1) Unreal Impact ****************** Recently the big news in the game industry was the announcement that the popular Unreal engine would now be available to use for free. We immediately asked ourselves if we should consider porting our game over to this massively powerful and amazing game engine. The answer?
Nope! For starters, the engine is only 'free' if you don't plan on your game selling very well. Secondly, a great engine doesn't make a great game for you. Case in point: TNA Impact. The team behind Impact are really good guys who desperately wanted to make a great game (their careers kinda depended on it). They also already had experience making wrestling games and a budget larger than any indy company could ever dream of. They also had the Unreal engine. And what we got was Impact because a great game engine won't bend the laws of time and money for you. It would take a year just to port our current game over to Unreal. Ask Suda51. He recently gave the same answer when asked about a Fire Pro style mini game in the new No More Heroes. If we had to start over from scratch and build a free game I'd consider it but until then we ain't falling for it. No way.
The idea behind this new offer from Unreal is to get students and under funded new studios using the engine and then to become dependent on it after developing on it for a while. For that purpose, it's a great deal. Unreal is taught in a lot of game design programs and almost every game design graduate has at least one Unreal mod under their belts. That's a wonderful experience to have and it certainly gives a person/studio confidence that they can produce something that looks and feels like a commercially viable game. More than a few of our crew already had Unreal mods under their belt before working on PWX. But basing a commercial game project/studio on the "free" Unreal engine? The license agreement says you can use it for free, but if your game makes more than $5000 you have to give them 25% of your revenue. That's a lot. That's for every game you make with Unreal. And that's forever.
2) New questions ******************** 1. Will there be any top rope moves in the free demo or Uprising like a superplex? A: Yup!
2. Also in the free demo and Uprising will there be difficulty settings? A: Yup!
3. Will there be damage/reversal sliders in the free demo or Uprising? A: Nope!
4. It was mentioned in newsletter #401 that specials can be done using medium/strong grapples, how many times can a finisher be done or is it like Fire Pro where you can do them as many times as you want? A: You can attempt them as often as you wish and there is technically no limit to the amount of times you can succeed although it would probably result in the need for avoiding pin attempts if you don't want the match to end.
5. Might it be possible before the release of the demo and Uprising that we might get to see entrances? Are entrances in the game? Or do the wrestlers just automatically appear inside of the ring? A: No entrances in Uprising. We invoke the ghost of World Tour in that respect.
6. I heard Dragon Gate USA is working with a game developer. Is it you? A: Nope!
3) KoC Sucks ********************* Ahem. In last week's newsletter I alluded to the fact that a relatively large portion of the wrestling gaming community does not find the King of Colosseum games to be "fun". I would like to clarify that I personally consider the games to be great testaments to a studio's commitment to detail, accuracy, and quality. A lot of love obviously went into making those games just as a lot of my money went into importing them. But let's be honest. They are an acquired taste. Compared to the bulk of wrestling games readily available and played outside of Japan and even to the relatively frenetic action of the Fire Pro series the KoC games are in a class by themselves. It's a class where a slower strong-style heavyweight pacing takes precedent over cruiserweight action, weapons, and gimmick matches. And it's just not a class that most (but obviously not all) wrestling gamers appreciate. And that's ok. If KoC was "fun" like Smackdown it wouldn't be KoC. Who'd prefer that?!
4) Aww Ric *********************** See that ship sailing away? It's called "Graceful Retirement".
I find KoC very fun, but the "fun" is had in a different way than in most wrestling titles. In KoC you primarily play to get 100% ratings and only after that focus on winning. With two people, it's more like a co-op game than a competitive title, and in that regard it is a better professional wrestling game than any other title. An issue with wrestling games is determining what experience you're emulating: the real experience of working matches for audience approval or the kayfabe experience of trying to win a la real sports. Personally I find the KoC style experience much more rewarding.
That Unreal deal is horrible. Of course, I don't think that the TNA Impact crew using UE3 had much to do with Impact being a poor game. Its faults really seemed due to time and money. They made a pretty decent foundation for a game.