Community Chronicle: 24/01/16

The extreme blizzards sweeping across the east coast of America have certainly had a major impact on the country being able to do everything from going to the shops to getting to work, but it’s meant that we’ve all been able to enjoy videos of dinosaurs shovelling snow, the grim reaper wandering the streets and panda bears frolicking.

Seriously, is there anything better than Tian Tian rolling about in a snow drift?

One of the big surprises this week was the pricing of The Witness, with the game being pegged at £29.99/$39.99 after a very long time in development. Of course, it’s still an atypically high price point for an indie game, which makes it all the more fascinating a decision.

Of course, that development time has been put to good use. TSBonyman said, “Well, extending it from a 10 hour game to a 100 hour game certainly explains the long delay. Thing is, it doesn’t look like the kind of game I would want to play for 100 hours, more like the kind of game I would dip into occasionally for a half hour at a time.”

The price does move it out of that impulse buy bracket, however, and Youles said that “without any pre-order incentive I’ll no doubt wait for a price drop. As I don’t think it’s an AAA title, it’ll probably be reduced by £5-£10 fairly quickly, hopefully.”

Though Youles’ reasoning was that he needs to cut down on game related expenditure in general, Tomhlord asked, “But what even is ‘AAA’ and why should that dictate price over game quality and depth?”

And that’s a very interesting question.

A lot of petrol heads rejoiced this week, as Assetto Corsa’s console release was announced for April 22nd. It’s the latest sim racer to be joining the console ranks, alongside Project CARS, Forza 6 and the forthcoming GT Sport, but perhaps this focus is leaving another bracket of racing game underserved?

Forrest_01 asked, “Seriously, is it too much to ask to have an arcade racer release that allows for multiplayer & mucho bashing? Dirt Showdown 2 would be awesome, or Motorstorm Apocalypse 2, or even a new Burnout. I’m not fussy!”

Avenger replied to say that “There’s NFS and The Crew, but some Burnout style mayhem is definitely needed.

“I love the fact there’s so many racing sims coming out. Personally I don’t mind arcade racing as long as it’s pure arcade (just for fun), and not some formal racing/driving culture game with a [rubbish] arcade handling model.”

Forrest went on to site the likes of Blur, Split Second, Burnout, Dirt Showdown and MotorStorm Apocalypse on PS3, but the problem is that none of these games really performed well enough at the tills.

The developers of Blur and Split Second shut down soon after, while Burnout evolved into Need for Speed as Criterion have been all but consumed by Ghost Games. Dirt Showdown was a brief dalliance for Codemasters who’ve barely made the jump to the current generation, and Evolution Studios are hard at work on Driveclub, but were on the brink of closure after MS:A’s difficult launch.

In short, there’s not really any studios left that are still working in this particular bracket of videogames.

Finally came the news of just how much the PlayStation 4 is outselling the Xbox One in mainland Europe, with a huge gulf between the two consoles.

JR. said, “I expected Xbox One sales to be worse in Europe, to be honest, and PlayStation 4 sales to be better. Only 1 million PS4’s sold in the whole of France? 1.4 million in Germany? Doesn’t seem many for the whole year. XB1 sales aren’t great but they’re not as bad as I thought either.”

But maybe he just needs a little perspective. Bunimomike replied, “Have a good look through the years to get a feeling for how consoles sell in each region (and country) and you can see that the PS4 is doing blindingly well. It’s something I felt a generation or two ago when I thought ‘Oh, that’s not much,’ and I just needed context. It was a bucket-load!”

Sticking with JR. as we turn to the achievements, and having been on a bit of a Call of Duty catch up, he ploughed his way through Advanced Warfare last week. Unfortunately, he felt it needed a better story overall.

Eldave0 has been saving the story of Resident Evil Revelations 2 until last, as he made sure to get all of the more annoying trophies out of the way so he could just enjoy the last couple of chapters as he cruises to the platinum.

And TSBonyman’s over the hump in Driveclub, as he finally managed to hit level 50 in the game, which surely means he’s very close to getting the shiniest of all trophies. MrYd, meanwhile, put his claim to the fastest platinum record for Hyperdimension Neptunia U Action Unleashed on PS Vita.

Finally, Lyts1985 nabbed the platinum trophies for Rocket League and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune Remastered. However, while he was put off diving into the sequel after playing Uncharted for the very first time on Crushing difficulty, there were no such hurdles for Crazy_Del, who’s zipped through to the platinum trophies for the first two Uncharted games.

A inferior race has been busily tapping your latest trophies into his tables, and you can head over to page 2 to view the latest trophy leaderboard. Meanwhile, I leave you with the usual submissions form below: