouldn’t say pressure. We’re a big company. There is some pressure, yes, but the company isn’t going to live and die by what Jade does. EA is a great place for where Jade’s career is at right now; she has a great vision for what she believes the future of IP is. She is great at bringing the best out of development teams. She manages classic, high quality, triple-A projects with big budgets, and brings them in on time and on quality.
Bringing in female talent is very important to the company. Jade and Amy are a year, or two, out from their project deadlines right now. It’s a great pipeline of games, and a testament to the way EA thinks about hiring women into senior development and management positions.
“Between when a dev team starts work on a game, and when it finishes, the world becomes a different place.”
Peter Moore
Are you looking to hire more well-known developers like Jade?
Well I don’t know if we’re looking. It’s more about, if they come along, we grab them. There’s not a huge amount of talent out there, available, right now.
I’ve always liked Kojima-san. I got on with him during my days at Microsoft. I just think… what’s going on there… I just think both of them should kiss and make up.
From my experience, and I’ve spent a lot of time working in Japan, I think that Konami and Kojima will figure it out. Those kinds of business relationships [in Japan] are typically for life, and Kojima is such an important part in what has gone on there.
Clearly, they’re at a rocky stage in their marriage. But you could take what is said about [Kojima Productions], about a game not adhering to budgets, about a game not being ready, and you could apply that to a lot of people.
Yes, any game that isn’t iterative in nature the way an EA Sports game is, or any series that doesn’t ship every single year… those things can go on forever. Ever. There needs to be an agreement between the publisher and developer to make sure that both parties understand when the game is supposed to ship, and what it’s supposed to be.
But with regards to Kojima and Konami, they’ll kiss and make up. They’ll be fine.
You mentioned EA Sports, which is something I wanted to discuss. Your franchises, such as FIFA, are so iterative that it would be good to get a sense of where you think they are heading. What lies in their long-term future?
FIFA is already there, and Madden is already getting to that stage, where these games are live services. When I joined EA, eight years ago, the dev team would deliver a game, take a few weeks off, and then off we go again. Today, the game never ends. With things like Ultimate Team, these games have no off-season.
I see a slight conflict in what you’re describing; EA is driving towards to continually evolving its sports games, but at the same time it switches attention to an entirely new iteration every year. Now of course, it seems like it would be commercial madness to stop selling new boxes of FIFA every year, but EA is essentially heading towards that dilemma. Do you foresee a future where a baseline FIFA game is updated with new season data every year?
Well that has always been nirvana, especially for sports games, and maybe one day that will happen. But I think there is still a thirst for a great, brand-new boxed game.
I want to switch to Star Wars Battlefront. Surely yourself, and the rest of the EA executive team, must be kicking yourselves for not including a single-player campaign?
Well, you never kick yourself about these things. You make a decision, years out, and you plan for what the world looks like when a game ships in two or three years. That’s about the intuitiveness about the executive producer, and his or her vision for the game.
Between when a dev team starts work on a game, and when it finishes, the world becomes a different place. I remember when we started work on Star Wars: The Old Republic; at the time, the model to go for was subscription. By the time we had the game ready, the model to go for wasn’t subscriptions. That’s why we had to stop the game, and rebuilt it as a free-to-play title with microtransactions, but even then there were some people who said they wanted to keep their subscriptions.
I totally understand that you have to think ahead when planning games. I was more thinking about Battlefront with more crude algebra, in that, triple-A games with single-player traditionally sell better than those with multiplayer.
So, there’s two phenomena with that statement. The first is that yes, you might be right. The second is that very few people actually play the single-player on these kinds of games. That’s what the data points to.
Let’s switch to EA Access, which a lot of people think offers a good deal.
I think it offers a great deal.
Do you still want to see EA Access on PlayStation 4?
Doesn’t matter. It’s on Xbox One, and those customers love it. We have analytics on everything these days, and subscriber satisfaction rates are through the roof. EA Access customers get to play more, because of the Vault, they get to play early, ahead of general release date, and they get to pay less because of the discounts it offers.
So, consumers love it. It’s doing well. If you expand to another console, business will be even better, right?
But it’s not. It’s on Xbox One.
Microsoft has begun to include EA Access subscriptions into its console bundles
I’m curious about what you’re saying. Is this part of a deal with Microsoft now?
It’s on Xbox One-
[Interrupting] Do you want to talk about this?
Well Sony talked about it, ask them [laughs]. There’s not much left for me to say.
I’ll move on. Battlefield Hardline had a strong launch, especially considering the time of the year that it shipped. I think people did notice that the player count dropped a little after launch, perhaps a little more sharply than you would have liked.
I don’t know if it was sharper than we would have liked. We’ve just delivered new content that will help people re-engage. People come back to games when there’s a reason to come back. People don’t play the same games every day. I can tell you our engagement levels are where we thought they would be.
I think one of the challenges was we missed the holiday window, we shipped in March, what happens then is you enter the summer months and–we have decades of data to back this up–people just play less games. It’s normal for game engagement to drop off a bit.
Techland has released the first full-length trailer for zombie game Dying Light‘s upcoming story-based expansion, The Following. The video, which was originally shown to press behind closed doors at Gamescom last week, shows off the game’s main area, which is as large as all the original maps combined.
The trailer also teases out some story details about The Following. Protagonist Kyle Crane (voiced by Assassin’s Creed and Batman voice actor Roger Craig Smith) travels to a dangerous outback, where he meets “mysterious and fanatical cultists” who have information about the zombie outbreak.
Players won’t be able to simply walk right up to the cultists and learn their secrets. First, they must complete various missions and objectives in the deadly environment to earn their trust.
As previously announced, The Following introduces vehicles for the first time in Dying Light through the dirt buggy, which is customizable and upgradable. It also features its own skill tree. Overall, Techland called the dirt buggie Dying Light’s “deadliest weapon yet.”
The Following is included with the $20 Dying Light DLC pass, while everyone else can buy it for $15. A release date has not been announced.
Until now, images of the game have been captured from the livestream during which the publisher announced the game. The new screenshots, however, are captured directly from the game.
The shots, which were posted on Japanese gaming site 4Gamer, show environments from the PlayStation 4 version of the game.
Click on the thumbnails below to view in full-screen
The areas featured in the screens, above, include a marketplace and sprawling field, as well as a dungeon in which the hero can be seen battling Dragon Quest enemies.
The screenshots of the 3DS version, meanwhile, demonstrate its two visual styles. The first is a 3D rendering technique that recent portable Dragon Quest games have used, while the second is a 2D display reminiscent of SNES-era entries of the Japanese role-playing series.
Blizzard has not ruled out the possibilities of a StarCraft 3 or Warcraft 4 strategy game. Speaking to IGN in an interview, StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void producer Tim Morten said that the upcoming expansion did not equate to “the end of StarCraft,” but “the end of this story for these characters.”
He went on to say, “It’s very rewarding for us to hear that there’s demand out there for more RTS content in the Warcraft universe so once we’re done with Void I think we’ll get together as a team and talk about what would inspire us to work on next. There’s no question, though, that we’ll consider Warcraft, StarCraft, or even new ideas. Anything is possible.”
