Square Enix have officially announced the release date for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, it’s being globally unleashed on August 27th. They’ve also revealed how much the subscription fee will siphon from your wallets: £7.69 and $10.99 respectively. Other confirmed details include an early access for pre-orders, as well as collectors edition.
Lara’s most recent adventure may have been out for more than two months but Crystal Dynamics aren’t done patching and updating their rough and tumble, quicktime infested platformer. The latest round of fixes are largely aimed at problems only experienced by players running certain bits of hardware but there are some more general improvements to the UI and such.
Square Enix announced yesterday that they’re working on an HD release of Final Fantasy 8 for the PC. While a release date and the addition of any fancy extras have yet to be announced, the HD spruce up is itself enough of a tempter to have me picking up a copy.
Square Enix have sent along a new batch of screenshots of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn in preparation for the next round of closed beta testing next month. The images show off some of the sights of Eorzea.
Particular highlights are the large floating crystals which act as teleportation hubs between locations in the game and what looks like large statues of pointing children. Don't be deceived, those children are actually Lalafells, the dwarven race that populates Final Fantasy XIV.
Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
Reborn is the right word. Final Fantasy XIV has always been a difficult game; an MMO built for Final Fantasy fans and players, it was roundly kicked in the face by both critics and its community before being taken offline late last year. Square Enix promised to have a second try.
That second try is currently in development, but available to play via a heavily NDA’d beta. I’ve been playing the game during the beta, and at various events, and am happy to say there are good things coming. Final Fantasy XIV is getting better: much better. Here are some highlights from last weekend’s phase two beta.
Tomb Raider is set to officially release in Japan on 25 April though PC players have been able to buy and play European and US versions of the game through Steam since its release in those regions. While it didn’t have Japanese voice actors, apparently, it had subtitles in the language. Again, apparently these subtitles have now been deactivated and if the owners of these foreign versions of the game want to have language support they will have to spend $30 on a Japanese language pack DLC to get it.
Nothing says poorly optimised controls and bad framerates for a PC game better than multiplatform release. Our platform has suffered a long history of shoddy ports or artificially limited development to keep games in line with their console brethren. Eidos Montreal are hoping to sneak past that trapping with their PC version of the new Thief game.
Two weeks ago, we learned that Tomb Raider had sold 3.4 million retail copies - a not insignificant result for you or I, maybe, but for Square Enix? A profound financial disappointment. Now the publisher has revealed that its targets for the Crystal Dynamics game in EU, US and Japanese markets combined were at least another one-and-a-half million higher than that.
Each weekend of April will see groups of excited Final Fantasy fans will be lead through a closed beta of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. On show during the event are the forests around the city of Gridania and the addition of personal Chocobo mounts. I’m not au fair with the Final Fantasy games and so am going to go ahead and assume they’re a sort of chocolate rococo rocking horse.
I’m close, right? I can feel it.
I have spotted a trend: Victorian brothels that conveniently epitomise the squiffy morals and gratuitous self-indulgence of society’s elite while you hide behind a chaise longue and watch are “in" right now. Thief’s House of Blossoms is populated by The City’s reprehensible, opiate-huffing upper classes as well as a slew of subservient, fully clothed women who sit on men's laps, pawing at fully clothed chests and giggling. Some of them are strolling around swooshing their technically impressive silk blouses, some are shovelling opium into a big ventilation system, some are huddled together in small groups joking about penises that they have seen. Overall, I must say that it is an excellent videogame brothel.
It’s not been a great day for Square Enix stockholders, doubly so if they live in the ridiculously cold north of England. First they learn that the company will be making an “extraordinary loss" this financial year as a result of a costly internal restructuring, they then learn that the company’s president of 13 years, Yoichi Wada will be stepping down (though, they may not be entirely torn up about that considering his role in the first piece of bad news), and now, on top of all that came before, they’ve learned that Tomb Raider grossly missed Square Enix’s sales expectations.
What with all the chasing in Bioshock Infinite and the running away in Tomb Raider, DeWitt and Croft need all the help they can get to perform their best. That’s why both characters recommend blood doping updating your Nvidia drivers.
Nvidia’s latest drivers see up to a 40% performance increase in Irrational’s 20th century floating island shooter and a staggering 70% boost in the recently released Tomb Raider.
Square Enix have announced that president Yoichi Wada will be stepping down after 13 years of leading the company. His resignation is attributed to an “extraordinary loss" reported in this financial year.
Square Enix’s trademarks have been the subject of much discussion of late, first there was Deus Ex: Human Defiance, which turned out to be the title of the upcoming film of the game, then there was Deus Ex: The Fall, something we still know little about and, so, fingers crossed it’s a new game in the works, and now we’ve got news that Square have gone and registered a possible Tomb Raider title, Lara Croft: Reflections.
Gas Powered Games may have been upon the brink of closure, it may have been three years since the game’s release, and it may have been two years since the last patch but Supreme Commander 2 has received a new update that provides a hefty reworking to the games mid to end-game stage.
Despite being just a week old, Tomb Raider is responsible for the death of 147,675,058 baddies (and that’s only the ones that were punctured with arrows), 5,294,879 deer (I expect we’ll be hearing about a PETA petition within the week), and a comparatively small number of skewered crabs: only 1,417,750 .
But those weren’t the only stats which Square Enix published.
With Tomb Raider’s release last week many have been muchly impressed by Crystal Dynamics reboot of the series - our own Steve was quite taken with it. Though a number of players have been experiencing a few problems with performance, particularly if they’re using Nvidia graphics cards and Intel processors. The latest patch hopes to fix a number of these issues.
Tomb Raider is a game about a woman who keeps standing on rotten planks of wood and falling down. It is a game about a woman who is always sliding on her bum, muddily, confidently towards her next adventure. It is a game about a woman who keeps going into rooms that are not properly affixed to the Earth, and then there is an explosion or a rumble or something, and then the room becomes unmoored and begins to lurch sideways and off the edge of a cliff or a waterfall. It is a very good game, full of exciting things to do with falling, and I like it.
Well, Thief 4 was semi-confirmed earlier today when Game Informer revealed that their cover for this month's edition was to be emblazoned by star of the series, Garett. Though we've now received word from Square Enix that Eidos Montreal, the studio responsible for the excellent Deus Ex: Human Revolution, are indeed hard at work on a fourth entry into the franchise. Although the 4 has been dropped, it is neither Thief 4 or Thi4f, but straight up Thief.
There’s something in UK libel law called ‘jigsaw identification’. Say one local newspaper physically describes a tall, moustachioed man protected by courtroom anonymity, and another decides to name the village he lives in. Both harmless details in themselves, but together? Perhaps our man sports the only moustache in the village. He might be identified.
