electronic-arts posts

One of the big games of 2011 will be Battlefield 3 and the first person shooter's developer Digital Illusions has made no bones about stating that the PC port of the game will be the lead platform with the console versions being developed around the PC port. In a new interview over at Nvidia's GeForce.com web site, the game's executive producer Patrick Bach believes that consoles are in fact holding the development of PC games back.

He states, "Most games are actually still based on the same core idea that the consoles are your focus, the superior platform or something. I don't know why. That was the truth 5 years ago, but the world has moved on." He says that PCs are much more powerful, hardware wise, than consoles, and few PC games truly take advantage of all that hardware.

He says, "So for our target of what we want to hit, we are now using the more powerful platform to try and prove what we see gaming being in the future rather than using the lowest common denominator, instead of developing it for the consoles and then just adding higher resolution textures and anti-aliasing for the PC version. We're do it the other way around, we start with the highest-end technology that we can come up with and then scale it back to the consoles."

While we wait for Electronic Arts to tell us how they plan to revamp the Command and Conquer RTS game franchise, the last game in the series, 2010's Command and Conquer 4, now has a free single player map to get via automatic download.

The map, Night Moves, was previously available only to folks who pre-ordered the game before it was released but the map is now available for everyone who buys the game. The map can be found via the automatic updater if you registered your game copy by March 2011. If you registered your copy after that you will need to post that info on this message board thread. EA will then be able to free up the map manually.

[Via Blue's News]

Developer Criterion Games continues to update the PC port of its recent arcade racing game Need For Speed Hot Pursuit. Today the developer released the fifth patch for the game since it was first released last November.

As with the most recent patch this new update is mainly to deal with various game crash issues which players have encountered while playing the game. One game crash in particular, which occured on some systems when players were prompted to "Press Any Key", has been fixed in this new patch. Criterion is still taking bug reports for the PC version at its Bugzilla web page.

Download the Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 1.05 patch at Big Download

GoG.com had a number of announcements today at its streaming press conference including big hints about upcoming publishers:

• GoG.com is not only selling the only DRM-free version of The Witcher 2, but starting May 10 people who pre-order the game from the site can start pre-loading the fantasy RPG sequel before its released on May 17. GoG.com will be the only digital download service that will offer a pre-load of the game.
• GoG.com's sales went up 163 percent in 2010 compared to 2009. No specific sales numbers were mentioned.
• Later this spring GoG.com will get some new features including a new game downloader that will have multi-threading features for large downloads and an error checker that will check the download for corruption issues every 10 MBs. Another new feature will add private messages to the web site.
• At the end of the presentation, five big publishers were shown on the screen; Electronic Arts, Take Two Interactive, Square Enix, LucasArts and Microsoft. The press conference said that one of those five publishers has signed a deal with GoG.com to bring 25 of its classic games to the site this summer. Two more of the above publishers are in talks with GoG.com to bring some of their own games to the download service as well.

While more and more game soundtracks are being released as paid separate products the folks at developers People Can Fly and Epic Games have decided to go ahead and release the music from the recent first person shooter Bulletstorm for free.

The soundtrack contains 24 separate tracks totaling 55 minutes of music from the game's composers Michal Cielecki and Krzysztof Wierzynkiewicz. Unfortunately the soundtrack doesn't have the "Disco Inferno" track that is heard in the game while your character is in a, well, futuristic disco. However you can't go wrong with the price and quite frankly we would like to see more soundtracks release for free.

Download the Bulletstorm soundtrack at Big Download

An annoying issue for some Dragon Age Origins PC players has supposedly been resolved. A post on the game's official message boards states that an online issue that kept players from playing the DLC content for the fantasy RPG "should now be fixed."

The issue started on April 9 and has angered a number of the game's players who have felt that BioWare's DRM set-up is to blame for this latest issue in the 2009 released RPG. An editorial at Ars Technica sums up the argument: "The fact that DA:O has to reauthorize my DLC every time I log into the Bioware server is just nuts, and it sets users up for all sorts of problems."

[Via Blue's News]

After holding a previous open beta test of Darkspore via Steam, Electronic Arts has now released a stand alone open beta client for the upcoming sci-fi action-RPG. The open beta for the game will last from now on April 22. The beta client contains 12 maps and 15 character progressions.

You can check out a massive patch notes list for the latest beta client at the game's official web site. It includes the addition of the Endless Play mode, described as letting players "chain to harder versions of the same Darkspore Threat level to prove their skills and to increase the chance of gaining rare special items." The game itself is set for release on April 26.

Download the Darkspore Open Beta Client at Big Download

Accessing downloadable content for Dragon Age Origins have caused problems for at least some players of BioWare's first game in its fantasy RPG series. Over the weekend players of the game encountered issues while trying to login and play the DLC packs for the game.

BioWare's Rob Bartel finally posted up word on the game's official message boards on Monday that BioWare was aware of the DLC issues, saying that the online servers "experienced an as yet unidentified failure" that cause some players to see a message "indicating that the DLC was unauthorized." BioWare says it is now looking into the problems and "working to resolve the issue on our end."

So far the games in BioWare's Mass Effect RPG series have been strictly single-player based affairs. The upcoming third game in the sci-fi series will continue that trend with no multiplayer features planned. But could BioWare see itself making a Mass Effect MMO game one day?

Reporting from Game Informer's recent print preview of Mass Effect 3, VG247.com states that BioWare's Casey Hudson admitted, "A lot of people say that they want to see an MMO, I think that kind of makes sense for this universe." He added, "I think Mass Effect has that quality to it. If you get rid of the Reapers and win that, wouldn't it be amazing to just live on the Citadel or just take a ship to Omega? That makes sense."

While last week's update on the Star Wars The Old Republic web site may have been an April Fool's joke, this week's update for the upcoming MMO is quite real and very detailed. Georg Zoeller, the Principal Lead Combat Designer for the game, gives out even more info about the advanced character classes in the game.

The update shows how the classes skill trees work to give the classes more abilities, with lots of examples. The blog update also shows how developer BioWare uses server metrics to evaluate how the advanced character classes work for players, including movement heat maps.