Fallout 4's launch was a huge success. Bethesda announced today that the game shipped 12 million copies worldwide for launch day alone, "representing sales in excess of $750 million." In addition, the game is generating "record sales" at brick and mortar stores and across Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, andPC.
Bethesda did not say how many of those 12 million copies shipped to retailers were actually sold through to consumers. The $750 million number likely represents the total possible revenue, if indeed all 12 million were actually sold. We've contacted Bethesda in an attempt to learn more about Fallout 4's performance.
"Major retailers have informed Bethesda of the tremendous consumer interest in Fallout 4 , with some noting it was the most pre-ordered game this year," Bethesda added, noting that the Pip-Boy Edition became the fastest-selling collector's edition for any game in history "at leading retailers."
"Following the release, Bethesda was advised that launch day sales at some of the leading retail chains were the largest of any game released this year," the company explained. "Bethesda is now shipping more Fallout 4 units to retailers to meet ongoing market demand."
For various reasons, not every Square Enix game gets localized for the western market, despite interest from gamers. Now, a Square Enix executive has said he's open to the idea of using crowdfunding to help fund the localization process. Speaking in the latest issue ofGame Informer, Square Enix Europe CEO Phil Rogers didn't make any promises, but said crowdfunding "seems very natural" for such an endeavor.
"It's a topic that comes up a lot, and we understand why it does," he said about localization in general. "To a great extent, in a really positive way, we're absolutely humbled that we have this loyal and dedicated fanbase that wants to give us the feedback. We're constantly working with the teams in Tokyo to show them this and to work with them there. The simple truth is that in some ways the development process and the tools, it's not always an easy undertaking to reopen a game and add localization subsequently.
"But I think as we go forward, with the way the group is working, technically, and the way it's now thinking globally, I'm really hoping that in the next 10 years, localization is seen as pleasing all our fans, because it's truly global and the methods in which we can localize now are vastly improved."
Asked specifically if crowdfunding could be a means to help localize more games, Rogers agreed that it could, but stopped short of confirming any specifics plans. He also said Square Enix fans are smart; they understand that the localization process can be time-consuming and expensive.
Some games may never be localized. But Rogers suggested that crowdfunding is a "very natural" idea to help fund localization for certain games.
"I think it's a really interesting idea," he said about crowdfunding. "I would love to try and work with that, to find a way, because ultimately we want to satisfy the demands of the fans. I think also, our fans are very rational. They understand, and if we explain things, they often go, 'Oh, I get that now. Thanks for explaining.' They know it's complex, or very expensive, and it's not as simply as you say as using Google Translate."
He added: "To get that essence of it actually translated requires this amount of resource. To see if fans want to sign up for it and say, 'This is the absolute demand for it,' and we can set targets and say if we achieve that, then we can do it. I think that's a relationship that seems very natural to build. I'd love to see how we get that to work."
In most sports games, instant replays are made to be skipped. In PES 2016, however, you’ll savour every crunching challenge, every kick, flick and fumble. Watching them back in super slow-mo is a genuinely disruptive compulsion, but then even the most minor moments in PES 2016 impress.
After years in flux, unsure whether to pursue a slick arcade experience or weigh it down with lengthy animations, PES Productions finally finds the answer: do both. There are three times as many animations here but they're sped up and cut down so the window of time in which you cede control is drastically reduced. As a result, matches consistently throw up surprises, but not at the expenses of reducing your feeling of involvement in the action.
After many hours of play I'm still seeing new moves, whether it’s Pogba improvising to volley an awkward hip-high ball or Lahm riding a challenge before seamlessly repositioning his feet and blasting it wide like a dummkopf. So numerous and natural are these bespoke motions, all used in the right time and the right context, they almost seem like the player's organic reactions rather than the computer picking from a bank of appropriate actions.
That said, it can feel almost too mechanical at times, particularly shooting. For some reason I hit the crossbar seven times in the same match—seven!—suggesting there’s a limited number of outcomes. While player collisions feel meaty, there’s no compelling feedback on shots. They just seem to travel stoically through space like spherical incarnations of the Silver Surfer.
PES doesn't enforce or promote a particular playstyle, though. You can play this like the PES games of old, kicking the computer down to easy and giving yourself a platform to express yourself with ridiculous runs, outrageous skill moves, and 70% possession, or you can notch the difficulty up and answer its fearsome but not unfair challenge. A stream of thrilling moments make the former consistently exciting, and incredible tactical depth makes the latter more rewarding.
Strategy offers extra dimension, and on higher difficulties a keen managerial mind is equally important as players’ physicality. During one tense encounter against FC Bayern I command Man United’s Rojo to mark danger man Lewandowski order formally rampaging midfielders Depay and Fellaini to stay back, and make my entire team keep a disciplined shape to contain the play. Instructions are simple to use and immediately noticeable.
Poor portsmanship
Where PES 2016 falls down, however, is this port’s surprisingly poor quality. It practically runs in slow motion (I actually had to whack the game speed on ‘fast’ just to bring it up to standard), and textures are hideous. Football boots look like blurred lumps of clay, logos across formally crisp kits are stretched and ugly, and the pitchside police basically waltzed in from a Playmobil set. Konami's other Fox Engine game, The Phantom Pain, performs excellently on PC, and even the last PES was solid, so why this looks and runs like a PS3/360 game is a mystery. It seems Konami can’t wait to ditch videogames and storm the pachinko market.
Still, in this curious mix of last-gen and new-gen, there is detail to be found. Sweat runs, kits muddy, players grimace during jostles, and there are some great contextual goal celebrations. At one point I run over to the advertising hoarding and my player jumps on it, arms pumping. License-wise the UEFA Champions League remains a coup, but the omission of most of the Bundesliga, and a lack of official Premier League teams aside from Manchester United, cheapens the experience. You can, however, import edited strips, logos and team files.
The lack of authenticity continues to hurt the Master League career mode. Select Chelsea, for instance, and you’ll manage a team called London FC who play out of a generic toilet bowl stadium. Diego Costa just doesn't look right in canary yellow. MyClub makes more sense by focusing on the fundamentals of squad building. Unlike in FIFA Ultimate Team, where players form chemistry with each other based on nationalities, here it’s how well they gel with the manager’s style, and while hunting for superstars can start to cost actual money, there are cheaper routes to building your dream team, whether utilising training or getting lucky with a scout. There’s a strong sense of ownership over your developing squad as you lead them into battle offline and on.
On consoles, PES 2016 successfully captures football’s complexities in the fastest, freshest and most responsive entry in years. On PC? It looks dated and runs slower. It’s still PES Productions’ best effort in some time, but the poor port is a bitter letdown.
World of Tanks is a global phenomenon, and its success has become a new genre of sorts: the World War 2 vehicle shooter. World of Warships, the newest entry in the series after 2013’s World of Warplanes, is finally out of drydock and officially launched. Its mix of ponderous warships and huge guns—the biggest guns ever fired in anger by mankind—is beautiful, polished, and a joy to play. Warships is the most thoughtful Wargaming game so far, but its economy continues Wargaming’s pattern of expensive, exploitative freemium prices.
Across the archipelagos of the South Pacific and the glacier fields of Alaska, the vessels of World of Warships duke it out. Unlike the dense urban landscapes in World of Tanks, there’s very little to hide behind. Unlike dogfighting aircraft in World of Warplanes, battleships are slow and vulnerable. Without the freedom to escape, turn, or hide, Warships places even greater emphasis on group tactics and positioning than its land and air-based siblings.
Full steam ahead
Ships are controlled from an overhead view, as though the captain was hovering twenty feet over the central tower. Wargaming continues to be a dab hand at making controls that turn a complicated war machine into an accessible, keyboard-friendly vehicle. The rudder and throttle controls are designed to be set and forgotten, as though a subordinate had an order yelled at them while the captain worried about other things.
Planning ahead is key for Warships. Especially in larger boats, bringing guns around to face an enemy takes a minute. Knowing that enemies will most likely come from the East, and planning accordingly, gives captains time to get pointed in the right direction with the explodey-parts facing the bad guys. This same slowness also makes flanking especially effective in Warships: sneaking around an island to come up behind a ship gives the crafty tactician a solid 30 seconds of free punches while the victim’s cannons rotate around to counter.
I had one particularly tense battle at the helm of the USS Montana, a truly monstrous battleship with guns as big around as my car tires. An enemy cruiser flanked our lead position and started making trouble, so I rotated my twelve barrels of kickass and started aiming down the gunner sights. In my narrow field of view, he sailed straight toward me. As the distance closed I measured his range on tiny hashmarks, leading the target from ten kilometers away. His profile was tiny and constantly shifting. Though it pained me, I kept taking single shots instead of unleashing my entire battery at once, trying to get my aim just right. Each time, my shot fell just short or just off to the side of his vulnerable hull.
Then, he made a mistake. To better engage me, he turned his fat broadside my way and stopped closing the distance. With a huge, wide target sitting at a set range, I took one more targeting shot. When it landed smack amidships, I enjoyed an evil smile and fired all four batteries at once. Twelve 16-inch shells, each weighing about three tons, arced across the sky and dropped on his head like the fist of an angry god, sinking his ship in one volley. If this had been Counter-Strike, I would have just landed a head-shot with the AWP. I got the same sense of satisfaction, even if it did take about five minutes to fully play out.
There’s an art to angles in Warships, and it tickles the tiny, forgotten part of my brain that experiences math as a form of pleasure. (I’ve tried to subdue that part of my brain with booze, but alas, it remains.) With guns mounted all down the body of a ship, facing broadside to an enemy is the best way to unload on some poor sucker. Unfortunately, going broadside also shows the enemy team a huge target to shoot at. There’s a sweet spot at around 30 degrees that brings all guns onto a target while minimizing exposure. Instead of doing a barrel roll or hiding behind a bombed-out church, this mental geometry is how captains stay safe on the oceans. And because boats can't pivot instantaneously, it takes pleasant intuition to pull off.
I’ve mentioned it in passing already, but Warships looks incredibly good. Even as pretty as it is, it comes packed with graphics options that should tone down enough for less powerful rigs to run it. It includes support for multiple monitors and a variety of native resolutions. “Sky and Clouds Quality” and “Sea Rendering Quality” would sound like esoteric settings for minutia in any other game, but in Warships half of what the game renders is water or sky. On my GTX 970, I had no problem getting a solid 60 frames per second on the highest quality settings.
There’s a huge variety of gadgets and weapons to play with, from scout planes to emergency repair crews. Each of Warships’ four ship types (destroyer, cruiser, carrier, and battleship) drive differently. Some are slower, more powerful, or pack smoke screens and deadly torpedo spreads.
The most unique is the aircraft carrier, which carries no ship-to-ship guns at all. Carriers are commanded from an overhead view as the flight deck manager, ordering flights of torpedo boats to attack enemy battleships or sending fighters to intercept enemy bombers. Playing a carrier feels like a slow-moving RTS has been welded onto the side of a different game, and I don’t think the native view works very well. Looking down on the carrier with a zoomed-out camera leaves out all the information I need to make decisions, so my carrier experience was spent almost entirely inside the tactical map screen. To break up the monotony, I enjoyed watching from the attacking warplanes’ perspective, but it's mostly a passive experience. Even so, after a few hours of pounding distant cruisers with artillery, dispatching torpedo sneak attacks was refreshingly new.
Stock the larders
All four types of ship also come in multiple tiers representing the advances technology brought to these war machines. The carrier is a good example: the lowest tier is a converted coal tanker, the USS Langley, with a deck covered in canvas-winged bi-planes. Carriers evolve up through the USS Lexington to the USS Midway, a late-War behemoth.
There’s no denying that high-end vessels are crazy fun to play. As the Japanese giantYamato, I terrorized the local battlefield, parking myself in shallows with a clear line of sight and raining explosive hell down on half the server. As the Midway, I hid behind a volcanic island just meters from the fighting, sending fighters and bombers overland and back again, picking the enemy apart. The trouble is that most players will never see these late game ships. World of Warships is Wargaming’s most expensive, grind-heavy meta-economy yet.
These ships are expensive, and playing at the highest tier is going to devour time and money. In order to research and then buy all of the ships required to play as the Midway—and then the Midway herself—I’d need to spend about $177 total. Grinding the XP (which isn’t purchasable) that you need to unlock the Midway would likely earn a fair chunk of in-game currency, but not enough, so that's more grinding to do if you want to avoid paying. Meanwhile, you also need to use in-game currency to repair ships and reload guns.
The USS Langley’s quaint biplanes are slow and weak, but their torpedo attack isn’t messing around.
Researching all of the American carrier branch costs over 700,000 XP, which I estimate would take me between 1,500 and 3,000 games—a truly interminable grind. Earning XP and in-game currency would be faster with a Premium account, which can be had for $90 per year or $11 a month. Premium ships like the $38 USS Atlanta can be bought at any time without spending time on XP.
It’s laudable, I guess, that unskilled players with cash to spare can’t just outright purchase the best ships in the game (they can buy pretty good ones, but not the best). The ship tiers themselves function as a type of matchmaking filter as well, so people in the biggest ships are going to find themselves against the best players around. To be fair, you do get a lot of ships fairly quickly. Most players will have no problem unlocking the first four tiers of ships, which gives access to all four types of ship and a lot of options. But after that tier, prices go up exponentially. It's unfortunate that so much of this game’s wonderful art, the gleaming steel decks and rusting hull panels and black-bored guns, won’t be seen except by a narrow sliver of die-hard fans.
For the rest of us, playing Warships for free at the lowest tiers offer a great tactical puzzle and an unusual take on the online team deathmatch. Finally sinking a troublesome battleship with a well-placed volley or torpedoing a carrier from behind is incredibly rewarding. Gorgeous lighting and water effects gently reflect infernos of burning steel. It’s a game that I want to come back to again and again. The lowest tier ships are fun, and that’s good—most players will probably only see the first three or four levels. With so much amazing art and incredible history in the biggest ships, though, I just wish that more of us could see everything Warships has to offer without an aggressive, expensive grind.
Reviewing FIFA 16 for PC is a tricky proposition. Sure, EA Canada has yet again laid out an all encompassing soccer smörgåsbord that boasts immaculate presentation and dizzying production values. Yet it's hard to fight off the feeling this season's effort feels more like a glorified DLC pack, rather than the full priced annual update you'd hope for.
No Touch Dribbling. Dynamic Crossing. Clinical Finishing. Confidence In Defending. Interception Intelligence. Good lord does EA love a capitalised buzz phrase. Unfortunately, most of this year's supposedly new on-pitch features translate into diddly squat when you're looking for tangible, easily felt improvements over FIFA 15.
Nearly everything that was right and wrong on the field last year remains in FIFA 16. That means slightly floaty shooting, fiddly tackling, lots of wing play and many an unspectacular tap-in dribbling over the line. Of course, it also means an incredibly solid passing game, with emphasis on satisfying buildup play and ferociously whipped in crosses. In other words, EA's chart-topping juggernaut still plays a cracking game of football... for the most part.
What little that has changed revolves around subtly tinkered with passing on the ground. Previously, the FIFA community would complain that zipping the ball about a packed midfield was like a giant game of human pinball being played out between 22 millionaires. Now, though, stroking the ball even 10 yards between midfielders can feel downright glacial, with passes demonstrably slower than they were last year.
It's not necessarily a bad thing—it certainly gives FIFA 16 a more realistic tempo—but given the fact many matches against the CPU are already unspectacular, low-scoring affairs, it leaves you with an experience that feels diligent, thoughtful, yet ultimately a little—whisper it—boring.
FIFA 16 may occasionally give into the Dull Side of the Force, but at least it's progressive in other areas. At long last women are represented in a football game. Considering the impact last year's terrific Women's World Cup had on broadening the appeal of the sport, this is a welcomingly inclusive move on EA's part.
The 12 national women's sides offered might be a little stingy in number, but it’s a start and at least an effort has been made to ensure their matches feel different from the men's game. The action is slower and more deliberate. Slightly more languid turning circles mean dribbling in tight spaces is difficult, encouraging a more robust style of passing. I found the altered pace refreshing.
Whether playing as men or women, FIFA's life-swallowing online offering is stronger than ever. EA's streamlined matchmaking is so confident and reliable at this point, instantly hopping into lag-free multiplayer matches is something you instantly take for granted. And of course, FIFA Ultimate Team (the absurdly addictive card-collecting mode) is back and remains the crowning jewel. This time, the headline addition is FUT Draft; a set of one-off tournaments that reward you for putting together winning streaks. The bigger the run of victories, the better the prizes—I bagged three Premium Gold Packs for a three-match win streak, one of which gave me Messi and Aguero as loan players.
This being 2015, these juicy card prizes don't come for free. You have to cough up 15,000 FUT coins or 300 FIFA points to enter a Draft tournament—the latter costing roughly £1/$1 of real money per 100 points. While you can still play the rest of FUT for free and have a grand old time winning games as you build up the Chemistry rating of your team by tweaking your squad and formation, EA's love of micro-transactions is a reminder that FIFA 16 isn't exactly great value for money. At £50/$60 for the standard edition, the lack of significant on-field improvements grates.
Make no mistake: this is still an exhaustive package. There are enough licensed teams, leagues and spot-on player likenesses here to, well, launch your own brown-envelope-free rival governing body. And, unlike PES 16's pitiful PC showing, FIFA 16 is a cracking port that runs well on a variety of rigs—I played on a (admittedly monstrous) 980 TI, and the subsequent 4K/unfaltering 60fps action was totally sumptuous.
Technical triumph aside, there's no denying EA's soccer goliath is resting on its considerable laurels. Between FIFA 09-12, each new entry introduced bold new revisions—think 360-Degree Dribbling and Tactical Defending—which had a transformative effect on the actual football year after year. Yet since moving to the Ignite engine, the series has effectively stood still. Is FIFA 16 still the best football sim you can buy on PC? Absolutely. Has it also utterly stagnated over the last two years? You can bet Diego Costa's hollowed out soul it has.
If you close your eyes and imagine what a PC port of a Ubisoft Wii U game from 2012 is like, I suspect you'll hit pretty close to the mark. Zombi looks a bit dated, the controls are a tad cumbersome, there are extremely limited video and sound options, and there are a number of bugs and broken features. It's a damn shame, too, because buried under the rubble of this lackluster port is a spooky, startling, challenging, and often highly enjoyable survival horror game.
Zombi takes place in an undead-infested London, and after stumbling into the safehouse of a man who calls himself Prepper you begin undertaking various missions for him, and later, perform tasks for other characters with their own agendas. You'll visit a number of locations during these linear missions, including a zombie-infested Buckingham Palace, and as you reach these areas they become open-world, meaning you can revisit them later. With only a small backpack to carry what you find, you'll constantly have to make tough choices about what scavenged weapons and supplies to take or leave behind as your progress through the story missions.
Zombified Londoners are no joke. While a lone zombie isn't much of a threat, putting it down is still hard work. Just as smashing a head open with a cricket bat in real life isn't easy (I imagine, anyway), so it is in Zombi, and I found myself mentally grunting as much as my character vocally grunted, as we smashed and smashed and smashed until that zombie head finally burst. When you're swarmed by several zeds it can be a harrowing, almost exhausting experience. If a zombie lands a swipe, kiss a big chunk of your health goodbye, and if they get their teeth on you, you're finished. It often takes several shots from pistols, rifles, and crossbows to put down a shambler, even with headshots, and ammo is precious and needs to saved for the most dire of circumstances. This results in a lot of cautious exploration, tons of tension, bouts of panic, and careful planning, all of which is essential for an effective survival horror.
Robbing zombie
I'm gonna need that backpack, zombified-me from a few minutes ago.
A wonderful aspect of Zombi is that when you die, you begin back at the safehouse playing as a different survivor, but the character who just died is still out in the world along with your collected weapons and supplies. Head there with your new character and you'll find your old body, shambling around zombified, and get to beat its brains in and take back your loot. (If you die before you can recover your gear, though, it's gone forever.) The different survivors you play don't speak but you do absorb a little of their personalities: some gasp in horror or panic as they split open heads, some roar with rage, and one—my favorite—occasionally erupts in nervous, horrified laughter while pummeling zombies into pulp. It's a nice little touch to make you feel as if you really are playing a different person every time you lose someone.
Final Fantasy 15 Will Get Simultaneous Worldwide Release
Final Fantasy XV was a hot topic during Gamescom last week, when director Hajime Tabata revealed a handful of new details, including the news that the game is on track to be released before 2017, implying that it will be released sometime in 2016.
When asked about the amount of work that's been accomplished over the last year--when it was first revealed that Tabata was taking over the project that was originally helmed by Kingdom Hearts III director, Tetsuya Nomura--Tabata revealed that Final Fantasy XV will be the first main Final Fantasy game to be released simultaneously across all regions.
"This may be something that we are little bit embarrassed to talk about, but really, this is the first time that we've done a packaged, standalone Final Fantasy game with a simultaneous global launch, so we didn't have the setup to deal with that, really. The first thing we had to do was rearrange our internal structure to create something that could do that. That was the first important work on the project."
The last "main" Final Fantasy game, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, was released in Japan on Nov. 21, 2013. It took three more months for the game to reach other regions, in February 2014.
A full transcription of our interview with Tabata will be live later this week, with more new info on the upcoming RPG that was announced over nine years ago, at E3 2006.
