Electronic Arts COO Peter Moore will make a “special announcement” tomorrow during The Game Awards 2014, the executive said on Twitter. No further details were provided. Here’s the tweet.
I’m looking forward to joining @geoffkeighley on stage Friday night in Las Vegas @thegameawards to make a special announcement from @EA
Geoff Keighley is the producer for The Game Awards 2014. The event kicks off at 6 PM Pacific / 9 PM Eastern, and you’ll be able to watch the full show right here.
GameSpot will have a team on the ground in Vegas this weekend for The Game Awards 2014. We’ll have red carpet interviews and all the news coverage and trailers for you as they’re released.
It’s a busy weekend for games, as Sony’s PlayStation Experience will immediately follow the awards show, taking place in Vegas December 6-7. Stay with GameSpot all weekend long for all the news.
Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com
Borderlands and Civilization publisher 2K Games today announced the formation of Hangar 13, a brand new, San Francisco-based developer led by Star Wars games veteran Haden Blackman, who spent more than a decade at LucasArts in the 1990s and 2000s.
2K has big plans for Hangar 13, but the publisher isn’t giving much in the way of specifics just yet about the studio’s first game. All we know is that Hangar 13 is working on a AAA “next generation title,” one that will allow players to “shape their own experiences.” The developer even teases that the choices you make in the game will impact moment-to-moment gameplay, as well as the the entire gameworld itself, including characters and narrative. Sounds interesting. Blackman told us more.
“The idea there is we want to make sure the players feel like they’re contributing to the overall experience,” Blackman said. “The player story and the player experience, not just the narrative, at both the micro level–the moment-to-moment choices they make–to the macro as well. How am I affecting the world, how am I impacting the characters around me. How does that in turn change my gameplay experience.”
“So that’s the biggest thing for me; making sure we get back to the spirit of why I got into games in the first place, which is this idea that it’s an interactive medium and I could be a co-author of the experience in some way,” he added. “And I feel like we only scratched the surface at LucasArts and now here I have an opportunity to really blow that out over time and make that our hallmark.”
Making this possible is Hangar 13’s proprietary technology, which comprises the game engine and various developer tools. On top of that, Blackman says Hangar 13 has hired an “all-star” team of professionals who have worked on such franchises as Dead Space, Assassin’s Creed, Splinter Cell, and Star Wars to help the project really, truly sing.
We spoke with Blackman about Hangar 13, but were told the studio isn’t planning to give official details about its first game for some time. We also asked if Hangar 13’s game was a new IP or based on an existing franchise, but Blackman wouldn’t budge.
Though details about Hangar 13’s first game are being kept under wraps for now, we do know a lot more about the man leading the studio. Blackman spent 13 years at LucasArts, working in a variety of roles on games such as Knights of the Old Republic, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and MMO Star Wars Galaxies. Blackman later left Lucas to co-found Fearless Studios, an independent outfit that was later acquired by Kabam. He worked there for around a year as the company’s general manager, working on The Hobbit mobile titles.
To go a little deeper into what Hangar 13 is all about, we caught up with Blackman and picked his brain about the origins of the studio and what it aims to achieve. Again, we were told that Blackman could not discuss the studio’s debut project. With that caveat out of the way, below are some highlights from our interview.
Where Does the Name Hangar 13 Come From?
“A lot of the 2K studios are named after where they were founded. So we are actually in a series of buildings called the hangars, up here in Novator. They’re refurbished military airforce hangars that have been turned into development space. But there is no hangar 13. So for us, we picked that specifically for a couple reasons. One, to hearken back to the fact that it is a hangar and we were founded in a hangar, but it gives us the freedom to kind of move between the hangars without causing any confusion. And, most importantly, because there is no hangar 13, it’s kind of mysterious. It’s like the hidden hangar. And we’re working on a top secret project here, so we felt like it was fitting. I also like the superstition part of it as well.”
“I know everybody by name and by face on the team, which for me is a big deal and I want to always keep it that way.” — Haden Blackman
How Many People Are Working at Hangar 13 Right Now?
“We’re not talking direct numbers right now in terms of our team size. I’d say we’re large enough to get all the work done that we need to get done on a milestone by milestone basis, but we’re still small enough that we’re nimble and we communicate fairly well across the team. I know everybody by name and by face on the team, which for me is a big deal and I want to always keep it that way.”
Challenges In Starting a New Studio?
“The biggest challenge is always hiring. We want to find the best people; we want to draw from across the industry. We’ve been trying to build a leadership team in particular that has come from a number of different studios and has worked on a wide variety of games in a lot of different genres. Hiring, and making sure we’re bringing people from a diverse backgrounds is always a challenge.”
More About That Mysterious Proprietary Tech
“One of the reasons I came here is because of a willingness to build proprietary tech. The 20 or so games I’ve worked on in my career, all but one have been built on proprietary tech. And for me that’s incredibly exciting; it’s very liberating. It allows us to essentially build the tech that we need for the vision of the game and not try to shoehorn or retrofit a game vision into tech, or overhaul existing tech to fit a game vision. That’s obviously not without its challenges, too. Building tech from the ground up is incredibly exciting but it can also be challenging for people, so that’s one of the things that we’re really focused on right now.”
“It’s the engine, it’s the tools, the pipelines, the workflows. Obviously, certain pieces of it might be off-the-shelf pieces or licensed tech that go into that. But the renderer, the game engine itself, everything that is driving the game systems, and game logic, and the tools, and the pipelines, and workflows are all homegrown and built from the ground up here.”
Lessons Learned from Past Jobs
“I had a really great experience at Lucas for the vast majority of the time there. I think, for me, the importance of investing in tech up front, was a hard-won lesson from Lucas. And making sure we’re putting just as much emphasis on the tech design and hiring for that. I think the other big learning for me, personally, I really want to work on games that I want to play. So working at Lucas, again, was a dream come true because we were working with Star Wars which is an IP that I love. And we were making the types of games that I enjoy playing. But over time, what became obvious to me was I really wanted to build games that allowed much more player authorship and making the player the co-author of the experience. So our mantra here is ‘every player’s story is unique.’”
“I want to live up to the expectations of 2K and make sure that we are delivering at the quality bar that they set.” — Haden Blackman
“The idea there is we want to make sure the players feel like they’re contributing to the overall experience. The player story and the player experience, not just the narrative, at both the micro level–the moment-to-moment choices they make–to the macro as well. How am I affecting the world, how am I impacting the characters around me. How does that in turn change my gameplay experience. So that’s the biggest thing for me; making sure we get back to the spirit of why I got into games in the first place, which is this idea that it’s an interactive medium and I could be a co-author of the experience in some way. And I feel like we only scratched the surface at LucasArts and now here I have an opportunity to really blow that out over time and make that our hallmark.”
Lot of Pressure to Live Up to Take-Two and 2K’s Great Track Record?
“I want to live up to the expectations of 2K and make sure that we are delivering at the quality bar that they set. But that’s the reason why I came here. Every time I’ve made a change in my career, it’s always been driven by what can I learn and where can I go to work in an environment where quality is of paramount importance. That isn’t the case everywhere, and that hasn’t always been the case in my career. And I think, being able to come here [to 2K] is a huge opportunity because 2K does have that laser focus on quality and the game itself drives every conversation. Everybody’s marching after the same thing, which is the highest quality game possible. And I never feel like there’s any distractions from that, or weird politics, or anything that distracts from that quest for quality. Probably the number one reason I came here was because of that.”
Why He Left Mobile for AAA
“I spent about a year at Kabam in San Francisco, which does fantastic free-to-play and mobile games. And I learned a ton. That was an opportunity for me to learn and learn about that space. And what I discovered about myself is I have to work on games that I am passionate about, and those are the games that I enjoy playing. Games that I enjoy playing are games that offer more immersive experiences, and we’re just not quite there yet on mobile from my standpoint. Not to say that there’s not any out there, but for me, most of them are on console and PC. And that’s the space I wanted to be back in. And when the opportunity to come to 2K to start a studio and start a studio building console and PC games emerged, I jumped at it, because I really wanted to get back to making the games that I loved to play.”
Lessons Learned In Mobile Space That Can Translate to Console?
“Absolutely. Even though we’re talking about dramatically different team sizes, that nimbleness and that ability to shift gears quickly, is something that we’re trying to infuse here. There’s a lot of focus on getting things up and running on screen as quickly as possible. We had it to some degree at LucasArts, but not nearly what I see in the mobile space. So we try and champion that here and really focus on getting something up and running on screen and then iterate on it. I think that in the mobile space a lot of companies do a great job of onboarding players with tutorializing things, with introducing players to mechanics and concepts in a very engaging way. So we’re obviously looking at that and learning from that wherever we can. I really think that it’s dangerous … for either side to look at it and say ‘There’s nothing to learn from those types of developers’ Because I think those guys have a ton to learn from each other. Over time, the experiences will probably converge. We’re not quite there yet, but I definitely learned a ton in my time in that space that we’re applying to what we’re doing here.”
The Culture of Hangar 13
“We are building a new culture here with this studio. Every studio is unique in its own way, and as we evolve over time that culture will evolve as well. A lot of it will have to do with the people that come on board. So now is a good time to join because you can be part of setting the foundation for the studio going forward. In terms of things like specifics around our culture, we are trying to be … one of our pillars is we’re decisive. We make and we own decisions. That helps us provide a lot of clarity to the team. Which hopefully reduces the churn and things like wasted work, which I think can lead to slippages, which then lead to crunch. Everybody in the games industry works hard. We’re no exception. We work hard because we’re passionate about building games, and we’re passionate about what we’re doing and we want to make the best games that we possible can.
“I also believe that there are diminishing returns to extended crunch, and we’re trying to be sane about that, and we’re trying to plan in advance. And we’re trying to build buffers into our schedules and make sure that people know when we’ll be pushing a little bit harder and when we’re gonna be taking a step back to focus on what we’ve just done and re-asses and iterate. And I think that’s worked out pretty well over the last several months. The feedback that we’re getting from everybody on the team is that it’s been very measured and very predictable, which is good. I can’t stress enough that providing that clarity to the team; being decisive and providing that clarity does a ton to cut down on that churn. But then one of our other pillars is we push each other to be the best that we can possibly be at our jobs. People are working hard, too, because everybody wants to do their best work and not let the rest of the team down.”
Would Hangar 13 Consider Adopting Emerging Tech Like VR?
“Right now, we’re focused on the core experience. But we haven’t ruled anything out. We’re always watching everything that’s being developed, and trying to see how it might impact–or improve and enhance–the vision that we’re working on right now, the game design that we’re working on right now. We haven’t ruled anything out. But we’re really focused right now on the world that we’re building, the mechanics that we want to bring to the fore, and the narrative, and our overarching game structure. Those are the core things that we’re really focused on right now.”
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Sony’s PlayStation Access YouTube channel today posted an unboxing video for the special edition 20th Anniversary PlayStation 4 system, which will be limited to only 12,300 units worldwide.
This $500 console was announced yesterday, coinciding with PlayStation’s 20th anniversary.
Watch the video above to learn all about the console, which comes in Original PlayStation grey, which applies to not only the system, but also the DualShock 4, PlayStation Camera, stand, and headset.
All 20th Anniversary edition PS4s come with an individually marked manufacturing number, letting you know which of the 12,300 units you received.
How can you score one of the super-rare consoles? Unfortunately, we don’t know yet. Sony will open preorders for the console on Saturday, December 6, with further details regarding how you can order one coming during PlayStation Experience that evening.
What do you think of the design? Let us know in the comments below!
Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com
Kmart stores in Australia will no longer be selling Grand Theft Auto V, the retailer has confirmed in a statement sent to Kotaku Australia.
GameSpot reached out to Kmart for comment, and a spokesperson confirmed, “Following a significant review of all content in Grand Theft Auto Games Kmart has made the decision to remove this product immediately. Kmart apologises for not being closer to the content of this game.”
The news follows on from yesterday’s announcement that Grand Theft Auto V would be pulled from sale at Target stores across Australia due to feedback from consumers concerned about the game’s “depictions of violence against women.” Both Target and Kmart are owned by retail group Wesfarmers.
Grand Theft Auto V is rated R18+ in Australia, which is the highest possible classification rating for a video game. It was released in September last year, and the new version for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 launched last month. In response to Target Australia pulling the game from sale, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick responded with the following public statement:
“We are disappointed that an Australian retailer has chosen no longer to sell Grand Theft Auto V–a title that has won extraordinary critical acclaim and has been enjoyed by tens of millions of consumers around the world. Grand Theft Auto V explores mature themes and content similar to those found in many other popular and groundbreaking entertainment properties. Interactive entertainment is today’s most compelling art form and shares the same creative freedom as books, television, and movies. I stand behind our products, the people who create them, and the consumers who play them.”
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Digital games retailer GOG.com begins its Winter sale tomorrow, starting by giving away free copies of turn-based strategy game Age of Wonders. The sale will run for 48 hours and will feature 30 flash deals each hour and discounted game bundles.
GOG.com turned six years old this in September this year. For more on how the site evolved from a niche online platform for classic games and plans for the near future, check out our interview with managing director Guillaume Rambourg.
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The Dark Below expansion for Destiny is coming next week, and developer Bungie is already confident that it will “change the experience of playing Destiny for all.”
In a preview posted to the developer’s website, Bungie detailed the major changes that will be introduced to the game. One notable change for hardcore players deals with leveling exotic gear; the update will allow you to make your exotic weapons more powerful, but it comes at the cost of “resetting the progression” you’ve already put into that item.
New Exotic Upgrading
Exotic Gear in The Dark Below will have higher Attack and Defense values than current Exotic Gear. For players and their current caches of Exotics, a path will exist to bring them forward into The Dark Below.
– Starting December 9th, Xûr will offer players the opportunity to upgrade Exotics to the higher Attack and Defense values
– Upgrading an Exotic in this way will require an Exotic Shard
– The upgrade will reset the progression invested into the item
– Each week, Xûr will possess a selection of upgrades for existing Exotics in his inventory
You can find the other update notes copied below:
New Legendary Gear
Existing Legendary gear on display in the Tower will be replaced
New Legendary gear will feature higher Attack and Defense values
Legendary items will still require Ascendant Materials for upgrades
This new, more powerful gear will be available to all players of Destiny
Legendary gear will not be as powerful as new Raid gear or Exotics
New Rank Commendations
In addition to Crucible or Vanguard Marks, purchasing new Legendary items will require a Crucible or Vanguard Commendation
Commendations are received in Reputation Reward Packages delivered by the Postmaster upon reaching a new Reputation Level
Exotic Talent Changes
As part of the December 1st Destiny Update, Exotic Armor and Weapons no longer require Ascendant Materials for upgrades
The final power node of all Exotic Gear will require an Exotic Shard
This new material is obtained by one of the following means:
Dismantling unwanted Exotics
Purchased from Xûr for 7 Strange Coins
Crucible (PvP) Changes
Expansion I will include two new exclusive competitive playlists
New Crucible arenas (Pantheon, Skyshock, and The Cauldron) will be featured in map rotation
Playlists available in the Director will change week over week
Experiences will alternate between 12 and 6 player engagements
Map rotation will alternate between focusing solely on new expansion arenas and including original launch maps in the mix
Heroics and Nightfall (PvE) Changes
With the Light level increase to 32, Heroics and Nightfalls will be increased by 2 Light levels to keep up with new content, level increases, and gear items
New Raid: Crota’s End
The new Raid, Crota’s End, will unlock on December 9th
Players at Light level 30 can lead a Fireteam immediately upon release
The reward system in Crota’s End will address some issues reported in the Vault of Glass:
Raid loot in Crota’s End will drop at a higher rate
New Raid gear will contain a wider variety of potential perks
Weapons and Gear from Crota’s End will not require Ascendant materials for upgrades
Radiant Shards and Radiant Energy acquired in the Raid will be used to upgrade new Raid gear
Unwanted weapons and gear from Crota’s End will dismantle into Radiant materials
Primary weapons will only drop in the harder version of Crota’s End, released sometime in January
The nominees for the the former VGAs have already been announced, and you’ll get to see who the winners are live on Friday, December 5 at 6PM PST. We’ll have a livestream of the show embedded above as well as interviews from the red carpet and analysis and commentary immediately after show.
Don’t worry if you miss the show live, we’ll have all the new trailers and a list of the award winners right here on GameSpot. And be sure to tune in over the weekend for even more exciting new announcements as Sony hosts the PlayStation experience over the weekend.
Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are over, but you can find great deals on games for all platforms. The best new deals of the day are from Amazon, which is offering Wolfenstein: The New Order for $20 and Destiny for $45.
Below you’ll find the rest of today’s best deals divided by platform:
PlayStation 4
Sony has kicked off four weeks of holiday sales on the PlayStation Store, with new deals every week. Here are some highlights from the first week of offers:
About an hour south of Los Angeles, in a nondescript office park, men are experimenting on monsters. Digital monsters, to be sure, though Turtle Rock Studios does have its own, real-life bearded dragon, who skitters around the office from time to time. “He eats roaches,” explains Chris Ashton, co-founder and design director at Turtle Rock. Perhaps that’s part of the inspiration for the enormous monsters that make up the antagonists in Turtle Rock’s upcoming shooter Evolve–crushing humans like bugs is a pet pastime. Of course, the humans have a say in how they’re going to be crushed, too, and Turtle Rock recently revealed a new set of four hunters to add to the eight already trying to put those pesky monsters in their place.
Each one of the new four falls into one of Evolve’s four hunter classes: trapper, medic, assault, and support (respectively Abe, Caira, Parnell, and Cabot). Each has his or her own unique personality, set of gear, and play style. “Originally, before we had the 12 characters we have now, we just had these four guys and a huge truckload of gear,” says Phil Robb, co-founder and creative director at Turtle Rock. “It ended up being overwhelming. We ran into situations where players could screw themselves right out of the gate–they’d take a bad loadout, so we divided the gear up into packages. Some sexy stuff that everyone wants and some non-sexy gear that’s important to gameplay balance.”
Abe, the new trapper, has a bit of Han Solo in him. He’s a smartass who can handle himself with a blaster–or in this case, a combat shotgun. Abe’s gun changes the pellet spread based on rate of fire: pull the trigger faster and you get a wider spread, useful for closer ranges. Shoot slowly and you get a tighter spread, good for hitting things far away. Abe also has stasis grenades that stick to and slow the movement of anything caught in their blast, which is useful for preventing monsters from escaping or blindsiding your party. He also has a tracking dart pistol that can be used on a monster directly or on potential prey animals. If a tagged animal is eaten by the monster, that monster becomes tagged and trackable. Like all trappers, Abe has a “mobile arena,” a tool that surrounds a small area with an impenetrable energy fence so that the hunters can trap and hammer away on a monster.
The four new hunters.
Imposingly clad in power armor, Parnell is the new assault class. He’s ex-military, and the special suit he wears is known for killing its user–but Abe’s tinkering has left it safe… somewhat. “When he activates his super-soldier ability, it basically makes him inhuman,” Ashton described. “He can run faster, he can jump higher, he can shoot weapons insanely fast, and reload insanely fast. The price, though, is that it damages his body. We wanted him to be as good as the other assaults in non-super-soldier mode, but super-soldier mode is like Assault Plus. It’s better. But we had to have a price for that somewhere.” Parnell carries an automatic shotgun and an automatic rocket launcher, one for close and the other for long range combat, and both become incredibly deadly with the super-soldier mode activated, but players will have to watch the health bar if they want to really start blazing away.
The good news is that the new medic, Caira, can help Parnell and other assaults with survivability. She uses a grenade launcher that can be set to fire either napalm grenades or healing grenades. Napalm sets monsters (or wildlife creeps) on fire for damage over time and allows the other hunters to do increased damage. Healing grenades heal everything (except the monster) in their blast radius, so Caira can heal herself, her teammates, or even wildlife. She can also raise them from a downed state. Her special ability is to activate an acceleration field, allowing her and anyone else caught up in it to move faster.
Rounding out the team is support class member Cabot, the leader of all the hunters, who brought them all together to take on these monster-killing duties. Stoic and calm by nature, Cabot sports a rail cannon, which launches slugs that have a long range and burst into shrapnel when they strike a target, allowing him to shoot through hard targets effectively. He’s also got a damage amplifying beam and the ability to call in a radioactive dust cloud that will coat anything it hits in a glowing haze, allowing the hunters to track it over long distances.
Previously, the team at Turtle Rock only ever showed one game mode in Evolve, but they’ve now unveiled more ways to play the game. Playable online or solo, the three new modes–Rescue, Nest, and Defend–join the previously announced Hunt mode for a total of four game types. “We made these modes years and years ago,” said Ashton, “but we didn’t want to overwhelm with a bunch of different modes at first.”
In Rescue mode, the hunters have to locate and save lost colonists before a monster can kill and eat them. The colonists’ locations are revealed bit by bit throughout the mission in groups of two, two, and five, and if the hunters can save at least five before the monster eats that many, they win. The colonists do have a mind of their own, though, and will try to book it for the extraction point once the hunters rescue them, so the hunters have to be careful not to end up herding cats.
Nest mode turns the tables slightly and puts the monster on the defensive. Six monster eggs, randomly scattered throughout the map, are the hunters’ quarry in this mode, and the monster must attempt to protect them. It can hatch an egg, however, to spawn an AI mini-monster to assist it, but this is risky, as the eggs effectively represent life points for the monster. Nest can be played on any of the 12 maps already used in Hunt mode, and eggs are procedurally spawned each time a map is played. Nest provides a lot of tactical options: hunters can either split up and try to divide the monster’s attention or focus on an egg at a time to take them down more quickly, or they can abandon killing the eggs altogether and just try to take down the monster itself.
Defend mode is just what it sounds like: the hunters must defend a series of shield generators from an angry monster and his continually spawning minions. If the shields don’t go down before time runs out, the monsters win. If they do, the hunters are hosed. “Defend feels like a finale,” says Robb, and Ashton echoes that sentiment: “It’s supposed to feel like one of those ‘it all comes down to this’ things.” In this mode, things are made more complex by the presence of AI monsters (and defense turrets to help the hunters out). The hunters do get an advantage by being able to respawn 30 seconds after death (as opposed to the usual two minutes), but the monster starts off maxed out in terms of power, as well. This is definitely the most advanced mode to play.
We checked, and there are over 800,000 different combinations of campaigns you can play in Evacuation.
Phil Robb, co-founder and creative director at Turtle Rock
It’s fitting, then, that the newly announced Evacuation campaign mode always ends with a Defend mission. A series of five missions linked together, Evacuation is a dynamic, modular campaign system that adds depth and continuity to Evolve’s gameplay. Essentially, a team of four players takes on the hunter roles (they can switch which character they want to play each mission), one player takes on the role of the monster (also changeable per mission), and they commit to a campaign that is designed to be about an hour in length, according to Robb.
Evacuation always ends with Defend, but it always starts with Hunt on a randomized map. In between, players vote on which mission type they’d like to play next. Winning a mission gives you key advantages in the next, such as more food for the monster to eat or more powerful defense turrets to assist the hunters. However, losing also powers up your defense and damage slightly to prevent unbalancing. In the end, the team with the most wins gets the most experience, which is used to unlock new persistent abilities and characters.
“We checked, and there are over 800,000 different combinations of campaigns you can play in Evacuation,” says Robb. These may be randomly generated, but they do a remarkable job of feeling internally integrated. Indeed, a game of Evacuation plays a lot like a campaign in Left 4 Dead. The two sides line up their strategy, attempt to execute it, and then everything goes to hell. Constant communication is necessary in Evolve, not just during missions but also between them. Lining up who’s good at which role, which particular hunter to take, and what your general plan is going to be makes for a much higher likelihood of success.
Of course, for the solo artists, there’s always the monster role. Each new game mode plays differently for the monster, and you have to be both adaptable and unpredictable, or the hunters will quickly overpower you. Playing the monster is a constant balance between hiding away, powering up, and quick bum rushes. You never know when trying to go in for the final kill will lure you into the traps that the hunters have for you. Each game mode emphasizes different monster styles, and while only two monsters, the Goliath and the Kraken, have been announced so far, Turtle Rock has promised more to come.
Evolve’s new announcements greatly round out the game, and the version I played was far less buggy than the early Alpha that was released to the community a few months ago. If Evolve can create a real sense of continuity and if it can continue to build on the clever level and character ideas it’s recently shown, it could be one of the most innovative takes on the shooter genre we’ve seen in years.
The release of Super Smash Bros for Wii U has led to a number of owners claiming that a system error has caused some people to accidentally brick their consoles.
A small minority of Wii U owners have said their system is refusing to play Super Smash Bros, with the console giving the error code 160-0103, along with the message: “There is a problem with the system memory. For help, make a note of the error code and visit support.nintendo.com.”
The damage caused by this appears to vary. Some users claim they are no longer able to play Smash Bros, while others say their system is now inoperable. However, it appears that the error, which is associated with corrupted data, only leads to bricked systems if people format their console after the problem occurs.
Users are strongly advised to not format their off their Wii U if they experience the same problem.
One user, posting on Miiverse, has explained that this error code is not directly associated with Smash Bros, but rather one that has flared up because more people are playing on their Wii U due to Nintendo’s new fighting game.
As pointed out by one Reddit user, the error code 160-0103 has been known to occur on numerous Wii U games, such as:
