(Emphasis mine)
Clearly there was no way to foresee this stunning eventuality. :)
Best of luck to them!
Haha, yeah, I was about to reply “Name checks out.”
Five unannounced D&D games cancelled.
That’s too bad; Baldur’s Gate co-op on PS2 was such a great experience. Yet another one my brother and I played for way too many hours.
Yes! Although I hate the original Baldur’s Gate, the game you’re talking about, Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance on the PS2, was really fun. Truly a Diablo-like ARPG for the console. And the Co-op just made it such a great social game.
I do hope they have more of those types of games in the pipeline, not just Baldur’s Gate 3.
Good Lord, I didn’t even know they had five games in…what do we assume, “early development?”
Maybe they were tie-ins to the movie releasing soon.
To be clear, WotC makes things other than Dungeons & Dragons, and it’s not stated that they were all D&D games - it’s highly likely that one or more of them were Magic: The Gathering-related or even related to other games in their stable, including games in non-English-speaking markets, like Duel Masters.
Ah, I’ll bet at least two of them were M:TG-related, that’s a good point. I’d forgotten they did that as well.
Whooopsie.
A says that a temporary “data storage issue” led to the corruption of many Madden NFL 23 players’ Connected Franchise Mode (CFM) save files last week. What’s worse, the company now estimates it can recover fewer than half of those corrupted files from a backup.
The issue started last Monday, December 26, when EA tweeted that it was “aware of players experiencing connection issues when trying to connect to CFM.” That problem lasted until Wednesday, December 28, when EA announced that subsequent server maintenance meant that “users should now be able to play CFM without issue.”
But users who attempted to log in to play online franchise games during a 22-hour period ranging from Wednesday afternoon to Thursday morning saw their franchise save data corrupted by the aforementioned “data storage issue,” as EA confirmed over the weekend. And while EA says some of those corrupted save files can be recovered from a backup, it adds that the development team is “currently projecting around 40% of leagues to be recovered.”
Thought this was interesting. Sports Story dev built a little room in the game to air some grievances over the troubled development of the game.
In a similar story, it turns out the Zelda Majora’s Mask team put a lot of their frustrations about crunch in the mouths of their NPCs in that game.
Sony finally catches up to Microsoft! Looks really cool.
Sorta. It’s still in development. The MS Adaptive Controller and accessories have been on sale for a while.
Still, I think the Sony concept looks really good, and anything that lets disabled gamers play easier is a plus.
OH yeah, and great that they worked directly with able gamers on the design, much like MS did.
Hidden Path took to Twitter today to insist their D&D game was still happening but Schreier is standing by his report.
If true, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time a studio found out there were boned after everyone else did via a news story.
God damn is that shitty, though.
It’s not the same thing, but I remember slowly realizing that something bad was brewing at Sony when we were in the middle of making Warrior’s Lair. (We were an external development studio building the game for Sony San Diego to publish.) The regular emails from Sony just kind of petered out. Composers at Sony stopped delivering music, and when I emailed them about a catch-up call, the producer jumped in with a response saying something vague like, “We’ll look at what’s possible sometime next week.” I’m sure Sony folks already knew that our project was dead… it’s just that no one had told us yet.
In a position like ours or Hidden Path’s, you don’t get a sit-down with the publisher where they say, “We’re starting to think this project doesn’t make sense for us anymore” or “Our budgets just changed and it’s hard to square them with your project’s current burn rate.” They don’t let you argue your case, or propose alternate plans to save the project. We were the only external team working with Sony San Diego, so when Sony Corp (the mothership) had financial hardships and sucked dollars out of every branch of the business, the studio in SD had the choice of cutting us loose or letting internal teams go. They actually claimed in the press that one of those internal teams was going to pick up and finish our project (which we knew was an obvious impossibility; not sure if Sony knew that too and it just helped them on a PR front, or maybe let them keep it on the books as projected income a little longer).
It’s bad enough to have a project evaporate on you, but it’s unconscionable for Wizards leadership to not even tell the developers as soon as the decision is made.
Super bummed out about the situation. I loved the Defense Grid games, so I was excited to see what Hidden Path could do with a DnD RPG.
Yeah, no argument there. Hopefully, Jason’s sources were just wrong.