Community Chronicle: 22/03/15

What a simply incredible trio of matches we saw play out yesterday to finish off the Six Nations Championship. First Wales dismantled a crumbling Italy, then Ireland did the same to Scotland and it was all capped off by an insanely free-form match betwen England and France.

A quite ludicrous 221 points were scored, and in the end it all came down to just three moments right at the end of each match, with tries scored or denied in the last few minutes to swing the points difference and eventually make Ireland this year’s champions.

It all bodes well for a rather entertaining Rugby World Cup, doesn’t it?

But moving on to the gaming news, and given the difficulties that the game faced at launch, it was with a sense of inevitability that Sony announced this week that Evolution Studios will be facing restructuring and redundancies – though trying to move employees to other studios in SWS – as they shift to focussing on Driveclub as a service.

JR. jumped right in to say, “It’s a shame because Driveclub is a great game now. They are obviously a very talented bunch of people but it’s clear there was a lack of communication and/or bad project managers.” Sentiments echoed by minerwilly, who said that it is “in my opinion the PS4’s best title so far and head and shoulders above anything else released.”

Tempering the announcement with modern realities, TSBonyman added that, “It’s pretty standard in the industry for layoffs to occur once a big project is completed and I wonder if they would have been let go sooner if the game had not required further work after launch.”

Yet there is always a certain fear when you hear such announcements. “I hope this isn’t the beginning of the end for Evolution”, said Jag, to which Camdaz replied, “Same here, Evolution Studios is one of my all time favourite developers.”

Obviously, we wish those who do end up being made redundant the best of luck in finding fresh employment.

There was a disappointing turn of events for fans of LEGO games, as Warner Bros. admitted that LEGO: The Hobbit will not actually be receiving the Five Armies DLC that was initially planned.

It’s something that Forrest_01 had been pondering since the game was released:

I did wonder how they were planning on handling the last episode with DLC when it was likely to be so far away from when the actual game released; there was no way that people were likely to hold onto the game for that long. Lego games rarely take a long time to complete/platinum, so unless people were specifically holding off for the DLC that they did say was going to come (& will therefore now be disappointed), it was probably traded ages ago.

Yet that promise of DLC has had such an effect on others. DividSmythe wrote, “This is a bit upsetting as I was holding off getting rid of this due to DLC coming out,” while gaffers101 added, “My son will be gutted. When Lego: The Hobbit came out I told him that the last film would be DLC. Bit rubbish to cancel it now.”

Pitcher-T recalled a rather similar bout of disappointment:

Finally, there have been some rumblings out of Nintendo this week, as they announced not just a new partnership with a company called DeNA, but they also spoke of a new device, going by the codename ‘NX’.

TSBonyman pondered:

They are in a difficult position but I feel they have brought it on themselves by taking the Wii’s success too much for granted. They must have made a mint on the Wii and they could have used that to develop hardware to equal PS4/XB1 instead of a device for a generation that was approaching the end of it’s shelf-life.

Whatever they are developing is probably still a few years away from launch so it will be interesting to see where they are targeting in comparison to the PS4/XB1.

JustTaylorNow, meanwhile, feels that this could be too late, saying “The Wii U is underrated but with PS4 & Xbox One selling like hot cakes, Nintendo left it a little too late to respond.”

On the other hand, Mark Lee thinks it’s almost immaterial, stating “I don’t think Nintendo ever have any hope of competing with the likes of Sony and Microsoft now. They need to do their own thing but, most importantly, they need to up the rate of new games being released. I love my Wii U and just wish I had more reasons to play it.”

Naturally, Nintendo and only do so much, and have been bringing a relatively steady stream of their own exclusives to the table. Without third parties though, their success relies on their own games and their own games alone.

It’s been a very, very busy March in terms of game releases, but that hasn’t really translated into lots of new games getting their platinum trophies grabbed, with a lot of indie titles and big huge games.

With that in mind, it’s surprising to see how far back people have gone into their collections. The most recent game to be completed was The Order: 1886, which Pixel_nme took the platinum for this week, though he has mostly been playing Destiny.

In amidst his generally very wide spread of games, R1MJAW made it 100% trophy completion for The Last Tinker, while the ever dependable trophy machine that is Crazy_Del found himself taking the platinum from Rambo for his 257th.

From one dodgy shooter to another, and hornet1990 managed to finish of a normal difficulty run of Medal of Honor: Warfighter. Why he played it, nobody will ever know, let alone why he persisted after it stopped loading his save!

A much better game became Carrot381‘s second platinum, as he completed Dust, while Avenger has returned to a much more accomplished shooter in Battlefield 3, getting himself an RPG helicopter kill, several repair tool tank kills and even the same person’s dog tags 4 times in 10 minutes. Sounds like he was running riot!

Rounding out this week’s achievements, Nintendave finished off the quite sublimely beautiful The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker HD, after spending 57 hours in the game over the course of three months.

We’re nearly done, but you can head over to page two for the return of the Fastest Platinum boards. To finish off this page, we have the usual submission form for photos and accomplishments.