Jet-set-ter is back again, doing a little international swing. Whether or not you sang that in your head to the tune of Boys II Men’s “Motownphilly” is irrelevant! You are reading Jetsetter, Digital Trends’ weekly look at the gaming scene in the other 195 countries covering the planet Earth that aren’t the United States. Plenty’s been going on our shores this week, but even more has been developing abroad! Join me, won’t you?
Remember: Jetsetter is also intended as an open dialogue. If your cousin in Nigeria just finished a new iOS text adventure, let us know in the comments section below. Anything you want to tell us, any feedback, will only make the column better so hit us up or hit me up on Twitter at @ajohnagnello.
* Fable studio working on MMO-like RPG for Xbox 720.
Microsoft’s famed British studio Lionhead may have lost its signature creator, Peter Molyneux, this year but the company is still keeping on keepin’ on. Job postings on LinkedIn, spotted by Superannuation on Twitter (via Eurogamer), indicate that Lionhead is staffing up for a new single- and multiplayer RPG for the Xbox Durango. “This is to assist in the development of a major brand new IP that is being targeted for the future generation of platforms and will be an RPG based game with a radical new take on how co-operative and multiplayer gameplay feeds into the experience, while blending online and single-player into one complete experience.” Very exciting stuff. Lionhead have always made multiplayer games that were at least interesting. Fable’s multiplayer was always a bit crap, but Black and White’s pet monster-god play dates were fairly ingenious.
* Atari divests in France’s Eden Games, creators of Test Drive Unlimited.
Sad news for fans of slow, steady, European-style driving games: Atari has shut down Eden Games, creators of Test Drive Unlimited and NFS: Porsche Unleashed. While the studio will be kept open while work continues on Test Drive Unlimited 2 content, Atari will divest its stake in the studio “in line with our previously stated strategy of exploiting our popular intellectual property library on mobile devices.” Eden is a talented studio whose ambitions often outstripped their skills, as with 2008’s Alone in the Dark, a smart, broken game.
* Ukraine studio Vostok says their new spiritual successor to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. will be multiplayer.
GSC Game World was hard at work on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, a sequel to its demanding post-apocalyptic first-person adventure, up until the game was cancelled for good in April. The keen minds behind those games have reformed in Kiev as Vostok Games to create a new game in a similar post-apocalyptic, Central Asian setting, but those hoping for a deep single-player game may be disappointed. Speaking with Gamasutra, Vostok’s project manager Ruslan Didenko said his company needs to go multiplayer. “What we realized is that while we had been preoccupied with delivering single player titles one by one, the world changed, and we have to change too. Therefore, we decided to take a dramatic step and switch to online.”
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