Speaking to GamesIndustry, Former THQ president Danny Bilson, who was ousted before the publisher’s collapse, has said the company had financial issues the whole time he was there. The one-time executive said this was due in part to an ongoing tendency to rely on licenses, which had served THQ so well from 1991 to 2007, and weren’t shucked fast enough.

“We were shutting studios the whole time, and I was the guy going out there and giving the bad news,” he said. “It’s like the worst thing that… it’s the worst. I’ll stop right there. Awful.

“When I left a year ago, we didn’t see what eventually happened on the horizon. I’m not kidding, okay: we knew we were in trouble, but we knew we had a good line-up, and I thought we had enough money put away to support that stuff, finish it, and market it properly. We had a plan to live another day.

“And this is honest, honest, honest: I do not know what happened after I left. No idea. I’m not privy to what went on in there and I didn’t try to find out. I needed to move forward. I really wasn’t engaged at all, and then the news came in December.

“This was happening to my friends. I felt terrible. I just felt terrible.”

Bilson has never made any comment on his exit from THQ ahead of the appointment of former Naughty Dog lead Jason Rubin as president, and said he has to count on influential figures in the industry and press knowing the truth.

“Do I take responsibility for being involved in the decline of a company? Absolutely. Will I tell you candidly that it was the hardest job I’ve every had in my life? Well, it was. But I gave it my best, and I didn’t see the end result coming at all,” he said.

“On my watch, we, meaning my team, took [THQ] from one place and got it to another. We made a lot of improvements, but obviously it wasn’t enough; it wasn’t fast enough and it wasn’t good enough. I take responsibility for that. I’m proud of the portfolio my team built under duress. My team helped to raise the quality bar at a company that was built on something else entirely.”

Source: GamesIndustry

I am sorry, friends, but it is time to let go. After eight years and a successful sequel, ArenaNet has announced it will cease development of new content for Guild Wars. Take heart, through; the game will not be shuttered any time soon, and the team hopes to continue supporting loyal players via an automated system.

“Our focus has shifted to updates that not only help maintain Guild Wars but help the game maintain itself. With this focus in mind, we’ll no longer be releasing any new content for the live game except in support of automation,” ArenaNet said.

“Our goal is to get the game to a place where it can continue to run and be available to all of our fans. We have a lot of love for Guild Wars—it’s the game that made us what we are today—and we want to continue sharing it with everyone!”

The Live Team will remain on hand to address critical crashes and the like, but the tournament system will be fully automated; events will run over the course of a week rather than a weekend; and festival tokens and birthday presents will allow you to pick up older unique items missing from your collection.

For more information, check out the May 16 developer post on the subject.

Source: Guild Wars – News Updates

Team Fortress 2: Robotic Booglaoo is the first major Team Fortress 2 update crafted entirely by community members – and ladies and gentlemen, it is a doozy. Admire the trailer below; check out this amazing gallery of artwork; read both pages of back story; and marvel in the fact that it even comes with a comic. A full list of all the contributors is available if you’d like to send some mad props.

Following on from cuts to the Rift team in December, Defiance developer Trion Worlds has made another round of lay-offs.

“To best position Trion in a rapidly changing industry, we have reorganized our teams and are expanding our free to play offering,” the company said in a statement.

“With Defiance, we delivered a great game that more than one million gamers registered to play and continue to enjoy. As we progress from launch to ongoing development of the game, we are adjusting our staffing levels to deliver new content and improved features. RIFT, and our other titles in development, were unaffected by these changes.

“We are very much looking forward to the free to play release of RIFT and are excited by the other new titles currently in development.”

There were some pretty furious rumours flying around about the lay-offs, including that up to 80% of staff had been affected; that staff were escorted from the building; and that senior employees would not receive due severance packages. Trion Worlds has said that the 80% figure is exaggerated – without providing a new one – and that the other claims are completely false.

However, the developer has not yet denied IGN‘s claim that all studios were affected, but the Defiance team and generic support groups were the hardest hit.

Defiance is expected to spawn five major expansions in the next year, so it’s hard to believe the MMO’s development team has been gutted.

Source: IGN

The glory of the legions and/or the screaming hordes they march against is proving highly attractive, with Sega announcing that Total War: Rome II has already collected six times as many pre-orders as Shogun 2 did, months out from its September 3 release.

As such, Rome II has set a franchise record for the most and fastest pre-orders – maybe the pre-order bonus of The Greek States Culture Pack explains why?

Sega said that the Collector’s Edition has been quite popular, with half of all copies slated for the US spoken for already.

While it was having a bit of a gloat, Sega noted that the Total War series managed two million sales last year, despite the lack of a major release.

Source: VG247

I’ve had a good run, writing for an all PC website, but Konami has ruined all that. The spell-check hostile Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (it actually is a real word) is headed to PC.

Hideo Kojima revealed the news on his Hideoblog, and it was later confirmed in English on Twitter by Platinum Games creative producer Jean Pierre Kellams.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance released on consoles in February this year. It was developed by the action specialists at Platinum Games – the team behind Bayonetta and Vanquish – with management by Kojima Productions. In fact, it began life as a Kojipro game, but halfway through the team realised their core mechanic of “you can cut anything” made for a pretty ridiculous final game and handed it over before it exploded.

No details regarding the PC port have surfaced as yet, but we may hear more at Konami’s E3 2013 presentation. It’l be interesting to see who develops it; Platinum Games has never produced a PC game, although it is a young studio with some very experienced veterans of other developers.

Source: Hideoblog via Joystiq

There is so much stuff in The Elder Scrolls Online. As well as all the usual stuff you’d expect to find on your adventures – plants, minerals and animal products – you’ll have access to stuff right off the bat in the first town, where you can able to rifle through people’s possessions and nick all their stuff, like food, drink and ingredients. You can then craft all this stuff into other, better stuff. And that’s not the end of the stuff! The world is full of stuff to collect, for quests, to improve your skills, or just because you can. Learn about all of this stuff in the video below.

In response to former THQ president Jason Rubin’s eye-opening account of working conditions at Metro: Last Light developer 4A Games, creative director Andrew Prokhorov has stoutly refused the suggestion that the team deserved a better critical response as a result.

“We deserve the ratings we get. After all, the final consumer doesn’t care about our conditions. And this is right. We need no indulgence,” he said in a comment on the article – as Rubin predicted he would.

“It is a fact that our work conditions are worse than those of other developers outside Ukraine. I don’t think anyone can doubt that – yes, it’s true that American and most of European developers operate in a country far more comfortable than Ukraine. And yes, the publishers pay them more. This is clear: the more ‘reasonable’ the country the less the risks. And we don’t want to be all dramatic about that – after all, better conditions are earned, and we strive to do this as soon as possible.”

Prokhorov thanked Rubin for his article, noting that in the ten year the former S.TA.L.K.E.R. team had worked with THQ, he was the only executive to visit and observe the team’s working conditions. He noted that Rubin didn’t have enough time to try and fix the situation – but also asked him to be less harsh towards Deep Silver, which 4A Games believes did the best it could in a bad situation.

The developer even said that 4A Games was itself keen to make a multiplayer mode, but admitted that it ended up wasting a lot of time and resources before cancelling it.

Source: GamesIndustry via VG247

Ubisoft has finally dropped a little bit of information about the multiplayer side of Watch Dogs, its upcoming surveillance state and hacking open-world epic.

Although you’ll always be playing in an individual session, creative director Jonathan Morin told the PlayStation Blog that these sessions can temporarily overlap according to Ubisoft’s “pacing”. Once the encounter is over, you’ll go back to playing entirely alone.

Morin admitted that players don’t necessarily want somebody else in their game, potentially ruining everything – but said Ubisoft has been working on this problem in a pretty interesting-sounding way.

“When we watch people play together in Watch Dogs, most of the time they don’t even realise that it was another player. There are no signs. There is a great thing there that someone can be in the experience and naturally enter a situation. They become part of the story. ‘That was another player? No way! That’s awesome!’ They didn’t notice. That’s spectacular!

“As a developer, I can immediately tell when it’s another player in a game – jeez, that guy doesn’t walk like an AI, that’s a player. But in Watch_Dogs, players won’t notice that immediately. It’s a new form of emotion and it fits perfectly in the Watch_Dogs universe where everybody watches everyone else.”

Naturally I’m a little bit dubious as in my experience multiplayer gamers tend to be fairly obvious – it’s the teabagging that gives it away – but the Assassin’s Creed series has created a whole new genre of “pretending to be an NPC” in its multiplayer modes, so let’s see what Ubisoft can pull out of its bag of tricks.

Source: PlayStation Blog EU

Ubisoft recently filed its fourth quarter and year end reports for fiscal 2013, reporting total sales of €1.26 billion for the year ($1.66 billion), an 18.4% increase on FY2012, and €175 million for the quarter ($230 million), an 8.7% year-on-year increase.

Far Cry 3 was one of the major movers and shakers behind this bounty, having shipped 6 million units, but The Settlers Online and Just Dance were also major performers, with Ubisoft highlighting the performance of free-to-play and casual games. The publisher noted that Assassin’s Creed and Just Dance had joined the ranks of the 20 best-selling franchies in the industry during the year.

It also revealed that the tepidly-received Assassin’s Creed III managed to ship 12.5 million units, including digital sales. During a post-release call to investors, Ubisoft said that it isn’t banking on Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag to do the same.

“In our numbers we expect less than last year,” CEO Yves Guillemot said.

“We are actually pushing to achieve more than last year because we think the pirate segment is a great segment that can generate a lot more on a worldwide basis than what was achieved last year. But we wanted to be prudent on our expectations so that it can probably be a bonus if it comes.”

Other reveals from the call include word of the shelving of Patrice Desiléts’s 1666.

Source: Ubisoft IR via Blue’s News

Last week Blizzard released a patch for Diablo III accidentally enabling an exploit, which led to utter chaos in the RPG’s delicate economy and resulted in both Auction Houses going offline.

Judging by the timestamps on Blizzard’s official forum thread on the subject, it took the developer about three days to resolve the issue, run maintenance to apply a fix, and open the real money and gold storefronts again. During this time, Blizzard had to renege on an ETA, with predictable rage fallout from those simply unable to cope without selling fancy magic hats at their convenience.

Due to concerns over server loads, access was limited as the Auction house re-opened, and Blizzard is still warily calling for bug reports if you notice anything weird in the wake of its hurried patching.

Source: Battle.net

While playing around with its website last week, Witcher developer CD Projekt RED accidentally opened access to downloads of its much anticipated mod tool suite, REDkit. It quickly corrected the error, but not before some lucky sods got their hands on the files.

“Those of you who have downloaded the REDkit files – have fun – they are official so don’t worry!” a community manager advised forum goers.

Although the tools seem to be in complete form, CD Projekt just isn’t ready to unleash them yet.

“Please give us just a little bit more time (it’s almost here!). We apologize for the confusion,” the representative added.

Source: VG247

Size Five Games, the indie team been behind Time Gentleman Please and Ben There, Dan That, has a new game headed into beat soon. Called Gun Monkeys, it’s a procedurally-generated, physics-based, online deathmatch … platformer.

“In the distant future, a catastrophic experiment into Perpetual Energy obliterates all human life, leaving the world choc-full of free-for-the-taking energy. Your job is to send a legion of pleasingly-expendable monkeys forwards in time to collect Power Cubes and return them to present-day, all from the comfort of your PC. Sadly, it looks like one or two other entrepreneurs have had the exact same idea,” Size Five Games writes.

Check out the trailer below, and if you’re keen – who isn’t? – keep an eye on Dan Marshall’s Twitter for word on how to get into the beta.

Source: Size Five Games

What makes Dontnod’s Remember Me stand out from other action games is protagonist Nilin’s ability to get inside people’s memories – and wreck havoc with them. This latest trailer for the action effort is all about this wetwork hacking, which has left our hero without her own remembrances, as explained by creative director Jean-Maxime Moris. Dystopic future Paris, here we come; Remember Me is due in early June.

Sony Online Entertainment has given a heads up on what we can expect to grace the MMO in update eight. As well as the usual bug fixes and some UI tinkering, the meat of the extra content includes new weapons, helmets and armour sets, and the super cool Harasser buggy. As the name suggests, the Harasser is all about quick hit-and-run assaults, and seats three players. Take a little peek below and visit the Planetside 2 forums for full patch notes.

Source: SoE Forums

Valve has chosen 13 teams to take part in this years Dota 2 world championships, The International.

Naturally, you’ll recognise most of the names, coming as they do from the best and brightest teams; Invictus, Team Liquid, Team Dignitas and both LGD and LGD International are among the lucky few.

Three slots remain to be filled; there will be a series of qualifiers to select the remaining competitors before the final in Seattle in August.

On the off chance you happen to be heading over to the US – perhaps for PAX Prime which takes place a few days later – tickets will go on sale early this week.

The prize pool has not been announced but the tourney has previously fronted a $1 million grand prize.

Source: The Inetrnational

Hooray! Your Linux box just got slightly more awesome with the addition of Portal to Steam’s Ubuntu-friendly collection, if you’re in the beta. Portal is Steamplay compatible so if you, like practically everyone else on Steam, already own a copy you may be able to just go ahead and install it without coughing up USD$9.99 for it.

In less substantiated but maybe more exciting news, sequel Portal 2 has been spotted haunting some parts of the Steam Linux store, as spotted by Gearburn. We haven’t seen it ourselves, unfortunately, but even if it’s complete moonshine you can probably expect it to be true eventually, as Valve seems hellbent on getting every Source engine game running on the alternate OS.

Source: PCGamesN

It’s so hard to believe that EVE Online is ten years old. The sandbox MMO has come so far, and grown into one of the most interesting phenomenon in modern gaming – although it’s not for everyone. The trailer below takes a look back at where it all began which is a nice introduction for those of us a bit baffled by the whole thing and a great nostalgia trip for insiders.

Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Blizzard is bringing a bunch of new content to World of Warcraft in upcoming Patch 5.3, with delicious new scenarios for Horde and Alliance alike.

Blood in the Snow is a story-driven scenario in which Alliance heroes assist Moira and the Dark Irons to pu down dwarven infighting. Dark Heart of Pandaria sends you to clean up after a crew of Goblin engineers who have uncovered a mysterious artifact. Both scenarios are part of the Battlefield Barrens storyline.

Secrets of Ragefire is another goblin-centric story, sending you to investigate the cause of missing scouts. Battle on the High Seas sens you onto the high seas in a factional battle.

Additionally, Blizzard has introduced a Heroic difficulty. It’s available for the four new scenarios listed above as well as for Crypt of Forgotten Kings and A Brewing Storm. To queue for Heroic mode, you’ll need an item level of 480 and two friends, but you’ll score Valor Points and a chance to obtain Raid Finder-quality items. A post on Battle.net has further details.

Source: Battle.net

Good news, dark elf fans. Might & Magic Heroes VI: Shades of Darkness is now available. This stand-alone expansion to Might & Magic Heroes VI has you viewing conflicts from the perspective of our shadowy, pointy-eared friends and their monstrous allies. As the trailer below notes, Ubisoft has produced a complete edition of the turn-based strategy title which includes all content released to date, so if you’re yet to try your hand at commanding the armies of Ashan, this looks like a pretty good place to start.

Deep Silver is offering a free digital copy of Dmitry Glukhovsky’s novel Metro 2033 with all PC copies of Metro: Last Light. The eBook will be awarded to players when they authenticate the 4A Games shooter on Steam.

The Metro games and books have a complicated relationship. Metro 2033 drew heavy inspiration from the novel of the first name, but the second book – Metro 2034 – is so experimental and oddball that both 4A Games and Glukhovsky weren’t keen on seeing it adapted. Instead, Metro: Last Light has an original story penned by Glukhovsky specifically for the game.

So, in short: if you really like the themes and story of Metro 2033, and you want the full picture fo the post-apocalyptic canon, you may want to investigate the novels – and luckily, you’ve been given a free opportunity to see if you like the first one.

Metro: Last Light turns up part way through May, after a wait of approximately forever. Metro 2035, Glukhovsky’s third novel in the series, is expected in English later this year. The series has sold over 2 million copies worldwide to date.

Source: Blue’s News

If James’s series has given you the EVE Online bug – or awakened it – you might be interested in this gorgeous new physical release of CCP’s seminal MMO. Called the Second Decade Collector’s Edition, it’s packed with a number of rare and exclusive goodies.

Perhaps the most interesting inclusion for die-hard fans is a translated copy of CCP’s board game, Hættuspil. It was developed in the 90′s and proceeds helped fund the development of EVE Online, but has never been available in English or outside Iceland before.

The package also includes a model Rifter which doubles as a USB hub; a CD of the EVE Online tenth anniversary symphony; Richie Shoemaker’s book Into the Second Decade; and codes for loads of digital bonuses. You’ll score a golden pod skin for one character; a bloodlines costume; a blueprint for a battlecruiser; lots of Amarr goodies; and a mysterious code which will apply to things added to the game over the next ten years.

The special release will drop in October through Amazon and the EVE store, and has been priced at USD$149.99/€149.99.

Source: VG247

Some of you may feel a bit weirded out by Saints Row IV. Although the series has always been fairly light-hearted, it’s now dropping realism altogether to focus on an alien invasion, with the game’s action taking place in a virtual environment instead of a real city. It seems like an abrupt change of tone, but senior producer Jim Boon said the decision has had some interesting knock-on effects in terms of design.

“Creating a virtual Steelport has helped us in a few ways. The use of a virtual world is what allows us to give the leader of the Saints their superpowers. Even for a game as over the top as SR, we wanted to give a reason for superpowers that made sense within our fiction,” he told OXM.

“This has also helped make Steelport feel like a new city once you start navigating through the world from up above, jumping and gliding through the air while battling aliens on rooftops. The addition of our superpowers bring a much greater emphasis on vertical gameplay so we were able to create content going upward rather than outward. While Steelport isn’t horizontally bigger there’s a lot more verticality to explore this time. It completely changes your perspective and feels amazing.”

On top of that, the virtual environment means that when you go on missions to rescue captured Saints, you’ll find them in virtual prisons constructed by the Zin, which will be different each time. Saints Row 4 will release in August.

Source: OXM

You may recall that the Total War: Rome 2 wiki page was sporting a mysterious unrevealed guest star among its list of major factions. That final veil has been lifted to reveal Pontus, an agricultural and trade focused region bordering the Black Sea.

Pontus is big on naval technology, but has absorbed military technology from both the Greeks and Persians, leaving it well-equipped on all fronts. Its special units include bronze-shield pikemen and scythed chariots, and it specialises in information gathering and diplomatic relations with Greek states – although its complicated history with Persia can cause problems.

Perhaps most interestingly, Pontus won’t be included in the core game; it will arrive on launch day as free DLC.

Although the addition of Pontus brings Rome 2′s major factions tally to nine, it actually boasts 117 of them – among other startling numbers like 500 unit types and 183 map regions. It’s expected later this year.

Source: Total War wiki