In Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled, players will find themselves in a classic RPG setting and plot that hearkens back to days of 8-bit yore.

Guide your hero from city to dungeon to city, picking up new characters, and assembling a three-person team of skilled fighters while locating cool new items, and slowly revealing a dreadful plot that must be foiled. Along the way, find a ship that can travel the sea, then find a ship that can travel the air. This should all be familiar to players of classic RPGs from the 80’s and early 90’s. This game’s main goal seems to be a modernization of the 8-bit RPG, taking the classic RPG formula, and adapting it for the DS audience in a way that remakes of the actual classic RPGs cannot ever do.

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Fallout 3 meet id Software

It’s difficult to think of any studio more influential and controversial in the history of first person shooters then id Software.  In fact, id Software states that they “created the original first-person shooter, Wolfenstein 3D” and id Software co-founders have been the stuff of legends with John Romero’s rock star lifestyle before leaving id and John Carmack continuing to earn respect at id from gamers and developers alike.  Today, id Software, the creators of Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake announced that they’ve been acquired by ZeniMax Media, the parent company of another game studio legend, Bethesda Softworks of the Elder Scrolls series and Fallout 3.

At first glance, id, an almost exclusively first-person shooter dominated studio; and RPG powerhouse Bethesda may not seem to have that much in common, but this may be the thing that makes them the best fit.  With no directly overlapping internal competition this deal serves to expand ZeniMax Media’s portfolio without creating conflict between their respective subsidiaries.

In the joint press release from all three companies they have committed that id will continue with business as usual and that all of the principles at id have signed long term contracts with ZeniMax Media.  The major changes for id will be having access to more funding, business resources, and stronger marketing under their permanent new publisher. (more…)

Not exactly the manliest of protagonists

It’s a bit hard to swallow, but I’ll just make it clear: I absolutely admit that I am in love with JRPGs (for the uninitiated, that stands for Japanese Role Playing Games). They’re like my guilty pleasure, my summertime kitschy romance novel. Yes, I understand the stories are often pseudo-philosophical ramblings with juvenile solutions to non-problems. Yes, I understand that the style of art can either be considered childish or overtly paedophilic. Yes, I understand that at their core, every JRPG is essentially the same. Still, I collect them, play them, and love them. I blame my childhood introduction to the NES hit Final Fantasy as the start of this dark path.

One game I recently became enraptured with was Namco Bandai’s Eternal Sonata. I remember fondly the warm memories of me rushing to hide it from my friend Jeff when he unexpectedly stopped by my house. I knew that if he saw the big-eyed lead character “Polka” on screen, he would be relentless in his mockery. And why is this? Why should I be embarrassed that I am enjoying a game with an art style that may not fit the American cultural norm? While the art style can be considered juvenile in games like this, the stories are often very much adult.

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The Last Remnant

Steam continues to make inroads to being the premiere platform for PC game distribution by signing on one major publisher after another. Today Valve announced that SquareEnix, a major console RPG publisher, will be distributing their epic saga “The Last Remnant” to PC users via Steam on April 9.

The Last Remnant is a fairly typical Japanese-style RPG; a young, unlikely hero and his ragtag band of friends are the only thing that stand in the way of an epic, world-threatening power. It is the plot of almost every SquareEnix game in the last decade, including all of the Final Fantasy games. It is the first SquareEnix game, however, that has been developed using the Unreal Engine 3—also the engine behind their upcoming sure-to-be-blockbuster Final Fantasy XIII.

Because the game is developed using a PC-compatible game engine, a PC release makes sense; without a solid platform like Steam in place, however, games like this may never have made it to PC.

The game will also utilize Steamworks, which means you will probably be able to store save games and configuration customization  in the cloud, and it will follow you wherever you log in.

Mount & Blade

From a small, relatively unknown studio comes a game that, with just few tweaks could be the best open-ended RPG ever. That’s right, I said it. Mount & Blade gets it right, where so many before have failed to deliver. This game is what The Elder Scrolls franchise should have become. Remember Daggerfall? Remember how cool it was to be able to go everywhere, and get quests and goals and items from wherever you wanted? Remember running into foes that you actually couldn’t beat, and thinking of certain places and areas as too dangerous to visit? Daggerfall is actually a pretty good place to start from when describing Mount & Blade. Okay: Take Daggerfall, give it modern 3D graphics. Change the world map to an  overland travel screen, add a tactics-style party management system, allow the player to fight from horseback, and remove the monsters and magic system. That’s Mount & Blade.

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