#wb interactive

" Postmortem : Scribblenauts! "

¡Ni las comparaciones mas eclecticas podran savarlos!¡Porque es lunes y SpreadShotNews Podcast esta de vuelta!

En este episodio:

Maxi nos da sus pensamientos finales sobre Future Connected, el epilogo de Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition, ademas junto con Nico continuan explorando las nuevas adiciones de Astroneer.

En un Rapid-Fire cargado de noticias de la industria tenemos a Microsoft como potencial interesado en comprar WB Interactive, Tencent le podria haber primereado Warframe a Sony pero Sony se la devuelve en forma de acciones de Epic Games, ademas Sony le diría que “si” a la emulación, los ejecutivos de EA y Activision cobran cantidades pornograficas de plata (no shit) y para no perder la costumbre, se filtra toda la conferencia de Ubisoft dias antes de que suceda.

Para el Hot Coffe separamos la noticia de Microsoft  que estaria recomendando enfaticamente no cobrar actualizaciones de versiones de juegos de Xbox One a Series X a publishers y developers.

Por ultimo, en el Special Move, Nico nos recomienda una charla de Jon Ingold llamada Sparkling Dialogue: A Masterclass. Maxi nos recomienda The Brilliant Soundtrack of Metal Gear Rising Revengance.

Shadow of Warner Bros. (The Jimquisition)

http://www.ludonarrativeassonance.com/review-batman-arkham-knight/

Review: Batman: Arkham Knight

By Wesley Scott

Don’t buy Batman: Arkham Knight on PC.

So here we are. The goddamn Batman.

Okay, let’s rip this band-aid off.

It’s a beautiful game even with the low-end settings I was forced to run. This in spite of the fact that I’ve had no trouble with The Witcher 3 and Phantom Pain. The low-grade world textures are muddy as hell but the character textures are nice enough. Arkham Knight really seems to squeeze every last bit of beauty out of the dying Unreal 3 Engine and as a last hurrah it could have been a great one if it didn’t run like hot garbage. It is, without reservation or qualification, the worst AAA PC port I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing and any sense of joy I may have felt while soaring high above the streets of Gotham with its volumetric, reactive steam and fog, and its incredible rain and lighting effects, was too often cut short by frame rate hitches and geometry pop-in (not even texture pop-in, I’m talking whole sections of the world).

The story is alright. It gets a little ridiculous even by comic book standards. I’m not certain what Rocksteady’s obsession with placing this relatively grounded, pulp detective icon in to a massive Sci-Fi epic of world-ending proportions is but it doesn’t work and never has. Not even in Arkham City. When they back off and let the narrative focus on the more personal conflicts between Batman and his rogues gallery it performs much better even though the dialogue remains uniformly terrible throughout.

The game play is excellent. What we have here is the most refined control scheme the Arkham series has seen yet with several key additions that make doing anything you could ever dream of doing as a Batman possible. It’s a different story in the new Batmobile though as things get pretty wonky and the precise on-foot controls suddenly become a floaty, meandering mess. The late game also suffers from too much complexity as both combat and driving sequences begin to require you to adapt to too many simultaneous inputs. You start feeling less like a kick-ass karate-fueled vigilante of justice and more like the loser sitting on a couch you actually are as Batman fumbles about with targets and let’s his car get crushed by the Riddler’s traps again and again and again, sometimes through circumstances you couldn’t foresee without trial and error.

If this doesn’t seem like a proper review to you, if it seems like I’m disinterested in writing it, that’s just because it isn’t and I am. What you’re reading is a rough outline I would have refined in to a full review but WB Interactive and Rocksteady didn’t take the time to make it work so why should I spend any more of my time reviewing it properly? I’ve been railing on Batman: Arkham Knight for almost 3 months now and it’s still a fucking mess that will probably never be fixed, but I’ve played the whole thing and I’m done and I couldn’t be happier. It won’t change anything. Immediately following this post I am going to delete Arkham Knight from my SSD (because it ran like shit on my mechanical hard drive) and never think about it again. This whole thing is just here as a pretense for one final thought that I’m hoping might save some unsuspecting gamers a lot of frustration…

http://www.ludonarrativeassonance.com/arkham-knight-is-somewhat-fixed-but-wbs-handling-is-still-inexcusable/

Arkham Knight Is Somewhat Fixed But WB's Handling Is Still Inexcusable

By Wesley Scott

Arkham Knight is back on sale for PC. The one of you who reads this blog might remember my storied history with this particular edition of the caped crusader’s video game saga.

The latest patch is supposed to finally make the game playable on moderate gaming systems and allow Warner Brothers to sell you the season pass for a game you probably haven’t been able to play yet unless you gave up and bought it on PS4 or Xbox One. They also instituted some community outreach programs for people who already purchased the game or will be buying it soon including free copies of games they probably already own some unknown DLC and a contest in conjunction with Team Fortress 2 so… Yeah, I don’t care about any of that shit and I hope you don’t either. I hope the question you’re asking right now is the question I I’ve been asking for the last three months: “Does it work yet?”

Yeah, it sort of does. I still need to use a Direct X plugin developed by a community member who seems to know more about what he’s doing than the actual team being paid to fix this thing and the frame rate is still hovering in the 30s on a mix of low and mid quality with some annoying micro stuttering but it’s actually playable now which is a great deal more than could be said previously. Also, there’s still no SLI or Crossfire support, the thing takes a full two minutes to boot in to a game between the initial load time and the fucking unskippable splash screens, and Rocksteady now recommends a whopping 12 gigabytes of RAM to help alleviate the persistent disk streaming problems. Yeah, it’s still a technical disappointment, but it’s now a manageable one, with a little extra work from the community that shouldn’t be necessary.

Of course WB couldn’t just leave it at that though because they’re a fucking mega corporation interested only in the perceived strengths of their respective brands in the eyes of their investors, so they went ahead and pulled some shady shit to go along with this generally positive news.

It appears that all the reviews prior to October 28th have now been labeled as “pre-release” even though Arkham Knight was most definitely released on June 23rd. I know that because I payed money for it, as did many others. This places the massive wall of negative reviews (including my own) the game has garnered since launch behind a sign that essentially says they are no longer relevant even though they directly refer to the product those customers paid for, assuming it was complete. WB and Rocksteady, you don’t get to cut corners, ignore quality assurance, release a broken product and then retroactively decide it was just a technical alpha so redo!

The most disappointing thing is that I have now played quite a bit of Arkham Knight and it’s actually a really great game. Possibly the best in the series, suffering a bit from “content” sprawl but incredibly refined and it turns out the Batmobile is kind of a blast. This could have been an easy recommendation but when I do my review – no matter how glowing it may be – I will never, ever, ever recommend that ANYONE spend their hard-earned money on something so cynically produced and marketed to take that money without any concern for the customer making the purchase. Fuck you, WB. Fuck you, fuck Mad Max, fuck Lego Dimensions, fuck any Arkham game you decide to shit out in the future, and fuck your mothers. That’s right, WB Interactive, your mothers! Do you see what you have reduced me to? I have not a single fuck left to give because the last of my supply went to the women that gave you life! I hope you’re all happy because, in case you can’t tell, I’m not.

http://www.ludonarrativeassonance.com/warner-brothers-wants-you-to-know-its-okay-to-spend-more-money-on-their-broken-game/

Warner Brothers Wants You To Know It's Okay To Spend More Money On Their Broken Game

By Wesley Scott

Warner Brothers has announced that the upcoming patch for their three-month-old, unplayable mess of a game will also allow you to play all of the previously released DLC minus the console specific stuff because that’s so much more important than giving updated minimum specs or announcing hardware specific optimizations or fucking apologizing again for releasing an unfinished product.