News Snatch: The Surge, The Division, Umbrella Corps, And Quantum Break

Well hello there, time to grab a nice cup of tea and settle down for the latest in the long running and so far not-award-winning News Snatch! Loads to get through today and our first item on our cut price conveyor belt of news is a video for the recently announced multi-mission mode for Umbrella Corps, which somewhere between reveal and now has lost it’s Resident Evil prefix. Maybe it’s down the back of the sofa, it’s always down the back of the sofa isn’t it? Last place you ever look, and there are you car keys (or video game prefix), jangling about in a mess of sweet wrappers and suspicious balls of fluff.


March 15th will find the Cloaked in Silence expansion for Metal Gear Online dropping on to digital stores. It includes three new maps Coral Complex, Rust Palace, Azure Mountain and a new character to play, namely Quiet. There will also be a new Survival mode launching on April 7th.



Tef had a look at The Surge recently, and also had a chat to Deck 13’s Jan Klose about the game. Some pre-alpha footage has now found it’s way on to the internet so we can all enjoy the dismemberment.


Quantum Break‘s live-action footage won’t be included on the disk, but will be streamed across the interwebs. Bad news if you have a data cap on your broadband. Xbox Owners will have a chance to download all the videos to their hard drive, but PC owners will have to stream as their videos are in 4K and are just ridiculously huge.



This is The Division TV advert which will be all over tellyboxes in the United States.

And this is the Official ‘gameplay’ TV ad. It contains no gameplay at all. Sigh.



Remember Myst? Well the people who made that have a new game on the way and it’s called Obduction, just to infuriate spell-checking software.


Lichdom: Battlmage, which I’m rather looking forward to, has been delayed. “We’re incredibly proud of what we’re making,” said someone important, “But unfortunately, in order to ensure a more synchronized worldwide release, we need to delay the launch of the game by about a month — from March 22 to April 19, 2016.”



Planet Coaster is being created by Elite devs Frontier Developments and this rather lengthy video includes some rather lovely pre-alpha footage. The game is one of those spiritual sequel type things, to Rollercoaster Tycon, obvs.


News from friend of the site, Bunimomike, who asked the devs of PC and Xbox game The Flame in the Flood why they had released their game with some rather big bugs.

We had been doing Early Access for a while and the game was really stable. A lot of people were remarking about how stable and ready for ship it seemed, so we were excited. Then, I made a call that would end up being the “crash bug” everyone is seeing. For the Xbox version, we were seeing some really long hitches, that I tracked down to large audio files that had to be loaded into memory and played. So, I asked our sound person to convert those sounds to stream in, instead of load in all at once. This fixed the Xbox hitch, and didn’t cause a problem for any of us.

Unfortunately, due to a bug in the sound system, this caused a crash for a lot of people.

We are a small team of 6 people without a large amount of funding. If we were a AAA studio, we could have been testing repeatedly on every form of hardware, and the crash would have been caught and fixed before launch. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. I’m not making excuses, but that’s what happened. I feel terrible about it and have been working like crazy to find a fix.



Square Enix have released a new version of their Jump Fiesta trailer for Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness but this time with English voice acting.


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“Working at SCEE R&D is awesome,” tweets Geoff Newman. “Found the original polygonal model of the dino from those PlayStation demos discs.”



And Finally, a big musical number to end with. Have a nice weekend everyone, tara!

6 Comments

  1. Any one else getting those awful full screen pop up ads for Lego? Driving me nuts! I’m on mobile btw

    • Yeah same here. They know about it and are sorting it out.

    • Yes they’re beyond annoying. Even when I click the x button it takes me to advert.

    • Yep when i press the cross it takes a second or two to disappear.

  2. Strange about Quantum Break’s live-action parts. What happens if there is no/bad Internet connection? I understand the reasoning with branching storylines though.

  3. Remember that T-rex well.

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