XCOM Shooter May Now Be Third-Person, Downloadable

A new rumor suggests that 2K’s XCOM shooter may have changed perspectives. According to a tip sent to Kotaku, the long-delayed title may now be a third-person shooter instead of the first-person game originally revealed.

 

The information comes from a survey allegedly sent out by 2K to gauge interest in the title, reporting that XCOM is still “being developed by the same people who created BioShock 2" – namely, 2K Marin. The survey includes a few screenshots – some of which can be seen above – and suggests that the game would have players commanding a team of agents, “which you can order around the map to perform various actions.”

The survey also asks players how they’d feel about the game being released as a $30 downloadable title instead of a $60 retail game, and refers to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions but does not mention PC. The shift prompts comparisons to Ubisoft's I Am Alive, which similarly transitioned from a retail title to downloadable late last year.

Not to be confused with XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which will hit stores this week, XCOM was originally announced in 2010 as a “re-imagining” of the strategy franchise, putting players in the shoes of an FBI agent “trying to wipe out a mysterious threat.” It was said to be coming in 2011 during E3 2010 and was shown off at the convention, looking promising.

XCOM was later assigned a release date of March 2012 and shown off once again at E3 2011 with a “changed formula.” It was later delayed to 2013, and after months of radio silence, 2K once again delayed the title in May of this year, pushing it to “fiscal 2014,” which means any time between April 2013 and March 2014.

The change to a third-person downloadable title hasn’t been confirmed, but we’ve reached out to 2K and will update with any comment they provide. In the meantime, XCOM fans can look forward to the more traditional, strategy-based XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which hits Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC on October 9th. For more on what Enemy Unknown has to offer, read our hands-on impressions and keep an eye out for our review very soon.

Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s associate news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following him on Twitter or IGN.

Source : ign[dot]com

ShootMania Storm Blows eSport Wide Open

It’s fitting that the impenetrable clique of competitive gaming should be breached by a first-person shooter, a genre that has long formed one of the key pillars of eSport. All too often, new titles added to this elite pantheon grant dominion to those with a prescient understanding of the established order. Rarely has a game deemed complex enough to promote the required high-level play and sufficiently balanced to prove entertaining to watch been so welcoming to a host of potential new champions.

Thanks to ShootMania Storm’s customisation options you can become very good at it on your own terms, without the hard slog associated with having to play as cannon fodder for several hours. If you don’t like the game’s default maps or modes you can turn to the community’s offerings or simply create your own. So, while the rigors of Call of Duty’s multiplayer demand that you pay for your stripes with the blood of countless deaths, ShootMania offers a gentler, more considered and altogether more fun way of becoming a skilful player.

“When we started building Shootmania we had an eye on what we’d done with Trackmania Nations, which was also intended to be an eSport title from the ground up,” explains Edouard Beauchemin, Nadeo’s international product manager.

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When we started building Shootmania we had an eye on what we’d done with Trackmania Nations, which was also intended to be an eSport title from the ground up.

“So, when we devised Shootmania Storm we also wanted that to be part of the mix and the very first thing that we worked really hard to achieve was to make sure that it’s appealing to watch. It has to be a great show: the game modes, the timing of the rounds, the spectator tools and providing many different stats in-game to allow shoutcasters to do their job.”

Of course, the fact that Shootmania is a FPS makes it instantly more decipherable than other common eSport genres, such as fighters and MOBAs. The majority of game players are familiar with the concepts, mechanics and language that form the basis of the most popular genre in video games. However, the biggest contributing factor that will allow new teams of eSport contenders to rise through the ranks of ShootMania is that it provides a gradual learning curve facilitated by an intelligent selection of game modes, which are, crucially, fun to play.

Shootmania Storm has already been signed up by IPL (IGN Pro League) thanks, in part, to its Elite mode. This part of the game is stable, balanced and eminently playable despite ShootMania as a whole being in the first of three planned beta phases.

Elite mode also attracted a lot of attention at Ubisoft’s recent digital day in Paris, drawing players and onlookers alike with its fast-pace and easy to fathom rule set. Beauchemin attributes this to the mode’s concentrated distillation of a key element of spectator sports: excitement.

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The best moments in FPS eSports are when you’re near the end of a round and maybe there’s just one guy standing and everyone knows he’s going to have to pull off an amazing feat to win.

“The best moments in FPS eSports are when you’re near the end of a round and maybe there’s just one guy standing and everyone knows he’s going to have to pull off an amazing feat to win,” Beauchemin enthuses. “We’ve boiled that down to one single game mode where it comes down to the last minute of the round: there’s one guy with a powerful gun and three armour points versus three guys with one armour point each who are working as a team.

“It’s really exciting to play and to watch because you can focus on just one person and see his choices and super-moves, whereas with 5 Vs 5, for example, it can get really messy and hard for spectators to keep track of everything that’s going on.”

Elite still supports six players in total, as each player on both teams takes turns to be the “hero” and tries to annihilate the opposing team or score a point by capturing the single base. This offers two distinct ways of winning and means intelligent traversal of the environment can see the round won without a single shot being fired, though this is the exception rather than the norm.

Nadeo intends that ShootMania’s status as an eSport not be restricted to major international events. Unsurprisingly, ShootMania’s highly customisable nature is called upon again as players are given the tools to create and host their own tournaments, which they can then publicise through use of in-game currency.

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With 5 Vs 5 it can get really messy and hard for spectators to keep track of everything that’s going on.

ShootMania’s adaptable nature means its official tag as an eSports title needn’t make it the exclusive domain of members of a digital Mount Olympus. Its persistent, intuitive controls and non-convoluted depth means it remains accessible, while offering the opportunity to its players to participate in competitive tournament play, even if they’ve never previously considered themselves eSports calibre.

“Ultimately, our games are powered by players,” Beauchemin concludes. “Some want to run competitions, some design levels and others simply take part by playing, all of which are essential to the community structure of our games.”

To apply for the ShootMania Storm beta program, visit the game’s website.

Stace Harman is a freelance contributor to IGN and is convinced that zombies will one day inherit the Earth. You can follow him on Twitter.

Source : ign[dot]com

We Came. We Saw. We ShootMania'd at PAX.

The IGN ProLeague was at PAX in Seattle, Washington all last weekend showing off Nadeo and Ubisoft's newest competitive first person shooter title: ShootMania. The weekend was packed with a ton of FPS eSports action. We had North America's best ShootMania team, ESP, along with SK.Rapha, EG.nOthing, and Chance in attendance to compete against each other all weekend. Check out our recap below!

Friday

Everything got started early on Friday morning with fans signing up to play with a Joes and Pros Elite mode tournament. After a couple of fun showmatches in SpeedBall and Siege, the Round of 8 in this tournament began. Chance, a former Quake professional player, seemed to pick up the game extremely quickly, knocking out SK.Rapha's team in the Round of 8. In a team kill situaion, we had ESP.Xp3's team advance past ESP.Godson's team in quick fashion. Also advancing to the next round were Area51.PineKone and ESP.Gillz.

Saturday

Saturday contained a lot of demos of different game modes, but the main event was a Best of 7 showdown between ESP, our qualified team, vs Area 51 Gaming. ESP again showed their complete dominance as they won the $750 top prize with an easy 4-0 map score. Area 51 didn't have a lot of time as a team going in to the event, and while they picked up a decent aim with the Laser as the match went along, their coordination was a little too weak to compete with ESP.

Sunday

The true draw of the event happened on Sunday, though, as the event came to a close. After a series of show matches in the Heroes game mode, the Round of 4 and Finals of the Joes and Pros Elite mode tournament were played out. The first match was played out between ESP.Xp3's team and Chance's team, and, despite being a 2-0 in map score for Xp3's team, proved to be incredibly exciting as maps were very close in score. The second match was had ESP.Gillz' team handily defeated Area51.PineKone's team when PineKone was unable to make the match and had to be substituted in for eLe.DarkRabbi. The final score was 2-0 in maps. The finals, though, were outstanding. It was a great setup as teammates Gillz and Xp3 from ESP matched their teams against each other. It went down to the final map, but ESP.Xp3's team was crowned the champion.

Source : ign[dot]com

Superman Annual #1 Review

If Superman Annual #1 were a person, I’d be sure that it was suffering from multiple personality disorder. It’s not a person, though, so I have to wonder what the hell was going on down at DC editorial when they cooked this one up.

The main plot of this book is fine. Helspont’s back to make a ruckus and to recruit some associates. Great. He’s doing all of this because of all of the emotional baggage he’s been carrying since he was just a lil’ ‘Pont. Even better. Problem is, that only takes up a fraction of the space in this book, only tangentially involves Superman, and doesn’t come close to drawing together the wildly disparate sections of the book.

There is so much wasted space in this book, the creators should be ashamed of themselves. It’s almost as though it was declared that each section must include at least one stunningly unimpressive and uninformative large format shot. Worse, we spend much of the issue being brought up to date on concurrent events happening in such titles as Superman, Stormwatch, Grifter, Red Hood and the Outlaws, and Hawkman. Scott Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza are smart guys. I’m sure they could have brought home the idea they were trying to make without scripting individual fights for each of the characters.

The most disconcerting aspect of this massive convergence of plot threads is the jarring transitions between them. One second I’m seeing Supes getting hit by a cheapshot and the next second I’m staring at some gratuitous Starfire cheesecake. It doesn’t help that the changes in which writer is leading the script at any particular time and penciller/inker team totally changes the tone of the book. Is this Superman the indomitable embodiment of strength or is he the Charlie Brown everyman who enjoys schlepping his way to work on the subway? Is he thickly muscled as depicted during his fight with Biomass or is he the nearly emaciated Clark Kent brushing his teeth? The whole assemblage is so disjointed, it takes a concentrated force of will to identify it as a related whole.

This issue accomplishes its purpose of initiating a massive crossover, but it’s not a fun trip. Visually, the book is a mess, with awkward postures, inconsistent inking, and occasionally confusing visual flow. The script isn’t totally smooth, either, as it teleports suddenly from scene to scene, vacillating between different voices and tones the whole while. There’s no way this book is worth five of your hard-earned dollars, so feel free to pass over this one.

Poet is a freelance writer, mid-core gamer, and frequent IGN contributor. Follow Poet on Twitter, or post a message on his IGN profile.

Source : ign[dot]com

Rise of the Triad Doesn’t Make Any Sense

It’s been almost two decades since Apogee’s Rise of the Triad was first released. That reaches all the way back to when nonsense ruled the first-person shooting genre, when few attempts were made to develop characters and layer themes. You loaded in, picked up a floating gun and killed absolutely everything you saw. Things bled, exploded, died, you moved on and ten seconds or less later you repeated, shooting and circle strafing until the credits.

With the reboot, Interceptor Entertainment is hoping to keep much of the original’s nonsense intact. You’ll pick up floating weapon icons that bob and rotate in place in stages. Your MP40 will have infinite ammunition and you’ll need it to cut down swarms of fast-moving enemies. You’ll use a weapon called the Excalibat – a baseball bat with a magical eye set in its center that as a secondary fire will launch a wave of explosive baseballs.

When shot enemies will be cut to pieces. Their hands and legs will snap and flip off their bodies and their heads will roll away like gruesome bowling balls. Your character will unload one-liners because dismembering an enemy wasn’t quite satisfying enough. You’ll rocket jump, uncover secret rooms, catch enemies in environmental traps and put together kill chains to drive up a score to post on leaderboards.

The game will feature a single player mode where you infiltrate an island overrun with cultists trying to destroy Los Angeles. To stop them you’ll use a drunk missile launcher to fire clusters of unpredictable spinning explosives, use a flame wall gun to ignite enemies and watch as they flail around before exploding, and pick up other strange tools of destruction. Infiltrator is still working out how all the alternate fire modes might function, but the examples given so far have especially interesting implications for multiplayer. For instance, the Split Missile launcher will fire out missile in different directions, and the alternate fire might cause them to converge on the same point and collide, which could be useful for splattering a player hiding behind a pillar.

While shooting at others online, expect the type of experience that emphasizes control of fixed weapon spawn points. Particularly powerful weapons may also be set on top of traps, so if you wait for someone to walk into the room to try and scoop up a coveted weapon, you might be able to drop the floor and watch as they’re skewered in a spike pit, or crush them under bricks, or burn them with jets of fire.

Built with Unreal Engine 3, this version of Rise of the Triad looks great so far, the perfect kind of experience for someone who just wants to sprint and shoot and not have to think about much beyond where the next enemy might attack from. Though it’s only scheduled to launch on PC, Interceptor is open to creating a console version as well if there’s interest. The only sticking point could be the user sharing features. Rise of the Tried will be completely moddable when it’s released. Interceptor is very enthusiastic about giving users the ability to generate and share content and isn’t very interested in putting together a version that doesn’t allow for that.

Source : ign[dot]com