digital-extremes posts

Canadian-based developer Digital Extremes is expanding to a new office, thanks in part to a $2.5 million grant from the provincial government of Ontario. The developer, based in London, Ontario, will use the money to move to a larger 33,000 square foot office space in the city, according to a report at IFPress.com.

Digital Extremes currently has 150 employees and has planed to hire 30 more team members, according to the report. It recently finished its work on the PC port of Homefront and is currently working on The Darkness II (shown above) for release this fall. The game is using Digital Extremes' in-house Evolution Engine.

[Via Gamasutra]

Homefront, the recently released first person shooter from publisher THQ, is set to get its first major PC patch sometime this week. The game's official web site has the first details on the patch which will include a new DemoURL feature.

This feature will allow players to indicate the location of stored demo files in a server playlist. Not only can server admins store demos for players, it can also be used to pinpoint evidence of cheating and hacking in online game. The patch will also have a number of other bug fixes, changes and improvements including enabling DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 via the system setting menu.

Homefront's early and mixed reviews lead to a massive stock price at THQ last week, which caused the publisher of the recently released first person shooter to announce that the game's first day of sales in the US generated 375,000 unit sales. Today THQ struck back again announcing that Homefront has now sold over 1 million copies worldwide since it was first released nine days ago on March 15.

It's currently unknown how many of those copies were of the PC version and how many of the PC copies were bought via digital download. What is known is that THQ has had to launch more multiplayer dedicated servers for Homefront in order to meet player demand.

Homefront was released for the PC and consoles this week and despite average reviews that cause a massive stock price drop for the first person shooter's publisher THQ the game seems to have found a growing audience. The multiplayer dedicated servers have been overflowing with players so much that THQ has already had to expand its multiplayer server capacity earlier this week.

Today the game's official web site announced that the development team is once again expanding the dedicated server support around the world (the game shipped to Europe on Friday). In North America, there will be some maintenance on the multiplayer infrastructure on Sunday morning from 6 to 8 am Eastern time. More dedicated servers will be put in place during this time.

After having its stock price go down by over 20 percent on Tuesday due to average review scores of Homefront, publisher THQ sent out word that the first day of sales for its first person shooter in the US registered about 375,000 units. Specific platform sales numbers for the PC and if those numbers included digital downloads were not revealed. THQ's CEO Brian Farrell added that the company is "already fulfilling re-orders for the game from multiple retailers." Previously THQ had said it had 200,000 pre-orders for Homefront just for the US.

Even with the average review scores it seems that the game is popular at least on the multiplayer front. THQ has already admitted it is suffering from a lack of dedicated servers for the game and says it is adding servers to meet player demand. Homefront will be released in Europe and Asia later this week.

While Homefront's early (and average) reviews were part of the reason for a massive sell off in publisher THQ's stock price today, the first person shooter is apparently selling well enough that there are not enough dedicated servers online to handle all of the multiplayer matches.

Homefront's Twitter page states, "Demand for dedicated servers outstripped expectations. Though we're thrilled by the popularity, please bear with us as we bring more online." That may indicate that despite the mixed reviews for the game, the multiplayer portion of Homefront is popular enough to get people to purchase and play the game online.

[Via VG247.com]

A few weeks ago developer Digital Extremes and publisher 2K Games announced plans to release The Darkness 2, a sequel to the horror-themed first person shooter based on the Top Cow-published comic book. Now Top Cow has announced that it will take advantage of a big day in the comic book industry to help promote the game.

That day, May 7, is Free Comic Book Day, where comic book stores all over the US offer free comic book issues by the major publishers, some of which are made especially for the event. Top Cow had plans to issue another book from its line up for Free Comic Book Day but today it announced that it has changed its plans and will now issue an original comic that will serve as a prequel to The Darkness 2. The game itself is due for release this fall.

THQ's big entry in the first person shooter genre is now complete. The publisher announced today that its "invasion America" game Homefront has "gone gold", meaning that the game is feature complete and is now being replicated on disks. The game is still scheduled to ship on March 15.

In related news, it looks like future Homefront games will be at least a collaboration between New York City based Kaos Studios and THQ's new Montreal development offices, according to a story on our sister site Joystiq. Homefront's PC port is already a collaboration between Kaos and Digital Extremes.

Homefront isn't due to be released until March 15 but according to what THQ exec Danny Bilson told Eurogamer in a chat the first person shooter is already the most pre-ordered game in THQ's long history. Bilson told the site that the game has received 200,000 pre-orders just in the US.

That's likely good news for the game's primary developer Kaos Studios. Internet reports earlier this year claimed that the New York City-based studio could be shut down following Homefront's release with the team moving to THQ's new Montreal, Canada-based offices. Bilson, however, stated that basically the sales of Homefront will dictate whether or not such a move is made. He states, "... we haven't made any decisions at the moment. That's the truth. We're going to look at how it goes. We don't want to relocate people just to relocate people."