A wise man once said that life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. But as the kids say nowadays …ain’t nobody got time for that.
Wireframe is summing up the most essential games news for you in bite-size chunks, as often as we can.
Read on…
Not Bord
How big is Borderlands 3 going to be when it finally lands? All signs point to the venerable category of ‘mahoosive’ as Take-Two Interactive’s most recent quarterly earnings report has revealed that over a million people are still playing Borderlands 2 every month. Given that the game was released seven long years ago, that’s quite something.
It’s-a Me! Zzzz!
The team behind Super Mario Odyssey clearly decided that Mario should be able to get 40 winks wherever he damn well pleases. As pointed out by @MarioBrothBlog over on Twitter, code in Super Mario 64 was written so that the lazy-when-you-are plumber could have a nice nap when his overlord (you) was afk, safe in the knowledge that basic physics still exist. In Odyssey, however, Mario can pass out anywhere. Lucky blighter.
In Super Mario Odyssey, Mario is able to fall asleep off edges of platforms, appearing to float. However, in Super Mario 64, code exists that checks whether there is ground behind Mario first. Thus, in a game 21 years older, sleeping is implemented in a more sophisticated manner. pic.twitter.com/YLoXgBMwfd
— Supper Mario Broth (@MarioBrothBlog) May 12, 2019
Smell The Cheese
Polyarc’s lovely VR game, Moss, is gathering some of the good stuff. The Twilight Garden expansion will launch on 21st May with Oculus Quest. Quill is promised to get fresh puzzles, enemies and equipment in the new (and free) adventure.
Loot Schmoot
A proposed ban on loot boxes in the US hasn’t rattled the likes of Take Two Interactive, as the company claims they barely make a fig off them anyway.
“Just to put it in context, that mechanic is responsible for less than three percent of our net bookings in the past fiscal year, so it’s not material to us,” CEO Strauss Zelnick said. “We have used the mechanic in the past, so it is something we’ve seen, and we think it’s just fine. There has been some noise around it, particularly internationally. As we said, we think it’s a perfectly reasonable mechanic, however it forms a very small part of our business.”
Alright, then.
Upside Up
Netflix is teasing more tie-in games based on its original series at E3 2019, getting tongues wagging that Stranger Things might not be the only project waiting in the wings at the streaming service:
This year at @e3 we are welcoming @netflix for a special #e3Coliseum panel with updates and news about its plans in the gaming space. pic.twitter.com/eLNSSdHKru
— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) May 13, 2019
Vamp Stamp
And finally, for the bloodthirsty among you, there’s news of a brand new Vampire: The Masquerade game on the way. Publishers Bigben revealed this week that another Vampire title is in the works at Big Bad Wolf, developers of The Council. It won’t have any connection at all to Paradox’s already-announced Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2, but it will definitely take the shape of a narrative RPG. So that’s something to look forward to.
TTFN
Issue #13 of Wireframe is on sale now
