Games – Page 6 – Ciaran Laval

January 31, 2015

Buried From MadPea Games – The Story Concept And Background Info

Buried from MadPea Games launches tomorrow and at last night’s blogger preview Kiana Writer, Axiomatic Clarity and Kess Crystal explained some of the story concepts, the work that has gone into the game and a bit about MadPea Games too.

First of all, let’s take a look at the story concept :

BURIED is a story of a writer for self-help books, Lily Morano, who gets interested in geocaching.
She spends the summer on her island writing and researching until she finds C-Me.

C-Me is a highly secret organization providing interactive geocaching and is invite only.
The C-Me capsules contain cameras and record the treasure hunters, allowing them to leave messages for each other.

Lily receives the app and starts the hunt. However, she realizes that something sinister is going on and gets involved into something big and evil..

The game begins when Lily has been missing for two weeks. Her husband is offering a $500 000 reward for the one to find her as the Police has been completely useless with their search.

Equipped with their tablets, the players will find Lily’s hidden ‘Lilypad’ and learn about C-Me and start a search through the grid to discover a thrilling story.

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BURIED is happening at the current time and date.

An Image Should Be Here — A rowing boat in Buried

The game is described by MadPea as an interactive adventure and there’s a lot of detail regarding the game in a blog post from MadPea :

We all know, however, that there will be more to this … much more. A story, a HUD to help us carry out the adventure, objects to interact with for clues, hints, and tools to use to find our answers of the day. We’ll also get sent all around the grid in search of clues to further the story, and get closer to solving the mystery.

This is a grid wide interactive adventure, it’s more than a simple hunt, you’re going to have to work for rewards in this game, although there will be a group inworld which will aid people to share hints, tips and troubleshooting.

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January 31, 2015January 31, 2015

Buried From MadPea Games – The Press Release

I’ll be embarking on a few posts regarding MadPea games latest venture today. The new game is entitled Buried and launches tomorrow, February 1st at 12 noon SLT. I attended a bloggers preview last night and MadPea games have provided me with an excellent press pack, which means I don’t have to do that much work!

In my other posts I’ll look at the game concept and my own early experiences.

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January 30, 2015January 30, 2015

Rod Humble’s Chaphat Reveal Details Behind Cult & Daggers Game

I’ve talked about Rod Humble’s Chaphat more than once, most recently a week before Christmas when I noted that their game, Cults & Daggers was scheduled for a January release.

As January comes to a close, official news about Cults & Daggers has started to be unveiled. A press release on Steam has appeared :

As the Old Gods plot to destroy a planet they can no longer rule, you are tasked with creating your own religious faith to fight a secret war for the soul of the world. Recruit loyal disciples throughout the Mediterranean in order to spread your faith by preaching to the masses and converting noble families. Along the way, you’ll have to deal with spies, assassinations, martyrs, occult forces, prophets and blasphemers, all while battling the Old Gods and other rising cults for the hearts and minds of the world.

The press release also includes a quote from Rodvik himself :

“With Cults & Daggers, I sought to explore beyond the traditional strategy game model of ‘build and fight’, and offer up a more cerebral experience,” said Humble, CEO of Chaphat. “At the same time, I wanted players to challenge themselves by navigating the chaotic web created by corruption, religious avarice and betrayal as rival factions vie for power.”

Rod Humble’s name still carries quite a lot of weight in the gaming community and this can be seen via some articles that have appeared about the game.

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January 26, 2015

Former Linden Yoz Grahame And The Not So Secret Forum Associated With A Douglas Adams RPG

These days Yoz Grahame works for 18F, a USA Government website that bills itself as : “Building the 21st century digital government“. However in a former virtual life Yoz worked for Linden Lab, unsurprisingly he was known as Yoz Linden. However he has also long been harbouring a secret, that may or may not have been closely guarded.

Yoz it seems was involved in keeping a alive a forum that had a life of its own, as reported by Kotaku : The Secret Douglas Adams RPG That People Have Been Playing for 15 Years. The RPG itself, known as Starship Titanic, is, claims the Kotaku article, pretty unplayable these days. The book of the same name was not written by Douglas Adams, it was instead penned by Terry Jones, but the forum? That’s where Yoz comes into play.

Yoz worked for The Digital Village and as part of his work on the website he created an employee forum, that wasn’t just open to employees. Cryptic clues were provided as to the existence of this forum. However Yoz forgot all about it, for around six months, and then decided to take a peek :

Visitors to the forum had created fictional employees and passengers on the Starship Titanic and begun role playing as them. Someone would make up an implausible, Adams-esque scenario, and everyone else would react to it in character, resulting in some enormously complex storylines and in-jokes that developed and diversified over years. And this strange fictional world had appeared entirely spontaneously, without any input from Douglas Adams or The Digital Village. Indeed, Yoz was as surprised as anyone when he stumbled across it: “It was like ignoring the vegetable drawer of your fridge for a year, then opening it to find a bunch of very grateful sentient tomatoes busily working on their third opera,” he says.

The beauty of user generated content, even in forum form appears to have been a sight to behold.

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January 21, 2015

Elder Scrolls Online To Ditch Subscription Model

Ok ok I thought hard about it but I simply can’t resist, back on March 29th 2014 I wrote :

The problem lies after launch, after people have tore through the content, when people are being asked to subscribe for a third, fourth and fifth month because that’s where many titles find themselves up a certain creek without a paddle.

The issue isn’t just about how good the game is, that’s only part of the battle. Another issue lies with retention and that’s where subscription only titles have struggled over the last few years, which is why so many of them end up turning free to play.

The Elder Scrolls Online faces a real struggle, history is not on its side but maybe, just maybe, it will be the chosen one and prosper, time will tell, but if I were placing bets, I’d bet that their subscription model will be radically different within 18 months.

Fast forward to today and an announcement regarding The Elder Scrolls Online : ESO Heads To Consoles June 9th. Heading to consoles isn’t the issue, although there is some unhappiness about the fact that console players won’t be able to play with PC players, however the really big news is :

In the latest and biggest Elder Scrolls game ever made, you can choose to adventure alone, quest with friends, or join an army of hundreds in epic player vs. player battles as you explore and discover the secrets of a persistent Tamriel. And with Tamriel Unlimited, coming to console on June 9th and PC/Mac on March 17th, 2015, you will no longer be required to pay a monthly game subscription to play ESO.

The official forums are a mixture of people saying “I told you so” and people saying “They’ve sold us out“. The reality of the situation is that you really did not have to be Nostradamus to see this coming.

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