#108: Hideo Kojima’s VR Vision Stranded?

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Hideo Kojima interested in VR?

Hideo Kojima expressed his interest in developing for virtual reality in a video interview with Rocket Beans Gaming – but he doesn’t have time for it right now.

The interviewer drops the VR question around the 22 minute mark: “What do you think about virtual reality? I mean, did you have any experiences, or do you have any ideas for PlayStation VR? Or is it too much motion sickness for you?”

Kojima’s response (in English, via interpreter): “Well, I want to create something [where] you don’t get 3D motion sickness. But for VR, I’m really interested in it [but] I think I’m not free enough.”

“I said [on] the panel yesterday – in the 120 years that the [Lumiere] brothers created, we have a monitor or we have this square like [an] iPad or iPhone. We have a frame, right? VR [is] kind of freed from the limitation of this frame aspect. So I want to do it, definitely, but I don’t have, really, time right now to concentrate on VR.”

Kojima gives his take on gaming in virtual reality

He also said that VR might be less suited for gaming experiences and more for interactive art and educational simulations: “I think it will be a breakthrough using VR. But in the next 5 years, I think streaming will be the biggest thing and if you’re streaming you cannot put framerates as much as you want, but in VR the framerate is really important.”

Death Stranding, Hideo Kojima’s first game since he left Konami, is out on PlayStation 4 on November 8th. While a PC version has been mentioned in the past, it was generally believed to be a PlayStation 4 exclusive until yesterday, when a PC version was confirmed for 2020.

There has been speculation about PlayStation VR features in Death Stranding, but it was denied early in development.

Time For A Quick Daily Quiz?

Who was the first classic horror movie killer to appear in Dead By Daylight?

• Freddy Krueger (The Nightmare)
• Michael Myers (The Shape)
• The Scream Killer (The Ghost Face)
• Leatherface (The Cannibal)

The answer will be revealed at the end of this issue!

News Bits

Sony preemptively files trademarks for future PlayStation consoles

Sony Interactive Entertainment is keeping tight reins on the PlayStation brand by filing trademarks for PlayStations 6 through 10 in Japan. Unsurprisingly, Sony’s not expecting to retire the brand any time soon. If future console generations last seven years on average, as the last two generations have, we will probably see the PlayStation 10 around 2055.

Fortnite Halloween event begins today, will last one week

The official Fortnite Twitter account has confirmed that Halloween festivities will start on October 29th at 13:00 BST. Fortnite fans may remember that last year’s Halloween event lasted throughout the month of October, but the release of Fortnite Chapter 2 has clearly taken precedence this year. In any case, data-miners have already revealed the upcoming Halloween skins, including a white and black variation of the skeleton costume Fortnite fans know and love.

Daily Fact

Resident Evil is a remake of a game based on a Japanese movie

It’s the week of Halloween, and that means it’s time to bring out the horror games and scare yourself silly. Resident Evil is arguably the most famous videogame horror franchise, and incidentally the game with the most successful movie adaptations to boot – but did you know that the original game started out as a remake of a NES game called Sweet Home, which in turn was a movie adaptation?

Capcom launched Sweet Home in 1989, and it’s one of the earliest examples of survival horror. You explore a haunted mansion in search of hidden artwork as one of five characters. You need to criss-cross through the mansion solving puzzles and avoiding being eaten by zombies, just like in Resident Evil.

The movie came out around the same time, but is more of a ghost story, although it does take place in a mansion. Sweet Home creator Tokuro Fujiwara came on board as a producer and mentor to Shinji Mikami for what was intended to be a remake of Sweet Home – although the team ended up doing its own thing. In any case, Resident Evil owes its existence to an obscure Japanese horror movie!

Daily News

Can Ubisoft fix Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint?

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint has had a disappointing launch, both in terms of critical reception and sales. That doesn’t mean Ubisoft is admitting defeat: They will continue to support the game and have outlined their plans for the future on the game’s blog.

The 1.0.2 patch launched two weeks ago fixed a number of glaring problems, and two more updates are scheduled for mid and late November to continue addressing the community’s concerns. For example, AI teammates are supposedly on the way, although no date has been given.

The in-game economy will be overhauled in the next few weeks, followed by the launch of the game’s first raid, Project Titan, in December with a Terminator-themed live event to follow shortly after.

Ghost Recon players are not convinced by Ubisoft’s list of fixes

Despite Ubisoft’s optimism, players remain unconvinced that the developers will do what it takes to make the game meet expectations. For example, the most requested feature is the ability to play story missions offline, which Ubisoft has refused to say anything about.

Players with unstable internet connections have found themselves losing progress if they disconnect from the server, which causes the current mission to reset. This is not a technical limitation of the game since Wildlands, the previous game in the series, allowed players to complete story missions offline. The developers still have a lot of work ahead of them to prevent Breakpoint from becoming another Anthem.

Valve clamps down on CS:GO container key trading

Container keys, the digital item required to open crates in Counter Strike: Global Offensive, will be locked to the purchasing account from now on. This means keys purchased from October 28th onwards can no longer be sold on the Steam Community Market, or traded.

A blog post discussing the changes also states that keys purchased before the change becomes active keys will be unaffected and can still be sold and traded.

Exactly is this happening? Turns out that the keys have been used to commit fraud, forcing Valve to take action.

In the blog post, Valve states that “worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains. At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced. As a result we have decided that newly purchased keys will not be tradeable or marketable.”

Valve anger traders all around the world with this change

Both Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 keys were used as the primary currency for traders due to their fixed price. At around $2.50, keys became the item that measured an item’s worth. With this change to keys, the price of every key on the market has more than doubled as traders are panic-buying all available inventory.

Valve has known about keys being used in this way for years, and attempted to alleviate the issue by capping the number of keys you could have in your Team Fortress 2 inventory to 100 . Traders are now moving back to Team Fortress 2 keys and DOTA 2 Arcanas in order to bypass this change.

News Bits

Sink your teeth into the first Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York gameplay trailer

There is finally a trailer out for visual novel Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York, which is heavily inspired by the original pen-and-paper role-playing game. The game mechanics involve class disciplines and hunger, and will feature time-sensitive events and decisions.

The PC version of Coteries of New York arrive on Steam and GOG on December 4th, before launching on Switch in early 2020. Developer Draw Distance are “actively exploring options for bringing the game to PS4 and Xbox One consoles”.

World of Warcraft’s next expansion leaked via Blizzard’s own apparel store

BlizzCon is right around the corner, and Blizzard is gearing up for their most important event for a long time. Fans have been scouring the internet for hints about the next World of WarCraft expansion, and it seems like Blizzard’s apparel store has delivered the goods: An image depicting the new Lich King, Bolvar, appeared briefly in the Blizzard Gear store directory before hastily being pulled.

Thanks to hints dropped in the most recent expansion, Battle for Azeroth, fans have expected to enter The Shadowlands fora while now. Adding even more fuel to the fire, data-miners have delved into the latest patch on the Public Test Realm and found out that Bolvar and his army of Death Knights are somehow involved.

In any case, there’s less than a week to go before we get definitive answers.

Weekly Giveaway

Anthill on Nintendo Switch

This week’s DailyBits giveaway is a cute strategy game for Switch, which is 100% handheld! We are giving away 5 codes for Anthill, a tower defence-style strategy game – with the twist being that you’re also directing your ants to retrieve the dead bodies of enemies for dinner! The Switch version features all DLC, and can only be played in handheld mode.

All you have to do to enter the sweepstakes is to follow Dailybits on Twitter or Facebook. We will choose five random followers over the course of the week, and each will receive a code for Anthill on Switch! It couldn’t be any easier.

Quiz Answer - Did You Get It Right?

Who was the first classic horror movie killer to appear in Dead By Daylight?

Answer: Michael Myers!

Asymmetrical multiplayer horror game Dead By Daylight is the perfect Halloween game, especially since developer Behaviour has been expanding the game’s character roster to include all manner of classic horror movie killers and survivors. It all started when Halloween’s Michael Myers arrived three years ago, fittingly enough during Halloween of 2016.

Since then the game has been expanded with characters from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Evil Dead, Saw, and even Stranger Things. Even Bill from Left 4 Dead showed up! But one major slasher fiend yet to make an appearance is Jason from Friday the 13th – most likely because he has his own (and quite similar) game!

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