The quick cap news
* Play.tm falsely reported two new Fallout: NV DLC packs on their way, but the report was denied by Bethesda.
* One more reason to see the PC as the natural home of the indie developer is that Nintendo stated a complete lack of interest in what it calls “garage devs.” Most think it is merely the Nintendo crying at the Apple Store eating so readily into handheld sales.
* NPD have stated that they are slowly adapting to the new era of digital distribution, after criticism that it couldn’t account for what is now 40% of the market and still growing.
* The new Stars Wars MMO from Bioware Austin, the Old Republic, has nearly 1.5 million beta-testers according to EA.
* For those with misgivings about the bugs in Dragon Age II, a patch has been released which most importantly fixes the busted save file problem.
* The final DLC for Mass Effect 2, called Arrival, will see the light of day on 29th March, across all platforms. This last DLC sees Shepherd to the edge of the known galaxy and will lead in to Mass Effect 3.
* Volition are saying the PC is worth investing in, despite the threat of piracy. I suppose that’s very easy to say given that they probably know as well as anyone that piracy dents sales very little.
* On the subject of piracy, Ubisoft showed themselves to be both dumb and hypocritical this week as it was discovered they had effectively “pirated” their own stuff after a Reddit user launched the accusation.
* Jagex, developers of RuneScape, have a deal with Hasbro to make a new Transformers-based MMO expected to be released sometime in 2012.
* Valve announced that they were hiring Doug Church. Church has an impressive 20-year long career that saw him work on projects like Thief: the Dark Project, System Shock and Ultima.
The Main News
The big story today is that the $400m Activision versus EA lawsuit got the go ahead and has been scheduled for May. The saga started after Activision counter-sued ex-Infinity Ward devs who accused Activision of firing them to avoid royalty payments. The suit exploded as 38 others at Infinity Ward then filed lawsuit against Activision. EA were added into this after Activision accused them on using unlawful practices to create this whole situation for Activision in the first place.
It, finally, gives me such great pleasure to announce that a game I loathed since I first heard its stupid, half-baked premise and saw the ridiculous and sometimes tasteless publicity stunts pulled for it has been released to utter disappointment of the part of reviewers. Homefront’s release to poor reviews left publisher THQ with falling stock by more than 20 percent. Reviews concentrated on how brief the single-player campaign was, as well as poor writing and voice acting, while speaking more favourably of the multiplayer aspect. If you’re are looking for a decent multiplayer game, however, you can do a lot better for a lot cheaper without having to go through an utterly implausible story. Even reading the reviews that are 80+ on Metacritic, they often point out the same problems as the lower reviews, but seem arbitrarily to tack on a good score as if to keep THQ happy.
