ArenaNet have updated their Guild Wars 2 FAQ, mentioning that they will be running closed alpha and beta events later this year. The success of the closed testing events will decide when a public beta will go live, and will be used to nail down a release date for the game.
ArenaNet posted the news on the Guild Wars 2 FAQ “We will be conducting small closed alpha and beta tests in 2011. The feedback from these tests will determine when we will do public beta tests and ship the game. Guild Wars 2 is a very large and ambitious game, and Guild Wars players rightfully have very high expectations. We want players to be absolutely blown away by the game the first time they experience it.”
Posting on the Guild Wars 2 Guru forums, ArenaNet’s Regina Buenaobra said that “the existence of friends and family closed alpha and closed beta this year has changed nothing about the release date. The release date continues to be: when the game is ready.” There’s currently no way to sign up for the Guild Wars 2 beta, in spite of a series of scam sites claiming that there is. We’ll let you know when ArenaNet start offering beta invites.
ArenaNet have recently revealed the Guardian profession, and have been talking about how combat will work in Guild Wars 2. We’ve had some first hand experience with Guild Wars 2’s scraps. Read our preview for a taste of ArenaNet’s refreshing take on MMO combat.
Oxford quintet Radiohead have once again announced that they’re to release a new album outside the usual channels, and have gone online to tell us all about it. The King Of Limbs will be released digitally on February 19th in both MP3 and Wav format, and can be “pre-ordered” now, which is an odd concept. This will be followed on March 11th by the world’s first “newspaper album”, I hope this doesn’t mean releasing it through the Daily Mirror like Prince. (The most exiting move of his career indeed!) This will feature the album on double vinyl, CD and download with an array of artwork, 625 tiny pieces of artwork and a full-colour piece of oxo-degradeable plastic to hold it all together”, and a portion of chips to be wrapped in it. Possibly.
BibliOdyssey gathers the work of the Sanborn Map Company’s anonymous artists, who created amazing cover illustrations for its insurance documentation. These works clearly involved intense labor for many hours; they seem to embody a particular genius, at the place where technical drawing and typography become one, rarely encountered in the computer age. We just don’t make dull official things this delightful anymore.
The long-running attempts by former college football players to earn a share of EA’s revenues from the NCAA series won’t just affect video games and “amateur” athletics. It could supposedly hit music, TV, movies and comic books too.
The legal battle, which was originally between former NCAA players (College level basketball players basically) and the games publisher, has grown over the years to now include everyone from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund to Bob Marley’s estate to major Hollywood motion picture studios, all concerned with the case’s potential to limit the creative use of a celebrity in a work of art. EA’s lawyers state that, were courts to find that the publisher owed the players money for simply insinuating that they were present in the game (players are not named, though all stats and characteristics are based on those of the player in question), it would “severely stifle artistic expression”.
They specifically give the example of the movie Forrest Gump, saying that the film’s use of actual persons and celebrities wouldn’t have been possible if “artists” were not allowed to use real people in their work. The athlete’s lawyers, meanwhile, say that NCAA Football is not “art” at all, and is a simulation that is entirely based in — and profiting off unlicensed players existing in — reality.
This week, Bret Taylor, chief technology officer at Facebook and co-founder and former chief executive of FriendFeed, which was acquired by Facebook in August 2009, is providing his musing on when and were the next social revolution will spring from. After deducing a rough opinion from some articles he written and some interviews he’s given, a brief overview of Facebook as of the start of 2011 looks like this:
Founded in February 2004, Facebook is a social network utility and website, with over 600 million active users. The company is privately held, so does not publish official results, but says it is cash positive as of 2009. Facebook employs over 2,000 people and has offices in 12 countries.
Probably the biggest technology problem that Facebook tells us they have is delivering Facebook to all the people who use it, in the places they want to use it. The past couple of years has seen a rise in really advanced mobile devices. The most symbolic of this is the iPhone, but now with the Android operating system we’re seeing a huge amount of innovation in the mobile space, and more and more people are interacting with Facebook as much on their mobile devices as on their PCs and laptops.
The Facebook platform really took off in the gaming industry. Zynga for example is a company based in San Francisco. It currently has a market cap that exceeds that of Electronic Arts, which was the incumbent game company before Zynga. The company is completely defined by social gaming though – games that you play with your friends. All of their games are Facebook-enabled. They dont seem to really be anywhere else though, Surely relying on Facebook as a platform is just bad planning by Zynga. But that’s a blog for another day.
In light of the recent news about Charlie Sheen, the USA’s leading newspaper, the Hollywood Reporter, conducted a survey on 700 Americans between the ages of 13 and 59 to find out how they felt about the Actor:
90 percent of “avid fans” don’t think drug and alcohol abuse problems matter as long as Sheen does a good job on the show.
56 percent think that a future episode of Two and a Half Men should address Charlie Sheen’s personal issues.
96 percent of Two and a Half Men viewers want Sheen to return to the show (only 4 percent want him to quit permanently).
82 percent of women say they will still watch Two and a Half Men despite Sheen’s personal problems compared to 76 percent of men.
59 percent of all viewers believe that Sheen isn’t acting on the show but actually just playing himself.
62 percent say media should leave him alone.
In fact, 26 percent of those questioned for the Hollywood Reporter survey done by polling firm Penn Schoen Berland view Sheen “much more” or “somewhat more” favorably after his recent antics.
In what I think is the most intelligent use of the biggest social networking site for age if not so far, Blizzard have pledged to reveal a new and exclusive Diablo 3 screenshot for every 25,000 Likes they receive on their Facebook page. They will keep offering new screens until the page exceeds the one million mark.
This quote recently appeared on the Diablo Facebook page: “The Warcraft Facebook page recently hit 1 million who Like it and rubbed it in our faces. We know there are millions of Diablo players out there, and to take the fight back we have some incentives all lined up.”
We’ve heard hardly anything about Blizzard’s highly anticipated action RPG since the reveal of the Demon Hunter class at Blizzcon last year. That could be about to change, providing enough people show some love for the Diablo Facebook page. Right now 552,531 people like it, but that’s not enough. For every 25,000 extra likes it receives a new screenshot will be revealed.
If you like Diablo, swing by Facebook and declare your love officially. While you’re waiting for the 25,000 likes to roll in, have a read of our Diablo 3 preview, or check out the Diablo 3 site for more information.
BioWare has revealed that Clint Mansell will be composing the soundtrack for the third game in its epic sci-fi RPG series Mass Effect.
For those unfamiliar with Mansell, he has previously worked on Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler and Black Swan.
The prolific composer also created the soundtrack for Moon, which has a similar minimalist, ‘space’ vibe as Mass Effect.
Until now the Mass Effect soundtrack has been composed by Jack Wall, who has a long history in creating music for games. His works include Dungeon Siege II, Jade Empire, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and Myst IV: Revelation.
Though this is his first video game project, Mansell isn’t a complete stranger to the games industry. He is responsible for creating the soundtrack for the Doom movie which stared Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.
