TGO Daily | January 8, 2021 | FFXIV "Endwalker"
February 8, 2021
In The News
FFXIV "Endwalker"
The next expansion for Final Fantasy 14 (the MMORPG) has been announced, and it’s called Endwalker — expected for release in the fall of this year. I won’t even pretend to understand the story elements, so if you’d like to read about that, check out Polygon’s article. It seems like people will be able to go to the moon (?).
The game will introduce two new jobs. One is a healer, called Sage, and the other is a unnamed melee DPS. The level cap is going up by 10 levels from 80 to 90.
In case you didn’t know, they offer a demo for FFXIV which is an entire game in itself. They essentially want to get you hooked so that you buy the expansions. I’ve heard great things about it though!
WB Games Patent
Warner Bros. has officially, and finally, acquired a patent for the Nemesis system from the Middle-Earth games. They’ve been trying to get this for the past 6 years, and the US Patent and Trademark office have now accepted it. They can maintain it until 2035.
If you never played the games — the Nemesis system was a feature where enemies that killed the player would become a “nemesis.” Because of their success, the Orc would be promoted within his ranks and become stronger, making it even more difficult to defeat the next time around.
People loved the feature, and wondered why other developers didn’t do anything similar. Now, if they want to do it, they may have to license it from WB. What exactly have they patented? The simple version, from IGN:
the “short” version is that the patent covers a system featuring procedurally-generated NPCs that exist in a hierarchy and interact with and will remember the actions of players, have their appearance/behavior altered by players, and whose place in that hierarchy can change and affect the position of other NPCs in said hierarchy (and yes, that’s the simplified version).
The move to patent this system has been criticized by fans and game developers alike. Its patents like this which have prevented some pretty interesting things from happening, like having a minigame play during loading screens. Conversely, the patent is fairly broad, and it is unknown if WB is actually interested in acting on it.
Factorio expansion
One of the most successful Steam games of all time, Factorio, is going to be getting its first paid expansion. They explored a bunch of different options for how they were going to move forward now that the base game is done (free updates? Factorio 2?) and decided that a big expansion is best. More details according to their blog post:
The Grab-Bag
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time delayed once again, this time indefinitely. Previously delayed in September up to March 2021. Fan feedback to the delay has been largely positive, which is a nice change of pace.
Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe heading to Steam after being free and open source over the last 15 years. Arriving on April 1st. It’s a classic city builder focus on transportation services.
Hitman 3 PC players can import the save data from Hitman 2 by the end of February. It was one of their priorities post-release, glad to see its almost there.
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